Hunger In Dark Places (Part Two.)

Freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave, for a union based on liberty, when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner 'Freedom Now', they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. ~George W. Bush

I no sooner posted my last post...than I saw this.
 

White supremacist Nick Fuentes, saying he's perfectly fine with standing up with the enemies of everything America stands for as long as he gets to have his bigotry and culture war priorities.

Fuck that guy.

Seriously, let's get a few things straight here:

While there's some differing schools of thought, to my knowledge most Islamic countries allow abortion. Not because of liberalism or anything like that, but simply because Islam has differing beliefs about the soul and about whether or not a person is considered alive before they're actually born. 

Before Roe vs. Wade turned it into a culture war issue, American Christianity was very much the same way and with the exception of Catholicism (which has always been opposed to abortion unless there's mitigating circumstances such as incest or rape) Christianity on a global scale is STILL that way, and influenced by all manner of issues from cultural to legal as in most places religion must defer to secular laws.

Also...and this should surprise absolutely no one...homosexuality (at least between consenting adults) is illegal in Afghanistan with harsh prison terms for it. It's always been that way, but it bears keeping in mind here that the country's current outgoing Constitutional system was put in place primarily by a Republican US administration at a time when the country as a whole was much more hostile to LGBT rights and on that they were perfectly fine with deferring to local culture. In point of fact, if anything the Bush administration improved the situation because it became a matter of de jure law rather than the previous prevailing de facto standard of gay people simply being killed in the street for being gay. 

No, that's not an improvement, but it at least allowed for the possibility of something other than automatic death.

That said, in Afghan culture there are strong...and largely tolerated within limits...currents of situational bisexuality because of the strict separation of the sexes under the harsh Islamic doctrines that have existed for centuries even without the Taliban...and in some cultures these predated Islam and were simply folded into its local forms. Older men very frequently use boys and young men for sex, offering them gifts and money in exchange. Women tend to be more discreet and egalitarian with each other.

Yes, these people are fundamentalist and patriarchal enough as a general rule that they've mapped out all the things they see as loopholes and using them is an open secret but part of their culture. It's particularly a thing with gangs, militia forces and soldiers who often don't have access to women at all.

And actual pious Muslims make considerable efforts to keep their children (of both sexes) away from such people.

One such situation in Kandahar in 1994...where two Afghan warlords were quite literally fighting over a boy that each wanted to rape and their respective bands were shooting it out...was where the nascent Taliban first made their bones with the people, ambushing both warlords forces, defeating them and hanging both men...and freeing the people of that part of the city from their reign of terror.

That, of course, was before the Taliban instituted their own murderous reign.

And Afghan men's sexual habits have in point of fact led to conflict with US and NATO soldiers who see their sexual abuse of teenage boys as wrong and to Afghan troops being assaulted. I know of several cases where Airmen and Soldiers were sent back Stateside because of these kinds of incidents, though I never heard of anybody being prosecuted.

That goes hand in hand with another issue, drug use is rampant in Afghanistan, particularly among militias, soldiers, and Taliban fighters. Hashish, Heroin, Opium...I've been told by multiple people I know...some of whom were people I served with...that the US and NATO troops were the *Only* ones who weren't fucked up on drugs all the goddamn time.

And the Taliban are absolutely the worst for this sort of stuff. They are absolutely the primary movers and shakers in the drug trade, human trafficking...and most other kinds of crimes especially anything organized. In point of fact, they'll either help other criminals or kill them, depending on whether or not they get a cut of the profits...and this is in addition to the fact that throughout much of the war the Taliban have maintained a sophisticated shadow government and their own tax system in areas that they control.

And as regards health outcomes in general and vaccines in particular...it's not so much that anything is de jure illegal so much as...just like American religious nuts...the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan see vaccination campaigns and other public health initiatives (sourced from NGO's or the State) as a threat to their power...citing "Allah's Will" as nothing more than a shitty rationalization.

In short, Afghanistan is probably not the conservative paradise that Nick Fuentes imagines it is.

But it says one hell of a lot that he thinks it might be, and was actually willing to say that shit where somebody could see him. I can remember when John Walker Lindh...an American kid who had joined the Taliban and had even fought in a few battles...was captured and people wanted the little fucker to be executed.

I can remember when publicly aligning oneself with America's enemies would get somebody beat up, possibly even arrested or shot in the street by some angry conservative, and I remember some history lessons about when we interned whole people groups on the off chance that a few of them might be enemy agents.

And now members of the American racist far-right openly align themselves with the Taliban?

What in the hell?

Like I said, when it's our time...

When we hunger in dark places...

Who will be there for us?

Especially when so many of our own would gladly join with our enemies.

Think about that for a second.

Part One.

Hunger In Dark Places (Part One.)

Freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave, for a union based on liberty, when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner 'Freedom Now', they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. ~George W. Bush

When I got home this morning, and got online, this was the first thing I saw.

There was one, perhaps badly phrased comment by somebody from CNN about members of the Taliban and their hangers-on shouting "Death to America" in front of the abandoned US embassy building in Kabul. Just one.

And there were dozens, if not hundreds of comments and posts and various hot takes by "Conservatives" about this...enough to make it a trending topic on Twitter.

Because the lady from CNN...who seems to be trying to be inconspicuous for reasons that should be obvious...wasn't freaking out enough.

Seriously?

Listen, you idiots, YOU made this trend. THEY didn't. I'm pretty sure that was the point.

If there's one thing that insurgents in general, and Jihadists in particular have to be good at, it's manipulating mass media and the internet. This is, in point of fact, why a number of major platforms have automatic and specific moderation, procedures, etc. against this type of stuff.

Outrage-based conservative media, not so much. In their haste to be seen being performatively against this bullshit, the right-wing media spread it way further than the allegedly-liberal media did. 

(Not that I would call CNN liberal, personally.)

But these idiots just kicked a major own-goal in their own meme war by boosting the fuck out of *Terrorists* because their next dopamine rush or hit of internet-fueled rage or need to deal in such was more important than, ya know, *Not* giving Jihad a platform.

And then they wonder how the fuck we lost Afghanistan?

Think about it, stop reacting based on emotion and use your brain for a second.

The fact that we didn't build up civil society or institutions or give the Afghan people something they could believe in didn't help us much. More and more and more force, more weapons, more violence is NOT how you fight an insurgent conflict. Insurgency vs. Counter-insurgency is a war of ideas, information and media as much as of direct combat, tactical doctrine and weapons. You can't just keep reacting. You have to be proactive. You have to gain control of the narrative...and repeating the other side's narrative verbatim because you think it's going to "gotcha" some reporter ain't how you do that.

And you not only have to consider your enemies and respond intelligently to whatever they might do. You have to consider your allies, the general population and those who might be on the fence as well. You have to watch your messaging so you don't #1 Alienate your allies and #2 Create more enemies.

So, naturally, here's Paul Gosar and Jack "Ensign Urine Sample" Posobiec disparaging Afghan refugees, perhaps especially those who fought on our side.

The Afghan National Army crumbled because it had been trained to operate with extensive air, information technology and logistical support in accordance with modern warfighting doctrines, and it was left unsupported in all respects. The Afghans were also dependent on the United States to police corruption, and we were not anymore. We made Afghanistan part of the world community, a major ally, a part of global civilization...and then turned our back.

