Saturday, November 25, 2017

The Devout Communist

The problem with most communists, and this goes for all of their imitators on the left, all the way up to the misnamed "liberals" of today, who are anything but liberal, is that they are such BRAZEN HYPOCRITES! If you're paying attention, it's damned easy to extrapolate the "liberal" agenda which is invariably premised upon Karl Marx's dictum:

Try this test, and decide for yourself, if you don't recognize the Marxist dictum embedded in the "core beliefs" of just about every politician, and every big-mouthed leftist professor or "activist" or fake-stream media commentator you've ever seen.

Homelessness: force someone else to pay for housing.

Health care: force someone else to pay.

"Education:" force someone else to pay.

Income Security: force someone else to pay.

Prescriptions: force someone else to pay.

Food Security: force someone else to pay.

You have a disability that restricts your mobility: force someone else to pay.

Make a living from your shitty art, music, and movies: force someone else to pay.

You're a boy who wants to turn into a girl: force someone else to pay.

You want an abortion or free birth control: force someone else to pay.

You want to be addressed by your preferred gender pronoun: force everyone else to do it, or make them pay.

You want "reparations" for the injustices done to your long forgotten ancestors, to be paid for by everyone OTHER than the long dead perpetrators of those injustices?

This is the new morality. (Actually, it isn't. It's been around since the beginning of time. Political history has always been about forcing someone else to pay.)

Yep, it's the same thing you hear extruding from every politician's lips, force someone else to pay.

The Marxist dictum is explosively obvious in every one of these issues.

What it always boils down to, is that everyone wants something for nothing, and if it doesn't just fall into their laps, well then, it just stands to reason: force someone else to pay.

Because I have long understood this simple dynamic, it has cursed me with the ability to see the future. The future I see is not in perfect contrast. All I can see are vague outlines. Ball park eventualities. But because of this ersatz clairvoyance, I am almost NEVER caught off-guard and surprised by events. Well, I didn't see the election of Donald Trump. I really didn't expect that one.

The problem I have with most politicians is that they never see themselves doing any of the actual work.

They care about homelessness, but it goes without saying, that the politician's role in this holy endeavor, is to make someone else pay. They don't lower themselves to digging in the ground, or hammering in the nails. Nope. That is someone else's job, even if it doesn't really need a whole bunch of that Marxian, "ability."

The same goes for health care. The politicians aren't the ones diagnosing the illnesses, suturing the wounds, writing the prescriptions, emptying the bedpans and cleaning up the vomit and blood. Nope, they will just be the ones getting someone else to pay for it, and then voting themselves $5,000 gold rings. And then they build fucking statues of each other. And, of course, someone else always ends up paying for it all.

And so on. And so on. For every political issue.

It's so simple. So easy to see, And yet the vast majority of the population remain blind to the whole scam. Why is that? I have some ideas, but I won't attempt to answer that question here. (But a good start for you, if interested, is to read a few books by Ayn Rand.)

Oh. I almost forgot about why I wrote this rant in the first place.

I was thinking about this die-hard Marxist friend of mine, and about the time back around 1983 when we happened to bump into each other in a quiet bar in the center of Hamilton. I always enjoyed jousting with this guy, because unlike too many phony, Che Guevara, or Nelson Mandella T-Shirt-wearers of today, this guy had some real intellectual power behind his convictions.

What a real treat. Someone who can actually defend his position, instead of what people do today, like kick you out of forums, or block you on Twitter.

The real bonus was that, despite the fact that we were both about as opposite as possible on the political spectrum, we were nevertheless able to joust away without resorting to insults or recriminations. The discussions were pure, as if examining a disagreement over math, or chemistry.

Never once did he accuse me of being a fascist, or a Nazi, or a white supremacist due to my fondness for individual rights, equal rights, and freedom of speech.

I enjoyed the conversation so much that I kept on buying more rounds. It was pure market economics, and I was willing to pay for the value I was getting out of this challenge.

The one thing that I did notice, though I never protested, was that the communist didn't offer to pay for a single round of beer.

I guess it came down to that greater need theory.

Once need becomes a politically valuable commodity, as it has become in most of the West today, the law of supply and demand, combined with scumbag politics, will ensure that it will become extremely abundant.

And in the modern welfare state democracies, it has.

Need is a bottomless pit. It will eventually drag every civilization, that predicates its politics on it, into the sewers of history.

What a shame.




