No Politics?

I’m thinking I might wanna stop doing political posts for as long as I’m able.  But I’d be going against my remit as a FtBlogger to not do freethunk content, so I think… art with good principles.  Atheistical or progressive or whatever, but just narrative art, or autobio, or some visual art.  I don’t know.  It’s just that thinking about specific political issues is getting me way too mad, and I say regrettable things when I get too mad.

And more importantly, I get close to breaking my own doomerism policy, and upsetting people who are already having a bad time in life.  So it’s time for me to step back for a minute.  I will still probably post that dubious shit when I feel moved to do so, hoping that doesn’t happen.  Rest of the time, just stories and birdposting, etc.  Might also say some stuff about religion, if I can keep politics out of it.

One last political thing.  I had call to look at the final tallies of the popular vote.  That increased the numbers of both sides, over what it was when the race was called.  In the end, gross creep had gotten substantially more votes than before.  But if you think about things that would have reduced his numbers in 2020 – covid, wildfires, etc – it wasn’t necessarily that big of a difference.  Meanwhile, Harris had substantially narrowed the gap.  Dems were slow to get counted for whatever reason, but they only lost the popular vote by about 2 mil, when the margin when the race was called was more like 4 mil.

I just think that feels slightly less brutal than it did when the shit was raw.  Still totally fucking asinine clownshoes horseshit that so many USians thought the most transparent con man in human history was gonna get them a good deal in life.  And abject foolery that any leftist non-voters thought they could “send the dems a message” without strangling US leftism in its cradle.  A shame we all have to pay for their foolishness, but that’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.

Last time around the leopard-eaten faces were antivax covid victims.  What myriad shapes will their misery take now?  “Arab Americans for Peace” and other people who snubbed dems for Palestine come to mind.  If Harris had won, you could sit there feeling smug about how she was just as ineffectual and crappy as you thought.  Since she didn’t, you have to watch gleefully nazi fucks showering Israel with genocide money like they’re at a strip club, while also watching essential functions of the US government (and every human right) fucked to death.

Finding out how bad leopard people will feel, how many of them are going to suffer or die, it’s a cold comfort we’ll get to indulge in a lot, for a long time.  Meanwhile, keep fighting how you can, and take care of yourselves however you can, because that is part of the fight too.

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Getting Bullied

On the post Getting Terrorized, I talked about this a little, but not as much as I’d meant to.  Our country was taken over by your high school bully.  This is what has happened.  There are people who look at a bully and think, great, we need somebody like that to keep the dweebs in line, or to show the bitches they ain’t shit, or whatever.  Or just think, that guy creates a tough environment, which is what we need, so people can get hard or go home, burn the losers, allow the winners to reap the rewards of their righteous might.

What’s wild to me is that many victims of bullying share this mentality – become bullies themselves, or the enablers and fanboys of bullies.  If that wasn’t you, great.  I don’t get these fools.  I know a guy that did a lot of primary research on gamergate, and found a very informative chat log.  The one thing GGers had in common was feeling frustrated in their attraction to women.  There were actually cisgender lesbians in that chat, which may surprise you.  But more relevant to this discussion, whenever a stereotypical bully came into the chat and started calling people slurs and nerds, basically shoving them in lockers, they welcomed their new bully overlords.  Few had the spine to tell off somebody with bully swagger, even though it was an entirely online situation – jock muscles didn’t figure into it.

And so you see the incels / PUAs / MRAs and their juniors flocking to fascism.  Andrew Tate could literally call them shit, to their faces, and they’d accept it.  These are a non-zero amount of people who voted orange last november.  Bullied bully fans.

And then there are magats that are just bullies themselves.  Your high school bully never changed.  They just learned to hurt people in more socially acceptable ways.  A non-zero amount of them became murderers, the majority are just republican.  Which might as well be murderers, to be fair.  Cruelty is the point, hurting those they perceive as weak gets them off.

Of the quarterish of USians that voted bully, many of them are not bullies proper.  They’re para-bullies.  Second string bullies.  The people who didn’t bully you, but did laugh when you were bullied.  Thoughtless, social cowards, creeps.  But not active bullies themselves, unless their victim is extremely powerless against them – like infants, or small animals.  I’m guessing the average GOP wife abuses her children, or animals, or disabled people, in small ways whenever they can.  You know.  The kind of nurses you pray you won’t get when you’re laid up at the hospital.

Hey maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe those fucking shitheads are just outrageously foolish rubes.  Easily led sheep for the sacrifice.  What is it, conservatives.  Are you fools or fascists?  Ain’t no third option under your big nasty tent.

I meant to talk about the guys in office (or privileged to be in the criminal syndicate), not the voters.  I just get mad and lose focus.  Yeah.  Orange man bad.  Not even a man.  There is no agenda except brutality and brazen theft, and cruelty for you and I.  Cruelty specifically for anybody who thinks cruelty is bad.  The cry of the bully, when confronted with their moral superiors: “Ya think you’re better than me?”  Yes, I know I’m better than you.

