Left Behind Is, And Always Was A Lie (Part II, Eighteen.)

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone

Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone
All in all, it's just another brick in the wall
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave them kids alone

Hey, teacher, leave us kids alone
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall.

~Pink Floyd, Another Brick In The Wall

When I got up this morning (Late because I've been sick and I think I hit the worst of it last night) and logged on, this was the first thing I saw.

Bunch of fuckheads flipping out because Pink Floyd had "Gone Woke" with their new av commemorating 50 years since the Dark Side Of The Moon album dropped.

(Once upon a time, I owned this CD.)

<---Original Album cover (From 1973) for your consideration.

Goddamn, but I'm really getting tired of performative extremism and stupid people.

It just goes on and on, none of these motherfuckers will ever be happy with anything. Why? Because that's what being a goddamn reactionary fanatic for its own sake even is. Without something to be mad about, what the hell purpose do these fools even have in life?

Confront their issues? Find ways to be happy? Get real jobs? How the fuck are rich "Conservative" elites supposed to be grifting off of that? 

Where the fuck you been, Foley?

'Cause if you think somebody like Lauren Witzke having to get a real job is what's going on here, you have another thing coming.

As somebody pointed out to me on Twitter earlier, prosperity (or presumably a stable society) isn't these people's goal, lying and stealing is and they think they're being pretty clever about it. Ultimately, it's kind of problematic for them that this stuff only seems to work on a certain kind of person, even though there's a lot of those people.

They've been clever enough so, that if they ever get what they think they want the law of unintended consequences is going to eat these fucking people's ass for lunch. 

Thing what gets me is...especially since I live in Northern Michigan and see it every day...it's the common working-poor Republicans who pay for a big percentage of their groceries with a Bridge Card who just might be the ones what end up paying the price for American "Conservatism" having blown out its own brains and fallen back on mythology that anybody who lives here could have told you was utter horseshit 40 years ago.

(Likewise, in my experience this generalizes to many, if not most other places at least at the major urban metro or state levels. Yeah, there's places where there's lots of poor POC but there's more white people, period, so there's absolutely going to be more poor white folks. If you can look at population figures and do honest math, you already know this.)

Funny enough, the only conservative that I've ever seen call this out was JD Vance, in his book Hillbilly Elegy. All the "Welfare Queens" are White.

A massive majority of the assorted liberals around here and certainly most of the LGBT folk or People of Color (and there's a lot more than you might think) guess what? For the most part, they either got enough education, enough hustle or enough social networking for the most part that...unless they have a bunch of kids...they have good jobs and generally don't need (or qualify for) any form of public assistance.

(I don't know how the hell people don't see this, except that they do not want to.)

But modern "Conservatives" be they atheistic Randian Libertarians or various forms of Christian Dominionist rage monkeys literally don't believe government has any responsibility towards its citizens, rather they believe that government exists to promote their Ideology and shitty social beliefs.

So, honestly, they don't really give a shit if they end up starving out their own damned people to prove some kind of bullshit "point."

And the fact that one hell of a lot of the "Conservative" voters would gladly starve to death to "Own The Libs" is what makes this shit potentially really fucking tragic.

Burning heretics, shouting "Unga Bunga" while dancing around the fire, and assorted witch hunts are literally the only things that matter to them. I mean, fuck, medieval peasantry is probably a step up from where these people would have us go in their zeal for "Purity."

Trouble with blasting ourselves all the way back to the Caveman days is, how the fuck does that work when so many people have absolutely zero survival instincts?

And don't tell me you have any survival instincts if you're a conservative and you seriously think anybody named Bin Laden is authoritative for any reason whatever. One of these things is simply not like the other one, period. These fucking people were funding radical Islam before a majority of Americans were even aware of that shit. Osama was far from the only one mixed up in all that. 

His father, for example, figured out he could do way more 'for Allah' with a business suit and a pen than with a Kalashnikov and scruffy BDU's. Osama was never going to inherit anything, anyway...which was exactly why he pretty much became an adventurer for "the cause" in Afghanistan. And then they kicked him out for saying the quiet parts from the loudspeaker on the minaret.

And, as with so much else, it's funny how the root of that problem, too, ends up being rich and powerful people, isn't it?

And when the forces of civilization and our global small-L, small-D liberal democratic order punch back...as they surely must simply to preserve themselves and prevent things from getting too out of hand (See Also, Ukraine, Invasion Of) well then all these goddamned nuts are going to be very likely to whip themselves up into some kind of genocidal fervor because they think Jesus is coming.

I did peacekeeping duty in the military, it sucks. Were these people to get their way, that's how the rest of us would have to live...just to live.

Imagine having to spend all day, every day, forever...trying to keep genocidal religious fanatics from killing you and everyone else. And they figure they can outlast the rest of us. For what? I don't know, at this point. There's no endgame here, the cruelty really is the point.

Never fucking mind that they booted Jesus Christ out of His own religion like, four or five years ago and started replacing Him with conspiracy theories.

Because guess what? As shitty as it has often historically been, there's absolutely no way that Christianity (or, for that matter, any mainstream form of Islam or Judaism) would enable these fucking people to be the monsters they wanna be.

If they really, really believe that the End Times are near, that Jesus is coming, they're picking the wrong side and they're doing it with malice aforethought.

I used to be a member of the End Times Prophecy Movement. I've read Revelation many times.

These Fucking People would rather make common cause with Falun Gong and Radical Islam than believe in their own supposed Savior and the black-and-white, chapter-and-verse text of Revelation they've spent decades quoting at the rest of us.

And I guarantee you, when M1A1 Abrams vs. Russian Orc, with or without the AK-47, and/or American Wannabe-Barbarian with an AR-15 reaches its natural conclusion is not when things will start to improve...but exactly when these fucking fanatics who performatively can't or won't read a fucking calendar or their own holy books are going to go all out trying to blow the guts out of civilization and society.

'Cause if you actually read between the lines on all their bullshit, these people literally believe the "End Times" is "When the world, as a whole, adopts liberal values."

So, when they get slapped down, that's how they'll interpret things and that's when they'll really become the suicide bombers shouting Ayn Rand Akbar.

(Never mind that Ayn Rand was on Medicare and Social Security when she died.)

Why? Because they think if things get bad enough...they'll all get whisked off to some gold-plated right-wing Heaven or some kind of space station or some shit...from where they can watch the rest of us suffer and die.

No, it doesn't make any sense. There's no internal logic. Trust me, it just gets worse.

And, were we to pull together and manage not to die, that's when they find some way to destroy the world, and then call themselves blessed for being the "Survivors." 

Which will, I suppose, work great until some nut that worships scarcity destroys most of their goddamn food supply, because reasons.

When there is no Conquering Christ to Shish-Kabob the rest of us for their enjoyment, these fucking nuts will try and make their own End Times, because the truth is it's cruelty and entropy that they worship. 

Left Behind is, and always was, a lie.

But it's the idea of other people being left behind that they actually worship.

Heaven isn't Heaven if everybody gets to go there.

The carpenter and itinerant Rabbi from Nazareth could not be reached for comment.

Don't be one of these fucking people, it's not actually that hard.

Seventeen

Слава Україна!

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

...

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Generation Of Swine.