Hopelessly Stupid People Talking About Iraq

Back in the day, when perhaps only 500,000 human beings had been killed in Iraq, I had an exchange with "conservative" blogger "Papa Junker" from the blog "Celestial Junk." While we were talking about some other subject, he asked if I'd care to admit that my side had gotten Iraq completely wrong.

Given that there had been no "Weapons of Mass Destruction" found there and that the occupation had turned into a bloody civil war, I could only sit stunned as I read his version that, ignoring the naysayers, bush II had gone in and removed a tyrant from power, freeing the Iraqi people who, together with bush II and other brave US Americans, pluckily stood together against the lefty pessimists and the Jihadists, defeated the bad guys and built a thriving functioning democracy with purple fingers and ponies and rainbows forever. Whiskey, democracy, sexy.

Obviously I wasn't convinced then and, obviously, I'm less convinced now, as Sunni rebels have conquered one city and are closing on Baghdad. Not even the delusions of someone like "Junker" could ... who am I kidding? He's probably got some new insane way to spin all of this (or blame it on Obama) that I'm incapable (being sane and all) of comprehending.

But right-wing blogging nobodies are one thing. What about the drooling alcoholic idiot bush II painting hackneyed portraits of his puppies and his feet? What about stephen harper? What about Paul Martin Jr.? What about David Brooks? What about John McCain? What about Tony Blair? What about all the powerful lying frauds who used their power and influence to sell this disastrous war and push it through to its hideous outcome?

Well? What about them?

What's the point of complaining about any of this? By that I mean, what's the point of CONTINUED complaining about any of this? Instead of complaining, wouldn't it be better if we, the people who have been consistently correct all the time, somehow figured out how to change things (at least in Canada) so that the ONLY people talking about the next imperialist adventure are impotent loser bloggers like "Papa Junker"? That there are no major political figures or media owners or pundits blathering on about more stupid nonsense, because they've all been driven from power?

Why don't we think about what is necessary to accomplish THAT rather than years of more sniping from the sidelines? Why are we all so incapable of even thinking about how this could be achieved? Why do we choose to spend our lives in impotent frustration?

Election Autopsy

Wynne's majority win is a testimony to how scary and awful Ontarians thought Tim Hudak and his innumerate platform was. (All the right-wing pundits and etc., who endorsed this piece-of-shit have managed to hammer another nail in the coffin of their credibility AFTER it was long ago buried under the ground!)

A majority government for these Liberal sleaze-balls is the worst thing in the world though. These people cut taxes for the corporations and the rich, waste BILLIONS on various mad schemes and corruption, and then charge us for it with higher taxes and reduced services. Expect a majority of seats to change the quality of Wynne's eye-sight, for now she'll go there and the cupboard will "gasp!" surprisingly be bare.

If Hudak had won, the ONDP would be accused of having given it to him. Are people accusing them of giving Wynne her majority? They should. Horwath's campaign was a schizophrenic attempt to navigate our "first-past-the-post" election system. People didn't see the point of voting for flailing criticisms of both parties, backed up by a slurry of vaguely centre-left, right-wing populist rhetoric.

I'm still relieved Hudak lost, but this is a sad day for Ontario's democracy.

This Putrid Election

Vote for the thieving assholes to stop the psychotic, stupid, monsters' party!

What a choice.

I voted for the milquestoast Liberal-lite party, thank you very much.

Horwath's problem is that she doesn't have enough analysis and enough faith in socialism to push back against the hegemony of stupid bullshit. Instead, she tries to accommodate it.

Don't ask me about any other party until we get proportional representation.

Oh! Those Fucking Liberals!

I don't usually make two posts in one day. But it was one thing after another thing.

Go through this blog's archives and you'll see that I almost always credit liberals for being generally decent, intelligent people. But I disavow liberalism the philosophy and I despise liberal poltical parties like the Canadian Liberals and the USA's Democratic Party. And I positively loathe Liberal hackery. (And, any honest reading of this blog will show that I'm no die-hard Dipper hack.)

So, here's "Big City Lib Strikes Back" belittling the gas-plant scandal in Ontario:

Gasplantsgasplantzgasplanzz

gasplazzzgasplzzzzgaspzzzzz

gaszzzzzzgazzzzzzzgzzzzzzzz

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I can't think of anything else to say on top of my reply/rant:

Yeah. What's $1,000,000,000?

This is the stupid partisan hackery that makes me sick.

The harpercons' torture and election fraud and "Election Fraud Promotion Act" haven't stirred apathetic Canadians either. Whether through successful cover-ups and corruption or sheer laziness on the voters' part.

Does that mean they're not scandals?

You seem like a decent person. Pull your head out of your ass and THINK for a goddamned minute. Do you really think it's a good thing for the Ontario government to have spent ONE BILLION DOLLARS to cancel some contracts to save the seats of three of their own MPPs?

Do you?

Do you think it's a good thing for governments to incur ONE BILLION DOLLARS in fines and then refuse to tell the people's representatives about it and, when pressed, outright LIE about how much their partisan spending cost them?

So, having gotten that off of my chest, I went to "Dammit Janet!" where I didn't see a new post. So next I went to the US pro-Democrat (except for the wonderful Susie Madrak) blog "Crooks and Liars" and found the first story was about my latest hobby-horse, anti-government, right-wing extremist gun-nuts. And the display of liberal cluelessness and hypocrisy there just made me livid. It's about the discovered YouTube videos of the crazy right-wing anti-government gun-nut from Las Vegas who died in a shoot-out at Wal~Mart with his crazy wife after having killed two cops:

Jerad Miller, the Indiana man who with his wife, Amanda, allegedly shot and killed two police officers and a bystander Sunday in North Las Vegas before dying in a suicide pact at a Wal-Mart store, posted several videos at YouTube in the past year that revealed his paranoia and antigovernment views.

One of the videos contains an extended soliloquy by Miller on government drones that turns into a quasi-philosophical rant about the nature of courthouses as centers of “authoritarianism.”

The latter is noteworthy in light of a report by the Las Vegas Review-Journal that among the documents found at Miller’s apartment was a carefully laid out plan to attack an unidentified courthouse building in Las Vegas, taking it by armed force and then executing public officials inside.
The video begins with Miller pulling out a conspiracist magazine devoted to government drones, titled “Drones: Are They Watching You?,” which was published in 2013 under the auspices of magazine publisher Source Interlink – a company that changed its name earlier this year. Miller waxes paranoiac about the likelihood that people like himself are under surveillance by them.

So are they watching you? Probably,” he says. “I mean, they’re already wiretapping your phones. You know, watching your Facebook and everything. And they’re probably watching this video of me right now. I don’t care. Congrats. You’re somebody special. You have” – waving his fingers – “clearance.”
After complaining at length about the ankle bracelet he was forced to wear as a result of being placed on house arrest in 2013 (according to the Lafayette Journal & Courier, Miller was accused of violating his in-house arrest twice that year), he turns his attention to the local courthouse near his home, which is within view of his window:

A beautiful building, even though it is a monument to authoritarianism. It’s just a big concrete building a … thing … that people have to go to, or else they go to jail. You gotta go get your marriage license, you gotta go get gun permits – whatever it is, you have to go down to that big stone structure monument to tyranny, and submit, crawling, groveling, on your hands and knees: ‘Oh, give me permission to do this, give me permission to do that.’

I dunno. Sounds a little like Nazi Germany to me. Or maybe Communist Russia. ‘Where are your papers? Do you have the authority to be here? Do you have the right to be here? Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Who’s in your car with you? Can I search your car? Can I stick my finger up your butt? No, oh, that’s probable cause, you probably got drugs up there.’ Because that’s what they’re doing now. They’re sticking fingers up people’s butts – lookin’ for drugs. Big scary drugs.

Really, people? It’s time to wake up. This is getting ridiculous.

Other videos that Miller posted on the channel suggested that he was emotionally devastated by his conviction and sentence for marijuana possession in 2013. In a couple, directed to Amanda Miller, he weeps bitterly as he soliloquizes about how much he will miss his wife while he is in prison, saying she always makes him smile, “no matter how crabby of a mood I’m in because of the New World Order and shit.”

In another video, he frets briefly about the possibility of something monumental happening while he is behind bars: “I pray to God that this Sunday is not the last time I ever see you again,” he says. “I swear to God that they better not fucking do this shit while I’m in jail. I’m pretty sure they won’t. Pretty sure it’s not happening that fast.”

This kind of paranoia is common among antigovernment “Patriot” movement followers, particularly the reliance on conspiracist publications for information. It’s also reflected, with greater intensity, in the Facebook post that Miller published on June 2:

We must prepare for war. We face an enemy that is not only well funded, but who believe they fight for freedom and justice. Those of us who know the truth and dare speak it, know that the enemy we face are indeed our brothers. Even though they share the same masters as we all do. They fail to recognize the chains that bind them. To stop this oppression, I fear, can only be accomplished with bloodshed.

It appears that in the space of the intervening year, Miller’s paranoia graduated from weepy-eyed frustration to boiling hatred. The combination of radical antigovernment views with personal problems has driven others to commit violence in the past, and Miller appears to be the latest to fall into this downward spiral.

As I said; liberal cluelessness and hypocrisy. And this is why things WILL get worse. I mean, for fuck's sake: Obama has been exposed (by the right-wing libertarian Eric Snowden) as having the NSA conduct an ongoing, massive, totalized spying operation on every man, woman and child on the face of the earth. One that is TOTALLY ILLEGAL by the way. US and Canadian police forces are trying to get surveillance drones to spy on us. Obama has the "audacity" to claim a constitutional right to kill American citizens without trial via some insane "Star Chamber" process. He (illegally) orchestrated through the Department of Homeland Security the campaign of police-brutality to shut-down the Occupy Movement while he protected Wall Street criminals from bankruptcy and persecution. We've long known that the "War on Drugs" is just an excuse for US elites to oppress the civilian population and to proportionately lock-up more of their population than any other country in the world (by a significant margin).

We all build our world-views to help us process information. But then we start to think these viewpoints are the ONLY way to interpret the world and we expel or distort information that doesn't match with them. How else to explain the otherwise intelligent people at Crooks and Liars for calling a guy "paranoid" just because he thinks the USA's drug laws are oppressive and that the government is spying on him?

Things are going to get worse because fucking liberal nut-bars will stupidly insist that austerity and war and surveillance states and imperialism and elite corruption and theft are unavoidable and/or okay so long as a Liberal or Democrat is doing them. And, as I said earlier today, more people will express themselves like right-wing libertarians, rather than as left-wing libertarians.

I'm starting to think there's going to be a war between the United States, Europe and Japan, and their client states in the Middle East against Russia, China and their allies in Asia. We'll get dragged into this horror and it will be on top of the devastation of climate change, if it isn't caused by climate change. We'll devolve into fascism here along with environmental and economic catastrophe.

Why the Gun-Nutz Posts?

I suspect my 13 fans might be thinking "Hey thwap! What's the big deal with these posts about gun-nuts? Do you think it's a news flash that they exist and that we can't work with them?"

I confess that I wasn't really sure about why I was posting about them myself. Maybe it was their shared recognition with us that a police-state is forming around us and that they're actually fighting back (albeit in a psychotic, stupid fashion). But they're racist conspiracy theorists. There was never any serious belief on my part that they could be our allies. But in retrospect, I think it was the idea at the end of my last post on them:

The sad thing is; as criminals like Obama and harper and the Koch brothers and Wall Street continue to rob people and imprison anyone who complains, and the economy understandably deteriorates, it's these fascists who will form the larger resistance force. New Hitlers will emerge while progressives blather to themselves with laughable rhetoric and impenetrable theories.

Things ARE going to continue to get worse. And more people buy into the right-wing view of the world than buy into the details of our analysis. The natural tendency of ignoramuses and cowards is to respond to bad times by turning on people weaker than they are. Make scape-goats out of immigrants and the poor rather than do the informed, courageous thing, and actually take on the elites. The recent defeat of Wall Street servant Eric Cantor at the hands of an anti-immigrant Tea Party candidate is testimony to the continued (and growing) rise of the far-right in the USA. White supremacist gun-nut conspiracy theorists are just a farther-out-there wing of the right that blends into the Tea Party.  It's the same general idea. Middle and working class racists and right-wingers who think they're being abused by corrupt elites but who take most of their frustrations out on the weakest in society, generally out of cowardice and/or laziness. Whereas progressives seek to make common cause with the weakest so as to raise everyone up.

The tragedy is, as I've said numerous times since 2011, is that we progressives are fucking useless. Laughably so. When have we ever upset the ossified leadership of the NDP? When do governments go out of their way to placate us? In our culture, politicians are praised when they ignore or insult us.

Crazy Right-Wing Extremists

 
So, two crazy people shot and killed some cops in Las Vegas. They see the police as an oppressive force, bullying people on behalf of corrupt elites. Some other guy in Georgia was convicted under some bullshit drug laws for a small amount of marijuna and because of that, the state was coming to take his guns away. So he went to the local courthouse with some guns to take some hostages, but it didn't work out like he planned. There's lots of this stuff in the USA. And, just recently, we had a Canadian version of this anti-authority gun-nut.

