Fascism was Never Cool

One of the best / worst moves the nazis ever pulled was recruiting a skilled fashion designer to the cause.  Hugo Boss towers over the history of the world as the unholy shithead that made nazis look cool.  I’m not going to pretend he didn’t, as much as the aesthetic is extremely disgusting to me from when I stand.  You can find stories about how this obsession with form over function resulted in bad clothing causing problems in combat, but that’s a quibble by now.  Even if nonfunctional buttons or unnecessary straps cost a nazi his life once upon a time, the look continues to give the worst people in the world erections.  So mission accomplished.

Aside from that one thing that one time tho?  There is literally nothing cool about fascism.  The ideology is ironically the mentality of the incredibly weak and foolish.  I say ironically because it poses as the mentality of the inherently mas inteligente and musclebound.  Fucking absurd.  Who wants to kneel before some almighty lump of decaying flesh in an expensive suit?  Who needs to be told their place like a good little submissive?  Who believes that tyranny is better for society than distribution of authority to those who should reasonably hold it, like experts in their fields?  Who thinks a con artist is better qualified to make decisions about medicine than a doctor, a bully is better qualified to make decisions about human rights than mental health professionals and ethicists and sociologists and the people whose rights are threatened?

That’s just the philosophy.  This article is about the superficial.  I’m talking about coolness.  You know the ’80s cool guy with the sunglasses?  The lady with all the bangles and the big hair and neon legwarmers?  The deadpan standup comedian with self-effacing charm, cutting down the powerful with the scythe of wit?  The hip kids on the corner always pushing the edge of what people think is acceptable to wear, making the world a more interesting looking place?  The people who invented the zoot suit?  Flappers?  Bobbysoxers?  Rock and rollers?  None of these things can come of a fascist mindset.

There are some people who were legitimately cool, such as cool is, that had flirtations with fascism.  David Bowie famously made that mistake while strung out on cocaine in the ’80s and I imagine got his shit right well before he died.  The artist Romaine Brooks let classism lead her into sympathy for fascists, according to some sources.  These were not shining moments in their lives that anybody looks to with affection, and of course, not moments that had anything to do with why they were ultimately regarded as cool, on the balance of their respective lives.

Fascists steal coolness from other people.  An mp3 that did the rounds back in the file-sharing days was a nazi propagandist antisemitic cover of “Making Whoopee.”  You ever want to hear a nazi jazz band?  I can’t imagine their originals were worth a shit either.  There was a pathetic moment in electronic music when neo-nazis tried to make “fashwave” a thing.  They tried to claim artists who despise them as being part of their shit, and sometimes just literally stole somebody else’s song and spliced in naziness.

A lot of cool comes from black folks.  And who is the most fascist black man making music today?  Ye?  That guy is about as cool as a rusty cybertruck.  That guy is about as cool as a crumpled paper bag full of shit and dead animals.  That guy hasn’t made a song worth a dime in a long-ass time.  Record sales to college republicans don’t count.

I remember when one of the Penny Arcade dudes was being a transphobe and got called out by the Diesel Sweeties guy who said something to the effect of, “hating trans people doesn’t make him cool; it makes him Rush Limbaugh with tattoos.”  Dressing hip while expressing the values of a megachurch is some youth pastor shit.  It’s coolness drag.

And let’s check out the coolness of fascism’s big boys and monkey boys of the moment, shall we?  Tfxnp.  Mxyk.  Ben Shapiro.  Charlie Kirk.  Marjorie Tailor Greene.  Tucker Carlson.  Candace Owens.  Are you starting to notice a pattern?  These are the people the ’80s cool guy would have been embarrassing with his hijinks and breezy charm.  These are the people who would be tearing down the community center in Breakin’ III: Electric Boogalee,  until those awesome kids raised a bunch of money with breakdancing powers and heart.

