Mr. Christ, Have You Met Dunning and Kruger?

Posted on September 26, 2017 by erick

There’s a pretty good chance you’re already familiar with what has been termed the “Dunning Kruger Effect.” But for any who may not be, I’d like to outline it, as the concept is what I want to talk about today.

 

The Dunning-Kruger effect is that of someone of low information or intelligence assuming the exact opposite about themselves. They believe themselves to be smart, when their ignorance is generally obvious and painful to behold. They are smarter than you are. They are smarter than facts laid out in front of them. If they believe that a turd is a diamond, then of course a turd is a diamond, because they’re smarter than you and can plainly see that the blowflies are all over a shiny diamond. This is the short description, but it’s a fairly concise one, and it’s good enough for the discussion we’re about to have. I want to talk about WHY stupid people get the idea that they aren’t stupid. And in case after case after case, the WHY is plain as day to see.

 

Yep. Religion. Seldom do you find anyone in the US with D-K delusions that doesn’t immediately identify him or herself as a “Christian.” And really, if you think about it, D-K and Christianity were made for each other. Doesn’t their holy book tell them that it, and it alone, contains all the truths of the world? This book condones slavery, beating women, selling off your daughters, killing people who don’t believe as you do and enslaving their children… these are not concepts that most people of conscience can subscribe to. This book also claims that God spoke directly to people (up until history began to be documented), that the Earth is only 6,000 years old (in spite of many towns in Asia having clearly existed for longer than that), that a dude existed who walked on water and fed thousands by conjuring up food out of nowhere (take THAT, L. Ron Hubbard and your OT levels!) Oh, and perhaps most importantly, it gives you a free pass to be the nastiest form of scum you can be, as long as you settle up with a couple of prayers at the end of the week. The people who buy into this are convinced that they, and they alone, are the keepers of a truth that is going to launch them straight into heaven while the rest of us toil in a pit of fire, no matter how well we conducted ourselves in this lifetime. With this kind of indoctrination as your foundation, you are equipped to live your life with a Dunning-Kruger point of view. I would go so far as to say that the D-K effect should probably be called the “Religion Bias” applied to all areas of life.

 

This is why debating the Trump dead-enders, or trying to reason with them, is a waste of time. They are the chosen ones, the keepers of the only truth, and nothing that hear about in the “fake news” media is going to change that, any more than any archaeological finding will make them rethink their notions about the age of the human world. To try to reach them is pointless, as they aren’t going to change the way they do things. Sanders, as just one example, couldn’t be more wrong when he says that we should be doing more to reach out to Trump voters. No, they are by and large a lost cause. If you want to defeat D-K and what it’s doing to this society, there is only one way to go. The 50% of us who never participate in elections must be brought in. Real-world truth, and what it means for us all, is undoubtedly going to fly further with them than it ever will with those who get their assurances from a book written by racist, misogynist goatherders thousands of years ago.

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Another Day, Another Cruelty

Posted on September 19, 2017 by erick

Yes, they are going to try it again, and all the people who cheered on “Maverick” McCain are about to be reminded that he’s always been a shill when the time came to be a shill. The praises sung for Johnny made me sick to my stomach, because I knew he’d eventually back stripping millions of their only realistic chance at having healthcare. He won’t fail to do so. Count on it.

 

For the GOP, it’s all good. Americans who die younger from preventable illnesses won’t be withdrawing any of that Social Security they paid into. And every dime not drawn is a dime that can be handed to billionaires, which is what this effort was always about. Do the idiots who fluff Trump at every opportunity really think he wouldn’t like for them to die and get out of the way? The average chumps are the people Trump’s been fleecing, abusing, and belittling his whole life. Trumpcare would really amount to his biggest scam ever, with a payoff that dwarfs all the other scams he’s pulled in this world. That would be attractive to him, as he measures his successes by the number of people he can rip off and the amount of money he can collect doing it. For the GOP, of course, repealing healthcare is a stepping stone to their long-cherished goal of stripping us of everything. Rich elites blame the poor for being born poor, and they resent anything that gives someone not born rich a leg up in life. They hate Social Security because it made generations of elderly people into human beings, instead of the sickened and desperate slugs the elites have always wanted them to be. Make no mistake; there is indeed a class war going on in this country, and there has been for 35 years. The rich hate you. They want you poor and desperate. That way they can laugh at you while they congratulate themselves on being better than you are. As for the lower rungs who also support this nonsense, a low education coupled with a high amount of racism has rendered them delusional. They are so blinded by hate (and dulled by an absolute lack of any desire to learn anything) that they buy into the notion that if the GOP will just hurt “them” enough, then those poor, persecuted white folks will finally be able to partake of those riches that should have been theirs by virtue of being born white. It is somewhat amazing that they’ve been conned now for 35 years, have seen their own futures crater, and still buy into the bullshit, but that’s what irrational hatred of other races/genders/religions will do for you. It’ll make you into a complete moron.

