Dark Side (Empire, Four.)

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying,
'Come and see.' and I saw, and behold a white horse"
There's a man goin' 'round takin' names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reachin' down
When the man comes around
The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup
Or disappear into the potter's ground?
When the man comes around
Hear the trumpets hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singin'
Multitudes are marchin' to the big kettledrum
Voices callin', voices cryin'
Some are born and some are dyin'
It's alpha and omega's kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

~Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around.

I saw this yesterday.

Just the world's alleged richest man trading White Supremacist-code references with Internet Nazis.

Also, that "Christian Nationalists" are openly threatening violence against LGBT people.

If this is what These Fucking People consider to be their "Brave New World" count me the fuck out of it.

Seriously, is it just me or is there something wrong with these fucking idiots?

Now that App stores are threatening to not carry Twitter because Elon has made a soup sandwich of things, evidently he made some off-the-cuff comment about designing his own brand of phone...and the fanboys immediately got to work circle-jerking out ideas for it.

Like, let's get real here. People who's idea of arch political commentary is racist 1488 memes don't give a rat's ass about Astrophotography, or tend to even know what they're looking at.

Reactionaries, generally speaking, do not build Starships. They use the rockets to bomb London from launch sites on the Baltic coast instead.

Also given the actual mechanics of Crypto mining? LOL.

Assuming this somehow was a possibility, I would not put it past these fools to melt their phones and set themselves on fire while walking around doing Crypto mining on their damn cell phones. 

Also wouldn't a phone with that much processing power be hella expensive? 

(If it was even possible?)

Um, speaking as a sometime forum admin and I.T. and tech support guy here...do we really want to risk giving some kind of neural computer interface to the kind of people who both routinely need professional grade virus-cleanings on their devices from downloading so much porn and who need to be told not to save their dick pics right in their main Pictures folder because the goddamn I.T. guy doesn't need to see that shit?

Also, maybe it's just me but I'd think even fantasizing about Nazis having the keys to the universe and theoretically infinite un-backed currency...with or without the capability to interface their brains with technology...sounds like something out of the kind of really bad science fiction that used to be on Showtime after 1 AM where you got to see the lead actress's boobs a lot as she and some generic unshaven sidekick character actor saved the world from even-more-improbably-stupid villains.

I mean, that's assuming, at the end of the day, that technology is even legal in their reactionary little world??

Seriously some nut from the Indiana GOP wants to bring back the Inquisition. How does that even work with the First Amendment (Much less the Second? Seems like they'd go through a lot of Inquisitors.) Not only that, but this kind of bullshit is exactly why the United States of America was founded on the values of the Enlightenment and not those of the Church.

Among other things, people got tired of that kind of garbage. And by "tired of it" I mean "fought dozens of Wars Of Religion over several centuries so that people could be free to, among other things, read the Word of God at all, much less read it in their own languages...and ultimately to have the freedom to choose their own religion and to have a government that wasn't beholden to some simpering priest that was dressed up in more bling than a mid-1990's rap concert.

For one thing, for technology to be developed, to work and to continue working requires both belief in science, widespread education and a functional civilization, almost certainly (at minimum) globalized, considering that making this stuff actually work will require resources drawn from pretty much everywhere.

And so much of this whole mess, whether it's Elon making a hash of Twitter in some monomaniacal quest to find the Liberal Secret Sauce or Putin invading Ukraine and trying to exterminate Ukrainians, but then getting his ass kicked, boils down to the fact that all these reactionary motherfuckers simply don't understand the modern world.

But it's more than that. They don't want to.

Not for some grand ideological or philosophical reasons, for the most part, but simply because modernity constrains their power.

Reactionaries are, to a great extent, infinitely able to be manipulated, so long as you keep them angry or riled up. This is what "Populism" is, yo.

Any talk of "Traditional" anything is usually just camouflage. The reasons these people like bigotry, classism, misogyny, racism, sexism etc. basically, without fail, comes down to the fact that these kinds of people are forever looking for an excuse to be a dick and get away with it.

Thus far Elon has run Twitter with no care for functionality, much less labor laws, and he's going to get himself in a huge mess that way. The fanboys who think being an exploitative, extractive dickbag is some kind of hilarious joke aren't the ones who are going to get stuck cleaning up the mess.

It's stuff like this that's why I say "Bring back the ass whuppin." Because, I guarantee you, if you do that...simply bring back a thing that I, being the middle-aged white male, was raised with...you know, a fairly immediate and visceral form of consequences for your own actions. I think a lot of this shit would stop pretty quick, if not right away.

And leave the guns out of it, you shoot somebody they're dead or possibly dealing with a lifetime of disability and injuries and likely that contributes to an escalating cycle of violence because the immediacy of death and retaliation prevents thinking too deeply.

No, what you do is you punch one of these chuckleheads right in the face. Then his homies see him cry like a bitch and maybe somebody stops and thinks "Hey, is this really a good idea?"

You know, maybe has an actual conservative thought process for a second.

"Oh, pain? That hurts. Do I want to proceed?"

And that gets harder when somebody's dead, because they can't feel anything anymore.

(And the industrialized State that industrializes the war doesn't feel anything either. It takes more for people to see that there's a problem)

Seriously it's taken basically wrecking Russia's economy, the Russian Armed Forces being exposed as a theft-riddled junk heap of a soup sandwich and thousands of dead people for even some Russians to see that Putin is a goddamn loser.

And the goddamn Russian media is still talking shit, like Red Army 2.0 ain't getting its ass kicked every damn day??

"A state of war is only natural for an empire of Russia's size?"

I mean "What the Mongol horde-raiding FUCK???"

Excuse me, but how in the hell is it that the first thing all these goddamned "Christians" purposefully forget is "Thou Shalt Not Kill?"

And somehow, it always comes down to the fact that they do this while following after some basic Antichrist Superstar like Putin.

Look, I don't know a better way to put this, but unless we as a species want to start living through some really bad science fiction, we need to stop putting up with this fucking bullshit.

'Cause ya know what? If we don't put a stop to it, maybe it's just me and that Christian background and education bubbling up again, but I don't think God or the Universe or the planet we live on is somehow obligated to put up with our bullshit.

Christ didn't come to Earth to build an Empire. He came to show us that His Kingdom was not of this world, and neither are we.

Christ came not with the sword, but to tell Peter to put up his sword.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. ~Yoda

But you know, you have to want to understand that. And some people just won't. You can't tell these fucking people anything. They seem to want to speed-run the last 2,000 years of bad ideas.

Somehow they think it'll work out different this time, or people won't get tired of it. These people could do anything, yet they make the choice to follow some rich loser who's taking orders from a guy with the internet handle of "Cat Turd." I mean, what the fuck?

It's like the Dark Side from Star Wars, but a lot dumber.

And some people seem to view this as a "little intellectual elite" but it's "theirs" so it's OK.

You want to be free of this small, mean bullshit, sooner or later you're going to have to fight for it.

Three

Слава Україна!

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