Bin Laden Victory Lap

Bin Laden inaugurated the new millennium by breaking some bottles airplanes on the prow of a ship world trade whatever whatever, with the goal of destroying the america.  How did that work?  Like a charm.  We flushed ourselves down the toilet after that, always looking for a bigger and better daddy to tuck us in nighty-night and make us feel safe from our craven cowardly baby shivers.  His terrorism terrorized us into giving up on the idea of freedom.

About this much has been said, but one thing I don’t often hear expressed is that he really did win.  He died, but if he was a true believer about martyrdom leading to a sexy paradise, then Obama helped him achieve that part as well.  More importantly, the big aim has come to pass.  The republic is over, and while the empire will look shiny for a few seconds, that’s just the beginning of the end.

Who’s gonna be our Caligula?  Our Nero?  Our Caesar is a fucking humiliation, so I’m sure the succession ain’t gonna be much better.  Maybe Barron will be the one holding the fiddle when Canada finally nukes DC.  Wait, DC will be underwater from global warming, so maybe they’ll nuke Nuevo Mar-a-Lago, Greenlandsylvania by then.

This is not to be a doomer.  I think plenty of us will have passable lives under that tyranny.  This country is too big to successfully be run like North Korea.  It’s just not feasible.  But whatever greatness this country possessed has jumped the shark.  It’s all downhill from here.  Hats off to the man behind 9-11.  And if it turns out sasquatch is real and that man is Dubya, hats off to him.

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What was I saying..?

I seem to recall in a blog post and a podcast mentioning that we’re about to see more terrorism from leftists, and there you go…  Is this a bad thing?  It’s fuel for the jerks.  After all, Israel’s current big genocide push was inaugurated with a terrorist action by members of the oppressed people.  Terrorism is often the tool of the disempowered, and the left here is more disempowered than ever.  We may have fewer guns, but you know which leftists do have guns?  The ones most inclined to do a terrorism.

This won’t just be leftists either.  There will also be centrist terrorists and more right wingers as usual.  That’ll be interesting to see.  People who were fucked over by conservative policies who themselves would be favorably inclined to said policies until their face got eaten.  We’ll be seeing some of those fellas exercising their oh-so-sacred second amendment rights as well.

Who pulled this trigger?  Who cares?  The right wing, in going full fash, has made itself an existential threat to immigrants, to lgbtqia+ people, to members of racial and religious minorities, to women who need abortions, to anybody with the wrong bumper sticker in the wrong part of red country…  People feel their lives have been threatened, because they have.  Some people respond to that with deadly force, because that’s what this country has told them to do.

My brother usually avoids “faces of death” type content, but he made an exception to watch the video of this one.  I personally am still going to avoid it, but I see where he’s coming from.  You get enough horror and enough hopelessness meted out to you from your political opposites, you take your gratification where you can fucking get it.

If the UHC motherfucker didn’t ring in hunting season, this one surely did.  This will be ugly.  Sorry to any decent person who is harmed as a result, truly.

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When it’s Over

I’ve been pretty blithe in my attempts to make people feel less doomy, and PZ did call me out on it, in a sense, during the August podcast.  The main thing I try to tell people is that for most of us life will go on – the terror fascism inspires may not play out as dramatically in most of our own lives as we are anticipating.  If you look at people from Ghana to Papua New Guinea, there are a lot of travails but people still live life, every day.  This perspective becomes especially important as shitler puts us in the fast lane to economic ruin.  We’ll suffer sometimes, but we will live our lives, at least as well as all the people who have been living under tyranny and economic depredation all around the world.  However, sometimes, for some of us, doom is gonna happen.  What then?

I’m put in mind of this by all the comments on a recent post.  A lot of people have family members near the end of the line, or have that in their own headlights.  I was reminded of my mortality a few years ago during my first nbd-styled cancer situation.  As a philosophical materialist, I know what comes after this: a big nothin’, which I want to put off as long as possible.  And my neurotypical sauce keeps me feeling like most likely, that will happen.  There’s a chance I’ll die randomly at any given moment of any given day, but it’s a small chance, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ll most likely be fine – even accomplish a few useful things before I go.  I just know, on a rational level, not even a minute of it is guaranteed, which is low-key depressing.

This is not to say I’m abandoning my anti-doomerism policy or even the earnest beliefs behind it, that for most of us life will remain tolerable for most of the path, that we gain nothing by living in terror and despair.  As I mention in the policy tho, I am occasionally going to point to dark truths, and this is one of them.  It’s something I need to address, because it points to what some might call a good reason to abandon the policy.

Sometimes you have to talk about your despair.  Arguably, sometimes you have to wallow in the ableism inspired by a world run by cruelty that defies all reason, by living among buffalo that are stampeding for the cliff.  First point true, second one maybe.  Neither of those are reasons for me to allow it here.  After all, Pharyngula is right next door and has no such limits.  If you need it, there it is.  And if you need to get away from it, here I am.