What would you do?

Afghan soldiers had been trained extensively to depend on and be interoperable with allies, and those allies were gone, mostly because of the vicissitudes of politics and one unstable leader...but also because to many allied nations' civilian populations the conflict itself had not been a priority for some time...if it ever was at all.

America was not at war, the United States Marine Corps was at war. America was at the mall.

The Afghan National Army and police, unlike the Taliban, had a standardized chain of command that was subordinate to a civilian government...and both their higher-ranking officers and that civilian government were corrupt and the troops often went unpaid for many months at a time.

The Taliban, on the other hand, offered to pay them not to fight and/or let them leave if they surrendered and left behind their equipment and weapons.

A fair number of them fought anyway, at least for awhile, until their ammunition and food ran out and most of their bros took the money, surrendered and went home.

Let's be real, what would you do?!

Would you stay and fight, maybe die, maybe starve, for the sake of duty, honor and country? Or would you take the money and run and hope the hell you can get yourself and maybe your family out of the country and on a bus to Peshawar or hire a guide to trek over the mountains on foot before the hammer comes down?

And then...THEN...you find out that some racist politician in the country that claimed to support you because of democratic values and a desire to stand against Jihad and that you fought for and with wants to deny you refugee status and a safe haven because you're not a white person?!

All while some punk-ass failed naval officer who didn't even make it all the way through being trained on his rating complains that you might get to go to America at all? Or that you should be "Vetted" when you might well have got shot or worse for these fucking people already?

Tell me how you think that's going to play in a traditional, tribe and honor-based culture. Go ahead, I'll wait. 

(If you want a free sample and probably an ass whuppin' without ever leaving your immediate vicinity, walk up to a black dude, a Latino or a redneck and say something bad about his mother, see what happens. It's the same general principle.)

Let's be real, what the fuck would you do? Would you keep on going? To face Allah only knows what and an uncertain future where you might be unwelcome? Or would you turn back around and join the other side because fuck these fucking people and how they set your country up for permanent occupation for no better reason than their own profits?

Again, what would you have done?

"Conservatives" set this thing up to be a loss right from the jump, and continued making it that way and lied about it for 20 years.

And other people will pay the price, especially people who bought hard into our rhetoric about democracy and freedom and things like women's rights.

And, aside from a few decent people who are legitimately anguished by all this, the vast  majority of them have already stopped pretending to care once they figured out that their side was well known to be too deep in the decision making process and they couldn't use this mess to shank their political rivals.

Because that's all any of this crap is really about to a large majority of current right-wing people.

The Right doesn't really give a shit about the Afghan people, not on a collective basis anyway. I think a fair number of Bush 43 people gave a shit, but they were outnumbered by those who saw the Afghan people and the war in their country as nothing more than yet another way to boost their stock portfolios.

Afghan people who, right now, are in large part trying to escape their own country, especially women, girls and young boys and men who don't want to end up living lives of constant rape and slavery, young men who want more out of life than constant war and harsh religion, and most especially of all those people who believed in our promises of democracy, freedom and human rights and who know in their hearts that the Taliban will offer them no peace.

And if you don't think right now that right-wing extremists are dreaming of the day when the United States is divided and weak and they can make the government and the military roll over like the Taliban just did in Afghanistan...you have another thing coming. 

The January 6th insurrection was an attempt to cause exactly what's happening in Afghanistan right now, right here at home.

When so many of us cannot resist the temptation to live in fear, or to bully and brutalize for no good reason...how the hell can we say we will be able to stand and fight when the time comes? 

Do you really think people who live under a constant stream of cowardice and performative fear and hate aimed at satisfying dark desires and negative emotions for the sake of somebody else's profits are going to be able to switch that off and be brave and do the right things if somehow, something something Gazpacho the "right" enemy attacks us?

And who might that be, really?

My guess is if the Chinese or the Russians came calling, the defense of America would be left primarily to liberals, conservatives would either bitch out and run and hide or actively join the enemy if they think it'd "Own The Libs" and if the enemy will take them.

Ya know, half a country might be able to defend itself. But that'd still leave a lot of people out in the cold. If these idiots get their wish and turn "Culture War" into civil war and ethnic conflict...long term my money's on my side...but how many lives, how much waste will that cost? How many Americans would be killed or become refugees?

When we hunger in dark places, who will be there for us?

Remember that, and tremble, if people like Paul Gosar are representative of how we're going to conduct ourselves in these matters.

Why? Because yet again, by being assholes we set ourselves up to lose. Eventually, it will happen here if it's not stopped, and soon.

The Universe will not forget. I believe this.

Part Two.

Gravediggers.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains
just roll on your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your Gawd like a soldier
  -- Rudyard Kipling

As of this morning, the government of Afghanistan collapsed, with president Ghani and his advisors fleeing to Tajikistan.

This mess is presently falling apart faster than we or the rest of the world can respond to it, and with the Kabul International Airport under some level of attack, only military aircraft can be used in the evacuation at the moment in an environment almost certain to degenerate into rough field conditions in short order.

And trust me, it's not very comfortable or a hell of a lot of fun being on a Galaxy, a Globemaster III or a Hercules under normal peacetime conditions. I can't imagine being on one that's taking off, let alone landing to pick people up, under any amount of fire.

It looks like the fall of Saigon, on steroids, but with Chinooks and Globemaster III's instead of Hueys and ships. I don't know how the fuck NATO and the US are going to get our people out of there, much less our Afghan allies...and if I had to guess, on top of that we're ALL going to be looking at an epic-level refugee crisis soon enough. Everybody with the guts, the money or the skills to get out who hasn't already is likely trying frantically to find a way to do just that. 

I'm serious. It's not going to be easy or any fun.

Probably a lot of their people (and more than likely some of ours) are going to have to trek over mountains and across deserts to get out...and most of the Afghans who can even get out will be the people with the connections, family in other countries, money and modern skills to make it in the world.

And quite likely a lot of wealthier Afghans are going to spend their fortunes just to escape and have to claw their way back up from whatever they can get, but I suppose working as a dishwasher or an oil change guy or a translator beats the ever-living FUCK out of being dead...and yes, worse can absolutely happen. Religious fanatics of all types desire to immanentize their particular shitty little eschaton, and I know from personal experience that some fanatic's idea of heaven is almost certainly everybody else's idea of hell.

Don't ask what the common people, much less the poor, people like me who have the skills to make it but not the monetary or physical means to get there are about to go through. You don't want to know. 

I'm here to tell you any disabled veteran of the Afghan National Army...and many of those who are not...at this point, is pretty much fucked.

And I guarantee it'll be worse with the Taliban basically extorting money and goods and outright stealing from a lot of those same people...and that's going to be compounded by the country's legit economy, both internal and international trade, pretty much grinding to a halt and collapsing. We can, however, expect that the drug trade, human trafficking, and whatever other crimes the Taliban are committing or allowing (for a cut of the profits) will very shortly hit some boom times.

It's a very safe bet, though, that the "Conservatives" most responsible for this goddamned mess...both the Trump administration and its supporters that threw the Afghan people to the wolves and the Bush 43 people who got us into this shit in the first place, have washed their hands of the situation.

