Author: Alan Buddug

Although I’ve alluded to this before, I decided not to hit it straight on until now because I realized that there’s a political powder keg hiding behind the issue of the Wuhan lab, which more and more sane people are now acknowledging as the likely source of COVID-19. In short, there’s a research lab in Wuhan that does “gain of function” work on viruses — modifying them to see what happens under the pretense of creating the opportunity to proactively come up with ways to combat new viruses. It’s exactly the kind of bad idea that would be the underpinning of a sci-fi disaster movie, and I was pretty surprised to learn that it is considered a normal line of scientific inquiry — though it is is quite controversial.

The lab, which did receive funding from the US, happens to sit right about where COVID-19 started. It’s way too big a coincidence. My assumption is that either the lab’s normal procedures were not adequate to prevent workers from catching the virus or that a worker (or workers) ignored safety procedures and caught it. It’s silly — but more importantly, it is paranoid — to imagine that China purposefully released a deadly virus in China to try to make Donald Trump look bad. If they were going to do something like that, they’d have no trouble releasing the virus in the US where it would be more likely to stick to Trump and less likely to stick to China.

I also don’t think this was a Twelve Monkeys Scenario — where a single worker decides they want to end the world, and releases a virus to accomplish that goal. It’s an extremely destructive virus, but not a world-ender.

Anyone saying that it is “unlikely” that the virus came from the Wuhan lab is — from what I can tell — basing that on an optimistic evaluation of whether human beings were following the standard safety precautions for a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) lab without error. (Here is a Quick Learn Lesson from the CDC about Biosafety Levels.) In contrast, I make absolutely no assumptions about people succeeding in following those worldwide standards for laboratory safety procedures based on both anecdotes (that I can’t share) and public records of previous mistakes in those kinds of labs — including labs in the US.

I’ve been pretty taken aback by all the experts claiming that the lab had nothing to do with it without any evidence to back it up. To be fair, their obvious concern is that there are fascists and that they would use the pandemic as a convenient excuse to start a racist war against China that would quickly blossom into an even bigger economic catastrophe and a world war. With the mere idea that the Wuhan lab might be the source being an existential threat to both capital and human life, elites decided that they had to quash it.

I respect that those trying to deny that COVID-19 might have come from the Wuhan lab have the best intentions.

In the long term, though, trying to hide the truth only helps the far right, and we’re going to see them use the Chinese coverup and western media and government participation in that coverup as powerful propaganda supporting the far right position. The situation reminds me very much of Chernobyl, an event that led to loss of faith in the Soviet project from within and significantly contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union; it wasn’t just the catastrophe itself that destroyed the people’s faith in the government, but the bumbling and callous way the government kept trying to bury the facts.

Moreover, I wish we could find a way to get our government — and government-funded scientists — to stop treating the public like children who can’t handle difficult truths. Suppressing harsh truths creates a culture of suspicion and prevents voters from making good political decisions — like whether to end funding for gain-of-function virus research or whether to finally do something about climate change. This is part of the overall anti-democratic culture of the United States (and, clearly, other countries); to truly have a democracy, you have to trust your citizens with the truth.

Related links:

The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak by Steven Quay and Richard Muller, June 6, 2021, Wall Street Journal

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis by Nicholson Baker, January 4, 2021, New York Magazine

Does this remind you of how we weren’t allowed to criticize President Obama? Thanks Obama | Why Obama is a monster who you should not celebrate.

Leon Thomas spent a couple of years on this video; it is extremely thorough and also a lot longer than what you typically see on YouTube. It is worth your time because the right-wing evangelical movement — perhaps more accurately called the Christian dominionist movement — is the most important component of the far right today, accounting for about one third of all Americans. Not coincidentally, hard-core Trumpers are about a third of all Americans who are eligible to vote.

I took the time to read the first Left Behind novel about a decade ago, and it really does explain a lot of the insanity of American politics. (Save yourself some time and watch this documentary instead.) The only important thing that I feel like might be neglected in the documentary is the relationship between anti-communist hysteria in the US and Left-Behind-style theology; that is to say, perhaps the biggest reason behind that hysteria is that far-right American Christians saw the Soviet Union as an immense atheistic force that intended to convert the entire world to an ideology based on materialism. That characterization is technically true, though certainly inaccurate.

In the minds of US Christians, the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union basically became a battle between the forces of their God and the forces of Satan. That they somehow decided that the UN — which is an agent of neoliberal capitalism — was part of the atheistic goals of communism is curious. The likely reason for this reframing is that American elites purposefully steered the conversation away from the real goal of communism — ending the rule of abusive elites — and toward this religious non-sequitur.

