Brothers in Entitlement

"Everybody's someone else's nigger
I know you are, so am I.
I wasn't born with enough middle fingers
I don't need to choose a side."

Marilyn Manson - Irresponsible Hate Anthem


Ah, so the piggies in Ferguson, Massourah are crooked after all. Color me unsurprised. On second thought, please don't color me. Seems to be a bit of a liability. Then again, what isn't? Back in the seventeenth century, Russia decided to dispossess and torture a sizeable segment of its population to death, basically for holding up the wrong number of fingers while crossing themselves. In various parts of the world, having ancestors that were undertakers makes you society's spittoon. Africa's littered with civil wars between villages which have been living so closely for centuries that they can't even smell each others' farts anymore.

There's always something. That's the point. If there isn't, you make something up. It's what humans do as living creatures. From the cellular level to the social, self-nonself recognition expands pretty seamlessly into kin recognition and own-group bias. It's a natural process, and nature produces no ethics. The hypercompetitive human ape will always fabricate an in-group for itself and an out-group to justify its greed and aggression. It works a bit like that old joke about playing poker. If you look around the table and can't tell who the mark is, it's you. Our social instincts operate on that sort of insecurity. If you look around and you're not part of a group that's out-competing outsiders, well, you'd damn well better find a winning side to side with, and quick! Otherwise, tag, you're it.

Many human social institutions work by hijacking the kin recognition instinct to fabricate arbitrary in-groups, institutionalizing individuals into new tribal loyalties. Wear the same sports team's emblem, brand yourself with a company logo, get the same gang tattoo, wear the same uniform, and what you're doing is tricking your brain into reconsidering its ties of similarity, its perception of family and clan. Not accidentally does the word "brother" crop up in so much of slang and propagandistic jargon. Is you a brutha? Brothers in arms? Our brothers in faith? Sister cities? How much of this crap do you have to swallow before you realize you're being sold a mind-numbing bottle of snake-oil?

"If you'd like to examine a granfalloon just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

Granfalloonery becomes especially destructive when coupled with an increase in social rank. When you institutionalize a bunch of knuckledraggers as the hired muscle of a power structure, legitimize their actions as moral authority, reinforce the sensory reinforcer of in-group advantage, what the hell do you think will happen? You're worried about abuses of power? The very awareness of power already embodies the beginning of abuse. Yet power doesn't corrupt nearly as much as the ethical umbrella of enforcer legitimacy.

Even the best of the media are selling the Ferguson case study as a racial issue, because that's how you sell an issue to tribal apes, especially to a population as institutionalized as contemporary America: make it a selling point for some interest group. Scribble it into some political lobby's day-planner; otherwise no-one gives a flying fuck about injustice. It is apparently true that in this case the victims were selected largely on the basis of skin color. Fine. Let's fix that idiocy while we're at it, but don't forget it won't actually address the issue of abusive power. If it weren't the blacks it'd be the Jews. If it weren't them it'd be pot-smokers. If not them, it's the people on the other side of the street (think they're so much better than us with their curbside parking) because in this case, the cause is an effect. The pigs wanted someone to beat and shake down and skin color was the most obvious demarcation.

Scroll down to section three on page nine of that DoJ report. Law enforcement focused on generating revenue. Well, no crap. What the hell did you think traffic tickets are, other than highway robbery? Mob enforcers collecting protection money, entire countries pillaged to justify reconstruction contracts, gang-bangers shaking you down on the sidewalk, piggies filling their trough from fifty-dollar grass-clipping fines, high school jocks taking your lunch money... there is no fundamental difference. This is how muscle acts. Thus the granfalloon inflates.