Motherfucken jeffrey dahmer was arguably a better person than the current president.  Huge piece of shit, thought his orgasm was more important than the human lives that he stole.  But ya know, scale matters.  No question orange worm has a massively higher body count – including so very very many of his own followers!  And he’s such a soulless gasbag I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s killed people for sexual pleasure.  He’ll probably be bragging about getting away with it by the time midterms roll around, just to test how badly they’ve broken the political system by then.

Ahh… still still still, too mad.  Gotta cool it.  Gotta cool it.

Would anybody be terribly disappointed if I avoided political topics for a good long while here?

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Furry Rights Now

Seriously.

Transgender people were a big wedge issue used to flip who knows how many fools to voting fash, or just not bothering to vote against them.  Scumbags look for somebody to hate, smash the hate speech button until they find one that doesn’t make people feel too bad about themselves, and get everybody disgusted about some disgusting weirdos that don’t deserve rights.

If social progress somehow makes it through the barrier of fuckery that has been erected against it right now, if transgender people become more accepted, who is the next target for nazis?  They never stopped targeting Jewish people and racial minorities and the disabled and women, just tuned that whistle high enough to harvest a few demographic traitors.  In this election it was all about “illegals” and “perverts trying to trans your kids.”  And somewhere in all that ruckus, they tried on a new target for size.

Furries.  They’re going after furries next.  I am not shitting you.  The time to try and move the needle on furry rights is now.  Get people to accept furries whenever you can.  Turn the conversations around, when people talk about how disgusting and creepy they are.  Who are you to judge, Nancy?  I seen what you’re into, Fred.

Anyway, for my part, I’m throwing open the barn stables right now.  Bébé Mélange is a furry ally.  I may not always be the best ally, but I’ll try to improve.

This gets into a territory of “is this an immutable characteristic,” like can you change this about yourself if you want to?  People will try that on as a way to say furries don’t need protection.  But I think, nuh.  I know the transgender experience is highly variable, and for some of us, it might feel like a choice – like for safety, some of us could detrans and ride out the rest of their life, without committing triple turbo suicides immediately.  But even for those people, they deserve trans rights.  Likewise, if being a furry is totally optional for all furries?  So what?

There are some lines I’ll have to scribble here and there on the big perv tent, like, I’m not gonna stump on Capitol Hill for age regression RP and diaper play.  People should be able to do that too, but it feels less like something you could do non-sexually at the office on Monday… I dunno.  I don’t know anything.

But I know this.  Furry rights now!

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We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

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Sieg Fvck All Y’all

I heard about the event but I’d never have seen the moment itself, if a tumblr I follow hadn’t thrown it in my face.  It’s a lot less ambiguous than I’d have imagined from the words apologists and wemblers used to describe it.  Side-by-side comparison with some non-trillionaire neo-nazis is informative, hidden under the fold because yuck.

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Getting Terrorized

If it seems like I’m not taking the current political situation seriously, that isn’t true.  I feel it.  It hurts.  It’s wretched.  I wish I could fix it, undertake some sort of violence that would set the world right.  I feel bad, for at least some amount of time, every day.  Feels worst in the lead-up to going into work on Monday – Sunday night, Monday before dawn.  Composing this on a Sunday, back on the 2nd.

But there are some facts that are very important to keep in mind.  Most of us are going to be able to live the rest of our lives just fine, whatever hardships this may add.  We can prepare ourselves in various practical ways for a lot of bad things, but not all of them.  Worrying is not preparing; it’s just hurting yourself.  I know, you can’t avoid it completely.  I sure can’t either.  But we have to minimize its impact on our lives.

Frankly, if we don’t, the terrorists win – to borrow a cheesy slogan from the post 9-11 era.  The fascists love it when we think about them all the time, when we show fear, even when we show anger.  Were you ever bullied?  Same deal.  I don’t love living in fear of what the bastards will do next, but I really don’t love the fact they can crank their hogs to the signs of my fear.

We have to oppose them.  I do think almost all the methods we were using before still have a place in practice now.  We might have to add some new tricks.  Keep up the good work, when and how and if you can.  And if you can’t?  Do your best to survive and thrive.  Anything you can do to make your life as good as it can be, that does matter.  It is a victory in this larger war, on one small but very important battlefield.

Meanwhile, what can we do to ease our worries?  I’m still trying to find things that work for me.  Obviously, I’ve been throwing myself into creativity, and plan to continue that as much as possible.  Even so, tonight I find myself feeling kinda ill, my viscera trembling like a fall leaf.  Keep in mind I wrote this days ago, so reassurance belated and probably unnecessary when you read it.

