Rapture (Nation Of The Self, Four.)

I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

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The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. ~Ronald Reagan

...

I traded You, oh Lord, for Mammon, and what did it get me, huh?! ~Splicer, Bioshock

I used the term "Empire of Stupid" yesterday.

Not long after that, I saw this.

Apparently, this whole dipshit Greenland thing comes back to Libertarians wanting it for another dumbass bullshit attempt at a Libertarian proto-State, but with this one somehow Something Something Gazpacho backed by US firepower and taxpayer money. So in their minds...Libertarians get somebody else to buy and build them a nation (and foot the bill) but wait, there's more! Who gets to pay for the cleanup, negotiate the return of the territory to Denmark and the US paying reparations out the ass for however long when the bubble invariably pops, everybody finally figures out that the place is inhospitable and that most of the resources there are mostly inaccessible and covered by an ice sheet and it all falls apart??

Oh, that's right, We do, the US taxpayers.

While the Libertarians get whatever they get, and naturally all manage to skate and hole up in non-extradition countries before the bill comes due.

On the other hand, are there Bears in Greenland?? Because it seems to me that the last time it came down to Libertarians vs. Bears, the Bears win. Awhile back these idiots tried to take over a small New Hampshire town named Grafton, but somehow none of them wanted to pay for trash pickup (because they're all inherently lazy, selfish assholes with delusions of grandeur) so they just threw their garbage out wherever or put it in non-Bear-proof containers and the place got overrun by Bears. The "Project" started in 2004 and ended in 2016 after they'd basically ran the place into the ground.

But let's look at this another way, for a second.

Consider for a moment, a bunch of Libertarians living in a can in a hostile environment with no survival skills, eating MRE's and playing Cryptocurrency bullshit games all day, and somebody else is footing the bill?? Throw in some Christian Nationalism, narcissism, racism and ridiculous self-important assholery just for the hell of it. This is going to end badly if they ever get to try it...pretty much anywhere, like, at all.

More to the point, I think I've played that video game before.

 This sounds suspiciously like a land-based version of the plot of the first couple of Bioshock games.

For those who don't know the plot of the Bioshock games is basically, some wealthy uber-Libertarian asshole creates an undersea city called (wait for it) Rapture, it's inhabited by Libertarians. They promptly discover a mutating substance they call ADAM that gives people super-powers and then all go insane and most of them turn into violent mutants called Splicers (for splicing the superpowers into their own genetic codes) and kill each other. 

Your job as the player is, more or less, to figure out what happened, survive and clean up the mess as much as possible. The first two games in the series are heavily based off the writings of Ayn Rand. Along the way, you figure out that your character was created to be some kind of appendage of the guy who built the place, and his demented dreams of becoming a world power unto Himself.

Sound familiar??

Cuz that's exactly what Elon Musk is trying to do now.

By the way this game came out in like 2007. (Also, seriously, kids, don't play Bioshock in the dark.)

Meanwhile, in the real world here in 2025 we keep handing these drug-addled fascists who are high on the smell of their own farts the keys and hoping they don't crash the country with their bigoted ideology that if only the people they "approve" of got to do anything, they'd all be some kind of fascist Supermen or some shit. 

So yeah, I could easily see these chucklefucks letting any jobs where you need people (like armed forces, civil government, firefighters or police) go unfilled because they demand the Perfect Human to fill them...and then trying to fill the jobs with AI and robots (that they don't pay and treat badly because they have to discriminate against somebody) because nobody equals their narcissism and pious belief in their own superiority and hoping they don't end up with some kind of Battlestar Galactica, Robocop or Terminator scenario. (Oh, wait, these idiots don't read, or watch science fiction!)

Worse, they think they have some kind of Divine Right To Fuck Shit Up For Everyone.

And what they really think, as evidenced by Elon/Trump trying to threaten war or "Regime Change" (in favor of the furthest of the Far-Right) against Canada, Germany, Greenland, Mexico, the UK and who ever else they see as "Liberal" or unwilling to submit to their Diktats...is that anybody who doesn't submit or won't be bought is fit only to burn. They're telling on themselves with this talk against California and LA in particular.

America isn't gonna survive another go-round of this stupidity intact unless We, The People, stand up and check this horseshit. And the truth is, if we don't, if We fail like all the "Institutions" did, we probably deserve it...but at least the people in the Great Lakes Republic, the Mid-Atlantic Commonwealth, the Pacific Republic and a few others will have basic human rights and some level of the scraps of whatever they had before. God help you if you live in the South, or Texas, though. The Idiocracy Cometh and it'll be far more evil and intentionally malevolent than the one in that movie was, on purpose, cuz Elon and them think that shit is funny.

The world These Fucking People think their ideology of cruelty and selfish horseshit is going to get them is the glittering, gilded spires of Dubai, but the truth is they're far more likely to get the Bears, overflowing trash cans and ruined public services of Grafton, New Hampshire...or a Polar Bear, nosing about a giant trash heap, and a lot of dead people because they put shit like nicotine and steroids in the goddamn drinking water and tried to build something bigger that the Burj Khalifa but didn't make sure they had a solid foundation and cut all type of corners building it, so of course it would fall down.

And at the end of the day, their only "Product" is Cryptocurrency bullshit and other lies and scams.

When it all goes sideways?? When they're surrounded by ravening mutants that they created and their Land-Based Rapture burns?? Even though they're facing mounting lawsuits and various other legal threats back in Civilization? They will demand the rest of us rescue they ass! Then these dipshits will want to claim some kind of Princely status to protect themselves from the consequences.

You get what you tolerate, Earth.

We, as a species, need to stop putting up with this horseshit.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck. ~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

Three

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco