Real Talk: The Illusion of Freedom and the Power of the Strike

Listen, some real talk here: I posted an image earlier calling for three-day strikes until Trump is removed from office. People seemed to get a little upset in the comments, pointing out—completely fairly—that most people in America can’t afford to just take three days off work.

The Healthcare Trap

Americans don’t get mandatory PTO like other countries do. (Y’all do know that in civilized countries they get a mandatory amount of paid time off per year and it’s often like a month, right?) Most Americans rely on their employer for the laughably sad healthcare they get.

To those who think your insurance is great: Go to a doctor who’s not in your HMO network and tell me how great it is. I pay the equivalent of $57 a month, and when I had a heart attack, they took me to the best cardiac hospital in the country. They said, “Yeah, we’re in charge of your heart care now,” and I didn’t have to beg an insurance adjuster for it.

I get it. I’m American; I spent most of my life there. I know. But you need to decide: Are you more afraid of losing your job and your insurance, or fascism? I see people talk bullshit about “armed resistance”—motherfucker, do you think you’ll be able to do that on the weekends (subject to availability) and keep your insurance? Are you high?

Why We Advocacy for Unions and Universal Healthcare

They’ve got you right where they want you. Why in the name of fuck do you think I kept saying that universal healthcare wasn’t just a nice thing to hope for, but a necessity? Why do you think we keep telling y’all to unionize? Not just now, but forever?

But people just wanted to keep their heads down and not rock the boat. Everybody thinks if they do that, they’ll be allowed to escape the maze eventually. Every American thinks they’re gonna get rich one day if they follow the rules.

But if your rule brought you here, as the man says, what was the point of your rule?

The Myth of American Sovereignty

You are powerless against tyranny. Fuck guns and armed uprising and all that macho fantasy bullshit—you can’t even call into work for three days, man. That’s why Americans get to beg whoever their party decides to make their candidate:

• “Pwease, sir or madam, might we have some democwacy?”
• “Might I pweeeeeease be awwowed to have soveweignty over my own body and mawwy the person I wuv?”

It’s why you are roped into accepting whoever is the least worst choice. They know better than you do that the only power you have is in the voting booth—and it’s like one of those Disneyland rides that use every trick in the book to make it look like you’re in a spaceship instead of on rails that only ever go one place.

A Prediction on the “Democratic” Leadership

If it does ever look like Americans are actually gonna take the risk for their democracy and do a massive general strike, the majority of the Democrats—certainly their leadership—will be just as opposed to it as the Republicans are.

• “Don’t throw away our economy,” they’ll say.
• “Don’t behave like spoiled children.” As though the system deserves your labor and consumption. As though you owe some abstract notion of “the economy” instead of it existing entirely and solely to provide you with what you need. And if what you need is freedom from tyranny, and the economy won’t give you that, you don’t owe it a single fucking thing except to present your peasant ass so they can kiss it.

The Capitalism Lottery

Americans have never demanded power for the citizenry the way Europeans have, because we’ve always believed that buying into capitalism will reward us if we’re “good enough.” How much evidence do you fucking need to realize that’s not true?

How long are you gonna take weird outlier examples of dudes who started in the trailer park and got out—people who beat million-to-one odds—as proof that the system works? That’s like thinking the lottery is a reasonable way to earn a living.

The Wisdom of Frederick Douglass

How long are you gonna not demand the one right you should have: the right to put down your tools and say, “I’m not contributing to this anymore until I have these basic rights and needs met”?

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them… The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

You know what radical said that? Frederick Douglass. If you don’t know who that is, find out.

The Reality of “Freedom”

How long will you endure? How long will you live in fear that losing your job means losing your life because you’ve allowed these sons of bitches to tie your health to your time card?

I won’t set foot in that fucking country again unless I have enough money to pay for my own insane, exorbitant healthcare costs. It’s funny how Americans quiver in fear at “soshulist taxes” and then sell themselves into indentured servitude for the privilege of paying even more for objectively worse healthcare.

If my fellow Americans are so fuckin’ free, do what every Frenchman has the right to do: have a general strike.

• Not violence.
• Not blocking doors.
• Just don’t go to work for three days.

Are you free to do that? Or will it kill you or someone in your family because you’ll lose your insurance? You ain’t free of shit. You are some capitalist’s bitch.

