No Sympathy For The Devil (End Times In The Idiocracy, Three.)

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.

...

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

I saw this the other day. RFK Jr. claimed (in a Congressional hearing, mind you) that "Trusting the experts" is "a function of religion and totalitarianism. This from somebody who has, whole hog, embraced the modern Right's belief that basically everything (except itself) is a "Religion" (the modern Right itself being, in its own mind, a Truth higher than God Himself.) 

(And then we wonder why this shit has turned into a Cult?)

And these people functionally seek to impose their religion, their totalitarianism, their bullshit-ass "Truth" on the rest of the world. But ya know, it's theirs, so "That's Different."

Facts, Freedom, Science and what anybody else wants be damned. And they propagated this bullshit with endless appeals to base greed, racism and sexism. I'm here to tell you, they're going to abandon Trump because he didn't go far enough.

Well, guess what? I think we got a peek at what they want during that hearing the other day. The one thing I have to say I was kind of impressed with was that DWS actually did something useful for once in questioning RFK Jr.'s bullshit.

RFK Jr. is a Democrat about like I'm a goddamned toaster oven. Fuck you, dude. You're not even appealing to Democrats nor trying to. The only people that I've seen like this drugged out motherfucker are edge-case MAGA's and really old wealthy people who might've been Democrats for the five minutes that they were eligible to vote before Civil Rights and ultimately the 26th Amendment. 

But they've been voting Republican for 50+ years because they resent the fuck out of both.

You know, the kind of people who pull up at a gas station with their redonkulous motor home, block both Diesel pumps and then spend an hour fueling their bus, generally farting around, and perusing the markdown snacks while making damn sure they get their ten cents off per gallon of fuel from the rewards program and like $200 worth of scratch-off lottery tickets. 

You know, the kind of old people who spend six months out of the year in Florida and think Ron DeSantis should be President.

Same pinch-faced angry assholes that be losing their shit about my governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

That's the kind of people what ultimately define where Republicanism goes and that's the kind of people who like them some RFK Jr. enough so that they chime in when they hear people laughing about that hearing and say they think DWS did him dirty.

And when Republicans destroy themselves or otherwise go down...and that's what we're seeing, particularly here in Michigan where I live...these same people are gonna try to jack the Democrats the same way as they did the Republicans from the 1960's until they got Newt Gingrich into power.

Thing what gets me is, I've seen these people's world, and it's not even interesting. These are the same goddamn morons who pound the table about how "moral" they are, but when nobody else is watching they're perfectly fine with jacking off to AI-produced porn...in fact they can't get it up for anything else.

These are the same people who say "Thank you for your service" to my face, and then vote for Republicans who've publicly said they want to cut (or get rid of) my veterans benefits.

Fuck that.

These are the same fucking people who, by and large, think "Business" should run everything, even though "Business" typically does nothing but run shit into the ground while trying to maximize its profits, even at the expense of the product and the people who make it. See also the many and varied reasons for the SAG-AFTA strike.

It's all these drug- and ideology-addled rich motherfuckers who've done their level best to turn America into an Idiocracy and who tried like hell to send it lurching into fascism and mass murder because they thought it would lower their taxes.

Note: And then the same people were shocked when Russian Dictator Vladimir Putin looked at how much bank his oligarchs were making, and said "Give me half or I throw you out the window." 

And yet for some reason, a hell of a lot of the money motherfuckers looked at Putin and said "Sign me up!"

So it's not really just about money. It's also about concentrating authority in the hands of a certain kind of person. And there's a certain kind of White People what don't care if they have to die to get that done.

Ya know, maybe it's just me but I can remember when people like that at least had some sense of self-preservation, if not exactly self-respect.

Goddamn it, I'll take Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer over that type of shit all day, every day. 

Why? Because I'm aware of history and I know what regimes like that tend to mean for most people...not least of all people like me who at least try to have principles that supersede the In-Group politics and petty resentments of the moment and who know a thing or two.

 It's not about religion, Bobby.

At least it's not, to those kind of people. 

It kind of is to me, and because of the beliefs, doctrines and values I was taught I'm 100% against this shit!

Or at least, it stopped having even one damned thing to do with religion once religion stopped being a sufficiently-bootlicking adjunct to "Will To Power." These same people who spent decades banging on about how everybody needed to get the Jesus and have a stricter moral code could give a shit now!

See Also: Americanism, the Bush Doctrine, Capitalism, [Reaganite] Conservatism, Militarism and pretty much every value otherwise that Republicans claimed prior to 2015. 

And more to the point, these fucking people can and will get worse, they're doing so on the daily right where we can see them. And they don't care that they're being seen.

Well, maybe it's just me, but I think these people have fucked around long enough, and they're about to find out.

You bought the ticket, assholes, now you get to take the ride.

You're why America is stuck dealing with End Times in the Idiocracy. Seriously bro, when is enough, enough??

People like me are tired of this shit, and I say that as somebody who used to be a Republican.

No Sympathy For The Devil.

Half the problem, America, is that we have seen The Enemy. And he is, indeed, us.

And then about a third of us militantly refuse to check themselves.

Two

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Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. 

In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. 

~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.