Crab Bucket (Not Legends, Not Myths, Facts. Six.)

Crab mentality or crabs in a bucket (also barrel, basket or pot), is a way of thinking best described by the phrase "if I can't have it, neither can you." The metaphor refers to a pattern of behavior noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape, its effort will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise.

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Brother Cavil/Number One: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova?

Ellen Tigh: No.

Number One: No? Well, I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air.

Ellen Tigh: The five of us designed you to be as human as possible.

Number One: I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I - I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws; and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I'm a machine, and I can know much more. I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body. And why?! Because my five creators thought that "God" wanted it that way. 

~From Battlestar Galactica (2003) S4.E17 "No Exit."

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Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from the D&D video game Planescape Torment.

I saw this earlier.

The National Swamp is already falling apart.

But wait! There's more...

Apparently, JD Vance and Ross Douthat got into an argument about the Trump administration being "Unchristian" and "Uncharitable."

Duh. For once, Ross ain't wrong. Even if it's a case of Captain Obvious being promoted to Admiral Of The Fleet.

And of course all JD has is to try to talk about the "Tone" of somebody's "Communication" as if that justifies all this evil bullshit.

America, Republicans don't care about you; Except that they have a way they think the Universe is supposed to be, and that they're too good to have to explain themselves, and you, America, happen to be where they live and the place they think they were handed to hammer into the shape that they want.

No, none of this shit is based on reality anymore than Soviet Communism was.

So, therefore, they keep trying to impose their idea of reality on the world. How did that work with the Iranians??

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. ~Ezekiel 16:49-50

For good measure, throw in that Republicans absolutely hate their own voters.

And Republicans hate that they have to ask anybody if they can have power, in any fashion no matter how pro forma or propagandized. They just want to do what they want to do, period, and the higher up the chain you go the worse it gets. The Republican mentality is basically that of a 13-year-old boy who thinks he knows everything...before his grandma gets ahold of him and beats the arrogance out of him with a wooden spoon one Sunday afternoon.

We need to bring back the Ass Whuppin. These fucking people feel too safe to do their shitty behavior.

And they know, yes, they know none of this stuff is going to work. It can't, the world does not work like that, at least not anymore, and you cannot put the Progress genie back in the bottle no matter how many rural white racist dipshits or white Suburban crunchy Yoga moms you infect with Medieval Peasant Brain.

There's a whole rest of the world that first will laugh at you, then stop doing business with you, and eventually stop talking to you altogether and wait for you to wreck yourself, until it gets so bad that UN peacekeeping forces have to get involved and then things get rebuilt on the rest of the world's terms and whatever some dipshit Calvinist from Idaho or Sedevacantist Catholic weirdo from New Jersey thinks about that, they can write on the pad of paper that prison in the Netherlands gives them and call it a Manifesto. Yes, there is a certain class of Republicans who think their shitty beliefs make them next to God.

In fact, to paraphrase Brother Cavil from BSG, they don't want to be human, they think this world is dirty and fallen...they think they know better.

While at the same time people like JD Vance apparently are iffy on the idea of whether or not us mere working people can be "Christian." Fuck you, bro. I don't need your stank ass to talk to the Lord, I can do it myself.

But, far from the higher thought processes of 40 or 50 years ago, modern Republican "Libertarianism" has basically just reduced a lot of people to being basically crabs in a bucket for no good reason, while higher up, privilege and religiosity have turned a lot of "Conservatives" into dumbass narcissists. 

Well, that and there's always the racism, that's the only glue that holds all these assholes together.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

Like I keep saying, I can't even talk the way these people talk anymore, and I used to be a Republican.

Seriously though, nobody has to put up with this shit. Not in America, and not in the rest of the world.

They know their ideas suck, and that the vast majority of people even here will never agree to most of this shit.

Social Security, for example, is something most of us have to pay into and thus expect to get, it's part of the social fabric of this country and pretty much nobody but idiot Libertarian teenagers and the most Miserable Bastard old Republicans out there expects or wants anything different.

There's a reason I say that their real Big Plan sooner or later is going to be "Break Off A Piece Of America For Themselves and hope like fuck that they can get all the people that do agree with them to move there." And there's a reason I say these guys are going to try to turn Florida into their own personal Banana Republic. Even that's not ideal, because there's Other People that live there, but it's what they have.

So they'll immediately start trying to price living there out of most people's income range while trying to lure in more rich people. 

Never mind who does the actual work.

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

Cuz whoever that is, the person doing the work, making lunch, taking out the trash?? 

it sure as fuck ain't gonna be no Little Mike Johnson.

The real issue here is that the whole basis of the current "Conservative" thing is disrespect. Disrespect from people that ain't got no self-respect. 

It's why these motherfuckers literally shit all over everything the first chance they get.

And then they wanna talk shit and use religion to cover their asses? Idiots like MAGA wannabe-rapper Forgiato Blow.

