Operation Republican Freedom (Reason For The Season, Thirteen.)

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, Kingdom Of Fear (2004)

I woke up this morning to find that Elon Musk had suspended a whole bunch of journalists from Twitter. At first, with no reason given, then the reasons given were shown to be bullshit.

I'm finding that:

#1 this autocratic, capricious one-man show horseshit is very tiresome. I used to be a conservative, I just don't work that way. If you can't, don't or won't clearly define your beliefs or rules and stick by them, I'm not going to keep playing with you, because after awhile the cheating, goalpost-moving and the hypocrisy gets old.

And people wonder why I'm not a Republican anymore...

#2 Whatever conspiratorial bullshit Musk believes that's causing this shit is already smacking hard into the wall of reality. People are simply jumping to other platforms. Mastodon, for one, is pretty chill and I don't have to worry about this kind of stupid shit over there. A lot of the people I follow on Twitter who are there have already followed me there, and I'm good with that.

Anyway...

Musk and his weird goons and "Conservatives" more generally seem to think they've won a great victory, somehow "taken down" and "taken over" some kind of "Leftist political organizing org disguised as a corporation." (Yes, I've heard/seen people say this.) It's not that, you idiots, a lot of the user base was journalists and politicians. All the Democrats are on there, yes, but so are all the Republicans. That was by design for what was previously the digital public square.

Twitter was a business, run by business people, on the American ethic that businesses should serve everybody.

But that's not the world these fucking people want to live in.

Musk and Republicans seem to want to turn it into all of the above...but only for far-right/fascist types thinking it'll somehow keep its previous organizing power but now only they can use it and somehow it would retain-and they would gain-its popularity.

Whole thing's already falling apart if you ask me. Seems like the Apartheid/Segregationist types fail to understand you can't really make a living, most places, if you're only serving White Conservative customers and their assorted kiss-asses and wannabe hangers-on.

And, meanwhile, people besides them (naturally) are moving on. I mean, among other things, what else can we do?

Because guess what? We really don't have to put up with this shit. 

This is America, it's a free country, we can go to another venue. Modern "Conservatives" just don't seem to understand that. And they're about to start shouting at us that we have to listen to them, because they have Twitter now!

Yeah, it's going to inconvenience everybody to rebuild all the networking we had on Twitter and that's going to take awhile. But I think we can rest assured the "Conservatives" will make a hash of Twitter and everybody will just end up inconvenienced and pissed off at them. 

So yeah, basically, it's just another Friday.

Meanwhile, and I've been warning about this for a long time, in Republican-land they're presently referring to Ronna Romney-McDaniel as a "Leftist" and blaming her for the Republicans' overall failure in the midterm elections.

The Zampolit class of "Professional Conservatives" is saying she spent too much money on "Leftist" luxuries like, ya know, transportation...?

Like what, she's supposed to walk? March wherever she has to go along with her assorted retinue?

As if Benny Johnson fancies himself some kind of rigid, straight-backed traditionalist-Catholic Vichy French General with a massive mustache and a fancy uniform (and a moldering, outdated army complete with Renault FT-17 tanks in 1942) who eschews luxuries and eats sausage off the end of a knife...and how did any of that shit really work out, anyway? 

LOL.

"Work, Family, Fatherland" only seems to last until they get to wherever tonight's Cocaine Orgy happens to be.

Not a word about the $1 BILLION+ that seems to have just disappeared under Rick Scott's leadership, though. 

It's like Operation Iraqi Freedom, but only for Republicans. 

And it's funny how so much of this shit seems to be "They just don't want other people to find out about that."

Don't worry, they'll hire a bunch of scammy "contractors" to root out the imagined problem, watch even more money go up in smoke, and accomplish nothing because they can't/won't admit what the problem even is...that they're all trying to scam each other, and the donors, and the voters.

But, before they come for the rest of us, they will have knives out for each other...and more seriously, for any institution, be it the government, the military, the police, etc. that they think might be able to stop them.

And they're telling on themselves, in that they appear to be switching their adoration and loyalty from Trump to Elon Musk. It's Christmas, and these motherfuckers think Ebenezer Scrooge is the fucking good guy.

These people don't want to live in America as it is...they want to live in the Aliens franchise where almost everything is run by corporations and the Marine Corps sends a squad to deal with a potential major crisis. 

