I was hoping to find something a little sweeter, more satin and candlelight eh? For shame.
Come see me whenever you get tired of getting hurt Carmen.
Dé hAoine, Deireadh Fómhair 30, 2009
Carmen Sandiego Porn
I was hoping to find something a little sweeter, more satin and candlelight eh? For shame.
Come see me whenever you get tired of getting hurt Carmen.
Dé Céadaoin, Deireadh Fómhair 21, 2009
Yo Greg Harper, Come and Get me Bitch
"In a new interview with Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), Politico asks the congressman what the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus does. Harper’s response:
We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition."
An obsession with pure manliness and violent assertion of power is most commonly associated with right-wingers and overwieght boys who drop out of third grade at the age of 12, but I repeat myself.
It's not hard to understand. When men of a particular ethnic group dominate a multi-ethnic society for any length of time they become unable to seperate their control of society from their own sense of manhood, and when they start to lose their traditional power....
Well, there have been an awful lot of white men in the past forty years have gotten awful fixated with GUNS and the fear of having their GUNS torn away from them. Like I said, it's not hard to understand.
The portrayal of every liberal female politician as a lesbian ball-buster, the rise of a partiular strain of Protestantism which proclaims a violently jealous skyfather who cares for little more than the endless praise and submission of his children, an endless stream of cinematic revenge fantisies, in which a rightous white man uses his GUN to mow down the killers of his wife or children, killers who are invaribly dark or, if not dark, the sort of white people who have negated their whiteness by getting involved with drugs. (Drugs equal pleasure, the need for pleasure betrays vulnerability, vulnerability equals effeminacy.) It is all pornographicly easy to understand.
And of course to the man whose sense of manhood is based on social dominance there is nothing more threatening to him than democracy itself. (Especially a democracy whose demographics are turning against him.) Democracy requires its citizens to consider those who disagree with them to be, at worst, well-meaning idiots. It requires us to accept that those who disagree with us are acting in good faith and doing what they sincerely believe is best for the country. Moral certainty provides the same sort of testosterone rush that comes with lifting a hundred pound weight or successfully seducing a beautiful woman. So does the belief that you live in a society that is innately just, one that always puts the most well deserving people in positions of privledge and that the most deserving people just happen to be you and yours. To accept democracy is to deny oneself this masculine rush. It is to accept that fair and honest elections will occasionaly put the Other ones in charge to enact their opposing policies. Worst of all it means to accept that those who disagree with your most passionatly-held principles are your moral and social equals. This neccesarily requires one to accept that his most passionatly held principles could be wrong. To live with the internal doubt that freedom demands is to accept ones vulnerability, and as stated before only women bleed.
This is why right-wing rhetoric is so full of strawmen and ad hominems, so full of apocylyptic dreams of crushing internal and external enemies with supreme confidence and will. For them it is not enough to believe that they are right. Belief leaves room for vulnerability. They must KNOW that they are right. The truth of their beliefs must be so obvious that even those who disagree with them secretly know that they are wrong, and are only pretending to disagree beacuse of some hidden evil motive. Right-wing argument violates the rules of logical debate so often because, in a world where abstract truth is as obvious as the color of the sky, there is no need for logic.
And so we have stabbed-in-the-back mythologies to explain the failures in Vietnam and Iraq. Womanly doubt is the only possible reason why indisputibly just White male power would ever fail to impose its infallible will abroad.
And so we have a long history of bullying language and behavior towards liberals, Democrats, uppity women and minorities, gays, lesbians, foreigners, eggheads, hippies, city boys, and every other strain of social outsider or vaginal skeptic.
We Come Unarmed, This Time.-Various 'Teabaggers' at recent protests
"We're going to keep on building the party (the Texas GOP) until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." Phill Gramm, 1995
Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick 'em out. We'd get rid of Michael Moore, we'd get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous. The Supreme Court ought to look into this. Absolutely brilliant idea out there.-Rush Limbaugh, 2005
I am a United States sailor. I have chosen to defend my country and the freedom some take for granted.
I love my country, my family, my freedom. Only by the blood which was shed by the service members before me did we receive this freedom.
There are some, though, who do not appreciate this freedom. I call these people traitors; they call themselves protesters. They are nothing more than an infectious disease that infests the minds and hearts of the Americans we are defending. It consumes the honor and courage within its host until it kills the very patriotism that made this country.
There is no cure for this disease. Never will everyone be satisfied. But let it be known what this guardian of America's freedom thinks of these protesters: Traitors should be hanged. I hold our enemies in higher standing. At least they are willing to fight for their beliefs and the country they love.
Sonar Technician
Derik L.Jobe
U.S. Navy
Amarillo-Letter to the editor of The Amarillo Globe December 2003
And how could we forget the old grandaddy?
I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches-Strom Thurmond, 1948.
The Thurmond quote of course comes from the days when lynchings of both Black men and liberal White "outside agitators" was common practice in the South, especially in Mississippi. Indeed the most famous act of terrorism against the civil rights movement, the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders, happened in Greg Harper's district. Happy fucking hunting you worthless piece of illiterate daughter-raping cracker-ass Nazi puddle of diaretic rat shit.
I'm kidding.
The thuggish language is nothing new. Putting it in the form of a "joke" is. Harper learned that one from Angry white Man radio. Tell a "joke" about liberals being a bunch of Commufaggot traitors who are going to get us all killed and than you can paint anyone who calls you out on your joke as a humorless p.c. nancy. But this tactic isn't really fooling anyone. We all know that the violent language is meant to intimidate, and that the drunken tough-guy language is descended from more direct forms of intimidation.
And I'm afraid that the brutish talk isn't going away. Because the right wing is unable to look itself in the mirror unless it has convinced itself that it is in a position of dominance over its enemies. (aka: Everyone else on Earth) If electorial reality denies them this need for dominance, they can always latch on to some minor political setback for President Obama or other Democrats (Such as Chicago losing out on the Olympics. Feel free to keep shitting on my city fellas. It's doing wonders to change our minds about you.) as evidence that the tide is turning and the wayward nation will soon be back in the right's burly arms where she belongs. The twenty four hour news cycle, with its essential tendency to blow up the importance of day-to-day political hubbub, is a great facilitator for this sort of self-delusion.
Or failing that, they can just talk tough, and indeed talking tough is the far- rights weapon of choice for any political situation. It is through threatining talk that they convince themselves that they are Titans among men, that they need not even think of compromise or nogotiation, that they need only apply their indisputibly superior force to assert their perfect will.
Mostly they will talk tough because they will always believe that it works no matter how many times it doesn't. Beacuse they sincerely believe that we liberals secretly know that they are right and we are wrong. Beacuse they really do believe that we are the weak, cowardly, and effeminate strawmen they have made out of us. They truly do believe that suburban moderates swung the election to Obama not because they were disgusted with right-wing governments failures (Which cannot possibly exist) but because white guilt and mushy-headedness led them to be seduced by mindless calls for 'change.' They truly believe that all they have to do to win these mushy-headed children back is to cow faggy liberal voices into silence.
It is indeed true that a high degree of passion for one's beliefs can better inspire one to fight for them when they are threatened. But again, the far right thinks that they are the only ones who truly believe what they believe. At any rate they think that beliefs are confirmed and validated only through the violent assertion of them, an attitude embodied in the hang-happy Texas sailor's letter to the editor. (The best demonstration I've yet seen of how the American right and Islamist terroists are quite a bit like each other.) There is no such thing as a grudging willingness to fight for one's beliefs. There is no such thing as fighting as a last resort. To be willing to fight for one's beliefs is neccesarily to feel overwhelming lust to fight for one's beliefs. Those who claim to be willing to fight only as a last resort are nothing but dishonest pacifists. The entire right-wing mindset is designed to maintain perpetual self-assurance, and the belief that they are the only ones with the balls to fight is the cornerstone of this self-assurance.
And of course it's not just jokes about murdering fellow citizens. Many of the most unhinged rightists are talking (talking at least)in utterly serious terms about taking back 'their' country through force. Death threats against President Obama are four times what is normal for any given president. Newsmax columnist John Perry has helpfully suggested a military coup. A new video game lets the player start his very own Wolverine Brigade to stike down Obama's Socialistic youth Corps.
And then there's the odd case of abortion doctors being murdured and Unitarians being massacred.
It will get uglier before it goes away. We are in the midst of a right-wing death roll. Their claims to ownership of American society will grow steadily louder and angrier as more and more Americans reject their barbarity, to which they will respond by growing louder and angrier, because it is the indisputible cure to all ills. Gays, immigrants, labor activists, and liberal politicians will face harrassment and intimidation. Some will die. It will get uglier, but at least we can take the death roll as proof that we have already won.
Where is their pemenent majority? If only they had been just a little less obvious about ruling the world as a Christian White man's world. There was a time when the GOP actually could have had a viable coalition for post-white majority America. Muslim immigrants from conservative cultures tended to vote Republican in 2000. A thing or two has happened since then to change that. The old game of power elites suckering poor-and poorly educated white men into thinking that they were among the elite has finally blown back on them, for it was this army of Real Americans that scared away Latinos who had been evenly divided between Bush and Gore. Even the military, which not long ago was overwhelmingly Republican and offered as proof of conservtism's superior virility, is no longer a solid GOP voting block. They have learned that "Vietnam syndrome" was not such a bad thing after all; that a government who faithfully believes that the military can do everything will command it to do exactly that.
So now the far right's oldest and most dreaded nightmare; sociopolitical impotance, has arrived; and since they have oppressed, terrorized, villified, marginalized, dismmissed, and demonized every rising demographic group in the country, there is a good chance that this impotance is permenent. Oh how sweet it is to hear the dying monster snarl as if it still has the power to scare anyone.
Still let the snarl be a reminder that a bang and a whimper can be the same thing.
We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition."
An obsession with pure manliness and violent assertion of power is most commonly associated with right-wingers and overwieght boys who drop out of third grade at the age of 12, but I repeat myself.
It's not hard to understand. When men of a particular ethnic group dominate a multi-ethnic society for any length of time they become unable to seperate their control of society from their own sense of manhood, and when they start to lose their traditional power....
Well, there have been an awful lot of white men in the past forty years have gotten awful fixated with GUNS and the fear of having their GUNS torn away from them. Like I said, it's not hard to understand.
The portrayal of every liberal female politician as a lesbian ball-buster, the rise of a partiular strain of Protestantism which proclaims a violently jealous skyfather who cares for little more than the endless praise and submission of his children, an endless stream of cinematic revenge fantisies, in which a rightous white man uses his GUN to mow down the killers of his wife or children, killers who are invaribly dark or, if not dark, the sort of white people who have negated their whiteness by getting involved with drugs. (Drugs equal pleasure, the need for pleasure betrays vulnerability, vulnerability equals effeminacy.) It is all pornographicly easy to understand.
And of course to the man whose sense of manhood is based on social dominance there is nothing more threatening to him than democracy itself. (Especially a democracy whose demographics are turning against him.) Democracy requires its citizens to consider those who disagree with them to be, at worst, well-meaning idiots. It requires us to accept that those who disagree with us are acting in good faith and doing what they sincerely believe is best for the country. Moral certainty provides the same sort of testosterone rush that comes with lifting a hundred pound weight or successfully seducing a beautiful woman. So does the belief that you live in a society that is innately just, one that always puts the most well deserving people in positions of privledge and that the most deserving people just happen to be you and yours. To accept democracy is to deny oneself this masculine rush. It is to accept that fair and honest elections will occasionaly put the Other ones in charge to enact their opposing policies. Worst of all it means to accept that those who disagree with your most passionatly-held principles are your moral and social equals. This neccesarily requires one to accept that his most passionatly held principles could be wrong. To live with the internal doubt that freedom demands is to accept ones vulnerability, and as stated before only women bleed.
This is why right-wing rhetoric is so full of strawmen and ad hominems, so full of apocylyptic dreams of crushing internal and external enemies with supreme confidence and will. For them it is not enough to believe that they are right. Belief leaves room for vulnerability. They must KNOW that they are right. The truth of their beliefs must be so obvious that even those who disagree with them secretly know that they are wrong, and are only pretending to disagree beacuse of some hidden evil motive. Right-wing argument violates the rules of logical debate so often because, in a world where abstract truth is as obvious as the color of the sky, there is no need for logic.
And so we have stabbed-in-the-back mythologies to explain the failures in Vietnam and Iraq. Womanly doubt is the only possible reason why indisputibly just White male power would ever fail to impose its infallible will abroad.
And so we have a long history of bullying language and behavior towards liberals, Democrats, uppity women and minorities, gays, lesbians, foreigners, eggheads, hippies, city boys, and every other strain of social outsider or vaginal skeptic.
We Come Unarmed, This Time.-Various 'Teabaggers' at recent protests
"We're going to keep on building the party (the Texas GOP) until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." Phill Gramm, 1995
Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick 'em out. We'd get rid of Michael Moore, we'd get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous. The Supreme Court ought to look into this. Absolutely brilliant idea out there.-Rush Limbaugh, 2005
I am a United States sailor. I have chosen to defend my country and the freedom some take for granted.
I love my country, my family, my freedom. Only by the blood which was shed by the service members before me did we receive this freedom.
There are some, though, who do not appreciate this freedom. I call these people traitors; they call themselves protesters. They are nothing more than an infectious disease that infests the minds and hearts of the Americans we are defending. It consumes the honor and courage within its host until it kills the very patriotism that made this country.
There is no cure for this disease. Never will everyone be satisfied. But let it be known what this guardian of America's freedom thinks of these protesters: Traitors should be hanged. I hold our enemies in higher standing. At least they are willing to fight for their beliefs and the country they love.
Sonar Technician
Derik L.Jobe
U.S. Navy
Amarillo-Letter to the editor of The Amarillo Globe December 2003
And how could we forget the old grandaddy?
I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches-Strom Thurmond, 1948.
The Thurmond quote of course comes from the days when lynchings of both Black men and liberal White "outside agitators" was common practice in the South, especially in Mississippi. Indeed the most famous act of terrorism against the civil rights movement, the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders, happened in Greg Harper's district. Happy fucking hunting you worthless piece of illiterate daughter-raping cracker-ass Nazi puddle of diaretic rat shit.
I'm kidding.
The thuggish language is nothing new. Putting it in the form of a "joke" is. Harper learned that one from Angry white Man radio. Tell a "joke" about liberals being a bunch of Commufaggot traitors who are going to get us all killed and than you can paint anyone who calls you out on your joke as a humorless p.c. nancy. But this tactic isn't really fooling anyone. We all know that the violent language is meant to intimidate, and that the drunken tough-guy language is descended from more direct forms of intimidation.
And I'm afraid that the brutish talk isn't going away. Because the right wing is unable to look itself in the mirror unless it has convinced itself that it is in a position of dominance over its enemies. (aka: Everyone else on Earth) If electorial reality denies them this need for dominance, they can always latch on to some minor political setback for President Obama or other Democrats (Such as Chicago losing out on the Olympics. Feel free to keep shitting on my city fellas. It's doing wonders to change our minds about you.) as evidence that the tide is turning and the wayward nation will soon be back in the right's burly arms where she belongs. The twenty four hour news cycle, with its essential tendency to blow up the importance of day-to-day political hubbub, is a great facilitator for this sort of self-delusion.
Or failing that, they can just talk tough, and indeed talking tough is the far- rights weapon of choice for any political situation. It is through threatining talk that they convince themselves that they are Titans among men, that they need not even think of compromise or nogotiation, that they need only apply their indisputibly superior force to assert their perfect will.
Mostly they will talk tough because they will always believe that it works no matter how many times it doesn't. Beacuse they sincerely believe that we liberals secretly know that they are right and we are wrong. Beacuse they really do believe that we are the weak, cowardly, and effeminate strawmen they have made out of us. They truly do believe that suburban moderates swung the election to Obama not because they were disgusted with right-wing governments failures (Which cannot possibly exist) but because white guilt and mushy-headedness led them to be seduced by mindless calls for 'change.' They truly believe that all they have to do to win these mushy-headed children back is to cow faggy liberal voices into silence.
It is indeed true that a high degree of passion for one's beliefs can better inspire one to fight for them when they are threatened. But again, the far right thinks that they are the only ones who truly believe what they believe. At any rate they think that beliefs are confirmed and validated only through the violent assertion of them, an attitude embodied in the hang-happy Texas sailor's letter to the editor. (The best demonstration I've yet seen of how the American right and Islamist terroists are quite a bit like each other.) There is no such thing as a grudging willingness to fight for one's beliefs. There is no such thing as fighting as a last resort. To be willing to fight for one's beliefs is neccesarily to feel overwhelming lust to fight for one's beliefs. Those who claim to be willing to fight only as a last resort are nothing but dishonest pacifists. The entire right-wing mindset is designed to maintain perpetual self-assurance, and the belief that they are the only ones with the balls to fight is the cornerstone of this self-assurance.
And of course it's not just jokes about murdering fellow citizens. Many of the most unhinged rightists are talking (talking at least)in utterly serious terms about taking back 'their' country through force. Death threats against President Obama are four times what is normal for any given president. Newsmax columnist John Perry has helpfully suggested a military coup. A new video game lets the player start his very own Wolverine Brigade to stike down Obama's Socialistic youth Corps.
And then there's the odd case of abortion doctors being murdured and Unitarians being massacred.
It will get uglier before it goes away. We are in the midst of a right-wing death roll. Their claims to ownership of American society will grow steadily louder and angrier as more and more Americans reject their barbarity, to which they will respond by growing louder and angrier, because it is the indisputible cure to all ills. Gays, immigrants, labor activists, and liberal politicians will face harrassment and intimidation. Some will die. It will get uglier, but at least we can take the death roll as proof that we have already won.
Where is their pemenent majority? If only they had been just a little less obvious about ruling the world as a Christian White man's world. There was a time when the GOP actually could have had a viable coalition for post-white majority America. Muslim immigrants from conservative cultures tended to vote Republican in 2000. A thing or two has happened since then to change that. The old game of power elites suckering poor-and poorly educated white men into thinking that they were among the elite has finally blown back on them, for it was this army of Real Americans that scared away Latinos who had been evenly divided between Bush and Gore. Even the military, which not long ago was overwhelmingly Republican and offered as proof of conservtism's superior virility, is no longer a solid GOP voting block. They have learned that "Vietnam syndrome" was not such a bad thing after all; that a government who faithfully believes that the military can do everything will command it to do exactly that.
So now the far right's oldest and most dreaded nightmare; sociopolitical impotance, has arrived; and since they have oppressed, terrorized, villified, marginalized, dismmissed, and demonized every rising demographic group in the country, there is a good chance that this impotance is permenent. Oh how sweet it is to hear the dying monster snarl as if it still has the power to scare anyone.
Still let the snarl be a reminder that a bang and a whimper can be the same thing.
Dé Domhnaigh, Deireadh Fómhair 18, 2009
Dé Sathairn, Deireadh Fómhair 10, 2009
Food Riots, Ghost Malls, Mob Rule, Terror
The spectre of minority/underclass revolution has always been used by American puppetmasters to keep lower class white males, (who imagine themselves to be members of the ruling class by virtue of being white males) terrified and in line.
The poor and brown are wild beastmen who must be kept under heel, otherwise the smallest taste of power will inspire them to take their savage vengence upon our womenfolk. There was a time when this idea was the accepted common wisdom, firmly believed by preachers and presidents. One was simply not a sane and responsible citizen unless he knew that the monkeys were coming for his daughter.
Over time this situation has seemingly reversed itself. While it was once commonsensical to believe that sharing a true democaracy with the underclass would lead to a maelstorm of anarchy and rape, it has now become dispeputible to believe such nonsense; or rather to express such belief directly. No politician would dare run on an overt platform of keeping poor people in the gutter where they belong, he'll just rail about imaginary welfare queens. I have lots of Mexican friends, but I just can't stand Illegal immigrants beacuse I have so much respect for the Law damnit. Out here on the virgin praries crystal meth was unheard of until they came along, everyone knows that. No one believes that Black people are inherently dangerous, oh heavens no, but of course everyone knows that they are more likely to be violent criminals, never mind any liberal media study that tells us otherwise, we know the commensense truth. It's not because we believe that Blacks are genetically inferior, of course not. It's the culture of poverty don't you know? Liberal welfare policies fostering a culture of dependence. They just haven't learned the value of working hard to earn what God says you deserve, like we have.
So of course we have by far the highest prison incarceration rate in the world. We just care about the safety of out children more than other folks don't you know. We understand what good and evil better than they do, and we know how important it is to harshly punish criminals without any weakkneediness about it.
And of course most of the people in jail are poor minorities. It's the culture of dependence, like we said earlier. It's not like we think that they're innately evil. Heavens no. Unless they're selling drugs. If were not man enough to just shoot all the dealers and junkies in the head than at least we can keep building prisons to keep the bastards locked up until they rot. Did you hear about that Mexican over in Peoria who was high on meth and fed threw his baby boy into a wood chipper? Oh it's terrible. Half the hookers you see on the street these days actually grew up in good whi--- Christian families and got hooked up with drugs. It's terrible. Why don't those liberals stop worrying about the so-called rights of these monsters and let the police do their jobs? What sort of place is this country going to be when our kids grow up Thelma?
So to make a long rant short respectible society has replaced overt belief that the mud people are coming to get us with dull self-rightousness toward vices that just so happen to be associated with the poor and brown.
The election of President Hussein Obama has predictibly pushed old fears of apocalyptic social levelling into overdrive, indeed further into the political mainstream since the days of Nixon; but not far enough into the mainstream to prod the more stable elements of conservative leadership to spout anything more than coded dismissal of any vaguely Newdealish proposal from the White House as 'radical' and 'a threat to our way of life.' Those who directly express their dread of the peasents overturning all that is holy remain in the margins.
But in the internet age the voices of the marginalized are as easily accessed as all of the old media stalwarts, and the world is a much brighter place for it. In the old days one had to sift through the local paper for weeks before finally coming accross some masterpiece of flouride& black helicopter lunacy on the letters page. Today we have internet zines like World Net Daily (known best as the main voice of the birther movement) to give us that sweet dose of shit-scared cracker nutcase whenever we want it.
And oh shit are they ever scared. 'Trend forcaster' Gerald Celente paints WND's Bob Unruh a future vision of "Food riots, tax protests, farmer rebellions, student revolts, squatter diggins, homeless uprisings, tent cities, ghost malls, general strikes, bossnappings, kidnappings, industrial saboteurs, gang warfare, mob rule, terror,"
"This is the decline of empire America."
"Now comes his forecast for a global depression and for the United States, 'Obamageddon."
PROTESTS!!!
RIOTS!!!
REBELLIONS!!!
GENERAL STRIKES!!!
BOSSNAPPINGS!!!
This is the way the world ends in Right-Wing loonie-land. Unless everyone sits meekly in their proper place and doesn't backtalk the streets shall flow with blood. And now that there's a niggrah in the White House there's no hope for keeping anyone in their place.
According to Celente, the road to Obamageddon shall be paved with economic mismanagement.
"Never before has so much phantom money been printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, producing practically nothing,"
Actually, money has been backed by nothing ever since we moved off of the gold standard. The American dollar is worth what we imagine it is worth, as opposed to the good old days when it was worth what we imagined a pretty yellow rock to be worth.
"drive around Detroit. Look at all the blown out houses and empty neighborhoods. Look at the violence that's increasing. … Look at the types of heinous crimes being committed by people – some blowing their whole families away…"
The violence is not actually increasing. But of course Celente is addresing an audience that belives the crimerate has been skyrocketing every year since 1921. So that today there is no one under the age of fifty who has not committed at least six murders.
There are indeed some towns in the country that are beginning to look something like Detroit and other moribund areas of the Rust Belt. They are the exurbs, the gated communities, the places where development was based on nothing but itself. The communities that were backed by nothing and produced practically nothing. It's most telling that in right-wing loonie land the closing of a shopping mall is considered just as apocalyptic as a food riot. Half of me believes that the "ghost malls" line betrays Celentes whole spiel as a satirical hoax.
When the Ghost Malls come to your bedroom community (and they will) gather your family and ammunition and head for the wilderness immediatly. Be sure to keep a six-month supply of bath oils and lawn care equipment availible at all times and whatever you do DO NOT GO DOWNTOWN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!! We have it on good authority that the Ghost Malls are in fact a clever ruse to draw desperate shoppers into the inner city and straight into the merciless teeth of; The Homeless Uprising.
The poor and brown are wild beastmen who must be kept under heel, otherwise the smallest taste of power will inspire them to take their savage vengence upon our womenfolk. There was a time when this idea was the accepted common wisdom, firmly believed by preachers and presidents. One was simply not a sane and responsible citizen unless he knew that the monkeys were coming for his daughter.
Over time this situation has seemingly reversed itself. While it was once commonsensical to believe that sharing a true democaracy with the underclass would lead to a maelstorm of anarchy and rape, it has now become dispeputible to believe such nonsense; or rather to express such belief directly. No politician would dare run on an overt platform of keeping poor people in the gutter where they belong, he'll just rail about imaginary welfare queens. I have lots of Mexican friends, but I just can't stand Illegal immigrants beacuse I have so much respect for the Law damnit. Out here on the virgin praries crystal meth was unheard of until they came along, everyone knows that. No one believes that Black people are inherently dangerous, oh heavens no, but of course everyone knows that they are more likely to be violent criminals, never mind any liberal media study that tells us otherwise, we know the commensense truth. It's not because we believe that Blacks are genetically inferior, of course not. It's the culture of poverty don't you know? Liberal welfare policies fostering a culture of dependence. They just haven't learned the value of working hard to earn what God says you deserve, like we have.
So of course we have by far the highest prison incarceration rate in the world. We just care about the safety of out children more than other folks don't you know. We understand what good and evil better than they do, and we know how important it is to harshly punish criminals without any weakkneediness about it.
And of course most of the people in jail are poor minorities. It's the culture of dependence, like we said earlier. It's not like we think that they're innately evil. Heavens no. Unless they're selling drugs. If were not man enough to just shoot all the dealers and junkies in the head than at least we can keep building prisons to keep the bastards locked up until they rot. Did you hear about that Mexican over in Peoria who was high on meth and fed threw his baby boy into a wood chipper? Oh it's terrible. Half the hookers you see on the street these days actually grew up in good whi--- Christian families and got hooked up with drugs. It's terrible. Why don't those liberals stop worrying about the so-called rights of these monsters and let the police do their jobs? What sort of place is this country going to be when our kids grow up Thelma?
So to make a long rant short respectible society has replaced overt belief that the mud people are coming to get us with dull self-rightousness toward vices that just so happen to be associated with the poor and brown.
The election of President Hussein Obama has predictibly pushed old fears of apocalyptic social levelling into overdrive, indeed further into the political mainstream since the days of Nixon; but not far enough into the mainstream to prod the more stable elements of conservative leadership to spout anything more than coded dismissal of any vaguely Newdealish proposal from the White House as 'radical' and 'a threat to our way of life.' Those who directly express their dread of the peasents overturning all that is holy remain in the margins.
But in the internet age the voices of the marginalized are as easily accessed as all of the old media stalwarts, and the world is a much brighter place for it. In the old days one had to sift through the local paper for weeks before finally coming accross some masterpiece of flouride& black helicopter lunacy on the letters page. Today we have internet zines like World Net Daily (known best as the main voice of the birther movement) to give us that sweet dose of shit-scared cracker nutcase whenever we want it.
And oh shit are they ever scared. 'Trend forcaster' Gerald Celente paints WND's Bob Unruh a future vision of "Food riots, tax protests, farmer rebellions, student revolts, squatter diggins, homeless uprisings, tent cities, ghost malls, general strikes, bossnappings, kidnappings, industrial saboteurs, gang warfare, mob rule, terror,"
"This is the decline of empire America."
"Now comes his forecast for a global depression and for the United States, 'Obamageddon."
PROTESTS!!!
RIOTS!!!
REBELLIONS!!!
GENERAL STRIKES!!!
BOSSNAPPINGS!!!
This is the way the world ends in Right-Wing loonie-land. Unless everyone sits meekly in their proper place and doesn't backtalk the streets shall flow with blood. And now that there's a niggrah in the White House there's no hope for keeping anyone in their place.
According to Celente, the road to Obamageddon shall be paved with economic mismanagement.
"Never before has so much phantom money been printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, producing practically nothing,"
Actually, money has been backed by nothing ever since we moved off of the gold standard. The American dollar is worth what we imagine it is worth, as opposed to the good old days when it was worth what we imagined a pretty yellow rock to be worth.
"drive around Detroit. Look at all the blown out houses and empty neighborhoods. Look at the violence that's increasing. … Look at the types of heinous crimes being committed by people – some blowing their whole families away…"
The violence is not actually increasing. But of course Celente is addresing an audience that belives the crimerate has been skyrocketing every year since 1921. So that today there is no one under the age of fifty who has not committed at least six murders.
There are indeed some towns in the country that are beginning to look something like Detroit and other moribund areas of the Rust Belt. They are the exurbs, the gated communities, the places where development was based on nothing but itself. The communities that were backed by nothing and produced practically nothing. It's most telling that in right-wing loonie land the closing of a shopping mall is considered just as apocalyptic as a food riot. Half of me believes that the "ghost malls" line betrays Celentes whole spiel as a satirical hoax.
When the Ghost Malls come to your bedroom community (and they will) gather your family and ammunition and head for the wilderness immediatly. Be sure to keep a six-month supply of bath oils and lawn care equipment availible at all times and whatever you do DO NOT GO DOWNTOWN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!! We have it on good authority that the Ghost Malls are in fact a clever ruse to draw desperate shoppers into the inner city and straight into the merciless teeth of; The Homeless Uprising.
Dé hAoine, Deireadh Fómhair 02, 2009
Spoil Them Or Don't, Brats are Brats
There is a small but significant segment of the population who belives that this...
is the landscape that the typical American lives in, and that this...
is what the typical modern American looks like.
I've mentioned before Bob Altemeyer's observation in his "The Authoritarians" how right-wing-authoritarians are obsessed with believing that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. While there is certainly arrogance, self-rightousness, and feelings of entitlement on the left, I think it is the far Right's tendency to believe that it is not just normal but normalcy (along with being far more likely to see cocksureness as morally good) that leaves conservatism decidedly more prone to hubris than liberalism. Remember the crows of 'liberalism is dead' earlier this decade when the GOP was sweeping the country with 51-49 victories. Remember when Karl Rove had 'The Math' just before the 2006 backlash. The rise of the Reagan coalition led to thirty years of rightist bragging about their coming 'permanent majority' but the fact of the matter is that they already had a semi-permenent majority who's time has now passed. The defection of southern Democrats by all rights should have been fatal to the party. Instead it was always at worst a significant minority. While it's true that the GOP, enjoyed a general run of success in getting its candidates into the White House, a predictible pattern of overreach, from Watergate to Social Security 'reform' to Gingrich being Gingrich always kept them from the long unbroken hold on power they always just knew was right around the corner.
But while it was the hubris of Republican leaders who brought the party down, it is the fantastically delusional and sad arrogance of 'The Base' at the pattern that seems to be keeping the party down. American Rednecks; who bolted the Democrats en masse when the donkeys broke their agreement to keep the niggers down, can now claim to have been the ruin of both major American parties. GOP victories in the early part of this decade had the camo ballcap crowd riding pretty high, and after Bush's reelection in 2004 there was real hope of never having to see some uppity dyke in a nosering or hearing some pinhead on the teevee say that they should buy one of those faggy little cars ever again. The clucking editorial tone of the "North Platte Telegraph" tells you everything you needed to know about red America's attitude in those days. Everyone knew that the sane, reasonible, salt-of-the-earth people voted Republican, and the fact that the GOP won was proof that it was the home of the sane, reasonible, and salt-of-the-earth. The urban elitists would stew in their coffee shops and deservedly suffer through structural rot while the real Americans enjoyed their tax cuts and cheered as their invincible masculine force expressed itself through military conquest.
But these military conquests went increasingly sour; and Huuricane Katrina revealed the fact that manly assurance in emergencies is not the same thing as knowing what to do in them, and so suburban moderates inevitebly became fed-up with incompetant right-wing government, and Rural White America was suddenly left without the dispropoertinate social influence it feels divinely entitled to. Understand though that the "Real America" crowd will absolutely never stop feeling entitled to rule everyone else. It's entire self-image and sense of self-worth is premised upon being the eternal universal norm. The hunter who feels that hunting is the only way his sons can learn the indispensible truth of man's mastery over nature can never understand a world in which perfectly conservative businessmen eat arugula because, they just don't like grilled meat that much. The retiree who is sincerely bothered by having to press 1 for English cannot conceieve of an America where walking one's dog past storefronts in four languages is banal. The very free market that right-wingers revere as a divine arbiter of moral justice has produced a nation that is decidedly urban and multithnic. It is a world where the White rural conservative is not the embodiment of sanity and salt-of-the-earthiness but rather an emberassment to everyone else. This cannot possibly be. Multiculturalism is not the natural byproduct of economic and technological development but rather a dark conspiracy among scholarly elites. The urban centers that so many Great Fathers lose their children to are not the proud centers of civilization that most people have considered their cities to be but rather unspeakibly evil hell holes full of violence and vice. A sense of superiority is the universal human addiction, and for the man who believes himself superior, equality is as unthinkible as slavery. If a person's sense of entitlement is threatened than the already-powerful human capacity for delusion will go into overdrive in order to protect it. The American good-old-boy would rather believe the most insane nonsesnse rather than accept that he is the weirdo in modern society, and so he does.
That's why right-wing rhetoric since 2006 and especially 2008 is based so heavily on agrievement, (The liberal media, the supposed enviromental hypocrisy of Al Gore and Hollywood celebrities, the War on Christmas) and usurption (President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. The way that certain 'ACORN' employees lookes the other way at a 'pimp's' shenanagins is proof that they tampered with the election, well somehow damnit. President Obama is a Communist Nazi. Illegal immigrants plan to establish Aztlan. Black dance troupes are planning their savage vengence against us all.)
What makes the delusion worse is the bullies need to believe that he is operating from a position of strength. At the top you have the Bill Kristol's and Karl Roves of the world, who, despite being exposed as and played for fools countless times in the past three years, still imagine themselves to political genuises with the ability to frame national debate in their favor. At the bottom of course are the rural whites who imagine themselves to be the country's eternal essense. And in between the two are the Limbaughs and the Hannities and the Becks linking the mud flap and country club classes together in one big naked esctatic whirl of fantasy.
Right-wing media knuckleheads may have the power to turn their fans out for tea-party rage orgies but, as the Times' David Brooks has pointed out, their actual political power is and has been grossly overrated. Limbaugh and company failed to prevent the nomination of the "moderate" John McCain, failed to turn the close primary fight between Clinton and Obama into a crippling blow for the winner, failed to make Peoria moderates see Sarah Palin as anything but the lunatic she is and finally of course failed to preven the election of The Other.
But of course the epilepsy cases of AM radio are more popular with their fans than ever before. The ditto-chamber provides a cacoon from a social reality that cannot possibly be. Here in the reality of hippy-socialise freaks, reaching out to moderates would seem to be the obvious way for the GOP to recover from recent losses, just as reaching out to moderates is the obvious strategy for any minority party anywhere. In Limbaughland it is exactly the appeal the moderates that has purged the real majority from power. Here there are millions of phantom patriots who stayed home on election day out of disgust towards McCains insufficient hatred of brown people. In Limbaughland the tea-party tantrums are a better measure of ideological strength than elections. In Limbaughland the thirteen million citizens of Limbaughland are an invincible arm ready to overwhelm a nation of 300 million. In Limbaughland it matters not that the thirteen million number has remained static for twenty years as the country has grown significantly larger in all areas except the hinterlands where Limbaughlanders hail from.
And the Rove's and the Kristol's who can't and the GOP members of Congress, who can't imagine themselves as anything but shapers of opinion, as anything but manipulative masters of imperial fate, hear this mouse in the megaphone and feel assured that they are still Lords.
And so the Republican party will continue to overplay its hand as it did when in power. Any public disontent towards the president will be interpreted as a massive popular rejection of him. Any temporary advantage gained by Democratic timidity will be pissed away by grandiose bluster that reminds the general public of what assholes these people still are. Hubris cannot possibly be unlearned by the mind that considers hubris a virtue, and conservative confidence that we will always be living in 1994 will likely asure that 1994 will not happen again.
is the landscape that the typical American lives in, and that this...
is what the typical modern American looks like.
I've mentioned before Bob Altemeyer's observation in his "The Authoritarians" how right-wing-authoritarians are obsessed with believing that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. While there is certainly arrogance, self-rightousness, and feelings of entitlement on the left, I think it is the far Right's tendency to believe that it is not just normal but normalcy (along with being far more likely to see cocksureness as morally good) that leaves conservatism decidedly more prone to hubris than liberalism. Remember the crows of 'liberalism is dead' earlier this decade when the GOP was sweeping the country with 51-49 victories. Remember when Karl Rove had 'The Math' just before the 2006 backlash. The rise of the Reagan coalition led to thirty years of rightist bragging about their coming 'permanent majority' but the fact of the matter is that they already had a semi-permenent majority who's time has now passed. The defection of southern Democrats by all rights should have been fatal to the party. Instead it was always at worst a significant minority. While it's true that the GOP, enjoyed a general run of success in getting its candidates into the White House, a predictible pattern of overreach, from Watergate to Social Security 'reform' to Gingrich being Gingrich always kept them from the long unbroken hold on power they always just knew was right around the corner.
But while it was the hubris of Republican leaders who brought the party down, it is the fantastically delusional and sad arrogance of 'The Base' at the pattern that seems to be keeping the party down. American Rednecks; who bolted the Democrats en masse when the donkeys broke their agreement to keep the niggers down, can now claim to have been the ruin of both major American parties. GOP victories in the early part of this decade had the camo ballcap crowd riding pretty high, and after Bush's reelection in 2004 there was real hope of never having to see some uppity dyke in a nosering or hearing some pinhead on the teevee say that they should buy one of those faggy little cars ever again. The clucking editorial tone of the "North Platte Telegraph" tells you everything you needed to know about red America's attitude in those days. Everyone knew that the sane, reasonible, salt-of-the-earth people voted Republican, and the fact that the GOP won was proof that it was the home of the sane, reasonible, and salt-of-the-earth. The urban elitists would stew in their coffee shops and deservedly suffer through structural rot while the real Americans enjoyed their tax cuts and cheered as their invincible masculine force expressed itself through military conquest.
But these military conquests went increasingly sour; and Huuricane Katrina revealed the fact that manly assurance in emergencies is not the same thing as knowing what to do in them, and so suburban moderates inevitebly became fed-up with incompetant right-wing government, and Rural White America was suddenly left without the dispropoertinate social influence it feels divinely entitled to. Understand though that the "Real America" crowd will absolutely never stop feeling entitled to rule everyone else. It's entire self-image and sense of self-worth is premised upon being the eternal universal norm. The hunter who feels that hunting is the only way his sons can learn the indispensible truth of man's mastery over nature can never understand a world in which perfectly conservative businessmen eat arugula because, they just don't like grilled meat that much. The retiree who is sincerely bothered by having to press 1 for English cannot conceieve of an America where walking one's dog past storefronts in four languages is banal. The very free market that right-wingers revere as a divine arbiter of moral justice has produced a nation that is decidedly urban and multithnic. It is a world where the White rural conservative is not the embodiment of sanity and salt-of-the-earthiness but rather an emberassment to everyone else. This cannot possibly be. Multiculturalism is not the natural byproduct of economic and technological development but rather a dark conspiracy among scholarly elites. The urban centers that so many Great Fathers lose their children to are not the proud centers of civilization that most people have considered their cities to be but rather unspeakibly evil hell holes full of violence and vice. A sense of superiority is the universal human addiction, and for the man who believes himself superior, equality is as unthinkible as slavery. If a person's sense of entitlement is threatened than the already-powerful human capacity for delusion will go into overdrive in order to protect it. The American good-old-boy would rather believe the most insane nonsesnse rather than accept that he is the weirdo in modern society, and so he does.
That's why right-wing rhetoric since 2006 and especially 2008 is based so heavily on agrievement, (The liberal media, the supposed enviromental hypocrisy of Al Gore and Hollywood celebrities, the War on Christmas) and usurption (President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. The way that certain 'ACORN' employees lookes the other way at a 'pimp's' shenanagins is proof that they tampered with the election, well somehow damnit. President Obama is a Communist Nazi. Illegal immigrants plan to establish Aztlan. Black dance troupes are planning their savage vengence against us all.)
What makes the delusion worse is the bullies need to believe that he is operating from a position of strength. At the top you have the Bill Kristol's and Karl Roves of the world, who, despite being exposed as and played for fools countless times in the past three years, still imagine themselves to political genuises with the ability to frame national debate in their favor. At the bottom of course are the rural whites who imagine themselves to be the country's eternal essense. And in between the two are the Limbaughs and the Hannities and the Becks linking the mud flap and country club classes together in one big naked esctatic whirl of fantasy.
Right-wing media knuckleheads may have the power to turn their fans out for tea-party rage orgies but, as the Times' David Brooks has pointed out, their actual political power is and has been grossly overrated. Limbaugh and company failed to prevent the nomination of the "moderate" John McCain, failed to turn the close primary fight between Clinton and Obama into a crippling blow for the winner, failed to make Peoria moderates see Sarah Palin as anything but the lunatic she is and finally of course failed to preven the election of The Other.
But of course the epilepsy cases of AM radio are more popular with their fans than ever before. The ditto-chamber provides a cacoon from a social reality that cannot possibly be. Here in the reality of hippy-socialise freaks, reaching out to moderates would seem to be the obvious way for the GOP to recover from recent losses, just as reaching out to moderates is the obvious strategy for any minority party anywhere. In Limbaughland it is exactly the appeal the moderates that has purged the real majority from power. Here there are millions of phantom patriots who stayed home on election day out of disgust towards McCains insufficient hatred of brown people. In Limbaughland the tea-party tantrums are a better measure of ideological strength than elections. In Limbaughland the thirteen million citizens of Limbaughland are an invincible arm ready to overwhelm a nation of 300 million. In Limbaughland it matters not that the thirteen million number has remained static for twenty years as the country has grown significantly larger in all areas except the hinterlands where Limbaughlanders hail from.
And the Rove's and the Kristol's who can't and the GOP members of Congress, who can't imagine themselves as anything but shapers of opinion, as anything but manipulative masters of imperial fate, hear this mouse in the megaphone and feel assured that they are still Lords.
And so the Republican party will continue to overplay its hand as it did when in power. Any public disontent towards the president will be interpreted as a massive popular rejection of him. Any temporary advantage gained by Democratic timidity will be pissed away by grandiose bluster that reminds the general public of what assholes these people still are. Hubris cannot possibly be unlearned by the mind that considers hubris a virtue, and conservative confidence that we will always be living in 1994 will likely asure that 1994 will not happen again.
Blackmailing David Leterman.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/david-letterman-extortion_n_307221.html
Remember kids, moral reputations are not very important to comedians, certainly not worth two million dollars. If you're thinking about blackmailing a comedian, writer, or musician, you'd be better off just robbing a bank.
And I shouldn't have to tell you that if you're doing any sort of illegal business by check you might as well just lock yourself up now.
Remember kids, moral reputations are not very important to comedians, certainly not worth two million dollars. If you're thinking about blackmailing a comedian, writer, or musician, you'd be better off just robbing a bank.
And I shouldn't have to tell you that if you're doing any sort of illegal business by check you might as well just lock yourself up now.
Déardaoin, Deireadh Fómhair 01, 2009
Surely I'm the Only English Major to Bitch About Banned Books
It's Banned Books Week, and this year's winner for most banned book in America is "And Tango Makes Three", the story of homo penguins Roy and Silo and their adoption of a chick whose natural parents were unable to care for more than one child at a time.
As with anything involving gayness, the gay penguin book has inspired all of the tired claptrap about "promoting the homosexual agenda" and "undermining Christian values," and I must say that when I read the book to my baby cousin, the part where Roy and Silo pop Amyl, grind to Kylie Mynogue at a Village club, and felate total strangers in the bathroom was a little off-putting. Mostly though the asshole segment of the American population is bothered by the book because of how it puts the lie to the old "homosexuality is unnatural" canard. The truth of course is that gayness is utterly rampant in the animal kingdom, and it takes a great deal of willful blindness to not notice. Sure you can chalk up your two hunting dogs having at each other to some sort of prison sex thing; but then come along these gay penguins right there in New York, and then along comes some fucker who writes a book about them, and the perfect naturalness of anumal gayness becomes almost impossible to ignore.
Well that's what you get motherfuckers. I loath homophobia, and more than that I trully dispise citing the naturalness or unaturalness of a thing as proof that is just and good or not. Nature is the incarnation of nihilism and anarchism. Our precious instincts are nothing but electric needles prodding us to become decaying vehicles for self-perpepetuating chemical mechinations that are wholly indifferent to us; wholly devoid of meaning or value. There is no circle of life. There is no Gaia system uniting all biological existense into some damned cosmic Kumbaya. But I digress.
Any man who raised in the Midwest has no chance of getting through boyhood without some shithead giving him the plug-and-socket metaphor. The correlation between homophobia and strong religious belief is based largely on the notion that the "perfect fit" between penis and vagina is the ultimate proof of an interventionalist God. A God who personally dictates the laws of society, determines what our social and gender roles shall be, what our desires shall be, makes sure our socks match in the morning, etc.
They have it precisely backwards. The reproductive process for placental mammals is indeed quite impressive, almost like clockwork though not quite. Mistakes still happen, and it wasn't until humans invented the abortion clinic that mothers had a more of disposing their dead and unwanted that was more appealing than eating them. At any rate placentals are the exception. Sex among the lower animals is a smorgasboard of methods that are by turns wasteful, needlessly dangerous, and frequently hilarious.
There's a lot of cloaca rubbing. The cloaca is the all-purpose rear oriface possessed by most birds and reptiles, male and female. Reproduction among birds involves a method known as the "cloacal kiss." Male and female back up to each other, line up holes, and then it's basically a game of ball-and-cup. Gay birds? They do it exactly the same way. What else are they going to do? It's hard to imagine why even bible-thumpers would be bothered by same-sex relationships among creatures who all carry the same junk. All bird sex is essentially lesbian sex. If you're worried about strange sexuality shattering your delusions of an orderly universe, than never mind gay penguins, worry about the coalca. Turn your extended family into a cult and picket Thanksgiving dinners.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8284509.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_animals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_and_Silo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca
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