On the post Getting Terrorized, I talked about this a little, but not as much as I’d meant to. Our country was taken over by your high school bully. This is what has happened. There are people who look at a bully and think, great, we need somebody like that to keep the dweebs in line, or to show the bitches they ain’t shit, or whatever. Or just think, that guy creates a tough environment, which is what we need, so people can get hard or go home, burn the losers, allow the winners to reap the rewards of their righteous might.
What’s wild to me is that many victims of bullying share this mentality – become bullies themselves, or the enablers and fanboys of bullies. If that wasn’t you, great. I don’t get these fools. I know a guy that did a lot of primary research on gamergate, and found a very informative chat log. The one thing GGers had in common was feeling frustrated in their attraction to women. There were actually cisgender lesbians in that chat, which may surprise you. But more relevant to this discussion, whenever a stereotypical bully came into the chat and started calling people slurs and nerds, basically shoving them in lockers, they welcomed their new bully overlords. Few had the spine to tell off somebody with bully swagger, even though it was an entirely online situation – jock muscles didn’t figure into it.
And so you see the incels / PUAs / MRAs and their juniors flocking to fascism. Andrew Tate could literally call them shit, to their faces, and they’d accept it. These are a non-zero amount of people who voted orange last november. Bullied bully fans.
And then there are magats that are just bullies themselves. Your high school bully never changed. They just learned to hurt people in more socially acceptable ways. A non-zero amount of them became murderers, the majority are just republican. Which might as well be murderers, to be fair. Cruelty is the point, hurting those they perceive as weak gets them off.
Of the quarterish of USians that voted bully, many of them are not bullies proper. They’re para-bullies. Second string bullies. The people who didn’t bully you, but did laugh when you were bullied. Thoughtless, social cowards, creeps. But not active bullies themselves, unless their victim is extremely powerless against them – like infants, or small animals. I’m guessing the average GOP wife abuses her children, or animals, or disabled people, in small ways whenever they can. You know. The kind of nurses you pray you won’t get when you’re laid up at the hospital.
Hey maybe I’m wrong. Maybe those fucking shitheads are just outrageously foolish rubes. Easily led sheep for the sacrifice. What is it, conservatives. Are you fools or fascists? Ain’t no third option under your big nasty tent.
I meant to talk about the guys in office (or privileged to be in the criminal syndicate), not the voters. I just get mad and lose focus. Yeah. Orange man bad. Not even a man. There is no agenda except brutality and brazen theft, and cruelty for you and I. Cruelty specifically for anybody who thinks cruelty is bad. The cry of the bully, when confronted with their moral superiors: “Ya think you’re better than me?” Yes, I know I’m better than you.
Motherfucken jeffrey dahmer was arguably a better person than the current president. Huge piece of shit, thought his orgasm was more important than the human lives that he stole. But ya know, scale matters. No question orange worm has a massively higher body count – including so very very many of his own followers! And he’s such a soulless gasbag I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s killed people for sexual pleasure. He’ll probably be bragging about getting away with it by the time midterms roll around, just to test how badly they’ve broken the political system by then.
Ahh… still still still, too mad. Gotta cool it. Gotta cool it.
Would anybody be terribly disappointed if I avoided political topics for a good long while here?
–
Do what you will. It’s your blog, and if you prefer to avoid politics for awhile it won’t harm us. At the same time, an occasional public rage might be cathartic.
My only hope now is that, when we get through this, that someone is taking notes on how all this happened and we’ll get some reforms through congress and the courts to prevent this sort of coup in the future.
A completely independent Department of Justice might be a good start. Musk and his team might have been arrested by now if the Attorney General wasn’t a Trump fanatic. When the US Attorney General directs the Department of Justice to not enforce the law, they need to be removed.
I know there will be some people who will say that we won’t get through this, but I don’t think we have to give up hope yet.
was talking with someone this morning and the subject of electoral reform came up, and i felt the need to say that unless every politician and billionaire is shot and replaced, it cannot happen here. buuut reinforcement of the separation of powers might be a much easier sell! leads to a less winner-take-all, less radical government, which is a more stable society and more possibility of continuing prosperity. i hope to see it.
I’ve a feeling you might find Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians enlightening (there’s a free ebook version available somewhere), and possibly its follow-on Authoritarian Nightmare, which extensively and specifically discusses Trump and his followers.
P.S. I encountered a glitch when trying to post this comment. It said I was missing required fields “name” and “email”, though there were no such fields on the submission form. When I reloaded the page hoping that would fix this, doing so logged me out! That’s also not supposed to happen. I logged back in and if you’re reading this, that fixed the problem. But why did it happen in the first place, and how do I avoid such unwanted interruptions and complications while commenting here in the future?
thx for references. re: the glitch, basically ftb as always randomly logged me out in a similar way. it looks like you’re still logged in because you were when the page loaded, but it gives you that error screen because it had timed out your log-in – hence logging in again to fix it. this can result in losing the comment you composed.
i don’t know if there is a fix. i’ve had that going on for years, sometimes worse than others. what i’ve found lately is that if i get the “missing fields” message, if i hit the back button in the browser, my comment may remain there intact. i ctrl-x the thing, sign in, the ctrl-v it to the signed in page.
–
I’d rather just stay logged in indefinitely. How do I do that?
i just deal with it myself, and have no idea what could be done about it, but i did run it by the backchannel, such as we be – anarchic and slow to act and unreliably technically learned.