Horse 3471 - The Worst Team In Australia

 As I stand on a train to the city in temperatures outside the train which will not climb into double digits until well after Morning Tea time, I am clad in a cheesecutter hat, a big black scary Crombie Coat, and the brown and yellow scarf of the Hawthorn Football Club.

In my lifetime, the Hawks have won 9 Premierships, which is in addition to the 4 that they had previously won; making a grand total of 13. The Hawks are not by any stretch of the imagination or statistics, the worst team in Australia.

I make mention of this because objectively there has to be a worst team in Australia. And no, I do not mean in terms of quality because very obviously Melbourne City could easily wail on a group of 11 year olds and that wouldn't at all be remarkable. Being the worst team isn't therefore a matter of the absolute quality of a team but rather, their proven ability to do the job which all teams have as their telos - to win championships and flags.

In the A-League, there are four teams which have never won the league. They are Auckland FC, Western United, MacArthur FC, and Wellington Phoenix. Of these four teams, one of them only just joined the league, two arrived in 2018 but Wellington Phoenix who arrived in the third season have been there since 2007.

In the NRL, if we ignore the Redcliffe Dolphins which only arrived in 2023, then every other club has won at least one Premiership except for the New Zealand Warriors. They have been around since 1995; which means that in 30 years, they have won nothing.

Likewise, in the AFL, the Gold Coast Suns, Greater West Giants, which showed up in 2011 and 2012, are both relative newcomers but the Fremantle Dockers arrived in 1995; which means that just like the Warriors in the NRL, in 30 years they have won nothing.

This is where I have a philosophical problem. Never winning a Trophy, which means that you have failed at the entire telos of your team is empirically bad. Is it better or worse to have never won a Trophy at all, or to have won one which it is literally impossible for you to remember?

St Kilda have but a single Premiership Flag to their name and that came in 1966. This means that they have the dubious honour of appearing twice on the table for the period of longest premiership droughts at 69 years from 1897 to 1966 at now 59 years from 1966 to date. St Kilda also holds the equally dubious honour of winning the most wooden spoons of all major sporting codes in Australia at 27.

So this is where the dilemma lies. This is similar to Alfred Lord Tennyson's famous quote, that: "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".

How do you qualitatively compare the thought of never winning a flag with winning a flag but it being literally impossible to remember? I shall assume that these things are identical because therein lies the solution.

The nearest analogue that I have to this is watching Australia as opposed to watching England at the World Cup. Australia is unlikely to ever win a World Cup but we're still insane and mad enough to believe that it is an outside possibility. England has had a number of oh-so-nears and the shadow of 1966 still looms large over the possibility of making it two. Perhaps it is coincidence that St Kilda also won their only flag in 1966.

As for where these three teams sit now?

NZ Warriors - 3rd

Fremantle Dockers - 8th

St Kilda - 14th

The Warriors are highly likely to make the finals this year, Fremantle are dancing on the cusp of success/failure, and while St Kilda are not yet woeful enough to be in contention for the wooden spoon they will not be seeing finals footy this year. Herein is contained the answer. As we are still in the regular season, the one thing that remains is that most absurd of concepts: hope.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

- Emily Dickinson 

In my lifetime, St Kilda have made the Grand Final three times. The NZ Warriors have made the Grand Final twice. However, the Fremantle Dockers in their entire history have only made the Grand Final once, and not only did they lose it but they were behind in all four quarters. To make your only Final and know that you were never going to win it, is surely worse than making multiple finals and be leading at some point. At least St Kilda have a trophy sitting in the cabinet even though it is from so long ago that you probably need to be a minimum of 60 years old to remember it.

The Fremantle Dockers are officially the worst team in Australia; which is why as a casual fan, you should jump on that bandwagon. I can guarantee that the dull pain of losing will be continuous and sad but when the payoff of winning does happen it will be euphoric. 

Horse 3470 - We Need A Big Glowing G

 In the twenty-first century and because we have all been trained for the last 25 years to care about percentage rates of charge in our mobile phones, when people then decide to get an electric car, it appears as though the anxiety about rates of charge has also translated one-to-one to cars. As I do not have an electric car I do not experience this and can only hear about this as second hand information but it appears to me as though range anxiety is not only real but pervasive among electric car owners.

It doesn't need to be.

