The Judge RANTS!
Date: 09/12/25
I Have Seen The Future...And It's Jerks
I tried, dear chums. Really I did.
I have been attempting for the last six weeks or so to write a piece summing up my thoughts about The World And Things In General. A big topic, natch, and one upon which I wouldn't want my readers (assuming I still have any) thinking that I had no views at all.
Time and again, I have sat here and started writing, only to give up in despair. Leaving aside the magnitude of the subject, I appear to have completely exhausted my stock of creative impulses. Anything is preferable to trying to extract any meaningful verbiage from my ever more reluctant mind. De-cluttering the house, watching random YouTube videos, even cleaning the bog; all of these activities have more allure. Add to this an eye problem which makes typing and reading a screen something of a strain, and you can appreciate why the envisaged screed has not yet appeared, nor is it likely to in its originally intended form.
There are two main obstacles. The first is that I know (and, truth be told, have been aware of for a long time) that nothing - but nothing - I write will change anything for the better. Oh, there was a time when I could kid myself on that there was just a chance that my aperçus would be picked up by Someone who could give it a far wider audience, but such self-delusion is now, like Clementine, 'lost and gone forever'. Besides which, there are already writers with far greater 'reach' than I will ever have who have done it, are doing it, and will continue to observe the dark mass of reality more effectively and more knowledgeably that I could, so why bother?
The second obstacle presents itself as a double question: where the fuck does one start; and, having fucking started, where the fuck does one finish? The world is experiencing a global clusterfuck the likes of which I have never before witnessed in my entire life. Not only is everything going wrong at once, but there seems to be absolutely no way out of it. All these things - be it climate crisis (coming soon to a low-lying coastline or river valley near you), the tacit acceptance of an actual, live-streamed genocide, the concomitant imposition of authoritarianism to squash even the mildest protests against either of the foregoing, and the removal of other fundamental historical rights on the grounds of 'efficiency' or 'keeping the public safe', the corporatisation of every aspect of our lives - all of these forming a mesh so tightly woven that you couldn't get a gnat's bum through it.
Plains and coastlines flooding? But global heating's a myth, don'tcha know? Mass murder of those deemed to be Untermenschen? But the colonial settler state has the right to defend itself, and you're a terrible racist who deserves to be excluded from society for suggesting otherwise! Defining non-violent direct action protests in which only infrastructure gets hurt as 'terrorism'? We must crack down on extremism! Loss of the right to trial by jury? We have to clear the backlog which is caused by jury trials (even if the real reason for delays is grotesque under-resourcing of the system over a decade and a half of utterly unnecessary austerity)! All rationales - promulgated by political and commercial élites and megaphoned by thoroughly compromised and complicit media - are fed to us as not merely The Way Things Are, but as The Way Things Have To Be. There is to be no alternative, there is to be no escape.
So it is that lives and livelihoods will continue to be destroyed so that fossil fuel companies can continue making themselves materially richer while people and entire societies drown or starve; that an entire nation can be forcibly removed or wiped out in the name of scribblings on a two-and-a-half millenia old goatskin; that those nations who have the great misfortune of having covetable natural resources on or under their lands will be relieved of their terrible burden of abundance by political, economic or military force; that political dissent can be punished by life-destroying prosecutions, convictions and sentences, and that those convictions will be achieved without the encumbrance of ordinary people sitting on juries to hear the evidence, with the danger that they might decide that the state is trying to pull a fast one; in short, that state and corporate power, aggregated and concentrated, will be maintained irrespective of the cost to those who have no such power, i.e., nearly all of the rest of us.
And there is fuck all we can do about it.
Well, there is, but the populations of the world - especially those societies which claim that their adherence to advanced, liberal values are sacrosanct whilst demonstrating daily the exact opposite - have been so lured and lulled into fuzzy acquiesence by media and technologies owned and controlled by some of the finest minds in the handbooks of deviant psychology - and have become limitlessly steerable in their views as a result - that the sort of necessary upheaval required to even start putting things right are infinitesimally likely. The authoritarian Right - and the even more authoritarian 'Centre' - are running rampant across the world, and what passes for the 'Left' has lost any guiding principles based on class analysis and devolved into a sectarian tangle of identity politics. If the 'Left' cannot address the real problems of real people in real time, then the extreme Right will claim that ground for itself, however fraudulently (because at least they will appear to be plausible). And the world has been there before, less than a century ago.
I suppose that the 'tl;dr' of all the above is that the entire planet is now ruled by sociopaths, psychopaths and just plain criminals, and that only a big enough shock coming unexpectedly and apparently out of nowhere - like an asteroid strike, for example - is going to shift anything to any real degree (and probably shift in the wrong direction anyway; you just can't bleedin' win, can yer?).
