If you could see me now.

This is not the first time I’ve gotten a message like this. I always find it curious. Because if you have this attitude you are either invincible, rich, or a fool.

I used to be in this tech nerd community and there was this older fella who slowly revealed himself to be a super right wing asshat. He complained about immigrants mooching, black people mooching, poor people mooching… everybody was mooching his taxes. Meanwhile, he was 65 and working hard. Paying his own way. Doing things proper like a good American. 

He was no damn moocher, that’s for sure.

Then he got sick.

He could not work anymore.

Lost his medical insurance.

His savings ran out in about 3 months.

And he became a fellow moocher.

He had to sign up for Medicare and disability.

But then he realized that wasn’t enough to live on. Boy, was he mad. ALL CAPS POSTS about how he can’t afford rent. He can’t afford food. He started posting links to his Paypal asking people to donate. He got furious at people because no one would give him money. Called us all bad people for not helping him in his time of need. He had to move to a smaller place. Sell a lot of his tech.

He was so very angry.

“I WORKED HARD.”

“I DID THINGS THE PROPER WAY.”

“I DESERVE MORE THAN THOSE MOOCHERS!”

Even after his experience, he viewed himself as different than other people trapped in the safety net. He deserved more because he had a bootstrap attitude. It didn’t occur to him that a lot of people on welfare or disability probably worked hard too. That he was no more or less deserving than them. It was sad to see his experience didn’t instill any empathy.

He’s a lost cause. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe you should think about how long you could last before you’d have to mooch. Are you set for life? If you were in an accident and unable to work ever again, would you be able to live comfortably and manage your expenses? Think about that. And think about the fact that disability pays less than minimum wage. Could you live your life on $750 per month? What changes would you have to make to accomplish that? Use your imagination and really try to put yourself in those shoes.

$1200 is not a windfall for me. It is maybe 4 months of having slightly less financial anxiety. That anxiety is a part of my life. It is inescapable and I have conceded it will always be there. It is the dread of seeing $14 in my bank account towards the end of the month and hoping I didn’t forget about an automatic payment. It’s the fear of looking in my freezer and wondering if two bags of frozen chicken nuggets are enough to last until I get my next payment. 

But now I am getting $1200 and for a few months maybe I don’t have to feel some of that anxiety. I can reallocate that anxiety to the world being on fire and worrying about my dad getting sick.

But you want me to send it back?

What’s even sadder about your attitude is you are focusing on the wrong people. I’m not a moocher. I’m an insignificant financial speck in the grand scheme. I’m probably a percentage of a penny on your tax bill. But then you look at companies like Amazon who used loopholes to pay no taxes. They also got cities to subsidize offices and warehouses. So not only did they not pay taxes, we paid them for the honor of giving people low wage jobs with poor benefits and dubious working conditions. 

What about our F-35 fighter jet program? For years they didn’t even work properly and they still haven’t even been used for anything and they will probably rarely be utilized because of drones. But we will spend a trillion dollars on them anyway. 

What about oil subsidies? About $20 billion of our tax dollars goes to the fossil fuel industry every year. An industry that has never struggled to turn a profit. Just look at pictures of Dubai and ask yourself why we are giving them subsidies. 

We give corporations billions upon billions of dollars even though they are making record profits. And then we find out they were operating so close to the edge that they can’t even last a month without us giving them billions more. 

But my $750 per month makes me the moocher.

For those not keeping track, so far President @rihanna has: 

 - covered the cost of ventilators in her home country of Barbados 

- donated $5 million to fight #COVID19 in Haiti, Malawi, Barbados & the U.S. 

- donated personal protective equipment for the state of New York

- Terisa Siagatonu 

Sharing tweet from NY Gov. Cuomo, “I want to thank @rihanna and the Rihanna Foundation for donating Personal Protective Equipment to New York State. We’re so appreciative of your help and that of so many others who have stepped up. “

“Wherever I go…I’m an immigrant. I think people forget that a lot of times. I think they see Rihanna the brand. But I think it’s important for ppl to remember, if you love me, everyone out here is just like me. A million Rihannas out there, getting treated like dirt.” -@rihanna 

A prime example is Bill Gates. Well known as a philanthropist, primarily for his large scale donation to education. Except what actually happened is he essentially bought a sharing control in the US education system and proceeded to fucked it up terribly. I will believe his intentions were good, but frankly that doesn’t matter. He fucked it up because he is a billionaire and billionaires just can’t give up control. It is how they became billionaires in the first place, it is baked into their minds.

They just can’t accept that Notre Dame isn’t for sell. Because that is what “donations” mean to billionaires. They want to buy a controlling stake in something that they care about, and they have been doing so long they think that this is philanthropy. Because it makes sense to them that if they are going to invest *their* money that they should make sure it is done right. But they generally have no fucking idea what they are doing when it comes to these things.

They don’t donate.

