I had a conversation with a relatively sane republican* the other night.
After listening to him complain about how much teachers get paid and how dictatorial unions** are and how only people like him who worked hard all their life deserve ANYTHING and, oh, yeah, 2 MILLION ABORTIONS A YEAR--you democrats want to kill everybody except the people on welfare (while his wife, who seemed like a very nice lady, looked on with a somewhat pained expression) I was allowed my rebuttal.
I told him that I'm an independent who will NEVER, EVER vote for a reptilican. I also told him that my politics are sorta "pragmatic socialism"***. I agreed that teacher's unions are powerful and that too many cities' and towns' school boards have caved in to them for about a zillion fucking years--because they're spineless milksops who haven't got the balls to say, "No."****
"So,", I said, "We've got, what, about 10-15% of the population (not including the OBVIOUS bad, mostly colored folks, who are in prisons) who don't pull their own weight and just suck on the gummint's teats*****? Let me know when you think we're ready to start euthanizing them. He laughed, not because he thought I was being ridiculous; it was just that he was surprised that someone who doesn't march to the Bekola Bullshit Ballad actually KNOWS what will solve MurKKKa's problems.
Since starting this I was "treated" to a viewing of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77rtyQf6Hwk&feature=player_embedded#at=38
from a SKKKrotal PatriotiKKK Rally a few days ago. One of the criticisms I read on the blog ("Dispatches from the culture wars") was that the video was composed of nothing but "soundbites" and had no real "context". Well, I'll call bullshit on that. People that think, seriously, that The Donaldfuck would make a good president or good anything--other than the butt of a lot of combover jokes--has established the "context"--the "context" being that they're frightened, confused and angry and willing to accept any sort of "fix" for their problems, real or imagined, that doesn't involve their being inconvenienced. Either that, OR, they are racist, RWAD******, morons and assholes.
Some folks have opined that I'm a bit harsh in my assessment of such people. They are correct, I am harsh; and the Teabaggistas deserve that and worse for what they've been doing. I'm fed up with the horseshit that these babbling buffoons regurgitate after having it pounded into their otherwise empty cranial cavities by Rushbo and the rest of the talking shitheads on their AM/FM manure spreaders. I'm not interested in listening to idiots spewing talking points that have have no factual basis for what they assert.
Many of them are from the "Greatest Generation" and many, far too many, are from my generation, "Baby Boomers". While they caterwaul about cutting entitlements and social programs to the marrow they are taking billions of bucks for themselves from SS, Medicaid, Medicare and a host of other gummint funded programs. They all want "states' rights" until such "rights" include popular votes or legislative acts that go against their desires. They want the gummint outta their lives; until they need help after an "Act of God" picks up their doublewide and tosses it towards Kansas, floods their low lying beachfront condos or affects THEIR health, welfare and property.
They want the gummint outta their lives; except for picking up the trash,. policing the streets, repairing the roads, inspecting the food they eat, confirming that their meds won't, in fact, just kill them and a host of other services that THEY are entitled to.
They want to stop the gummint bailing out failing businesses and hurting profitable ones with "needless regulation" and gummint red-tape.. Of course, if they had any fucking inkling of what their retirement funds and stock holdings would be worth, without the bailouts and no regulation, they might be singing a different chorus.
They want small gummint, but they want it to be big enough to ensure that they can make other people do what THEY believe is right. They don't want anybody telling them what they can or cannot do--that's "socialism"; they for shitsure want the gummint to tell them durned fags and sortabrowns and poor people (poor people other than themselves) and non-believers (any sect that is not theirs) what they HAVE to do and what they CAN'T do.
They want to stop the "baby killers" from snuffing "2 million" unborn babeez a year. As soon as the fetomerKKKins become living, breathing, dependent children, however, they don't want to pay for anything that those children need, 'cuz that'd teach those kids that they can always get a free ride.
They want smaller gummint, just long as it's big enough to keep all of the badperpz in jail--4EVAH!--and just so long as it's big enough to take care of THEIR needs AND keep everybody else under control.
