Ok, so this actually could be the most important election of our lives...

 So, I've been kind of saying it since 2016, but we are in the midst of a party realignment. The previous realignment concluded in 1980. They normally happen or at least start happening every 36 years. 1980 + 36 = 2016. 2016, all hell broke loose. We got bernie sanders on the left, we got me pushing for UBI, with Yang pushing it as a candidate in 2020, we got Donald Trump and his brand of populism. But, the dems kept screwing up. They pushed Hillary in 2016. They pushed Biden in 2020. And now in 2024, Biden's age forced their hand where Biden was forced to hand over the keys to Kamala Harris, and Harris is now choosing Tim Walz. This is a progressive power ticket, and the best we're gonna get. Harris is the most left of the establishment democratic candidates, and her running mate Tim Walz is midwestern Bernie Sanders. No, really, he is. He's BASED. He's MAJORLY based. And he can frame progressive policies in ways that are popular. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is threatening to be a dictator, talking about overthrowing the constitution, and pushing project 2025. The republicans are rolling back worker protections like heat protections in places like Florida and Texas, they're trying to legalize child labor. Theyre talking about banning abortion, banning gay marriage, banning contraception, banning porn, pushing religious extremism on everyone. I mean, it's stark. The republican base is in danger of collapsing. Their base is aging, it was probably supposed to age out in 2016, but Trump bought them a few years, and now some are saying this might be the last election they can win. So they wanna get in and force america to the right through disenfranchising the left, and we might be stuck with a right wing government for a while if the dems lose here. We could fall into the hand maid's tale where we become this religious dictatorship where this increasingly small minority of extremists foist policies on the rest of us. Trump is their in, project 2025 is their in. We need to stop that stuff and block this rightward movement by soundly rejecting them at the ballot box.

Meanwhile, if Harris gets in, we get the best possible democratic candidate with the best possible VP behind her. We get 2 terms of Kamala, and then afterwards who is gonna be the frontrunner to take over? Walz. And he can carry this to 2040. Now, I know it's hard to have a single party dominate the white house for up to 20 years. But you wanna know who did it? FDR. Lincoln/Johnson/Grant also did it back in the 1860s-1870s, for 16 years. Reagan/Bush did it for 12. What makes it possible? A party realignment. A party realignment happens when the coalitions in America shift, and often involves one party's coalition collapsing and the other party becoming dominant. It was looking like, while under the helm of Joe Biden, that the democrats were kind of falling apart. That their mistakes from 2016 on dug us into a deep hole and now trump was looking to go full "angst" on us if he won. It was depressing. And I was like, well, let's defend this the best we can and hope for 2028. But this basically is the closest to that 2028 outcome we were gonna get. We flipped the script overnight. We have the energy, we have a progressive power team suddenly, RUN WITH IT. Take over the white house, keep winning elections. Force the GOP to collapse. Because then they'll be forced to moderate and come back in the 2030s and 2040s as a lot more reasonable. Think the Eisenhower republicans of the 1950s or the Clinton democrats of the 1990s. We Harris-Walz democrats now. Get out there, vote, win the election, enact progressive policy, and then win more elections and do more awesome crap. It's a new "morning in America" again to use a reagan reference. Let's make this realignment happen. 

Yay, we somehow got the best outcome!

 Guys...she chose Walz, she actually chose Walz!

I mean, just to explain why this is a big deal for me, let me go into what her choices were, and how I view Harris. Harris is that kind of democrat who in 2020 I called a "fauxgressive", she seemed as fake as a $3 bill. Like the kind of democrat who would run to the left in campaigning, only to run to the center and govern like a corporate moderate in office. 

There's been some questions as to what kind of candidate and president she will be if she replaced Biden. Biden himself kind of did this middle ground between progressives and centrists, and I know theres been a tug of war within the party what the donors want and what progressives want, and Harris's candidacy represents the next battleground between those interests. As such, her first major decision, her VP choice, is, to me, the first battle we got.

