A Christmas Miracle

Even while you regard conservatives/fascists as your bitter enemies and threatening to your life liberty and happiness, it is useful to not transform them in your imagination into supernatural monsters, alien from you and all you know.  They are human and we have to live with them, because much like how gay and trans and disabled people will always exist in a given population of humans, so will people with deficits of compassion, and people with the malevolence and greed to manipulate those people into granting them power and wealth.

I say to the idea of genocide against gay people and atheists, even if it was magically 100% successful, it would be undone within one generation, and sadly the same is true of fascist thought – and at this point the odds of that being expunged are basically nil.  On the plus side, ditto for lgbt people, etc.

That’s all getting way off topic.  What I meant to say is this:  we have a rare opportunity right now, and one we should relish, to feel bonhomie and kinship with our fascist family members.  It is but one fleeting moment and soon to disappear, so hold it up and marvel.

Left right and center, if you aren’t a billionaire or a saint, you liked seeing a health insurance CEO gunned down with a smile.  Even fascists suffer and die under capitalist medicine, and have reason to enjoy this.  And they have!  On facebook, of all platforms, his death announcement got tens of thousands of laughing face emojis.

Now they’ll probably be assuming he’s jewish, or daydreaming that immigrants are the reason the system exists like it does.  I dunno, I’m not them. But we have, in this one moment, correctly identified the enemy, and taken pleasure in this one random action against them.  It’s a miracle.

You won’t see this on the corporate news, except in some politically slanted form, scoring points for the establishment.  But it’s real.  It happened.  Appreciate it.

Then resume your watch for face-eating leopards with grim resolve, and resume your caution around the hateful fools that voted for them.  As you were.

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If you wanna say murder is always wrong in the comments here, congrats, you might be one of those saints I mentioned.  Keep being you; the world is a better place with you in it.  But understand, if you will, where the rest of us are coming from.  In America.

pay raised

got my annual pay raise, works out to about $75 per biweekly paycheck. that’s better than a punch in the scro, but considering this only comes once a year and the cost of everything can quadruple when a billionaire sneezes, kinda getting nowhere. it’s alright. i know i can sell my screenplay and make a bank full of money. i know it.

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The Anticipation Kills

What horrors will happen in 4 years, and with their power cemented by all the things they can get away with between now and then, what horrors will happen after that, and for how long?  Don’t answer that question.  We all have some pretty good ideas, I don’t need ’em spelled out.  But my mind can’t help but ask, like the way we think “why?” when we feel pain.  Doesn’t have to make sense.

I just hate it.  It’ll be more bearable to me if they at least lose their vile messiah.  Leave us in nazi hands, apparently we asked for it, but just lose the hideous smug face and insufferable voice at the top.  Fuckin ben shapiro’s uncle tom ass lollipop guild voice would be more bearable.  Entropy i pray, please do your inexorable magic, disintegrate the life, steal it away, reduce this horrific waste of flesh to atoms, and then to nothing.

If you’re one of the few tender souls who doesn’t think we should wish death upon the worst of us, take heart that this is as useful as thoughts and prayers, and can do no harm.  Shit, you know he’d be proud and pleased to be despised by people like me, so if anything I’m doing him a favor.  Even knowing my ardent desire for his extinction might cause his desiccated member to twitch, I can’t help it.  I need it so much.

I have wondered in life sometimes who I hate the most.  Con men tended to be number one, followed shortly by nazis, transphobes and misogynists somewhere down the way as well.  These were always categories, not individuals, but how apt that all are rolled into this creature, the number one category embodied there with primacy.  Just cease to be, bitch.  It could happen any day, or not for twenty years.  The luck we’ve had, you know which is looking more likely.  But fuuuuuck.  Let it be.

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Silver linings,ugh, lemme see…  Just the usual.  I think for most of us our lives may be negatively impacted but they will not end, we will survive and love our people and go into the night the same as we would have in a better world.  Stick around, my friends.

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Another one:  I don’t feel homicidally cranky about these fuckers all the time because I don’t think about them all the time.  If I’m thinking about them, I want them dead.  But mercifully my mind allows me to think about other things during the day.  I can lean into that.

In fact, I’ve been queuing posts, and by the time this one comes up, I’ll probably be a lot more chill.

Memes are Dead

I remember before it was general knowledge that literal neo-nazis were the chief purveyors of pepe memes, when we’d pass them around on tumblr like fucken clowns.  Anyway, the Department Of Government Efficiency is absofuckinglutely named after the same meme as elron’s crypto rugpull “dogecoin.”  It is.  It is a massive “fuck you” to all the innocent summer children of internet foolery past, that hey, look, you helped this happen.  This is always what it was about.  Soft-pedaling the death of democracy.

