This is the only time I will ever be a party to the reproduction of this nazi scumbag’s nasty face – to share this perfect meme somebody posted on reddit’s Herman Cain Awards. Enjoy.
Life's a Gas
I Hope it's Gonna Last
This is the only time I will ever be a party to the reproduction of this nazi scumbag’s nasty face – to share this perfect meme somebody posted on reddit’s Herman Cain Awards. Enjoy.
I guess all nazis have to do to get away with murder is have their teen sons pull the triggers. Given the public statements of the judge in murder boy’s case, I want nobody to act surprised by this outcome. Outraged is cool, yeah, do that. But surprise? That would just be silly.
There’s a foul stench of danger hanging over this country, that the barely concealed racist fascism of the turn of our century will go overt, will remove the last pretenses of democracy from our processes and usher in a new era of far greater horrors. I can understand people feeling hopeless – and especially turning up their noses at our supposed liberal political party – but we can’t stop until this is over.
I mention these things because stuff like the result of this court case is empowering to the fash, which will make them more motivated to turn up in numbers next election, depending on what happens in the meantime. And what’s been happening lately is a 24-7 doubt parade from corporate media on the ability of the democrats generally and Biden particularly to govern. The “people say” style of reportage is in full gear, where any nasty fucked up lie from billionaire-funded nazi-ass think tanks turns into a headline.
Protestors will be returning to the streets. Some are probably there already. And now murderers have been forearmed with precedent for how to get away with straight-up executing them in broad daylight. But people will fight on anyway, and I fucking love them for it. Long live the fighters! Black Lives Matter. Black Power Now!
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HJ doesn’t do comments at his blog, but his recent article about Harriet Hall – concluded with a simply told bit of news that makes the more well-loved end of the skeptisphere a lot less lovable – cries out for comment. If you wanna rip on Harriet Hall, or her pals Steven Novella and David Gorski, or whatever, I invite you to make the comments on this post into your mosh pit.
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Justice is a human construct. The Universe does not have an inherent sense of right and wrong. Karma is nonsense, heaven and hell moreso. But sometimes we luck out, and things happen that look to us like nature making things right.
Five conservative radio hosts – all people who spread deadly misinformation about covid – have died of covid. Of them, as you may have heard, Phil Valentine died in the most brutal, drawn out, and excruciating way of the lot. His fellow radio recipients of coincidental justice were Tod Tucker, Marc Bernier, Dick Farrel, and Jimmy DeYoung.
In other good news, disgraced fascist demagogue Baby Milo got covid and poisoned himself with ivermectin.
For a LOT of additional examples of people dying for conservative identity politics, check out the reddit COVIDAteMyFace. How do you feel about the ethics of this kind of reportage? I feel like these stories need to be spread as much as possible, for the sake of the dicks that are dying. If all they care about is owning the libs, maybe they’ll get smart and mask/vax up – if they see that doing otherwise is fielding the opposite result.
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Get a load of this shit: Activision-Blizzard Hires Amazon Union-Busting Firm. As Boots Riley from the Coup said, “If we’re ever gonna do it let’s do it now.” That is to say, when a government agency in a state with anti-worker wildcat strike laws decides to bring charges against a company for fucking massive systemic sexual harassment, and as employees start to organize, and that is their response? Workers of the world unite!
The game industry is massive in profits thanks to selling gambling to children, but small in workforce, which makes it extremely vulnerable to labor revolt. It hasn’t happened yet only because douchebros attach sucking corporate ass product to their sense of manhood and identity, and have stacked the industry with like-minded people.
But the video game industry, like all creative industries, is so vicious and life-draining that even scumbag misogynist right wingers last an average of two years there before flaming out and going back to work at Electronics Boutique. The sausage is made out of art students and young programmers, and management thinks nothing of it because there’s always a new graduating class to brainrape (or sometimes just physically rape).
So here’s how you do it. Organize their asses before they leave the schools. You can’t do this at one school or you’ll just get the grads there shadowbanned. You need to hit them all at the same time. There are not that many schools producing video game creators. Find them, do not involve the faculty in any way, and infiltrate their shit. Full court propaganda press.
