Secretary-General Annan spoke for all of us...when he said that ethnic cleansers and mass murderers can find no refuge in the United Nations, no source of comfort or justification in its charter. We must do more to make these words real. Of course, we must approach this challenge with some considerable degree of humility. It is easy to say, "Never again," but much harder to make it so. Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little. But difficulties, dangers, and costs are not an argument for doing nothing. When we are faced with deliberate, organized campaigns to murder whole peoples or expel them from their land, the care of victims is important but not enough. We should work to end the violence. ~Bill Clinton
There's something that's been bothering me for awhile, and that I've written about previously.
It started with the anti-lockdown, anti-mask and anti-vaccine protests last year.
As I said at the time, there's one hell of a lot of Americans that don't want to live in America, they want the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with an Applebee's and a mall. Whether it comes down to hatred of one's neighbors, racism, or shitty politics, there seems to be a lot of this crap going around.
And I'd like to make a note of the fact that both Donald Trump and Mo Brooks were booed by their own supporters at a rally in a cow pasture in Alabama yesterday when they said that their supporters should get vaccinated.
I've also been worried for a long time, longer actually, that especially when the internal logic of conservatism ceased to hold up, the endless radicalization feedback loop would slip out of the control of those who started it.
And since among other things, Fox News has decreased in popularity in favor of channels like Newsmax and OAN, that seems to be happening.
As many other people have observed, in the end fascism spares no one. If this crap blows all the way up and Americans end up shooting at each other in the streets, those who started and hoped to profit from this mess will get to die along with the rest of us.
Is this endless...freaking endless parade of "Own the Libs" bullshit worth that to you?
We have millions of people who've willingly turned themselves into biological weapon Kamikazes for the shitty airheaded ideology that has effectively eaten modern American conservatism alive and worn its skin like a coat. That ideology seems to consist of two things "Donald Trump is God and I DO WHAT I WANT!" Or there's the ever-popular bumper sticker "God, Guns and Trump" which really makes me wonder just what the hell god these idiots think they're worshiping.
And for all this, the medical profession collectively is Not Okay right now, people are more than a little overwhelmed and you can't find an ICU bed in pretty much the whole damned South right now, how long before we have refugees of our own? Not from some kind of civil war, but from a pandemic we had mostly under control six months ago, but now we're right back in the shitter because culture war-obsessed idiots made the virus and any measures to protect oneself from it a political issue.
You don't need to arm mobs with Machetes if you can weaponize a virus to do the killing for you.
But, at this point, a majority of the people who are dying are conservatives, the performatively Evangelical, Republicans, the followers of the people raging against masks and vaccines. How the fuck does any of this make any sense?
It only makes sense if you consider that at the height of the virus last year, a previously very much underground current of Eugenicist thought bubbled to the surface, along with the Right's traditional social Darwinism...on full display these days with Fox News requiring vaccinations and such for its employees but trying to discourage their viewers from getting the jab.
It's not just the same old garden-variety hypocritical bullshit anymore.
These fucking people are trying to kill you.
These fucking people are actively trying to kill other people, and they've started with their own followers, simply by making them fear and hate education, reason and science and encouraging conspiracy-minded paranoia and tribalism. Once they did that, they didn't have to do much else, but the programming may have worked too well. When they made "Giving a fuck about your health" a tribal marker...which they actually did a generation and more ago, if you think about it...the stage was set for something to turn into a goddamn disaster.
And, to top it off, the violent rhetoric of last year has not only not stopped, it's gotten much worse. Hell in the last week so-called American Christian Conservatives have been exalting the fucking Taliban. These are the same damned people who, for eight years while Barack Obama was in office, acted as if the words "Radical Islamic Terrorism" could summon devils.
Because of course, it was never really about any of that. They were afraid that a Black President with a funny name somehow meant that they were going to lose something, just by the fact of existence. There was never any threat of this, but the idea that there theoretically might be sent these chucklefucks over the fucking falls with paranoid paroxysms of utter rage for basically no goddamned reason. I mean, yeah, racism and all that, I get it. I get the fact that American conservatism has been dead for years, replaced by a perpetual Opposite Day ideology of anti-liberalism at any cost.