But what should I say to people for whom doom is extremely nigh?  I don’t know if I’m the guy to say anything to them.  My “dark realist” perspective makes me rather terrible at helping friends and loved ones through depression.  Sometimes at my job I have to talk to people who are dying, or have recently had loved ones die – sometimes their children.  I gotta keep it professional.  This isn’t a professional setting and I don’t have that excuse here.

Not everybody can be everything to everybody, and my pollyanna ways are a thin coat over a rather bleak point of view.  Best not to interrogate it.  Even so, I’m not lying when I say most of us are gonna be alright.  We’ll have pain and suffering, we’ll have ok moments, we’ll have life, the same as anyone has ever had.

There are many places in the world where that is less true.  Very sorry to those people, but we can’t all be thinking about that all the time, or life is over for us.  I expect that some people dying in pointless wars will die thinking, I’d love every last motherfucker living a life of ease to experience what I’m experiencing.  If I have to die, everyone should die.  I’ll forgive them for feeling that.  I’m a cranky bitch and I’d probably feel the same if I had to live through such times.

But I also expect there are people in Ukraine, Palestine, etc, who would not begrudge any of us trying to live life in peace and feel as ok as possible – as long as we do what we can to help steer our respective societies away from war and ruin.  Who are we beholden to, the angriest in suffering or the more kind?  What should we do?  Live in anguish and die in terrorist action against our tyrants and warmongers?  Or do what we can, within the limits that allow us to know the fleeting happiness we are allowed on this bitch of an earth?

When something scary or sad is going on, there are a million motherfuckers lining up to tell you that you are not scared or sad enough.  Let this blog be one place that calls bullshit on that.  Do what you can to make life better for others, as much as you can, but know your limits, and allow yourself to be as happy as is possible – in a world that is doing its best to make you miserable.

It’s Gloria Gaynor time.  I will survive.  You will too.  Until you can’t, and I’m sorry to hear if that’s happening for you.  I hope you can find solace and peace along your way out the door, as I hope I do when it’s time for me to go.  That’s all I can reasonably say or do for you.  Good luck to all, and a good life as well.

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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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Why Loan?

My dad was recently in one of those shitty situations people find themselves in, when dependent on social benefits – (hopefully temporarily) homeless, living in rented van, waiting on heel-draggers to approve his new place.  I sent him $700 thru paypal.  A loan?  No.  He doesn’t have to pay that back.  I don’t give a shit.

This is after my brother already loaned him $500.  I’m not going to ask my brother directly for reasons, but generally, why even have that be a loan?  What do you get out of getting that money back?

You know I am often close to the wire, came to y’all with hat in hand a few times.  That looks straightforwardly like charity and nobody expects charitable donations refunded (unless an org or individual was found to be scamming, etc.).

When you have a family member or friend in need of help and you are the person with something to spare, how is that different from charity to where you’d expect anything back?  You’re helping them but also adding to the stress of the moment the concern of how they’ll ultimately repay.

That’s easy for me to say when I owe my brother like $5000 on principal of $10000.  No resentment there; he ain’t charging interest or pressuring to get it faster, I ain’t asking for loan forgiveness.  Just saying if it was me, it probably would have been a gift instead of a loan.

The story of my adult life has been availing myself of the generosity of others over and over again, particularly getting extremely low rates on rent to live in somebody’s attic or basement.  Of getting a few grand from my dad when he got an inheritance, that I was able to use for rent for months.  When that ran out, I had accidentally’d into a relationship with a generous guy who let me move in with no expectation I’d pay anything until I could.

Maybe my dad suggested it be a loan and it wasn’t my brother’s call.  Pride thing.  I wouldn’t have that, personally.  I don’t love loans.  From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

Betcha didn’t know donating to me made you a filthy commie.  No backsies now.

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sometimes u can give sometimes u gotta beg.  it’s the line.  right now i have a condo.  my employment has a sword of damocles hanging over it that might never drop, but if it does, will i be able to cobble together enough from less well-compensated work to pay the bills?  what if we lose the income of my husband’s mom, who lives with us?  will i be working three jobs, or losing my home?  for the moment, i’m in a place we own, with big-ass flowers.  a hoodie druid dans le jardin d’Eden, babey…

this will all be under water when florida is.  big sigh.

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Purple Pill Poppers

Red pill, blue pill.  Why so biney, Morpheoose?

I’ve gotten self-righteous about it from time to time, as have most of the people on this network – bloggers and commenters included – but fundamentally I am an atheist because it feels real to me, based on my predilections in combination with my experience of life, and not because I was moved to this position by Reason and Enlightenment.  In the Matrix metaphor, to me, atheism is the blue pill – the world that has been “pulled over my eyes.”  Comforting, tho often a cold comfort.