The Economic Rebellion

They give you freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t interfere with their bottom line. They give you freedom to own guns that you buy from them. As the journalist AJ Liebling once wrote: “Freedom of the press belongs to anyone who can afford to own one.”

How much do they need to take from you before you’re willing to sacrifice anything but a couple of hours on a weekend?

• When they increase your co-pays again?
• How many claims do they gotta deny?
• How many bombs do they need to drop in your name?

Ask yourself: What will it take for you to think three days is worth the tradeoff? Figure that out and then shut the fuck up until things get that bad, because the only real rebellion left is economic. They’ve got politics all sewn up.

The only weapons available to you are your hands and your wallet. Until you are ready to empty them both, you will remain powerless. You cannot shame the shameless. You can only stop feeding their machine.

When you’re ready to put down your hammer and walk the fuck away, then we can talk strategies and tactics.

I just want to go on the record that I’m 100% in favor of shaming people for not knowing things everyone should know. I could care less why you don’t know the moon is lit by the sun or the basic structure of your own government or where Africa is in relation to Europe. I just don’t care. This is your personal failure. If you don’t want to be mocked for it, never speak out loud or try to add your voice to the conversation, because you have nothing to contribute.

Seriously. I’m not gonna ever back down on this. I am absolutely cool with being an elitist, if elitism means expecting grown people to know a certain set of facts. So cool with it. I might actually buy a monocle and start looking through it down my nose at ignorant ass people. So unapologetic. Don’t care at all about hurting people’s feelings. They should be hurt. They should feel bad and either do better or shut up.

Do you think Microsoft understands consent?

I got a theory, but you’re not gonna like it.

I take a lot of guff for openly saying that I think most people are dumb. Whenever you say this, someone inevitably pops up and says “50% of people are below average by definition.”

While that’s not really how it works, it also dodges something I’m starting to think we need to admit:

In this modern world, totally average human intelligence is actually kinda goddamn stupid.

The more complex the civilization, the more intelligence is required to navigate it.

By “intelligence” I mean:

• capacity to absorb information
• process it
• contextualize it
• make connections
• do useful things with it

This was not always the case.

Up until relatively recently, you didn’t need to know much to be perfectly happy and functional. If you were born to a farmer’s family, you learned everything you needed from helping the old man and old lady around the farm. When they got too old or sick, you took the reins, prospered, had a family, and taught your kids the same way. You had a place in the order of things. Nobody asked you to answer hard questions or shape the destinies of strangers.

In the West, that changed in the eighteenth century when we invented modern democracy (not the ancient Greek version—don’t be tedious).

Suddenly people were expected to understand complex systems involving people nothing like them doing things they knew nothing about—but those things still mattered.

A Bavarian woodsman had no clue how the fishing industry worked, nor did he need to. That didn’t make him an ignoramus; it just wasn’t his world.

But now you were asked—allowed, even—to vote on what society did. Considered progress, sure. But it also placed a new burden on the proletariat: responsibility for anything beyond feeding their family and paying taxes to whatever inbred idiot made the decisions.

At the same time, we shifted from feudal agrarian → mercantile → industrial → post-industrial. All new, all fast-changing.

For millennia the amount of genuinely new information needed in a lifetime was near zero. Maybe one big idea per generation.

Suddenly entire industries were replaced every couple generations… then every couple decades… now every couple months.

Why? Because information became the currency, and information is defined by novelty (thanks, Claude Shannon).

Being skilled no longer meant apprentice → journeyman → master. It meant keeping up with relentless change and innovation. Civilization rewarded those who could—and left everyone else behind.

When you look at Americans who make the dumbest political decisions (aside from bigotry and religious fanaticism), the #1 reason is: they don’t want to learn things.

Every election, politicians pander to dying industries: coal, oil, old-school manufacturing. The workers are proud their parents did the same job… and apparently can’t grasp that the world has changed so much since their parents bought a house at 25 with overtime at the plant that they might as well have time-traveled here.

They complain about being left behind, but they ignored roughly everyone warning them to adapt. You can’t keep voting for people who only benefit capitalists and still expect solid ground under working-class boots. You can’t demand cheap goods while removing every limit on what capitalists can do.

Yes, it’s complex. It requires reading and critical thinking.

But for nearly twenty years everyone has had instant, free access to all the information all the time.