I currently operate cars within the architecture of the petrol based built environment. To that end, it doesn't matter if I jump into my wee ickle Mazda 2 or someone else's big ol' Truckosaurus Chunkmonster 350, if we're both pootling down the motorway then what happens is that we burn down the miles, the needle on the petrol gauge slowly falls from 1 to ¾, ½, then ¼, and finally E for "Eh, there's not much left" and we're eventually greeted with a big glowing Shell, or stupid Big Green Flower Sun, or a big Pegasus. See one of those and we're fine. 

Petition Stations, like the giant yellow arches, or Col. Sanders smiling face, are all designed to be seen by people from hundreds of metres away; before you whizz past them at 100km/h. The whole point of the very big glowing thing in the night, is to get you to see them and then respond.

I do not think that I have ever seen an electric charging station with anything like that kind of visibility. There are no glowing yellow lightning bolts, or giant light bulb signs; which surely means that as we the general public in our petrol cars are blissfully unaware of exactly how much petrol that we have left and do not care, our motoring brethren in their electric cars must always be in a constant state of panic.

This could very easily be solved with two very simple measures.

Firstly, get rid of the percentage numbers of charge left on the dashboard. Do electric car drivers really need to know or care if the amount of charge that they have drops from 64% to 63% ? If not, then get rid of it. Three-quarter, Half, A Quarter: is good enough. It is only really when you get below about 15% or 10% that discrete granularity matters.

Secondly, since people have to stop on the motorway anyway, then why not install big glowing icons for the temples of automotive electric charge? I don't know if Apple or Google own or operate electric charging stations but if you had a forecourt of sixty charging points and a restaurant/burger joint, then people are hardly going to feel anxiety while they bite into beefy cheesy yumminess. If this sounds ridiculous, then just remember that motorway services already have big forecourts where cars come and go as well as restaurant things where cars are then parked as well. 

An Apple branded charging station with its big white apple with one bite taken out, glowing into the night, would already have massive amounts of brand recognition. As for Terry Google And Sons, his glowing G already fits into a whole design language which already includes Chrome, Home, Lens, Authenticator and what not; so a Google branded charging station is not out of the ordinary.

If all of this sounds silly, then just remember that once upon a time, the whole idea of petrol stations was utterly unknown. An electric charging station is just the latest iteration of the various kinds of staging posts and houses which have existed for thousands of years. It used to be before the advent of mass motoring, that if you wanted to fill up your petrol car then you needed to visit a chemist or pharmacist who had access to petrochemicals and other motor spirits.

Of course this means to say that a place like Westfield which already has thousands of car park spaces, could just as easily turn every single spot into a charging station and charge a small amount for people to charge their cars while they shop; instead of the half dozen or so spaces which they currently have. The difference between a motorway services with electric charging stations and a Westfield, is really only a matter of location.

The mere existence of these roadside shrines to the motor car, has been the solution to range anxiety for petrol cars since 1913. That's so much of a long time that it rarely even enters people's psyche. The existence of petrol stations as the solution, negates the initial anxiety caused by having highly granularly graduated charge status numbers in the first place.

Anxiety is a very useful thing in the world of marketing because you can induce people to slide their wants into needs. However anxiety which is impossible to satisfy, isn't particularly useful at all. Also, since the vast majority of profits at petrol stations actually come from the sales of all of the incidentals at massive markups, then it seems to me that inventing some kind of charging/restaurant which satisfies the need while taking in profits, is the most obvious solution.

Horse 3469 - Rocket Bombs Turn Israelis And Iranians Into Chunky Marinara For No Reason At All

 "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

- George Orwell, The Lion And The Unicorn (1941)

As I write this, some 84 years later, the nations of Israel and Iran are flinging rocket bombs at each other; presumably for the gratification of people like Benjamin Netanyahu and Masoud Pezeshkian, so that they can go back to their respective people and use this as a propaganda device to justify flinging more rocket bombs at Tehran and Tel Aviv.

The trigger for this was that before dawn local time on Friday the 13th of June, Israel started chucking rocket bombs at several places in Iran in what they called Operation Rising Lion.

Allegedly this caused damage to key nuclear sites and killed Iran's top military leadership, though I wonder what kind of pleasure that the Israel Defense Forces and Mossad, actually get from attacking of ordinary Iranian citizens under the excuse of supposedly the private residences of senior officials, military installations, and imaginary nuclear facilities. Given the glee that they have taken from turning Palestinians into chunky marinara and making Gaza flow with red milkshake like slop, then doing this against Iran also seems like fun for them. 

