Cryptocurrencies are like stocks. None of them have any inherent value. The only reason they’re worth money is because people have enough faith in their percieved value to trade real money for them, which isn’t so crazy, because money has no real inherent value either. Money, stocks, and cryptocurrency are all just tokens we assign a value to on faith.
The value of these tokens is based on two things: scarcity and the reputation of the person issuing them. For example, the U.S. government says, “We’re putting 10 trillion dollars into circulation. You can trade 1,000 of them for a cow. The more stable our economy is, the more our dollars will be worth. Trust us.” IBM says, “We’re putting one billion stocks in circulation. You can trade ten of them for a cow. The more profitable our business is, the more our stock will be worth. Trust us.”
Note: The video above says stocks represent ownership of assets in a company, which isn’t always true.
These promises are worthless until someone actually accepts these tokens as payment for real-world goods. Bitcoin was just an empty promise until people started accepting it as payment. Once other people saw that happening, they said, “Holy cow! This is worth real money!? Let’s buy and sell it too.” The more demand there was for it, the more money people would pay to get it, and the more it became worth, just like stocks. So you can think of Bitcoins like stocks in Bitcoin Incorporated. It’s even sold on cryptocurrency exchanges that work like the stock market.
The difference between cryptocurrencies and stocks is that there is no Bitcoin Incorporated. There’s no head office, CEO or profit margin because there’s no product being sold. Bitcoin is like a stock in a company that doesn’t exist. There are just a bunch of servers all over the world owned by volunteers, which run programs that were originally invented as a way to back up digital files in multiple locations simultaneously and securely.
Hospitals and big businesses used this technology so they could guarantee they’d never lose important records, and those records could never be tampered with. So employees couldn’t go back in and cook the books to cover up their mistakes or hide fraud. The system works sort of like Utorrent. There are a bunch of people all over the world running a program that allows their computers to collaborate with each other to write chains of data. Unlike torrent programs though, the data isn’t copied. Each server just shares the responsibility of creating and hosting a set amount of data.
The value of a Bitcoin isn’t backed by this data. The data is the money. So a Bitcoin mining machine is like a money printing press, but no matter how many mining machines are online, they collectively only create a set amount of data every day, which is distributed between all the printing presses. Ultimately, the Bitcoin printing presses will produce 21 million bitcoins, and then they will stop producing new ones. I’ve heard the number 21 million is supposed to reflect the amount of gold in the world, which is, in theory, should make Bitcoin the gold standard of cryptocurrency. The last bitcoin will be generated sometime around the year 2040. This system makes inflation impossible, but while Bitcoins are still being created, the more miners there are, the less each person gets to keep.
If this sounds ridiculous, think of Bitcoins like digital diamonds. Diamonds have no inherent value either. They’re just common rocks. The only reason they seem scarce is because DeBeers has a monopoly on the diamond supply and only lets out a few at a time. Plus, they’ve hyped up the value of diamonds so much that people believe they’re worth money.
If DeBeers flooded the market with all the diamonds they’ve hoarded, the price of diamonds would plummet, and your warehouse would become full of stupid, worthless rocks. Bitcoin miners can’t flood the market with Bitcoins and crash their value like DeBeers could with diamonds. They can’t split or reverse split a number of Bitcoins it has issued like IBM can. They can’t print 10 trillion more Bitcoins tonight and crash its value like third world countries sometimes do with their money supply. A foreign country can’t overthrow Bitcoin and crash its economy like America did to Iraq. In a crazy, turbulent world, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin will always be stable… as long as the internet exists. That’s more than most currencies can boast.
How many people accept it as payment for goods and services
There are hundreds of different types of cryptocurrencies, and they each have a gimmick. Some are centralized. Others are decentralized. Some have more transparent histories. Others are more secure and untraceable. DogeCoin is just a generic coin that isn’t backed by anything and has a joke for a name. STEEM is backed by the popularity of its social media platform, which is a cool gimmick, but ultimately won’t determine whether or not STEEM succeeds or fails.
Even if Steemit becomes a great site, people will stop investing in STEEM eventually if they can only spend it on one or two websites. Even if the Steemit admins never make another improvement in the social media platform, if they focus all their energy on getting businesses around the world to accept STEEM as payment, the price will go up and never come down.
Compare STEEM to Bitcoin and Gold. Most of the people who buy Bitcoin probably don’t understand how it works. All they know is that a lot of people accept it as real money. Therefore, it must be real. It’s like gold. Gold is useful in the real world, but most people won’t use gold for anything other than buying things with it. Very few people know why gold is so universally accepted, and they don’t need to. All they need to know is, they can buy anything with it, anywhere in the world.
This leads me to the number one reason I haven’t invested money in buying STEEM yet. Steemit practically forces you to keep your STEEM tokens locked up in Steem power, and it takes months to turn your power into tokens and sell them. The official reason Steem power exists is the admins want to keep timid investors from crashing the price in a panicky sell-off.
This is true, and it works, but it also makes the price of STEEM look stable on paper, which impresses speculative investors. The problem is, if everyone’s STEEM is locked away, then nobody is buying anything with it. The fewer people who spend STEEM, the fewer people will accept it as payment… because they’ll have nowhere to spend it… because nobody else uses it. When intelligent investors realize they can’t use STEEM for hardly anything except selling it to speculators, they’ll probably stop buying it, which will make its price go down until it dies a slow penny stock death.
When it took two years to power down your account, I had zero faith in Steemit, but I knew the program was in its beta phase. So I used it hoping the problems would get fixed. When they lowered the time to three months, it restored some of my faith. However, it’s all for naught if more businesses don’t start accepting STEEM as payment for real-world goods and services. If anyone can share some links to articles of STEEM catching on with merchants, it will make me more of a believer.
You can use this concept to predict the future of other cryptocurrencies too. Dogecoin is doomed to fail, because it’s not based on anything, and nobody is seriously trying to convince businesses to accept it. However, it is popular, and if a profitable business ever accepts it as payment, its value could spike.
There will always be a real-world need for hard-to-trace currencies like Dash and Monero on the darknet, but the value of privacy-centric currencies are likely to stay pegged to the size of the black market. It is possible another Bitcoin could break out of the black market though. So investors should keep an eye on which currencies are growing in popularity there.
The cryptocurrencies with the most potential are ones like Etherium, Zcash and Ripple, because they’re designed with business in mind, and they’re focused like a laser on getting their currency into circulation, unlike Steemit, which is more focused on manipulating the appearance of its value.