And here’s the counter: “People don’t know how to access it, process it, contextualize it, or think critically.”

Exactly. That’s my entire fucking point.

Our civilization has hit an inflection point where merely average intelligence is no longer enough to understand how almost anything works.

People still grasp what their great-grandparents did: their job, their hobbies, their local community, whatever mass media is trending. Not much else.

That’s simply not enough anymore to make informed decisions or even hold informed opinions.

Yet this is precisely when social media encourages everyone to not only have but share uninformed opinions—and expect to be heard, respected, taken seriously. Not because it’s wise, but because engagement makes rich people richer.

People are simultaneously told it’s their right and duty to participate in democracy regardless of preparation. That idea collapses the second you think about it—unless you see it as a well-meaning attempt to fix historic discrimination against minorities who were barred from education and voice.

But at some point: do we really want to encourage participation from people who don’t know how anything works—when one dumb vote in Nowheresville can rain bombs, starvation, or ecosystem collapse halfway around the planet?

I’m not saying ditch democracy. It’s still better than autocracy.

But maybe it’s time to revisit the idea that you should at least understand what kind of government you have before voting on what it does.

Literacy tests were white-supremacist garbage in the 19th century when Black people were deliberately kept uneducated. That’s not today’s world. We could design gatekeeping that doesn’t discriminate on race or class.

Or we can stay committed to absolute freedom with zero responsibility: that people too unintelligent to understand society should not only be heard but allowed to dictate taxes, policy, and killing done in our names.

Maybe that really is an inalienable right.

But look around.

If enough people are so easily confounded by modern life that they elect a mentally unsound psychopathic con-man game-show host as emperor—and the system is so broken it allows this, allows him to run amok, and singlehandedly torches America’s stability and global standing—

maybe we’ve spent way too much time talking about freedom and way too little about responsibility.

Can we really keep a functioning society on vibes only?

Ok, listen, if we want to accomplish anything from a grassroots perspective, we need to start thinking like engineers. Good engineers don’t just look at a problem and say “It’s impossible,” and throw their hands up. You define the problem, research solutions, come up with potential actionable strategies that can be broken down into discrete logistics.

So we’re gonna have a general strike in America the week before the midterms, or else an asteroid will destroy all life on earth except for Kid Rock. We have to figure out how to make this happen no matter what. The future of humanity is at stake.

OK, so we know that general strikes have worked in the past in other countries. What were the conditions which allowed them to succeed? How did the people not go hungry and lose their houses? What were their demands and how long did it take their government to acquiesce? What percentage of the population striked? (Struck? Whatever.) Identify common factors in successful general strikes. Never mind about unsuccessful ones for now.

Start there. Don’t tell me why it can’t happen in America, tell me how it did happen elsewhere.

Once we understand that, we can start to reverse engineer from the outcome we want. People needed X, Y and Z to get by and their system allowed A, B and C that ours doesn’t; OK, so how do we enable A, B and C and get X, Y and Z for people so they are equipped to carry out a general strike. What precisely would satisfy us to end the strike? Not “Stop fucked up shit from happening”, or “end racism and bigotry” because these are not discrete, defined goals that are achievable by the people we mean to oppose with this. “Create a nonpartisan regulatory body to control the use of AI in the workplace” is a better example. “Do not allow Donald Trump to use ICE as his own Praetorian Guard to interfere with the midterms” is another. These are Boolean conditions that can be objectively met or not.

(Here’s the really important part: some of you are already itching to explain to me why this can’t work or my examples are bad or how I’ve missed a crucial step. If you are one of these people, sit this one out. I want to hear from people about how something could be accomplished and absolutely no one else. If you ignore this, I will be angry, because it’s not helpful or useful in any way. I know you think it is, and that’s why you need to not get into this conversation. You are not a problem solver, you are a problem definer, and we all know what the problems are and it’s not helpful to redefine them yet again.)

So who wants to start? Some quick research, maybe?

So yes, I believe in individual self-improvement. It’s why I bought a bike and try to ride it because walking hurt too much. It’s why I read everything I can, try to learn everything I can, try to be a little better today than I was yesterday and a little better tomorrow than I am today. It’s why every day I try to write code, get out of the house, do little tasks and chores that most of you - even the people who were born without any of the privilege I was - wouldn’t think twice about. Every single day I make myself hold off on taking those pain pills instead of throwing em back by habit just in case I might hurt bad enough today to need them. I push myself in small ways. And sometimes I don’t do shit and some days I gotta chug those fucking pills before noon and some days I can’t even get myself up and to the café a block away.