This isn't to say that Iran is somehow a rolled gold voice of peace and integrity though. Iran has essentially been a rogue state since the ayatollahs seized power in 1979, and has repeatedly conducted terrorist attacks all over the world; including places like Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, Paris; and was probably at least partially responsible for the October 7 attacks as well. As an aside, Iran is also the largest external supplier of drones to Russia in the ongoing conflict for fun and profit against Ukraine; so that Vladmir Putin can get his jollies and can go back to his own people and use that as a propaganda device.

The usual chorus of idiots in the United States who have turned what used to be Twitter into a constant raging bin fire of hatred for brown people, all think that if they treat God like a vending machine, then if they pray a bit and support Israel unblinkingly, then they will receive blessings. Push button, receive bacon.

Meanwhile, arms manufacturers like Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, et al. think that this is lovely. They are mostly the reason why Americans don't have basic universal health care as well, because it is too hard to pay for the things that make people's lives happier, if you are busy paying for the profits of weapons manufacturers. I say this without a hint of dramatic irony, as 14th June 2025 also just happens to be the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. As they have a giant military parade which looks all the world like it could be in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, or Israel, the band plays "Hail To The Chief" while the United States wraps itself in the flag and congratulates itself.

As all of this goes on, the United Nations secretary general General Antonio has called on Iran and Israel to stop the "escalation", adding "peace and diplomacy must prevail". I can't help but feel that this is like a nerdy kid in the schoolyard asking politely that the two bullies who are currently engaged in pugilism, stop for a bit. The UN when it comes to this kind of thing is historically impotent, and given that the United States, Israel, and Iran have all consistently defied any instruction from the UN which they find inconvenient, then the UN's impotence must invariably continue. 

Meanwhile:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-857619

The Wing of Zion, Israel’s own version of Air Force One, took off from Ben-Gurion Airport on Friday morning as Israel initiated an assault on Iranian nuclear facilities as part of Operation Rising Lion, Israeli media reported.

The aircraft, which serves Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog as their official vessel of transportation during international visits, departed for Athens on Friday morning amid fears of an Iranian retaliatory attack.

- Jerusalem Post, 14th Jun 2025.

If you ever needed proof that the leader of Israel in addition to being a worthless knave, was also a complete and utter coward, then this is it.

This is the attitude of the leader of Israel?

Having thrown the people of his own nation into harm's way, he is able to get his own gratification as he watches Jews, Iranians and Palestinians all get turned into chunky marinara.

I'm even going to go so far as to say that Netanyahu is so much of a cussjack, that he is secretly happy that his own people are being killed. I think that he actually wants this. His government would be happy if Iran massacred thousands of Israelis because then it would give him an excuse to go full out against Iran and drag America into the war.

When oppression goes unchecked for decades, consequences become inevitable.

Iran didn’t start this, but they’ve shown they won’t be silent either. This is what resistance looks like when it's backed by resolve. Both sides in this conflict are deeply evil; and the price is not paid by any of the leadership of any of these countries but by innocent people. 

Unless the leaders stop this immediately, I can only hope that their respective nations get rid of them.

Horse 3468 - I Don't Get Pet Sounds

 On the day that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys died, invariably there was always going to be remarks on social media inevitable mentions of their 1966 album "Pet Sounds"

https://x.com/cosmicjester/status/1933007646036275528

"Listening to ‘Pet Sounds’. It’s pretty good"

- Cosmic Jester, via X, 12th Jun 2025

https://bsky.app/profile/bencrazy.com/post/3lrem5kxqlk2x

 "Took a nice long walk listening to Pet Sounds, Smile, and Pacific Ocean Blue"

- Ben, via BlueSky, 12th Jun 2025

There is something that I just don't get about the Beach Boys album "Pet Sounds" but rather than just have an opinion, I am reminded by something that my Year 7 English teacher said: which is that it is perfectly okay to have an opinion about something, provided that you can reasonably articulate why you hold the opinion. This is distinct and slightly different to the premise that people can like what they like and dislike what they dislike, without having to justify why. I neither like nor dislike Pet Sounds for the simple reason that I can not get attached either way.

Pet Sounds is an undeniably and unequivocally pretty album. The harmonies on the album are very tight, the instrumentation was basically unheard of in 1966, and the musical density of the album is a technical wonder. 

I absolutely understand why Pet Sounds is seen as a defining point in popular music, and it absolutely deserves its place as a hinge point in music history; so much so to the point where we are still talking about it 60 years later. Aspects about this have been emulated, copied, parodied, and pastiched again and again and again.