Monday, November 20, 2017

Abuse of Power by Mini-Tyrants

This morning I discovered that I had been blocked from accessing the Facebook Group, World Wide Anti-Uber Society, for having allegedly "dumb" and "hateful" opinions. Perhaps surprisingly, the mini-tyrant did not go so far as to accuse me of being a NAZI as well.

At first World Wide Anti-Uber Society Facebook admin, Justin La Plante, tried to bully me into complying with his world view by deleting a couple of my posts and threatening to use his administrative power to block me from the group.

During a private message session he tried to justify his bullying by accusing me of lighting fires he then had to put out. Seeing as how the "offending" post had garnered little attention or commentary, I'm not sure of what kinds of fires he imagined he had to put out, unless he was deluged with a bunch of private messages, which I doubt. In other words, his real message was that no controversial views would be permitted in HIS group if they happened to clash with HIS opinions.

No Donald Trump Supporters Allowed

He then dug himself in deeper by confessing that he had a problem with my support for Donald Trump, and that he equates my posting of a Confederate Battle flag on my own facebook page with "hatred" rather than my life-long interest in, and love of American history, and the spirit of rebellion that flag represents. In bringing up these matters, he did nothing but reinforce the fact that he was using his admin POWER to enforce compliance with his god complex.

So it came down to another small example of what we've been hearing about all year with respect to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google, the censorship of opposing views.

During the discussion, which he later published on the group page to demonstrate how flawed my character is, he tried to show how big his brain is by asking me some civics questions.

He obviously wanted to keep kicking this ball back and forth in the PM session. I don't like wasting my time arguing with fools in private. I'd much rather poke fun at them, and expose their self-righteous hypocrisy in public so I invited him to take the debate back onto the group he wanted to block me from.

He took the bait.

I was confident I had sized this guy up rather well during our PM session, that he was an intellectual lightweight, and that it would be easy to publicly humiliate him in the light of day.

After he agreed to an open debate, I proceeded to annihilate Justin La Plante in the World Wide Anti-Uber Society group.

It was no surprise to me, therefore, that after a few punches were thrown, he took the coward's way out, posted a few twisted misrepresentaions to get the last word in, then deleted the debate, and blocked me from the group.

Maybe the guy is not such a coward in the end. After all, it takes some balls to brazenly demonstrate that you have none.


Also of interest:

The Fred Eisenberger Comedy Special

Saturday, November 18, 2017

My Warning from an Uberpeople.net "Moderator."

I just got a message from one of the moderators of the uberpeople.net Toronto driver's forum. In it he states,

"This forum values opinions from all angles. However, being argumentative, name-calling, personal attacks, instigating other members, and any post that can be deemed confrontational will not be tolerated. Please refrain from any posts of this manner, even if instigated. We hope you can tone it back a bit going forward.

Please review the terms and rules http://uberpeople.net/help/terms"

I think he was feeling a bit humiliated after he read my criticism of his limp response to my "Uberpeople Service Animal Discussion" that I posted in the Toronto Uber taxi driver forum.

Things have really changed in the last twenty-five years. It used to be quite the rollicking back and forth in discussion forums. Now, whenever you get the better of some smart-ass who takes shots at you, he threatens to have your views censored.

As an example of my objectionable conduct, the "moderator" cited the following passage by me,

"Are you dyslexic? The individual referenced in my post was not "terrified of driving," he was terrified of dogs. A remedial reading comprehension course might help you in this thread."

I thought I was being kind in attributing the respondent's dishonest and deliberate misquoting of my post to dyslexia rather than the slimy tactic that it obviously was. It seems to have escaped the "moderator's" attention, that deliberate and dishonest misquoting of forum participants is, itself, "confrontational." Yet I doubt the individual who slandered me received any similar warning. I doubt that the thought even occurred to the censorship muscle-flexing "moderator," Mugats, or whatever his real name is.

I could be wrong. Maybe "Mugats" did send a similar warning to "Fuzzyelvis," but I sincerely doubt it.

By the way, and perhaps of some significance, is the apparent fact that this "moderator" uses a fake name and a fake picture of himself.

In my reply to his "warning" I challenged him to reveal his true identity. Any bets as to whether he will have the guts to step up?

I anticipate that Mr. Mugats will use his power to shut me down on the discussion board.

My last reply to him was,


Relevant Screenshots

Did this person receive a "warning" from Mugats for this?

Or this?

Bets?

I am not omniscient, but I remain certain that none of the other "offenders" received a similar warning from the mysterious moderator. Notwithstanding, I will happily recant if Mr. Mugats provides any evidence that proves me wrong.

