Red Guards (Sick, Three.)

Yesterday you came to lift me up

As light as straw and brittle as a bird
Today I weigh less than a shadow on the wall
Just one more whisper of a voice unheard

Tomorrow leave the windows open
As fear grows please hold me in your arms
Won't you help me if you can to shake this anger?
I need your gentle hands to keep me calm

'Cause I never thought I'd lose
I only thought I'd win
I never dreamed I'd feel this fire beneath my skin
I can't believe you love me
I never thought you'd come
I guess I misjudged love between a father and his son. ~Elton John, The Last Song

...

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

Yesterday, I saw this, but I was out at my Mom's so I didn't get a chance to write about it yesterday.

Police in Moscow raided gay bars after the Russian supreme court labeled the "Global LGBT movement" as extremists. 

I started out as a conservative, way back in the Reagan years. Do me a favor, and don't ever try to tell me how Russia is "Conservative" ever again. This isn't *Individual Liberty* or "Limited Government" let alone self-governance in any fashion what the fuck ever.

This is the State, telling people who they can fuck, because LGBT people don't generate enough bodies to feed into the war machine...and on that same note, don't ever even try to tell me that Americans or the US Government are "War Mongers" ever again, because Putin is literally restructuring Russian society in such a way that the rest of it feeds the goddamned 2nd Edition of the Red Army, in apparent anticipation of a permanent state of war despite (or perhaps simply because of) the Russian Army's failure to conquer Ukraine.

This is the kind of future "Conservatives" want. And if you think it'll stop with the gay people, you have another thing coming. I think once they get all or most of the Afro-Russians, Jews and LGBT people to leave, it's gonna get a lot harder to leave Russia.

If Putin somehow turns that around...or, far more likely, simply gets bored with the effort and redirects it towards an occupation of Belarus (Which he likely suspects their government might not resist, but the people will) or other former Soviet states...many of which are, for survival's sake, shifting their allegiances towards the West only because they know what's coming. 

And they're preparing. Oh yes, they are.

If Putin wants to try and recreate the Soviet Union outside of Russia he's gonna need a lot more meat to throw into the grinder. And that's well before he tries to take on Poland, for example, he's gonna need a lot more bodies. Aside from Ukraine, In recent years, Azerbaijan for example has allied itself with Turkey (that was a thing well before the Ukraine situation) and Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have all made efforts to strengthen ties with the EU and NATO...and in the case of the last two, this includes increasing amounts of purchases of Western weapons, also. 

It seems like aside from American Republicans and Hungarian followers of Viktor Orban, nobody...including a lot of Russians...really wants to be Russian all that bad. 

And that was before Putin's apparent effort to recreate the New Soviet Man got started.

So now Russia is banning abortion and "encouraging" families to have more than 8 children. Mind you, Russia is already (has always been, by comparison to the West) a poverty-ridden 18th Century shithole. Want to take a stab at how that works out with worse economic metrics, less technology and worse medical care?? Russia is a sick society, and Red America wants to emulate that crap? Make it make sense, because I fucking can't do it.

I strongly suspect Putin, somewhere, is being egged on by some of these new New Right weirdos and that, shall we say, there's likely to be a lot of unintended consequences of this bullshit. Also, none of them will be good, for anybody.

It's like these fucking people see that their efforts to create some kind of global alt-Right Nazi empire centered on places like Dubai and Moscow are just straight-up failing, so they want to breed Russians into some kind of mass human-wave assault and when that doesn't work either...because people are people and tend not to want to be cannon fodder for the mad schemes of others...they'll try and use all these surplus Russians as a global cheap-labor underclass to enrich themselves and they won't have to hire Latinos to do their hard labor. Pro Tip, fellas. Russians are "White People" and won't do that shit either.

Then, these fools will try and keep them tamed by promoting a certain kind of Christianity and bullshit social conservatism.

Of course, when the people driving this manure wagon don't understand that the armored knight started to fall by the wayside with the invention of the Longbow, and was finished off by the invention of the Black Powder firearm and the pike and because it was just plain easier to throw mobs of illiterate peasants at each other while staying out of the fighting their own damn selves...like an early version Russian and Ukrainian armies lobbing volleys of drones at each other's vital points today...that shit was all over.

These fucking people don't understand the world their ancestors lived in, let alone our own, and it's often willfully so.

90% of Evangelical Christians don't know the answer to a simple, basic-knowledge question like "Who was Martin Luther" and as regards Traditionalist Catholics those numbers only improve among the very well educated. But yeah, tell me how these fucking people, with their fertility cults and folk religions all nominally under the aegis of "Christian" churches are going to somehow create a Christian theocratic monarchy in even the remains of a nation quite literally founded in rejection of Monarchy and based on a secular Constitution.

One of these things is simply not like the other one. I don't know how these fucking people don't understand this.

Most of these fucking people don't even know what they're asking for, let alone how to get from Point A to Point B, because most of them don't even understand what those two things are.

They just want somebody to wave a magic wand and make all the stuff that annoys them go away, and the last thing they even want to understand is that, as such things are actually defined neither Christianity nor conservatism is the cure-all these idiots think it is. Hell, conservatism should be about trying to maintain the society we already have...because that's what the philosophy even means. "Things as they are" doesn't mean you get to get rid of all the Black people or all the gay people because they're already a part of society and the ancestors you claim to revere so much were the ones who even made that decision. 

But no, because this shit has been dumbed down to the point of ridiculous by fools who are moral bottomless pits, we've got a bunch of dumb motherfuckers who think "Conservatism" means they have some kind of "Right" to destroy civilization and rebuild it in their own demented images.

This is America, and none of this works that way.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen...and this ain't it.

If you really think that Christianity or conservatism means things like that government gets to abuse and bully gay people at the behest of the mob or that Putin or Trump are somehow gods or that Unga Bunga witchcraft bullshit isn't Unga Bunga witchcraft bullshit because you allegedly slap the name "Jesus" somewhere in there, yes, you really do deserve the hell you're going to go to.

And it's as simple as that. These people are going to destroy themselves with their own wannabe Cultural Revolution, because they don't know how anything works...or want to. They don't know or never learned that once the Red Guards got a taste for blood, they could never be satisfied. You fuckers make Trump your "god" and you'll deserve exactly what you're going to get...and yes, the Revolution will eat you first.

Слава Україна!

Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name: ~Amos 5:7-8

Two

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press