And yet they think they are cool.  Look at the way they swan around in their piles of ill-gotten loot.  It’s absurd on its face.  I can’t even with that shit.  I know I’m not the coolest bitch myself, and I definitely know coolness isn’t the most admirable quality a human can possess or any kind of basis for making important decisions in life, but I’m claiming rank as an arbiter of cool here.  I deserve it more than they do.  Hell, I could dress in garbage and shit myself on the bus and be cooler than any one of those clowns.

My husband reminds me that a few years ago there was a book claiming that conservative was the new punk, that they were taking cool back from the radical left or whatever.  Now it’s cool to own property and go to church, they said.  I couldn’t find it on a cursory google search, which is more effort than that crackpot idea deserved.

I don’t have a point.  Shit’s just got me a little cranky.  That makes me a “hater” and therefore inherently less cool than a “player,” right?  There are more criteria than that.  On the balance, any cool points they get for being players are utterly hosed by anything else about their entire lives.

Get ’em off the stage.

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Surreal Products and Services

to not run out of birds i’ve seen, i’m going to include dreamposting in my every-other-day posts.  to that end…

had a dream last night that was racist against southeast asian people.  you may recall i’ve had dreams that are racist against the irish, which you’d be hard-pressed to make genuinely hurtful in the usa, so “white” as they’ve become.

the level of acceptance for people from thailand, laos, kampuchea, vietnam, it’s not that good yet, so i’m not even going to say what happened in the dream.  my dream southeast asians were smart conventionally attractive professional people with fully americanized accents, but stereotypes happened nonetheless.

in this den of my own unconscious villainy, there was a snack bar with goods on offer – mostly sweets, like big cookies.  one thing available for purchase was a frozen pepsi with adds like pomegranate arils.  i eagerly made the purchase but the dream conspired to keep me from tasting my prize, didn’t seem to want to put in the work of imagining the taste and texture.

but hey, i can make this thing for myself!  it’s been years since i’ve frozen a cola intentionally, but i recall how.  basically you can’t leave it unattended.  you have to come back frequently to break up the ice and mix it in.

if you don’t slip up and get big chonks of ice, this will automagically have a texture somewhat like a slurpee, which i can’t say for some other water concoctions.  might be from the sugar breaking the crystals into smaller bits.

before that i should pre-peel the pomegranate.  i am fussy about this because i like intact arils that pop in your mouth.  i notch the rind’s surface and pull it apart, float the pieces in a bowl of water as i extract the arils.  i’m usually doing this in a chair with inadequate side tables, so i use a disposable garbage bag of some kind for rind and a zippered sandwich bag for the arils.  in the end the water doesn’t have much in it and i pour that down the sink, trash the rind, and keep the bag of arils in the refrigerator.

i like to eat them from a small ramekin or cup plain or with cool whip.  for this recipe, i’d mix them into the frozen pepsi.  i’d like to add more stuff too but the dream provided no other details.  maybe tapioca pearls like in bubble tea, but what else might be good?  cinnamon imperials?  chocolate chips?  i dunno.  suggestions are welcome…

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The Worst Goddamn Show

i did the obvious photoshop, if not particularly well.  enjoy.  for better post, hit Previous button.

if i was fauci i’d be hatching terrorist schemes to bomb republican politicians.  this’d be my jolker origin story.  i’d kill the motherfuckers.

but i’m not him, and he’s just an old dude who was doing a reasonable job in unreasonable times, so orngdolf shitler lives another day.

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Why Will Mxbk be Assassinated?

Place your bets! Mwpk has fewer people motivated to kill him than Tfndk – but as many people as there are who would gladly see this president turbokennedied, that should afford him little comfort. And he knows this. He has been seen wearing body armor.

Again, do not kill people, as understandable as it may be, as much as I would never rebuke you for actually doing it, it just isn’t worth it. Think about it. If you have the wisdom and compassion to see the evil he does and the threat he poses, one of you is worth twenty of him, and the exchange rate if you lose your life, it’s just a bad deal.

