Polishing the Catturd (Election 2022, Seven.)

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom Of Fear (2004)

I wasn't going to write anything today, but two things have happened so far this weekend that I feel like I need to say something about.

#1 The Muskrat takeover of Twitter is complete, and it is of course, scumbag central. Well, slightly more than it usually is anyway. I rather suspect that since Twitter is losing a lot of users over this, content moderation will have to become less confusing and sporadic than it's been (for months) or Musk and more importantly his shareholders gonna get spanked on a deal where it already looks like he paid way more for the platform than it was worth.

#2 Paul Pelosi got assaulted with a hammer by some mentally-ill MAGA nut, and ended up having brain surgery because of a skull fracture. It very much looks like this was a particularly ill-considered assassination attempt against the Speaker herself.

I mean, shit, this situation even managed to pry some apparently genuine sympathy out of Ted Cruz and a lot of the other Republicans I thought incapable of it.

But, apparently the "Conservatives" think this is hilarious. 

If you need anymore proof that these fucking people think this shit is nothing more than a big game and have bottomless contempt and hatred for other people...including people they never met, who never did anything to them personally or anything that affected them negatively at all in the world...I don't know what to tell you.

Also #3 At least as of yesterday Elon Musk was apparently going out of his way to be performatively solicitous to...Trailer Park Loser Weirdo Florida Man types...on a personal level.

Imagine having all that money and status and thinking some Florida trailer park nut who goes by "Cat Turd" online even deserves the time of day from you.

For comparison I'm a disabled veteran who works part-time and just scrapes by and I blocked this "Cat Turd" idiot years ago...without ever having interacted with them. But of course the vicissitudes of Cheap Internet Fame means this asshole pops up in my feed anyway.

Needless to say Twitter is bleeding off users who don't want to deal with this shit, and has already had advertisers including GM 'temporarily' suspend advertising...and I can't really blame anybody for that.

This shit gets tedious on a normal day.

And I rather suspect I'll be making even more use of the "Block" button because it'll get worse that way.

But, on a societal level, if you think ignoring this kind of shit will make it go away, you're nuts. Anti-liberalism, Antisemitism, LGBT-phobia and Racism are just the canaries in the coal mine.

We face the very real-and very likely-possibility that no matter what the results of the election are, the Right is going to be dissatisfied with the results and start shooting at people...if they don't resort to political violence first...that is. And it's thus far, a concern of Homeland Security that this is exactly what will happen.

Let these assholes have what they want and they'll get to killing each other, too.

I don't give a damn. Show up and vote and tell these sons of bitches to go fuck themselves anyway.

"Civil War" is these assholes default answer to everything these days, they want to kill Americans, and I suspect as soon as these bitches get enough liquid or otherwise-chemical courage in them they're going to try something stupid no matter what happens.

The fight is here, online and IRL, and I think people like Muskrat going to be surprised when they end up being targets too.

Because I guarantee you, nothing and no one is going to be "good enough" for These Fucking People. They'll turn on everybody, and performatively so, because the cruelty is the point.

And when "The Cruelty Is The Point" and you want to cede control to people like that? What you end up with if that happens, very quickly is not a civilization.

The fight isn't just here online, it isn't just in Ukraine. It's out there, in your neighborhood, it's out there in "The World" not just on some far-away battlefield you can put out of your mind. And the less people stand up politically or in social terms the more likely they're going to have to stand up kinetically. This is the lesson of the war in Ukraine. For 20 years people thought if they were just nice to Putin or ignored him, he'd go away. Dude simply took that as license to do what he really wanted to do.

It's not just that the Right wanted Trump Forever and thought they were going to get it, or that the Russians thought they'd conquer Ukraine in three days that needs to be noted. 

It's that Trump is out of power and seething in Florida and has the total power he desired only over the Republican Party (and only because they gave it to him.) 

It's that the Ukrainians have turned Putin's "Pack a dress uniform for the victory parade" campaign into a bloody 8-month grind of a war that stands a real good chance of destroying Russia.

And they were doing that right from the start, even before Western aid kicked into high gear.

And it's that by adopting the mentality of Putinism, the "Conservatives" have somehow managed to adopt...and to adapt for their purposes...the worst traits of both far-Left Communism and far-Right Fascism with a healthy side of "Christian" homophobia and misogyny plus Southern "honor culture" and racism.

But ya know, I think the situation shows that decent people can get results when they fight back.

I understand that some people feel the need to leave certain spaces, oh yes, I do.

But "America is not at war, the Marine Corps is at war, America is at the mall" is not an option anymore, and some people are clearly still needing to internalize that.

The enemy is stupid, but they count on us being lazy.

The fight is here, it's now, and going somewhere else only delays you being engaged since the problem is global. But, all we have to do to win is get off our asses and do something about it.

Six 

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

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