She had like 10-20 candidates to choose from. Of those, a few were good, and most were complete and utter crap. Walz was always my actual #1 choice, with Shapiro being a compromise choice. Walz was the "progressive" pick. it was who everyone on the left wanted. But I kind of figured, well, there's no way we're getting him, he's TOO good, so I mostly argued for shapiro, both with centrists and my fellow progressives who are bugfudge over Israel for whatever reason. Shapiro had, of the centrists, the least offensie flaws for me. What I really DIDN'T want was a corporate friendly democrat like Beshear or Kelly. Because that would represent triangulation to the center and Harris kind of selling out to appease the rich guys who want everything to be "moderate." 

So I mostly pushed for Shapiro, thinking Walz was off limit, and as it narrowed, it looked like it was Shapiro, with Walz still being considered for some reason, and others like Kelly or Beshear still being chosen. But I can't be lucky enough to get Walz, right? Obviously Shapiro is the middle ground option for me and odds are they'll go with the most boring white moderate they can right?

BUT THEN THEY CHOSE WALZ, HOLY CRAP GUYS, THEY CHOSE WALZ!

Now to be fair, it's possible they chose walz because shapiro fell through and by then they had no backup option. Shapiro had his share of flaws and skeletons in his closet, possibly literally, and it's possible that by this point Harris had eliminated enough moderates where she had to choose Walz instead, and even the donors were like "just fricking choose Walz". In which case she failed my test, but somehow failed upward. In which case, I say yay, I'll take the win anyway. 

But yeah. This actually is the best possible outcome, and I'm really happy with this. This is a victory for the left. I hope all of Harris's presidency is this based. 

Our society is basically a dystopia

 So, I had a question asked today about which of these three dystopian choices I'd rather live under, and one of them really stood out to me as being "what's so bad about that?"

Brave New World/Wall-E- Life is physically pleasant but meaningless

Cyberpunk- Technology is extremely advanced but inequality is rampant and corporations run everything

Under His Eye- Life is superficially more "normal" than the others, but extreme religious fundamentalists run everything.

And I really had to ask, like...what's so bad about #1? I admit, I never read Brave New World, and I'm too old to have watched Wall-E, but honestly, a life that is physically pleasant but meaningless is utopia. Keep in mind, my own ethics are geared toward maximizing well being, including pleasure, and doing it without meaning. Meaning is a holdover from the protestant work ethic and religious thinking. As someone who embraces humanism, I embrace the meaninglessness of it all and think we might as well have fun while it lasts. 

So what's so bad about this? To be fair, i did do some research into Brave New World and Wall-E, and have found that yeah they're a little dystopian, but honestly? Still preferable to our current society. As I see it, we basically live in the cyberpunk world. Cyberpunk 2077 is just a version of our existing world except corporations run more stuff, and all of the problems of capitalism run wild out of control. I'll be coming back to this, but yes, Cyberpunk is just basically our future if we don't fix our crap now. 

But let's talk about those other two. Apparerntly with Brave New World, they pump everyone's brains with chemicals to make them feel happy all of the time and make them docile. And I guess that is kinda creepy and dystopian, but to be fair, we do tend to do something similar in our society. our society creates mental illness and forces people to take little pills to be more productive and cope with the pain of living in such a horrible society. We pathologize stuff in such a way where simply failing to mesh with our pro-productivity capitalist culture is a disease that needs to be cured. ADHD is pathologized when I'm like, gee maybe the problem is society forces us to be constantly focused all the time. Autism is really just...being "different" and its core issues are again, not being able to cope in our existing capitalist society. 

And I'm not saying that brave new world is good. I mean, I am for the pursuit of happiness, and all fo the liberty that comes with that, but I'm not about to say utopia is messing with peoples' brain chemistry to make them happy all the time. That is creepy. I do think people should be real and in their own minds. 

As for Wall-E, uh, isnt that the kids movie with the robots sifting through trash all the time that characterizes humans as dullards because they have lives so pleasant they never have to work? Yeah, real protestant work ethic happy message there. I don't actually see that as dystopia, although I do think that the characterization of humans is particularly bad and biased there, and that state is primarily interpreted through our own cultural lens.

