Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism. ~Thomas SowellWut?
Apparently Kanye West is meeting with Vladimir Putin.
I mean, what? Was it Dennis Rodman's day off or something?
What's next, Patrick from SpongeBob held up as a conservative intellectual?
I'm curious, how does one go from in 2005 saying that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" to sitting down with and performing for Vladimir Motherfucking Putin AKA the right-wing's literal Great White Hope in 2022?
And let's get real here, how the fuck did that even happen? I can remember when people would have looked at the words "Vladimir Putin, KGB Agent" like the words themselves could conjure up demons...and perhaps in those same people's minds 30 years ago they could have. I sat through enough screeds about Communism and fearful rants about KGB spies back in the day...and the KGB was the Sword and Shield of the Party...that I wonder how none of this matters to modern "Conservatives."
But now? A pact with the Devil is apparently no big deal if it gives them bonus Culture War points or lets them feel like they "Owned the Libs" for ten seconds. Never mind the potential consequences later, apparently.
How did Kanye go from a successful career as a rapper...along with a less profitable but absolutely no less popular-among-those-people second 15 minutes of fame as a Gospel musician (And I'm serious, in another era that would have been a huge thing itself, he was well on his way to reinventing himself yet again on religiosity alone) to...this? Effectively, he's trying to Blackwash the White-ocracy...and it's not working, but he's still working away at it.
Dude has replaced religiosity with Ridiculosity and he's the only one who doesn't know it.
I mean, I get that some of these fucking people think nobody will notice the authoritarianism and repression if you keep them busy singing songs about Jesus. But Kanye, of all people, should have fucking known that.
IF he is or ever was the person he says he is, anyway.
But that's a big "If."
I thought after the debacle that ensued from him wearing a MAGA hat and staging a crank run for President (apparently aimed as a spoiler to split the Black vote, no less and despite the fact that he'd been a sometime-Trump critic previously) Kanye had decided he was going to stay out of politics?
Eh, I guess not.
Some people can't resist the urge to talk simply because they have the capability to talk. And Kanye is
definitely one of those people.
But he's not the only one.
Conservatism is currently full of those people. Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, anybody named Trump, and of course Ye West (I guess that's what he goes by now.) So yeah, I'm pretty damned sure people like Thomas Sowell wouldn't recognize what conservatism has become...and for the record Sowell was on the "Never Trump" side of the equation in 2016 and as far as I know, still is.
Thing is, agree or disagree with Thomas Sowell...and I disagreed with him plenty, even as a conservative...he had ideas and he stuck by them. There was, in fact, an understandable framework to his beliefs, his libertarian economics and social conservatism, and he did, in fact, turn out to be right about some things.
I was already on my way out of conservatism (though I didn't know it yet at the time) but when I saw that Sowell opposed the Iraq War my initial reaction was "Well, when they've lost that fucking guy..." being that I, myself, was a conservative who was against the war...and against war in general (and what happened to my military friends over there only made me more so) I got that. His reasoning was a little different than mine, but back in the day, that was OK.
He had some things I could identify as ideas. He believed in them. You could usually tell, back in the day, when people were just mailing it in.
Some of them were right, a lot of them were wrong, bit there was consistency to them. You could reasonably well expect that if he was going to say dumb shit, it was you that thought it was dumb shit and he could defend his position logically if questioned.
Nowadays the core ideal of "Conservatism" is basically a combination of two things, those things being "Fuck You" and "The Dog Ate My Homework." It's all about bullshitting your way through your day and making it up as you go along. And these people aren't even smart enough to do that very well.
Much of Thomas Sowell's various discourse was about what he saw as the difference between ideas and knowledge. I'm just....not even sure what the hell Lauren Boebert even thinks she means when she says the words "Conservative ideas"
I know what those words mean, but to me those words also mean that people would have looked at an airhead like Blowbert as a congressional candidate and been like "Nope."
She's basically a cuter, more belligerent, younger Sarah Palin with more of a gun fetish and Palin absolutely was the straw that broke the camel's back as far as me being a Republican. Right or wrong, I still think she got the VP nomination because some old Republican thought Republican men would vote for her because they wanted to bone her...and whoever thought that wasn't wrong plus her blatant ignorant Pentecostalism also fired up a sector of the religious nuts that usually doesn't bother to vote or do so coherently.
