IT wasn't Covid-19 but it was quite a bad virus that I got. Thank God that it wasn't something that required hospitalization. I can't imagine what it's like in those places that didn't take New York's and Washington State's early crises with Covid as a warning to take adequate precautions to avoid the deadly consequences of having their hospitals overflowing with Covid cases. Imagine having a heart attack or a bad accident there, right now.
I know in the de-religionized, secularized, sciency regime that rules right now it's forbidden to take the experiences we have as warnings or teaching opportunities, we're just supposed to shrug and say "shit happens". But that's a pretty stupid way to look at things because how we learn or choose not to learn from experience AND ACCORDINGLY CHANGE OUR BEHAVIOR, OUR LAWS, AND OUR PRACTICES very often makes a huge difference in the outcome. Recent days there have been a number of stories about studies of what might have been if we didn't have a bunch of pathological gangsters in charge of the federal and many state governments, by the end of the year there may be a quarter of a million Americans who would have been alive to see in 2021 if even the simplest measures, masks, social distancing, banning spreader events and occasions had been in place and encouraged by the media instead of the utterly insane situation when the mass media, FOX, Sinclair, hate-talk radio, pathologically fascist podcasts, etc. had been suppressed.
More practically, why bother making such bad mistakes and so many of them if you're going to be too stubbornly stupid to learn from them? How stupid do you have to be to fail to learn from observed experience? But such are most of the best and brightest among us. Look at how few of the Coney Barret Super Spreader Event Republican fascists have learned a damned thing.
One of the biggest learning opportunities of my lifetime, the very age of "liberty" of a childish and naive form of "freedom" has been to see the not only malignant but oppressive results of things such as free-speech, free-press absolutism. Last week I spent a few posts going over one of the emblematic, the flagship examples of "liberal" advocacy of such absolutist readings of the First Amendment and how it has helped to bring us to Trumpian fascism. I said how their advocacy for the "rights" of Nazis and the American Nazis of white supremacy and other such violent, anti-democratic, racist oppression to do what they have done in most of the countries of the world, including the United States, to gain power and put into practice exactly what they advocated.
It was probably a small thing to the mostly white lawyers, mostly never impacted by the very real American apartheid of Jim Crow and the other forms of it in other parts of the country, when they made their arguments and wrote their amicus briefs and went home secure in the expectation that nothing they were helping to get a "fair chance" at happening would ever touch them or their loved ones. But we are seeing that it not only can happen here, it has, in fact, happened here over and over again and for most of our history under the friggin' First Amendment, which has been not only like the laws that illegalize billionaires sleeping under bridges as well as the destitute, with rulings like Buckley v Valeo, that advocacy has set up the most uneven playing field possible by making billionaires the possessors of ever so much more speech than the unheard destitute.
That's the thing about speech that the advocates of free speech absolutism choose to ignore as they bleat "more speech" in the face of the tsunami of lies that has drowned American equality, America's only real form of democracy, speech to have an effect has to be heard.
Equal rights to say something is as meaningless to our social and political lives as the Republican-fascists including those who such advocates write those amicus briefs for and who argue in front of are making the votes of potentially millions of Americans in the Roberts Court run up to repeating the ratfucking of the vote by the Supreme Court. It may be a long shot for them, but they'll do it if they figure they can get away with it.
These are a few of the things I've been thinking about in the past several days of wondering. It looks like my ballot, which was hand delivered to the ballot box at our town hall will be counted because I'll still be alive on Election Day. I think I'm back.
I hope one of the things we get a chance to learn from is how seriously stupid it has been for the left to trust the Supreme Court, the court so ridiculously romanticized through so many Nina Totenberg segments on NPR, so many sappy Hollywood and TV movies, through the absurd mimicry of false sanctity gained through the false practice of having judges dress up like priests when they are probably now as they have been through most of the period of the American judiciary, one of the worst parts of government. In the ominous choice of Coney Barrett to have the most reactionary and pathological of the sitting "justices" the degenerate Clarence Thomas be the one to swear her in, I saw what should have been the death of that pantomime. Things are going to get a lot worse very fast.
Yeah, I'm pretty well over Nina, I was pretty well over her twenty years ago.
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