How to Not Live in Rage

God damn this is a hard one to write, in this moment.  That said, not a hard one to live up to – for me.  You see, I might hulk out from time to time, but most of any given day, I’m thinking about things neutral to positive.  I’m thinking about the creeping sorrel in the crack at my front door, about whether I could make a breeding habitat for alligator lizards in my back yard.  My mind is biologically healthy, mercifully so, and just doesn’t want to cling to bad feelings.

Anger is a bad feeling.  Some people with pathological minds think of it as “fun,” but they somehow don’t look like they’re having fun when they snap their xbox controller in half and bellow obscenities.  People who think about who they hate all day?  They are unwell.  It is said if you aren’t outraged you aren’t paying attention.  Well, if paying attention leads to poor health, then one must spend at least some amount of one’s life not paying attention.

I don’t know what else to say on this one.  I’m writing at two in the AM, and within the space of composing the first paragraph I lost the rage from the first sentence, then got it back at the beginning of this paragraph, then lost it again.  Think I might be tired.  Baby needs a nap.

But seriously tho.  If you’re angry all day, you need to jailbreak your mind.  I don’t have any constructive advice aside from the usual shit you have already heard a million times.  “Touch grass” meme.  I’m just here to remind you it is actually important for your health that you figure out how to do this.  And good luck with it!

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If anybody has some good suggestions or wants to start a discussion about this in the comments, the floor is open.

Acceleration

Fuck accelerationists a lot, those people who, realizing crises precipitate change, have decided any amount of mutilated or dead innocents is a reasonable price to achieve their aims.  That said, if acceleration is happening despite our best efforts, they are not wrong that it can precipitate change.  This is a dark one, but it is a cause for hope.

Just how bad can the rethuglicans fuck this up?  How bad can they make themselves look?  Will they dismantle Social Security?  Privatize Medicare A and B?  Put ten-year-olds to work in Amazon distro warehouses?  Will they exonerate hate criminals?  Deputize proud boys to shoot up downtown Portland?  Be caught filling mass graves at the southern border?  Just considering the possibilities fills me with a murderous hatred, so I’ll just stop there.  Fuck those guys an awful lot.

I think that’s the best hope for a reversal of this country’s course, of us staving off decades of fascist rule: that the fascists cannot help themselves, and go so hog-wild for evil that even badly suppressed, the anti- votes will wipe those motherfuckers off the ballot.  And if voting is off the table?  That blue states might secede.  Who’s to say only bigots can rebel?

May we start living in less interesting times as soon as possible, but in the meantime, it’ll be grimly fucking interesting to see what happens, with fascism’s jackboot on the gas pedal.  This has become their country to lose, and that’s a dark hope, but it is a hope.

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cute animals, seal hijinks

remember when that seal slapped a kayaker with an octopus?  apparently owner of video was content to make it a gopro commercial, but still, fascinating.

reminiscent of when those seals in hawaii had a juvenile fad of getting an eel stuck up one nostril.  the behavior of some weird mer-dogs, being weird.  remarkable.

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State’s Rights

In our perfected world, whatever that looks like, from sea to shining sea all will live under a universal guarantee of human rights.  But billionaire-owned media selling tax breaks for themselves with fear of the underprivileged, well, it’s got a big swath of the middle of this country in a death grip.  It does not matter one jot what the actual majority of people in those states want*, the ones favored by gerrymander have decided it’s time for jim crow, prison farms, gaybashing, bookburning, and elimination of any religion but christianity from the public sphere.  And, in this moment, they’ve won so decisively that they are very likely to work the levers of power to eliminate democracy in the USA for decades to come.

In the meantime, the excuse they’re using is state’s rights.  States should have the right to murder their own citizens to meet the cruel whims of Blood Jesus.  Why don’t you understand these things?  It’s only right.  The flipside of this coin is that it may allow blue states the power to pass strong protections for human rights, and might allow for a lot more.

