Buying Child Porn on iTunes

The title of this post is an extremely tasteless joke, but it fits the foulness of my mood on this subject. In the last few months I’ve become aware that Apple has, through ignorance ineptitude or uncaring, allowed its iTunes gift cards to become a prime currency of the black market, which means most assuredly that people are using those things to pay for child pornography, weapons, drugs, prostitution, and soooo many stolen things. Not to mention the money laundering. So my question for Apple: If you’re allowing this to happen, why not sell the contraband directly through your corporate platform? And fuck y’all evil asses.

For any naive old folks in my readership, never do any business involving iTunes cards on any end. They’re employed in a number of cons these days. Heard about this deal where they try to get you to deposit a check for $3000, spend $2700 of it on iTunes cards which you return to them, and keep the $300. Do not bite.

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Signal Boost: Fuck Marvel Nazis

Via someone who calls herself “drachentöter” on tumblr, regarding the recent “nazis were meant to win WWII” reveal in some recent shit-ass Marvel comics by shit-ass nazi fetishist / “civility advocate” Nick Spencer:

it’s exhausting to keep seeing people talk about marvel’s hydra problem as an issue of them just being tone-deaf or obtuse or clueless, this “boys will be boys” mild eyeroll attitude to the entire conversation that so vastly downplays just how fucking evil these people are

do you honestly think that the CEO of marvel who is an outspoken trump supporter and pumped millions of money into the trump campaign doesn’t know what he’s doing by pushing the nazi faction into the limelight of his comics?

turning captain america, the literal symbol for american nationalism and patriotism, into a supporter of hydra and therefore a nazi, is not a writing accident. it is deliberate.

their latest little ~fuck up~ of asking comic stores to re-brand their stores and work uniforms with hydra logos, is not just a PR gaffe. it’s deliberate.

their continuous campaign to make nazis into a faction readers are supposed to find exciting, supposed to align themselves with, supposed to wear on their shirts like a uniform, is not an accident in the kind of political climate we’re in right now. it’s deliberate.

i don’t care that hydra is fictional, this isn’t like the empire in star wars or w/e where it’s just about some sort of vague fascism aesthetic. hydra were always explicitly n a z i s, since their very conception, have always been called nazis by marvel, have always stood for nazi values. and now marvel is trying to make them cool again. and it’s not a fucking accident.

stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. stop talking about this like it’s something that can be fixed with civil conversation and a stern finger wagging.

nazis and anyone who defends them don’t deserve that much consideration from anybody. just, yknow, a friendly psa from your neighbourhood romani jew.

Oh, did I spoil that plot for anyone here? Sorry. Guess you’ll just have to not spend money on the shit-ass comics now, or just enjoy your nazi wank a little less. Shucks.

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The Pain of Being a Man

A quote attributed to meme star Dr. Samuel Johnson by a Reverend Percival Stockdale, popularized by Hunter S. Thompson and often internet misattributed to Dr. Seuss: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Ugh, this paragraph was annoying to write.

What is the pain of being a man? Let’s automatically discard the old time sexism as irrelevant. The pain, then, of being human?

For me (surely different from Johnson), the pain is in that we are the first (and almost certainly last) species to arise on this planet with the ability to see what we’re doing wrong, see ourselves hurtling toward extinction, and be completely fucking powerless to do anything about it. It’s more depressing than the cosmically depressing things, such as life being meaningless and doomed by an indifferent Universe.

We should, with our powers of thought, be able to start a dynasty of thinking beings that lasts at least a few billion years into the future. As it stands? We’ll be lucky to escape the next few hundred years. Massively cheated by our collective incompetence. We are constitutionally incapable of escaping our animal ignorance and greed. The ability of some individuals to get past that? Somehow amounts to nothing, every fight, every time.

I’m of a mind to keep fighting for what’s right, even in the face of defeat. Don’t let the Cheetos of the world think we’re all on the same page, we’re all ready to dickride him into that bad night. To whatever extent we can make The Man sad, that’s the only satisfaction I’m expecting out of the fight.

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War, All Day Every Day, Until We Are Gone

Largest non-nuclear bomb ever dropped was shat out on Afghanistan, because Syria somehow. There is nothing we can possibly do to rise to the level of the threat against the human species that Trump and his fuckhead legions represent, which makes it a good time to consult your reasons for fighting in the face of certain defeat, like those French Resistance folks. More accurately, like the German resistance to Hitler. All those lovely dead people.

So war, all day every day, against those who kill thousands at a time for fun and profit, against those who poison the biosphere and condemn our species to earn pennies on their stocks, against those who exploit hatred of every class of “other” to make Amurrican jackoffs vote against their own interest in every fucking way, every fucking time. A war where maybe the second worst outcome is the extinction of our species.

I say second worst because I consider the eternal reich of racist sexist dominionist eugenicist queer-killers to be a skosh worse than death. Probably not going to last forever because it may already be too late to prevent global warming from killing us off in a thousand different ways. So I guess that’s going to be my point of hope for the moment.

Anyhow, long live the fighters. G’night!

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Giving You Pause About the ACLU

I remember Kurt Vonnegut cussing about the ACLU on TV once. He didn’t like that they protected the free speech of nazis. They have, in the past, invested their resources in defending the “peaceful assembly” of homicidal racists. I used to be a bit on the fence about that, but then, I’m white and I used to have the luxury of being more politically moderate, to see that bullshit as abstract rather than a personal attack. Now everything I hold dear is being targeted for destruction by the nazis in power, who were given more air time than ever should have been possible.

So good job ACLU for working against the travel ban. I find myself waiting for the other foot to drop, to find you’ve spent donated money helping someone like Yiannazilos. And I remain tired.

