This week on What a Hell of a Way to Die, we keep our new years resolution of being extremely shitty toward every Democrat who has thrown their hats into the ring, specifically Kamala Harris.
We joke that Harris is a cop, but honestly it goes further than that. A cop can fuck up your day and the day of people in a small community. Harris was a prosecutor who filled profit prisons with black bodies. While Attorney General in California, her staff joked that keeping prisons full meant cheap prisoner firefighters. Later she said she was shocked to learn about this. Much in the way the officers in charge of Abu Ghraib prison were "shocked" to found out literal torture was happening to their prisoners.
2020 is around the corner and it will be 2016 all over, in which the left is told to stop their "Purity politics" of demanding things like universal healthcare and not dying in poverty because rich people keep sucking up all the money. And hey, I don't necessarily want a Bernie Sanders presidency either, mostly because liberals won't shut up about how he's not a democrat. We know. That's why we like him.
Let us be 100% straight here. Bernie Sanders is the compromise and it's time you dorks came to the left instead of bowing down to the right. Claire McCaskill lost her senate race in Missouri and insulted progressive dems on the way out of office, all the way to being paid by MSNBC as a political consultant. I was told I had to vote for her too. I still got the shitty republican who doesn't do his job.
Here's the purity politics I demand from Dems this coming election. And indeed from my local votes as well. First, they need to strive for some kind of universal healthcare. Maybe it won't happen in their term, but steps need to be made. Second, they need to have an agressive plan to reverse global warming. Third, Something to be done about the massive class divide happening. I don't care what. Taxes, legally hunting the rich for one day a month. Whatever. Just something. That's as pure as I need right now.
We'll focus on fully automated gay space communism in 2024.
A number of news articles get discussed this week as well. Here they are for your own inspection. First, a piece from In These Times about women being the CEOs and directors of the military-industrial complex
And a story from Military Times indicating that Trump’s DOD is, like his golf-club buddies at the VA, trying to stealth-cut any form of socialized medicine in America
Nate also mentions an essay by Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) about the way the US medical system treats black people. Read it here
This week’s bonus episode is a one-on-one interview between Nate and veteran author Drew Pham. In this interview, Drew talks about his family's history in Vietnam and their relationship to the war, Trump's targeting of Vietnamese asylees and refugees, why he loves Tim O'Brien's work but couldn't see himself in any characters, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and its promise for people with PTSD, and quite a bit more. You can access it on the Patreon here