When Fascism Continues to Reign

Content Warning: Political Despair

Michael Moore recently had some dire predictions for us:

“I think if the election were held tonight, Trump would win. Not in the popular vote. Oh, no. Hillary won by 3 million votes? Whoever the Democratic nominee is, is going to win by 4 or 5 million votes. The gap will be even larger. The popular vote is going to be huge. But Trump has not lost his base. They’ve gotten bigger, and angrier, and whiter, and madder.”

I know this. I’m not sure if most people are noticing the extent of the problem here. The narrative has turned against progress. Public discourse in America and places like it around the world has been soaked in fascist propaganda for long enough that even some of the best of us regurgitate “common sense” we got third hand from neo nazis via our friends, family, lovers, the comedians and cultural figures we grew up with. Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, harmless innocent funny people are telling us social justice has gone too far, people are too entitled, etc etc.

Kind and reasonable (but naive) people have been drinking from this cyanide well for so long there are young voters who have grown up knowing nothing else. Progressive movements like BLM get exploited by corporations to sell shit like Netflix TV shows that admit, yeah, maybe there’s some problems and you should stand up in some ambiguous way, but at the end of the day your political opponents are good people who can be reasoned with. You don’t need to do anything truly radical. You don’t need to care or to fight *that* much.

So the middle is kept too passive to vote, while conservatives are feeling more empowered and engaged than ever. Literal nazi propaganda has normalized so much that Fox news might as well fly the swastika. White people are gagging for it like sweet ambrosia. They believe it, they buy it, they sell it, they wallow in it. The belief that all of the woes of the world are the fault of outsiders, interlopers, anyone but themselves and the institutions they’ve been trained to revere.

Together with the fruit of decades of racist vote suppression, gerrymandering, and prison industry, that can sew it up for Trump – or his successor, whoever that great white fuck happens to be.

I’ve said it before and Mr. Moore reminded me today to say it again: Be ready to lose. To live under full bore fascism. To struggle to do right with no reward in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel. I wonder what it will look like from the inside, rather than from stories about other countries and other times in history. Some of it is already here, but when the scale tips – when we don’t even get the half-assed power to wag our fingers publicly at the tyrants, like at the impeachment – what will that feel like for us? I hope we don’t get to find out.
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Chelsea Manning Back in Jail

As predicted, they convened a new grand jury just to toss her back in the clink, along with an unprecedented from of punitive extortion.

Chelsea E. Manning, @xychelsea, May 16:
** Today, Chelsea was not only put back in jail, but Judge Anthony Trenga ordered her to be fined $500 every day she is in custody after 30 days and $1,000 every day she is in custody after 60 days. This is unprecedented.
Linked article: https://www.sparrowmedia.net/2019/05/statement-from-chelsea-mannings-lawyers-regarding-chelsea-being-remanded-into-custody/

Like a champ she was streaming video games the night before the trial. I’d say the dirtbags doing this need a lesson in class, but they get one every time they’re in the room with her. Maybe that’s why they want her out of sight. Anyhow, storm every Bastille, smash the state, yadda yadda.

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Chelsea Manning is Free… For Now

You can see a video and transcript of her statement at this link. I hope she manages to evade further instances of this persecution. But if she goes abroad, the US courts can get up to all kinds of horseshit which could lead to her getting even worse treatment if she gets extradited or kidnapped. The whole situation is creepy as hell.

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This Six Year Old Tweet

Content Warning: Apocalypse Despair

Via Alex Wild, entomologist, six years ago:

Alex Wild @Myrmecos
“Being a naturalist in the 21st century is like being an art enthusiast in a world where an art museum burns to the ground every year.”
-12:20 PM – 22 Dec 2013

It’s an appropriately depressing way to phrase the problem. To that I would only say it’s more accurate if every drawing would take hundreds of thousands of years to complete and every painting millions. I see the value that investment of time represents in every species and it creeps me the hell out when I see them being smoked like cigarettes, by the dozens, the hundreds. Entire populations of organisms lost forever, many every single year.

Some people also see that value and the destruction gives them an erection. Some people would pay big money to personally kill the last rhinoceros. The same kind of people who destroy art, who blow up thousand year old statues. What can I even say about people that evil? Nothing. Whatever I say they’d enjoy it, wallow naked in it. I’m done.

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Chelsea Manning is Being Tortured

Just in case anyone’s forgotten, Chelsea Manning is still in jail, and currently in solitary confinement. The legal defense link again. When does the world stop burning? We could use a rest.

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Right Wing Projection Wave

Content Warning: Wearying Endless Hope-Destroying Fascist Evil, Apocalyptic Crapola. “wontbehere4long” don’t read this. You’re too high strung, kid.

Projection is a phenomenon in psychology whereby a person protects themselves from awareness of their own flaws by accusing someone else of having said flaws. I’m not the racist, that guy is! Sadly, this is so widespread among right wingers that one could make a serious case that it’s a defining feature of the motherfuckers.

Dave Futrelle at We Hunted The Mammoth has been facing a fucknado of fascist irony victims, defending their most transparent act of projection to date: the spreading of the “NPC meme.” Let me see if I can break down the background of this situation to a simple timeline:

In video games, non-player characters are the guys you interact with that have just a few pre-programmed things to say and never meaningfully change.

Random fucklord says he sees people he doesn’t like as NPCs, thoughtless and soulless.

Projecting fucklords who speak in “kek” and “cuck” notice that social justice advocates use some jargon and assume it’s the same sort of group-affirming dog barks that they use.

Projecting fucklords adopt random fucklord’s meme and promote it.

As they always fucking do, they form a massive wall of hive-minded tools bargling at decent people about how we’re mindles soulless conformists.

They do this kind of shit all the time. Any given anti-feminist argument, for one small example, is repeated VERBATIM by forty thousand fucklords who somehow feel like they came up with the idea.