Being Black, or Down's Syndrome as "Punishment from God??" Sorry, bro, but God does not work that way and pretty much every Black person I've ever met is an observant Believer in something. 

More, *Every* person with Down's Syndrome that I've ever met was exactly that, but specifically Christian. My ex-girlfriend's disabled sister was very active in our church. She was the one who wanted to go to the camp meetings and all that type of stuff. She did nothing wrong.

She was the kind of person that if she tried to tell a lie her tongue would probably break off.

And I repeat, God does not work that way.

More to the point, sorry to be especially "Politically Incorrect" about things but I can tell you exactly what a guy with a name like "Forgiato Blow" would have got from basically everybody who wasn't some kind of politically correct liberal 30 or 35 years ago, and longer than that, it would've been worse! Probably the only people I knew who wouldn't have made fun of a first name that Italian would have been the Black people, and a last name like "Blow?" 

The jokes write themselves...and that's before you realize he sucks. Dude could (okay, just hypothetically speaking) have been good at something and back in the day people would've still been relentless. I ain't saying it's right, I'm saying that's how it was. You either rolled with the punches and gave back as good as you got (and probably got very tired of shitty people and tried not to be that way yourself, or you turned out to be a monster and ended up in jail) or you were considered a bitch and probably had to move away and change your name to make that shit stop.

I get that a lot of people thought they were doing the right thing changing the culture but the meanness just went online and if anything the bad people actually got worse due to lack of consequences and too many of the good people ended up in their own bubble and didn't start realizing they had to defend themselves until shit was already starting to get really bad. 

There's a reason I say bring back the ass whuppin.

You wouldn't have somebody like Andrew Tate or Elon Musk...certainly wouldn't have them being open about being how they are let alone famous...with the societal standards that I grew up with or the fact that they were backed with a little more force. Not to mention Trump was Tabloid fodder that pretty much everybody hated. I mean, come on.

I shouldn't even need to say this shit!

Instead, I saw Republican standards in particular decline throughout the 1990's and the Aughts while they bitched about moral relativism and situational ethics (even as they became the primary practitioners of that stuff) and ultimately way too many people reordered their moral universe to accommodate men like Donald Trump!

And along the way, they flushed everything else and turned our country into a moral and later literal swamp, and now they'd rather mythologize that crap than fix it. If they can get you hooked on the idea of Aphrodite springing fully formed from the seafoam it's easier to manipulate you into being the crab in the bucket pulling other crabs down so nobody gets out. They don't want sound doctrine, they want excuses.

Sorry, but way too many of these secular liberals didn't do shit about that. I hope that guys like James Talarico might be able to accomplish something, but clearly going high all the time doesn't work.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And sometimes, to defend freedom, you gotta get dirty.

But the idea is not to be a crab in a bucket, not to stay in the swamp. Sooner or later you have to reach for the stars.

But you have to get the small things right first. My partner and I had a conversation about that today because she's dealing with idiots at work. That's the part these fucking people don't understand.

And worse, they don't want to.

We get out of this mess, this crab bucket, and reach for the future Together.

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

Five

 [The Mandalorian brings together the entire Mandalorian covert after Carson Teva makes a surprise visit and asks him to help Greef Karga's situation on Nevarro when the New Republic won't lift a finger]

Mando: Now, many of you don't know Greef Karga. And those that do fought against him when you rescued me from his ambush many cycles ago on the streets of Nevarro. Since then, he's had a change of heart and has risked his life to save mine as well as the Foundling in my charge. [Grogu coos] I stand before you to petition an intervention. To help rescue Nevarro before it's too late. I am in no position to ask any more of you. However... However, the enemy that decimated this very covert were Imperials, not Greef Karga's bounty hunters. Greef Karga is now a High Magistrate and has offered me a tract of land on his independent world. Perhaps it is time for us to live in the light once again on a planet where we are welcome. So our culture may flourish and our children can feel what it is to play in the sunlight.

Armorer: Does anyone else wish to speak?

Mando: It's up to them now.

Paz Vizsla: I do. I was there on Nevarro that night. I fought against Greef Karga and his hunters. I saw my brothers and sisters fall at the hands of the Imperial butchers that hunted us in the sewers. I saw many die to save the life of [gestures to Grogu] this one, tiny Foundling. And now we are asked to sacrifice yet again. The question we should be asking ourselves is, "Why? Why should we lay our lives down yet again?" Because we are Mandalorians! I have had my disagreements with this man, but he risked his life to save my son. And Bo-Katan Kryze did not give up on my child's life even when the rest of us did. These two are asking us to take up arms in the name of a brighter future, and I for one will take up arms to fight by their side. [Mandalorians agree] This is the Way!

Mandalorians: This is the Way.

Armorer: This is the Way.

~From The Mandalorian S3.E5 "The Pirate."