WatDabney

We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. Of course.

This is the part that gripes me the most.

It would of course be best if more people had sufficient empathy to oppose the oppression of others just in and of itself, but I recognize that empathy isn’t sll that common (and has its own drawbacks), so I don’t really expect that.

But at the very least, anyone should be able to follow the simple chain of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that a system that’s empowered to oppress someone, no matter who it is or what the excuse is, is a system that’s empowered to oppress me if it happens to turn its attention my way.

It’s as if people stand in the middle of a crowd as gunmen walk around, shooting people in the head, and they completely ignore it (or worse yet cheer it on) right up until the moment the gun is pointed at their own heads. And then and only then - far too late - do they think to oppose it.

We could well be heading towards something interesting in the not very distant future.

I’m not sure if Musk sincerely believes his wealth makes him untouchable or if he’s too self-absorbed to even consider the matter, but it works out to the same thing either way - he’s likely wrong.

He can get away with a fair bit manipulating an emotionally stunted egomaniac like Trump, but when he starts trying to butt into European politics, he’s going to find himself running up against families that have been pulling political strings for centuries now, and who don’t fancy crude upstarts with nothing more than money going for them, and if he proves to be too much of a problem for them, they’re going to squash him like a bug.

Wait, what?

They actually have the gall to say they stood behind Obama?

Obama’s presidency was the exact point at which toxicity and hate became the overt centerpieces of Republican identity - when they stopped even pretending to be motivated by “fiscal conservatism” and instead gave themselves up entirely to just sowing division and spewing hatred.

Hell - virtually the first thing they did was co-opt the formerly libertarian Tea Party movement, which started out, under Bush, as a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts - and converted it into a traveling right- wing carnival of hate. That became the entire point of it - after the Republicans took it over, the bailouts were never even mentioned again - all it was was an opportunity for right-wingers to congratulate themselves on how much they hated the left, and especially how much they hated Obama.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that everything MAGA has become - all of the division and all of the hatred and all of the lies - traces back specifically to how the hateful bigots among the Republicans reacted to Obama’s presidency and the influence they came to hold over the rest of the party.

In his memoir, Stanley stated that “The right to bear children will in time be reserved to the fit.”

He died at the age of 90, with no children.