Random Thunk I Fergot

EDIT: This turned out to be dead wrong, but my other posts less so.  Disregard this one.

I’m in a rush as I’m doing these political posts and I forgot a significant one, on “how to not fear conservatives.”  the number of people who voted that way was *less* than it had been last time around.  that point of view has become measurably less popular.  just a compelling piece of data, i think, in support of the idea the taste for evil isn’t as strong as it appears from its most visible and ardent proponents.  –the number of tr*mp voters this time was weirdly similar to last time.  at least he isn’t gaining followers, tho sick and sad that the ones he has are that loyal.
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How to Not Fear Conservatives

It is important to not waste your life hating or fearing conservatives.  Disregard their entire-ass existences, shun them, cut them out of your lives, piss in their wheaties, and fight them in whatever ways you can, but do not waste any more of your precious life than they’ve wasted of their miserable own.  I’ll talk about the hate in another post; this one is about the fear.

Fascists loooove fear.  It literally makes their cocks hard.  Picture anime villains with no eyebrows and rippling tongues, reaching for their crotches while stylized schoolgirls are spraying tears like sprinklers.  Well, the only thing they deserve out of you is blue balls.  Don’t give them what they want.

But aside from what’s right and wrong, deserved or not, fear is an element of how we got here today.  Again, I’ll talk about it more on a later post, but evil benefits from the surrender of good, right?  Common sense.  Aside from shooting their goo, it’s the reason they’re so invested in fear.  Because it’s a game and a strategy for them, a certain amount of the threats they’ve made have to be a bluff.  Of course there are genuine beasts among them who are not bluffing, we must do what we can to keep a good defense and offense running concurrently, but on the whole?  Conservatives are not monsters.

The majority of the people who voted for ShitTrickler & Dickslime were not fans of every last policy they have promoted.  Some were lulled by a sense of cultural identity – they liked the branding, thought this was a vote for how america should look.  But when it comes to actually looking people in the eye and hurting them?  They may find it does not suit them.  Many of the voters – especially those who had any chance of swinging – were just voting against inflation.  Life got economically worse for them and they figured it’s time to vote for the guy who wasn’t in office when it happened – which is why this country swings on a pendulum.  Many people voted for Biden with the exact same motivation, not giving a fuck about human rights – just their bottom dollar – and showing their ass about how little they understand fucking anything.

All that’s to say, if they were really going to try to make death camps in the USA, or breeding pens for womb-having chattel, they’d be shit out of luck, because most of the people who voted for evil are not as evil as all that.  You can write fucked-up laws until your hands turn into ashes, but you need actual monsters to enforce them.  Who is going to be willing to do that?  Some tiny selection of fuckos, who will not be nearly enough to overcome the opposition.

Some bad things will happen.  Some people will die, and I hate that and am not trying to minimize that in any way.  They shouldn’t have to die and I would proudly shoot two republicans in their unthinking faces for every one person who dies to their policies.  But we were sold mortal terror as part of a political game between Evil and Evil Lite, and the reality is not going to look like that.

It is vitally important that you feel this is still the land of Dunkin Donuts and strip malls.  This is not a dark fantasy novel.  The reality in this country is not the spank material of swastika fetishists.  It is where your aunt martha is a shithead about gay people but does not want to see people die – is not interested in killing them.  She is a shithead about abortion, but she just blithely assumes anyone can get an exception if they really need to, you don’t need to codify that in law.  Or assume that exceptions are never needed, some shit like that.

They are fools, they are hateful, and they will get some people killed, but they are not demons, they are not a mindless zombie legion that will sweep over hills and valleys to murder you and everybody you love.  They are just a bunch of shitty tools, a bunch of craven bullies having a laugh.  But they are human, they have something sort of vaguely resembling hearts in there somewhere, and when it matters, enough of them will abstain that the real monsters will not be able to achieve their worst excesses.

