SJA #13 - 27 August 2018 - The Parties Are Not the Same

The Rant - The Parties Aren't the Same
There are two kinds of centrists and they both piss me off. The first are the right-wing douches like Carl Benjamin and Dave Rubin, assholes who are too afraid, dishonest, and/or pig-ignorant to realize they're right wing. Benjamin might just be that ignorant, but I'm convinced Rubin is just dishonest.

But it's the other group that's got me pissed off today; the group that says the two parties are the same so there's no point voting.

How fucking blind would you have to be to actually think that?! Setting aside the people who are just avoiding stating their opinions because they're afraid to stand up for their convictions, there are people who actually think this? Unless they're all just scared.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not here to sing the praises of the Democrats; they're beholden to corporate money, they're an entrenched interest run by the upper class... in a word, they're corrupt.

But come on! The Dems at least try! They know that racism, misogyny, and homophobia are wrong even if they're not willing to actually fight them! They at least have a wing of the party that forces them to care a little about people's suffering!

The Republicans though? They're assholes! An alliance of two kinds of villains! They're the KKK on the one hand and naked greed on the other! They're every movie and TV illain for the last 40 years, at least the ones without super powers. Hell, even a few of the ones with powers!

The Republican Party openly wants people to suffer and is actively working to destroy democracy around the globe! Some of them are only in it for profit, but the rest are doing it because of their sincerely held religious belief that some people are naturally inferior and/or evil and must suffer here on Earth before getting shipped off to hell to suffer for the rest of eternity!

The Democrats are terrified of change, they're run by short-sighted clowns who are very comfortable with the status quo and wish all those "identity" people would quit rocking the boat, but at least they recognize that some things are wrong and should probably change!

And there are a lot of really fucked up things that the Republicans do that the Democrats just don't!

Like preventing people from voting! Thuglicans have packed the courts with the sort of ideological assholes even they would accept 30 years ago, activists so naked in their hypocrisy that Bork would blush, and that's why the fascists can get away with purging voter rolls without notice and shutting down polling places in Democratic districts! And they're so goddamn willing to accept a victory, no matter the source, that they've stalled a bill meant to safeguard our elections from foreign interference! And all that's on top of the gerrymandering so frozen that judges are calling them on it! Democrats try, but they've got nothing on Confederates when it comes to gerrymandering.

And Democrats don't staff government with people fundamentally opposed to the duty of their office! No pacifists in the Department of Defense, no vegans overseeing the ranchers, no antivaxxers or "alternative med" quacks in the CDC. But the Thuglicans just can't seem to help it, they've got a whole army of Umbridges in the wings ready to dismantle the oversight that prevents their bullshit. Oil lobbyists in the EPA, fundamentalist home-schooler Devocs in Education, the guy who wants to dismantle Energy (Rick Perry, who didn't even know that Energy manages our nukes) in charge of Energy, and a fucking asbestos lobbyist who's in the process of legalizing fucking asbestos! Dems just don't do this Orwellian shit!

And taxes! Forget what the fascists say, Dems haven't put a new tax in place in decades, but they're not doing the Thuglican shit. They keep cutting taxes, but only for the wealthy! Meanwhile, they have to keep the budget balanced, so they shift the burden to everyone else! That's why the middle class is disappearing and the poor are getting poorer; the rich are paying less and less! The Dems just don't do that!

And they're not goddamn Nazis! How the fuck is anyone blind to this? How the fuck is anyone okay with this?! Every other year, literal actual Nazis keep voting, campaigning, and running as Republicans! I'm not just talking about Trump and his "very fine people"! I'm talking about open, uniformed Nazis on the ballot as Republicans in 2018! I'm talking about Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who framed a journalist for attempted murder and opened actual concentration in the desert! Sheriff Joe Arpaio who was convicted of contempt of court and pardoned by Trump, who went ahead and opened his own concentration camps! FOR CHILDREN.

I'm talking about Nazis in the goddamn White House! Like Steve Bannon, who told the holocaust-denying far-right party in France that "history is on our side", who courted the same alt-right that marched and murdered in Charlottesville, who Trump called "very fine people", the Steve Bannon whose rag of a newspaper likes to bracket some names with little globes so their readers know they're talking about evil, globalist Jeeews.

I'm talking about Donald fucking Trump! The Democrats didn't elect Trump! TWICE. The Democrats aren't supporting him, aren't protecting him, aren't propping up his shit agenda and policies. The Republicans are the ones still showing up at his goddamn rallies, still kissing the ring of that piece of shit racist, misogynist, transphobic, anti-semitic, rapist thief!

The Dems are a conservative, right-wing party, but they're not Republicans, not by a long shot. Anyone who says the two parties are the same is either dangerously ignorant or a pitifully slack-jawed liar. Either way, don't trust them with anything sharp or heavy.