 

What we have to do now is to try and turn someone who went with the flow before. Capito might turn. Some people are suggesting Portman, but that just isn’t going to happen. Paul, perhaps, if you can inflate his ego enough. It is for certain someone had better be turned. Stripping millions of their healthcare is a big step towards the coming national implosion. A nation that preys on its own, and does nothing in the way of helping them to be healthier, or better educated, or even fed, is pretty pointless. Why would any feel patriotic towards a country that sees them as disposable trash? This has to be stopped now, and stopped dead. Tomorrow is probably too late.

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Corrosion of Conformity

Posted on September 6, 2017 by erick

Some traditions are good ones. Other traditions are evil and need to be addressed. I am, of course, thinking of one particular tradition.

 

I couldn’t tell you how many people I know that vote Republican because “my family has always been Republican” or “this is a Republican town.” When I ask such people to tell me what is so great about the Republican platform, all I ever get are FOX “News” sound bites that have absolutely no resemblance to what Republican Administrations actually do when governing. I can usually get these people to admit things like a better minimum wage is necessary, healthcare for all is a laudable goal, and it’s better for abortion to be legal than for women to die in back alleys after a coathanger filleting. The broad mass of us have a lot of similar ideas, but a lot of people will go back and vote Republican simply because they’ve always done it.

 

They don’t change. The Republican Party has changed, though. To vote Republican in this age doesn’t mean the same thing it did to vote Republican when Eisenhower was President, or even when Ford was. To vote Republican now means that you’ve cast your lot with a nakedly racist organization. An antisemitic organization. A misogynist organization. It’s very clear that in governing practice, the present-day GOP may be to the right of the old Apartheid regime in South Africa. The only consistency there’s been to the entire Trump Administration has been its very public friendliness to fringe racists and religious lunatics. If Trump didn’t make that clear enough with his despicable campaign, then he surely did it when he refused to condemn Nazis who murdered a peaceful protester in Virginia. And if that wasn’t convincing enough, his pardon of a man who ran concentration camps for minorities in Arizona should have been convincing enough. And if THAT didn’t convince you that the man you’re dealing with is a real-life Nazi, how can you overlook what he’s now going to to to countless thousands of kids with his DACA repeal? The only possible reason for expelling lawful people who have lived in this country for most of their lives is a racist one. And his suggestions that he’ll spare the children if we build his border wall… think about that for a minute. The scum is using children as hostages to get a wall that no one save racist dullards sees any point in building. This reminds me of nothing as much as it reminds me of Himmler sparing a few assorted Jewish and other undesirables from the camps and the gas chambers in hopes of negotiating himself a lighter treatment by the Allies who were rapidly bringing Nazi Germany to an end. That’s where we are now. That’s how the world now sees us.

 

I have said, and I say now, that if we don’t expel this scum from power in less than 4 years, there won’t be a United States of America to expel him from anymore. It’s very clear that New York and California have no intention of going along with his Nazi pogrom against Latinos, nor should they. Every day this scum is in office, chunks fall away from the foundations of the United States. This rot will soon find its natural end, as Trump does more and more blatantly racist things to try to distract us from his criminal collusion with Russia. At what point do we finally decide that he’s gone too far? Do people not realize that he may well have ALREADY gone too far? It seems to me that Republican voters had better carefully reconsider their traditions, and find themselves some new traditions. Enabling monsters is only going to bring us to a kind of ruin we’d have thought impossible just 20 years ago.

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The Skunk and the Scorpion

Posted on August 23, 2017 by erick

 

I once shared a bed with a skunk, and got away without a stench.

