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Blame the Last Guy For Everything, Screw Things Up More, Then Leave. Politics and Business Management. (Walmart)
(Originally posted on Wordpress.com on August 10, 2023.)
In American politics, and probably in general, you blame the last guy for everything that’s going wrong. Business works this way too.
When I was a child, I was a big fan of Babylon 5, still am.
(It’s being considered for a reboot.)
The author/producer, J. Michael Straczynski, managed to pull off a five season story arc, unheard of on shows like Star Trek, which were always so annoying in that they were off to some totally new thing every week like a Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers.
Sure, Star Trek had it’s great moments, but it’s got at least four or five bad or middling episodes for every great one.
Every Star Trek show also seems to suffer from one character that steals the show. Is obviously more capable than the others, more intelligent, and gets treated like a damn kitchen appliance.
For example, Data and The Doctor both show that they are single-handedly more capable than the rest of the crew combined, and should obviously be in command of the ship.
This is the way a lot of organizations are. The stupid and corrupt people float straight to the top, while the people who should be running the place get pummeled with shit work that doesn’t use 1% of their talent or abilities.
But the biggest failing of Star Trek is just how shallow it is.
Babylon 5 dropped some heavy stuff in there, and was just far more cynical.
I think one of my favorites was the episode where The Regent, possessed by a Drakh handler, tells Londo Mollari, “I’ll be dead soon, and when I am you can blame me for anything you want. Yes, you can say I was quite quite mad.”
May not be an exact quote, but it stuck with me in principle.
When leaders fail, or worse, when they are totally incompetent or even criminals, this is where they go first.
Presidents Obama and Biden started out with this, and it works for about a year, and when absolutely nothing gets better, they go to Stage 2.
President Biden’s Stage 2 is this:
“Not only did that last guy completely fuck everything up, you’re stuck with me because we’re putting him on trial now, on trial everywhere with all of the things. Also, if he does come back you’ll wish you had someone like me because I’m fucking you but holy shit will he fuck you worse! You’ve seen what he’s like.“
This is worse than usual for America. Usually it’s just “If they come back they’ll be worse than me.”
It’s gaslighting. It’s like two parents arguing in front of children about which one beats them more severely.
When abusers are afraid of losing control of their victim, they try to make them more afraid of leaving than they are of them.
When my parents were divorcing in 1999, my dad told my mom that she wouldn’t be able to live on her income and she’d come crawling back to him, then when she told him she’d rather live in an outhouse if she had to he realized he had pushed one too many times, so he turned around to me and said “You know, your mother already had cancer once. It’ll almost certainly come back and when it does you won’t have anywhere to live.”
(It never came back, but we see what he did there.)
After blaming someone else stops working and after they try to make you too afraid to leave them by letting your imagination run wild, it turns out that emotional abusers really don’t have a whole lot left in their arsenal.
Only in the case of American politics, you have two parties propped up by the wealthy elite and they tag team you and use these tricks, and it goes back and forth, and it’s never good for you.
Meanwhile the entire country keeps getting amazingly shittier as we all live under an amalgam of the policies they both manage to enact.
The United States got its debt rating downgraded about a week ago by Fitch, and of course fake economist Paul “I drove mah Volvo to the Nobel Prize and they said you shall not pass!” Krugman said he was horrified to watch that, and of course not about the national debt, which can keep soaring forever and ever with absolutely no negative consequences at all.
(Sarcasm) Debt works because everyone will lend you money forever without becoming concerned that half your population is unemployable and couldn’t pay taxes if it wanted to and it’s getting worse because that’s how it works.
Nobody will ever cut you off so just go on spending like there’s no tomorrow I’ve got a Volvo. (Paul Krugman) (/Sarcasm)
I honestly hate Paul Krugman the more I read him and after over twenty years that’s an amazingly long unbroken record.
Of course what made my blood boil this time is that while Walmart tries to get my spouse to quit by cutting his hours (and most people’s) and pulling people making minimum wage from the floor to do his job, Krugman, a Democrat Biden flackey, says that “Everyone at the low end got a raise, like grocery store workers.”
It would be great if someone took Krugman’s money from working the Democrat propaganda mill circuits like the New York Times and made him work in a grocery store. He could even drive his Volvo there, and get a “raise“.
(The 10% reduction in hours.)
It’s surreal that the New York Times is behind a paywall and posts utter bullshit, day in and day out. It’s basically Fox News for people who think they’re “cerebral” because “Democrats”.
Being a Democrat doesn’t make you intelligent. It just means you got gaslighted by the slightly less abusive shitty parent.
Back to Walmart. The local store has a different manager every year. They blame the old manager for everything and then give the new manager a year and fire them too.
“I’ll be dead soon, and when I am you can blame me for anything you want. Yes, you can say I was quite quite mad.”
It’s not the store manager’s fault that people steal TVs and set the store on fire as cover while they bolt.
It is, of course, also not the fault of the store employees who get their hours cut while Walmart turns around and tries to make everyone else suffer for the Democrat State’s Attorney’s failure to prosecute.
I asked my mom what we should do about them cutting my spouse’s hours while they pull people making minimum wage from the floor to do a job that should pay them more.
She said, “Oh just wait until they get their tax returns and quit because they have a thousand bucks and figure they never have to work again.”
Walmart definitely does cycle through people with this mentality.
It never ceases to amaze me what kind of a world we live in now under the current generation.
Every time I’m taking a dump in a public restroom with the door locked, people come up to it and try to shake the building apart trying to walk in, and you have to wonder if they were all born in a barn and never heard about knocking on the door.
About a year ago, some of my spouse’s co-workers got fired for having an orgy in the cissy bathroom and not one of four adults thought to lock the door, and of course they got one of those “today people” that doesn’t knock and just walks on in.
Needless to say, they all got fired.
Meanwhile, Walmart basically encourages MOAR of these people to apply while they cut your hours if you show up every day, never late, don’t do anything wrong, and do half again as much work as one of the usual suspects.
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
I’m just glad we don’t have kids. That’s about the only way this shit sandwich could possibly get any worse.
Directly contradicting Paul “Economic Propaganda Minister” Krugman with “mah Volvo”, even CNBC admits that wage growth in the past 12 months is only a third of what inflation is.
Of course, it doesn’t matter what inflation is with the millions of layoffs and the reduced hours and people not having any money to spend. They always make the “unemployment” figure lower by counting anyone who works 1 hour a week at Taco Bell or has given up and ran out of benefits as “not unemployed”, and they do the same with inflation.
There’s no Izvestia in Pravda, and there’s no Pravda in Izvestia.
"That was a good line. And a very dissident one, which could only be uttered among friends in a kitchen, the place for candid discussions in Soviet apartments.
In Russian, pravda means truth, while izvestia is a somewhat old-fashioned but still widely known word for news or more precisely news messages. The two words were used as names for two widely circulated newspapers. So the line would go:
There is no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda.
For the sake of the word play, the phrase targets one of the newspapers for having no truth in it and the other for having no news. In fact it was critical of all Soviet press for reporting neither news nor truth."
-Dmitry Budko (Born in the Soviet Union)
(But someone is clearly getting their wires crossed.)
“I suppose I will have to have to have that painted over.” -Prime Minister Londo Mollari