That’s harsh, but I’ll be fair, Steemit did take a step in the right direction by lowering the time it takes to power down your account. If they just do a little bit more to improve the circulation of STEEM, I’ll put my money where my faith is.
I was born and raised in the United States, but I’ve spent seven of the past thirteen years living in other countries. In that time I’ve had thousands of conversations with people of other nationalities about life in America. They didn’t all bitch about America all the time, but through the course of these conversations I heard the following reasons why non-Americans are underwhelmed with America:
1: The death penalty
America has always had the death penalty. So Americans tend to take it for granted, some people even celebrate it. There are a lot of pro-death penalty arguments that sound good on paper, but people who were raised in a country that doesn’t have the death penalty tend to be queasy about it. They view it as archaic, small-minded and an inherently counterproductive path to prosperity. They also see it as an overreach of government power because if a government has the right to kill its citizens then how can you really say citizens control the government and not the other way around? Even if American citizens want the death penalty that says something about the American public: that they’re bloodthirsty. You can disagree with this perception, but don’t blame me for its existence. I’m just pointing out that other cultures view killing as uncivilized and thus they view America as uncivilized for using much less embracing the death penalty.
2: Guns
There’s no doubt that America loves its guns. American gun advocates will tell you that the less armed a country is the more it will devolve into fear and chaos. There are a lot of arguments for gun proliferation that sound good on paper, but life in countries that have strict gun control laws (and a lack of gun-loving culture) is very different than the N.R.A. would have you believe. People raised in first world countries where there are strict gun control laws have never experienced the fear and chaos Americans live with every day where you can’t cut off another driver or shout at someone who bumps into you on the sidewalk without worrying about them shooting you. In other first world countries, you just go about your business and never worry about getting shot.
Sure, criminals will always have guns, but most people only shoot people they know. And the fewer people who have guns the less opportunity they have to commit a crime of passion. The less people who want guns the farther the statistics of gun violence fall. Countries that don’t have and don’t want guns are more peaceful, and they feel more peaceful. And the less afraid people are of each other the better they tend to get along. People who grew up in countries where this is the norm look down on America for celebrating weapons of mass destruction and thinking mutually ensured destruction is a viable path to prosperity when it really just ensures destruction.
3: Prisons
America bombastically claims it’s the land of the free, which confuses foreigners since America has more people in prison than any other country in the world. Not only that but American prisons are famous for being inhumane. If you go to an American prison you’re either going to have to join a gang or become someone’s bitch to avoid being raped and/or killed. That’s a simple fact of life for Americans but it’s not for citizens of every other first world country. This is yet another reason why foreigners look at America with pity and disgust.
In America, the high school football captain and head cheerleader are at the top of the high school social hierarchy while the nerds are at the bottom. This phenomenon isn’t as bad as it used to be, but it was never this bad in other first world countries. In other countries, you’re viewed as a failure if all you can do is move a ball from Point A to Point B.
Even in the adult world American culture celebrates idiots more than smart people. Just turn on any reality television show to see more evidence of this. Granted, every country has its own share of morons, and television personalities in other countries even copy America’s idiots. But the fact remains that America sets the bar in anti-intellectualism, which makes citizens of other countries facepalm at us.
6: Propaganda/entertainment news
Possibly the biggest monument to American anti-intellectualism that foreigners facepalm at is Fox News. It’s a thinly veiled propaganda machine for the ultra-rich that employs shock jocks to use reactionary rhetoric and fear mongering to pit its fan base against everyone who isn’t just like them. People from other countries don’t get it. They think it’s satire, and it terrifies then when they find out that millions of Americans take it literally… as well it should.
7: Patriotism
North Korea is the only country in the world that currently rivals America’s sense of patriotism and sense of exceptionalism. America’s sense of patriotism is so strong that social scientists have referred to it as bordering on a civil religion. Germans in particular view America’s fanatical sense of self-righteousness with horror because they know all too well where the path of nationalism leads: it leads to blind obedience and treating others as inferior.
The grim truth is that America isn’t the God-blessed land of milk, honey, and freedom that it paints itself to be. It’s the world leader in prisons, shooting sprees and exporting war, which is all the more reason why foreigners scratch their heads at American patriotism.
8: Broken electoral system
The past two United States presidents’ approval ratings dropped to around 30% in the last few years of their tenure, and Congress’s approval rating has been even lower. The 2013 government shut down just goes to show how ineffective America’s leaders are, which just goes to show how ineffective America’s process of picking leaders is. Yet Americans continue to celebrate their electoral process while jeering the results it produces. And everyone else wonders what’s wrong with us.
9: Invasion of privacy
America, the self-proclaimed land of the free, sets the bar for invasion of privacy. This was common knowledge even before Edward Snowden handed the world proof on a silver platter that America has no respect for its citizens’ privacy. People from other countries have a hard time imagining living in a country where their own government distrusts and disrespects them so much. They have an even harder time imagining why Americans are so lackadaisical about being spied on.
“Black Lives Matter is an activist movement, originating in the African-American community, that campaigns against violence toward black people. BLM regularly organizes protests around the deaths of black people in killings by law enforcement officers, and broader issues of racial profiling, police brutality, and racial inequality in the United States criminal justice system.” Wikipedia
Like Wikipedia’s definition, most media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement focuses on the issue of cops killing black men and vice versa, which could mislead foreign observers to conclude police brutality is the crux of the issue. More accurately, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Black Lives Matter is a new banner for an old movement, and if you want to understand the movement today, you have to know its historical roots.
The African-American community has been justifiably simmering with resentment and anger since the 1600s. Being a second-class citizen will do that to you. Even after the emancipation of slavery in 1863, Jim Crow laws continued justifying blacks’ antipathy towards the American government (and the white people who ran/supported it) until those laws were abolished in the 1950s. Then it still took until the 1990s for discrimination to be completely criminalized.
This puts American race relations in an awkward position today. There are white Millennials who never lived during a time when discrimination was legal. Simultaneously, there are elderly blacks who still remember being forced to drink from segregated water fountains.
So to white children, the struggle for equality can look like ancient history, but in the black community, the wounds of the past are still fresh, and new ones are being created every day. Even though we now live in a time when African-Americans can become celebrities, billionaires or even the president of the United States (twice), at least 27% of African-Americans still live in poverty, more than any other race in America. Blacks are also at least 3 times more likely to go be shot by police and at least 5 times more likely to go to prison than any other race. Obviously, something is still wrong.
