And here's Arthur Silber, being all relevant again...

Despite being in failing health, and now freshly persecuted by The Gang That Wishes Demonstrably Sapient People Would Just Go Away...Arthur Silber is at it again.

Being relevant.

In From the Merely Calamitous to the Ungraspably Nauseating, he offers a brief (for Silber) reaction to Dear Leader's recent lecture on how a Zimmerman acquittal means that we should stop being naughty and swallow his gun control pill, for our own good of course.

It's not terribly flattering:

If a significant number of Americans were remotely healthy, they would treat Obama as they would any monster who raises his bloody arms from the open chest of his latest victim, lifts up his hands -- which hold his victim's heart, liver and other organs -- twists himself with enormous effort into his most obviously and fundamentally false serious mien and with phonily solemn voice, as blood soaks the scene, implores us all to love one another and embrace tenderness and gentle care for each other as the greatest of virtues.

What stuck out at me, though, was his quoting of himself, from January of this year, on the same subject in a previous round:

Therefore and thusly, to believe that one of the greatest sources of violence in the world today should be trusted to solve the problem of gun violence in America is to believe in self-contradictory statements which immolate themselves on a gigantic pyre of the most ridiculous, asinine, ludicrous notions ever imagined in the malformed, grotesque, nonfunctioning brains of the dumbest animal that has ever existed. Anyone who believes that gun control -- gun control devised and implemented by a brutal, endlessly violent, systematically murderous State -- will even begin to solve the problem of violent death in and by America is a fucking idiot. Moreover, to believe that the man who has lovingly embraced the principle of mass murder, and who proudly and repeatedly declares to the world that he is a serial murderer dedicated to continuing his murders into the indefinite future, targeting an ever-increasing number of victims, is sincerely devoted to ending even a single aspect of the problem of violence is so colossally, stupendously stupid that it defies accurate description. 

Well said, as usual.  And this is not a guy that you would naturally call a "gunnie" in the sense that I know it.

In Stop Doing the Vicious Work of the Ruling Class, he goes further on what I was on about in the last post.  As usual, Silber says it far better.

The demonstrations against the Zimmerman verdict continue, as the tribes play out their chosen roles. The demonstrations concern a case which should not have been brought, and which cannot support the constructions the right and left have placed on it. Meanwhile, wouldn't all those energies be far better directed if, for example, they were targeted against U.S. foreign policy? Or against the War on Drugs? Or against what is almost certainly the already irreversible rise of the surveillance state? But no: the right and left have learned their parts very well. All the arguments they need have been prefabricated, ready to be hauled out whenever the signal is given.

The Zimmerman case is yet another in an endless series of distractions. It is another bauble to be tossed around by the ever-busy writers and "activists" of this country's political factions. It is a means of fragmenting and splitting the people's political power, which would be far more meaningful -- and far more powerful -- if the warring factions could only be motivated to form strategic alliances. All those energies are safely directed into a non-threatening pathway -- while the ruling class continues to consolidate and expand its power over every one of us. To the extent the right and left play their parts with such enthusiasm, they do the ruling class's bidding. Most of those on the right and the left have enthusiastically placed themselves in service to the State, and the majority of them have no understanding whatsoever of their grievous failing.

At this point, I almost feel it's beside the point to blame the ruling class for this kind of thing. (Note: I continue to blame and condemn the ruling class without mercy.) What appalls me is how easy it is to distract the American public with incidents like this. Most Americans have been trained very thoroughly. The bell is rung, and they eagerly run to their designated positions. While they are entirely consumed with playing their meaningless roles in the affair of the moment, they pay no heed to the hell that is rising around them.

Indeed.