You step outside, you risk your life. You take a drink of water, you risk your life. And nowadays you breathe, and you risk your life. Every moment now you don't have a choice. The only thing you can choose is what you're risking it for. Now I can make these people feel better and hang on a little bit longer. I can save lives. That's reason enough to risk mine. ~Herschel Greene, from The Walking Dead.
Freedom.That's a word I keep hearing a lot lately.
When Democrats say "Freedom" they tend to be talking about concrete, discernable things; Equality, Fair wages, Human rights, Social safety nets, the Vote.
Self-determination, in all its forms, whether it's pretty or messy or we like the results or not. That's democracy.
I was a conservative, like it or not, I like things presented in such a way that I find them understandable. I don't much care for hokum in all its various forms. Don't piss in my ear and tell me it's raining.
Freedom.
When Republicans say "Freedom" these days it's...this kind of stuff "Florida just hosted the largest concert since the Pandemic began because FLORIDA CHOSE FREEDOM OVER FAUCI-ISM! USA! USA! USA!"
Excuse me, what the fuck does that even mean? You chose "Freedom" over listening to the medical experts that were trying to save your life and the lives of your constituents?
Call me crazy but that sounds an awful lot like a good way to end up dead, and last I checked the number of COVID-19 deaths is at least 600,000+ and still climbing, albeit much more slowly now. The virus meanwhile is still ravaging other parts of the world, Brazil and India for example, it's caused governments to fall in Africa, and who knows what other disruptions lie ahead.
These people are shouting "USA! USA!" all the way to the grave. That's fascism.
And the practitioners of it seem to have a desire to be their own victims as well. How the fuck does that work?
It seems like having a good time might (still) not be the best priority right now, and I say that as somebody who just went without a mask last night at work for the first time in over thirteen months because I'm fully vaccinated and the heat and humidity were literally making me sick the other night despite the air conditioning. So I had my boss make a copy of my vaccination card and filled out the proper form.
The point being, one has to strike a balance between health and safety on one side and comfort (or, if you will, entertainment) on the other side, or even between different shades of health and safety.
And in terms of preparedness concerning the virus, they're whistling past the graveyard. India is a petri dish of over a billion people. Think about the staggering scale of that for a second.
God knows what else might crop up in the next couple of years...and then on top of that these people want to disrupt our society and obstruct or possibly even destroy our government and break apart our country because "their" guy didn't get reelected.
And like angry, manipulative little children they're willing to blame whoever they must (as long as it's not themselves) tell any lie or make up whatever dumb shit it takes to try and get their way. I'm sorry, but where and when I come from that sort of thing got a kid's ass beat until they stopped doing it. Let that shit fester long enough, it goes on until they're a grown person who's dead or in jail because they never learned how to control themselves, have morals, or tell the truth. Is that really how you want to live, or be remembered, conservatives?
Most of us grow out of that sort of shit by the time we get old enough to drive a car.
But then most of us aren't smug rich little fucks like Tucker Carlson, either.
If you've passed a high school government class you should know how things like citizenship and voting work and what the requirements are, on a basic level.
Like I said last year, I haven't seen a protocol for social distancing when you've been shot...and I still haven't over a year after the first time I wrote that.That's what this mess is going to come to if it's not stopped, and stopped right now. And yes, I'm looking at guys like Joe Manchin and Merrick Garland when I say that.
And as for you Republicans, I'm going to say it again, and louder, when people want you to be dumb and play up your prejudices and appeal to your bigotry, they are not your friends, they're trying to manipulate you. Tucker Carlson isn't some truth-teller, he's a smarmy little rich boy who wants to get richer and he wants to get that way by picking your pocket.
These people are coming right the fuck out and saying that they want to put your kids to work instead of sending them to school.
Job sites? If we, as a society, were halfway serious about the future we'd be teaching kids to program robots because in 20 years *That* is going to be who's on the "job site" straight up, and the only human workers around will be the architects and civil engineers and shit that are directing the things and the skilled-trades people who maintain them. My bet is the operators will be dozens or hundreds of klicks away in an air-conditioned facility running hella big computers that need a cool space...if there are operators at all...because we might well be talking about AI by then, too.
