Earwig and His Fearsome Critters

Oh my GERD, this started as a short blurb for the video, because I think Drew Gooden is great at what he does. I don't know what happened. I can't read this anymore, so I'm posting. Not sure if I'll keep it because I don't really know what it is.

Drew Gooden provides my annual realization that Spotify is still a thing. He is such a good egg. Love everything about this video. I have no idea why anyone is still using that parasitic garbage service or propping up these kinds of destructive companies.

This is where the "you can't stop/hinder capitalism by boycotting individual companies without organization, so it's pointless" shit drives me nuts. Sure, if you're of the mind that you're a one-man capitalism fighting machine, but that's not the point nor the expected outcome. Brother, you're only saying that for selfish reasons (which is fine, some treats are fine, but be honest with yourself and others about it). Your behavior as a consumer absolutely matters, if for no other reason than to show others that they have the power to say "no" to companies that are misanthropic and to emulate supporting and promoting ethical companies and owners/workers. You might just inspire a corporate subverter or a person/collective who wants to try something different (like a co-op). Socialism and communal ideas can catch like wildfire in the right conditions (like living under global fascism). That's why throughout my entire life, they have wanted social and economic punishment for even talking about it in a neutral or positive manner. You currently can't control where you get your water from, or in many places, what your ISP is (which is why all utilities should be nationalized), but you can control where you get your produce, dinner, and your shoes. You consistently have a choice of whether you'll keep paying for meals at a restaurant you know doesn't pay well, is a union-buster, and treats it's workers like shit. Or supports/facilitates genocide and the dehumanization project. As workers, we often don't have much choice but to take what job is available to us or end up on the street and/or in jail (as a very legal slave). As a consumer, especially AS A WORKER-consumer, you have a responsibility to be discerning about what you buy and promote. Stop using brainwashed consumerism addiction and loyalty to the tools of the system as excuses to tune out ethics in order to pretend to not give a shit. It's the same thing greed addicts do. If we don't acknowledge it, we don't really have freedom to have an honest conversation about it. No one is pristine, making all of the perfect and agreeable ethical choices all of the time. Especially if you live in the West, it is next to impossible to only support ethical people/companies. The point is doing what you can is, at the very least, better than trying to live honestly with or promoting doing nothing at all.

Only thing I'll add is that art is just like every humanistic thing that Capitalism inevitably decimates, the industry is not broken. It has never not worked as intended. It's why 95% of "pop" music everywhere in the western world is so bland, formulated, and soulless. Always has been. This shit is nothing new. They're just still prospering because everyone who should be reporting on and regulating this shitty system ends up in their position precisely because they will never produce or do anything of consequence. Once we created super-citizens in the form of corporations, the old/new money families who freely rape and pillage because of that status don't need us anymore. They choose their representatives. They just need some of us to show up and vote every two years to validate their openly corrupt sham system and to unquestioningly prop up their bottom of the barrel companies, services and modern day feudalism. They then use that power and those companies to create a constant spectacle of working class infighting with an entire industry that swallows up all media. Always recentering all things around voting and politics to give the illusion that something, anything, everything is happening solely because of how important elections and our faux American democracy are. If you control the choices between Nazi, nazi, or Nazi/nazi sympathizer, you're still voting for a nazi, even if they're wearing a blue armband and register under the "center/left party" instead of red and identifies as being on the right.

It's all a part of the meat grinder. Technofascists hate art because it first teaches, then reminds them and everyone else of how soulless and sociopathic they and their products/services are. They must be totally detached in order to steal all of the wealth and life-sustaining resources of the planet from 8 billion people and all other life on the planet. Without real push-back and economic consequences, it was inevitable that their delusions of grandeur would eventually have them longing to do it to other planets too. Unironically, their own "AI" grift is unintentionally exposing their eugenicist misanthropy on a much grander scale because they can't see how much they have completely exposed themselves with these schemes. It's inevitable that this artificial bubble is eventually going to burst, so until then, they must contain the media we're exposed to in an attempt to soften the blow. To direct the growing anger in one direction, that isn't them.

