Over the past few days, I’ve stumbled upon a word that more of us should know as it so perfectly captures this moment in time. Commit this one to memory, because you’re probably going to want to use it often:
Kakistocracy n. (kak·is·toc·ra·cy / kækɪsˈtɑkɹəsi) Government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.
REUTERS/Christopher Aluka Berry
The origins of kakistocracy are actually pretty neat. The term was first used around 1829 and was coined as an opposite to “aristocracy”. It comes from the Greek “kakistos” or “worst”, which is the superlative form of “kakos” or “bad”. Switch the “k” to a “c” and you have the root of modern words like “cacophony”.
But here’s where it gets even more fun. “Kakos” is closely related to “Caco” or “defecate”. As we saw above, it’s essentially the same phonetic sounds and has similar modern words derived from it.
Today, you’ll find this in the Greek “Kakke” “human excrement”, Latin “cacare”, Irish “caccaim”, Serbo-Croatian “kakati”, Armenian “k’akor”, Old English “cac-hus” or “latrine”, Dutch “kak”, German “Kacke”, and the school-yard favorite “caca”.
So in this trying time, remember the word “kakistocracy”.
“We have had enough of the hatreds [this man Trump] has unleashed and the apologists in the media who have not stood up and have called him what he is: a fascist who wants to end this democracy.”
There’s nothing patriotic about the lunatic outrage of the angry white male Trump voter. Real Americans have had enough.
Every few generations, we Americans are called upon to defend our country. To defend it not so much from foreign dictators or war or terrorism, but from those here who have no commitment to progress or democracy or representative government—no commitment to anything except their own out-of-control minds and the bottomless pits of their egos.
Our society has thrown up these people before: Joseph McCarthy. George Wallace. Father Coughlin. Jefferson Davis. Aaron Burr. The Know-Nothings. The Blacklisters. The America-Firsters. And we have always thrown them out. And now our generation has its own: the most dangerous individual ever nominated by a major party for the highest office in this country.
His base wants few details and fewer facts; they just want to burn it down and blame their failures on the collective other. And Donald John Trump is their demonic messiah in Oompa Loompa’s clothing. We must stop him. It is not pleasant. It is not fair that we have to do this. But it is our turn.”
This will have absolutely no effect upon the hard core fascist Trump supporters, but it is nice to know for all of us who live in the real world that not all of MSM has been overtaken by the creeping toxicity of their narrative.
I can’t. I just can’t. And this my friends is why it is so vitally important that we all get out and VOTE in November. If you don’t want that Cheeto-faced straw-toupeed fucktrumpet sitting in the White House—and by extension idiots like this running the country and determining your future—you have to VOTE. Sitting at home on November 8th, thinking you don’t need to drag your ass to the polling place because everything says that Hillary has it wrapped up, is no guarantee she will win if you don’t cast your ballot. We need to show unequivocally that Trump’s hate and his Neo-Nazi brain-dead followers have no place in our society.
A thoughtful, reasoned response to the Republican cray-cray that seems to be spewing from a fire hose lately…
“At the risk of taking Gingrich’s nonsense seriously, just imagine for a moment what translating his proposal into action would mean. The government would round up 3.3 million American Muslims, then “test” them to see “if they believe in Sharia,” a notion about which Gingrich doesn’t have the remotest clue. Sharia is the Arabic word for “law”; there’s no guidebook of official Sharia, and Islamic scholars have a multitude of ideas about how Koranic ideas could or should be translated into civil rules. But even if there were, Gingrich is literally proposing to prosecute thought crimes, as well as jettisoning the First Amendment to throw people in jail for visiting certain web sites. And where is he going to “deport” the Americans whom he decides believe in Sharia to?
Frankly, I think we need to ask just how Newt Gingrich got radicalized, and what caused him to reject the values of the country that gave him so much. Was it some radical cleric who did this to him? Is there a church somewhere in Georgia we need to be monitoring?“ ~ Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
TEXAS. Bureau of Investigation arrests two pastors for seeking sex with underage girls: “Jason Kennedy, 46, who held the role of children’s pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Knoxville, and Zubin Parakh, 32, who is listed as the creative pastor at LifeHouse Church, were both nabbed in the undercover investigation. According to a police report seen by WVLT Kennedy had agreed to pay $100 for a half hour with two girls, one of whom was 15. Kennedy faces patronizing prostitution and trafficking charges—and could land in prison for up to 60 years. Kennedy has lost his job at Grace Baptist Church as a result of the investigation.”
‘The Obama administration is bypassing Congress by attempting to rewrite the law and set restroom policies for public and private employers across the country, not just North Carolina.’
That was North Carolina Governor, Pat McCrory.
You know, that’s a pretty bold statement coming from a guy with a gender-ambiguous name who himself signed into law regulations setting bathroom policies.
North Carolina was given until today to suspend enforcement of the gender/bathroom portions of HB2 or lose federal funding.
Washington indicated it would extend that deadline if McCrory would publicly agree HB2 is discriminatory.
Instead, McCrory chose to sue the federal government. That’s right, instead of doing the right thing, the inevitable thing, he’s chosen to waste taxpayer money at both the state and federal levels in order to fight for a law that is obviously unnecessary and based entirely on bigoted fear of a situation that is essentially nonexistent.
