The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. ~Karl Marx
Madison Cawthorn says the proposed door-to-door vaccination plan is a plot to take people's Bibles and guns.
Bibles and guns...
I mean, to hear some Christians tell it, today, firing a weapon is almost a sacrament in and of itself.
It's funny how those two things always seem to be pushed together by conservatives, isn't it? Bibles and guns, I mean, what is a religion that espouses nonviolence and peace if it's not backed up by massive firepower up to and including military grade rifles, right? "Peace through strength" as Reagan said.
The difference is, Reagan actually believed in peace and negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev and worked to end the threat of nuclear war. What has Madison Cawthorn even done, except be an obnoxious little ghoul?
In point of fact, if you ask me, the entire purpose of the Republican Party...the only purpose it's allowed itself to be given...is the defense of privilege, racism and wealth.
As I've said many times, Trump is not the cause of this shit, he's the symptom of it.
He'd never survive in the world he's trying to create, of course thinking that he's somehow creating such a world only for other people.
Not to be outdone, here's J.D. Vance (you know, the hedge-fund douche bro lawyer who's effectively appointed himself Peter Theil's personal suppository and apparently is jammed all the way up there) comparing New York City (a place he apparently knows fairly well) to one season or another of The Walking Dead.
I've been watching the ongoing soup sandwich that is the current CPAC conference in Dallas. Among other things, over the weekend white supremacist Nick Fuentes and his followers attempted to crash the convention, but were kicked out.
But that somebody like this fucking racist loser would even try and show up is absolutely emblematic of the goddamn problem. He's nothing but a privileged little twit who, being Latino himself, is roughly the equivalent of a sheep trying to survive by wearing a wolf costume...and he's too fucking dumb to know the wolves can smell him. I mean, seriously, all this little fucker has ever done is hard-right political spew and he's mostly known for feuding with people who are the same way. I'm willing to bet he's never even had a real job.
In the morally empty, vapid world of modern conservatism (which is dominated by the cowards and immoral people) and Moron America, nobody has the guts to tell him right to his face that the first thing most Anglo white supremacists would do if they had their way is shoot him in the back and then spit on his corpse as they step over it.
And then there's this motherfucker.
Apparently at some point in the last 25 years or so, former Saturday Night Live dipshit Rob Schneider went off the fucking deep end as an anti-vax ninny. I'll admit I didn't know, l simply haven't followed anything he's been doing since he left Saturday Night Live. Other than bit parts in Adam Sandler movies, I think the last thing I saw him in was the original Judge Dredd movie with Sylvester Stallone in 1994, and it wasn't that good.
So, Bibles and guns, but also fascism, racism and virulent viruses. Wow, that's a hell of a combination of things to be in favor of there, Republicans. I've been wondering lately just what the hell kind of fucking drugs these people are on. No, it's not the first time I've thought that, either.
One might be disposed to wonder just what else Republicans actually stand for.
Here's semi-literate, GED-holding restauranteur Lauren Blowbert denouncing welfare on the CPAC stage before a crowd of people who, unlike her, have never had to worry about applying for it.
Of course I'm fairly sure she didn't either since her high-school dropout ass most likely kept living with her parents while she worked that MacDonald's job she's always talking about. I'm going to go out on not much of a limb here and take a guess that somebody whose big accomplishment in life is being seen as the intellectual successor to Sarah Palin probably never bothered to ask all of her coworkers how they got by.
And I'm here to tell you that America is full of Republican voters who are perfectly fine with getting government benefits of all sorts including welfare...not least, Blowbert herself, who seems to spend most of her time as a member of the US House of Representatives (for which us taxpayers must pay) continuing to function as a right-wing activist forever in search of just one more hit of cheap internet fame for herself.
You know, there's dog-whistling your contempt for your own possible voters, there's using a goddamn air horn, and then there's this 100-megaton flash in the night. I mean, for fuck's sake, dude.
I always thought that all this Culture War bullshit was really stupid, but comparing New York City to a Zombie Apocalypse simply for cheap political points and because all you know about your target audience is that they're both dumb and suspicious of anybody who isn't like them takes the cake. J.D. Vance is exactly the same as the clueless city folk elites he's trying to build a political career on mocking...he just picked a different side. This dude with the quintessential American story, this Hillbilly-turned Marine turned Lawyer and Author who four or five years ago could've picked which ticket he wanted to be on and been cheerfully accepted by either side...picked the gay foreign billionaire with the utterly repugnant beliefs as his sugar daddy.