My point here, though, is that the reason conservatives are so terrified of anything they perceive as “Marxism” is because their worldview sees it as a threat to their very existence — quite literally. Fear of death is one of their primary motivators — to the degree that they almost completely sublimate that fear — and a Marxist world all but guarantees that they will eventually cease to exist.

This Memorial Day, I again saw how the liberal media lies by omitting the most important details. In this case, the important detail was the true origin and meaning of Memorial Day. Predictably, they did talk about the many people who lost their lives in more recent conflicts, and I certainly appreciate that they should be remembered on Memorial Day, too — but their sacrifice is not the reason we began the Memorial Day tradition.

Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, and it began because the fascist trash of the confederacy chose to bury Union soldiers in a mass grave behind a horse track in Charleston, South Carolina.

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Dr. David W. Blight, The First Decoration Day

The Charleston race track prison camp was the sequel to the horrific Andersonville prison camp.

You may have heard that Republicans are trying to ban the teaching of real history by calling uncomfortable truths “critical race theory” and then banning the teaching of “critical race theory”. Critical race theory (CRT) is a real thing, but conservatives are using the term to mean a conspiracy among liberal elites to make them face the consequences of America’s racist past — which means they are putting the CRT label on any teaching of true, complete US history. For conservatives, anything that points out the truth of racism is “divisive” but the racism itself is somehow not divisive. It’s almost like they are racists trying to deny that racism exists.

It would be nice if the liberal media would not help them by omitting important details that point to the truth of the matter — a truth that consistently supports the positions of the left.

Those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it, the saying goes, and there are lessons to be learned from the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca civilizations. These are things we can apply to our situation today as we again face the specter of fascism — or perhaps continue to face the specter of fascism.

1. Superior Weapons: The weapons wielded by the Spanish were superior to those of the native people that they destroyed. Spain had portable cannons, steel swords, pikes and crossbows, whereas the Aztecs and Incas had wood swords and spears tipped with obsidian blades. Of course, the Aztecs and Incas did not have a choice regarding weapon technology, but we do; if we are to successfully resist the march of fascism, we must not give up our access to modern weapon technology.
2. Human Sacrifice: Three main city states of the Aztec empire ruled over the rest of the surrounding areas and would regularly require that sacrificial victims be sent to the capitol — their hearts cut out and their bodies literally consumed by elite members of Aztec society. Historians will talk at length about the supposed religious significance of these rituals, but any leftist will note the fact that it was outsiders (based on genetic analysis) who made up almost all of victims, and conclude that human sacrifice was used by the ruling Aztec city states as a tool of intimidation (probably also used against rebellious citizens as well). It was a clear and ever-present message of domination, and as you might expect, those communities who were required to send victims to the ruling class had a hatred of them that the Spanish found easy to take advantage of. When Cortes asked them to help destroy those city states, all the surrounding communities were happy to oblige. The United States of today is also practicing human sacrifice, just not in such an overt way. As a few examples: Our homeless community members, people who can’t afford good food, everyone who loses their savings in the stock market, people who join the military because their economic situation makes it seem like a good idea — these are all victims of human sacrifice waiting for the right person (or the wrong one, as was the case with both Cortes and Trump) to lead them against the elites.
3. Chaos: The Spaniards brought smallpox with them, which infected the Aztecs, sending their civilization into chaos. The Spaniards were able to leverage the chaos of that epidemic to end the Aztecs. We have to recognize that fascists will strike in times of chaos and be ready to fight them precisely in those moments where all our time is already taken up by some other disaster.
4. Tolerance/Appeasement: First, their leader, Moctezuma, tried appeasing Cortes with gifts; but Cortes saw through that tactic and took Moctezuma captive. Next, the Aztecs continued to tolerate the Spanish invaders and allowed them to continue holding their leader hostage for quite some time, only fighting back once he had died. Perhaps Moctezuma and the Aztecs as a whole tolerated the Spanish because they thought they couldn’t win — and maybe they were right — but allowing the Spaniards to have marginal control only allowed the situation to get worse over time. The lesson here is that you must fight back immediately and never resort to appeasement — the goal of fascism is to destroy you, so there’s no downside to fighting back.

In the case of the Spanish invasion of the Aztec and Inca societies, the existing society was also fascistic, but the invading Spanish were worse. This feels very familiar to me. If we were able to go back in time and try to convince the Aztecs and Incas to have some solidarity with one another and fight off the Spanish, would we be able to succeed? My guess is no. My guess is that the Aztecs would not be able to stop being evil and that the Incas would harbor too much hatred of the Aztecs to allow them to rationally choose the lesser evil — even if the Aztecs managed to reform. Even Aztecs in the lesser city states might still be ready to throw their lot in with the Spanish in order to put their rage against abusive elites into action.

