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Saturday, November 22, 2014

Dugout

One of the "advantages" of having mostly conservative (especially a few really conservative) Facebook friends is that you get direct links to some odd shit. We're talking about stuff that makes Whirled Nut Daily look like the Utne Reader.

One such outlet is something pulled out of (let's say) Jerry Corsi's gaping asshole, called (hilariously) Western Journalism. One such "article" (the entire site seems to be an incompetent mishmash of half-witted conspiracy theories and circus-freak clickbait) involves the hapless Duggar family, whom you may recall as the goofball Arkansas cultists whose sole claim to fame is doing what just about every human can do, just way too much of it.

Apparently some five-figured number of gay-rights supporters have e-signed an e-petition to cancel 19 Kids and Counting, not because the entire premise of the show can be gleaned from the title, and therefore every episode is interchangeable, but because they tried to start a stupid meme and got trolled by same-sex couples, and took those eeevil fotoz down. Oh noez!

So of course e-supporters from the "other" "side" of the e-divide sharpened their e-crayons, and proceeded to self-actualize by e-signing their e-petition exhorting TLC -- which, let's step back and recall for a hot moment, putatively stands for The Learning Channel -- to keep the show on the air.

Does it really need to be said that whether or not this dumb fucking show about these dumb fucking people (and really, take a look at the ricockulous clickbait items on the right sidebar at the HollywoodLife link -- "Jessa Duggar & Ben Seewald:  Why They Didn't Have First Wedding Kiss"; what sort of inbred maroon cares?) gets cancelled is entirely based upon whether it gets good ratings or not? And amazingly, it does. Someone actually tunes into this nonsense, for some reason.

Like Duck Dynasty, this sort of stuff is just the usual cultural self-affirmation, a reminder of a largely mythical time when those people knew their place, and Jebus brought the Constitution down from hebbin to explain to the Founding Fathers (in English, doncha know) what the deal was.

I really could not possibly care less whether or not 19 Kids gets kicked to the curb or not. It's not like religious fanatics haven't had shows cancelled that that they found offensive. There can't possibly be any more to this premise, than watching the grown kids conceive and start ludicrously large families of their own. The Duggars are a "traditional" family only in the most archaic sense of the word, a vestige of a time when life was short and there were acres of subsistence crops to tend to.

I think this "quiverfull" bullshit is just that, especially on a groaning, strained planet at the extent of its resources, vastly overpopulated as it is. If everyone decided, like these religious fanatics, that viral over-breeding was the thing to do, we'd have twenty billion people, instead of just seven billion. The idiocy is in thinking that something will come along and work out and enable that to happen, because something always comes along. And that's just not true; every tsunami and earthquake and hurricane that takes thousands of lives is the earth sneezing, attempting to expel the virus which has overrun it.

That's a bit polemic, but the core truth still holds; the planet is optimized for maybe 2 billion people tops. After that, the issue of finite resources tend to become an issue. Good luck when the majority of humanity, who live in poverty-ridden, over-populated places like China and India, catch up with the West in resource consumption. That is the endgame of thinking you can just have a couple dozen kids, turn your vagina into a clown car, and that there will be no environmental effects.

It's to be expected that in an enormous (and enormously diverse) nation there will be manifold buffooneries, each more puzzling and laughable than the next. What's tricky is figuring out whether the cultural buffooneries inform the political ones, or the other way around. Probably a bit of both.

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