I mean, for fuck's sake if J.D. had ever been the guy he presented himself as in his book, or espoused those sort of views, he'd have had a better than average chance of getting elected as a Joe Manchin-style conservative Democrat and quite likely been able to instantly claim the kind of rock star status that old Joe could never dream of having and there'd be three, rather than just two, gumming up the works in the Senate right now.
But if he ever was that guy, he decided he didn't wanna be that guy.
I used to be a Republican and I'm tired of this angry, puerile Culture War bullshit that never actually seems to go anywhere and almost always, long-form results in Republicans losing and looking like fools not least because of the bad quality of the leaders they choose.
Because the asshole dudebro demographic is so under-represented in the modern United States of America, or something something Gazpacho.
This dude's trying so hard you can't even joke about him and have it be funny. He's your basic Unfuckable Dork Brigade 1980's movie villain. Three years ago this dude could've picked whatever side he wanted to and done so on his own terms. He chose...this...apparently for no better reason than it was easy. This dude who is obviously no stranger to doing hard shit for unpopular reasons just bitched out and took the easy way and even that probably isn't actually going to work for him.
I rather suspect that with Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Ted Cruz already in Congress...the "All we have is this giant middle finger" caucus...excuse me, the 'Little intellectual elite' of modern conservatism...is probably pretty full up.
Again, I can't help but wonder what kind of drugs these fucking people are on.
Except now, Republicans have basically given up on being leaders and the Republican voter base has given up on selecting them, preferring instead to have angry representations of its bigotry and cultural grievances instead.
William F. Buckley famously once said that he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But you know, I cannot help but think in his heyday he was a citizen of a smarter America. He certainly presided over a smarter Conservatism.
And so did this guy;
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
I cannot help but think that the current "Conservative" hellscape would horrify both men.
But this is what the Angry White Jesus crap that Buckley tolerated and Reagan formally allowed into the Republican Party leads to. This is what constantly feeding outrage with no plan and ultimately no leadership enables.
Like most people, I think, I've been watching the accelerating disintegration of everything that the world community has built and all the stuff people fought for in Afghanistan with nothing but horror.
But a big part of the problem was that outside of the cities there wasn't that much effort to build things up, nor much of a focus on strengthening local government in any way that didn't involve the use of force, nor much of an effort to tackle the illiteracy that's so widespread among even police and soldiers in Afghanistan, nor to address both the widespread cultivation and use of drugs in that country...nor the fact that Opium was the primary cash crop, nor the unemployment so widespread among the country's people.
And I do in fact have on my old laptop a bunch of photos of US Marines on foot patrol walking through a field of Opium poppies, as well as a bunch of amazing photos of the flowers themselves...these were sent to me by one of my cousins, evidently taken by a US Navy mass communications specialist embedded with his unit at some point. They had orders to leave all that shit alone. Who benefits from that?
The same people drowning rural white conservative America in a flood of easily accessible Opioids, maybe?
Thing is, Afghanistan wasn't working out for ordinary Afghans to begin with. We failed to make it better for too many, especially outside of the cities. Now, things are going to get bad and likely fall apart again, and the rest of the world is going to have to deal with more waves of refugees, likely a lot of them women and girls, which some people will hate and resent, and others will use to increase hatred and resentment.
And it ever and always only benefits the few, who already have vast power and wealth.
Years ago in my last year of college I met a lady that was from Afghanistan. She always said things like "If you want to make things better, don't send 30,000 more soldiers, send 30,000 doctors, or engineers, or 300 venture capitalists. Soldiers won't help anything."
We should be aware of that, when we look at the fact that America isn't working out for too many ordinary Americans.
We should be very aware of that when any political leader pushes constant culture war or the idea that guns and religion are the solution to every problem or who seek to make hate the new opiate of the people and who dole it out like drugs.
Yet again, and more explicitly, for the benefit of the few.
They demand that others be left behind. They demand that no country works out for its ordinary citizens, that the only thing they give, and the only thing anyone ask for be violence and war.
We're all going to have to watch in real time how that ends over there.
Now, what are we going to do to prevent that type of shit from happening here?
If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen. Stop taking the drugs, real or metaphorical, that these fuckers are using to destroy and divide society.
The behavior of the Taliban as well as their extremist attitudes do not correspond in any way with a tolerant Islam. We have always been opposed to extremist tendencies of Islam and we still are. We have not stopped insisting on defending an Islam of tolerance which would be profitable to every Muslim, in Afghanistan and in the whole world, and we will always defend it. ~Ahmad Shah Massoud
It has always been our deep conviction, and we have always stressed the fact that the only solution for Afghanistan is democracy through elections. Each individual must have the right to vote. The day we will be in Kabul, we will organize elections under the auspices of international organizations. ~Ahmad Shah Massoud
