How to Screw Courage

Don't you absolutely treasure when people tell you their gambling with real people living real lives in the real world is a game they play to score points against real people living real lives in the real world? 

Because point scoring is as demure as game playing is as demure as brinkmanship masquerading as outrageous ploys for specious and sophistic puffery and deification?

#gamblinglife

How to Screw Courage

People pretend that selling your soul is a last act. That a first step is the only purportedly 'difficult' one. That every act after is neither here nor there. A painless slide into ease. 

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But selling your soul is not an excising of conscience. It is a rational decision to position yourself above everyone. It is a ruthless justification that insists on positioning your interests ahead of everything. Because anything less would not be

'right'.

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It assumes that morality is an imaginary obstruction. A costumed affectation that is 'put on' and 'set aside' like an alien-armor-suit of make-believe-invulnerability. A baptism of 'magic dust' from the props department of an amateur theater.

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Principles, dear captain obvious, interfere and impede, do they not? Like runaway forces of nature, they wreck what is undeniably precious,

legacies of greed.

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People pretend that selling your soul is a very smart feat of genius. That a life arcing towards the attaining and the amassing of a lot in the hands of a few is

fair. 

That this is what it means to earn, that this is what it means to be deserving of generously lined silk pockets, that this what it means to receive what you are due, 

dammit.

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But it is not work to allocate wealth or assign power or disavow aid, to enrich the wealthy or empower the powerful or deny the beset. It is not toil. It is not labor. It is not sacrifice. It is neither blood nor sweat nor tears.

It is a calculated decision to position yourself above everyone. It is a callous justification that insists on positioning your interests ahead of everything. Because anything less, to be brutally honest, would not be

'just'.

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It assumes that 'equality under the law' is toothless by purposeful design: 

when it is working as intended, it is pacifying fools and idiots with spit slinging and gnat swarming; when it is working as commanded, it is codifying patronage, partiality, prejudice.

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Indeed:

as an axe, 'the law' falls on enemies and scum and parasites; as a shield, 'the law' protects the wealthy and the powerful. What a providential hymn

to live and die by.

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People pretend that selling your soul is a show of gallant strength. 

That appeasing, that abject groveling before, that surrendering and submitting to tryhard tyrants, czars, emperors, caudillos, kings, on their terms of course, is how to be principled, how to be powerful, how to be peaceful.

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However, when no despotic tryhard would ever in a million lifetimes stand for a cessation of literal or figurative war without demanding the exacting of retribution and spoils as an imperative condition of peaceful accord: 

this is not a triumphant illustration of bullies holding 'all the cards' gloriously proclaiming their literal or figurative armistice shall be bought and paid for with souls graciously sold to slake the unrepentantly insatiable pleasure of an opportunistic tryhard;

this is a sham of conscience, an unmitigated corruption of law and order, a perversion of alliances secured by assurances of mutualism that smugly dictates the price of nothing beyond existence itself shall be

gratefully demure spinelessness.

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As if a 'f_ck you' to the backbone estate for not screwing their courage to the sticking place is how prayers are answered, how promises are kept, how people are saved

from self-respect.

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When point scoring and game playing and brinkmanship masquerading as outrageous ploys for specious and sophistic puffery and deification 

is sanctioned in the name of morality policing, is excused in the name of scorn and indifference, is condoned in the name of partisan loyalty -

this does not 'cancel' the reality of real people living real lives in the real world like a scripted show in the 'nonfiction' category or 'rewrite' the reality of real people living real lives in the real world like a bestselling novel that is not 'truer than fiction'.

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In other words, reality can neither be 'cancelled' nor 'rewritten' on the basis of

because a lie is sanctioned, because a lie is excused, because a lie is condoned.

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Which to say, all the tools in the world can applaud being tools in the world until all the hot air in the world is used up by fabulous effort and still,

all the tools in the world will remain nothing more than tools.

That tools profess and proclaim otherwise, can neither 'cancel' nor 'rewrite'

reality itself.

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That this strategy is the game plan of a 'party', an 'ideology', a 'system of belief', a 'policy', etc., speaks not to a trustworthy position that 'keeps it real' or 'truths' -

but to a relentlessly self-interested willingness and wherewithal to deny reality and defy the truth. For no self-respecting tryhard would ever in a million lifetimes stand for the backbone estate.

#thef_ckyouestate

M