But yeah. I've said it back in the earliest days of this blog, but our society really is the matrix. if you want a real science fiction dystopia, look no further than our society in the 21st century. The matrix is a literal allegory for our society. It's an allegory of plato's cave. I mean we have this society that brainwashes from birth into this crazy religiously inspired work ethic, makes us feel like pieces of crap for daring to question the concept of work, we really do make people take happy pills to cope with how crappy our society is, and yeah, we basically are at the cyberpunk universe now. The only difference between cyberpunk and reality is that cyberpunk's problems are exaggerated to make them more mask off and in your face. But yeah. We really do have a society in which we are surrounded by advanced technology. Just think of it, you're probably reading this on a little pocket computer or LCD screen. You are probably surrounded with advanced technology all the time. We could automate away wide swaths of labor. But for some reason, we keep talking about the need to "create jobs" and we pride ourselves on being such "good workers" and the worst thing ever is just...giving people money where they sit around and do nothing. No, humans need to be made to do things, they need to be made to be productive all of the time. We have to keep working non stop all our lives just so number on chart goes up. We keep people in a perpetual state of precarity and poverty to keep people working. We have this feeling that we cant ever get ahead. That's normal. You're supposed to feel like that. Because if you were too comfortable, you might stop working. You need to be constantly uncomfortable and stressed financially so you keep working. You need to be in constant fear of losing your job and losing everything so that you keep working. our society literally runs on incapacitating stress and poverty to sustain itself. And in doing so, it makes the idea of a world where we...don't have to do that any more sound like the worst thing ever. But maybe what's really the bad dystopian society is actually our society now.

I keep saying it. Our society, in any other context, would literally be seen as dystopia. Work, in our society, would be seen as slavery, and often was seen as slavery by our ancestors. We just now, in this time, see it as a good thing. It's very culturally ingrained into us from birth, and most of us are given little chance to really question it. And often times those who do question it are considered crazy, or just plain lazy. Either way, we're written off. Many people just have this cold hard nosed idea of "that's the way it is" and seem to have not only resigned themselves to it, but seem to constantly crap on those who actually do see it as a problem and try to make it better, as if this is the best that things will ever get and anyone who tries to make them better will actually make them worse. I used to be that cynical, but now I'm not. Because I understand that our world really is socially constructed and that all of this can change if only we collectively decide it to be so and organize this way. It really is a bunch of rich people at the top who don't want the world to change because they profit off of all of this. And they control society and how it is through throwing tons of money through our political system to keep it the same. Which is why progressives are fought so hard in government. If we actually succeeded in making society better, they'd lose all of their power and their privilege would be sure to follow. So we keep society as it is, and keep people working as long as possible, to produce as much wealth as possible. Again, we're all slaves, and as George Carlin would say "no one seems to notice, no one seems to care." 

But yeah. Make no mistake, we ARE the dystopia. We ARE the cyberpunk society. Cyberpunk is just a little more mask off about what it is while we tend to hide it better. The best way to maintain control is to have everyone share a mass delusion about how this is just how the world works and that we can't change it and don't bother even trying. 

As such, to go back to the dilemma above, yeah, I'll take my risk with Brave New World/Wall-E. A pleasant life with no purpose sounds like utopia to me. I admit, those actual worlds do seem like dystopians, but in reality, I don't think my human centered capitalist approach is much better than the above description. A world that is pleasant and comfortable to live in and aims to make people happy? A world in which we embrace purposelessness and live for ourselves? Sign me the frick up. Sounds better than what we're currently doing.

Harris's choices narrow to two...

 So, it has come to my attention that Harris's VP choice is down to two possible contenders. Tim Walz and Josh Shapiro. I'm going to be honest this is good news for me. I've been for one of these two from almost the get go. Walz always stood out to me as the progressive choice, and if anything, he is my preferred choice. He's the most progressive option, he always been (of the choices considered), and I consider him not just the lesser evil but the greater good. If it's down too these two, Walz is my pick.

Shapiro was basically my "safe pick." If Harris is gonna go for a centrist, I'd rather he go for Shapiro. All of the centrists have flaws. It's about finding the one with the flaws I can live with. And that is Shapiro. His biggest flaw is on Israel-Palestine. He apparently has a zionist past, although he's mellowed out, but progressives are uppity over that issue this election, so yeah they shapiro with a passion. I don't care as much. I don't care about the issue at this point. I find the protesters are rabid, and the fact that Shapiro obviously thinks so too is why he hasn't gained popularity with progressives. 

I also think that Shapiro adds to the ticket from a pragmatic standpoint. I've been following the electoral math of this election and the odds all year, and yeah, we need PA. PA is THE easiest path to the white house, and any other path would require winning several sun belt states. Georgia is more likely than PA at this point, but we can't win with JUST GA. We also need Arizona, Nevada, or NC, which are all a bit harder to get. Until recently I would say the sun belt was totally out of reach. but even as the odds change and and Trump's lead narrows, the rust belt has always been the way. Shapiro and Walz both help us with the rust belt. Shapiro helps us with PA, Walz is from minnesota but probably has a crossover effect to the rest of it. 

But yeah, the path to the white house is easiest through the rust belt, and the rust belt strategy allows for more ECONOMIC PROGRESSIVISM too. If we chose a southern moderate, lke Beshear or Kelly, they would be better on Israel maybe but likely far worse on economic issues. And let's face it, that's my bread and butter. We're getting social progressivism either way, its a given in the modern democratic party. But rust belt progressives are more likely to be labor oriented, while sun belt ones are upper class and more moderate and more willing to throw those issues under the bus.

In a sense, Shapiro is the "damage control" pick for me. Walz is the ideal. As such, I would prefer Walz if he's a serious option. I've mostly been pushing for Shapiro as I really dont have enough faith in the dems to give us an actually good option, but if Shapiro is now the less ideal option, I'll shift my support to Walz. I'll support either, but Shapiro has always been the less than ideal pick. Between these two, I'm going for Walz. 

So what Harris's VP pick will tell me about her administration

 Harris is in a weird position right now. She has no stated platform, and as I keep stating, she can either go in a centrist direction or a progressive one. I obviously want her to go progressive. Her 2020 persona was, in retrospect, kinda based, I just didnt trust her vs Bernie and other better candidates on the field. But looking at her policies now, yeah, she was one of the better of the establishment dems, I just didn't want ANY establishment dem. 

But in 2024, she could be distancing herself from those positions. It's clear the donors forced Harris out, and it's possible the donors are gonna force her to the center as well. Going back to my 2020 beef with her, Harris always did strike me as a "fauxgressive", someone who fakes left in election season but who will likely triangulate to the center afterwards.

HOWEVER, Biden has proven that he can be true to his word. And he's been carving out a more "harris" like lane in the party with his presidency. And Harris could continue and expand on that. But it's unclear if she will.

As of today, I know it keeps changing, it seems there are three finalists for the VP nomination, and all of them tell a different story about Harris and her place in the democratic party and where she seems to wanna go. As such, I'm going to go into all 3 finalists and what I think of them and their impact on the future of the party and the Harris administration.

1) Tim Walz

Tim Walz is basically....midwestern Bernie Sanders. He's a progressive from Minnesota, he has been the one who came up with the "weird" thing. He has major rust belt appeal. He's actually my ideal choice for the role. if Walz is Harris's hand picked successor, then I feel like the democratic party is in good hands. It wishes to continue in a progressive direction and will likely appeal to me for years to come. Even if I don't get everything, I'll feel like I got a seat at the table, and people in my corner who think like me.

2) Josh Shapiro

 Shapiro is the "neutral" choice. He's a bit of a centrist, but he's the best of the centrist and the obvious strategic pick. I won't assume anything either way if she picks shapiro, as his primary utility is to win my home state of Pennsylvania, which is the swing state of swing states and likely THE state to tip the election one way or another. Not to mention his flaws don't grate on me like the others. i know the free palestine is foaming at the mouth over him, but I keep saying it, I don't care about Palestine, screw Palestine, and yeah I really am kind of at odds with the "progressive left" right now as they seem to be throwing economic issues, and by proxy, me, under the bus, over a fricking foreign policy conflict that has nothing to do with us. 

Really, I'm falling out with the left HARD here. And I'm really to the point of becoming openly hostile toward the free palestine crowd. They really wanna throw the election over this crap. Well, screw them, they're no ally of mine if that's how they feel.

That said, Shapiro's big flaw is neutralized for me. I don't think he's particularly bad on any economic issues or core priorities of mine. And I think he has strategic utility to win the election. So, yeah, Shapiro is my compromise pick, he's the "neutral outcome" pick for me.

