"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Aug 8, 2011

Humiliation

You want to know what makes the Teap Artiers tick?

They don't like being treated like bitches, faggots and niggers.

And they certainly don't like going through it with bitches, faggots and niggers in charge. 

Obviously, they're not being treated that way. They're not going through anything. Their taxes aren't going up, and nobody is stupid enough to take away their monthly largesse. That burden is being shifted elsewhere. You know, onto the poor.  And the melanin superfluous.

There is no more coddled a federal dependent than middle class whitey. The roads are paved for him. The ports and airports and train hubs are built to deposit fat around his waste line; the stadiums and teevee stations are built to entertain him. The telly tells him the lies he wants to hear. The subsidies flow in order to guarantee the inevitable expulsion of beef waste products from his Christ clenched and puckered asshole. Toxic assets are bundled and sold so that a Teap type can buy a house and then turn around to milk himself and his fat little children into generational debt. A debt he'll never have to pay, because he's not good for it and never will be.

And wars. The fucking wars. The joystick warriors have killed thousands in Southwestern Asia for him just this year alone.

And you know who has a million dead Iraqis pinned to his chest?

The Teap. He was cheer leading foreign wars and the death of brown people right up until a black man got into the game. And once whitey gets the White House back, he'll be cheering those wars again.

The whole fucking federal edifice is run to keep the Teap demographic in cheap sugar, cheap oil, cheap corn and a cheap bootstrapper mythology scribbled on the back of the rough equivalent of a yeoman's snotty handkerchief.

It's the Teaps who cough up rankers, middle managers, small holders and cops. It's the Teaps who lobby for prison construction. It's the Teaps who've got wood for a Crusade against Islam. The Teaps are Christianized and militarized, and that makes them the perfect narrative foil to the faggot loving liberals, those feminized nazis who keep taking from whitey to give to shiftless niggers, and who don't know how to raise boys to be men.

The Teap is white, mostly Protestant (although a third are Catholic) and more well off than close to two thirds of the subjects of our bureaucratic empire. And he is pissed: the radio has him convinced that it's all going to hell - because black folk won't behave, because the gays are getting uppity and spoiling marriage, because women have the audacity to refuse to be mandate incubators for future Christian warriors.

Perhaps even more tellingly, he is pissed off enough to pack heat in public and brag about it because the government has finally got around - at least, in his fevered, ignorant imagination - to treating him like it has been treating women, gays and black people for the majority of its existence. Like he and his forebears have always treated the lower orders.

The Teap is one half of White America, and he knows his deviled half when he sees it. The Teap doesn't fear roving black mobs in Wisconsin, or the thought of Greece coming home, or the end of foreign wars and the coming closure of bases in a vacuum. He hates all that shit because liberals says they're for it. Or more precisely, because that's what he thinks liberals are saying.

The Teap ain't all that smart. Liberals are his best friends. Liberals and Teaps need each other. The Teap needs to blame the liberal for niggers on welfare, Jew York and Jewlifornia's sewer of liberal programming, and the decline of the Once Great Republic. The Teap needs to take back the country from liberals, in order to prepare for the Great Restoration.

And liberals? Well, we've covered them already.

The Teap ain't gonna take it anymore. He's had enough of those liberal socialists and their hatred of red apple, red blooded Amurrica. He's the rightful heir. He's We The People. And he's a bootstrapper, you know. He made himself all by his fucking lonesome. He built this fucking God kissed white nation. And he did it in spite of all the muckraking and fifth column agitation of socialist bugbears and bogeymen.

He* is through with compromise. How dare they take his hard earned bribe and blood money and give even a dime of it to filthy fucking niggers poor people, or to dirty bitches who get what they deserve women seeking STD testing, or to godless ass fuckers who spit on Christ the gays looking for a piece of the marriage pie.

See, that's the beating heart of Teap Arty rage - it's that they imagine someone now dares treat them like they've been treating everyone else for as long as their values voter, warriors for Jesus, backbone of the nation demographic has been in existence.

It's rage and angst at being treated like poor people, black people, women and homosexuals. At being humiliated. Don't for a moment doubt that the Teap's most fundamental standard is a social order of a Golden Age that never was - one where the lessers kept their peace, the places and their hats in hand.

And lest we form the wrong picture: no one is actually humiliating the values voters, fundamentalists and Catholic maximalists who have re-branded themselves as the "Tea Party."

