The Republican nominating convention is a massive celebration of evil, the first I've see of this movement having gone so far beyond normalization -- the full Nuremberg, devil worship and a spectacle of drunkenness on the power of hatred.
Pure moral inversion. There is no normal anymore. Everything is upside down. Hate has become the arbiter of virtue.
Imbedded in a lot of destructive behavior is a desire for renewal. This is entirely Christian. Regeneration by burning it all down. Adolescents also do it. In an attempt to grow up.
Blow stuff up. It's supposed to be an interior thing. The 'dying unto yourself' kind of language. But fucked up people who can't deal with their guilt and shame externalize it.
They will burn down your house. And every other house. Cities. Countries. The world. Because they've got it wrong. So it doesn't work. And since it doesn't work it's compulsive.
That's where we are now. Evangelical Christians are taking over in America. Some of the most guilt-ridden, screwed-up people in history. And they might be unstoppable.
Look at Vance as a peon and it makes sense. Bergum isn't a peon. Rubio, well, I don't know what he is. Peons can be ass-kickers but only on behalf of their liege or lord and Rubio is kind of a worm.
So, you see how we got to Vance. He's loyal but degraded in the right way. He's like the guy who sees to the needs of a knight, a Sancho Panza to Trump's Quixote. And God help us all. Squire Vance it is.
I do. I'm there with you. We should talk. But, to preface the thing, and given the way a lot of people with drive are behaving these days, I'm feeling better about it all the time.
The Supreme Court's immunity (for Trump) verdict seems to have given Aileen Cannon the confidence to own her boot-licking, anus-sniffing fealty, say 'fuck-it' about appearances and embrace her inner hack. I'm sure there's more of this to come from hoards of Republican judges, operatives, lawyers and organizations.
The battle that's shaping up, which the head of Heritage, Kevin Roberts, says might be bloodless if liberals behave, has nothing to do with liberals -- 'the radical left,' as Kevin calls them. The fight is internal to some wackos who call themselves conservatives. Apocalyptic evangelicals on one side.
Authoritarian Catholics on the other. Both decry declining standards and permissiveness but, guess what, those social problems are worse in red states or trace back to 'conservative' policies. The problems are not due to social deregulation and an assault on standards. Who deregulated that shit? No one, really.
The problems resulted from despair and deprivation put on average people in the richest country ever by asshole Republicans who, when it came down to it, stood for nothing but cutting taxes on the rich and allowing corporations to plunder at will. That's it. That's all. Though there's an interesting aspect.
Those rich people.
Where do they fit in? Nowhere. Not among the combatants. The great manipulators are elsewhere. Money speaks for them, powerfully if imperfectly. Do they care about abortion and D.E.I. and that shit? Maybe a little. But not for reasons other than money and power. Money and power are it for them.
I've heard populist murmurs from both evangelicals and reactionary Catholics. That could get interesting -- if their dupes begin to turn on the rich. But for now it's scapegoating. Of lefties. Who have nothing to do with all the stuff they hate. They created their own problems, like their racist forebears.
Like the southerners who couldn't bring themselves to let up on black people, the fucking racist asshole morons, and put the country through hell and got exactly what they didn't want, compensatory damages. Forced racial intimacy. Black guys with big dicks scoring on their pretty little daughters.
Trust me on that one, if you don't see it. I live in a college town in the south. But that's the kind of sick animus and fear we're looking at. Coming from sick fucking people who will take us all down. Ultimately because they can't handle their own imperfection. Their shittiness and carnal desires and mortality.
So I say pray for a real populist on one or other side of that mess to succeed. One who will go after the rich, which a true populist would have to do. Trump made such noises. Evangelicals are apocalyptic individualists and incoherent. Nobody tells them what to do. Or that they're not 'saved.'
The Catholics are institutionalists. Radical authoritarian institutionalists. Fascists, that is. And incoherent. Sane, sustainable social structures and policies result from balance and compromise. The people making out on this mess are the rich. We might have to kill them. They're already killing us.
Kill them just enough to get their attention. Not that I believe in this but to minimize the damage. Because they will stop at nothing. Their greed and lust for power know no bounds. They did the classic thing and played the little people off against one another. They were unbelievably successful.
Meantime we're spectators in our own destruction, with Democrats several layers into irrelevance dating to the implementation of the Southern Strategy and the rise of bad faith, notably under Gingrich. So Democrats been hostages for decades, as have we all. But the schismatics must schism.
Always. Their lives aren't livable without conflict. Modern Republicans were an unstable coalition dating to the sixties. Now the voters to whom the Republican elite sold their souls for votes have risen up and are fragmenting. I say again, this could get interesting. The rich might finally have fucked this up.
That was a reminder.
For anyone who thought John Roberts might have come around, maybe fearing he'd be remembered as the guy who oversaw the destruction of America by judicial fiat, the jury is in. Roberts was playing a longer game. And aiming breathtakingly bigger, as was speculated about when he 'saved Obamacare.'
Roberts is a committed reconstructionist. He intends to remake America, returning it to something it never was. But there's this conservative image in amber of simpler times. An abstraction of unreality faithlessly rendered in fantasy. He thinks he has special access to the ideals and perfections of governance.
The messiness of reality is what he can't handle. Everything is a theoretical construct. You can't cure racism with racism, or whatever ridiculous justification it was that led him to throw out affirmative action, for example. In a purer world he might be right. In the 'real world' he's tragically wrong.
So with voting. So with abortion. Their eyes were watching godliness. And people -- sorry -- are not usually godly. I think it drives people like Roberts nuts. The awful imperfection. Which it's why we must love God through loving our neighbors and all of creation. Loving an abstraction is easy. I suppose.
Loving the imperfection is harder. Loving reality is harder. But only at first.
Then it becomes easier, because it enables the same love and forgiveness and tolerance of oneself. And that diminishes the anger. The hatred. It's called Christianity. And what it doesn't look like is Bill Barr and Herr Trump rushing through as many executions as possible before the opportunity was lost.
Which they did, the sick fucks. For the sheer persecutory pleasure of it. And Roberts is right there with them. He's got bigger fish frying than worrying about human suffering, since he's on the side of God and has God's sanction and some kind of delegation and franchise. Or maybe he's wrong.
And he just loves the power rush of the crazy shit he's doing. The same kind of rush someone might feel -- hypothetically, mind you -- if they blew his fucking head off. Those Republicans have hell of a death tally. Iraq. Afghanistan. Trump and COVID. Funny, Bill Barr doesn't crave justice on that front.
Good thing for them, including those wonderful justices now who've chosen politics over principle, and so are implicated in all those deaths. But Trump must be saved from the perfidious Democrats. Save away, ye fuckwads, but lose the righteousness. It doesn't sit well with all the blood and gore.
The Death Alliance has realized other and continuing victories under Lord Trump. Decency lets down its guard, finding life and love and beauty compelling. Evil never sleeps. Paranoid imaginings won't allow it.
Circular reasoning is sneaky. Describe it to someone. It sounds patently wrong and bad. And easy to detect. But it isn't. There are many forms. Much of it assumes information not in evidence. Which is like starting at the end. You want to cut taxes on the rich.
No matter what. You find justifications. You want to deregulate. You find justifications. You want people who disagree with you to go away. Things move in that direction. The line between wanting people to disappear and killing them is less clear than we think.
But it becomes clear in the end. When the bodies are piling up. And by then it's too late.
Fake news. AI didn't come up with it Trump did. Or one of his minions but no matter because he owns them. Let's posit there is reality. And there is lies and bullshit and made-up stuff. At some point you have to judge intentions. Will. And you have to judge systems.
The humanity of systems. Because you won't be able to tell the rest of it apart. Distinguish one thing from another. Individually authenticity with be indistinguishable from rubbish. Rubbish wins in that scenario. Then rubbish will be all that's left. Because it's cheaper.
At which time the system will be perfectly diabolical and inhumane.
Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana has signed a bill to put the Ten Commandments in the schools during a deadly heat wave, presumably following on and attempting to capitalize on the wonderful and successful Republican campaign to fight gun violence with 'thoughts and prayers.' He noted that the idea was never to reduce mass killings, since that's the price we pay for our freedom, but to send victims off with the grace, blessings and thanks of the country, knowing that getting killed like that is a ticket to heaven and a pleasing sacrifice to God our creator because God made mass killers as well and this shit just happens. God's ways are inscrutable, said Landry, though only an idiot would doubt the importance of the Ten Commandmants and it was good politics too.
I follow a certain American arch-conservative who moved to Hungary to he among his peeps. So sorry Franco no more. He's published books. More coming. Supposedly he's a Christian. He says he is.
