Week of 08/30/2021

 

The Absence of Consequence
– by David Matthews 2

In an article on the Huffington Post website, Caroline Bologna talks about the importance of parents teaching accountability to their children.

She starts off with the following: “We’re living in a time and place in which it often seems the people in charge have no sense of accountability... whether it’s governors rejecting mask mandates and other public health measures aimed at keeping people safe, or leaders failing to own up to their role in big and small failures.  On an everyday level, many adults don’t understand the consequences of their actions and refuse to acknowledge when they’ve made mistakes.  And as always, our children are watching.  So perhaps now, more than ever, is the time for parents to focus on teaching kids about accountability.”

This commentator certainly agrees with the statement.  Those who have seen my three-part video on what constitutes freedom know that consequence or responsibility is an essential part of what makes up freedom, along with choice and individuality. 

You, as an individual, make choices, so you bear the responsibility or consequence of those choices, both positive and negative.  You show up at work, that’s a choice.  You work a full shift doing what you’re supposed to do, that’s a choice.  You get paid for that work, that’s a positive consequence.  You don’t show up at work or you don’t work that full shift or you don’t do the work you’re supposed to do, that’s still a choice.  You not getting paid for that work that you didn’t do is a negative consequence.

Accountability is owning up to and taking responsibility for the bad choices.  It also means holding up others to their bad choices.  In other words, it’s not enough to not get paid for the work that you chose to not do.  Your supervisor, manager, or boss also has to speak with you about that, and, if it is a habitual bad choice, then they have to fire you and replace you with someone who will do that work.

The problem is that we are not doing that.  We are not holding people to account.

There are far too many people that believe themselves to be entitled to do whatever they want with zero accountability.  This commentator sees them on the road every single day.  The guy who thinks him driving an oversized pickup truck or an Audi means he’s entitled to drive 90-miles an hour in the middle of a congested highway.  The ones who treat the breakdown lane as their personal lane when there’s a traffic jam. 

We’re seeing it now with people who throw temper tantrums and fights on airlines.  People who make terrorist threats against others over a mask mandate in the middle of a deadly global pandemic.  We have banks that engage in fraudulent activity, that causes harm to others, and yet not one person goes to prison over it.  And they not only get caught doing it, but then they get caught doing it again and again, and still with no accountability whatsoever.

And we are definitely seeing it now with governors, state legislators, members of Congress, and even a certain narcissistic former President of the United States, who act recklessly, destructively, and with wanton disregard to the lives and safety of others.

Governors are demanding no new mask mandates be enacted in their states, nor do they want any private means to require either vaccination or proof of vaccination for businesses, while not only in the middle of a deadly global pandemic, but one that has surged with an even deadlier new variant that is overwhelming hospitals.  They are blatantly guilty of negligent genocide, and yet they will never be held to account for their criminal activities.

Jingoistic media personalities are telling their viewers to rip off the masks of other people and accuse parents who have their children of wearing masks to be child abusers and to have them reported.  There are several instances where this has actually happened.  The people who engaged in the assaults have been arrested and charged.  But the jingoistic media personalities who pushed for committing criminal acts haven’t.

Once upon a time, scandals and the threat of impeachment would cause any politician to step down.  Not anymore.  We impeached a sitting president not once, but twice, including a charge of inciting a domestic terrorist attack against the Congress.  A member of Congress is being investigated for underage sex trafficking, but he acts like it’s nothing.  Newly-elected members of the Senate and even seasoned members of the Senate are engaged in insider trading, but think nothing of it and are allowed to get away with it.

And if all this is allowed, then how the hell can we teach children to be accountable?

The next generation look to the current generations for guidance.  If they see what we do, then they think it’s okay to do it as well.  Remember those old anti-drug commercials where the parent demands their child answer who told them doing drugs was okay and the child screams “it’s you, Dad!  I learned it from you”?  Well, we did, and so did the generations that follow.  If we think it’s okay to drive aggressively and recklessly, then the next generation will think the same.  If we think our elected officials should be allowed to lie, cheat, steal, commit criminal offenses with impunity, then our next generation will think the same.

Let’s get brutally honest here... we cannot... absolutely *can* *not*... expect the next generation to be accountable if we do not do the same to our own today!  We cannot teach the next generation that which we ourselves refuse to be.  They see our hypocrisy and learn it to be normal.

That means we need to see prosecutions and arrests of those who engage in criminal activity, especially those that sit in or have sat in positions of power.  That means that the former President of the United States *needs* to be criminally charged for his acts and not be excused under some BS made-up “tradition” like CNN’s Jeffrey “Zoom Junk” Toobin insists.  That means going after the reckless self-entitled drivers and the anti-mask terrorists and the banks that defraud.  That means condemning the jingoistic media personalities that preach anti-vaccination and anti-mask efforts while their own employers do the opposite.

Yes there are the occasional rare exceptions where we do something right.  But for every Harvey Weinstein or Derek Chauvin, there are plenty of others who get away with their acts.  And we think nothing of it.  That has to stop.

Teaching people to be responsible means holding them to it when they do wrong.  Those of us who truly support freedom know that it’s not just about doing whatever the hell you want without consequence.  The next generation learns from our own, just like we did from the ones before us.  If we want the next generation to be better than us, then we need to break from that now.

Week of 08/23/2021

 

Afghanistan Summarized
– by David Matthews 2

So, as of this column, we are trying to get out of Afghanistan... for real.  Not hypothetically.  Real.  The Taliban have taken over and a lot of people there, especially Americans, are scrambling to get out while we still have a few soldiers left and an ever-closing window of opportunity to do it.