At least I have a posse.  I have a blue state behind me, I have a union, I have my comrades here.  It doesn’t feel real some days, but other times, it really helps me.  I know a lot of you don’t have all of those reassurances.  But you do have a comrade in me, for what I’m worth.  Let’s keep this life going, together.

Drop suggestions for ways to feel better, even if they only work a little bit.  Add ’em all up, that’s something.  See you later!

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A Civil Restructuring

As Abe Oceanoxia mentioned, we’re in an era of endless recovery, where the damage wrought by natural disasters will always outpace our ability to repair it.  The slithering shitstain in chief is doing a blitz of horrible moves to make life worse for everyone.  Everything has everybody on back heel all the time, which parallels the recovery from natural disasters.  Before you can even get a handle on one fucked-up insult to human dignity, you are broadsided with another three.

But at some point, we are going to have to crawl out from under the fecal deluge, and make some moves.  You and I can only do so much, and we should of course do that much, but the people most responsible for fighting back?  That’s on the decent people in government.  What can they do?

It is distinctly possible this is the end of democracy in america for the next few decades.  Certainly it feels like the Civil Rights Movement was just busted back to the 1960s.  I used to say there was no way a politician on either side of the aisle would want to be the one holding the bag when Social Security runs out of money, but that sentiment belongs to a time when norms existed.  We’re in an era of uncharted fuckery, under the fascist deathclown administration.  Will they let the SSA fail?  They might.

This brings me back to those decent people in government, particularly in states where they have enough power and resources to make real moves for their people.  The governments of places like California, Washington, and New York, they need to start uncoupling themselves from the federal government.

What does it matter to your state if Social Security fails, if you have a state retirement system that covers your citizens?  What does it matter if Medicare fails, if you have a better state healthcare system?  Those things are not so trivial and not so easy, but I contend that they are possible.

Those would be the actions of true states – independent political entities.  Easy to forget that the very name of the USA is an artifact of a time when every state wanted to be its own country, with only a nominal federal government.  Well, the federal government is about to get nuked from within, so it’s time to start treating the situation with that kind of seriousness.

How hilarious would it be if the NYPD had its budget actually fucking constrained for the first time ever, to pay for important shit the people actually need?  It would be soooooooooo fucking easy to spot the excesses.  They could keep their massive salaries and benes and number of cops in the city, sure, and still save millions by, oh, say, not having offices in foreign countries?  Not having military vehicles?  I’d love to see it.

I had another article about this before, more or less, but that one didn’t get this specific.  I’m calling on the governments of blue states to make those baller moves.  Protect human rights.  Get teams of civil rights lawyers figuring out any way possible to keep civil rights decisions from escaping to higher courts staffed by fascist shitlords.  Get sociolgists forming comprehensive analyses of the ways people live in your states, where society is failing them, and develop more efficient and effective ways to palliate human suffering – thus making your states even more attractive to people fleeing from the United States of Jesusland.

Get civil engineers thinking of ways to take care of natural disaster preparedness without a lick of federal support.  Make concrete plans that will make your states physically safer and better places to invest in, for business and real estate etc.  Laugh at places like Florida letting themselves get blasted to pieces year after year, just to stick it to the transes and DEI wokesters.  What if Cali could figure out a way to make fire season less dangerous?  What an achievement that would be!

Yeah, there are a lot of items on here that seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, even sci-fi, but this is the future, guys.  Right now it’s a burning trashfire of a cyberpunk dystopia.  The failure of the central government might actually be just the opportunity you need to set this thing off – to really change the world where you are in ways that inspire all of humanity.

Do you have the political will?  You’ve never shown that spine before, but these are wild-ass times.  Show us what you can do, please.

Hey, why am I not making a hunnerd grand a year in a DC thinktank.  George Soros!  Hear me!  (in the voice of that guy that recorded himself kidnapping his kids and asked Qanon to save him)  Give me tha power.  Y’all know I’m good for it.

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Are Black People Smarter?

Little bit of a land mine here, but I’m feeling insouciant today, so bear with me…  I’ve talked with thousands and thousands of Americans from all walks of life, and surely my impressions of that experience are tainted by biases.  Racists annoy the fuck out of me and are foolish as all hell; people who live on the receiving end of systemic racism have my sympathy.  I also relate a lot more to poor people than to the middle class.  So are my perceptions accurate?

There are standardized tests for “IQ” other cognitive faculties, and these have problems galore – not the least of which was their origin as a method for justifying racism.  I’m not even gonna bother with links; this shit is common knowledge among those nominally acquainted with the subject and with no delusions about their genetic superiority motivating the shit out of their reasoning.

But on a practical level, numbers aside, some people are just more thoughtful than others.  I characterize this as being willing to take new information on board, genuinely try to understand new things they encounter, and able to learn.

