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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Chaos Rules Everything Around Me

C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan says “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”  No, my fellas.  It is Chaos that reigns supreme.  I do think you understand that – it does get mentioned in your song, by synonyms.  Anyway, I’m feeling it tonight, feeling my religion, as I ponder the problems of our time and come back knowing less than before I started pondering.

The biggest problems that face humanity may be insoluble.  No resolution but the bitter end – which I don’t expect for some time to come, will not likely live to witness myself, so don’t get too bent.  But it’s a possibility – over a long enough arc an inevitability – so whoever is there to bear witness, I hope they can care for each other with a dignity that has eluded the masses of people for a long time.  Learn the lessons of Hellstar Remina.

But smaller problems than the apocalypse are giving me a case of the ass right now.  Take any one issue, think of a solution, and you can think of a thousand ways it can fail.  The nature of life is that everything angles for every advantage it can achieve until it undermines itself or is outmaneuvered by another angling life form or circumstance that throws the chess pieces on the floor.  Start over, if you can.  The same principle seems to apply to civilization.

One of the big problems that philosophy applied itself to, going back to the ancient world, was to decide what is the best society, and how it can be best achieved.  By the nineteenth century and early Modernism, this took the shape of various theories about the natural progression of history, of which Marxism was the most enduring.  I remember hearing a Rage Against the Machine song where lil’ Zacky said, “It’s the end of history,” and the commie rocka was not talking doomerism, more the idea that capitalism was entering the stage where it is inevitably defeated.  Lovely vision.

I’m pretty sure one or more of those old Modernist theories included the notion that this progression of history is cyclical – that societies come and go in a predictable way.  To that I say, maybe not all that predictable, but yes, invariably societies fall.  Political ideas and orders fall.  The idea that America was ever about freedom, that is rocketing into graveyard of history.  It’s sickening to see all of Orwell’s observations about totalitarianism coming to pass here – especially the inverted language.  Yell freedom while demanding servitude and conformity.  Seriously, fuck the USA so fucking much on that one.  Y’all fascists make me wanna puke.  Utterly beneath contempt.

Not what I was thinking about when I started this post.  Here it is:  when the fascist screws tighten on the internet, how will we communicate with each other?  When the police state algorithmically suppresses all leftist / lgbt+ / non-christian thought online, how do we stay in touch?  Social media is a panopticon.  Right now, the means to communicate “off the grid” are too elaborate for the average person use, in practice.  VPNs are controlled by businesses, which are all focal points of attack for fascists – systems that can fail.  Being based in Uzbekistan doesn’t make your VPN much safer; it just means the efforts to compromise it will be covert and illegal.  The dark web is grimy pedo murder city, no place to be, and involves some kinda weird technical knowledge just to get through the door, right?  Ya probably don’t want to answer that question if you know, heh.

Chain e-mails?  I’m told e-mail has terrible security.  Encrypted e-mails?  How does that shit work?  Could we get everybody on the same page in time to dodge the hammer coming down?  Will we be passing around secret media, thumb drives in brown envelopes?  What will we want to tell each other about, and how can we do so, in a way that minimizes exposure to a state run by murderous thugs?

Everything I can think of has failing after failing, exploit after exploit, and can’t hope to rival the reach of even the worst social media sites.  I’m not looking forward to this becoming a more significant problem than it already is.

One sliver of hope in that:  When corporations are the only law, competition between those corporations gives windows for some small amount of liberty.  For example, let’s say the fuckos who run bluesky decide they want to keep snatching all the business from non-creeps, and successfully resists buy-outs and government pressure.  Eventually they will become corrupted or fail, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere to be that isn’t run by the state’s biggest corporate allies.  The hand of the market giving us a favor, for a minute.  Maybe this keeps happening – we all just keep wandering from place to place, until our years in the desert are at their end.

It’s chaos.  The corporations would like to monopolize everything, fight to become Big Brother, but they’re still ruled by entropy, at the end of the day.  They eat each other, teeter, and fail from their own internal corruption.  We’re just fleas on the dog.

Anyway, for the time when Matt Mullenweg’s meltdown consumes wordpress and thereby Freethought Blogs, I hope you’ll all subscribe to my xerox’d zine, coming soon to the haunted and burned-out remains of a university near you.

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We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

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Getting Terrorized

If it seems like I’m not taking the current political situation seriously, that isn’t true.  I feel it.  It hurts.  It’s wretched.  I wish I could fix it, undertake some sort of violence that would set the world right.  I feel bad, for at least some amount of time, every day.  Feels worst in the lead-up to going into work on Monday – Sunday night, Monday before dawn.  Composing this on a Sunday, back on the 2nd.

But there are some facts that are very important to keep in mind.  Most of us are going to be able to live the rest of our lives just fine, whatever hardships this may add.  We can prepare ourselves in various practical ways for a lot of bad things, but not all of them.  Worrying is not preparing; it’s just hurting yourself.  I know, you can’t avoid it completely.  I sure can’t either.  But we have to minimize its impact on our lives.

Frankly, if we don’t, the terrorists win – to borrow a cheesy slogan from the post 9-11 era.  The fascists love it when we think about them all the time, when we show fear, even when we show anger.  Were you ever bullied?  Same deal.  I don’t love living in fear of what the bastards will do next, but I really don’t love the fact they can crank their hogs to the signs of my fear.

We have to oppose them.  I do think almost all the methods we were using before still have a place in practice now.  We might have to add some new tricks.  Keep up the good work, when and how and if you can.  And if you can’t?  Do your best to survive and thrive.  Anything you can do to make your life as good as it can be, that does matter.  It is a victory in this larger war, on one small but very important battlefield.

Meanwhile, what can we do to ease our worries?  I’m still trying to find things that work for me.  Obviously, I’ve been throwing myself into creativity, and plan to continue that as much as possible.  Even so, tonight I find myself feeling kinda ill, my viscera trembling like a fall leaf.  Keep in mind I wrote this days ago, so reassurance belated and probably unnecessary when you read it.

At least I have a posse.  I have a blue state behind me, I have a union, I have my comrades here.  It doesn’t feel real some days, but other times, it really helps me.  I know a lot of you don’t have all of those reassurances.  But you do have a comrade in me, for what I’m worth.  Let’s keep this life going, together.

Drop suggestions for ways to feel better, even if they only work a little bit.  Add ’em all up, that’s something.  See you later!

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