But on most days I do. And that’s me pushing myself. That’s winning.

I don’t want you to hear things I’m not saying here. I’m not saying that if you’ve got the deck stacked against you that you’re just a whiner and you should man up. I’m not saying you can do anything if you believe in yourself or anything dumbass like that. I’m not saying privilege isn’t real or that I know what it’s like to be a woman in a misogynist society or a black person in a racist society or a queer or trans person in a homophobic society.

I’m saying that in addition to - and, honestly, maybe even before - trying to right the wrongs of all the other people who make up this stupid ass monkey species of ours, you begin by looking at your own situation, what your strengths and limitations are, and work on yourself to build the former and overcome the latter based on the resources you can find both within and without yourself - your community, your family if they’re not shitty, and your own will and skillset and knowledge and tangible and intangible assets you have at your fingertips. Because whatever else might be bad or unfair about your life, you ain’t dead, and that puts you ahead of the 100 billion people who already shot their shot at this world.

So, no, I don’t think we need to cede these beliefs and questions to the right wing. I think there’s a place for us to stand up for young folks and say: yes, you might be society’s victim in some ways, but that doesn’t mean you have to be society’s bitch. You can be better than you could be, be more than the product of your circumstances, and make the world better by working to be a good person and stand up for others and fight for what’s right instead of always and only ever striving for yourself.

And that’s a good lesson to learn no matter who or what or how old you are.

3/3

One thing that has discouraged me from trying to help people understand and survive climate collapse is that I tell people they have to be adaptable and find ways around their own limitations. If you’re worried about heavy weather where you live and you don’t drive, then you better have some good routes to get to safety on foot. I say that and people get angry with me. “Well, I’m in a wheelchair and couldn’t drive a car even if I could afford one, you asshole!”

Like, do you think I’m gonna go “Oh, shit, my bad, that’s my privilege talking,” and go have a quick word with Mother Nature? Or were you expecting me to fly to wherever you live and do a thorough analysis of your situation, home and the surrounding geography and draw you a map? Or perhaps design and build you an amphibious wheelchair with jets on it for vertical takeoff and landing like some Charles Xavier shit that I can assemble for you on your budget?

(OK, I actually might design something like that, if only for my own half-crippled ass. But I’d at least open-source the plans.)

The greatest failing I see in the Left in the Western world is how many of us actually think that we will ever see a perfectly equitable world where nobody is a loser or the victim of prejudice or just bad luck and limited resources; that when we find a mismatch between what we need and what society has to offer that our focus should be entirely upon changing society, and that telling people to adapt themselves to circumstances as they are here and now is some sort of betrayal of ideals or cruelty or dismissal of people’s pain and challenges.

And I just do not believe that, and I never will. I’m sorry. Nor do I believe that every single statement anyone makes anywhere ever must take every other possible viewpoint before being uttered. I believe it is contingent upon each and every person to take context and source into consideration. To put it bluntly: I’m not talking to you every fucking time I speak, just as you’re not talking to me.

I believe in agency. I believe that though our choices are largely shaped by our place in society, our upbringing and our past, they’re still choices. We can choose what we do. If we can’t, if there’s no free will, why even debate or have a democracy? If I’m just a product of my weird ass upbringing, why should you consider anything I have to say, because my life doesn’t align with yours and I couldn’t possibly understand what the world is like for you, any more than you can for me, so why even bother talking to each other?

I believe that everyone is stronger than they know they are, tougher than they’d possibly believe, and capable of much more than they even give themselves credit for. I know this because I see it every day of my life. I see people who are absolutely ass-reamed by the world from the day they’re born decide they’re not going to let other people’s greed and cruelty and bigotry ruin their lives. I see people who have absolutely shit luck who still find a way through it. I see people who are the victims of every kind of horror this world can come up with to throw at them who still make it. And I know even on my worst days that no matter how fucked up my situation seems to be, there are people who have it way worse than me who still manage to find a way to live and laugh and, yes, goddamnit, love - love their own lives and other people and the world.