Then they're saying that your kids (and your) working conditions should be a "State's rights issue" like that wasn't already decided by sixty years of labor struggles and the worst economic crash the world ever saw.
They're also not too subtly saying that they want to put your 14-year-old daughter into a grown-ass adult work environment where she might well be approached by some grown-ass man whose idea of big fun is railing some little girl. And lest you think I'm kidding, it's always pictures of young women that Libertarians put up when they say this kind of shit.
This ain't the Trickle-Down economics Libertarianism of the Reagan years anymore. One of these people's avatars in Congress, Matt Gaetz, is actually under Federal investigation for human trafficking.
Again, think about that for a second.
And here's the thing, there's one hell of a lot of patriarchal conservative white men who are just fine with that, because that's what they aspire to be, protestations of religiosity are generally nothing but horse shit in this case.
And no, they don't give a shit about your daughter, or any other woman right on up to Vice President Kamala Harris herself. When fucking Geraldo Rivera thinks the dumb shit people are saying has gone too far, it's probably time for these people to check themselves.
And again, as for y'all Republicans, when these people are shoving racism at you like chum out of a boat to a slew of hungry sharks...it might just be time to start asking yourselves why instead of eating that shit up like bloody red meat.
It's like an old bro of mine said back in the day "If the best thing you can say about yourself is what color you was when you came out yo mama, it's probably a good idea to evaluate yourself and do a few things differently."
Funny thing about me, and the Black (Afro-Cuban, in particular) Airman who said it. We were both Republicans at the time.
Republicans don't have to be this, in fact they would be far better served by broadening their tent, reaching out to other people besides white conservatives in general and conspiracy theorists and racists in particular. They choose to be this, with malice aforethought, because change is too hard or something and because all they have in their hearts is hate.
You don't have to be this, either. You can choose not to be, and start again. It's not that hard, I did it, because it was easier for me than just following along when all this crap started. Having a group to identify with wasn't that important to me. Being popular wasn't that important to me. Hell, the way I was taught if you're a Christian and a conservative ain't none of that is supposed to be popular.
And you'd do well to actually look at the stuff they're mixing in with it to try and make it all be "popular" and note that they still can't seem to get more than a quarter or so of the population (and falling!) to rally to this crap.
Oh, and regarding vaccine research, Marjorie Taylor Greene said "I don't believe in evolution, I believe in God."
Now first of all, there ain't one damn thing says this is an either-or question. You can believe in both Evolution and God, I do (more or less.)
I was a Christian for most of my life, but when I was a kid I was taught religion in religion class and science in science class and the two subjects didn't mix very much. Anybody who objected was generally told to go pound sand. Maybe that's the difference between the 1980's and today.
But here's the thing, this crank is around the same age as me, assuming she really is a Christian, she is without excuse.
I've seen a fair amount of stuff I couldn't explain, but one thing I've never seen (or even heard of!) is someone actually healed from a disease by prayer alone. Normally, in my experience there's prayer AND you go to the fucking doctor because we're modern people, not savages dancing around a fire shouting "Unga Bunga!" As I was taught it "Call on God, but row away from the rocks."
If you want to look at it that way, God gave us brains, He gave us reason and science, so that we could figure stuff out and do for ourselves...you know, that old conservative mantra. "God helps them that helps themselves." In reality, there's some truth to that, but far too often it's just used as an excuse to be an asshole and that's not right.
An example I remember hearing about in church was fighters for one side or the other in Sierra Leone's civil war went to the local witch doctor, demanding some salve that would make them invulnerable to enemy bullets, and when they got it, they tested it out by having some other group of goons shoot them and they all died. As for the witch doctor, he was beaten for "failure."
This is the kind of shit that happens when religion is devoid of common sense or morality, and whether we're talking back in the 1990's or all the way back to the Crusades or the people who got sick and died because they thought God would protect them from COVID-19, it always ends up the same way.
More. Dead. People.