The reason that it’s ironic this time? The projection is an accusation of conformity and mindlessness.

Now, despite this being a fresh incident with that minty taste of a new twist, why does this feel instantly wearying and soul crushing? I didn’t get it, but then I reflected. Right wingers always do this shit. Fucking always. “You want to take away our religious freedom!” “You want to control our lives!” “Atheism is the real dogma!” “You want to censor us!” “You hate freedom!”

This last couple of weeks has been hard as fuck. For me, the worse part of it was the newest report on climate change. Like the scientists sounding alarms since the fucking industrial era began, I’m feeling that Cassandra Complex. It’s worse now because we’re in the 11th hour and there actually is nothing anyone can do to stop the hell that’s coming. It’s about mitigation and we can’t even get the demons in power to do anything about that.

Humanity is so consistently foolish and venal that we’re destroying ourselves and taking down most of the biosphere with us, when we have the ability to do better. It’s just that grain of thoughtfulness and compassion is always overwhelmed by fear and loathing.

Because white right wing cattle vote with their spleen, we’re down to hoping we can shape the apocalypse instead of preventing it. Will it be Mad Max or 1984? A little of both, but an increasingly safe bet there’s no humans left on the other side of it.

And these chucklefucks are jeering and capering while the ship goes down. Thanks guys. You wanted to “pwn the libs”? You got me. I’m “pwn’d.” Not in the sense I’ve come to realize you are the super geniuses who were right all along. No, I’m owned in the sense that I understand you’ve won, and I feel bad about it. And the “I told you so” we’ll get as we all die? Doesn’t make me feel better about it.

Fuck, y’all are so pig ignorant and compulsively projecting, you’ll figure out how to blame us for that too.

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Blue Wave Ain’t Gonna Happen

I’m calling it now with reasonable certainty. Lots of people would vote if they could, but they can’t, so they can’t help. Meanwhile, the roaring heyday AmeriKKKan fascism is enjoying at the moment? Very empowering. Tons of the wrong people are going to vote – including people who hadn’t even bothered to vote their fuhrer in. Baby nazis who stayed home during the last election because they felt hopeless to affect it until the upset? Or who couldn’t vote then but can now because they’re 18? This beer with kavanaugh thing. This is their time, my people.

Look to Brasil. It’s always rough but it is diving straight into neofascist hell right now. They’re fucked even worse than we are – and we are pretty damn fucked. Anyhow, look to places like Brasil, like Spain under Franco. Capitalist democracy has handed some of the most populace countries in our hemisphere to pure evil, and the only progress we’re going to make is by fighting every bloody inch, breaking laws, risking our lives.

We might have a few democrats flip a few seats, but it’s not going to be what they hope for, what we need. I’m not saying don’t vote. Vote, knowing you’re going to lose. What I’m saying is be emotionally prepared to suffer and fight every day and still lose everything, because that is what being a good person in a fascist state looks like.

Long live the fighters.
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New Diss for Trumplets

Between Don Jr. and Ivanka, which one is Uday and which one is Qusay?

Remember to show your work, class. This will be five percent of your grade.

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Penny Arcade & Love Lost

Many of you have never heard of Penny Arcade. As far as webcomics go, it was the original success story, the ur-two-guys-on-a-couch video game afición strip-styled deal. The popularity of the comic helped the writer and the artist build a significant business, running gaming conventions, charities, and so on.

They’re still doing their thing, but outside of “gaming” (the bro subculture, not video game playing as a whole field), who has heard of them? They’ve hit the wall.

Two factors limit their success – the existence of gamergate and the “dickwolf” controversy.

Gamergate poisoned all things gamer, actually succeeding at their primary goal. Gamergate’s social terrorism was so vast it gained international media attention and told the world that gaming is an off-limits hostile place, ruled by miscreants that are best left alone. Congrats! You kept out the normies!

I’m not going to explain the dickwolf controversy and subsequent flare-up involving transphobia (because of course it did), even though they’re less well-known than gamergate. Long story short – they aligned themselves culturally with gamergate, with regressive gaming, by having mean-spirited blow-ups at mild criticism.

The dickwolf controversy aligned them with gamergate, no matter what they’ve said on the subject since, and gamergate relegated the culture of gaming to the sewer of human civilization.

I was thinking about that, about love lost. I used to follow the comic for a chuckle and dropped it like a rock back then. How many trans women and progressive-inclined people in general felt they weren’t safe engaging with the comic, with its fans, with the conventions they sponsored? How much love did they lose forever by being reactionary dickwolves?

And here we are – online atheism. The background is different, but the end result is the same. We were founded on islamophobia, so we were rotten at the core. A lot of us may have been socially progressive on a few issues, enough to feel good about ourselves, even then.

But collectively we were reactionary. When an opportunity for a movement-wide misogynist freakout came, it showed that we were stacked to the rafters with villains.

Many of us left the movement and culture altogether, I have no doubt. And of those who remained, the scum outweigh the rest of us by an order of magnitude. Maybe not in actual population (though I bet they do), but certainly in terms of will, of money, of resources, of cultural impact in the form of web presence, on social media and youtube.

Atheism aligned itself with evil and lost love. Where could we be without “elevatorgate”? Without the years of feeding the right wing islamophobia war machine?

It’s gone and it’s never coming back. I had a slow moment and considered opening up Penny Arcade’s website to see if I could have a chuckle. But no, I really profoundly don’t want to. They betrayed the vulnerable people in their audience – a fucking lot of us – and I’m not about forgiveness.

And no one is obligated to forgive us either. Organized atheism is a sewer. We can do things, we can be together, we can fight the good fight as much as possible. But what more could we be right now? How much love was lost?

Feels like all of it.

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