And trust me, if what Madison Cawthorn is saying here counts as Conservative thought these days, I'm pretty sure I'm in the wrong business and my
Ferret...who is currently snoring away curled up in his hammock...has a bright future ahead as an economist or perhaps a New York Times columnist and his big idea lately is trying to steal my Grinch pajamas so he can sleep on them. What's worse is he wouldn't even have to get out of bed to sound more intelligent than Madison, here. Buddha is a Cinnamon-colored Ferret, so he's
already an asshole by nature, making the upgrade to
Republican won't be difficult...
It's not so much even that I don't understand these people, who used to be my people, anymore. It's that when it comes to understanding this shit, there's no "there" there. There isn't anything to understand, you can't really reason with unreasonable people, there's no logic to their argument or thought process because at best, they didn't think of it themselves and they've been told for decades now that if they believe it hard enough and fill themselves up on enough hate and rage they'll eventually get what they want...and the people who convinced them of this were purposefully vague on what that was, letting them fill in the blanks themselves, and then keeping them watching and listening to the Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson types to make sure that what they "wanted" was suitably angry and filled with thoughts of domination and violence.
And that was before Trump added himself to the equation and all these MAGA freak-show nut jobs weaseled their way into Congress.
Seven years ago, it was only outliers like me who thought that our political differences in America were going to result in violence up to and including Civil War. Now, such is more or less treated as gospel among Republicans...who are eager for it...and increasingly expected by everybody else, who are collectively not so eager, but expect these fools are going to try something stupid.
But with Republicans embracing every bit of insanity they can find from Antivaxxer woo to far-right politics and increasingly insane religious bullshit...and the problem is, the level of insanity keeps increasing...it's not hard to find oneself drummed out of "Conservatism" and get pushed over to the other side anyway. If it's war these people want, numerically they're not doing themselves any favors.
Trouble is, society has become too accepting of this horse shit. And note I say this as somebody who's benefitted from it and once was that guy, but the "Left" (mostly meaning the squishy Democratic majority in this country, which essentially runs the gamut from "Hard-Right but Anti-Trump" like Tea Party Joe Walsh all the way to "Hard Left" like Noam Chomsky) is far too eager to say "Come on over to our side, we have cookies."
Trust me, when your inbox has been oozing green acidic drool for a month, that sounds pretty good.
And the fanatics on the Right come at you so hard with the crazy bullshit, and are so fucking relentless about it, that most people accept. Like I did.
There is, literally, zero incentive for anybody with a brain in their head to stay and fight to define what a Conservative Idea even means...so no one does and that gets left to toilet scum like Lauren Blowbert and Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene and ten thousand worse people we never hear about.
And everything, not least what These Fucking People think of as "ideas" has gotten worse as a result. Not only that, it will get worse still.
Think I'm wrong?
I'm not claiming to be an oracle here, but I think we'd better get on to regulating all this Cryptocurrency and other unregulated digital capitalism before too long, before that shit becomes another corrupting strain on our politics.
But more to the point we need to stop normalizing scamming and stupidity and Capitalism can go fuck itself on that one. If you want to have a civilization, it's going to have to, anyway.
We need to take the shitty consistency away from people like Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin and give it back to people like Tea Party Joe Walsh and Thomas Sowell, and somebody give Ted Cruz his spine back and we can throw him in too so we can at least all agree we hate that shithead.
We sure as fuck need to do something, because the alternative is mob rule led by conspiracy theorists and vapid morons while greedy sociopaths walk away with your shit...and if you're taking financial advice from people like Reese Witherspoon you're a damned moron and I'm not afraid to say so...while the government and the military and whatever intelligent or sane people can get away are holed up in safe zones like it's World War Z out there or something.
And trust me, that plan doesn't work out too well for most of those who end up left behind for one reason or another.
We, as a people, need to stop putting up with this silly bullshit.
You can't read the Death-cult Romance if you're illiterate, nor understand it if you're this fucking dumb.
And that's where this is headed if it goes on long enough.
Somebody has to put their foot down and say "Enough." This isn't Jumanji. The only way to win this game is to get people to stop playing it.
I volunteer as tribute.
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
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