Anyone who thinks globalist monopolism (aka neoliberalism, neoconservatism, Friedmanite economics etc etc) is merely an economic model doesn’t go online enough, The Slog suggests.
For the fourth time in three years (five pcs later) I have had to bring in an expert, wipe everything off my two main laptops, go back to Windows 7 and install the things I want myself. In doing this I have of course lost all my settings, and have just spent the last 48 hours rejoining, reidentifying, reconfiguring and generally rebuilding. And it cost me €80 to get my own machines back doing what I want as opposed to what the software industry wants.
The difference this time is that I now have a gizmo that refuses to install any updates automatically. It is the very latest thing. It will probably work OK for a few months until the hobgoblins find a way through it, then I will have to get the next gizmo.
Let me just give you the highlights;
- It took the expert four hours to talk Windows 10 and Lenovo into allowing the reinstallation of Windows 7: a grand total of some 17 obstcacles, circles, dead ends and lies. This is indeed choice – fascist forced choice
- Already, Chrome has installed itself on both machines, causing the older one to crash. I’ve had to restart it in safe mode and uninstall Chrome. The first couple of times, it just reinstalled again.
- Every vehicle I’ve used in the rebuild tried to sneak in a useless search engine ‘free’.
- The antivirus I’ve installed on both machines was first of all deemed ‘malicious’ by Microsoft, and then once I’d downloaded it they tried to overule its activity….this is how the problems started last time. So I’ve uninstalled their protection completely. Now it tells me three times a day that the pcs are unprotected.
Now before another bonehead who can’t read threads ‘Get a Mac’, I’d just like to say something to him or her: this site is not about I’m alright Jack f**k you. OK? The average useful Mac costs five times what a pc does, and if you’re on the side of only the élite having access to contemporary life’s soi-disant advantages, then this is not the site for you. Follow Jeremy Hunt or Katie Hopkins….they’re much more your speed.
The best way to think about how dictatorially dishonest this mode of business can be is to imagine the old traditional forms of physical shopping. You walk into a shop with something you want to fit to your favourite gadget, and the first sales assistant you show it to drops it on the floor before treading on it. If you’ve been in this shop before (there are no alternatives) you keep a firm grip on your gadget and ask for a recommendation. He only offers you the shop’s own label version, so you say no, what I want is Grapple or nothing. The assistant pulls a gun, puts it against your forehead and asks, “Are you sure about that?” You turn away and try to serve yourself from the open shelves: when you pick up the Grapple pack and walk towards the till, alarms go off and the police arrive to accuse you of shoplifting. So for a quiet life you buy the own label product, and when you get home and fit it into the slot provided, it starts bombing your machine’s main cog and killing all the little people inside who make it work.
The chap who did the wipe-and-refit basics was only a young bloke. I was relieved to hear someone from that generation agreeing that the internet is a den of thieves above the law, thanks to a vicious concoction of lobbying and security services relationship. He came to France from Blackpool seven years ago, his French is fluent, and he works at least ten hours a day seven days a week providing service to not rich people who have had junk and/or inappropriate software forced on them by globalists who care about three things only: volume, profit, and the share price.
I asked him why Lenovo pcs now have the battery as integral rather than easily removable. I knew the answer, so I was pleased by his:
“Simple,” he said, “to replace the battery will now require a complete strip down of the pc, the cost of which will be not a lot less than buying their new model.”
If ever one needed confirmation that real consumer protection is now dead and buried in the West, then that example – for me – is it.
As he was about to leave, I asked him the age of his mother. “Sixty” he answered. I told him about the WASPI campaign. His mum didn’t seem to know anything about it.
After he’d left, I put on the fire in the gite, and watched ITV briefly. At the first commerical break, an ad for a new weight-loss pill came up. I’ve heard about it from American friends: apparently you can more or less eat what you want, and this new Max Strength variant will still make you lose weight. The next commercial was for McDonalds. I can’t believe that was a coincidence. Clever media aperture-buying, but about as sociopathically anti-social as it’s possible to be.
I flicked channels over to PBS, the European version of this oustanding US channel. I sat gripped for fifty minutes watching a documentary about how incredible NASA ingenuity first of all created a cockup with the newly-launched Hubble telescope, and then fixed it thanks to the bravery of several astronauts. Their fix has, in just a few short years, revolutionised our thinking about the cosmos – for example, I was always taught that the expansion of the Universe is slowing down. We now know it’s accelerating. This is (at last) causing some doubts about why a bang that happened 7.3 billion years ago created debris that doesn’t behave as it should. If, of course, there was a bang in the first place.
However, thanks to budget cuts in the US caused by the cost of debt maintenance, banking sector bailouts, global economic slump and increased defence spending, flights to update the Hubble have been discontinued.
You see, neoliberals aren’t interested in the voyager gene or new knowledge: that’s the last thing they want. All they want is power over munneeee. For them, stagnant is good – let’s not get beyond oil or design a better car engine or invest in our civilisation or move science forward or develop the Arts: progress and culture? That’s for wimps, right?
Enjoy your Sunday lunch.
This weekend at The Slog: The nastiness of Jeremy Hunt goes on and on
The Slog 