Out of the barrel of a gun

I won't kid you; I've been actively avoiding posting here for a while now.

Part of this is purely the pressures of work and worry. I've had a damn busy month and it's not getting less busy. The Boy is being a trial and so there's work to be done at home as well, and there's my own entertainment, ramping up now in anticipation of the World Cup.

But a huge part of this is also just not really having anything to say other than my usual grousing about the fucking Himalayan mountain massif of Stupid that seems to ever more characterize my country.

I could begin with the New Gilded Age and go from there, but, frankly...all it would do is raise my blood pressure and for what?

If you're here reading this you know what I'm talking about. And if you don't agree, I'm not going to convince you.

Take, for example, these fucking nimrods. In The Great Penguin's own words:

"At which point the Open Carry Texas web site sums it up as, “our intent is to make people as comfortable with guns as gay pride parades made people comfortable with gays.” Uhm. I’m not aware that gay pride parades have ever killed someone. Unlike chain saws. Or guns. Just sayin’.

The Stupid, it is dense in these people…"

To begin with, just the sight of these their-brain-cell-is-lonely idiots' rifles leaning unattended with the magazines locked in place?

Makes my hands itch for a nice, juicy piece of dimension lumber and a room with thick walls and a sturdy door so I can do a little wall-to-wall counseling. You're one of my troops and you do that shit? You'd best thrust your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye. And that's a trained troop, not some fat bastard whose "weapons training" consists of snarfing down a Whopper with his rifle slung over his back.

These fucking people...and the thing is, this "democracy means that my ignorance is the equal of your knowledge" seems to extend to every damn topic under Heaven. Prisoner exchanges. Climate change. Tax and tariff policy. Health care.

It's piling Ossa on Pelion, and I have no idea what the hell I can do or say to change anything. For example. Nobody with a functioning hindbrain could look at the U.S. electoral system circe 2014 and conclude the the "problem" is that rich people can't influence the political process enough, rather than the brutally obvious fact that the entire magilla has been captured by malefactors of great wealth. And yet the consensus is that the sad little attempt to change the process back closer to that of a less-oligarchic United States is fucking doomed.

The Stupid seems to be dense...well, everywhere.

My "fellow citizens" seem content with their bread and circuses or whatever as their nation literally burns its way through the atmosphere, sqanders blood and treasure in idiotic foreign advantures, romps back to the social, political, and economic tenor of 1890...and all the while seems fixated on who's fucking whom and how, and Jesus-pestering, and homos. This seems to be the "Will of the People" circa 2014. I know that the Public has always been an Ass, but...

The fuck..?

And that brings me back full circle to the goddamn guntards.

Because here's the thing. That rifle is a tool, but less of a tool that the person carrying it if that person is all hopped up abut their "need" to wander around in the peaceful public square carrying it. I've talked again and again about how an armed society is NOT a "polite society" but the functional equivalent of a lawless society, with every armed citizen being, in effect, the ultima ratio regis. Being armed in a civil society makes you the dangerous arbiter of any sort of public dispute, and forces me to arm myself if I have a disagreement with you or face the reality that you will always have that ultimate argument to use against me.

And as a tool, it's not a really useful one. It's useless for hunting unless you're hunting people, and it's useless for "defending yourself" unless you're walking around with a round in the chamber ready to flick the selector lever to "fire" at the slightest hint of danger, in which case I don't want your paranoid ass within 450 meters of me and mine.

And in terms of an "armed citizenry resisting tyranny" it's useless, too. Bob Farley has a pretty good summation of why, on this week that an UNarmed citizen held up a column of tanks on their way to Tianenmen Square twenty-five years ago:

"The thing is, Tank Commander is far more dangerous than Tank Man. Tank Man can simply be shot; most seem to believe that Tank Man was later executed, far out of sight of the international media. The regime survives if Tank Man dies, even if the death of Tank Man isn’t the optimal outcome. The regime dies, however, if Tank Commander refuses to run over Tank Man. Eisenstein used the Odessa Steps to demonstrate the corruption of the Czarist regime, but the regime didn’t die until the soldiers refused to shoot the demonstrators. The successor regime didn’t die until Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank in August 1991. While there’s some mystery as to the fate of Tank Man, I don’t doubt that the CCP found Tank Commander and put a bullet in the back of his head at the first opportunity."

I can tell you - you and your pissant little rifle? A wet spot under my tank treads. There has never been a rebellion in history that survived suppression when the suppressor didn't run out of money or the regime troops didn't turn on it. What comes out of the barrel of a gun has typically been oppression, not freedom.

And trust me; you're better off armed with a couple of shopping bags, like Tank Man. If I catch you a rebel in arms you're toast, my friend, and don't think you'll have a chance to die gloriously. If not me, My Little Droney will fly over you and drop some ordnance on you in the dark. Ka-blooey. Game over, thanks for playin'...

Now. That was a nice little rant. If you're out there reading this sucking the muzzle of your AR-15 like a little black metal binkie, is it going to change your mind? Did I tell you anything you probably don't really know, if you were willing to stop fondling your rifle for a moment and admit it?

Of course not. Because none of this is really about "facts" or "knowledge" but about that some people just want cool rifles n' shit, and are more than willing that some other poor sonofabitch is gonna die because in order for one person to have cool rifles n' shit another person - some utterly fucked up bastard - has to be able to get one, too.

So - no different from my going on and on about Citizens United, or offshoring and outsourcing, or the hypocrisy of sending other people's sons to war and then roaring and bleating when they're ransomed by releasing some raggedy-assed Afghan POWs. I just don't want to try and swim upstream against this tide of rancid stupidity. If the people backing this moronity, or the people backing the morons, can't see what this is doing I can't save them and I can't change them.

I've watched from afar as my friend Labrys drives herself slowly bugnuts getting spun up about this shit, and I've told myself; not going there. I'm not going to spend a bunch of time and energy battering the ignorance and carelessness of fucktards.

So I'll be back in just a bit with some more reminesences of Panama and this month's "battle", the Philippine Sea in 1944. And maybe some kiddo and family stuff.

But politics? Why would I want to jam my intellectual dick into that meatgrinder? Again?

I've really got better things to do.