Mysteries With No Payoff

I was eatin’ a sammich in the living room and the series premiere of Taboo was on. Tom Hardy is in there and he’s usually got an interesting presence. I’m kinda inclined to like him, though I haven’t been given a whole lot of cinematic reason to. So I thought, this show has until the end of this sammich to appeal to me. No dice. I’m done.

I spent a lot of years not watching TV shows, just started doing it again within the last five. I’m starting to see the same tropes and writing techniques play out on the scale of seasons, and to appreciate the things I’ve read other people saying on the internet.

That is to say, fuck Lost. TV shows love setting up a mystery but there are too many examples of them leaving you without an answer, or with an answer that strongly suggests they were making shit up as they went along. I find that so annoying that I have serious misgivings about any TV show that relies heavily on mystery.

So Taboo is building up Hardy’s character with rumors and whispers and mysterious behavior and blah blah. There’s the East India Company as villains – legit historical monsters but he’s very much one of them. Hardy’s boy was in the EIC and bounced around the world getting into backstory hijinx whenever he wasn’t mighty whitey-ing his way into indigenous cultures.

It’s like we’re being expected to root for a trust fund cockhole who spent his young adulthood being an asswipe in faraway places, then came home to act like he’s morally superior to the community that spawned him. Then there’s weird shit like the implication from wasted-as-a-whore Franka Potente that he kills women, to which he’s like “You know it, baby!” Who is supposed to like this? Not me.

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Reason and Observation are Unnatural

HEY, dudes and dudettes.  I know you think basing your metaphysical beliefs on reason and observation is “healthy” and “cool,” but you gotta know, our ancestors didn’t do that!  On the African Savannah, or maybe caves I guess, we spent what, a million years, getting our facts from pattern association, superstition, arguments from authority and antiquity.  Well listen up, babies.

PALEO THOUGHT.  None of that unnatural processed scientific garbage polluting your brains, just what your body is designed for: metaphysical beliefs that would make your caveman ancestors proud.  It’s a common sense approach to mental fitness.  Get with the program and we’ll send you two coupons for the granola bar at Whole Foods, offer not valid in all locations, some conditions apply.

Namaste.

 

Advice for Trump, Surely Pointless

Just thought I’d get this out there into the universe.

You wanna show that you aren’t down with nazis?  Wanna defy expectations, win over hella moderates?  Take white terrorism seriously, empower the FBI to make serious moves against neo-nazis and the KKK.  From where a lot of us stand – including elected officials in your own party – it kinda looks like you use those hate groups as a threatening mob to quell dissent.

Kinda?  It very much looks like you’re a straight-up racist, cozying up to anti-semites who would have members of your family dead in their ideal world.  Just, please prove us wrong, please do something to defang the homicidal hordes that are feeling so empowered right now.  I care more about people dying or having to live in fear than I care about whether you can play Nero for four years or eight.  Not a racist bone in your body?  Lock up some race terrorists, save some lives.  We will thank you.

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Dem Complacency About Racism Caused This

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. If Democrats protected the voting rights of people of color with an appropriate sense of urgency and importance, we probably wouldn’t be in this crisis. The average dem voter couldn’t have done shit about that; it’s all we can do to work for a living and survive this blasted libertarian hellscape nation. But strategists, movers, shakers, butts in office: they could have done a lot more, should have seen the danger a lot more clearly. I just hope in some tiny but still tragically unrealistic way that they’ll learn the right lessons off this shituation. Odds are, we’ll just get another round of smug “whaddyagonnados” and capitulation and rightward slide.

The media is always on the leading edge of AmeriKKKa’s stampede into hell tho. Dems got nothing on CNN & friends. As an anonymous commenter on yoisthisracist said,

“Even broadcast media is afraid to use the word ‘racist’ and is 100% more likely to come down on someone for correctly accusing someone of racism than for being racist.”

It’s true, isn’t it? How fucked are we? Especially those more darkly complected than myself. But still, us honkeys too. The white supremacist voting bloc in this country has proven so many times over that they will consign us all to begging the billionaires for moldy poison scraps if it means some brown people will be disallowed from the begging party. I try to scrupulously tag my posts, but kinda feel like tagging my whole existence with “wake me when the world is over.”

Outing Nazis Might Lose its Sting

I love the idea of outing nazis, allowing their personal race terrorism to affect their professional lives the way it should. The problem is that as this happens more often – as white supremacy is more normalized and accepted in mainstream society – employers are going to become much less likely to fire or otherwise penalize these people. It’s still useful, because, say, if we had a database of professionals who are racist, we could help steer clear of them and impact their business from the outside. Boycotts and the like. Likewise, knowing which health care providers are misogynists could be of great utility. Hmm. I don’t have a fully formed thesis here, just things to consider. I’m still considering.

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from Xeni Jardin

As Trump appoints one white supremacist after another to his staff, a brilliant (& only slightly grammatically typo’d) tweet from Xeni Jardin:

“Ever wonder what it’d be like to go back in time and help fight nazis? Support Civil Rights Era? Resist Native genocide? Now’s your chance” –Xeni Jardin

The soup is on. It’s nothing but war from now into the foreseeable future. Good luck, warriors.

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Juice the Fascist Orange

I made a product. You can buy it. As I said on my new shop’s tumblr site,

The inaugural T-shirt design for my SJW merch site on Spreadshirt, “Juice the Fascist Orange” sends the message that you love deriving your breakfast drink from the forcibly extracted fluids of a politically evil citrus. Certainly no advocacy of violence here.