But all of that still doesn't get at my core problem with the album. Even though it is pretty, and technically brilliant, I still don't get it at all. It remains somehow inaccessible to me. 

From a lyrical standpoint the first song sounds interesting and I think that it was clever if the lyrics are intentionally ironic. If they are not, then they are still amusing enough to be memorable. 

Beyond that though, most of the album is pretty standard fare: boy wants girl, boy can't stop talking about girl, boy has sad existential crisis. It's the kind of cheesy and relatively unsophisticated stuff which knows exactly where it is on a pop album.

I'm not even complaining that it sounds nothing like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan. It is perfectly acceptable that this isn't psychedelic, or savage, or raw. This is designed to be something else; I just don't understand what that something else means, or what its telos is. 

Pet Sounds is an album that is trying to sound like it is pure and wholesome; without bitterness or rage or angst. It sounds as though it wants to sound innocent or evoke some kind of beauty. Maybe that's why I don't get it. 

People make art because they like making art. People like listening to music because they enjoy listening to the art which has been made. The impression that I get from Pet Sounds though, is that deliberate choices were made for an audience in mind, and that audience is not me.

I like some music that is tragically pretty. I understand and get why Erik Satie or Claude Debussy are trying to pull silk through your head. I even think that Procol Harum who were contemporary to the Beach Boys, totally nailed a piece similar to "Air on the G String". Pet Sounds sounds like it should be as good as any of this, and it is extraordinarily well executed, but it just can not make me care. 

I think it's because I like The Beach Boys earlier albums, which is why I think that Pet Sounds misses that one important thing that they had: Fun.

I have a similar kind of problem with The Beatles after "Revolver". Sgt Pepper is a landmark album but it simply isn't fun. "With The Beatles" is not really an album but a collection of songs that they played and I think that it is their best work because it is the funnest.

Pet Sounds sounds mature and pretty but I just don't have fun listening to it. Perhaps they hinted at this when they sang that "she'll have fun fun fun, 'til her Daddy takes her T-Bird away". Well that has already happened by Pet Sounds. Daffy took her T-Bird away and now she works in a shirt with her name tag on it, drifting apart like a plate tectonic; all she wants to be, is a million miles from here and somewhere more familiar.

Horse 3467 - The Others - 4: On Poverty

 One of the interesting things about having a class system is that it works pretty much identically to having a racist system. In some respects, a class system is a kind of advanced form of racism because it allows you to discriminate against people who look like you.

Perhaps more importantly, unlike rascism and to a lesser degree religious intolerance, is that if you are in possession of the vast majority of capital and the rewards of other people's labour, then you can actively rig the game in your favour in the long run. Working hard produces a smallish reward. Controlling other people's labour gives you the reward which would otherwise be due to them. However, controlling capital and especially other people's money, means that the rewards which would be due to wages, rents, dividends, and management fees, condensate to you far harder and faster than to anyone who has to actually work for a reasonable living.

Let's assume that it costs ₱10,000 to live a rudely boring and middling life in Pallet Town.

If you get a job at Silph Co. making Silph-scopes and other gadgets and widgets, on a wage of ₱10,000, then: 

₱10,000 - ₱10,000 = ₱0.

This is in fact the set of conditions most people, in most cases. They earn a wage to live, and there isn't really a lot left over.

However, someone who owns ₱250,000 can expect to get a 4% return on capital in the long run (being the average rate of inflation since 1 Anno Urbitae). Thus: 

₱250,000 x 4% = ₱10,000.

Yes, ₱10,000 - ₱10,000 = ₱0 but such a person would still be able to work and earn their own wage; which means that in the long run, the gap between people who need to work as opposed to those who could in theory merely live off the interest, must invariably widen.

If you are in possession of capital, then you can also 'invest' in the apparatus of society itself, such as schools and universities, guilds and associations, by making these fee collecting institutions. Fees are a barrier to entry; which means that you can keep out the people who have to actually work for a living. This also has the added benefit of acting as a set of economic signals; which means that future employers can actively discriminate on the grounds of things like postcodes and where someone went to school, to actively keep entire classes of people out of your places of privilege.

Of course if you are in possession of capital, then you can also change the narrative and openly lie about the fact. Since people believe that working hard is what generates rewards, then you can hold out the lie that if people work hard, then they will be rewarded. This is despite the fact that you by virtue of controlling other people's labour and capital, already collect their rewards as well.