See, when Red said “Get busy living or get busy dying,” in The Shawshank Redemption, I actually believed it. I don’t believe anyone has the right or the power to tell me that I can’t be happy, do the best I can with what’s around me, and try however I can to make the world a little less shitty for myself and others. And I know plenty of other people who are in far worse circumstances than me, or you, who believe the same thing and live it every day.

Things are not fair and probably never will be. We need to work hard to try to fix that as best we can, but we also need to live in this unfair world ourselves. And that means accepting the things we can’t change right now, changing the things we can, and knowing the difference. And the one thing I know - I know - is that we always have control of the world as it extends to the tips of our fingers and from the tops of our heads to the bottoms of our feet. So that’s the first place we need to start with.

I remember a quote that stuck with me: when a college professor was challenged by a student who said that racism was basically over in America, he asked his white students: all things otherwise being equal in your life, would you prefer to be black in America or white? And you know what the answer was.

But let me ask you: if you are not a cishet white man like me, would you rather be a person of color and/or a woman and/or LGBTQ, or would you rather be a cishet white man like, oh, I don’t know, let’s say… Stephen Hawking? The hierarchy of privilege is real but it’s not the only thing that defines us and who we are or the only lenses with which to understand the world. And Stephen Hawking had some pretty godawful fucking luck, but he also had an amazing life and did amazing things. I had three heart attacks by the time I was 45 and if I tried to run to the end of my block I’d probably explode; would you rather be my pale dick-having ass? But I still manage to do a lot with my limited resources, which are not limited by society but biology and human frailty. I used to know a dude in Long Beach when I was young who got paralyzed by a bullet when he was a young Crip; when I met him he owned a small head shop selling bongs and One Love incense and shit. Is that the best path the universe could have possibly provided for that young brother? No. But it was what he got and what he did afterwards was his choice. He didn’t have any of the luck of the dice I did when I was born, but what he got, and what came later, he did the best he possibly could with.

2/3

I just shared a Jason Pargrin video that I can probably share again in the comments for this post, but the gist was that it seems as if all of the influencers offering any kind of given guidance for young men are all right-wing, and that if you asked them, they would probably say that individual self-improvement is a naturally right wing idea. Pargrin says that you cannot base any movement purely on the idea of improving society without improving the individual or vice versa.

And I think he’s right, and recent events in my own timeline lead me to think I see the problem.

Those of you who say that we need to march and protest against Trump and fascism: how dare you tell me to march? I can barely walk most days now, much less march. Do you have any idea how insensitive that is? Do you ever think that when you advocate people marching or doing community outreach or just “being strong” that some of us have heart failure and herniated discs and literally can’t be strong or tireless or keep on marching, you ableist fucks?

Guys, I’m kidding.

I don’t think that way. I don’t think you’re “minimizing my challenges” or anything of the sort. I do know you’re not speaking with me in mind at all. And you know what? That’s cool. I don’t need you to take my exact set of circumstances in mind every single time you talk, even if I’m included in your audience by virtue of being your social media friend. OK? I swear I don’t think you’re ableist for saying people should march.

But some of you do think that. I know you do. You also think that I can’t make any pronouncements that aren’t filtered through the experience of being a cishet white man. And maybe that’s true, but a lot of you will say shit like “we need to grow our own food” without realizing that there are some cishet white men (and lots of other folks) who’d love to do just that and have tried but are physically incapable of literally walking to our garden plot and tending it. You think that you are somehow not seeing the world through your own set of privileges and filters.

And some of you actually seem to think that doing so is possible.

1/?

I am still a smoker, but even when I quit I’m going to need a lighter. I’m that weirdo who actually refills the little cheapo plastic ones with canned butane, which makes em last for months… but in my heart I am a Zippo man. I’ve bought a couple of them here, but they’re all shitty copies that don’t have proper parts and break down after a few months.

So I have an authentic matte black Zippo and flints and wicks arriving today - cheaper because it does not have the Zippo logo on the side but a Zippo nonetheless.

I’m going to take it to Timpson’s on the high street - a chain of small shoe repair and keymaking kiosks that largely employs ex-cons as a policy - and get two words engraved on it:

BELLA CIAO.

If you know what those words mean - not in Italian but what they mean - you will know why I want them engraved on the side of a reliable lighter even if I quit smoking.

I might have to return to America some day, after all.

