life too hard for daily blogging. did not manage a year of it. sure was an interesting ride, at least for me. the thing that made the most practical difference in my life was making myself listen to new tracks by The Dead Milkmen. that changed the rotation on the radio station in my head some.
i’m too tired to do this tho. it’s over! see u whenever i get to it. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
zzzz.
zz.
I’ve been pretty blithe in my attempts to make people feel less doomy, and PZ did call me out on it, in a sense, during the August podcast. The main thing I try to tell people is that for most of us life will go on – the terror fascism inspires may not play out as dramatically in most of our own lives as we are anticipating. If you look at people from Ghana to Papua New Guinea, there are a lot of travails but people still live life, every day. This perspective becomes especially important as shitler puts us in the fast lane to economic ruin. We’ll suffer sometimes, but we will live our lives, at least as well as all the people who have been living under tyranny and economic depredation all around the world. However, sometimes, for some of us, doom is gonna happen. What then?
I’m put in mind of this by all the comments on a recent post. A lot of people have family members near the end of the line, or have that in their own headlights. I was reminded of my mortality a few years ago during my first nbd-styled cancer situation. As a philosophical materialist, I know what comes after this: a big nothin’, which I want to put off as long as possible. And my neurotypical sauce keeps me feeling like most likely, that will happen. There’s a chance I’ll die randomly at any given moment of any given day, but it’s a small chance, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ll most likely be fine – even accomplish a few useful things before I go. I just know, on a rational level, not even a minute of it is guaranteed, which is low-key depressing.
This is not to say I’m abandoning my anti-doomerism policy or even the earnest beliefs behind it, that for most of us life will remain tolerable for most of the path, that we gain nothing by living in terror and despair. As I mention in the policy tho, I am occasionally going to point to dark truths, and this is one of them. It’s something I need to address, because it points to what some might call a good reason to abandon the policy.
Sometimes you have to talk about your despair. Arguably, sometimes you have to wallow in the ableism inspired by a world run by cruelty that defies all reason, by living among buffalo that are stampeding for the cliff. First point true, second one maybe. Neither of those are reasons for me to allow it here. After all, Pharyngula is right next door and has no such limits. If you need it, there it is. And if you need to get away from it, here I am.
But what should I say to people for whom doom is extremely nigh? I don’t know if I’m the guy to say anything to them. My “dark realist” perspective makes me rather terrible at helping friends and loved ones through depression. Sometimes at my job I have to talk to people who are dying, or have recently had loved ones die – sometimes their children. I gotta keep it professional. This isn’t a professional setting and I don’t have that excuse here.
Not everybody can be everything to everybody, and my pollyanna ways are a thin coat over a rather bleak point of view. Best not to interrogate it. Even so, I’m not lying when I say most of us are gonna be alright. We’ll have pain and suffering, we’ll have ok moments, we’ll have life, the same as anyone has ever had.
There are many places in the world where that is less true. Very sorry to those people, but we can’t all be thinking about that all the time, or life is over for us. I expect that some people dying in pointless wars will die thinking, I’d love every last motherfucker living a life of ease to experience what I’m experiencing. If I have to die, everyone should die. I’ll forgive them for feeling that. I’m a cranky bitch and I’d probably feel the same if I had to live through such times.
But I also expect there are people in Ukraine, Palestine, etc, who would not begrudge any of us trying to live life in peace and feel as ok as possible – as long as we do what we can to help steer our respective societies away from war and ruin. Who are we beholden to, the angriest in suffering or the more kind? What should we do? Live in anguish and die in terrorist action against our tyrants and warmongers? Or do what we can, within the limits that allow us to know the fleeting happiness we are allowed on this bitch of an earth?
When something scary or sad is going on, there are a million motherfuckers lining up to tell you that you are not scared or sad enough. Let this blog be one place that calls bullshit on that. Do what you can to make life better for others, as much as you can, but know your limits, and allow yourself to be as happy as is possible – in a world that is doing its best to make you miserable.
It’s Gloria Gaynor time. I will survive. You will too. Until you can’t, and I’m sorry to hear if that’s happening for you. I hope you can find solace and peace along your way out the door, as I hope I do when it’s time for me to go. That’s all I can reasonably say or do for you. Good luck to all, and a good life as well.
