"a well-run tyranny is almost as scarce as an efficient democracy"
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"What makes me sick about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if THEY are against Communism, I have to be for it, and I don't want to be!"
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"The property of [France] is absolutely concentered in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers, & tradesmen, & lastly the class of labouring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? [...] Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, & to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."
(note he was writing this shortly before Malthus provided the counter-argument to simply letting the rabble stake infinite claims for their infinite progeny)
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Lookin' to get my culture on (as one does) I tried watching
Das Lehrerzimmer, which turned out to be one of those movies every professional critic feels obligated to praise because if it's 'tackling issues' in a rudderless and stilted manner, it must somehow contain deep truths. While I'd normally welcome more criticism of modern interpersonal bureaucracy, that won't be found in a work which can itself manage no more than a tepid "
careful now" as it merely confirms the existence of topics. Worse though, in order to advance such a plot without anyone playing the villain, all characters are forced to instead play the fool, making deliberately moronic choices at every step which fit neither into a realistic portrayal nor into the more consciously exaggerated old absurdist theater mold. It's hard to empathize, much less sympathize, with a bunch of clowns derping around worse than even your stupidest coworkers while the visuals and audio push you to feel invested and even anxious about their plight. I don't. I feel firing-squady about their plight.
One could, however, credit the flick with at least one brilliant impression on later reflection: that through that entire hour and a half of discriminatory implications and polite hand-wringing, nobody in the zimmer actually gets lehrered a single damn thing. Whatever's happening in that school, it ain't math, science and reading comprehension. And, as anyone who's met a GenZer can attest, that's all too realistic a depiction of past decades' cultural downshift.
On a completely unrelated topic, Bill Maher continued his descent from "tell it like it is" comedian to political mouthpiece recently with
a New Rule attacking New York's newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani and the rest of America's few Democratic Socialist politicians. Now, granted, the U.S. only acquired a semi-official socialist movement in the past ~15yrs and much of what you hear from them resembles less a valid political platform than the same idiotic virtue signaling and moral purity tests which have already sapped the (supposed) left wing's credibility. It is also true that Mamdani will either prove a Trumpish charlatan with no intention of fulfilling his ludicrous campaign promises or an imbecile whose effort will crash and burn spectacularly in a year or two, as the changes he's promised cannot be effected at a metropolitan level, either because New York is too big or too small. Taxing companies and parasitic billionaires might work for a large, powerful country leaving them less room to run with the loot, but not when they can simply move their office half a mile outside city limits. Rent control requires a shitload of ancillary subsidies and regulation to ensure apartments are actually livable. As for fully free public transit? I don't know what
the hell that is, because we didn't even have it under a literal
communist regime! It works well for small towns with light and predictable demand, but for a metropolitan clusterfuck? For just one problem, how many extra cops do you plan to pay to kick all the hobos out of their now free dormitory cars?
But none of that explains why Maher felt a need to lie in conflating socialism with totalitarian communism (especially as he himself spent decades' worth of shows outlining the differences for idiots) and pull an argumentum ad North Koream, except to virtue signal as anti-socialist to all the redneck imbeciles still obsessing over the Red Scare.
Funny thing: when phrase searching that Jefferson quote above, for the second hit down I got "was Jefferson a socialist?" which, given he was writing three or four generations before it even became an issue, I'm gonna call a bullshit question. How about: he was smart enough to note the absurdity of infinite wealth accumulation and the needless cruelty of enforced poverty and six and a half years later the French Revolution more than proved his point. But the only question relevant to the average moron is that of tribal affiliation: was Jefferson an "us" or a "them" either a dirty godless commie or a filthy decadent capitalist pig and should we mindlessly attack or mindlessly defend him while never bothering to understand what he said?
It's easy to forget that communism did originally address quite real imbalances of power like the 19th-century robber barons, sadistic fucks
like the Carnegies that kept their workers under a slaver regime and could order a bought-and-paid-for private or state military to violently crush any dissent. So what will you do to prevent sadistic fucks like Bezos and Musk from starving the population to death on a whim? And what name will you append to such worker/consumer protection and individual rights measures other than socialism? Because there is none more fitting.
Now, of course once socialist protection measures advanced to communist state ownership - of everything - those states themselves even more thoroughly crushed the populace, because ANY human element, once allowed to reign unchallenged, will be a tsar, will be a khan, will be a Nero and Caligula and Torquemada, will gleefully bathe in the blood of innocents, will rehash every flavor of sadistic oppression soon leading to collapse. When it comes to the real-world game of civilization, if anyone wins, everyone loses.
But then we may simply be under an illusion that these sociopolitical transitions ever represented a discursive trade-off between publicly accessible ideologies, and that brings us back to schooling. The past couple centuries' industrialization created a demand for skilled labor and middle-class invention which forced rich investors to tolerate the lower classes' education in the interest of... interest. But they've always strained to restrict education solely to the skills needed to operate their machinery and the information age makes tighter control possible again, promises unlimited surveillance and forced consumer spending. The rise of copy-pasting artificial "intelligence" offers the rich an alternative. No longer must an educated middle class be tolerated to lead, entertain and indoctrinate so long as such functions can be automated by 1984's "versificator" and no longer need competent scientists be recruited if massive processors promise to
brute-force technological solutions.
Thus public education must die a living death, so that the world can once again return to the perennial ape-friendly pattern of masters and slaves, and nothing in between. Kill phonics, kill multiplication tables, kill universities most of all, devote more hours to football, inculcate identity politics instead of reasoned social awareness, argue about capitalism vs. socialism while the rich get richer off corporate socialism,
pick an ideology to make yourself feel big by participation and champion it to take over all of society. Crush any who would oppose your shibboleth. Much as in The Teacher's Lounge, this idiotic plot would never hold together if all the actors weren't bending over backwards to lobotomize themselves toward their primordial utility:
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"The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage.
Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the
capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to
work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a
matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of
six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the
Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in
subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In
reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to
know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other
activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle
turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style
of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral
pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work
at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and
sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty,
they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of
home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football,
beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To
keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought
Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down
and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming
dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the
ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have
strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive
patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make
them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they
became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led
nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it
on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their
notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in
their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little.
There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole
world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers,
and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the
proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals
they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism
of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished,
divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would
have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or
wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it:
'Proles and animals are free.'"
George Orwell - 1984
