Well, it still is, sadly. But that doesn’t much matter. Because the sentiment is spreading — and far from being able to “crush it,” as McConnell and Boehner and McCain and Cantor, et al., wish to do (right along with their Democrat colleagues) — the voices are growing louder and more insistent.
This country is bifurcated. The divide is no longer easily traversed by the empty form of compromise and watery shades of gray passed off as nuance. What we are witnessing is that bold, clear line that Reagan spoke of when he rejected political pastels for vibrant principled color, and that people like Jeb Bush routinely demand that we learn to blur for political expedience and a “bi-partisanship” that seems always to move us ever leftward, ever more toward liberal fascism, and ever more toward a time and place where party affiliation means nothing more than a vote for the speed at which we embrace totalitarianism.
I’ve never been for losing more slowly — and being outspoken about it has cost me. But that’s okay. Cowards will have to live with the knowledge of their own cowardice and bogus hive-mindedness, while those of us who have given up reaching for popularity continue to ring the bells and sound the alarm, liberty being so precious and it being only always a generation from extinction…
Well, not on my watch. At least, not with some sort of impotent whimper passed off as “realism”.
So yeah: outlaw.
(h/t Bob B)
Keep up the good work, Jack.
As ever,
*burble*
From the post Jeff linked:
That’s one of those self-reinforcing things. Partly because the so-called pragmatic mentality at work on much of the
conservativeRepublican partisan right isn’t very practical. I mean, if you don’t want to call attention to something because “nobody’s paying any attention to X,” you’re not likely to have a focused and reasoned body politic now, are you?But increasingly, I’m coming to believe, like Jeff, that Establishment, regardless of partisan leaning, has a vested interest in the status quo, and therefore, in an uninformed, inattentive, irrational citizenry.
Arguably, that makes the losing more slowly mentality on the right a greater betrayal of the guiding principles on which this nation was founded, than the outright rejection of those principles we see on the left today.
I just spent some time reading the “news” over at a pragmatist, “conservative” site. I have just realized that I no longer give a shit about the assistant principal in bumblefuck Pennsyltucky who didn’t have enough French vanilla in her gas station coffee this morning so she took her bad mood out on the first kid she crossed paths with, who just happened to be the son of goddam G-O-D and wearing nothing but a bible taped to his genitals and snakeskin boots. I no longer care, and voting for the assholes they want us to vote for isn’t going to cancel out PMS any time soon.
Fuck ’em all, every one.
And none of this, “first they came for the…” bullshit either. They came for ME first and jammed it right up my ass. For what? My vote counts for exactly jack shit. Doesn’t matter who I vote for, they do what they want.
“And none of this, “first they came for the…” bullshit either. ”
Martin Niemöller used that line in his pro-commie/soc/trades-union lectures well before Hitler and the Nazis were even in power and it was focused on creating an alliance of various factions against anti-communist groups rather than fighting authoritarianism intolerance. “They” became the nazi’s eventually but the speech went after the “they” as a general voice of an old fashioned “imperial” society being mean and hostile to the progressive voices and institutions who wanted to dismantle it.
After WW2 Niemöller was quite ashamed of himself and the people of Germany, both Lutheran, and Catholic, that they let what happened happen instead of being guided by their faith and culture to oppose it and end it before it was unstoppable. His anger at the Nazis and the people who let them rise was been whitewashed into a lifelong pro-Jewish anti-Nazi sentiment.
Niemöller was anti-semitic but freely admitted in the aftermath of the holocaust that his personal dislike of the Jews meant nothing in the face of what was done to them and that he could not keep his head raised in the presence of a jew for the shame of having done nothing when they were being tormented, imprisoned, deported, robbed, starved, and put to death.So he was a self hating anti-semite who recognized the terrible consequences of his antisemitism to other people and his own sense of honor.
So later in life Niemöller lived up to the “first they came for speeches” just not how he expected to when he made them.
His old pro-red speeches seemed to fit his later speech/writings and so became whitewashed into an extract that has been reoriented to being naturally anti-nazi and pro-pluralism.
Cowards will have to live with the knowledge of their own cowardice and bogus hive-mindedness
Except that they don’t value courage or individualism in the first place, so why should knowledge of same discomfit them?
Being In Power permits them to live comfortably with any and all character flaws, regardless of how repugnant.
outlaw outlaw my kingdom for an outlaw
to be an outlaw you have to aim to misbehave
i don’t get the sense that all too many people have gone to the effort to assemble much in the way of misbehavior toolkits
but then
americans are notoriously lazy
unlike industrious little pickachus who can shovel the shit twenty FIVE hours a day
brb I gotta go do some misbehavings
“to be an outlaw you have to aim to misbehave”
No you can be declared an outlaw and move to crime by not moving at all. And if they want they can make it so you CAN’T move back to being law abiding because they outlawed not what you do but what you are and just BEING is a crime. Or they can even fool with words so that stuff you do or think somehow becomes what you are. Performativity being the magic word that makes that happen.
Palaeo, you’ve been reading about my ancestors, haven’t you?
I think the return to stratified paranoiac city states surrounded by raiders will be fun once the starvation is over. Meteor hammers. Belly bows. Steles at the cross-roads. 16 year olds leading the army. Living past forty-five making you a weirdo… good times. And you won’t even need a D20.
I’ll push the big grist-mill wheel and say ” Y’know, when I was a boy we wore pants, and sent people to walk on the moon. We made machines to teach us to spell. We had shoes with wheels and we’d scoot around on them to music. I remember….” and they’ll say ” shut up old one, and earn your salt or the cold ground takes you tonight.”
I’ve been misbehaving so long there’s no one left for me to piss off. Everything from here on out is dessert.
Yum…dessert!
Message From A Minuteman: Paco [UPDATED]
Paco is messing for a fight, like any good Patriot would: At this stage, my disgust is no longer even directed primarily at the Obama administration; lying, corrupt, narcissistic, cowardly douche bags will do what lying, corrupt, narcissistic, cowardly…
Tonight I dipped cold pizza slices into a bowl of old stew(heated up). I’m not sure if I’m a genius or not. I think I liked it. Sometimes.
Maybe if it was gumbo instead of stew?