It's just that they think not getting exactly the country imagined in a fictional Golden Age is a humiliation. A country where they are on top and no one treats them like people ought to treat women, or homosexuals, black people and other outward expressions of an interior lack of worth.

The Teap imagines himself humiliated. Humiliated for the sake of women, homosexuals and black people.

And it's not for nothing that these are also exactly who the Teap blames for his wholly imaginary and completely invented condition.

* - he, of that most compromised and bought off of all American demographics...


[On a lighter note, it amuses to no end to discover that someone found this blog by way of a search for "peruvian bear fucker." Delightful.]

37 comments:

Susan of Texas said...

They talk constantly of how everyone (else) needs to show humility, of how arrogant others are. How dare they not keep their place.

Cüneyt said...

Don't see too much right-bashing among the anarchs as of late. This really did something for me. While I burn at the libs since they've got the big chair, I continue to be surrounded by asshole rightists, and while some of them really are hard-hit povs, some of them are bourgeois shit-talkers who told me about necessary abrogations of liberty in 2003 and now act like born-again libertarians. Fuck them up their asses.

Roseanne said...

jack, then you can't fully lack empathy for the people who were fooled by the Obama campaign. I know you were never among them, but you grasp why the guy was successful in co-opting the things that we thought would be forms of resistance, and sure some of us were foolish, only now do we realize the degree to which these forms of resistance were mere co-opted...

but...

Roseanne said...

*merely (not mere)

Jack Crow said...

Roseanne,

If it helps at all, in my ordinary life I can separate empathy from disdain, or maintain them both at the same time. For the purposes of blogging, I'm not inclined to pull punches.

Nuance is not without its merits, but the starkness of polemic (and that's really all I write) appeals to me.

My style comes with a host of limitations, not the least of which is the deliberate disavowal of the ordinary muddle of complicity, compromise and confusion which tends to characterize our lives.

When I first started writing, that's what interested me. It also interested exactly no one else.

I think for the same reason that we watch teevee shows with implausible storylines and unrealistic motivations, we read and write our outrages as if they were more extraordinary than they really are. This isn't to say shit isn't really bad, or that a lot of people aren't suffering.

But, part of the political outrage against suffering is the willful rejection of the evidence provided by our sensory faculties.

Human misery is quotidian. It should surprise no one.

If I assumed that obvious starting point, I'd have nothing about which to write except: grasping causes suffering, et cetera.

Still, to your point, I cannot argue that you are wrong, because you are not. And like the good sir, BDR, in my heart of hearts I have less patience for the motherfucking conservatives than I do for any given liberal, because liberals mean well.

My major objection to liberals is nonetheless that they mean well while refusing to reconsider how little contact with reality their intentions have, or can have. It's not difficult for a liberal to hold as simultaneously true that the world ought to have a more equitable distribution of goods and wealth and that the State which serves the wealthy ruling class is the best means by which to achieve that end.

I cannot excuse a liberal for believing this rotten tripe, nor apologize in advance for any meager effort on my part to mock misguided faith.

There is no hope or change to be found in any politician. And that holds as true for the Greens, the Libertarians or an imagined vanguard Marxist party as it does for the current duopoly.

The question which follows, then, is should liberals know better by now?

I think so. And I think even moreso than conservatives.

Jack Crow said...

Susan,

I think your observation is often neglected - the key to conservative fantasy making is the belief in a stratified social order which is somehow maintained by a perfect class mobility that is nonetheless punished whenever someone attempts to actually move without prior permission.

Cuneyt,

Having been both a Christer fundie mercenary and a recovered liberal, I have to buck with what appears to be common American anarchist tradition: the Teaps are more revolting an expression of discontent, however less dangerous than institutional liberals they actually are. This is not because the Teaps are innately fascistic (although, at this state, they are close to accepting proto-fascism while calling it libertarianism), but because what their ideology allows them to excuse and tolerate is simply more reprehensible.

The liberal is by definition a hypocrite, since he is committed to the expansion of rights while employing a state which exists to reducing them.

But the Teap is a fifty year old zealot who would gladly welcome an American Caesar, the crushing of "urban unrest" and open austerity, as long as that Caesar sounded like yeoman Spoonerist philosopher and loved himself some Jeebus.

Abonilox said...

Mr. Crow,

I had a polite conversation with an elderly white client the other day who was really upset about her financial situation. It seems that a certain negro has destroyed America and is personally responsible for the major ass whooping her mid-six-figure pension was getting.

