I have SO fucking had it with these people

 So there's not a lot I can do with this damn knee. I can't drive, so I'm locked within the distance I can walk. And I can't walk very far, so I'm pretty much under house arrest. And I can't sit up for long without the damn thing swelling up and bitching at me.

So I spend a lot of time sprawled out on the couch or the bed; reading, cruising the 'Net, dozing or sleeping. It's about as fucking mind-bendingly boring as you'd think, so when there is something to do, I'm all about it.

Yesterday (Saturday) evening the Portland Thorns soccer team was scheduled to play the Washington club here at 7:30. I'm still too banjaxed to go in person (and, frankly, even with the club requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test, not all that excited about mobbing up with people...) but I was really looking forward to enjoying a couple of hours of soccer and cheering for my club over the screen in my lap...until I went to the club site and was met with this:

It turns out the the visitors had a teensy-weensy little pathogen problem:

"Spirit have 4 positive COVID cases; multiple sources also tell me that the club has “multiple” unvaccinated players. One source said # as high as 8."

So. Here's the thing.

NWSL teams roster between 22 and 24 players. So assuming the high end number is correct, a third of the roster is unprotected against the Plague at a time when vaccination doses are aging out for a lack of willing arms to receive them.

Think about that.

A business that is a part of a public accommodation industry - an entertainment or hospitality business that is centered around hosting the public - has not required it's employees to meet the most fundamental of public health measures; preventing or slowing the spread of disease when preventive measures are easily available and free. And the employees have refused to voluntarily meet that simple and logical standard.

As a result the other party, the business that has been responsible (the Thorns roster and staff are fully vaccinated) has lost a massive chunk of revenue and has been put at a competitive disadvantage by having to reschedule this game. And thousands of people like me are out their ticket costs.

Which is better, mind you, than having these disease-riddled harridans show up and breathe the Plague all over everyone.

But.

Here's the thing.

I'm sure that these players had all the usual bullshit excuses. Muh freedums! Don't know what's in it! God will protect me! Personal choice!

To which I simply reply:

You're running a public business that relies on public health measures. You're a restaurant, and an inspection finds that a third of your kitchen staff refuses to wash their hands after taking a dump?

You get shut down. Period. No explanations needed, no excuses accepted.

No health inspector would buy your bullshit that God protects you from getting shit in the food. Or that it's your choice. Or "freedom!" means you get to decide whether to follow simple basic public health regulations.

Kitchen closed. Boom.

And yet...because a bunch of lunatic QANuts and Three Percenters and Republicans and antivaxxers have decided to make "I will wash my hands after taking a shit" into a political issue, the rest of us are supposed to humor these fucking ninnies and accept losing our time and money and health and, possibly, our lives.

I lived with a lurking sort of low-grade fear, like the point man in an ambush terrain, for over a year until I could get vaccinated. It's hard to explain just how liberating that two-weeks-past-the-second-Pfizer moment felt. Finally! I had my MRAP. I had my mine plow! I could look forward to a normal life again. Yay, medicine!

Boy howdy, was I fucking wrong.

I'm SO fucking done with these people.

There's lots of other reasons to be done with them, too. But this - this idiotic demand that the rest of us go live in the QAnon Bronze Age with them when there's an actual modern world just over there - this just sends me into a flame of utter rage. Like the Emperor Caligula I can only wish that they all had one neck so I could choke the life out of them and move on with all the other, less easily solvable, problems we should be dealing with.

But no. And here we are.

Fools Rush In

 I see that the "news" is fulminating about the Senatorial GQP's hard no on setting up an "investigation" of the weird mysterious thing that happened at the Capitol on the 6th of January 2021.

 

 
Ummm...gee. That's too bad. 

Without our solons on the case how on earth will we ever get to the bottom of that mystery, Scoob? Imagine the difficulty of unraveling who might have stormed the seat of government in desperate hopes to change the result of an election they'd been told over and over by their beloved Dear Leader had been "stolen"? Who, on that day, had spent hours listening to Tubby and his minions roaring about how the "traitors" and "thieves" inside the building were going to make that theft official and that how if only brave patriotic Real Americans could somehow, someway, get between these rascals and that process perhaps their dream of an endless reign of Emperor Trumpolean could come true? Who might possibly, just possibly, have been goaded through their gullible rage and credulous stupidity by grifters and conmen into trying their own Orange Foolius Revolution?

Who were recorded on live footage, on thousands of their own cell phones, on Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram doing just that and boasting about it?

I can't possible imagine, and now, without that precious commission, We the People will be forever in the dark.

