by stickdog99 » Wed Oct 07, 2020 5:32 pm
Worse still, having constant up-to-date knowledge of our increasingly bizarre and byzantine establishment narratives (and kabuki in-fighting) is now what passes for being "politically informed."
Among our "political cognoscenti", any illustration of the clear corruption, rampant hypocrisy, and intellectual bankruptcy of both establishment branches on any issue and/or any opinion outside of expressly sanctioned Blue vs. Red blood-feuding is ignored as the ravings of a politically ignorant lunatic. Incontrovertible truths have no purchase unless they can utilized to fuel the fire of pro/anti-Trumpism.
Here is a post I made in March. It's still relevant:
The spread of COVID-19 is somehow your personal responsibility. Dealing with economic effects of COVID-19 is also your personal responsibility. Unless, of course, you are an oligarch or one of the oligarch handmaidens we call our "government representatives." In that case, you deserve trillions to tide you over through a crisis "nobody could have possibly predicted."
Since at best all we are doing by hiding from our fellow neighbors in the face of any communicable respiratory disease is "flattening the curve" of our population infection rate at the expense of our quality of life and the entire economic livelihoods and financial reserves of millions of individuals, the priority of any rational government would have been to long ago ensure the ability of its healthcare system to respond to the effects of any especially deadly flu pandemic. Had this somehow not been done long ago, the current situation would of course force such steps to be implemented immediately on an emergency basis.
My personal assessment about shelter-in-place regulations for COVID-19 is that this policy, while at least temporarily prudent, is 100% typical of the socialism-for-oligarchs and rugged-individualism-for-working-people political system that all Americans live under. Our entire debate about this issue has been limited to whether we should listen to Democratic "leaders" like Governor Cuomo and Governor Newsom and hide in our houses for the next 18 months while depleting all of our life savings in our desperate efforts to hoard toilet paper or whether we should instead heroically sacrifice our lives in order to keep supplying our cheap labor to further enrich our oligarch bosses' portfolios.
This is perfectly emblematic of the Demopublican choice we are constantly offered at the ballot box. Should average Americans further sacrifice (1) our standard of living and political rights or (2) our very lives to enrich our oligarchs? Depending our exact locality, our political choices have devolved into "risk death to enrich our bosses or starve" or "risk arrest by violating the conditions of our perpetual home imprisonment or starve." We are asked either to join a death-cult that explicitly seeks to sacrifice the lives of millions on the altar of hypercapitalism or an authoritarian cult that demands we sacrifice our economic, social, and privacy rights, as well as our right to assemble and protest, on the altar of "one less" COVID-19 victim. While we debate the Procrustean choice we have been presented, our one Demopublican party is unified only in its rush to use yet another (at least largely) manufactured crisis to open the gates of our treasury to each and every one of our oligarch masters. No Lobbyist Left Behind.
Note that under no circumstance are we allowed to ask our government to do anything significant to help us. No, the onus is instead almost completely on each and every average American struggling to survive. If we can't afford the outrageous cost of health insurance, then that is our fault and we deserve to die. If we can't afford the outrageous cost of housing, that is our fault and we deserve to live in the gutter. If we can't afford the necessities of life, that is our fault because we didn't plan far enough ahead. If we can't earn a living and manage to survive comfortably while hiding away in our houses indefinitely, that is our fault for not having sufficiently prepared for ourselves for the cybernetic dystopian future that Hollywood unceasingly warmed us about. If we contract COVID-19 and get seriously ill or die, that is our fault for interacting with other humans or objects touched by other humans without immediately dipping our hands in the precious cytoplasmic membrane exploding chemicals we should have stockpiled.
On the other hand, our joblessness and the loss of half of our retirement savings and all of our rainy day savings while we weather this storm by hiding at home are nobody's fault because, of course, nobody could have possibly predicted the genesis of a slightly more deadly form of the flu.
The ill effects of this crisis and to a large degree the entire governmental response to this crisis have been offloaded on us by our government leaders to become the personal responsibility of each individual American. The role of our government leaders in this crisis is limited to maximizing their investment returns through their insider trades while arresting any of us who dare breach our personal responsibility to keep our fellow citizens healthy by imprisoning ourselves indefinitely.
However, in reality, this whole situation is roughly equivalent to a corrupt Chicago mayor who tells everyone to stay at home until spring because "nobody could have predicted this bad of a snowstorm" and then proceeds to use this "crisis" to allow his cronies loot the city's treasury.
