US Politics |OT|

[Shadow1980]

Some goose-stepping Gestapo agent summarily executes a citizen in cold blood in broad daylight with it being filmed with clear angles, and the usual "law & order" types still try to twist themselves into knots trying to justify a literal fucking murder. Shaking my goddamn head right now.

ICE is populated by bloodthirsty thugs who were looking for someone in power to give them an outlet to be the bullies they always wanted to be. Now they have a head of government who is a bloodthirsty bully himself who surrounds himself with bloodthirsty bullies. They enjoy inflicting violence and hurting people. They enjoy asymmetries in power they can exploit. We had Steven Miller and a bunch of other stooges and talking heads basically saying the U.S. can do whatever the hell it wants to do because they're bigger and stronger than everyone else. They don't give a shit about "law & order." They demonstrate that on a regular basis. They care only about power and domination. Imagine the stereotypical asshole jock that likes to shove smaller kids into lockers and shake others down for lunch money, but in this case the U.S. government is that asshole jock.

And like I said last week, there is arguably no constitutional basis for the federal government even being able to regulate immigration in the first place. ICE needs to be shut down, permanently. No replacement agency for it.

konnichiwa said:

Doesn't many of the programs and projects not started up in the first place by white cis males?  If non white non cis non males want those programs and many projets to continue why they don't pay they themself for it?  Why should white cis males have to force to pay for it? Let's just say it like it is even non whites don't want to pay for it. 

Its like the free pubilc transport program promises in NY.  It is nice to say but someone has to pay it and so far I know they are still not free in NY. (correct me if I am wrong)

Ignoring the not-so-subtle mocking for now, but we don't get to pick and choose what our tax dollars go towards like it's a buffet. That's never been how it works, and it will never work that way. You tax dollars will always go into a general fund. "I don't use it, so why should my taxes pay for it?" is not a valid argument. For example, I've heard people ask why they have to pay taxes for schools when they don't have any children or their children are all grown. Yes. Why indeed? Why shouldn't the government allocate some of its budget to fund educational facilities so we don't have a society full of ignorant people? You would think the answer is obvious. A functional democracy requires an informed electorate. They need to know more than just basic literacy and mathematics. They need to not just memorize but actually comprehend basic facts about science, history, economics, civics, geography, and so on. Business interests and religious authoritarians are directly threatened by education, and that's why they've spent decades undermining it in one way or another (and what is the GOP besides an unholy fusion of the most base, atavistic impulses of capitalism and fundamentalism?).

In regards to business interests, to quote George Carlin "They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago." To add to that, they don't want a population that understands how the physical world works, because the capitalists' business model requires people to be unaware that negative externalities even exist in the first place, as the tobacco, chemical, and fossil fuel industries demonstrate. I mean, if your business model is dependent on getting as many people as possible smoking as many cigarettes as possible, scientists discovering that smoking is really bad for public health isn't exactly good for business.

As for the religious authorities, throughout history they have likewise felt that science, archaeology, and other fields of study directly threaten their authority. Science has long had a knack for telling people things they don't want to hear, like "The Earth isn't the center of the universe," "The Earth is billions of years old," and "Humans share a common ancestry with all other living things." That's because they can no longer treat their holy book as literally true front and back and point to this or that passage to settle any and all arguments. That's why they've spent decades in just the U.S. trying to undermine the teaching of evolution, among other bullshit they do.

When they say "schools shouldn't be indoctrination centers," they're lying. They absolutely want schools to be indoctrination centers. They just want to be the ones indoctrinating people. I wouldn't expect anything less from Christian fundamentalists, given their historical track record going back literal centuries. They want every child to be good little Christian soldiers who never question the Bible and their preachers, because it's for the good of their souls and the soul of the nation. There's a reason why there's supposed to be a wall of separation of church and state, because whenever organized religion captures the levels of state power, the result is always disastrous. If someone wants to believe the Earth is 6000 years old or that gay people are possessed by demons or whatever, that's their prerogative, but those beliefs don't have a place in public schools. Curricula should be determined by educators and experts in the subject material, not some clueless parent who spends half the day watching Fox News being told that there's nefarious communist conspiracies lurking behind every corner trying to turn their kids into transgender Marxists or whatever.

Which brings me to the CPB. There's a very good reason for non-profit government-funded educational television to exist. But the problem is that impartial educational television doesn't mesh well with business interests. At the end of the day, every commercial television network is seen by the executives as a vehicle with which to sell ad space. They care about ratings and profits. We did once have major educational cable networks, but they all met the same fate as executives saw that reality TV was a huge cash cow. That's why "The Learning Channel" simply became "TLC" and became an outlet for slop like "Honey Booboo," "17 Kids and Counting," and "My 600-pound Life." Doesn't exactly leave much room for well-researched scientific or historical programs, now does it?

Outlets like PBS are important. But conservatives are threatened by it because they are threatened by education. That's why they want Big Bird replaced by Dennis Prager's slop in schools. They believe everything must serve the dual purposes of A) generating as much profit as humanly possible and B) producing a legion of barely-literate people incapable of critical thought and that are little more than blindly nationalistic worker drones who focus all of their frustrations on some marginalized group (typically immigrants, racial & religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ people) that serves as a scapegoat.