Liberalism, reality, nihilism and depression

‘If you really care, wash the feet of a beggar.’

Some clever bloke said that. Indoctrinated and educated within the feminist neo-liberal/Marxist UK education system he got a bit depressed because he realised that people only really act out of self-interest.

Before he threw himself off a bridge (probably) he looked at the world, saw lot’s of dirty beggar feet and realised that no matter what people said, their actions demonstrated that they didn’t really care about anybody other than themselves.

That can be very depressing for the ‘liberal’ mind-set as it’s a wake up call to reality, and that’s one thing that liberals hate more than anything else, more than people like me actually.

It’s difficult to deal with reality when you come from the ideological prison known as the ‘left.’  It angers you, it makes you throw insults, and it makes you accuse people of alleged social justice warrior ills.

Oh, he’s just a racist, sexist, homophobe, bigot, right?

As long as you keep accusing those that disagree with you, you don’t have to examine the truth behind your own shaky ideological foundations.

So, will you wash a beggar’s feet tonight?

Will you do something to prove that you really care?

Or will you drink a beer, fill your belly, ignore reality and find a politically incorrect thought criminal to criticise?

Liberalism is collectivism, and collectivism is a lie.

It requires you to ignore human nature, to ignore reality and to live a repressed life of self-delusion.

Liberalism is about individual weakness, backed-up by the gun of the state.

Reject self-hatred.

Reject weakness.

Reject statism.

Reject neo-liberalism.

Miss Morality in ‘The Tunnels of Intolerance’- Part Two

Written by: Mark. A. Pritchard
Released on: The Rorshach Rant- 6th March 2015



As she rushed, heroically, into the cold, dark, patriarchy filled streets, the strong, empowered, beautiful and independent Miss Morality courageously blocked out the despairing wail of a crying child and moved forward, towards her duty, her destiny, her raison d’être.

No longer would the white male privilege of her society continue to victimise those she loved, no longer would she remain powerless, victimised, unable to defend herself from the tidal wave of sexism, of racism, of homophobia, of intolerance that was destroying the very planet herself. NO, she would bravely stand up, and do something about this intolerable situation. A member of the homosexual community had been raped by the system one too many times, and today was the day when she righted that wrong, and changed the world forever.

Rufus ran into the street, mobile phone in hand, frantically waving at the departing Miss Morality as she took the Number 176 Bus.

‘Miss Morality, Miss Morality…wait. I have to go to work in ten minutes and my sister is missing. Who is going to look after the baby, she’s crying. Miss Morality…..Miss Morality.’

Focus, focus was needed here, no distractions, just focus, and that’s what Miss Morality had in spades. The world was blocked out, her mission was set, the outside world faded into the background as she concentrated on her goal, the goal of liberation, the goal of emancipation, the goal of freedom.

‘Daddy, what’s the matter with that lady?’ Asked a young girl who sat one row behind our snorting, mumbling and ranting super-heroine as the number 176 Bus jerkily made it’s way through the mid-afternoon traffic.

‘Don’t look at her Sally. She’s not very well,’ her father softly and quietly replied as he shifted in his seat now shielding his daughter from an increasingly loud and agitated Miss Morality as she cleared the back of the Bus from all passengers but herself.

Meanwhile, deep beneath the city centre, in the cold, grimy, filthy, rat infested den known as the ‘Man cave of Intolerance, the devilish group known as ‘The Politically Incorrect Scoundrels’ chuckled in delight at the scene they had expertly managed to orchestrate.

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha ha, my fellow scoundrels, the plan is working to perfection,’ spoke up the leader of the group, the face of evil himself, a man known only as ‘The Dissenter.’

‘Not only has Miss Morality left a crying baby behind her, she has also caused quite a scene on public transport. Her true colours are being revealed, and the public will inevitably start to lose sympathy for her rightful cause. Now, let’s sit back, relax, and watch our Patriarch-cam monitors as she walks directly into our trap, Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’

And as the evil, cackling laugh reverberated around the lair of the villainous scoundrels a kind hearted, trusting selfless Miss Morality walked straight into their trap.