And they see Elon and SpaceX and all that other crap as a means to get there. Oh yes, they do. They want to live in a world that's run the way God-Emperor Elon runs Twitter.

And this...they claim...is freedom.

Mind the Aliens, they bite.

Twelve

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

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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

Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride (Reason For The Season, Twelve.)

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.

I had to get groceries, pay bills and run a few errands this morning. This afternoon I went out to lunch with my Mom and her partner, to a Mexican restaurant on the other side of town. Place has a decent view of Lake Huron and we sat there and ate and watched some pretty impressive waves crash against the shoreline. 

A nice compliment to the slurry of rain/snow mix fouling everyone's day here.

Plus, all my bills are paid up for the month.

All things considered, it wasn't too bad of a day.

And then I saw this shit.

Trump's "Major Announcement" that he's been crowing about for days is some kind of stupid Digital Trading Card/NFT crap. Like, WTF is this silly bullshit??

This shit looks like took some stoned college bro 15 minutes on an old Windows 98 PC with some $9.95 Graphic Design program off the discount rack at OfficeMax from the same basic era. 

While he was listening to an old William Hung Christmas CD and smoking a blunt.

I'm like...are you fucking kidding me? I may be, for once in my life, at a loss for words.

I'm just...I'm so old I can remember when Republicans had more self-respect than this stupid bullshit.

It's like a completely non-combat, chickenshit version of Doom, but for morons.

You bought the ticket, Republicans. Now you get to take the ride.

You wanna know, Republicans, why the North Koreans and the Russians and the Saudis think they can just own yo ass??

Because some of you fuckers think that the Ukrainians, who are fighting to the death for their right to have their culture, language and nation keep existing, are the enemy.

Because you motherfuckers, being the utter swine that you are, turned the party of Ronald Reagan, who carried Barry Goldwater's ethic of "Peace Through Strength" out into the world and stood there in Berlin right in front of the Brandenburg Gate and told Mr. Gorbachev to "Tear Down That Wall" and turned it into...this.

Because you goddamned elected somebody pathetic enough to even try this shit. 

Because you treat disabled veterans and working people, like me, and those fighting for their own freedom as enemies or inconveniences and you lionize...Trump.

This is what you traded people like Adam Kinzinger, Justin Amash, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and the memory of guys like George HW Bush, John McCain and Ronald Reagan for.

And you thought you were going to come out ahead?? LOL. 

I have no sympathy. Fuck you.

With malice aforethought, you sowed the wind.

Well like I said, fuck you, now you can reap the whirlwind.

You feel "Punked?" Well, shit. I haven't been a Republican since 2008 and this makes me feel dirty.

You fuckers did this to yourselves, have fun.

And the worst part is, there's a lot of you assholes don't think you even did anything wrong.

Eleven

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

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Screaming (Reason For The Season, Eleven.)

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

Apparently, there was a bit of a situation in San Antonio. Right-wing idiots showed up with guns to "protest" a drag show...and then LGBT rights protesters showed up with more people and more guns.

Good.

But, and I'm being serious here, somebody needs to get a lid on this and put a stop to this idiocy before there's a firefight and the situation gets out of control and people get killed.

Seriously if you think this shit will stop with the Right's current manias about sexuality, you have another thing coming. They get what they want that way, they'll just move on to something else until we're all living in some kind of a Star Wars prison.

Earlier today, Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station made the point that Twitter under Elon Musk has effectively become a simulation of the Dystopian America that modern "Conservatives" want, in which even information that is by Federal Law public and freely available is subject to the capricious whims of Power.

And he also said, quite accurately, that this was the kind of shit that the Constitution was designed to protect us from.

Thing that boggles my mind is how many of these Bible- and Constitution-humping "Conservatives" can't wait to live in a world where they are utterly subject to the whims of a very small number of small, mean, powerful men. Constitution, checks and balances, freedom and rights etc. be damned, apparently.

Hell, they don't even give a shit if the Power they subject themselves to is even American...in the case of people like Elon Musk or Vladimir Putin. Or if it's subject to god-only-knows-what foreign money and powers like Donald Trump is.

The Right is making no secret of wanting civil war and to turn America into some kind of nuclear-tipped Bosnia 2.0 complete with ethnic and political cleansing of whatever areas they can capture. If they can't realistically help Putin conquer Ukraine, I'd imagine they figure to at least get the US government, NATO and supporters of liberal democracy in general to have to fight a two-front war. 

It won't turn out how they think it will.

And in the meantime, we've got Muskrat trying to make the world...or at least Twitter...safe for Oligarchs. 

Even as he's actively trying to stir up trouble for the rest of us, if only to get "Likes" from his fanboys.

I just...don't even see the point.

Dude could have literally done anything with all that money, and at one point had a stated ambition to run for President...of Mars.

Why in the fuck is he doing shit like buying Twitter, firing all the workers, not paying the company's rent, and suspending flight trackers (which use literally Federally-mandated public information, that's what a flight plan is) and trying to suppress Ukrainian accounts while throwing in with the absolute slime of humanity in America and abroad.

We see you bro. We see what you're doing. It's pathetic, and you suck at it.

Like, what's even the damn point? Do you fuckers think Vladimir Putin is going to give you a cookie if he wins? 

No, the rich and famous who threw in with him might be welcomed for the cameras with a handshake before they're led away and murdered, but the average person will just get enslaved or shot without the pretense.

I can't imagine the people freaking out about Critical Race Theory, LGBT stuff and Pronouns...which chip away at their understanding of the world in small ways...will really be all that excited about Russification and forced conversion either to Russian Orthodoxy or just straight up Atheistic Neo-Communism...depending on how well Re-Sovietization is going by then.

And make no mistake about it, if Putin's version of neo-Communism offered these fucking people Power and Patriarchy, they'd fucking take it.

The thing I don't get is, for all intents and purposes whether it's constant confrontations in the streets, Musk-Twitter, subjugation to foreign powers or the very real threat of an armed right-wing insurgency at this point, this is the world something like a third of us want to live in. I don't know why anybody wants to live like that, from Elon all the way down to dudes I know what can barely keep a roof over their head and it's December...in Michigan.

But that desire for debasement, dystopia and subjection...it's there. I'll never understand it, but it is.

Because America is too hard, or something, especially if it tries to actually live up to the things it already promised all of its people.

And there's a certain kind of white person wants to burn it all down, so they can keep feeling special instead of being one of many.

There's some of us, mostly a certain kind of white dude, that are just goat-eager to kill somebody. I'll admit to being a sadistic bastard at times. I hope some of you fuckers get your wish...and wake up screaming in the middle of the night from the PTSD, throw in living from bottle to bottle for extra points.

And that's not even considering all the people left dead, maimed, incarcerated or facing execution for war crimes, etc.

Does that kind of shit really sound good to you?? Because you're mad?

I'm a veteran. I saw the aftermath of that kind of shit in Bosnia. I saw shit over there I still can't unsee. You want to inflict that kind of shit on Gen Z just because they didn't vote Republican?? Back in the day when I served, I had this strange idea that maybe if I did, my kids or somebody else's kids wouldn't have to.

But no, we got people want to speed-run all the bad shit from the last 120 years because they're mad at the world, or something.

Or worse, because they think some angry, dumb, unemployed beard-o who shitposts on 4-Chan all day will like them if they set it up that way?

It's Christmas, and we've got people who'd rather fight in the streets over dumb shit (that hardly mattered to anybody last year) than love their neighbor as Christ commanded.

If that's the world you want, fuck you. 

I'll be one of the people fighting to maintain the civilization and nation we already have.

I can't...and I won't...put it any other way.

Ten

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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

Fuck Off, Bird. (Reason For The Season, Ten.)

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. 

~Matthew 5:43-48

I kept seeing stuff like this yesterday. 

"People never become atheists for intellectual reasons, but for sinful reasons. People become atheists because they don’t want to be held morally accountable for the sins that they love."

I'm not sure I've seen that much of a damned Strawman since I used to watch the Wizard Of Oz every year or so as a kid.

For all the talk about Christian Nationalism lately, I've legit not seen that kind of argumentation basically anywhere since I used to be an admin on the ex-Pentecostal forum and have to ban idiot trolls like that every damned day.

Until yesterday.

Even pretty much all the remaining Christians I communicate with know better than this kind of stuff

I'm not going to bother to engage and take this garbage apart theologically. That implies that I think this dude posted it in good faith in the first place. Suffice it to say, that this is but one of many different interpretations, and one you don't see too much anymore...certainly not from decent people.

