Quislings’ work turns noses brown
Funny how all the people going on about Fascism never remembered the word ‘quisling’. I didn’t myself, until I thought about all the people I’d communicated with online – trying to make the world a better place, you know – only to receive back, finally, dead silence from them and everyone they knew.
*shrug*
A copy of a comment I just made on The Globe And Mail, and copied to LinkedIn…
Joseph Furtenbacher
10:33 AM on April 20, 2013
Hmm… a copy of a comment I made this morning on the Washington Post and copied to Facebook (where it showed up with the somewhat mystifying conversion of ‘justice tempered with mercy…’ to ‘justice…’)…
JoeFurtenbacher wrote:
7:39 AM EDT
Well, I thought I could let it go, but no, ethically, I realized I had to try one last time, it having become obvious to me that if I didn’t, the pipeline would surely be approved, and I would face years of being forced to put the boots to you all – to the opponents for trying to play me, and to the President for having assumed that he could pretend to be more intelligent and ethical than me and get away with it.
As well, having reduced my policy prescriptions for reducing both poverty and environmental destruction to three that I believe are both necessary and sufficient, I thought I’d set them out, and let any psychologist/sociologist/economists explain to me, or to anyone, for that matter, why exactly they wouldn’t be. So,
1. Levy a stiff carbon tax, on both domestic sources and imports from countries that don’t ratify similar social contracts; stiff enough so that the fossil-fueled luxuries of the rich (roughly speaking, people who make more than the median per capita income) are reduced more than the fossil-fueled necessities of the poor are increased;
2. Implement wage and price controls; three percent per annum (including on financial transactions) seems more than generous to me;
3. Deposit $20,000 in the bank account (if they don’t have one, get them one) of anyone who’s willing to contract to work a maximum of 1,000 hours a year, if necessary (with the necessity to be decided by a majority of the contractees) to counter a deemed shortage of necessities, which I would define (to go on with) as: clean air, water, and energy, nourishing food, adequate clothing, shelter, health care, education, justice tempered with mercy…
Feel free to discuss, but I should warn you, I won’t be waiting on your decisions. Been there, done that, learned a lot since…
Q. What happens if you’re living in Ottawa, Canada, and you’re thin, and your place is a mess, and you ask the Ottawa Police Service if you’re legally required to eat?
A. Well, I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but for me, it went something like this: first, a couple of officers showed up while I was still on the phone, leaving only when I made noises to the person on the other end of the line about how I was about to be abducted, and then, around a week later, a public health nurse (and her sidekick) who’d been visiting me arrived at my door, announcing the imminent arrival of what turned out to be a crowd of people including a psychiatrist and a plain-clothed police officer.
Said officer proceeded to ask me a lot of meaningless questions about The Case(s) of the Stolen Cats, before accepting my invitation to talk alone inside (and once there, taking the opportunity to advise me to get my remaining cats registered, and telling me he knew nothing at all about the registered cat I had also reported as stolen, and had not yet been assigned an officer), and then going back outside, and asking me to come out and point out the houses of the neighbours involved.
Well, that, as it turns out, was merely another of the lies he told me, being nothing more than a prelude to the announcement, in front of the crowd of assembled Nazis, er, do-gooders, that in the interests of protecting me (and others!) from myself (when I’d left my apartment in the last four weeks only to buy groceries), he would have to put handcuffs on me, and force me into the back of his car (which turned out to be an undercover police cruiser), and take me to the hospital for a seventy-two hour observation/incarceration period.
After which period of petty tyranny, I was released without the shirt that had been on my back when I was forced in (fortunately I’d been wearing a jacket and parka, since I was left with a long walk home in a snowfall)… the shirt I’d been working in for the last little while… too dirty to wash, apparently… *shrug*
And, as a result of my small absence, I return to find (in addition to no running water in my apartment, and my stolen cats no closer to being returned) worldwide bedlam. Good job, City of Ottawa… How’s that WinterNoBrainActivityLude workin’ out for ya?
D’oh! – Homo Simpiens
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers. – Kahlil Gibran
One of the little people; my little people.
