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pbmus

(12,422 posts)
Sun Jun 18, 2017, 02:43 AM Jun 2017

Stop Legitimizing 'Conservatism': It's Not an Ideology It's a Goddamn Death Machine

There’s no end to the maladies that ail American politics these days. It would, indeed, be far easier and quicker to identify what’s working than to itemize the travails that bedevil our pathetic polity in 2017. Altogether, if this country was a piece of art it would have to combine the orderliness of Pollock with the perceptual logic of Dali, all rooted in the joyful well-being of Hieronymous Bosch, in order to do justice to our times.

For those of you who for some reason always wanted to know what it looks like when an empire cracks apart, I’ve got some lovely news for you: A certain North American specimen, not generally known for its generosity, is nevertheless happy to oblige you today. Truly, the full catalog of America’s political woes could crash Amazon’s entire array of server farms, and most of us are struggling enough with chronic nausea these days such that revisiting all these horror stories again is way too depressing to contemplate. So I won’t. But there is one thing that inflames my tortured mind more than any of these items – perhaps because it is the one thing that explains them all.

Here it is: I am sickened to live in a society that treats a malignant illness as just another legitimate point of view, when in fact it’s the very disease that is killing us. We don’t treat a heroin epidemic as an innocuous choice that some may opt for and some may reject. We don’t treat cholera as just another flavor of ice cream that some prefer while others go for strawberry. And we don’t welcome Nazism as a legitimate belief system that deserves the same consideration as any other old model of race relations a society might adopt. So why do we treat ‘conservatism’ like some harmless cup of tea that some choose over Earl Grey or Jasmine?

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/06/05/stop-legitimizing-conservatism-its-not-ideology-its-goddamn-death-machine?utm_campaign

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Stop Legitimizing 'Conservatism': It's Not an Ideology It's a Goddamn Death Machine (Original Post) pbmus Jun 2017 OP
launched on 9/11 the chance to turn the screws on americans personal freedoms nt msongs Jun 2017 #1
The real death panels dalton99a Jun 2017 #2
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