The state of California has so many people, so many resources, that when they pass laws that are technically only enforceable at home, any business that wants to do business in that economy has to conform or gtfo.  Chik-fil-A can deep fry trans people in Arkansas (I assume) but not so much in the city of Compton.  In fact, it’s pretty likely that Cali has everything they need to just ignore the entire rest of the USA economically and use their access to shipping in the Pacific for anything they lack.

They are exceptional in that respect, but a number of coastal states can still pull a pretty strong flex if they want to – which is why it greatly heartens me that my own state has a democratic governor.  During the strife around covid, there were meetings between the governors on the “Left Coast” about how they should respond, almost as if… they had the power to tell the District of Columbia to kiss their asses?  I dunno.  I’m interested to see what’s possible if these leaders are bold enough, when the time calls for it.

It’s not right that in order to maintain their human rights, many people will have to flee their home states.  But as long as states are being allowed some say in these issues – and as long as some states are powerful enough to take that say whether it’s allowed or not – there are places in the USA where hope is a little less crushed.

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*74 million fascists in a country of 300 million is NOT the majority.

Don’t Miss Posts

I’ve been doing something silly that might be getting less traffic on my higher effort posts. I queue a serious post for 6:30 AM Eastern time and a frivolous link post for 9:30 AM.

It’s to give heavy stuff a light chaser, but it could result in anybody checking in at 10 AM assuming I’m posting nothing but foolery. If that’s you, scroll back a bit, if you please.

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Total Anarchy and Can’t Nobody Stop Us

I want to devise a virusTo bring dire straits to your environmentCrush your corporations with a mild touchTrash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrusI want to make a super virusStrong enough to cause blackouts in every single metropolis’cause they don’t want to unify usSo fuck it total anarchy and can’t nobody stop us
-Del the Funky Homosapien, Virus, from Deltron 3030 (2000)

Do you have respect for the law?  Fucking why?  Some laws are good guidelines for being a good person, like no passing in a school zone, pay the taxes that fund social programs libraries roads etc.  But if it ain’t one of those laws?  Who could possibly give a shit, that’s worth listening to?

Do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want, however you can.  If the government says “penalties now,” well, fuck the government.  They have to catch you first.  Now.  Tall talk coming from a bitch that almost never commits crimes because I’m afraid I’ll get caught, but still.  I think part of the despair of living in a land where laws are unjust is the feeling you will be subject to those laws.  That isn’t always true, strictly speaking.

This is one of the great ways blue states can protect people from shitty federal decrees.  Commit to non-enforcement, like they did with marijuana.  There’s precedent for this.  But on a personal level, same thing.  Who’s going to bust you for shielding immigrants from ICE?  Anybody whose opinions you value?  Anybody you’ll feel so sad about disappointing?  Didn’t think so.

If you’re brave enough to risk the consequences, you can do all sorts of excellent things.  And there are places and situations in which getting busted is massively unlikely.  Try to arrest somebody for sodomy in Haight-Ashbury at this point in history, see how far that gets you.  Try to throw somebody in federal prison for jailbreaking their modem to prevent youtube ads, see how well that goes over with the public – assuming you could detect that they’d done that in the first place.

Part of the catastrophizing I’ve heard sounds like, “if it’s illegal to be me, i’ll just have to do what they say and stop existing.”  That is just weird, guys.  Another part is the idea there will be death camps for trans people, which is very unlikely for other reasons.  But even if some flavor of that happened, were you planning to save them the effort by offing yourself?  Were you planning to walk up the chute like a cow to a slaughterhouse?

Given how many people violate traffic laws every day on every road in the country, it’s hard to believe you’re all that passive and law-abiding.  It’s time for the “be gay, do crimes” slogan to be put into action.  Although you’re probably already driving too fast in school zones.  Not that crime.  The other one.  Yeah, you got it.

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funny video, useful information

couldn’t help it; had to post another one by zane golia.  i love this stuff because it isn’t mean.  you can watch this if you’re a jerk about guy fieri, but it’s even better if you have some affection for him and his persona.  like the frakes videos.  btw, if either of those dudes is a milkshake duck, don’t tell me.