You get enough traction and make these vampire businesses face a united group of graduates saying NO. I don’t have the time to do a two year unpaid internship, or take starvation wages. NO. It is not acceptable to make drinking to excess normal during business hours. NO. Seriously, your entire fucking culture must die, now, so that the silly people who love video games enough to want to make them can stop being chewed up and shit out. Having a dream should not make you into so much bloody meat for billionaire pit bulls.
Video game workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your mass exploitation.
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Past a certain point in the USA, holdout businesses and agencies are going to need to end their quarantines, even in places with low vaccination rates, where it will result in contagion and death. A certain amount of americans have chosen ignorance and the risk of death – to themselves and others – that it carries. We’re stuck together in this country. Most of us do not have the means to emigrate, would not be allowed into many other countries due to our national antivax rep, nor allowed to stay due to local xenophobic policies that mirror our own.
We’re stuck together and that means we’re really over a barrel. There are some things we cannot force on other people, any more than the US could force itself on Vietnam or Afghanistan. If fashy freaks don’t want to participate in a public health project even to save the lives of them and their own, we cannot make them. We cannot try to protect them from themselves forever. It’s just not feasible.
At some point, we must embrace the horrible status quo. Sufficient numbers of people want their grandparents, parents, husband and wives, themselves offered up as a plague sacrifice to their orange god, and they can make it happen. Just like they can make getting a simple ID practically impossible in the pursuit of vote suppression, they can make vax carding illegal, or make enforcement unfeasible. We cannot control them, cannot control this, and some crucial public services cannot remain limited like they are now.
It’s time to reopen the government offices (yes, many are still closed right now, even in texas), wear masks all day long if we have to, get used to this reality. Trump-style virtue-signalling won’t die until the last trumpist dies, probably around the time coral goes extinct and the US midwest is the new Sahara desert. Many of us will be alive to see that. Looking forward to the death of qanon-type shit, not looking forward to the time that will drive in those coffin nails.
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There are a few articles around now about how laughable Qanon is. It’s true, they’re the most absurd and easily mocked face of modern nazism. And as atheists, seeing a new religion arise around a well-documented and incredibly obvious con man confirms our prejudices about religion as a whole. Trump as messiah? One wonders how much a twisted crapsack a historical Jeezy could have been and still ended up with that hagiography.
Trump showed the right wing of politicians across the entire planet how much they could achieve with bald-faced lies and appealing to straight-up white supremacy. Qanon was a crucial component in the latter part of that project in a number of ways. One, there is a limit to the bullshit the masses will accept, even if it’s dangerously high, and Qanon showed us the upper extent of that limit. The majority of people who see the facts regarding Qanon will not accept it, now we know. That gives the fascist bullshitters a neat metric to constrain their lies.
Two, Qanon has not reflected badly on Fox News, Breitbart, OANN, or any of the other people that helped create them. It was an object demonstration in how the public consciousness is utter shit at connecting important related concepts, at holding the right people accountable for serious problems. Now more than ever, Fucker Carlston knows he can have 100% swastika facial tattoo having nazis as audience members and nobody in the USA that matters will ever call him to account for it, or at least they will not be believed.
I’m not going to breathe any sighs of relief about this fascism crisis being near an end. Not that I think any of my comrades are either. They’re just taking the chuckles they can where they can. But personally, not laughing right now.
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“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That quote popularized by MLK Jr and originated in a different form by an abolitionist preacher in the 1800s has appeal for a lot of people, not just to our sense of optimism but also to our sense of reason and observation. We see injustice spark resistance, we see how some great injustices of the past were defeated, or at least greatly diminished by long struggle. It makes sense that given enough time, all injustices will fall, right?
With more recent history we can see resurgence, re-empowerment, and expansion of old injustices, which is a really useful reality check for those naturally inclined to optimism like (believe it or not) myself. And while outside of the worst environments for these prejudices (such as being trans in the UK) it can still be easy to see the resistance and feel optimistic they will overcome again, what would that mean long-term, if anything?