3) Mark Kelly

So yeah, this is where I diverge from the free palestine left, but my progressivism is mostly centered around economics, and my core vision. Mark Kelly is exactly the kind of democrat antithetical to it.He's more from the sun belt centrist wing of the party, and probably in favor with the corporate interests. A Mark Kelly pick tells me that Harris will fold on anything that helps working class people. This is exactly the kind of democrat i DON'T want in the white house. 

And yeah, that's who the finalists seem to be now. Apparently Beshear got snubbed in the final round of interviews. Which I'm ok with, I know some union guys kinda liked him and I might've underestimated his appeal, but honestly, Beshear was just another southern moderate dem who talks about bipartisanship and working across the aisle and blah blah blah. Not a fan of his. Pete Buttigieg is apparently an option but he's kinda corporate too, although he could be more of a shapeshifter like Harris in a sense so I'm kinda inclined to see him as a more neutral pick. But yeah. 

Honestly, my heart tells me walz, strategy wise, i like shapiro, and most of the others don't resonate with me at all. I really don't like corporate moderates. I just don't.

Leftists aren't gonna let us have relatively nice things, are they?

 So, I keep seeing leftists crap on our most likely next VP, Josh Shapiro. 

I admit, I'm very opinionated on the VPstakes myself. Like many progressives, Walz is my first choice, beyond that, it's just a matter of the lesser evil. And for me, of the other candidates, that's Shapiro. Beshear as "red state moderate" vibes that alienate the crap out of me, and Mark Kelly is, well, a centrist on economic goals. Shapiro's big issue is that he's, well, a bit of a zionist. Now, to be fair, he's mixed on israel, he has condemned the Netanyahu administration, but he's also been extremely pro israel in the past, and for some reason, the left foams at the mouth over this issue. And they're crapping on him and attacking him, and it irks me. because if we get stuck with any non progressive candidate, I'm like, PLEASE let it be shapiro. Of the flaws that these candidates have, shapiro's are the least egregious to me. But it seems like leftists and progressives are getting weirdly uppity over him in ways that they dont with any other possibility. They're screeching over school vouchers because something something teachers unions (never mind astronaut man was against the PRO act), and they're screeching over Israel, because for some fricking reason, this is the left's "single issue" of 2024, and the whole world has to stop on its axis because of Palestine. 

Ugh. 

I mean, the worst part is, I dont even disagree with Shapiro's comments. Like he had one where he condemned the pro palestine protesters as anti semitic. And to be fair, a lot of the free palestine crowd is completely crazy, and I ALSO condemn them for various reasons. Then there's the fact that shapiro also said that palestinians are too "battle minded" to have their own state, and after researching the history of Palestine and Hamas, I kind of agree with that assessment. Keep in mind, I tend to condemn both factions because both are too fricking genocidal to allow the other to coexist. But for some reason, the free palestine crowd seems to think palestinians are innocent and just wanna coexist. No they don't. They want Israel GONE. And the most extreme pro palestine people ALSO want israel GONE and would probably, in my view, cosign a genocide of Israel itself. Not saying that's the position of all of them, but it's more common than you'd think.

As such, do I blame a jewish governor for being critical of the palestine movement? No, i think he's right on the money. I just dont like Israel either at this point because I'm fair and balanced and recognizing that they're ALSO acting with genocidal intent. Even if I'd otherwise be pro israel, i have to condemn the current administration. And that shouldn't be a controversial position either.

And...to my knowledge, Shapiro is ALSO nuanced enough on that to condemn it. Not that I care, Shapiro could be the biggest zionist on the face of the earth after Bibi the war criminal, and I would still support him as VP, because I don't get this being the left's one big purity test of this election year. And quite frankly, I don't think it matters. Most dont care either way, it aint their top issue, and these leftists are just weirdo extremists screaming into the void. Still, they're vocal online and if they actually have any sway at all, are gonna try to push us to Kelly or Beshear or Buttigieg as it's unlikely Walz is "the guy." Which means we might get an inferior candidate. 

Idk, I don't get where peoples' heads are at sometimes. You got the idiot low info crowd who thinks "astronaut" is the answer even though flying around in space doesnt make you qualified for politics. You got the leftist crowd who has to whine and moan about palestine and is trying to screw us out of, IMO, the least offensive of the moderates. 