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When I was a kid in the ’80s, the children in the halls and on school buses would chant song lyrics, especially raps. Janet Jackson, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Run DMC all had their time, sometimes with alternative lyrics, like the “batman smells” versions. This song was especially popular.
The place I heard it the most was in the mouths of other babes four decades ago, and I’m only seeing the video for the first time now. I love the use of white people in this video. It’s like these guys are the sensible cool mans in a world of weird posers and art freaks. They gots my number.
In more ways than one. In the latest FtB Poddish Sortacast, I spoke way too much. I had proposed the topic so it was kinda my time to rampage, but still, rude. Nonetheless, I thought I did a great job elucidating my perception of the world and the shituation we’re in. This is not a good video to watch if you’re one of the people my doomerism policy is designed to protect, so don’t watch it if you’re one of them. Anybody else, have at it.
Am I foolin myself, or did I come off like a big ol’ smartypants? I lost the bead a few times, but when I was on, I was on.
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I’m so close to the bottom of the well (get it get it) on my daily posting it’s fuckin’ wild. I get the feelin’ the way PZ and Mano work is by reading their news and social media, and commenting on anything that seems worthy of comment. I don’t follow news or social media on purpose. FtB is the condensed version run thru the filter of people who share my principles. Good enough. Could I just do posts reacting to what they’re posting? Blogly shadow puppetry? Nay. I don’t even feel like making a two sentence comment under most of their articles, no offense intended.
As much writing a chapter a day of novels was a frenzied dash, at least it gave me something to work with. On the other hand, I seriously doubt I have the sauce to write fiction every day. I imagine what I would write and immediately it all seems so high effort. Even cheeky nonsense involves craft, way more than you might expect.
What would Groucho Marx do? If I recall he was a well known epistler. That’s like blogging but involves ponies and shotguns, I’ve heard.
Recently I’ve been watching The Dead Milkmen‘s vloggish thing on yewchoob, called Big Questions with the Dead Milkmen, and getting a mental picture of their lives. Those guys had a hit almost everyone over forty has heard, in “Punk Rock Girl,” but they never stopped needing day jobs for at least part of the year. The lead singer is at an age where some emeffs are retired and he still has an office job of some kind. Royalties for the artists ≠ living high on the hogg 4 lyfe. What hope do the rest of us non-fame-adjacent slobs have, of escape from tha Grind? We all know PZ should be retired by now for health reasons, but can’t due to financial concerns. Work sucks. Everything fucking sucks.
Chill, me. Chill.
That’s a bit off topic, but maybe it is a better topic for discussion. Being a “creator.” I’ve long wanted to put it all together as an artist, to assemble the palace of my perfected works, to accomplish whatever bare minimum level of public self-expression that would feel like “enough” when it’s bucket kicking time. But to what extent is the public element necessary? Should I be building an aluminum foil throne room in a storage unit or composing ten-thousand page novels about sentient tornadoes that will be found in shoeboxes after I’m floating out the crematorium pipe?
The world is glutted with motherfuckers. There are a million bajillion artists clamoring for attention, a great howl reaching up into the unfathomable cold. To be one more vainglorious mausoleum builder, this feels just pitiful. Uncool, and you know I want to be cool.
But still, it gets me, thinking about how I have to toil most of my life at things I don’t want to do, while my imagination burns with things I’d prefer to be working on. And the certainty that if society wasn’t a giant pyramid scheme to keep business nazis in boats, if I literally had to plow fields, I would have vastly more free time to pursue my craft? That’s a ten thousand degree knife thru my braincase.
Chill me. Chill.
Anyway, if the daily posting train comes sputtering to a stop very soon, do not be surprised, nor concerned. I’m as well as anyone can be, given the current circumstances of the world. Thanks for reading this foolery as long as you have, and even if I return to erratic and much less frequent posting, I will most likely be here until FtB itself is pushing up daisies.
See you around!