 

I was camping. The rain was hard outside my tent, and loud as I drifted off to sleep. Sometime later that night, I was awakened by something wet brushing my face. Thinking it meant that I had a leak in the tent roof, I turned on a lantern I kept by the bed. And then I saw what was brushing my face. The dripping tail of a skunk. He was next to my head, snorting (yes, they snort, almost like pigs) and rooting around for something. Since he hadn’t given me the business yet, I decided to watch, hoping neither of my young daughters on the beds to the other side of me and my new friend would awaken. Little ones sometimes mistake a skunk as a friendly creature, since skunks don’t run away. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it turn out badly.

 

Where was I? Oh, the rooting around. As it happens, one of my daughters had left a pack of twizzlers, open, on the tent floor. As it turns out, that was what brought my friend to see me. He spent a leisurely amount of time eating what were now his twizzlers, and then went back to where he’d made himself an opening by pushing up enough on the tent door zipper to allow him to squeeze into the tent. He got in, but for some reason, he couldn’t figure out how to get back through the door to get out. I decided to take a chance that our new friendship would stand the test of time, and I slowly sat up, and very gently opened the zipper up some more. The skunk looked at my hand, and then looked at me, and then bade me farewell, leaving by the newer and bigger exit I’d made for him to use. Relieved, I immediately zipped the tent back up, and then tied the upper zipper to the lower zipper with a shoelace to make sure that it wouldn’t ever be so easy to open again. And I went back to sleep, this time without another interruption.

 

The skunk, as it turned out, could be reasoned with, in a manner of speaking. If I provided the skunk with something that made it happy, then the skunk would leave me without causing any trouble. This is a far different experience than most people have with a scorpion that gets in bed with them, something I’ve been witness to but never experienced myself. It would seem that if one has a scorpion in the bed, any movement at all results in being stung. It doesn’t matter to the scorpion whether or not you might be trying to help it find its way out, or even if you have something in the tent that it might want. The scorpion sees you as an enemy, and you will be stung for any movement you make, or perhaps for no more than breathing and annoying it.

 

In the political climate we live in today, I see more traditional conservatives as the skunks. I don’t want to hang out with them, and I’m wary of them at all times, but I think that if I give them some of the things that they want, they might well leave me without a need to shower 50 times and burn my clothes. Some of the “skunks” I can think of right off the bat include Lisa Murkowski, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, perhaps even Jeff Flake and Mitch McConnell. I think we probably ought to open up a dialogue with them and see what we can find to agree on. But I also see many scorpions among the right wing today. People like Trump. Louie Gohmert. Steve King (of Iowa.) Paul Ryan. Jim Jordan (of Ohio.) And most certainly, Trump’s support base is a nest of scorpions that is simply impossible to try to communicate with. They see you and me, and most of the people I mentioned, as enemies to be stung and brought down. There is no hope for any form of dialogue with them, as they’d rather destroy us than give an inch regarding lunatic, Nazi-inspired worship of the moron presently occupying the White House. As they are poisonous and hostile, we can’t do anything but try to contain them. And that means we’re going to have to hold our noses, let the skunks in the tent, and ask them if there’s anything we have that they might like to sample. The sooner someone opens and sustains some kind of real dialogue with them, the sooner we can send them on their way, and prepare ourselves to begin evicting the scorpions from the government, at all levels.

 

We should stock up on tomato juice, just in case. But I’m hoping we won’t have to use it, at least not right away. Let’s see if some kind of sane coalition is still possible. We’re already in a majority. If we can bring some of them along, we’ll be an unstoppable one.

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There Is No Middle Ground Here

Posted on August 17, 2017 by erick

I couldn’t tell you what disgusts me more right now. While I am revolted that a supposed President of this country could emphatically defend Nazis, I am just as disgusted with the people who dutifully picked up his parrot points, and are now helping him to insist that a woman run down in the street by a car shares in the responsibility for her murder. I will assume those apologists are among the “fine people” Trump insists show up at rallies fig-leafed as “protecting history”, but known to all to be chances for white bigots to get together and try their hand at giving Nazi ideology a respectable position in society. It certainly isn’t hard to see why these idiots would feel emboldened, is it? An undemocratic electoral system forced a white bigot into the Presidency. As surely as he’s ignored the fact that a sound majority of Americans did not want him in that office, so have they. And they all maintain their ignorance the same way, via only reading or listening to media outlets that confirm their sense of majority. And superiority.