And yeah. This is why I'm not on the same page as leftists this time. Again, my progressivism is primarily economic, although i am pretty progressive on social issues in a non woke way. But foreign policy, yeah I'm just a lib. And these guys are seemingly putting the economics on the back burner to go all in with this free palestine crap and I quite frankly DONT CARE ABOUT PALESTINE! Ugh. Really. These guys arent my ally this election any more than woke people were in 2016. Which is to say, they're not.

Why my anti work views aren't "weird", and why, if anything, work is "weird"

 So, I kind of recognize that the right might try to take aim at those who think like me and call us weird, citing that the anti work type people are "weird" for not wanting to spend all of their time working, and how we might be a liability to the democratic party. After all, I do understand my views are abnormal, kind of extreme, and I do fit the stereotype of a lazy person who wants to just live off of the tax payer's dime and "get crap for free." So, as such, I'm not only gonna try to defend my views, but I wanna flip the script on these people. 

So, before I get started, one thing I'll admit that's what's weird is to some extent, culturally determined. Views that might make sense in a certain time and place might make sense to people with a shared cultural identity, even if they themselves seem "weird" to outsiders. On the flip side, we might consider things that are normal to others to be "weird to us." And much of our current "work cult" as I'll call it is a cultural construct that makes sense in this world, at this specific time, and in this specific context, but honestly? As someone who never "got it", it's "WEIRD."

With that said, let's get into it. 

So...human nature. Are humans work happy, or are they "lazy"? I would actually argue that they're somewhat lazy. They work to do the things they need to do to feed themselves and take care of themselves, and then they don't want to work more than that. Our current attitudes toward work are actually culturally ingrained in us by modern society. I've read books about, and have written stuff based on these books, about how we got here on this blog, but long story short, our society has a history of violence and coercion that brought us to this point. We set up the rules of the current game of capitalism roughly 200 years ago, and at the time, it was poorly recieved among the working classes. Because in terms of many aspects of working conditions and the like, it was actually worse then the feudalism that came before. We forced peasants off of the land that they farmed during the "enclosure" movement in order to force people into cities. We then make all other options but to take work miserable. We criminalized homelessness and vagrancy. We forced people into work houses to force the work ethic onto people. In colonies, the British and the like would essentially forbid people from planting crops that were too easy to harvest (see, potatoes and the Irish). We enslaved the Africans. We genocided the Native Americans as they'd rather fight to the death than become slaves. We forced our will on the rest of the world to establish the system that has since become global capitalism. And in this effort, we basically forced this crazy work ethic on people and punished them for not internalizing it themselves. Either people could internalize it and become part of the system "voluntarily", or they would be forced to by literal force. 

Nowadays, the system just "is". Leftists kind of understand it, for as deluded as they are by their own doctrines, but they are familiar with what we call 'capitalist realism", the idea that capitalism as it exists is so ingrained in our psyches and cultures, we struggle to imagine a world outside it. Even I "fall victim" to this phenomenon, in being a "human centered capitalist". I don't try to abolish capitalism, i actually think it's quite useful and has some upsides. And I also understand that trying to replace capitalism means replacing what we have with an entirely different system in which we'll have to rethink the logistics of from the ground up ourselves. And most who have tried such a path, like the leftists and the communists, and the anarchists, quickly find themselves over their heads and end up creating something akin to Soviet style communism instead, with all of its warts and flaws. And that's no better. 

To some extent, capitalism "just works", but that doesnt mean that we cant reimagine it without the psychotic work ethic. So let's talk about the work ethic. The protestant work ethic, as the name implies, comes from Calvinism. It comes from religious weirdos who were...just weird. They had this idea of predestination, in which they were chosen by God to be saved, and they had to prove that they were saved through hard work and meager living.

Now, to the uninformed, this is a lot to unpack. So let's unpack a lot of the assumptions in this mindset.

First, let's go into Christianity, specifically protestant christianity based on biblical literalism. These guys believe God talks to them through this old collection of writings and stories known as the Bible. They believe that while God authored the Bible, that he did it through humans. 

In the Bible, the world is about 6-10,000 years old. In the beginning, things were perfect. We all lived in a garden, everything was great, no one had to work, all they had to do was not eat fruit from a single tree. God specifically commanded them not to. but then a talking snake who was god's enemy allegedly entered the garden and tempted them to eat the fruit. So because of that, sin came into the world. Sin is rebellion against god. And because of that, humans die, women have painful childbirth, and men have to work for a living. 