There's no purpose in engaging theologically, in even implying this bad-faith, my-way-or-the-highway shit is a legitimate argument for anything in a diverse, secular culture. The only question anybody should even bother asking is "Why should I follow this?"

And the only answer you'll ever get is more of the same, because they don't actually have an answer that falls outside of the same kind of religiosity-based claptrap. To call it a circular argument implies that they thought enough about it to call it an argument. It implies these people want any outcome other than to say "You're going to hell!"

I heard enough of this crap for the first 34 years of my life.

It needs to be understood, to these kinds of people, religion is nothing more than a weapon to be wielded against people they don't like...and should they successfully bully somebody into accepting it...turning some other person into one of these Stepford-clone Evangelicals is the ultimate form of erasure.

And then "Based on my Retweets" Twitter hit me up with more of the same.

Fuck off, Bird.

These people don't care about Jesus, they want ethnic and political cleansing, fascism and genocide of the people they don't like...which is basically everybody including Christians and conservatives who've accepted any degree of modernity. 

(Which, again, is most of them because we all have to live in the world and most people will get fired for being openly anti-LGBT, fascist or racist. Capitalism needs/wants everybody's money, and that's why these idiots want to destroy it.)

And if religion doesn't work as a justification...and it really doesn't, because even the most stringent form of Fundamentalist Christianity that pays the least attention to the Word imposes limits on their behavior...there's always conspiracy theories.

But then there's people like Muskrat looking to indulge that shit, if only so they can monetize that infinitely-moveable goalpost to try and make up for the losses from all the stupid shit they've done.

But make no mistake, that's not all that's going on here. 

I have no doubt that somewhere, Muskrat has somebody digging through lines of code somewhere in the electronic guts of The Bird (if he's not doing it himself, micromanaging twit that he apparently is.) tying to find the Liberal Source Code or Secret Sauce or Something Something Gazpacho...because these are the same idiots who thought the Blue Check meant people were some sort of Progressive Secret Society, rather than, you know, simply who they say they are.

He thinks the culture of Twitter...the company as well as the content/users...was imposed by somebody or something else. And Muskrat wants to find it so he can monetize or weaponize whatever it is. 

That's just how a lot of these people see the world. It's bullshit, but you can't make these people see that. They have to find that mental space for themselves. He doesn't understand it's the people.

He doesn't understand the world's not changing, it's done changed. While Republicans were playing Hide The Sausage with Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay or blowing up a good chunk of the Middle East or going down endless conspiracy rabbit holes themselves for years, while people like Elongate were out doing other things...the rest of us just kept on living.

And along the way, adapting, learning to work around or with the new gay coworker, the lesbian roommates, the friends coming out as transgender, the different cultures and people from around the world represented in the ferret group on Facebook.

Because, ya know, we just gotta live. Most of us, in a world that doesn't have time for our personal bullshit. And remember, I was a (small-c) conservative.

Doesn't matter.

I don't have the patience or privilege or time or the lack of compassion necessary to try and put my life or anyone else's on hold because of some willfully ignorant uninvolved third party's opinion.

More to the point as somebody steeped in Christianity and the philosophical guts of "Western Culture" I absolutely know that doing so would not be Just.

It certainly does not reflect the conduct of Jesus as described in the Bible.

And people whose thing is ideology or technocracy don't understand that. To come to understand it would mean they...and the ideas they regard as or even above holy writ...would have to change.

And oh my God are these fucking people pissed about that.

They keep trying to force a large spherical world into a very small cubic box and if that's unjust, well, they simply don't care.

It's supposed to be the time of Peace On Earth and Goodwill Towards Men, but of course hate is more important to them than any of that.

Even Christmas is nothing more to these nuts than a stick to beat somebody else with.

I just...couldn't do it. And more to the point, I don't want to. There was a time we were supposed to be better than that.

And now, at this time of year Twitter wants to promote hate and religiosity??

Fuck off, Bird.

Nine

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

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Total War (Reason For The Season, Nine.)

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.

Over the weekend, Gavin Wax, the president of the New York Young Republicans, demanded "Total War" in front of a packed audience.

Total War.