Nothing unusual about that. What interested me was her solution. She wants the government to start issuing Identity Papers that prove that certain people belong here (not clear what her criteria would be). She further indicated that were the feds to do that, all that trash would leave the country and things would get better immediately!

So how far away are we from a fascist state? The Tea Party rhetoric oftentimes feels to me like pump-priming for a good old-fashioned fascist take-over. Or are we already there? No, I don't think so. But it's conceivable. Another spectacular terrorist attack, for example, could do the trick.

To your topic, most of the tea party folks would sign a contract in blood giving up their civil rights (preferably at a prayer meeting in Houston overseen by Rick Perry), confident that only the riff raff would be victimized. Honest, God-fearing people like themselves have nothing to fear from Law & Order Goose-Stepping Military Police with nothing better to do. Don't forget the depth of self-righteousness that flows within those red-blooded Ameruhcans.

Justin said...

So how far away are we from a fascist state?

The only reason we are not there yet is because we the people have not put the elites to any kind of question yet. If we ever do, then we will have a fascist state lickety split. Power concedes nothing, it will always do whatever it has to do to protect its interests.

If there were hints of mass unrest, then the US would become more overtly fascist just as soon as the elites perceived any threat to their power.

The Rich Fear the Poor

Fascism, dictatorship don't just happen, they are contingent on circumstances. The power elites of the United States have, over time, proven to be perfectly willing to use slavery, genocide, concentration camps, repression, murder, and surveillance to maintain their power. So long as they can keep their money, we can keep the trappings of democratic government. That is the deal. For a time, there was enough money to bribe enough people, the middle class, to maintain stability. That situation appears to be ending.

Justin said...

From the comments at that article I linked, "The solution is obvious: reduce the number of dangerous poor people, namely unemployed under-40 males.

How? Make abortions and birth control free to all teenaged girls or poor mothers already on welfare. Prevent the animals from being born."
I forgot to list that the rich have also used eugenics programs of reproductive control. Don't flatter yourself too much Jack, you write starkly, but nothing you've ever written has been as nakedly aggressive as dehumanizing sentiments such as this expression, which I have heard many times from middle class whites.

Jonathan Versen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jonathan Versen said...

This is an excellent post.

Strangely I'm reminded of a post of Digby's(!) from several years ago, "The Resentment Tribe."

I went back and reread it to see how I'd regard it now. (FWIW I think she's occasionally valuable, at least she can be when she writes about something in which her team democrat bias doesn't factor in the subject matter.)

In 2005 I had a favorable impression of this post, and I don't think I saw her Democratic Party boosterism as a factor.

But now, when she talks about a battle for "the soul of America", I get the impression she sees a contrast between what she calls Southern Exceptionalism and (an unnamed) Liberal Exceptionalism, and appears to approve of the latter. I assume it's unnamed because she doesn't want to acknowledge it, as opposed to being blithely unaware.

davidly said...

A very good piece indeed. It is still hard for me to muster anything but numbness to the Teap because it is precisely those types who kept me a good liberal for so many years.

And I recently made the mistake of stumbling upon (inadvertently trolling onto?) The Widdershins, where the thought of Clinton primarying the prez has them salivating. They think she'd've been different - employing logic just as shallow as your average right-nutter.

Teap or no, the war-faring fascists (yes, absolutely fascists) are having their say from both sides of the aisle, and though it is becoming more difficult for me to think straight in this regard, the Teaps continue the long tradition of rallying the troops into their respective camps.

Roseanne said...

Jack,

Thanks for the great response, and of course I definitely agree with you in terms of style: the last thing I want is for you to exchange your aggressive polemic for the dithery passive style of the Yglesias types, not only because that style is more boring, but also because it's long since been co-opted by the neoliberals.

But yes, good, I'm glad to get a large sense of the context.

Anonymous said...

not really

Justin said...

"But now, when she talks about a battle for "the soul of America""

I'd have to stop right there. A more nonsensical bit of gibberish I could hardly construct. Euphamism piled atop euphamism, all begging clarification examination, all abstractions of premise and assumption. What the hell is meant by a soul, America, and how does America have a soul, and ho exactly do we fight over it? And who is we?

Digby thinks the soul of America is fought over between primarily in politics. I have yet to ever read what she or anyone else means by any of that. I am not trying to be a dick, I know this type of boilerplate is very common in our rhetoric. I have found that it all means anything whoever says and hears it wants it to mean, which is another way of saying that it means nothing.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

I think the Teahadis are scared shitless, as well as humiliated. They think that the coming minority-majority will treat them with the same amount of respect that they have always shown minorities... that prospect has them terrified.