They’ll give money for a hospital or museum wing with their name on it, or a scholarship fund with their name on it, but they won’t pony up to keep the lights on or to pay support staff salaries because that’s not exciting or sexy boosting to their egos.

You know, I just feel like women, they have minds and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it. But I’m… I’m so lonely.

in a nutshell, instead of reforming the bad parts of your society, you try to opt out of it in a way that has really no effect, and wouldn’t work at all if the majority of people weren’t still part of the industry you dislike.

there was, for a while, a real movement of people who tried to get everything out of dumpsters, as a way of opting out of capitalism. but the problem was that you couldn’t get what you need when you need it, leading to you being kind of a drain on your community, and someone had to buy that stuff in the first place for it to end up in that dumpster anyway. it was Fundamentally Silly.

going vegan to opt out of farming practices has similar problems. for instance: you (hypothetical vegan you) won’t buy honey, but the bees are being used to fertilize the vegetables and fruit you eat, they’re making the honey anyway, all you’ve done is – well, nothing, because you’re not a big enough demographic to make an impact, but even if you were, honey sales are a much smaller part of beekeepers’ income than crop pollination. and beekeeping is not a big faceless corporate interest. it’s not monsanto. it’s a bunch of single-family or partnership business with a truck or two and a couple hundred hives. the bees make honey after a pollinating run, and the beekeepers sell it for a little extra income. if you made a dent in that, you’d be achieving nothing but making joe beekeeper buy his kids’ t-shirts at k-mart instead of target.

animal farming and plant farming are deeply interconnected. plant farmers grow animal feed; animal farmers sell manure for fertilizer. most non-corporate farmers raise both plants and animals. it’s more economic and gives them more resilience.

if you were a big enough demographic to hit ‘the farming industry’ in its wallet. you would be making things MUCH harder for small farmers than for factory farms. you would be making it easier and easier for factory farms to crowd family farmers out of business. so that’s pretty much achieving the opposite of what you want, right there.

and then there’s the fact that plant farming is just as rife with gruesome factory farm conditions as animal farming, but it’s humans who are exploited in those. i’m not going to level accusations of racism here, but it really is unfortunate how little the vocal internet vegan contingent seems to know or care about the exploitation of the mostly nonwhite workers in the industry. it makes y’all look racist, whether you are or not.

look, i keep saying this, even though folks never seem to hear me: i don’t hate vegans, i’m not trying to stop you being vegan, i do not care what you eat.

You CANNOT grow crops there. That’s WHY there are sheep on it.

You refuse to use wool, well aside from.the fact that it’s a fantastic fiber and how polluting polyester and other plastic fibers are, it doesn’t harm the animal to remove and in fact is done for their benefit.

Above - a sheep farm (note steep and craggy hills), an uncompressed bale of freshly shorn wool and some sheep being shorn.

It’s not stressful for the sheep. Sheep are dumb. Be confident, dont hurt them and they’re good. Wool is a good fiber - strong, warm - even when wet - renewable and biodegradable.

My issue with Veganism-As-A-Cult is the lack of critical thinking. By all means eat what you want, wear what you want to wear but a blanket ban on all animal products because they’re HARMFUL is in itself an extremely harmful philosophy.

Do you refuse to eat plants that were pollinated by bees or fertilized by manure since they’re a product of animal labour?

Honey doesn’t hurt bees. Wool doesn’t hurt sheep.

What about animals that are going to die anyway? We are currently in the process of exterminating possums in our country as they are a pest and destroyer of our native species. We kill them humanely but they’re still going to die because its them (introduced pest) or our endemic endangered species. We use the meat for pet food and the fur for a lot of things now - in making yarns or fur items - because the alternative is to let it rot. Which is just bloody wasteful tbh.

What would (generic) you prefer we do here? Let sheep die of over heating or the weight of wet wool? Force bees into swarming (90% casualty rate) so we can avoid taking their honey? Leave pest animals to rot and encourage the use of set-and-forget traps since there’s no incentive to check them?

Roddenberry, Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols and all the rest of the original Star Trek cast and crew had no small role in making the moon landing as important as it was.  A few years before they set that lunar module down, this little TV show came along and fanned the dream into wildfire with an image of what humanity in space could actually look like—not only peaceful on our own world, endlessly curious, and prosperous enough to pursue it, but an active force for good in the greater universe.  Carrying not what’s most toxic about us, but what’s best about us out to the stars.

Everybody who has worked at NASA or any other space agency for the past 50 years is waiting for the day when that unmanned probe doing a flyby on a comet can be controlled from the bridge of a space-faring vessel.  When we’re not just looking at that comet through a color-coded sonar map, but we can look out a porthole and see it tumbling by with our own eyes.  When as a species we can finally outgrow hate and fear and violence, and turn our faces with joy toward all the beauties and wonders that lie waiting to be discovered.

XKCD’s excellent presentation on historical global temperature and anthropogenic global warming.