There are many reasons to despair of this fucked-in-the-head country of ours (hi, systemic racism, massive militarization, and climate change!), but letting Joe Fucking Manchin roll over and beg for doggie treats from Moscow Mitch "investigating" whether the sun rises in the east isn't one of them.

 No.

THIS is one of them;

"Yet a full 73 percent of Republicans pin “some” or “a great deal” of responsibility on “left-wing protesters trying to make Trump look bad,” even though both the FBI and Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have rejected the falsehood that leftist protesters were involved."

Now that's fucked-in-the-head. When you can see something with your own eyes, hear it with your own ears, and yet "not believe" it? What's that line about those who can make you believe absurdities..?

There are things that we can fix about the issues We the People face in the coming years.

This? This intransigent, dangerously belligerent stupidity of the people who have gone all in on the QANut Con?

Is not one of them.

There is no cure for Stupid.

It can only - and must - be utterly exterminated if this nation, as the nation it promised itself it would be, shall not perish from the Earth.

Darkness and not light

 

Worthwhile read from Fred Clark on the trace of fear, anger, and hatred that connects the current "conservative" panic that has become the animating force of the GQP with the earlier conspiracy-theory pogroms like the Salem witch trials, the "New York Conspiracy Panic of 1741" and the "satanic panics" of the 1980s and 90's like the McMartin and Kern County hysterias.

"Moral panics are not sparked by sincere, well-meaning convictions of those who wish to see wrongs righted and justice done. They are sparked by the sincere, inescapable conviction that, in the words of the prophet Amos, the day of justice would be, for them, darkness and not light. The recognition that justice would not mean well for us."

The link between the QAnuts, the "conservative" hate for the Black Lives Matter protests this past summer, and the "Stop The Steal" idiocy draws all of this together.

The people inside all of these are, more than anything else, terrified of "The Others" gaining the sort of power and control over them that they have always had over "The Others"; these wretched subhumans (who are, however, secretly powerful and dangerous) are using the Deep State or the Swamp or the black power of Antifa to swarm over the Good People who just want to Make America Great.

It doesn't make any sort of sense, of course. It's like the weird Nazi ideology that simultaneously insisted that the Jews were the worthless, degenerate scum of the cursed Earth while also running the political and financial world.

It's exactly the sort of thinking that turns a small-time New York real estate grifter, con man, frightened little germaphobe into a bare-chested hero of the People.

Here's the problem with all this.

As Clark pointed out in a pair of earlier posts, the people involved in all these "moral panics" included some deeply cynical sonsofbitches that pushed this sort of Pizzagate nonsense for the handle it gave them over their marks and dupes.

Those people are just Nazi-grade evil, Steven-Miller-type "first up against the wall" bastards.

But the rest?

There are certainly a large number of stupid and gullible people in that group. But there just aren't enough stupid, gullible people to make up a large enough group to take over the U.S. government for extended periods of time; government is simply too complex and difficult to do for large numbers of stupid and gullible people to do it.

So among this group there has to be a fairly large percentage of intelligent, competent, critical-thinking people who want to believe these implausible, ridiculous fairy tales.

As Clark points out in the last of the linked posts:

"That requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.

This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.

Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty?

Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us. We need each other."

It's sad to think that someone needs something like that to be able to live with themselves.

But how else can you explain the notion that otherwise-competent people believe that someone like bland corporate hack Joe Biden, the guy who represented MasterCard in Congress, is a communist puppet who wants to outlaw guns and Christianity and make every toddler attend Drag Queen Story Hour?

But...how else do you explain it?

How else do you explain things like the Texas governor's reaction to his state's catastrophic public power disaster, or his ramming his citizen's collective dicks into the COVID meatgrinder?

How else, in a pandemic on a scale unprecedented for a century, do you explain this?

I can't. Other than what Clark is talking about; that a relatively huge minority of my supposed fellow Americans want to believe that me and people like me are evil traitors who want to utterly burn down "America".

On the Left there are people who are not happy with how things are. But as Cohen notes, even these people will compromise and cooperate if that means the public good.

On the Right, there are people - in the case of the "Relief Plan" vote in the tweet above powerful, well-educated people, people who are supposedly familiar with the inner workings of the U.S. government and through it armed with all the sources of potential knowledge and understanding of the Plague Year - who have convinced themselves that their political adversaries are literally so evil and dangerous that the most anodyne of their proposals must be utterly, furiously, and sometimes even violently, fought against.

 They will not compromise or cooperate, for who can "compromise" and "cooperate" with Evil?

And that brings us to the point where we're going to discuss climate change