P24 - Words Should Mean Things
The gosh darn internet which is both the suppository of all information and an open sewer into which all kinds of muck flows into, got that way because the overwhelming majority of users (that is, 100% of all of them) are irreparably flawed beings who have a right to free speech and will use it, regardless of forethought or content. People's rush to say things without thinking results in great swathes of nonsense and gibberish; which upon any kind of inspection at all, is revealed for the nonsense and gibberish that it is.
While I was reading a motoring website, one of the adverts that came up was for an 'energy drink'. If you compare the actual amount of energy contained within various kinds of fizzy sweet drinks, of the ones which contain sugar, the amount of energy doesn't vary all that much. On the actual metric of using energy to compare drinks, then Sprite and 7-Up are about the same as Coca-Cola, V or Red Bull. What the 'energy' drinks contain is increased amounts of caffeine, taurine, guarana and other drugs; which almost unironically is how Sprite, 7-Up and Coca-Cola were originally marketed in the first wave of soda fountain tonic drinks. In the unregulated period of drug sales before the First World War which is also known as 'The Great Binge' when everyone was on everything, it was common to find drinks which contained cocaine, lithium salts, and maybe laudanum.
This post isn't about what does and doesn't constitute and 'energy drink' though. The advert which was flashed before my eyes, proclaimed that their energy drink which helps you do dumb things faster, was 'plant based'. Already my mind was in apoplectic fits of confusion because there aren't that many drinks which aren't plant based. You already know what they are. They are the milk drinks which includes coffee and flavoured milk which is the preferred drink of tradespeople for reasons that I do not understand, and broth and yeast extracts, which includes things like Bonox and Bovril.
I can imagine a meat based energy drink and no doubt because I have imagined it, then someone else will have also imagined it and maybe even sold it but all the drinks containing coffee, citrus, and any fruits at all, are plant based. Unless you invent a drink which is purely made from industrial chemicals such as esters, then stating that a drink is plant based is borderline absurd.
This advert then announced something else which makes my blood curl and my hair boil. It said that the drink was 'organic'. This is where marketing people have stolen a word and sucked all of the meaning out of it. In the simplest possible terms, something which is 'organic' contains carbon atoms. Indeed 'organic chemistry' looks at the various amazing ways which carbon atoms arrange themselves into chains, planes, rings, and three dimensional structures. Arguably diamonds which are made of an allotrope of carbon in which the atoms are arranged into tetrahedra are 'organic'.
Every single living thing is mostly made of just four elements. Plants, fish, elephants, bacteria and men are mostly nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. You are organic. You contain carbon chemistry. Now although single living thing is mostly made of just four elements and one them is carbon, this makes every single plant in the world 'organic'. It also follows that every sugar in the world is also organic. The other side of this was when I saw a bottle labelled 'organic water'; which is idiotic because it was just water. Water as a chemical contains only hydrogen and oxygen and is therefore inorganic and to say that it is organic is a lie.
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E9 - Politics of Envy
There is an interesting phrase which exists in rightist politics and authoritarian politics; which is couched in the language of virtue ethics but is actually a cover for the maintenance of private vice. That phrase when deployed states that their enemy Mr Banana is engaging in the "politics of envy".
I think that we can agree that 'envy' is looking upon the goods, whether real or unreal, of another person and desiring them for ourselves. Using the phrase the 'politics of envy' immediately burns all grounds of discussion about whether or not the person who is the subject of alleged envy, acquired those goods, whether real or unreal, or the position, station, situation and conditions that they enjoy, justly or not. By invoking such a phrase, the person who has said such a thing, has invoked an immediate demand to be above any and all scrutiny; including whether or not the very system which put them there is fair or not. In fact, they refuse to admit that the system which gave them those goods, services, benefits, station and/or position can be unjust at all.
This makes me wonder about the employment of the phrase 'politics of envy' itself. Is it really a case of envy, when people who actually pay tax are then treated with utter disdain by the people who benefit from it? While the very poorest in society might receive the bulk of transfer payments from the government, it is the next two quintiles upon whom the greatest disproportionate brunt of the burden of carrying the entire tax system sits.