Fear and rage, like cornered animals.

Cüneyt said...

Jack, that's certainly been my experience. I have sympathy toward faux-libertarian good ol' boys when they bitch about elitism, but the fact is that they want socialism--for them and their sort. And it wasn't so long ago when this stuff was very powerful and very visible. Bushism lives on, our Kennedyesque motherfucker in the WH notwithstanding.

Anyway, I liked Boyd's take on the Tea Party as an opportunity to critics of government rather than an essential foe, but that said, there's plenty that the Tea Party has been supporting and which they have voiced, and I'm sick of pretending that they're regular folks posing thoughtful critiques of politics as usual. They are nothing more than an echo of the "outsider" rhetoric that got Obama the nomination, mixed with the domestic rightwing paranoia we've come to expect since the John Birchers.

Jack Crow said...

Thanks folks. Hope to get in some replies tomorrow.

David K Wayne said...

Teap, Arty and awayyy!

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/to_infini-tea_and_beyond_tea_party_in_space_aims_t.php?ref=fpb

Anonymous said...

this thread is a bonanza of ignorance

ergo said...

Why the refusal here to differentiate between partisan hacks willing to co-opt whatever popular movement comes along in order to enact policy no different from the other faction in DC, and then people who have legitimate grievances against the ruling elite, but who may couch their discontent in a rightwing viewpoint, or a religious viewpoint, or a traditionalist viewpoint?

A cursory look around the paleocon blogosphere reveals that the idea that the Tea Party is a monolithic group, particularly a monolithic group of warmongers, is a bit ridiculous. Lumping nonvoting Tea Party-identifiers in with Republican hacks and then stereotyping the sum only serves the ownership class because it a/ keeps the masses divided and conquered whilst fighting over table scraps and b/ reinforces the narrative they try to sell year in and year out to keep enough people believing that our democracy isn't fake. Why are you making the Donkle campaign pitch for them?

Jack Crow said...

Ergo,

The Paleos are not Tea Partiers. About twenty effective minutes into the Teap phenomena, the Paulists lost their claim to the mantle and were overtaken by the values voters and Christianists who have long despised Ron Paul and the paleos.

You have but to read through the largest Teaper internet forum to have this made abundantly clear:

http://forums.hannity.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=&f=7

The Tea Party is exactly the same "Moral Majority" which has been agitating for a lean, mean, efficient theocratic state it has always supported.

You cannot let yourself be snowed by a clumsy rebranding effort.

[And for what it's worth, here in NH, the Tea Partiers are ridden though with the ugliest skinhead and nativist elements. I went to their thousand person strong rally, and it was a who's who of local bigots, Yellow Fringers, skins and Freestater goons.]

Jack Crow said...

And I'm really not sure how identifying the Tea Party in its proper context is doing advance work for the Democrats.

The Dems and the Teaps are working the Ratchet with remarkable efficiency. They need each other.

It's the Tea Party which is doing the work of the Democrats, by putting a demonstrably idiotic face on "anti-government" unrest. Not that Teaps are anti-government. Anyone who thinks that isn't reading their screeds, listening to their speeches, or looking at their program.

They want a State, all right. A nasty, vicious, lean, efficient one which enforces an ugly Christianity, and which is well funded enough to take up a total war with Islam. A state which sheds all of its welfare functions, privatizes highways, sell off state and national parks to private operators, and demolishes the Commons in their entirety.

These are people who actively promote the idea that Obama is a Kenyan socialist who has organized groups of black men to terrorize white people, and who is deliberately trying to scuttle middle (read, White) America in order to bring about a UN supervised socialist dictatorship.

These people are astroturfed into stupidity, and it wasn't really all that hard to do it. As was mentioned above - they are the heirs to the John Birch Society. Or often enough, youthful Birchers themselves.

ergo said...

I'm not sure I buy this argument. Hannity is the face of the Republican party. As such, they will claim the mantle of the Right, because there is popular sentiment to be exploited. Of course they hate the paleos who criticize them. This is no different from Daily Kos and god knows how many pwog sites claiming the mantle of the Left, who equally hate socialists and their own critics. They are all shilling for the duopoly. I'm more interested in the nonvoting half of the population anyway.

I think the part of your argument that I don't understand is your equation of the Tea Party wholesale with the Republican party. What is the basis for this? Because there are more party hacks than paleos in the general population? What about the paleos who nevertheless identify with the Tea Party? I was not aware that they had conceded the mantle of conservatism. Maybe you are distinguishing between the Right, conservatives, Tea Party, and Republicans in ways that aren't clear to me?