Except when they can use it as a stick with which to beat the other side, or when they find out they can use desperate, needy Afghan refugees for cheap labor (as I said yesterday.)

I'm here to tell you that the David French, Max Boot and Rick Wilson types who are supportive of the Afghan people are absolutely in the minority. Most of these idiots (Trump Supporters or otherwise) could absolutely give a fuck about Afghanistan.

And the military-industrial complex has already made their money, which seems to have been the whole fucking point of us being there in the first place if you think about it.

I mean, seriously, the Bush administration made no secret of their intention to set Afghanistan up for a permanent US occupation. Their government and military were dependent on ours, equipped and organized to modern standards the locals often lacked the technical skills to maintain on their own. US contractors fixed the aircraft, equipment and vehicles and maintained the logistics of their military. US funding paid the police and troops and when we were there, we had to make sure they got paid...and even at the best of times corruption was rife.

Afghanistan under the regime we set up was democratic, globalized and so plugged into the world community it couldn't stand on its own two feet without us.

And then under Trump, America took a turn toward isolationism and first, left the Afghans holding the bag...then Trump actively threw them to the wolves. 

Of course, conservatives had been looking to divest themselves of this mess since they decided Iraq was a newer, prettier, more oily sort of toy to play with and decided we were going to invade there, too.

And I'm here to tell you, they had hopes of using Afghanistan and Iraq as springboards to attack Iran as well...as if that wouldn't have turned out to be a complete disaster.

And that was, to a great extent, the American center-right. Mere Bush-era Ghouls...almost liberals by comparison with the MAGA nuts and in fact often called exactly that by these fucking people.

Don't think that, as with the coup in Myanmar, that the American far-right (particularly the religious nuts) isn't looking on the Taliban, green with absolute envy right now.

Don't think these fucking people won't try to find a way to turn America into some kind of gonzo Afghanistan, only with more guns and way the hell more drugs.

They've been telling us exactly that since January 6th, and they're doing so with increasing fervency now. They have fever dreams of civil wars and ethnic conflicts and all type of shit. I'm serious. Why the hell do you think these motherfuckers were and are mismanaging the COVID-19 response so badly?

Their whole bit right now is trying to find a way to crash American, if not global civilization.

Because they think they'll be the king in his castle, or the warlord with all the guns, thugs and drugs. Not the serfs picking poppy bulbs in the fields or the catamite strapped to the back of the truck until the local Potentate gets horny. Or ya know, just plain dead. They all think the bad stuff will only happen to other people.

And I guarantee you these motherfuckers will praise the Taliban and DEMAND that we deny assistance or asylum to our Afghan allies or refugees (until they find out they can put them to work for minimum wage.) Hell, people are already saying this type of shit.

We blew up Afghanistan, don't we at least owe the Afghans a safe place to come to, if they want to come here?

It seems to me that this is a moral obligation at this point.

And I'd take any one person who trekked over mountains and walked across deserts to get here over ten Americans who were born here and don't appreciate this country or understand its purpose. I'd take one refugee over any hundred of the far-right nuts who are trying to burn this country down.

It's said that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.

But right now we've got a whole hell of a lot of gravediggers looking to bury us.

Not over there...but right here at home. People who call themselves Americans...but who would happily destroy America just to make their political rivals mad.

Think about that for a second.

And if you're not willing to do something about it, look around you at what's happening in the world today and tremble.

Because just like the soldiers of the Afghan National Army...if we don't stand up and fight, then this fall is in our future too.

It's really that simple.

If you're not willing to fight for it, take the word 'Freedom' out of your vocabulary. ~Malcolm X.

Reality Bites Back (Opioids Of The Masses, Four.)

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

This was the first thing I saw when I logged into Twitter last night.

You know, if there was ever a group of people in the world that could make the Communists look like the fucking good guys, it's the American rich people. Here we have some asshole that I'd never heard of before last night...and Laura Ingraham...basically saying that they think they should be able to literally starve working people into submission.

First of all, speaking from experience, I have no idea where this asshole got this shit about how military working dogs are treated. A hungry dog may well bite when it's not supposed to bite, for one thing.

Secondly, it's also been my experience that neither dogs nor people are very focused, or much good at doing what they're supposed to do when they're goddamned hungry because you're not thinking about your work...you're thinking about the fact that you're goddamned hungry. Why is this hard?

Keep ignoring reality, and eventually it's going to bite you to get attention.

Too many problems have been "Kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with" for long enough that now they're all starting to morph into Disaster Voltron.

Afghanistan right now, for example. We're literally watching the disintegration of a country set up on the principles of the Bush 43 administration, that was made so interoperable with US that we haven't even left all the way yet and it's already falling apart because (among other things) Afghan logistics and maintenance were largely done and managed by US contractors who are now gone...and again, the idea of "Kick the can down the road" came due and there was no one left to kick the can.

But the fact that we're all going to see how this affects the people who happen to live there makes it a hell of a lot less of an ideological exercise. My guess is a hell of a lot more of those people are going to end up here. 

And the people who created this mess will bitch about that too.

But then here on the home front, there's still COVID-19, and the idea that the Right seems to have latched onto that they can use a big pile of bodies to gum up the works...even if (perhaps especially if) the bodies are their own.

And of course, the fact that whole US industries deal with conditions that are so shitty and pay so low that nobody wants to do the work, and even bumping people up to a living wage isn't helping because unattended problems continue to snowball.

I don't know how the hell people aren't seeing this shit.

Oh, wait, assholes who've lived a mostly consequence-free existence who've never missed a fucking meal nor likely had to eat anything that they didn't want to in their entire fucking lives. Why the fuck is anybody listening to these dumb entitled shits, again?

Well, except for the fact that there seems to be a decent-sized faction of us that wants to keep partying it up even as the world literally burns, ignoring any resulting issues unless we can blame them on people we don't like.

But don't worry, that's when assholes like John Taffer and Laura Ingraham and the politicians they're in a feedback loop with get positively innovative.

I'll bet you MONEY that incoming Afghan refugees get pushed into filling vacancies in hospitality and service industries in a matter of months or years.

And THEN Right-wing politicians will bitch about those people taking jobs that their followers didn't want anyway and Fox News will yammer on about it for weeks at a time. American idiots will (repeatedly) claim that it's some sort of social problem that their waitress is wearing a Hijab.

And people who were there, who went over there and fought, and/or who tried to do the right thing, and who speak up about it or assert that *Wearing* that Hijab is her right, and would have been in 1776 just as much as it is in 2026 will be vilified as "liberals" and "radicals" and some shit like that. This will happen no matter what their actual political affiliations are, because Conservatism, Inc. is predictable and stupid.

And *I* can see things like this coming already.

I mean, seriously, this shit is getting old. 

These are people who have maliciously not maintained what we have, not paying the bills to boost their profits in the short term and their only response to bill collectors and a massive need for deferred maintenance that has to be dealt with RIGHT NOW is to try to burn the house down. Die off so it's not their problem, Downsize, break a piece off and try to split the difference with reality. Peace With Honor, y'all. (And where have we heard that before?) All to avoid admitting that their whole culture war thing was a losing bet to start with.

Or at least it became that way when they got too radicalized, and got worse when their voter base started dying of a preventable disease.

But they can't see that, won't see that, and that's the problem.