The top quintile pays 48% of all income tax but they also receive 51% of all incomes. If anything that's an argument that the very top of society are undercharged for the privilege of have the other 80% of society be stable enough for them to sit atop their gilded towers. You would expect that the next quintile down is where the bulk of the taxation burden lies but as a proportion of income, people who are already materially satisfied do not spend orders of magnitude more in consumption in keeping with their income. Money itself tends to have an ever marginally decreasing utility the more of it you have because there are only so many restaurants you can visit, so many houses you can live in and so many hours in a week that you can leave all the lights on and the water running out of all the taps.
Envy implies that being desirous of goods and services which you do not have is a bad thing. What it doesn't describe is questioning why when you have paid for something, why someone else who already has more should reap the benefits of your effort. That turns the Matthew Effect (that is that to those who have more, more will be given; and to those who have not, even what little they have will be taken away) into public policy. A desire not to be robbed blindly by people who lets be honest would send you to the battlefield to die for their benefit, isn't envy, it's asking for justice.
The phrase 'the politics of envy' is said by those people who are skilled in the art of public sanctioned theft and want to lie to justify their moral turpitude.
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C16 - Getting A Cat
The one piece of vital information that is relevant here is that when you go to bed, although a cat might very well go to bed at the same time that you do, the chances of it staying there are exactly nil. At some point during the night, the cat will be up and about doing cat things, irrespective of what you want it to do. If it wants to go somewhere, it will. This is the reason why cat owners generally sleep with their doors open. It is not because they want their fuzzy little friend to sleep with them but because a cat as an uncontrollable force which does as it pleases, will have scratched at doors in the night and broken their will.
Cats will always do their business of catting, irrespective of what you want them to do. When the lights go out, a cat does not think that this is the time to go to bed, a cat thinks that this is the time that it claims every single thing in the house and there ain't a thing that you can do about it. A cat is going to cat.
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I15 - 15 Items Or Less
If I see a sign in the supermarket which says "15 Items Or Less", part of me dies inside because there are rules about countable and uncountable things, and about tangible and intangible things. Those rules should lead one to the conclusion that the sign should in fact read "15 Items Or Fewer". However I also look at such a sign and immediately back down because English is a vulture of a language which steals from everywhere and ignores all rules; including its own. "15 Items Or Less" is perfectly acceptable because in a war between the prescriptivists who want to set rules and the descriptivists who want to describe how things really are, the descriptivists win.
The semantics of language matter far less to me than the truth which the language conveys. One of the things that my Accounting 101 teacher said in the very first lesson of the class was that "the purpose of accounting is to provide information". The sign "15 Items Or Fewer" provides that information concisely and the prescriptivists who want to set rules can not disagree with that.
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B22 - The Power To Be Left Alone And Uncared For
One of the superpowers that I have as a 43 year old white male who is 6 feet tall, is the power to be ignored by everyone. This superpower stems from the fact that as a 43 year old white male who is 6 feet tall, I have the potential power to harm people and for people to be quite rightly afraid of that potential. The downside of having this superpower is that along with practically everyone in the world ignoring you, it also comes with an accompanying state of affairs where nobody in the world cares about you either.
For a short period of time when I had my arm in a sling and was walking around with a walking stick, the amount of societal apathy and disdain that I would normally encounter, was cancelled and replaced by a temporary kindness. Now that I am not wearing a sling, nor using a walking stick, that kindness is not extended by very many people and we have returned to the default setting of society where my superpower causes people to be afraid of me.
I know that we are in the middle of a pandemic and that people are used to having more space around them, however at the moment when I am tapping this out on my phone and barely six weeks after getting a broken leg and a broken arm, my superpower has created so much of a forcefield that people's bags now have more priority than I do, at least in their minds. As I am standing on the B1 bus with both my arm and my leg screaming out in silent pain, I am simultaneously aware of the power that I have supposed to be able to wield and my inability to do so.
I do not get undesired attention from members of the opposite sex, such is the curse of being the gender of which I am not a member; I have the amazing power of being able to walk home at night completely safe in the knowledge that I will remain intact; and there is the base assumption that I know what I am talking about despite the fact that I like everyone else is merely pretending to be an adult and in reality, we're all really just big children who want other people to be nice to us. However, thanks to men who have been before and have spent every last penny of societal trust, I am not even afforded basic decency. I would like to say common decency but let's be honest, it's as rare as hens' teeth.
My reward then, is to stand on the bus in pain but being left alone. I suppose that's something. I shouldn't expect anything.
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