Are the police oppressive? Obviously they are. More and more, they're cold-blooded killers. Authoritarian goons, accountable to no one.

Is the system corrupt? Are our elites corrupt and evil and detrimental to our health? You bet they are.

So, what about these people? Aside from their murderous rampages, is there any way we could find some common ground with them?

No. First of all, us wimpy progressives believe that the best way to control the government is through firm application of the rule of law on corrupt elites. (Well, at least us wimpy, wimpy progressives. Fire-eating radicals know that the whole enchilida is a scam. That our elites are crooked our courts are crooked and we have zero rights and voting is for suckers. These radicals know that the best way to achieve revolutionary gains is by discussing things in small groups of like-minded people, and to organize pointless "actions" until the group splits up because they're all a bunch of power-hungry assholes.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, ... organizing to make the government strictly adhere to their obligations on citizens' rights and the rule of law is going to control governments a lot better than putting on sixty pounds and strutting around with semi-automatic weapons while ignoring the police-state abuses of protesters and the poor and minorities ever will.

Ah yes! "Minorities." "Visible Minorities." "Racialized Individuals." It seems that these anti-authority gun-nuts are white supremacists. In 1930's Europe it was Gypsies and Jews. In North America, it's mainly Blacks, Latino hordes, Muslims, ... and various others. I think on the East Coast it's also East Asians and South Asians who they hate. For the white supremacists, the efforts to regulate guns are really about disarming white people so as to leave them at the mercy of the degenerate sun-people. (And, of course, everyone's afraid to admit that it's really THE JEWS who are behind it all! For reasons that only the crazed, paranoid, racist conspiracy theorists can understand or describe.)

These idiots also disagree with us about the economy. They appear to believe in some mythical never-neverland, where small farmers and small business owners always make a comfortable living because evil governments and corporations don't exist to fleece them. And, decent, hard-working white people can always find a job because there aren't any coloured people with no self-respect who will work at any wage and drive down wages and cause unemployment for white people. In other words, total bullshit fantasy.

The sad thing is; as criminals like Obama and harper and the Koch brothers and Wall Street continue to rob people and imprison anyone who complains, and the economy understandably deteriorates, it's these fascists who will form the larger resistance force. New Hitlers will emerge while progressives blather to themselves with laughable rhetoric and impenetrable theories.

Endorsing Hudak

No surprise that the shit-for-brains Toronto Sun is endorsing the shit-for-brains Tim Hudak for premier in Ontario. And, at first it's a little shocking, but in retrospect, not surprising, that the shit-for-brains at the Globe & Mail endorse the idiot too.

What is it about Hudak and the Ontario PC's do they like? Is it the fact that his tax-cuts and jobs plan is the same failed crapola that brought us to the economic crisis of 2008? Is it the fact that his stupid plan has been exposed as having been based on laughably bad math and is being sold with lies? Do they like the idea of the public service being decimated by 100,000 positions being cut?

Or do they look back fondly to the Harris-era, when First Nations people, occupying their homes after FIFTY YEARS of peaceful petitioning had failed to get them returned after the government stole them, get shot at and killed by the OPP? Do they sigh wistfully at the thought of people dying from drinking the tap water? Do they think constant, needless fights and teacher strikes were a good thing for Ontario students then and they will be so again? Did they chuckle to themselves when they read about people dying in ambulances that couldn't find a hospital emergency room that could even pretend to be able to look at their patients?

You know what? At this point I thought I'd quote from their asshole endorsements and go to town on them, but the fact of the matter is that I'm too lazy and I don't care anyway. I don't care what stupid words those drooling idiots have strung together in an attempt to justify their asinine, anti-democratic decision.

This is what hegemony looks like people. You get to pretend that your own brand of insanity is "normal" and you get to pretend that reasonable, sane policies are "radical extremism."

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine if Andrea Horwath was found to have conflated annual job hours over 8 years to mean actual new jobs per year. Imagine what the Sun and the Globe would say about her. Imagine if it had been Rae's ONDP that was responsible for the deaths at Walkerton. Imagine what right-wingers would be saying today about the ONDP's desire to govern.

Personally, I'm done with caring about the reasons for their stupid delusions. I don't give a flying-fuck about their opinions or their criticisms or anything they fucking say. They were wrong about everything in the 1990s and they're wrong about everything today. We need to change the culture. We need a left that actually stands opposed to capitalism. We need a left that knows how to change the culture and that actually does so. So that we don't have to endure this stupid bullshit.