For the Nice People

I had to Get Off the Internet this last couple of days because things were getting frankly ridiculous.

“Things”, in this case, meant “a mystifying preponderance of liberal/left tone cops flitting around social media finger-wagging at anyone who dared to express, in however ironic a fashion, amusement or pleasure at the possibility of a gaggle of shit-for-brains billionaires being turned into krill on the demonstrably unsafe submersible on which they’d been fucking around.”

I’m not going to name names, because it’s as pointless to argue with online liberals about their non-politics as it is to argue with online conservatives about their bad politics, and I’m not going to go into further details since, for one thing, you probably know all of them already, and for another, I already developed severe bruising of the frontal lobe just typing that last paragraph. Suffice to say that we have not seen such an explosion of “Oh my, one mustn’t laugh, dearie” since Trump got COVID.

Let us lay it on the line early: The working class does not win often. We die often, in our thousands and millions and billions, to hunger and disease and violence and the myriad little miseries forced on us by the kind of people who were in that sub, so that they could be on that sub. When there are stories — and there are stories every day — about the mass death of people in wars, storms, plagues, famines, migrations, and climate disasters, it is the working class who are dying. The ruling class, meanwhile, who are in the main responsible for those deaths and the conditions that precede them, have become so elevated above consequence that they do things like spend more money than most people will see in a lifetime to tool around the wreckage of a previous generation of capitalistic excess in a craft whose owner treated safety regulations like a smear of shit on his dock shoes.

And, to be perfectly clear, this was a complete own goal. These men, who as you might imagine have the same moral character as anyone who has accumulated their level of wealth, died by their own hands and their own hubris, doing something even more unnecessary than it was expensive. It’s not like someone on the left murdered them. They were not felled by violence inflicted by some wild-eyed anarchist, from the times when such people were better known for throwing bombs than doing art builds. They didn’t even die in an *accident*, unless you append “world’s most easily avoidable” to the beginning of that word. Their voyage was not necessary (it was pure ghoulish tourism for the ultra-wealthy, despite the repeated spin that they were doing “research”) and it went poorly because the man who owned the company held the safety of himself and his customers in the same contempt he did any attempt to impose reality between himself and his desires.

So how, in the face of all this, do so many people find it necessary to spend their time repeatedly scolding anyone — anyone on the left, to be clear, as there were thousands of tasteless jokes cranked out by apolitical internet hacks if you cared to look for them — who expressed so much as a “good riddance to bad rubbish” at the self-engineered removal from the land of the living of a handful of the worst people in the world?

Look, I get it. Without even diving into the psychology of it all, and what kind of a person feels the constant compulsion to turn every W, however rare, into an L, it cannot be denied that this respectability politics, this “the struggle should be nice, for the nice people” attitude, is beaten into us as children and is dreadfully hard to escape from. This is especially true for people who do not understand dialectical materialism, and who suffer from a sort of moral paralysis when faced with something outside their simple binaries of what is good and bad. All I can tell these people is to consider engaging with neo-pragmatism, the Marxist dialectic, or any philosophy more mature than the hand-me-down Christian moralism whites fed to slaves for much the same reason.

Of course, because we live in the time and the place we live in, this immediately gets robbed of its actual political content and abstracted through a lens of culture-war posturing. Normal people, we are assured by these wise observers whose tone indicates they feel qualified to speak for such people but also that they may not encounter them in any form but their own, are turned off by that sort of unseemly dancing on the grave of their social betters. This comes as news to many who have spent time around those plentiful segments of the working class who delight in gallows humor, who write songs about the downfall of their bosses and rulers, and whose only moments of feeling liberation or control often come when some top-tier dipshit suddenly disappears from their lives. Left politics, we are further assured by people whose engagement in same happens exclusively via wi-fi, turns these selfsame normies off because of its cruelty and callousness towards human suffering. I cannot even imagine being this naïve about human nature, but to anyone tempted to believe this is true, allow me to introduce you to a little something called the Republican Party.

In the end, in a practical sense, all this bafflegab serves is to further the very invincibility felt by the rich, and to make them know they are protected always from the righteous wrath of the people they exploit by a thin but strong layer of self-impressed liberals. With the same allergy towards the very concept of coercion, and the same conception of all acts existing in a nebulous limbo of equality of principle where all uses of power are on the same moral plane, they signal at every opportunity their answer to a simple question: If a moment ever arises that we have the ability to seize wealth from the elites and return it to the people, what are you willing to do when those elites say “No”?

For them, I offer the same deal I always have. The moment one single billionaire offers even a single word of apology for the incalculable, obscene immiseration cause by their wealth, I will stop laughing when one of them dies. Until then, they owe us plenty more laughs.