[Update: Pics]

Don’t y’all see? WEAPONIZE THIS. The entire system relies upon your participation and they cannot force you to comply, only threaten you with deprivation if you don’t. And you’re already suffering deprivation, aren’t you? You’re not paid enough to live comfortable anyway. You can’t afford the stuff they want you to buy anyway. So why keep running on the same fucking treadmill?

Remember how the pandemic just scared the shit out of everyone? How having less consumers and less employees killed off entire industries? And that was by accident. Do you get that if you simply stopped buying anything but survival stuff you could tank these companies?

They don’t think the way you do. They’re beholden to shareholders who demand not only a return on investment but perpetual growth, and who are skittish as newborn colts. If you can reduce sales for a given company in a given year by 10%, you’ve fucked them. Doesn’t matter how many billions they make, you’re still spooking their investors and the market, which is based on absolutely nothing but vibes. Literally nothing else. You can cause chaos by causing doubt. The best part is, you can just straight up say that’s what you’re doing and it won’t make any difference.

General labor and consumer strikes will absolutely wreak havoc. They’ll go on CNN and rant like lunatics: BUY STUFF! JUST BUY ANYTHING! AND COME TO WORK! Because they can arrest you for protesting and they can arrest you for sabotaging pipelines, but they cannot arrest you for not buying shit and not going to work.

You would have to face the possible consequences, but would you rather be scared and stressed because some rich asshole decided to wring another dollar profit out of you or because you were standing up against fascism and trying to turn humans into machines fit only to work and die?

General strikes in 2025. Decide to do it and do it.

Do you know the thing that will make a lot of people angrier than almost anything else? If you look them in the eye and tell them: “Nobody is trying to kill you or rape you and nobody wants to kill or rape your spouse or kidnap or molest your children. You have nothing anyone wants enough to take it by theft or force. Any time you get scam messages on the Internet? It’s automated. Nobody is targeting you to scam or con. Nobody wants to get in your house. You could leave the doors unlocked for the rest of your life and nothing would happen. Nobody wants to sell you or your kids drugs. You are no one’s target and you never will be.”

I know this, and it’s why I live my life with no fear of other people. It’s why I have spent decades walking totally alone into places that even cops and soldiers don’t go without backup, and walking out without ever even raising my voice, much less getting hurt or killed. I know that nobody cares. And I’m not inconspicuous, unless I’m at a NASCAR rally or ComicCon. I’m big and very white. But I still get left alone for the most part and, despite actively tempting fate by going into far more dangerous places at dangerous times than most people ever do, I’m fine. Happy as a clam. Completely at home pretty much everywhere.

Most violent crimes - including sexual assault - are perpetrated by the victim’s friends, family, neighbors or acquaintances. The reason serial killers were able to operate with impunity for many years is because all criminal investigation is based upon this simple fact. Very few robberies or home invasions are nearly as random as their victims believe they are. The robber is almost always tipped to the fact that something in the house is worth the risk of stealing it. Online crime is a percentage game - if you send a million scam emails and two people with money respond, it’s worth it. Muggings and pickpocketing are down because no one carries cash and phones are too easy to find (unless you’re sending them to China). Cars have alarms and GPS too. Basically, the only actual real world crimes committed by strangers anymore are kids breaking your car window because you left your purse in it and junkies with angle grinders taking your catalytic converter.

So you don’t need a gun, unless you’ve given yourself a reason to carry a gun. Home security is not a reason to carry a gun. You can solve that with a good security/camera system or bars on your windows if you’re that worried, which you shouldn’t be. If you’d rather have a gun than bars on your windows, that tells me a great deal about your personality: namely, that you’d rather kill another person than be inconvenienced or confronted by the truth that you do, in fact, live your life in fear.

A “responsible“ gun owner is like a “benevolent“ dictator: they are until they aren’t. Every prick who murdered a teenager for the crime of walking while black or mowed down a classroom of children was a responsible gun owner… right until they weren’t.

England gives lie to the idea that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Criminals here don’t have guns. In fact, if you were to go out in an empty lot in London and fire a gun a few times harmlessly in the air, it would make the national news the next day. There were 22 gun-related deaths here in 2024, out of a population of 66 million or so. There are probably less guns in all of Great Britain - aside from in the armories of the handful of police authorised to use them and on military bases - than there are in Akron, Ohio.

