Suffering Fools

Extended Trailer: Locked Up Season 1 (Vis A Vis) | Channel 4
We started watching this Spanish crime series on Netflix a couple of days ago, but last night I bailed out. The story is about a nominally middle class, law abiding family that gets sucked into the criminal justice vortex. Given the pressure they are operating under and their naivete, their stupidity might be expected, but gee willikers, there is some really stupid shit going on. In any case, I couldn't take it anymore and bailed out. Also, the casual viciousness of the ringleaders in the woman's prison is a little hard to stomach. That might have something to do with why I quit watching it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, this comic showed up in this morning's paper:

Pearls Before Swine - Thinkyman

which hits kind of close to home. There are no end of troubles in this world, or at least no end of people complaining about troubles, but what can be done? Fixing societies ills requires working with people, or more to the point, getting a critical mass of people to agree on what should be done, and I've never been very good at that, or maybe I just don't have the energy or patience. Instead, I try to avoid problem areas. Avoiding problems is not too difficult as long as you have the freedom of movement to get away from them. Not everyone has that luxury. Of course, there are some people who seem to thrive on conflict.

So I hide out in my cave and think deep thoughts and some of them even make it into this blog and out into the world. Some people might read them, and it might affect their opinion on some issue and maybe that will alleviate some problem, somewhere. One can hope. Or not.

Lately I've been wondering why some big cities seem to have so many troubles, problems with homelessness, gangs, crime, poverty, etc. Much of the property in urban areas is owned by a relatively small portion of the population. I would think that property owners would be concerned about property values, and further that the social problems that inner cities are experiencing would have a negative effect on those property values. Vast areas of Detroit were abandoned. Yes, people lost their homes, but the mortgage companies that financed those home also lost a boatload of money.  Why aren't the property owners doing something to combat these social ills? Could if be that the will of the mob is too strong? People would just rather abandon millions of dollars worth of property than try to fight an army of people whose only interest is conflict?

Likewise, I suspect the War On Drugs [tm] has become such a large part of our society that legalizing drugs would have a huge negative effect. We don't have enough for people to do now. At least the War On Drugs [tm] is keeping huge number of people employed. Yes, a lot of them are shit jobs. Being an inmate in a prison has got to be the worst, but at least you are helping to keep prison guards employed, so that ought to count for something when you meet St. Peter.

Computerization has been a double edged sword. It has made material goods cheap and plentiful, but it has also put zillions of people out of work. What used to cost $100 to be done by a person now costs a $1 to be done by a machine. When you have cut the cost of production by that much, your profit margins become huge. You can cut your prices and still make more money than god, which is why we have a proliferation of billionaires. What we don't have is something for the great mass of impoverished people to do, other than pick fights. I'm thinking we need to start a big building program, building things out of stone blocks the way the ancients did. It takes a lot of manpower to build things out of stone. All we need is a god emperor to command everyone to build a ginormous temple.