Some Lies Should Be Jailing Offenses

The laws of the USA are profoundly generous to liars and con artists.  I don’t know from legal history, but some court said there could be “common sense” limitations on freedom of speech, like “no shouting fire in a crowded theater.”  I could google that easily enough but whatever.  I bring this up because the problem is not alerting people to fire, it’s unnecessarily causing a stampede when there is no fire.  The problem is the lie.

What do you charge that liar with?  Reckless endangerment?  Malicious mischief?  Anyone who has ever lied about covid for political or financial gain should have spent time in handcuffs.  Of course, a creepy enough liar can believe almost any lie they tell, at which point, is it a lie?  That would be a common defense if we ever arrested people for that shit.  “What?  I really believe the vaccine helps them control you with the 5g.  Prove I don’t believe it.”  I don’t know how to deal with the actual prosecution of such cases.

But there are no such cases in the first place, no consequences for telling world-ruining lies, literally strangling a million people to painful miserable death with your flaming bullshit.  Those lies lead to lies lead to lies, a circular firing squad of fascist dreamers creating a world of illusion.  And now we have honest, earnest true believers in these lies.  People who believe in antivaxxing like they believe in jeezis.

In my day job I hear their stories.  One woman had a health problem blood clottish and blamed the vaccine.  One man’s wife took the shot and died from a stroke, perfect health before that he says.  She took the shot and he didn’t.  His faith affirmed, he will one day have a chance to lay in a hospital for a month with his body ravaged in unimaginable ways, his lung’s function replaced with machinery while they run out the clock, if that hospital doesn’t have to triage his ass straight to hell.

Because this lie was sold with conservative cultural identity, most of the victims are fascists, and I can’t feel too bad for them.  Lest we forget,

But it isn’t only fascists that buy these lies.  Mainstream anybodies can be swept up in memes and swindles, and they are – great swathes of them.  I don’t know the numbers but I do know a lot of people in this fairly urban part of a blue state are complete rubes about this shit.  People I know, people I’ve known.  They’re at a risk of death and at a risk of killing people they care about, not to mention all the people they don’t know or care about.

This could have been stopped by aggressive laws against demonstrably dangerous lies.  But politicians on both sides of the aisle, plus the corporate world (and all the incestuous crossover between the two) benefit from dangerous lies just often enough that they don’t want to take that tool off the table.  Freedom of speech is freedom to lie.  Any policies we currently have against that are defanged or shot full of loopholes that are barreled through by fuckers in monster truck convoys from sea to shining sea.

I’d just love to see people like the pink-faced sack of shit in that picture purse their lips and wonder – will this be the one that sends me to the penitentiary?  Please.

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Got No Memes

I want to do something for International Down With Cis Day, but ideas fail me.  Every year since I started at FtB has gotten materially worse for trans rights and the well-being and safety of trans lives.  I hold the shitbird governor of Texas as especially emblematic of the whole situation – blatantly using open bigotry to score political points, bible bashing while using rhetoric generously provided by terfs, pushing for the worst anti-LGBT policies this side of China or Iran.

So I think, meme his ass.  Political cartoon like this was 1922.  But nothing comes to mind except depictions of him on the receiving end of terrible violence – you know, madame guillotine putting in an appearance, somebody setting him on fire and kicking him off a cliff, etc.  Not funny, not a good look.

Hm…

https://www.google.com/search?q=respect+existence+or+expect+resistance+trans

Not bad, but still feels wildly inadequate to the struggle right now.  We’ll see what we’ll see.

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I Stopped Reading FtB

Nobody in my immediate life is affected in any way by abortion bans.  We don’t have the equipment for pregnancy or it doesn’t work – not a functional uterus in sight.  And yet somehow reading about the “kill the doctors and the patients” anti-abortion bill from Texas was the final straw for me being able to follow news.  I just can’t handle it anymore.  The most cogent response I have to that is bargling death threats.

“What can men do against such reckless hate?” asked King Theo in nerdwad movie.  To the people capable of engaging with these fights, I say “Long live the fighters” (from different nerdwad movie).  Good job, people.  You’ll always have my votes and other support as possible.  Right now, I can’t handle reading about that or anything else wrong with the world.  It’s gotten too stressful again.

I don’t follow political tumblrs though I catch dribs and drabs of politics on there.  On FtB there’s always a blog on top of the newest fuckshit, and as long as I have a sidebar of “Recent Articles on FtB” I’m going to compulsively read all of them until blood shoots out of my ears.  I blocked that element in my browser, and I likewise I left the FtB discord for the same reason.

That also means I’m missing any non-stressful news or cheeky posts.  If anyone sees anything fun elsewhere on FtB don’t link me to it, but give me the short version in the comments here, if you’ve got a moment.  I don’t want to look directly at the articles and see the titles of the “Previous” and “Next” ones.  And thanks.

As for my own posts, I’ll continue the little random things I’ve been doing, though without news input, it will be less topical.  Also less despairing and angry!  So that’s something to look forward to.

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Hey Conservatives

Lately you’ve been trying to kill people a little harder than usual – kill people who get abortions, drive trans people to suicide, killing the old and the infirm with covid, torturing refugees and stealing and raping their children, legalize killing protestors – as long as it isn’t your own nazi buddies…  Anyway, I’m just thinking, anyone who is so horny on killing should absolutely be horny on being killed.  If you push this stuff but don’t want to be murdered, you’re being hypocrites.  I don’t even need this to be an even split.  Let’s say for every five oppressed people you kill, I wanna see one of your figureheads take their face apart on national television with their weapon of choice.  Get on it, motherfuckers, or I don’t know, stop being such homicidal fascists for TEN FUCKING MINUTES PLEASE.

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Don’t Be a Coward

It’s hard to judge what a reasonable level of fear is in reaction to shitty events, and there are plenty of extremely shitty events going on in the world right now.  (Thanks, fascists!  Please eat shit and die at your earliest convenience.)  That said, there are a loooot of people on the internet right now stoking panic.  Like Putin makes a lazy threat about hacking our shit and tweets and subreddits explode, telling you to run for the hills immediately lest you fall victim to supply chain banditos.

Harden the fuck up, you ridiculous cowards.  You make it harder for people to judge what that reasonable level of fear is, by ratcheting every little thing up to “cannibal holocaust.”  You spread anxiety and dread and turn stomachs and ruin people’s days.  The way you talk, I imagine you trembling like little chihuahuas with urine running down your thighs as you clack out your terrified tweets.  Yeah, especially those of you with guns.

Do you live in America?  Are you not a member of an oppressed minority at the moment?  (No, xtians don’t count.)  You’re going to be fine.  Some bad stuff will happen.  Wildfires burning up your cabins, rising tides taking out your timeshares.  But compared to people in Ukraine, or Russia, or anywhere near the Equator?  Your life is going to be a cakewalk – at least until you’re old and infirm enough to be considered disposable by republicans.  Drink in the freedom, manbabies.  Calm the fuck down.

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Last Climate Doompost

I have a bad time thinking about climate change, clearly.  Maybe that’s something I have in common with the blitherers who oppose action on it?  Aside from love of pounds and pence, who knows what goes on in their unthinkable heads?  Anyway, I intend to stop posting about it for the foreseeable.  I expressed my main thoughts about it on this blog and in the FtB podcast on the subject, that should be enough.

But I want to leave one last prediction for the way this is going to play out, have this on record.  There is going to be a holocaust heat wave at some point somewhere in the tropics.  It could happen as soon as this summer, or maybe ten or more years from now, but it most assuredly will happen.  There will be a heat wave so severe that literally millions of people will die within days.  There will be mass graves, mountains of bodies in this incident.

I say this with confidence because where I live we, just last year, had a heat wave that smoked all previous records by more than ten degrees.  A few small towns were disintegrated by wildfires so fast people barely had time to escape – certainly no time to pack.  Hundreds of people died.  This is the Pacific Northwest of North America, as moderate of a climate as exists anywhere in the world.  What happens when a similar heatwave hits Delhi?  Hyderabad?  Jakarta?  Jerusalem?

That’s my prediction.  There was a major volcanic eruption this year and sometimes that cools the global temperature for a while, so we may have some reprieve on this.  That’s time to prepare, to prevent deaths, but will it happen?  It sure as fuck isn’t happening in Louisiana or Florida.  Now that you’ve heard the prediction, hear my request, my call to action.  Because this will not be prevented, due to greed and politics, it is a request for what you should do once those mass graves show up in your news feed.