It is even better if you can actually make poorer people subsidise your schools and universities, guilds and associations. If you can manipulate government so that they will pay your preferred institutions subsidies (using the narrative that all children deserve an education), then not only can you exclude poorer people from entry but you can make them pay for the places that they are excluded from. 

Since buildings are very big pieces of capital infrastructure, then if you pay people so very little wages that they have no choice but to rent somewhere to live from you (because while being homeless is an option, it is not desirable), then you can take away their wage almost immediately after you've given it to them. 

The really fun thing about all of this is that if you are in possession of media outlets, then you can gently wash the general public's mind in the marination of "personal responsibility". People will naturally resent having to pay anything in taxation, so by constantly purring the message that you should be responsible for your own fate (even though all of the above suggests that that isn't actually true), then you can actively make the moral argument that poverty is actually their fault. Furthermore, because richer people also resent having to pay anything in taxation, then you can also poison their minds into actually othering all of the poorer people to the point where they are seen as less than, and maybe even subhuman. 

Since we've already established that there are different schools and universities, guilds and associations, then we've already segregated people since birth. Because people never have to look at poorer people, then they don't even have to imagine them as being people with lives. They are just economic units to be plugged in where (and if) appropriate. That's the most hilarious thing of all because then we can come after their ₱10,000 and take that away by replacing them with machines which cost ₱100 per year, and it will also be poorer people's fault for not working hard enough.

Horse 3466 - The Others - 3: On Nationalism

 If you have a place which is sufficiently big enough that it has many different kinds of people who are racially diverse, or you have a place which has people who are religiously diverse, then a fun way to demarcate who is "Not Us" is simply to wrap everything up in a flag and make up some myths about the founding of your nation.

It does not matter if there were native people who were there before you lot showed up. It does not matter if you exacted violence upon them, or if you engaged in systemic clearance and genocide (and still have the accounting records to prove it). It does not matter if the people who came after you decided to declare your national project also engaged in systemic extermination of people. As long as you are able to tell some kind of story that people will sign up for (it doesn't even have to be coherent or logical), then congratulations, you have just invented a sense of nationalism.

It helps if you have either some founding fathers whom you can turn into demi-god like figures, because then you can project whatever your current political aims are upon them and because they are all dead, they can not sue you for defamation. It helps if you have some kind of constitution (don't worry if you have never read it, or if it is objectively bad legislation) because then you can employ strict constructionism or invoke the spirit of law, even if you have no idea whatsoever what either of those things mean. 

Nationalism is handy because it means that you can go to war on the premise of lies, and then have some veterans left over, whom you can continually refresh the mythology with. Again, it doesn't matter if as a nation you honestly couldn't give a cuss what happens to them afterwards (shell-shock, battle fatigue, PTSD), because you can decry any of them who step out of line as being not patriotic enough.

Then after having gained some token veterans, you are free to invoke the caterwaul of 'freedom', any time you like; all while demonising anyone whom you don't like.

Nationalism is handy because it comes with a set of visual language and maybe some songs. This means that you can reduce your followers to unthinking plebs who will even sing along to your hymn sheet. Anyone who dares protest, is a heretic and you can them accuse them of hating your nation. It is even better if they choose to wrap themselves in anything other than your flag. If they even as much dare to wave a different flag, then you can accuse them of being self-confessed demons, and then use your military on them with impunity.

If you can find a few token members of the people whom you hate, then you can drag them out in front of your propoganda machines, as examples of what 'those' people should look like.

If you run the line of nationalism far enough, then you can strip people of their humanity and your followers will keep on singing your praises while you do it. You can deport people who have arrived 'illegally' (you can make up the rules on a whim), and if you have gone far enough down the line, you can exterminate them.

You can even subvert the church if you like. Since your followers can be relied upon neither to read the constitution nor the scriptures which they supposedly follow, then you can pick and choose whatever you like as proof that you are in the right. Remember, a lie can run half way around the world, even before the truth has had a chance to put its boots on.

Taken far enough and you can even exact violence upon the people whom you don't like, paint them as less than, maybe even kill a few and spin their deaths as though they deserved it, and because you've wrapped the whole thing in the flag, your unthinking followers won't even so much as bat an eyelid. You have provided the designated enemies, you have othered them to the point where whether they live or die is irrelevant, concepts like justice and truth need not trouble your followers minds, all while the band plays the songs of your nation and your praises. 

