I’d been planning to tell a joke about a Canadian lesbian who walked into a Muslim barber shop, but it turned out to be true, and not all that funny. It was, however, interesting to me, in that it rather neatly exemplified a point made in a recent thinky-think by Slavoj Zizec titled Liberalism and its Discontents:
[…] But as every observer of the deadlocks of political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral goodness – which should be relativised and historicized – ends up in a claustrophobic, oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what George Orwell approvingly referred to as “common decency,” the minimalist program of laws intended to do little more than prevent individuals from encroaching upon each other (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process of legalization and moralization, presented as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, just the bare fact of subjects “harassing” other subjects, then who – in the absence of such mores – will decide what counts as “harassment”?
Slavoj Zizek (photo by Mariusz Kubik)
So, this is what happens when you decide to tolerate people with different religions, different cultures, different haircuts, different seckshul orientations, instead of sending them all back where they came from, goddammit. You have to put up with their different frigging religions, cultures, haircuts, and whatnot. And then, on top of that, you have to deal with the consequences of tolerating them, because they don’t tolerate each other.
Jon Stewart had a funnier, more positive take on this issue — this “American experiment” — the other night. Unfortunately, the clip of it isn’t available in Canada, so I can’t see it and I’m trusting it is the show I watched that night and not the one I watched the other other tonight:
Goddamn bunch of ingrates, I say. Taking out jobs.
Anyway, so I changed my mind and decided not to talk about that, and I got to thinking about how every time Israel does something — anything, our Prime Minister insists on being the first in line to defend them. Mr. Harper, is it really necessary? Really?? I mean, he even upstages the US pro-Israel lobby. What gives? Certainly not because his hick-ass cares about Israel, or the Jewish vote, or about anything for that matter. Here is an interesting theory that plays nicely to my anti-religious zealot bent; he’s trying to hasten the End of Days! Yeeehaw!!!!
Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horsemen
Stephen Harper at the World Economic Forum 2010 in Davos (Remy Steinegger)
San Bernardino, California Files for Chapter 9 Bankruptcy
A recent Reuters story provides a cautionary tale of a city going under due to mismanagement of municipal worker pensions. (And it’s not the first.)
It’s no secret that I hate the working class. They are stupid, although they are generally much better at getting laid than me, so I’m jealous of that. A particular subgroup of the working class I find especially heinous: the unionized worker. I’ll always remember my first “real” job (after my summer in the army reserve and the even briefer stint telemarketing) as a security guard and my first taste of union mentality. I remember the idiot with the tumor on his forehead, smoking incessantly, bellyaching about the anglais, as many morons in Quebec like to do. (Et je t’invite à crisser ton camp si t’aimes pas mes propos. Connasse.) I remember how my grievance was tossed because, though I had seniority on the site, tumorface had company seniority, and therefore entitled to the best shift. And after that site contract ended, I stopped getting called for other jobs. So, yes, I have an axe to grind. And I have an English name, so I should toss in a claim of discrimination too. But as usual, I digress.
Back to unions. A further subclass, yet more despicable, is the public servant. As someone who’s worked in positions with no benefits for most of my life, I find their sense of entitlement galling. But to be fair, I don’t believe public servants go into the job with purely selfish intentions. I mean, they’re not like investment bankers. But are there not similarities? Are we not seeing some of them now getting rich with the money of others, retiring young, and abusing everyone and everything along the way?
It would appear that some sense of entitlement is clearly a part of the culture. A belief that, for their great sacrifice, society owes them a debt of gratitude extending well beyond the period of their service. While city boys see themselves as conquerors, the naturally dominant class, and entitled to take what they want through force, public servants see themselves as heroes and we have a moral obligation to give them whatever they see as their due.
Both groups have built powerful systems of self-justification that are not easy to challenge from within. Even in the face of both local and worldwide economic difficulties, these people dig their heels in and steadfastly refuse to change their modi operandi. It would be unfair (even for me) to blame individuals. But that doesn’t exonerate them. It doesn’t exonerate us either.
When we live in “democratic” societies and turn the reins over to a select few because we don’t want to be bothered with the minutiae of the operations of government, these are things that will happen. Policy and governance need to become an ongoing conversation. If you aren’t engaged, those who are will call the tune. And you’re going to whine about it after the fact? Demand a 1000-page, multi-million-dollar inquiry? Threaten to vote them out next election? Or maybe even voting is too much to ask because you don’t believe in the system anyway, so you just bellyache on the comments pages of online news sites, right? Get a fucking grip.
Use it, or lose it.
Bloodfreak 