The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, which inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, blew the problem to the forefront of the national dialogue by dumping fuel onto a 400-year-old tire fire of resentment and anger that has been a part of African-American culture so long, it has become a cornerstone of their cultural identity, which you can see erupting throughout black culture.
Black comedians habitually fill standup routines and movies with derogatory jokes about white people. Black people call each other “nigger” to spite white people by taking ownership of the term, and despite their intolerance of racial slurs, they’ve invented a whole slew of Caucasian ones they use openly. Black Christian preachers still lecture congregations about how evil the white man is. There are black-only magazines, holidays, music labels, television stations, clubs and clothing lines that blacks use to distance themselves from whites. White racism is such a strong force in the African-American community, members are often punished for acting too white. To the extent a black man is likely to be hassled by the cops if they’re caught in an all-white neighborhood after dark, a white man caught in an all-black neighborhood after dark is likely to be killed.
With so much bad blood bottled up, anyone paying attention to the history and institutionalization of black backlash wouldn’t have been surprised when, on July 8th 2016, a Black Lives Matter protester shot 14 police officers, killing 5, and admitted he was “targeting white people, specifically white officers.” The shooting didn’t come out of nowhere, and realistically, we can expect more of the same until black America’s grievances are settled.
Many white American Millennials are surprised black people have so much animosity towards them because they’ve spent their entire lives apologizing to them, treating them with respect, giving them special privileges and walking on eggshells around all minorities. They’ve grown up celebrating black celebrities, making black friends, living with black roommates, obeying black bosses and voting for black politicians. Yet, for all their efforts, they’ve been told that no matter what they do or think, it’s impossible for white people to not be racist. So they’ll always be presumed guilty of subconscious racist microaggressions. Furthermore, white guilt is a form of racism, and it’s impossible for black people to be racist.
If the white population is sitting around subconsciously conspiring to oppress black people, then why do least 26.6% of Mexican Americans live in poverty, which is within 1% of African-Americans? Other estimates put the percentages of African-Americans and Mexican Americans living in poverty at 38% and 35% respectively, but that still means there are more Mexican Americans living in poverty than African-Americans.
If nothing else, this indicates blacks aren’t exactly being singled out. It also raises the question, if anyone should care about blacks lives, then isn’t it equally important for blacks to care about Hispanic lives? Even if blacks are slightly more oppressed, ignoring the plight of Hispanics, and calling dibs on the first place in line to get saved, is just as callous as ignoring the suffering of poor Asian Americans, and putting them third in line just because a higher percentage of Mexican Americans live in poverty.
Poverty isn’t just for minorities either. While at least 3.6 million black children live in poverty, so do at least 4.2 million white children, and their pain is as real and important as anyone else’s. The fact that a bunch of other random people just happened to be born with the same skin color doesn’t negate their plight.
Most impoverished white children will never recover physically or emotionally enough from the trauma of growing up poor to escape poverty. Like their black counterparts, they’re only theoretically eligible to become president someday, but for all practical purposes, they’re doomed at birth to work like slaves their entire lives for barely enough to survive, living perpetually paycheck to paycheck, in constant fear of their car breaking down and wiping out their entire life savings. Their employers and the customers they serve, treat them like second-class citizens, and all the hard living they endure, inevitably takes its toll on their bodies, killing them prematurely.
If black people feel like nobody is listening to their cries, imagine how ignored poor white people feel. Not only does nobody care, but the whole world is explosively passionate about their indifference, especially blacks, who should care because it raises the question, how can white people be the source of oppression when whites are being oppressed by the millions?
Black people should be equally concerned with the fact that police kill twice as many whites as blacks. If there’s a conspiracy to shoot black people, what purpose does the enormous pile of white bodies serve? Police killings shouldn’t be a divisive issue because black and white victims are two sides of the same coin. Black and white Americans should be complaining about their piles together.
As important as it is for Black Lives Matter to raise awareness of how far blacks are from achieving the American Dream, the movement also needs to raise awareness in the black community of the long-ignored truth that white people don’t live in Whitopia. Rich people do. Everyone else, regardless of color, are varying degrees of wage slaves living in varying degrees of ghettos.
Take a long moment and think about this: Almost half the children in America live near the poverty line, and the percentage is always growing, which proves America has a systemic problem, but it’s not race-related. Every poor person in America is under the same boot. Only acknowledging one race’s plight is myopic and can only make solving the systemic problem less likely.
This is almost beating a dead horse because Black Lives Matters organizers have already acknowledged all lives matter and clarified it’s nevertheless time for America to get off the pot and do something about their complaints.
A Redditor summarized the concept eloquently, “Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!”
The analogy would be more accurate if it read, “Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family. Your uncle gives half the people at the table less than half a portion, but he gives you the least. Then, he keeps most of the food for himself. So you say, “I should get my fair share.” When everybody else says, “What about our empty plates?” You say, “Your plates aren’t the issue. Mine is.” Your comment dismissed everyone and didn’t solve the problem that half the people at the table are starving.
If everyone in America owes it to African-Americans to acknowledge their suffering, then African-Americans owe it to all of America’s races to acknowledge theirs. As it stands, blacks are demanding everyone reach out to them with an open hand while they hold a closed fist and belligerently refuse to reciprocate what they’re asking for.
Ultimately, every race in America has the same problem. The best way to solve it might not be for everyone to get behind one race, but for every race to get behind each other. Instead of singling one race out for rescue, everyone works in tandem as a unified front.
Before the black community can accept that, someone needs to answer the million dollar question you’ve probably been screaming the whole time you’ve been reading this:
Why are African-Americans disproportionately screwed by the system, and is it racially motivated?
Obviously, before the Emancipation Proclamation, the American government, in tandem with the white population, intentionally conspired against and oppressed blacks. White Americans born between 1863 and the 1960s were guilty of gradually lesser degrees of conspired oppression. Baby Boomers were the last generation to live in a time with discriminatory laws, and a significantly low number of white Boomers’ descendants still believe in racist creeds. Any conspiracy to oppress blacks ended with the Millennial generation.
Part of the reason it looks like blacks are still being singled out is because the target was taken off their backs about 20 years ago. The white archer is gone, but the arrow is still freshly lodged in the victim’s body. The arrow is a metaphor for the ghetto. That’s what’s responsible for African-Americans’ disproportionately high rates of poverty, violent crime, incarceration and police altercations. The simplest way to explain why/how is by looking at how the same thing happened in other racial ghettos.
