Newsflash for the intellectually challenged: guns are completely irrelevant!

There are certain topics which I really hate.  I hate them not inherently, not because they make me feel somehow uncomfortable, but because both sides of the issue are equally repulsive, self-righteous, ideological and totally stupid.  One such topics is "abortion rights".  Oh how much I hate both pro-lifers and pro-choicers!  But today I am going to vent about another topic which fills me with an overwhelming desire to, maybe, "shoot them all!"?

Gun control.

Rather than going into some fancy analysis (after all, I am only venting, not analyzing), I will just tell each side why I hate them so much.

Gun controllers - I hate you because:

a) You are totally obsessing over a completely irrelevant topic.  Yes, guns don't matter one bit in our society. They matter far less than cars, phones or computers.  And if you are going to give me that crap about guns killing people, I will ask you about "car control" or "obesity control".  Bottom line: you are like dumb sheep who follow the purely ideological agenda of your political leaders who instead of looking at the real issues want to have you all get upset about a topic which they, the "One Percenters", don't give a shit about.

b) Your entire outlook is predicated on a total fallacy: that regulating or banning guns will reduce violence.  In fact, it won't even reduce *gun* violence for a simple reason: gun violence is only legal when engaged in by representatives of the state, all other form of gun violence are illegal.  And since the action itself is illegal, it is hardly going to be controlled by making illegal the acquisition of the implement needed for the illegal action.  Got it?

c) You are confusing everything and anything: automatic weapons with semi-auto, clips sizes with calibers, hollow-point rounds with "cop killer" ammo, assault rifles with submachine guns, submachine guns with machine guns, and I won't even go to hunting rifles or knives (which most of you also want to regulate/ban).   Most of you see an AR-15 semi-auto and think of it as an "military assault rifle".  The fact is you don't care one bit about the "firearms" or "guns" you want to ban, as long as you get to "disarm the brutes" (or so you think).  You always begin with "military weapons" (whatever that means) and you end up banning knives and box cutters!

Gun righters - I have you because:

a) You are actually dumb enough to say with a straight face that giving guns to people will protect them from tyranny.  Let me break it to you: not only have their been plenty of tyrannical regimes which were more than happy to distribute guns, a single platoon of well-trained government goons will easily wipe-out several hundred of gun-toting civilians who would be dumb enough to challenge them.

b) For all your "concealed carry license" and gun magazines, you fail to realize that 99% of all folks out there cannot defend themselves with a gun.  Not with a handgun, not with a rifle, not with an assault rifle.  Most folks can only miss and freak out. If you had any common sense you would realize that a dog is far, *FAR* better defense against violence (including gun violence) than a frigging gun.  Let me break it to you again: there is a darn good reason why cops regularly go to the shooting range - guns are hard to use.  And then, look at how often even trained cops end up doing God knows what (mostly miss, run and duck) when in a shoot-out.

c) Most of you cretins think that guns are somehow patriotic.  They are not.  They are just tools, implements, devices.  They are no more "American" than knives or even fly-swatters.  The only thing truly American about guns is the mental dysfunction which consists of thinking of guns are patriotic.  In other, civilized, countries guns are simply no big deal.

A couple of days ago I saw this cretin Obama standing with is VP offering a new set of gun control measures.  Half of the morons reacted with delight, half with outrage.  And ever since the airwaves are filled with a deluge of imbecilic statements about guns.  What is really happening, of course, is this:

The USA is ruled by a tiny plutocracy which holds total power over society.  There are no liberals here, and no conservatives.  All I see is *serfs* who must toil in increasingly worsening conditions to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.  And in order to create the ILLUSION of a political life, the One Percenters simply toss in the "gun control" issue, so the pseudo-liberals can "feel liberal" and the pseudo-conservatives can "feel conservative".  And as long as you morons keep on taking that kind of nonsense seriously, you are doing exactly what the One Percenters want you do to: arguing about a completely irrelevant topic while your masters are laughing at you.

Wake up guys,  you are being conned!  Stop it!

The Saker

A disgusting "fuite en avant" with devastating consequences

The French have a wonderful expression which is hard to translate into English:fuite en avant. This expression can roughly be translated as "flight forward", or "headlong rush", "panic-induced compulsion to further exacerbate a crisis or calamity" or even "unconscious mechanism that causes a person to throw himself/herself into a dreaded danger".  No matter how one translates this expression, it is painfully obvious that this is exactly what took place in yesterday's elections in the USA: a sickening, disgusting electoral fuite en avant.

Only an thorough analysis of the many decades of immoral and incompetent political rule by both Parties could truly explain what happened yesterday, but even a look at the comparatively recent acceleration into chaos and debacle is already a good indicator of the causes of the current disaster.

Bush (I am talking about "Junior" here) and Obama will enter the history books as the two President who totally and shamefully squandered a truly historical opportunity to achieve otherwise impossible results.

Following the events of 9/11 the entire world united behind the USA in an absolutely unprecedented show of sympathy and support for the USA.  This was when the French socialist newspaper "Le Monde" had a headline saying "Nous sommes tous des Americans" (We are all Americans) and one million people demonstrated in the streets of Tehran to express their heartfelt support for the victims of the tragedy in New York.  It took the Neocon's boundless arrogance, imperial hubris, crude illiterate "cow-boy" "diplomacy", xenophobic nationalism and narcissistic condescension to alienate the entire planet to never heard of before levels of anti-Americanism.  Following eight years of such horror, the world naively mistook Obama for a quasi-messiah, the man who would somehow change it all and bring back an old USA (which never really existed, but nevermind that).