Trouble is, say they take a chunk of the Midwest and South and turn it into some little fascist Banana Republic, what happens when nothing improves for them (and it may get worse) because they were the problem all along? (Spoiler: They'll start a war and try and take it out on the rest of us.) My guess is the end result looks an awful lot like Afghanistan...but it'll be over here, instead of over there.

And the people who want to keep partying it up while the world burns literally won't care (if they notice at all) when the fire is right outside their window. In fact, they'll blame that on everybody else too.

This is a conspiracy, ONE BIG DAMN CONSPIRACY!

AND EVERYONE'S IN ON IT, INCLUDING HER!

(Sorry, Obligatory Shawshank Redemption quote.)

Sooner or later, we're going to have to start doing something different.

We The People seem to get this, or a lot of us do, anyway. Trouble is there's a lot of people that want to go back to "Normal" without realizing (or even caring) that normal was pretty damn broken.

The problem isn't and never was Unemployment Insurance, the problem is that whole industries have been allowed to boost their profits by massively underpaying workers.

The problem wasn't something inherently wrong with Afghanistan, or South Vietnam for that matter...the problem was that we tried to instill Democracy with a Mk.117 Bomb and didn't do enough to build institutions, prevent corruption, or support the regimes we installed...and when we got bored we washed our hands of it...and in Afghanistan's case much of America did this as soon as the possibility of a bigger adventure in Iraq came along.

America was not at war, the Marine Corps was at war. America was at the Mall, and therein lies the problem.

If we want a better country, we're going to have to be better citizens.

A hell of a lot of us don't want a country, they want the Killing Fields, but with a Mall.

Because it's too hard to give a shit about people, or something.

We're going to have to start giving a shit or selfishness will be the death of us and no amount of force or money is going to stop it. That's all there is to it. Caring about ideas more than people doesn't work when there aren't people alive to have the idea in the first place.

That's all.

Three.

Mob-erty (Q-Berty, Again)

Falco: Games. One hundred and fifty days of games.

Gracchus: He's cleverer than I thought.

Falco: "Clever"! The whole of Rome would be laughing at him, if they weren't so afraid of his Praetorian.

Gracchus: Fear and wonder, a powerful combination.

Falco: You really think people are going to be seduced by that?

Gracchus: [about Commodus] I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate, it's the sand of the Colosseum. He'll bring them death…and they will love him for it.

~From the film Gladiator

I saw this a couple days ago.

After a school board meeting in Franklin, TN, medical professionals had to be escorted out by police after a near riot and death threats from the crowd.

This isn't the only place this has happened, in some areas, the Proud Boys have showed up. They claim to be protesting against "Marxism." So, wait a minute, protecting your and your children's health is "Marxist" now?

Excuse me, what the fuck?

Of course, on a certain level I shouldn't be surprised. There's certain fucking people in this country who see the words "Public Health" and immediately feel threatened because that means collective effort to maintain the health of the population and they think they might have to give a shit about somebody else or pay more in taxes or something.

And between seventy years of Ayn Rand horseshit, the endless glorification of selfishness, Donald Trump edging out both...the endless proliferation of conspiracy theories and the outright marketing of fascism to conservatives a crowd of wannabe Gnostics who desire that they, and only they should reap the benefits of society or the fruits of law and order, well, here's where you end up.

Time was, not so long ago, that conservatives very often were the experts everybody listened to. Granted, the same fucking people still threw a shit fit when C. Everett Koop said "Hey, smoking is bad for you." But nobody rioted or had to call the cops over it, because the assorted chucklefucks had not yet been reduced to simian overreaction, shrieking and throwing their own shit when somebody, anybody, told them to do something that they didn't want to.

Now, in effect, if anybody other than Donald Trump tells them to do something, their attitude is "YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!" Like they're a bunch of entitled ten year old kids from wealthy families, in effect raised by servants that they can boss around.

I mean, seriously, what the fuck happened to these people.

They see people trying to protect their kids...and indeed, them...from a deadly disease and they react violently?

Come on, people, what the fuck?

For one thing, this is the bitter fruit of confirmation bias, endless dumb shit on the internet, Fox News and the Prosperity Gospel...people have basically been taught that this life is a "Choose your own adventure" book where they can do whatever they want and nothing seriously bad ever happens to the protagonists (which, of course, they assume must be themselves.) 

Ever notice how, in these people's budding mythology (Q-Anon and shit like that) nobody ever seems to actually die? For such a violent, bloody-minded mob these motherfuckers seem awfully squeamish about death. Not only because the Q-Anon shit is chock full of people who've supposedly been executed but there's still clones and robots and uploaded personalities of them so that they can still continue to obsess over Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, etc. etc. and this same mythos is likewise a vast, overly complex web of Matrixes and this and that and the other Deep State or Potemkin thing or secret cabal because something something Gazpacho while the world is somehow magically still super-secretly being run by Donald Trump? 

(You know, the guy who couldn't keep a secret if his life depended on it if it's "good" and for whom anything "bad" gets leaked to the press by somebody else eventually.)

And I'll hasten to add, these people take the even bigger leap of magical faith that Trump would run anything competently, when he clearly never has before.

Not to mention, while savagely throwing aside their claimed support for the police, these same people act as if several of their own either being killed or dying for other reasons during their clownish insurrection was literally the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world.

And somehow, Communism, a political ideology that basically collapsed under its own misbegotten inefficiency in 1989 is still a thing.

And you know, out here in the real world you have to damn near be my age to even know what Communism actually was.

And then what do they do with all this crap?

They riot like animals in the street, literally acting worse than how they try to say the people they don't like acted. Yes, every single thing these fucking people ever accuse Black people or anybody else of is something they have at least thought about doing themselves, it's all projection.

 These fucking idiots hate nothing in the world more than the very society that keeps all of us alive.

You know, like most people (especially veterans and others with even peripheral ties to the situation, in my case knowing several people-including people I served with-who served over there) I've watched the worsening situation in Afghanistan with an increasing feeling of dread, knowing where it will lead. I can tell you that there will be even more civil war, more death, a huge refugee crisis, and ultimately a need for someone else...probably the United Nations this time...to have to go in there with military force and try to straighten this mess out when Afghanistan Under The Taliban 2.0 invariably becomes first a deepening quagmire as different Jihadist factions fight it out to see whose brand of extremism is on top, then a haven for terrorists and an unending flow of drugs that worsens our own assorted domestic crises and those of other nations.

But here's the thing.

While most of us regard the impending collapse of Afghanistan with unvarnished horror, these people, the ones rioting after a school board meeting and threatening health care professionals?

Something like the Taliban is exactly what they aspire to be, right here, in America.

If you don't think Jihad, or at least some kind of godless Culture War racist version of it, is something these fools aspire to you have another thing coming. If you don't think these goddamn morons would gladly shout "Trump Akbar" while "Owning The Libs" by blowing themselves up in a crowded Walmart you're wrong.

If you don't think that this "Culture War" bullshit will eventually lead to ethnic conflict and outright warfare of the usual sort if it's not checked now, I don't know what to tell you.

And the worst part is, that's what Republicans want. Why else do you think they've gone right ahead and decided that the United States Armed Forces was their enemy? Or why they so easily have thrown the police under the bus?

Because civilization, expertise, and giving a shit about your fellow humans isn't entertaining enough, or something. Because humanity is too hard and fear and hatred come easily to certain people.