And we are not without protection from those that are truly that bad!  We have people who will fight for us.  We will fight for us.  And there are powerful state governments that will step up to curtail much of the shit that comes down those pipes.  I encourage anybody who is pining for Canada right now to consider Washington, Oregon, New York, or California first.  It ain’t paradise, but neither is Canada, and they make it very hard to become a citizen up there – or even a tolerated resident.

They are not going to get us here.  It’s not gonna fucking happen.  They will do harm, it will be sad, but for many of us, life will barely change at all.  You can, if you pull yourself through the shocking wretchedness of this moment, find a way to live, and possibly even to thrive.  Those of you that can’t make it on your own, look for allies, because you do have them.

And don’t imagine that Bob Utah is coming to personally kill you and turn your trans nephew into a concubine.  Fight them up and down the line, but don’t be paralyzed by grotesquely inflated fears.

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one example of this is book bans.  they can ban books in schools, but can they ban them on amazon?  it ain’t happenin.  bezos has the billionaire veto and wants to maximize sales.  these guys can be bought for the price of fucking cheeseburger.  politicians in the US are cheaper than sex workers and nowhere near as ethical.

Expanding my Thesis

The dems, at the end of the day, tried to sell this election to us with fear.  A lot of people felt very afraid, so why did it fail?  Because what gets one person to the polls gets another person hiding under their bed with a shotgun, not daring to go out in public.  (of course there are multiple factors, but this is one.)  This is why Abe Oceanoxia says climate despair is the enemy – if you think you’re all fucked forever, that carries the implication there is nothing you can do about it.  No matter how much you yell “unless you vote!,” people’s hearts and minds shut down after the first part of the sentence.  I’ll talk about that more another day; here the observation is preface.

Over the next week or so, I’m going to expand on the thesis in the Momma Mia post, and this post is about the reason why.  I feel the need to do my part to heal the damage caused by this climate of terror, because barely anybody else in a position of responsibility is looking at it this way.  We got skullfucked, and as long as we want to survive, we gotta get unfucked.

There are legit reasons to feel sad and battered.  Every human right and human need is going to take massive hits, starting before the end of January next year.  People are already dying because of Fascism Part One’s supreme court appointments.  It’s gross; it’s sad; it should never have been like this, let alone as bad as it’s going to get.  BUT.

People have been overselling how bad it will be, and badly.  While everybody will have their lives diminished in some way, at least tangentially, the vast majority of people will survive!  And I mean you, my transes!  If anything, the lack of immediate goose-stepping murder parties will probably leave people feeling lied to, feeling like the dems were full of shit, which also leaves them open to facilitating that gradualism HJ wrote about.

Also, it was already bad here!  The USA – and most of the world at this point – have been run by short-sighted and callous greed for a long time.  By discriminatory laws used as bait to get bigots to vote against their own interests.  The democrats themselves are rich people protecting rich interests, which is exactly why they fight so half-assed:  they profit from losing.  Just hang out in the wings being the “reliable opposition” and paid for tut-tutting while republicans make them and their families fabulously wealthy off tax cuts and raiding the public treasure.  They are very much the lesser of two evils, and we’d be in a better position to fight if they’d won, but at the end of the day, most of them don’t give a flaming fuck about you and me.

So, bad as it has been under both parties (always measurably worse under the elephants), when it gets worse now, how noticeable is the difference going to be?  For the most vulnerable people, it will be.  But me: queer enough to not be emotionally damaged by manmoding to survive the daily, good job security, a mortgage i can afford (for now), living in a nicely blue state?  Don’t cry for me Argentina.  And that tells me that a lot of you can survive as well.

We have been royally burned, and in turn, the entire world has been burned.  But you still have every day of the rest of your life to live, and you can live it well.  For some of you, it will involve grievous challenges.  For some few of you, it may be cut short unnecessarily in any of hundreds of ways that conservative policies increase our odds of dying.  BUT.  Within that time you have, there is room for love, friendship, video games, violent radicalism, anything that brings you joy.