The thought had crossed my mind the first time I saw a news article about it, but like so many things in the era of Fascist Deathclown AmeriKKKa, I didn’t even know whether to believe the article was real, or a joke.  So it took a few days to sink in, days during which I may have posted a meme or two.  Like earlier this week.  I think, no more.  Gonna figure out a different way to be on the internet, in my remaining time here.

No more memes.  The nazis dug up that cheezburger cat and crucified him on the whitehouse lawn.  Matt Furie’s frog ripped his skin off and sunk his carcass in a peat bog.  Somebody once told me the shrek theme guys headlined a superspreader event in the heart of the pandemic.  The doge is a government entity devoted to killing poor people through “austerity” policies.  Any hope for gradual change to a better USA and a better world is triple fucking dead right now, and irony is the weapon that killed it.

Memes served a purpose for those of us who aren’t soulless nazi fucks, and not sure what we’ll replace them with.  Well, I’m probably the only person in the world that is going to hew to this policy, so I’m not sure what I’ll replace them with.  I’ll figure it out.

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Give More of Yourself

I don’t know if this has always been true but people, in general, are very stingy with themselves.  Attention, interest, affection, sympathy, friendship, assistance… Anything positive we can do for each other, we tend to give less than we can.  I would like to take pains here to be very clear that the people most likely to read this and think, “oh no, it’s me!  i suck!” are probably not the people I’m talking about.  The people that are like this – most of us – are inattentive or ungenerous in ways that we don’t notice.

My last two jobs have involved helping people, which aroused a sense in me that this is what I have to do.  One can work at walmart and put in the bare minimum effort, and honestly, you probably should.  They don’t fucken pay you enough.  But you are in a position where sometimes a desperate sad-ass person will want something that you can actually provide, or at least do enough to take the edge off the situation.  The sense of reward isn’t some rad dopamine hit or smug warmth that filleth thy cup.  It’s more like, you saw somebody bleeding and slapped a band-aid on them, and now, at least until the band-aid wears out, there’s less bleeding in the environment.

It’s not nothing, and it is necessary.  People that can do things for other people should do things for other people.  It’s how this social species is supposed to work.  If you got nothin’, ok, disregard.  But if the thought hasn’t crossed your mind, and on reflection, you think maybe you could be doing more?  Do more.  Let this be your permission.

You do not have to go out of your way for it.  Opportunities to help people will find you.  This sounds like I’m talking about helping the needy, and that’s part of it, but there’s a much bigger one that is in front of most of us everyday, all the time.  That’s just being sociable.

You aren’t obliged to be friendliness champion of the world, not obliged to do anything weird.  What I’ve noticed is that the most basic niceties of conversation and companionship are egregiously lacking from our interactions.  Like, somebody says “I watched a movie this weekend,” and you don’t say, “What movie was it?,” you just leave them hanging in that weird space.

If they’re immune to noticing insult, they might carry on, but if they’re not, it’s “Well fuck me” on the inside.  You don’t have to give a shit what movie they watched to just do the bit with them.  And who knows?  You might find out something funny or diverting.  At least, you will not have made a person feel like they don’t or shouldn’t exist.

I got a few half-assed friends, and I don’t want to tell them to fuck off, but they don’t have anything for me unless I have something for them.  Like, they literally don’t want to hang out with me unless we’re doing the one specific thing they want to do with me.  Don’t wanna play a video game, don’t wanna watch a movie, don’t even want to chit-chat about the weather.  What’s up with that?

Humans are like pokemons that say their name, “pika pika.”  We start conversations to assert our presence in a space, like, look fellow humans, I am a human here as well.  When people don’t reciprocate adequately, it feels kinda shit.  This is part of our “loneliness epidemic.”  Nobody wants to take half a fuckin second to say, “tell me about it, bob.”

I’m not even talking about the little old guy that’ll yard your ear off.  We won’t even do this for more than a few seconds with our peers, right in front of us.  It’s kinda weird.  Some amount of this may be social anxiety.  Social anxiety, on the other hand, may be a result sometimes of never learning how to do this, or falling out of practice with it.  Socialization, they call it, when talking about puppies and kittens.  We need that too.  We need to learn how to not go through life alienating ourselves from everybody, wondering why we’re alone at the end of the day.

When we’re better able to look at other people as full humans with all the feelings and importance that we ourselves possess, we’ll be better able to make mutual aid happen, make durable social institutions that can succeed where liberal “democracy” has failed.  Figure out how to stop spinning alone in your hamster wheel and squeak with each other.  It’s time.

