Wearing a Confederate flag should be as intolerable as wearing a swastika.

Celebrating Robert E. Lee is like honoring Erwin Rommel.

There’s a reason the “unite the right” rally organized over the removal of a Lee statue in Charlottesville: he is an ongoing symbol of white supremacy despite the lost cause myth perpetuated by reactionaries.

He was a cruel slaver who sought to permanently entrench the practice. There was nothing honorable about what he fought for and he doesn’t deserve the respect of a single person, much less that of the government.

Edit: Some added context for this piece of shit, from an account of one of the enslaved people he inherited who expected to be emancipated upon the death of their previous enslaver as promised:

[W]e were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.

State courts in both 1858 and 1862 denied Lee’s petition to indefinitely postpone the emancipation of his wife’s enslaved people and forced him to comply with the conditions of the will. Finally, on December 29, 1862, Lee officially freed the enslaved workers and their families on the estate, coincidentally three days before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

Give a real comic five minutes to roast this motherfucker and we’ll see who’s sensitive.

Wish I’d bought a bunch when they were on clearance.

My stepmother is a fundamentalist Christian, and when I pressed on her black-and-white views of sex and gender she told me that intersex people exist because of sin in the world.

Just psychopathic to think that God punishes a baby for things other people did.

Note that I don’t see intersex as a problem aside from potential medical complications and societal pressure to conform.

There’s a new podcast (the Know Rogan Experience) with one of the guys from Cognitive Dissonance, and there’s an episode that breaks down the interview this guy did on Joe Rogan and shows just how full of shit he is.

He’s a liar and he knows it.

Nooo!!! You’re making me be a fascist! Stahhhhhp it!!

Gun restrictions? Fuck you!

Medication restrictions? Fuck 'em!

There’s another user who replied to me who answered much better than I could.

Loading a program from disk on the Commodore 64

LOAD"*",8,1

I haven’t loaded a game on that system since I was probably 10 or so, but I’ll never forget the command.

I memorized it as L-O-A-D shift-2 star shift-2 comma eight comma one.

I live in Texas, and we focused on the glories of “free-market” “laissez faire” capitalism in our American history class.

Not a word about things like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire or the Homestead Strike or the Great Railroad Strike of 1922. I’m frankly shocked that we talked about the civil rights movement at all.

Reactionaries always attack the most vulnerable while pretending to be above “identity politics” because they don’t see “straight white conservative” as an identity, they see it as the default.

It’s pathetic how the most hateful people want to put everyone into tiny boxes that they can hold inside their diminutive minds.

Yeah, I’d have left a misogyny warning if I’d remembered that part. Thanks for the note.

Yeah, that’s pretty bad.

I still think it’s an interesting read.

You’re telling me that shocking one’s nards on a hunch and writing it down isn’t real research?

I’m starting to think I know nothing about science. What have I been doing?

How about HG Wells talking about mini wargaming in 1912? I think it’s fascinating to see proto-nerds inventing the geek stuff that we take for granted a hundred years later.

Little Wars via Project Gutenberg

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, and agency the prerogative of the elite.

Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom.

Corey Robin: The Reactionary Mind

There’s also a fantastic book called The Reactionary Mind that’s the best thing I’ve read on conservative ideology. The newest edition has updated chapters through the Trump administration. It’s essential reading, in my opinion, for understanding what drives them.

He also has a great chapter shredding Ayn Rand to bits.

I think they just whittled down their ideology into the most privileged and selfish extreme. They do believe the insane things they spout like “tax is theft.”

I think you’re right that the rank-and-file libertarians don’t really think their ideology through or educate themselves on its flaws or alternatives, because it really is about identity. I’m pretty convinced that it always has been though. Conservative ideology is based on hierarchy, and they think the right outcomes result from having the proper social stratification— this is usually wealth-based.

Go to a thrift store like a real punk and find something cool & unique.