Can of mace in hand, and with her keen senses alert to the faintest threat of danger, Miss Morality stealthily made her way up the front path towards Ruthus’s flat.

‘Oh hi Liz, nice costume you are wearing. How’s little baby Sojourner today? Does she still have her funny tummy?’ said a smiling, cheerful, middle-aged lady as Miss Morality crept stealthily down the pathway.

‘Yeah, she’s fine. Bit busy now, chat later,’ mumbled a fiercely determined and steadfast in her assignment Miss Morality. This was no time for chatting; this was a life or death situation she was dealing with here.

‘Oh, okay then. Talk later love,’ came the reply from the ever cheerful, middle aged victim of masculine, rape culture oppression.

Miss Morality had been working on her for six months now, but it just didn’t seem to be working. Patriarchy was strong, but social justice was stronger, and Miss Morality felt sure that it would just be a matter of time before this poor, deluded old lady was wakened up to the realities of our times.

However, that smiling middle class lady was not what she appeared to be. She was no innocent; she was in fact the distraction agent of the Scoundrels. It was her job to distract Miss Morality, to break her focus, to leave our brave heroine open to attack, and that is exactly what she had done. Miss Morality attempted to refocus her attention on the mission of the day, but she was off guard, and taken unawares.

What happened next was almost beyond words, beyond powers of description, of comprehension, of believability in fact. The front door of the block of flats flew open, and a smiling young man bowed respectfully before a startled Miss Morality, loudly announcing,

‘Hey lads, the stripper’s here. Barry get Dave, get Dave quick, he’s going to love this. Right love, we’re ready, that bald bloke coming down the stairs now is the husband to be, so do your worse and show him some final freedom before his big day.’

Everything in her body screamed no, struggled to rebel, to fight the situation, to fight for woman-kind, to fight against this disgusting display of brute male sexist aggression, but Miss Morality felt powerless to resist. She struggled and struggled, but the distraction agent had done her work and our brave social justice warrior felt her willpower evaporating. What happened next was terrible.  She grabbed a bottle of vodka, took a hearty gulp, and then began to slowly strip, and dance for the group of demonically cheering men.

Just half an hour later and the world was turned completely upside down. Miss Morality was dancing drunkenly upon a table, and a panicked, scared and quietly sobbing homosexual brother searched desperately for his missing sister, and somebody, anybody to help him pacify a crying baby girl. He called his sister, called his friends, called his family, but there was no reply. Something very strange was happening here, and he didn’t know what to do.

The wild, triumphant scenes of celebration coming from the bowels of the earth threatened to shake the city itself as the gang of rogues known as the Politically Incorrect Scoundrels saw their perfectly set trap coming into fruition.

‘Settle down lads, settle down,’ said the devilishly hateful Dissenter, the leader of the group of intolerant, sexist, racist and homophobic scoundrels.

‘Our plan is going just as I envisioned. Miss Morality has been drawn into our tractor beam of Patriarchy. She is powerless to resist, and her time as a thorn in our manly sides is over. It’s now time to put stage two of our plan into operation.’ 

There was no humour in his voice, not now, just cold, harsh malice as he detailed the endgame of his devious, woman hating plans.

‘Our friends in the Police and Social services are waiting, we have netted our prey. It’s time we put this wet fish out of her misery. The days of social justice for all are over. Miss Morality is finished. Make the call, and end her for good.’


END OF PART TWO

Miss Morality will return next week (Friday 13th March) in ‘The Tunnels of Intolerance’- Part 3. How can our brave heroine extricate herself from what seems like certain doom?   All will be revealed next week. DON’T MISS IT.

* If any artist would be willing to illustrate this story, then please let me know.