The art style is an overt homage to Keith Haring, whose ghost is probably doing scary things to Pence every night. Boo, as it were. Boo.

"Juice the Fascist Orange"

“Juice the Fascist Orange”

some varieties displayed

“Juice the Fascist Orange”

So now u kno. Great American Satan’s SJW themed merches going forward will be sold under the name of RepreZebra. I will advertise them here from time to time. If you have any requests or feedback, let me know in the comments here.

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Illegal Actions Will Be Necessary

As Caine reports, there are already attempts to take away our legal right to protest. That doesn’t mean protest will be impossible, only that you will be more likely to be shot or arrested for it. There are lots of things we will have to do under trumpence that are or will become illegal. Interfering with immigration officers, recording racist police murdering people, protesting in hundreds of ways, stealing to feed and clothe the needy (no doubt including many of ourselves), possibly hacking communications to discover and reveal evil government actions to the people, so on. Not to sound apocalyptic – a lot of this stuff can be pretty low key. Are you prepared to risk becoming slave labor for the prison industrial complex? Not sure if I am yet, but it may get to where I don’t even have a choice. Many people have already been there.
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Black Power Now

stylized raised black fist

Throughout this article I focus on racism in the political process as being about the persecution of African Americans.  Latinx people and others have definitely been oppressed as well, but the number one boogeyman that drives institutional white supremacy has always been fear of black people.  I’d like to give everyone some props and some encouragement.  Rock on!

To me the silver lining of this election is that now I know white people are not even worth trying to reach.  Those of us who are compassionate enough to see suffering and progressive enough to be intolerant of the intolerance that promotes it – we’re going to come correct no matter what.  White moderates and swing voters?  Total trash, useless, racist as fuck, just fuck ’em off.   We tried in so many different ways to win them and it was for jack dick.

People of color, on the other hand, recognized the threat and did what you could to stop it.  Every category of you had a good sized majority voting for the not-completely-depraved candidate.  If we collectively want to believe history has a forward trajectory, that it’s possible to end this fucking rocket train to the abyss, you, people of color, are the only real hope of that.

And I am absolutely not being one of those fools that blames low PoC turnout for Trumpistan.  I’m not saying you have to take responsibility here.  Samantha Bee said we shouldn’t be expecting you to build our country yet again, but then she went on to try and rally white people.  I’m saying that is a lost cause, probably until my generation is in the fucking dirt, and that could literally take eighty years to happen.

I’m saying you have support from some of us, you won’t be completely alone in fighting la revolución, but white people have proven themselves collectively without honor, without courage, without compassion, and cannot be trusted with control of the United States.  It’s bullshit that this falls to you, but I really think you can do it.

Why didn’t it work this time?  Racist voter disenfranchisement policies and the school to prison pipeline, first and foremost.  A full third of African American men in Florida were disqualified from voting due to felony records.  Now some would say felons have proven themselves morally defective and therefore unworthy to vote, but when you look at the demography of prisons now, you’d have to be racist as fuck to believe all those people actually deserve to be there, that they’re all guilty or morally faulty.

In fact, at this point it is safe to say the average white voter is much less moral than the average felon.  So smashing the school to prison pipeline, working this war from multiple angles, it’s all going to be necessary.  But if there was one thing that could swing the balance of power in this nation instantly?  It’s getting felons their vote back.

Now I’m just another fucking white person talking out my ass here and I know this is going to be impossible for a while, but I’m pathologically hopeful and can’t help but think that just maybe you have a shot at it.  Donald Trump got fewer votes than Romney, which means that he was so odious even some republicans couldn’t bring themselves to pull the lever.  That means their turnout is down.

Now your turnout is down as well, because white supremacists engineered it to be that way.  But how did they do it?  Some of the methods they used can be fought against with enough organization, enough will.  For example, you’re more likely to be voting late and without adequate ID to meet their racist requirements.  But what if a big enough push was made to get all of you the ID?  To get you registered?  To get as many of you as possible mail-in ballots and early voting options?

And what if you managed to reach some of the folks you know who – understandably at this late reactionary racist and terrible stage of history – won’t bother trying in the first place?  I don’t know.  White, talking out of ass.  But hopeful.  And I’m certain many of you are already working these angles, have already promoted these ideas.

So if you get the vote you should be entitled to, you manage to turn the tide in some races for legislative seats, what of the Democrats?  There are some situations in which you’ll have no choice but the lesser of two evils and I know you know what to do there, but I’d also like to remind you that it’s a lot more possible for third party candidates to do well in very important local races.  Say you have a state with racist voting laws but you secure a proactive black mayor and sheriff.  They could do a lot to facilitate access to voting even in the face of that.

The Democrats might be able to become worthy of your votes eventually, instead of being the wholly ineffectual stopgap against white terrorism that they have been.  But I can understand giving them all of the side eye.  Here’s a fact that just can’t be disputed:  Democrats could have secured a much stronger position for themselves in government by fighting against racist voter disenfranchisement, but when they had the best shot at it?

They were actively part of the problem.  Bill Clinton used “tough on crime” laws to score points with racist white moderates, helping to bloat the fucking horrifying US prison system.  The Democratic party fears black power.  Maybe they should, but I don’t.  The paranoid dreams of white cowards and race terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to hold sway over the course of this nation, and with the power we have, shouldn’t have this large of a hand on the whole world.  Black Power Now.

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