His identity is built on it. He's a son of a Cyclops. So, good lineage. And he's full of hate. Hate and faith can't occupy the same space, as I understand it. So it's on him. He had a choice. And he chose hate.
People are not getting it. About how impossible our way of living is. And how radically we have to change. Especially with respect to oil. We need to get radical. Total rehab. And we're addicts. Electric cars are a joke. Diet crack. We need a complete break with the old ways of living.
I actually follow some of the right wing sites, supposedly some of the better stuff, and they're all upset about 'woke' and generally scared out of their panties over it. I smell a political ploy. So I went in search of woke and couldn't find it so my suspicion is, yet again, the right is making it up. Woke is basically a puritanical fad, fashion or trend on the left in reaction to a massive, organized and incredibly well funded movement on the right that has successfully undermined and subverted our government and is attacking democracy itself while making a run on establishing minority rule. Which are related.
Conservatives should normally function like the Senate, acting as a check on rash populist undertakings and ill-conceived legislative impulses. Cons should act as a responsible minority restraining force because they stand more to lose, being rich, and because their core belief -- that some people, they, are simply arbitrarily born better than others, us. Fairly presented it's a tough sell, that the common people should just accept this and defer to them and serve them as bultlers and factory workers and shut up about it. And sometimes some weird shit happens like in England, where an underclass buys into this.
They sign off on the idea they're inherently inferior and deserve lesser status and are destined by God or Darwinian forces to support an upper class of wastrels like Boris Johnson and to let them rule and defer to them generally because, well, you tell me. The ol' U.S.A. did that with Bush and look where it got us. I think all the trouble in Europe is due to Bush. Because Bush created all these refugees who are inciting the immigration overreaction and he trashed the world economy. The English are racist and incredibly degraded, overall. So, not the model to follow. And the hysteria about woke is bullshit.
But some hysteria about Koch would make sense.
Evangelicals have always hated creation. They despise life. And now they're moving in for the kill. With global aspirations. They want to destroy everything.
The gun nuts aren't about self defense. Of course it was a lie. They're on the attack now. Intimidation is the new way. Instead of democracy. To get your way by bullying.
Meta is the place to start. The rational place to start. Because huge, monopolistic corporations are a problem. And social media is a problem. So let's take that fucker down. And go from there.
A few years ago I had a gun nut harassing me. He was a neighbor and I made the mistake of telling him I didn't think the Second Amendment had anything to do with private ownership. And that it was insane for average citizens to own assault weapons. I qualified it by saying it was impossible to de-gun the country but that it was bullshit about private ownership and that the whole thing was rooted in racism, which is one of the main lines of thinking on the issue. He of course took it badly because it's an opinion we are not allowed to have, as though the 'Constitution' isn't much more explicit on speech than on guns, thereby backing up my opinion that the constitutional 'right to carry' is a scam.
But we're way further down the road now. In a whole society so buried in a mass of lies it will never get dug out. But I still fight the battle in my own useless, backwater way. My neighbor, who was rich as shit, I think, moved away to be near a race track so he could drive cars around recklessly for the rest of his life. So I no longer have him throwing trash on my property and tearing down my 'bird friendly habitat' sign and buying me subscriptions to Gun Nut Magazine. But I ran into an old thread on a website where people post local stuff where he misrepresented what transpired between us. Amazingly.
With the election looming we see the beast of the Republican lie machine rearing up and it's unbelievable. A total fucking monster. Sometimes I think it all started with guns. They learned they could brazen it out and force it through and stuff the Supreme Court with hacks and, basically, beat up on us and the 'constitution' and all and get away with it so they keep going. Lie after lie after lie. We can't have a society like this. Built on lies. I don't mean 'can't' in some abstract way. It can't continue to exist. It might already be dead and riding on inertia. We'll see, but I Fight My Liar because it's my little thing.
Whereas they will carry on with the Right to Lie movement.
Trump and COVID have melded in my mind into an amorphous mess. A single disaster. I'm going to honor this. Let them be forever associated in their deadliness and misery.
The American vampire state is still trying to fill the void in its soul with stuff. Bad enough, that it's not only impossible but harmful, since it can't work. But, worse than that, it's harming the rest of the world. And, more so now, vulnerable populations within America. Time to pull the plug on the vampire état.