They want their gummint to stop wasting time and money on meaningless hearings and programs, yet they are perfectly happy to have their elected representatives go on endless witch hunts re: MurKKKa's mooslim 5th column or the president's providing proof that he's a REAL American.
IOW while they're busy protesting the greed, selfishness, stupidity, duplicity and generally "unchristian" behavior of everyone who is not them, they are at least as greedy, selfish, stupid, duplicitous and unchristian as they accuse those "others" of being. I'm an atheist, but I know, from having been raised cath-o-lick, that christians and KKKristians alike claim to be followers of JESUS. If the stories of his time on earth (which, most of them insist, are true) are to be believed, then they are NOT his followers except in the pious, empty-headed sanctimony of parroting his "words". The hell with them.
* The "relatively sane" standard keeps moving downhill as the "Overton window" moves farther to the right.
** He used to sit on the local schoo board but he quit because he couldn't "Walkerize" the PEU in NY State.
***Basic, affordable preventive health care instead of extrtavagant and useless end-of-life or publicly (not government, but you folks that buy insurance) funded emergency medicine. Other stuff like that.
****Oh, wtf was I thinking! Only "first responder" unions (Hi, Gov. Walker, you cowardly piece of shit!) have pay and benefit packages that are sacrosanct.
*****I'm pretty sure that the latest figures I've seen say 150% of the entire U.S. Budget is being given to the poor, so's they can buy Cadillacs to drive to the liqour store and use their food stamps to purchase Patron, Skye, Johnny Walker Blue, Cuban Monte Cristos and grosses of rubbers which they then punch holes in so's they can make the babeeeeez for welfare and then abort the rest for fun!
******Right Wing Authoritarian Dickheads
12 comments:
So, basically, you are at peace with the world and everyone in it?
I was able to nod in agreement to most of your rant, though, finding the message through the myriad of acronyms is no small feat...
The other day, I realized something..every time I've been thwarted by a Govt when I needed to do something, its been on a local level. These Teabaggers don't wan't to live in a world where a very small, (and ever shrinking) number of people get to make determinations as to their fate. They just think they do.
Mack:
Yeah, I'm with you on that. The problem, actually, is that "thinking" in any genuine sense of comparing and contrasting what they hear from the likes of Rush Limbaugh with what's really going on in the world (even at the local level). They've given up on making hard decisions that might involve some actual work or sacrifice on their parts and on the free ride being given to them on Astroturf shortbus. They will be surprised to find that they have one way tickets.
America has always had a lot of people like that. (Witness Alabama since pretty well on from forever.) I remember them from my youth in the southern part of Maryland in the 1960s. But their proportion of the population seems to have grown in the past two decades.
And it used to be that the U.S. was mostly run by sane people. There were always nutballs like Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox, but even they had at least a lick of sense when it came to not pitching the country over the economic precipice. But now, the brainless yahoos have combined in power with the reckless greedheads (including purported libruls like Chris Dodd). They have driven the clown car right off the cliff and stomped down on the gas pedal even while the car's flying through the air.
It's fcuked, Demo, jest plain fcuked. Be glad you had the good fortune to live the bulk of your life in the country when it was on its glory years. (Me too.) The ones I feel sorry for are those like my daughter, in her early 20s, who are going to spend their main days splattered in the shitstorm.
Bukko Canukko:
Yeah, it's not gonna matter all that much to me, I'll be dead in 50 or 60 years but I've got 32 or so grandniece'n'nephewspawn and they range from ittybittybabeez to pain in the ass teens. Them, I worry about.
I reckon we don't have 50 or 60 years -- I say 10 before oil is something that only rich people and Chinese can burn. The financial system is on such thin ice in so many ways, mostly related to the erosion of the U.S. dollar's value as a reserve currency, that it's likely to go kerflooey from any number of possible economic shocks.
