The Post Dominic Weekender

 Or so I thought. 

Unfortunately though I am not feeling well. I am slightly shivery; my skin feels all prickly and I need to pee almost constantly. No fever or, hopefully, other symptoms of Corona, but since there's no way I can get tested there isn't much I can do. Frankly I don't really see how it could be Covid. Even here there aren't - as far as I'm aware - many people with the disease and I have hardly been socialising nor being subject to the tender moistures of my fellow villagers. It was always going to be dicey at this time of year because it's that time of year.  I'm hoping it's nothing more than some random bug, but then I've no idea how I could have caught that either. I guess all it takes is to pick up something in the shop that's been handled by someone less careful and boom. I can't rule out Covid.

Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow. I had this in January, but then who knows that could have been Covid as well! What luck eh!

Anyway, I've been writing this old bollocks solidly (ore or less) since March, this is a day off. To recap: the government are shit, the world's going to shit, covid is shit, have a nice night!

Return To Lockdown: And He's Out The Door!

That's ok mate, just leave the monkey to clear up your mess. 

The former organ grinder on his way out, and, as people have correctly pointed out, right before Brexit crash lands. 

What now Boris? Where are your mad ideas going to come from now? Johnson claims his Brexit position hasn't softened. Reality will take care of that and he will have no one to blame. He's on his own now. What this means for Gove isn't quite clear since, really, he and Dominic were the government. Johnson just gets to sit in the big boy chair and say stupid things.

Who will be left to take the blame for Brexit? Will that be the day that 'inexplicably' Mark Francois will return to continue his long missed grandstanding. His brazen parading of utter stupidity. Mogg won't be around, he'll have jetted off to some Corona-free (he hopes) tax haven. Like the enclave of the rich in a zombie apocalypse, where the elite sit quaffing whatever it is they quaff, playing golf while armed security bozos gun down anyone that starts coughing at the gate.

Johnson's days are numbered. But then so are Britain's. Maybe he'll just concede everything the EU wants and then fuck off to play croquette with Mogg on Spaff Island.

None of this will make any difference. The next grey eminence will be no less a weird tory ideologue, full of stupid antisocial ideas. Desperate to use the empty vessel that is our PM to push them through. None of these people are good people. By virtue of being what they are they invalidate themselves. It's not like we have a say in any of this anyway, as if representative democracy actually works. Ha ha! What joke, of course it doesn't; we have no say at all!

It seems that the R rate is getting under control. At least according to the people at the ZOE study. I have no idea how reliable they are. Locally only 5000 out of 200,000 have their app btu at least it isn't run by Serco. I guess we have to take our good news where we can find it. Of course the real issue all along has been what happens when the doors open once again. Can we really afford to entertain another Eat Out To Help Out when it didn't last time. Word is, the chancellor hasn't ruled this stupidity out again.

Oddly, according to their data, I live in a very highly infected area, as the numbers go. But because it's a low population area it is difficult to be accurate. What we know is the R number is an average. You need to take into account that Covid is spread by a few who infect many. The R number averages this. So if you can isolate those people you'll go a long way to solving the problem. Shame then our useless government gave billions to Serco and the like to do...something.

I notice there's a lot of bumph around the place talking about Children In Need. Certainly there are, sadly, plenty of those right now. It doesn't need to be that way. The amount given to these privateers throughout this crisis utterly dwarfs the amount Children In Need raised last year (about 50 million quid). Yet somehow these Tory arseholes can't find it upon themselves to feed kids without kicking up a stink. It's ridiculous. That's taxpayer money given to these privateers, yet we allow ourselves to fall for the charity telethon con, thus allowing the government off the hook. 

Is that a good thing?

Return To Lockdown 9: Thus Ends Lockdown 2's First Week

A strange little bald man got into trouble in the government. You'd be forgiven for thinking it was Dominic Cummings again, though his fingerprints are all over the situation. No, it was some other little Tory weirdo. Is there a factory that spews out these creepy little oddballs? One after the other; a production line of antisocial monsters who view society as some grotesque experiment. They are like Q from Star Trek. Not omnipotent, but powerful nonetheless. Playing games with the rest of us like broken toys.

