SCOTUS Suggests the Wire Hanger

Once more, the US comes down with political hiccups, as Roe v. Wade is threatened by the US Supreme Court. According to leaked documents, it turns out SCOTUS, as it’s more commonly referred as because these American acronyms are fucking adorable, has been discussing the overturn of the landmark ruling on abortion rights from back in 1973.

Bottom line is; SCOTUS wants to remove the constitutional right for women to have abortions. Or, more precisely, they want to rescind their previous interpretation that the US Constitution protects a woman’s right to chose. Which, essentially, would give states and the federal government free reign on how to legislate for or against abortions.

Which will not end well for a lot of women in the US. Because as it stands US federal, state, and local lawmakers are a bunch of tossers.

Even SCOTUS itself seems to realise that overturning Roe v. Wade is unconscionable, because the very moment the leak leaked like leaks do, they tried to swivel the conversation toward how “absolutely appalling” the act of leaking government documents are. Yup, you read that right. SCOTUS thinks that showing how the government works in the dark is more deplorable than the government’s work of indenturing women to be brood mares. Transparency is worse than tyranny. That’s the dystopian conversational climate that hovers over the “land of the free and home of the brave” in this our sordid place in history.

It is always a mixed pleasure to witness this sort of US spin doctoring when you look at it from the outside. It keeps happening, it never disappoints, it entrenches the notion that the US is a third rate country, a prototype gone haywire, it never stops, and it just keeps smashing through rock bottom to find a new low. Every damned time. It’s an art, really. Just when you think that the US political discourse can’t get worse, it just… keeps… digging.

Abortion rights are just about universal in the northern hemisphere. It is a right taken for granted, much like that child labour or war crimes are bad. But despite the fact that the abortion debate has been raised and long since settled, the US lets a western Taliban movement drag them down into the absolute muck like a political miscarriage. This is not a question about being pro-life. Carlin absolutely destroyed that argument decades ago. It is not a matter of empowering women or protecting women’s health either (argument destructions supplied by John Oliver). The only humans that even come close to being pro-life are Jainists, and those motherfuckers are too busy sweeping walkways so they don’t accidentally step on an ant to get ontop of soap boxes to propose that abortions are punished with the death penalty. And yet… here we are. Again.

What are we supposed to do with you, America? You’re like a child at a wedding who throws a tizzy fit if you can’t sit at the grown-ups table, and dissects frogs while the main course is being served. You’re an embarrassment. Worse yet, you’re a dangerous embarrassment. Because believe it or not, there’s spillage. Just look at our Mays and Borises, our Le Pens and Busches, who I bet would not be half as bad without your influence.

What do then? Protest? Revolt? Whatever progressive political action (which is never very progressive if measured internationally) that gains traction in the US only seems to galvanize the American Taliban even more. So what’s the option? Abandon ship? Let the madness consume itself, and start anew? Quarantine it in a padded cell? Easy suggestions coming from someone who lives beyond US shores and just don’t want the red, white, and blue insanity to spread and drag me down with it. But whatever cancer has grown endemic within the “greatest country in the world”, it needs to be dealt with. Preferably from within.

Abortion rights is not a debate you should be having, people of the United States of America. Whether or not to allow abortions is a solved question in the “free world”, which you ostensibly are leading (into a brick wall). The real question is how you can turn the tide, stop glorifying fear and ignorance, and stop coming back to these regressive questions time and time again. How to stop going backwards. Absolutely; put out this fucking fire, post-haste. But once you’re done, grow up. Evolve. Get better. And do it yourself, because the gods help us if anyone has to do it for you.

/Sebastian Lindberg 10/5-2022

Just let them have more Kool-Aid

Quarantine’s rough on everyone. Jobs are lost, people are getting the jitters staying at home, and mental health is even harder to maintain when you’re locked up inside than it was before. But Social Distancing seems to be working to slow the spread, even if it’s not nearly enough for some health care services around the world.

