Everybody ready for the Thanksgiving Season?!?
We get to gather around a table to enjoy a meal, say thanks, and listen to our boomer parents or extended family rant and ramble completely fabricated bullshit from a completely out of touch, ignorant, stubborn, arrogant, combative right wing perspective! (If this isn’t your experience, buckle up, because you might learn a whole lot of context from lived experiences a la your frfiends or partner/s!)
Now, for others, this edition of The Pickup Truck Diaries might be a bit close to home, so I’m going to avoid using names as ever – even if they’ve already been on fucking internationally broadcasted Reality TV or not a decade ago. Even if they have tenuous nebulous ties to Hollywood. (Not like I kept in contact with any of the fucking crew this past decade, after all. Shout out to… Clint? Cliff? Family-Man Camera Guy. You were cool. Fuck my Hollywood Cousin, IDGAF artistically.)
But in actuality, my shitty little logging family is probably the perfect microcosm case for the absolute batshit insanity that is the right wing worldview: Usually devoid of facts, truth, logic, or any semblance of rational logic or sanity. Plus it’s the Canadian rural tradie experience, not an American one, so look, niche market target demographics as if I give two fucks about my audience.
This shit is all for me, baby. I’m just farming dopamine in my little corner of the interwebs for my ADHD/Infinite Hunger. Welcome to my catharsis.
So there’ll be a couple of highlights I’m going to try and hit along the way. First is the general right-wing worldview and the same tired old logical fallacies it usually presents us with. I’ll be pretty general here, as right wing parties and governments across the western world and even the larger world are pretty fucking boring. Banal Evils to a “T.” They all do the exact same egregious bullshit after all, with surprisingly increasing consistency – lying, stealing, corruption, the whole shebang. Overall, they’re pretty good at hurting people; specifically targeting immigrants, minorities, queers, disabled folks, or whatever other tiny demographic they can villainize and demonize most easily for their own gain.
Fear mongering and rage farming is the norm. As is toxic Populism. South American politicians over the past century would be proud!
Queue Donald Trump’s insane debate claims of Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets… A perfect example! This statement is completely untrue, unfounded by evidence or logic, and demonizes a minority group as some sort of evil. Clearly just bullshit to hate-farm. Yet, we’re watching even now as the US right is touting these sorts of insane things as if they’re facts. This sort of false propaganda spreads through right wing communities like wildfire, and most never fact check jack shit. Scary how similar these strategies are to the Nazi Germany attacks on Jews, no? (Not that conservatives don’t still hate Jewish people… A la “Jewish Space Lasers” and other insane tripe.)
Which brings us to our second highlight we’ll hit later. “Logical Fallacies.” I’m going to do my best in as concise a format as possible to lay out some of the most common of the many logical fallacies the right wing uses, for you to recognize, and then use to call out your own right wing batshit crazy family around the dinner table.
I knew my family was ignorant, arrogant, and stubborn as fuck, of course. But the sheer stupidity, insult, disrespect, and ignorance I’ve experienced has me reeling with a deep-cutting anger and betrayal on my worst days.
But we have to start with the brass tacks first, to lay out what we’re really addressing here.
To do that, we need to take a quick scan of general belief structures across right wing governments and parties all over the world.
Primarily, conservatism and right wing interests in general are founded on Traditionalism. Both societal and religious traditionalism, mostly. Now, as I’m speaking from my own knowledge and braincage, you can go and google this if you don’t believe me: Most right wing movements are biased heavily towards, and support, Abrahamic organizations and/or dogma. In Middle Eastern countries and territories, usually this means Islam smattered with others, and in Western contexts, it’s Christianity of some denomination, a la Catholicism in Italy or Protestantism or Anglicanism in jolly old England.
Abrahamic faiths are just that – the organized religions with some tie to biblical or religious historical worldviews from a monotheist perspective. Abraham and fam. There is ONLY ONE GOD, and he is better and more powerful and more awesome and more cool and special than every other belief or religion. Fuck those Greek Gods or any indigenous beliefs!
At least it’s all that to them I guess.
We’ve seen this play out many, many times throughout History – via the various Crusades, where Christian Europe straight up waged holy war on Islam a bunch of times to take back the vaunted holy land, stealing their shit and murdering them, or via the modern North American demand by far right religious groups for the removal of church and state separation, and removal of Secularism in general. These folks literally think their religion should be synonymous with government, and that everybody should live according to their dogmatic beliefs.
Hope you were paying attention in Grade 8 Social Studies, because I’ve literally taught it. Sans my real opinion and only the facts, of course.
I’ve written about organized religion before, as the sham it is with any real close observation, and in my Poetry I’ve even joked about following the path of L. Ron Hubbard, just making up my own organized religion to indoctrinate people however I want. (If you dig into Scientology, be prepared for it to get scary, dark, kidnappy, and straight up murdery! Hence why my jokes are just that! Jokes! Scientology is eeeeeevil!)
Now, with this religious background as a base, their beliefs and goals make sense somewhat. The bible straight up tells Christians to do some awful fucking shit, just like the god depicted in that bible does all sorts of awful fucking shit, from stoning people to death, genociding the whole world via flood, wiping out entire populations with plagues or destruction, or forcing a devout believer to ritually sacrifice his own son to that god as a form of worship and prostration, only to go: “Just kidding!” at the last second, claim it was a test of faith, and say: “Yeah, you can sacrifice a goat or some shit instead, it’s fine.”
Don’t even get me started on the anti-queer sentiment that is RIFE in such belief communities, which then is transferred directly into their politics. I will never understand queer folks who choose to be Christian. Like, you know Christians literally murdered people like us for being different across actual thousands of years, right? Most of them still think you, being queer, is a choice, motherfucker! Even if your local congregation tolerates you, or is queer, what about the rest? Gonna spit on the queers that fought for even this modicum of acceptance we have now – which is still actively being threatened by people from your faith daily? Bah.
The hypocrisy and irrationality drives me nuts, especially when they have no fucking clue or feign ignorance that people are actively being hurt by these communities. That feels like betrayal, even though I’m just one single Demisexual Enby asshole.
Bigotry thus becomes a central point of most Conservative and right wing parties and movements by extension, trying to fight and roll back protections or basic freedoms as per that Traditionalism thing I mentioned before that I tacitly expected you to pause and Google. While the queers tend to get bashed on by Abrahamic faiths the most – don’t forget the general racism and hate Conservatives tend to spew pretty consistently at groups they see as “the other.”
America is a great example. The American South is predominantly very Christian, and that region is eerily also the same one that literally fought a civil war in order to keep people of color as slaves. Tell me why The Dukes of Hazzard so prominently displays the trash pro-slaver side that lost, which keeps popping up to this day? Modern Conservatives are really just an extension of these same hierarchical beliefs, centuries old! Traditionalism, is traditionalism, is traditionalism. It can be good in some cultural contexts, such as saving local indigenous knowledge and practices from extinction, and really, really shitty in most others. When two traditions meet, what happens? (Well, History has some answers for you in depressingly repeating cycles.)
My History degree introduced me to literal tens of thousands of horrific acts perpetrated by Abrahamic Faiths, from the Islamic Prophet being a literal warlord that invaded across the Arabian Peninsula, forcing the population to follow his dogma and faith, to South American Catholic contexts where indigenous people were massacred or enslaved or “other-massacred” via bare-hand quicksilver-mercury gold mining. Don’t even get me started on Residential Schools here in Canada. I’d lose my shit in anger at the priests, nuns, and government cops that kidnapped, abused, raped, and murdered poor aboriginal kids. Or whom just let them die of TB in medical neglect.
