I'm So Fucking Sick Of Jingoistic Bigots Who Surround My Life

[matcom]

:grr:

Just about EVERYONE I know. It is getting sickening. And this is in the bluest of the supposed blue states.

I subscribe to a discount travel site that sends me emails every week. Round trip from Boston to 10 different European cities is on sale for $450. We are at my BIL's house last night. Good guy despite his political ignorance. I mentioned the air fare sale and he immediately piped up with a derogatory comment on the French & English surrendering. :wtf:

It was a fucking statement on air fare and how if we were planning a trip to Europe it would be a perfect time to go. NOT some political or social in-depth discussion. :eyes: Then he mentioned how the British all have bad teeth. Good GAWD why are people so fucking asinine? Why the FUCK would you do that during an innocent, adult conversation? WHY?

Nothing constructive mind you as he has never BEEN to Europe, just a fucking FAUX talking point. Of course my SIL laughs her silly laugh and the conversation turns to the NI**ER episode of South Park (insert laughter here). :eyes:

I don't even watch South Park.

Guy at work I smoke with wants the U.S. to 'slip' and push the nuke button aimed at Iran. Says the Brits are 'Pu**ies' for not nuking them over the hostages. When confronted with the fact that the U.S. has been holding 6 Iranians from the January raid, he says "they aren't really diplomats". Like THAT matters how? Again, he is a nice enough guy when politics aren't involved but he insists on inserting them in almost every conversation. He likes to watch the 'Weapons' shows on the History Channel and openly laments why we aren't actually USING them against brown people. Oh he is boycotting any business who employs 'foreign workers' whether they speak english or not. :eyes:

I am hoping he is forced to grow his own produce by the end of this year since he can't visit ANY business due to his beliefs soon. :eyes:

This shit happens in every day conversation. what the hell? Last night we were over at SIL's for a simple dinner and cards. NOTHING political as far as conversation goes. Every day, SIMPLE, conversations with every day people. Jingoistic bullshit abounds. Intelligence has died.

Is there intelligent life on earth anymore?

[havocmom]

1. Ditto-heads & bush-bots find jingos easier than actually THINKING

And their comfy delusions are getting kicked out from under their lazy asses left, right, and sideways.

When one is running a behavior modification program, one generally notices an increase in the unwanted behavior. The person/group being educated (getting their behaviors modified) isn't getting the expected response to the behaviors which have generally worked for them, so they sorta clear their throats and do more of it, ya know, in case we didn't catch it the first time.

We have a lot of people who just pass on thinking and they are desperate to avoid it as their assumptions are being proved wrong. Some have a vague feeling they fucked up in not really being active in our little experiment in Democracy. They are feeling pretty bad and to numb-up, they deride others to make give themselves a squirt of the 'I'm better - We're #1' drug they are addicted to.

I know it doesn't ease the discomfort of dealing with the fucking idiots, but it is part of the reality. Going through life unaware is SO much easier than being conscious. Still, conscious is better. They aren't really alive. You are.

Had a strange discussion on reincarnation years ago. One person insisted it was bogus and her proof was that there are more people now than there has ever been, so how could that happen if we just recycled souls? Thought on that a bit and offered that there seemed to be a lot less animals too. Sure seems like some people are not as far along on that evolution project as others. ;)

I share your pain, MATCOM. You live in a very blue state. I live in a tiny rural county where there are less than 10 registered DEMS and no radio reception save one station which does Toby Keith, Rush and the rest of the RW noise machine.

The good news: even in my deep red area, most people are coming out against bushco and the war. Critical thought is getting more common. Bigots still abound, but there is some light coming in. They used to mouth off about how evil Liberals were to me! HA! As they would go along, thanking me for the things I do and commenting how kind I am... I like to drop the L bomb on their little heads. I like to be living proof that what they assume about others is not accurate. I love popping the balloons that get in the way of their vision. I am a Liberal walking the walk. When they stop to talk, they are amazed. More and more come with questions and asking for resources for some truth. More and more are sharing those resources with kith and kin.

We just have to keep calmly confronting the Archie Bunker mentalities. Then we can come here for a shoulder to cry on when it all gets too much.