If you are in the company of anyone who spouts off denialist or petrol-defending rhetoric after that happens, I want you to do them violence.  At very least slap them hard, knock them upside the head.  Preferably knock out one of their teeth, and I wouldn’t be disappointed to hear if you stabbed them in the gut.  Spit on them.  Curse them.  Let them know what they’ve done and that this particular holocaust is the end of the line for tolerance of their worldview.

If there is one thing that will tilt majority opinion on the globe in favor of radical action, it’s another holocaust.  It’s gotta be.  I know it won’t convince everyone but it has to be enough to convince a majority of those in power.  Right?  Right?  Maybe one more thing to say.  FUCK YOU, JOE BIDEN.  You fucking ignorant rich trash.  You murderous greedlord.  You fucking waste of space.  I hope your death is painful.  I hope you hate every second of it.

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No Win

Content Warning: Despairing Rhetoric re: Politics, COVID, Environmentalism.

Fighting antivax beliefs, and indeed reactionary thought as a whole, feels like dealing with an insurgency.  There is just no good solution at this point.  (Government crackdown on facebook’s fascist bullshit algorithms in 2015 might have helped, but there’s no political will to make that happen even now.)  You’ll never win the hearts and minds of people deluded into feeling like brave defenders of an invaded homeland, any effort to force compliance will just lead to more terrorist reprisal.  We’ve already had a taste of that, in destruction of medicine, in obstruction of vax sites, and in many cases of physical assault all across the country.

Given all that, how does one adjust to this new world of biological gods and ideological monsters?  Knowing what endemic COVID looks like will be a good start for that discussion.  Funny to think if I live to my seventies or nineties I could be killed slowly and painfully, asphyxiated and brain damaged by a disease that could have been strangled in its infancy two years ago.  By funny, I mean all rethuglican fucks please eat shit and die ASAP, it’s the least you can do for us.

No, no, Satan.  Calm down.  These are human beings, this is humanity.  The same humanity that supports Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro, that has LGBT Jamaicans assaulted every day, living in vacant lots and scrounging garbage to eat, that packs megachurch pews to fund murderous hate around the globe, that scapegoats anybody and everybody to pursue short-term political and financial gain while ensuring the extinction of your species.  You have no choice but to live with these people, or to die.  They are here to stay, for as long as humanity continues to exist.

I don’t know.  We can just keep having these conversations, every day until we die.  Very tiring.

 

 

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The Fvckpile

Capitalism as practiced in most of the world – but especially the USA – revolves around one principle: I got mine, Jack, Fuck everyone else.  The future doesn’t exist, consequences don’t exist.  And as we see in fuckos like Biden, when the consequences do come home to roost?  It ain’t as bad as it looks, it wasn’t my individual fault specifically, it’s somebody else’s bad, somebody else’s duty, somebody else’s problem.  If he saw things clearly and accurately, if he wasn’t huffing the statue of liberty’s ass vapors, he’d know that by being rich he has no small amount of personal liability for it, and as president every moment that he doesn’t exercise his massive executive powers to fight AGW, he’s taking on much much more personal fault for the destruction of life as we know it.  He’d be wracked by grief, but spending all his waking effort to make right what has transpired on his watch.

I’m not going to write this story because it’s too bleak to focus on for the length of time required, but take in the short version, if you will.

Upper middle class family.  Dad’s a contractor, mom’s in publishing, they own their own home.  They have  more than a million in assets, but much less available for day to day things.  Nonetheless, a life of comfort.  The only worries they have are ones they brought on themselves by keeping up with the Joneses.  The kids all grow up to be similarly successful, but have fewer assets.  Their mortgages are less generous, housing prices massively higher, but still.  Not shabby.

One of the kids breaks the mold.  He’s a stand-up comedian, turned actor and screenwriter.  He gets a few hot breaks and is pulling royalties off of some kids movies he co-wrote, getting character actor parts with minimal effort, bringing in that cheese.  He is a millionaire with no quibbles – Where his parents had over a million in assets, he has more than a million in the bank.

You can’t expect that to last forever, kid.  You’re gonna be old and wanting the kind of loot that lets you pay for black market organs someday.  So how do you get it?  Pay a money guy, don’t ask questions.  It doesn’t matter what he does to increase your wealth – he just says that he can and has a track record of measurably succeeding.  You have proof it isn’t a ponzi scheme.