The Native Americans, the native Hawaiians of Oahu, and the Maori people of New Zealand were all forcibly relocated off their tribal lands to isolated geographical locations. Since they’d naturally settled in the most fertile, convenient places before white men came along, they were sent to more inconvenient, inhospitable areas. They still could have lived off the land as they always had. It would have been tougher, but they could have made a go of it. They didn’t have a chance though because capitalists (who just happened to be white) came and introduced the concepts of money and ownership.
Suddenly, everything cost as much money as possible, and the only way to make money was to own a business or work for a business. But employers paid as low of wages as they could get away with, and it costs money to start a business. Even if a Native American, Hawaiian or Maori could start their own business, it would be in an isolated economic wasteland where none of their customers had any money because there weren’t enough jobs to go around. Relocating was easier said than done, because that required money they didn’t have, and more importantly, abandoning their family, culture, and heritage.
Once all the land around their homesteads were developed into suburbs with no jobs, options became even more scarce. The higher businesses raised prices, the more the ethnic poor became hopelessly chained in place with debt. The bleakness of their circumstance became a perfect recipe for stress, hopelessness, depression, anxiety, resentment, anger, desperation, violence and drug abuse, all of which became epidemic in their communities.
Since businesses didn’t want to move into areas where people were being driven to extremes by economic oppression, jobs never came to their ghettos, which meant they would always be opportunity-less economic wastelands full of drug addicts who gave up hope and desperate young men who figured out crime pays limitlessly more than minimum wage.
That’s the story of every ghetto in the world, and that’s what happened to African-Americans the moment they were settled into theirs. Anyone of any color who lives in those geographical locations will experience the same thing, but not because any racist mastermind is actively tinkering with their lives. The concrete does all the work.
This is why attacking police officers and white people won’t change anything. It doesn’t create job opportunities or lower the cost of living. If the Black Lives Matter movement never amounts to anything more than a white witch hunt, its momentum will be wasted lynching scapegoats, and its only long-term impact will be to distract poor Americans from the real source of their problems: America’s predatory financial system and its control of the government. Until that’s addressed, most Americans, particularly anyone living in a ghetto, can expect to live in poverty and suffer all the horrific consequences that come with it… together.
White people aren’t the enemy. CEOs are. They were the ones who owned the cotton plantations and had the capital to ship slaves across the Atlantic ocean. They were the archers who put the target on African-Americans backs. Now America has billionaire CEOs of every color, even black ones, oppressing their wage slaves indiscriminately. To modern business owners, everyone is a disposable resource who is worth less than the products they make.
Since Caucasians are the largest group of poor people in America, they’re actually the most logical ally and most illogical enemy for the Black Lives Matter movement in its struggle against the financial system. However, joining forces with white people to organize bigger protests will only result in the corporate-controlled government deploying bigger columns of riot police to brutally shut down the assemblies the same way they did the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was mostly white. If protesters respond to violence with violence, the only result will be the government justifying further militarization of the police force and erosion of everyone’s civil rights.
The American government doesn’t care about protests. All it cares about is money, because money is power, debt is slavery, and debt-slavery yields the highest, most long-term profit margins. If the poor can pool their resources and build self-sufficient communities that provide free food, water, and shelter to its members, then the rich will lose their leverage over the poor and thus their control. If Americans can coerce their government into prioritizing spending taxes on the necessities of life for all citizens instead of a more high tech police state, then everyone will be free from the desperation and indignity of poverty. There are multiple approaches that could work, but the goal of the Black Lives Matter movement must be systemic financial reform or it’s just hacking at the branches of income inequality.
A sheriff in Lubbock Texas recently made a surprising comment “predicting” there would be a civil war in America if Obama were reelected. Not long after that a couple of American soldiers got caught plotting to assassinate President Obama. It didn’t surprise me at all that either of these events happened, and it worries me that I was so unsurprised.
The extreme conservative right has been beating the civil war drum since 2008, and what started out as a slow clap has finally worked itself up to a fevered pitch, and I blame conservative shock jocks and Fox News pundits almost entirely for this. They’ve been acting like fire and brimstone evangelical preachers this whole time. It’s just taken them this long to play enough hymns and preach enough sermons to get the conservative base worked up like a church revival.
I don’t know why they’re doing it, but I can see what the end result is. They’re poking a bear with a stick, and by “bear” I mean “millions of people who already own A LOT of guns and resent authority.” And by, “poking with a stick,” I mean, “feeding sensationalized disinformation to…” it was only a matter of time before a self-proclaimed Republican somewhere in America acted on what people had been thinking after watching Fox News.
The thing about that is, yeah, the American government is completely broken. That’s been front page news since we were born, but civil war won’t fix that. All it will do is make America turn its gargantuan war machine on itself and shoot itself in the foot. No group of Tea Part militia men could possibly defeat the U.S. military no matter how many shotguns and rifles they owned.
If a rogue group of battle-hardened veterans started attacking politicians, the American government would have to declare martial law on all of its citizens, which would needlessly inconvenience and infuriate an already stressed out, anxious, and fearful population. The worst consequence of even a small scale violent rebellion in the United States would be shutting down travel and business. That would stop people from working, getting paid, or buying goods. If roads were shut down or became unsafe to travel on, then consumer goods would stop reaching markets. Once grocery shelves ran dry, very few Americans living in suburbs or cities would have any way of getting more food except to fight their neighbors for it, and since there are so many guns in America, that’s a recipe for total collapse of civil order. Anything remotely resembling civil war in the United States is a lose/lose situation for everyone except America’s enemies. Anyone doing any saber-rattling is either completely detached from reality or wants America to lose.
The ironic thing about all of this is that there’s a perfectly sane, nonviolent solution to all of these problems built right into right-wing, conservative values. Conservatives, you want government out of your lives. You want to set the laws where you live. You don’t like handouts. You believe in hard work, fiscal responsibility, and fair compensation. And between the lot of you, you’ve also got a ton of money.
You could channel all of those strengths into butting heads with a bankrupt government that’s going through the death throes of an unsustainable empire while being bled dry by welfare queens and an unnecessarily huge and epically wasteful military… but you expect the American government to collapse if another Democrat gets elected anyway. So why not just let the government you hate so much die a natural death? Then you can be the first in line to pick up the pieces instead of being the first to drag yourself out of the rubble you went out of your way to create.
