VOTE VOTE VOTE

this is a bonus post; for regular content see the previous &/or next buttons.

washington state midterms rolled right up on me.  not good.  there are reasons in the US why voting early can be a good idea.  i missed that boat.  but it’s not too late to vote!  ballots have to be postmarked no later than the 5th.  if you have to change your voter registration status or information and forgot past the mail deadline, you can do it in person on election night, but go early.  polling places close right at 8:00 pm.

another useful thing for last minute voters:  voter’s guides.  it’s good to have at least two you can check against each other.  there’s a guide for progressive voters online.  not sure who runs it or how they pick their endorsements, but you don’t have to take their word for anything.  they spell out their reasoning, list other endorsements, and line up well compared to other sources – at least for elections in my area.  useful enough for me, especially since my other main source does not make endorsements for municipalities outside of seattle.  you can also read what the candidates say about themselves in the official voter’s guide.  since that is often carefully worded to not offend voters on the opposite side of the political divide, it can be tricky to parse.  in that situation, look to who’s endorsing them for clues.

anyway, as slim as hope is these days, you’d be an asshole to throw away the tiny tiny say you have in things.  if enough of us get our asses in gear, we can make a difference.  it’s real.  my trailer park town had a city council that moved to ensure abortion access would be available here, right after roe v wade fell.  that’s because more decent people than asswipes voted here, at that time.

do what you can, and VOTE VOTE VOTE.

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You’re Not Ready for the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would Johnny Mnemonic do?

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When the Shit Goes Down

Said Cypress Hill, when the shit goes down, you better be ready.  Today is that big No Kings biz, which shitler has promised to respond to with brute force, while he’s doing Kim Jong Il cosplay in a monument to Rome built by slaves.  Meanwhile, Israel has expressed its desire to turn the whole middle east into a smoking puddle of blood, Pakistan and India are still nuclear powers skirmishing as well, and Russia is still trying to turn Ukraine into Russia Junior with more mutilated human remains inside.

If you’re in a directly impacted part of the world, my condolences.  That feels like the emptiest of gestures.  I can’t throw away my life to save yours, and that feels like the only gesture that would have any meaning, when you’re looking at people whose lives have been chucked in the meatgrinder of political greed and bloodlust.  May all the responsible world leaders magically develop consciences tomorrow and die from the agony of guilt.

For the rest of us, we’re all weighing the risks coming our ways, tho they pale in comparison to yours, and thinking of what we will do, what we can do.  Within that, it’s important to keep a sense of perspective.  For much of the world, life goes on, and we’re obliged to our families and friends, to those who depend on us, to keep going on as well.  To those who can fight, long live the fighters.  To the rest of us?

Try to remember you’re still shopping for groceries, paying your bills, going to work, feeding your pets, watering your plants.  Stay with us.  Don’t give up.  For 99.9% of you, the shit is not imminent.  Your world will still be there next week, regardless of what happens now.  Much love.  See you around!

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Zoroastrian Optimism

I was looking up monsters and some chain led to motifs from Middle Eastern art, which led to an article on Zoroastrianism, which led me to get confused about their concept for the soul.  I remember once reading some outdated conventional wisdom about the origin of religion, wherein the concept of the soul emerged from the observation that the living breathe and the dead do not – that a soul must be an immaterial thing that is in your body and subsequently leaves.  Simple enough, but a lot of supernatural ideas from older religions leave me scratchin templez.  More complicated.

If I got this right, the main part of your zoroastrian soul exists outside of the material world.  It sends a piece avatar-style when you are born, animating you, and that part returns to the source four days after you die, bringing with it the wisdom of your time spent on Earth.  As you spend various lives on Earth, you’re making your main soul more wise and powerful.  Juiced-in soul points.  Power ups.  I presume when you hit your limit break, you can do a special finishing move.

The concept of the soul that most amurrican christians believe is less ornate.  Your soul is born when you’re born, it goes to heaven or hell when you die.  I think most of the denominations preach something more like you stay in the dark until judgment day when the helling and heavening will actually happen, but that doesn’t stick in the heads of the laity.

Still, these are the conceptions I’m most familiar with, and you gotta admit, they’re more streamlined than that zoroastrian stuff.  Why the extra steps, zoroastrians?  I have to admit tho, I find their take appealing.  While you are alive, you are fighting against evil.  When you die, your main soul gets the XP, making you more powerful against evil.  We’re all getting better at fighting evil all the time.

Whenever the zoroastrian end of days comes around, we’ll all be 99th level paladins, kickin’ ass on the angra-mainyu-something-whatever.  That’s optimistic.  That’s some “moral arc of the universe bends toward justice” kind of shit.  I can’t believe it, but it’s nice.

This is the part when people raised under the cruel repression of the zoroastrian bible belt come into my comments and explain how it isn’t nice.  As you will…

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Curtail Executive Power or Else

Obama should have done it.  Biden should have done it.  In Clinton’s time this would have been a little harder to see coming, but sharp people were already predicting some flavor of it.  If the dems ever gain power again, the hindsight should be bright as day.  They need to limit the powers of the president.  The executive branch in the USA has too much power, and it has caused direct, possibly irreparable harm to our standing in the world.

In a sense, who cares about our standing in the world?  We deserve to be taken down a notch or several.  It’s a market adjustment that is very long overdue.  But it’s going to be painful and ruinous to people all around the world, so perhaps best avoided?  Accepting this shituation is accelerationism, not my favorite flavor of change.