What then would be the red pill?  Anything that was capable of overthrowing that idea of reality, replacing it with something new.  In The Matrix that would be the Truth.  In my ill-conceived thesis, I’ll just treat the red pill as an alternative view of the world, different from what you’ve previously known and not necessarily true.  With that being the idea, red pills are rare things indeed.

We have a sense of what’s real built on the stuff of our lives.  For some people that’s jesus and paranoia, for others, well, there’s a lot of ways people can be, regardless of how polls aim to simplify it all.  But across the board, we are not easily convinced of anything that falls outside our biases.  Some of those biases are good and fine, even factually correct like atheism, but that doesn’t keep them from being biases.  The bias is the thing you are predisposed to believe.  What can overcome this?

Believers in society as a great discourse between rational minds, they’d say debate and discussion can overcome incorrect beliefs.  The truth will inherently emerge from a true socratic dialogue.  Does it though?  Seems to me we almost never change what we believe to something directly opposite.  Those who went from cookie-baking grandma to goose-stepping Q-creep were building on whatever their baseline was.  The flaw was there, waiting to be nurtured.

The gradual creep of US fascism over the last hundred years, while it involved intentional propaganda by malevolent masterminds, those masterminds themselves were thralls of propaganda they’d been fed, as much subject to manipulation as anyone they sought to manipulate.  We’re all just following a course of social entropy.

Within that, there are ways to bend people, to ourselves get bent.  Like that fascist grandma, take a pre-existing belief or point of view and elaborate on it, build it into something new.  Not a red pill because it’s not a total jailbreak of the original firmware, call it a purple pill.

In The Matrix, Joey tha Rat had the same choice about what to believe that Neo was given, chose red, then changed his mind.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Change your beliefs on a dime, to whatever felt the best in a given moment?  Not to say I want to change my own beliefs, just using a lil’ reflection on my relationship to those beliefs as a way to understand some people whose thoughts are nigh unimaginable.  Do your own research, as they say.

What I’m interested in, like anybody else living in a society that isn’t living up to their ideals, is how to alter the beliefs of those who seem dead set on ruining everything.  They got purplepilled into that point of view, and maybe we can purplepill them into a point of view that is less ruinous somehow.  It’s not like looking for a “weak spot” to exploit.  Those that indoctrinated them into fascism did not seek to dominate, they fertilized the soil and watered it.  It’s a process of nurturing, I think.

What is left in a fascist that is good enough to build on, to encourage them to become something less bad?  I don’t know, but it could be worth thinking about.

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Red State Leftists Please Start Voting

You heard about all the businesses capitulating to the fresh fashy vibes of the new ameriKKKa?  Tossing diversity initiatives, LGBTetc protections?  Amazon doing this is particularly shit because like many tech companies, they have a disproportionate number of trans women in computer programming.  You’d think that would count for something, but here we fucken are.

Red state leftists don’t want to vote because it feels hopeless, but here’s the thing.  If all of you got up and voted at the next opportunity and lost, it would send a message to the world, loud and clear.  The kind of message electoral politics can ignore, yes, but not the kind of message that corporate america can afford to ignore.  If the nazis win the next one by electoral margins but lose by 80% of the popular vote?  That is a show of force for human rights, for humane policies, for progress.  Corporations will realize that catering to the nazis is not the wisdom, and at least one source of human misery will become substantially less miserable.

That’s where the real power is at the moment.  Corporations.  They have all these fiefdoms carved out in the legalized monopoly game, so boycotts can only do so much.  But demographic information that their advertisers can use, that is something they’ll pay attention to.

Give it a whirl, please?  And who knows?  Maybe there’s still a sliver of a hope in hell that democracy can move this needle slightly away from endless calamity, right?  Throw me a fuckin’ bone here.  Do it on a lark.  Do it on a dare.  Do it high on bin laden weed with a six-pack of beer.  Just do it.

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No Politics?

I’m thinking I might wanna stop doing political posts for as long as I’m able.  But I’d be going against my remit as a FtBlogger to not do freethunk content, so I think… art with good principles.  Atheistical or progressive or whatever, but just narrative art, or autobio, or some visual art.  I don’t know.  It’s just that thinking about specific political issues is getting me way too mad, and I say regrettable things when I get too mad.

And more importantly, I get close to breaking my own doomerism policy, and upsetting people who are already having a bad time in life.  So it’s time for me to step back for a minute.  I will still probably post that dubious shit when I feel moved to do so, hoping that doesn’t happen.  Rest of the time, just stories and birdposting, etc.  Might also say some stuff about religion, if I can keep politics out of it.

