Ending currency

Actually, I want the transition to a post currency economy to start now.

Money already has lost its meaning – if it can be argued to have ever had one beyond power hierarchies and control, which I’ll concede was possible back in our history.

Automation is reducing employment rate below what is possible for currency to have meaning.

When employment rate reduces whilst scarcity of resources reduces, currency begins to lose all meaning beyond abuse in order to maintain power over others.

Universal income is a quick fix – a band aid for capitalism faced with rising unemployment due to a lack of scarcity and need for human labour.

The most worrying thing is that the more we try to pretend a currency based economy is the only way, the more we force people to either face poverty or become snake-oil salesmen. And beyond those two choices, we force people into jobs that do nothing except prop up an economic system that has no purpose – selling people insurance for things that can be easily replaced, or banking systems that circulate currency that has no value beyond its circulation.

Gene Roddenberry was right about one thing:

The economics of the future will be entirely alien to a currency based culture.

Whether we like it or not, our great-great-grandchildren will live in a world without currency, or at least one where it only exists to promote an artificial division in society.

Beyond that, our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will live in a world where currency literally makes no sense to them at all.

Unless we blow this world back to the Stone Age before then.

We are already at the point where currency is becoming obsolete.

It’s about time we embrace it and work towards a world without it.

If this seems alien or unimaginable to you, think of how your ancestors in the Middle Ages considered serfdom ever becoming a thing of the past.

You’re poor? Fuck you!

If I work 40 hours a week and spend my wages buying 4 beers a day (even adding a Weekend’s worth of drinking in between), with a high enough paid job to not go bankrupt, nobody blinks an eye.

If, however, I work 40 hours or more a week and spend my wages buying just 4 beers a day, without a high enough paid job, and I go bankrupt, it’s my fault.

Addiction isn’t just excusable and sustainable if you’re rich. It’s actually celebrated.

If you’re poor, then even lower levels of addiction are enough to condemn you.

Why is that?

(Hint: it’s because we’re conditioned to hate poor people and blame them for their poverty, whilst ignoring the economic system that both makes them poor and happily punished them for the same behaviour we absolve rich people from displaying.)

Royalists should choose their arguments more carefully

To those saying the UK should keep the monarchy because they generate tourism:

I don’t think you really want to go down the “tourism dollar” route.

For starters, France beheaded their whole aristocracy and still has a roaring tourist trade – even looking at the old palaces and castles.

Secondly, ok, let’s talk dollar.

We behead the monarchy in Trafalgar Square and put it on pay-per-view live.

I guarantee that billions would pay to watch it – probably enough at the right price to more or less wipe the national debt.

Then we still get tourists flocking to the old palaces, and even re-enact the event in Trafalgar Square every anniversary to crowds of people who will definitely turn up to watch such a historic event being re-enacted, and have tourists flocking to re-enactments of old monarchy-days traditions with cheaper actors instead of expensive royals playing the roles.

We’ll make way more out of them that way.

I’m not saying we should do this at all.

But if the tourist dollar is all you care about, then I’ve just used your argument to demonstrate that executing the royal family is fiscally responsible.

So why not try to come up with something meaningful, rather than an idiotic idiom?

Hey, you’re argument was pure capitalism.

By pure capitalism I’ve come up with a better and more lucrative argument for getting rid of them.

Don’t blame me if your argument was so flawed.

Rule #78

Every true statement regarding how lies are perpetuated and maintained, and how those deceived will react to people who debunk those lies, will be used by those perpetuating and deceived by lies against those who debunk them, and to maintain or justify their lies.

Rule #78(b):

Even this one.

Systemic homeless starvation – the next step in street cleansing

There’s a contentious argument that has existed for centuries over whether it is morally correct to give money to homeless people.

I’m not going to get into that argument here. I will do do elsewhere, but it’s not relevant for me to do so right now.

Many of those who state that they won’t give money to the homeless say that they will give food to them. Again, I’m not going to go into the ethical conundrum that this can entail, I’ll deal with that elsewhere.

The main thing here is that, if you want to help someone in need, and you feel the best way of doing that is by providing them with the things they need right at that moment as you see it, rather than the ability to get those things – because you fear that they may “squander” that money instead of looking after themselves – hats off to you.

I don’t fully agree, but you do care and you are giving directly (and I hope ethically, taking their dietary needs and limitations into account) to someone you see in a desperate situation.

So let’s talk about Nottingham

According to the city of Nottingham’s new “Public Spaces Protection Order” (PSPO), it will not only be an offence to obstruct a doorway (homeless people often need to sleep in doorways to protect themselves from the weather), but even to give food to homeless people.

That’s right. You won’t be able to even give food to homeless people.

So I’m intrigued as to how those who want to just give food feel about this. Because now a city in the uk is seeking to make it an offence – by which you will be punished – for giving to someone in need, even in ways that you feel are morally fine and necessary.

This doesn’t just affect the public individual donating a kebab after being kicked out of a pub. It affects outreach teams, who take it upon themselves to ensure the homeless population are well fed and well clothed throughout even the worst months of the year.

This order will criminalise grass roots networks who do nothing more than provide warm clothing and food to people who are denied the ability to procure those things. At a time when services open to homeless people are in decline (from housing to welfare to mental health).

How does it feel to know that if you try to help someone not die, you will face a criminal sentence?

In reality, this is just what councils have been doing across the country – criminalising homeless people, and attempting to brush them under the carpet in a manner close to genocide by negligence, to “sanitise” the economic heartlands they perceive as being inconvenienced by the existence of poor people.

So even if you only want to give food to homeless people, surely you see this as an attack on both yourself and the homeless?

In reality, it’s just the latest progression in attacks against homeless people, that has continually attempted to de-humanise us. That’s obvious to most ex-homeless people, who are still stigmatised by society for their homelessness, even after the fact.

Since not only is the right of homeless people to ask for or accept food being taken away, but also your right to give food to someone you see as being in desperate need, will you finally agree that we live in a country that hates homeless people and is willing to pass anti-homeless laws that will have a catastrophic impact on our homeless population?