Bébé Mélange (née Great American Satan) is an AMAB genderqueer pansexual person living near poverty with their husband in the concrete suburban sprawl of the Puget Sound region.

With regards to the new blog title up there, apologies and respect to the late and lovely Marc Bolan.
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**COMMENT POLICY**
I recognize this is not easy, but avoid using "stupid" "crazy" and their synonyms in my comment sections. Also try to be a little less aggro with each other than you might be on other FTBlogs. If somebody is being a shit, I'll probably get rid of them myself. I get few enough comments it's not hard to moderate each one.
DOOMERISM POLICY - I'm going to stop posting hopeless content, although I am allowing myself to post things that point to dark realities, within the context that I'm advocating we all do our best to survive and have a stoic spirit. And in exchange for me not posting doomerism, I'm banning doomer comments, whether they're about the environment or politics. I won't allow people to make other people terrified or suicidal by expressing their own terror or suicidal ideation here anymore, sorry. Take that to Pharyngula. For the history of this policy, see this post.
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Kein Mensch ist Illegal

It’s easy when an issue is outside your direct experience to see it more broadly, to feel its impact less personally. I dunno, these words are excuses for the fact that while I was always on the better side of the issue of immigration, I wasn’t passionate about it. Recent events have changed that, which is good. Of course, it feels bad.

My husband had a boyfriend once who was racist against Mexicans, and when that came out, my dude didn’t even process it at first. How can you hate those guys with the oompa music and straw cowboy hats? What did they do to you, rat-faced little creep? I had a friend who emerged from the methed-out trailer park to become an itinerant goth queen, very cool, but one time she likewise exposed a racism against Mexicans that shocked me. I imagine she has moved and improved since then. Unlike my husband’s shitbird ex, my goth friend had decent values in the broad sense, was amenable to change. And I did understand what was happening to call it out when I saw it, so she had a learning opportunity.

Now where are we? I’m on the phone at my day job, full time talking to the breadth of amuriKKKa about the difficulties of obtaining and maintaining benefits of various social programs. I had a front row seat to the effects of rethuglican propaganda, as late 2023 through the whole of 2024, there was a significant increase in the number of fools randomly blaming “the illegals” for the barriers they were experiencing. Motherfuckers, those barriers were set in place by racists like you, who are convinced with zero evidence that there are a zillion little brown people getting buckets of welfare cash. You are literally voting to make life harder for yourselves. They did, and now my rate of fucked-up tragic phone calls where I can’t do anything to help a person has increased, because of this shit. Cause and effect.

I’ve carefully come close to saying exactly that a few times, and the response from xenophobes is a surly nuh-uh, or silence, or whatever. Doesn’t matter. What’s really making them mad is that we can’t explicitly make a whites only pass for welfare programs. When the revolution comes (if shit comes to that) I will shoot these people in the face.

The mobilization of the genocide machine has begun. Of course it’s starting with immigrants. Saw a comment at Mano’s that “people will die because of this situation.” I regret to inform you they are certainly dying already, and had been under Biden and Obama as well. It’s just going to get worse now.

Talk about “the illegals” has never been about the rule of law, or protecting your people, or whatever they imagined. It’s the seed of mass murder. Zero tolerance for that talk wherever you encounter it. Fuck the motherfuckers.

Let us stay furious, block the bastards, be as proactive as we can be, protect those who need protection, and not sleep on a single instance of this ongoing horror. I say that but I know it’s already too late for a full account of the fallen. So many of those ghosts will never be named.

No more ghosts, no more genocide. Fuck the USA.

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Fascism is Misogynist First

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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How Fringe Figures Wield Outsized Influence

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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Throwing the Game

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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A Moment of Bothsiderism

The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens. That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I. That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.

Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign. Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA. If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.

If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy? Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people. When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard. I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them. Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well. Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.

So here’s my moment of bothsiderism. Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers? Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy? Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question. Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.

In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA. That broad tent is wild as hell. It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better. The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.

I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances. We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.

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Yankee Doodle Fvck the USA

I’ve mentioned my pants before, in an article that was no doubt much more entertaining than this one will be. When I was a wee child I got some 4th of July themed underwear, which meant I was wearing 4th of July themed underwear for as much of the year as they continued to fit my growing ass. I remember little snare drums like you’d see in front of a juvenile revolutionary war reenactor, betsy ross flags, fireworks. Something in this imagery interested me enough to remain now as a sliver of a memory. I found out about “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and other patriotic hokum, and thought this was all in good fun. Yay, freedom! My country ’tis of-

I don’t remember when, specifically, I started to get the facts. While history classes tended to stop before Vietnam, sometimes the textbook itself would have a section we just magically never got around to, and maybe out of boredom I read ahead. Sometimes I’d just happen to be around while a movie about Vietnam was playing. War is the impossibility of reason something something. Maybe it was the inevitable question raised by the parts of history they didn’t manage to skip – what actually was wrong with white people that slavery and Jim Crow were things? The Trail of Tears? The Japanese Internment? Seriously, white people?