God then chose this group of people out of all the world's people to be HIS people, and they had to cut off the tip of their...things....to show that they were of god's people. And then he wrote this collection of stories and commands through him to show humans god's perfect law. And god was a control freak. And while the rules made sense in a certain concept, and most of it had to do with primitive attempts at cleanliness and avoiding disease, in a modern context, these rules are often plain WEIRD. 

Anyway, as it turns out, humans are sinful and horrible rule followers, so god got pissed and felt morally obligated to smite them and/or send them to an eternal torture chamber for disobeying god. There is original sin, which everyone gets just for existing, and then all humans commit their own transgressions against god, often simply for living their lives. In christianity, HUMAN NATURE is sinful, and peoples' natural urges lead to sin, and people need to actively fight their own nature in many ways to avoid sin. 

Anyway, God solved the sin problem by sending his son, who is also himself, to earth, so he can be a human blood sacrifice, to himself, to absolve us from sins against the rules that...he created. In the olden days, people would absolve themselves of sin for doing things like sacrificing goats (the name "scapegoat" comes from this fact), and now we sacrifice this holy human who is also god to god, so that we can be absolved from sins. Because the only way to forgive sins is through blood and death apparently. This is the best system an all knowing all perfect creator could come up with. Idk, to me, it's just WEIRD. 

Anyway, because this dude WAS God, he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, and anyone who believes in him gets eternal life. Like....brutally honest, it's "weird". Christianity is "weird". It's something I noticed when we left it. We kind of had all of these lessons sound normal growing up in it, but it ended up being kind of...weird. 

And now, a lot of the pushback against the GOP being weird is often because the more radical bunch of extremists of this religion want to push their weird ideas on the rest of us. But yes, the whole thing is weird. 

But back to "work." I didn't go into what christianity is, just to bash christianity. No, I did it to set up the historical context for the protestant work ethic. So Calvinists basically are a "weird" Christian sect that believes that those who are saved from God are "predestined", and they believed, because christianity is closely related to asceticism and pleasure denial because of the "sin" fixation, that the way to show one is saved is to live a meager life devoid of pleasures, and to instead invest in hard work. But one can't enjoy the fruits of their hard work, as indulgence would be sinful, so they're just expected to give away their money or something.

Anyway, some Christians decided to push this idea society wide, which is how we got the work ethic. The idea was kind of to keep people working all of the time so they'd never have time to fall into sin, and to create a surplus of resources that would then be used to give to the poor. But the poor won't get this for free. No. Because the Bible says "those who do not work shall not eat" at one point (verse cited explicitly without its historical context in this case), they can't just feed the poor. They have to save their souls by forcing this work ethic onto them as well. So charity to the poor got linked to being coerced to work, and this idea caught on and was implemented by early capitalists.

Which is how we got to this secularized version of this where we are all to spend all of our time working and developing this work ethic, and we need to actively punish those who don't work. We like to act like it was essential at one point, but never in the history of capitalism itself was it. Sure, humans have always had to toil to some degree to survive. For much of society it was necessary just to not starve to death. But what makes it different under capitalism is the fact that we do create this surplus of resources, and then we insist on people working all of the time to create more and more and more of a surplus. 

And here we are 200 years later living lives of luxury beyond our ancestors' wildest dreams, but we are often stuck on the edge of poverty intentionally in order to keep us working. We love to act like this is just how the world is and it's necessary, but no, these ideas came out of a specific cultural context, and in abstract just seem...weird. 

And they are weird. Honestly, work should be seen as an evil. We should seek to minimize how much we work. As we gain the ability to create a surplus, sure, we can use that to enrich ourselves, but we should also allow ourselves to work less, and to make work more voluntary as a result. Maybe we won't grow as much if we did this, but maybe growth isn't the end all be all of everything. 

