Bang Bang Crazy: Supreme Court Conclusion

 

On Thursday, June 23, 2022, six of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States wrote the conclusion to my little thread about the butchery that took place inside an elementary school in Texas almost exactly a month earlier.

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.

Interlude: Big Bang Crazy

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...

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 2)

 

Just look at 'em. 

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.

I'm not against that, exactly. That's what We the People seem to be fine with, and, besides, someone has to roust the smelly crazy homeless people off the Safeway parking lot and it's sure as Hell not gonna be me.

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.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 1)

 

I'll be back with some thoughts on the latest watering of the Tree of Liberty, but let's get this out of the way first - here's an observation from an old GI:

 

A school shooter - hell, almost any "shooter" in a civilian setting - is pretty much the exact equivalent of an "ambush" in a military setting.

You're doing the civilian equivalent of diddy-bopping down the trail - studying, serving macchiatos, shopping - when someone does the equivalent of blowing the claymore and opens up from the tules and you're caught in the dead center of the kill zone. 

 

You - unless you're insane-grade paranoid - are completely unprepared both physically and mentally to respond with quick, accurate, deadly force. So - like the GIs inside the ambush kill zone - what you pretty much almost always do is; die.

 

So the people who are running this "arm and train" level of bullshit aren't telling you that to "arm and train" anyone, be it teachers, bank tellers, grocery clerks, won't do more than provide another target. 

 

Because the third part that has to follow "arm" and "train" to make a difference - the part that they don't want you to hear - is that these armed and trained people would have to walk around like a grunt in a weapons-free ROE combat environment; on the immediate, hair-trigger edge of a violent response to the slightest hint of danger.

 

Now think of your fourth-grade teacher being there through the whole fucking school day.

 

And...seriously?

 

(Next: To Protect and to...what? Are you fucking nuts..?)