From the people who...40 years too early...have decided that the Tabasco Sauce that makes most MRE's palatable is too spicy and that naming a pepper (or a sauce) after a Mexican province reeks of liberalism.

Yeah, Okay, if you say so.

These are people who think their posts not getting enough "Likes" on Twitter is somehow as bad as "Conservatives" getting murdered in the streets. But they're going to go hump a ruck in the boonies and go full Rambo on some motherfuckers.

We're coming up on Christmas. The usual "War on Christmas" horse shit hasn't even started yet this year and these idiots want to declare "Total War?" LOL.

I can see it now, in all cases, a backlog of 10,000 motherfuckers all demanding to be the platoon Zampolit. Nobody wants to be a regular infantryman, or has the ability to be an NCO or an officer.

Going to guess most of these people couldn't beat the tutorial level on "Shogun: Total War" back in the day.

Suffice it to say, I'd have to see all this to believe it.

Maybe it's just me but I don't think people whose regular routine is fake outrage, made-up problems and dishonest moral panics would last a day dealing with the kind of disgusting bullshit that's normal, but often routine for military life. 

Personally I don't think soft-ass bitches like Matt Walsh or Seb Gorka would get past the cockroaches in the chow hall let alone having to shit in a hole in the desert and then bury it.

And that's before you get to stuff like burn pits and wounds, let alone having to keep a cool head and maintain discipline in all type of shitty situations or under fire.

Part of me...the part that remembers what Bosnia was like...is looking at these motherfuckers like "Yes, please, go ahead and declare war on the rest of us. 

I don't think you fuckers could've hacked it even in peacetime." Because yes, that really was hard enough. And I wasn't anywhere near being one of the people whose job was dealing with human remains or talking to traumatized survivors or trying to piece together everything that happened, when I was over there. Protecting the people doing that, and rounding up the occasional war-crime suspects...not to mention trying to keep previously hostile groups of people from killing each other...was bad enough.

We're basically dealing with people who think if they screw for political advantage hard enough and often enough, they'll get to call Black people the N-word again and get to be rich just because of their political affiliations. 

They have no interest in actually fighting a war.

Doing the actual fighting will be for other people, preferably conscripts thrown into the field with little training and shitty weapons who don't want to be there. And their basic job is to try and wear out the other side by sheer mass of forces while (maybe) they're supported by ARTY or airstrikes. The Cruelty Is The Point.

Never mind that isn't working in Ukraine and it's the same scenario the United States Army spent generations training for vs. the Soviet Union and/or the Russians anyway.

Their basic plan when it comes to anything is "Flood the zone with shit until other people give up in disgust and leave, then we win."

Which is pretty much what they're doing to Twitter, and I've seen this a fair amount of times before. And when these idiots wreck the place, and it's not fun or profitable anymore, Elon will sell that shit and it'll probably go the way of MySpace or whatever and never be heard of again.

I just find it all kind of sad, really.

But this whole "Twitter Files" stupidity lately and all the conspiracy theories and the whining have about done it in for me. I spent years fighting against this kind of shit elsewhere when I was younger and had more of a tolerance for stupidity.

And I can't say I ever really tried to stick it out and fight on a site where the CEO/New Owner was going around acting like he was the personal Maitre D' to various extremists and nuts.

But it's worth noting that Twitter isn't real life...as we all just found out with last month's midterm elections. I strongly suspect the Republican side of the House is going to collapse into chaos, among other things.

And the thing is, these fucking people hate that Twitter isn't real life, or that America is not Hungary or Russia (Never mind that neither country is what it says it is) and there aren't enough of them to just swamp the rest of us out and get us to give up and leave on a national or global level. They hate that the rest of us don't just complacently accept their bullshit or regard power or wealth as their due...like they do among themselves.

They hate that the rest of us have a right to exist and live our lives without them telling us what to do...and that even when they do so, nobody is required to obey them.

At the end of the day, these fucking people's problem is that other people exist.

And you can't reason with that. We cannot live with people who think that other people do not have a right to exist.

And we don't (and shouldn't) have to put up with that crap online, either.

I feel like we're close to a tipping point where the Right resorts to mass violence, probably some kind of right-wing insurgency. I don't think it'll turn out well, and I sure don't think they'll win.

The truth is, neither do they. 