At this point, I would say the odds that Mr. Mugats uses his power to borf me from the forum is about 99.9 % to the .1 % chance that he will identify himself and provide evidence that he sent the other confrontational users similar warnings.

By the way, I love it when people are confrontational with me. It gives me the opportunity to work on my debating skills. If no one ever confronted me, I would be bored as shit.

Unfortunately, these days, it seems that whenever you challenge the crooked scumbags that spew their fraudulent effluvia on social media, rather than engage, they run and hide.

Well. That didn't take long.


Also of interest:

The Fred Eisenberger Comedy Special

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Uberpeople Service Animal Discussion

I knew a guy who was terrified of dogs, no matter how small. Even a Mexican Chihuahua would terrify him. It would be a dangerous mistake to force someone like that to drive passengers with service animals.

Some of the people in the thread claim to have pet allergies. Should they be forced to take service animals?

And what about those who have strong religious beliefs about dogs? Whose rights rights should prevail in our new utopian socialist caste system?

I prefer one of the greatest achievements of Western civilization, the now deceased ideal of equal rights for all. In accordance with Rand's statement,

"Any alleged right of one person which necessitates the violation of the rights of another is not, and can never be a "right."

According to that simple formula, there would be no question about the Ubercab driver's right to refuse service animals.

And there's no reason it should be a problem in the first place. There will always be drivers willing to take service animals. The installation of a simple marker or flag in each driver account indicating a desire to accommodate service animals (or anything else, for that matter, including heavy bags or luggage and wheelchairs, tobacco use, racial or ethnic background, music preferences, intelligence, alcohol, prostitutes, drug addicts, people who stink like corpses, etc.) would solve most driver/rider incompatibility issues.

Everyone could be happy. It's the manifestation of Milton Friedman's "Unanimity vs. conformity" argument in favor of the free market vs. the coercive democracy lorded over by slick, mendacious, manipulative, sociopathic, and above all, uninsightful politicians we must all presently endure.

Instead, the politicians opt for brutal mandates, the equivalent of using a legislative sledge hammer to force square pegs into round holes. It creates nothing less than a social pressure cooker. A war of all against all. It's dumb and it's evil.

It also explains why all socialist regimes eventually descend into chaos and mass murder. If the sledge hammer isn't big enough, try a bigger one. And if that doesn't work, use internment camps, guns, gas chambers, and gulags.

For my part, I have never refused animals in my cab. In fact, they are often preferable to many of my "human" passengers.


Service Animals Forced Agreement

Saturday, November 11, 2017

The Most Boring City Council Meeting Ever

Refresh my memory. I seem to recall being able to tune in to the odd City council show back in the 1960's when I was still a kid. We didn't have cable at the time. CHCH was the local channel. Did they broadcast the tomfoolery that was going on at city hall at the time, or am I just imagining it?

What struck me at the time, and this was long before I had any serious political opinions, was how phony all of these politicians were. I could see right through them. They were basically a bunch of actors putting on what had to be the most boring show around. They reminded me of some of the people in my classes at Westwood public school. The ones I couldn't stand. The ones that had picked up on the art of virtue signaling. Today we call them Social Justice Warriors or SJWs.

You know, this edition of the Public Record is more boring than most. That's probably because there is no sound. I mean, how much time is anyone going to spend watching a bunch of people in a room scratch their noses, and walk up and down stairs, and in and out of doors.

The most exciting part I've seen so far is where Maria Pearson reaches across the desk to retrieve an item that is under a piece of paper. She rearranges the paper after retrieving the object, but doesn't seem to do anything with the object after successfully retrieving it. What ever is going on must be REALLY boring, because the guy beside her, I'm guessing it's Lloyd Ferguson, actually allocates a few seconds of his valuable time to turning his head and watching his colleague's fascinating maneuver.

I mean, these people haven't even figured out a creative way to waste time. At least, when I was in high school bored as hell with what was being taught, I used to drum on my desk, trying to mimic In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly. You should have seen my Gr. 10 French book. I covered every inch of it with creative doodles. I knew how to waste fucking time.

There is one thing these politicians are very good at, though. I'll give them that.

It's wasting money.

I'm surprised they haven't actually hired that transgender piss artist to put on a show right outside of those glass doors.

For something completely different, and much less boring, I invite you to view my latest video.