4th of July underwear on my baby ass, made me feel some type of way. America the beautiful. Three cheers for-

I Said No Motherfvcking Backsies

The US government told people it would give them a thing, then it said psych! jk lol. OK, this has happened many times, but the one I’m thinking of most recently is student loan forgiveness. This is backsies, and I say, no motherfucking backsies. Now some might say that about us loser ass chumps who didn’t caveat our emptors before agreeing to the loans in the first place, but no, we signed those agreements based on the fabulous careers the education was supposed to provide us. That shit ain’t real, therefore the education was never worth the asking price. It was, as so many things in the United Snakes are, fraud.

So when we were told forgiveness was on the horizon, just do this and that, pay what you can in the meantime, we’ll work this out, and then… hard no. Because fuck us for being poor, that’s why. cool, cool, cool. I’m just gonna be over in the corner sharpening this big piece of metal to hang in that wooden frame over there, hang it on a string. It’s modern art, don’t worry about it. After all, I have a bachelor’s degree in fine art. You told me it was worth a lifetime of debt, so it must be legit.

Supposedly, the type of forgiveness I’m in line for was not one that has been kiboshed. It was part of a court ordered thing, the government telling a slew of sheisty business schools to eat shit. So perhaps it will come to pass. Perhaps not. Perhaps they’ll slap the irons on me when debtor’s prisons return in force.

The way federal employee pensions are calculated includes an average of your highest three years of earnings, and at some point the Big Beautiful Bullshit included a change in that math that would result in federal employees getting less money when they retire. You’re promised one thing, you pay in, you get arbitrarily told psych, jk lol, no. This is backsies.

Poor children dying of easily prevented causes was making states look bad, and they got a lil federal money to reduce the body count thru a program you may have heard of called Medicaid. Thanks says the state, collecting funds to save poor people’s lives. Psych jk lol, no. They can eat shit and die now. Backsies.

Anyway, don’t tell me you’ve got something for me and then take it away. No motherfucking backsies. Thanks.

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The Auction

What’s for sale? Everything. Tvngp would sell Texas to Mexico for 47 pesos. I guess conservatives just love a white thief, even when it’s their own ass getting jacked. Let’s play Orngdolph Shitler for a minute and call all the leaders of the world to Meryl Oggo to sell amurriKKKa’s gullible gluteus out, one hank of meat at a time. Bidding is open!

Our land. A ton of it is already owned by foreign investors, but let’s start forking over government land as well. Six Flags Over Yellowstone, a subsidiary of Volkswagen-Daimler-Yamaha.

The Social Security Administration. Home boy tried to nix the social security tax during his last year in office, which I don’t quite understand. It’s meant to pay for this program, but as Dubya discovered in the naughts, you can also pillage it for other purposes with a rubber stamp congress of warhawking shitlords. With this tax in place, when it’s not getting robbed for other things, the agency can actually make money. That means it has value, which means somebody might be down to buy it. The money that’s meant to keep you from subsisting on cat food when you’re too old to work, how would you like that turned into a hedge fund run by transnational casino owners?

Our nuclear power plants. China owns a lot of US Treasury bonds, time to cash in those chips. This one would amuse me so very much.

Our prisoners. With private prisons already being a thing, some might already be owned by international corporations. Reduce infrastructure costs and make it official. Essentially if you get caught for jaywalking, you can be sold into slavery abroad.

The United States Marine Corps. Army is land, Navy is sea, Air Force is air, Marine Corp is … what? I guess alchemically they’d be fire, but that’s making them out to be cooler than they should be. At any rate, they don’t make much sense to me conceptually, so you know damn well the Leather Lich doesn’t get it. Sold! I’d like to see what Denmark could do with a Marine Corp. Maybe annex Yorkshire?

Our dignity as a sovereign nation. Psych, he can’t sell this because we threw that in the garbage when we elected a linty ballsack as god-emperor.

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When the Shit Goes Down

Said Cypress Hill, when the shit goes down, you better be ready. Today is that big No Kings biz, which shitler has promised to respond to with brute force, while he’s doing Kim Jong Il cosplay in a monument to Rome built by slaves. Meanwhile, Israel has expressed its desire to turn the whole middle east into a smoking puddle of blood, Pakistan and India are still nuclear powers skirmishing as well, and Russia is still trying to turn Ukraine into Russia Junior with more mutilated human remains inside.

If you’re in a directly impacted part of the world, my condolences. That feels like the emptiest of gestures. I can’t throw away my life to save yours, and that feels like the only gesture that would have any meaning, when you’re looking at people whose lives have been chucked in the meatgrinder of political greed and bloodlust. May all the responsible world leaders magically develop consciences tomorrow and die from the agony of guilt.

For the rest of us, we’re all weighing the risks coming our ways, tho they pale in comparison to yours, and thinking of what we will do, what we can do. Within that, it’s important to keep a sense of perspective. For much of the world, life goes on, and we’re obliged to our families and friends, to those who depend on us, to keep going on as well. To those who can fight, long live the fighters. To the rest of us?

Try to remember you’re still shopping for groceries, paying your bills, going to work, feeding your pets, watering your plants. Stay with us. Don’t give up. For 99.9% of you, the shit is not imminent. Your world will still be there next week, regardless of what happens now. Much love. See you around!

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