I'm no more advocating that pseudo-Christian religion than I would the costume and make up Disney-celluloid "western and pioneer" view of "democracy", which is distinctly a non-egalitarian democracy and the phony cinematic "American tradition". It is no accident that that is set, in the cultivated imagination of susceptible Americans, in the period before women voted and before any effective campaign of equality or even fair wages happened. Most of it, indeed, is set in the period before slavery was made legally forbidden - though it certainly continues. In the United States, even in the bizarre melding of that movie-TV based patrieroticism (ironically, enough, steeped in adoration of the treason of the original and neo-Confederacies) and such stuff as Euro-fascist "Catholic" integralism by the likes of Cardinal Dolan, Tim Busch and William Barr, that stuff is an expression of the Antichrist right there to be seen.
I think one of the problems of the United States is that the Republicanism of the Founders clearly was at odds with the egalitarian democracy that was desired by, at least at most times, most of the American People. It think the country imagined by most of the Founders, perhaps all of them, saw an unequal country in which the rich, white males of property would rule, it was an eqality only among them as governors, not The People. And they are the ones who set the form of our government. It was not conceived of as a government of, by and for The People, certainly not if you included the majority of The People, Women, People of Color, not the slaves or the native inhabitants of the land who they were clearly intent on displacing, killing them as needed or desired. And that doesn't get to poor white men who were hardly immediately enfranchised by the adoption of the Constitution. It was, perhaps, the Founders mistake that they expressed their desire to be free from England to do that in terms of the equality of all people and rights of all people because that's what the majority heard. Though the first recourse of the slaves in expounding their right to freedom was Exodus and not Jefferson, the hypocrisy of his most famous sentences was noted by them quite often. In the most stirring part of our history, it was people going with that unintentional and atypical expression of universalism that has been responsible for any reason that the United States has had anything admirable in its history, the things unadmirable about us, uniformly an expression of inequality.
No, Gospel equality is the most potent potential source material out of which to make an egalitarian democracy, the attempt to do that through Marxism has flopped everywhere it was installed. No one who had any experience of it wants it back once they've gotten shut of it.
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I'm not sure what I'm going to do when Blogger changes later this month, I might keep on, working around whatever they do or I might change hosting or I might stop doing this in this form. I will NOT go to Facebook, I will certainly not do Twitter - as if what I write about could be done on in tweets. We will see what I do, me included in that waiting.
Update: I'm putting this here at the top because it is true, the overseers at Amazon warehouses, using computers and those "algorithms" so beloved of the smart set and other maximizers of "efficency" (you can read profitability) have absolutely no regard for the human needs or dignity or health or well-being of those who work there.
Working at an Amazon warehouse in the U.K., James Bloodworth came across a bottle of straw-colored liquid on a shelf. It looked like pee.
How could he be sure? “I smelt it,” said the 35-year-old British journalist and author, talking about his new book “Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain.” It was definitely pee, he said.
As he tells it, urinating into a bottle is the kind of desperation Amazon forces its warehouse workers into as they try to avoid accusations of “idling” and failing to meet impossibly high productivity targets — ones they are continually measured against by Big Brother-ish type surveillance.
It didn’t help that the nearest bathroom to where he worked was four flights of stairs below.
and more
Bloodworth said he spent several weeks at Amazon in early 2016 working the requisite 10-hour shifts, four days a week, at a warehouse in the West Midlands countryside. Seeking to write about the plight of the working class, he also worked at a call center, as an Uber driver, on a building site and as a home aide caring for the elderly.
“Amazon was the worst employer, easily,” the author said by phone.
When he took a day off sick, he received a “point.” Earn six and you’re fired, he said.
Bloodworth said he heard of one person getting a point because she had to leave early to see her child in the hospital, and he talked to another who got a point for failing to hit her rate.
At the warehouse where he worked, Amazon monitored everbody’s rate through a handheld device — tracking “our every move as if we were convicts out on house arrest,” he writes.
The device carried messages to workers and recorded how quickly they were picking or packing goods. “Your rates are down this hour, please speed up,” a message might say, according to Bloodworth.
It's clear from the way Amazon has behaved during this pandemic that any improvement in the wage-slave conditions that allow for it to operate as it does is done on a piecemeal basis and, I suspect, temporarily done for PR purposes.
I won't buy from them, they are a manifestation of modern-day minimum-wage slavery.
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