 

Anyone trying to excuse the murder of Heather Heyer away is an enemy of freedom. Of humanity. Anyone excusing this has earned being called a Nazi sympathizer, because they are Nazi sympathizers. There is no logical way anyone could blame “both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville. Only someone who believes in white supremacy can try to equivocate. The anti-Nazis protesting in Charlottesville weren’t carrying around guns, nor were they screaming about their hatred of other nationalities and/or ethnicities. The Trump Nazi machine (with the very willing assistance of FOX “News”) has geared up to try to paint Antifa as some kind of “alt left” equivalent to Nazism. They are nothing of the sort. Antifa doesn’t drive cars into innocent people. Antifa doesn’t stockpile weapons, and then parade them around in public to intimidate peaceful citizens. Antifa doesn’t coordinate hate rallies via the use of online dens of filth. Antifa is you. Antifa is me. We reject Fascism. We reject racism. We don’t murder unarmed and innocent people. That’s their bag. If Trump wants to try to excuse them, Trump tells you everything you need to know about him. As does any Trump supporter trying to equivocate.

With Trump’s statements yesterday, any middle ground is now removed. You cannot be pro Trump and anti Nazi anymore. You never could, of course, but there was once almost a plausible deniability available to you. That is gone, and it will never come back. So if you consider yourself a Trump supporter, you can also consider yourself a white supremacist and a Nazi sympathizer, because you cannot divorce your support from his actions. The contradictions are not mine to solve for you, either. They are for you to take care of.

 

It seems to me it’s time for you to decide which side you’re on.

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The Long Slog, The Wrong Way

Posted on August 12, 2017 by erick

We’re bombarded with the news, every day. Emergency medical services stretched to their limits. County Morgues forced to use refrigerated trucks reserved for mass-disaster events to deal with overflows. Lives ended, families destroyed, entire neighborhoods of dead-eyed zombies, “Walking Dead” characters in your yard, instead of on your TV.

 

Many shrug their shoulders at the exploding number of overdose deaths. There is a general mentality that a junkie brought his or her death on themselves. That he or she should have been “too smart” to ever pick up that needle. This attitude is fairly common in spite of the staggering number of people who will die from prescription medication overdoses. Prescription drug overdoses will, in fact, claim more people year-to-year than heroin and cocaine overdoses COMBINED. Heroin is a symptom. Addiction is the disease. Addiction is what must be addressed.

 

At least half of all heroin users, and perhaps as many as 2/3 of them, began their opioid addictions due to having been prescribed opioid pain medications. Most of these folks weren’t looking to get high all the time. They were people who had had surgical procedures in some cases. People who got injured on the job, or on the playing field. They wound up hooked on pain pills, and a lot of them suddenly got cut off their legal medications by a newly-tough FDA regimen. Opioid withdrawal is especially devastating, and a lot of these folks not only were suffering from withdrawals, but also the pain that got them on the pills in the first place. For some of these people, heroin became the way by which existence continued to be possible.  Unfortunately, the heroin a lot of these folks bought happened to be spiked with fentanyl, a drug normally used as sedation for surgeries. Fentanyl is cheap to produce, incredibly potent, and quite profitable if sold either as heroin, or as “generic” opioid pain pills. Prince died from a fentanyl overdose, having purchased what he thought were knock-off oxycontin tablets. Many others who were addicted to prescription pain medications have died just as Prince did. People who were functional, with jobs and families. There is no cookie-cutter addict. Fentanyl doesn’t care who you are, who loves you, or what your status is.