I am on this rampage because there has to be a realistic middle ground between foolish hopes and suicidal despair.  Do not let the terrorists win, my friends, my comrades.  Do not take yourself out for them!  Live, like a motherfucker, live!  Survive.  You might even thrive.  The world will be a sadder place, and we’ll all be sad about it, but within that, life is possible.

And I need all of you to do this.

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Momma Mia Here We Go Again

I was different about this the first time around; too raw, too new.  Now I know just how bad that energy is for people who need protection and encouragement the most, so my doomerism policy remains, and I am committed to tempering all my political posts with hope.  Because when did we need hope?  When Obama won?  A lil’.  When do we need it much more?  Times like this.

And so, my main points about why we are not all gunna die:

The majority of conservatives are not monsters.  That’s all it takes to prevent the worst things people fear from coming to pass.  To get the death camps and the red dresses and bonnets, you need more than just the levers of power: you need people to enforce them, and outside of the most twisted fucks in the world, who is going to want to enforce all these laws Pisstake 2025 is trying to enact?  People who voted for fascism this time around were, by and large, not voting for fascism.  They were voting for illusions that were sold to them by billionaires who have basically bought the entire fishbowl they swim in.  Reversing inflation, saving freedom, pure nonsense.  They were not voting for death camps, and they will not man those trains.

Having all the power means they get everything they want – legislatively.  But.  Every monstrous thing they favor is a nail in the coffin of their power, the inspiration for the fucking fools that voted them to work against them the next time around.  Now, will they prevent any future elections from happening?  Part of the reason this was possible was because of four years of concentrated voter disenfranchisement and suppression.  OK, but you don’t need an election to get your ass fought.

We have fighters.  A lot, a lot of fighters.  People who every day are doing their best for women’s rights, trans rights, black lives, native americans, immigrants, etc etc.  They will do what they can until the end of the line.  No matter what oppressed group you are in, you have allies, including some people for whom your particular cause is their entire reason for being.  Long live the fighters!

State’s rights, lol.  But seriously, blue states are the economic fulcrum of the country.  They can make it hurt to do evil, and they are likely to do so.  Anybody thinking shitbird’s sentencing is going to go as scheduled is bound to be disappointed; don’t go for false hope when you have a lot of other things you can hope for.

As much as I despise accelerationists, they are sometimes, in a nasty way, right.  Things have to get worse before they can get better.  That is gonna be terrible for some people, which is why that’s an evil philosophy to hold.  But it can be effective.  More people are against Israel than before Hamas’s big terrorist funtime, and when Americans have to live under the kinda laws these guys are going to pass, they are going to rebel against that in a way that the fascists are not going to weather.  They are going to fucking lose, some time, mark my fucking words.

It’s just a question of time, of doing your best to be alive so you can smile as they fucking burn, burn, burn.  And to temper that anger too, because living with constant anger ruins people.  Live for what’s good in your lives.  It’s still there.  It is still there, and you are too.

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December 12th

Given they’re talking about the election being close, and given that the rethugs have been gearing up for ages to do a bunch of dirty tricks in courts and state governments, it’s possible we’ll have a replay of Bush v Gore 2000.  If that happens, expect some measure of suspense, because it wasn’t decided til December 12th.

On the other hand, if it happens, we really do know how it will be decided already, and the shitbird court du jour will just be a formality and a rubber stamp, so the suspense won’t take that long.  I just know that my expectation now is that by the time of the next FtB Poddish Sortacast on November 9th, there will still be no decision, and we’ll be twisting in the wind, sickened and upset.  That’ll be a good time.

I just want to tell everybody things I wasn’t able to understand the first time hair fuhrer was elected by a minority.  You will almost certainly survive.  Life will go on. We will get up and go to work and come home and love and live and whatever we need to do, to the best of our ability.  And people will still fight against fascism every way they can, whether you personally are able to or not.  People will be fighting for you, and sometimes those people will win.