Comic review: Winterworld #0- Wynn’s Tale- Beautiful Christian folk

Writer: Chuck Dixon
Artist: Tommy Lee Edwards
Publisher: IDW
Released: 4th March 2015

Winterworld ‘Wynn’s Tale’ is a book where Christians want to help, educate and protect the young. There are no twists, no nastiness, no hypocrisy, and no perversions. The Christian adults quote from scripture, give the children everything they need, including an appreciation for fairness and hard work, and when the children grow up they have the free-will to leave, and to spread the good word, to help others, or not, it’s their choice, nothing is forced.

The artwork is beautiful, laden with a sense of roughness, but the colouring resonates with the narrative themes. There is beauty in the roughness, a beauty to be appreciated, it’s up to the individual to see it, it’s exists, just as long as you look and want to see. Again, like the core moral message of the book, it’s there, nothing is forced, you are free to choose, free to appreciate it, or free to ignore it and instead focus on the harshness, the unreality within the reality itself.

I enjoyed the subtlety of this book, the sense of beauty, the lack of cynicism, the lack of nastiness, of spite, of hatred for humanity and distrust of the religious. It is a beautiful book, and I recommend that you get yourself a copy, sit in a warm, comfortable place, read, relax and enjoy.

Rating: 10/10 (Subtle, warm, poetic and kind)

Comic review: Green Lantern #40- Corporate neo-liberal brainwashing 101

Writer: Robert Venditti
Artist: Billy Tan
Publisher: DC Comics
Date of publication: 4th March 2015


I couldn’t help but read this book as the corporate mainstream whore satanic system trying to make excuses for itself, it’s actions and the fact that the alternative media is destroying its credibility on an hourly basis.

What makes me say that? Just reading the book and seeing how the Green Lantern character (Hal Jordan) is acknowledging that the system that he represents is now seen as ‘Cops, and everywhere we go, people don’t want us.’

Soldiers are not ‘cops,’ they are not peacemakers, they are not flying around the world to save and help poor innocent victim/civilians. They are told that they are the heroes, but that is a lie. We know it is a lie, everybody knows it’s a lie, so let’s start pointing it out. Uniformed order followers of the state operate as the private mercenary army of powerful banking and corporate interests, the 1% that the Occupy movement has been talking about, and ridiculed for it’s truth telling in the corporate whore mainstream media.

Green Lantern #40 is the story of one individual order following soldier. He defends the system that he is a part of, leaving it in order to personally shoulder the blame for it’s recent abuses, all of which are characterised as ‘mistakes’ rather than anything that is inherently wrong with the system itself. He acknowledges that he is not to blame, but he is prepared to shoulder that blame in order to prop up a system that he has religious faith in.

Hal Jordan has deliberately turned himself into a villain in order to back up a discredited control system. The system itself will use this sacrifice to carry on with business as usual. He’s sacrificed himself, just like a good soldier would sacrifice himself for the benefit of his comrades on a battlefield. This is a standard technique used by control systems, and the best thing about it is that no coercion is required, as the indoctrinated individuals willingly sacrifice themselves for what they see as the greater good.

Green Lantern #40 is reflecting the religious faith system of mainstream western ideology. That faith system is an unquestioning belief in neo liberal capitalism, centralised, corporate statism and with an army of order following mercenary soldiers to back it up with violence. The act of sacrifice, of having faith in a system that is rotten to the core, is presented as a heroic thing for a soldier to do.

Sacrifice yourself to the gods of the corporations.

Sacrifice yourself to the gods of the banking sector.

Sacrifice yourself to the gods of the mainstream media.

Sacrifice yourself to neo-liberal crony capitalism.

Sacrifice yourself to wars based on lies.

That’s how it works, hundreds of thousands of Hal Jordan’s pumped up with false pride, indoctrinated, propagandised since birth, sacrificing themselves to the centralised control system, the borg collective hive mind that helps the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the entire planet enslaved…forever.


