When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
~Leviticus 19:33-34
A rented bus full of undocumented migrants was sent from Texas to Washington DC and arrived today. I think we found that "Human trafficking" that Republicans are always going on about.
You know, I get that Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis both either have problems or want to be President but I don't understand how the fuck this is legal, or why it would be tolerated even...maybe especially...in a place like Texas.
It's not even so much that "Conservatives" have abandoned all of their own values and gleefully set that shit on fire and left it in the middle of the road to burn. It's that...well, to be honest even if you assume all of it was a lie and in bad faith, a lot of this stuff lately directly contradicts the lies they've historically told themselves so they could feel good about it even while they were being assholes.
You know, I don't like it...and I
do have more understanding of this stuff than some people do...but when war crimes happen in places like Afghanistan, Iraq or Ukraine, I can at least
see how this stuff could happen.
It's horrible, but once you understand something like "Russia is regressing to being the Soviet Union again while being led by a mentally ill narcissist who wants to fight a war against the rest of the world" I can at least mentally get it.
War crimes in the US Culture War...which isn't even a shooting war? Forced relocations as if Texas was the Soviet Union under Stalin? I mean, are you fucking kidding me with this bullshit?
That, not so much, I don't get that, and I don't want to. Least of all in a "Conservative" state like Texas where you'd think they would be aware of and
conscious of the fact that such comparisons could be made. That is,
if they ever believed anything they said they did. After all, Greg Abbott was the Attorney General of Texas who prosecuted Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints cult for human trafficking and sexual abuse.
Again, you'd think stuff like that might matter. But of course that's not the world we live in anymore.
We've reached the point where "Conservatives" have become the level of fanatics that will gladly outdo the damn Devil when it comes to evil deeds...not so much consciously but because they're literally hell-bent on "No, NO, it HAS to be THIS WAY!" And they refuse to even think about what anybody else might actually be doing, need or want. The road to hell is paved with the bones of people who always thought "Me, Me, Me!"
And the people who think that...the fascists, the selfish rich fucks and the shitty little haters, they're all looking at Putin's Neo-Soviet Russia with love in their eyes because that's what they think they want to be.
In effect, Communist totalitarianism without the social welfare system is exactly the future that "Conservatives" have decided that they want. I don't know how these motherfuckers think they're ever going to maintain that constant thrill of victory that Orwell wrote about, that future of a boot stomping on a human face forever, without turning on each other, though.
And that's exactly what these endless circles within circles of paranoid conspiracy theory will eventually cause. Sooner or later Republicans are going to have to start throwing each other under the bus over this Q-Anon shit, since nobody else seems to be cooperating. And that too, is all about glorification of the Self, because conspiracy theory is all about making the conspiracy theorist feel important. We cannot maintain a civilization with everybody thinking "Me, me, me!"
And nihilistic sulking fury or refusing to participate when you don't get exactly what you want
isn't the answer, Progressives.
Republicans are committing treason and war crimes in plain view...and there isn't even a war here yet. Do you think that's going to get any better if We The People stupidly hand power back to them?
We're dealing with people who don't even see that they're using science and technology...computers and smart phones...to advocate for the destruction of science and technology and the people who create such things.
That and the constant "Me me me" shit and the people who act like any half-baked idea they come up with is some kind of novel concept so they're special is exactly what I'm talking about when I say "Conspiracy-theory driven techno-Gnosticism" There seems to be a kind of theological primitivism that has taken over some people's minds...almost as if the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Reformation and hell, the Crusades and the later Middle Ages never even happened.
Some people seem to long to bow down before some all-consuming Power...and then they somehow think that it will grant their selfish desires rather than simply consuming them, too.
And far too many people just stand by and let this shit happen.
Where would we all be right now, if the Ukrainians had half-assed their war like the British and US governments have half-assed multiple crises and refused to hold numerous bad actors accountable?
Would a Ukraine, say, that had abandoned Kyiv and relocated its government to Lviv or Odessa still be tying down the entire Russian Army? Even with all the help they're getting? Or would they simply have been bypassed, Belarus annexed and Russian armies getting the shit kicked out of them in Poland and the Baltics instead while the US...now having no choice but to fight...falls back on the same kind of stupid "Limited War" ideas that brought us disaster in Vietnam?
And don't think the fascists wouldn't be exploiting that...and claiming they could and would do better, even if they agree with Putin I suspect they'd find the opportunity for more death and destruction too good to pass up.
But instead, they're holding on and apparently Ukrainian Navy shore-based missile batteries have either severely damaged or sunk a Russian cruiser. The
Moskva, the same one that bombarded Snake Island in the famous "Russian Warship, go fuck yourself" incident.
And while Ukrainians fight Russia with all the ferocity of Kratos taking on the gods, and Belarusian and even Russian opposition people risk their asses trying to get the truth out and resist, Americans continually hem and haw and waffle back and forth on whether or not to fight our own fascist problem or hold our own bad actors accountable because everybody desperately wants to pretend things are "Normal."
Bitch, Russia is hell-bent on provoking a confrontation with the rest of the world, we could be staring down the barrel of World War III here, or even a potential apocalypse, and you want normal? That ship got blown up in the Black Sea awhile ago!
And while three quarters of Americans argue over what to do about it, or even to do anything at all, Republicans are doing the type of shit that we'd all be condemning as war crimes if it happened in Ukraine right now.
This is a problem, and we're goddamned well going to have to do something about it. If the government won't do it, then it falls to the People to do it. You know how it is, all too often Democrats have to be pushed to do anything.
So, push. It's not that hard, at least Democrats can be made to do the right thing.
Republicans, not so much.
Fellow serpents, stop hissing the truth in someone's ear and shout it in the fucking streets, or Ukraine's present could damned well be our future, too.
It'll get harder, then.
Whether one draws one's certainties from religion or science, in order for one to push back against Power one must have one's feet set on a hard floor of Truth, and one must have the freedom to build and to have and to maintain that foundation. This can only exist in the context of a democratic, pluralistic society. Now I don't give a damn if the truth one uses for this is Darwin's theory of Evolution or that God created the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. People have to have this, and conspiracy theories, false doctrines, junk science, quack medicine and religious extremism are nothing more than shades of the same effort by forces of Greed and Power to undermine Truth on a conceptual level.
Слава Україна!
For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. ~Matthew 24:27
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