There is so much that needs to be said about this, but rather than go over a long and drawn-out article, I’m going to summarize the key things.

And this first one is crucial.

Let’s get brutally honest here... America *did not* fail Afghanistan!  The Afghan people failed themselves!  We were there twenty years ago to take the Taliban out of power, to shut down the al Qaeda terrorist group operating there, and to take down Osama bin Laden and his associates for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  We did those things.  We took the Taliban out of power.  We shut down the terror groups operating there.  And we killed bin Laden and captured and imprisoned his lackey who masterminded the attacks.  Those were our objectives.  Those were met.

We gave the Afghan people twenty years of support and training and equipment and weapons so they could stand up and defend the government that we helped to put in place, with all of the rights and provisions they wanted.  And yet these soldiers, whom we helped and trained and equipped at the cost of our blood and money, turned and ran when it became their job to do what they are supposed to do.  They turned tail and ran.  They failed their own people and they failed the United States, not the other way around.

Equally important is this: At no time, past, present, or future, would there *ever* be a “right time” to leave Afghanistan.  Ever!  It does not matter if it would be ten years, twenty years, a hundred years, or a thousand years, our war-hawks and chickenhawks and their descendants would be screaming and wailing in front of every camera and every social media post they can get about “emboldening enemies”.

It doesn’t matter if it is the Taliban, a reborn al Qaeda, ISIL, Cobra, SPECTRE, the Legion of Doom, HYDRA, or an enemy to be named later, there would always be some group that our war-hawks and chickenhawks would claim would be “emboldened” by our departure from any front.  That is what fascists do.  That is how fascists think.  Everything is a war front to them, and war is universal and never-ending in their heads.

Third: The only sin President Joe Biden committed was following through a plan already in motion!  President Biden wasn’t even president when a certain orange-skinned narcissist orchestrated his “deal” to get us out of Afghanistan.  Hell, Biden wasn’t even nominated yet!

A deal was signed on the last day of February 2020 between the United States and the Taliban to get out of Afghanistan within a 14-month period.  That would end in May of this year.  Not between the U.S. and the Afghan government, but between us and the Taliban!

Who was president at the time of that deal’s signing?  Narcissist Donald John Trump.

Who was there for that signing?  The Narcissist’s Secretary of State, Pompous Mike Pompeo, who whines like the hypocritical bitch that he is about the pull-out now that Biden is in the White House.

Where were all those war-hawks and chickenhawks on Leap Day 2020?  Where were all the ones screaming loudly today when the deal was struck last year and their orange-skinned “genius” wanted to have the Taliban at Camp David?  I’ll tell where they are now: they’re trying to whitewash any mention of that deal and to lie about what they did. 

The Trump/Q Party praise of their messiah’s deal?  That mysteriously disappeared from their website during what they called “maintenance”.  However, this commentator’s good friends over at the Internet Archive managed to find it.

President Biden’s only part in this has been pushing the exit date back a few months, not listening to the war-hawks and chickenhawks to renege on the deal already in place (the one that they helped to create), and to take responsibility for being the one in the White House when it happens.  He actually shows more responsibility in this situation than all of his critics and predecessors combined!

We could have stopped the Taliban but we chose not to!  We were in Afghanistan a mere six months, and we supposedly had the Taliban and al Qaeda and bin Laden on the run, and then someone decided he wanted to focus our attention on another country.

The president at that time?  George W. Bush.

He even openly admitted six months after 9/11 that Afghanistan didn’t interest him anymore.  He wanted to go to Iraq and take down Saddam Hussein.  Junior wasn’t even president anymore when we did take down bin Laden.

So, yeah, we could have finished off the Taliban decades ago, or at the very least cripple them so they wouldn’t come back as the charging bulls they are today.  Instead, we brokered deals.  And by “we” I mean the same war-hawks and chickenhawks who drove us there and demanded we stay there until the end of time.

But that still does not excuse the Afghan soldiers from cutting and running like the cowards they are.

There’s one more thing that needs to be said, and it might go towards why the Afghan soldiers cut and ran.

Who sold the Afghans on our way?  Here’s a quick fact: we as American colonists had no idea what our proposed constitutional system was back in the day.  There was nothing like it at the time.  We had to be sold it through published documents like the Federalist Papers.  Arguments about what a supposed “free country” would be like without nobility and about democratic representation without “divine right”.

So who taught the Afghans on the way that we supported, a way without the Taliban?  Where were their versions of the Federalist Papers? 

This is something I was saying twenty years ago when we first went to Afghanistan.  Freedom has to be taught.  It has to be sold to the people and for them to accept it.  That’s the only way they will want to fight for it.  Because otherwise we are just another group of occupiers to them, like the Soviets before us and like the British before the Soviets.

Who were their teachers?  Were there any teachers?  Or did we let the air-fluffed media and “decadent” television be our models and salespeople?  If we did that, then it’s no wonder why Afghanistan went back to the Taliban! 

Look, it sucks to see Afghanistan fall with such speed.  I’m sure it hurts those who fought on behalf of our country and to the families of those who died in service to our country to know that twenty years of sacrifice could go away so quickly and so easily.  Twenty years and trillions of dollars and American lives were spent on that.  But America didn’t fail the people of Afghanistan.  They did that themselves.  The only thing that we can do now is try to get as many out as we can.