Jack Crow said...

ergo,

Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the money.

Look at who founded the Teaper orgs, who pays for them, and who promotes their message. These people were corralled by FreedomWorks, Americans For Prosperity, FOX News and the same old spectre of the fucking Scaifes.

They're not - not, not, not - some new phenom. You want to know who the Teaps are? They're the same demographic which zealously supported BushCo for eight years.

All those funding mechanisms come from "mainstream Republicans."

And the Teaps are not - I mean, seriously fucking NOT - non-voters.

I can't understand how you can watch what they're doing and conclude that the Teaps are some segment of non-voters.

ergo said...

Jack,

I agree with you that there are concentrations of power that have actively used their resources to promote organizing people in ways that entrench their own positions within the ruling class. I also agree that the Tea Party is not people who emerged from the aether three years ago.

But not to be totally dense here, I think your argument would better be served by saying "Republican voter" rather than "teap". Yeah they supported a Republican president and hated the Democratic presidents who preceded and followed him. They are hypocrites. Just like Democratic voters who hated Bush for all the things Obama is doing now that are just fine to them.

Are you saying Tea Party-identifiers have 100% voter turnout? I tried to find some stuff about this but I couldn't. Anyway, at this point I am more curious as to what your thoughts are on the following questions: Who constitutes the rest of the Republican voting base? What about the rightwing third partiers? And the rightwing nonvoters? How do you differentiate these groups from the Tea Partiers?

Landru said...

*facepalm*

But for you, friend Jack, nothing but thanks for rewarding and restoring my faith in you. Not that I ever took any of the otherside personally.

Cüneyt said...

ergo,

I agree with you that there are concentrations of power that have actively used their resources to promote organizing people in ways that entrench their own positions within the ruling class. I also agree that the progressives are not people who emerged from the aether three years ago.

But not to be totally dense here, I think your argument would better be served by saying "Democratic voter" rather than "pwoggie". Yeah they supported a Democratic president and hated the Republican presidents who preceded him. They are hypocrites. Just like Republican voters who hate Obama for all the things Bush was doing back then that were just fine to them.

Are you saying progressive-identifiers have 100% voter turnout? I tried to find some stuff about this but I couldn't. Anyway, at this point I am more curious as to what your thoughts are on the following questions: Who constitutes the rest of the Democratic voting base? What about the leftwing third partiers? And the leftwing nonvoters? How do you differentiate these groups from the progressives?

(A humble experiment; sorry to use your words.)

ergo said...

Cuneyt,

No apology necessary. I see your point but there are a couple things to point out here. Jack's post about progressives was rather explicitly connected to the fact that these are Donk voters. If he was making some blanket post about leftists that never once mentioned the Democratic party, I might have objected in a similar way.

Are Tea Partiers as pro-Republican as progressives are pro-Democrat? That's not really my impression, maybe they are, but what is the basis for this? Will they vote at the same proportions in the upcoming election? I guess we'll see. When Jack says the Tea Party needs liberals and vice versa, I understand this but only if he means Republican partisans need Democratic partisans. Frankly I'm more inclined to take seriously a rightist psychoanalysis of a Tea Partier the same way I would be more inclined to take seriously a leftist psychoanalysis of a progressive.

I am aware that I may have a skewed perspective. I read from the anarchist and anti-imperialist blogosphere, which includes leftists and paleocons, to the exclusion of mainstream and partisan media. Pretty much the only exposure I get to the M$M is whenever IOZ links to some NYT article or Crispy talks about what he saw on CNN. Call that willful ignorance if you like. I do it to maintain sanity.

Cüneyt said...

Your perspective's no more skewed than mine; neither of us knows the whole country, much less any preponderance of any politico-cultural group. So let me say it clearly: I'm talking out of my ass here.

All I can say is that my direct experience of the people in my life who attended Tea Party rallies, and the discussions I had with people afterward in the area, made me feel that they were as critical of the GOP as all those peace-sign wearing MFers at Obama rallies are now critical of the Obama wars.

There may be some exceptions to that; I wouldn't be surprised if many TPers are angry. Some of them have to be intelligent and honest enough to see that, but I feel they're about as common as are critics of the Obama campaign who were caught up in the swell of 2008.

That said, my bias comes from the fact that I use the deprecation of both TPers and Obamaniacs to get a lot of headway with local conservatives in the area and with my family. That may be a rhetorical fastpunch, but I am a political snake myself.