MATCOM, you are a good person. But life is not often kind to good people, especially the ones who are pretty close to fully conscious. Still, we trek on; and it ALWAYS seems to be uphill & snowing TO and FROM school ;)

:hug:

[trof]

17. Exactly the same down here.

"They used to mouth off about how evil Liberals were to me! HA! As they would go along, thanking me for the things I do and commenting how kind I am... I like to drop the L bomb on their little heads. I like to be living proof that what they assume about others is not accurate. I love popping the balloons that get in the way of their vision."

That's exactly what Miz t. and I do.
We're very involved in a couple of volunteer organizations.
Put in a lot of hours.
Sometimes (not often) politics comes up.
You can just see the tiny wheels turning in their tiny heads.
"Wow! They seem like such nice people and they're LIBERAL DEMOCRATS? How can that be?"

[havocmom]

22. Messes with their heads when their kids and dogs love us

and then they find out we're ::gasp:: LIBERALS. But, wait, how come the kids and dogs all love you if you eat babies and all... :rofl:

We're ambassadors out to prove Rush is a lying sack of shit, aren't we trof? ;)

[trof]

27. Have to tell you about a guest in our home.

He is a complete jerk, but his wife and mine are friends.
So 'we' invited them to dinner with two other couples one night.
He arrived already pretty drunk.
That's OK, as long as you are a happy drunk.
He isn't and he got drunker.

During dinner we got into the most idiotic argument I've ever been in.
Out of the clear blue he made a comment about how liberal Democrats were trying to ruin the country.
The funny part is that he was talking to his plate during the following exchange. I guess he couldn't hold his head up any more.

"Hey Duane, HOLD IT! I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm sure not out to ruin anything."
"Ya are NOT! Yer no sucha thing!"
"Yes I am Duane."
"Naw yer not. I know you. I know yer not."
"Duane, this is stupid. I know what I am and what my politics are a hell of a lot better than you do. How the hell can you keep saying that?"
"Well...I still don't think ya are. Yer not a commoniss."
He was going glassy eyed and started to slump in his chair.
His wife said "Weeellll...I think we better get on home now."
I helped her help him out to the car.
She called to apologize the next day.
He died with a sudden heart attack about a month later, so I never had to be around him again.

[havocmom]

40. Hellova story! What an idiot.

Sudden heart attack a month later. Man, that anger/hate thing some of them have going is hard on the ticker!

My brother is a class A hothead who drives for a living = too much time listening to crap on AM hate radio. He gets real cranky and it generally gets worse just prior to a cardiac event. He is not stupid. Don't know why he can't figure out that the head of steam he insists on maintaining is killing him.

[Orsino]

2. As the * economy collapses, fewer and fewer people...

...can maintain the standard of living to which they feel entitled. Corporate executives having elevated their class beyond our reach, many of us look for someone a different color to blame. The most pathetic of the jingoists will wrap themselves in (real or imagined) military prowess they had no part in earning.

It's just the same dirty little might-makes-right meme in slightly different but equally filthy clothing.

[rockymountaindem]

3. Confront them about it. You'll run circles around them

Soon enough they'll be feeling stupid and sorry that they ever mentioned it to you. Just tell 'em how wrong they are every time they bring stupid shit up, like how nuking Iran now would definately mean those hostages are going to die...

Also, make sure everybody else hears it.

[matcom]

25. oh I do but it gets SOOOOOO tiresome!

just give me a REGULAR conversation about something innocuous. i'm so tired of everyone putting down everyone else.

sick.and.tired.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. My freepish SIL hates the French.

We're having a nice family dinner -- think it was somebody's birthday -- and somebody had brought a bottle of a nice French wine, and SIL refuses to drink any of it. Fine; that meant more for me; but she's gotta start busting on the cheese-eating surrender-monkey French, turns the whole thing political just because some other family member thought it would be a nice thing to bring some good-quality French wine to the party.

:nuke:

[realisticphish]

8. I love their "We saved their asses in WWII" meme

Just respond with, "They saved OUR asses in the American Revolution"

[Skittles]

9. I saved your life, now help me rob this liquor store

that's the gist of it

[realisticphish]

11. lol

:rofl: great analogy

[Skittles]

12. I wish I could take credit for it

I read it somewhere but I don't remember who said it....but you are correct, it a great analogy.

[XemaSab]

5. Why do you hate America?

:shrug:

[Hugin]

6. I feel your pain matcom...

Great rant.

