Bloody Hands, Part One.

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 saw this the other day.

Picture of a small kid with a military-style rifle.

And a Bible verse about "Train up a child..."

As if that shit hasn't been used to justify every kind of abusive fucking bullshit you can imagine and more than a few that you can't until they're seared into your memory by some sickening news story...

In the wake of a goddamned mass shooting in a school.

These people are some seriously sick motherfuckers.

I'm not asking you, I'm telling you, think about that for a second.

Even considering that these fucking people are basically using the idea of individual rights...as they pertain to the ownership of weapons almost exclusively...to beat the idea of our collective rights as citizens to death, to break down civilization one mass murder at a time...do you really think a person who would say such a thing gives a good goddamn about individual rights, really??

Do you think they give a flying fuck about their own kids...much less yours...vs. the idea of holding the power in their hands to end a human life?

I sure don't.

And then they want to tie all this crap up in bullshit religiosity and faux piety because after all, what could possibly be more "Christian" than weapons of war? I've read the Bible, Christ believed in nonviolence and preached a message of peace. Most of his talking about conflict or about causing conflict are in the context of people, often violently, rejecting the Truth as He saw it.

This isn't about self-defense. And for a hell of a lot of these fucking people, in never, ever, was. 

You can just as well defend yourself with a hunting rifle, a pistol, a shotgun...or your bare hands or a dull knife or a goddamned cast iron frying pan...and any of those would be more than a valid fucking strategy, all the more so if military-grade weapons weren't being sold at stupendous profits to any unhinged fanatics that happened along by utterly amoral gun companies.

And trust me, they want things to come all the way unglued, because they think they'll make even more money...as if money is worth a damn without the civilization that gives it value. And by the way that's exactly what any kind of nut that's advocating for a return to the "Gold Standard" is talking about. That, and forcing crushing poverty on any people who cannot afford to hoard kilos of gold bars right out the gate.

Imagine These Fucking People's ideal world.

Constant, senseless violence, crushing poverty, ready access to weapons for anybody who can scrape up the money to buy one...or sneak up on and kill some armed person...do you really think in these people's ideal world that the police or society would give a shit about the common people murdering each other in the streets? 

No, the cops would stand around and eat donuts and not do a damn thing...until the wrong person stepped "out of line" (as if such a term would have any real meaning in such a world) or somebody threatened a rich person. 

And then it's on like Donkey Kong.

But wait, there's more! And yes, it can and will get worse!

Add endless bigotry and senseless religious tripe to justify it, too. A world where people use the words "Religious Liberty" to further ideas that haven't one goddamned thing to do with either religion or liberty as any civilized person would define either.

And it's all for some nebulous ideal of authoritarianism that most of these people don't even have the intelligence or the understanding or even the vocabulary to even describe.

But it basically boils down to, they want some tin-pot local warlord to kill people they don't like, and then tell them what to do, all in very demonstrative fashion while talking bad about everybody but them.

And somehow these fools all imagine themselves as the protagonists of this world, like life is an MMO where everything automatically centers on their character. In literature, this would be referred to as a dystopia...and you probably couldn't get anybody to publish anything that 'over the top.' But this kind of stuff is what actual people think. Stupid people, maybe, but still people.

And there's something very dysfunctional about a society that produces this kind of garbage.

You know, we have words for countries that meet this description...like Somalia or the Taliban's Afghanistan which are dominated by [what should be mutually exclusive ideas like] crime and radical Islam and likely soon Putin's newly re-Sovietized Russia which seems to be dominated by a Russian Orthodox-themed Christian-Jihadism. We call them "Failed States."

And yes, modern American "Conservatives" absolutely think what the Russians are doing in Ukraine is some kind of wonderful ideal...and that the Ukrainians, themselves actually a moderately conservative, religious people...are some kind of epitome of Leftist "Evil and sexual excess" because they have the guts to defend themselves at all, much less to defend themselves effectively.

Why? Because that is simply how modern "Conservatives" see anybody who wants to defend democracy or practice their own culture or preserve their own existence in some way besides cowering submission to the Republican Gods. It's literally the same set of slurs these assholes use against everybody from Black people to Jews to 'liberals' to rival conservative factions. 

Because they're small, petty, racist assholes who think they should get to decide when and how another person even lives, much less conducts relationships, has an orgasm or even works. These fucking people are all basically pissant totalitarians who all think they're going to get to be Pol Pot some day.

And if you don't think these motherfuckers will soon resort to eliminationist warfare against basically the entire rest of the whole damn world, you're not paying attention. Outside of whatever things they "like" in any given moment it's just the Killing Fields, for everybody.

I grew up with the vision of Ronald Reagan's "Shining City On A Hill" firmly implanted in my brain. And compared and contrasted that, right or wrong, with nightly news images from places like Communist-dominated Afghanistan. 

These fucking people think of Afghanistan...rather than 1980's America...as their vision of the "Conservative" or "Republican" ideal.

As if the word "Republic" itself doesn't connote something greater than rule by petty warlords and mean the literal exact opposite of this dumb ass idea of Kingship by Donald Trump or vassalhood by dictators in thrall to a New Communist Revolution that is all but a reverse version of the old one.

I don't know about you...but I don't want to live in these people's fucked up vision of the world.

But to prevent it, you have to do something about it, and you have to be prepared to defend yourself either way. That's the only thing they even understand.

I've often followed others in saying that if you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

But some people don't just not understand what citizenship means...they are violently rejecting the concept in favor of a society where the cruelty is the point. And then these fucking people have the balls to think they're going to get to wash their bloody hands clean with the whitening bleach of religion?

Fuck that, and I say that as somebody who's seen some of the dark and dangerous places in the world.

We're going to have to reckon with that somehow, and deal with them.

The longer we as a people put up with this bullshit, the worse it's going to get.

Слава Україна!

My hands are tied
For all I've seen has changed my mind
But still the wars go on as the years go by
With no love of God or human rights
'Cause all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars

~Guns-N-Roses, Civil War