Rottcodd

Oh look - election season has officially kicked off with the DNC's first attempt at trying to guilt trip people into voting for their shitty candidate.

Expect many MANY more of these in the months to come.

It really takes a special kind of scumbag to decide that the proper strategy is to nominate a dismally corrupt and/or incompetent sack of shit then try to guilt trip people into voting for them and blame the voters if they lose, when they could just nominate a decent candidate and people would willingly and even eagerly vote for them and they'd win easily.

I sometimes wonder what it's like to be that entirely devoid of principles or integrity.

I imagine it involves a lot of alcohol.

Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore.

It's a satirical science fiction novel written in the 40s that, aside from the dated cultural references, might've been written today.

The MC and narrator is a salesman who answers an ad wanting someone to market a product that will make it so that plants can extract nutrients from virtually anything. The woman who created it envisions people in even the most barren areas being able to grow food regardless of the quality of their soil, but the MC believes that she's just a dumb woman who doesn't understand business, and obviously those people couldn't afford to pay enough for this product, so the better idea is to market it to suburban homeowners to put on their grass.

Which leads directly to the entire world being overrun by an unstoppable mutant strain of bermuda grass.

Throughout the entire chain of events, the MC remains completely oblivious to the threat facing humanity, and is instead entirely focused on profiting off the events. He's like every self-absorbed politician or corporate executive rolled into one, overtly bringing destruction to countless people in his blind pursuit of profit and privilege, and railing against anyone or anything that stands in his way.

And naturally, the people he meets pretty much universally loathe and detest him. And if he notices it at all, he ascribes it to their purported jealousy or envy or ignorance.

I've long been partial to orange tabbies and standard issue cats, but my current one - a stray that just showed up one day and moved in - is a tuxedo, and that just might be my new favorite.

The prettiest one I've had was a Siamese/tabby cross (also known as a lynx-point Siamese), She had classic Siamese markings and blue eyes, but instead of solid color points, her dark patches were gray tabby stripes.

I've found Goodreads to be a generally dependable source for synopses.

And that's it. I don't consider reading to be a competition to be won or lost, so all of the progress tracking stuff is pointless at best, and the reviews are some startlingly awful mix of egos vying for attention, edgelords trying to demonstrate how hiply counterculture they are and people who apparently can't even manage to communicate using words.

It's likely that if/when it closes down, I won't even notice.

The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

Yes - some number of people have melded religion and politics. There's nothing new in that.

But I'm talking about a different dynamic.

Religion is only in part, and arguably not even primarily,about deities and creation myths and such. To some significant degree, and arguably primarily, it's about establishing and maintaining a sense of identity and community, and providing self-affirmation. People adopt and practice religion in large part so that they can self-apply a label that represents a particular set of values and virtues that they wish to project, and so that they can surround themselves with, and gain positive feedback from, like-minded fellow believers.

To that end, each religion has a set of values and virtues that are presumed to be possessed by whoever wears their label, a designated community of believers, a set of beliefs to reassure the believers that theirs is the one true faith, and a designated set of enemies upon whom to blame all wrong and toward whom to direct their hatred, reinforcing both their sense of virtue and their sense of community.

And those things are the things for which a growing number of people in the west are turning to politicsl ideology. They've just filled all the gaps that would otherwise have been filled by traditional religion with secular counterparts. They still have a faith which they share with fellow believers, they still have a label they can wear to designate their faith, they still have tracts and preachers and their sermons, which are still alternately about the inherent correctness of their own faith and the evil of the heretics and unbelievers, they still have a set of morals by which they can maybe attempt to live their own lives, but much more importantly, against which they can judge others, and so on.

It's really all of the same sorts of things serving the same purposes - it's just different insofar as it's centered on politics instead of religion.

I don't think it's even particularly notable except insofar as so many seem to be completely unaware of it. In fact, I would say that that broad dynamic of seeking identity and community and self-affirmation by investing oneself in some specific belief system and joining with others who share those beliefs and thus that identity is one of the most common and basic human traits. For some reason, it's come to be associated (and often disparagingly) with traditional religion, but people actually do the same thing with any number of different ideas or credos.

And currently, and particularly in the west and particularly online, a significant number of people do it with politics.

My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.

So instead of going to church so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics, they go online so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics.

Seriously.

i was just about to post about that - my tuxedo also loves zipties and I have no idea why.

The thing that most stands out to me about Musk and his ilk isn't their hate - it's their cowardice.

If they would actually own their hate, I'd have some bare modicum of respect for them. At least then it would be a principled stance. A loathsome one to be sure, but at least principled.

But they're too cowardly and weak-willed for that. They're all telling it like it is and going their own way and fuck your feelings right up until someone calls them out on it, then they instantly turn into weepy schoolgirls moaning about how picked on and persecuted they are.

Of course he was - I'm sure it was understood and accounted for when he was hired that his job was to promote DeSantis to the Nazis, and if/when some shit hit the fan, he would be very publicly fired.

I'm sure it works just like police brutality firings, and he'll just get hired by a neighboring campaign.

At this point, every new day brings new things that are going to astonish future generations (if there are any).

They're going to look back and be amazed and repused by seemingly entirely inexplicable examples of our impossibly obvious stupidity and insanity.

Hey c'mon - he was on vacation, so he was doing what he loves most.

Megamind

Monty Python's Life of Brian

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Not Another Teen Movie