I’m not going to say that this process is perfect equilibrium, with history swinging between justice and injustice in equal measure. There does seem to be some staying power in some of the successes justice has achieved. People aren’t willing to lose the freedoms they earn with blood. But the arc idea is too simple to describe how the world works. A more accurate way to look at this fight, I think, is that there is an ecosystem of ideas in which selection plays a role.
Injustice species Misogyny rex rules the land unopposed, king of ideas. But wait, opposition appears. Justice species Feminism ceratops evolves defenses so effective that M rex dies out. But a subset of M rex mutated bigger teeth that can overcome F ceratops defenses, and do so well against them that F ceratops goes extinct. But lo, there were a few survivors of F ceratops and they evolve into the next progressive resistance.
In this model, injustices in their existing forms do go extinct – the phenomenon that makes the moral arc model seem convincing – but something always seems to evolve to replace them. What replaces them isn’t always equally bad, so it is still useful to keep fighting. But without the absolute destruction of these injustices, some form of them always survives and has a chance to grow again.
And now, from my reality-checked place of diminished optimism, I feel like even if every ounce of racism misogyny homophobia transphobia ableism antisemitism islamophobia colonialism etc. were magically extirpated from the minds of our species, some new injustice would arise de novo, due to the angling of the power hungry.
The arc of the natural universe is long, but it bends toward everything going extinct in ways ranging from miserable to horrible. Humans have time and again shown ourselves collectively unable to overcome our animal nature. As much as hippies like to separate man from animals to say industrialism is unnatural, it is not. Human decimation of the biosphere is the natural result of a species becoming too fucking successful – something we’ve seen many many times before in nature. The difference between freshly evolved plants causing a mass extinction and what we’re doing now are mostly cosmetic.
My only hope is in the unnatural. Not Elon Musk pipe dreams of technology saving us. More like Gene Roddenberry pipe dreams – the idea we can somehow overcome human nature to create a lasting utopia. And where I said the difference was mostly cosmetic? There’s a fundamental difference that might offer a sliver of hope. The tool of our decimation is a social construct, and we have the power to change those within the space of a single generation sometimes – if rarely. Whether that happens or not, praise for all of the warriors for justice, whatever your part of the struggle. Power on.
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I sign out of Outlook and it takes me to msn.com. I generally avoid news but some imp of the perverse makes me look at the headlines on the scroll there. And today, I was treated to the following:
Mass shooting in Texas. Mass shooting in Wisconsin. Orange prick John Boehner says mass shootings are national embarrassment. And Mass shooting in Nebraska.
I’m not looking into those articles, but short question for anyone with more fortitude: Did we literally just have three mass shootings in one day? Is this fucking nonsense for real?
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See Marcus’s post about Caesar for an example of what courage looks like. Courage is a virtue, in the sense that “virtue” originally meant manly qualities, and while it can sometimes be good, it can also be decidedly evil. From the time those American nazis entered the Capitol Building, all it would take to snuff out the already miserable vestiges of US democracy would be a rich person exercising evil courage.
I say a rich person rather than a politician because they’re the ones with all the levers. If a Koch grew a pair and took a risk, they could grab Trump’s ear, tell him all the right things to say, grease the right palms, pull the right levers. Trump has very little control over his messaging because he’s an impulsive dipshit with a paper-thin concept of reality. But if the right rich person sidled up like the serpent and told him what he had to gain from following a script? He could be far more dangerous than he is now. He could actually be effective, instead of just being a half-assed stochastic terrorist.
But late capitalism is all about playing it safe. Don’t take risks, even the bare minimum ones necessary to maintain control. Just keep ratfucking everyone in sight and hide when you get spotted. Cowardice. They know they own Biden, that he’s the safety, the security, so while they’ll boost the Trumpism that lets them run riot over the natural resources and slaughter-me sheep of red states, they won’t help keep Trump himself in power.
Nothing good will come of today, but the worst case scenario will not either, and for that I’d like to thank our country’s rich for being more Antoinette than Machiavelli. Stay down, cowards.
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