[redwitch]

7. I just returned from a week in Paris.

It was simply heaven to set American politics aside for a whole week. I used the internet to email or SKYPE talk to hubby a few times and that was it. I liked being out of the loop. Back home, I am once again a junkie. Can't resist reading the moronic LTTEs here in upstate NY, or turning on CNN.

I am avoiding visiting one of my brothers because he is too much like your smoking buddy. I can feel my blood pressure rise. And I just know the bullshit anti-French spew will be forthcoming. I am afraid some day we will have a "conversation" that ends our relationship. Ugh.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. I love being out of the country, too

My trips to Japan and England last year were really relaxing. Both countries have their own problems, but they weren't MY problems.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

20. I was in Amsterdam last week,

and even though it's a crowded city it somehow seemed more relaxed. A lot of bicycles, didn't see a single SUV, people didn't look angry the way they seem to so often here. To get to downtown Amsterdam we had to take a ferry, and it was -- get this -- free. How very civilized -- a city offers free transportation to its citizens so they can walk or bike downtown. Here, the ferries would have been run for profit by some private business (on the basis of a no-bid contract).

Although the U.S. is, of course, NUMBER ONE!!!, oddly enough I don't see huge crowds of desperate Europeans trying to cross our borders to escape the bleak socialist hellholes they live in. :sarcasm:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

23. The idea of using government funds to benefit the general public

or to stave off possible future crises seems to have disappeared completely here.

You don't see SUVs much in Japan, either. (They wouldn't fit in a lot of the streets.)

Last summer, I sat having coffee in a shop at a major intersection in Kyoto, which is a big modern city, although with a few sleepy traditional areas, and the cars were small, the trucks were small, and there were a lot more scooters, buses, and bikes than you would see at a comparable U.S. intersection. I also know from my translation work that the Japanese government and industries are serious about reducing carbon emissions and other kinds of waste. Almost every bit of corporate puffery that I translate mentions how much that specific company has reduced carbon emissions since the Kyoto Accords were signed and how much they hope to reduce them further and by what means.

I think there's something about having survived total destruction of one's infrastructure and having rebuilt it quickly that gives the authorities an awareness of how fragile everything is.

How many American companies are even thinking about reducing their carbon load?

[Darth_Kitten]

10. What did you say to them?

Don't put up with their crap. You don't need to hang around anybody who's hateful and ignorant.

Life is too short.

[Jade Fox]

13. Right-wing radio talk shows and Fox News have....

given validity to what used to be recognized as the world view of adolescent males--fantasy-based, simplistic, hostile, crude, self-absorbed--and rooted in no actual real life experience. Grown men and women are now running around spouting the sort of crap that used to make parents look forward to the day when the kid would turn 18, join the Army or get a job, and get his butt kicked by a little thing called reality.

That's my theory anyway.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. You're right--right wing radio and Fox News and the way the listeners

reinforce one another, has led to a whole sub-population of men (and some women) who are stuck emotionally and intellectually at age 15. (Apologies to any real 15-year-olds who have overcome their MSM conditioning, but if you actually are 15, you probably have some of those macho jerks in your school.)

[Jade Fox]

18. Thanks....and as someone else said.....

this is all reinforced by having a puerile President who clearly never made it out of adolescence himself.

I also think this new cultural immaturity has to do with how relatively few Veterans there are in the current adult population. Having been born in the 1950s, virtually all the adult men around me when I was growing up were Veterans. What with WWI, WWII, and Korea, most men had seen war. I don't remember that those men ever glamorized war or indulged in simplistic fantasies about it.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. Yes, there are an awful lot of younger adults who don't remember

any president before Reagan, with all his phony militarism and aggressive foreign policy. As horrible as the Vietnam War was for my generation, it didn't involve nearly as high a percentage of the population as World War II did.

[realisticphish]

36. hey

i don't remember before CLINTON. How do you like THEM apples :evilgrin:

I was alive during Bush I, but I don't remember it.

[trof]

16. Come spend a few days down here.

"Damn mescans are ruining this country. They oughta all go back where they come from."

And you hear a lawn mower running and look out in the guy's yard and that ain't a damn Filipino cutting his lawn.
Go figure.

[havocmom]

24. I hear a variaiton on that theme up here in Montana:

Here, too many crackers want the 'Indians' to go back to where they came from. :wtf: If I'm confused by that attitude, what must the Native Americans think about the idiots?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. This tells me there are some serious gaps in the history part of the

local school curriculum. :eyes:

The only proper comeback (but it would have to be spoken by a Native American) is, "My people have been here for at least 15,000 years and probably longer. YOU go back to where you came from."

