There’s no doubt a sizeable proportion of the population of this country last weekend, and the weekends to follow, particularly as we edge towards Christmas will find themselves strolling around Bluewater and Lakeside Shopping Centre, Westfield Stratford City Mall and many others dotted around the country buying and consuming to their hearts content blissfully or ignorantly unaware of the sweatshop labour, the slavery behind the products they are buying. We all do it, some more than others, it’s a modern-day preoccupation for many, a false idea of comfort and happiness. Of course, there are things we need and trying not to buy sweatshop products is quite a task. But we should be aware of the pain and suffering that goes into the making of those products, particularly if we are to be angered by the rise in energy prices coming our way.
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Whilst the increase of energy prices is awful for many families across the UK and the world, it shouldn’t surprise us that the price of energy is rising, in fact we should be expecting this. Energy companies aren’t philanthropists, it’s their job, their role to make a profit. Their role isn’t to give us good deals on energy or to ensure that we all keep warm and have enough electricity. They exist for one reason and one reason alone: to make money. Of course, when our lives are so dependent on this energy it affects us hugely, as does the rise in the price of food, the price in rent or mortgages and every other tax hike currently coming our way. But none of it should surprise any of us for if we truly understand the system we live in, then we can see this is exactly how it should be performing. In fact, we should be expecting this, it should be common knowledge and easily understood when we identify that we all live within a system based purely on profit by any means.
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Solidarity and understanding are two major components to recreating a better society. As it stands, we are easily divided by many things, one of them being wages. This has been highlighted in the media response to the strikes by the RMT in the last week. And it worked. Given that the strikes aren’t even solely about wages, it’s clear that the ‘wage’ can be used as a divisive issue causing discontent among some of the population as they react with how little they earn in comparison to the 60k a train driver earns. Is it the train drivers’ fault, if true? Of course not. This is a corrosive issue across all our society. We should also be focusing on and questioning the wages of politicians which currently stand at £84,144 https://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/pay-mps/ and be happy that our contemporaries are making a good living.
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Every week generally on a Tuesday night I treat my kids to a meal out. It’s a bit of time for us to spend together and chat about school, their digital existence, and life. I like to give them the choice of where we can chow down, but I draw the line at McDonalds. There’s something about the Golden Arches that doesn’t sit well with me: the unhealthy injection of sebaceous fat with every meal, the digital menus on huge screens to order your food that some have touched with their unwashed hands after defecating and the business model with their highly expendable work force, but most notably it’s the fucking disgusting and inedible food. When I do relent to them in moments of paterfamilias weakness and ‘treat’, isn’t that the oddest term for digesting anti-health fat fast food from any Ronald eatery staining the country, I try a fry and instantly realise why I never eat there. I don’t relish chips tasting like deep fried cardboard. And another reason is that I don’t eat meat, but that my friends is a whole other article.
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If there is one term in this cosmos of captions we now find ourselves encapsulated in that I truly biliously detest and everything it stands for, it is ‘brand loyalty’. Why anyone in their right mind would devote themselves to anything as dull and faceless as a ‘brand’ is truly beyond me. Have you not seen these clowns ‘branded’ head to foot with logos exhibiting their ‘brand loyalty’, under the incredibly false assumption that somehow, we should envy them or even worse be under the illusion that they have achieved something by simply going into a shop or online and paying for the ‘branded’ item? Wow what an achievement! It’s a pair of fucking shoes! It’s a garish gaudy handbag! It’s just a fucking car! I love to hear folk brag about how they think their ostentatious material products speak volumes about them. They have to, because they nothing to fucking say! It illustrates the legerdemain of marketing.
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There is a disturbing irony between how human consumption is destroying the Amazon rainforest through our need for vast amounts of resources including logging, agriculture, cattle ranching, mining, oil extraction and dam-building while the other ‘Amazon’ known to us all too well for delivering consumeristic goods at the touch of a button is growing exponentially and taking over the world.
(more…)On the 7th February 1497 in Florence, Italy, a bonfire of the vanities occurred where according to Francesco Guicciardini the destruction of objects took place that might tempt one to sin.
(more…)The face mask is extremely divisive and interesting. There are those who feel they should wear it, who believe the virus is contagious and don’t want to either catch it or pass it on, particularly to the elderly. There are those who don’t believe the virus is as problematic as it’s purported to be, that it’s an attack on our ‘freedoms’ and just a huge cash cow for Big Pharma. And then there are the clearly insane who think we are only a step away from the Nuremberg trials, who obviously never attained their GCSE in history and have no idea of one of the most heinous genocidal crimes in the last 100 years, all fighting for Katie Hopkins hot spot.
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