Also, while some conservatives may be as monstrous as you imagine, the majority are not!  Foolish, cruel, petty, greedy, craven, maybe.  But they don’t want to kill everybody!  They’re just swimming in toxic horseshit, because every fucking ounce of media outside major cities has been bought lock stock and barrel by billionaires who have a vested interest in selling conservative shit.  This is important to understand.  Just because the boy favored by nazis wins, even if he does some nazi shit, it is not immediately time for death camps.  That shit would almost certainly not fly, even in Kansas, even now.

Many people will suffer, a non-zero amount will die from that suffering, but some of us won’t even notice a difference in our daily lives, and most of us will be able to live through whatever happens with just a little perseverance.  The democrats are selling you mortal fucking terror because they know it gets them money, but will it get them votes, or will people feel too paralyzed to go to the polls?  This is going to prove to have been a mistake, or at the very least, unnecessarily abusive to the masses.

Nobody die now, OK?  And before you comment with more blood-throated freakouts, read my doomerism policy.

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Still on Xitter?

Just today it was announced Xitter was planning to remove some functionality in the Block feature, which of course has all sorts of legal and market ramifications.  One could easily imagine the fuckhead is trying to do some should-be-illegal market manipulation again, I dunno.  But let’s say you’ve been scraping along in the land of rapists and poison honey, just to follow the sad desperate personalities who haven’t been able to extricate themselves from the garbage fire yet.  Maybe it’s worth getting an outside perspective on what your current user experience looks like, and decide if you still want to keep doing this.

D’Angelo Wallace made a video about trying to create a new Xitter account and not get overwhelmed with ragebait and right wing content.  Worth a look.  Although if you are a person who appreciates my quaint ableism policy that nobody in the internet is following these days, note that D’Angelo does use the mild everyday ableist lingo, and skip the video.  But also if anybody shouldn’t be on Xitter, it’s you.  Take care of yourselves, people.

Because the video has musk’s shit-eating face on the thumbnail, I’ll hide it below the fold.  Also content warnings for all the fascism, transphobia, and conversely liberal despair that is now typical of the internet.

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they don’t stop believin

still trying to keep this one-post-per-day streak going.  what to say next?  i’d like to get away from grim topics and controversies.  hmm…

i should really be atheisting more often on this blog network.  lessee, how does god not exist today?  physically, spiritually even.  culturally his binch ass exists more than i’d prefer, but in every other sense, this being doth not be.

seen a person recently suggest that some particular form of propaganda might hand the election to the creep.  i dunno.  but it got me thinking, in conjunction with a post on mano’s and with remembering that christians exist, what drives orange voters?

ah, a depressing topic.  can’t escape scylla and charybdis.  oh well; we press on.

religion for one.  not the religion of young jeezy, but of the creep himself.  i think the majority of repubs are not his faithful.  they’re just “values voters” who see human rights in terms of winners and losers, and they want to win.  but he does have his faithful, and it’s kinda wild to behold, from the outside.

talked to a few in the course of my job.  they include no small number of rfk jr types – liberalish democrats for whom the right to medical woo is the only thing they care about, people now embracing naked fascism because it came with the freedom to spend your life savings on snake oil and die from ultracancer.

they include people who just picked up all the nonsense he was laying down, gullible enough to not see the overt dishonesty.  he says he’s the only guy that can save america from the wily messican horde, get you the jobs you bigly deserve, protect your children from whatever whatever.  why would he lie about that?

and of course, they include Qanon die-hards, with the full suite of completely upside down beliefs.

deprogramming cultists ain’t easy.  it’s not the sort of thing we can do on a macro scale, which is a shame because creating cultists can be done in that way.  wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to how we can fight that.

in a way it’s a shame they aren’t the majority of his voters because some of them are actually compassionate at heart; they just bought a very twisted pack of beliefs regarding who needs protection from whom.  is it worse to be a fascist because you are full of hate, or because you are able to believe complete absurdities?

i’m just glad we seem to be doing well at the moment.  here’s to keeping that going.  may the believers in orange weep citrus tears in november.

with this, i return to doing my level best to not see anything election related for two and a half months.

