What an asshole

Stupid asshole kiddies advocate inconveniencing millions to get back at "The Man".

Sigh. While accurate in some respects (specifically, about the fact that the U.S. Government is the most powerful entity that has ever existed during the history of this planet, and fighting it is like fighting a mountain, the reason the U.S. government isn't particularly oppressive is because it's so powerful that it doesn't have to be), the rest... bah.

Slow down traffic? What an asshole. All you do is make me waste gas, or if I'm riding my motorcycle to work like I did this morning, make me pass between you (lane splitting is legal here in California). Besides, I don't need to be physically at the office to work. If somehow you managed to bring the entire SF Bay area to a standstill, I'd just telecommute from home. Crap, I don't even have an "office telephone", I have a company-issued cell phone so that my "office" can be anywhere.

Keep your kid from doing homework? Bah. As a former teacher, I can tell you that it wouldn't make a hill of beans of difference to me. As long as your attitude-problem child does not interfere with the learning of other students in the class I would have been happy to allow your kid to be as stupid as his parents want him to be.

Cover up surveillance cameras? Good luck with that one. Most of ours live over intersections and are used to set signal timing and issue congestion warnings. My employer has cameras all over the place pointed at areas we want to be safe, but all that spray-painting them does is cause us to spend money to replace them that we'd really want to use to take on the behemoth corporations that tiny little us is competing with.

As for the other stuff that anarchist idiots often advocate, such as, e.g., a national strike... err, most folks work for small businesses. My employer has a total of 30 employees on American soil, and none of us are rich, and thanks to employee stock options we own a significant part of the company. Why would we want to go on strike against ourselves? I can see it if you work for some big faceless corporation owned by our slave master elites, but really, if you're hostile to our powerful elite, why are you working for them in the first place? And how, exactly, would our going on strike hurt our elites anyhow?

As for the bombing and crap like Baghdad... well, violence scares people. People do violence only if they see no real alternative. Otherwise they'll put up with a lot of shit before they'll do anything violent. Saddam's Iraq, for example, was quite peaceful despite Saddam's viciousness, because while Iraqis had the ability to rise up in violence against the regime, they didn't have the will -- they viewed Saddam's viciousness as preferable to violence. Folks who recommend violence as a method of overthrowing the most powerful government ever to exist on this planet are advocating madness. As Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana was reputed to have told the Legislature when urged to fight a desegregation order, "Are you kidding? We're talking about the government of the U S of A here, they got the goddamned ATOMIC BOMB!".

In the end, people are going to wake up and make things change only when things get so bad that there's no alternative, and even then, the sheeple will merely shift power from one elite power group to another. We are, after all, talking about monkeys. Monkeys are genetically wired to follow an alpha male. That aspect of monkeys will change about the same time that penguins can flap their flippers and fly. We are all, in the end, prisoners of our biology.

-- Badtux the Flightless Penguin