My only take on the Trump/Musk bullshit is that we should all consider the implications of the reality that our current economic and political systems have determined that Elon Musk is the most important and valuable type of person humanity can produce, and Trump is who we should have leading us.

If you see the people in those pictures as human, you immediately grasp the gravity of the current moment, but by dehumanizing them, a third of the country cheers, and a third looks the other way.

The head shaving is a tool used to dehumanize these people. It’s much easier to see as normal a line of faceless, bald men with their feet in chains, dragged by masked guards, than if they looked like what they are - mostly regular ass people, who have personalities and inner lives all their own.

Whose interests does hardening our communities like this serve? What could we be spending time and money on instead?

My local Starbucks has razor wire on the fence. And if that’s not in precisely the spirit of the above passage, I don’t know what is. In a very real sense, this is what it looks like when a society has failed. Who is this here to keep out? What is it here to protect?

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I've been thinking about this passage from the grapes of wrath a lot these days. What's old is new again, again and again.

when you and the boys never get punished for overextending

#dota2 #earthshaker #dazzle