I agree with the posters below this piece who says milk chocolate is for children.

When I was young I remember not liking chocolate all that much. And then going to the UK in the late 80s and deciding on someone’s recommendation to buy a chocolate bar despite it costing two pounds (five times as much as a bar in the US).

Damn, what a difference. It contained actual cacao that you could taste. It was rich, flavorful and didn’t taste like someone was squirting sugar straight into your mouth.

After that I was a dark chocolate devotee. (In most European countries it is almost impossible to find chocolate of the terrible quality of almost all US chocolate.)

So now when I buy chocolate it’s usually got 60%-80% cacao content.

So much better.

Milk chocolate is indeed for children.

And Americans, I guess.

This is why voting is pointless, especially when it comes to anything that actually matters.

A 2014 Princeton University study comparing 1,779 policy outcomes to more than 20 years of public opinion data found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Assuming absolutely everyone voted, climate change would still not be treated seriously in the US and that has the possibility — the likelihood, even — of being an extinction-level event. This is the prime issue which absolutely swamps every other concern (or should).

The same large companies would still have the same power they have now. Abortion restrictions would still occur. No systemic changes would be made in any real way.

Voting is an appeasement process to make you think that you matter.

You don’t.

I’ve been thinking tonight about my disagreements with modern liberalism and with identity politics.

Lately, it’s hard to un-conflate those two as they’ve essentially merged — a great mistake, I think.

More and more I’ve been leaning towards a more Marxian analysis and practice of liberalism which of course eschews identity politics by nature.  Identity politics and its inherent focus on the individual and their feelings is implicitly an extension of neoliberalism and in fact extremely compatible with all of the goals and end-states of this worldview.

Which is why I generally want nothing to do with it.

Take transgender rights for instance. Before anyone goes wacko, I’m a full supporter of transgender rights and the ability to define one’s gender. Absolutely a full believer in this. Enough said.

But as identity politics goes further down its Sarlacc hole, I question the wisdom of entire activist communities concentrating so many resources, words and effort on 0.3% of the population.

It’s not that they’re not important. They are. But in times or ridiculous and rising inequality, the near-complete triumph of neoliberalism and the oppression of the everyday worker, the concentration on transgenderism is like fighting a battle against a tadpole while an electric eel shocks you and all your friends to death.

Identity politics is nearly perfectly-designed to further the triumph and complete dominance of neoliberalism.

Its concentration on atomistic individualism and feelings over data and results; its focus on non-systemic causes and problems; its descriptions of issues as solely relating to personal flaws in oppressors — all of these sound like they’d been written up by the Koch brothers for squelching real protest or revolution.

I’m still thinking about all this. But I’d rather fight battles worth fighting.

You can continue striking a death blow against the tadpole if you want.

But I’ve got bigger fish that I don’t want to fry me.