While Efron Murk has to spend his whole shitty worthless dog puke of a life wondering who wants to kill him and where the attack is going to come from, today I am only concerned with one question. When he is assassinated, why will the killer have done it? What will their motive be?

Again, right wingers are far more likely to make him dead – although in this case, it’s somewhat more likely they will be corporate rivals than disgruntled neonazis.

Right Wing Reasons to Murk Mfzk

  • ur street samurai & u don’t ask questions
  • fucked on a business deal
  • to facilitate your own corporate gov takeover
  • not doing enough to hurt transgender people
  • too many black friends (fucking how?)
  • he’s just profoundly unlikable (ableism)
  • xitter not making swastika its logo fast enough
  • fealty to hair fuhrer

Good Reasons to Eliminate Egln
(but please don’t; i love you)

  • to fight white supremacy
  • to fight sexism
  • to fight transphobia
  • to fight fascism
  • to send a message to dork fuckerberg
  • revenge for south african miners
  • revenge for apartheid
  • revenge for children who committed suicide due to online bullying
  • revenge for anyone who has had to live through online bullying
  • revenge for the victims of genocidal and hate movements promoted through social media
  • to save future children from being born to him
  • family member who hates being part of a motherfucker’s unforgivably vile breeding fetish
  • revenge for someone killed by a tesla
  • life ruined as federal employee
  • life ruined as twitter employee
  • life ruined as tesla employee
  • life ruined as tesla or twitter stockholder
  • parents’ mortgage foreclosed because social security benefits suspended and the remaining ways to get them out of suspense disadvantage the elderly and disabled
  • swore an oath to defend the constitution from enemies foreign and domestic

Did I miss any other reasons this may happen? What do you think the motive will be?

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Life List: Water Ouzel

also known as the american dipper but fuck that lol. this is a drab grey but real cool bird. they’re the only perching bird (to my knowledge) that has become adept in the water. they swim with their wings (called aquaflying in birds) and clamber on riverbed rocks underwater.

i wish i’d gotten a better look but i only saw them at a distance, while hiking out to see a waterfall in the olympic rain forest. i often ask for people to relate their stories of these birds in comments but i’d especially like stories about these ones.

there’s an idea in zoology that “anatomy is not destiny” – that animals can do things or go places you would not expect of them just based on how they look. the classic example is goats in trees, another is humans swimming. water ouzels do not have webbed toes and look much like any passerine bird, but iirc they do have some subtle evidence of aquatic adaptation – like denser bones? idk.

expertise welcome below…

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Why Will Tvnfp be Assassinated?

Why will presidente tvnfp be assassinated?  Place your bets!  I, of course, do not endorse the assassination of even the worst people in the world.  I may find it understandable that another would want to assassinate them, I would be hard pressed to find it in my heart to condemn such a person, but I do not want to see good people throw away their lives trying to erase bad people.

It’s a challenge, I know.  But disclaimers aside, it is important to try to understand one’s current geopolitical situation with bracing discourse and insightful discussion of the facts and potentials etc etc etc.  That is to say, I find myself pondering one aspect of the potential assassination of orngedolf shitler:  Why?

I will, for now, leave it to others to discuss when, how, who, etc.  The question on my mind is simply this:  Of the myriad possible motives the assassin may possess, which motive will be dearest to their heart?  Why will they assassinate trgkp?

I will consider multiple potential reasons, but before I do, let me just say it’s wild as hell that no matter what evils he does to leftists, a right winger is far more likely to be the triggerman.  They’re just that much more likely to kill somebody, and that much more likely to be a heavily armed and erratic thinker with a poor grasp of the reality of potential consequences of their actions.  If a q-nazi dreams up a reason to do this and makes it happen, well, them’s the breaks.  Stirring that pot to brew up a political base, that was playing with fire.  Tfcnp’s nearly been burned by it already.