Is there a chance Cummings could be goings? I really don't know. Anything's possible right now. These are febrile times and uncharted territory. I don't really believe Johnson is politically long for this world. Perhaps he'll cling on like Trump, albeit without the result of an election. Perhaps he too will end his career sandwiched between a porn shop and a funeral directors shouting at clouds like that bizarre little gnome working for Trump.

According to Micro-President Macron, of Le French, Biden will make our planet great again. Isn't that nice. A 77 year old neoliberal has the power of the gods, apparently, and Monsieur Macron is only to happy to kowtow in such a meaningless way. Biden does have power....in January (god knows how many more Americans will have died by then), but of course Macron is essentially celebrating the rise of another capitalist orthodox operator. Business as usual, salut!

Yeah, no.

This is how Trump types win. It will be four years of business as usual, like I said, and the working class will be screwed over. It will be exactly the same over here. There's every chance Starmer could win the next election, but by 2024 the Tories will likely win. You cannot out-Tory the Tories. If you try you do so at the cost of the working class who already lent Johnson the red wall. Why would they go back to the racists at the Labour party? Starmer is bending over backwards to be perpetually sorry for the minority of cranks in the party, but the more he tries to appease, the more of his blood they will want - and he'll happily offer up the vein.

There's no future in these people. Look at how far to the brink they have brought us already. Meanwhile the risk here is that the government will use the potential for a vaccine - far from decided - to abrogate its responsibilities and district from its ongoing mismanagement. Day after day it's just one more example of corruption. If I read another article about that bloody Baroness Harding I will scream blue bloody murder. But it won't matter because, and ably supported by the screaming media, desperate for a normal Christmas, there's a vaccine on the way. Happy birthday Jesus, here's your corporate capitalist multinational medicine deal. Now look over there while we quietly bury all the evidence of how tragically we fucked up the economy and people's lives.

Return To Lockdown 8: The Days Feel Longer

 Anyone believing that lockdown, the winter remix, was going to be fun is clearly wrong. I doubt any such people exist. It is no lie to say that this time around, I am feeling more stressed and anxious. As the days get shorter and the weather commensurately rubbish they also feel longer: hours tick for longer as I struggle to fill them. To be clear, there are things I could do but I am both filled with lethargy and restless. I don't want to be here. I want the opportunity to do something meaningful to stretch my legs, other than just stretch my legs. 

And god knows they need stretching (I hate exercise, the way Indiana Jones hates snakes). I'm becoming filled with hate. Hate for the Tories, that is. But it threatens to percolate, becoming a pervasive constant hatred. Animated by itself. I don't want to be like that, but I have all the time in the world now and there is plenty to justify it.

This isn't an argument against lockdown. It's an argument against the continued mishandling of this crisis. It's reaching a point now where I can't imagine a day going by that doesn't include another example of utter incompetence mixed, like piss in wine, with corruption. It's just become white noise at this point. Like television static (remember that?). It's there all the time, pixels of cracking colliding snow that end up in the wallets of people like Dido Harding.

Christ I hate that woman's face. She sort of strained smile she effects. A look like a smacked arse. It's indignant; how dare you question that I receive 65 grand a year for doing precisely fuck all - for driving the bus backwards. Meanwhile the staff in the call centres driven to distraction by the script they are forced to read instead of actually helping people are working full time for less than half that. Capitalism is a sick joke. Are we even actually any closer to a working test system? Of course not, they are now hoping that a can of pfizzy Pfizer vaccine will save them from themselves. 