It'll be like Argentina in 2001. Nothing changed in the physical world -- there was no warfare with bomb-destruction, no plague of disease, no natural disaster -- just an economic change on paper that said "Those pesos that we had pegged at 1:1 valuation with the Yanqui dollar? Now they're only worth 1/3 of a Yanqui." Just like that, 2/3 of the "wealth" people thought they had was GONE! The houses and the factories were still standing, but the money system that kept them humming had collapsed. People couldn't get their now-worthless money out of the banks, and Argentina froze up.
My bet is that something like that will happen with global finance. It'll be like an economic short circuit. People won't die directly, like when some robot killer drone blasts an Afghan wedding party. But the financial ZAP! will knock normal functioning out until some new system gets organized. And when Amurkins can't get cash out of the ATMs, and there's no food at the grocery store because the truckers can't make their credit cards work to diesel up their tanks to make deliveries, Amurkins are going to go apeshit. Not all of 'em, but enough to touch off a downward spiral of crazy.
I'm a doomster when it comes to the Big Picture. In my own life, me and the Mrs. have six months' worth of canned food inside the house. A habit we got into while living in Florida (hurricane protection) then San Francisco (earthquakes) and Australia (it's at the end of the farking Earth, and if anything ever got temporarily in the way of the shipping industry, Oz is farked.)
We have a stockpile here because Vancouver is earthquake territory. Doesn't take much -- maybe $500, which is like buying earthquake/econoquake insurance that you can eat. We have spare water, too, although in a rainy climate like this, natural H2O is easy to come by, even if it will be contaminated with Fuck-u-shima particles. Me and the Mrs. are also growing as much food as we can in our backyard and a community garden plot.
I expect to see the wheels come completely off the cart in my lifetime. I probably won't want to keep living in the nasty new world that's going to follow, but I intend to be in control of my fate, not at the mercy of whatever authority is in charge afterward.
The only young person I have to worry about is my daughter, currently attending college in Tampa. I've tried to give her a heads-up -- done things like sent her a copy of "The Long Emergency" by James Kunstler (ever heard of him? Has a great blog) which I purchased through Dan and Tammy. But she won't read it. Thinks I'm a scaremonger. I tried to warn her, but I can't help it if she didn't listen.
All I can say is that I've been right with my predictions of doom, even though they've played out slower than I thought. Stuff like getting the hell out of the U.S., selling our house at the peak of the bubble, converting our retirement accounts into cash before the market crashed (and then into gold and silver when they were one-fourth the price they are now) has been wise decisions. I earnestly wish I was wrong about the direction things are heading. Perhaps I'll be revealed as a Chicken Little in the long run. But I figure I'm WINNING! like Charlie Sheen no matter which way things turn out.
Bukko:
You're much more proactive than I am. I'm going to sit around and cry when the worldasweknowit ends, for, um, maybe a day. Then I'm gonna start looking for the people who've been telling me for years that they have all kinesashit stockpiled for Dollargeddon. You're safe, I ain't goin' any further than twenty miles from my current home.
None of what you're saying is inaccurate, afaia, but I have always lived on the edge of insolvency and today is no exception. My house is worth less than it might be and I'm a little bit upside down at the moment, but I don't owe enough money to anyone to make me lose a lot of sleep. I do what I have to do to get through the day and entertain myself with thoughts of what it will look like when the "Night of the Living Broke" comes to a neighborhood near me. They won't be calling them "lapdogs" anymore, maybe "house wolves"*.
I luvz my word verification for this comment, "fugsta"!
*The chinese have, at times, referred to rats as "house deer"
Demo, as concerns being proactive, I subscribe to the saying that "He who panics first, lives." Part of the reasoning for moving out of the U.S., aside from hating George Bush THAT MUCH, was because we figgered that the people of Australia would be nicer to each other come crunch time than Amurkins would be. Ditto for these Canucks. They're just not as excitable as people south of the border.
