Death-Cult Romance (A series, Part One.)

History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease. ~Jimmy Carter

I saw this yesterday, a right-wing-owned newspaper literally is romanticizing dying of COVID-19.

I mean, what the fuck?

If they'd gotten vaccinated, they'd both most likely still be alive. This isn't even a question at this point. 

This is the kind of immoral stupidity that results whenever some conservative idiot decides they're so against this or that thing (no matter what it is) that literally anything else is acceptable. 

These people were so hell-bent against abortion that some of them decided a nine-year-old girl getting pregnant was Okay. They're so against the Democratic Party, and equality and social change and this and that...that they've decided everything from fascism to feudalism ought to be on the table as options for a political system...anything but a basic small-L liberal, small-D democratic system where somebody has the option of not voting for them and where things change. 

And their monomania against COVID-19 vaccination, fundamentally rooted in everything from Eugenics to simple-minded "You're not the boss of me" bullshit is basically the same. 

Except there's a real difference here: Like it or not there's historical options for not having abortion, like adoption and stuff. There's reasonably functional systems of government other than Democracy as we know it, as some of the few monarchies that linger today attest. This is different. Science is the only option. The only effective prevention against this virus...against any viruses that can be prevented...is vaccination.

And a hell of a lot of these people would rather die...would rather kill other people by carelessly infecting them...than face that single fact and do the proper thing and get vaccinated. 

They'd rather see people die in the streets than get vaccinated, and they want to burn the country down because our government went ahead and did the right thing and made vaccination available to everybody. They'd be 100% fine with vaccination if each shot cost a million dollars and only elites had access to it in order of their social importance.

On a basic level it's belief in bullshit hierarchy and simple-minded stubborn selfishness. These people waste so much brainpower on this bullshit, daily, on who is more important than who and how to get more important themselves...that it simply doesn't compute to them that a virus doesn't care how much wealth you have or what color your skin is or who you are. Even though, by definition, that's what a virus is. It's a strand of DNA that attaches itself to your cells and makes you sick, all it's trying to do is propagate itself, it doesn't think on that order of magnitude, it simply can't. It can't be bargained with, it can only be protected against, one way.

The virus is biologically incapable of giving a shit about you.

And it really doesn't help that a lot of the real reason for these people's shitty politics is plain old narcissism. 

And the only thing they love more than themselves is death, preferably when it happens to other people.

They can't imagine a world that isn't all about them...even though the real world doesn't give a shit about them and never has before. The virus...as my friend Aaron says it's these people's first crisis...forces them to have to face that. So not only can't they hack it, but they go a little bit nuts trying to process it.

And this absolutely applies to all sorts of other things in life, too. The world is what it is, and it doesn't give a fuck about you.

Steve Bannon, for example, called Biden's speech on the anniversary of 1/6 a "Declaration of War against MAGA" as if MAGA hadn't declared war on the United States a fucking year ago. He's just mad because...as it must...the State is acting to protect itself against destruction, albeit slowly, the same way that the body acts to resist illness or infection.

And frankly, if that's what he wants, Captain Beer Gut better eat his Wheaties, pack a lunch, and be prepared to get his ass kicked quite a few times, or maybe expect to get shot in the face. 'Cause I don't think any of this is going to work out the way he thinks it will. 

Republicans want to allow COVID-19 to spread, they want to go to war against the rest of us, and the absolute last thing they want is for other people to have a say in what goes on in their own country. 

Ask yourself, why do Republicans want to live in a dirty, diseased shithole ripped apart by civil war?

Consider, for example, a less violent situation. 72% of Niger's exports are Gold and Uranium from the Agadez region, mostly to the EU, the mines are operated by French companies centered on the town of Arlit, with mostly French workers. Who do you suppose sees any of that money?

Not the common people of Niger, who mostly live off of herding and subsistence agriculture, afflicted by poverty and widespread illiteracy. I mean, sure, the country's elites get a cut, but in a country that's had seven Constitutions and three periods of military rule, with said elites changing every so often, how cheaply can they be bought? And we're talking about a country with a Per-Capita GDP of about $1,213 per person, here.

This is the future Republicans want for the United States.

Not only that, if they get their way, for most people there won't even be a vote. Actually, they don't even want you to care enough about political matters or your future or your life to want to have a say, unless you're rich enough to give them a bribe or a donation. 

You're supposed to be happy with chest-beating nationalism, hate, rage, shouting Unga Bunga and waving flags...while Republicans pick your pockets and walk away with your future, your children's future, and your freedom.

And all they'll offer you as compensation is that there's somebody more unfree than you are and encourage you to pick on them and deepen their misery.

Like that's going to end well. Eventually, the people on the bottom get tired of being kicked around and stepped on by their self-proclaimed "betters" that's just how shit like that works. That's why there even is a country called the United States of America.

But you can't tell these fucking people anything, because they've never known anything but privilege, and resenting that [they think] they're not privileged enough.

Stuff like that is why little, poor countries like the Central African Republic end up collapsing into civil war and cycles of endless violence.

Again, this is the future "Conservatives" want for America, too.

Because they figure it's more profitable for the 1% at the top, and the 0.1% at the top of that, and they don't mind the idea of living in walled compounds surrounded by armed guards and not being able to go anywhere without their heavily-armed motorcade and retinue. Actually, a lot of these fucking people probably look at that type of shit as status symbols rather than living in a gilded cage of their own creation.

I don't want to live in that kind of country, life in the one we have is hard enough.

If we want things to stop getting worse, we're going to have to come together and make them stop getting worse. That means we're going to have to stop tolerating this bullshit. Unless we refuse to allow these motherfuckers to keep tearing down civilization, they're going to keep doing exactly that.

So get after it. It's really that simple.

You get what you tolerate.

Unless we do what's necessary to get better, the disease of aggression will progress as surely as the disease of Coronavirus.

If you tolerate these people glorifying the death-cult romance, you're going to get a lot more of it.

A party with a narrow vision, a party that is afraid of the future, a party whose leaders are inclined to shoot from the hip, a party that has never been willing to put its investment in human beings who are below them in economic and social status. ~Jimmy Carter, on Republicans.