Obama (who had campaigned on an explicit promise to double the size of the US special operations forces and to increase of the US Army by 4 divisions!) was even given a Nobel Peace Prize before having actually done anything at all.  Yet literally from day one, Obama back-stabbed his voters by betraying almost every promise he had made.  The "yes we can!" and "change you can believe in!" brand salesman turned into an ugly and equally evil "Bush the Third" kind of President: a puppet of Wall Street, a puppet of the Israel Lobby, a puppet for the military-industrial complex, a puppet for the billionaires, a puppet for Big Pharma and Big Oil - a puppet for everything which is destroying the USA as a country and makes it hated by the rest of the planet.  So one can hardly blame the American public for being "angry with Washington".  But what is sickening is not the public's anger, but what it chose to do with this anger.

If the Republicans are quite literally the party of open and unapologetic evil, then the so-called "Tea Party" is the militantly lunatic faction of that already quite demented party.  I am not referring to all the policy "solutions" which the Tea-Partiers are advocating here, but to the kind of illiterate, ignorant, angry and frightened base instincts which they appeal to.  This is Bush's nationalism, only squared.  This is Reagan's "government is the problem", only pushed to even more absurd extremes ("Obamacare" is described as "socialism" by people who have absolutely no concept of what the word "socialism" means!).  While originally the Tea Party did have some real libertarian roots, it was rapidly co-opted and fully taken under control by the behind-the-scenes "Big Business" (the Koch brothers, Carl Rove, etc.).  Just like Hitler used illiterate morons for his SA, so will US Big Business use the "Tea Partiers" as the stormtroopers to further weaken the state and strengthen the corporate control over the USA.

All this really begs the question of how stupid Americans really are, does it not?

The truth is that stupidity does not explain what is going on.  Sure, the entire propaganda structure of the US society (from a lobotomizing school system, to 4+ hours of TV exposure each day, to an almost overt cult of ignorance and illiteracy - many did vote for Dubya, remember?) has greatly contributed to the "stupidification" of the American public.  But that's only part of the story.  What is no less important is the absolute moral bankruptcy of the US society.

Think about it: this is a society which suffers from what a friend of mine calls an "acute compassion deficit disorder".  This country has the highest per capita ratio of people in prison and male rape is considered an unofficial but widely accepted form of torture for prisoners and most Americans think: screw them!  They deserve it.  Obey the law and you will not be raped.  This country has an immense population of homeless and poor, many of whom hold one or several jobs, and what do most Americans think?  Screw them!  They are welfare bums!  Medical problems are one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy and homelessness?  Screw them!  We don't want "socialist" healthcare in our "free" nation!  The world hates the USA?  Screw it! We brought these ungrateful bastards freedom and prosperity and they hate us?  We will kick their sorry asses! Etc. etc. etc.  This is the kind of ideology which permeates the ideological fabric of this ugly society.

Mind you, the very same people who mindlessly parrot all these slogans will also show a lot of sincere generosity and compassion towards their fellow-citizens when they see them.  Primarily, this "compassion deficit disorder" is an ideological phenomenon, not an expression of an individual morality.  But then, the vast majority of Germans during WWII also retained their individual sense of decency and compassion, its collectively that they acted like vicious beasts.

Americans even display this blinding ideology to "screw" themselves.  Just look at the State of California in which a proposition to legalize marijuana was defeated.  California is completely bankrupt, its jails are over-filled many times over, and weed is smoked all over the state.  Anybody sane would therefore conclude that 99.99999% of Californians would agree to legalize marijuana, tax it and thereby take away the profits from the drug dealers and place them into a dying state.  But no - Californians voted to keep their jails filled with non-violent offenders, to keep the drug trade up and running, to keep their state bankrupt and to have the Federal authorities further raid the providers of medical marijuana (which is legal under state law).  How stupid can anybody get?!

You want another example?  Florida is a state totally devastated by promoters of urban sprawl, rabid and unplanned growth, and by a massive - and probably irreparable - destruction of Florida's water supply (no, not for drinking, but for watering golf courses and providing cheap water for industry).  And yet, Floridians soundly *defeated* a proposition which was supposed to give them the right to vote on any changes to local comprehensive land use plans (Proposition 4).  Yes, Floridians voted *not* to have such rights.  How stupid can anybody get?!

One thing is clear: the immense disillusion with Obama has resulted in a devastating backlash into a new era of triumphant Fascism and lunacy.  For the rest of the world, this basically means, more of the same, only worse.

At a time when banks are hoarding their assets and credit is dead, the US government will not inject more money into the economy, it will further make cuts into budgets even if that means utterly destroying an already moribund US economy.  You can count on the Tea Partiers to push the USA into a full-scale and lasting depression by essentially asphyxiating the US economy.  This, in turn, will negatively impact the rest of the world or, at least, that part or the world which still sheepishly follows the "Washington consensus" and its suicidal policies (Europe anybody?!)

US imperial policies will only get worse.  When real unemployment is somewhere in the range of 20% or more, and 40-50% for Blacks, you can be sure that the ranks of the military will swell with more angry jarheads ready to take on any "sand nigger" who dares to sit on the oil Americans 'need' to drive all their big SUVs.  The war on Iran is on, my friends, make no mistake about it.

And if fictional terrorist plots a la "shoe bomber", "undies bomber", "Times Square bomber" or the latest Yemeni "Postal bombers" do not do sufficiently terrify the general public, you can expect another false-flag operation a la 9/11 which will usher in yet another era of hysteria, fear and aggression.

Eventually, of course, the USA will collapse under the weight of its own self-defeating hubris and idiocy.  But in the meantime, things will get very, very ugly indeed.  This is the inevitable consequence of any fuite en avant.

The Saker