The issue is stability.  You’d think a dictator’s hand on the tiller would stabilize the country’s institutions, but that’s not how this is playing out.  Stability is the source of value in our treasury bonds.  Lose that stability, lose value, lose bargaining power, and there you are.

The system of checks and balances that we all learn about in elementary school, that thing that was supposed to make us so much cooler than other countries?  That was the stabilizer.  The oligarchs could play tennis in the legislature and pass the baton to the other guys every four to eight years, the supreme court could go one way or the other on any issue at any time.  Through this all, nothing truly radical could ever be accomplished.

That sucks when you want things to be radically better, but at least it keeps things from getting radically worse – when it’s working right.  If the democrats want to be moderate and responsible and not be radical and not rock boats, they should go for that moderation radically.  A Constitutional crisis calls for a Constitutional Amendment or several.  We had a bill of rights, how about now a Bill of Liberty, to save us from democratically elected dictatorship?

They will need to angle desperately to fight any vote suppression tactics in preparation for the outside possibility a fair-esque election can happen in two years, but they also need to have an agenda locked and loaded, ready to go, to force checks and balances back into government.  That executive power can be used to undermine itself at first, through careful use of executive orders, but it absolutely must be relinquished as soon as humanly possible, and locked out of future hands.

Tvfnp will pocket veto and otherwise stymie any legislation to that effect, but keep up the pressure and see what’s possible a few years after that, in the presidential election.  If, by some fucking miracle, dems get control of this trash fire again, it’s time to lock it down so this disaster can never happen again.  The next democratic president, hope to hell it’s four years from now, needs to gut their own power.  It’s a moral imperative, it’s crucial for the US to continue to have anything resembling the prosperous status quo it’s enjoyed for a hundred years.

Personally, motherfuck our prosperity.  Time for everybody in the world to come up and get a piece of our loser asses.  But dems, if you’re listening?  If you ever get another chance to do this?  Curtail executive power in any way you can.

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Primary they Asses

My union talked me into writing to my representatives thru a web form, and the responses have trickled in.  Clearly just had a machine or intern look at the subject matter vaguely and send robo-reply.  On the web form all three required an honorific but the senatorial old ladies only had mr. and mrs.,  while the congressdude had other options.

For the senators I chose mrs. but also used masc legal name.  First senator with a robo reply “corrected” it to mister.  Kinda like, fuck all y’all.

I’ve said before I’m ok with dems taking some bad deals when they’re in the weak position, negotiating however they can to reduce the damage of nazi policies, but if they act at all like they consider a demographic an acceptable loss, or worse, show enthusiasm for nazi ideas like fuckface newsom, we must brutally primary their asses back to whoville.

And if the dem establishment rams a shit candidate through?  I think they’re a few decades overdue for a riot at their convention.

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What it Sounds Like when TDoVs Cry

I do find the most worrisome thing about trans rights and the struggle against fascism broadly at the moment is corporate ameriKKKa’s embrace of the very bad november as a meaningful barometer of public opinion – that fascism is more profitable than progress.  I’m gonna try not to think of that too much.  I’ve got dreams to dream.  But for now, let’s say I can understand trans people wanting to inviso all the way out.

When the very bad inauguration happened (2025 version), I immediately began wearing a pink bandana and makeup and pearls at work, to show my less visible trans coworkers that they are not alone.  I don’t usually bother to shave, so this is a pretty queer-ass look.  I’m more self-conscious in recorded form, so not posting selfies of that right now.  But just tellin’ the tale:  I’ve been trans day of visibilitying since Jan 20th 2025 every day that I’m seen by coworkers.

Except that one day I forgot my eye makeup.  Wotta disaster!

Wait, no, fuckit.  Here’s my work look.

visible’d!  why yes i am craggy like the surface of the moon, and not interested in starting to wear foundation at the moment.

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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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It’s a Gas

What did ’60s people mean by “it’s a gas”?  Something like “it blows my mind, it’s trippy, it’s exciting,” I think.  Wasn’t there.  Were they thinking of inhalants, huffing gas fumes?  Or laughing gas, at the dentist’s office?  Probably the latter.  Wait, no, maybe it was just about the fuel to make a hot rod go – mostly about the excitement.

Whatever the answer, life is a gas, and it blows my mind, and it’s trippy, and exciting.  Too much of the last one, unfortunately, but one can abide.  I think of the laughing gas.  I laugh under stress sometimes, like when I was a six year old shepherd in a school play and lost it completely, or when I annoyed my husband by weirding out at the hospital.

I remember when my homeboy was trying to go on a road trip, with me and my brother, and his car gave up the ghost at freeway speed.  We were slumping to a stop while a chu-chunk sound played to the tune of “when johnny comes marching home again.”  I started laughing.  I remember when we did manage to actually undertake that road trip, and a map put us on something one would barely consider a road, with giant chunks missing and boulders in the way, in the rain in the middle of the night.  The gas tank had a “remaining miles” display which was ticking down from two to one to zero super slowly as we struggled up a gradual incline that never seemed to end.  Inappropriate jokes, stifled laughs.

We finally crested that hill as dawn broke and the remaining miles jumped up to ten, gravity helping us out.  I hope we all crest this hill together, and in the meantime, I hope my coping mechanisms don’t get too annoying.

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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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