Me and the Mrs. are not "survivalists" in the "hole up in a bunker in the woods" sense. We're making friends up here who think the same as we do, will help each other out, share stuff around. As we will do for them if it comes to that extremity. Mrs. Bukko is an old hippie Grateful Deadhead, so if the shit comes down, our intention is to take that shit, mix it into our compost heap, the spread it onto the garden and invite the neighbours over to eat a salad with the tomatoes we grew from it.
I keep hoping that I'm all wrong. But if I'm not, there are enough gentle souls here in the Pacific Southwest (SW in Canadian terms, that is) like Dan and Tammy (I'm gonna drive out to visit their bookstore sometime this summer) and others who pop up on teh Gen'l's blog that we'll create community. If you ever hobo a train ride out this way after some downschluss crisis, you're welcome to dig some potatoes out of the back 40. (That's 40 square feet between the flower beds.) Just none of that Donner Party cookbook stuff, eh?
Bukko:
Well, part of the reason that you'd be safe while I am out "making best use" of other's stockpiled goods is that there are more than enough republicans around here to feed off of for quite some time. The other reason of course is that one does not eat one's friends! That WOULD be barbaric. It's funny you bring up SeattleDan, since I just left a comment on his book report post a short time ago.
Not to get off on too long a tangent but...Though I mine the subject of cannibalism for its humor potential* there is a part of me that sees the hypocrisy in decribing that behavior (for either cultural or pragmatic reasons) while the majority of folks seem to have no problem with destroying nations to get what they want that the unfortunate bastards are sitting on.
*Didja hear about the cannibal who passed his neighbor behind a tree?
Jeffrey Dahmer's mum said, "Jeffrey, I just hate those KKKristian missionaries!". Mr. Dahmer replied, "Just eat the hush puppies and the okra then. I'll try to get my neighbor, Mr. Wong, for dinner on sunday. You do like, "Chinese", yes?".
You are always welcome, Bukko, and we'd love to see you. We have a stash of what we call "earthquake" water, and the cupboards are fairly well-stocked. And flashlights and candles. Don't forget flashlights and candles.
Thanks, Dan. Although me and the Mrs. cruised the Prius down the central Oregon coast on the way to San Francisco last October, I haven't been any further west in Wash. than once when visiting an online friend in Kingston who I know from econoblogs. He's another guy who has a day job like me, but he's got 10 acres on which he's growing a lot of stuff (the legal variety) in greenhouses he fashioned from scrapped window glass.
My daughter, the one who's afraid to read that Kunstler I had you send her a few years back, wants to visit Vancouver in August. I want to see the Olympics (if there aren't any Samsquamnch alerts) and she prolly will too. I'll even buy some books when I'm in Hokeytown!
If you have anything by economic contrarians like Ravi Batra, Gerald Celente, Robert Kiyosaki, etc. I'd be well into them. It's hard to find anything out-of-the-mainstream in used bookstores, although I did recently score "Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein and "Twilight in the Desert" (the seminal Peak Oil book by the late Matt Simmons.) I enjoy reading stuff that confirms my doom-bias, eh?
Seattl:
Hail, fellow, well met! Always a pleasure to see you round these here parts!
Bukko:
I don't know if you'd consider him contrarian (except that he's honest) to other economists but a PhD I know who teaches at the SUNY Oswego campus has a blog. His name is Ranjit Dighe, his blog is "blogging through the wreckage", it's on my sidebar. Give him a try.
Ranjit's a good read, Demo. I will click through to him when I visit your blog. At work on the psych ward, especially when I'm doing 12-hour overnight shifts, there is a lot of down time when I can wank around at the 'puter. (Not literally wank, because the hospital has a strong porn filter that even blocks some decent sites.) That's one way I manage to stay on top of the news.
I appreciate finding out about new information sources. Most of my favourite writers and websites have been those exposed to me by other people.
With that in mind, in case you haven't heard of this James Howard Kunstler and his "Clusterfuck Nation" blog, take a click at this week's post, "Lying is the New Normal." Not only do I agree with his viewpoint, which is an amalgam of Left and Right, but he's great at slinging invective without resorting to obscenity.
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