It's something different to assume the power of life and death. There are even restraints on assuming it over yourself. Society is saying, in outlawing suicide, that it has a stake in the individual. A responsibility. So it's an antisocial act. Potentially society's failure.
Enter the Republicans. They've created a class of losers they can exploit. Created them so they can exploit them to gain power. Culminating in Trump, the king of the losers. So this movement assumes the right to run everything and eliminate those who resist them.
The power of life and death. This is the inverse of knowing we have a stake in one another. It's unloading your shit on people and making a bonfire out of them because it makes you feel good. They are Nazis. Because they are losers. A loser nation under Trump.
America is going full-blown Nazi. And there's no coming back from that. Only forward, into the abyss. Self-destruction, once you've fucked everyone else. Then you rebuild. If you can. But past experience might not apply. America has become such a black hole of greed the world might never be the same. Way to go, you fucking pigs.
Steve Bannon is a Republican Santa. He doesn't mark the solstice and bring gifts and hope. Bannon brings destruction. He believes in a cyclical view of history, and that we're due for cataclysmic change and a rebirth, never mind that this would mean millions of deaths. He doesn't care. He wants to usher it in. Like any good Nazi he sees right through the deaths. Because he doesn't give a shit, the sick fuck.
Trump was a born pariah. It is his destiny. He's dying to be a pariah. All his life a guy like Trump has to have wanted to be put in his place. To encounter a strength in the world that stands up to his money. A strength that doesn't give a shit about his wealth and can't be bought. This is his psychology.
But this is America, where money buys anything.
I guess being whipped in public would turn him on. He would love it. Look at what he did with the presidency. The way he won the office he could have played one party off against the other, done unbelievable stuff and been the most loved president ever. But he's wallowing in shit again.
Because it's what he wants.
In an incredibly sick way this is a choice. Both a choice and a compulsion. A warped choice at some brain-stem or digestive tract level. Let's give the fucker what he wants. To be scourged and beaten and humiliated like Jesus on the way to Calvary and crucifixion. Look at his madness for risk.
He wants to be crushed. At some depth, in his sickness, he's dying to be stopped. Or be stopped by dying. For God's sake, let's pull the plug on this piece of shit before he gets more people killed. Free Trump! And the only way to free Trump is to destroy him. Completely. Finally. Give the boy what he wants.
America can never have been the country it thought it was or claimed to be. Not and elect Trump. And considering electing him again. He's too big a piece of shit. Trump exposes the sham. America never owned its shit. Now it's too late. Our shit has caught up with us.
We're all inhabitingTrump's Atlantic City now. Where you go to lose -- always, on average -- in service to the post-financialization American Casino Empire. And to buy a little hope. Roll the dice on your life.
Remember Trump's claims about all the money he pulled out of Atlantic City, where he fucked up unbelievably because it was all about him and his ego and needing to be a big man and the best.
What a fucking idiot. But this is his model for America. And the model among his rich supporters. Pillage and get out. Run away from the ruins. We are being looted. And Americans are voting for this.
Conservatives endlessly present themselves as outsiders, and as being disrespected and powerless. So, not responsible. Yet they control everything. The battle they feel themselves to be in is internal to them. Their movement. They lack discipline, authority, consistency and rigorous thinking. They think they're rigorous as hell but that's another lie. They're rigorously wrong because their thinking is constrained by their prejudices. What unites them is fear. The suspicion or belief that something is horribly wrong.
They need to look at themselves. The thing they're worst at and refuse to do.
As we all know the issue in America is money. Great healthcare, if you can afford it. Excellent everything, for the rich. Fuck everyone else.
But for children?
The same, sadly. Because the rich must always have more. I'm proposing an Affordable Adult Program, modeled on England's Appropriate Adult.
Which is a legal thing. A kind of guardianship. Apparently America can't afford to take care of its kids. This will be intended to fill the gap.
Some people support Trump because they think America is a massive evil and Trump is the man to destroy it. This argument, unlike almost any other for supporting him, makes sense. He's capable of destroying anything.
'What rough beast' and all that. Trump's talents as a con man are hereby acknowledged. It is his slouch. The second coming is upon us, as his evangelical supporters desire, and the destruction of the world.
I'm not familiar enough with other cultures to judge if their fundamentalist religious sects are as bad as ours but American evangelicals are evil. They're rapists and murderers and criminals and they bring in drugs but I'm sure of few of them are good people.
They might be the worst. Not inherently but because of American history and the Civil War and America's power and reach. They, together with their laissez-faire political partners, informed Hitler's racism and put him in power by trashing the world economy.
They have a lot to answer for. I think that's why they want to end the world. To escape accountability and justice.. And these morons think they're going to heaven. I hope to god there's a god and a judgement in fact but I doubt it. And it's too late for justice.
Greg Abbott pardoned a convicted murderer because it was a miscarriage of justice. Because the pardon was a miscarriage of justice, intended to poke Democrats in the eye and to assert autocratic rights for Abbott and Republicans. Justice is what a ruling class wants. Their will and whim -- fuck everyone else. And Abbott did it because he could, and because he's an asshole. He loves being an asshole.
The latest development should surprise no one. Trump wanting to throw the world under the bus. He promised the heads of the oil companies the opportunity to run rampant if they give him a billion dollars to get him reelected and it succeeds. He's promised them the world.
For peanuts. Because it's him. And he outweighs the world. And it isn't new. It isn't news. He's been this way forever. As has the Republican Party. That's the incredible thing. There should at least be a down side. If they do it and fail they get put it up against the wall and shot.
Republicans are emerging as more than the party of national suicide. They're the world suicide party.
I think the Reformation idea of Sola Scriptura was sincere. They wanted things less fuzzy. They wanted accountability. They wanted answers, a benchmark, and feelings of regulation, limits and security.
To feel secure in the prospects of their salvation and its terms. The Supreme Court has taken the same path with originalism. So they can claim certainty and authority. It's a scam. To do whatever they want.
Originalism is nothing but a scam and power grab. A lie. Another lie. From the party of lies. The party of Trump. Big surprise. A stolen election. Stolen by him. And a stolen court. And nothing but lies.
Maybe it's true.
That Joseph Kennedy knew it was time to get out when the guy shining his shoes was talking about investments. I had a similar experience. With a well dude.
In the days of Corona my well stopped working. I called the well person, who was retiring and trying to hand his business off. Three young guys showed up.
It was an easy fix.
One, a young unmasked punk, seemed intent on getting into my personal space. Assuming I was a college-town liberal, I guess, and a believer in science, vaccines and such.
I am a college-town liberal. And a fan of science.
I've taken all the vaccines. I think. Somehow, this little peace of shit let out a comment on Hayek, who wrote 'The Road to Serfdom' which idiot 'libertarians' love.
I knew it was time to sell -- my emotional and intellectual investment in America. But somebody is buying. Get it now, people! Everything is on the block.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/with-trump-everythings-for-sale
This is the new model. Breaking shit is good. Because we're spoiled. And sick. And Republican frat boys are running everything.
Anyone else notice how the women of Fox who ratted out Ailes and O'Reilly (and whatever other hideous bully scum) waited until it suited their interests? It appears it was always about ambition.
Looking out for number one. Which slut is to wed? Kellyanne is available now, we know, but she seems to be a true believer so maybe not a slut but more of an aspiring doness, in the mafia sense.
Godmother, I think, is the term.
Hope Hicks is marrying a tycoon. Will she be happy now? Will she carry on the con or sit back and watch the world burn after stylishly and with composure throwing her own bit of gas on the fire?
This passes for character among conservatives. I wonder if they talk about it. If they have tests. They love the litmus. With us or against? Does having sucked Ailes's dick confer status or contempt?
Hopey is all set now. And she was worried about her employment after Trump got canned. Can she have been so clueless? When it's clear that no bar is too low. She seamlessly became pussy at Fox.
Well-paid Fox pussy.
Now she's just going to be retired pussy. Which, the way she's doing it, like Mitch McConnell and others, is totally honorable. Only idiots believe in anything. Smart people are pure opportunists.
Hicks is all set. More than 50 years of feminism and white women still vote mostly Republican. They wanted jobs, they said, and to be equal. But clearly having a job being pussy is still fine.
Maybe they are equal. And America was never about anything but ambition. Our men were sluts. Anything to win. The talk of principles was always a scam. Principles were for little people.
The fools who died in the wars and worked and built everything while the Wall Streeters raked it in. Those with 'principles' were always suckers. And it was always a scam. Another kind of opium.
A civic religion of bullshit to blind people while we plundered the world.