You have to have an achievable, concrete goal...besides constant inchoate rage...first.

These people want some kind of Forever War to give meaning to their lives, but I think that it will be short.

Why?

These idiots are also getting to the point where it's literally impossible for anyone to be "Conservative" enough for them, thus their movement keeps shrinking. And they call this "Winning?"

More to the point, if these fucking people's goal, such as it is, is some kind of eliminationist pogrom...where does that leave all these fucking people who absolutely live for having somebody to yell at on places like...Twitter??

It seems like a hell of a way to live, going around mad all the time.

But that's literally how these people want to live. I couldn't do it. I deal with the leftovers of addiction and depression every day as it is.

I'm just...so tired. Dealing with this crap day in and day out has gotten old.

When they come at the rest of us out here in the real world...well, like it or not, I at least know how to deal with that. I can process things like gunfire and people I've never met treating me like the enemy.

But in the meantime, I'm tired of the endless puerile bullshit and conspiracy theory stuff.

I can't hack how some people can just endlessly bang on with this shit, with nothing changing, day in and day out basically forever. Like, what's even the goddamned point??

Some people are apparently so angry that they're angry about being angry, even. And all they want to do all day is tell the world about how angry they are and be rewarded for their upraised middle finger.

Even thinking about that crap depresses me, to be honest. I could not live like that.

So, I'm going to probably be reducing my level of engagement on Twitter and posting more back on Facebook, I just started a Mastodon account and I'm going to get on Counter Social and on the list for Post this week. I'll still post on Twitter sporadically, when I have a new post up, until I can find my footing somewhere else.

Y'all be good.

Слава Україна!

Eight

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

Crocodile Tears (Reason For The Season, Eight.)

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.

For as much therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.

~Amos 5:8-15

I saw this earlier.

Some idiot Republican Congressman speechifying about "National Bible Week" which, by the way, I've never heard of. He talks about how the Word of God is a "Pillar of his life" and how our country is in the midst of a "Moral and Spiritual War."

Well, bro, if you really think that, why are you a Republican?? Republicans are almost always the first ones to abhor those who speak uprightly, take bribes, or tread upon the poor. 

(This isn't my opinion, this stuff is a matter of public record on a consistent basis.)

If there's a moral or spiritual war going on, according to the Word, it's Republicans who are on the wrong side.

And then these motherfuckers have the nerve to shed a bunch of crocodile tears on the House Floor because Congress is taking steps to make sure that Interracial marriage and Marriage equality cannot be repealed because of the rogue Supreme Court.

Only to get hella called out by their own relatives.

I would imagine the family Christmas dinner is going to be extremely awkward for Aunt Vicky and if we're being honest, she deserves that shit. There is no excuse for this crap. I don't give a goddamn what you think. It's the 21st century, we are a Constitutionally secular country. Why the fuck do these idiots think it's the job of government to "Protect" their fake-Christian "Values?"

How in the hell do these assholes continue to believe they have some kind of a "right" to shit all over other people??

Seriously, these fucking people ignore absolutely everything in the Bible about how to conduct yourself, how to have a more just society, or how to treat your fellow humans. And then they constantly talk up all the bloody, judgmental, pie-in-the-sky holiness stuff as if that somehow makes up for it.

And for the last decade or so, these fucking people have never met a goddamned nut or a vicious authoritarian dictator or a war they didn't like.

I mean, seriously, their boy Putin is losing in Ukraine and has decided, for whatever reason to start threatening Kazakhstan. Why do I get the feeling Republicans will try and claim this is a show of strength, rather than stupidity?

Okay, Republicans "There's a moral and spiritual war going on." That said, why the fuck do you stand up to be counted with the enemies of everything America or Jesus Christ ever stood for?? There's a war, you pick the wrong side, and call that "Righteousness."

And then these people have the balls to think the rest of the world should fall down in worship of every stupid idea they come up with?

No, fuck you, I'm tired of this shit. Grow the fuck up, the lot of you. 

I've had it with the authoritarianism, the bad faith, the bigotry, the constant conspiracy bullshit, the escalating extremism, the priggish fake religiosity, the firehose of lies and the wielding of politics, religion or any old damn thing as weapons against other people...simply for the "crime" of being other people. 