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Shadow Everything

This is the end of my Hope Series, in the wake of the Likely Death of Democracy.  I’ve been queuing these posts for 6:30 AM Eastern time and a frivolous link post for 9:30 AM as a chaser.  I mention this because you may have missed previous entries.  There is one per day for every day from 11/6-11/16.  Check ’em out.

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You may have seen a video recently where I said I want to see the equivalent of a “shadow government” for every aspect of life.  I want to buy shadow groceries at the shadow 7-11.  I want to see shadow movies at the shadow theater, eating shadow popcorn and drinking shadow coke.  With my shadow homies, Sheisty Pete and Nefarious Gonzalez.

Off topic, but how about Shadow… run?  In that TTRPG there were cyberboyz with something called a “monofilament whip,” which was sooo sharp it could slice through anything.  They had to keep it in a slice-proof little spool case like deadly dental floss.  It raised similar questions to the omnipotence of god – can there be a filament so mono that it can cut itself?  Would it turn into mono-confetti if you rattled your floss box?

Sorry, this is the last post of my “reasons for hope” series, so I should really be more serious.

OK a shadow government is where people are like, let’s actually run this joint because the official guys aren’t it.  Pretty quickly we will not be able to rely on the federal government for much.  The more “evil genius” of the coterie of ghouls waiting in the wings of the oval office will probably opt for a gradualism where the public won’t notice what they’ve lost until it’s gone, so I don’t expect Social Security to get shut off instantly, for example.  But it will get worse, as will every government service we rely on.  So.  Shadow government.

I do think good state governments will help a lot, but we will be better off with more self-sufficiency.  I nominate the university system to be the first system to get Shadow’d.

SHADOW UNIVERSITIES

The U system is a dead system walking.  The vast majority of professors are academic hobos who can barely afford mouthwash, while administrators snort coke off gold-plated toilets with israeli ambassadors.  I know the people who still are hanging on doing the best they can are doing the best they can, but.

Let’s get stronger systems in place for giving anybody whatever education they may desire, for free, under the table, out of the back of a rusty van with dealer plates, in a haunted stretch of Interstate 99.  Or the internet, whichever works better.  This would require a number of things to work.

First, an incentive.  The current U system uses the rotten carrot of adequately paying jobs as reward for million dollar debts.  The shadow system would have… what?  Shadow prestige, I think.  God, I’d heap laurels on a good shadow professor, for what those are worth.  Sexual favors too, if my husband allowed it, haha.

Second, it needs a way for professors to get by in a pursuit with no recompense.  You know, a lot of academic hobos / adjuncts are hard-pressed to get enough hours to pay rent, so they do have some free time.  Not all of them, but enough to support this endeavor?  Maybe.  Third, it needs resources, for lab work and such.  Well, meth labs exist.  We can figure it out if they can, although we have less money.

Fourth and by no means least, it needs at least a virtual classroom.  I think, maybe internet forums?  They’d be subject to getting disappeared instantly by crapitalism, but with frequent backups, you might be able to slide under the radar for years and survive a few fires, y’know?  Anyway, it would need a lot more than what I’ve discussed, but I hope what I’ve done is get a conversation going.

SHADOW SOCIAL SECURITY

Well, everybody who isn’t lost in the bullshit blizzard of media created by fascist billionaires knows that the rethuglicans want all social programs dead, dead, dead.  This is just a matter of time.  The only solution for this is something that people from more collectivist cultures have been doing for ages:  family and community associations.  In the West we used to have some things like this as well, but those institutions were eroded or violently taken out, in order to reduce us to rugged individualists who scrabble in the dirt until we die.

How do we rebuild something so completely fucking gone from our civilization?  Ya got me, chief.  But if we did, these groups could do things like care for the old and disabled, when all the mainstream gov institutions fail.  They can also pool resources, get young people jobs, provide physical protection when the community is threatened…

SHADOW MEDICAL SYSTEM

This already exists, and it is fundamentally bad.  Remember Sally Fields talking about how she was molested during her Tijuana abortion?  This is what we’re dealing with.  But.  I imagine the right kind of activists could improve it.  This would be fundamentally more expensive than anything on the list.  Shadow Social Security might help pay for some of it, but it might just need to be a kind of altruistic organized crime – straight up stealing medical supplies.

I don’t know, but it would be cool if, in some place where health care is all owned by the catholic church (much of the USA) or ruined by forced-birthers, there was recourse for health care that wouldn’t end in molestation or stolen kidneys.

