I’m so worn down. I cannot get enough rest. I swear. And then I just want everyone to shut the hell up and stop talking nonsense. Our Congress has nothing better to do than to discuss whether Texans or Floridians are more brain damaged, as if that’s some kind of choice. Let the dildos decide!
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Sounds like you need a break. Listen to some music you like while going for a walk or fishing or whatever you enjoy. Time for you to take care of you. Those that love you will understand. So do it.
It’s not you. It’s the unrelenting cultural/political stoopid and the economic/environmental/social bleakness combined with permanent warfare.
I’m in pretty much the same place mentally and emotionally and it’s leaving me open to becoming cranky and unduly harsh. I have just had it with all the freaking stupid and awful.
Conversations with the wheels spinning Rights who insist on using all the oxygen in the room spouting talking points that the Left has to relentlessly fact check has made it so none of us can get any traction on any subject. I swear, it’s like mankind is hungry to have a shouting match at every corner but can’t remember they have to tie their shoelaces every once in awhile. You’re worn out because you show up each day and try and get them to tie their shoelaces.
Not only fact check — but forced to engage in debates that not so long ago were considered settled. Torture, evolution, abortion/birth control, progressive and corporate income taxation, environmentalism, public investment in infrastructure, voting rights, public social safety net, etc.
Nothing is settled when there are profits at stake.
True. Guess it’s a good thing that the profiteers are too greedy not to see that they sow the seeds of their own future destruction. Might be the main primary reason why social and economic changes ever happen.
You have discerned the dominant theme of human social history.
Pathetic isn’t it?
Although in the build up phase of a new order of wealthy and/or elites, the general population tends to fare better than they did prior to the end stage and after the collapse of the old. But I seems to learn little from either. Human population collapses are also good in the long run for those that survive. And new technologies and innovations keep the old running longer and enhance lives under new orders.
Suggest it is the natural order of things:
The difference being is that we create our own asteroids in politics, economics and war.
Culture — the best way to see and do things — is passed down from generation to generation. Except for the youthful tiny style revolts that change little to nothing and are more likely to be harmful than healthful. (How I wish tattoos and hip-hop and rap would disappear.)
It is one’s loathing of these things that makes them so irresistible.
Very interesting developments in Greece; the newly minted left government is giving the ECB and Eurozone neoliberals major heartburn. I am surprised this isn’t getting more recognition among similarly motivated cohorts in the rest of Europe and even, gasp, here.
Take a break. Avoid those people who are draining your energy. This blog will be just fine without you trying to figure out and explain why some people are totally nuts. They just are, so don’t waste your time on them. It’s probably the pressure of trying to measure up to your expectations of perfection.
There’s beauty out there just waiting for you.
This is one of those times when the best course is to grab some popcorn, sit down and just enjoy the show.
I do applaud the the dillweed from Florida for calling the douchebag from Texas a dick. It’s nice to see a little honesty once in a while. And it’s not like name-calling is going to lower the tone in Congress, that hit rock bottom a long time ago.
Over the recent past I have seen a lot of recommendations for “grabbing some popcorn”. And in isolation, the craziness could be entertaining in a freak show sort of way. But we are talking about the majority party of our country’s governing body. Pardon me if I defer on the popcorn and instead retch into my commode. I am not finding one bit of this entertaining, as there are lives, jobs and futures hanging in the balance. And a large part of our country is simply okay with the most extreme clown car antics imaginable. I am nauseous on a daily basis just thinking about how far our politics have devolved in such a very short time.
Such is the burden for those of us who pay attention to politics.
Then we wonder why no one else is paying as much attention as us, or voting for that matter.
And that is the goal of the people at the top. The less people pay attention, the more sway their army of useful idiots can have on elections.
It’s a real son-of-a-bitch for those of us who care. Which is why I’ll keep saying that until the Democrats stop being cowards and start being progressive, things will continue as they have for the past 35 years. If the Democrats are just a less-terrible flavor of politician, then a whole lot of people who would otherwise be on our side will continue ignoring politics.
Yes, my friend, life was so much simpler when I was just one of the ignorant masses, so enamored of the shiny spinning objects that were regularly dangled in front of the populace in order to distract our attention from the total rat-fucking that was being done while we all sat, dumbstruck, at the keen illusions at the end of our noses.
This last election cycle here in Ohio left me more disillusioned than I could have ever imagined. We were chartered to go out there and sell a non-existent message. By the last week, I was mentally and emotionally spent. I was depressed, pissed off and frustrated. We now have a whole new cadre of people running the Party. And based on what I have seen, they seem to recognize that we need to get back to the being a real alternative to the GOP. I am hopeful, but time will tell how much change can really happen and whether it makes a difference in our fortunes.
I was (I believe) the youngest Election Judge in Hamilton County in 2004 (24) working that General election. My Republican counterpart and Chief Election Judge was telling me the entire night that he was sure that Kerry was going to win Ohio based on all sorts of stuff. I never let it get to me, because after 2000, I knew that ratfucking is not only possible, but likely.