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More Tumblin’

Random things I’ve seen on tumblr. I’m on hiatus with all my tumblrz, but that’s just from reblogging, and the attendant chore of sorting / tagging content. But these should be shared anyhow. First some tweets which I encountered on tumbl because fuck having to see the comments on twitter:

tweet by ryanlcooper

ryanlcooper: “don’t have a strong take but worth remembering the whole point of fascism is to leverage liberal tolerance to dissolve the liberal state”

tweet by ryanlcooper

ryanlcooper: “fascists will be whining about free speech and being bullied right up to the point they overturn democracy and start the purges”

tweet by rosesurnow

rosesurnow: “I guess my favorite thing about the @BarackObama administration was being able to sleep at night.”

Then “fandomsandfeminism” on tumblr had this to say about why things were fucked even before we had fascism looming this large:

Every human being inherently deserves safe food, clean water, and adequate medical care.

The greatest moral failure of capitalism is that it turned these necessities into commodities.

The greatest moral failure of capitalists is finding ways to justify withholding what we need to live while it is in abundance for the sake of profit.

Nothing to add to that.

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Doing One’s Part

If I missed a day of work I’d be fired at this point, so rather than join the protest, I spent the day’s wages on donations to people. I was going to donate to an org but had trouble making indiegogo work on my computer, and one of the people I was going to donate to I couldn’t figure out how to make a one time donation. So anyhow, my hot 80 bucks got spread around mostly at The Orbit. Now I’m gonna buy a “Make Racists Afraid Again” hat and call it a night. >_< -

Not MLK, but Relevant

Engraved Langston Hughes quote at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

“You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
from the ku klux klan…
Cause everything that hitler
And mussolini do,
Negroes get the same
Treatment from you…
I ask you this question
Cause I want to know
How long I got to fight
BOTH HITLER-AND JIM CROW.”
-Langston Hughes,
“Beaumont to Detroit: 1943”

Still fighting.
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Dem Complacency About Racism Caused This

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. If Democrats protected the voting rights of people of color with an appropriate sense of urgency and importance, we probably wouldn’t be in this crisis. The average dem voter couldn’t have done shit about that; it’s all we can do to work for a living and survive this blasted libertarian hellscape nation. But strategists, movers, shakers, butts in office: they could have done a lot more, should have seen the danger a lot more clearly. I just hope in some tiny but still tragically unrealistic way that they’ll learn the right lessons off this shituation. Odds are, we’ll just get another round of smug “whaddyagonnados” and capitulation and rightward slide.

The media is always on the leading edge of AmeriKKKa’s stampede into hell tho. Dems got nothing on CNN & friends. As an anonymous commenter on yoisthisracist said,

“Even broadcast media is afraid to use the word ‘racist’ and is 100% more likely to come down on someone for correctly accusing someone of racism than for being racist.”

It’s true, isn’t it? How fucked are we? Especially those more darkly complected than myself. But still, us honkeys too. The white supremacist voting bloc in this country has proven so many times over that they will consign us all to begging the billionaires for moldy poison scraps if it means some brown people will be disallowed from the begging party. I try to scrupulously tag my posts, but kinda feel like tagging my whole existence with “wake me when the world is over.”

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Though Pepe’s meme is usually in the hands of hate criminals, in hateless incarnations, I can dig.  Here we see the sad Pepe in a very brief animation…

Two things:

I had this foolish schedule with only an eight hour gap between two eight hour shifts, and rather than monkey with buses to get ten minutes of sleep at home, thought I’d be clever and sleep in the break room.  I barely slept and ended up super sweaty and vile.  I felt so gross it killed me.  Plus just working that shift wrecked me even worse than the job usually does.

I’m in this state that is hardly a relief from the quasi-depression I’d gotten into from long underemployment.  I put myself through pain and stress all day for a reward that seems inadequate and a million years away.  My first paycheck is in about four days, it feels further away.  Feels like I’m hurting myself for nothing but self-loathing, a punishment for inadequately providing for my loved ones for years.  I do my customer service game face as much as possible, but it’s a thin mask on a zombied out pile of agonized cellz.  Seems to fool about 65% of people.

Thing two, being around humans means sexism, racism, misogyny, fatphobia, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia.  If you’re clued into that shit, you know why anyone would want a safe place from it all.  It is shot through so many of our conversations and ways of relating to each other.  Like, in any work environment, you’re going to have one or more guys whose interactions with women are all creepy as hell.  Maybe for whatever reason the ladies are sorta OK with it or front as such, but it doesn’t make it less grody to see a fiftyish dude smiling on young ladies over everyone else.

Then there’s like a third of all lady conversations that seem to come back to weight, with a lot of self-loathing and popular delusions and eating disorder talk.  Then there’s the really disgusting fuckers – the ones with minds so full of hate they need to be shitting on someone to feel right.  Some are macho men, some are ladied-out ladies, but they’re usually awash in cisheteronormativity, have to treat the existence of non-cishet people as a joke in and of itself, act like LGBTQIA people are repulsive, when it’s the brains on these creeps that are the most disgusting thing in the room.

And all this stuff is low-key and banal and common enough that I’ll look like the unreasonable terrible nogoodnik for reporting it.  What could that evil liberal PC police fucker’s problem be?  Does he just hate America?  Hate fun?  I dunno.  Maybe.  Our society as it now exists is fucking unacceptable.  Change it please.  We shouldn’t spend so much of our time hurting each other, regardless of whether or not we recognize that’s what we’re doing.

Oh, also, I saw a gaggle of young skinny white dudes with one wearing a trump hat backwards.  And I didn’t even stop to crush them into bone meal.  I’m really being spectacularly well behaved lately.  The man should throw me a fuckin’ bone already.