SHADOW 911

Be nice to have somebody you could call to help with a rough situation where deadly force would be completely off the table.  Because 911 is tied to the pigs, even asking for an ambulance can get you twitchy overpaid nazis with guns.  I don’t want to discourage people from calling who they need to in an emergency right now, even with some amount of associated risk, but I do wish we had more alternatives.

SHADOW IRS

The tax system should be used to pay for the betterment of all, but it’s mostly a vacuum suck to the military industrial complex and other horrifying corrupt entities.  Not saying you shouldn’t pay your taxes because unfortunately that’s how things like Social Security are funded, but it’d be nice to be able to pitch some money into a fund you know will help your people.  I guess this gets back to the community groups I mentioned in Shadow Social Security.

SHADOW ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

There are a lot of people making art for little to no recompense, just to be heard, to express something, whatever their reason.  Corporate art has glimmers of brilliance that it squeezes out of the tortured bodies and minds of exploited artists.  Fuck the big five book publishers, fuck Diamond Comic Distributors, fuck the fine arts community and its incestuous relationship with extreme wealth, fuck the RIAA to death, fuck Netflix, fuck Disney, fuck Time-Warner-AOL-Nestle-Mars-DuPont-Halliburton.

We need better systems for supporting indies, but more importantly for big projects, like competing with hollywood, we need better ways to have artists collaborate without exploitation.  It’s hard as hell because we’re such a chaotic bunch, but it could happen.  I can envision a better series of action-adventure movies than anything Disney could shit out, made with cardboard and computers, real writers, and a genuine vision.  I don’t know how yet, but I swear we could do this.

A good aim would be an indie soap opera.  Drama students and out of work dinner theater actors of the world, unite!  I want you to make compelling telenovelas for release on yewchoob or dailymotion or thepiratebay or thumb drives in manila envelopes and dark alleys.  It’s high time you got to answer your calling without a rapist’s casting couch in the way.

ORGANIZED CRIME

Technically speaking, even if these things were 100% altruistic and well executed, they would be criminal organizations.  Worse still, any institution that is not allowed to function in daylight is going to attract exploitation from the actual organized crime.  There are some who say the mafia is a community group that helps people get employed and defends when the community is under attack, all that stuff, but at the end of the day?  Protection rackets, drugs, sex trafficking, murder.  Bad shit, and any shadow org is going to attract some involvement of criminals like that.

There are no perfect solutions to a situation that is fundamentally bad, and I don’t have any solid ideas on how to make these things happen.  But it’s time to start trying again.  We have a lot of work to do.  We won’t have it all, won’t be safe or secure in what we do get, but we can get a better deal than the fascists are going to give us, if we make it happen ourselves.

It’s worth a shot.

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With that, my Hope Series is ended.  Regular random content continuing tomorrow…

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Long Live the Fighters

My least favorite refrain from oppressed people is “nobody cares about us.”  Bitch, please!  You have hella allies.  Yes, they aren’t always enough to keep you as safe, they might not be in your neighborhood, but they exist, and they are numerous.  You have the right to feel hopeless (I’d prefer you didn’t), but don’t try to spread your despair like a fucking ghost curse.  The rest of us don’t deserve that, and maybe our allies don’t deserve that either?

There are orgs with lawyers dedicated to defending this demographic (like lambda legal) or that right (ACLU), at least dozens of such groups.  They have the experience and knowledge to achieve things within the legal system we have.  It won’t always work, but sometimes it will.  There are orgs and less formal groups that provide material aid to people in trouble, like driving folks who need abortions between states, or giving help to homeless LGBT youth, etc.

There are hacktivists and whistleblowers who expose government evils to international shame.  There are left activists who take direct action, like antifa, protecting vulnerable people during protests, and making sure right wing thugs never have the street.  And there are whatever people in your own life that might be of some help.  People are people, which means every one of them is a mixed bag of good and bad traits.  But sometimes you need help from somebody who is a colossal piece of shit, and they’re willing to provide it.  My dad was rescued during a crisis by a fascist war criminal.  Take what you can get, when you need to.

We don’t all have the strength to fight fascism every day, but we do what we can, and some of us are much cooler in this regard than the average.  Real champions are out there, fighting for whatever causes move them, and every cause moves somebody.  Just because millions of Americans were ignorant or cruel enough to disregard human rights by sitting this election out, it doesn’t mean there aren’t millions more that see the danger and want to do whatever they can to fight evil – to protect those that need protection, from those who seek to cause harm.

Start looking for them.  Find your people: who you can reach, and what they can do for you.  And of course, whatever you find, take care of yourself as well.  And if, at the end of the day, you need somebody to fight for you,

Long live the fighters.