I know you may have thought that the US presidential election was over, but it isn’t! Much like a Romero zombie, it just keeps shuffling forward hoping to make enough new zombies along the way to take over the world. Republicans are calling it the “Arizona audit”; they’re saying that the purpose of it is just to confirm that everything was cool, but the first step of the audit was giving the voting machines to a Trump fascist who held onto them for quite some time, so they are no longer safe to use for future elections.

The current process that’s happening with the audit would be that Trumpers are examining all the ballots for Arizona. If there is anything weird about the ballot (folding, smudges, crumpling, presence of bamboo, or if it just seems suspicious), the Trumpers place the ballot in a special examination area. Then, the special examiners look at the flagged ballots. Ballots that were for Biden are determined to be fake ballots from China (this is really what they believe), and ballots for Trump are determined to be real, American ballots.

Slate has a pretty good description of what’s going on at the audit site.

This whole process is so obviously skewed toward confirming the Republican belief that Satanic pedophiles of the Democratic party (in cooperation with China) somehow stole the election from Trump that it will be extremely shocking if the audit confirms that the election was valid. The more likely outcome is that conservatives will mark down Arizona as having gone to Trump in the election and then move on with the same strategy for the next swing state with the long-term goal of getting support for seizing control of the entire government. The other swing states that went to Biden are New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia.

One thing interesting about this is how it illustrates the conservative thought process in a more general sense. There’s nothing about Cheeto powder on a ballot that suggests anything is wrong with it in an electoral sense, and both Republicans and Democrats enjoy a good Cheeto. The conservative sees an area where they lack power (the ballots in this case) and manufactures bullshit to be concerned about; that’s the first step. “Oh, no! The ballot is soiled!”

Next, the conservative formalizes the bullshit as an important feature; in this case, it would be making a rule that we should be putting “soiled” ballots in the pile marked “suspicious”. Again, there’s nothing suspicious about dirt on a ballot, but putting it in the “suspicious” pile sure makes it look suspicious. From there, the conservative simply says that some percentage of the suspicious ballots were rejected. Nobody is surprised that suspicious ballots were rejected — they were suspicious! Interestingly, most of the rejected ballots opposed the conservative’s worldview — which, the conservative says, is exactly what you’d expect.

If you were to examine the ballots specifically to determine how many are soiled and whether Democrats or Republicans are more likely to have soiled ballots, you’d probably find no connection. You might even find that Republicans are more likely to have soiled their ballots — that’s what we find with things like pedophilia and Satanism. But somehow, this process, which is run by Republicans, will reject more Biden ballots than Trump ballots based on the issue of soil, which isn’t at all related to how ballots work.

Remember, Republicans never actually cared about Cheeto stains, just like they don’t really care about democracy, justice, or babies. They want you to care about Cheeto stains so they can leverage your feelings to further their power, and they do it by defining “soiled” as “suspicious”. This is the same way they redefine all sorts of words to try to get people to go along with their agenda: capitalism, socialism, freedom, self-defense, power, baby.

100% of conservative political positions are based on manufactured bullshit like this, which is why there is absolutely no reason to try to negotiate with them. Anyone who tries to negotiate with them is either exceedingly naïve or working the negotiations for their own selfish benefit. Which of those apply to the Democratic party?

Ignorance and they way liberal media purposefully omits certain facts that would clarify or even radically alter the audience’s understanding of the world is something that I find really interesting. It’s a self-censorship to manipulate the bounds of our social system and maintain the media owners’ preferred power hierarchy. In this video, Abigail Thorne talks about ignorance and censorship from a philosophical perspective, and about why people can choose to be ignorant.

I’m going to go ahead and add her previous video on ideology (which uses the ideology of Jordan Petersen as the central example) because it covers much of the same area, but in a different way.

Conservatives are really obsessed with chaos. They call it “anarchy” and they call a society in chaos an “anarchic society”. This may seem obvious, but I think it’s a good idea to talk about it. From the conservative view, chaos is always right around the corner because somehow their preferred hierarchy will be upended and then, suddenly, everything will be on fire. That’s literally what they believe. They don’t seem to really have any kind of understanding of how, exactly, women wearing pants or Cardi B publicly talking about her sex life is going to cause everything to catch fire, but that’s definitely what is going to happen — and that’s why decent 5.56x45mm ammo is still 73 cents per round.

For many issues, the real problem conservatives have with it isn’t the issue itself, but rather this ever-present subtext of chaos (which they call anarchy). When they rail against abortion, the subtext of every claim and concern they voice is that if women don’t follow the course of action that has been ordained by the hierarchy, the next thing you know, everything will be on fire. It’s not about babies — it’s about chaos.