Money guy says all the B list celebs are getting theirs from real estate.  Not houses anymore.  It’s all about apartments.  All you have to do, comedian, is give me the money – and I’ll give you a reliable return every day for the rest of your life.  Money guy pools money from various Hollywood types to start a “property management company” that buys up apartment buildings around the country.  Now comedian has a partial stake in apartments from Florida to Oregon.

The apartments are any cheap pile of moldy lumber, with more effort put into faking a good look for the exteriors than any structural or maintenance issues.  They look alright from a distance but once you get in the door you realize it’s all falling apart.  PropertyCo still jacks the price up every year until people are forced to move into still cheaper places – owned by companies like PropertyCo.

Since these apartments are businesses designed not to deliver an essential service but instead to rob poor people blind, moneymaking schemes are added to moneymaking schemes.  Require pet rent, renters insurance, parking rent, etc.  Cut deals with shady insurance companies that will give you a slice if you coerce your customers into using them, or better yet toss together your own insurance company based out of a server in a Connecticut basement.  Have the price for units so high that people can only afford them by having more adults in a single unit than they were designed for, meaning more cars necessary for commuting than the parking lots were designed for, so that in desperation people who work late park in fire lanes and get their cars towed – by tow companies you have other shady deals with.

Inevitably a certain amount of people can’t afford to stay or pay timely due to losing work (possibly by having their only ride to work held hostage for thousands of dollars) or other bad luck, and they get evicted.  You have debt you can sell to a collection company.   It’s basically impossible to lose money as a property management company.

Some sixty year old lady with poor health is among the evicted and she manages to beg her way into the household of one of her children.  At her new residence she starts receiving harassment from a collection agency.  Story cuts to Hyderabad India where a call center full of crash course English speakers follow their scripts to hound people to desperation and suicide, while their company compounds interest on the debt every time somebody sneezes.

How do you convince a decent human to be a collections agent?  It probably helps to hire as many violently twisted people as possible, but no way there are enough people like that in a given community to comprise the entire staff of a given call center.  I imagine there’s some indoctrination session, like, “These are scum, criminals who don’t pay their dues.  They deserve all the scorn you can muster.”

Story follows a guy who took the job.  It paid better than anything else he could find and he needs it because rent is going through the roof, but he senses something wrong, messed up.  Still, he powers through it.  One day that he has inflicted exceptional cruelty upon the “clients,” he snaps out of it, like coming out of a dream.  He has become a horrible person and blames the business.  He burns the place down.

The debt collection agency gathers its insurance and ponders options.  Hey, the corrupt government has made it very easy to do organized crime against targets overseas, you have experience running a call center, just start over with an explicitly criminal call center.  Now the indoctrination is a little different.  “Americans are all greedy fat cats ruining the world for fun and profit, their old folks and disabled people have money but are too stupid to hold it.  Tell them you’re calling from a government agency and they’ll be in big trouble unless they give you their social security numbers, mother’s maiden name, bank account info…”

The new call center cuts deals with US telecoms to acquire thousands of US local phone numbers, makes it look like their calls are coming from within the US, and hits the phone book.  They dial everyone, but whenever they have a hint somebody might be old or disabled?  They hit them ten times as hard, calling round the clock, trying to scare someone into slipping up.

They call the comedian’s mom and pop, get enough info to run massive fraud on them.  Because of their assets they have higher credit limits than most of the call center’s victims and the scale of loss is immense.  Well, you know, even modestly rich USians get enough deference from financial institutions they could probably get out from under the damage, but it’s scary to get scammed like that.  Mom and pop spend the rest of their lives not answering phones, paranoid and scared.

It’s the circle of life under capitalism.  And notice I didn’t even invoke the evil of billionaires, easily the most destructive class in human history, with more resources than god emperors.  I kept the story down to millionaires at the worst.  Money chases money chases money, until the people who have the least are hounded into the grave.  And even people with resources know on some level that vultures are nipping at their heels.  They’ll blame taxes and the government, but it’s the whole sick-ass world.

This property company thing is real.  Mid-tier celebs from Fox News talking heads to liberal Hollywood types are all making their loot from stuff like this now.  I’d say, might be cool if somebody created a property company whose selling point was doing business ethically – minimizing the travail of tenants, not doing business with collection agencies, etc.  But if somebody did come up with that as a sales pitch for the millionaire investors?  It would be nothing but a snowjob and the apartments would still be horrid slums.

Anyway, smash the system, down with everything.  I’m gonna go back to sleep for a while.

