Maggie's Farm

Hopefully calm will be restored as the nation moves back toward some semblance of whatever it is we consider 'normal' for the last 9 months.  I hope things continue to improve as we move out of the Covid scare and fear mongering (yes, Covid is real, I had it as have many friends, but no it's not so bad for 95% of the people who get it).  If we can move past all this, my job opportunities may improve.

Then again, who knows?  I know few of you are on Facebook, but I am (or was).  It allowed me to reconnect with friends and family and it's a useful tool.  I've also shared Maggie's articles there with my friends, and met many other people who I share interests with.  I am well aware of the privacy issues, but I know how to navigate them (part of my everyday job) and manage them effectively.  There is, however, one thing I can't manage.  It's the real problem we're facing today.  It's the reason I deactivated my Facebook recently (after letting people know how they can reach me if they want/need to).

I am aware of many HR Departments doing sweeps of social media to find things out about people.  I have heard several stories of pro-Trump people losing job offers.  This doesn't surprise me at all in NYC today.  The shift here has been significant from not just hating Trump to full-fledged belief that anyone who supports him is a deranged psychopath.  I have never been a Trump supporter, but that doesn't mean anything because I've never hated him, either.  It's best to hate him with the passion of a thousand suns in order to win approval with many organizations today. 

I haven't loved him, haven't hated him, I've merely tolerated him, and realized his persona was a massive problem but that he was accomplishing some good things.  I was for honesty and balance of thought and reason.  Today, you can't be that way.  You have to be a true believer, or at least not come across as a believer of "the other side".  In other words, it is almost a requirement to be Progressive to be "acceptable".  Such is the nature of modern definitions of Diversity - be like us or you're not acceptable.  I'm all for Diversity.  Diversity of thought, and respect for other views, without accepting the enforcement of those views on others by law, social shame, or other means of behavioral modification (brainwashing via education, for example).

I don't support vandalizing anything, or anyone's property.  But in this case, it's hard to deny that Nancy didn't somehow get what she deserved.  Pelosi's apologist position, promotion of leftist causes, and general lack of interest in pushing back against the extremes of her own misguided ideology have repercussions, and if there is anything which is true in life, it's that leftists eat their own faster than they destroy their enemies.  

Maybe I'm jumping the gun, but 'Cancel Rent' and 'We Want Everything' (presumed to be about stimulus checks, though I think it is more than that), are not what I'd expect to see from right-wing protests.  I'm sure the media will spin it that way, somehow, because the Left is never dangerous or wrong when modern media analysis is engaged.

It's too bad she didn't see this coming.  But I did believe a Biden win would embolden the Left to become more aggressive and violent, and that still seems to be true.

I'm sorry Nancy has to learn the hard way.  Destroying property is always wrong.  But she's done her fair share of damaging property throughout her tenure...but has done it 'legally'. 

All our lives have been impacted.  All our lives have changed.  

Some more than others.  But the most annoying and problematic part is economically.  The US was a nation of small businesses.  It may be again, but not nearly to the degree we were prior to Covid.  The main outcome of the lockdowns and distancing is that larger firms have benefited.

When this started, and people commented how lockdowns would kill businesses (and, as I pointed out, hurt landlords and even renters, depending on legislation in your given state or locality), I read mocking articles, and heard statements from pundits which put forth a concept: "Isn't Capitalism about entrepreneurship, ingenuity and risk-taking?  Won't these all come back, what are you worried about?"  These were designed to taunt believers in Capitalism and push a misleading agenda of Leftist/Progressive economic thought.

I literally read all the comments, which came to 76 (not counting my own, and a few other, comments which were not specifically about work).

Everyone had very different specific circumstances and jobs, or 'jobs' as the case may be, but what interested me is that few seemed to be mentioned in a grudging or unsatisfied/disappointed manner.  My own comment to Mrs. Bulldog was that I remember my first job fondly because of the odd circumstances which led to me getting it, but also because I remember little else about that summer, and the work itself only lasted the month of August.  But we had our own room at the resort if we wanted to spend the night, and we could use the pool as long as we didn't annoy guests and were respectful. 

It was also the first summer where I really learned about music and girls, which had previously never been primary interests.  Girls and music do seem to go together pretty well.  The girls at the resort were impressed that we had money, and that we worked.  The parents still couldn't know we were interested in them, though.

Commenters mentioned roofing (something I did on a few holidays), picking fruit or vegetables (which I had to do in my mom's garden), babysitting (which I did, too), paper routes, flipping burgers, and a variety of other things which I have less experience in.

It's my view that if people let their work define them, it becomes a limiting factor.  If our work is just part of who we are, we control our outcomes.  We can choose to be what we want and who we want.  I see a lot of that in our comments.  We've all done many things and each seems to have mostly good memories of what has been done. I can only think that the young people today who complain, protest and make demands simply have not worked hard enough to know that you're happier when you produce rather than when you demand things. 

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?  My son says no.  I say yes.  My brother says yes, the director John McTiernan says yes, and a host of others say no.

Others play Solomon and split the baby.  It's not a movie with a Christmas theme, but does include the element of Christmas.  So, "no, but..."

Another way of looking at this is to ask if there was a message regarding "the system" in Die Hard.  It was based on a book which was clearly anti-capitalist in nature, and McTiernan states it was supposed to be anti-capitalist.  Frankly, I think he lost on that score.  The proletarian nods don't really add up well.  Capitalism had been so successful in providing more for all that by the time the movie was made some of the items he felt delineated 'wealth and privilege' from 'working class' were no longer meaningful.  They are even less so today (assuming our economy had not been locked down, which has only exacerbated some of the divisions of wealth which were barely noticeable before). 

That said, the most noticiable delineations of class today are not wealth-related, but power related as our "leaders" lock us down and lecture us on how to behave, only to go do the exact opposite things which they suggest we do.  The real 'class warfare' today is power vs. the lack of it, not whether one has more money than someone else.  Of course, that was always the nature of 'class warfare', but Leftists love to obscure that fact with a veneer of basic economic BS that only people with common sense can see through.  McTiernan, therefore, fails miserably in his goal of making a legitimate anti-capitalist story.  Mainly because there is no legitimate anti-capitalist story to be made.  Unless you are a "trained Marxist" and know how to create one out of whole cloth.  (For what it's worth, the term "trained Marxist" always made me laugh.  I studied Economics at The New School, which tried very hard to push the Marxist agenda, and I read quite a bit of Marx, Hobsbawm, Gordon and a host of other Marxist garbage.  So I'm a "trained Marxist" and one of the things every single Marxist professor said was "Marx left no blueprint, only an idea with no path forward and no clear goal except revolution." That's why Marxism and Leftist thought is such utter BS.  Unlike Classical, Neo-Classical, Monetarist or even Austrian schools of thought, Marxism is just an idea and not a fully-formed one, but full of childish and misleading binary concepts.  Though I will credit Marx with completely shifting the study of History in a very meaningful and useful fashion.)

At any rate, to me Die Hard is very much a Christmas movie and very much a pro-capitalist one.  After all, Hans Gruber himself, like so many Marxists before him, only cared about the power he was managing (his gang) and the money he was trying to collect, and was utilizing a facade to perpetrate his crime...you know, like BLM and Antifa today.  These movements are cargo cults, full of images that seem to 'make sense' but cannot ever effectively achieve the goals they have set for themselves because they are inclined only toward one thing.  Perpetual Revolution.