As I see it, we live lives that are stuck in protestant work ethic thinking. They're lives based on self denial, and asceticism, and pleasure denial, where we demonize laziness, we demonize rest, and it seems like, if anything is considered bad, or evil, or "weird" in our society, it's daring to be "lazy" and say what many of us are probably thinking, but none of us can say for fear of the social or financial consequences. That work itself, is "weird". That the work ethic as we practice it, is "weird". That our society is "weird." These ideas arent natural. Nothing about them is natural. If anything, they arose in contrast and in conflict with our natural impulses, and spread because of weird ascetic mindsets from christianity, and are replicated through force and common lies we tell ourselves about the state of the world. but it isn't us who are weird for not wanting to work. it's society that's wierd for forcing us to work to keep creating a surplus in a never ending fashion, where we act like we can just keep growing forever, or that growing forever is preferable, and that this won't come back to bite us in some sort of resource crash or ecological collapse. Even if we didn't. The whole thing, to me, comes off as so irrational, since the economy should exist for humans, not humans for the economy, and living in a way where we are forced to work all the time to generate more and more growth and profits is just plain "weird." We're denying ourselves the pleasures of this world, because we're too busy working. And for many, religion is what keeps people docile and complacent to this system, as christianity teaches people that this world isn't fair, but that we'll all live better in the next. If there even is a next...

Hence why the far left calls religion the "opium of the masses", because it's this mass delusion to stop people from recognizing they're being taken advantage of by these religious worldviews. It kind of keeps them docile and going on about how this world is fallen, and we cant change anything about them, and that oh well, guess we gotta suffer in this life to live well in the next. But honestly, to me, this is also just plain "weird" and we should want to live for today. We don't know what comes next, if there is a next life. If atheism is true, then we are kind of wasting the only life we have working for the sake of growth we never truly enjoy, and we have to ask "what's the point?" And if reincarnation is true, then we still have to ask, well, should we be wasting our lives working? Even if there are other, more pleasurable lives, should we have to suffer in this one? 

I mean, and that's the thing. These ideas only make sense within the cultural confines of protestant Christianity and its quite frankly "weird" mindset. And for the rest of us, these ideas are not only weird, they're harmful.

As such, as someone who rejects the Christian worldview, i think we should push back just as hard against the work ethic and this weird fixation on work that our society has just as hard as we push back against project 2025, or JD Vance and his crazy ideas. Because it's all interrelated, and it's all part of the same worldview, and the same battle between worldviews that our society is fighting. The culture war isn't JUST about christians and their weird views on social issues being imposed on the rest of us. it's everything. it defines their entire theory of everything. And that includes this weird fixation on work that society has. As I see it, my anti work views are, in a sense, just another front of that culture war. And the mainstream views of work are, in a sense, just another front in the culture war except expanding into economics. It's all related. For these fundie christians, everything comes back to fundie christianity. For me, I act as a foil to this by coming back to secular humanism, and my own iteration of human centered capitalism is really just an extension of my secular humanist philosophy, in which we choose to live for ourselves, and make rules for ourselves, rather than living according to the arbitrary dictates of some psychotic, "weird" creator god who insists we do things his way or burn in hell for all eternity. It all goes together. It truly is a clash of worldviews. And always remember, we humanists, we're NOT the weird ones. We're the RATIONAL ONES. We're the ones who subject all ideas to reason and critical thinking and dont just accept things based on faith. THEY'RE the weird ones who believe strange ideas without much evidence and introspection, and then insist that all of society must be run this way. It's fine if they want to live a certain way. It's not fine to make ME live that way, or anyone else. And that's why I push back against this crap.

I understand that most people dont have their minds set up to think this way. Mainstream ideology is kind of insidious like that. it just comes off as "reality" until people question the ideas, at which point, they just start sounding increasingly weird. And then one day you wake up and realize you don't believe that stuff any more. It happened to me, and I hope it happens to everyone at some point in their lives. Because you kind of need to break down the illusions of this world, before you can build your views up again into something that is actually based on reason and evidence. Many of our social structures will survive this test. But others won't. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Get rid of what which doesn't work, stick with what does. 

And yeah, that's how I feel about this. So sorry, not sorry, I'm not actually the weird one here. I'm actually the rational guy in a world that is weird. At least that's how I see it, at least. Why should I continue to give fealty to ideas that don't serve us and are harmful and antithetical to my being? So yeah, sorry, not sorry, I'll never apologize for my views on this subject unless literally coerced to somehow. And if it's coerced, is it genuine? Of course not. Then it's just ceding to power and tyranny, which rips the mask off of everything anyway.