Your True Name

Charly recently raised a question that on the surface seems reasonable, but when applied to ameriKKKa, becomes a bit of a mess.  Why is there a problem with requiring ID to vote here?  Wasn’t that already required?

It depends on a lot.  I don’t recall specifically presenting my ID to vote, maybe once at an in-person location a few decades ago?  You have the option of registering to vote any time you renew your photo ID or driver’s license, and I think also when you submit a change of address at the post office.  I’ve been doing mail ballots for ages now.

But this is a state that isn’t powerfully motivated to suppress voter will, unlike the rethuglican political establishments of the Southeast, where black people are often a majority in urban centers.  In those states, ID requirements are a very useful tool of voter suppression, precisely because on the face of it, they’re a reasonable requirement.  The trick is how difficult it has become to obtain and maintain a photo ID.

ID requirements are also a great tool for kicking the poor off of social benefits, of keeping them homeless or imprisoned, of getting them to die from preventable health conditions.  The closer you live to the ground here, the more likely you are to be evicted and lose all of your possessions.  To be incarcerated and have your wallet “lost” in the process.  Old folks and people with vices are easy to rob.  At the level of the homeless, they tend to have their every last possession stolen at least once a year, by other homeless people or by corrupt cops.

Over-policed populations like people of color, lgbtetc people, the poor, the homeless, can be arrested at higher rates and lose their rights and possessions that way.  If your ID expires in prison, good luck getting it renewed when you get out.

At the federal level, “Real ID” (a creation of the fascist Patriot Act) or a passport is required for air travel and a few other circumstances.  States can require it for a lot more than that, at their discretion, including voting.  To get one of those, you need your social security card, birth certificate, a mailing address, and more.

Mailing address is tougher than you’d think.  Poor people get priced out of their circumstances often enough that we move a lot.  I’ve moved well over a dozen times in my adult life; some move every few months.  To get my birth certificate took three months.  What if I didn’t have the money to pay for it?  Very few parts of this process are free.

There’s a lot more that could be said on these things but I don’t have much time these days for research.  Some amount I know of due to my job, but I can’t elaborate on that.  I wonder sometimes if the sheer size of this country makes it harder to administer than Europe, even if the colonial linguistic hegemony makes many things easier.  Certainly the lack of political will to properly fund the government is a problem.

If you live in the USA and you have all your papers in a row, keep them in a safe place, as much as that’s possible.  If you don’t have all your papers, get crackin’ whenever you’ve got a stable circumstance, because you never know when you’ll lose that, and potentially lose much more.

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Oh yeah, I named this article before I wrote it.  What’s with the title?  I thought I was going to get into this more.  You may have heard people use the phrase “legal name” as if there is one definitive database where these things are kept.  There isn’t, and even where there is, you might be surprised by what’s filling out the fields on those computer screens.

Did you remember to update your citizenship when you got it?  Your name when you got married?  Divorced?  Did you do it with just the court, the DMV, Social Security, or all three?  What about your passport, if you have one?  Department of Education for your student loans?  The IRS?  All of these agencies could have different names on file for you.  Maybe even different dates of birth or places of birth, due to typos.  If DE for Germany was mistakenly entered in a state of birth field, congrats, you were born in Delaware.  That doesn’t automatically make you a citizen because that’s a separate field that could say anything as well.

That’s probably the most important thing of all now – consistency.  Government computers have become more integrated in recent years and people who never had a problem from these inconsistencies in decades of life are suddenly having problems with them now – couldn’t file taxes, couldn’t fill a prescription, couldn’t vote.  Make sure your biographical details are accurate.  Pick a name and go with it, and make sure all of the agencies have all of your names in all the right fields – first, middle, last, suffix.  Honestly suffixes can be more trouble than they’re worth, might consider losing that.  Some computers have a separate field for it, some just tack it onto the last name, and if they disagree you could find yourself locked out of something.  Whatever you do though, do it consistently, because this is not automatically done for you.

Legal name evokes the old magical idea of a “true name.”  Who are you?  Your name is words that, like all others, are trying to simplify a reality that can be much more complex than syllables can convey.  Even your own country may, in important ways, have no idea who you are.  Fascism’s trying to fix that for you.  Thanks?

Financial institutions and government have relied on Social Security Number to verify people’s identity for a long time, but with leak after hack after leak, practically every SSN that exists is compromised.  Hell, does DOGE still have read access to the Social Security Administration and Department of Treasury?  I’ve heard they have been reduced in prominence, but never heard anything concrete about them being shut out of the access they were initially granted.

But fuck all that.  Maybe we should have code names known only to our favorite people.  Or is that what internet handles are?  Boochie Flagrante and Buttfucker3000 are truer names than any birth certificate can contain, I say.  Power on, comrades.

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Who Are You? (Owl Noises)

I really wanna know, so sayeth the Whom’st.  Who art thou?  I had another wacky idea for a series of posts, and feel like this one might have more appeal – at least for a narrow audience.

In slowly building an archive of my old blog poasts (insurance against the anarchy of FtB finally doing it in), I’ve also been noting the personalities of commenters, and thinking of you.  Who are you people?  Would any of you consent to an interview?

To test the waters, I’m paging John Morales.  I’d like to do an interview about who you are, in the vein of what some newly minted celebrity might receive, but hopefully less fake.  I’d publish the results here, not unlike the times I interviewed The Beast from Seattle.

If you’re not a lurker – if you’re a person that’s willing to make public comments – I expect you’ve got enough ego to want to be known.  The aging writers and readers of blogs are heading toward oblivion, might be cool to graffiti something of your life into the internet before you go.  Something that will at least last until it gets painted over.  I expect my own blog archive to outlive FtB, so it could be for a while.

I would also love to interview at least one lurker, but I don’t have high hopes you’ll be willing.  I may name people who commented once in the past and mentioned that they lurk; we’ll see.

Aside from John, not naming specific invitees yet, but I may in the future, depending on how it goes.  Nonetheless, if you want to nominate yourself, go ahead.

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Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Stayin’ Alive.

The blog network is getting a concussion, but we keep keeping on.  Most importantly, am I still in the sidebar?  This post should ensure I remain there a bit longer, whether it adds anything of value to the world or not.  Hey, google just informed me we still have a Bee Gee too.

Mano suggested PZ get cute little grippy booties to prevent further damage to his frail corpus.  What are you doing to stay alive in this benighted era?  I’m trying to keep my husband’s gothery within acceptable limits, while scheming on achieving a sense of creative fulfillment in the not too distant.  Will probably start posting some prose around here again, within a month or so.

I’m trying to think of a way to inflate the word count on this post.  Um… survival.  When I was a child, I took passing interest in the things one boyoid is meant to take interest in.  I got a book on survival called, like, Survival, from the library.  How to remove leeches and camouflage your bodkin whilst you sleep in enemy territory.  Shit like that.  It was a product of cultural Ollie North militarism, which makes me wonder how much bullshit it contained.  Feeding into the idea one could be that GI Joe who lives long enough to rack up a spartanesque kill count on the faceless hordes, recruiting kids more foolish and more physically adroit than myself to enlist.

For a few months I played more “realistically” with my GI Joes before I stopped playing with them in favor of TTRPGs.  Later, in high school, I had a friend who liked to amuse us all with his creative writing during lunch breaks, the future Bad Moustache Having Guy.  I’m suddenly reminded he did a few stories modeled off that Hamburger Hill type Vietnam vet foolery, guys surviving by duct-taping their guts in or stapling their heads back on.  I don’t remember any particular lines, just the raw idea.  Thanks, BMHG.  I hope your eldritch ladywife appreciates your literature as much as we did.

Alright, that will do.  Stay alive, y’all.

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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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