And let’s be honest here for a minute. If the Chick-Fil-A protest was any indicator of how prepared you are to put your money where your mouth is or endure hard times, then armed rebellion is not an option for you. You will fail, but if you know one way or another, America is heading towards its next great depression, then the most important thing you can be doing right now… is preparing for a great depression.
During Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, he raised over $500 million from conservatives, and all of that money got flushed down the toilet when he lost. Imagine how big of a trailer park you could build with $500 million. You could build a trailer park the size of Pecos County, and since Donald Trump is on your side he could Trump it up. With or without trailer houses, you could build your own conservative Utopia surprisingly easily in this day and age. Then all the godless liberals can go to hell inconspicuously outside your walls while you wait for the rapture securely inside.
If you build your own cities then you’ll get to do things your way there. If you design your city to be sustainable then you won’t be dependent on your government. The fewer people are dependent on the government, the fewer people the government can depend on in return. You can assert and enjoy your independence by simply living independently, but that means moving off the grid and building new infrastructure.
You might not want to move off the grid though. You might feel like you paid for the grid with your tax dollars and therefore it’s owed to you. Well, as true as that may be, that grid is broken and unsustainable. It’s a cash sieve. It’s a white elephant. The smartest thing anyone can do is move out of the suburbs and into sustainably designed, self-sufficient communities. If everyone did that then it wouldn’t be a problem when the old system finally dies from eating its own tail. Then we could all just pick up the pieces without having to fight each other over scraps.
On a final note, I just have to ask, was Jesus a builder or a fighter? If you want the world to be a better place then build a better world. That option is still on the table. In fact, the more violent and destitute America becomes the more you’ll wish you had built a sustainable world when you had the chance. If you ever get to thinking that you can bomb your way to a better world, just ask any Iraqi how well that works.
If you don’t then you practically don’t exist. Traditionally, success in the publishing industry hasn’t been determined by what you know but by who knows you. In the age of digital publishing, this is truer than ever. Popularity is success. And you don’t have to woo crusty old publishing executives to be a success anymore. All you have to do is find a way to make your work go viral, a task made easier by the fact that humanity’s artistic standards hit rock bottom decades ago. So you don’t even have to be that good. You just have to provide what people want. But no matter how good you are, nobody can throw you a bone if they can’t find you. Even if you could succeed without an official presence on the Internet, you’d just be making your job harder than it has to be.
2. It allows the general public to give you negative feedback.
This might sound like a bad thing, but writers who get their feelings hurt over negative feedback from the public are like motorcyclists who whine about riding in the rain. You knew this was going to happen. Deal with it. Embrace it if you can, and move on… or get off the ride.
Negative feedback from the public can be used as constructive criticism if you look at it stoically. You can’t always trust the public’s opinions, but it can tell you if you’re moving in the right direction.
3. It allows professionals and semi-professionals to give you constructive criticism.
It doesn’t happen that often, but sometimes people will stop by and tell you in the most tactful way possible that you suck and point out what you can do better. If you don’t want to wait for that to happen by chance, you can link your blog in writers’ forums and beg for feedback.
Nobody wants you to E-mail them your amateur work or open text documents posted by strangers on public forums. However, if they see you post a link to a blog. they don’t have anything but their time to lose by clicking it. If they were lurking on forums they were probably looking for amusing links to click anyway. A lot of people will click on your link just to see if you’re a hot chick. And if your “About Me” page does have a picture of a hot chick on it they’ll pay even more attention to you.
4. A blog is a portfolio.
Blogging allows you to compile a professional portfolio of work that you can always search, access and edit quickly and easily. Granted, your first couple hundred blogs you write are going to be crap that you should be ashamed of, but over the years you’ll add better posts. You’ll have time to go back and preen your old ones. After you’ve trashed half your posts and rewritten the other half 35 times you might end up with a site full of refined work that any professional would respect at a glance. Or you might end up with a site that shows you still have room to grow, but you’re obviously committed and have potential if someone would just give you chance. There’s no guarantee that will happen, but it’s like the Texas lottery commercials say, “You can’t win if you don’t play.”
5. You get to obsess over stats.
This will be depressing at first when nobody looks at your work. But that should also tell you something and motivate you. If that is enough to discourage you from writing, then it’s just as well you quit early because you were going to quit eventually anyway. If you stick with it and your work is worth reading, and you’ve promoted it at all even just in the forums you lurk on, you’ll start to see regular traffic. It’s exhilarating to watch the numbers grow, and sometimes someone will link to your site, and you’ll see a big spike in traffic. You’ll also be able to see what sites have linked to you and what people on that site are saying about your work. If you see certain types of sites tend to pick up your links, then you’ll be able to identify your audience, and if you’re smart, cater to them.
Once your stats start moving up and down, your blog becomes like a “Farmville” game. Whether you’re writing a blog or playing a game on Facebook, you’re still just staring at the computer screen for hours clicking buttons. The Facebook gamer gets to watch their virtual farm grow as a reward. The writer gets to watch their stats go up. Every once in a while you get a bonus reward when someone clicks the “like” button on one of your posts. Sometimes you get penalized when someone leaves a comment telling you how stupid you are. The reward and risks make the game more exciting. As a reward for enduring all that negative criticism, eventually, you get to watch your E-book sale stats, where each number represents real-world cash piling up in your online bank account.
6. Having a blog will allow you to communicate with your fans.
You never know what can be gained through networking. You might meet another writer who wants to collaborate. A fan might tell you exactly what your audience wants so you can give it to them. An agent might contact you with a deal. You might flatter a fan with a reply, which might motivate them to direct new readers to you. You might just have some interesting conversations and learn something new and random about the world. So even if your blog doesn’t open the doors to heaven, it’ll still open doors to opportunities that are enjoyable, if not lucrative.
7. You make books out of your blogs.
Once you’ve got 1-300 pages of quality of work, regardless of whether that’s baking recipes, short stories, character descriptions, advice, opinions or bullshit you can slap that in an E-book and sell it on Amazon. If Tucker Max can make a fortune publishing stuff he had laying around, then so can you.
8. You can justify crowd-sourcing.
If you have fans following your blog, then you already have an audience who might support you. You can open a fundraising page on Patreon or Kickstarter. Then you can market that to the general public. If you build it they may come. If you don’t. Then they never had any reason to.