• Rant: The Parties Aren't the Same - 01:03
• Preventing people from voting
• Shutting down polling places
• Blocking election protection
• Purging voter rolls
• Putting Umbridge in charge of Hogwarts
• Appointing anti-cabinet cabinet
• Fox in the henhouse: Asbestos Edition
• Regressive taxation
• Literal nazis in the party
• Very fine people
• Nazis running for office
• Steve Bannon
• History is on our side
• Courting the alt-right
• Tagging Jews in headlines
• Donald Trump
• Racist
• Misogynist
• Transphobe
• Anti-Semite
• Timeline to 2016
• "Globalists"
• "Sleepy-Eyes"
• Rapist
• Thief
• Trump University
• Screwing contractors
• Bankruptcies and shells
• Trump golfing
• Secret Service Broke
• Diplomats at Trump Hotels
• News
• Kavanaugh is even worse than you thought. He's a eugenecist, a slaver, a nazi. He's a Republican. - 06:05
• Truth isn't truth - 10:16
• Prison strike - 12:17
• John McCain is dying dead, still scum - 14:08
• Amoral is the best you can hope for - 16:25
• Lindsey Graham, still a coward - 18:00
• Manslaughter for Flint Official! - 19:31
• No more period poverty in Scotland - 20:50

SJA #12 - 20 August 2018 - Don't Trust Revolutions

Episode Transcript:

Intro - 0:00
Hello and welcome to another week. Remember, the work week is a fiction, Monday doubly so; you can get rid of them if you really want to. This is Social Justice Alchemy.

[Me rocking some arpeggios.]

Rant - 0:30
So, just imagine: there you are living your peaceful, happy life here in the US, then in comes an alien invader that kills and enslaves, like, 90% of the US is wiped out through genocide both accidental and deliberate. The aliens move in and start tearing everything apart. Everything we've built is erased, paved over with alien culture and technology. Sights, sounds, smells, everything is this alien cacophony of stink.

The aliens are jerks to each other, too. They're bringing in slaves and servants who they treat like garbage. They live in squalor as bad as yours.

And then the aliens go to war. Not with Canada or Mexico, but with each other. See, while they were slaughtering you and your family, and importing slaves and the servant caste, and setting up these massive estates and fiefdoms, the homeworld was ignoring them. There was no profit in screwing with them. But now? Now they're established and have money.

So what does this war mean for you? Not a damn thing! The local aliens are genocidal slave-owning bastards. The distant aliens are genocidal slave-owning bastards. It's old money alien aristocrats trying to assert control over new money local alien aristocrats. You can try siding with one group or the other, trying to negotiate a better position, but really, what are you really gonna get from slave-owning genocidal bastards?

And then the war's over. Local aliens won. So they go ahead and set up a government giving themselves power, ignoring their servants, their slaves, and you. Since they're not members of the homeworld ruling class, they congratulate themselves for being so forward-thinking. Hooray! They've replaced their old, distant alien aristocracy with a new, local alien aristocracy. Sooo radical.[/sarcasm]

Now, some of you (a lot of you) will have already realized what I'm going for here: the US Revolution was not radical or progressive. It was liberal, in that it set up this individualist pro-capitalist so-called pseudo-democracy. It confirmed the authority of the landed aristocracy that settled itself in the colonies. It gave power only to wealthy white men, ignoring women, people of color, natives, slaves, and the poor.

I mean, the reason the 3/5ths Compromise was acceptable was because the northern nobility were already voting and ruling on behalf of their disenfranchised servants. The reason the northern aristocracy objected to the southern aristocracy being able to vote on behalf of their slaves is because slaves were a lot cheaper than servants, meaning that they could have a lot more slaves. That's it. So the reason they came up with the compromise: that's what they worked out, y'know, what a slave cost versus what a servant cost.

Now, the Patriots didn't call themselves aristocrats; they pretended to meritocracy just like wealthy people do today, that they had "earned" their wealth. They replaced a feudal aristocracy with a capitalist aristocracy.

Revolutions always come back around to where they started. Don't trust them. And don't think of the US as something new, something different, something great. It was a modification of the old to put power into the same hands. That's all. They then set about establishing the exact same kind of evil empire it had just left.

Or in the words of Terry Pratchett: "Ave duci novi, similis duci seneci!" = "Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss!"

The US has never been particularly liberal. It has never been radical or progressive. It has never been great. It's been more of the same. We really need to fundamentally alter the way the United States is set up if we want to see genuine progress, genuine human rights, genuine support for human rights, a genuinely benevolent system of government. Let's move on to the stories.

• Review: The Witcher - 4:45
• I am rage - 6:36
• Ongoing US-Backed Genocide in Yemen - 8:42
• Wikipedia article
• US Bombing Children... again
• Pharyngula Phlashbacks
• Provocative Posing is the Problem? - 12:10
• What is N170?
• Sexual objectification is in the pose
• Pose article
• What's the difference, I wonder? - 18:00
• Muslim terror camp
• Catholic terror organization
• Children still separated - 21:07
• Trump finally cancels parade - 23:08
• Healthcare for 500 million - 25:38

SJA #11 - 13 August 2018 - No Religion, Too

SJA #10 - 6 August 2018 - Astrology FTL

• Ramble - Astrology Inaction
• India targeting ethnic minorities for statelessness
• Why women might not tell men to stop
• Kidnap them, yes, but don't drug them, you monster
• Remember, the empire exports its bigotry
• Better mileage is for pussies. States' rights, too.
• Zimbabwe not quite over Mugabe
• Hawaii
• Cruze could lose