i’m turning into an edgelord, talking violence too often. politics, maaaan. gotta shut it off, focus on other things entirely. sometimes when i hear other people talk, who are being upset by the same things that bother me, it helps me look at the same issue more calmly. a weird quirk, i wish i could call up on command. works more IRL than online, where i more often get the opposite effect.
;slkjgrdlkagjlskjrgfkjvrak i tells ya.
but i’ll be alright.
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A wiser woman than I said we should all give dems the spurs on trans rights, specifically to say we’ll stop supporting them with votes if they stop supporting us. My initial reaction is to think of just how much I despise all the leftists who said it was OK not to vote this time around. It was potential dem voters staying home that caused us this crisis in the first place, and the margin was so massive it must have had multiple causes. Misogyny, racism, transphobia, vote suppression (i have firsthand knowledge of some, but it doesn’t explain the big shortfall by itself), apathy caused by a campaign relentlessly focused on fear? Discouraging voters was surely one of the causes, as well as single-issue voters like pro-Palestine people not wanting to sully hands. This campaign would be both of those things, right? Single-issue vote discouragement?
On the other hand, voting for the lesser of two evils only makes sense if it actually does prevent some amount of evil from happening, undoes the evil that was done the last time their opponents were in power, something… Like, I’d accept that my demographic had no legal protection and was royally fucked, if there were some kinda super-genius badass legislative masterminds successfully making great things happen to, say, benefits for the poor, or environmental legislation, medicare… something important. The dems, and left parties around the globe, have been unbelievably useless at this. Biden should be using the last days of his executive power to make baller moves, but there’s no indication that’s going to happen.
As an example of that, I thought about pardoning Leonard Peltier. No dem was ever gonna do that, but I haven’t looked into the subject much. I just assumed that since a lot of thoughtful people think he is innocent, they probably had good reason. A brief look into the subject brought up this slanted-ass bootlicking NPR article that was covered top to bottom in e-begging. (How long has NPR been sucking fascist balls?) If there is reasonable evidence supporting his innocence out there, getting people OK with releasing him would be as simple as presenting that evidence, right? I dunno.
How about something less controversial. Commute the penalties of everyone on death row to life imprisonment. Full pardons for everybody on death row where the police or prosecutors are legally proven to have fucked up the truth for the sake of a lynching. Last time the billowing bowelsack was on his way out of office, he accelerated the rate of executions, including those of people who had strong evidence of wrongful conviction. Just do the opposite thing. That’s an obvious good deed that would not be easily reversed.
One factor in how the election was lost: the dem hesitation to simply stand for anything. If there was a case being made outside of “at least we won’t kill you,” I didn’t hear it. It may have been spoken, but the threats were so much louder. All I saw was them using terror to ransack the wallets of the base, and making wacky jokes. I dunno if anyone was paying attention when Clinton lost, but all the night show funnymen were joking in overtime, didn’t make a difference when it counted.
Having lost, it seems to me, puts dems exactly where they want to be, doing what they do best. Tut tut ineffectually from the corner, play the good cop role in our persecution, and so lend a veneer of legitimacy to our deeply anti-democratic government. They make themselves reeeally hard to defend, especially the centrists like Pelosi.
As much as I feel a nigh-murderous hatred for anti-voting tumblr anarchists, they represent a genuinely felt position among many lgbt people – particularly trans women – that nobody in power honestly cares about them or is willing to protect them from literal genocide. That belief was stoked by social media cryptofascists, especially foreign ones, but it would have been there even without that encouragement. Dubya’s government tried to use disgust of gay people to bolster their political power, unsuccessfully. Us trans folk are even more disgusting to the masses, so using us has proven more successful. Or has it? The gasbag barely got more votes than he did last time. Again, this was all about our side staying home, and not theirs achieving anything besides holding the base.
I’m conflicted. This is an important enough issue for obvious personal reasons, as well as for all the trans people less privileged than myself, that it’s easy to see making it the one issue to vote on. So are the other issues though. US support of genocide abroad, anthropogenic global warming… As I used to say a lot, everything is on fire and nothing isn’t.