Most of the conservative logic around how a society might become chaotic is completely bananas, but one part of it makes sense, and that is their severe anxiety about the police potentially being defunded. Whether that defunding would be a marginal decrease in police funding to move tax money to other government functions that would actually help people, or whether it be the complete abolition of the police, conservatives are scared shitless by defunding the police.

That’s a little bit odd because it is conservatives who are always most loudly talking about how they need to be armed — and if they’re all armed, you would think we would not need to pay a few of them to be armed. It’s also weird because even though the police are conservative, they don’t serve conservatives but rather capital (i.e., wealthy people), and you’d think conservatives would have noticed that, oftentimes, they are the ones catching law enforcement’s bullets (Ashli Babbitt comes to mind).

However, it does make some sense. Police are, in fact, the people who are the ultimate enforcers of the social hierarchy — because they are the agents of violence serving the ruling class — and they are all conservatives, so it does make sense that they would follow the wishes of other conservatives. While it is true that police will always favor capitalism over conservativism (they don’t have a choice if they want to keep their jobs), it’s also true that they usually don’t have to choose between the two. For example, conservatives love to hate poor people, and capitalists want people to be poor, so the fact that it is the police who directly keep America’s half-million homeless people from occupying the 17 million empty houses in the country makes both capitalists and run-of-the-mill conservatives happy.

Because police are the enforcers of that social hierarchy that keeps people from having what they need (in order to benefit a tiny minority of ultra rich assholes), it is the police that are most directly responsible for creating poverty.

We can have order, though, without it being the current order.

Other order is possible.

Capitalism is an illegitimate order, because capitalists are not better than us (they are in fact worse). If we want an illegitimate order, we could have a different one. For example, we could have a society where the Catholic Pope is the highest authority, or a society where a Muslim cleric is the highest authority; those would both be theocracies. We could have a society where the highest authority is inherited; that would be a monarchy. We could have a society where the taller you are, the more power you have. None of those are legitimate order.

When people say they are anarchists, conservatives really tremble in fear, because they believe that anarchists want chaos. Exactly the opposite is true, though; anarchists want order — anarchists want more and better order, in fact. Anarchists rightly see the suffering, poverty, death, and destruction of capitalism as chaos and they want a legitimate order. Similarly, they see the suffering, destruction, and death of racism, sexism, and other aspects of fascism as chaos. To anarchists, order is only legitimate if it is democratic.

Anarchy is order. Anarchy is democracy taken seriously.

A hierarchy of domination is chaos.

It is conservatives who are clinging to the chaos of this illegitimate order, because they support either the supremacy of super-wealthy capitalists or a more traditional hierarchy that is more complicated but even more illegitimate. It really comes down to a lack of imagination, fear of change, and fear that other groups of people will treat conservatives the way they have treated others. They don’t understand that the violence they fear is ultimately caused by the illegitimate hierarchy that they support.

Conservatives, whether they are Democrats or Republicans, do not want democracy. Both groups believe that most people are too selfish and stupid to have direct political power, and so they have these ideas about what group of people is superior enough to lord over the rest of us. Conservatives are only angry about someone ruling over them if it is the wrong someone in their view.

All of this is important to understand because the fear of chaos in conservative culture is so basic that they don’t talk about it clearly. If you don’t understand that this subtext is present globally in conservative arguments, their arguments just seem nuts; it becomes a lot more difficult to work against those arguments if they don’t make any sense to you. Change does result in an uptick in chaos, but change is inevitable, and if we can make changes that move us toward a more legitimate order (real democracy), the end result is order.

Opposition to Zionism is very different from anti-Semitism and many Jewish people are also opposed to Zionism. The Jewish people certainly have a right to exist and the right to a homeland; but the Palestinians have those rights, too.

Here is a short history of the Israel/Palestine conflict:

You’ll notice that the basis of the current conflict is the colonialism and meddling of the British empire. Here’s another one, which brings up the same point.

And here’s a music video that portrays the complete history of the land we now call Israel and/or Palestine:

An interesting detail of this whole thing is that conservative Americans support Israel mostly because they want the Jewish people to rebuild “the temple” which conservative Christians believe is necessary for the end of the world to begin. Yes, they are supporting Israel because they want the Apocalypse; I think that really cements the perfection of the above music video.

You might have noticed that all the advice online about how straight men can successfully date is created by right-wing men who seem to at least kind of hate women. It’s a really weird dynamic if you stop and think about it. Well, Thought Slime is here to make a tiny correction to that and offer some dating advice… from the left!