Honestly it seems to me that this is a feature, rather than a bug, of conservative politics and religion.
The cruelty is the fucking point.
Art Laffer (whoever the fuck that is) said on Fox News yesterday regarding wage increases that "The poor, the minorities, the disenfranchised, those with less education, and young people" aren't worth $15 an hour.
Your daily dose of relative status for the day, I guess. We can't all be old rich white guys.
Fuck him, anyway.
Every last word that he said is nothing but fucking bullshit and I say that as a veteran and somebody who has worked in a shit-ton of service industry jobs.
You know who's most willing to work? You know who's lean and hungry and ready to learn the job, and whatever it takes to do the job" "Minorities, the poor, the disenfranchised" that's who. Because this is America and that's how you move up. Seriously, some of the hardest-working, and for that matter most fun to work with, people that I ever worked with in my life were Jamaican seasonal workers in Northern Michigan. They'll work minimum wage for 14 hours a day, take all the overtime you can give them and have a good time doing it...and working around them doesn't feel like work! I'm being god-damn serious here. One of the hardest working people I know in my own workplace is an immigrant from Zimbabwe.
I'm completely not kidding, if you gave a country like Nigeria just a fraction of the resources and technology that American people take for granted that country would probably be a real Wakanda in a very short period of time.
(And again, on a serious note, China has made a point of investing in Africa. Shouldn't we? Isn't this a potential national security issue?)
You want my honest opinion? You know who's not worth no $15 an hour? Lazy privileged rich white kids. I live and work in a college town, we get a hell of a lot of those too, and most of them don't last and end up nothing more than humorous anecdotes shared by us old-timers years later that only the two or three people who were there who might still be around even understand.
My own work just raised our wages, not out of some politically-correct reasoning, but simply because they have to in order to compete with Subway and Walmart, or even just limit the turnover in the workplace, which has been crippling for quite some time now.
You know what wealthy conservatives like Art Laffer, Donald Trump, and Mitch McConnell, and the New Hampshire Libertarian Party are really mad about?
That they can't just clap you in irons and force you to work for free under the threat of the lash or the barrel of a rifle. Mitch McConnell yesterday was blaming Democrats and Unemployment insurance for people not wanting to come back to work. Somehow, he missed the fact that the reason a lot of people don't want to come back to work is actually shitty treatment and shitty wages.
You know, the overly-dependent on service-industries economy that didn't survive contact with a pandemic the first time. What happens if there's another disruption like a major war or something? What if it's with China and all that industry we outsourced is suddenly on the other side of the line?
What then? Do they care?
These people are assholes, Nazis and sociopaths, or at best quisling enablers of the same, who only care about their own profits.
And you know what the sick thing is? There's always some fools, mostly white, who'll look at this and be like "Yes, Mr. Republican Sir, I'll sign up for that" because racism or relative status or to "Own the Libs" or some such bullshit.
Or simply because they'll empty their pockets for the chance to kick down on somebody and think they're somehow coming out ahead.
I'm tired of people signing away their futures for empty promises and magic beans and various prejudices, and I'm even more tired of living in the kind of society that willfully tolerates this sort of manipulative horse shit, day in and day out, because too many goddamned people are Stockholm-Sydromed to rich motherfuckers who could give a shit about them.
Every day you risk your life.
Do you really want to risk your life for some rich person's profits and sinful sexual desires?
Because that's what all this authoritarianism they keep pushing is about. That's what they want, while YOU Obey and work for shitty wages, they want to fuck 14-year-olds and amass more wealth than one person could use up in a thousand lifetimes.
Is that what you want running our civilization.
I sure don't.
If you wouldn't tolerate a person like that in your peer group, why do you want them running the country?
Maybe we as a society better rethink a few things.
Maybe when somebody starts talking about "Freedom" we need to start asking:
Freedom for whom, and to do what?
I used to be a conservative, conservatism isn't supposed to be a slaver's bill of sale.
Is that what you want to risk your life for?
I don't. I won't. Fuck that.
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. ~Revelation 13:1-6
Part One.#Top20
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