I read a hilarious article today about someone who died of a heart attack, directly caused by regularly dining at the Heart Attack Grill. The owner, Jon Basso, claimed that he told this customer not to eat there so regularly. The guy defended himself by saying he liked the burgers. Oh, well. Good sound reasoning, there.

The Heart Attack Grill insists it will not change its policy of offering irresponsibly unhealthy food to paying customers. “People have got to live their lives,” says Basso. Even when… their choices are stupid… to a life-threatening degree? For example, John Alleman was the second unpaid spokesperson to die in two years.

Basso insists he warns people not to eat here regularly, despite the neon sign over the door that says people weighing over 350 lbs. can eat there for free. And look at the last picture in this montage: the menu comes with a commentary about sales tax the government will squander…

Now it falls into place. Basso must be a libertarian or maybe even a teabagger. Freedom of choice! Freedom for an entrepreneur to serve damaging food; freedom for customers to buy food that will kill them. Freedom for women with low self-esteem to dress in provocative outfits, marketing themselves as pieces of meat, just like the lumps on the grill.

Which is hilarious when you see what bigoted misogynists show up on the company’s website. A nurses group protested the misrepresentation and degradation of their uniforms for sexual titillation and exploitation. In response, both the customers and the management responded by calling “humorless,” “fat,” “ugly,” and worse than that. Which is really the pot calling the kettle black, if you look at the guys in these photos.

But what’s the alternative? A nanny-state which endeavors to protect the citizenry from itself? Because people do have a wicked self-destructive streak, from biking around at night in dark clothes with no reflectors, to racing at top speed, drunk, with no seat belts while updating their status to Facebook. Irresponsible behavior like this causes personal trauma to the people in their lives, as well as jacking up the costs of health care coverage, a financial burden protested by the very people who insist on leading a lifestyle that brings it into being.

Right-wingership, libertarianism and teabaggery are merely bastions of greed and ignorance. Consume more and more, don’t care where it comes from or what it does to us. Freedom to make terrible decisions, protest having to take responsibility for them. Lemme keep all my money, and I’ll need guns to protect it, and fuck everyone else.

“The best argument against democracy is to speak with a citizen for five minutes.” Benjamin Franklin didn’t say that, but I wish I knew who did.

These guys got to me: “After 34 years, I want to marry him.” Thirty-four years is like 172 Kim Kardashians or 5,400+ Britneys, yet conservatives (when not cheating with hookers, sexting interns, or soliciting for sex in airport bathrooms) insist that sharing all human rights with all Americans will compromise the sanctity of marriage. Hyperbole is insufficient to circumscribe their hypocrisy.

LET LOVE IN.

We Started with Central American City-States

  • Martin:

    Haha, the pseudo-neutrality of geopolitical citizenship can't save you. It seems increasingly like there's no way out of this without sounding like a rube or a racist so take your pick: recant or just say "Those various brown people south of us are all horrible, violent monsters."

  • Christian:

    They may not be monsters, but everyone knows they eat dogs.

  • Martin:

    ...and they do it for half the price an American does it for! Why, forty years ago, a fella could make a decent living eating dogs! It was a good, patriotic, American job. Most of our finest statesmen started out in dog-eating trades: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, MLK... If I'm not mistaken, Ward Cleaver, the father on Leave it to Beaver ate dogs for a living; it was that iconic!

  • Yes, it used to be, the big dog-eating firms downtown had to pay an honest wage with time off at Christmas and a company picnic every Independence Day just to attract the real craftsmen, you know. Nowadays, with all these illegals coming into our country, willing to eat dogs for next to nothing, it's turned into a numbers game where quantity is more important than artistry. There's no such thing as a dog-eating apprenticeship anymore. It's a shame too. A good apprenticeship could teach a boy the sort of discipline and integrity you just can't learn from a book. The devaluation of American craftsmanship and know-how is what's going to let the Chinese take over the world and you know whose fault it is—those godless, Central American, polytheist Mexicans!

  • Christian:

    Dog-eating has gotten really expensive, what with organically raised dogs and fair wages for their handlers. It's really hard to convince a struggling lower-class family to do the responsible thing and shop for locally sourced, humanely treated dogs when they're counting pennies and have to choose between that and anti-three-month-death medicine, every three months. But those cheap dogs they're getting from Shenzhen, dogs stuffed with lead-treated dogs, that's what's giving them those bad cases of death you read about. It's a vicious cycle, but the Republicans are having none of it. Import dog lobbyists have not only dismantled dog-rendering regulation but are working to block outside media investigation, so the already-biased domestic media is increasingly unwilling to run this kind of story.

  • And the GOP doesn't even eat dogs! They eat people who eat dogs, but the irony is that they won't eat the lower-class families getting sick off the Chinese tainted dogs whose import they're working so hard to defend. They only eat canid-vegetarians, people subsisting off the same high-quality dogs they're working to get shut down. The blatant hypocrisy drives me blind with madness.

Things that don’t legitimately exist in conservatives’ eyes:

wilwheaton:

inothernews:

  • Presidents who are not white that are born in the United States
  • Poor people
  • Poverty
  • Uninsured or underinsured people
  • Women’s reproductive rights
  • Donald Trump’s nutbaggishness
  • Racism
  • Corporations that are not people
  • Sensible gun control laws to help stop people from getting murdered over stupid shit
  • Tax breaks for anyone but the uber-rich

Also:

  • Genuine compassion
  • Gratitude
  • Humility

Unemployment is Hard Work

Oh, I’m so sick of Republicans and their “immigrants are taking away the best jobs from Americans” illogical nonsense, and their “unemployment benefits only encourage laziness” ignorant generalizations.

I can tell you, I’ve had cube farm jobs that were considerably less challenging than qualifying for unemployment benefits. I’m thinking about one in particular, a support position at an international retail chain, where I was paid to sit on my ass for half a year, doing absolutely nothing (because interoffice communications were crap: there was need for me, it’s just that nobody knew I was there and I didn’t know there was work I could be doing).

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