After hearing it over and over, and then seeing the result of the Ohio election, I was pretty disheartened, but not surprised.
I’m not a young Millenial, but I have my finger on their pulse (I’m a Jan. 1980 birth, so I’m either the youngest Gen-X’er you’ll ever meet, or the oldest Millenial you’ll ever meet). Politics is fucking boring, because Democrats and Republicans may talk different games, but ultimately, it’s just about the same people running the government in very similar ways.
Sure, there is a lot that Gore would have done differently than Bush, but we also have ye olde media out there screaming BothSidesTM, so that affects it. But in reality, a whole hell of a lot of Democrats really are just slightly less-terrible Republicans. And Millenials, regardless of political ignorance and naivete, know it. They know it because shit doesn’t really change. It might veer now and again, but it doesn’t change in any perceptible way.
And I think most people recognize it, right? We talk about the last Gilded Age that seemed intractable and then boom, a progressive era. Well, between Occupy, the 1% becoming a household term, and lots and lots of movies (In Time, Hunger Games, even the last Batman, etc) class divisions and wealth inequality are becoming front and center (screw income inequality, a lot more damage comes from wealth inequality…it’s not people making $30k more a year than the average salary who are doing the major harm, it’s the assholes sitting on hundreds of millions/billions actively doing it).
To me, Lundergan Grimes is the perfect example.
If you’re a f-ing Democratic candidate, and you won’t say that you of course voted for the Democratic candidate for President last time around, you’re f-ing useless. Go get a job screaming that BothSidesTM do it and leave Democratic politics to actual Democrats.
Let’s talks some sense. The US needs to back off Russia and Ukraine. We don’t have the policy-makers who have seen what a nuclear weapon does to have sufficient fear of a rapidly escalating nuclear confrontation.
The crazy political rhetoric from US members of Congress that is obscuring this increasingly slick slide to a huge major war is beginning to concern me.
If for a week we could have someone make sure that Rush Limbaugh and John McCain stuck a sock in it, might a tad bit of sanity return? Trolling the religious right at a prayer breakfast with the Dalai Lama looking on seems like a scene out of Fellini’s Roma. But John Kerry ratcheting up the the “Russian aggression” theme while Angela Merkle is trying to backpedal the conflict looks crazed.
That’s why we’re worn down. It gets tiring constantly watching the march of folly. Especially when it gets existential–literally existential. Take your choice: global climate change or World War III with John McCain.
Well it’s good to see at least one other person at this fine forum who is aware of the gathering storm clouds from the Russia-Ukraine situation, slowly building to crisis proportions.
Because out there in the real world, almost no one I talk to has the slightest idea of the grave danger we’re stumbling into with our reckless words and actions towards Russia. But as Prof Cohen has noted for the past year, our MSM has rather uniformly covered this story from the neocon perspective, much as they did in the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War, so little wonder most people are in the dark. To get a more balanced perspective, it’s mostly been necessary to read TheNation and watch RT, about the only places where Cohen’s pov get a platform.
Even the liberal Msnbc has been a day late, dollar short and has been timid in covering the story, from what I’ve seen. I would imagine at CNN, which I no longer watch, the range of views probably goes from the interventionist Kerry perspective to the McCain “never met a conflict or crisis the US shouldn’t get involved in” crowd.
This one is so ominous, even Henry Kissinger is warning that we’re stumbling into a disaster. And how many US media outlets ran the recent Gorbachev remarks warning of US recklessness in eastern Europe possibly leading to war with Russia? Disturbing the censorship going on.
Far more than two here. Numerous comments and diaries have been posted over the past couple of years or so about the serious danger of the US reigniting the Cold War. We also have to recognize that this is a long-standing policy. Back to the 1990s when there was no “peace dividend” and instead of axing NATO that ceased to have any purpose, it was expanded. Then GWB’s missile defense complex in Poland (scrapped by Obama) Covert funding in support of so-called color revolutions. Covert and overt support for toppling dictators that don’t follow US orders or don’t do so as well or as fast as ordered to. Why do we need expanded or new military facilities in Australia? We’re already all over the freaking world — in constant search of a new enemy for a new war. AFRICOM. Chalmers Johnson did try to tell us.
Yes, as if the US didn’t have enough on its plate poking and provoking the Russian bear, we’ve also decided it would be a good idea to expand our military footprint in the Pacific with Obama’s “pivot”. The Chinese no doubt see this as an encroachment on their sphere, and, not surprisingly, are responding by beefing up their military presence and by continuing to firm up various ties with Russia.
So by our stupid actions, starting 20 yrs ago in Europe and continuing now with Obama in eastern Europe and the Pacific, we’ve managed to have the two biggest countries on Earth form a formidable military-political alliance in opposition to us and our allies. Way to go Obama and team.
Btw, I wanted to also mention Patrick Smith’s two recent outstanding, wake-up-call pieces at Salon on the US vs Russia growing crisis.