 

Let’s say I buy a new car. I never so much as have an oil change done, and the car breaks down in a couple of years. So I go buy another car, and I treat it the exact same way, and it also breaks down. At what point do we agree that I’m an idiot? Especially when I’ve been told how long my cars will last in most cases if I perform the correct maintenance? My example translates nicely to the way we handle opioid addiction in the United States. In spite of study after study showing us that opioid addiction is NOT the same as alcohol addiction, we continue to run people through AA-style programs. Counseling and cold turkey often work for an alcoholic, but with an opiate addict this methodology is a complete and utter failure. The reason is in our brains; opioid addiction rewires our expectations, our sense of “right” internally. The brain becomes dependent on the “rush” that can only be derived from an opiate. And the brain wants that rush, no matter how many people love us, or support us, or will talk to us all night if we want them to. The average opiate addict is going to relapse repeatedly, because the brain is screaming for something to end the disorder in the mind. And if he or she is fortunate enough to survive another round with opiates, he or she is likely going to again be sent back to counseling that we know does not work, and is not going to work. We don’t have to do it this way. As far back as the 1970s, we were aware that another opiate, methadone, will take care of the screaming brain, while leaving the methadone patient able to function as a productive member of society. Yes, methadone CAN be abused, and some people do abuse it, but most methadone users are looking for some way to really and truly wean themselves from a costly, debilitating, and deadly addiction. And besides, we’ve got something even better in the pipeline now. Suboxone is also an opiate, and it dispenses quite well with the withdrawal problems associated with opiate addiction. What suboxone does NOT lend itself to is abusing it for the “high.” People who abuse suboxone will more often than not trigger the very symptoms of opiate withdrawal, making abuse of the drug a highly unpleasant experience. In the US, relatively few doctors are prescribing either for addiction, because a process one must go through to get certified for prescribing methadone and/or suboxone is time-consuming. It shouldn’t be. We know these things work. It is time for us to arm our practitioners with the correct tools they need to combat the problem we have. Suboxone and methadone can be prescribed, and slowly tapered off under the supervision of a medical professional. The long-term results are very encouraging in places where this has been done; relapses are far fewer, and overdose deaths drop (Portugal, in particular, has a wealth of successful experience with this kind of therapy.) And in the pharmaceutical arsenal beyond opioids themselves are psychedelic drugs, which also seem to have some promise for relief of the symptoms of addiction.  Should we not, at long last, at least be trial running some psychedelic therapies? Why on Earth do we continue to do things we know damned good and well aren’t going to work?

 

Trump has said a few words about the ravages of opioid addiction, but his actions have amounted to nothing thus far. Attorney General Jeffy Beuaregard Sessions seems more interested in filling up private prisons with punk small-time dealers than he does addressing addiction, a “strategy” that has been a spectacular failure each and every time we’ve tried it before. Given our continuous mistakes, and the known successes of others, it’s time we did a little learning. And while we’re at it, let’s do a lot more caring. Addiction is an ailment, like a broken arm is an ailment. If we treated a broken arm the way we treat addiction, we’d dismiss the patient with the broken arm as a moron and offer him a 12-step program to heal up his bones. And he’d be about as likely to have his arm mend that way as an opioid addict is to get off drugs that way.

 

Don’t you think it’s time we stopped being so damned stupid?

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Cults, Realities, and Pain

Posted on August 9, 2017 by erick

Seoul, South Korea city skyline at twilight.

This is Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea. Around 10 million people live in the city proper. The metropolitan area around Seoul has about 25 million people in its environs.

DMZ map showing Seoul’s proximity to North Korea’s border.

Here is a map showing us Seoul and its proximity to the 1953 Armistice Line (also known as the DMZ.) If you click the picture, you will see a legend at the upper right giving you a way to measure distance. What we learn from this map is that the City of Seoul, and those millions of inhabitants, live within 25-30 miles of the DMZ. On the northern side of that DMZ are thousands of artillery pieces, encased in hardened mountain bunkers, pointed at Seoul.

 

There is no way to give someone an early warning of an artillery attack. You might become aware of what’s happening slightly before the shells start falling, but not in enough time to do anything to protect yourself from the shells. And any attack on North Korea by our idiotic orange fool is going to provoke, first and foremost, a retaliatory attack on Seoul. Whether we were to win or to lose a war there is going to be irrelevant for countless thousands of Seoul residents, who are going to die. The magnificent city they built from the ashes of the Korean War will be laid to waste. This is true if the next war lasts 6 months, 6 days, or 6 hours.

 

Some people here in the US think that a war with North Korea is a dandy idea. I’d like to ask them to stop and consider how dandy the idea seems to the residents of Seoul, or the US forces in the area, many of who have family there with them. Of course, these tend to be the same people who are more than willing to accept as President a man who colluded with a hostile foreign power to get himself anointed in the White House, so I’m not terribly surprised. The Trump cult is a nihilist cult, and a cult of ignorance. They don’t care how many innocents die as long as their Lord comes to no harm.

