Beast Of War (Left Behind Is A Lie II, Two.)

We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley

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It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

I saw this last night. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev talking absolute nonsense about what he thinks will happen in 2023...to which Elon Musk replies "Epic Thread!"

I couldn't help but notice that Dmitry's demented musings sound like world-building for the kind of after-1AM borderline-porn movies that Showtime used to run back in the 1990's; All featuring some actress-model with big boobs and a stereotypical unshaven male character actor sidekick and a wildly improbable plot.

I'm starting to wonder if Muskrat is a little confused about which country he lives in, and about the fact that civil wars kill a hell of a lot of innocent people. (Also, there's the inconvenient fact that Russia is closer to a civil war than America is at this point, by an order of magnitude.)

Except that, I'm becoming firmly convinced that privileged, rich white people like Elon Musk, Peter Theil and random Q-Anon nuts don't want to live in America. They're bored, they seem to think it'd be fun living in a dystopian hellscape. 

Of course, they've not the first idea how to survive in such a thing. 

And they want to quit when it doesn't give them attention and money.

I think they think that life will somehow remain "normal" for them, that the "Zombie Apocalypse" or whatever will somehow only take place outside of their gated community.

Too many of these people internalized the Evangelical End Times Movement's basic belief that they'll get to go to heaven without dying and then they can sit up there in heaven and watch the rest of us suffer and die and go to hell for no greater purpose than their own entertainment.

Heaven isn't heaven if everybody gets to go. America isn't America if LGBT people get any. The Ukrainians have to be "sacrificed" to the Red neo-Soviet Hordes in order to preserve the "Liberal" global order. (As if the Neo-Soviet Hordes would stop there.)

Also I've noticed not very many of these motherfuckers want to go where there's an actual war going on. Their idea of action, adventure and the fight for freedom seems to stop at the idea that they might be cold or get dirty, God forbid and of these too-comfortable chickenshits would have to go and fight! 

And the post about the Q-Anon lady clipped above suggests something I've thought for a long time; For a lot of these fucking people, the conspiracy theories and the performative right-wing bullshit are just that...bullshit. They don't want to live that way themselves, if they can make others have to live like that for their own entertainment...cool...but they still want to have their bullshit jobs, comfortable lives, Social Security, etc.

They just don't want you or me to have any.

And they'll sacrifice anything and anyone else in order to keep their own levels of comfort and convenience and not having to so much as look at anything Other inside their Bubble.

Seriously if anybody ever tries to enforce a Mark Of The Beast type situation on the rest of the world it'll be these sons of bitches, because it'd take that level of totalitarianism to keep others out of their "perfect" little world.

Kind of interesting how their eschatology is almost entirely political, isn't it?

They want to talk up a bunch of murderous bullshit, ethnic cleansing, pogroms against LGBT people, political "Purifications" and shit...they just want somebody else to do the killing for them so they don't have to get their lily-white hands dirty. And then they'll comfortably, conveniently, get somebody to dispose of those people too!

And it'll keep going until it's basically four rich old white guys and Mary from Accounting sitting on top of a giant pile of money...and then they start fighting among themselves, next.

Oh, wait, somebody might want to explain to Chaya Raichik that not a goddamned one of the White Supremacists she keeps dry-humping...likely including Tucker Carlson himself...actually thinks she's "White."

And here's some idiotic Russian priest, preaching that a "Warrior's death is the best of all deaths." I notice he's not strapping up and volunteering. Fuck him.

Yet increasingly, it seems like the American Right sees Russia as their prototype, as something they think they want to be.

Well maybe it's just me, but I was taught a long time ago that there's nothing "Conservative" in finding "meaning" in other people's deaths. Life is hard enough without that kind of shit. I was raised with the Reaganite ideal of "Peace Through Strength." 

I was taught that war is a terrible thing, and something to be avoided except in self-defense or the defense of another. Yes, that was once defined as a conservative value.

But the modern Right seems best defined by an ideal of "War Through Weakness" and a desire to live vicariously through the cruelty of others they deem as being on the same ideological "side" whether they actually are or not. Common enemies are far more important than common values.

These fucking people would rather all die in a nuclear war, or subject themselves to tyrants, than see Black people or LGBT people have equality. They'd rather feed us all to the Beast Of War than have White Male Patriarchy diminished even a tiny bit.

And they're losing, so they're looking to burn everything down, period.

That's not much to build a civilization on, if you ask me. They all want to die because they think it will hurt you worse sure as hell doesn't make any sense to me.

And when the task of the moment is done with, these fucking people will have knives out for each other. They aren't even going to wait until they've dealt with all the rest of us. Just look at the looming struggle for Republican leadership in the House.

I'm warning you, when they think the time is right for the "Purge" the very first thing these people are going to do is go after their own who they find impure or lacking somehow. Russia looks to be very close to descending into that sort of genocidal mayhem against itself. I think Medvedev's fantasy about mass European fratricide is not much more than projection. 

I worry that Republicans will follow, if such is the case.

And I don't know who needs to hear this, but I'm telling you right now, as a former Christian, former conservative, and US Air Force veteran, that no, neither we nor the rest of the world have to subscribe to these fucking people's bloody-minded view of life, religion, social Darwinism and every other goddamned thing. 

But here's the thing. We don't have to put up with them acting the fuck like this either.

It's worth noting that these assholes literally equate a mostly-peaceful world with liberal values with the goddamned Antichrist. Yet at the same time, they are the first goddamned people to bow down before damned near any aspiring Antichrist World-Emperor potentate that comes down the road, no matter how farcical.

I can't make this make any sense. All I know is I'm tired of it. 

I, being a conservative, was all-in on that peaceful world, and served to do my part to keep it that way.

So yeah, I'm tired of this.

The question is, why aren't you?

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and send rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. ~Matthew 5:43-48

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No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

This post is a continuation of this series.