American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

We don't need no stinking democracy!

Yet in the neighbouring arts district of downtown LA, a gentrified grid of former warehouses and factories, the bakeries and cafes were busy as usual. Over pricey iced coffees and fat, artisanal sandwiches, fashionably dressed clusters of largely white people chatted about their latest cultural projects. The fact that Trump and his supporters would probably hate the whole scene, or that something approaching martial law had been imposed just up the road, did not appear to be affecting these ambitious millennials. In the US, as in other countries that are becoming or have become authoritarian, for those spared by the state, careers, social lives, leisure and consumerism carry on – and sometimes with a new intensity, as a form of escape.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... resistance

[Brian Peacock]

I enjoy Abby Zimet's rants on Common Dreams but I'm not sure whether I've ever posted some of her stuff here. On the '12 year olds' hypothesis/meme:

We know the awful, the stupid, the cruel goes on, but we’re heartened by the birth of “a new unified theory of American reality” to help explain the darkness. It’s called, “Everyone is twelve now.” Suddenly, we get it: the right’s puerile idiocy, pointless vengeful assaults on law and decency, poop-bombing and racism, staggeringly simplistic solutions to issues like, “Let’s arrest everyone” and “Why don’t we just blow them up?” At 12, they learned to slap nasty names on anything they didn’t like; now, they still do.

What one grateful patriot calls “the most important political thread of our time” came from one Patrick Cosmos, a musician and frequent Bluesky user who goes by @veryimportant.lawyer. All we know about him is that his moment of snarky political clarity swiftly spread across much of social media - an irony unto itself given that many attribute the current Infantilization of right-wing discourse, at least in part, to a scattershot Internet that gives an instant platform to the most vicious and pea-brained among us. Still, many argue the notion those in power never got past being 12-year-old, emotionally stunted losers deeply resonates in a grim cultural moment of conservative ascendance that feeds on ignorance, bullying, fear and lack of critical thinking.

Opening the door to this moment of unashamed intellectual regression was, of course, the orange cretin who rode down his fake golden escalator and into our nightmares by proclaiming the way to solve the complex, longtime, political and moral issue of illegal immigration was to build a big wall across the southern border of an entire country - a dumb, mean, juvenile, sadistic “solution” on a par with last week’s video abomination in which, ever more demented despite his glorious “person, woman, man, camera, TV” recitation, he acted out dropping a planeload of shit on millions of Americans who oppose him, because he’s a sociopathic 8-year-old, not yet 12, whose only response to any challenge is to sneer, “Oh yeah? I want to. Watch this.”

In an America where “the only two speeds are gun and burger,” his knee-jerk, self-serving response was appealing ...

[source]

Ooff!

I'd say there's a serious analysis hiding beneath the satire there... somewhere. The stunting effects of childhood trauma perhaps, as played out through world-making fantasies of empowerment... or something.