This isn’t the new standard way to become a professional writer, but if you’re going to be writing anyway, you may as well set yourself up for success and build the tools you’re going to need eventually anyway.
9. Your blog is your data backup
Blogging allows you to keep an up to date backup of your work, and after you’ve written a few hundred posts your blog also serves as a historical vault.
You might not want to post your earliest work because you don’t want to establish a reputation as a bad writer, but nobody is going to remember your bad work. If they do, they’ll be that much more impressed by your latest and greatest work. Even if one or two people get the wrong impression, you’re going to win more fans than you lose in the long run.
If you’re worried about people stealing your work, don’t be. Nobody is going to steal your early work because it sucks too bad. If someone does steal your later work, it’ll be free publicity, and the loss will be offset by a number of legitimate sales you’ve gained through your web presence. If you simply can’t stand the idea of anyone seeing any of your work without paying top dollar for it then I hope your manuscript stays is your desk drawer for the rest of your life. The world will manage fine with one less greedy, tight ass in the publishing business.
You never signed a social contract agreeing to any terms or conditions regarding what authority your government has over you or what you get in return for ceding authority to your government. You were just born into a country at random and told what laws you were expected to follow and how bad the consequences would be if you didn’t follow them.
1: Your life, liberty, and happiness are bound to the conditions of a contract you didn’t sign.
You may have some freedoms, but you only enjoy those freedoms at the whim and leisure of politicians you didn’t elect. Even if you would have chosen to follow all the rules politicians have decided for you, there’s a very important principle implied by the fact that you didn’t choose them: The laws you’re subject to…subjugate you. You’re an indentured servant to the rulers of the land you were born in.
2: Being forced to follow rules you never agreed to is an indignity, even if you embrace them.
The more you celebrate your own subjugation, the more indignity you heap on yourself. Anyone who tells you to celebrate your own degradation is not your friend. Your government doesn’t treat you with respect and dignity. By forcing you to follow rules you never consented to, your government treats you with the disrespect and indignity of a slave, not a free and equal human being. It’s even more degrading to you if you drink the Kool-Aide and celebrate all the rules you never agreed to. The more you celebrate your own subjugation, the more you shame yourself.
Anyone who tells you to celebrate captivity is not your friend. By forcing you to follow rules you never consented to, your government treats you with the disrespect and indignity of a slave, not a free and equal human being.
3: Paying taxes you didn’t agree to is extortion.
Not only are you not free to live how you want, you’re not free to keep the money you earn. You never agreed to pay taxes, but you’re not free to refuse to pay. You never agreed to what kind of taxes you’ll pay, how much they are, what they’re spent on, or what the punishment is for not paying them. You were simply told you have to pay an arbitrary amount decided by someone you’ll never meet. Even if you emigrate, American citizens are required to file taxes in America every year or risk going to jail.
Even though you get something in return for your taxes, that doesn’t justify taking any amount of money from you for any reason, especially when you’re punished severely for not paying. Even if your taxes were completely fair and were spent entirely on public works that benefit you, if you’ll go to jail for not paying taxes you never agreed to, then you’re being extorted.
If there’s any basic human right that everyone deserves, it’s the right to choose how much money you give to your government in return for services of your choosing, but you don’t have that right. You owe your government a lifetime of money the moment you’re born, and since the only way to get money is to work for it that means you owe your government a time debt. That time is infinitely valuable because life is short and irreplaceable; the fact that you have no say in how much of your life is taken from you is infinitely degrading.
Not only are you denied the right to choose what taxes you pay, how much you pay, or what that money is spent on, you don’t have the right to even know what your taxes are spent on. There are thousands of rooms in this world with “Top Secret” signs on the doors that nobody outside is allowed to enter or know the contents of without authorization and a need to know. You don’t have authorization or a need to know…what your taxes are spent on. You never chose to be kept in the dark about what your taxes are spent on, and you have no recourse to rectify the situation. If you don’t continue to fund these mystery projects, you’ll go to jail. This is not a situation you put someone you respect into.
The people who authorized your taxes to be spent on classified projects will tell you that you’re being kept in the dark for your own protection and benefit, but what are you being protected from? You’re being protected from someone overthrowing your existing government and replacing it with one that forces you to follow rules you never agreed to and pay taxes you never agreed to for projects you never asked for and aren’t allowed to know about and will get thrown in jail for not funding.
If you assemble in a group of protesters large enough to have the leverage to influence your political leaders then your political leaders will order the law enforcement agencies (that you fund to protect you) to terrorize you and your fellow citizen/protesters until you disperse. If you need any proof how free or represented you are, just watch footage of the last protest your government shut down. If you need any proof how much dignity your government believes you’re worthy of, watch footage of the last instance of police brutality that went unpunished.
4: Paying taxes to a country you can’t leave is extortion.
If you come to the conclusion your government only cares about you to the extent that it can exploit you for taxes and farm you out to businesses as wage slaves, and no amount of protesting will influence your leaders to treat you with the dignity becoming of a human being, then you might decide to just leave your birth country.
That sounds reasonable in theory, but all the governments of the world (by intent or incident) have effectively colluded to make that option impractical to the majority of the human population. In order to emigrate to pretty much anywhere you need a degree from an accredited university and at least $10,000 in cash. Plus you have to be perfectly healthy. University degrees tend to cost more than $30,000. So unless you have at least $40,000, an able body and a brain smart enough to pass all your university classes then you can’t leave your home country. You’re effectively a prisoner.
I know all the arguments and reasons for why immigration laws exist, but if they sound reasonable and justified then that just means it’s reasonable and justified to imprison human beings in their birth country. Furthermore, it means the poor and stupid don’t have the right to choose where they live or which laws they’re subject to. So by justifying the current immigration laws, you’re justifying denying equal rights to all human beings. You can make that argument, but in doing so you cede the right to claim you believe in freedom, equality or the right to life, liberty, and happiness.
5: Serving unaccountable leaders who don’t serve the people is supporting tyranny.
This is how the world works. These are the indignities you’re subjected to. Yet you’ve been told your entire life that if you don’t like it then you can change it by voting. And yet, year in and year out new politicians get elected and appointed to power without changing the system that imprisons, exploits and degrades the poor. How many more impotent politicians do we have to elect before we accept that electing different politicians isn’t changing anything?