This useless government can't even make up its mind whether or not it hates/likes Joe Biden. I know what I think. He's a rich old man who will shore up capital and inspire the next Donald Trump by being everything Trump campaigns against - even though Trump is part of that swamp and just as corrupt. More so, in some ways, as he's willing to wepaonise horrific social injustice and inequality to make his point. Perhaps he'll rise from the grave in Election Horror The Sequel and drag Biden, and thus America, into the depths of civil war. It's not impossible - saying that makes me feel like I've passed through the looking glass. It's actually a possibility.

The working class across the world remains divided and the left, the conventional left, has no understanding, nor any willingness to. Instead the smartypants crew over at Novara will cite arcane historic figures and scenarios while cheer leading for the beige terror himself. The Ultimate Centrist, Keir Starmer. A man so bland he could only come into being if Thanos willed it. The Banality Gem. The Unity candidate who will unify Labour under capital at all costs, specifically the cost of the working class.

Anyone that thinks they have a chance of taking their party back is fooling themselves. Labour are done. They never were anything special. Everything they did was within the confines of Capital. Even the NHS exists within a capitalist paradigm: it's theirs not ours. Meaning they can take it back at any time, they being the ruling class, and that's exactly what's happening now. Labour aren't it's champions any more than they are ours. It's sad so many committed hard working activists are willing to throw their time away. Stop funding Corbyn, he's a lame duck - don't worry he'll be alright. Go into your communities and make the state irrelevant. Labour won't help us, not now not ever again. There's only us.

Return To Lockdown 7: Let's All Pretend Idiots Can Deliver A Vaccine

 Now the government are playing with fire...again.

I'm not sure how wise it is to be promising nearly 1000 tests a day. The vaccine is a promise, it is hope. But it isn't made real by the intensity of our collective need. Do our useless leaders think they can just sprinkle the possibility of a Christmas vaccine like fairydust? A bright Christmas?

How likely is it that a vaccine will be approved and distributed in time? Even then it will take time to work; it requires two shots a month apart and there's no way we can test it. It's not like we can infect Granny afterwards just to make sure! 

This is a gamble. A necessary one, but the idea of these stinking Tories fermenting hope as recklessly as they play their Brexit game isn't the solution. Beware people pretending to be wisemen bearing gifts. I don't know how likely the vaccine is, nor how near. Hopefully very. But what comes out of the mouths of Tories should never be trusted.

Baroness Horse Rider (Dido Harding, I'm running out of witticisms, bear with me) was in front of the select committee again today. A selection of more grasping parliamentarians, including Jeremy Hunt, now trying to whitewash his time as wrecker in chief at the Department of Health. Ridiculous; is he trying to position himself, once again, as a leadership candidate once Johnson, inevitably, goes?

Of course Harding has no answers, while she takes her thousands of pounds salary (on top of her free money for being a peer). People like here must just wake up in the morning laughing like giddy drunks. I bet they can't believe their luck. Of course they can't: it isn't luck to them. It's how things should be. They are the op of the perfectly justified and necessary social order - where they belong! Fucking obscene.

This lockdown is getting me down right now.

Return to Lockdown 6: Online Discourse Is A Bloodbath

 If there's one thing I hate about political discourse online, it's the vampires...no wait that's the movie The Lost Boys. Sorry I mean, it's the bad faith actors.

Vampires, in other words. No difference :D

It's intensely frustrating, I find, because conversation is a minefield and I'm shit at it. I speak very poorly and stumble over words. I am not a clear speaker. That makes activism difficult. This, here, is different for obvious reasons, though you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm any less incoherent! (Not by me though! Hah!)

Forums are just filled with puffed up players. Mainly young blokes with a bit of theory under their belt that think as a result they know it all. It's the vanity of youth as yet lacking the wisdom of experience. Just live a little, see what the working class puts up with and how it gets treated before quoting Milton Friedman at me, or pretending that what you read in fucking Breitbart is truth.