 

I care, however. Do you care? How much pain does there have to be before we decide that enough is enough?

 

 

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Tuesday Twitter Turds

Posted on August 2, 2017 by erick

It’s time for another foray into the the MENSA factory that is #tcot. Get your favorite disinfectant, put on your chemical gloves, and join me for a bit.

 

Our first one is one of those EDJICATED INTELEKTUL types. And she’s a great believer in “Justice” too, if by “Justice” you mean the persecution of innocent people that you don’t like. I’ll bet she has a BIBEL handy at all times as well.

Really a smart cookie, this one, right? With a bio that boasts “18 Playboy Pictorials” AND “Christian.” The kind of “Christian” we’ve all come to expect, no doubt.

 

She’s really something, but just because she was in Playboy doesn’t mean we should overlook Trump’s ardent male supporters. I can’t ever remember seeing this kind of “class” in any leftist I know of.

https://twitter.com/SlicksTweetz/status/819146744260763649

Anyone who hasn’t understood what Trump’s “wall street” rhetoric referred to in 2016 should have all doubt removed by now.

 

Twitter, of course, remains a great place for the classics. If by “classics” you refer to meth-inspired, delusional racist bullshit that only a complete and utter idiot could buy into.

https://twitter.com/worldtoday365/status/884481434462957569

Stupid white people, peddling syphilitic propaganda fed to them by a little man in the Kremlin who wants to be the new Stalin. If that ain’t FREEDUM, I ask you… what is?

 

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Make <...> Great Again

Posted on July 31, 2017 by erick

History is always your friend. It is a fact that we can often predict the outcome of things by studying similar events and eras in the past. And when we apply this truth to studies of those who promised to make their countries “great again”, what we learn is chilling.

In general, the “great again” figures have several common points of view, which leads them to operate in much the same fashion. Among their common notions, we can find the following:

  • A tendency to assign blame to minorities and/women for deteriorating conditions.
  • The assertion that they alone can restore the society to “greatness.”
  • The perception that they are the state, and the state is them, and any dissent against them is by definition treason.
  • A very distorted view of the past, usually colored by exaggerations and outright untruths.
  • A perception that their ideas are never at fault, and any failures in policy are the result of treason and/or weakness on the part of those who are under them.

The notions I mention above are integral components of the personalities of those who peddle “make us great again” to gullible segments of the population. We know how they think. We also know how their thinking usually turns out in real-world terms. As history furnishes us with the ideas these leaders had, so history furnishes us with the things that they ultimately accomplished once they’d reached power. Let’s take a look now at several men who promised to make their countries “great again”, and what they ultimately managed to achieve in real terms.

 

Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler came to power in a Republican Germany still stinging from a defeat in the World War, and struggling economically because of the burden of war reparations it was assigned to pay. Hitler assured Germans that they were never defeated, but were instead “stabbed in the back” by unpatriotic elements at home. He blamed the German Jewish population, especially, as the source of German defeat, and assigned them the blame for all German problems in the aftermath. Hitler promised to crack down hard on the Jewish population of Germany, as well as restore German military might to allow Germany what he claimed was its destiny of colonizing the east of Europe. The Slavic, Roma, and Jewish peoples living in those territories weren’t “Aryan” Germans, so they could safely be displaced, disenfranchised, and disposed of in the quest to make room for the “superior” German race. As a result of Hitler’s quest to Make Germany Great Again, some 20-25 million Soviet citizens lost their lives, and 12 million Jewish, Roma, gay, disabled, and assorted other human beings were gassed to death in a system of camps set up for that purpose across eastern Europe. And in the end, many millions of Germans lost their lives in the ferocious battles of World War II set off by Hitler’s quest. Hitler, himself, committed suicide as the Soviets were closing in on his Berlin bomb shelter.

 

Mussolini

Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini was the creator of Fascism, a virulently nationalist political philosophy that was modified to include virulent racism to form Hitler’s Nazi ideology. Mussolini promised the Italian people that he was going to restore the glories of ancient Rome, and to that end he attacked and occupied Albania in Europe and Ethiopia in Africa. But his alliance with Hitler eventually got his country invaded by the Allies, and Mussolini himself was killed by partisans and strung up by the feet in a town square by local Resistance fighters in 1945.