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A Dang Shame

Sure liked The Dukes of Hazzard when I was a wee child.  Beautiful man voice theme song, talkin about those beautiful boys that never meant no harm.  They just wanna fly their pretty orange car over random rivers, pursued by unscary little comic relief policemans.  One of them had a floppy-eared dog.  Sometimes there was a pretty lady there.  When stuff got too wild, beardy uncle would settle it down.  If I remember all that right.

I loved the shape of a muscle car, the perfect combination of boxy and curvy, the dark grill reminiscent of the intakes on jet engines, the feeling of power and possibility.  They stopped making cars shaped like that and I always wished they’d bring them back.

Well, around pandemic time, they actually did.  Muscle cars exist again, happy day!  But I’m not four years old anymore, don’t live in a world where fast driving never kills or disfigures people, don’t live in a world where gratuitous fossil fuel use is a harmless lark.

And just everything about that piece of shit tv show has aged equally well.  It put a shiny sexy funtimes gloss on the worst shit imaginable, just the worst crimes in human history.  Hundreds of years of monstrous evil defended to the dying breath under that fucking orange flag.  The way the flag’s renewed popularity in the 20th century had always been a banner for the proud perpetuation of dehumanization and oppression, of lionizing the villains of history that Hitler himself was inspired by.

General Lee, fuck your memory and fuck the people who tried to sing it sweetly to tiny children.  Fuck whatever ancestors of mine that put our surname on generations of their rape victims, their human “property.”  Fuck ameriKKKa for clinging to the idea of our virtue on the blood-drenched soil of this land, echoes of absolute horror in every ruined plot and parking lot from sea to polluted sea.

Unrelated, fuck street racers, who care so little about the lives of others they endanger them every day for cheap thrills.  Rest in pieces you criminal fuckers.  May all your buddies mangle only their own flesh, may they fly past the innocent and burst into flames alone.

Shame shame shame, a little song of shame.  Then I return to idle fancies and daydreams in my usual way.  A floppy-eared dog hanging his head out an unproblematic car, flying merrily through a consequence-free world.

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had a dream the other night i was some gal’s gay best friend, so i had an excuse for not knowing how to drive, hey, same excuse i have irl, except i have no hetero bff here.

anyway, we went to a little movie theater where you reserved your seat by taking a slice of cake, the colors of which corresponded to the movie you wanted to see.  but the only slices remaining were the white ones with rainbow splotches, corresponding to the cg smurf threequel, so we took no cake and watched nothing.

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I Voted

If you’re in a red state and think your vote doesn’t matter, well, it doesn’t matter until it does.  How many republican voters have been killed or crippled by being weirdos about covid?  While minorities in “essential” jobs were disproportionately hard hit and they’d typically vote blue, most of those folks are not politically engaged, just getting by.  Meanwhile, the republicans who were shittiest about covid were the most politically engaged.  Also, shifting demography across the country will eventually tip these scales, no matter how gerrymandered and fucked apart the scumbags make it.  And if nothing else, your shout into the void is appreciated, by me if by nobody else.  Do it.  Vote.

I live in suburban Washington, in the district that gave republican scumbag Dave Reichert his political career.  Let’s see if a motivated anti-trumpist wave can kick the fuckos out of local offices and congress hereabouts.  If you live in a blue state, vote local, vote whenever the chance comes up.  Yeah, this ain’t november, but if this state gets any redder, that just ain’t cool.  Fuck shit up for La Resistance, and if you think voting is insufficient funds, do what works for you, but vote as well.

Votety votety vote, votabulistical votation votatage my votistas, and a votely votely vote unto thee.  Vote?  Vote.  This is the thing to do.  Presently.  And futurely.  Make it so.

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Stop Freaking Out

Does freaking out help you to engage in political action that improves the world?  Get you to rally to the defense of the oppressed?  Make you vote when you have to?  Does it paradoxically cultivate in you an ability to lucidly prepare for disastrous circumstances through communal organization and grass roots activism?  Then get your freak on, I guess.  If it doesn’t, maybe shut the fuck up before you spread more hurt and pain than necessary to people around you.

