The Great Experiment

 Came across this...

...in the Xhitter feed of this guy.

And even given my long attention to and understanding of the fundamental shallow and rapacious shittiness of "conservative thinking" I was kinda gobsmacked.

WTAF? Seriously, National Review? Lights on in your heads, dumbfucks!

"Grand social experiment"..?

Really, which part of high school civics were you Rushbo-wannabees sleeping through that you missed the whole "American Experiment" thing?

"The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness."
George Washington, January 9, 1790

The promise of these United States - the only thing about them that has value, the implicit promise the Founders didn't realize they'd made - is the idea of the grand noble experiment in self-government for all of We the People.

No kings. No popes. No lords and ladies, no hierophants, no rigid social framework where those born to rule rule those born to serve.

The entire, central fucking IDEAL of the United States, the core tenet of the values that supposedly make this nation different, is that We are embarked in a "grand social experiment" to see if that can work.

The fact that we've fallen far short of that value doesn't decentralize it. The fact that we have to, that we need to, make reparations to those who, because of our prejudices we wrote into our laws and baked into our society, were held back and held behind the ideal of equal justice under law, doesn't change it's importance.

The armed forces of a Republic are representative of - must represent - the ideals and goals of that Republic. If they do not, they must be held to a higher standard than the civil society around them in hopes of reforming that society. Not the other way around.

For those reasons alone Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the Army over half a century ago.

I'm sure the National Review tut-tutted that "grand social experiment" that time, too.

In the Age of Trump it's increasingly difficult to hide the vicious racist stupidity behind "conservative" politics. But this was stupidly racist even for these gomers.

I think I hated them a tiny bit less when they were just openly honest Klansmen,

Blood Money

It’s difficult to put in words how infuriating Trump’s pardons of the Blackwater Nisour Square scum are.

But imagine if you spent a huge chunk of your life perfecting a difficult, dangerous craft only to find that a gang of incompetent, undisciplined, arrogant hackers had used it to just go wild, randomly killing helpless innocent people, in the process also disgracing you and your craft while making that craft even more difficult and dangerous.

And then, when you finally manage to see these dangerous fools given the barest minimum punishment needed to ensure they serve as a warning to future dangerous fools, your boss - who is a hopelessly stupid fool himself with only the most cartoonish and moron-grade understanding of your craft - undoes all that in an instant for no reason other than his foolish whim, making a hollow mockery of you and the labor and suffering you and yours had devoted to that work.

And, mind you, this is completely leaving out the contempt and disrespect for the murdered victims of these scum, who deserve more justice than to have their lives and deaths thrown away again by a fucking coward who ran away when it was his turn to risk his precious skin.

That's what these pardons mean; the exact opposite of what Trump believes. 

 

They mock and sneer at every murdered civilian and at every good US troop who did their work honorably and well. They make America small and weak.

It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and their impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

~ Hugh MacDiarmid