And why would you expect electing politicians to change anything when your politicians are in no way held accountable for their actions? They’ve given themselves and their friends’ diplomatic immunities you don’t have. They may as well have painted the words “Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.” On every government building.
That’s not just a line from a dystopian children’s story. That’s reality even in democratic capitalist countries. Politicians don’t get in any trouble for reneging on their campaign promises either. The can even break the law with impunity, because when politicians break the law, it’s legal. If they get really backed into a corner they can just get another politician to absolve their criminal charges. That’s true freedom. Now, why would you expect your politicians to restrain themselves when they have free reign to abuse their powers? Because they represent you? They don’t represent you. Most people have never even met a politician. We only find out who we get to vote for a few months (at most) before it’s time to vote.
You’re not represented in government. You have no say in government. Your vote is meaningless at best and a lie that enables your victimization at worst. You don’t know what your government does or why it does it. If you don’t like it you have no recourse, and if you take matters into your own hands you’ll be punished with severe prejudice. The only thing you can do is run for a government office yourself and dedicate your life to your political career until you have the power to make the changes you want, but everyone can’t do that, and nobody should have to.
What can we do?
So what can we do about this? You can’t do anything alone. The only leverage the civilian population has is their numbers. No army can stop a hundred million people acting in unison. A hundred million people literally don’t even have to do anything to effect change. If they all went on strike at the same time or stood in the streets and refused to move then their inaction would have enough leverage to twist the arm of their politicians, but a hundred million people are never going to act in unison until they think in unison. Nothing will change as long as people have faith in their government and believe the benefit of keeping calm and carrying on outweighs the cost of sticking their neck out.
If you want to make meaningful change in your government the first thing you need to do is explain everything I’ve just said to your fellow citizens, particularly those in law enforcement and the military who will be called on to terrorize anyone who makes any progress in effecting meaningful change. When the majority of the population loses faith in their government then the stage will be set for the people who are capable of organizing nonviolent political change to do so.
If you choose not to help erode public confidence in your corrupt government, then you should build a bunker to protect you and your family from the problems you’re enabling. You might survive that way, but you’re choosing to live without dignity, and you’re condemning your fellow man and future generations to live without dignity. If that’s your choice, then you have no right to pat yourself on the back for anything you ever accomplish for the rest of your life because all of your accomplishments will be tainted with the indignities you’ve accepted for yourself and everyone else.
Why should you have dogmatic faith in your government anyway? Your government exists to serve you. Why would you be expected to have unquestioning loyalty to your servant? Your servant should have unquestioning loyalty to you. When you subjugate yourself to your servant you make your servant your master and place your dignity under your master’s feet. You’re better than that, and you deserve more than that not just because you’re a human being but because your government is a product that you paid for with your blood, sweat, and tears. You deserve to get the highest quality product for your tax dollar. If you’re not going to demand to get what you deserve, I guess you didn’t deserve it in the first place after all.
“a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion”
On the surface this concept is innocuous. If the country you live has given you the freedom and opportunity to secure meaningful employment and build a life for you and your family, then why wouldn’t you feel some kind of gratitude? If that’s all patriotism means then patriotism is a good thing, but in practice, patriotism is rarely so blase. More often than not a patriot takes a more fanatical tone; the tendency is to support and defend your government unobjectively against all forms of criticism.
Blind patriotism is the definition of insanity.
“Sane” is defined as :
“having or showing reason, sound judgment, or good sense”
Insanity is the lack of use of reason and judgment. Patriotism throws reason and judgment out the window in favor of blind faith, and the effects are catastrophic. The patriot sees their country like a parent who has put a roof over their child’s head, sent him to school and bought him lots of toys. However, the parent also beats his child, and any time the child complains about being beaten, the patriot defends the parent’s actions by focusing entirely on the positive things the parent has done for the child. We should give credit where credit is due, but that doesn’t justify or excuse the harmful behavior… especially because if the child grows up crippled by their abuse, then all the positives are wasted.
The more unconditionally one supports their government, the more their patriotism defeats its own purpose. If you’re truly devoted to your country, you’ll want it to fulfill its potential. Refusing to acknowledge its flaws will only cripple it. Sincere patriotism necessitates hunting down the flaws in your government relentlessly and then rigorously addressing those issues through open conversation and political change. If you view the desire to change your government as treason, then you cripple its ability to ever improve. The only thing that kind of patriotism can accomplish is defending tyranny.
Patriotism misses the whole point of government existing, which is to serve its citizens. People don’t exist to serve their governments. If a person feels, perceives, or understands their government is not serving them, then it’s their right and responsibility to change it. If people lose their ability to change their government, then their servant becomes their master, and they literally become slaves to their own creation.
What end can blind servitude to the random government someone happened to be born under serve? If you want the answer, ask any German. Germans today are possibly the least patriotic people in the entire world. To them, it’s taboo to even say you’re proud to be German because they know all too well where the path of patriotism leads. Let me spell this out loud and clear. The Holocaust would not have been possible were it not for blind obedience to the state. Patriotism enables atrocity under the guise of appreciation. Blind, fanatic patriotism enables tyrants. Tyranny cannot exist without fanatic patriotism. Thus the truest form of patriotism is the most critical of government.
Finally, patriotism undermines humanism. Why would anyone value the good things its government does? Because they value people. Whatever value a government has is derived completely from the value it places on people. But if you value the people who just happened to be born in the same geographical area as you, then why not value all the people who were born in the same universe as you? Are we not all equal? If so, then why pledge allegiance to one bureaucratic system? Why not pledge allegiance to humanity? If you truly value humanity, then why pledge allegiance to one system that cares for a relatively small portion of humanity, especially if it does so at the exclusion or expense of others?
The problem with the world is that humans don’t believe they’re stupid. Obviously, we recognize that individual people can be stupid, but as a species, we believe we’re the closest thing in the universe to god. So our vanity blinds us to how stupid we really are. Then when we, as a species, screw up big time in a way that results in a spectacularly shameful human rights atrocity that doesn’t fit inside our Disney version of reality, our minds reverse engineer a mental trick to excuse and explain away the breach in the schema.
The excuse we tell ourselves is that bad luck and evil geniuses are responsible for all our problems. Everything bad in the world was perpetrated by the man, the terrorists, the NWO, the CIA, the FBI, the Illuminati, the communists, the socialists, the capitalists, the bourgeois, the Bilderberg Group, the church, the corporations, Big Government, Big Business, those people, etc., etc. We find it comforting, even necessary, to believe that if you trace any problem far enough it’ll always lead back to someone bigger, stronger and smarter than us.
