The genocide of US LGBT+ folks is in progress

Conservatives know that the political climate is not right just yet to start mass arresting or massacring LGBT folks (stages 8 and 9 of genocide). But by passing laws to strip away their rights and to literally silence their voices and act like they don't merit being treated like human beings, pretty much every Republican-dominated state is at least at stage 6.

For years, many decent people have pooh-poohed warnings that the country was going in this direction. "Overreaction," "Exaggeration," "Don't be hysterical"...

The problem is that decent people tend to lack the imagination of sociopaths. They assume that almost everyone is as decent as them and that the aberrents are too few and disparate to engage in anything worse than the odd individual act of depravity.

When sociopathy is normalized and they become numerous enough to seize power structures, a nightmare is what follows. And we are headed in that direction, mark my words.

(Pseudo-)Christian theocrats, funded by US extremists, are already doing a test run in Africa.

Republicans want to eradicate LGBT people and they're not hiding it

Many Americans who should have known better were slow to pick up on the warning signs of fascism, which have been obvious for years.

Whenever signs of rising fascism were signaled, centrists, who controlled with an iron grip both the Democratic Party until recently and the punditocracy, would often dismiss such concerns with Godwin's Law, issue warnings about "unhelpful exaggeration", mouth pieties about "civility" and, most pernicious of all, engage in morally repugnant both sides-ism.

Now, it is crystal clear that much of the right wants nothing less than the eradication of LGBT people. The "mainstream" (whatever that means these days) of the right will deny say, couching their bigotry and oppression under the vile deceit of protecting children. But some of their ilk - here's an example - drops the pretense and utters right-wing's vicious intentions out loud.

It's long past time we believe them.

People's fundamental humanity is well beyond the privilege of "agree to disagree."

Fascism is destroying us from the bottom up

 When I saw this PBS article about the Republicans' normalization of violent rhetoric, it reminded me of how broad the GOP's war on decency is.

The most evil part of this is who it targets.

They no longer limit themselves to presidents and governors and other high ranking politicians who, frankly, expect quite a bit of nastiness as part of the job but accept it as the price of their ambition.

Fascist/Trumpist rhetoric is increasingly targeting ordinary people doing fairly low-profile jobs: elections bureaucrats, teachers, public health workers, (unpaid) school board members. 

 

It's a no-holds barred war to destroy our country from the grassroots by targeting the very people who make our communities function.

Punish the first coup attempt so there isn't a second one

On this first anniversary of the terrorist insurrection that tried to overthrow Joe Biden's comfortable 2020 election win and with a second coup clearly in the works, remember this. 

 

Although it was a ham-fisted coup attempt, Weimar German authorities did not adequate punish the white supremacist fascist authors of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. They barely got a slap on the wrist. A few months in jail for treason and attempting to overthrow the republic. Enough to make them invent more grievance against the democrats (lowercase d) but not enough to deter them. 

 

They didn't fail the second time. 

 

Within a decade, they fabricated an excuse to seize absolute power - an attack on their national legislature building, mind you - and eventually genocide and world war.

The 'labor shortage' is due to the lack of 'positive work cultures', not laziness

The Lake George Mirror newspaper had an interesting interview with Lisa Ochsendorf, director of the Warren County Employment and Training Administration. She pointed out that higher unemployment benefits had little impact on the available labor pool in the county.

"We saw only about 300 people rejoin the workforce in August and September," when jobless benefits ran out, she said. 

She pointed out that the workforce is roughly the same size as in September 2019, prior to the pandemic, and that the size of the full-time workforce has been "remarkably stable for the past two decades." 

"We keep hearing that people don't want to work but that's not really the case," she pointed out. "COVID is an issue. Child care is an issue."

She added a point that is common sense among workers but seemingly controversial among the pundit class: in order to attract and retain workers, employers must create "positive work cultures."

Undocumented immigrants have a lower crime rate than US citizens

Today we celebrate the event in which undocumented immigrants arrived in this land and were welcomed and fed by the native peoples. We all know what the immigrants did next. 

 

I am grateful that today's undocumented immigrants act with more respect toward folks already here than those who arrived 400 years ago.

The only Republican ideology is nihilism

The idiocy of one puppet attacking another is too absurd to bother commenting on itself.

But the nuclear war against efforts to overcome COVID and finally bring our society back to something approaching normal is a perfect illustration of the destructiveness of the Trumpism. They were lying when they said #AllLivesMatter.

 

It is a further illustration is that their only concern is to sabotage these efforts to undermine the recovery and harm Democrats chances of retaining Congress in 2022. Their governors are working quite effectively to this end.

To put their own jobs ahead of the greater good is not entirely new in politics. But to do so on a literally life or death matter that is harming their own base far more than the opposition's shows that their approach is not only vile and inhumane but stupid and self-defeating.

It's no surprise that the three or four vaguely reasonable Republican governors out there want nothing to do with the national death cult (who, of course, wants to cancel them for the disobedience).

The former Republican Party's only ideology is nihilism. They have literally nothing offer except rage. They can't even bring themselves to denounce violence or threats of violence. Even as their own supporters die in the meantime.

Conservatives are better than liberals at organizing

A few days ago, I read an article expressing surprise that school boards became a major battleground in 2021. The author, as they say, must be new here. School boards have been an integral part of the right-wing culture wars for nearly half a century, back when they were railing against the "homosexual agenda" with their extremist demands about gay not being beaten up or outright lynched. It's no surprise that the current rage at school board meetings is neither grassroots nor spontaneous.

 

Conservatives have always had much better organization at the local levels, though, as the article points out, this hardly means the efforts are grassroots. Liberals have tended to focus almost exclusively on the "sexier" national and state issues. Conservatives thus win by default in the areas that most directly affect people's daily lives.