Listening to a conversation with Attorney General of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro admirably, reasonably, rationally speaking about what is wrong with the Republican Party concentrated on the Republican-fascist Attorneys General and House members who supported Ken Paxton's treasonous law suit against electoral democracy. While it's important to go through the futile motions of bringing shame on the clearly shameless, that's just the tip of the shit pile that is poisoning American society and, so American democracy.
Listening to the reasonable AG Shapiro talking about how we have to get back to even a mutual agreement on what's true almost gets us to the root of the problem but that's putting it too rationally. What we need is a moral agreement that the truth is clearly good and what isn't true is, when not merely unreal, evil. I have no doubt that a lot of those idiots out on the streets and often threatening the majority of voters by showing their automatic weapons, know that what they're saying, what they're supporting is a big fat lie. A lie told to be pleasing to the further evils of greed, envy, racism, etc. In that they share the same mindset that Nazis, fascists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. had, that a lie was as good as the truth if it got you what you wanted. I will point out with total and complete relevance THAT THAT IS THE AMORAL POSITION OF CAPITALISM, OF BUSINESS (with a few, largely irrelevant and financially disadvantaged exceptions) AND OF MODERN, SECULAR CULTURE IS OF VITAL RELEVANCE AND IMPORTANCE.
The popular anti-scientific use of the unfortunate term adopted by modern physics, "relativity," to relativize an attitude toward the truth and, so, morality may have seemed useful at times but there was no further assertion of morality, even the most vital of morality on behalf of individuals, entire racial, national, class groups, etc. which could not be summarily rejected or ignored or brushed aside by it. That is why you can find credentialed scientists to assert scientific racism, sexism, "herd immunity," climate-change denial for pay, in "journalism" as practiced but he unregulated "fee press".
The descent into Trumpism is a result of a long abandonment of even the most basic ideas that produce morality in human culture, the extent to which we participate in that as those who enjoy modern affluence is the extent to which we are culpable of it.* The extent to which we admit the dangers that are adopted with the modernistic refusal to admit that there is truth which is discernible, even that which cannot honestly be discerned with the methods or standards of the hard sciences or mathematics, is the extent to which we can hope to defeat the evil that we are forced to confront.
* Reading a piece bemoaning the prospect of Trump's suckers refusing to follow masking guidelines or to take the vaccines as those become available, I was reminded at the reactions I've gotten from the anti-Trumpers when I noted the as scientifically valid points about the dangers of anal sex, promiscuous sex, alcohol, and a few other topics, citing the scientific literature which is not in any way controversial. In those instances I got college-credentialed members of "the left" being as stupidly irrational as the anti-masking idiots and I think that the common aspect of that has nothing to do with knowledge or acceptance of science, it is all about club membership, assumed class identity, of us vs. them. And also the extent to which the concepts of personal liberty rule over not only reason but the morality of refusing to put other people and society in danger through self-indulgence. I have found it astonishing how the Republican-fascists supporting the overturning of the election for Trump have been raising that popular, Hollywood peddled cry of "McCarthyism," even as they still use McCarthyism in their next breath to attack Democrats. All you have to do is say a word, you don't have to have any regard for its meaning, using the common-received attitude towards it.
When American democracy is destroyed, it will be destroyed in the name of "liberty" and a distorted, dystopian thing which will be called "democracy". While that's something that the Republican-fascist, corporate dupe "right" is making real, it's not something "the left" is immune from, nor the "center" either.
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