Some say they're "evil", I favor "soulless," but really, we're saying the same thing. I just don't believe in predetermined "goodness" or "badness", in part because they're defined by humans as opposite poles of a spectrum that is based on a very narrow perspective and very little information in terms of universal knowledge. Our little monkey brains, who can't even hear or see as well as billions of other "lessor" beings on this planet, really don't know a whole lot to be feigning that we understand unseen objective polar opposites of the Universe in totality and then using to determine whether groups or individuals deserve air, water, shelter or even life. We don't even understand Dark Matter -- 27% of the universe (as opposed to 5% ordinary matter, ie atoms) -- which we can actually detect. It just isn't logical as the most informed among us are adjusting, re-defining, and discovering our basic laws of physics, while uneducated and selective dumbfucks are still insisting dinosaurs never existed, on Thanksgiving Day, even. They are the most driven amongst us to coerce others into parroting their insanely stupid beliefs by threatening to withhold your basic human rights if you don't.

The technofascists and ethnofascists who proudly and undisputedly own and control most major outlets that claim to disseminate "verified" and "unbiased" information must repeatedly hit us over the head with how SmArT, just, and virtuous they are. How lucky we should all feel to have them allow us to have things. Even though it's easy to learn there is absolutely no evidence to back that claim. The reason people listen to AI slop unironically is directly linked to the same people who need you to think people like Ford, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerburg, etc are just one-man operations developed in a basement/garage that shat out computer systems, conjured an ugly car out of thin air, or was divined a shitty society-collapsing app because they're so brilliant. That’s what they want to force upon us instead of the reality that ultimately tens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens or hundreds of thousands of people contributed to defining and expanding that idea, worked to bring it to fruition, creating a company to sell a product that very, very, very few people will soak up any recognition and capital/profit from. The workers and users are deliberately detached from their own contributions and experiences, human interaction and social/ethical norms at home, on their phones, and at work. We're supposed to be grateful to walk on the same planet with these extremely unique specimens, when they're just they're just adept criminals with the willingness to do whatever it takes to feed their collective greed addiction and the means to do it. Breaking laws, bending and breaking societal/ethical norms, practicing and enforcing dis/misinformation astroturf campaigns, deliberately flooding information systems with lies and disinformation, buying millions of bots and trolls to inflate numbers against unpopular ideas, stealing large sums of money under a system ran by criminals and carpetbaggers is just OP. It doesn't make you smart, just ruthless and misanthropic, which has also always been OP since the dawn of time.

Making us vulnerable to believing what they ~~want~~ need us to starts with little (conditioning) lies like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Disney princesses. Mom and dad, grammy and pop-pop, great-great county chapter treasurer for the KKK granddad and pro-patriarchy self-hating great-great-granny knows best. Everything your parents do is for you and you're the most precious perfect person who is a chosen person and handcrafted down the particle by your god. The foundation of sex binarism at birth and the accompanying socially coveted gender reveals, pink vs. blue, patriarchal vs matriarchal mindsets leave out a whole lot of people and biological nature, and make the world unnaturally adversarial to a child before they're even born. Conveniently, this mentality innately evolves into red vs blue, whether it be the Cards vs the Cats, Coke vs Pepsi, or Dems vs Republicans. Our capitalist politico-economic system relies upon this winner vs loser dichotomy-dependent brainwashing.

The capitalist system is sustained with enforced brand worship and leisure-time religions like the NCAA/NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL/FIFA/NASCAR. If you aren't into sports, you'll always have the old-Hollywood-style 24 hour, Next Door feeding "News" cycle of whining, false/malicious grievances, gossip, slander, defamation, calculated targeting, stochastic and state-sponsored terrorism. Out of all of that comes required proselytized dogma that provides cover for abusive/corrupt family/religious/community members and leaders, as long as they've been proven the be "not one of them". At that point, training to become a professional and proud propagandist hypocrite with squishy, ever-changing boundaries and morals is complete. Next you just have to cut out all of the logical, reasonable, and caring people that are left in your life, like any good cultist does. Now no one can stop you from becoming a billionaire. Or star dust.

Throughout history, the transformation into a professional misanthropic tool always ends with trying to stave off the predators we feed by sacrificing the most vulnerable among us out fear and selfishness, disguised as necessity and freedom (see COVID). You find yourself voluntarily throwing your hard-earned money back to your masters, might as well save them the trouble, since they'll just steal the rest anyway. Embracing the worshiping of a geriatric rapist-grifter as your apocalyptic self-fulfilling prophet, while he eyes your 14 year old daughter. Or son. You start to assume it was your idea to cheer on or demand the imprisonment, state-sponsored murder, torture, ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide of other oppressed people you were told are your enemy as soon as you could speak. All the while, you've been made to wholeheartedly believe that if you deserve your own level of enslavement, punishment, and misery, so too does everyone else who is "below" you. It's all according to the system you live by, and you know it is the only way to live unless you want to spend eternity sucking some version of a lava filled demon/devil dick. You're fine with going back to at time when racists could be overtly racist because you perceive you have the right combination of phenotype expression that will always be in charge, as you mainline the fear that you won't and then your "enemies" will act like you. What you're conditioned to forget is that we're all oppressed by the same people. Like, for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