It's about:

  • Uber Drivers Soliciting Cash Fares
  • Mayor Eisenberger Refuses to Apologize
  • Uber Driver Takes Graveyard Shift Too Seriously
  • Hamilton Cab Drivers Say it Plainly
  • Comedy Segment Featuring Fred Eisenberger

Check it out

Uber Driver Tells Young Girl to Meet Him in Graveyard

In this show:

  • Uber Drivers Soliciting Cash Fares
  • Mayor Eisenberger Refuses to Apologize
  • Uber Driver Takes Graveyard Shift Too Seriously
  • Hamilton Cab Drivers Say it Plainly
  • Comedy Segment Featuring Fred Eisenberger

Background Links

Fred Eisenberger Exposed

REPORTED LIST OF INCIDENTS INVOLVING UBER AND LYFT

Friday, November 3, 2017

Satan Lives.

Person A: I like what I see in Person B, but I cannot attempt to make contact with him/her, unless he/she first gives me a verbal indication that they are interested in hooking up.

Person B: I like what I see in Person A, but I cannot attempt to make contact with him/her, unless he/she first gives me a verbal indication that they are interested in hooking up.

In the end, they just walk on by each other for fear of being accused of a transgression..... finally settling on the much safer option of showing interest in someone they would otherwise not be interested in hooking up with, because, if accused of a transgression, they could always fall back upon the argument that they WERE NOT attracted to the person they tried to hook up with.

This is the purest expression of the self-sacrificial, self-immolative, altruist/collectivist morality identified, and condemned, by Ayn Rand.

I think what we are seeing here is the evolution of a code of thinking that has, at its root, exactly that which Rand tried to warn us about.

Hatred of humanity. Hatred of the mind. Hatred of success. And above all, hatred of human happiness.

Oh! And correspondingly, white people, be they atheist, Christian, or Jew, being, arguably, the happiest, most successful people in the history of this planet, must be correspondingly marginalized, vilified, and blamed for all of the planet's wrongs.

Oddly, perhaps, though I am an atheist, this monstrous evil is beginning to persuade me that Satan, does indeed, exist.

What a weird way to become religious.


More News

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

For a while there, Uber seemed to have the whole world hoodwinked…

By Rita Smith

November 2017

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Taxi News. It is reproduced here with permission from the author, Rita Smith.

Rita Smith is a writer and communications consultant whose career was launched at Taxi News almost 30 years ago. She has worked at the municipal, provincial and federal levels of government as well as in multiple roles in media and public relations. Her respect for hard-working cab drivers is endless.


Taxi drivers are owed giant apologies by so many groups, it’s hard to keep track any more.

I have read so many ridiculous, misguided, inaccurate and plain pathetic media articles about Uber in the past four years, I am at risk of becoming inured to the lunacy. I’ve lobbied politicians and pleaded with cops. I’ve debated family members and friends. I’ve pestered media members until they ran away from me.

Their minds are impenetrable; people want so desperately to believe you can get something for nothing, you can’t overcome their magical thinking.

We should never give up thinking skeptically, though, and challenging the lunacy; because what happened to taxi drivers could happen to anyone in any industry. The corruption and massive breach of business and political ethics that have infected the vehicle for hire industry can – and will – affect EVERY industry in future. Uber’s business model and philosophy is a cancer that must be removed from commerce. Cabbies, unfortunately, have been the canaries in the coal mine.

First, it appears that Uber’s terrible, horrible, very bad year was triggered by a blog post published in February by Susan Fowler, a female engineer at Uber. Her treatment was so egregious that her recounting of it set in motion a chain of events that forced CEO Travis Kalanick to resign.

What, you may ask, could possibly have happened to motivate Uber to send Arianna Huffington off on a fact-finding mission and hire former US Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate its toxic culture?

Well, this woman’s boss sent her an online message saying he would like to sleep with her. Instead of replying “F--- you,” or even just “No,” or perhaps taking documentary evidence in the form of a printed chat message to a lawyer, she went to Human Resources, which did not help her. She was sad. She did not quit, though.

The next event, in a display of sexual discrimination so breathtakingly cruel I cry just thinking about it, Uber bought leather jackets for a team of male engineers, but they did not buy any for the women.

I contrast these dire circumstances with those of cab drivers whose stories I have heard over the past four years: one driver I met had his own apartment in spring of 2014. By summer, he was sleeping on a friend’s couch. By fall, he was homeless.

I wish the legal, licensed taxi drivers who’ve had their lives decimated by Uber got even the tiniest percentage of the media attention female engineers get when propositioned or deprived of leather jackets – but nobody cares. Not even Susan Fowler, who is clearly completely comfortable with the thought of wrecking the lives of thousands of law-abiding cab drivers and their families, but doesn’t have the guts to say “no” to a lecherous boss. I am sorry for the pain she was content to cause taxi drivers, and I am sorry we are even the same sex.

