Wear your War Paint and Fight for Gender Equality!

[A]

As a good male identitarian Leftist you are intent on promoting gender equality, breaking stereotypes, combating toxic masculinity. You may – or may not, who knows – read learned journals on that subject, but you certainly read columnists in the left-leaning press promoting third wave feminism; and you certainly watch and agree wholeheartedly and applaud that kind of highly-educated, upper-middle-class feminists’ interventions on TV debate shows and then support them in subsequent Twitter battles to the death.

In other words, as good ally of women, you do your bit for the revolution, but want to do more. And you are searching for other means to contribute.

Why Work Sucks? Could it be Better?

Monday morning. [A]

“These really clever people used their brains only to work out how to squeeze as much blood from the workers as possible within the boundaries of the law,” says the mother of 27-year-old Jang Deokjoon, a Coupang worker who died of a heart attack, caused by overwork – Dead on Arrival.

Capitalist societies require a division of labour, in which

[E]ach man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.

And if you work for a living, you know deep inside not only that that is almost trivially true but that such state of affairs is often deeply frustrating. 

I am not talking only about people like South Korean delivery driver Lee Seong-Wook slaving away in poorly-paid, dead-end, killer jobs, although for them that frustration has literally tragic connotations. I am also talking about people in better-paid but pointless, unfulfilling, soul-crushing Graeberian bullshit jobs: people who wish they could slip into an unconscious, automatic pilot, zombie-like mode early on Monday morning, to wake up back into consciousness late in the afternoon on Friday, just in time for the weekend.

Workers’ Mail: Australian Workers’ Wages are Going Backwards.

(source)

ACTU media release:

Workers’ wages in Australia are more than remaining dismally stagnant – they are in fact going backwards in real terms.

The latest Wage Price Index data released today shows that real wages have fallen by 2.1% over the last 12 months. In this quarter, wages growth has been only 0.4%, while inflation in Australia has increased to 3.8%.

In addition to those shocking figures, the public sector recorded wages growth of only 1.3% this year - its lowest annual rate of wages growth since the ABS started tracking this in 1997.

Prof. Bill Mitchell gives a panoramic view of the Australian labour market: wages, employment.

Judgement Day?

The news may have left American readers – at least those less absorbed by the fall of Afghanistan or the “pandemic of the unvaxxed” – reeling:

(source)

Yep, that’s right. For the first time since its creation in 1930 (that’s 91 years, people!), the US Bureau of Reclamation declared a Tier 1 water shortage in the US’s largest fresh water reservoir. Come January the great states of Arizona and Nevada, plus their southern – and perhaps less great – neighbours of “old” Mexico will have their Colorado River water allocations reduced (Arizona, currently worst affected, will lose about one fifth of it). Further cuts affecting other equally great states are scheduled.

But wait, there’s more. When the water level is high, the Hoover Dam (which created Lake Mead) generates up to 2,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power. Currently it’s only 327.66 m above sea level or 1,075 ft (which triggered the Tier 1 restriction declaration). If it were to fall to 289.56 m (950 ft) the Dam would not be able to generate any electric power.