If I don't know anything I can believe what I want! (My American Dark Age, Part Four)

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Over the weekend, Matt Gaetz (R-Natty Lite) Tweeted this; "Black Lives Matter is a Marxist movement."

Really? Seriously?! Are you fucking kidding me?!

As I understand it, Black Lives Matter doesn't actually endorse any particular economic system other than, ya know, one that doesn't hurt or kill Black people as a central part of its existence.

Meanwhile, while American conservatism goes down the rabbit hole of deploying armed officers to protect Confederate statues and ignores Russian bounties on American military personnel being paid to the Taliban by the Russian GRU and the literal murders of American citizens by American police officers in favor of trying to settle ideological grievances that are currently older than most people now living...authoritarianism and evil remain on the march across much of the world.

And thanks to their destruction of America's moral authority, soft power and indeed, reputation for anything much at all including basic competence...and after the deaths of almost 130,000 Americans thanks to COVID-19 and our government's schizophrenic responses to it...we have all but guaranteed that there will be a hundred thousand or more American deaths and countless others throughout the world when the only option we have left to even start trying to put things right is force and assorted other hard-power methods.

This morning, I saw this, that US Customs intercepted 13 tons of human hair taken from the prisoners of Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump fiddles while the world burns and Republicans...thus far frustrated by our own Federal system and prevented from their goals by our own Constitution...dream of finding some way to arrest people simply for having opposing political viewpoints.

Kind of like what the goddamned Chinese Communists want to do in Hong Kong, eh?

And...the bellicose Tweets of Marsha Blackburn and Mike Pompeo aside, Republicans and the wealthy have borrowed so much money from, and outsourced so much of our manufacturing to the Chinese that short of a nuclear-backed canceling of contracts and refusal to pay until these fucking bastards stop detaining and murdering their own citizens for no damned good reason and start respecting human rights...what in the hell can we actually do?

Ordinarily, we'd get most of the rest of the world behind us and collectively tell these fucking people what to go do with themselves, and likely extract some concessions simply because in economic terms China needs the rest of the world a lot more than we need them.

But America lacks the moral standing to do that right now, and at least until Trump is gone, likely lacks the political will to actually do anything, either.

In point of fact, for all of Matt Gaetz's and the Trump administration's bellicose 30-years-too-late anti-Communism, American corporate fascism is all too eager to give these fucking people its money in exchange for cheap crap that they then turn around and sell to the American consumer for way the hell more than they paid for it.

In point of fact, it's not Donald Trump and his trade wars that have made American corporations start thinking about onshoring rather than offshoring jobs...and likely using automation rather than human labor to do so...it's Coronavirus and the simple fact of mass disruption to global supply chains that resulted from it.

And once those factories are built, they won't need more than a few people to run them, and maybe a janitor or two.

But, I mean, that's Okay isn't it? After all, conservative groups like the Club For Growth seem to be primarily working on resolving their staffers' dick-size issues. It's not like we're dealing with any important stuff like deadly viruses or economic crises or anything.

And speaking of economics...

America and other countries have, fundamentally, paid the goddamned Chinese Communists trillions of dollars over the last generation or so...that they have been putting a lot of into military hardware and building alliances and infrastructure and webs of capital and influence throughout the world, especially in places we tend to overlook like Sub-Saharan Africa.

If we get into a conflict with the Chinese it doesn't really matter that they don't have the kind of intercontinental strike capability that we or the Russians or NATO (collectively) have if they have bases in (for example) Cabo Verde or Venezuela and can hit our East or Gulf Coasts from there in addition to being able to target Alaska, Hawaii and the West Coast with their own weapons based on their own soil...and the difference between China and Russia in this regard is that China didn't shed 65% of its military capabilities after the Cold War nor suffer through a long period of few upgrades and little or no new equipment. In fact, their capabilities have only grown, and largely without much of a per-capita increase in defense spending because their population is so large.

And let's not forget the still-ongoing standoff between China and India over a few square Kilometers of land in some remote Himalayan river valley, either. Another situation we'd normally be working to resolve under any kind of a sane administration...or even if Donald Trump simply made any kind of effort to be the leader or the man he says he is.

Simply put, tens of millions of Americans lack even the kind of basic familiarity with world affairs that I just described...much of which could be gained simply from a quick Twitter browse...but they can spout volumes of data, real and imagined, about their favorite conspiracy theories and other pet issues. Simply put, if you don't know anything, you can believe whatever you want.

And "Conservatives" meanwhile, the very people who at one time were the go-to motherfuckers for navigating thorny problems like "How do we win the Cold War" are posting shit like this...a "Youth Patriotism Index" that seems intended solely to disparage higher education, even though said higher education often takes the place of effective secondary education which in all too many places focuses mainly on sports and below-board political and social indoctrination, to the point where a high school student or graduate could have trouble passing the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) a fucking decade ago. I can only imagine what it's like these days. But, you know, in a way this is problematic in it's own right.

Honestly, so far as I'm concerned I say that the idea that there even is such a thing as a "Youth Patriotism Index" in this country...official or otherwise...sounds pretty goddamned Communist to me. Note that I say this as a former conservative and Republican. If you'd have told me 30 years ago that some supposedly-conservative group would produce such a thing I'd have laughed at you.

But as of right now, too many of us are cheerfully trying to defend apathy, ignorance and nihilism or aiming weapons at each other (deliberately or negligently) or deliberately trying to believe, against all the evidence, that we are each, individually, somehow the protagonist of reality.

It might be that now, enough of us are observing the basic duty of paying attention to what's going on in the world around us. In fact, I'd say that's probably where we're at right now.

Call it just over half, maybe, have actually decided they care enough about life and living to pay attention enough to protect themselves.

But there's about a third or so that don't...or that have actively thrown in their lot with the bad guys. Then there's a high-teens percentile that look at whoever's around and say "Whatever you think."

You can argue the exact numbers all day, but the point is that's a problem.

Apathetic neutrality doesn't seem like much of an option in a world where both Communists and Nazis are looking for a resurgence, and both have and are persecuting other people.

Yes, this is America and you can believe whatever you want.

But that doesn't make it true, and nobody that doesn't want to listen to that crap actually has to.

Does that spell it out for you?

Part Three.

Part Five.