Second, cab drivers are owed an apology by technology writers at every outlet that covers Uber. These writers are supposed to be smart and prescient and have their finger on the pulse of all the trends which are going to affect us in the years ahead. In fact, they are so out of touch with business reality that they shouldn’t even be allowed to predict whether VHS VCRs will overtake Betamax, or whether online music shopping might be more popular than vinyl records.

Here’s a quote from a ReCode article on self-driving cars written by Johana Bhuiyan:

“Uber’s future depends greatly on solving self-driving. It’s what will keep the ride-hail company relevant as more automakers produce their own autonomous vehicles. But taking drivers out of the equation would also increase the company’s profits: Self-driving cars give Uber 100 percent of the fare, the company would no longer have to subsidize driver pay and the cars can run nearly 24 hours a day.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Let’s just skip over the fact that Uber has NEVER turned a profit, and is on track to lose more than $3 billion in 2017.

Uber doesn’t own, or maintain, or insure, ANY cars.

The cars are owned by the drivers, who absorb every dollar of the cost of maintaining them no matter how much or how little revenue they generate.

Imagine what Uber’s bottom line would look like if, in addition to buying leather jackets for female engineers, they also had to purchase, insure and maintain their own cars. And then pay drivers. Uber’s business model is based upon persuading car owners to share their cars with Uber, while those drivers assume 100 percent of the risk of the business. While this appears to be far too futuristic a concept for a tech writer to grasp, P.T. Barnum was able to sum it up succinctly over 100 years ago: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Third, the mainstream media.

There aren’t enough column inches in Taxi News for me to recount the ways in which the mainstream media missed the boat on Uber.

I’ll just focus my comment on one recurring inaccuracy which is repeated in almost every article I read about Uber around the globe (England, Australia, Canada, the US, India and various Asian and African nations): how fairly or unfairly Uber “pays” its drivers.

“Uber doesn’t pay drivers!” I groan every time. “Drivers pay Uber! The driver does all the work, invests all the time, pays all the vehicle maintenance, and gives Uber 25 percent of the money he earns. Without drivers, Uber has nothing. The drivers are Uber’s only source of revenue. Uber doesn’t pay drivers; drivers pay Uber!”

If they don’t understand that, they don’t understand anything about Uber. Why would we trust anything else they report? I am sorry we can no longer trust the mainstream media on much of anything.

Fourth, politicians.

Where to start? The betrayal of the taxi industry by politicians around the globe has been complete, quick and starkly hypocritical.

From John Tory in Toronto to David Cameron in England to Daniel Andrews in Australia, politicians who are either air-headed or corrupt just rolled over backward for Uber, re-writing or eliminating safety standards that have been decades and millions of dollars in the making and shredding the social contract with drivers that supported consumer protection.

Nobody puts it better than Hamilton taxi driver and writer Hans Wienhold:

“All of the most expensive elements of a secure taxi industry were never about safety at all. Now we see clearly that none of these things ever had anything to do with safety: they were just power grabs and cash grabs. No one will ever buy the politicians’ BS again.”

Finally, consumers.

People like cheap, there’s no arguing that.

When Uber first arrived, there was much ado about cartoon cars on cell phone screens and free ice cream and free puppy cuddles and hot women drivers.

Really, though, what it all comes down to is that Uber is cheaper than taxis, and people like cheap.

For the first two years after Uber arrived we read lots of stories about free water and candies in the car and happy grandmothers driving for extra cash.

When the first stories of sexual assault started showing up, a little dark cloud appeared on the horizon.

When an uninsured Uber driver killed a six year old girl in San Francisco, concerns were raised.

When London, England announced they were averaging almost one sexual assault per week and Londoners began referring to Uber as “rape roulette,” things began looking serious.

And then, when a woman in Texas was made a paraplegic in an accident with an uninsured Uber driver, people sat up and took notice.

Back in the day, when I was reading dozens of articles about Uber around the globe as part of my job, I felt some sympathy for these people.

Now, I confess, sympathy has evaporated. Now, when I come across complaints about Uber in my Twitter feed (“My Uber driver refused my service dog! My Uber driver left me at roadside! My Uber driver showed up at my apartment and told me he has feelings for me!”) I tend to reply sarcastically, “But you saved some money, so it’s all good, right?”

I particularly love the fact that there is a campaign underway by some women right now to get security cameras in Uber vehicles….now, consumers want to combine “cheap” with “safe.” They want it all; but as Austin Powers would say, “Some things just aren’t in the cards, baby.”

Tempo