This may seem ironic from person who has engaged in no small amount of public political and climate despair, but I’m coming around the bend on that.  Been talking again with somebody who is harmed by amped-up fear in comment sections, like, even when he doesn’t believe it on a rational level, the tension immediately gets him in the nervous system and ruins his day.  And as he’s trying to calm his nerves, he’s complaining about the level of fear people are promoting on the internet, how useless it all is, and I can’t help but concur.

It’s very easy for me to imagine a trans person who in fear of a trans holocaust just offs themself on election night.  (My erstwhile despair commenter wontbehereforlong is no longer in the comments, and that might be why, afaik.)  I don’t care if the fuckheel wins and ameriKKKa goes full nazi.  Don’t kill yourself, please.  What if we reach temperatures like the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the icecaps melt and all the beautiful megafauna of the world go extinct, replaced with ugly ratty little things squabbling over bones in the wasteland?  Don’t kill yourself, please.  What if somebody is finally enough of a creep to use nukes and a small exchange renders some of the urban centers of the global north uninhabitable for a while?  Stick around, babe.  What if plastic pollution reaches a kind of critical mass disrupting reproductive cycles and cellular activity, causing populations of all organisms to crater until natural selection works out the kinks over a thousand barren, burning years?  We have each other, kid.

We have things to do, and you’re invited to the party, mon frere.  Life can go on, if you try to live.  There are so many places in the world right now that have to live with ten times the ugliness the USA is bringing on itself, but people there live on, as best as they can.  Trans and gay people exist in the most oppressive countries in the world.  Women have abortions where that would get them life in prison.  People read banned books wherever they’re banned.

This isn’t Grand Theft Auto, where you accumulate stars from doing illegal shit, and when you have five, every cop psychically intuits your exact location and showers you with machineguns from helicopters and APCs, and suicide bombs you with crown victorias.  The illegality of being trans or jewish or cetera doesn’t instantly mean complete extinction of your kind or even you personally.  You have friends and most of you are going to live.  Hell, even truly universally reviled people like convicted pedophiles have somebody in their lives who would try to help them survive when the whole world says “die.”

It ain’t over til it’s over, and when this election is done, even if the nazis win?  It still ain’t over.  People are hurt by panic and fear.  Also, you’re giving bullies exactly what they want, and what are conservatives if not bullies in their purest form?  When that islamophobic mass shooter in New Zealand filmed himself killing people, some progressives on the internet (looking at you, wehuntedthemammoth comment section) said they felt obligated to watch the video, “to be informed,” or because bearing witness to the senseless deaths would grant those lives a meaning in their heart, or whatever.  OK, sure, whatever.  But you know what the killer wanted?  He wanted you to watch the video (and pewdiepie).  So score one for nazis, again.

This is a significant part of why I unfollowed James Stephanie Sterling on youtube.  They’d beat that drum, day in day out, about how trans people have no political allies, nobody cares about them, they’re all gonna die.  It’s nonsense, even on Terf Island.  Trans people have some amount of allies everywhere they exist.  Jewish people in WWII had some small number of nazis and imperial japanese people smuggling them out of the line of genocide, besides resistance people of every other stripe.  The USA isn’t going to instantly transform into The Man in the High Castle because a little strip of land in Washington DC got taken over by nazis.  The idea that regressive states are the only ones that can rebel is kinda silly.  New York and California have the numbers by population as well as economy, and they aren’t just going to say, “cool, we’ll kill all our gay people for you now.”  Don’t be fucking absurd.

I know you can’t control your fear, much like my bud can’t control his limbic system’s response to panicky people.  But maybe you can just think twice about hitting the keyboard and making some innocent third party feel as bad as or worse than you do, when it achieves fucking nothing.

Am I wrong?  Is publicly shidding your fucking pants every ten seconds helping us win the next election?  Fuck me then, keep dropping those deuces.  If not, maybe step away from the computer and take it down a notch.  Touch grass, smoke grass, whatever.  Deal.

This is directed at me in 2016.

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