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The rich have always controlled civilization, one way or another. Who those rich are and what that wealth looks like have changed a lot over time, but the anprims are right about this much: civilization itself seems to exist solely to promote inequality. I’m not meaning to invalidate all the volumes that have been written proposing ways societies should guarantee rights and safety to their denizens, just to say that such ideas are aspirational, and in practice I don’t know if we’ve ever quite made the grade.
My homeland is now dominated by open fascists, who still have the gall to refuse that name, to call themselves by other cutesy little nicknames like “conservative” or “republican.” Whatever. Not here to talk about that. I’m trying to express my perception of power in this country and in the world, and what that power is going to do, so that we can be as emotionally prepared for it as possible.
Wealth feeds itself endlessly, like a virus. It can’t stop devouring any society in which it exists, until that society is utterly destroyed. The billionaire class ate and ate until they became so powerful they functionally ran the world, but didn’t seem to realize this until now. They did understand a lot of their specific powers – pay any politician any amount of money to get laws to hand you even larger sums, assassinate your worst opposition and pay for the dirty tricks to keep any investigation from getting far, have friends in DC sic the CIA on leftist movements in South America, etc etc etc. But I think shitler’s public alliance with apartheid junior really shows they didn’t understand what that power meant until now – because you can see them desperately scrambling to define the borders of their fiefdoms. Something busted this flywheel.
America falling under control of the most corrupt businessman since Ea-Nasir has opened up the battlefield. Through lobbying and cutthroat financial maneuvers the corpos have been building their power, like the modernization of armies in the run-up to World War I, packing the powder keg for purposes they didn’t fully comprehend, and now it’s all-out war for the top spots. Apartheid junior is the first billionaire to directly control government agencies with no authority except his bank account, and now everybody else realizes they need to get a piece of that action. Who will win? What will their victory look like?
I know shitler won’t be around for it. We all know that. But he was crucial in making this possible, so the corpos have to be very careful how they handle his exit from the stage. If I was them, I’d make him die from “natural causes” fuckin’ immediately, before history has fully vindicated his naysayers, so more competent tools can control the damage, spin his hagiography to my brand’s advantage. If he lives long enough for the world to be completely fucked apart in a way that unambiguously points to him as the cause, the damage to business interests will be huge.
If beezus, murdrock, et al are thinking along those same lines, his days may be very short indeed. Then it’s beardo mccouchfuck as bribe recipient in chief, and mfsk will find himself suddenly faced with a lot more competition for that access. This will not look like it used to. There was a kind of detente or gentlemen’s agreement between corpos that what was good for one was good for all. Deregulate deregulate deregulate, and poison the earth to grow your filthy lucre. The peace is over. It’s time for Shadowrun.
Or should I say Cyberpunk? I’m referring to the old TTRPGs where transnational megacorporations were no longer content with mergers and acquisitions, but paid goons to slice throats in the night. Cyberpunk by R Talsorian Games was the first, but its name is too easy to confuse with the genre writ large. I’m gonna stick with Shadowrun.
Shadowrun was a successor to Cyberpunk in the same genre, but with added fantasy elements – elves and magic alongside “chrome” and “street samurai.” Within that world, shadowrunning was doing the illegal bidding of corporations as a mercenary. Such a mercenary would be called a shadowrunner, which is a cool name. I’ve already made reference to this game in another post.
Anyway, shadowrunners IRL. Cool name, bad people. Were those Boeing whistleblowers whacked? Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? Expect more of this, and more overt. Amazon security will, at some point, turn live ammunition on Amazon employees, and get away with it. Any news you read that makes a business look bad, you can trust it was only able to be published because it benefited a competitor who owned the media platform on which it appeared.
I’m pretty confident in my lil thesis here, but still haven’t come close to my first aim – prepare myself for what’s next – because there are so many possibilities my head is spinning. First order of business will be taking over different aspects of government or political regions, like cities or states. Texas, a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil. Social Security – Goldman Sachs. How much say will the congress or even the president have in altering these contracts, when resistance will be met with dioxin poisoning, blackmail, even mass murder?
No idea. Used to be medicine and caregiving were the growth jobs, but crapitalist medicine and fascist corporate influence has hospitals closing left right and center, the remaining staff massively overworked. The new growth industry will be shadowrunning. Learn to hack with artificial intelligence. Amass blackmail dossiers. Join private security trained by alums of CIA death squads.
