Hitchens knows what socialism is, and socialising risk and privatising profit, with rich rewards for gambling with — and losing — other people’s money, is not socialism.  Then there are the appeals to shamans and other unseen powers:

That Paulson should have gone down on one knee to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as if prayer and beseechment might get the job done, strikes me as further evidence that sheer superstition and incantation have played their part in all this. Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that.

Not socialism, but a banana republic where infrastructure and services are allowed to rot and die while thieves stuff their pockets. The ’socialism’ jibe confirms the political right in its smug ignorance of anything and everything outside its narrow little world view, in which there are only two possible ways of structuring an economy — unregulated (and mythical) ‘free markets’ or Stalinist ’state capitalism’.

No-one has come up with any suggestions as to what to do with the criminals who gambled homes and jobs away. In the northern hemisphere, they would make effective christmas tree decorations (although the twelfth night rule would have to be strictly observed). In Britain, bonfire night is a matter of weeks away.

Thanks: RD

Drinking and shit – we are all drunks.

Kill ourselves.

Fedora tipped.

Fighting against an invented enemy is wasteful; fighting for ourselves and one another is constructive, is sharing—otherwise known as love.