Because to a person, they think that when civilization collapses into heavily armed anarchy they'll be the Lord or Lady in the castle who fornicates atop a giant pile of money, not the illiterate thugs fighting those other illiterate thugs for scraps of stale bread and promises of magic beans from whoever's really in charge. It's not them that'll be the serfs in the fields, or the catamite strapped to the back of the truck...or ya know, just plain dead. That'll be somebody else. Why? Because they think the universe is all about them. Every last one of them thinks this.

The Universe may disagree, however.

Ya know, a substantial portion of the conservative people in Western civilization never got over Plato, or Rome, or their fascination with ideas being better or more important than people.

I'm here to tell you the Universe didn't give a shit about them then, either.

The Q-Nuts like to say things like "Where we go one, we go all." But they never think of "We" as humans in general. They never, ever, would think to consider the people of Afghanistan as "We" as part of US. 

They're wrong.

Just think about that for a second.

And if we don't stop this shit, these motherfuckers would gladly bring the same kind of violence that's engulfing Afghanistan right here, for no better reason than they think it would "Own the Libs."

Because they literally think nothing bad would ever really happen to them, even as they get eaten alive by their own addictions and petty fears and hatreds because deep down they know they're wrong.

At the end of the day, a lot of them probably don't really care, either.

And this, they call freedom.

When it's anything but that.

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

If you want to be free, You have to start giving a shit.

That's all.

One.

Hate For Sale (Opioids Of The Masses, Three.)

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

I saw this last night.

After I'd just finished my previous post.

Ball caps with Nazi symbols, the Swastika and the symbol of the Waffen SS, for sale at the Sturgis biker rally in South Dakota. AKA the latest COVID-19 Mega-Spreader event.

I mean, Jesus Christ, what the fuck is even wrong with people?

I'm going to say it again. This is not the conservatism, not the Republicanism, that I grew up with. This is the type of shit that America spent a shit-ton of its own blood and treasure and, fundamentally, made itself a world power to fucking stop. Never Again, as they say, is now.

This is exactly the shit that those Ronald Reagan called 'The Boys of Point Du Hoc' swarmed across an iron-gray, stormy English Channel on the 6th of June, 1944 to put an end to, and threw themselves into the meat grinder of breaching the Atlantic Wall to stop. Ever seen the movie Saving Private Ryan? One of my Grandpa's brothers was a US Army infantryman who stormed ashore that day, not knowing if he'd live or die that day and he never, never talked about fighting on that beach, what it was like, or what he saw there. 

I heard the story of how he got to meet Edward R. Murrow while he was in the Army a dozen times. It took me 20 years to even learn, and still longer to understand the magnitude of the fact that this happened during the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp and I didn't learn the full history of his military service until somebody from that branch of the family researched it after he died and had some copies of what they found printed up and distributed to the rest of us.

And today, you can find the symbols of Nazi Germany on something as American as a goddamned baseball cap, openly for sale at a massive public event in the middle of the goddamn country.

There's something very broken about that.

It almost seems to me, like a certain segment of modern so-called "Conservatives" venerate the Nazis far more than they revere the memory of the Americans who fought against them, even more so than they do the Confederates...and I think they do so with a far more political than cultural or historical sort of interest. You know, I've written down my thoughts about the Confederate Flag elsewhere, but at least it could be said that the people who flew it were Americans, after a fashion, and eventually at least a few of them remembered that fact later on. For those who didn't, the Lost Cause historians cropped up later and airbrushed and whitewashed their crimes and for good or ill, that became a part of our history and affected all type of stuff in terms of culture and symbolism, 

I mean, shit, I grew up watching the Dukes of Hazzard too. I've not seen that anybody's ever seriously done anything like that regarding the Nazis, who remain nothing less than a symbol of human evil. Hell, even the modern European fascists generally trace back to and claim the heritage of their domestic collaborators rather than the Nazis themselves. There is no Lost Cause for Heinrich Himmler. 

American neo-Confederates revere Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Even a French fascist these days styles themselves an Anti-Gaullist or a Petainist. The Ukraine's far-right reveres a guy named Stepan Bandera. Until fairly recently in my life, nobody has cried for the goddamned Nazis themselves, or at least dared to do so openly. 

For the record, the only people I've ever personally met who had adopted Nazi symbolism were outright criminals who had done so in prison.

I'm 100% serious here.

I once met a guy who had the Waffen SS lightning bolts tattooed on the side of his head. Everybody called him "Crazy." To this day, I don't even know what this dude's name was. He was this skinny white guy that had literally been furloughed from prison so that he could attend the Custodial program at the same school that I was going to for a 14-week vocational evaluation after my accident. He was learning to be a damn janitor. I have no idea what this dude went to prison for, I never asked. I didn't care. I know Crazy got with a few of the white girls that were there, and this was a source of some interpersonal problems. I know Crazy smoked like a goddamn train and was always trying to bum cigarettes from people after he'd spent up the little bit of money that the program gave him. I know during the time I was there he was in and out, gone back to prison after only a month or so because he got in a fight or some stupid bullshit. He was in the same dorm hall as me, at the other end, but I still heard about how he conducted himself.

What a shitty life, eh?

The whole time I knew this dude, I think I personally said only a few words to him, one time, when he tried to bum a cigarette and some snacks off of me. I didn't have any cigarettes because I was trying to quit smoking. I did give him a couple candy bars, though, even that asshole didn't deserve to be hungry. Truth is, like most people, I just wanted him to go away and beating his ass just for existing would've got me kicked out of the program.

The truth is, like most people I regarded him as a joke.He was this dude who presented himself as if he was some kind of moral force...but he openly talked about fighting, prison homosexuality, stealing, toilet wine and various improvised drugs.

But this ideology that in my experience only ever leads to bad ends, personal destruction, ridiculous behavior, the destruction of whole nations and societies and mass murder on an industrial scale...and in America is associated with criminals and cranks...is being marketed to people, sold on the street like it's no big deal. Because racism.

As if it's a goddamn basketball team logo.

If we are to remain a whole country, if we ourselves are to avoid destruction and violent internal conflicts, this shit has to stop.

It has to be stopped. And no one is there to step up and stop it but us. As I've said before, hate and rage cannot be allowed to become the new "Opiates of the Masses" if we are to remain a civilization. This social fentanyl is something that will destroy us if it remains unchecked.

You want a better America? Be a better citizen, and punch a damn Nazi while you're at it.

Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on a race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength of the world. That is the American way. ~Ronald Reagan

Two

One

#Top20

Death By Narrative (Fight the Memeocracy, Again.)

[The Mandalorian brings Moff Gideon and Grogu to the bridge, with Darksaber in hand]

Bo-Katan Kryze: What happened?

Cara Dune: He brought him in alive, that’s what happened. And now the New Republic’s gonna have to double the payment.

Moff Gideon: That’s not what she’s talking about. Why don’t you kill him now and take it? It’s yours now.

The Mandalorian: What is?

Gideon: The Darksaber. It belongs to you.

The Mandalorian: No... [offers Bo-Katan] it belongs to her.

Gideon: She can’t take it. It must be won in battle. In order for her to wield the Darksaber again, she would need to defeat you in combat.

The Mandalorian: I yield. It’s yours.

Gideon: [smug] Oh, no. It doesn’t work that way. The Darksaber doesn’t have power. The story does. Without that blade, she’s a pretender to the throne. 

~From The Mandalorian, Season 2, Episode 8 "The Rescue."

Last week, Tucker Carlson broadcast his show from Hungary, complete with giving Viktor Orban an interview that all but ended with Tucker giving the Hungarian dictator a blowjob live on TV.

But what caught my attention was this picture of Tucker standing by the fence, which looks not so much like the border of a country, but like...Maximum Security. (Note: This is the Serbian border, Serbia being pretty much the other right-wing shitbird country in the region, but not right-wing enough, apparently.) Former Republican that I am...I just don't see the attraction here and I'm not going to apologize for that in any way, shape, or form.

These people...be they Orban's followers in Hungary or Tucker's worshipers in the United States...seem to think that by looking out their window and seeing a big goddamn barbed wire fence, by giving up their own freedom and rights...or wish-casting after the same in the case of Americans...that they're somehow harming somebody else more than themselves.

I'll note, and I say this as a former conservative, that I can't fit my head far enough up my own ass to see these people's point of view and that's all there is to it.

I'm serious, on everything from COVID-19 response to fiscal policies to immigration and social beliefs, these fucking people are destroying themselves...on the off chance that doing so might somehow something something Gapacho "Own The Libs" or whatever.

Whatever they think they're doing it doesn't seem to be working very well.

I quite frankly don't understand the logic of destroying one's own life and self, giving up one's own identity for whatever's on Fox News tonight and surrendering one's freedoms and rights to the will of the mob...on the off chance that it might hurt somebody else's feelings. Correct me if I'm wrong but, on the face of it, this seems downright fucking stupid.

The basic idea, as I've been saying since 2015, is that these people would be fine with a dictator, so long as they thought he was "their" guy. They'd likewise be fine with being slaves if they could be induced to think that they were a better class of slave than some of the other slaves. As someone else put it, the cruelty is the point.

And that goes hand in hand with relative status. There's a vocal minority of Americans who would be perfectly fine with living in a cardboard box underneath a freeway overpass, roasting a pigeon on a coat hanger, so long as the Black people or gay people or whatever in the next box over didn't have a coat hanger, or had a smaller box or something. Certainly at this point, within American conservatism the people who think this way are in the majority, if perhaps just barely, but that said they're the ones driving that bus to a great extent because others just won't stand up and do anything about it.

I can remember when cowardice, or incuriosity, or just plain stupidity were not regarded as virtues even by conservatives. Likewise I can remember when racism and sexism were things that were not practiced openly, and I'm so old that I can remember when talking a bunch of anti-American shit around a bunch of conservatives might get you beat up, or for that matter when if doctors or experts said something, conservatives listened like everybody else did.

And that's the thing, isn't it? The stories people tell themselves to justify their own egos, to buff up their own mental image of themselves, are literally killing us as (mostly) conservatives refuse to get vaccinated, effectively creating a second Pandemic a year and a half after the first one, with the specter of more still to come. They seem to think that a big enough pile of bodies will jam up the works for all the rest of us, and that causing this is somehow both an end in and of itself and a worthy purpose for their lives.

These fucking people are turning themselves into biological-weapon Kamikazes for...what, again? Because Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson said so? To "Own The Libs?" (Again, whatever that means) or for some stupid idea of "Freedom" and THIS stems directly from the shit people said during the fight over the Affordable Care Act. People started considering it "freedom" to die in the street of a preventable illness because a Black President got the government to offer private health insurance at cheaper rates and make it harder for insurance companies to refuse to serve people. So, again, a lot of this bullshit comes down to racism.

Wait a minute, doesn't having better or more options for health insurance make people more free?

Isn't it kind of hard to enjoy or exercise one's freedoms when one has died of a preventable medical condition?

And how did we as a people become such idiots that this kind of crap became viewed as anything other than the murderous crank bullshit that it is?

Conservatives have become nothing more, at this point, than the exact kind of murderous political cadres existing only to kill people for some vague notion of "Purity"  that so disgusted the more pragmatic Republicans of my youth, they're the Brownshirts, the Red Guards, and the people in Soweto who would put tires filled with burning petrol around someone's neck for offenses real or imagined...and like that last group, their victims by now are overwhelmingly their own people, as much as they like to fantasize to the contrary.

I'm serious, the vast majority of anti-Vax nuts are white folks, and certainly at least a majority of them are conservatives, or at least conservative-adjacent (and ya know, I do not really draw a big distinction between certain far-left people and the far-right anymore, because while the rationalizations might be different, the results are very, very fucking similar.

Whether it's political, racial, or what have you, certain fucking people's desire for purity...and for a world that shouts their alleged conclusions right back in their face...is killing a hell of a lot of us, and making life difficult for the vaccinated majority of us

And I'm tired of it.

You want to destroy yourself, die of disease or go live in a prison...or a country that looks like one...fine. YOU go and do that. You do not have the right to force your idiotic conclusions or life choices on even one other human being on the face of the Earth (or to force us to clean up your mess, really) because you saw some idiotic meme on the internet or had one implanted in your stunted consciousness as a child and I am goddamned tired of you trying.

Fuck you.

And that's all I have to say about that.

The Believers (Opioids Of The Masses, Two.)

Hess: So what shall we toast to, boys? I can blather on about “To health” or “To success,” but I’d like to do somethin’ a little less rote. Where you from, Brown Eyes?

Migs Mayfield: How ’bout a toast to Operation Cinder?

Hess: Now there’s a man who knows his history.

Mayfield: No, I don’t just know it. I lived it. I was in Burnin Konn.

Hess: Burnin Konn?

Mayfield: Mmm.

Hess: That was a hard day. I had to make many unpleasant decisions.

Mayfield: Yes, you did. Entire city gone in moments, along with everybody in it. We lost our whole division that day. Man, that was like 5-10,000 people.

Hess: Yep. All heroes of the Empire.

Mayfield: Yeah. And all dead.

Hess: Well, it’s a small sacrifice for the greater good, son.

Mayfield: Depends on who you ask, don’t you think?

Hess: [irritated] What you gettin’ at, trooper?

Mayfield: All those people, the ones who died, was it good for them? Hmm? Their families? The guys I served with? Civilians, those poor mud scuffers, died defending their homes, fighting for freedom. Was it good for them?

Hess: But we’ve outlasted them, son. They’re eating themselves alive. The New Republic is in complete disarray, and we grow stronger. You see, with the rhydonium you’ve delivered, we can create havoc that’s gonna make Burnin Konn pale by comparison. And then they’re gonna turn to us once again. You see, boys, everybody thinks they want freedom, but what they really want is order. And when they realize that, they’re gonna welcome us back with open arms. Ah. To the Empire.

[Mayfield chuckles, then fires a blaster at Hess' chest, killing him instantly. He and Mando then shoot their way out of the mess hall] ~From The Mandalorian, Season 2, Ep. 7 "The Believer"

I'm confused.

A year ago, in spite of COVID-19 and what even then looked like an impending election loss for Republicans in the middle of multiple incompetently-handled crises, it was all "America First" and "MAGA" and this, that and the other goddamned thing.

Now, according to these fucking people, America sucks and nobody can do anything right. 

All these fucking idiots have done lately is bitch about the US Olympic team, even though we're far ahead of our nearest competitor (the Chinese) at this point. As if that even matters. Ya know, for a majority of us, life hasn't really changed all that much, except maybe a little bit for the better. I'm a former conservative, I like not having to worry about what my government is doing.

I'm tired of this bullshit. Either you care about your country or you don't. If you only "like" your country when your side holds political leadership it's not your country that you care for, it's your mostly-imagined "side" in some cultural or political dispute, and yes, these fucking people very much would like to make everything political. Thus, to maximize the diminishing returns generated by a mostly aging, shrinking voter base that's still being ravaged by COVID-19 when most of the rest of us went and got vaccinated.

Yep, the Republican politicians, and the "Conservative" influencers and the selfish rich people, they're all starting to regret convincing their fanatical followers not to get vaccinated because something something Gazpacho "Own the Libs" bullshit, or whatever it was. People are dying, their people.

They've done lied themselves into the position of being up shit creek without a paddle because their stupid, fanatical followers who believed all their cult bullshit will just assume that they're in on whatever imagined conspiracy theory. Even admitting that they've been lying probably wouldn't fix the situation simply because they programmed these people to not believe anything they don't "like" or that doesn't tickle their ears, and to double down infinitely when their bullshit gets challenged.

On a more personal note, I've gotten tired of arguing with this garbage, shouting into this bottomless moral abyss. It's gotten old. I've been dealing with and writing about this crap for going on five years now. In the immediate post-Trump period I dealt with months of exhaustion because I'd basically been spending much of it only getting four hours of sleep most days. Last month, I hit a wall and fell into a serious depression. I'm coming out of it, but it's still a struggle. The way work is going, with our business in continual decline, hasn't helped. 

I'm thinking about and actively planning to move...and looking for a job. At my Mom's insistence I surrendered the ferrets...I can always start over with just a couple when things stabilize again. The truth is, it's all I can do to keep myself going right now. adjust your expectations here accordingly. 

I'm going to start another blog page, and likely put a lot of effort into discussing other things, ferrets, gaming, photography, travel, hell, maybe even the fact that I've started studying Buddhism. And I think I'm going to set up a Patreon so I can make some extra money with all this stuff.

But in the long term I feel like this page has mostly served its purpose.

And what good has it all done? Seriously?

Literally what the fuck good does it do to argue with people who believe Communism is still a thing? Communism fell in 1989 (although I'll also accept 1991 as a valid answer, also, Merry Christmas.) 

I saw it fall when I was just a fifteen-year-old kid, live on CNN as ordinary people knocked it down. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and the then-nascent 24-hour news cycle I was there, while also eating a pizza in the living room.

Not only that, Commies under the bed and all (Let's party like it's 1952!) but Communism in America is somehow real and a threat (despite the fact that Communism hasn't been a force in US politics since the 1930's and that was the Communists own fault.) 

All this while ignoring the fact that people like Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin were literally raised in and trained by Communism on an ideological level and in Putin's case he was a legit member of the KGB, the "Sword and shield of the Party" where one had to be a Communist's Communist to even get in the door...and in Russia they say that there are no former KGB men. (And people like Tucker Carlson are just fine with this, really. I'm serious.)

What they are saying is that their ideological boner for authoritarianism by any means necessary trumps (pun intended) all actual beliefs or other ideologies. These people would embrace Albanian-style bunker-Communism, or Falun Gong, or belief in Rajneesh, or auras and crystals and New Age woo woo if that shit got them the power and control they wanted.

These idiots are the ideological descendants of the fools who thought everybody, including Eisenhower, was a Communist in the 1950's. Except now it's "Everybody but who we're in business with or have an ideological man-crush on." 

Their grasp of reality is about as limp as most of their dicks.

Fuck all that silly bullshit. What is it even good for?

Was it any good for the refugees we turned away? The soldiers, both American and Kurdish, who got left behind? The kids who got kept in cages? What about the people who got beaten or run over or shot because of all the violence Trump and his wannabe Nazis fomented? What about guys like Ahmaud Arbery or George Floyd? What about the impending collapse of Afghanistan? 

What about the hundreds of thousands of people who died alone with tubes jammed down their throats because they couldn't breathe anymore, or who said goodbye to their family only via social media and technology, with a nurse holding up an iPad as they gasped out their last words...if they could even do that much, or be aware of their own end?

What about all those who denied the very virus that was ravaging their bodies, or who regretted only at the end that they listened to Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson instead of Dr. Fauci or Governor Gretchen Whitmer?

Did any of this shit do those people any damned good whatever?!

What are we, even, that we have done this to ourselves?

I'm asking you.

What have we become.

What is it that we, as a people, believe in that's even worth saving at this point? What the fuck are we even doing here?

We need to answer this question, because it seems like just over a third of us would be perfectly well fucking fine with prostrating themselves before an orange would-be Antichrist.

A problem, this is, and it's not going away just because you might want to ignore it.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen. You cannot outsource doing your part in the world to anyone else.

It's as simple, and yes, also just as complicated as that. It seems a trite oversimplification to say "Do better" and yet we must.

That's all I've ever said here.

Peace.

Part One.

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

Chasing The Dragon (Opioids Of The Masses, One.)

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. ~Karl Marx

Madison Cawthorn says the proposed door-to-door vaccination plan is a plot to take people's Bibles and guns.

Bibles and guns...

I mean, to hear some Christians tell it, today, firing a weapon is almost a sacrament in and of itself.

It's funny how those two things always seem to be pushed together by conservatives, isn't it? Bibles and guns, I mean, what is a religion that espouses nonviolence and peace if it's not backed up by massive firepower up to and including military grade rifles, right? "Peace through strength" as Reagan said. 

The difference is, Reagan actually believed in peace and negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev and worked to end the threat of nuclear war. What has Madison Cawthorn even done, except be an obnoxious little ghoul?

In fact, what have Republicans in general done, except continue their descent into authoritarianism, corruption, and racism, and try to prevent anybody else from doing much of anything at all?

In point of fact, if you ask me, the entire purpose of the Republican Party...the only purpose it's allowed itself to be given...is the defense of privilege, racism and wealth.

As I've said many times, Trump is not the cause of this shit, he's the symptom of it.

I've been watching the ongoing soup sandwich that is the current CPAC conference in Dallas. Among other things, over the weekend white supremacist Nick Fuentes and his followers attempted to crash the convention, but were kicked out.

But that somebody like this fucking racist loser would even try and show up is absolutely emblematic of the goddamn problem. He's nothing but a privileged little twit who, being Latino himself, is roughly the equivalent of a sheep trying to survive by wearing a wolf costume...and he's too fucking dumb to know the wolves can smell him. I mean, seriously, all this little fucker has ever done is hard-right political spew and he's mostly known for feuding with people who are the same way. I'm willing to bet he's never even had a real job.

He'd never survive in the world he's trying to create, of course thinking that he's somehow creating such a world only for other people. 

In the morally empty, vapid world of modern conservatism (which is dominated by the cowards and immoral people) and Moron America, nobody has the guts to tell him right to his face that the first thing most Anglo white supremacists would do if they had their way is shoot him in the back and then spit on his corpse as they step over it.

And then there's this motherfucker. 