And I get it, we're dealing with unreasonable people who are too used to getting their way and who didn't reason themselves into any of the positions they now hold. So they can't get out of this vicious feedback loop they've gotten themselves into.
I understand that, do you?
Because we, as a society, are going to have to find a way to defuse this bullshit before it blows up or it's going to blow up, because the NRA, right-wing ideology and stupid Hollywood movies have been convincing a whole hell of a lot of these morons that they're Bruce Willis as John McClain and it's perpetually Christmas Eve...but for fuck's sake Bruce Willis isn't even the guy he plays in the movies, he's a fucking actor. Some people legit need to learn to distinguish between fantasy and reality before it gets people killed.
Yeah, one hell of a lot of these dudes would die of a heart attack just getting off the couch, a hell of a lot of those who didn't do that might have serious problems distinguishing between their dicks and their rifles at a critical moment, and a hell of a lot more of them might just shoot the wrong person the second they find themselves in whatever they think looks like combat.
In other words, take the ravening insanity we saw on 1/6 and drop it onto a battlefield.
But a few of them might be effective, and for an insurgency or a terrorist group that's all it takes, really.
It's far more likely that a hell of a lot of these people would kill their own, use the crisis that they started to solve petty grudges, and shit like that. It's a safe bet (and trust me, I know this from experience) that most of these morons have no idea what liberalism really is let alone what liberals actually look like or how people of color or others that they hate actually do conduct themselves, or of the skills that a lot of those people have in the modern world.
Trust me, a lot of the people who compose today's modern conservatism think only in terms of emotional reactions and stereotypes. That makes them very dangerous, but also very stupid and likely, self destructive. (And I think this is why a lot of their leaders want them as biological weapon Kamikazes, rather than say, insurgent fighters.)
But that's wrong too, isn't it?
We as a society, as a civilization, are not supposed to just let people destroy themselves.
Especially not for the fun and profits of a few people who are already fantastically wealthy.
But if we don't stop this silly bullshit that's what we're doing, because one hell of a lot of these fucking people have been convinced that the way to really enjoy themselves is to shoot down their own neighbors.
And the ideology being used to justify this shit is itself contradictory and stupid. Mehadism, like I've been saying. I do what *I* want, even if what one wants to do is kill one's neighbors for no damn reason, or overthrow the government because something something Gazpacho that they heard Mike Lindell or Tucker Carlson say.
The incompetent stupidity seems baked into the whole thing. I would not want to be one of the people who throws these ignorant goons at Army National Guard soldiers, for example, much less one of the goons. The bill for all this is going to come due eventually and it won't be in these people's favor.
But that's not the goddamned point. The point is war is a fucking crime, and civil war all the more so. We as a people should not be tolerating this, we should never have allowed ourselves to even get to this point. That the other side doesn't see this bothers me, because I learned all this stuff as a fucking conservative my own damn self. The only thing I can conclude is that what it all meant when I was coming up and what it all means now are two fundamentally different things.
Mehadism is the glorification of the self, even at the expense of other people's lives.
And if it's not stopped the only thing that might wake people up is when they've done so much damage that the power grids and the technological base collapse and all the sudden the dopamine rush of Fox News or their favorite "Conservative" Facebook group is gone, but by then they'll have all sorts of other reasons to keep fighting.
We as a people need to stop tolerating this bullshit and start holding these motherfuckers accountable before it ever gets to that point. WE have to do this, not the government. The government's response to 1/6 for example has been swift, but ultimately half-ass because the Republican minority keeps trying like hell to undermine it. No, this is a democratic country, WE have to push the government to action, while countering those forces trying to push it to inaction.
Because if we don't, well, the fucking Republicans are making no secret of the fact that they want to kill us, or at least at the minimum try and turn America into another Afghanistan, in the hope that one day Washington D.C. will be like Kabul was last weekend.
If you want to stop that, if you want a better country, you have to start by being a better citizen now.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan
