Well...not now. But until this morning we had a week (and more) of 95+ temperatures thanks to those cunning Chinese climate-change hoaxters.
Being the hardy American pioneers were are...we all hid inside the air conditioned Little House
Like any good American, I started this with a long post al about memememememeMEEEEE! because that's who we are. Americans, the People of the Ego. It's ALL about us, speshul snowflakes that we are.
Which, I should add, goes a hell of a long way to explaining WHERE we are and how we got there.
But that's part and parcel of this post, about the city and state and country I (and many of you...) are living in.
Let's start local; Portland.
Those, in turn, seem to come from, in order:
1) The reporting on the protests that made it sound like all of the city was in flames because a six- or eight-block area around the courtshouse/Central Precinct cop-shop were Ground Zero for the combat between Portland Police Bureau (and, later, a trashbag assortment of federal cops and cop-like entities...) and people who don't much like Portland Police Bureau. And
2) The frequent, highly visible, presence of homeless people in almost every public space from parks to streets to open waste ground.
Let's take them apart.
The first is pretty simple; Portland is always been a pretty shitty town to not be a straight white guy. And Portland cops - who have always been, like most Portlanders, white - tend be shitty; shitty cops, for one, and shitty people in general.
I mean, you kind of have to be sort of an asshole to be or want to be a cop to begin with. Your job, how you earn your living, is mostly going to involve pushing people around, as well as constantly dealing with shitty, awful people, or people who are having a bad day, or troubled people, or insane people, or just people who are looking for trouble.
Throw in that your job also involves making sure that the Good People - that is, the nice, well-bred, wealthy people who largely pay your wages - aren't bothered by Those People. And that our country's history and many of our institutions ensure that Those People are somewhat darker-colored than the Good People.
Means that you stand s pretty good chance of coming off like a racist bastard even if you aren't personally...
(hint; that's what "Critical Race Theory" pretty much predicts - that we've set things up, even here in "liberal" Portland - so that the effect of the Law In It's Impartial Majesty has the effect of making huge swathes of the U.S. being effectively pretty goddamn racist...)
...which, so far as we can tell, a hell of a lot of Portland coppers are when they're being honest with themselves. And as the link shows; the PPB knows they're hiring these freikorps wannabees and don't care. They just send them out to fuck with the people that you'd expect an American Nazi to fuck with.
So you had a perfect shitstorm; Portlanders - sick and tired of being pushed around by blue bastards and angry because the resurgent Republican "fuck you, I'm a racist Nazi bastard, what you gonna do about that?" crew of Proud Boys, Threepers, and Oathers had been goose-stepping through downtown with the ostentatiously visible love and tongue-bathing of said blue bastards - finally snapped.
And the result was - if you knew Portland coppers - depressingly predictable; the coppers ran wild bashing, macing, and arresting everyone.
And what happened after that?
Nothing.
Nothing was done to make the Portland cops less shitty, so they're still the same bunch of gormless freikorps-fondling fucksticks they've always been, and nothing was done to make things better for the people they constantly fuck with, Portlandrs of color, the mentally troubled, and the homeless.
But - here's the thing that makes the whole "Portland, it's SO over" bullshit bullshit - it was just downtown, and just a tiny part of downtown, at that.
It didn't make Portland better.
But it didn't make Portland any worse, either. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Portland and Portlanders had no contact with and were not impacted by the protests or the cop response.
The "reporting" was copaganda crap, and if you believed the reporting you were being played for a fool.
And the "Portland is Over" line is a constant stream of wingnut projectile vomit spewed (mostly) by the "People for Portland" gang responsible for the ads like the one at the top of this section. These jokers want to put the "rich, the well-born, and the able" higher on top and are using this ooga-booga scare noise to try and do it.
They're hard at work state-wide, too, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Homelessness.
This one is a subject that's hard for me to be objective about, because my part of Portland, North, seems to be overrun with people living in tents amid mountains of trash and shit, or in trashed-out campers parked in our little residential streets.
(the morning I found her at the bottom of our steps, smoking - and how the fuck do you afford smokes at fifteen bucks a pack or whatever they cost now if you're a jobless homeless crazy lady? - and muttering between bouts of begging remains a pretty memorable one. I asked her to go smoke somewhere else, please, and was met with a screech of nuttiness that culminated in her proclamation that Jesus (her nuttiness had a strong religious taint) wanted me to see her tits and her yanking up her grubby clothing so I could. Let's just say that I'd have appreciated Jesus' ideas more had said tits been both cleaner and more attractive...)
...who had my daughter, in particular, massively creeped out for weeks.
Like a hell of a lot of Portlanders, I'm heartily sick of being run out of our own public spaces by reeking piles of trash and whacked-out campers. Tired of having anything moveable stolen, of having parked cars broken into, of being unable to visit parks and trails without stepping around discarded tweaker trash and soiled underwear.
But - and this is what makes this whole thing a lot less simple than "exterminate the brutes" - I also realize the "problems" are other human beings trying to make human lives for themselves.
This isn't some sort of mindless orkish horde invading our city.
The people making this happen are just people. Some are troubled - with addition, with mental or emotional problems - but a hell of a lot, probably most are just poor and down on their luck in - and this is the most important part - a town that has done nothing and worse than nothing to provide actual places for poor, down on their luck people to live.
It's not fucking rocket science.
Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.
Seriously.
That's it.
It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care.
Sure, a handful of the people living in the tent camps along the Cut would need more even if you got them into a little house or an apartment. Counseling. Medical care. Social interventions of various sorts.
But a hell of a lot would simply need a home and a decent job and a way to get there and back.
We the Good People aren't doing anything to help with the home.
We're not doing anything to help with the job.
And we're sure as hell not doing anything about the "getting there and back" think with our bad-and-getting-worse transit.
What's frustrating as hell to me is that it's pretty simple.
You change the zoning laws and subsidize (or force) building houses and apartments poor people can afford.
You subsidize - or just create - work that poor people can do that pays them enough to afford that housing.
You create enough bus and trolley and train routes to get people to their jobs and back home (since if you're poor all you can afford is a beater piece-of-shit car and those are less reliable and worse for everyone than a bus ride).
You pay for people to help where it's needed; physical and mental health care workers, counselors, addition care people.
And you tax the rich fucks and their businesses to pay for it all.
Will that "solve" homelessness and the attendant problems?
No.
Will it improve the situation, probably immensely?
Yes.
Will it happen?
No. The Portland City government has already given up trying anything but force, might, beatings. The "homeless sweeps" are the "answer", so the City has directed the coppers (see above...) and the city cleanup crews to chase the poor bastards from one place to another.
But because the solution would require Americans to abandon their prejudices and make hard choices and financial sacrifices, they won't even be seriously discussed, let along tried.
Take all this larger, and you've got the same problems.
Do they have answers to these problems outside of blabbering about illegal aliens and woke capitalism?
Don't make me laugh.
Instead they want to join their fellow wingnazis in Idaho. That pretty much tells you about the condition of Oregon's goober politics.
The country at large?
The United States has a massive, indigestible minority - something between a quarter and two-fifths of the country - that want caudillo-style dictatorship if the alternative is not getting all the guns, Jesus, tax cuts, and ability to call people they don't like rude names they want.
They're not going to change. Nothing that we've seen proving the unparalleled shittiness of Republican "policy" (such as it is other than "whatever Donald Trump wants me to suck...") or the hammering that Republican governance will give anyone not in a two-yacht family will persuade them to back anyone other than the reddest of red-meat Bircher Trumpkins.
The institutions and political structures that empower these hayshaking fucksticks mean that they can rule the rest of us unless the other three-fifths of the country 1) gets off their collective dead ass and 2) votes against every one of these C.H.U.D.s...and this is a country where barely two-thirds of the eligible population bothers to even show up in the most important elections.
They have a gajillion reasons, from ignorance to indifference to actual "reasons" (my personal favorite being libertarians, who seem to think that the opposite of "government regulation" is "freedom" and not "rule of the most rapacious and powerful wealthy individuals and groups") but the overall effect is, again, to put these well-funded, rabidly active, right-wing nuts in power.
It's not like the danger is hard to see. It's right fucking there, the iceberg not on a cold dark night but in broad daylight, visible for miles ahead. And yet the fucking U.S.S. Titanic seems determined to ram the goddamn thing, maybe just to see if letting these gomers put a massive hole in the Republic's hull will fucking sink it.
Maybe just for shits and giggles.
Either way?
Pretty soon we're going to have to decide, those of us non-wingnut, whether to bend the knee to these fuckers, or fight.
The only question is how willing I am to die on my feet.
Because when your country becomes Bosnia, you have no other choices.
And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished
without the dark stain
of alphabets?
When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.
Instead he invented
ebony and crows
and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.
Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"
Ask the Moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.
~ Linda Pastan
(This is from a newsletter I follow. It's written by someone who I came across very oddly, a former actress by the name of Lisa Jakub. She gave up acting and has, instead, become...thoughful. Her substack is here, if you're interested.
But the thing is that almost immediately after posting the personal piece that precedes this I ran across the wonderful Pastan poem in her newsletter and it fit perfectly with my mood.
So. There.
I don't have any particular thing to say. Just sort of noodling around and had nothing better to do than peck at the keyboard, so here I am, on a cool gray morning in mid-July, wondering what to say and do.
Well...not really wondering; I've got a busy and, I hope, fun day ahead. Volunteering at a local park. A Japanese brewing exhibition. Block party around the block. And then a home game of our women's pro soccer club.
But now? The Little House is quiet (as the local garage band has finally given up trying to cover Paint It Black, thank Asmodeus...) with everyone asleep except Drachma the Merkitty and me. So let's start with them.
Okay, Me; wassup?
Mostly the usual; work.
For one thing, the local branch of my company is kind of imploding. We've hemorrhaged good people - three in the last quarter - and we're down to four:
1) the least-liked and least-respected senior engineer,
2) a complete noob who comes across as utterly green,
3) a tech who is at best marginally competent and has a weird, shifty personality, at that, and
4) me.
The fucked-up part is that my corporate doesn't seem to either know, or care, how to improve this. They know the senior engineer is kind of a putz - it's been his clumsy lack of management skills and greed to bag shitty development work that has gone a long way to driving off the good people - but won't either can him or try and fix him.
Instead their solution is to bring one of the Puget Sound office rainmakers down here to generate work.
The supposed plan was that this would help kickstart getting Portland good work...but this particular guy doesn't bring in "good" (that is, interesting, challenging, demanding engineering project-type work) work. His stuff is just the other guy's writ large - boring Earthwork 101 mass-grading development projects.
And, to make things weirder, he's set up a completely parallel-but-separate construction monitoring program here, all run out of the Seattle office. His staff and tech people use our equipment and office space while keeping their schedules and needs utterly hidden.
It's ridiculous and frustrating.
Add to that we just lost our last good field staff guy last Friday. I've got to work with the noob and the creepy guy, neither of whom I trust.
Frankly, I'm ready to hang it up.
Seriously. Our financial person looked at our assets and the actuarial tables and told me that I could legitimately retire this fall and not end up living under a bridge before I die. That's looking ever more attractive right now. I'm sick of trying to herd these boobs and noobs, I'm tired of the boring bullshit development work, I'm ready to give something else a shot.
(Narrator voice: "It became obvious that not all was well...")
Meh, fine.
I'm relatively healthy. I like where I live - sorry, Tucker, Portland still isn't burning down amid Antifa terror - and I like my life outside work. My knees are slowly healing, tho it took a fuck of a long time and I still have weird after effects - the top of my feet, the instep? is sort of numb, like when your arm or leg "goes to sleep"? Like that, and I have no idea why - but the horrible insomnia is gone, at least.
I am getting old. I can feel it in the slowing of my pace, lower energy, and slowly growing stiffness and creakiness. I don't feel like I'm going to take an Ivana-tumble-down-the-stairs (and how about that for a conspiracy-theory story, eh..?) but five years ago I could pretend that I was still in "vigorous-late-middle-age".
Now?
Fuck, I'm old.
I still enjoy the things I've always enjoyed: the world around me, the world of imagination and creation (I've recently gotten on a weird manga kick, and my reading is now vigorously interspersed with stuff like Sweat and Soap...). I've set up a gaming table downstairs to renew my enjoyment of tabletop wargaming.
I still follow soccer - the Timbers (tho the cost finally persuaded me to yield my season ticket- a grand a year is too fucking much - and write the Thorns over at the Riveting! website.
The Girl is deep in teenland; she's salty and quirky, she's become a horror of a mess in the kitchen (where I'm rapidly becoming even more of a Neat Nazi - I hate when she cooks and leaves ingredients and cookware scattered all over...) and creates shockingly professional drawings and ever-more-impressive pottery.
His brief foray into low-end low-wage unskilled work (bag boy at the local grocery) ended in less than 100 days. Now his "plan" is to strike at a lineman job at PGE, but he seems in no hurry to get there. He mostly hangs out and games - which is mostly what he did in grade school, middle school, and high school - so it's like having a monster (because he's grown up into a big beast - with a neck beard, which is "ugh" but fuckit, it's his neck) kid still around the place.
He drives me kind of nuts; I want to chase him out of the house into the Navy or VISTA or to college or...something. It just feels to me like he's wasting his youth sitting in his old room playing HALO or World of Tanks.
But...he's an adult, technically. So he's his own boss to an extent.
I just wish corporate would kick himself in the pants a bit.
Oh, and Drachma the Merkitty?
He's living The Best Life.
Since little Nine's death he's the One and Only Boss Kitty. He gets to prowl his range, demanding with imperious meows that the support staff open doors for his entering-and-exiting pleasure. He has splendid quantities of food whenever he wants it. He gets to hunt - his latest prey appears to be dragonflies, for some bizarre reason - and proudly presents his game bag to the suitably-appalled humans.
The Girl still grieves her Little Cat and still wants another, more loving kitty...
(Drachma has become slightly more affectionate - at least, to me - but he's not really a "lover kitty". He won't cuddle with you or tolerate much holding, unlike Nine who was a complete love sponge. He really is how my Bride described him when asked whether he was a Good Kitty: "Well...he's good at being a cat.")
...but she's up against it. Drachma, obviously, is a hard "no", as is The Boy. The Bride is a "maybe" and I'm a "maybe but leaning no", so the Girl - after a brief spasm of cat-looking - appears to have conceded the One-Cat Family setting so long as Mister Mister is the cat.
So. That's that.
What about this place?
Well...I'm still struggling with that. This is the most writing I've done here in a long time. I've taken several stabs at doing a Brusilov Offensive battles piece but just can't seem to work up the enthusiasm. It's just dire Great War shit; people dying in pointless ways and to make matters worse it's the two most incompetent of the combatants, Austro-Hungary and Russia (the Italians are a special case...) finding ways to get their own people killed.
And outside of personal stuff like this?
Well, for soccer I have my other blog. I'm really done with writing filler and oddball-news stuff. I've given thought to completing the Army I Knew series but am kind of at a point where it becomes less gripping and more All About Me. Maybe I'll give it a stab after I retire.
Politics? Oh, God. That's just dire.
I'm fucking sick of what my country has become, fucking angry that all the shitty things that I thought we'd driven from the public square - racism, proud ignorance, white power, religious nuttery - and into private muttering have returned out and loud.
The GOP must be destroyed. It's really just that simple, and just that impossible.
But that's for the next post; a State of the City and the State and THE Union.
And that conclusion was: we're wingnuts and we love guns, so fuck you.
It's really just that simple.
The modern "conservative" movement loves them some guns. Big guns, little guns, old guns, new guns...guns are what gives them wood. There is no firearm that the current SCOTUS majority considers too risky, too dangerous, too lethal, for some mouth-breathing peckerhead to carry around the public square.
Why? Because there's a good reason for mouth-breathing peckerheads to stroll about armed like a Nung mercenary?
Fuck, no.
It's because ammosexuals - people who get their rocks off having badass weaponry - are a crucial voting element of the Republican criminal conspiracy.
Without the gun-humpers, the racists, the incels, the bible-bangers, no Republican would ever get elected. Ever. Again.
So this is them throwing brains to their zombie horde.
There is no other reason.
They give fuck-all about the people who are going to die, who are going to live miserable lives with the damage the bullet will do to their arms or legs or guts (have you ever seen a gunshot wound? Unless it's from a peashooter .22 it's not a nice neat little hole. High-velocity ammunition shreds human meat and splinters bone. It commonly leaves you crippled and in pain for the rest of your life) or the grief of loss and rage at the insult to minds, lives, and bodies those firearms and the mouth-breathing peckerheads who will soon be humping them everywhere will do.
