The Beast out of the fever swamps, Part Two.

If any man have an ear, let him hear. He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints. And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exercises all the power of the first beast before him, and causes the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he does great wonders, so that he makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, And deceives them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. 

~Revelation 13:9-14

I've been ranting since yesterday about the #ReOpenNC protests in North Carolina. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this morning I found out that no, those protests aren't really about any of the things those fools say they're about...

...Only to find out today that there's a similar protest going on in Lansing, Michigan. I'm not happy about this, least of all because I live in Michigan.

And ours likely aren't about any of the shit that conservatives claim they are, either. Although the bullshit seems to be going in a different direction this time around.

Supposedly, these people are protesting the stay at home orders, and stuff like that.

So it follows that some idiot in a jacked up pickup truck with a boat motor on the back of it is going to participate in blocking access to the emergency room entrance of a hospital, during a pandemic?!

I'm honestly not sure how these people aren't getting arrested or at least getting hella tickets for this kind of bullshit. These fools could very easily cause someone's death.
Of course, they don't care about that. Hence, my viewpoint about this shit, which could basically be summed up as "Liberty, my ass." It's more like "Liberty for me, YOU can fuck off and die."

I'll give the North Carolina idiots credit, at least a visible percentage of them are arguing for a peaceful protest and a reasonable approach.

Of course, there's also the problem that there are some of them arguing for violent overthrow of the state government for those people to argue against in the first place.

Like I've said, there is a violent faction on the Right that is looking to use this pandemic as a means to force an armed confrontation between itself and the state. It's telling that it increasingly seems irrelevant to these fools that there are plenty of conservatives in government in most places.

Why? Because to these fucking people, government as a concept is automatically bad. No, it doesn't matter that nobody else would enforce the existence of things like a minimum wage or a social safety net or maintain things like education, fire and police departments, the garbage dump, or the road you drive on to get to it.

According to a certain segment of the conservative base, government is ipso facto bad, simply because it's the government.

I'd argue that the actual reason for this is that government provides services to all people, not just ones that look like them or that they approve of.

In fact, I'd argue that if you're treating this garbage as anything else at this point, you're delusional.
Why?

Because I'm very skeptical of the idea that the basis of their argument is some kind of philosophical point when the first damn thing I see the second I start to follow the rabbit hole down is a whole bunch of Confederate flags.

You can't hardly be an American and not know the significance of that flag, or what the Civil War was fought over. It wasn't a "State's Rights" issue. That war was fought over one issue; Slavery.

The only "right" at issue was that lots of Southerners thought they had some kind of a right to own other human beings as property, for the express purpose of using them as unpaid laborers.

Now the next time I see some conservative ranting about liberals and people of color wanting "Free shit" I'm going to bring that up.

The Confederate Flag wasn't about some kind of noble principles, or heritage, or the piece of ground you lived on being better than the one to the north of you. No, it was about slavery and the supposed right of some humans to own other humans and don't you ever forget it.

Some people might argue that slavery was described in the Bible, therefore it was Okay. But see, here's the thing. Slavery in the ancient world was not based on race, and it was very often a condition one could buy or work their way out of, many slaves were prisoners of war, or those who had fallen into debts and sold themselves to get out of it. In the Bible, every fiftieth year was known as a Jubilee year,mandated as a time for the freeing of slaves, redistributing lands, and the settling of debts. In the Roman Empire, great civic pride was attached to manumission, and a freed slave became what was called a Libertus, and might even be treated as part of your family for a time, and then become one of your societal contacts in the complex web of Roman society...and even the Romans eventually abolished slavery, by their own choice, not because others forced them to do it.

In the Antebellum South there were no such options, and if you escaped they'd send bounty hunters to capture you, or use duplicitous means to capture Free Blacks, there was no getting out of it, and the only reason that shit ever went away was because the rest of the country fought a war to put a stop to that shit.

But you know, it's actually worse than that.

Religion was part and parcel of the defense of Slavery, too.

Just like it's part and parcel of the defense of racism and right-wing politics today, even if not quite explicitly, but very much implicitly in that anything in terms of government policy or social systems that requires people to care about other people gets attacked as "liberalism" and increasingly connected with the various End Times beliefs of "Conservative" Christianity.

There's apparently a belief that COVID-19 is the End Times. According to this line of reasoning, giving a fuck about other people and social distancing and any directives or prevailing public opinions in this regard are some kind of grand End Times conspiracy theory to something something gazpacho destroy white conservative Christianity or something and the COVID-19 vaccine (that does not, as of this writing, exist) is the Mark Of The Beast because of some kind of nonexistent "Nanotechnology" or something like that. How these people think you can cure a virus with electronics, I have no idea.