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How to Not Live in Rage

God damn this is a hard one to write, in this moment.  That said, not a hard one to live up to – for me.  You see, I might hulk out from time to time, but most of any given day, I’m thinking about things neutral to positive.  I’m thinking about the creeping sorrel in the crack at my front door, about whether I could make a breeding habitat for alligator lizards in my back yard.  My mind is biologically healthy, mercifully so, and just doesn’t want to cling to bad feelings.

Anger is a bad feeling.  Some people with pathological minds think of it as “fun,” but they somehow don’t look like they’re having fun when they snap their xbox controller in half and bellow obscenities.  People who think about who they hate all day?  They are unwell.  It is said if you aren’t outraged you aren’t paying attention.  Well, if paying attention leads to poor health, then one must spend at least some amount of one’s life not paying attention.

I don’t know what else to say on this one.  I’m writing at two in the AM, and within the space of composing the first paragraph I lost the rage from the first sentence, then got it back at the beginning of this paragraph, then lost it again.  Think I might be tired.  Baby needs a nap.

But seriously tho.  If you’re angry all day, you need to jailbreak your mind.  I don’t have any constructive advice aside from the usual shit you have already heard a million times.  “Touch grass” meme.  I’m just here to remind you it is actually important for your health that you figure out how to do this.  And good luck with it!

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If anybody has some good suggestions or wants to start a discussion about this in the comments, the floor is open.

Acceleration

Fuck accelerationists a lot, those people who, realizing crises precipitate change, have decided any amount of mutilated or dead innocents is a reasonable price to achieve their aims.  That said, if acceleration is happening despite our best efforts, they are not wrong that it can precipitate change.  This is a dark one, but it is a cause for hope.

Just how bad can the rethuglicans fuck this up?  How bad can they make themselves look?  Will they dismantle Social Security?  Privatize Medicare A and B?  Put ten-year-olds to work in Amazon distro warehouses?  Will they exonerate hate criminals?  Deputize proud boys to shoot up downtown Portland?  Be caught filling mass graves at the southern border?  Just considering the possibilities fills me with a murderous hatred, so I’ll just stop there.  Fuck those guys an awful lot.

I think that’s the best hope for a reversal of this country’s course, of us staving off decades of fascist rule: that the fascists cannot help themselves, and go so hog-wild for evil that even badly suppressed, the anti- votes will wipe those motherfuckers off the ballot.  And if voting is off the table?  That blue states might secede.  Who’s to say only bigots can rebel?

May we start living in less interesting times as soon as possible, but in the meantime, it’ll be grimly fucking interesting to see what happens, with fascism’s jackboot on the gas pedal.  This has become their country to lose, and that’s a dark hope, but it is a hope.

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State’s Rights

In our perfected world, whatever that looks like, from sea to shining sea all will live under a universal guarantee of human rights.  But billionaire-owned media selling tax breaks for themselves with fear of the underprivileged, well, it’s got a big swath of the middle of this country in a death grip.  It does not matter one jot what the actual majority of people in those states want*, the ones favored by gerrymander have decided it’s time for jim crow, prison farms, gaybashing, bookburning, and elimination of any religion but christianity from the public sphere.  And, in this moment, they’ve won so decisively that they are very likely to work the levers of power to eliminate democracy in the USA for decades to come.

In the meantime, the excuse they’re using is state’s rights.  States should have the right to murder their own citizens to meet the cruel whims of Blood Jesus.  Why don’t you understand these things?  It’s only right.  The flipside of this coin is that it may allow blue states the power to pass strong protections for human rights, and might allow for a lot more.

The state of California has so many people, so many resources, that when they pass laws that are technically only enforceable at home, any business that wants to do business in that economy has to conform or gtfo.  Chik-fil-A can deep fry trans people in Arkansas (I assume) but not so much in the city of Compton.  In fact, it’s pretty likely that Cali has everything they need to just ignore the entire rest of the USA economically and use their access to shipping in the Pacific for anything they lack.

They are exceptional in that respect, but a number of coastal states can still pull a pretty strong flex if they want to – which is why it greatly heartens me that my own state has a democratic governor.  During the strife around covid, there were meetings between the governors on the “Left Coast” about how they should respond, almost as if… they had the power to tell the District of Columbia to kiss their asses?  I dunno.  I’m interested to see what’s possible if these leaders are bold enough, when the time calls for it.

It’s not right that in order to maintain their human rights, many people will have to flee their home states.  But as long as states are being allowed some say in these issues – and as long as some states are powerful enough to take that say whether it’s allowed or not – there are places in the USA where hope is a little less crushed.

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*74 million fascists in a country of 300 million is NOT the majority.