And don't even get me started on how the already-twitchy trigger fingers of the cowardly cops will get an order of magnitude twitchier.
Adam Serwer has a terrific article up in The Atlantic that explains that this isn't some sort of "conservative" bug. It's a feature:
"The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along."
Which, of course, leads us to the past week's Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade.
Wingnut assurances to the contrary, people have been purging their spawn since there were people. The difference that Roe made was that the person outside the spawn was likely to survive.
But, like the Bruen decision was not intended to make civil society safer, saner, more reasonable and more attractive for everyone but to give the Republican gun-humping faction a chubby, Dobbs isn't actually intended to make things more sane and sensible for actual human beings but to make the fundamentalist freaks that are one of the other important parts of the GOP base cum their brains out.
That's it.
That's all.
That's the entire reason these black-robed fuckers are tearing out everything built since 1929 they can lay their grabby little dickbeaters on.
Look up "nondelegation" if you really want to get a shiver of existential terror.
That's where these fucksticks are going. 1929? Just a pit stop on the way to 1879.
As I said back in May; these people are coming for us.
Any of us who aren't like them.
They're coming with force and fear.
Serwer sums it up neatly:
"The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. (T)he right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing."
This is what they want for you:
It's from The Onion, but don't kid yourself.
It's only as funny as long as they haven't actually done it.
All these nice people? The church lady, the gruff-but-loveable old cuss down at the VFW, the nice missionary who handed you the tract the other day, the respectable attorney who's the chairman of the local Kiwanis?
They're your deadly fucking enemies and want you powerless and crushed.
So.
It's really simple:
Fight them.
Fight them or be destroyed.
I'm going to break off for a moment from the Real World and just rant for a moment, because I'm sitting here trying to read and my lovely Bride has turned on the fucking Big Bang Theory again.
She loves the hell out of this sitcom, and it's her single most go-to form of video entertainment, to the point where I can be at the far end of the house and hear the laugh track and know without a scintilla of doubt that it emanates from the fucking Big Bang Theory.
(Since I'm gonna be using this term a lot, let's save bandwidth and abbreviate it TFBBT.)
This sucker turns out to have been insanely popular - so she's not alone - ran for twelve seasons, and made big stars out of at least two of the leads; Jim Parsons as the male lead, Sheldon, and Kaley Cuoco as the female, Penny. Supposedly each of them (and Johnny Galecki, who played second lead, Leonard) made something like a million bucks an episode and they made over seventy of the bastards.
That's some serious jack.
And I don't get it.
I mean, de gustibus nil disputandem and all. But to have gustibus for TFBBT? Really? C'mon!
Seriously. The thing is just that bad. It's one of those painful trainwrecks that leaves you wondering if the writers and showrunners weren't missing out on their destined careers as housepainters, baristas, or grips on a porn film set.
To make matters worse, it's backed by a braying Sixties-sitcom-grade laugh track that just serves to point out how gawdawful the supposed-"jokes" are.
I have problems with about 99% of "reality" television because "reality" usually turns out to be a cast of variously-dysfunctional assholes being miserable to each other.
Christ, if I wanted that I could go to work.
Somehow TFBBT manages to combine the unfunny-ness of an unfunny sitcom with the trash human resource of your average "reality" show.
No kidding. There's barely a salvageable human being on the screen.
"Raj" (a.k.a. "the Indian guy") is just an extended Apu joke; he's a whiny, clingy, constantly horny rich desi whose domineering parents bankroll his overseas adventures while his supposed American friends mock his race, his culture, his personality, and his pathetic attempt at a love life. The whole Raj idea should have been euthanized for the same reasons the Simpsons showrunners flushed Apu.
The three women characters are just different versions of female stereotypes; "Bernadette" is a ball-buster (who hooks up with the smarmiest male character) who improbably becomes the mommy-character, "Amy" is the girl-geek, all social incompetence and ugly clothes, and "Penny" is the hottie who uses her looks to gold-dig and manipulate.
The male leads are just punchable; "Howard" (the smarmy wanna-be-womanizer) is needy and whiny but with a nasty undertone, "Sheldon" is just a complete asshole who'd be shunned by normal humans, and "Leonard" is perhaps the worst of them all, a meeching little man who hates his roomate Sheldon's bizarre assholish behavior yet constantly defers, enables, and sucks up to him - why he'd want to stay "friends" with the gomer is beyond inexplicable. Leonard "gets" the hot girl Penny by lying and faking and pursuing her so relentlessly she just gives up and settles for him.