‘I’m not going to publicly announce that something discriminates, which is agreeing with their letter, because we’re really talking about a letter in which they’re trying to define gender identity,’ McCrory said. ‘And there is no clear identification or definition of gender identity. It’s the federal government being a bully.’
There is no clear indication of gender identity.
I wonder if this idiot can actually hear the words coming out of his mouth? Or if he’s just a puppet with Tony Perkins’ hand up his ass?
No clear indication of gender identity? Well gee, fellas, ISN’T THAT THE ENTIRE BASIS OF THE HB2 PROVISIONS REQUIRING PEOPLE TO ONLY USE SPECIFIC RESTROOMS MATCHING THEIR SEX AT BIRTH?
The fuck? Seriously.
‘This is now a national issue that applies to every state and it needs to be resolved at the federal level.’
You know what, Pat? You’re right. It IS a national issue. And thank you for making it so. It was a NON-issue, but you, you ignorant hateful bigoted jackasses, have now made it a national issue. Just like interracial and same-sex marriage—and how’d that work out for you religious nuts? Remind me.
This is why I laugh when I hear conservatives bleating about ‘state’s rights.’ If 200 plus years of American history have taught us anything at all, it’s that the states cannot be trusted with civil rights.
The last few days are a reminder that a large number of Americans are in fact shrieking, bigoted cowards, and that’s a sad thing, indeed.
Seriously, I don’t think the bedwetting about Muslims has been this bad in a very long time, which is saying something, and the panic on Syrian refugees is particularly ridiculous. Here’s a nice, juicy quote from a just released essay on the subject:
Of the 859,629 refugees admitted from 2001 onwards, only three have been convicted of planning terrorist attacks on targets outside of the United States and none was successfully carried out. That is one terrorism-planning conviction for a refugee for every 286,543 of them who have been admitted. To put that in perspective, about 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014. The terrorist threat from Syrian refugees in the United States is hyperbolically over-exaggerated and we have very little to fear from them because the refugee vetting system is so thorough…
The security threat posed by refugees in the United States is insignificant. Halting America’s processing of refugees due to a terrorist attack in another country that may have had one asylum-seeker as a co-plotter would be an extremely expensive overreaction to very minor threat.
What horrifyingly liberal commie soviet came up with this load of codswallop? The Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, i.e., the fellow who with his brother is currently trying to buy the entire right side of the political spectrum for his own personal ends. When the Cato Institute is telling you to maybe take down the pearl-clutching over the Syrian refugees a notch or two, it’s an indication that you’ve lost all perspective.
It’s been particularly embarrassing how the mostly-but-not-exclusively (and thankfully not all-encompassing) GOP/conservative politician freakout about the Syrian refugees points out that, why, hello, bigotry really is a thing, still. From small-town mayors declaring that FDR had it right when he put all those US citizens of Japanese descent into camps to presidential candidates alluding that might not actually be a bad idea to make special IDs exclusively for Muslims here in the US, to the House of Representatives passing a bill to piss on the Syrian refugees, it’s been a banner week for bigotry here in the US, enough so that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement of concern with reference to the Syrian refugees. And as many have noted, there is irony in the freakout about Syrian refugees coming into a season which celebrates a notable middle eastern family who famously were refugees at one point in their history, according to some tales.
But as this asshole politician said this week, “Mary and Jesus didn’t have suicide bomb vests strapped on them, and these folks do.” Well, no, they don’t. Leaving aside that the perpetrators on the attacks in Paris all appeared to live in Europe to begin with, the actual process for placing refugees in new countries is so long and arduous and so selective, with just 1% of applicants being placed, that (as the Cato Institute astutely notes) there’s a vanishingly small chance that someone with ill intent will make it through the process at all — and an even smaller chance that they would be assigned to the US when all the vetting is done. To worry about terrorists in the refugee pool is, flatly, stupid — no terrorist organization is going to pour resources into an avenue with such a small chance of success, especially when it’s easier to apply for a friggin’ visa and get on a plane (they can buy their guns when they get here, don’t you know). The reasons why so many people are voiding their bowels about it are simple: Ignorance, racism, xenophobia and bigotry.
“But people are scared!” Okay, and? Being scared may be the excuse for abandoning all sense and reason in the moment one is actively under attack; it’s not even close to a reasonable excuse for, thousands of miles away from an attack and with no immediate threat on the horizon, vilifying innocent co-religionists of the attackers and plotting to slam the door on refugees running from the very people who claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks. Taking the Paris attacks out on Syrian refugees is security theater — it doesn’t make us safer, it’ll just make the most ignorant among us feel safer. It’s the TSA of solutions to the Daesh/ISIS problem.
This has been a bad week for the United States, folks. France was directly attacked by terrorists and its response was to promise to house 30,000 Syrian refugees; we weren’t and one branch of our government fell over itself to put the brakes on accepting a third of that number. France is defying the very organization that attacked it while we, on the other hand, are doing exactly what that organization hoped we would do. We’re being the cowardly bigots they hoped we would be, and as loudly as possible.
So congratulations, America. We’ve successfully wrested the title of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” from France. Enjoy it.
“A Philadelphia man was temporarily barred from boarding an airplane Wednesday after a fellow passenger overheard him speaking Arabic and complained that it made him uncomfortable, The Associated Press reported.”