So people stab each other to death, sure, but you know what nobody ever does? Accidentally stab someone across the street from the person they wanted to stab. On the rare occasions someone goes apeshit and commits a mass stabbing, most or all of the victims survive. The difference is both quantitative and qualitative.

I don’t think no Americans need guns. I’ve lived in rural areas where people hunt for meat they can’t afford to buy and get grizzlies at the back porch or have cattle that need protecting from predators. There are lots of rich and famous people who are targeted by strangers who probably need some kind of armed protection. But all of that could be handled by sensible licensing laws.

The fact that you have to prove you can drive to own a car but don’t have to prove you can shoot a gun to own one is preposterous and no sane person, even a rabid gun aficionado, would disagree with me except on the spurious grounds of stretching both the letter and the intent of the Second Amendment as far as you possibly could. Nobody says it’s a violation of the First Amendment to make it a criminal offense to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater or explicitly call for violence against a citizen; so we are OK with sensible limitations on our rights.

Why is it not sensible to say that if you want to own a murder machine, you should have to prove you’re mentally stable and capable of hitting what you point it at and obtaining insurance in case somebody gets dead with your gun?

I think what worries a lot of gun nuts is the idea that they couldn’t pass those tests or afford to be responsible for what they do with their guns… and that is the very best argument I can think of for having those restrictions.

But the harder truth to face might not be that you’re not sane or evenhanded enough to have a gun; it’s that you probably don’t need one because you are neither a threat nor a target to anyone on earth - that nobody else even wants what you hold so precious you’d be willing to commit murder to protect it. That’s the real violence most Americans could not bear to undergo: violence to their own sense of value and importance and being the target of other people’s anger or envy or desire.

Americans will wade through oceans of blood, but God forbid someone challenge their sense of specialness.

Ok, listen: I wanna ask about this seriously, because I truly don’t know what the right thing to think about this sort of thing is.

Thse girls get paid a lot of money to basically go party on yachts with rich dudes. It may shock you to learn that they have to put up with sexual harassment, groping and even occasionally sexual assault from these wealthy and powerful men while trapped on a boat with them often miles from shore or anyone who might help them.

Like, I’m truly not trying to be an asshole or be a victim blamer, I swear I’m not, but it’s really genuinely hard for me to understand how anyone could possibly not see that coming. Like, I cannot picture a scenario where a rich man I don’t know pays me to come “party” with him and possibly his collection of bros and something seriously fucked up doesn’t happen.

Rich people like to buy other people and treat them as property. If somebody is paying you to “party” with them, you gotta ask yourself: why can’t they find rich chicks to party with instead? And the only answer - the only answer - that comes to mind is, they want someone they think isn’t important or that they think they own, or who they think they can do anything to without any consequences. Because if you are a dude with a yacht, there are never any shortage of hot women who will be happy to get on your yacht with you for free.

Should it happen? Absolutely not. Should these young women be able to get paid $250 an hour to drink champagne and look pretty and flirt with wealthy dudes and be treated with total respect for all their boundaries and total courtesy and then be dropped off back at shore with a hearty handshake? Of course. But I just cannot imagine any version of this world where that is what always happens, any more than I can imagine any of the other staff on these yachts not being occasionally subjected to borderline or outright criminal behavior by their very wealthy, entitled employers.

I’m not saying they deserve it, I’m trying to understand how one could possibly accept this sort of job if you’re concerned about one’s own security. Like, I literally cannot figure out the reasoning that would lead one to make these choices. I get that good money is hard to come by and you’ve got to use whatever assets the universe or genetics gives you, and I absolutely don’t blame anyone for doing so, but it just seems to me like putting your head in a tiger’s mouth and then acting surprised when the tiger bites it off.

Rich people should treat everyone, even employees, with respect, but they just don’t and never ever have and probably never ever will and no amount of social progress or awareness will ever change that, not ever. As long as you give people who crave wealth and power a remote location where they can be hidden from the eyes of the world, they’re gonna do some fucked-up shit as much because of what sort of people they fundamentally are as anything else.

So help me understand why there’s any reasonable response to this other than “What the hell did you think was gonna happen, girl?” Because I swear I’m not trying to be sexist or misogynist, but I truly, truly cannot comprehend this kind of decision making process.

https://www.ladbible.com/lifestyle/yacht-girls-rules-reality-job-industry-489819-20250905