That’s as far as I can go with this for now. Might revisit in the future.
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composing this in “hall bed” at emergency room, drankin saline solution thru stigmata. was weak all day and slightly short of breath.
not lookin forward to the bill. the way the insurance tango works i might not know the final tally for months, or might find out in a week. that is to say, i might come to y’all with hat in hand again at some point in that time frame.
fun how so few people here wear masks. minimizing my household’s exposure to crud by having no company in here.
i’ve queued this post so if it goes live with nothing after this point, you can assume i’m dead or otherwise unavailable. be concerned if the rest of my queue starts rolling out one day at a time, posts with titles but no text other than a hasty note to myself or a keysmash.
i’m sure it won’t be like that, but this is a weird one for me, and who knows? will it be better for them to discover nothing or for them to find out i have something annoying or expensive to treat?
will i contract covid in here? will the visit be worse for my health than muddling thru without help?
will check in later…
nothing! they found nothing. i don’t think they ran the most expensive tests so i’ll probably be coo. just gotta get up the gumption to stop smoking my sick leave.
yeah, back home, had dinner, feel better – if a bit frail. what will i feel like tomorrow morning? stay tuned lol.
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You can imagine a fascism without misogyny. Many have, especially misogynist fiction writers in the 20th century – see the alien world where men have been enslaved by vixens in silver lamé. Leaving aside that frivolous example and just daydreaming, you can see it, right? Not from Shitler. Maybe his sidekick, Couchfuck McBeardnazi, could in some world in some way be totally respectful to women, keep them close in his counsel in the tower of Mordor, march arm in arm with them to burn and oppress. In practice, it never happens. Misogyny is a first principle of fascism, in spirit and deed if not always in word. As it happens, we also have it in word here.
As primary caregivers under patriarchy, women are primary authority figures over children. To keep peace, rule one for the unruly kinder is “be nice to each other.” Don’t hit people, think about their feelings. Basic liberalism born of practicality. To forge a brave new world without mercy, where violence can be wielded without restraint by the cool sexy stormtroopers, we must first remove the authority of anyone who would tell you to play nice. We must chain mom to the house and beat her if she dares to speak.
Maybe that’s it? Maybe not. I’m sure you can find dozens of essays from antifascists like Umberto explaining the principle, or even writing from fascists telling on themselves. I wonder if, in some unrealized golden future where all prejudices and bases of oppression are falling away one by one, misogyny may be the last one to fall. Far more than racism, antisemitism, transphobia, etc, it has traitors within the oppressed group lining up to enforce its agenda. Misogynist women are the fucking pits. Not that there aren’t racist members of oppressed races, antisemitic jewish people, and transphobic trans people, because there are. It just seems like a worse issue with women’s rights.
I haven’t been perfect on feminism by any means, especially the deeper you go into my foolish past (pre-blogging), and am not trying to pose like a saint of the practice. Just pointing some shit out. The real meaning of “woke” is “maintaining awareness of oppression, especially for self-defense.” I want the world to wake up to the insidious omnipresence of misogyny and do some real shit about it. We persist in our fascist coma. Big sigh.
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I was working on my lotto ticket this month. I have a lot of stories to tell, gonna do some up proper eventually. Self-publish, most likely. The lotto ticket? Not like the others. I was going to omit queerness, make the main characters white, and follow a conventional thriller outline – sell out, maximize appeal to stodgy industry scum. It was to be the last thing I bother trying to pitch, but I couldn’t hack it this month. My brother came over for a big visit with his kids. More than one person in my life is getting pressed by mental illness. I just don’t have the time right now.
But man, I wanna get this done. Any of it. I’m tired of only going part of the way. And as far as lamestream publishing, I need to try at least once. I needs loot. I’m sure the advances ain’t anything like they used to be, when they happen at all, but who knows? That’s why it’s a lottery ticket.
I gotta pay off this fucken mortgage before the chaotic nature of this dystopia ruins my life, and the lives of the people that depend on me. If it wasn’t for shitler, I’d feel a lot safer in slow and steady, but it ain’t like that anymore. The job security I once enjoyed is a distant memory. The evergreen advice of the Wutang Clan somes to mind again, “You can’t just get by anymore, you gotta get over.”
