Monday is here again, and it means everyone has to go to work. Well, not everyone. If you are one of those parents who needed government-funded daycare to watch your children while you were at your job, you aren't going to work today, because, fuck, that daycare subsidy doesn't exist any more and you have to watch your kids instead. If you are a European who is approaching what used to be retirement age, however, you can look forward to many Mondays of hard work ahead because, fuck again, European countries are going to be bankrupted soon by all of their old pensioners living off of the government. I don't really understand exactly what happened, but all of a sudden there's less money in the world, and every single government in the world is poorer.
Ayn Rand's followers, those pillars of self-reliance who probably couldn't get laid in high school, might be rejoicing at the dawning of this new era, where even Europe is turning away from social safety nets. Then again, Randians had to deal with the embarrassing sight of favorite son Rand Paul* deliver a rambling defense of his criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, during which he somehow got around to saying,
"Do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says 'well no, we don't want to have guns in here' the bar says 'we don't want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each-other.'"
What? Maybe we should have laws against discrimination and bringing guns to bars, is that what's he's saying? Or is Rand saying that the government is forcing bars to serve the heavily armed? If so, I'm against it.
Meanwhile, oil is still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, a bullfighter became an internet phenomenon after getting his throat gored open, and Brooklyn continues to fill up with dead animals. But on the positive side, neoliberal policies have had a positive effect on the US GDP! Doesn't that make you feel better?
*Yeah, Rand isn't a “true libertarian,” blah blah, blah. He's pretty close for someone who could actually get elected. And why would a libertarian run for public office anyway? Shouldn't they be busy enough being titans of industry or whatever?
About the guns in bars thing: I'm a slow-witted middleaged person, but I think what's wrong with the Ayn-Rand-Paul frame of reference is that it holds "my individual rights" more dear than anything else. When you live in a "society" rather than some idealized remote frontier world, the point should be "the common good"--how everyone's rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happines, rather than individual rights, can best be upheld. Is all we are a bunch of self-centered individuals, running around crashing into each other, screaming our heads off about how everyone else is crashing into us and trying to take away our rights from us? What a stupid cartoon that is. What do the Ayn-Rand-Pauls think a society is?
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