Thoughts on a Friday afternoon

I hate middle class people. Not anybody who reads this, you guys are cool. And maybe things are different back home in North America, I can't remember and I don't follow the news over there. But I'll tell you what drives me nuts about the English middle classes - ethical causes (ie. fads). There's a few going around right now that I just can't stand hearing about. I hardly ever read the paper or watch the news, except maybe the Economist or Financial Times, they don't make me mad because they don't usually give a crap about the stupid things middle class people care about. That's because it is the newspaper of the rich, and they just care about making money. I like that about rich people, they will pretty much leave things alone and are content to just get on with making lots of money. They have this in common with poor people, who are too busy trying to feed and clothe themselves to care about stupid bull-crap. As for that residual underclass of criminals and welfare scroungers, I hate them too, but it is tinged with a miniscule amount of sympathy, I don't know.

Anyhow, back to middle class people. They have a few 'causes' right now that really are annoying. One such cause is the campaign against battery chickens and the related obsession for organic food and against additives, 'chemicals', etc.

For those who don't know (I didn't) a battery chicken is basically a caged chicken, as opposed to the free-range or barn chicken. Now, I don't care if people want to live solely on organic food, more power to them, I would love to be able to eat solely organic food, it tastes better. However, I can't afford fancy-pants chicken that have been provided with opportunities to express themselves creatively or some junk. I, like many others in my financial situation, need cheap protein. That's why industrial farming and agriculture rules. I don't care if the chickens don't like it, screw the chickens. They don't even know where they are anyways.

Another thing going right now in England is this demonization of the big grocery stores for selling cheap booze. Apparently, this is a terrible problem which troubles middle class people. The poor are getting drunk and being uncouth to their own detriment. The solution: to make booze expensive enough so that only people of the correct social standing can afford it. Grrrr!!!

It's much the same with every sort of environmental campaigns. If I hear one more middle class person telling me off for not recylcing my piddly amount of waste or for not using energy efficient appliances I'm going to snap. These people spend all their time flying everywhere and buying tons of junk and then what time they have left they spend whining about how much they waste, fly, etc. etc. and how nobody else should do it. I am poor, and your carbon foot-print is bigger than mine, so bog off.

Honestly, these people have the stupidest problems - they have too much, they have wrinkles, they fly too much, etc. This all boils down to a preoccupation on their parts with minding everybody else's business. "We already chopped our forests down, but your dirt poor country musn't do that because it makes us sad." Or, "stop clubbing seals" because they are cute or something. The singer Morrissey won't even come to Canada because Canadian club seals, what a tool. Who cares about the stupid seals. I could understand if they were going extinct or something, but their not.

This busybody trend is supposed to be an effort at transcendence or something, but it ends up being just a bunch of loudmouths squabbling over stupid garbage and screwing things up even worse. Case-in-point: humanitarian interventions. These are motivated in large part by the same sort of concern to make the world perfect that drives people to ban smoking, raise the price of booze, and all sorts of other crap that general does nothing but add to the existing level of human misery. Some government starts killing its citizens, usually incited by some rebels who were hoping to achieve exactly that result. In a small minority of cases, once enough stupid celebrities get concerned, a Western intervention begins - a NATO or UN force breaks in to the country, undermining what little authority the state's government had been clinging to. Sometimes, like in Iraq, the government is taken out of the picture completely. Now, instead of eeking out a miserable existence under some oppressive government, they get to live in the hell that is stateless/government-less anarchy (eg. Iraq, or Afghanistan). Now they pay tribute not just to one bloody tyrant, but a myriad group of gangsters, warlords and criminals. Depending upon who the 'liberators' are, the people of the oppressed country may also have to deal with being bombed, tortured, incarcerated, etc. etc. in addition to being harassed, kidnapped, extorted, etc. by local gangsters. If the 'liberating' powers do finally manage to impose democratic processes on this unlucky country it usually takes the form of factional parties aligned on ethnic divisions. The majority ethnicity then sees that advantages lies in kicking out the minority ethnicity so that they can consolidate their 'democratic' advantage.

Anyways, that's enough ranting for one afternoon. Time to start drinking my cheap beer before some well meaning temperance group manages to jack up the price and take away my cheap chicken.