The 1950s that they long for are when there were millions of children, parents, grandparents, and extended family, whole communities, with trauma and PTSD after WWI, the depression, and WWII who were forced to tough it out without being able to talk about their private hell or risk going to the "nuthouse", being dispossessed and ostracized. This was the heyday of major "job-creating" corporations freely and knowingly taking advantage of and poisoning their employees, citizens, and/or air and water supply of surrounding towns with the complicity of local, state, and federal government. They created a cancer epidemic in some of the poorest parts of the nation that still exists today. They never had to fucking pay for it, so it's still happening in new oppressed towns (see East Palestine, Ohio, Flint, MI, the entire state of OK). That's what they want to get back to and make even more efficient at creating more profit at any cost. To do that they must get rid of regulations and unions, to remove our rights as consumers and workers without putting themselves at risk. This means they must contain, direct and control class struggle, not end it. It's just that the majority will never be ok with criminals defining and unevenly doling out inverted justice for those they choose to oppress. Never forget, in 2026 everyone has the power to learn what they believe is based in capitalist propaganda and not provable facts. The problem when they've been indoctrinated to believe that they must be a "winner" above all else it's easy to justify dominating others in the name of Capitalist Nationalism, so they don't have to care about truth or facts (nationalism's is founded in lies and selective half-truths). On the contrary, evidence or witnesses, scientists, analysts, or anyone who disagrees with their version of events needs to be discredited or disposed of in some manner.

Without the deliberate distractions, myths, and lies we tell ourselves, or more accurately, that are shoved into our brains from birth, we'd eventually have to actually look into the meatgrinder as we're pushed toward and then through it. We might ask why are we the ones in the butchering line at all when we're literally 99.9999% of the world's human population? Which begs the question, since we know their bullshit "AI" is deliberately programmed with bias and an agenda (@grok is this true?), what do you think those catchy AI generated songs are allowed to convey as we live in a society of ad overload, forced and uninformed/limited choices? Where monochromatic out-of-touch billionaire con artists have convinced themselves they keep the earth turning, they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, because after all, it all belongs to them, including us. I'm sure their AI songs are all about helping one another, the perilous fallout of greed addiction, subversion, and questioning authoritarianism.

Because apparently I can turn any discussion about music and politics into something that will piss people off, this is where I would have probably found a way to blather on -- as person who has never identified under as any social label other than being socialist (which is a natural state of being) -- would say 85% of what you think is punk, is not punk. People who don't agree with you and have a solid argument with history to back it up are not "gatekeepers." You can't require me to meet an impossible monetary requirement to buy your album and call it socialism, and you can't just use that word because you don't understand a stance or intent behind it. Anyone can become a punk, anyone, there is no gatekeeping, you just can't change the definition of what it is to fit your favorite band... or you. That the adoption of "pop" punk as a thing amongst some of the old guard is what "killed" punk (punk never dies, it just disappears for the douchebags who feel completely comfortable saying sentences like "Punk is the most "gatekept" genre there is." That is a very real thing I have seen said more than once, the irony is lost upon them it seems). "Mainstreaming" Punk died with bands like Green Day and the Offspring, neither of which are remotely punk (was Billie Jo a punk? I guess? probably? He was a Gilman rat, right? Does that make GD a punk band, of course fucking not). Then I'd say something about bands like the Descedents being part of the problem and reiterate that skate/gutter/LA punk has absolutely nothing at all to do with "pop punk". I am waaay too easy find on the internet to invite some emo kid who has spent 20 years of life calling himself a punk because he owns every Blink 182 album to come throw shit at my windows. It's also not something I really give a shit about all that much. Especially since we're kind of all punks now on the left, whether we like it or not. So, to be clear, I won't be doing that.

What the fuck do I know, anyway. I'm just a dipshit who has possibly been walking around on a broken or fractured leg for 4 weeks, as I pay almost $900 a month for insurance, but can't talk myself into going to the Dr. because of severe anxiety due to a couple of really shitty doctor experiences over the past 5 years (and when I was younger). I told the wife of the MD I work for about it for the first time today in passing and she didn't seem to think anything of it, so I'm sure it's fine. I swear, next week is the week. I'm going next week. After I cry a lot. And maybe take some Xanax. Probably. Maybe.