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Tuesday, May 31, 2022

May melee: much too much to muse on

Another month has flown by with your increasingly distracted hostess being absent from her Whirled for almost the entire month. It's not that I don't have enough material on which to muse: to the contrary, the problem is that there's too much, and (though this isn't really a problem) there's also the for-pay writing and editing and so forth that are the first priority. But I'm keeping my dogged and perhaps irrational commitment to post at least one offering each month, even if it's a mere stub of a post.

To tell the truth, Scamworld per se hasn't weighed on my mind over the past few weeks quite as much as matters that are far more serious, though sometimes related to Scamworld and scammers. One obvious weighty topic is the
May 24, 2022 school shooting/mass murder in Uvalde, a small rural town west of San Antonio. That gruesome and almost certainly preventable incident, which left 19 elementary school children and two teachers dead, plus more than a dozen people injured, once again highlighted Texas' status as the proud leader of both gun lunacy and gun-related deaths in the United States. Talk about Texas exceptionalism... or Texceptionalism, as the case may be.

Of course, gun-nuttery isn't the only shining example of Texceptionalism, thanks to regressive republican Texas politicians and
the increasingly crazy and brutal laws they're foisting on the rest of us.

Naturally, right-wingnuts in Texas and all across America are blaming everything but guns for Uvalde and the countless other mass shootings that have dominated the American news cycle in recent years. Included in the blame game are "wokeness" and "critical race theory" -- not to mention the LGBQT community, illegal immigration, "the left," and other rethuglican bugaboos -- but never, never are guns and those who worship them to blame.

Despite the recent carnage in Uvalde,
the annual NRA (Nazi Republican Armies) convention was held elsewhere in the state this past weekend, in my former hometown of Houston. Some of the rethuglican luminaries who'd been scheduled for in-person appearances -- e,g., Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and assorted other scoundrels -- cancelled their attendance, though Guv'ner Assbutt still managed to be a presence at the gun orgy. (In lieu of wheeling his way into the NRA, the guv'ner opted for another trip to Uvalde, where he was... well... not enthusiastically received.)

On the other hand, loathsome weasel
Ted Cruz and #NeverWasMyPresident Donald John Trump appeared at GunCon in the (rotting) flesh -- blaming, of course, everything except guns and the people who cherish them for the horror in Uvalde. Trump's speech was particularly offensive; after feigning compassion by staging a Hunger Games-ish sing-song reading/mispronunciation of the Uvalde victims' names, complete with a gong sound after each name, he did a little dance. As reprehensible as he is, though, he remains a hero among the gun loonies, not to mention the hero and de facto leader of the entire rethuglican party.

To add endless insult to boundless injury -- and here is where my Whirled's original beat and American politix converge in an unholy union -- Trump has expanded his grift by hitting the "motivational" speaker circuit as part of the "American Freedom Tour," as reported by Axios earlier this month. It could be argued that he hasn't been off the speaker circuit since his presidential campaign began in 2015, what with the endless string of fascist pep rallies he has conducted -- but the "motivational" gig goes above and beyond the fascist to-dos.

It can be pretty pricey, for one thing: though tickets for the riff-raff start at a mere nine bucks for the "Satellite tier," which apparently grants the lucky ticket holder the right to watch the program on a TV screen in an overflow room, "Presidential tier" tickets cost nearly $5,000, and the promoters won't even list the price for the top "Patriot tier."

By now I'm far beyond caring about individuals who actually get grifted by Trump. At this point, anyone stupid or willfully blind enough to still admire him deserves to be scammed. I do, however, care about the countless folks who have been, are being, or will be harmed by the ugly stain of Trumpism, which is far more to blame for the mass shootings in America than "wokeism" or "critical race theory." All I can say now, to eligible voters in the United States, is this: Vote blue in November and beyond. The Democratic Party is far from perfect, but the other party is batshit crazy.

I'll be back in June, which is just around the corner. I'd like to say that I hope it will be a calmer month, but I wouldn't count on it.

 

1 comment:

  1. When a group allows pathological people to participate because it doesn't have good psychological knowledge and hasn't excluded them then that group seems to turn into half-wits. The group is now on the road to the creation of evil - 'ponerogenesis'. The Republican Party will soon enough become 'The Party', and The Party will be filled with psychological deviants. 'The Party' will then become the ruling group in a pathocracy (rule by the pathological).

    QUOTE:
    Any human group affected by the process described herein is characterized by its increasing regression from natural common sense and the ability to perceive psychological reality. Someone considering this in terms of traditional categories might consider it an instance of "turning into half-wits" or the development of intellectual deficiencies and moral failings. A ponerological analysis of this process, however, indicates that pressure is being applied to the more normal part of the association by pathological factors present in certain individuals who have been allowed to participate in the group because the lack of good psychological knowledge has not mandated their exclusion. Thus, whenever we observe some group member being treated with no critical distance, although he betrays one of the psychological anomalies familiar to us, and his opinions being treated as at least equal to those of normal people, although they are based on a characteristically different view of human matters, we must derive the conclusion that this human group is affected by a ponerogenic process and if measures are not taken the process shall continue to its logical conclusion. We shall treat this in accordance with the above described first criterion of ponerology, which retains its validity regardless of the qualitative and quantitative features of such a union: the atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic.

    'Political Ponerology' by clinical psychologist Andrzej Lobabczewski. A book well worth reading as the USA seems to be faithfully following the roadmap to Totalitaria that it describes.

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