A recent email to the schoolers behind a website which, in order to protect the innocents, shall not remain nameless…
Hi folks,
Look, I thought I’d take a chance and contact you privately instead of venting on Disqus (one of my many soapbox platforms), but I’ll tell you straight, if no one sees fit to honor me with a personal reply to my request (no professional not paid to do so has done so so far), then it will come to that, and not, I assure you, to your advantage.
You may or may not have heard of me, but even if you have, you can’t have been paying very close attention; your website contains just about every error I’ve been railing against for the last year or so. See, unlike you guys, I’ve spent the last twenty years or so living on an average of around $10,000/year (Cdn), in order to have the time available to study, from the top down, any branch of knowledge I felt would have any utility in resolving, with minimal pain for all, the many problems faced by human societies and individuals, a list of disciplines that included, but was not limited to: philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, law, history, politics, pedagogy, theology, architecture, computers, and nutrition. Try to understand: to me, hearing you people talk is very much like what I would expect to hear from one of your more alert teens, were they given an equal chance to expound; I’m guessing it’s been a while since anything any of you wrote was reviewed by a peer who wasn’t being paid – in status and/or comfort – to do the deed, as I am not…
As a small example, your webpage states:
About Us
The Early Education Initiative seeks to promote a high-quality and continuous system of early care and education for all children, birth to age 8. Much of our focus is on pre-K up through 3rd grade.
All children? Sure you don’t mean ‘all (legal) American children’? Yes, I’m well aware that that information is provided by context, but so what? That sentiment infects your website: NewAmerica.net. Too bad even the newest, shiniest America money could buy wouldn’t help the half of humanity living on less than $9,000 (US, PPP).
And so, entirely unaware, having never reexamined your first principles in decades, you foist your unsustainable, unhealthy, and unethical fossil-fueled lifestyles off on the very children you claim to care about. As an example, it seems that since adults like living in cities better than villages, it is, quite obviously, better for their children to be raised there, right? They are just little blank-slate adults, aren’t they? The world, according to your pronouncements, would obviously be a better place if all children were raised in the city and bussed out to the country to examine strange flora and fauna such as pumpkins, instead of being raised there and taught to produce any of their own food, right? That would require teachers willing to rot somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and – gasp – get their hands, and possibly even their clothes, *dirty* – perhaps even willing to be forced to – gulp – *sweat* (sorry, I’ll try not to mention it again without a shower handy). While, apparently, other children – Somalian children, for example – are well enough served by being left behind, dead, when their parent’s food or water supply becomes too low to keep them alive. Gonna bus them out to the pumpkin patch too? Or maybe just discuss whether they’re watching age-appropriate television or not?
Hope someone on your team will decide to work with me instead of against me; I don’t ask for impossibilities, but unless anyone being paid to improve things starts admitting that I know more than they and all their colleagues put together do – it’s no more than the plain truth, after all – there will be no saving of even your own children. You’re better than most of the people I end up reading, but, because of your duties, which are rather imperfectly imagined, you’re just as dangerous as your less-educated adversaries, because you’re no less out of touch with reality than they are… on your front page, for example, for every mention of (entirely impersonal) children, there seems to be an equal and opposite mention of (entirely personal) paychecks…
But, much in the same way an astronomer could fairly safely predict that the sun would appear to rise the next morning, I’m more than capable of predicting that none of you will reply with an honest statement of your salary, and why, precisely, you deserve it any more than, say, I would. I’m that good… not at all confused, in fact. Just sickened by what humanity has become while I wasn’t watching.
Joseph Furtenbacher
p.s. You can find most of the fruits of my labor on Facebook, WordPress, The Huffington Post, Disqus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The National Post and The Ottawa Citizen; Google should snare most of the rest. Of course, I’ll understand if you don’t feel the slightest inclination to do any such thing after such an insulting letter – being the world’s best polymathic macroethicist, how could I fail to also be best qualified to understand the effects of my own handiwork? Happens, though, if I do anything else here, we’re doomed anyways…
p.s. As predicted…
If children lead children, it shall all be fun and games, until somebody loses an eye…
Is there anybody out there who wants to help the rich more than become (or remain) one of them? Is anyone more interested in helping the poor than using them?
fs910@ncf.ca
Ah, the crickets… summer can’t be far away!
