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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You’re Not Ready for the Future

Fascism is changing everything America thinks it knows about itself, and people are really not grasping the extent of that. I keep hearing about all the court cases dude has lost, all the success the opposition has had in this or that political arena. But what do any of those victories amount to, while a fascist is president? Hey stop doing evil, says the court. No, says the fuhrer. Conversation over.

Ditto unions. A lot of federal employees are in unions, like AFGE. Their contracts are being ignored. They put those union dues to use, sue for injunctions, for damages. Who is responsible for enforcing those judgments? It’s fuckin’ over, guys. The unions and lawyers aren’t convinced yet, plugging away like laws still exist.

I believe there is a very outside chance dems pull a legislative coup out of the midterms, but they are up against absolute corruption, absolute power over so many states including some of the swingers, and against the apathy of blue voters who are paralyzed with a sense of doom. Honestly, pitching the last election with doom, as real as the risk was, may have helped the nazis. And now that the doom is here, is manifest, you think those voters are going to feel any more like they have a chance to win, like it’s worth getting up and trying? I hope they do, but it’s not looking great, and even if they do, who’s to say their votes will be counted?

Beating this is going to take something else. I can’t say what. It’ll probably be a combination of lots of things. But they aren’t going to look like they did before. We have some historical examples to look to, of other countries that pulled it off, that shook off corrupt right wing governments. However, this brings us to another problem.

Technology is changing everything about human society, surveillance, and warfare, and people are really not grasping the extent of that. I’m very much pro-AI (don’t @ me bro), but that is one of many tools of oppression we’ll have to contend with. Remember when the NSA got carte blanche to record everything anyone says anywhere forever, within spittin’ distance of electronic devices? As if they needed that permission in the first place?

We could kinda laugh it off. How will they sift through all that information? It became a meme, your google search terms putting you on a government watch list. Well now the NSA can work up an LLM to read information in minutes that would have taken agents centuries to get through. They can use that data much more easily now. Every phone call you’ve ever had, it’s reading material. Hope you were speaking backwards Assyrian when you said how much you wanna gank the pigs in 2006.

I say people don’t get this because they keep talking like this tech can be opposed. You can war of words this all you want, make legal cases (good luck not empowering IP lawyers to own your entire soul in the process), have a million people in the streets doing a hootenanny about it, but you can’t stop it. Now that it’s here, it’s too easy to use. Script kiddies with a few thousand dollars worth of hardware can run an LLM. I don’t think the NSA is going to be too concerned about your folk songs.

I’m not saying it’s hopeless. I’m just saying y’all aren’t having the right conversations yet. I don’t know what the right conversation looks like, but this isn’t it. Marcus’s blog has a convo going about the warfare side of things, and it’s getting close. The future of warfare is here, but money-wasters are still playing with jets that have a human inside. Anyone selling those is just a con artist at this point. There’s no reason for humans to direct any of this. If you’re going to do war now, you build up your drone and missile infrastructure and protect it. You tell Skynet it’s go time, then sit back as it purées your enemy with airborne death. Even without nukes, it’s a nightmare vision. Kissinger levels of evil.

Bringing it back to the intersection of tech and fascism, social media is another genie you can’t stuff back in the bottle. It’s here and it’s controlled by nazis, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. Try to get Joe Shit to understand Mastodon, see how far you get. The main run of human conversation is subject to Fuckerberg’s accelerationist algorithms. How can you jam that signal? What can you do?

These things are all designed from centuries of experience with manipulation by politicians and businesses and religions, refined and turbo-charged by technology and money. Slot machines were good but online casinos and video games with microtransactions are better. Uploading Protocols of the Elders of Zion to usenet with your 14.4 modem is good, but buying out every platform of human communication and flooding them with Birch-flavored aggrievement politics is better. These techniques rely on humans being fools, and humans cannot resist them. We will not. We’re not smart enough, in masses. We see a picture of coke on the screen and we take a sip from our 64 ounce bladder-destroyer, watching Sell U Bobbleheads VIII in iMax.

How will these things be fought? Lots of ways, I’m sure. We can look at things that were done in the past. A lot of people are looking. But it isn’t going to look like it did in East Germany. And it damn well isn’t going to look like the democratic party’s facebook page. The web-based side of this is especially exciting. What would it take to wipe out the internet and phone service, globally? How long before that happens? What will it look like?

I just think too much discussion blithely assumes we’re still living in the world of the past, with cosmetic differences. We are in a full-fledged cyberpunk dystopia, and until the coming Mad Max era hits, we have to operate in the world we’re living in now, if we have any hope of making it better. Again, don’t know what that will look like, but we’ll never figure it out if we don’t change the discourse.