You fuckers are no better than the goddamned colonizers who spent 400 years murdering Native Americans, or the goddamned slavers who held Black people in bondage, or the Russians who are attempting to wipe out Ukraine, and the worst part is you don't even have enough common decency or human empathy to be ashamed of your damn selves.

(And yet I find it interesting that none of these sons of bitches wants to actually move to Russia or some other country where this shit is acceptable, they'd rather fuck up America.)

People are getting tired of this garbage. Go ahead, do what you want to do, crank the abusive-right-wing-ism up to 11, go full crazy-stupid and try and render the government nonfunctional by jamming up the House for months trying to find the "Perfect" Republican Speaker, and declare war on the rest of us.

Go ahead. I fucking dare you.

I'm here to tell you, it won't go how you think it will. People are tired of your shit.

Many years ago no less of a conservative Great Man than Ronald Reagan said, "We are spirits, not animals."

Why then, Republicans, do you feel the need to act like beasts?

Keep it up, and you'll find yourselves treated accordingly.

It's the fucking Christmas season, does any of that even matter to you??

Слава Україна!

Seven

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

Walking Away From The Shining City (Reason For The Season, Seven.)

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

Yesterday, Brittney Griner was released from captivity as a Russian hostage, traded in the UAE for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. By the time I saw this, she was wheels-up from UAE and on her way home. She'll be home and life somewhat back to normal by Christmas. Good for her. 

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas, Brittney.

There simply is no other appropriate response.

In the military I was taught the ethic that we Leave No One Behind. It's as simple as that. We're all Americans, period. You either believe that, or you don't. You believe in freedom, or you don't. There can be no half measures. In the Battlespace, civilian friendlies aren't exempt from this, either. 

And I've known enough old men whose minds and souls never left the Bocage country of northern France, or the bright and sunny South Pacific, or the jungles of Vietnam, to know that war is a hard enough thing to deal with when those ethics are observed. My Grandpa never quite got over that he was the last man picked for the carrier air group of his first ship, the USS Natoma Bay. The next cadre up went to the USS St. Lo, which was sunk by a Japanese Kamikaze during the battle of Leyte Gulf. I heard the same stories over and over, about the Battle off Samar, the interminable CAS (Close Air Support) runs covering the Marines retreating from the Chosin Reservoir during Korea, and even a few stories about the very early parts of the Vietnam war as a senior officer aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard.

But we should not forget that adversity comes in all different kinds, too.

Why should an athlete, a civilian, unjustly imprisoned to serve as a hostage to be ransomed to the West for concessions because of a genocidal war be treated any differently? She didn't volunteer to be put in that kind of position!

We're either all Americans or we're not.

You don't have to care about or like Brittney Griner, but no one deserves to be left to die in a Russian Gulag. I don't give a damn who they are or what you think they did or didn't do.

And it's a safe bet the Russians, on the other hand, don't give a damn about Viktor Bout.

Since they didn't release Paul Whelan, it's likely they're holding out in case some other high profile Russian asset gets popped for espionage, or whatever. We'll get him back, as we must, it'll just take more time. It's worth noting that Whelan's family signed off on the Griner deal.

But it's absolutely a core value of the modern Right that some of us aren't "real" Americans. Some people should be left behind so that the fortunate can feel more fortunate. That, hell, entire nations and peoples simply are not fit to exist for no better reason than some "Great Leader" decided that they should not.

I've still not gotten an answer from any "Conservatives" on what happens when Vladimir Putin decides that America should not exist.

The hatred for Brittney Griner that I've seen is purely because she's a gay Black woman. The hatred for Ukrainians that's so in vogue among "Conservatives" now is only because Vladimir Putin...who they admire...has decided that Ukraine should be erased and its people exterminated. These fucking people look at Russia...which is still losing the war and is reverting to Communism in all but name...and the American "Conservatives" see Goodness and Strength in that?

And they see their own fellow Americans, particularly their fellow citizens of Color, or who are LGBT, or who have different politics, as enemies to be destroyed. How fucked up is that?!?!

Reagan Wept.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

Together we rise, or none of us do. 

We're either that Shining City On A Hill, or we're not. There can be no half measures. 

It's the fucking Christmas season, can't you fuckers stop being dicks for one damn day??

Слава Україна!

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. ~Ronald Reagan

Six

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.

For as much therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.

~Amos 5:8-15