Monday, August 13, 2007

Fear the Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Cyberpunk Future

Okay, here's my beef. Hillary Clinton was recently talking about how she's been standing up to "big business" (as she rides a yacht to the Hamptons, I'm sure) and it got me thinking about the strong emotional knee-jerk response you get from typical liberals when you invoke the scary satanic enchantment of the "corporation". What is it about the idea of a company that illicits such strong irrational responses?

I suppose first we have to discover who Hillary was really aiming that to. Part of me wants to write it off as a power grab to the WTO-protesting, hemp-wearing, laughably inconsequential radical wing of her party. Such a play by her is expected but pointless in the long run because it a) appeals to a segment that'll probably be too baked or can't afford gas to actually vote and thankfully b) represents a statistically insignificant portion of her party (American anti-capitalists are retarded for reasons I won't fully go into now but I'm sure nearly everyone understands). So who was she talking to? The main fund raisers for her campaign? Certainly not, because I'm sure that laundry list contains quite a few industry bigwigs. It must be to the working-class democrats, those who are most likely to feel victimized by the Great White Satan of the West, also know colloquially this side of the Euphrates as "The Man".

So who is The Man, and why do so many working-class democrats hate Him? I've often wondered if people who subscribe to this ideology really believe that Steve Jobs is out to oppress them and rape them for their money and labor. Do people really believe there's so Illuminati type organization keeping you from moving out from that studio apartment? Looks a little ego-centric to imply that anyone even cares. Sadly however, The Man is much more complex than this. Like Holden's red hunting-hat The Man is literary symbolism at it's best. To many, The Man and corporations and the UN and whatever authority figure they can dream up really represent the angry feelings they have about themselves; their own disappointment with their life manifests itself as this overshadowing entity from which all trouble comes from.

Corporations aren't evil. Some do bad things, but the entire way of life all of us enjoy is integrally interwoven with capitalism in all it's myriad faces.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

everyday of my life, i wish you would just stop breathing.

emozilla said...

"hurr I defend my progressive ideas by threatening those I don't agree with over the internet, I'm so enlightened" -- you

Coolhand Jones said...

I've never seen you anonymous people make a decent or valid point.

Anonymous said...

as a democrat, i dont like hilary clinton because she is making my party look bad and will fuck us over if she is on the presidential ticket. No one will vote for her just because shes a woman for one thing, and she is just going to split the democratic ticket...so i really wish she would just stop running for president...if she doesnt run..i know the democrats will win if the nominee happens to be someone like john edwards or someone similar

Anonymous said...

Thats because my anonymous comment (#1) wasn't against what you were saying, so much as it was an insult to you. I thought you were going to catch that. Good try, though.

emozilla said...

everyday of my life, I wish you would just get a job.

Anonymous said...

I have two.

Anonymous said...

i think you guys should start a discussion about the creationist museum where it depicts us riding the dinosaurs because that makes perfect sense...i feel a need to discuss religious beliefs and why it HAS to be creationist vs evolution...has anyone ever considered a compromise of the two? Sorry for going off topic but i really would like to see people discuss this kind of thing..if you don't want to just delete this comment when you see it

emozilla said...

Young Earth creationism is mainly a Protestant idea, while Catholicism's official position is that the creation story can be interpreted in many ways (evolution is one). However, what they say is not up for debate is that God was active in the creation of the universe, however that may have been.

Anonymous said...

It's funny that I am Catholic and really didn't have the full scoop of what I am allowed to believe or not. Because with all the evidence around me saying the Earth is 6 or more billion years old, dinosaur bones, fossils, carbon dating...etc, it's hard for many people to look the other way (assuming they didn't know what the actual standpoint of Catholicism is). To express my opinion of how it happened, change 1 thing about the bible and its teachings, change the days (the time of 24 hours) in which the Earth was created to a billion years, and you have my belief. God created the universe (because I don't think we are all here by accident from an explosion, if it was an explosion, it was on purpose as planned by the man upstairs), then the Earth is created, and things began to evolve. This would solve the religious problem of people who think it is impossible to go from small mammals to monkeys to humans because if God planned the whole thing, it doesn't have to be scientifically possible (even though that is still debatable). It doesn't tamper with Jesus Christ and all that he did (it ain't a miracle turning water into wine if we were put here with a structured plan of evolution created by God? If anything, it just further proves how good God is at his job). It still leaves room for all the scientific evidence of a crater killing the dinosaurs (so humans didn't have to ride them to go to the store), and pretty much, you have the best of both worlds. I like knowing that believing in evolution doesn't mean you're not a catholic.

Anonymous said...

(Christine, Kim's older sister)

You can have both creationism and evolution. For instance, if you subscribe to the big-bang theory, (because he HAS been proven, through radiation graphing of the universe, and that there had to be some logical explanation as to why stars create molecular atoms from sheer "nothingness", that the universe started as a mass of four elements. Radiation, Gravity, Matter and Anti-matter I believe were the last two mentioned, that expanded much too quickly to keep all four bonded together. Once one breaks off, the other's follow, in a rapid, "Big Bang") The universe, then, is always evolving, always changing. God Created the universe. He created it to expand and grow. If you talk singularly on an Earth Bound level, creationism is a bit more vague. For one, with as many "ancestral" human fossils that have been found, why would God have created one after another if He is perfect to begin with? It wouldn't make sense.

He has given us the power to evolve not only physically, but mentally. Humans have come a long way since our stick carrying, termite eating days on the African Savannah. if we were "Dropped" on this Earth perfect beings so long ago by God, why wouldn't we have had the technology and the scientific means that we have today? We had to earn it, through trial and error, all the means necessary to survive. That is the essence of evolution. Yes, I believe God created us in his image. But he also created us to evolve into something more then that said image. We've become sentient beings.