Rapture.

I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well. ~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of Oxford school shooter Ethan Crumbley, were charged yesterday with four counts of involuntary Manslaughter.

They ran from the cops, were located and arrested overnight, and were arraigned this morning.

What the hell kind of shitty people are these? "Our kid is in jail, we'll just run from the cops and leave him twisting in the wind." Seriously, Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with these fucking people?

The morning of the shooting, the parents had been called to the school for a discussion because the kid had got caught searching ammunition on his goddamned cell phone.

After that, his Mom texted him. "I'm not mad, LOL, you have to learn to not get caught."

Family of the goddamned year, right here, seriously.

And somehow, Jennifer Crumbley's slobbering sycophantic letter to Trump seems to me to not even begin to put in perspective just what's wrong with these fucking people.

Couple days ago, I saw this. Now, keep in mind that it's the 21st century in the United States of America, which is supposed to be the lead country of the Free World and by definition an advanced First World democratic nation with an advanced society and *Checks Notes* people believe in "Magic dirt" and think it will cure or protect them from COVID-19. First of all, I say this as a gamer, and as a person with a Christian theological education. Magic in the sense that these superstitious people believe in it isn't real. There are no magic talismans that will protect one from disease or from evils real or imagined. That's just life, you have to do that shit yourself and do it based on what's real and excessive belief in what's not real will only get you killed.

Like I have said for years, we have people that don't want any of this civilization stuff. They'd be happier dancing around a roaring bonfire, shouting "Unga Bunga" and roasting their neighbors on Rebar spits while they wait for the local witch doctor to come out of his cave.

And if you think that having people around with that sort of mentality benefits you, you're a damned fool.

Among other things, most of these people don't have the first clue how to survive without "Civilization" being the default setting, and all their right-wing libertarianism and survivalist crap boils down to is Live Action Role Playing for entertainment and selfish bullshit because they want the benefits of civilization, but don't want to pay for them.

What they want is a world unconstrained by petty morality, but only for themselves.

They want you to have to have morals so you're easier to control or take advantage of.

And they're willing to kill not just different people or other people, but civilization itself, to try and get that.

These people want to live in the Bioshock franchise.

I suppose the one thing civilization, and the rest of us, have going for it is that as my British Twitter-bro puts it these people will die for lack of a manual can opener.

The problem is that like I said, when they run themselves out of food, when they realize that in most places there isn't enough wildlife to support themselves by hunting and that in a lot of places the rivers aren't safe enough for them to support themselves by fishing, they'll just turn to cannibalism and start eating their neighbors.

But to start with, a lot of these people would rather kill and steal than live, or would rather hate than eat.

These are people, that individually and as a group don't believe that other people...including others of their own tribe...are really people. All of them, deep down, believe that they're the protagonist of reality, of which there can be only one.

And then we have the nerve to wonder why a kid like Ethan Crumbley can go so wrong?

Whoever thought teaching people this crap was the formula for a successful civilization ought to have their ass removed.

They really do want to live in the underwater city with no constraints on their behavior and no rules and they really don't care that this ultimate expression of Randian objectivism leads people to all become ravening murderous psychopaths who kill each other for fun and profit.

The truth is, they don't even want you to know that civilization is a thing, or that it includes people who are any different than you are.

And the truth is, it's even worse than that:

Look at this list here.

Look at what's on it.

The thing that reached out and grabbed me is that "V For Vendetta" by Alan Moore. The comic itself and the Guy Fawkes mask (and the movie) having become icons of both the far-left and the far-right and of social libertarianism (and libertarianism in general) long ago. 

The core of these people's love for V is their love of the idea of standing up against a tyrannical government. Yes, a lot of these people are idiots who think any government is tyranny, I get that.

But the fact that they'd blacklist something that so many of these people view as an expression of their entire goddamn philosophy shows that, to the people who imagine themselves at the top of the hierarchy it was all bullshit to begin with.

They don't want people to have the power...or even the desire...for redress of grievances. In fact, they don't even want people's grievances directed at the proper things. Unending Trumpist cultural grievance benefits them. People realizing they're underpaid, overworked and in comparison to much of the rest of the world do not have proper social benefits...that doesn't benefit these motherfuckers.

These people have far more in common with the Chancellor, Mr. Creedy and the Norsefire Party than they do with the dude in the Guy Fawkes mask and don't you forget it.

And if you don't believe me, believe them.

Here's Madison Cawthorn referring to women as "Earthen vessels." 

I want you to take a step back and look at just how dysfunctional of a statement all that is...not least because, in a "nation born of freedom" these fucking people would have to recognize that not everybody believes the same way. 

If these idiots believed in freedom they would have to have the understanding that not every woman, not every person, wants to be an "Earthen vessel" or any sort of vessel for somebody else's beliefs or desires, but rather that people have their own autonomy and beliefs and sovereignty over their own bodies because we are ALL endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, according to our system of government, and that we may not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

That's not what these people want. Not for anybody but themselves, anyway.

The truth is people like Madison Cawthorn don't see it that way and they want a system where they live forever, have power forever, and all they have to do to get more is say dumb shit and claim to believe in Jesus...which they don't, really. Trust me...not only would they be happier making sacrifices to some emperor in an imperial cult...they're actively making efforts to found such a thing.

And they'll tell you so themselves, proudly.

Don't believe these fucking people when they start talking about God or Jesus...because they are obviously and openly trying to replace both of them with *Checks Notes Again* Donald Trump, who is an old man who will die sooner or later and anybody who believed in him is (according to the Word) going to go to hell right along with him and that's all there is to it.

There is no ambiguity here. Donald Trump is not the Creator, he is a Man. 

According to Christianity or any of the other Abrahamic traditions, Man Cannot Save Man. That's the entire basic principle of most religions in one way or another, not just of Christianity, Islam or Judaism. You have to believe in a higher power over and above Earthly powers and principalities in most theistic understandings of the Afterlife.

And Donald Trump ain't that guy. He'll fucking tell you he ain't. That guy doesn't believe in anything and he doesn't care about anything that doesn't give him glory, money, or a Viagra-assisted erection.

Of course, neither do they, nor do they care about anything else, really.

The reason these people love Donald Trump beyond all rational sense is most of them are the same fucking way.

The fact that he's not just their nominal leader, but their symbol...in many ways their god...should tell you just how lost these people have become.

But the truth is, the right wing is moving past Trump already, just like they abandoned Ayn Rand and every other person that embodied their beliefs previously. 

They're looking for something worse, but I think eventually they're going to realize that the only place they need to look is the mirror.

And at that point they're going to try and overthrow our civilization, government, society, etc. themselves. 

Sure, most of them will die for lack of any skills to match their inflated visions of their own toughness, or for lack of a damn can opener or any other capability to survive in a world where electricity and refrigeration and public health standards aren't things everybody has. That's a feature, not a bug in this. Just like the fact that these people are the ones doing the most dying from COVID-19. No one has more contempt for these people than their own masters do.

Why do I say that? The people who set all this up? The people watching the chaos from bolt-holes and fortresses guarded by private armies or from yachts safely offshore? Or from space?

They'll be just fine.

Until they start killing each other.

And it'll come to that, too.

Welcome to Rapture. Welcome to Bioshock, the real game.

That's the future "Conservatives" want. A world of nihilistic objectivism and murder where they can chop someone up while singing "Jesus loves me."

And then they'll call themselves Pro-Life.

Who gets to be free in that kind of future?

Nobody.

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan