Civil Rights - OR - Why Can't We Just Kill Everybody?

The title isn't really a joke; more and more, with the sheer number of willfully ignorant and hateful people infesting this nation, I think a zombie apocalypse or another giant asteroid might actually make things better.

So what has me pissed off today? I'm glad you asked, disembodied source of inquiry! There are two things that are really making me angry as of this moment. The first is the NRA and the second is the marriage equality debate, and both have to do with equal rights under the Constitution.

First off, the marriage equality debate should not be a debate. At all. The Constitution is pretty clear on this in the 14th Amendment, providing equal rights and protection under the law for all US citizens. Ever since Loving v. State of Virginia, marriage and all the laws/protections provided thereby are counted as rights for anyone willing to make use of them. This isn't quantum physics or an attempt to prove Toni Morrison isn't a repetitive and formulaic writer; things are pretty damn straightforward.

I will illuminate: According to US law, no citizen can be denied equal rights and protections under law. Also according to US law, marriage is a right that provides more than 1,500 protections. Therefore, since even criminals are still permitted to marry, there is quite simply nothing legally preventing homosexuals from getting married and any preventions thereof are demonstrably unConstitutional.

The only things in opposition to the very real legal imperative to permit marriage equality are the religious and right-wing lobbies. For some reason lawmakers are so scared shitless of these groups that they are willing to ignore unConstitutional laws being written into existence and to permit the obliteration of every principle upon which this country was founded.

The nation of the United States of America was founded on the principle of religious freedom. No religion could impose its rule onto the people of the nation. Should "Christian" laws get ratified by the Supreme Court, this nation will have obliterated one of its oldest tenets.

The only thing preventing our Supreme Court from doing the right thing is a combination of personal bias and fear of retaliation. If we had given in to petty squabbles and fear of a violent presence instead of standing as one, this nation would never have been founded. Every moment of hesitation on the part of the Supreme Court is another moment spent shitting on each and every person who died defending this country or who dedicated their lives to ensuring the survival and correct course of our nation.



Now, since I don't really have a segue, let's just take a moment and shift gears. From the legally-ensured right to the Pursuit of Happiness, let's move to the right to Life. Hey, that was a segue after all!

So the NRA have started sending robocalls into Newtown, just three months after the Sandy Hook massacre. Well of course they are; after all, how long do you have to take to get over your children's deaths? They're just noisy little bastards who aren't good for anything. You can't even get 'em to work since those silly child-labor laws got passed. Like any other possession, it should only take a month or two for you to get over it and focus on what's really important, like guns!

The Second Amendment is one of the least-contested of the Constitutional Amendments and for the life of me I can't see why. The entire point of the Second Amendment, as written into the Bill of Rights, was to ensure that the states could protect themselves should another nation invade or a civil war between states stir up. That was the reason for the first phrase in the Amendment: "A well-regulated militia." Well, now we have a well-regulated militia. It's called the National Guard. State militias have been outlawed, since heavily-armed groups with questionable sanity and morals are a threat to everyone else, so there's really no need for all these firearms.

Of course, the Supreme Court spat in the eyes of our Founding Fathers on that one, ruling that the well-regulated militia part of the Second Amendment was outdated and everybody had a right to guns whether they intended to defend their nation from invasion or just planned to kill their governors.

Gun violence in this country should have reached its saturation point last year with the sheer number of mass shootings, but sadly it seems that no number of dead children and loved ones can sway gun-lovers' hearts. Apparently a chunk of metal designed for murder is more important than the life of your spouse or parent or child.

The illegal firearms trade is inextricably linked to the war on drugs. By turning drug possession into a multi-billion-dollar black market, we've made it a requirement for all drug peddlers - from cartel lords to street pushers - to carry guns so they can murder one another and take territory. Basically we established an underground repeat of early-Renaissance mercantilism, and we all know how fucking well that turned out.

Honestly, I foresee that if the underground drug trade were killed through legalization, taxation, recuperation programs and the decriminalization of those users inadvertently hooked, the illegal firearms trade would all but dry up. There just isn't any other major money-earner for gangs that can be hidden and shipped so effectively, so gangs wouldn't have the income to continue buying guns and their rackets would be easier to shatter.

And then, when the illegal gun trade is practically dead, perhaps people's eyes will be opened to the wanton slaughter perpetrated by psychotic alpha-types when they feel their authority is threatened, or by self-styled victims who decide to lash out.

We've created this mess, true, but we can still undo the horrors we've helped to bring into existence. We need to follow the moral compass provided by human empathy and common sense. It's not that hard; it's just inconvenient sometimes, and some people would rather a million innocents die than they be inconvenienced for a minute.

Goodnight, and stay safe.

Kill Whitey

After the Sandy Hook massacre I had to remove myself from all media for well over a month. The gun-loving crowd's mania that firearms trump the lives of innocents was just too much for me to handle. Well, zip-a-dee-fucking-doo-da; the old saying is, "when it rains, it pours." Here in America the saying should be, "when it rains, it's actually somebody pissing on you."

Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder. With mass-murder as a garnish. That pretty much sums up the entirety of our country in two sentences. We're more concerned with Gomer being able to have a dozen pistols than we are about Little Suzy being able to have one meal a day.
Our country is so mired in hatred and ideological trench warfare that we're paralyzed from being able to do genuine good for anyone. In the sixteen years since Great Britain passed their laws banning all civilian firearms, gun-related deaths have numbered in only the double-digits annually, sometimes cresting one hundred on a particularly bad year. Conversely, the average death toll from firearms in the good ol' US-of-A is somewhere between ten- and fifteen-thousand.

Our nation is divided right down the middle and never the twain shall meet. On the one side we have the ideological patriarchy: cannibalistic monsters who think they're the only ones deserving of a free meal and who are sociopathic enough to wish death on others just so that they don't have to pay a cent more in taxes. This includes gun enthusiasts, corporate vultures, hyper-aggressive rednecks, and gender-"rights" extremists from both Mars and Venus. In case you hadn't noticed, the vast majority of those folks fall into the Republican party's wheelhouse, except for women's-rights extremists, who wouldn't get along at all with the "barefoot and pregnant" goal that Republicans have for women; still, anyone who's willing to sacrifice other innocent human beings in order to push their own agenda fall into this category, so that includes modern pseudo-feminists. This also includes PETA, because fuck anyone who claims to want to protect animals but whose activism results in a nearly 100% kill rate of animals "rescued" and brought to their shelters.
On the other side we have the ideological pussiarchy: a bunch of mostly well-intentioned people who want equality and safety for all but are too incompetent, naïve or pacifistic to actually affect positive change. This mostly includes Democrats, the majority of college educators, charity workers and activists. Basically anybody who thinks that they can win people over and affect change with a well-reasoned argument without a good heap of fire-and-brimstone or pathos winds up in this category.

A lot of you might be wondering where the hell I'm going with this. The answer is, I'm not really going anywhere. Reason being, if you can't see my point already then I'm never going to convince you. We as a country have no chance to survive this century if we can't find some way to move past this polarization; unfortunately, we pretty much have no common ground any longer. Even the dead bodies of children can't bridge the gap, because apparently the life of a fetus is sacred but once it's been popped out the little fucker can go die in a ditch.

As far as I can see, there are only three potential outcomes that could prevent the US from falling the fuck apart.
The first is that the aggression and hatred grows to be too much. Ignorance and oppression from right-wingers eventually reaches the overflow point and the sensible human beings in this nation stage a mass-disembarkment from a failed experiment. This would likely result in the fearmongers remaining either falling on themselves in an orgy of conspiracy-driven madness or, more likely, attacking every nation on Earth at once in an attempt to force their ideology onto the world. This would leave millions if not billions dead and the US annihilated.

The second, and sadly the least likely, is the exact opposite: somehow the mass paranoia causes the maniacs to snap and stage a nationwide exodus to somewhere else, where their hatred will fester freely. This would likely result in a new aggressive nation infested by rednecks, but who cares about that? The real problem would be that suddenly Liberals would lose their own common ground. Without a threat to unify the differing points of view, strife would continue on. The only silver lining is that, without the rampant paranoia and hatred brought on by the Far-Right, perhaps the more minor difference could be overcome.

The third possibility is of a second Civil War: militant Right-wing madmen raiding their neighbors' homes and slaughtering them for thinking freely, corporate demagogues hiring private-security firms to act as their own armies against the National Guard, and the end result a scorched husk of a former nation. Whoever the victor, the US would limp along as a shadow of its prior greatness, falling into a third-world state similar to Haiti.

I understand that all of this is quite grim and nothing like the snarky nature of my other posts. I agree but, sadly, I see nothing humorous about the current events within this country. I can see only smoke from blazing charnels on the horizon as we hurtle toward an inevitable negative outcome. It would take a miracle to change things for the better, and I've noticed a distinct lack of those in my years on this earth.
Perhaps we as a people can affect change by standing up and making our voices heard. Perhaps we'll only be barking in the dark as the walls close in around us. But we have the obligation to try, if not for our fellow humans than for ourselves, for our survival instinct.
Freedom is not free. This is true but the price of freedom is not, as many would claim, the corpses of our children or the sacrifice of our safety. The price of freedom is that we must all stand together, forego our petty differences and work toward a better community for ourselves and future generations.

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Forget the Amendments and what you think they mean. Those were added on. This right here, the preamble, the very first words of the Constitution, this is what matters. The unification and protection of our nation and our people supersedes any petty grudges or ideological demands. This isn't a contest to be won by forcing half our people to concede; this is a duty that we owe to ourselves, our neighbors and even our hated rivals.

Goodnight, and stay safe.

A Cult

I have no premeditated witticisms for this one. I'm too pissed-off for that, but I'll probably toss some stuff out on the fly just so I don't cry myself to sleep tonight. I can no longer sit idly by and pretend at some facsimile of political correctness or benefit of the doubt. That time has passed, and I must truly speak my mind. I make no apologies to anyone who is offended or thinks that I am too harsh.


The Republican Party is a cult, as sadistic as Charles Manson's family and as fiercely devoted as the residents of Jonestown. They deny science, dehumanize anyone who doesn't conform to their delusions, and call for the deaths of whomever they arbitrarily declare to be the enemy. As I write this all off-the-cuff, I realize that I must give this some structure or I may devolve into the same firebrand death-wishing as those I so despise, so let's do this.

Formation
First off, a cult does not need to be established around a religion; a dogma or philosophy works just as well, as Nazi Germany showed. The National Socialist party was most certainly a cult, and it rejected all religion.

The only true necessity for a cult to form is a dogma strong enough to gather like-minded followers and enough intelligence in the leader to realize that it needs to be kept silent. I cannot point to exactly when the Republican party became wholly infested by their cult, but I know that Conservative dehumanization, death-wishing and regressionist campaigning has existed ever since before the Civil War. My best guess for the firm entrenchment of this cult would be during the McCarthy era, wherein the madmen found that the public was willing to go along with the wildest accusations if driven by fear, and the Other was certainly enough to incite this fear.

The fall of the Soviet Union had to be a crushing blow to this cult, as suddenly there was no looming Other to terrify the proletariat. In the face of this, the cult dug deep and dipped into the collective fears that are nurtured by religious dogma and the willful ignorance that has always been a secondary goal of the Church since its rise to power at the fall of the Roman Empire. Lacking one major Other, they decided to instead sow the seeds of terror and division far and wide, striking at anything they could: homosexuality, women, other races, other religions, other demographics and educational levels; anything that could be painted as Different, Other, and Evil was done so. Fear is the single greatest motivator to make a person act against his or her own best interests.

Dogma
What makes one small group a religion and another group a cult? Well, there are all sorts of reasons, but the number-one thing that separates a religion from a cult is that religion is supposed to be a part of your life, while a cult is intended to BE your life. Nothing can supersede your loyalty to the cult, your subservience and dedication to your leaders. This certainly explains how so many competing Christian religions, who normally despise one another to the point of near-civil war, can work together in the Republican party while still making religion one of their primary stances. The reason, of course, is that their religion is their cult, not whatever denomination they claim. They ally with a church to gain the loyalty of the cattle, following basic talking points while keeping their true intent hidden.

This is another important point in defining a cult: they keep their behavior secret. They do not share their beliefs with others who have not yet been heavily indoctrinated, nor do they share anything about themselves, their lives, friends, activities, or anything else if they can avoid it. Todd Akin's recent verbal atrocity hints at this: we all know that the Republican base believes his words, that the vagina is some magic creature that can slay unwanted sperm, but I don't honestly believe that the cultists in power believe this. This is the dogma they spout to their constituents to get them to fall in lockstep; Akin made the mistake of sharing it with people who would protest, so the rest of the party immediately disavowed him.

In addition, cultists actively reject facts that do not gel with their fantasies. Whether these facts are that their leader is only human and not a god, or that economic deregulation has never worked in the history of modern America, they are ignored and violently shouted down. As with most cults that find their origins in heresy, Republican cultists have no problem with picking apart their holy book - the Bible - and rewriting sections to fit with their own interpretation of the world, to hold up homosexuality as a far greater sin than violating the Ten Commandments or the Two Commandments of Christ's covenant, and to somehow completely negate Jesus' lessons to support the poor and donate their wealth as the rich can never enter Heaven.

Something odd, though, is that most cults don't last very long because they have a single godly figurehead, and with that lost most can no longer cling to their madness, or at least cannot perpetuate it. In this case, scarily enough, I believe that their god-figure is the dollar. Every policy recently offered up that did not strip individuals of their rights was somehow designed to leave more Americans unemployed or stuff even more money in the pockets of the richest Republicans. In this case, the cult's leader will never die as the dollar cannot truly be killed. Instead, we are tasked with the nightmarish challenge of defeating the worshippers rather than executing their leader.

Principles
Cults always stand against human decency, acting in manners directly anathema to the survival of the species. In this case, we know the origin of their actions: fear of the Other keeps their followers quietly in check, following along in abject terror of some evil brown person leaping out to slay them, with the occasional carrot being dangled before them to make them move faster - usually something to do with religion or the stripping of human rights from women or minorities.

However, fear has been working less and less. Americans don't have as much to fear. Fewer and fewer people, though still more than is in any way acceptable, fear others for the color of their skin, their religion or orientation. So, faced with this glaring fact, the cult has changed to incite hatred.

This scares me more than ever, even more than when I first learned about Bush-era renditioning. Tea Party rallies cheer when someone dies from lack of medical care, they call for the deaths of their candidates' political rivals, and plot the demise of our President. All the while their cultist puppet-masters continue to drive them forward, stoking the flames of their rage.

Republicans have made more unfounded claims regarding fellow Americans than we have seen since the age of McCarthy, and now the motivation of these accusations are not fear but hate. We have seen a total of eight mass killings in one month, and the month isn't even over yet.

We need to declare this Republican cult to be the religious terrorists they are before they amass and strike against peaceful Americans. Human compassion from the Right is at an all-time law, and they believe murder to be justified in idealistic disagreements. I do not normally stand as an advocate of fear or direct negative action against fellow human beings, but I can no longer sit quietly and watch as the raving masses continue to build power and create a feedback loop of rage amongst themselves. This bubble of hatred is soon to burst, and I fear for all those who believe in self-determination and human moral responsibility. The most outspoken of them will likely be the first casualties.

Pros and conned

The recent Chik-Fil-A controversy has unveiled a disturbing number of gay-haters, many of whom try to disguise their bigotry - even to themselves - with rhetoric and differing arguments. The "pro-" movement has existed for a long time, and is most often utilized by the ignorant in an attempt to positively or negatively charge a debate.

Take some of the most common (and inaccurate) terms: Pro-Life and Pro-Family. Pro-Life is just a blatant lie. If life is sacred, why is it only sacred until birth? After that, Conservatives work to strip healthcare from mothers and children, stating that programs such as welfare and Medicare are only a drain on society, and it's every person's duty to take care of themselves. Of course, this is why Ron Paul, one of the biggest supporters of abolishing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security makes excessive use of all of them for himself and his family. Apparently only those capable of easily supporting themselves deserve handouts, because why should those with the ability to do so actually do so?
People who are Pro-Life also frequently favor the death penalty and leniency in killings with laws like Stand Your Ground, so again life is sacred only until birth, then they don't seem to care if people die or are murdered. Truly, Pro-Life is simply Anti-Abortion trying to make itself appear friendlier.

Pro-Family is another laughable concept, if one actually takes a step back. Those people who claim to be Pro-Family stand behind representatives who are adulterers, who hate their own family members for being different, who divorce their spouses or abandon them to die, and numerous other atrocities against the concept of family.
The entirety of the Pro-Family argument is basically "pro-anything that's not gay." Gay children are shunned, and gay people are hated. Many of homosexuals' detractors say that gays are "anti-family" or "anti-traditional marriage." This implies that they wish to abolish marriage or tear apart families, and where has one advocate for gay rights seriously come out and said that gay marriage should be the only marriage? I'm seriously asking for a single recorded statement, on the record in a press release, saying that this is the goal.

Now for two actual "pros": First is Pro-Choice, which does nothing but acknowledge that it is each woman's, and each family's, choice. If Pro-Life doesn't care that parents torture and violently beat their children, and calls for the deaths of people every day, how can they claim the moral high ground over a movement that just says that a person's body is his or her own?

Next is Pro-Equality, a common term for the gay rights movement. As the name says, the movement is focused on equal rights, not on superiority. Gays only want the same rights as any other Americans, the ability to visit their loved ones in the hospital and to share the precious commodity that is health insurance, among other things.

As an addendum, I truly do not understand the hatred of gays. Homosexuality is not condemned by the Ten Commandments, nor by any sacred covenant between God and His people. How do the religious Conservatives justify permitting violators of the Ten Commandments, the very building blocks of Christianity, to hold rights that they would keep stripped from gays?

Obamacare; or, What Happened to our Yam-Head?

It's no big secret that I supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 bid for Democratic presidential candidate. I thought that her experience in the White House, as well as having her husband's knowledge to draw upon (Bill Clinton was the last president to leave us with a surplus, a staggering surplus at that, which Bush burned through and got America nearly a trillion dollars in debt in his first term) would make for an incredibly capable president. I believed that her no-nonsense attitude would also be beneficial, as her track record included far less BDSM-style submission that Democrats misconstrue as compromise.
However, Obama won the nomination and then the presidency, and I supported him as I view anyone with apparently good intentions as being vastly better than the exploitative vultures in the Republican party who would have all money and resources funneled directly to the rich. Unfortunately, his administration has been one of waffling and surrender to the point where I'm surprised the birthers don't think he's from France instead of Kenya.
Guantanamo, Afghanistan, gay marriage; all of these major issues the president has either simply let lie or, in the case of Afghanistan, actively aggravate the situation by pushing more troops into an area where US presence is a prime cause for terrorist sentiment.

Above all else, however, it is this abomination of Obamacare that will forever blight the president in my eyes. It is his "No Child Left Behind," a presidential mandate that will doubtlessly begin to tear apart those least fortunate. The original proposition reviled by Conservatives as Obamacare was an ingenious concept and a transitory phase to universal healthcare like every other first-world democracy has: it would have the United States government implement its own health insurance plan that citizens could sign onto if they lacked the funds to get healthcare from the private insurers. Obviously, the idea that big business might lose income from the unemployed - those rendered jobless by the Bush housing market collapse and subsequent stock market implosion - switching to a public option sent Republicans into a panic and Congress, now controlled by Republicans because Americans were too goddamn stupid to realize that two years isn't enough time to fix eight years' worth of bullshit, shot down the bill like nobody's business.
Fast-forward two years, to this landmark Supreme Court decision over the newest incarnation of Obamacare, the one that Mitt Romney is vowing to slay even though forcing the public to buy from private insurers or else was his fucking idea back in Massachusetts. This Obamacare is a travesty, an order for all Americans to purchase health insurance or be fined, yet it has no impetus for insurers to lower their prices for those below the poverty line. This is exactly like No Child Left Behind, wherein the least able schools are further penalized because they can't educate their students well enough with what meager funds they have, so Conservatives' solution is to cut their funding further. Only, unlike NCLB, there is no real way to cheat the system and fake test scores to get out of paying for insurance or paying a fine.

I believe that this act will go down in history as one of the worst governmental mandates in history, only helping the rich to get richer while the poor lose what little money they have. I can bet it won't be too long before some rich bastard is offering deals to the poor like a feudal lord, where they can live on his thousand-acre estate in return for endlessly working for him.

However, in this latest presidential election I will still be voting for Obama over Romney. I'd rather have a spineless, idiotic wimp in power than someone actively working for the bad guys and promoting prejudiced, even genocidal, sentiments.

Temptation my white Irish ass

What's the best way to prevent someone from doing something? Obviously this answer will vary and there is no one universal answer, but if you said that a good way to keep someone from undertaking an action is to treat them as intelligent and lay out the negative consequences for them, trusting them to do the right thing, there's a good chance you're right.
If you said that the universally best way is to just shame the person into submission and tell them that they don't know well enough to be trusted with their own lives, please take this moment to apply a stapler to your groin.

In case you haven't yet guessed, this post is riding the coattails of Coattails in reference to policy and rhetoric. In the barest essence, abstinence teaching doesn't fucking work. If you protest, look to the person whom Conservatives hold up as the proof that abstinence does work: Bristol Palin. She got herself knocked up and is still unmarried. And that last part seems to be the real thing about abstinence: its proponents seem to believe that "abstinence" means, "if you fuck you gotta get married," rather than the real origin word, "abstain." Then again, how can one expect Conservative thought to make any goddamn sense? In that vein,

Hypocrisy


Family values. The fuck are "family values," anyway? Nobody in the Romney or Bush or, hell, ANY camp can tell you what family values are. It's just a term they spew over and over like a moron with a word-a-day calendar trying to sound smart. Speaking of family values, how about we look at Newt Gingrich? How many wives has he ABANDONED TO DIE now? I think the tally is four. As soon as one of his wives falls ill he starts banging some other broad and once his wife is terminal he outright leaves her for this new model. This is not a one-time event, either. It's happened, like, three times now. Check it out for yourself.

With family values still firmly in mind, how about Larry Craig or any of the dozens of Republican congressmen and senators who have been caught in the act of performing or soliciting gay sex? Considering that one of the only definitions of family values that Conservatives can agree on is "not homos," that's a pretty fucking big issue, eh? In fact, let's use another heading. I have more to bitch about and it needs a separate section:

"Temptation"


The idea of temptation is easy enough for anyone to understand. You find yourself drawn to perform an act that is either sinful or not-good in some other way. Be it a hot chick when you're married, the opportunity to shoplift, or the urge to stab your fucking seventh-grade English teacher for exploiting your autism to abuse you (or maybe that last one was just me), something tempts the average person almost every day.
Now, straight males, tell me this: when is the last time you looked at another man's ass and had to resist the nigh-overwhelming urge to release a noise like a gorilla whose nipples are aflame before leaping upon said ass and pounding it until it resembled Jennie-O ground turkey? The answer, for most of the world, is "never," followed by, "what the fuck is wrong with you for asking that kind of question?"
That, my friends, is the difference between genuinely straight people and "straight" Conservatives. I bullshit you not, jump to any religious pundit or politician babbling about religion, particularly on Fox News, and just wait for one of them to mention "resisting the temptation of homosexuality" and how difficult such resistance is. In actuality, for those whose brains are wired for heterosexuality, there is no temptation, because we aren't wired to find those of our same sex attractive. I have watched my openly gay dorm-mate in college prance about in naught but his underwear and my only comment was to put on a damn shirt.
Find yourself a Bible. Open up to Leviticus, the book most Conservatives reference when put to task to actually give a point as to where it says not to be gay. This book also says to kill children who talk back and that rape victims must marry their rapists, among other things, but notice the term for lying with a man as with a woman: "it is an abomination." Not a sin, an abomination. Look at what else is an abomination: wearing clothes made of more than one fabric or color. If you've guessed by now that an abomination in the Bible isn't so much a monstrosity as something that's not a good idea to do, you've got it in one. Leviticus was written during the time that the Israelites were still numbering in the double-digits and were, like the rest of Western humanity, barely better than bonobos. If they could fuck something, they would. This would result in low reproduction and they'd all die off. Now look at Idiocracy, the Mike Judge cult classic. It's easier to tell stupid people that you can talk to plants or that, "I'm God so what I say goes" rather than trying to explain the intricate details to your flock while they're trying to bone their camels.
The Old Testament also has God ordering His people to rape the women of a conquered city and mount heads on spikes in His name, so maybe we shouldn't be following that particular half of the Bible so closely these days...
To make a long tangent a bit shorter, it's seeming to me that many decades ago the Conservatives' forefathers made a big damn deal about homosexuality so their children repressed their urges, since it appears that nearly every mainstream Conservative is at least bisexual from their "struggles with homosexual urges" that nobody else in the country really has to deal with.

Think on another section of temptation as seen by Conservatives: have you ever wondered how these groups, in their protests of things, come up with such perverse and insane ideas on their projected "slippery slopes"? To reference homosexuality again, one of the common protests is that if gay marriage is allowed it's only a short trip to people fucking and wanting to marry chickens. To me, this is evidence that Conservative perversion extends deep and they're afraid that if they're given permission to be gay they won't be able to control their actual twisted sexual urges, fucking barn animals or running through the streets violently raping people. In my opinion, we should all be very afraid of what twisted fantasies run through the minds of Republicans in power.

Coattails

The world is turning to shit. There is one simple reason for this: we're letting it. Oh, I could bawl on and on about how corporations and big media use the power of their lobbyists to control our government like a really expensive marionette, how the alcohol and tobacco industries intentionally beat down the legalization of marijuana because it's safer and less addictive than either of the aforementioned substances, how pharmaceutical companies have to be led by evil overlords, and all sorts of jazz. But at the end of the day, it's the people's fault. The Obama election proved that a true grass-roots campaign, making people aware that they had the power to improve things, worked. It proved that we, the people, can change things.

Unfortunately, that election was very telling about the American people. You see, the reason it worked so well was because the people weren't really the ones taking responsibility. They were picking somebody else to shoulder the responsibility, somebody else to take the blame. The voter is like the sports fan: If his team wins, he exclaims, "We won!" If his team loses, he growls, "They lost." Notice the difference? A fan and a voter can claim responsibility for their favored team/candidate if they perform well, citing their support, but can also foist the blame on the same figurehead if things go awry.
This is a VERY important point: for the most part, Americans don't want to do the work. They don't want the responsibility. Fuck, I don't want the responsibility. Not alone. And the problem is that, even with all our social media, many of us do feel hopelessly alone. One person is as effective as the lone remaining protestor in Tiananmen Square, but without becoming a symbol around which others can rally; the rest of the people will just change the damn channel.

This subject of responsibility cannot be stressed enough. When combined with Americans' short-as-fuck attention spans, it has made for an unbelievable upheaval. Apparently the average person either is too stupid to realize that the world doesn't reset itself when a new president is elected, or entirely forgot about the foreclosure bubble destroying the economy and blamed the economic collapse on Obama rather than the fact that the economy looked like a three-hour game of Jenga by the time Obama took over.
This is also a question of responsibility: whenever a Liberal does something wrong, every Conservative talking head and the entire body politic gathers together and declares the n'th crusade against the target, but when a Conservative makes such a minor misstep as, say, politicians who call for the persecution of homosexuals being found to have been gay all along or actively promoting laws that serve a company they or a friend owns at the expense of an entire state, no expense is spared to downplay or erase it. Bush the Lesser was a barely-functioning alcoholic until he was 40, and his wife killed a man with her car. Pundits have referred to these occurrences as, no lie, "Youthful indiscretions." Youth ends at about 25 at the very latest, and I don't think the taking of another human being's life counts as an indiscretion, particularly considering that this is the same party whose members have been known to bomb abortion clinics because murder is wrong.

The author side of me jokingly blames Stephen King for the negative reaction to Obama's four years in office. The writer whose dramatic works inspired the term "the magic Negro" undoubtedly raised Americans' expectations as to what would happen. The public expected him to raise a magic wand and fix everybody's problems. But are we really surprised? These are the same idiots who don't want to work toward anything, so why should a fix to their suffering have to take time and effort? We want our happy ending NOW, and if we don't get it we'll turn to a representative of the party that violently butt-fucked us in the first place.
Speaking of, Conservative policies have never worked in the history of forever. The entire idea - removing, of course, the rampant hatred and religious oppression now so inherent in the Republican party that it makes actual governmental policy an afterthought - is that corporations know best how to run themselves, and catering to the wealthy will make the entire country a better place. Now, back in the early 1800s (the time period to which most Conservatives seem to want to return, albeit with air conditioning and TiVo) this might have worked, seeing as the country was for the most part self-sufficient and self-contained, so money spent would cycle through American towns. However, ever since the infamous robber-barons realized that they could incorporate, charge whatever the fuck they wanted, and sell for profit with no regard for consumers or those affected by their actions, the entire economic policy falls apart. Corporations care only about profit. They care nothing for proper service, or if the service even comes through. So long as they are paid and those in the highest echelons receive titanic bonuses, they do not care.

Christ on a cracker, I could go on forever about this stuff, but I haven't slept in forever and I really don't want this single post to become a book-sized diatribe, so I'll save the rest for another post.

Gotta Start Somewhere

To all who may stumble across this little gem (using that term loosely at the moment), it would likely be best to take a moment to illuminate readers as to what they may expect from this. Quite frankly, this is a place for me to praise, decry or simply expound on any subject I can imagine. It'll get political, it'll get religious, it'll get explicit, it'll piss a ton of people off.

But then again, what doesn't piss people off these days? Actually, that's a good starting point for this blog:

Immature Rage


We've all seen it happen: some titanic cocksponge in power has a fit over something minor and creates a nation-wide controversy that will last the entirety of twelve-and-a-half days before Kim Kardashian breaks another chair with her giant ass or some other inane occurrence.
This is what passes for the social climate in America, and like all things, it's difficult to decide where exactly it started, but we'll get back to that.

As I said, this is a repository for my thoughts, and my mind works in some pretty damn mysterious ways, so forgive any tangents I am unable to repress. That said, words. Words have power that nothing else in the world has. The right word in the right place - just one word - can incite riots or calm hearts. All of the greatest wars and achievements have not been won through strength of arms, not really. Sure, the soldiers and the explosions get the glory, but how did those soldiers even get mobilized? Words. Somebody said the right things to get the collective public off their fat, lazy asses and onto the battlefield. We've seen this work for good, as with Churchill and Eisenhower, both Roosevelts, and even Patton in his pre-battle speeches. It has also worked for ill, through Hitler and Stalin, Hussein and Ahmadinejad, and even Bush the Lesser.
Yes, I said it, and not just to stir up controversy. Face it, in the wake of 9/11, the general intent of which was well-known to the DoD and Bush himself since the day the reins were handed over, words like terrorism and patriotism were bandied about like "bitch" and "fuck" are in a gangsta rapper's songs. Plus, the entirety of the "war on terror" has been built on a lie, that lie being that Iraq had anything whatthefucksoever to do with 9/11. Honestly, The Mighty Shrub just wanted to beat up the guy who made his daddy sad.
But this isn't about Bush, not yet. This is about the monster of political correctness, and how the evils of maniacal fantasies have corrupted this nation and continue to do so. I direct you to the following link, http://tinyurl.com/8ys7swm but will gladly sum it up for those of you who don't like to be sucked into other websites: a comedian named Ally Bruener, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, was arrested for using the word "crippled." I'll pause for a moment to let the sheer level of bullshit sink in.
A crippled woman was arrested for using the word "crippled." Isn't that like arresting Jews for not referring to themselves as some made-up PC term like "Moses' Followers"? Or forcing everyone of Hispanic heritage to call themselves Latin on pain of incarceration?
Now, this brings me to several different points, all of which bear analysis, so I'll arrange them in no particular order.

1. Offensiveness
This is a sticky one, since offensiveness is sort of subjective. Up until my late teens, curse words caused a literal reaction of pain in my mind when spoken by people I knew. I chalk this up to autism, as my mind is geared toward words. The intent that comes with these words, when spoken in anger, burned in my mind; at least that's the best I can describe it. Now that I'm older and have really made words my thing, I am for the most part unaffected by the cursing of myself, my friends and family, though words spoken in true hate directly in front of me still generate a visceral response beyond simple revulsion.
Enough about me, let's talk about me some more! Just in a context that's relevant this time: I am a graduate of an HBCU. For those who don't know, that's a monogram for Historically Black College/University. I am essentially the photonegative of a black person, so while I was readily accepted by most people, I was always looked at funny if I used black slang and I didn't dare use "the N-word." I'd have gotten the ever-loving hell beaten out of me.
This is important for several reasons. First, it still shows the power of a word. Even if the general definition has been inverted, non-blacks are still forbidden to say or write it or they are automatically labeled as evil. Second, it proves that the civil rights movement has backslid. I won't say it altogether failed, because I can't judge, but when the same group that fought for equality now fights to remain segregated in its own subculture and lashes out against others, I'd say that the sentiment definitely got lost in the generation gap.
The question I raise, then, is this: how is that word, one that can get sixty to seventy percent of Americans beaten up or killed if uttered in public, not legal taboo, yet in a moderately large city the word "crippled" can lead to the incarceration and fining of a legitimately crippled person? The mind boggles.

2. Presumption and, moreover, missing the fucking point
This is something that both "sides" fall victim to, though in its inception political correctness was more pioneered by liberals yet is now more a weapon of conservatives, but we'll get to that. The presumption is, forbidding something will make it stop. That somehow, by preventing people from using a word, we will stamp out discrimination. I hate to make the reference, because the referred-to material makes my eyeballs bleed from its sheer ineptitude, but even fucking Naruto got this right: forbidding people to tell that the kid had a demon stuck in him didn't make people hate him less; they just found other ways to raise their children to hate the kid.
Originally, political correctness was just a finger-wagging method of trying to force respect, which I suppose is a noble cause and it got the general idea of words' power: by insisting that certain groups be referred to by more respectful terms, the idea is that people will come to be more respectful. This is decent enough in theory, but since you can't control what people think or what they say in private or among likewise bigoted minds, it accomplishes precisely dick. Tacking on a fine to this is a more conservative way of keeping up appearances, Stepford-style. You WILL conform to our delusion that Leave it to Beaver was a documentary and that life can still be like that, or we WILL jail your pinko-Nazi-socialist-fascist-Commie-homo ass.
This draws from what would be a major failing in Conservative thought/rhetoric, except that the American public is so bone-stupid that it works: most Conservatives believe that not talking about something makes it cease to exist. And guess what? Like a Twilight Zone ostrich whose world really does vanish when it sticks its head in the sand, this works more often than not. Who among you remembers Ted Haggard, the figurehead for the entire goddamn Evangelical church who was, in the mid-2000s, finally outed by a guilt-ridden male prostitute who confessed that Haggard had for decades been paying him exorbitant fees for gay sex and copious amounts of drugs. What did Conservatives do? A collective "our bad," then he was swept under the rug and never spoken of again.
Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away, but if the public forgets about it that's what matters to maniacs like Beck and Limbaugh and other less-powerful political figures like senators and congressmen who vehemently fight environmental acts because that would mean admitting that a problem exists, and it's just easier to pretend everything's fine.
This entire concept of Conservative rhetoric will be examined in a later post. I'd do a piece on Liberal rhetoric, but let's face it, Liberals really have no fucking rhetoric, nor do they really have a platform. I'd refer to Liberals as "we," but I like to imagine that, were I attacked by a murderer, I wouldn't help him drive the knife into my throat after a few seconds of struggling and nearly disarming him.