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Hope Without Hope

How do you act without despair, when you’re too realistic to genuinely hope or think your actions will have an effect?  One route is Absurdism, which is a more specific philosophy than you might be aware, and is probably not for everyone.  However, it did help one person survive a hate movement of thousands, so could be worth looking into, if you’re curious.  It was, after all, born from resistance to the nazi occupation of France.  Unfortunately relevant once again today, and has been for a while.

Another way is to focus on your actions that do have an effect.  Yeah, they won’t save the world, won’t individually defeat the monstrosity of this movement, but your actions could save other people, could save yourself.  That matters.  You don’t have to be the world’s buffest antifa kickboxer to carve some good out of a grim world.

First up, do things you enjoy, that also move your mind.  Reading, listening to or creating music, making art, writing, playing video games.  Doesn’t matter as long as you take a little care to do it in a reasonably balanced way – don’t let it round a corner to becoming unhealthy.  Hard to imagine how it could happen with some of those items, but somebody would figure out how, lol.  Second, do the things you don’t want to do, but will be glad to see done, like washing your dishes and take out the trash.  Just do what you can to be OK.

Something I forgot to mention in the inaugural post of this expanded thesis is that my real reason for doing this is my growing awareness of people in my life and in my readership who are physically hurt by stress, sadness, anger.  The rest of this blog network, especially Pharyngula, is apiece with the deathscroll vibe of the leftosphere at large.  That isn’t healthy for anyone, but for a significant subset of people, it’s extremely harmful.  For you more than anyone, self-care, buddy.

If you’re doing well enough, see what you can do for others.  This can include animals and plants in your life, or if you got the sauce, people.  For my part, at the moment, these posts are as much as I can manage.  The feedback I’ve been getting tells me it’s a good thing.  I will get to the end of my supply sometime next week, but I will have done something worthwhile for a minute.

Water the cats, feed the plants, give to medical fundraisers, give to charities, talk to lonely people, try to soothe people who are worried or upset – whether it’s about politics or not.  Careful with helping people that it doesn’t blow up on you, of course.  Never know when a guy you smiled at in the Starbutts will turn into a stalker.  But take the risks you feel comfortable with.

When it comes to politics, the best thing you can do is help people overcome the hurdles that rethugs put between the righteous and a voting booth.  It’s relevant even now, with the next elections a ways off.  In part, because people who were successfully kept from voting this time might still be struggling to get registered.  I know this is true – I spoke with a very old Native American woman from Arizona that was facing some inscrutable bullshit from that state just the week before the election.

I don’t know what the wisdom is, with fighting the ratfucking dirtbag “leftists” that discourage people from voting.  I know a lot of them are foreign – a weirdly large amount of them from Brazil and Argentina, the next largest contingent from Eastern Europe – which puts them out of reach of the ol’ sockarooni.  If the answer to bad speech is more speech (dubious), then you can just reach out and touch people you know, people who are non-voters, and encourage them to get it together.  That is itself a serious challenge, because you won’t win ’em over with condescension or screaming, but goddamn is that tempting.

People like me might be well-qualified for that task, on a good day.  When I interviewed for my current job, I cited my experience helping poor people with communication difficulties in customer service at muffuckin’ walmart.  With the shit I have to do at my current job, I feel like my ass could get nominated for sainthood by now, so I’m probably doing something right.  Maybe take a job in social services?  If they’re hiring and you have serious fucking neurotypical sauce.

I don’t have a rousing endpoint for this.  I’ll just reiterate the thesis.  You can do things, and even little things matter.  More grandiose things can come if you’ve got the strength, and that may be at some undefined time in the future.  But if all you’re doing is cleaning your goldfish’s bowl, thank you.  You’re also cleaning the inside of your skull.  Heal.  and then go kick some fucking ass.

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Oh yeah, I’d meant to mention my Hellstar Reminism philosophy.  Maybe another time.