[realisticphish]

37. Maybe he wants them to take a trip to Africa

:shrug:

[allalone]

21. geez

have they never seen the films of the nazis marching through Paris? Believe me, no flowers thrown to them. the looks on the people's faces could break your heart. Does your bil think he would be standing there throwing gasoline bombs? No my friend, he would not be. Has he never heard of the French underground? Has he never heard of LaFayette, who came to assist in the Revolutionary war?
Sometimes I think the ones who complain the most about France and England are the ones who can't afford to go there.

btw, saint reagan in a speech once called military uniforms wardrobe! Please, no more actors!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

26. Back in the 1980s, the husband of one of my cousins was constantly

ranting against the anti-nuclear proliferation movements in Europe. Bunch of prissy wimps, those Europeans were, according to him.

Well, his brother-in-law (another cousin of mine) is a former military man who married a German woman and retired in Germany. He invited the couple over to visit him.

Well, this former enemy of peace groups came back singing a different tune. Now he was saying that he could understand the peace movements, because Germany and the other European countries had done a great job of rebuilding after the war and had a very pleasant way of life, and he could understand why they didn't want to risk wrecking everything again.

Americans are SO provincial, and that's why I used to encourage my students to take advantage of study abroad programs, not the two-week trips that just reinforced their prejudices ("The Mexicans aren't physically fit. I never saw anyone working out" was one priceless line from a veterna of a two-week trip). There's something about living with a local family and having to deal with a foreign culture on a day-to-day basis that changes you forever.

Still, the person has to be open-minded and humble. If you look at travel websites, you'll find freeperly types who complain that Europeans constantly picked fights with them and were "anti-American." I can just imagine the freeperly approach to foreign travel:

"Why don't you accept good old American dollars? Not good enough for you, huh?
"What do you mean your local TV station doesn't broadcast in English? How am I going to watch the play-offs?"
"What's this café au lait and croissant nonsense? I want bacon and eggs and a short stack for breakfast, and it better not cost more than $6.00."
"What do you mean you don't have any SUV's for rent?"
"Train? Bus? Do I look black?"
"I don't see what's so great about Europe, just a bunch of old buildings and snobby people."
"I am not drunk and disorderly!"
"USA Number 1, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys!"

[Forkboy]

29. And what's even scarier is we're considered one of the MOST liberal places to live.

What the fuck is the rest of this country like right now? :scared:

[matcom]

30. fuck. i HATE to think about it

and we would like to move to Florida one day :eyes:

[Pierre.Suave]

33. Fuck Florida

I want to move to Germany.

[matcom]

34. lived there for 3 years

even though it was 'army living'

but...

i agree 100% :thumbsup:

[kwassa]

31. Your BIL is probably jealous of your potential overseas trip

can't admit it, and has to badmouth the idea of something he has no chance of doing.

[GOPisEvil]

32. Go rent 'Idiocracy'. It is the direction we are headed as a country.

[Maddy McCall]

35. Great movie. I'd say we're almost there as a nation.

"Would you like another extra Big-Ass Fries?"

[Little Wing]

38. depends

are those fries from ButtFuckers? I won't eat fries from anywhere else

[xchrom]

39. there are too many ignorant, nationalistic idiots in this country.

perpetually terrified somebody is going to get something that should be coming to them.

[NC_Nurse]

41. My dad always has to spout a few RW talking points when we visit.

The last time he was going on about the US Attorney scandal, I'm sure his POV came directly from Billo - his hero.
I suddenly blurted out "George Bush is a lying piece of shit and so is Gonzales."

He looked at me like my head had just spun fully around like in the Exorcist. I just couldn't listen to it anymore.

I felt kinda bad, and I apologized later. Not because I was wrong...but because it was pretty rude at the dinner table and all...:blush:

[Wapsie B]

43. I wouldn't apologize.

I've got a family just like that. It gets to me too.

[WindRavenX]

42. They're not adults. They're big children.

Most people I meet are complete idiots and do not qualify as rational, critically thinking adults.

I rarely bring up politics *ever* anymore simply because I get too angry when people open their maw.

[Skittles]

44. YOU WANT I SHOULD KICK SOME JINGOISTIC ASS??

YEE HAW !!!