Los Angeles Daily 12/14/20
By: Clint Allisone
Tags: Daily Blog, Progressive, Los Angeles, Culture, Democracy

Playing at Medium has been fun, I’ve earned $1.81 since I’ve started. I’m super proud of that, as it’s the first time I’ve earned any money writing, and it means I can do it.

Writing here, though does seem like a chore sometimes, mainly because I started with a daily, that I haven’t kept up on. It’s in the infancy stages. The internet itself in its adolescence, all the ways of expression in their growing pains, my small expressions are like a sapling trying to find its roots on a new mountain, and that feels really good.

With all of the bad actors of late, on both sides of the aisle, and the way people drive, I’m wondering if mankind’s natural state might be one of asshole. I mean who set up these standards of being nice anyhow? Maybe we really are just a bunch of self centered assholes, and that’s okay. I’m certainly not perfect, and I have been a dick, so maybe its okay for other people to be dicks, too.

I’m pretty sure it was Christ’s golden rule that got people thinking, maybe I shouldn’t be a dick, because I don’t like it when people are dicks to me. He wouldn’t have had to create the golden rule if people weren’t naturally dumb self assholes. It was like he had to come up with a self introspection of behavior even the dumbest of us could understand.

I think on all the following creators of etiquette, just how perfect were they? What I’m saying is even the most respectful person alive today has the capacity to dick out completely, blind spots to their own behavior, excluding a big part of the population from their respect.

Inequality is like that, you got the most dignified families on the planet, members of the most elite clubs, potentially not insulting a soul, yet their wealth is gained on the backs of the ultimate insult of considering others worth as less than their own, but again maybe that’s just how we’re made.

A lot of it could also be cultural. I worked for Adrian Velicescu for a while, he was trying to get a bid on a large project with Bahrainian businessmen that would make or break a manufacturing start up he had put all his assets into, they drug him along for over a year, him thinking it was a sure thing, them playing at business. A month before he would default on everything they still had not closed with him, and he lost it.

In a meeting with the princes his frustration exploded into yelling, cursing, called them bad names, and demanding a contract with half down. This was what it took to gain their respect. Papers were signed that day. Go figure.

Apparently behavior, and the judgment of it, can be subjectively good or bad. The wealthy squeeze the working class, to them that’s good behavior because it makes them richer, to the working class its bad behavior because it keeps them poor. Those with something to lose watch those with nothing to lose protest, and revile considering it bad behavior, those with nothing to lose protest, and revile and consider it their only form of agency. Are both wrong? Are both right?

Personally I side with neither the Dems or the Republicans, the two party system designed to keep the masses divided, and every decision carried out by either side that helped “the People” made solely to keep the rich safe by boosting the buffer of a middle class between them and the poor. Both sides are comprised of assholes.