The "Mark of the Beast" means liberalism, no, it doesn't mean that in the Bible...not at all...Jesus was a pretty solid blend of conservative and liberal if you look at His own actions.

What the Mark Of The Beast is, is choosing the false, money-based system of this world over that of God. In effect, the Mark Of The Beast is the Prosperity Gospel, and all the other false gospels these motherfuckers preach.

I was not taught that the End Times were something that was coming, but that they were something that we lived in. There are events Jesus and the Old Testament Prophets prophesied that have already happened, such as the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The Seven-year End Times Prophecy narrative is horse shit. It was invented so that people who don't really believe, who just use Christianity to get Man's approval, could delude themselves into thinking they had time to repent.

That's what I was taught about this stuff.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13:15-18

There isn't a damn thing in there about computer chips, or liberalism, or social distancing.

Basically, what these idiots are saying is that they intend to rebel against whatever forms society takes at the end of this thing, and they'll make up whatever bullshit they have to in order to justify it...because honestly, shooting people has been all that a lot of them ever wanted to do all along, and now they see their chance. I suppose they had hoped for something else, but these fucking people seem to have a real problem with the idea of an apocalyptic situation that results in people sitting on the couch ordering takeout, playing video games or watching Pornhub instead of butchering each other in the streets.

Something about the idea of their liberal professional neighbor working from home, cooking in the evenings and playing with the cat seems to really offend these people. The thought process seems to be "You need to die of disease so that we can restart the economy and I can get money."

If anything, that grates on my nerves a lot worse than the Confederate Flag.

But the idea of Confederate flags in Michigan pisses me off anyway.

Why?

Because I literally knew people, at one time, who were the descendants of a soldier who served in the 24th Michigan Regiment of Volunteers. I was taking a class on the Civil War at the time, and they gave me access to their history, so that I had something more I could contribute to my class.

Their ancestor was on the firing line when the Army of the Potomac made contact with Confederate troops 'foraging' at Gettysburg and Union forces spent the next three days telling Bobby Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia just what they could go do with themselves.

Because they didn't have all the technology and stuff that people have today. They didn't have body armor or Camel-baks or drones or M16A2 Rifles or computer-driven hyperwar, they had nothing but their own courage and guts and a .57 Caliber Enfield Rifled Musket that they were expected to be able to fire three aimed shots per minute with. Because that's a lot of work to be able to tell somebody "Eat shit and die." That they had the courage and the skill to do exactly that is why we still have a country.

Because a quarter of the men in my state at the time fought in the Civil War, and because 15,000 of them died. Because my Dad was a Civil War reenactor and because I have been studying this stuff literally since I could even read. He owned a reproduction .57 Enfield Rifled Musket, which I inherited, and have shot. The damned thing kicks like a howitzer. I don't know how the hell anybody could maintain a volume of fire, shooting that shit in a standing position.

There are few symbols of anything in this world that I hate more than the Confederate flag.

Why? Because knowledge of that history informs my hatred.

Because I've known African American people who embodied the principles by which I defined my own life better than I did. I owe some of those people my life, my very soul, and it's really just that simple. Some of those people gave freely of their own selves, of their own blood, to serve this country, to serve God, or both. They didn't do it because anybody told them to, they did it because it needed to be done, because it was the right thing to do, because it was who they are.

And I've personally known Black dudes who were both more conservative and better people than any of these douche bags blocking access to a fucking hospital in the middle of a pandemic will ever be.

You can take your Confederate Flag and shove it right up your own ass, Fuck you.

If you think your race, or your religion, or your politics or your worship of a man gives you the right to some better social position, or gives you the right to put people's lives in danger by blocking the way to a hospital in the middle of a pandemic, fuck you.

That is some of the most anti-American shit I have ever heard of in my entire life and I say that as somebody who spent much of his life as a conservative Republican, who probably knows this shit better than any of these fuckers who are busy making fools of themselves and despising those who wish only to save their own lives today.

I'm pretty sure Gretchen Whitmer doesn't care if you're a conservative or a liberal or whether you'll vote for her or not. She just wants us all to get through this mess.

If you think your money or your privilege is more important than somebody else's life, you're not a conservative, you're a sociopath.

And the religion of Jesus requires that you give a damn about other people, it really is as simple as that.

Part One.