White Pride?

[Ryantology]

I wouldn't destroy all humans who poach elephants. ESPECIALLY if it was to feed their starving children. And the fact that you do not utilize that differentiation really speaks ill of your sense of morals and ethics, in a way that I find reprehensible, to be frank. Clearly you've never suffered the pain of starvation yourself in your privileged little sheltered life to hold such sentiments; if you had, you would find yourself eating your words quickly and regretting ever speaking them with any semblance of pride or conviction. If someone is poaching elephants just because they want to be rich, then yeah, I'd be happy seeing them sent to prison for the next quarter of their lifespans. But killing them because they're doing it to feed their starving children?

I don't agree with her desire to destroy the poacher, even though elephants are amazing and beautiful and intelligent animals, and I despise that they are slaughtered for any reason at all. I think what she's saying is that she finds it arbitrary to suggest that human lives are objectively more valuable. And, is that not correct? I rather dislike any instance of animals being harmed or hunted for anything other than for subsistence (and those who do it have a moral responsibility to minimize the suffering of the animal). I think people who hunt for sport, who shoot animals because that's how they have fun, aren't that different from a person who would shoot a person for the same reason.

But, I also don't agree with killing the poacher who does this to feed his family, because he is likely doing this for want of easier and less harmful methods. I blame the people who have vastly more than they could ever need and will still deprive others so that they can have more. I blame the wealthy individual who takes from society and feels no obligation to return what has been taken. I blame rich people who want only for themselves and their own. No matter how you justify it, if you can shit in a gold toilet, you have more than you need and you have a moral obligation to the society you live in, to spread that wealth around, be it by charity or investing in job creation. I don't think that any person on earth needs a seven-figure salary to live a fulfilling, happy, safe and secure lifestyle doing almost anything that they want to do. I would tax income above $1m 100% unless it was demonstrably used in ways that benefit someone other than themselves.

Because, when you get down to it, the source of most human misery is scarcity. When one family makes more than a significant portion of the entire world's population, that's a seriously fucked-up situation. That is an example of the problem being artificial and intentional. There is enough in this world for every person to live a good and fulfilling life, which would very obviously make people a lot less interested in wars and strife. Differences in skin color wouldn't matter nearly as much.

I mean, think about American history. Think about the strife between blacks and whites. What is the origin of the entirety of this strife? Economic exploitation, the masters and the slaves. Chattel slavery tends to be frowned upon by most sane people, but that has just forced the greedy and the overprivileged on a different offensive. If your average white, black, hispanic, Asian persons banded together in common cause regarding how they are exploited by the wealthy, the wealthy would not be able to withstand them. They would have to make concessions. Wealth is not created by job creators. It is created by people who work. It's created by the factory worker, not the factory owner. If you own a factory that has no workers, then you aren't important in any sense.

This is why the wealthy exploit racial divisions. They convince the middle class that the poor want to take from them, that they want to sit around and collect welfare checks and purchase SUVs and crack and lobsters off of your dime (oh yeah, and this "welfare queen" stereotype is always a black woman who has kid after kid just to keep drawing checks, or it's an illegal Mexican who wants to come to America just to have anchor babies and suckle off the government teat). And, they even have a point, because they have ensured that the middle class pays a much larger relative tax burden than they should (of course, they have done even worse to the poor). The wealthy corporate interests who control the Republican Party and dictate its policies very openly encourage racial divisions so that the middle class views the poor as their enemy. But, the poor need assistance because the corporatocracy wants to pay virtually nothing to workers, and strip them of rights and protections to the greatest extent they can. They can't have chattel slavery, so they are trying to have feudal serfdom, a system in which the rulers basically had total control over the economy, and in which the people actually producing were forced to give just about all they worked to make, to the people who controlled their lives.

And, they will continue to achieve progress on this front as long as we allow such stupid and arbitrary differences to matter to us. That's why the average Republican voter is so frustrating to me. They are angry because they have less than they should, but they buy into the lines fed to them by their exploiters. They are threatened with the loss of livelihood if they allow the parasites to tax the wealthy. It is the very kernel of the 'trickle-down' myth. Wealth does trickle down, but only after it has all been sucked up and collected at the top, first. Wealth should be flooding down at nearly the same rate that it floods up.

As long as we pretend that it doesn't work this way, we're going to have all the problems we have now. That's crime, violence, drug use. None would be solved, but all would be stupendously lessened.

Think about that when elections roll around again.