Happy Trails!

 

Is it just me, or has The Atlantic become our one-stop shop for tone-deaf shit takes? My current favorite clunker concerns the fascist abortion law in Texas, and its potential to turn out the vote for the Democrats. Yeah, that's right — Texas has gone full-on fascist with this shit, a fistful of other states are reportedly considering going that way, and the Democrats' number one priority is — exploiting encroaching fascism to rustle up votes and money for the midterms, and herd the Left back into the Party. Git along, little dogies. H'yahhh.

if you are playing games with repoduction rights to stick it to the other side in the midterms then you're not fighting for anyone's rights, you're fighting for your own power. And while we see you doing nothing in power except offering empty promises for when you get more, no

— vegan honk thinks it's fucked, @VeganHonk666 on Twitter

C'mon, Trigger, we can still ketch 'em...! Yippie Ty yi yayy!

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Stealing Our Souls

 

There's a new strain of Covidiot virus going around among healthcare workers — proof that Stupid can strike any of us, though if you consider how long it takes to become a doctor vs. how long it takes to become a nurse, it all makes sense.

There have been a couple of outbreaks of the new Stupid Variant in the past week, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and in New York. A close read of the thread in which Max Blumenthal tweets the NYT article tells me, personally, that Blumenthal is about to dive down the anti-vax rabbit hole if he hasn't already. He seems to imply at one point that PhD's were among the most reluctant to take the vaccine, which proves nothing except that having a PhD doesn't make you immune to the Stupid Variant — nor does not being a Trumpster.

But, back to the outbreaks of Covidiot Virus. You know how back in the 1970s and '80s you'd read every so often about some National Geographic documentary crew going deep into the Amazon jungle or someplace and encountering some tribe that's lived in isolation for a thousand years, and they see the cameras and video images of themselves for the first time and freak out because they think the cameras are stealing their souls? Well, how different is that from these doorknobs who think that Bill Gates is putting microchips in vaccines, or that taking cow dewormer and shitting out your stomach lining will cure Covid-19?

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Afghan Women's Liberation no. 2 (or, Won't Somebody Think Of The Women?)

 

When the US first set out inflicting two decades of destruction and misery on Afghanistan the Liberals, true to the old Phil Ochs song, were never more red, white and blue — and the Liberals' most appallingly cynical appeals for support for that debacle came from the "imperial Feminists" who tried to tug our heartstrings with horror stories about burqas, illicit nail salons, and no HBO. 

So, it was no surprise when America's Imperial Feminists picked up where they left off, joining the chorus of bitching, pissing, moaning and sour-graping about their being run out of Afghanistan, reviving the tired old bromides about women's rights and how the US "left women behind" when it dragged its bloody ass out of the place after twenty years in the Graveyard Of Empires.

The most unctous of these was an article in The Atlantic which dragged out every one of those tired old arguments, hoary old horseshit so old it's got SCSI ports on the back. What was merely appalling twenty years ago is absolutely godawful today, considering the current abuse of working-class women in the US, and in US satellite states like Saudi Arabia:

One reason that we stayed in Afghanistan so long with nothing to show for it except the safety of women, @CaitlinPacific writes, is that for all of our sins, our default position is freedom.

—The Atlantic, @theatlantic on Twitter, 08.19.2021

Says on the author's profile that she traffics in "thought crimes for all occasions". I wouldn't know about that, but that article of hers sure is a goddamn crime, I'll tell ya that for free.

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