Horse 3465 - The Burning Of The Angeles

 The United States in its mad dash to the far right, has taken a few more steps down the school corridor and like all true madmen, is armed. After successfully removing the shackles from the law, and with the Supreme Court and the Congress choosing to remain silent and impotent, what is occurring in Los Angeles at the moment is nothing short of barbarous and the perfect excuse for the Federal Government to send the military on its own citizens.

President Donald Trump’s rush to deploy California National Guard troops upon the citizens of Los Angeles, was so quick that they hadn't even arranged proper sleeping arrangements, with troops being forced to pack together in one or more federal buildings, resting on the floors of what appear to be basements or in loading docks.

The state troops federalized by the Trump administration over the weekend to confront immigration protesters, without the approval of California Governor Gavin Newsom, were wildly underprepared. The deployment is so makeshift that they arrived without federal funding for food, water, fuel, equipment or lodging.

What I find utterly disappointing is that this kind of thing is more or less exactly how one might imagine that the United States drifts inexorably to the right. It has had its equivalent of the Enabling Acts of 1933, this is its Burning Of The Reichstag, and soon to follow will be its World Cup and Olympics which look like Italia '34 and Berlin '36 but in the same country.

To be honest, I do not understand California Governor Gavin Newsome doesn’t activate the rest of his army guard to prevent the president from it or force him to overrule it. He could then take the fight to the Supreme Court on Second Amendment grounds, which guarantees a state a right to a militia. The question then posed before SCOTUS would be how can a state have a militia if the president can simply federalize it?

From a cultural standpoint, anyone claiming that the United States is a "Christian" nation, or resembles anything like one, is either deliberately stupid, dog ignorant, or seriously delusional.

The folks hollering about “family values” are out in the street tearing families apart with unlawful ICE raids, militarized police, & the weaponization of government; all while ripping away food & healthcare from working-class families.

This is all coloured by the fact that this has been baited and egged on by the right wing media who must be absolutely beside themselves after having gained some official designated enemies for whom people can direct their Two Minutes Of Hate at, and they can sell advertising space. 

For decades the NRA and other gun nuts told the American public that their guns were to protect everyone from a tyrannical government. So when a tyrannical government actually does arrive, all they do is either all sitting on their hands, or applaud. Meanwhile, the people who want gun control have to take to the streets to defy the tyrannical government instead.

I am not condoning violence. Setting cars on fire and causing damage to property is not acceptable and should be condemned. What does need to be made clear though, is that this doesn't happen in a vacuum and the right wing media and the people cheering this on, because they can now claim some kind of moral high ground, are evil.

If you think a guy standing on a vandalized Waymo car with a Mexican flag is a bigger issue than the president calling for the arrest of a Governor for no reason, you may have lost the plot...

...or you might very well be one of the howling masses trying to sleepwalk and goosestep at the same time. We have seen this before. 

Horse 3464 - The Others - 2: On Religion

 Literally everyone in the kosmos and everyone who has ever lived, has had at lease some basic belief set about how they expect the kosmos to operate. It is impossible to literally believe in nothing whatsoever. This means that while it is possible to believe that there are no god/gods and be an atheist, it is impossible to be an apistist. As religion is a set of practises based upon what one believes (indeed the word 'religion' comes from the Latin 'religare' which is an observance), then even atheists have some kind of religion because they act in the kosmos.

What is up for contention is how those practices are played out. While there is a common assertion that religion is responsible for more deaths and wars in history than anything else, that kind of immediately falls to pieces under even the lightest of interrogation, when you consider that apart from diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, plague, influenza, and dysentery, the actual thing that casus the most wars is weaponised selfishness. That is: "You have what I want; I am prepared to kill you and your family/nation to take it." Then there is the argument over what constitutes a person; in which case abortions conducted in both capitalist and communist countries, both voluntary and involuntary, might in fact change the numbers by hundreds of millions of not billions of people.

Setting all of that aside, the subject of this post is about the demarcation line of who is 'Us' and 'Not Us', is the subject of religion. Already we are off to a tenuous start as we can and have put a very very big asterisk on the subject.

Organised religion (as opposed to the disorganised religion of an individual - see above) usually comes with a set of scriptures/mantras/rules/laws/covenants et cetera, which readily inform the adherents of their belief set. This ready cut intellectual material is really useful in defining who is 'Us' and 'Not Us' and does so on all kinds of grounds such as race, geography, gender, and even observance to the physical things that the intellectual material demands.