It's all just simultaneously sad and annoying, and my Bride loves it dearly, which makes it even more annoying.
And it re-runs constantly, so she can always find one playing somewhere, so as often as not the evening resounds with the braying laughter of TFBBT's idiot "audience".
Ugh.
I'm with you, Penny; rather than sit through a FBBT I'd spend the evening sanding my feet...
The Uvalde, Texas Police Department Special Weapons and Tactics Team.
Pretty badass, aren't they? All dress-right-dress-and-covered-down, got their GI on, tac boots and blue fatigues, locked-n-loaded and ready to protect and serve, right?
Except they didn't.
When an angry but untrained young man with a similar weapon turned up to kill a bunch of the kiddies their P.R. claimed were the reason for their existence, these heroes stood around with their thumbs up their collective ass for an hour or so letting the dude wax those kids.
What you and I and every other American needs to get is that this was a feature, not a bug.
Think about who those coppers actually work for.
You? Me? Those kids or their parents?
C'mon. Pull the other one. That's enough to make a cat laugh.
The Uvalde cops work for "the City of Uvalde" just like the Portland Police Bureau works for the "City of Portland".
When was the last time your city or town did something because you wanted or needed it?
That's not to say that the people who the cops do work for - the federal, state, county, or city governments and those who have outsized influence on them such as wealthy donors or corporations or political action groups - don't do things that help work for you.
But they don't do it for you.
And neither do the cops.
Instead, given the way most police in the United States have been infected with Soldier-Cop Disease, it's more likely that these rascals look at you and me as nuisances at best and enemies at worst. We're not why they do their job; we're a problem that has to be solved for them to do what they see as their job. We're the randos in Nisour Square that scare the shit out of them, that put them on edge and make them reach for their weapons.
Now.
I have a tiny amount of sympathy for the coppers, given the immense number of firearms wandering around the U.S. public. It's kinda hard to avoid being paranoid and trigger-happy when any rando could be a whackaloon with a hogleg and a hard-on for killing someone.
Not that they usually kill coppers, mind. That's hard and risky; it's a lot more fun and easy to kill kids or shoppers or folks in church or massage parlors.
But my sympathy is hammered pretty flat by the hard cold facts that those coppers will willingly shoot your or me but are unwilling to risk going in hard on some whackaloon with a black rifle.
Frankly, it's time and past time for We the People to get over the ridiculous tongue-bathing we give our coppers.
I get it; we've had years and years of copaganda, going all the way back to the old Dragnet- and The FBI-style TV shows, telling us that these jokers are the Thin Blue Line between us and anarchy.
But think about it.
Coppers don't "prevent" crimes.
Unless the copper is literally standing right there, the cop has no way to "prevent" crime. Or anything else, when you stop and think about it, from a riot to a hobo taking a dump on your lawn.
Portland has a whopping 0.0012 sworn officers - actual cops - per person. How the ever loving fuck is one-thousandth of a cop going to stop me from whipping up on your head. Like I said two years ago; what maintains our civil society isn't some thin fucking blue line. It's us, you and me, being good citizens and good neighbors.
Coppers don't "solve" crimes, either.
I'm old enough to remember Sergeant Friday locking up all the baddies every week. Crime didn't pay, at least not on TV.
In real life?
The cops barely clear half of all murder cases. Here in Portland? It's less than half.
And that's THE big crime, felony murder. Figure out for yourself how the Blue Line does with stuff like robbery, rape, or burglary.
Yeah, like that.
So what do these tax-fattened fucksticks do?
Largely exactly what their owners - the governments and wealthy government-influencers - want them to do; keep the canaille in line, show the flag so the plebs see who's in charge, do the minimum to intimidate the normies from misbehaving and to ensure that there's no visible opportunity to break loose and run wild.
But there's no reason to valorize or even defer to the people we pay to do that sort of stuff.
It's not like they're going to charge a looney murderer with a rifle for us, right?
No.
The coppers won't save us from these lunatic killers and their semiauto hard-ons.
Next time, let's discuss what, if anything, is possible.
