DEBATE ME!! (Rabbit Hole, One.)

"Life is sacred"? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death! Has been for thousands of years! Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians; all taking turns killing each other because God told 'em it was a good idea. The sword of god, the blood of the lamb, 'vengeance is mine'; millions of dead motherfuckers. Millions of dead motherfuckers, all because they gave the wrong answer to The God Question: "Do you believe in God?" "No." BAM! Dead. "Do you believe in God?" "Yes." "...Do you believe in my God?" "No." BAM! Dead. "My God has a bigger dick than your God!" ~George Carlin

...

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

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The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angkar are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive. ~Dith Pran, The Killing Fields

I've been noticing something lately, and it's really starting to bother me.

It boils down to, in order to be a "Conservative" in good standing these days, you can't just be an anti-government nut, Antisemitic, an antivaxxer, a conspiracy theorist, a cryptocurrency shill, cynical to the point of sociopathy, a fanatic, fascist, gun nut, insane, an LGBT-hater, narcissistic, Q-Anon, a racist, a religious nut, a Russia Stan, a self-important buffoon, a Trump Supporter, a Ukraine-hater, a Wannabe Putinist Neo-Commie, or a yahoo who mistakes confirmation bias for intelligence.

You have to buy the whole package, or at least a majority of it with clear stated intent to pick up the rest as you go.

And you cannot object to anything along any of these lines that other "Conservatives" say or, well, you're a Deep State Plant or some shit.

You can't just go down one rabbit hole, you have to go down them all.

I couldn't do it, Hell, I find it exhausting to even half-ass keep track of all this bullshit.

Which seems to be the point.

I mean, I legit don't know where these fucking people get this limitless energy to be...well, these fucking people.

I simply couldn't do it.

I'd get depressed, I'd go insane, I'd shoot myself. I simply don't have the emotional resources to participate in this bullshit! Call it burnout from the Trump years, I guess.

And the trouble is, 

And if you know anything, you're automatically treated as some kind of Elitist Ivory Tower something-something-gazpacho that needs to be discredited, ignored, or violently threatened.

Or you're somehow threatened by their supposedly "manly" alleged certainty or some shit.

While these same fucking people treat guys like Donald Trump and Joe Rogan as...some kind of omniscient gods?

And I got called all type of shit the other day for refusing to "engage" with a bunch of gun nuts spouting the same irrational bullshit that they always do. And then for blocking them because you can't reason with unreasonable people, and I know this from experience.

And then I posted about the ginned-up Pride Night bullshit and had a bunch of far-right Catholics get up in my shit.

Most of what I did was point out that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have been a thing since 1979 and no one cared until some right-wing "Influencer" made a big deal of getting mad about it.

Excuse me, what the actual fuck??

I lived in California where those people were a known factor, hell I was Catholic for part of that time and we simply didn't care. Might have had a few not-so-politically-correct-these-days opinions about it, but it wasn't a big deal, certainly not something to get mad about.

Most of us, well aware of and scared of the AIDS virus at the time, noted that they were trying to raise awareness and well, that was a good thing, wasn't it??

And then because Joe Rogan wants to moderate a debate between some doctor and RFK Jr. about Antivax Woo, these fucking idiots have been going around screaming "DEBATE ME!" and then a bunch of people that I follow have been hitting back with facts and screaming "DEBATE ME!" And, well, it was enough the last couple days to make me decide I'd rather sleep when I wasn't at work than be on Twitter.

Life isn't sacred to these fucking people. Truth isn't sacred to these fucking people.

It's just not.

That vague feeling of Gnosticism, of "Specialness" that they get from believing all this shit is what's "Sacred" to them.

Nothing else matters.

I watched this video of RFK Jr. speaking, this morning when I got home from work and still had decent internet and...Jesus...I was honestly surprised he didn't shout "Praise The Lord!" and call for an offering at the end.

Because this shit is pretty much the same basic kind of stuff as I heard from any number of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostal preachers over the years, but with Jesus replaced by conspiracy theories.

And that's the thing that scares me.

I have a theory that Conspiracy Theories themselves are becoming a New Religious Movement.

And, in terms of form, of basic presentation at least? It's a safe bet that they've eaten Evangelical Christianity alive from the inside out and are wearing it as a skin-suit like the serial killer in The Silence Of The Lambs.

Combine all this shit with AI, Long-termism, Transhumanism, various latent desires on the part of American Christianity to experience the worst parts of Revelation out of some perverse omnicidal death wish, and whatever other possible weird shit is coming down the pike and it gets genuinely scary.

And there's...no bit of debunked, provably wrong bullshit the people driving this train won't latch onto for more attention and money.

You end up wasting ridiculous amounts of time explaining basic shit to people who should already know this stuff.

The thing is, there's a much more nefarious underlying purpose to what appears, on the face of it, to be a very disorganized, sclerotic effort to spread this shit and keep it going:

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.

The thing is, Truth is the only thing that gives most people a floor to stand on to push back against Power and Wealth. That, and the fact that at the end of the day we have the same vote that they do, and there's more of us.

Why the fuck else do you think these assholes keep conspiring to take that away from us??

The "Conservative" movement has been eaten alive by hatred and insanity, and given it the form of basically a Christless Christianity, a godless theonomy of Power and Wealth and the worship thereof by a whole lot of empty-headed chucklefucks and the thing is, because these fucking people have been ginned up into a mob and basically addicted to hearing this bullshit for 30 years (and really, convinced for twice that long that the world would be a perfect paradise if we could all just be unfiltered greedy sociopathic bastards, thanks Ayn Rand) sooner or later these motherfuckers are going to want to act on all this bullshit!

And Trump was the closest they ever got, but he still couldn't deliver, simply because he couldn't break shit enough.

But that's Okay.

The Prosperity Gospel liars will be all too willing to find somebody to replace him.

You can fight back against this shit, it's not really that hard.

But the last thing you want to do is engage some nut who's screaming "Debate Me!" on their own terms. Go around them, find the "Undecided" people, and inoculate them against the Crazy Virus.

And lean into the fact that there's more of the rest of us than there is of them, while pushing back every which way we can.

But don't debate foolishness, because in the end that legitimizes it.

And here's the thing, if you don't...if you just block them? What you end up left with at the end of the day is...the fool, begging for your regard, then insulting, screaming, threatening...and reduced to utter impotence when they don't get it.

And that's exactly why these idiots are going to resort to violence sooner or later, because they think we should have to listen to them.

But even then, we don't.

We can fight back.

We can refuse to go down the rabbit hole with these motherfuckers.

Remember that.

Last Post

Слава Україна!

No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind as between the internal and the external threats of communism. 

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." Good night, and good luck. ~Edward R. Murrow

Bonus Content I

Bonus Content II

(Note: The Pride Month Series will also continue, on an intermittent basis, for the rest of the month.)