The internal problem and the big question which results is: does a religion actually give someone licence to hate someone else, as opposed to what they do, or what they are, or what they decide, or is this the excuse to hate someone else? In deciding who is 'Us' and 'Not Us', the follower of a religion not only has to filter this choice through the intellectual material of their religion, but also decide if the intellectual material lends itself to this conclusion, or even if the intellectual material is internally consistent and/or valuable enough to apply.

Here is where the entire field where religion becomes the excuse to condemn people as other. In very many circumstances, we can find that someone is prepared to accept their own kith and/or kin who happens to do something which violates the moral code of their religion but if someone is more than a couple of arms' lengths away, it suddenly becomes acceptable to wish not only existential hellfire upon them in the abstract but immediate and present harm and danger in the here and now.

Think about the so-called "religious wars" that have happened. Was the Catholic v Protestant fighting in Ireland really over the practice of religion? Not a bar of it. The English has invaded Ireland under William III and everything which followed including "The Troubles" has been about the control of Ireland. Not once have I ever heard even so much as a peep of reference to anything in scripture. The current war in Gaza also has nothing to do with religion. Hamas and Likud are about as far away from Qu'ran and Torah as you can possibly get, and the current Netanyahu Government has openly stated that this is about land clearance; with the destruction of innocent people as collateral damage. The people of Gaza have been othered to the point where they are no longer seen as people.

On the other hand, the great waves of the Islamic Caliphates, were also never really about promoting Islam. Rather, they were about conquering land, controlling resources, and finding new and cheap sources of labour to do the dirty work; all with the threat of the sword and the power of the state. This is hardly a new concept at all. Whether it was the Arabs in the 600s, the Spanish in the New World, or the British in the immediate wake of the Industrial Revolution, money and power are what drive the rise of Empire; with religion being used as a paintbrush after the fact.

The "religious right" in the United States which appears to be in the ascendancy right now, also likes to cover itself with the iconography of Christian Nationalism, which is ironic given that they also want to weaponize the state to destroy their designated enemies. Say what you like about the moral conception of and treatment of gay people, trans people, illegal immigrants and whatnot, because it all seems to ring a bit hollow in a nation that on one hand wants to kill unborn babies for economic convenience and on the other thrown poor people to the weeds, also for economic convenience. Caring for the poor and vulnerable, all looks like anathema to the so-called "religious right".

I do not know how you can hold the ideas of civic philos and charitable agape in the same hand as a gladius. I do not know how you can demonstrate love for someone while actively banishing them. I do not know how you can show respect for your god/gods while at the same time othering someone else who is made in the same humanity as yourself.

However, I can understand all of these things if you made the decision to other someone else, to put them outside of your religious space, and to render them as less than human. Because if you render someone as less than human, then you are at perfect liberty to take their money, their house, their bodies, their dignity, their land, and their lives, because if they are less than human then it isn't really stealing, is it?

Horse 3463 - The Others - 1: On Race

People seem to forget that the entire of the twenty-first century, all follows on from the fallout of the Sep 11 attacks in the United States in 2001. The need to fund two wars based upon the premise of lies, meant that the US Government borrowed money from the general public by issuing Treasury Bonds which were then sold to financial institutions, who then saw it fit to sell cheap unregulated housing loans which then caused the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. 

On the back of trying to find any kind of hope in the midst of the worst economic downturn of that generation, the people of the United States voted in Barack Obama as the first black president; which then gave rise to the TEA Party and then Obama's one misstep in making fun of Donald Trump in the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.

That act of provocation became the single hinge point which led to Trump deciding to run for the Presidency  and finding compliant token sycophants who know that they are being used on a contractual basis in return for their fealty.

Trump was not the first white president but he was the first explicitly white president in direct opposition to a black president. Trump's rhetoric almost from the get go of announcing his candidacy has always been firmly grounded in race; which included one of his very first press conferences containing the assertion that "some Mexicans are rapists, some are good people"; as well as trying to blame China for any and all of the United States' woes.

Trump was also not the first explicitly racist President but he was the first in a while; which seems to indicate that racism was always bubbling away under the surface. The very existence of the United States as a nation was predicated on punitive taxation measures which were designed by the Lord North Government to bring the 13 Colonies to heel, over the issue of slavery; to the point where slaves were considered to be "three fifths of a person" within the bounds of the Constitution and because this issue was never properly resolved, arguably even with the Civil War, the existence of Trump is a symptom rather than a root cause of the current wave of racism. What he has done is given permission on the world stage, for various kinds of explicitly white nationalist causes to flourish in other countries.