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Disparity in Politically Motivated Murder

Some politically left people are hard line against killing anyone for any reason, especially in Europe these days.  Some of those make allowances for self-defense or waging defensive war or whatever.  These attitudes are very much lacking in the USA.  We are all about the murder.  The states that do manage to abolish the death penalty often find that reversed by the vagaries of democracy within a few years.  I can’t speak for Canada, but it seems like they also might be more into murder than, say, Germany is these days.  Don’t know about other countries either.

But even with our comparatively bloodthirsty attitudes, with the tall talk we make about willingness to pull the trigger on those we regard as evil, where are the bodies?  US lefties have an incredibly meager body count to our name, compared to right wingers.  I sit here and say, yes, I will proudly and easily kill nazi sumbitches, put a knife in their soulless faces.  I can think that, I can say that, I can dream about it.  But at the end of the day, the vast majority of politically motivated violence comes from right wingers.

I have no problem attributing that to inherent goodness.  When you were a little rough with an animal or a sibling, and mommy rebuked you for it, did you feel bad?  Did you feel like you’d been justly reprimanded, that you would do what you could in life, from that day forward, to not be a bad person?  I have no problem saying that is a good thing.  Good people should not want to hurt people, let alone kill them.  The extent to which the evils of white supremacists make me want to shred their bodies with nail bombs or just break their faces?  Is the extent to which they have made me a worse person than I’d otherwise be.

And could I do those things?  If the scumbags get the war they’ve been gagging for since 1860, let’s hope that we all can do what needs to be done – and with gusto, why not?  But in these times of peace, whatever turmoil is happening, the people generating corpses right now are right wingers.  Might be that changes at some point, but I think those particular numbers will always be on their side.

They valorize cruelty.  They despise compassion.  This informs much of what they do and say in life.  Indeed, a common reason for people born into red states to become politically opposed to their own culture is from suffering the cruelty they inflict on their own.  If I saw a man in pain, mortal terror in his eyes, I might take my knee off his neck.  But white supremacists don’t do that.  Right wingers don’t do that.  They want to hurt and to kill.

I can say I’d kill every last Rittenhouse with a smile on my face and piss on their corpses, but at the end of the day, would I?  The numbers suggest that we just aren’t like that, and whatever violence is ultimately necessary to do in the defense of goodness and humanity, the fact it isn’t our first recourse is surely directly connected to our own goodness and humanity – whatever we have left of that – and it might be a good thing.

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There’s a separate topic that came out of the discussion that spawned this post.  Is guns bad?  I don’t like them.  I have liked them in cinema an awful lot, but the reality is unpleasant.  Have you ever had a suicidal or homicidal thought, however fleeting, in your life?  How should you then feel about having a “make person instantly die” button in your fucking hand?  Like standing at the edge of a cliff with somebody.  I don’t like how it feels.  If you can’t dig my position, eat shit.  Step on up for a ban.  I’m generous with those.

Or you can listen to my follow up statement.

If you’re somebody who has never felt like I feel, or who managed to suppress that long enough to become comfortable with firearms, and you use them responsibly?  I have no problem with that, or even with saying that it is possible for you to be a good person.  I’m not saying that comfort with guns inherently makes you a bad person.  I personally believe no private citizen should ever be legally allowed to have an assault weapon, will side-eye the fuck out of you if you say otherwise, but that’s a difference of opinion I’m willing to hold without thinking of you automatically as a bad person.

But you have to admit, it’s easier for bad people to get cozy with killing machines, which again, might have something to do with the great disparity between murders by fascists and murders by their opposition.  I hope you won’t take offense to the statement of some plain facts here, and will spot me a roscoe when the soup goes down, comrade.  Thank you.

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Fuccing Breakthru Cases

I have an online acquaintance I don’t know very well.  She’s been bitching about shitty family risking covid constantly – including a lady whose children have no father because of it.  My acquaintance got vaccinated and… currently has covid, surely from one of those family members.  Meeting at my workplace a week ago.  Guy says “I know three people fully vaxxed still that got covid,” boss says, “I keep hearing that at these meetings.”

Any luck and my acquaintance won’t so much as lose her sense of taste, though she’s about as old as me and it makes her more likely than the babes to come off of this scathed.  I told her I wouldn’t blame her for pistolwhipping a family member’s teeth out.  Motherfuckers got to know their limitations.

How are your vaxxed up people doing?

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