And while it’s true there are people actively, consciously making decisions that will hurt others, they’re not the end of the rabbit hole because you have to ask why anyone is hurting anyone and why haven’t they been stopped yet by everyone else? The answer to both of those questions is that we’re just that dumb. We tell ourselves the smoking gun always leads to this:
…. when in reality it always leads to this:
We’re so dumb it doesn’t even make sense. We’re so dumb that a movie called “Dumb and Dumber” has a cult following. We’re so dumb our adult news channels look like children’s video games, and in many ways operate like them. The world has gotten bizarro dumb.The president of the country that has invaded the highest number of countries in recent history, and was complicit in the torture of a whistleblower who publicized human rights abuses, received the Nobel Peace Prize. The dumbest real-life characters on television right now are on Jersey Shore and C-Span. There are fictional characters who were consciously designed to embody idiocy who would make better presidents than recent real-life candidates. Even the caliber of those who inspire us to be better people has dropped to ironic levels. Our idea of what constitutes an idyllic suburban life has taken one step forward and two steps back. We’re so dumb that you can’t tell when we’re being serious or just joking. We’re so dumb we have to come up with conspiracy theories to make sense of the dumb fuck ups happening all around us. We have become the dark parody of ourselves we warned ourselves about.
Dumb is the norm. Dumb is cool. And a dumb culture bears dumb fruits. And that’s why all the bad things happen on every level of society. It’s not because of “them.” It’s because of us. We’re all the problem. Our dumb is our fail. Think about that next time you think about not donating to help create a free, universal education system.
I visited the Occupy Auckland protest a few weeks ago when it started and wrote about my initial impression in another post. Yesterday I went back with my tent and spent the night. I participated in the general assembly and offered to teach the protesters how to use my formula plot template to write stories about the issues they were trying to raise awareness about, but nobody took me up on the offer. I ate a fantastic meal from their excessive kitchen facilities and spent the rest evening talking with the other campers. Here’s what I took away from the experience.
The “Occupy Auckland” camp is basically a homeless shelter draped in protest signs, and most of the non-homeless occupants seem to come from very low socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. I’m not saying this to be judgmental. I’m pointing it out as an objective observation, and it needs to be pointed out because it has some important implications.
Don’t go to “Occupy Auckland” to meet the people who are going to change the world. Go there to see why the world needs fixing. If you see mentally ill vagrants and dirty hippies there, don’t jump to the conclusion these are irresponsible, clueless moochers who came to Auckland to blow off steam before getting back to their normal lives. Those irresponsible-looking human beings have been occupying one city or another their entire lives. It’s just that nobody ever noticed them before because society kept them kicked in the gutter out of sight of the good shoppers and rugby fans. Now that the human beings the system has failed have come together in conspicuous numbers and occupied a highly-visible public space the world can’t wait to find any excuse to dismiss them again and sweep them back into the gutters so they can get back to their luxurious shopping sprees, binge drinking, mindless television-viewing and whatever other diversionary activities they can come up with to try to make themselves forget that they’re throwing their lives away in a high-stress rat race to nowhere.
What do the protesters want? What would the government have to give them to get them out of the public eye again? On the most basic level, they just want a chance, not just for themselves but for everyone alive today and everyone yet to be born. The only problem is they don’t have the educational or professional background to articulate how to fix the system that failed them and is setting up a whole new generation of unsuspecting human beings to fail as well. That’s why they’re not in politics. That’s why we rely on politicians to manage the system for us. The only problem is that the politicians don’t have the educational or professional background to fix the system either. These days politicians are professional campaigners. They get elected because they can convince naive voters that they’ll represent their needs and interests, but once they get into office they need someone to tell them how to do their job, and the only people with access to the halls of government are professional lobbyists and campaign financiers who have a vested interest in twisting politicians’ arms to represent the interests of the rich, who have a vested interest in exploiting the common worker/voter.
Why is there economic inequality? Because the only way the rich can get richer is by taking a bigger share of the poor’s income, which the top 1% have made legal by buying out the majority share of representation in government. That’s probably the crux of the protester’s message, but then the heads of state knew that before the protesters did. John Key, the prime minister of New Zealand, could walk down to Aotea Square today, set up a tent and sleep on the ground with the protesters tonight. He could raise the minimum wage, make profit sharing mandatory, raise taxes on the rich and make education free. The fact that he hasn’t acknowledged much less addressed the plight of the bottom 1% should be taken as evidence that (just like Barack Obama) he has no intention to….not until they twist his arm like the top 1% have done.
Unfortunately, the protesters don’t know how to do that. To their credit, unlike the top 1%, they’re committed to nonviolence, which is just as well because they’re so disorganized that any attempt at a violent revolution would just result in fruitless rioting. In lieu of that, they’ve resorted to blowing bubbles in banks and harassing bank clerks, who are obviously, downtrodden members of the 99% themselves. At this rate, all John Key needs to do to shut down the protesters is stand back and let them make such a nuisance of themselves that the public asks for the police to evict them back to the gutters they came from.
I saw one beacon of hope at the Occupy Auckland protest, a professional academic from the Auckland University of Technology who has been trying to inject the voice of reason into the general assemblies but getting hopelessly blocked by obstinate factions and individual, attention whoring naysayers within the assembly. If that professor (or the person who takes his place after he throws up his hands in frustrations and quits) can structure the camp into a professional public relations machine then the protesters have a chance at waking up the rest of society to the fact that the homeless and hungry are not anomalies; they’re an inevitable product of a broken system and are only a taste of what’s to come if business continues as usual.
But the protesters aren’t going to be able to do that on their own because they don’t even have the skills to secure meaningful employment for themselves. But rather than faulting them for that, we should learn this valuable lesson from them: The people most oppressed by the system are not the people most responsible for fixing the system. The people most responsible for fixing the system are those with the most power. Everyone knows money is power, but the wealthiest 1% have already drawn a line in the sand to stand against their fellow man. Luckily, money isn’t the most powerful force in the world; knowledge is.
The people with the most responsibility to speak for the poor and uneducated are the professors and university administrators. The derelict campers shouldn’t be picketing outside banks begging clerks to change the system. They should be picketing in front of the universities and begging the academics to come down from their ivory towers to accept their responsibility as the voice of reason, the voice of history, the voice of the people.
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