What would Johnny Mnemonic do?

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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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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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USA, More Weimar Than Weimar

A few years ago it was hot to compare the USA to the short-lived Weimar Republic of Germany, the one that was replaced by the nazis. The situation in Germany was largely attributed to the punitive treatment of country after World War One. Somehow (demonizing socialism, never meaningfully addressing any crimes the US committed, never willing to face the hateful core of America’s real values), we did this to ourselves, no major military loss necessary. Congrats? Anyway, the comparison never stopped being valid.

Right now we are even closer to nazi rule than we were under Trump himself. The way power is structured in this country guarantees the GOP a seat at the table, and they’ve gone full goosestep. Many states are already falling under laws that are equivalent to the book burning at the Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Don’t say pronouns law? Rampant book banning? The dismantling of a single university in Florida under that state’s governor? The exact mirror of Bolsonaro’s raids on universities in Brazil. Expect it to go nationwide as soon as we have a nazi president. I’d say republican but at this point that is fully redundant.

The howling jackals of fascism are gearing up for total conquest, and all they need is the executive branch to clinch the end of our weak-ass imitation of a democracy. It’s just a matter of time. They will get the presidency again. One possible way to prevent a future nazi president from devastating this country with executive orders would be to curtail the powers of the president substantially. I’d like to see that happen, but power fucken looooves power, and will never put meaningful restrictions on new powers that have been allowed. The same way we can’t make meaningful taxes happen on the rich once they’ve been given breaks.

I was put in mind of this by the way there are good things happening right now, mostly from executive action. There are executive orders, but also appointed heads of government agencies making progressive policies within their remit – like the way you can, for the moment, change your gender marker on your Social Security card or passport without need for proof documents. Expect all of that to be reversed with a single pen stroke under the next nazi president.

It’s best to just be prepared for it, emotionally and physically. Think, what will my role be under nazism? We can’t all be armed fighters. Some of us will have to settle for smaller acts of resistance. As republicans expand their hate campaigns and shore them up in the legal systems of their states, anybody who murders a trans person, no matter how flagrantly, will be let off the hook – like Emmett Till’s killers. For that matter, expect all reproach or rebuke for killer cops to end. Many who have already been jailed will probably get pardoned. At least the white ones. Under a republican president, we may see concentration camps for trans people (we never stopped having them for immigrants), probably gay folk as well. The idea has already been floated, in Arizona I think? Jewish people will be far from safe. I have no idea what kind of crack fucks like Ben Shapiro are smoking, that they are willing propagandists for the nazi side.

That’s the obvious stuff, the stuff they’re already announcing as future plans. But what about the stuff that hasn’t been stated yet? That is historically part of the fascist agenda? Military conquest. Fascism fucks a country up, and to maintain the illusion it’s a reasonable way to do things, they need to sack resources from other countries. The easiest targets will be Cuba, Haiti, and other Caribbean countries. Might see an Axis-type alliance with Brazil if things go sideways there again. Ultimately Canada and Mexico would be occupied territory. Hopefully no nukes will be used, but given the expansion of first strike capabilities under Trump, it’s anybody’s guess. I’m guessing the Mexican resistance will do some righteous terrorism on our asses. Maybe the resistance under Vichy Canada will also impress?

Eventually US fascism will fall to whatever nonsense comes next. But consider this. Even in nazi germany, some people could live almost sorta kinda normal lives. Have love, have children, work, nurture, make art, etc. Bad things will happen on a terrible scale, but life will go on, and eventually the worst things will pass. Fight if you can, live if you can’t. Don’t give up hope, because, ultimately, anything can happen – including your own happily ever after.

As always, long live the fighters. Death to fascism.

Illegal Actions Will Be Necessary

As Caine reports, there are already attempts to take away our legal right to protest. That doesn’t mean protest will be impossible, only that you will be more likely to be shot or arrested for it. There are lots of things we will have to do under trumpence that are or will become illegal. Interfering with immigration officers, recording racist police murdering people, protesting in hundreds of ways, stealing to feed and clothe the needy (no doubt including many of ourselves), possibly hacking communications to discover and reveal evil government actions to the people, so on. Not to sound apocalyptic – a lot of this stuff can be pretty low key. Are you prepared to risk becoming slave labor for the prison industrial complex? Not sure if I am yet, but it may get to where I don’t even have a choice. Many people have already been there.
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