The are multiple reasons why the current social order should be abolished: from the refusal to submit to authoritarian rule, to a practical reasoning that environmental destruction is bad for self-preservation, maybe a deep visceral hatred of wage-slavery, even the idealistic liberal appeal to a sense of fairness and our common humanity, It’s All good! But those weighty themes get enough ink, I prefer to focus on little things, on the tiny cracks that reveal a deeper meaning underneath. As Ghost Dog quotes “Matters of small concern should be treated with great seriousness.” Thus I give you yet another reason for a flippant dismissal of the world as it is: Multiple Satellite Dishes!
In LH and other working class neighborhoods you’ll often see homes and apartments with a dish mounted on the roof, wall, or even the front yard. Turns out satellite tv offers a cheaper service than the local coax cable company, so the popularity of these dishes is reasonable. What doesn’t make any sense (assuming we even acquiesce the concept of paying for electromagnetic waves that are bombarding us anyways!) is the need for more than one dish per building; that is just plain technologically needless, wasteful, and a ringing indictment on the capitalist system. And its Stooopid, ay! Click ahead for more pics of the irrational!
And here you were thinking that 3 Sat dishes on the front lawn were illogical, how about a 4th? Should I mention that there is a 5th up on the roof? I just did…
This place has 4 though they are symmetrically placed, somehow making them blend in. Still stooopid though.
Now this pic is just gratuitous, as my minimum was 3 dishes per building, this house only has 1 and the neighbors only have 1 as well. But when you think about it, there’s no reason why these three homes in close proximity can’t share the one dish, no? Besides, I really just wanted to have a reason to show the house with the clock. Now you know what time it is, fool!
This one doesn’t fit my criteria either, but I think 1 HUGE dish counts for at least 2, que no?
Back to good ol’ 3 dish homes. If we were talking about food, I’d be all for it, but we ain’t, so it’s another thumbs down for the world that makes this happen.
This place has interesting asian-themed wrought iron and some nice plants, and 4 visible dishes.
Another foursome, these are hanging out together at the corner. Sat Dish Gang!!
Nearby is a quartet that tends to channel sounds and images of questionable value, just like most other quartets.
3 red dots. That top one is real.
And finally, this apartment building takes the fucking pastel, here you can see 5 dishes…
…and on the other side there’s another 5! But wait, there’s more! This building has at least 12 dishes that can be seen from the street. You got that? 12 fuckin’dishes! Wot a waste…
There you go, more ammo against those that try to argue that “this is the best possible system” that we can have. That’s your best? Some weak-ass shit that creates technology that is unneccessarily complicated and wasteful to maintain? Eso es pero efaakin’ estooooopid ayy!
Simon que yes.
Chanfles RSS Feed
That’s a great post. Nice work. It is so true that these little moments of irrationality, which we (or I, at least) so often take for granted and ignore, illuminate the big-way-stoopid social picture. It reminds me of a quote from william blake: “To see a World in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” Of course he had something nice in mind, but sometimes we can see the whole in the part, and i think that doing so allows us to reclaim/subvert the part.
What’s a guy to do if he wants to watch “My Super Sweet 16,” “Deal Or No Deal,” and “America’s Next Top Model” all at the same time? You gotta have extra dishes!
Actually, the only reasoning behind it that I can think of is that unlike cable, DirecTV and Dish are installed by “independent contractors” a.k.a. anybody. You can buy the stuff and install it yourself if you want. So you get people who don’t know what they’re doing installing dishes all over the place when all they need to do is install a multiswitch which can split one dish signal into 8. I actually could see why there would be 3 dishes in a multi-family complex, one for DirecTV, one for Dish and one to pick up the free Spanish or Asian stations. Ugly, yes. Unnecessary, certainly. But that’s how one shows love to our evil television overlords.
You have a point my Chicano Studies friend, all of this excessive waste that capitalism produces makes me nostalgic for the days of scarcity, where we would stay up late at night, so closely nit as a family, so strong in tradition and family values, hoping to have something to eat in the morning. Communist egalitarian famines, whether in the Ukraine, China or even modern day North Korea, clearly get a bad rap. I mean seriously, sure there was alot of starvation, murder, and torture in non-capitalist countries, but atleast the leaders in those countries cared about the poor, atleast they tried to accomplish equality and not this evil greedy economic growth that selfish capitalist countries pursue.
This whole discussion reminds me of what Churchill said about Democracy, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”, well in the same way, capitalism is the worse form of economics except all the others that have been tried.
Wow, HispanicPundit, you’re so smart! I bet you have, like, six dishes in your yard! Do you get the Ayn Rand channel?
I have no idea about the need for more than one satellite dish, but I do know that HP takes all the fun out of things.
Chuck
Thanks for pointing out the Blake quote, thats exactly the idea I was looking for! Except now you’ve exposed the fact that I go to the trough of pop-culture for references when I could be eating from the banquet table of wordsmiths, I guess I’m gonna have to kill you! 😉
Kevin
I talked to Roberto, my local DirecTV provider (otherwise known as the guy that sets up a booth at the Big Saver on Ave 26) and I asked him about getting service and if I could add it to my neighbors existing dish (which was a lie, but I wanted to see what they would say) and it was a thumbs down. It doesn’t matter if people live in a duplex in the same house, they all need separate accounts: companies don’t get rich by people sharing services.
HispanicPundit
Nostalgia for the days of scarcity? Wouldn’t that be today? These plastic dishes might be made from Nigerian oil, a place where your cuddly capitalism cares not for the well being of the people that live on the lands where this precious commodity is extracted. It is no wonder people are starting to take things into their own hands. And last I checked, via the local papers, the US is blazing a path in the use of torture, you might want to rethink that analogy. Capitalism is the worst form of “economics” that has been tried, and there are a shitload of other options creative people should consider!
Chanfles, is Nigeria really your best example? It is not the United States that is dooming Nigeria, it is political instability, corruption, inadequate infrastructure, and the constant failure to inact capitalist reforms – though that has started to change recently, well see what happens.
But why bring up Nigeria when you could have instead brought up Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, or even more recently India and China. These are all places that have been transformed by capitalism and free trade. East Asia alone experienced the greatest alleviation of poverty in the history of man.
Yet compare these countries to their counterparts – compare South Korea to North Korea, compare Taiwan or Hong Kong to China, or even West Germany to former East Germany, or on a grander scale, the United States to the USSR.
This is no coincidence either, Walter Williams (who has lived in apartheid Africa, btw), Professor of Economics at George Mason University puts it this way:
Capitalism is the worst form of “economics†that has been tried, and there are a shitload of other options creative people should consider!
What are those economic systems then, Chanfles? Please do tell! Because from what I see, history has clearly shown that if you want to avoid concentration camps, starvation, mass murder, and political oppression, it is precisely capitalist systems you should shoot for.
I end with one of my favorite Churchill quotes: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. “
I walked by those dishes in the garden the other day and guffawed, making a mental note to stop by later and take a photo. What’s up with the giant ones? Why don’t people get rid of those? What channels do you get on those and are they free? Confusing.
It is only recently that LNBs with four, now ten, connections for downleads have been available. These indeed make dishsharing possible. In a family house, dish numbers may very well now begin to fall.
But in a building with multiple dishes it is equally probable that the occupants are tenants and landlords are unlkely to be able to guess what distribution system will meet everybody’s needs.
Some of the dishes were clearly pointing at different satellites. Here in UK, we have three main sats fro English-language shows. Then other people want to point at Turksat or Arabsat.
As for all naive adolescent gab about capitalism, it provides what the people desire, as opposed to what loony left poseurs think the people OUGHT TO desire. In those countries where you say the rulers cared for the people, they cared so much that they lived in luxury whilst the people queued for hours for bread. Capitalism works. Marxism does not. We human animals are not ants or bees. We are weakly-social, strongly-individual.
mydigest.wordpress.com
Sir Cy,
Yer a menso. Greetings!
They should arrange their dishes so they point at different satellites, and switch the signals at their box. Then, collectively, they can access the most satellites.
Also, the idea that capitalism provides what people desire is so totally wrong. People have always tried to make or get what they desire. Capitalism is a social system to lend money to start firms, charge interest, own property, and take a profit. Try to stop those things, and a cop will hit you with a stick, or a dude with a gun will shoot you.
Imagine if one of the engineers who developed direct satellite (at Hughes, a big war machine business) a tried to take a bunch of dishes home, or used his knowledge to build a descrambler box. He’d be beat with a stick, by the city police officer, or he’d be sued out of existence in a federal court, and put into a virtual debtor’s prison.
Shoot, imagine if said engineer made a hack to enable what I described in the first paragraph. He’d probably get reprimanded at work. That’s capitalism for you.