 

polpot

Pol Pot

Pol Pot dreamed of the reformation of the Khmer Empire, which stretched across much of southeastern Asia and encompassed great swaths of Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. To accomplish this, he set the clocks back to “the year Zero” when his Khmer Rouge forces captured all of Cambodia in 1975. His first act was to empty the cities of residents and put them to work as agricultural laborers, who he slowly starved to death so he could export the grain they produced in order to have the currency necessary to purchase weaponry in his quest to rebuild the great empire of the past. He was also a racial and cultural purist, meaning that ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, and Laotians either had to flee or be massacred. Even ethnic Khmers that were in his point of view “tainted” by too much education and/or contact with the outside world were killed in his quest to reconstruct the “pure” ethnic Khmer. Between the years of 1975-1979, he probably killed around 1.5 million Cambodians, and completely wiped ethnic minorities off the Cambodian map. Being a virulent racist, Pol believed that his “pure” Khmer Army would wipe out anything in front of it, so he began attacking Vietnam and Thailand in an attempt to regain the territories of his dreamed-of Khmer empire. Attacking Vietnam would prove to be a fatal mistake: after an attack that killed several hundred Vietnamese in 1978, Vietnam responded ferociously, and drove Pol Pot out of power in Cambodia in a 2-week war that started on Christmas Day in 1978. Pol Pot was forced to flee the capital city Phnom Penh in a helicopter and retreat to the jungle, where he waged low-intensity warfare for the next 20 years before dying in 1998. At the time he died, his own forces had placed him under house arrest due to murders of other Khmer Rouge leaders (and their families) at his instigation.

 

These men are not anomalies. Some combination of their racial and territorial ideas can be found in just about anyone who preaches “great again” rhetoric. Those who blindly follow such men are quite likely to follow their delusional leaders over a cliff.

 

Sadly, a whole lot of innocent people usually suffer and die as they make their way to their inevitable ends.

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Thursday Twitter Turds

Posted on July 28, 2017 by erick

I’m delighted to take this opportunity to introduce you to some of the dumbest people on Twitter. As you’ve already guessed, every one of them is an ardent Trump worshiper. Stupidity is a base requirement for worship of the orange trash, after all.

Let’s start with a face many of you know, but probably hate. I certainly hate him. He’s been a pandering waste of oxygen and a mooching slug his whole life, living off the resources of decent people while he condemns the working poor.

 

huckabee humor

Huck thinks this is humor. I shudder to think of the suffering of those close to him.

Yes, he’s exceptionally lame, appallingly dumb. But if you look hard enough (meaning not much effort at all), you’ll find people who make him look like Einstein in comparison.

 

Here’s a prime example of Trump worshiper intellect and humor that actually makes Mikey’s lame joke almost funny in comparison.

 

A real charmer. Her family must be so proud.

I often wonder what these people would do without some demagogue or other telling them who to hate. Would they wind up killing each other? I think perhaps they would, since they live their lives looking for new bogeymen to be scared to death of. I suppose Trump and his ilk do them a favor by giving them someone external to hate.

 

This one identifies herself as a “Catholic” and an “independent voter.” Left off the description is whatever brain-wasting disease produces this kind of delusional stupidity.

idiot

Lawdy, the Pope has a village idiot in his flock.

I’m past being surprised at the stupidity. The only thing I ever get surprised about is my own surprise at how stupid they can be.

 

To finish up, let’s visit the timeline of a well-known Trump worshiper/pervert/Russian go-between. Here we learn that even the higher-ups in the Trump cabal of dunces are just as stupid as the ones on the street, voting to shorten their lives and die in poverty.

Oh my, the little tough guy is threatening us! Hide!

Every time I think Roger Stone can’t get more pathetic, he proves me wrong. 2/3 of this country despises his Lord. There may indeed be blood, but it will be the blood of the innocent or the unsuspecting, as it always is when one of Roger’s kind gets mad enough. Just ask the Las Vegas Police Department how that works. Of the families of the victims of Wade Page.

 

Clicking on the photos will take you to the original tweet. If your stomach is strong enough, click, click away. I’ll be back regularly with more Twitter turds for your morbid fascination. I think this was probably enough for my opening shot.

 

 

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