Blackmoor Vituperative

Is good news even a thing anymore? Not “making the best of it” news. Not “people staving off doom for one more day” news. Not “here’s some trivia about some stranger’s personal life” news. Not “be thankful things aren’t even worse” news. Actual good news.

That would be nice.

It is bad for people to be obeyed too readily. It is corrosive to good manners and a healthy relationship with those around them. When you resist someone with authority, you are looking out for the well being and sanity of that person.

This is your semiannual reminder that the pointless ritual known as “daylight saving time” does not make you lose or gain anything. You don’t gain or lose time. You don’t gain or lose daylight. The amount of daylight stays precisely the same.

That’s not entirely correct: we do lose something. We lose hundreds of millions of dollars, and thousands of lives.

A lot of states have a very nearly 50/50 split between reasonable voters across the political spectrum, and Republican death cultists. Who wins an election in most of the USA boils down to a tiny fluctuation in the electorate. There are two significant consequences of this.

First, in places like Texas, where that tiny difference leans ever so slightly in the direction of far-right extremists and would-be fascists, you get state legislators calling for their state to secede (taking with them the nearly 50% of the populace who aren’t overtly delusional death cultists).

Second, in places like Virginia, where that tiny difference leans ever so slightly in the direction of people of good will across the political spectrum, the state is run by well-meaning people, but those people are continually struggling against the nearly 50% of the populace who are death cultists.

Don’t be too proud of the fact that your state veers ever so slightly away from the Republican death cult. In most of the USA, it wouldn’t take much more than a stiff breeze for that to change.

Trump is just a symptom; Republicans are the disease.

“Both sides are the same”?

• Only one party has had 120 criminal indictments of Executive Branch officials, 89 criminal convictions, and 34 prison sentences in the last five decades (as of the last time I looked into it — it has gone up since then).
• Only one party is devoted to oppressing women.
• Only one party is pillaging public services for the private gain of billionaires.
• Only one party is deliberately refusing to participate in the government of the USA by sabotaging the legislative process.
• Only one party is obsessed with ridiculous conspiracy theories.
• Only one party’s Presidents have consistently left the USA with much more debt than it had when they started (Clinton left office with a surplus, while Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have all run up huge debts).
• Only one party is overtly, blatantly, PROUDLY racist.
• Only one party is aggressively anti-science.
• Only one party calls Nazis “fine people”.
• Only one party places grossly unqualified people in charge of government agencies with the purpose of destroying those agencies.
• Only one party is steadfastly, maniacally devoted to lies, hatred, and death.

I’ll put this as nicely as I can: if you say “both sides are the same”, within the context of political parties in the USA in the 21st century, you are just as responsible for the fall of the United States as the Republicans are.

[red pild]
adjective

To internalize a set of misogynistic far-right beliefs popular with certain corners of the internet; the product of a noxious blend of junk science, conspiracy theory, and a pathological fear of social progress.

Origin and etymology of redpilled

based on the “red pill” philosophy, using a metaphor borrowed from the film The Matrix (1999)

First known use by far-right misogynists: 2012

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, two dozen police officers are under investigation for falsifying evidence, and three (so far) have been charged.

I have been saying this since… (checks blog)… early 2018, but Chris Conroy’s analogy is much better than mine. (Mine was about earthworms and astronomy. Alligators and pants is better on a couple of levels.)

Republicans literally don’t care if what they say is true, or even consistent. All they care about is causing harm. Criticizing a Republican for being a hypocrite is like scolding an alligator for not wearing pants. They don’t even know what pants are.

Also, they want to kill you.

The neighbor who doesn’t mow their lawn often enough is not “just as bad” as the neighbor who tortures and kills your dog. One is an irritation. The other is evil.

When you say that it’s unreasonable of me to keep criticizing the dog-killing neighbor (who is, at that moment, torturing and killing yet another neighbor’s dog), and when you bring up the neighbor with the unkempt lawn (which I never did), and when you say that you won’t “take sides” between the evil neighbor and literally everyone else, it does not make me angry at you. It makes me sad and confused.

I do not understand why you are obsessed with the neighbor with the unkempt lawn. I am horrified that you can make excuse after excuse for the dog-killing neighbor. I do not understand how your values became so utterly warped.

My heart is broken, and I miss the person I thought you were.

That’s a photo of a lava flow slowly obliterating everything it touches. That white house on the far left: that’s us.