Rating: 4/10 (Subconscious mind-set of a neo liberal corporate slave)



*Lead Image on this review is the excellent movie cover variant front cover to Green Lantern #40 by Tony Harris

Comic review: Big Man Plans #1- It’s about a Dwarf stabbing people in the neck and face

Writers: Eric Powell and Tim Wiesch
Artist: Eric Powell
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 4th March 2015


Is it particularly clever or worthwhile to either read or write a comic book about a bullied Dwarf who spends his life stabbing people in the neck and/or face?

Umm, if you are the writer and people buy the book, and if you make ‘F**k you money’ out of it (this apparently is the only thing that drives writers Tim Wiesch and Eric Powell) then I guess it was worthwhile.

But what if you are the reader? I’m the reader, and I feel like I’ve just given my money to a couple of sociopaths. I feel like I’ve given money to people who want to get dirty, filthy rich not because they feel like the money can help anyone, but no, because they want to use the money to abuse people instead.

How did I get this impression?  I got it from writer Tim Wiesch in a page titled, ‘What the f**k just happened?’ The page describes the motivations (in his own words) behind the writing of Big Man Plans. Here’s a section of that article:

‘I really hope that a lot of people buy this thing because f**k-you money ain’t easy to come by…..and Eric and I have some big f*****g plans.’ (Tim Wiesch)

These plans involve replicating scenes from a serial killer movie and other stupid things that only a hipster douchebag or immature teenage boy from 1991 would find funny.

Well, that’s made me feel great guys. Thanks for that Tim. Now I know that your life goals are to get rich, and to use and abuse people. What can I say? Have you ever thought about getting involved in politics?  I’m not very impressed with that mindset at all. It’s not clever, it’s not funny, it’s just depressing, deeply, deeply depressing.

Rant over, so what is this book all about then? It’s about a little man, a Dwarf. We follow his life as a young little man. His Dad is nice. His Mother isn’t. She leaves him, and the family. Dad drinks heavily, then dies in a barn fire. Young little man and his sister are taken away by social services. Sister goes to a nice home because she is pretty. Young little man gets beaten up and abused in care homes because he is a Dwarf. From there he tries to join the army, fails, and is taken into a special unit where he is broken down and stripped of his humanity, and then sent down Vietnamese tunnels (and why are comic books in 2015 still talking about Vietnam when they should be talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria?) where his job is to stab people in the face, murdering people for the banks and corporations that operate under the corporate fiction known as the USA.

After his legalised murder unit is disbanded, an older little man comes home to the US where he gets into bar-fights and stabs people in the neck, but it’s okay because the guy he stabs in the neck has a swastica on his forehead. The book concludes with the Dwarf wielding a hammer and looking to hurt more people because his childhood sucked and because the army turned him into a secondary psychopath.

Okay, so what am I supposed to say about all of this? Am I supposed to go…………Cooooooooooool maaaaaaaaaan????????????? Come on. Come off it. What the Hell????

I can’t even be bothered to properly finish off this review. I feel gross even writing about this book. Okay, so it has some truth in it. It shows that abused people become abusers, and that the US army is the perfect place for psychopaths, that they deliberately manufacture psychopaths in order to carry out legalised butchery. Okay, that’s real, that exists, but we already know about that, and I’m going to repeat myself here…WHY THE HELL IS IT STILL SET IN VIETNAM??????

That’s it, end of review.

Unpleasant book. Yuck, yuck, yuck. If you want to do yuck in 2015 please set it in Iraq, at least then we can get something new and contemporary out of it.


Rating: 3/10 (Although I hate the book I do admire Eric Powell’s artistic abilities)

Comic review: 2000AD PROG 1920- You don’t fix a rotten barrel by throwing out a couple of maggoty apples

Writers and artists: Various
Publisher: Rebellion
Released: 4th March 2015


My 2000AD reviews have been a bit too long recently, so this will be a condensed version.  I’ll do the reviews, but I’m not going to dissect the book panel by panel. Does the book resonate in a contemporary context? Does it deal with neo liberal/new world order issues? These are my concerns, so that is what I will talk about.

So, here we go with PROG 1920 of 2000AD.