One last political thing.  I had call to look at the final tallies of the popular vote.  That increased the numbers of both sides, over what it was when the race was called.  In the end, gross creep had gotten substantially more votes than before.  But if you think about things that would have reduced his numbers in 2020 – covid, wildfires, etc – it wasn’t necessarily that big of a difference.  Meanwhile, Harris had substantially narrowed the gap.  Dems were slow to get counted for whatever reason, but they only lost the popular vote by about 2 mil, when the margin when the race was called was more like 4 mil.

I just think that feels slightly less brutal than it did when the shit was raw.  Still totally fucking asinine clownshoes horseshit that so many USians thought the most transparent con man in human history was gonna get them a good deal in life.  And abject foolery that any leftist non-voters thought they could “send the dems a message” without strangling US leftism in its cradle.  A shame we all have to pay for their foolishness, but that’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.

Last time around the leopard-eaten faces were antivax covid victims.  What myriad shapes will their misery take now?  “Arab Americans for Peace” and other people who snubbed dems for Palestine come to mind.  If Harris had won, you could sit there feeling smug about how she was just as ineffectual and crappy as you thought.  Since she didn’t, you have to watch gleefully nazi fucks showering Israel with genocide money like they’re at a strip club, while also watching essential functions of the US government (and every human right) fucked to death.

Finding out how bad leopard people will feel, how many of them are going to suffer or die, it’s a cold comfort we’ll get to indulge in a lot, for a long time.  Meanwhile, keep fighting how you can, and take care of yourselves however you can, because that is part of the fight too.

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Furry Rights Now

Seriously.

Transgender people were a big wedge issue used to flip who knows how many fools to voting fash, or just not bothering to vote against them.  Scumbags look for somebody to hate, smash the hate speech button until they find one that doesn’t make people feel too bad about themselves, and get everybody disgusted about some disgusting weirdos that don’t deserve rights.

If social progress somehow makes it through the barrier of fuckery that has been erected against it right now, if transgender people become more accepted, who is the next target for nazis?  They never stopped targeting Jewish people and racial minorities and the disabled and women, just tuned that whistle high enough to harvest a few demographic traitors.  In this election it was all about “illegals” and “perverts trying to trans your kids.”  And somewhere in all that ruckus, they tried on a new target for size.

Furries.  They’re going after furries next.  I am not shitting you.  The time to try and move the needle on furry rights is now.  Get people to accept furries whenever you can.  Turn the conversations around, when people talk about how disgusting and creepy they are.  Who are you to judge, Nancy?  I seen what you’re into, Fred.

Anyway, for my part, I’m throwing open the barn stables right now.  Bébé Mélange is a furry ally.  I may not always be the best ally, but I’ll try to improve.

This gets into a territory of “is this an immutable characteristic,” like can you change this about yourself if you want to?  People will try that on as a way to say furries don’t need protection.  But I think, nuh.  I know the transgender experience is highly variable, and for some of us, it might feel like a choice – like for safety, some of us could detrans and ride out the rest of their life, without committing triple turbo suicides immediately.  But even for those people, they deserve trans rights.  Likewise, if being a furry is totally optional for all furries?  So what?

There are some lines I’ll have to scribble here and there on the big perv tent, like, I’m not gonna stump on Capitol Hill for age regression RP and diaper play.  People should be able to do that too, but it feels less like something you could do non-sexually at the office on Monday… I dunno.  I don’t know anything.

But I know this.  Furry rights now!

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Love Time

Get loved on, fools.  If you have somebody to love on this day, do your duty.  If you have not, well, yours is another kind of love.  The love of your fellow humans, of those kinds of humans that can have love for you.  Like me, por ejemplo.  I can love you.  It’s easy.  Mwah!  I blow kisses.  Or offer solemn salutes, if that’s more your speed.  Fist bump?  A terrorist fist jab..?

How do I love strangers?  Let me count the ways:

I’m an everyday people fetishist.  If you don’t look like a model, you’re probably on the list of people I’d bone, if I wasn’t in a closed relationship, and if you were amenable.  Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, baby.  Especially if you’re over forty and overweight like me.  Yeah, I’m talkin’ to me, baby.

That was a bit off color.  Moving on…

We’ve all got our own row to hoe, as they say.  I respect the struggle.

We are all subject to egregious indignities, and slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  Your pain is not worth it, but it does ennoble you nonetheless.

We are all made out of the same parts in varying proportion, mentally and physically, and how could I hate somebody like me?  That would be like hating myself, which is just not in my nature to do.  The people on my shitlist had to work pretty hard to earn that position.

And if you’re here, it’s probably because you have similar values to me, whether we agree about every last detail of it, and that makes us comrades.  Camaraderie is no joke.

While I can’t be very emotionally available to very many people, I will generally do my best.  If you need some affection, holler at your dogg.  I will love upon you in the comments below.

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