It's a bloodsport; a pit of fighting cocks who argue with ferocity matched only by the endless tedious need for sources and citations. I get it; evidence is absolutely important when making a point. But calm the fuck down about it. The call for proof isn't a mating cry, charged with testosterone like deer fighting in the rut! Horns up! \m/

Most of the time, in my experience, it becomes an exercise in trapping the opponent. This makes conversation an exhausting exercise of constantly having to guard your speech and hedge your beliefs. If you don't then you find what you said earlier is taken as an absolute statement which you will then be hung drawn and quartered on. "But you said x! I win!" - because winning is the most important thing. Ironically though these re people that I, at least, will never convert away from their capitalist beliefs. Views that are proving destructive to the world. It's just a horrible tiresome waste of time. Sadly in lockdown I though it might be productive. At best it would help sharpen my own arguments, but that's actually not the case, and I'm certainly not convinced of capitalism. Not when I can live see and smell it for real everyday, not just in some macho fantasyscape online. 

It's just a proving ground for young angry men. In the absence of social certainty, now that we're in late stage capitalism, these people are searching. Unfortunately theirs is a bloody quest.

Meanwhile there's talk a vaccine is looming. A corporate concoction (aren't they all?) has an apparent 90% success rate. That's great, we all want an end to this dreary nightmare. I certainly do, today I've been feeling quite negative. Only another three weeks of this shit (before a break and then lockdown number three). Of course this is only half the story: getting the vaccine from the lab to people's bloodstreams is the real task. I look forward to Brexit making that impossible. Nothing's ever simple.

Wweekender No More War

 Today is Remembrance Day. The local God outpost is livestreaming their event. How very 2020. I won't be watching, what's the point? I don't wear a poppy. Why; because I don't support the war machine. 

It's just like clapping for the NHS. Meaningless. What does it mean for me to 'remember'? I don't know anyone that was involved in war and what am I meant to remember? It seems like propaganda; we are annually envied to condition ourselves into believing in noble causes and justice. But that's not what happens in wars. What happens is people lives and communities are destroyed; perverted by ideologies and divided. We learn nothing precisely because all we ever 'remember' is the narrative the elite sells us while we compete for who's got the biggest poppy.

Tell you what: I'll commemorate the day we end war. It wasn't enough when they came back from the trenches with the brutal message 'never again' many shocked into silence, keeping the depth of the horror form their families. The government didn't care then, Germany was eviscerated and fascists rose to power, we know what happened. But they'll always reference ww2 as the just war, while ignoring the context and the course of events. Hitler was a vile monster, one whom the British ruling class didn't have a problem with (while conducting their own horrible imperialist actions) for the longest time. But my enemy isn't the German working class; it's the ruling class of all countries. All of whom are happy to bomb or sell guns and death to tyrants, exporting it globally.

That's what the poppy represents. Inevitably. Look, I get it. You have a grandfather or great grandfather who fought. You want to honour him. That's fine. But that's a private thing. What we have with the poppy affair is an industry; one intended to prop up the war machine. One that allows the government to avoid caring for those whose flesh it chews up on foreign shores to fight in its name. Not my name. I don't consent to your warmongering and your death industry, and I will not buy a poppy, borne on my chest which I puff out with pride, wherever I go.

Clapping was the same. For a time it was (I'm guessing) a grassroots symbol that people used to show simple kindness. But it achieved nothing. It become perfunctory. A duty, and in so doing nothing was learned or improved. If these acts don't achieve ends like this, then they are merely mechanical. They just serve a darker purpose: propaganda. Reinforcing ruling class values, allowing them to propagate more death and destruction. Currently our stupid leaders are risking a return to the Irish troubles; the years of funeral bombings and children being slaughtered. Fuck that and fuck them. These people are scum.

I will not wear your poppy as long as war is still a thing. That is the real message of those you blithely call heroes, whom you laud while leaving them to rot in the gutter. I will not subsidise your death and destruction if you can't even take care of these people. Those that came back from the trenches had a simple message and the poppy obscures that allowing it to be repudiated and ignored. All for the profit of the capitalist imperialist war machine, oppressing and exploiting. 

That's why they call the Union Jack the Butchersapron.