The cover (by Dylan Teague) is great, and it made my cashier at WH Smiths feel uneasy (it has a girl with a gun in her mouth) so that’s a win as far as I’m concerned.

The first story (Judge Dredd) is your usual statism propaganda nonsense with the cops portrayed as brave heroes.  I’ve already discussed this in my previous reviews so I won’t repeat myself here. Great art, boring story, horrible message about human enslavement to a control system of sociopathic, order following, uniform wearing dogs of the elites.

Second story (Survival Geeks) was a Kevin Smith fanboy pleasing comedy thing with references to Star Wars. If you are this kind of geek then you and me will not get on. Next story…

Third story was the conclusion to ‘Station to Station.’ I read it as an individual’s attempt to make a mark on a world of hive mind conformity. I can relate to that. Very good, very good indeeed.

Great art, blah story

Fourth story (The Order) was a fight scene with worms. Not much happening here this week.

Last story (Savage/Grinders) disappointed me somewhat as the ‘resistance’ were basically portrayed as deluded terrorists who were then executed by our hero, a man who sees the problem not as the system itself, but ‘a few rotten apples’ in a perfectly good barrel. That’s the mindset that the mainstream relies upon to keep the system going. It’s a mindset that makes excuses. A mindset that helps control systems, a mindset that doesn’t want to rebel. It’s the mindset of one of the dogs of the centralised control system. It’s a mindset that doesn’t want freedom, and has no interest in being free because the very idea of being free terrifies it. In other words, and to be brief, blunt and direct. IT’S THE MINDSET OF A COWARD.

That’s the book for the week. A bit disappointing really. I liked the cover, the art in Judge Dredd and everything about Station to Station. I want to read more from Eddie Robson (the writer of Station to Station) so hopefully I’ll see more of his stuff in upcoming issues of 2000AD. More freedom, more individuality, more breaking free from the hive mind control system of our times. That’s what we all need to start thinking about, and demanding. You don’t fix a rotten barrel by throwing out a few maggoty apples. You smash it to bits, and start building all over again.

Ratings:
Judge Dredd- 5/10 (I really love the art from Greg Staples)
Survival Geeks- 3/10 (Kevin Smith stuff)
Station to Station- 9/10 (Contemporary, interesting and by far the best thing about this comic book)
The Order- 5/10 (A lull in the story this week as our heroes fought against the worms)
Savage/Grinders- 2/10 (Protestors equal Terrorists)


Overall: 6/10 (Worth getting for the cover, the art in Judge Dredd and a contemporary sci-fi story that actually resonates with what is happening in the world today in ‘Station to Station’)

Comic book review: Neverboy #1- Avoid the previews, just buy the book

Writer: Shaun Simon
Artist: Tyler Jenkins
Colourist: Kelly Fitzpatrick
Cover Artist: Conor Nolan
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 4th March 2015


Don’t read the previews for this book, as they spoil the central idea that makes it so much fun, and worth purchasing in the first place.

Neverboy #1 has an idea, that idea is new, and you don’t get much that is really new in comics these days. You’ll have to trust me on this one, as I’m not going to say much about the book during this review. Just take my word for it that Neverboy #1 is a bloody good comic, take a chance, buy it, and I’m pretty sure that you’ll both like it, and thank me for warning you about the previews.

I can understand why the central idea was leaked to the preview writers. It’s a great idea, and knowing about that idea tempted me into purchasing the book in the first place, not the writer or artist, it was that one idea, and when you have a great idea why not tell everybody about it?

The worst thing surely would be to have a great idea, keep it secret, then have nobody buying your book, so by releasing the idea at least you get people’s attention. I understand that perfectly, so this review is for those fortunate people out there who haven’t yet read any previews.

JUST BUY THE BOOK.

That’s all you need to know.

Neverboy #1 made me smile, made me happy, made me feel good about the comic book genre as a whole and reminded me that all it takes is one idea, and everything feels brand new again.

Rating: 10/10