It’s sometimes difficult to imagine how things could get worse. Unless you’re living in the Fragmented States of America. Then, over the weekend, it got real easy to imagine how things could get worse, as the most belligerent parts of the nation brought guns to a epidemiological fight.

All across the US, people took to their cars and their MAGA shirts and hats to close down their cities and towns in an effort to protest and threaten their leaders to cease the shut-down in effect. Some even brought their obscene automatic rifles on display on the steps of civic buildings, chanting that not even a global pandemic and international health crisis would stand in the way of their corn-syrup-soaked privileges. In Denver, Colorado, it even went so far that the already beleaguered health worker professionals had to leave their posts to perform a silent counter-protest; blocking the Trump-fanatics in their rage-filled, slow-moving cavalcades.

Nurses and doctors who labour day and night to stem the tide had to go on strike to take a stand against the most putrid people of the Republic. That is absolutely staggering.

“Give me Liberty or give me Covid-19”, one plaque in Olympia, Washington, said. “Freedom or Death”, another one cried.

Okay then. Sure. These bible-humping, Trump-totting, ignoble ignoramuses can have it. It is just a shame that the Wuhan Virus isn’t lethal enough to plausibly make a dent in their numbers. Or discriminating enough to target these gaps in the gene pool. If people want to make themselves a part of the problem, then let them. I’m liberal enough to see the philosophical virtue in letting people put themselves at whatever risk they want. You can’t force people to not become part of the problem. All you can do in such circumstance is to also treat them as part of the problem…

Deny people health care if they won’t follow quarantine protocol. The US has already proven that it has no inherent problem with letting people die on the doorsteps of hospitals, and that its health care administrations are woefully unprepared to meet this challenge. I am sure that the insurance industry would just absolutely love to void a whole lot of flimsy insurance claims because the claimants have disobeyed the stay-home ordinances of many states. Cordon these cretin off from all the horrified masses that prefer not to subject their health services to back-breaking pressure. With any luck, the stress of having broken their contract with their government will send these profanely armed death-cultists and Rapture-chanters into a mindless frenzy and kill each other off.

You think I’m being too harsh? What we have here is a sizeable minority of the population that have turned ignorance and indignant rage into a revered virtue. Galvanized by a criminal and unconscionable president. These creatures are a threat to every single other being that comes close to them. As if their evangelical fanaticism wasn’t bad enough. As if their armaments and love for The Gun wasn’t bad enough. As if their rage and stupidity weren’t bad enough. Now they are on the verge of taking up arms against their elected leaders just because they want to make themselves carriers of a potentially lethal, nation-breaking virus…

Is it really I who am too harsh when I think that a vast majority of the US population would be better off without them? Am I the one being too harsh when I think the world would be better off without them? I am humanist and liberal enough to see the ethical problem of just smothering them like the political wild-fires that they are, but here we have a circumstance where they want to expose themselves and their loved ones to a decimation. To me, it seems like a problem that comes with its own solution.

Sure, the virus isn’t all that lethal. But its lethality increases with obesity, nicotine use, underlying health concerns, and when official health guidelines get ignored. Maybe Lady Luck and her a-romantic companion Statistical Probability would be on our side this time.

Of course, we would never be that lucky. No excommunication is going to happen. If they have to, I bet Jared Kushner and the Orange House would even use their “own federal medical reserves” to save a good portion of their precious base. No, with so many military grade guns in so many belligerent and angry hands, with white supremacist support from an orange despot and his converted political establishment, with a soft-core plague running rampant and supply shortages abound, with overworked government staff and idle hands among an insanely armed population, odds are instead high of insurrection. Civil war. Just like what the Orange Hydra has insinuated calls for from his ivory throne. Just like all the great Empires of Earth’s days passed, so do the Discordant States of America seem to be fated. In fire and blood, and not a clean sweep.

Either way, all us international onlookers can do is to by proxy experience all the shame that the ruling minority of the US seem completely alien to feel on their own, and to keep face-palming our way through the new millennium.

/Sebastian Lindberg 20/4-2020