But in the end, no, I won’t join the crew in saying I won’t vote dem if they don’t support trans rights. I would implore whatever passes for human decency in them to throw us a bone, but I can’t say I’d one-issue this, as bad as the dems are. The nazis are just so god damn much worse. I say vote dem anyways, and if they ever win again (lol), don’t assume that’s the end of it. We’ll have to fight them for what we need; it’ll just be easier to fight them than the fourth reich. Maybe fight them like my comrades are trying to, with this campaign, if it makes sense to you. I can’t join them in making those vows of non-voting against spineless dems, but I like to think I have other types of fight in me, when it counts. Who even knows until you’re on the line? None of us should have to be living through these struggles.
Either way, the country is going to be so gerrymandered and vote-suppressed in four years that dems will be lucky to win participation trophies, so I’m probably overthinking it. Just done and tired, waiting for the hurricane of hammers to drop. And still viciously, viscerally furious with the proselytizers of non-voting.
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EDIT: forgot silver lining. yes i think dems are not going to win next time without the republicans literally having a child sex orgy on prime time basic cable and using the blood of a vivisected vietnam vet for lube (that was a bit off color jeezis). but people survived fascism in spain and we can do it here too.
If you’re coming at it blind, Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible can make for a rousing rebuke of christian BS. Particularly the idea you should love your enemy is mocked as hypocrisy and foolishness. Well, I don’t know if one should feel as bitter about one’s enemies as I do, but the idea of loving those bastids is profoundly wrong.
That said, the book is rotten to the core. Much of it was repurposed from a proto-nazi book called Might is Right, and another big influence was Rand’s objectivism. Dude said evil is live backwards, christians be asking us to live shadows of a real life, so doing evil equals living, something something yadda yadda. But somehow this morality shook out to being much the same as mainstream christianity in LaVey’s country – this wonderful land of genocide and slavery. The poor and the disabled are only allowed to live until they’re inconvenient. Anybody you regard as an enemy can be completely dehumanized, oppressed, segregated, exiled, or slaughtered. Real daring, Anton.
The specific part I want to address is his big tirade against “psychic vampires” – people seeking sympathy or help from you, who always take and never give. We all know people who drain our mental health, one way or another. (I believe there was a big running joke on What We Do in the Shadows about it, but I’ve only seen gif compilations of the show.) Sometimes they just have an energy that hits you the wrong way and they ping you with it so hard that you lose hp by the minute. Bip Bip. Sometimes they really do need more of you than they can ever give back – the gratitude won’t make you even close to whole after the ordeal is done.
But most of us need to get less selfish, not have our callousness reinforced with polemic. That thesis is ableist as all hell. Either we think the disabled should be helped or we don’t, right? The sloppy middle ground as it plays out in reality is bad for everybody. And there will be disabled people who drain your emotional reserves, but they need help just the same, from somebody somehow somewhere, or their suffering is just another failure of our species to live up to our potential as thinking creatures.
I’m getting into all of this because I’ve been thinking about people with paranoid delusions again recently, for some reason. They’re so freaking exhausting. Here’s an interesting wikipedia article on a guy, James Tilly Matthews, whose ideas may sound familiar to you. Supposedly, near the end of his short life, his delusions had fallen away. May the same happen for everybody with such problems, and not at the expense of their well-being.
I’m given to understand that the recommended way to handle paranoid delusions is to not question or contravene them, just see what you can do to help the person in unrelated ways. Like at an old folks’ home, a lady with dementia thinks all her things are being stolen, you say “That’s terrible, what would you like for lunch?” I’m sure there’s no one-size-fits-all for it.
But equally sure we don’t need to banish all the exhausting people from our lives wholesale, leave them in the terrifying margins of civilization. We don’t all have to put ourselves out any more than we can, but we do need to figure out how much we can do, and do at least that. One man’s psychic vampire is another’s disabled person that needs whatever help we can give.
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I had been doing at least one post a day for months, but on 11/30/2024 I made no post whatsoever, even accounting for time zones! And with this break in my streak, I feel free from the pressure to continue it. On the other hand, sometimes it feels like I need to pick up where others be slacking, try to keep this scene alive. I dunno tho, I feel the same global malaise and lethargy and sense of being wreck’d by life that anybody else feels. Short-ass little shitposts are the best I can do, most of the time. Does that really help anything?
I resume less frequent posting, unless something changes, and it may. Until then, see you when I see you.