Now, to be concise, the political spectrum usually looks like this: The further left a person or party gets, the more empathy they usually seem to have towards injustice, sans authoritarian leftist governments a la the modern CCP or now defunct USSR. This is primarily why you see a lot of minority groups self-identifying as leftist in some form or fashion. Unless they’re Token Neo-Liberals or Neo-Conservatives, of course. Disabled folks, people of colour, and queer folks have shifted further left over time naturally to combat the 50% evangelical majority demographic in many western countries that has been oppressing and attacking them for literal decades or centuries. Leftist Worker Unions fought and died, bloody in the streets, for our forty hour, five day work week.
Yet we as minority groups are still fighting for our very survival even today.
Inversely to this, almost one eighty degrees… The further right a person or party gets, they seem to do the exact opposite of this, perpetuating such injustices further instead. (Look at how many conservative politicians vote against shit like gay marriage, or school lunches for kids, for example. Or the Grinder jump at The Republican Convention.)
It can really be summed up as a “Fuck You, Got Mine” mentality, to use a phrase where I’m from. And unfortunately, the Overton Window is so absolutely fucked by the back and forth volleyball game between center right and further right parties, after centuries of dogshit First Past The Post voting systems, that The Overton Window always gets pulled further back to the right without fail. We’re watching the death of that entropic spiral now in America. Too much greed. Too much corruption. Too many lies. Too many shitty decisions over too many decades.
Fuck Reagan, Nixon, etc.
Sucks to be a leftist in North America with any semblance of empathy or compassion for your fellow Humans, eh?
Now, the final tenet of the right seems to be the visible tendencies we see fairly constantly towards lies and corruption. This one is pretty night and day based on what they say and what they do. Despite what many religious views espouse, look at all the old white men playing gerontocracy, plutocracy, nepotism, cronyism, etc. these days! Backroom handshakes and sketchy circles of “friends.” While the bible does dictate some positive or general basic moral values, we see these ancient fucks taking bribes, handing off government contracts to allies or buddies, or even allowing lobbyists to dictate entire bills, writing them for some officials in some real sketchy cases! Again, one only needs look at America’s corrupt as fuck Surpeme Court for some easy examples.
Not that we in Canada have it any better. The current Conservative (right wing) party leader not only blatantly lies as if he’s allergic to telling the truth… He refuses to get security clearance, and has done so for quite a long time now. Of course, now we’re seeing that Conservative MPs and even the Conservative leadership race within the party, was involved with and influenced by both Indian and Russian secret intelligence assets. So on top of all the hate, bigotry, and discrimination, here in Canada our official opposition party is literally flirting with and committing treason. But the current leader was/is a patsy of Stephen Harper, the most evil Canadian I know still living, an ex-Prime Minister for The Conservatives up there with Kevin O’Leary. He’s literally never had a job other than politics in his whole life. As a living breathing shill for the corrupt. And don’t forget Harper is still very much active geopolitically via his little international front group…
Can’t really have any better example than that for corruption and lack of morals or ethics, eh?
Literal fucking treasonous traitors to the country!
Now, I really fucking hope no conservatives are reading this, because what I’m gonna say next will undoubtedly piss them off.
No matter how many examples I offer, no matter how many logical fallacies or lies I correct… Conservatives are well known for sticking to their guns with arrogance, ignorance, and plain stubbornness. Nothing I could ever say will really change their minds. No number of true and fact-checked statements will ever fucking matter to them. This does tie to the Abrahamic concept again of preferring to be “sheep” over “goats” in some contexts. Sheep are docile, and easy to lead, whilst goats are independent, ornery, and don’t really give a fuck. Yet, they actively see being sheep as a good thing. Traditionalism, remember?
Don’t succumb to the Devil’s way of thinking!
Which is any other way but ours, of course. The organizers of the congregation.
I believe that this strain of dogma is largely by design via Social Engineering to maintain complacency and to eliminate critical thinking overall over impossibly long timeframes. Pretty smart for some fucks who wrote a holy book two millennia ago, eh? Pity it worked well enough to indoctrinate a large portion of the planet to this very day, eh? Even The Roman Empire converted, obviously, realizing the true benefit of a carefully orchestrated populace with numerous systems of control other than just military or police. International Historical Or Traditional Leaders have used this shit for literal millennia – back to the fucking city states of Mesopotamia.
Again:
No matter what truth, or what facts you provide… These are people who have literally been trained to ignore and discard anything that doesn’t come from either the bible itself, or their local congregation, or their echo chambers, at the whims of whichever pastor or sermon is delivered unto them. Being sheep is good, remember? Can’t be a bad sheep! Or worse yet, a goat! Goats are associated with the devil!
(Goat is delicious though.)
You must come to terms with this, and not let it bother you. You cannot allow apathy for Human life and existence to overcome you in your despair. My own journey, and one I do actually honestly preach as per my beliefs, is the fight to turn Nihilism into Existentialism every time it looms over you. You must stare into that void, that abyss of meaning or guidance or intention, and create light and life all your own in what we have, some odd mortal Human years plus random scribblings left behind like this. (Hope it all helps!)
It’s really frustrating to me, as I’m sure it is to a lot of leftists. We are consistently assaulted with claims to refute like fucking buckshot shotgun blasts, knowing that even if we do refute the blatant lies and fabrications we get hit with, we will achieve absolutely nothing. Trying to help Abrahamic believers or general right wingers escape such ancient dogma is like pulling out your teeth and nails with pliers. They hate you for not being a believer, but tend to hate you more for going against their beliefs, as you are their and god’s enemy as a queer, or a person of colour, etc.
It does not matter how much you care about their overall education or well being, because you are often perceived as attacking what they know and believe, in your efforts to help.
Now, we know the blanket fear mongering conservatives spew, usually complete fabrications, exaggerations, misinterpretations, or the like.
“Immigrants are evil!”
“The queers will destroy America/Canada/Australia/England/etc.”
But there are a few other methodologies they follow.
Firstly is “Austerity.”
Which is where you get to the whole social or fiscal conservative bullshit that right wingers throw out as a smokescreen to hide their true stances on blanket issues. Usually you see this play out in enormous omnibus bills that have so much garbage packed into them, that politicians hate combing through and dissecting such fucking textbooks. Thus, bad policy and law gets passed, hidden inside other boilerplate or populist issue bills or motions.
Social or fiscal conservative means jack shit, because you can play the fiscal or social issues you want as a right winger, and then use the normal playbook that stumps the stupid – off forcing through other social or fiscal shit in the background.
What austerity means is basically claiming to be fiscally responsible, usually by balancing budgets or the like. What conservatives don’t tell you is that this involves hacking, slashing, and cutting as many social supports or citizen services as possible. They like big military, and fawn over big business with egregious subsidies (not medium or small with tiny GDP footprints), so often you’ll see government spending by conservatives go towards defense at ever increasing warmonger-style rates, even as they continue to use “austerity” measures to eliminate the programs aimed at helping the sorts of people they hate. Fuck the elderly! (But we need the Boomer vote!) Fuck the youth! (They don’t vote!) Etc. Etc.
I ain’t gonna cite shit for this. You can literally google it. There are hundreds and thousands of shitty austerity actions by many right wingers over many countries and decades.
(I’m refusing to do the labour of refuting or backing up or citing what I already know as true, just because right wingers tend to spew eighteen lies so you can’t even keep up with the untruths or manipulations of the conversation. So this buckshot shotgun shit, this is kinda my way of doing it back to them? The burden and labour of proof will always be placed upon you, not them. They allow themselves to operate on echo chambers and hearsay as gospel evidence.)
Just read the Wikipedia page on general “Conservatism.”
It popped up as a concept around The French Revolution, aiming to roll back as many progressive changes after the Revolution as possible. This trend has obviously continued for a few centuries. Progressives tend to push for positive social and political change, only to have traditionalist conservatism fight them tooth and nail to regress as much as possible towards older cultural or religious values. Like a losing tug of war game we progressives always have to play; or simply be wiped out, hate crimed, and murdered.
The middle majority being apathetic and largely ignorant on most social or political issues ensures that these small denominations of political philosophies can form majority governments and thus force their right wing beliefs onto the entirety of the population.
(Don’t get me started on how broken First Past The Post voting systems are, allowing Majority governments, which basically dictate whatever they want or believe onto the masses, even with like a 25-30% vote share. Can’t remember if I’ve written one of these on Voting and Vote Reform, but somebody, imperative: remind me in a few months to do it.)
So.
What can we do against all this? Especially us folks in minority groups? POCs, Indigenous Folks, Queers, Disabled Communities, and so on? (Insert high-brow Academic joke about a Black One-Armed Lesbian here – that will get me crucified by people who don’t get the reference, as some hypocrite.)
Well, the only thing we can do, which I know is exhausting, is to call them out on their lies, bigotry, and shitty beliefs in real time. Or, if your emotional battery is low, simply stop doing the labour of refuting every point with logic, and just tell them to shut the fuck up. Or use simple phrases: “Not true.” “That’s a lie.” Etc.
For example, the right uses “woke” as a slur of sorts these days. As a hipster myself back in 2010, we used the term to basically mean in short: “Not a bigot.” But nobody uses this term authentically anymore, except for the right. They claim that “woke” is silencing them.
Funny enough, even that shows a blatant ignorance of freedom of speech rights. What right wingers are really complaining about with this dog whistle is the consequences of what they say. Nobody is preventing right wingers from speaking. But the right wingers want to refuse any accountability for what they do say.
“What are you being silenced about? What won’t you say out loud that you want to? Nobody is stopping you from saying it.”
The answer is usually bigotry, or discrimination, or some trashy, toxic belief that harms other Humans, boiling my Humanist blood.
As a right wing conservative, you are free to speak whatever you want in countries with freedom of expression laws. Or in authoritarian countries that dictate a religion and culture that match what you believe, I guess. But that does not mean that you are not free from the consequences and fallout of what you say in any international context in the 21st Century. The Internet, Social Media, New Media, and the like, all of that exists now. Global Geopolitics exists. My freedom of speech is just as important and acceptable as yours, and I’m gonna use it to call you an ignorant dumbass, full of hate, when you’re being a twat or a prick.
Nobody is silencing you.
You’re just afraid, a coward who knows what you’re saying is rude, discriminatory, or just plain false.
Now, the core arguments of conservatives are usually along the lines or issues we discovered above. Fear mongering, attacking minority individuals or groups, using faith or belief as defense, etc. etc. and so on and so forth.
So at your kitchen table this Thanksgiving, you’re going to need to be able to recognize some of the most common logical fallacies that conservatives use to dance around facts, logic, and accountability. This will be our finale to this edition of The Pickup Truck Diaries, a good old fashioned list, a la the Buzzworthy trash top tens of decades ago!
Here are some of the ones I’ve noticed crop up the most in my own lived experiences:
General Gaslighting:
Welcome to the Baba McRae trauma hour, where we do a quick reliving of all the times we’ve been gaslit in our lives by family or partners. Some top numbers include: “That’s not what happened!” or such hits as “You’re remembering it wrong!”
Jokes aside, gaslighting is being made to doubt your own lived experiences, feelings, or memories and the like. This was primarily a puberty years thing, back in my public education days, where I experienced 12-14 year olds reinvent different memories of interactions, then repeat them enough, in the lie version, to actually believe them as true. I think many adults are capable of this too though, especially folks like me and my family, with a whole stack of neurodiversities, all crammed into the same head all at once.
The only good method I’ve found for fighting gaslighting is to call it out each and every time, and make the person doing it look and feel as sleazy as possible for doing it and being pointed out. Now, you might not have a stupid half-cocked broken eidetic memory like mine, so sometimes abuse survivors (gaslighting is abuse btw) have to keep journals, videos, or audio recordings of events to keep track of all the lies and gaslighting an abusive family member or partner might be doing.
It fucking sucks.
I hate it so much, and there are some people in my immediate family who use this shit constantly, so you have to be constantly hyper aware of every single thing they’re saying, inferring, or manipulating towards. You will find yourself repeating – circular, hours-long conversations again and again. It’s fucking exhausting and I err on the side of just going no contact and cutting all ties with people that lie. I don’t have the mental or emotional energy to keep the stories and mistruths lined up.
Love Bombing:
This is less-so a logical fallacy and more a subtle indoctrination technique, in which an abuser will follow up cycles of attacks, abuse, or mistreatment with “bombs” of love, offering gifts, meals, niceties, sex, love, or other things to buy back trust after it has been broken. In family gatherings, such as thanksgiving, food can be a central theme, and thus being used as leverage against you to draw you out of your comfort zone or wariness. “Normal” folks with “normal” families apparently get to completely ignore this and just eat good food.
The Red Herring:
“But what about?!?…”
Famous in crime dramas and the like, a red herring is a misdirect, segway, or other distraction to pull away from the actual point and topic and misconstrue it with something else that is actually mostly irrelevant. This keys in with the “buckshot shotgun blast” style lying that right wingers do, and is a popular favorite in more immediate family dynamics because it again puts the burden of proof and truth upon their opponent in a debate, rather than doing any actual fact checking themselves. “But your sister/brother/comparison,” is a common one when shaming or guilting compliance in a parent-child dynamic, and one I know well. You might also hear as an eldest child: “You’re the oldest, you’re supposed to know better!”
Moving The Goalposts:
No matter how many points you seem to make or lies you seem to pick apart as untrue, there’s always another topic or excuse just past that one, on and on, forever. The goal post or goal line keeps moving further and further away no matter how far you go. Tying into abuse techniques like those circular arguments from above, you might often feel trapped or overwhelmed with so much mental and emotional expenditure, and thus opt out or have burnout. This can be interpreted by the right wing family as “winning” an argument, which is what they want. They never actually proved anything, they just got you to give up on your beliefs and values in pure fatigue.
Strawman Arguments:
This is straight up lying about a person’s stances, beliefs, or arguments. Othering via racism is a common one here, adding a bunch of crazy batshit things to a single opinion or issue. Those immigrants murder and kill and steal and eat pets! And so on and so forth. Really hard to make a point that you actually do want to make, based on a real belief of yours, only to have to wade through the buckshot shotgun blast of fake bullshit people have made up about you or your identity or beliefs! Queers being predators is a common one here. And the only way to shut this down is to call people a lying bigot to their face, I’ve found, and simplify down the strawman point they’re making to receive a yes or no to such a belief. Because when they hear it parroted back at them in plain language, they struggle to admit anything.
Belief As Absolute:
“They’re my beliefs, and I’m allowed to believe them!”
A la conflating freedom of speech with a shitty opinion, value, or belief. Oftentimes in more religious families, the holy book of choice will be cited as an absolute authority, but the specific scriptures or lines used as evidence will be cherry picked (a lesser form of dishonesty and logical fallacy – discordant and irrelevant quantitative data sets). Right wingers can be indignant until they die specifically because they never have to give up their beliefs, especially in religious contexts, because that’s the whole point of such dogma in the first place – to indoctrinate them in social engineering against such open mindedness or diversion from the flock. In my experience, staunch stubborn refusal or denial ends most conversations at this point, with nobody feeling like they won or achieved anything at an impasse. Or somehow a pastor or the like gets involved, which is kinda weird.
Appeal To Authority:
“My Pastor/Dad/Mom/Grandma/Politician/Friend/Buddy told me…”
Who are these “authorities?” Why the fuck does their opinion or stance on the issue matter? Why is your tiny echo chamber of fifteen friends and a hundred facebook group friends a good enough dataset for any proper inference? Guys like Dr. Oz, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Rudy Guliani and the like are these sorts of quoted people often. They have a credential of some sort they are leveraging for specific political or religious beliefs. As per Jordan Peterson and Rudy Guliani getting their credentials revoked for being lying garbage hacks, these folks tend not to last under any actual scrutiny for more than a few years at a time, which is why new monsters like Andrew Tate or the Paul brothers keep seeming to pop up forever. No joke, I had a Middle School Counsellor (one who literally tried to get me fired) sending me links to Jordan Peterson content long before the firing attempt via work email. We like to think these batshit crazy motherfuckers are somewhere out there in rural North America, but they are literally all around us like fucking sleeper agents! Even guiding our kids day to day on serious personal issues…
Ad Hominem:
These are easy to spot – bad faith attacks on a person or idea that aren’t an argument, point, belief, or value, but instead, rather a blatant attempt to slander or libel a person or concept in general. Can be generalized as before – “All Queers are pedos” (Obvious lying generalization) or “All immigrants do X or Y! (Insert derogatory slander however.)”
The Slippery Slope:
Facing intelligent people with anxiety disorders like myself is where I run into this one a whole lot. “BUT WHAT IF?!?” Some doomsday or apocalypse or rapture scenario is imminent, and one tiny thing will lead to some catastrophe not just down the line but RIGHT NOW. Most of the time the only way to stop this is to literally step on their lines when they start to spew random possibilities. “You don’t know that.” “Oh, you tell the future all of a sudden?” or some other take the piss measure that makes them realize how overwrought they’re being.
The Bandwagon Fallacy
“Jimmy Bob at work told me and he’s a good guy so…”
Again, as per above. I don’t give a shit if fifteen people said it, Uncle Bob, I don’t give a shit if a hundred people said it, Uncle Bob, it’s fucking wrong and untrue. Your random fucking sample size is about as helpful as polling companies like The Fraser Institute (A Right Wing Hack Front), Angus Reid, or me walking down the downtown east-side near me in Vancouver and asking folks on the street what their vaccine thoughts might be. (We should have never closed Riverview/Riverside/Whatever, and supported mental health in BC.) Your family and friends and their six degrees of separation are not fucking experts unless they have a degree and credential in the appropriate field, such as a doctor for health, or a lawyer for law. And even then, as we see with guys like Peterson or Guliani, even that isn’t fallible. Some doctors are even fucking antivaccine!!!
Whew.
As usual, I apologize. My three thousand word rough cap on these seems so disingenuous at this point, as similar to Jon Oliver’s recent New York Times podcast appearance:
“There’s just too much for a fifteen minute comedy show. We gotta balance the really true depressing shit with light jokes and gags or we’d never stay sane. We use blue and red cards to simplify it.”
That is 100% my paraphrase of him, including the shitty Americanized British Received Pronunciations you’d imagine and expect when he probably has a more specific regional UK dialect.
But that does bring us to the end, my friends. This Thanksgiving, I’m sending you strength and luck via all the witchcraft I can muster via my shitty little poetry Metaphors. I might be the second most prolific poet in history now, but I still feel for all the leftist folks out there with awkward and unfortunate family situations they bear.
Sometimes, as I’ve had to do for my own wellbeing, if people shit on the boundaries you set, you have to just cut people out who make you unhappy and miserable all the time, regardless of if they’re blood or not. If somebody is a person I would want to consider my family, I would want to show them laughter and love and care, as much as I can, and I refuse to perpetuate old stereotypes and cycles of abuse, even if “they don’t mean it that way” or whine that “you’re too defensive!”
But at the very least I can hope I’ve cleared up some things for somebody out there this Holiday season, that struggles with this same sorta shit. I can only give them the tools or knowledge, and it’s up to them from there!
Now, let’s get the fuck outta here!
-Baba McRae