Right Wing Reasons

Hate how many Jewish friends he has because u r nazi.
Hate how many Jewish friends he has because u r islamist.
Q was false messiah. Something something pizza something pedo something flat earth something lasers.
Not establishing Gilead fast enough.
Not killing transes fast enough.
Not establishing white ethnostate fast enough.
He realizes gun control will make assassination attempts less likely to succeed and does something good for a change.
Burned by him in a business deal.
To formally inaugurate the teslocracy.

Good Reasons (tho you still shouldn’t)
Swore oath to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic.
To stabilize the economy.
To save the republican party from nazism.
To save christianity from idolatry.
To fight global warming.
To fight white supremacy.
To help Palestine.
To defend Ukraine.
To defend transgender people.
To avenge the cops his fans killed.
To avenge people who died from covid.
To avenge those killed by right wing terrorists he inspired.
To defend immigrants.
To answer a personal insult (motherfucker insults a lot of people).
To show Q cultists their god is false.
Revenge for his brainwashing previously decent relatives into Q cult fascism.
Life ruined by debt that was about to be forgiven.
Life ruined by losing federal job.
Revenge because he raped the assassin or one of their relatives, on account of he is a rapist that raped people.
To save the US from starting an ultravietnam or two in Mexico or Canada.
To prevent his use of nuclear weapons.
Vengeance for his use of nuclear weapons or to end the ultravietnams he’s already started (i fucken hope not this one).

Did I miss anything? While “swore an oath” could be a military coup, did you know literally every desk jockey in the federal gov has sworn that oath, and a lot of non-federal employees that shouldn’t even have to, like local cops? I wonder if they’ll start changing that oath?

So… Why do you think this trigger is gonna get pulled?

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Life List: Merlin

I’ve seen falcons and possibly other small birds of prey at a distance a number of times, but IDing them?  Forget it.  It’s small.  It’s streaky on belly.  It has lil markies on its lil face.  It could be literally any falcon and if you aren’t 100% sure about the face?  Small hawks too.

Then on March 26th, one killed and ate a Eurasian collared dove on my front lawn, leaving only tawny feathers, blood, and one funky magenta foot.  Lots of people have seen this kind of thing, sometimes more than once, but it’s the only time I’ve seen it.  The bird was pretty bold, which let us get some shitty pictures of it.  Here’s the suspect beside a near identical one from some yewchoob man’s video.  An adult female merlin?

I was surprised the crows, which are not shy about mobbing much larger hawks and eagles, gave this little beast a very wide berth.  Maybe they saw the death blow and it was scary to behold.  I know I’d be freaked out to see a bird dive bombed out of the sky and ripped to pieces alive while still stunned.  Lucky me, I did not have to watch that happen.  I’m confident the victim was taken on the wing tho, because eurasian collared doves pretty much never land in my yard, flying high above it.

The crows were flying rather oddly, which was the first hint I was coming around the corner into a freaky scene.  Part of that may have been the weather; a thunderstorm broke out within a half hour of the kill.  The crows had wings and tail feathers fully fanned, and were floating around all strange.  But it was so weird, right after I saw the little murderer on my lawn, I glanced around for the crows and they were nowhere to be seen.

The tiny monster was so intent on defending its kill that I was able to walk around, try to find my husband, and bring him back.  Then my husband took the pictures and a short video, which is where the stills you see here come from.  To the right here, you can see the great escape.  She finally got annoyed with our shenanigans and flew away with a big chonk of meat.

Vaya sin dios, you funky killing machine.

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Are You the Baddies?

Lil’ question for the scientists and science communicators and defenders of liberty who thought woke moral scolds were impinging so badly on their freedom to be assholes.  Who is censoring the hell out science right now?  Whose side is doing that?  I know, bring up the way your fave race “scientists” could only sometimes get published in mainstream sources, cool cool.  But on this scale?  How about the way they’re gutting universities?  Destroying the Department of Education?  Libraries?  This sound like the work of people who care about academia, enlightenment, the advancement of the human species?  Sophisticated discourse, holding up the hem of your toga as you walk through the agora?  Is this how you saw yourselves?

Are you starting to understand what censorship actually is?  Are you starting to understand how misogyny, transphobia, and racism will always lead into fascism?  How there’s no good and actually cool version of any of those things?  Growing a tiny spark of self-awareness yet?  The clock is ticking.  You’re running out of time to breathe the air of freedom you’ve so stridently clamored for.  Anything you might think say or do that isn’t in support of the party line, better get your freak on while you still can.

Remember those guys painted out of Stalin’s photograph when they became not stalinist enough?  By supporting this situation, you’ve put yourself in a more dangerous position than most.  Does this feel like freedom to you?  Does this look like what you imagined it would, throwing off the shackles of woke?

I’m thinking of Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson here.  I’m not gonna host an answer by one of those humanoid tools of fascism, but I wonder vaguely what that would look like.  I wonder if OB feels like this is the dawning of a new feminist paradise, feels completely blameless in the use of transphobia as a wedge issue to establish Gilead.  I wonder if JC feels good about the state of science now, feels completely justified in working to achieve that egregious new normal.

I don’t wonder enough to read their sniveling bootlicking shit, but maybe one of you could summarize it for me in the comments, heh.

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Life List: Greater Sandhill Crane

There’s an idea that famous cryptid The Jersey Devil can be explained by the sighting of a lone crane in the forest.  Sometimes it is depicted as a bird-like thing with the head of a horse.  I believe it’s a coincidence that the young of cranes are called “colts,” but it’s a fun coincidence.  Unlike the other leggy-and-necky birds known as herons and egrets, baby cranes are cute as hell.  I love them.  I also love hideous freak heron babies, but for different reasons.

Another cool mythical association:  Cranes are the mortal enemies of pygmies.  I do believe this myth has fuck-all to do with the various African tribes of short stature.  The pygmies of Greek legend are mythological beings.  In modern times we’re used to creatures like unicorns or centaurs existing as solitary units, discrete icons.  These ones came with a built-in drama in the form an aeternal war with another type of mythological creature.  Because waging war on pygmies is not something real birds do.  That shit’s just weird.  But funny.

I’ve only ever seen cranes when going out of my way to find them.  They are not a part of my life at all.  I went on a big birding road trip with my dad once and saw cranes in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.  I didn’t remember with certainty which crane species they were and had to look them up.  Based on range maps, this had to be the one: greater sandhill crane.  I didn’t get a very good view.  It was using binoculars to see them at a great distance; not too exciting.  Greige beasts with a lil red bit.

But still.  Big-ass birds are the closest thing we get to pterosaurs nowadays, and they are very cool.  Cranes.  Worth going out of your way for.

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RP by Comment 00003

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Already some cool kids were planning to indulge in the city’s night life.  The folly of youth.  Meanwhile, the tour continued into a building full of laboratories, where there was little of interest that they were allowed to see.

Josh came back to Ilmardan and Kaldonia.  “Turns out Humuk is too shy to go to clubs.  Still figuring himself out, I think.”  Kaldonia laughed quietly.

It was hard not to want an escape of some kind, a daydream to distract from the dreary reality around them.  The place looked even less interesting than the average high school – more like an office space of buzzing lights and clicking keys.

They came into another courtyard, this one adjacent to a cafeteria and featuring a heavy mechanized gate which would be used for access by utility vehicles in off hours.  It had a smattering of graffiti and a mostly occluded view of people walking by out on the street.

Ms. Selber sorted the large pack of freshmen into two concentric rings for some awkward ice breaking games.  Everyone had to say their name and answer a specified question to the closest person in the other circle, rotate, introduce themselves and answer a different question for the next.

Kaldonia was with Ilmardan for the question of “What’s your major?”

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