[npx]

I think it's time to confront the reality that we have a serious asshole epidemic in America. It has gone unchecked for a few centuries and it has reached a fever pitch of state sanctioned torture and Donald Trump supporters.

Much like idiots, assholes cannot possibly realize that they are being assholes. It's one of the symptoms. They're actually completely confident that what they're doing makes total sense. It's a touch-and-go sorta thing; how do you openly confront assholery without becoming a huge asshole? I call this the Snowden dilemma. It's a real problem.

We are well past the point of occasionally waking up to find feces on the kitchen table. The majority of this country is subsisting entirely on a diet of pure shit. I don't want to seem elitist - I regard myself as a world class dummy - but I do know what shit tastes like and I understand that eating it is bad for you. I don't have any answers but I think we're in a lot of trouble here.

"Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. [...] It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world." --H.L. Mencken

[titzer]

I don' think there's a magic bullet to asshattery. There has to be a cultural shift away from asshattery as acceptable behavior. The same way there has been a cultural shift away from domestic abuse and racism being acceptable (though they both have their stragglers).

The problem is that the diet of pure shit serves a purpose. It keeps people both agitated and docile at the same time. The kind of agitated and docile you would recognize in a cranky 80 yr man who shouts at clouds. Angry and uncomfortable, but ultimately harmless; miles away from taking an AK-47 and marching on Washington, and ultimately willing to pull the lever for the blue or red party, or best, not vote at all.