Man, FtB was dead as hell yesterday. Wonder what it’s looking like as this post comes up? … …
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Had some people doubting my assertion that the gnu atheists significantly contributed to the rise of fascism. My life is fucking microwaving my brain right now. I’m having a bad time in part because people around me are having even worse times. I shouldn’t be writing this right now. I should be helping people I care about get thru their shit. But I’m running out of queued posts and this is something I can generate a few words about. So here I am, really profoundly not fucking feeling it, but committed to the bit of daily posting.
Celebrities advertise the positions they endorse. Advertisement wins new converts, but importantly, it can reach the people who matter the most to global power – moneyed fuckoes who want to hear their power justified, who want a religion or belief system that exonerates them from the egregious injustice their privilege itself represents.
Remember the NYT puffing up the Intralectural Dork Web? The Yooniversity of the Intellectional Durk Werb at Austin dot org? Whatever that shit was called? If you’re a big enough asswipe, you can make a bank fulla money just saying the fuckshit you believe, because the kochs or millers or rockefellas can give u a shower of gold. A golden shower, if you will.
One thing feeds the other feeds the other feeds the other. The game goes like this: get famous, say evil things, watch evil men line up to pay you for promoting evil that benefits them. Via hyper-incestuous thinktanks and lobbies and yacht parties and media juntas, the thousand-headed hydra of conservative bobbleheads normalizes fascism and emboldens politicians to put that ideal into practice.
Dawkins et al were definitely part of that, and still are. They spend more time promoting fascism now than fighting against oppressive religion. He has become an absolute second stringer. Fuckin’ Candace Owens and any number of rappers and standup comedians have bigger seats at the table than Dawkins now. But I watched this happen. We all did.
I’m just gonna assert again what I did the first time around. Elevatorgate was one of a rapid-fire series of reactionary movements that helped convert misogyny into a broad tent fascist movement. Misogyny was the starting point, but it eventually incorporated conspiratorial thinking and fringe beliefs, racism and xenophobia. Amusing to think about old dicky wondering why o why his side includes the flat earthers. Keep thinking about it. Maybe you’ll figure it out before you die.
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A thought follows from my recent bothsiderism post. There have been a lot of situations like this in recent years, haven’t there? A group or individual devoted to a cause decides they hate some oppressed people so powerfully that they ally with opponents, and set their own cause back by decades. The obvious example is terfs aiding fundies to absolutely devastate women’s rights, all because trans women are yucky.
The slvmepit queen’s contribution to fascism set vaccine acceptance, research, and availability back decades, when that was originally her cause. If memory serves. Maybe she was more of a nü atheist, whose raison d’être was pwning christians, and didn’t spend much digital ink on pro-vaxxing. It’s been a long time.
Dawkins, Harris, etc set atheism back a lot. One of the sorest groups of burned atheists has to be the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who recently had to watch christian bigots gloating as they excluded women from military careers, had to watch the executive branch that controls the military go from being the most inclusive it had ever been in history to literally labeling DEI as a hate movement. But, y’know, having to respect people on their own terms is a tall ask. Better to hand the world over to theo-fascism, right?
Man that last group really hacks me off. Terfs are just comparable to nazis to me. They’re gloating, gleefully evil moustache-twirling freaks, living their best lives at the expense of the human species. Consistent in their evil, right? Anti-woke atheists are such mealy-mouthed little creeps, weaselly motherfuckers acting like there’s a centrist or even liberal way to oppose social justice, man, I wanna slap the shit out of them. Don’t ever let me meet that little old man. I don’t know how well I could restrain myself.
I wonder if there are any environmentalists out there who got environmental protections overturned because somebody asked them to be nice to black people. I wonder if there are any black power activists who got racist politicians elected because the alternative was a woman. I wonder if there are any women who … eh, we all know that story now.
All I’d like to say in conclusion is this: If your support for a cause is so weak that you’ll throw the game that hard, maybe don’t get involved in the first place? Nobody needs friends like you. Fuck’s sake, atheism is probably worse off now than if Dawkins had never picked up a microphone.
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