Prosthetic Conscience

In the big picture though, consumerism was never the problem. Capitalism was. And it still is. Conumerism is merely the way workers are compensated for the general shittiness of their lives. It seems to have worked. Thus, my urge to get on the public address system at the NASCAR Talledaga run and scream: “You fat fuckers don’t need another corndog or that fifteenth beer that has made your belly so big you haven’t seen your dick in ten years.”

But as historian Eugene McCarrher points out, simply telling people that they’re too consumeristic, too materialistic, doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it gives people the impression that the material and the spiritual are antithetical. Yet the natural material world is the only sacramental thing that exists (minus the corndogs).

A long story, but basically the Mumbai attack traces back to the Reagan administration’s pressure on Pakistan to arm and train right-wing Islamic paramilitary death-squads.

A short talk on IT security by one of my favourite socialist Scottish science fiction writers.

It’s not the tax cuts so much as excessive reliance on sales taxes relative to the income tax. The biggest cut was one I approve of – eliminating sales taxes on groceries, and another was the elimination of the lowest income tax bracket. Both are good things, but they weren’t offset by increases in income taxes (especially income tax top rates).