Ability to learn is a funny thing, because as we grow out of childhood, many of us handicap ourselves on purpose.  You mean I’m never gonna need this information again?  Fuck it, I chuck it, will re-learn as-needed.  I can feel that I did this to myself sometime around age 20.  While circumstance has pushed me into trying harder, I still allow myself the luxury of not learning shit, whenever I can.  There are people who either didn’t limit themselves in the first place, or are just more wise in how they apply that limitation, more able to get back into learning mode.

Willingness to try to understand new things is obviously a useful trait to have, but we don’t need it most of the time.  Our lives can be pretty damn simple in most ways, most of the time.  Whatever else is difficult about them, it isn’t the complexity of the problems in front of us.  It can get rusty, same as what I described in previous paragraph.  But I feel like this is a little different from that issue…  That’s about memorizing a new fact, this is about understanding why that fact is so – understanding a process.

The thing the reflexively ignorant don’t get is that understanding the process makes remembering the facts easier.  Like, remembering dates in history is rote, easy to lose.  Understanding what happened in sequence – what led to what – can make the simpler facts, like dates, easier to remember.

This is practical intelligence, not fancy logic or math or knowing big words.  A small child can be thoughtful, an adult can be thoughtless, and vice versa.  By this metric, I’ve spent a vast, unspeakable amount of time talking with thoughtless people, and less speaking with the thoughtful.  Of course, the average person is somewhere in between, but still shades toward the foolish side.

If I’m talking to an 89 year old who is still very sharp, it’s usually an upper class person with an ocean of privilege behind them, who worked in academia, finance, law, etc, on the pointy end of it.  That’s gonna shade white, tho not exclusively.  But stepping back from those rarities to look at people who are still very competent, who can look at a situation involving new information and deal with it, not shut down and get angry or cry about it?

Feels like the median black person is more intelligent than the median white people, in practical ways – which are the only ways that really matter.  I’m not interested in having a conversation with somebody that has advanced knowledge but can’t be fucked to understand anything outside that domain.  I want somebody that can be exposed to new information and understand it enough to have something to say about it.  That’s just conversation, but it’s indicative of the approach to other kinds of information as well.

It’s like white people feel more entitled to not have to think about things, to put that onto other people, and have anything they need sorted out for them with zero thought involved.  Black people are used to a society that is low key hostile to them getting their needs met in every way, cradle to the grave, so they need to be able to understand the shit that comes their way.

I might be remembering the thoughtless white people at outsized rates because of the biases I mentioned above, but also because they make a much more acrid stink about having their right to not have to think impinged upon.  I might be remembering black people who figured out some tangled bullshit at outsized rates because my unconscious bias is to assume them less intelligent, and it comes as a surprise when it should not.  I know there’s no way I haven’t absorbed that poison on a cellular level.

But I dunno.  Maybe black people are just better than us.

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Note:  If my comments are half as foolish as this post itself was, I’m gonna have to shut ’em down.  It could get offensive in a hurry.  For that matter, what I wrote could be pretty offensive to a reasonable person, and they don’t deserve to get upset because I thought it would be funny to upset unreasonable people, right?  In which case, sorry, and let’s just move along tomorrow.  I’ll leave this post up as a monument to my folly.

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Tvxnp Wants You Stuck in Traffic

There are about three million federal workers and more than half of their collective work hours take place in person – telecommute is common, but most telecommuters spend some amount of time in office; few are exclusively remote.  Sixty-one percent of work hours are in person, so using that an extremely crude proxy for amount of time spent in commute, something something,

Tvxnp🖤Mvksk want to put like 1.8 million extra drivers on the road during your daily commute, with all the attendant pollution we as a nation have proven to not give a fuck about, but also adding to congestion, which we do complain about an awful lot.  That includes people whose entire-ass job is being on the phone and computers, whose work is constantly tracked and monitored, who couldn’t be doing less work at home even if they wanted to.

It’s also making any federal jobs that had offered telecommute before suddenly a lot less appealing than their equivalents in the private sector, driving people away from agencies that are already understaffed.  This only makes sense in light of their overt not-quite-fully-confessed desire to destroy the entire US government, except for whatever apparatus funnels working peoples’ tax money into the bottomless tax credits and loopholes available to the rich, and except for the police and military which are needed to keep the proles in line.

Never change, shitheads.  Keep making everything worse for everyone in every way you can, why not?  It’s who you are.

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What Are You Doing for MLK Day?

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along.  But if you can’t, I recommend watching Birth of a Nation (2016 of course).  This country is back on its bullshit and I think it can be useful, if you’ve got the heart for it, to look with unvarnished eyes on a realistic depiction of slavery.  It’s as horrible in that film as it should be in the hearts of all decent americans.  If you have to look at something horrible that day, at least it shouldn’t be the motherfucking inauguration.

Ah, today is the four year anniversary of the beer hall putsch, USA edition.  I can’t even.

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