re: #316 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

It reminds us that her brain rejects modern science, history and even logic in favor of her belief system.

It’s not so much that I disagree as that I shrug; I don’t accept the premise that rationalism and Enlightenment spirit have ever illuminated human beings such that there exist benighted individuals that are the drag on the species as a whole. As always—this is not stupidity it’s cruelty.

Also…and this is also consistent, stamp your bingo card of things I go on about…I find the largely-liberal assertion that all reactionary politics is a function of disability—intellectual impairment or mental illness—to just be gross. It’s eugenics for people that eat crudites.

She’s operating at peak performance while fixating on all the embarrassing, ugly stuff that Americans prefer to pretend aren’t a part of our history: white supremacy, colonialism, class warfare, and a nationalist-religious hybrid that justifies all the above. None of that shit ever went away, it’s embedded in the culture so deep that people that think themselves above such notions still adopt nationalist posturing when poked—to the tune of several million Iraqis—and smooth public figures that lean into whig enlightenment still talk about “American exceptionalism” like it’s not Manifest Destiny wearing a greasepaint mustache.

Reason is only as good as it’s shittiest base assumption, and our society is built on shitty base assumptions mostly proposed by thieves and creeps, euphemized and bronzed by whigs. Greene isn’t like that because her brain is bad, she’s like that because it is entirely rational to be that way if you live in a country that was built on racism, flipping countries to get cheap bananas, and bought into the same kind of religious nationalism that white Europeans did.

America is cruel. You have to build cruel into your culture if you’re going to own people, fuck them, and sell the kids so produced; you have to build cruel into your culture to see homeless people and addicts and single moms and decide they did it to themselves and thus shouldn’t be helped; you have to build cruel into your culture so that most people won’t feel rattled by the constant drip-drip of extrajudicial death handed to keep both the international and domestic “peace” (commodity prices and property values, respectively).

[America is cruel because it’s culture has all the worst parts of capitalism, unfettered by a pre-existing culture that merely by valuing commnity—just people sharing space together—is anti-capitalist. The American Dream is being a little king, with a suburban demense and a service-industry sector of short-term-rental vassals. Assimilation to America is assimilation to being your job and thus earning your life; fighting in the class war guarantees citizenship. Stamp the bingo card twice.]

Scratch a center-left American and you find someone down for cruelty as long as it’s characterized as moralistic punishment. Scratch a young American going hard left and likely the grossest thing about them is their fixation of punitive measures, or their personal attacks: they learned that from their environment not from a book on theory. Fuck, what portion of social media is just socially-acceptable bloodletting for the Anglosphere? Every day I’m on here there’s a cloud of posts that amount to “well, the important thing here is we all get feel schadenfreude.”

Hence the constant pocket-pool about how half the country are retard hicks.

[Oh hey did I forgot to mention the weird fucking class thing where all the bad reactionary people aren’t just stupid but poor and rural? That persists even as all the fascists are suburbanites with small businesses or rental property? Also, stamp the bingo card.]

Marjorie Taylor Greene is honest about the ubiquity of cruelty in American culture: it makes us great, she proposes; it makes us blessed, she opines. And lots of people agree with her: actually it was good when we were just actively banana warring the world, we should do that more.