Apparently at some point in the last 25 years or so, former Saturday Night Live dipshit Rob Schneider went off the fucking deep end as an anti-vax ninny. I'll admit I didn't know, l simply haven't followed anything he's been doing since he left Saturday Night Live. Other than bit parts in Adam Sandler movies, I think the last thing I saw him in was the original Judge Dredd movie with Sylvester Stallone in 1994, and it wasn't that good.

So, Bibles and guns, but also fascism, racism and virulent viruses. Wow, that's a hell of a combination of things to be in favor of there, Republicans. I've been wondering lately just what the hell kind of fucking drugs these people are on. No, it's not the first time I've thought that, either.

One might be disposed to wonder just what else Republicans actually stand for.

Here's semi-literate, GED-holding restauranteur Lauren Blowbert denouncing welfare on the CPAC stage before a crowd of people who, unlike her, have never had to worry about applying for it.

Of course I'm fairly sure she didn't either since her high-school dropout ass most likely kept living with her parents while she worked that MacDonald's job she's always talking about. I'm going to go out on not much of a limb here and take a guess that somebody whose big accomplishment in life is being seen as the intellectual successor to Sarah Palin probably never bothered to ask all of her coworkers how they got by. 

And I'm here to tell you that America is full of Republican voters who are perfectly fine with getting government benefits of all sorts including welfare...not least, Blowbert herself, who seems to spend most of her time as a member of the US House of Representatives (for which us taxpayers must pay) continuing to function as a right-wing activist forever in search of just one more hit of cheap internet fame for herself.

Not to be outdone, here's J.D. Vance (you know, the hedge-fund douche bro lawyer who's effectively appointed himself Peter Theil's personal suppository and apparently is jammed all the way up there) comparing New York City (a place he apparently knows fairly well) to one season or another of The Walking Dead.

You know, there's dog-whistling your contempt for your own possible voters, there's using a goddamn air horn, and then there's this 100-megaton flash in the night. I mean, for fuck's sake, dude.

I always thought that all this Culture War bullshit was really stupid, but comparing New York City to a Zombie Apocalypse simply for cheap political points and because all you know about your target audience is that they're both dumb and suspicious of anybody who isn't like them takes the cake. J.D. Vance is exactly the same as the clueless city folk elites he's trying to build a political career on mocking...he just picked a different side. This dude with the quintessential American story, this Hillbilly-turned Marine turned Lawyer and Author who four or five years ago could've picked which ticket he wanted to be on and been cheerfully accepted by either side...picked the gay foreign billionaire with the utterly repugnant beliefs as his sugar daddy.

I mean, for fuck's sake if J.D. had ever been the guy he presented himself as in his book, or espoused those sort of views, he'd have had a better than average chance of getting elected as a Joe Manchin-style conservative Democrat and quite likely been able to instantly claim the kind of rock star status that old Joe could never dream of having and there'd be three, rather than just two, gumming up the works in the Senate right now.

But if he ever was that guy, he decided he didn't wanna be that guy.

Because the asshole dudebro demographic is so under-represented in the modern United States of America, or something something Gazpacho.

This dude's trying so hard you can't even joke about him and have it be funny. He's your basic Unfuckable Dork Brigade 1980's movie villain. Three years ago this dude could've picked whatever side he wanted to and done so on his own terms. He chose...this...apparently for no better reason than it was easy. This dude who is obviously no stranger to doing hard shit for unpopular reasons just bitched out and took the easy way and even that probably isn't actually going to work for him.

I rather suspect that with Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Ted Cruz already in Congress...the "All we have is this giant middle finger" caucus...excuse me, the 'Little intellectual elite' of modern conservatism...is probably pretty full up.

Again, I can't help but wonder what kind of drugs these fucking people are on.

I used to be a Republican and I'm tired of this angry, puerile Culture War bullshit that never actually seems to go anywhere and almost always, long-form results in Republicans losing and looking like fools not least because of the bad quality of the leaders they choose.

Except now, Republicans have basically given up on being leaders and the Republican voter base has given up on selecting them, preferring instead to have angry representations of its bigotry and cultural grievances instead.

William F. Buckley famously once said that he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But you know, I cannot help but think in his heyday he was a citizen of a smarter America. He certainly presided over a smarter Conservatism.

And so did this guy;

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

I cannot help but think that the current "Conservative" hellscape would horrify both men. 

But this is what the Angry White Jesus crap that Buckley tolerated and Reagan formally allowed into the Republican Party leads to. This is what constantly feeding outrage with no plan and ultimately no leadership enables.

Like most people, I think, I've been watching the accelerating disintegration of everything that the world community has built and all the stuff people fought for in Afghanistan with nothing but horror.

But a big part of the problem was that outside of the cities there wasn't that much effort to build things up, nor much of a focus on strengthening local government in any way that didn't involve the use of force, nor much of an effort to tackle the illiteracy that's so widespread among even police and soldiers in Afghanistan, nor to address both the widespread cultivation and use of drugs in that country...nor the fact that Opium was the primary cash crop, nor the unemployment so widespread among the country's people. 

And I do in fact have on my old laptop a bunch of photos of US Marines on foot patrol walking through a field of Opium poppies, as well as a bunch of amazing photos of the flowers themselves...these were sent to me by one of my cousins, evidently taken by a US Navy mass communications specialist embedded with his unit at some point. They had orders to leave all that shit alone. Who benefits from that?

The same people drowning rural white conservative America in a flood of easily accessible Opioids, maybe?

Thing is, Afghanistan wasn't working out for ordinary Afghans to begin with. We failed to make it better for too many, especially outside of the cities. Now, things are going to get bad and likely fall apart again, and the rest of the world is going to have to deal with more waves of refugees, likely a lot of them women and girls, which some people will hate and resent, and others will use to increase hatred and resentment.

And it ever and always only benefits the few, who already have vast power and wealth.

Years ago in my last year of college I met a lady that was from Afghanistan. She always said things like "If you want to make things better, don't send 30,000 more soldiers, send 30,000 doctors, or engineers, or 300 venture capitalists. Soldiers won't help anything." 

We should be aware of that, when we look at the fact that America isn't working out for too many ordinary Americans.

We should be very aware of that when any political leader pushes constant culture war or the idea that guns and religion are the solution to every problem or who seek to make hate the new opiate of the people and who dole it out like drugs.

Yet again, and more explicitly, for the benefit of the few.

They demand that others be left behind. They demand that no country works out for its ordinary citizens, that the only thing they give, and the only thing anyone ask for be violence and war.

We're all going to have to watch in real time how that ends over there.

Now, what are we going to do to prevent that type of shit from happening here?

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen. Stop taking the drugs, real or metaphorical, that these fuckers are using to destroy and divide society.

The behavior of the Taliban as well as their extremist attitudes do not correspond in any way with a tolerant Islam. We have always been opposed to extremist tendencies of Islam and we still are. We have not stopped insisting on defending an Islam of tolerance which would be profitable to every Muslim, in Afghanistan and in the whole world, and we will always defend it. ~Ahmad Shah Massoud

It has always been our deep conviction, and we have always stressed the fact that the only solution for Afghanistan is democracy through elections. Each individual must have the right to vote. The day we will be in Kabul, we will organize elections under the auspices of international organizations. ~Ahmad Shah Massoud