The big through line here, is that racism which is closely linked to nationalism, is about demarcating lines to divide those people who are 'Not Us' from 'Us'. The anarchists who would like to smash the patriarchy almost hint at the root of the thing that they are fighting against. The 'patriarchy' defines its terms by the 'pateras', that is the big question of 'who is our father?' and 'who is our father's children?'. If we are children of a common father, then the people over there who are not, are 'Not Us'.

In fact many nations explicitly have their national stories defined either by some founding fathers, or by some mythos which defines the nation itself as the 'Fatherland' or the 'Motherland'. Within the context of empire, the 'Mother Country' is often the one which decided to go off on its path of conquest; the irony here is that after having arrived and convinced local populations that they should be like the Mother Country, it is the children of the shadow of Empire who are often the most resentful and explicitly racist if those peoples then show up in the Mother Country. 

To wit: In Australia there is quite an explicit undercurrent of overt racism who resents people from India and the sub-continent arriving here. Usually the excuse is that these people refuse to 'assimilate'; when in actual fact it is the children of Indian migrants who are out on the sporting fields playing cricket of an afternoon. I find it somewhat ridiculous to accuse people of not assimilating when they are better at actually living out your culture than you are.

At the vanguard of this movement are organisations like Advance, which as far as I can tell is a front company of some kind and largely funded by former Liberal Party operatives. If it was set up in opposition to GetUp as an astroturf group, then it has expanded beyond its original remit. 

Racism at its core, is the incredibly lazy form of othering based upon the outward appearance of people. It exists to create the "Not Us" through nothing more than looking at people from the outside and then deciding that they do not fit the imagined ideal of what "Us" should look like. To that end, depending on what the "Us" actually is, people can be scaled as being not enough of "Us". At various stages, Jewish people, Chinese people, and Eastern European people have either been determined to be enough or not enough of us depending on circumstance and the current political climate. Of course this assumes that we view the world through a white lens. In some parts of Africa the lens is differently coloured and reversed. 

Speaking as someone who lives in Western Sydney, where there are people who look different to me all over the place, I really do not understand either the point or the effort required to enforce racism. I also work in a firm in which everyone else can speak Chinese and I can not; which means that there are many conversations which occur which I have no idea what is being said; and that's totally fine. Even doing a simple count of the number of nations where people from my local church came from, I count 17. 

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus"

- Galatians 3:28

I am assuming that most people who read this are not people of faith and that is fine. This part is not directed at you. This part is directed at the people who supposedly believe in "Judeo-Christian values" but then immediately start spewing nonsense, which demonstrates that they really do not understand the "values" which they like to cosplay in. The Old Testament contains many many commands in Torah to look after the vulnerable, widows, orphans, and aliens. The New Testament, which was written entirely underneath the rule of the Roman Empire, very much is about opening up the The Way to people who are not the same as "Us". Explicitly, the Roman Empire which was the biggest superpower of the day, stood as the overarching enemy; which meant that issues such as race dissolved in the face of the common foe. Of course, Christianity itself stands in stark opposition to racism; by virtue of the fact that it declares that there is one race, the human race, and we are all sinners in need of salvation.

Private corporations are different in that the members and owners of the corporation, have an interest because they chose to buy into the organisation through the purchase of shares. The nation state which owns itself, doesn't really have that kind of subscriber model; nor does it make sense to define who is "Us" and "Not Us" by those same terms. Being born into a family at a particular place and time is entirely a lottery. Literally nobody chooses where they are born. Nobody chooses who their family are. The nation state is different in that people who are not automatically citizens by accident of birth, can choose to join another national project (subject to rules of course). The nation state, especially when it is made up of people of various kinds of races, both internally and externally, is completely agnostic and apathetic to the notion of race entirely unless otherwise and/or explicitly stated. 

Yes, I understand that the nation state exists because there are things like language and religion which mean that people have been sorted, but the nation state itself in essence is just a very big collective purchasing and organisation tool; which is one of the biggest pieces of community and commonwealth there is.

I do not know how you can look at other people and come to the conclusion that they are not worthy of dignity. I do not know how you can look at other people and come to the conclusion that they are not worthy of decency. I do not know how you can look at other people and come to the conclusion that they are not worthy of being considered your confederate.

In short, while I understand why racism exists, I think that the people who want to engage in it, do so because they are cruel knaves who refuse accept the notion that someone who looks different to them, can ever be included as "Us".