I bt hispnaic pundit is wearing a bright yellow bow tie while he’s “sticking it” to El Chavo.
As a disclaimer(Not an excuse, naturally), I live in sweden, I have had a bad experience as far as you can. I have not lived in complete poverty, but I have not been lauded in luxury. Nor do I even want to, even when having the opportunity. But, I have read the manifesto and I am aware of what actual communism entails. Of which many communists, are not.
First, we must differentiate between the instances of supposed communism, before we could possibly understand it’s potential. Marx never composed a system of economy, he simply denounced what existed.
“Capitalism works. Marxism does not. ”
This is a false statement, unless you make up what “works” means. What was the point? What was the meaning behind it? Have you read the manifesto? What does capitalism entail, what does it do? What is the actual definition of this? Let us look first at what capitalism has created, before we take a look at Marxism, of which you obviously do not understand.
“an economic system based on private ownership of capital ” The general consensus is clearly of individualism. This few would argue against. It usually, or at least so far always has, had the consequence of placing the notion of “material wealth” high in priority. Why is this? I presume greed, what would you say? Regardless, individualism has always strived to place some above others, ever since it as a concept arose. Capitalism is about placing the ultimate power and influence in the hands of individuals, which will always result in exploitation. Even here in Sweden, the supposedly neutral nation, that cooperated happily with nazis. The entire ordeal with Israel is to me, the perfect evidence as to why capitalism causes extreme suffering and direct warfare. For the interest of a few, the majority will be put at risk. The USA was founded on blood and it continues running on it, aslong as it adopts capitalism, it will continue to do so. Even if it is happens to be the blood of honest, hardworking americans. Coloured or not.
What can we then say about communism? China, the Soviet Union, north korea, Cuba and so forth… So many lives lost. To be fair, we should first define “working”, for both capitalism and communism. I can’t expect a direct answer, so I simply picked an internet dictionairy to tell us.
“adequate for practical use; especially sufficient in strength or numbers to accomplish something;” This is still vague. You can argue that anything works, regardless of it’s sacrifices, it’s sideeffects. If you tell yourself that communism has caused more death than democracy and/or capitalism, I am afraid that you are drawing the line far too short. Since it is a system of individualism, it’s causes are less documented. Not just because capitalism has, so called prevailed, but also because it is not a matter of the system being easily identified. Unlike communism which is striving to be centralised, it is difficult to properly document. You could argue that so many things are because of capitalism, while some could stay and argue that it is not. This is what gives it an edge in propaganda. Everything communism does, by it’s nature of being completely government, is easy to blame on said communism.
It is also fun to see the argument that communism does not work because some societies CLAIMING to be communistic, I’ll dwell deeper into that, have at some point fallen apart. As if capitalist nations never have. As if democracy has never failed. How many times has Communism been tried? How many times have democracy and capitalism been tried – How many times have either failed? When does it succeed? It is in the end, a tired debate of semantics, where BOTH sides tirelessly use their own definitions and understanding to portray their own side as infallible.
In the end, what you view as working, I do not. The Soviet Union rose high, from war torn nations suffering extreme problems from an exploiting monarchy… They became a super power capable of MORE THAN RIVALLING the USA. They defeated the extreme Wehrmacht, numbers given up to 80% of their veteran forces defeated by the Motherland. All this under the guidance of visionaries. Were there sideeffects, horrible ones? Yes. There were. Are we clearly and able to see there? We are! This is *to me* a GOOD thing. This means it can be adapted and changed to PREVENT this. The system was NOT defined by Marx, he created CONCEPTS. Lenin, Stalin, of whom had practices many do not agree with, acted from their own interpretations of these concepts. One sentence looking down on one concept, and they decided that large amounts of people were to be persecuted. Leninism, stalinism, marxism… They have FEW things in common with Marxism. Else is simply propaganda to denounce communism and it’s actual values.
People are vastly incapable of differentiating between luxury and necessity, this is a fact in a society that is completely geared towards profiting from the ignorance of others. Watch your media, watch your corporations, then watch your education. Compare it to socalist nations. Not necessarily china or north korea. But take, say sweden for an example. Which is still a nation that is very horrible under the surface.
Ah, I might’ve missed a point or two, I blame it on my intoxication. My only praise left is for the notions of Marx. Long live the proletariat!
/Engelbrekt