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What horrors will happen in 4 years, and with their power cemented by all the things they can get away with between now and then, what horrors will happen after that, and for how long? Don’t answer that question. We all have some pretty good ideas, I don’t need ’em spelled out. But my mind can’t help but ask, like the way we think “why?” when we feel pain. Doesn’t have to make sense.
I just hate it. It’ll be more bearable to me if they at least lose their vile messiah. Leave us in nazi hands, apparently we asked for it, but just lose the hideous smug face and insufferable voice at the top. Fuckin ben shapiro’s uncle tom ass lollipop guild voice would be more bearable. Entropy i pray, please do your inexorable magic, disintegrate the life, steal it away, reduce this horrific waste of flesh to atoms, and then to nothing.
If you’re one of the few tender souls who doesn’t think we should wish death upon the worst of us, take heart that this is as useful as thoughts and prayers, and can do no harm. Shit, you know he’d be proud and pleased to be despised by people like me, so if anything I’m doing him a favor. Even knowing my ardent desire for his extinction might cause his desiccated member to twitch, I can’t help it. I need it so much.
I have wondered in life sometimes who I hate the most. Con men tended to be number one, followed shortly by nazis, transphobes and misogynists somewhere down the way as well. These were always categories, not individuals, but how apt that all are rolled into this creature, the number one category embodied there with primacy. Just cease to be, bitch. It could happen any day, or not for twenty years. The luck we’ve had, you know which is looking more likely. But fuuuuuck. Let it be.
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Silver linings,ugh, lemme see… Just the usual. I think for most of us our lives may be negatively impacted but they will not end, we will survive and love our people and go into the night the same as we would have in a better world. Stick around, my friends.
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Another one: I don’t feel homicidally cranky about these fuckers all the time because I don’t think about them all the time. If I’m thinking about them, I want them dead. But mercifully my mind allows me to think about other things during the day. I can lean into that.
In fact, I’ve been queuing posts, and by the time this one comes up, I’ll probably be a lot more chill.
Seriously, what is anybody going to joke about now? It’s over. I cannot imagine ever laughing at anything related to politics ever again, not that I was laughing much in the year leading up to the end. The cackle of demonic glee I might get from seeing one of the new clowns get brutally murdered? Doesn’t count. Mirthless. The second the SNL people put on their wigs and get to doing impressions again, it will just be a demonstration of the fact. Is Colbert cracking wise? I wouldn’t look it up to find out. All of the court jesters should just go home and call in sick for the rest of their lives.
We are all the joke now, and the only people laughing are the worst people in the goddamn world.
I gotta stop thinking about motherfucking politics like right the fuck now. Woof.
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I’ve had the strange experience a few times in recent years of mentioning my childhood poverty to another person and their response making me feel gaslit, like what am I remembering wrong? For example, mentioning I have lived in a few housing projects and homeless shelters, and them asking which ones, and then… I don’t remember the names, barely remember the locations. I wasn’t living in them for long enough to identify with them, to see that as my “hood,” get to know the other kids there. We’d be kicked out or otherwise shuffled along to our next flophouse before that could happen. My father helped me fill in a few of these details, but he didn’t remember all of it either.
So to gird myself for this situation in the future, I’m trying to remember everything about my childhood that wouldn’t be too creepy to tell. Maybe some of those things too, with appropriate content warnings? Here we go…
Content Warnings: Violence Against Animals, Animal Death, Description of Poverty, Mention of Parasites and Pests, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Child Injury, Children in the Context of Sexual Things (but no CSA mentioned in this one), Racial Tension, Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Marital Infidelity, Teen Pregnancy, Vomiting, Terminal Illness, A Man Dying Young, Mental Illness, Generational Abuse.
This will take more than one post and include details that don’t have to do with the poverty itself, just me trying to remember what I can before it slips any further into the void. For this post, I’ll lay out what I can recall of the chain of places I’ve lived. [Read more…]
if nature could finish the job on the scrotum elect, i wouldn’t mind. i’d sure appreciate it. as incompetent as he is, him staying alive is probably the least worst scenario at this point. but i’d take competently evil replacements over him, just to not have to see his face or hear his voice ever again. just to see every single reference to him be in past tense, damn, that would feel like a hit of ecstasy every time i saw it. i feel the lack of that in my life right now. c’mon. just a tiny taste, i’ll never ask for anything else as long as i live.
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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.
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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