The $8 Revolution? (Left Behind Is A Lie III, Eight.)

[The 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first Black regiment in the US Army, has just been attached to Col. Montgomery's brigade in the hope of seeing combat. The troops are marching through a regimental camp]

Cpl. Thomas Searles: Who are these ragamuffins?
Sgt. Major John Rawlins: Contraband, straight out of the field.
Short contraband:[to Thomas] Hey old man, where from?

Cpl. Thomas Searles: Massachusetts. You?

Short contraband: Round about here, we slaves in the field when the Yankee man come. Say we soldiers!

Tall contraband: You walk like the Bukra Soldier, even talk like the Bukra Soldier!

Cpl. Thomas Searles: [to Rawlins] What'd he say?

Sgt Major John Rawlins: He says we march like white soldiers. How you like the Army, contraband?

Tall contraband: Oh, we love it! We thank the Lord every day for de good vittles and de beautiful clothes! This year every day like Kismis!

Cpl. Thomas Searles: [to Rawlins] What?

Sgt. Major John Rawlins: Like Christmas.

Cpl. Thomas Searles: Oh.

~From the film Glory.

This motherfucker thinks he's paying $8 to Elon Musk for a revolution.

This motherfucker thinks free speech, revolution, world-changing vision is something you can pay for with money. As if the Freedom of an oppressed people, or the Tree of Liberty, could merely be watered with...$8?

Patriots and Tyrants could not be reached for comment.

As if the freedom of a people, the sheer amount of original ideas needed to change the world, could be commoditized down to...something that could be purchased for such a low prince.

Hello? Is this thing even on?

Seriously it's this kind of goddamned willful ignorance that's exactly what has the ultra-wealthy thinking they can just buy and sell the rest of us and take things back to a time where if people even had a decent life, it was because they owed allegiance to whatever local despot, petty tyrant, or warlord, or submitted to have their lives run by the local religion. 

A time where things like basic rights, or consent, or the common person having a say in their world was just a fanciful dream...and those who fought and died for such things mostly just died because Power was all there even was.

A time where, if you did what you wanted at all, you did it when no one was looking. There's a reason a lot of beliefs or stories or traditions were passed down covertly, or syncretized with existing religions of the Powerful, and why so much of what is actually true about our world still holds the aura of legend and mythos.

(And frankly, "Conservatives" are all about using even this, in total bad faith now that they no longer totally control societal narratives! Why else do you think conspiracy theories are so popular?)

A time where somebody like Elon Musk could say "I'm gonna open my fly, and you're gonna swallow what I give you to swallow" and that was that.

That's what people are saying they want when they say "Get rid of the government" or "Close the libraries" or "Shut down the public schools" because then, who or what is going to fill those gaps but the few individual people with the combination of desire to shape the narrative and the wealth to afford to do so?

And they're going to shape things for their benefit, not for yours.

Somehow "Conservatives" think that by supporting such arrangements they're going to come out ahead and you aren't...as opposed to everybody gets screwed over pretty much the same.

In fact, as long as somebody else gets screwed over worse, they'll rationalize whatever happens as somehow being to their benefit.

Seems like a hell of a way to live.

And more to the point it seems like exactly the opposite of a revolution, or a struggle for freedom. It seems a lot more like these Unfreedom Fighters are just trying to carve out some bullshit ass comfortable space for themselves and they don't actually care what happens beyond that.

And then they'll end up wondering how their daughter or son got sold to human traffickers when they weren't looking, or how their community's schools or their health care or social security just plain evaporated.

And that's exactly where this $8 Revolution crap leads.

More to the point, too many of these people actually know this...they just don't care or they resent the fuck out of it. But it's apparently too much work to change things.

In fact, some of these fucking people seem to view a society and various institutions full of uneducated ragamuffins to be the fucking goal.

And they don't actually care if it doesn't work...just so they got to feel somehow special for a few minutes or something.

Then they bounce from hit to hit to hit of this stuff, like addicts, and only later when they haze clears briefly do they even wonder why they've hardly got nothing at all.

I realize bullshit tautologies and simplistic ideals are these fucking people's thing...I used to be a conservative. I get this. 

But there comes a point where you have to have systems operated by people who know what they're doing who don't have an ideological or other axe to grind or some scam to run at the expense of all else...or you're the one who's going to get screwed.

If you want a better country you have to be a better citizen, and that costs a lot more than $8. It costs effort and knowledge and time...and work. Don't forget that part.

In case you're wondering why so many of these fucking people just don't want to do it, because it's easier to be Slaves to the Caesars or something...or to go on believing in End Times narratives and Left Behind novels that one knows to be a lie. Motherfuckers wanna believe.

Because believing makes it easier to be motherfuckers.

And at the end of the day, they don't care about anything else. It's all they want or understand. If they have to embrace endless conspiracy theories (which are lies) to keep doing it...they will.

Because the "right" to be absolute selfish motherfuckers is the only "right" they care about.

This situation cannot hold.

Sooner or later somebody's going to have to give a shit. That's pretty much the core element of civilization. Somebody has to give a damn or it doesn't work.

Remember that.

Seven

Слава Україна!

We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the outside world can speak out in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle. Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States. And as long as it's civil rights, this comes under the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. But the United Nations has what's known as the charter of human rights; it has a committee that deals in human rights. You may wonder why all of the atrocities that have been committed in Africa and in Hungary and in Asia, and in Latin America are brought before the UN, and the Negro problem is never brought before the UN. This is part of the conspiracy. This old, tricky blue eyed liberal who is supposed to be your and my friend, supposed to be in our corner, supposed to be subsidizing our struggle, and supposed to be acting in the capacity of an adviser, never tells you anything about human rights. They keep you wrapped up in civil rights. And you spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don't even know there's a human-rights tree on the same floor. ~Malcolm X.