rrneck
rrneck's JournalAttractive people of both sexes have it easier.
Both sexes use what they've got for advantage. Pressing ones advantage to oppress or manipulate others is unacceptable behavior regardless of sex.
A beautiful woman can use her looks to use people, a wealthy man can do the same. A woman has to be born good looking, a physically weak man can still get rich. He doesn't have to be a great warrior, or even a towering genius. He only has to be a bigger asshole than the next guy. And when a woman competes in that context she has to be a "bitch". Both conditions have less to do with gender than with wealth and how we manage it.
It's just another market.
Ours is a service economy. Certain services are indispensable, like fire and police protection. Other services are part of the social contract that is as old as our species like the distribution of food and medical care. Religious organizations, as private entities, are privatizing government through their charitable activities.
Considering the fact that there is a millionaire corporate raider running for the office of president, and it is people like him who have made their millions plundering the public trust, advocating that same for your pet private interest presents a clear ideological conflict.
When people need help because of the failed economic policies of the right, aid from religious organizations is little more than disaster capitalism. The fact that conservative churches support such disasterous policies and liberal churches are quick to ballyhoo their charitable response reveals just how pernicious and complementary are their shared objectives.
People have to have the services provided by government. Private entities would like nothing better than to capitalize on that need. They would like nothing more than to be the sole supplier of an indispensable product. Privatizing government is a form of profiteering that is the sine qua non of fascism. When liberal churches lambast their conservative peers in the political arena while simultaneously trumpeting their own good works they are simply engaging in the same corporatist risk dispersion for profit as any other business.
The failure of religion is not unique or even unexpected. Religious organizations are doing what organizations of people have always done: ensure the survival and advancement of its members by capitalizing on available resources. The failure of religion is the failure of our species to manage abundance. There is no inspiration in an ideology that has proven itself to be as fallible and duplicitious as the evil it claims to overcome.
Talk is cheap.
It doesn't cost much to validate people's opinion of their on pre concieved notions. For example; censor offensive language and imagery and you make both the fundies and a lot of feminists happy. Or enact draconian laws for regulating stuff that can be manufactured in a garage or imported by the ton, like guns and drugs, and you make anti gun liberals and anti drug fundies happy. And all the while they make money on surveillance and incarceration.
Create a relationship with religion because its a lot easier to manipulate populations through a few, preferably one, strong charismatic leader than through the Democratic process. Market forces, which typically favor the rich, will determine the most influential religious leader.
That's how they peel support away from progressives. They turn us into cultural consumers who only need to have their opinion of themselves validated.
When we fight the culture wars we're demanding something our political opponents, the 1%, don't need. They will always be decadent, corrupt, racist, mysogynistic, perverse assholes. When we enact laws to control culture, we only restrict our own freedom to live and make the rich richer doing it.
There is no culture, faith, love, compassion, hope, or respect in politics. Politics is the art of who gets what. It determines who has the power to distribute resources through government. Demanding anything other than money is demanding, and fighting for, nothing at all.
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Member since: Sat Nov 29, 2008, 02:55 PMNumber of posts: 17,671