Cüneyt said...

Also, I don't know what a "fastpunch" is. I think my autopilot kicked on there. I'm sure my point is evident.

Jack Crow said...

Ergo,

Sean Hannity may be a mainstream Republican. Scratch that. He absolutely is. This is a guy who backed Giuliani and will go full court press for either Bachmann, Romney or Perry.

But, his listeners and followers are as clear a representation of the Teap movement as you can find, and they are all in one place.

If you watch Teap voting patterns, it's all for Republicans. 70% of the self-identify as Republicans, and I think 90% of them will vote for a Republican over a Democrat.

It's erroneous, I believe, to treat with the Tea Party as distinct from the Republican Party. In 2008, the GOP brand was shit. It had worse markers than that of frat boy vomit on a church lady's dress.

What did FreedomWorks and AFP do?

They coughed up a "new" brand.

ergo said...

But, his listeners and followers are as clear a representation of the Teap movement as you can find, and they are all in one place.

I agree with this to the extent that this is as clear representation of partisan mentality as you can find. Look I don't deny that Tea Party-identifiers vote overwhelmingly for Republicans. They coalesced around opposition to a Democratic president. Then DC hacks and their media servants went to work to make sure the narrative was about race or death panels or whatever that has nothing to do with our corporate overlords, in a sad attempt to deligitimate any principled decentralist, or anti-Wall Street, critique.

I am not saying that partisan voters have principles. They have none. This is true for Democrats and Republicans alike.

But all the stuff about marketing and labels, so what? Why did the Donksphere take on the progressive label? Because their brand was shit and there was popular sentiment to be exploited. Now progressive is more or less equivalent to Donk shill. Was this true in 2000 when self-identifying progressives were campaigning against Gore?

Let's take your statistics as given just for the sake of argument. What about the 10% who won't vote for a Republican over a Democrat? I assume at least some of these people aren't going to be pulling the lever for Obama. What about them?

Jack Crow said...

Ergo,

The point of corralling the Teaps is to keep them voting Republican. That's the what-for of the re-branding effort.

And I don't really see the point of introducing the outliers. Sure, 10% of Teaps won't vote for a Republican as a matter of habit. That makes them outliers, no?

If we focus on outliers, we miss the point of the vast majority, don't we?

ergo said...

I guess being an outlier myself, I am sympathetic to other outliers, be they on the left, right, anarchist, or underclass. I'd rather be pretty clear about who the obstructions are, especially if you are going to be psychoanalyzing them in ways that are, shall we say, (un)fairly brutal. The obstructions are duopoly partisans in my opinion. I have little to no interest in attacking nonvoters or even people considered fringe, because they have no power nor are they empowering others. Ask me again when the Third Palmetto Republic has successfully seceded and they try to impose a poll tax.

Talking about groups in ways that necessarily lump in the outliers with the partisans, I'd rather avoid. Cuneyt was right to point out how I'm being hypocritical here. If there are a number of self-identifying progressives advocating not participating in the charade of voting next year, then I will eat crow as it were. Likewise if there are no Tea Partiers willing to do the same. This is probably naively optimistic on my part, but I fully expect there to be the lowest voter turnout in history next year. Under 50% seems guaranteed, and if it hit 40% I would be fucking ecstatic. I find it difficult to believe that that would be possible if all the so-called Tea Partiers are participating. But maybe I'm wrong.

Anonymous said...

So all of Jack's "teaps" vote GOP.

big fucking deal.

since when does the GOP control what's happening in America right now?

since when has the "teap" (what a fucking IDIOTIC idea that monniker is, it is none but identity politics of an "I'm better than you" sort) had any power over the US Economy or political process or Fed Govt wrangling?

what's the practical connection here?

to make Susan of Texas and Landru and Big Bald Bastard feel "welcome" because you share their fucktard identity politics of NOT EVIL RETHUGLICAN?

jesus christ, what a charlatan you turned out to be.

at least you're not imitating me directly any more. grateful for that part.

Jack Crow said...

Ergo,

I don't think outliers communicate that much about the subject population group, is all. Most Americans are Christian. Replying to that fact with, "but I'm an atheist" doesn't really address the main point, which is that most Americans are Christians.

KFO,

You'll get over it. Or not. It is amusing that I'm a "tribalist" and a "charlatan" because I took on conservative shitwits, but it's all "right on, Jack!" when I'm infinitely nastier to liberals.