Some old lady randomly stopped me outside the store yesterday leading with a hearty “Happy Easter!” Unfortunately, she ignored my reply and went off about how amazing it would be if the Easter Bunny dropped off checks at everyone’s door from Elon Musk.
Still have no idea what to make of that.
Unfortunately, she ignored my reply and went off about how amazing it would be if the Easter Bunny dropped off checks at everyone’s door from Elon Musk.
Huh?
Yeahhh. Still not sure if she was being sarcastic or not.🤷♀️
I suspect it means she’s a reactionary who has been duped into thinking DOGE is really going to be paying out “dividend checks”.
Where is it going to get the money from? They shut down a whole bunch of profitable departments.
it’s not going to happen anyway, and Trump doesn’t mind adding significantly to the deficit (he did last time he was in office)
… I thought reactionaries were against UBI or people receiving free stuff from the government??
to be honest, Trump and Musk are not ideologically driven, the grift and their personal desires matter more than anything like adherence to principles of free market capitalism or whatever other nonsense.
And I can’t tell you how the mind of a lay reactionary works - they seem capable of rationalizing and accepting contradictions quite easily. It is simultaneously true for them that they view themselves as “anti-authoritarian” and promoting a diminished government, while enthusiastically supporting police violence and pushing to pass laws that outright criminalize sexual orientations or gender identities they don’t like.
So yeah, plenty of hypocrisy dunking to go around, I just don’t know that it makes a difference at this point - contradiction and hypocrisy does not seem to be a problem for reactionaries.
EDIT: shoot, I meant to say - also there are reactionary forms of UBI, see Milton Friedman’s support (usually re-articulated as the “Negative Income Tax”) and Andrew Yang’s support, etc.
Yeah, this was my concern and why I bailed on the conversation as quick as I could.
yeah, that’s a solid “yikes” from me - I try to be nice to people, even reactionaries - but it’s hard for me to not start eyeing the exit and want to escape any further interactions 😬
Tbf im all for taking money out of elon’s pocket, and distributing it to the masses x3… but as described that is just such a curveball to hear hah
Maybe she’s a religious studies expert who knows that Ostara is a whole cloth invention of a 19th century German man and that while the English name of Easter is probably derived from a little understood Pagan Goddess other languages use derivatives of Pascha but she didn’t want to make a whole deal of it
I think one of the neat things about neo-paganism is that you can kind of make it up as you go along and it’s perfectly valid. The gods are really just set dressing, shorthands to concepts that you can acknowledge and appreciate, with rituals and holidays more for mindfulness and community than harkening back to some proto-Germanic/Celtic worship for material gain from powerful spirits. I mean I’m sure there’s some of that too and many people take it seriously, but I hardly think strict belief in the gods is necessary. Most of it’s guesswork anyway, it’s not like written language was widespread or lasting in those areas, and even then what’s the real difference between going back a millennium or two and the present day when there’s another 60-80k years of unknown language/religious history before that? Might as well find a name you like that other people recognize and go with that.
I’m going to choose to believe this is what happened because it makes me happy.
Maybe she was confused as to why one would celebrate Ostara a whole month late aha
