Observe: the lie that "government" is a monolithic entity, from which we are somehow separate.
Government is how we organize, manage and maintain our society, but to acknowledge that is to acknowledge society, and one's responsibility to organize, manage, and maintain it.
Government didn't close churches. Churches closed because people with something more than a childishly selfish view of the world understood their responsibility to the shared life of a society, and government is how that understanding was operationalized and delivered.
Nor does government militarize police. The police is militarized because people with a fearful, hateful or selfish view of the world understand a militarized police will operationalize & deliver that fear, hate, and greed through the mechanism of government.
Government is *us*.
Those who now align with a party actively working to dissolve and demolish democracy in our country do so not because they don't understand this, but because they do.
Democracy allows people they fear and hate to be government with them.
So they hate democracy, and government.
People who align with a party standing in the way of any solution, any maintenance, any governance, do so not because they don't understand this, but because they do.
Better to die of sickness, disease, and neglect than allow those they hate and fear to be government with them.
Thus we see the spectacle of incurious & dim opportunists like Jordan, making his career in government by convincing people to lend their governmental power to him, allowing him to join the government to protect them from the government by destroying the government—which is them.
They vote for Jordan, not because they don't understand what he is, but because they do.
They're willing to be ruled, as long as others are ruled more harshly.
They're willing to suffer, as long as others suffer more.
They're willing to die, if others suffer first.
An early Republican rallying cry was: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help..."
Until recently they kept the last five words quiet: "...all the people we despise."
Which is what they meant.
Government, to the extent that we are a democracy, is us. It's just us.
People who treat "government" as some fearful other do so, not b/c they don't understand, but b/c they do.
A promise to fight, diminish & destroy the government is a promise to fight, diminish & destroy us.
“Few understand this” because it is a fantasy.
Government is these things when it is controlled by people who are oriented toward these things.
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Oh and at least 1 of our 2 major political parties will absolutely program robots to slaughter a crowd of protesters.
“‘Deactivate murder robots’ is a terrible slogan that confuses white suburban robot murder aficionados, and you saying it is why we lost House seats in Texas. Think of a snappier slogan, like: ‘give murder robots extra money and make them spend 68% of it on less murdery stuff.’”
It's important to remember that Trump suits Republicans—whose entire strategy is engineering government failure to use as a pretext to further dismantle government—perfectly.
This is a party that exists only to demolish society.
They've created an alternate reality, in which people can claim morality based solely on their own personal intention, regardless of result, allowing them to engage in sociopathic cruelty and overweening moralism simultaneously.
For certain people, it's a VERY popular reality.
To watch Trump succeed despite epic failure is to understand: U.S. society is based on knowing enablement of the violent abuse of marginalized people—mostly young, mostly of color, mostly women, mostly poor—by powerful people—mostly older, mostly white, mostly men, mostly rich.
My pitch is, Superman goes on Jeopardy, and he does pretty well, like 2nd place but a respectable 2nd place? like he only loses by $300 because the other guy bets it all on Final Jeopardy, but he gets the home edition of the game, which he plays against Jimmy and Lois and wins.
I don’t see how I can tell that story in less than five movies.
Rand Paul is outraged by the distribution of $600 he considers unearned, and the death of 300,000 people he considers unworthy is to him an acceptable price to pay to avoid distribution. No death rate could be too steep, any relief would be too high. He’d like to talk about soul.
We've seen conservative morality unmasked. Its prime principle is the belief that some people matter, the rest do not, and to spend a single dollar on someone who doesn't matter is a mortal sin, whereas using those deaths as pretext to further enrich people who matter is virtue.
Ask yourself: what would such people do in a larger emergency? What contingencies have they already devised for such an event?
What will they do as the earth warms and oceans rise? As water becomes scarce?
Any serious look at mid 19th century American history recognizes that Robert E Lee fought a treasonous war against his own country to preserve chattel slavery. I’m sorry if a generation raised on revisionist history and Rush Limbaugh doesn’t recognize that.
The funniest thing about dudes like this is the way they pompously assume we haven’t heard the bullshit apologist version of the Robert E Lee for our entire lives, and that our rejection of it is a result of lazy ignorance rather than earned awareness.
The Robert E Lee who abhorred slavery and only took up arms against his count with a great but honorable reluctance is literally the dominant cultural version of his story over the last century, and a cornerstone of white supremacist strategic rehabilitation of the Confederacy.
They're talking about a military coup right now and if it doesn't happen we're going to be told the best way to heal is pretending it never happened.
This is how abuse works.
3,000 people are dying a day and after nearly a year of this Congress is releasing the barest fraction of the economic relief needed to keep people safe and only in exchange for the promise that we can't sue those who endangered the dead.
This is how abuse works.
We have a president who spent 4 yrs lying every time he opened his mouth, obvious lies everyone knew were lies, which his followers believed mostly because the sight of them believing lies caused the rest of us distress, and they loved our distress.