Perspective and Nazis

Content Warnings: Anti-semitism, Mass murder, Racist terrorism.

A creepy antisemite killed some people the other day, in the usual way. It was at a synagogue during a religious occasion. According to tumblr user prismatic-bell:

“You know, the news is really sheltering gentiles from the full horror of what happened this morning when they keep using the phrase “Brit Milah.” Yes, that’s what was happening in the synagogue this morning, but do you know what it is?

It’s a baby naming.

Every bit as important as a christening or first birthday.

That is what this shooter opened fire on. A baby naming with people praying for that baby’s health and happiness and future.”


And what did Robert Bowers, the mass murderer have to say about the baby-blessing business?

“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.

I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.

Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

There’s a little bit of unexplained lingo in the terrorist’s tweet (or was it a “gab”?)  HIAS is an organization that helps immigrants, originally dedicated to helping jewish people escape pogroms and the like, now helping refugees more broadly. Nazi conspiracies have it that all those immigrants from south of the border are hot to kill the white man and take his women.

To the terrorist, those baby blessers were inhuman wizards, summoning an army of orcs to take out the magical people of light. Where is the evidence that refugees kill people? Recently Faux News helped Cheeto Hitler through a rough week by hyping a story about a young lady murdered by a shitty boyfriend who happened to be an immigrant.

No haps from them that week about how often white men – especially veterans god bless the troops – murder the ladies in their lives.  It paints a picture for people like our nazi terrorist du jour, this lopsided reportage, in combination with less accountable news sources on facebook publishing flat-out lies.

Anti-semitism is baked into Western civilization, like, oh, say, blood in a loaf of bread. As something of a cultural outsider – a neglected destitute child of two mentally ill black sheep – I missed the memo that I’m supposed to hate jewish people. But because of these centuries of persecution, wild folklore, pogroms, general shittiness in christendom, it’s really easy for many culturally christian people to buy these murderous lies about jewish ethnic groups.

I suspect the people in our fuhrer’s clique that are capable of being semi-thoughtful would really rather not have anti-semites be their main supporters. To them, it’s about oppressing negroes, which is much more politically safe in the United Snakes.  But they can’t hit one target without causing splash damage to jewish people. They try to stoke anti-latin prejudice and nazis figure out a way to blame it on “The Jews.”

But leaving aside the reason he believed jewish people were murdering whitey, he seemed quite convinced of it.  And if you care about a group of people who are being murdered, wouldn’t you want to go to bat for them?  I see jewish people actually being murdered, and could come back with a very similar train of thought to this creep:

“Nazis like to kill innocent people.  I can’t sit by and watch my fellow humans being slaughtered.  Fuck trying to look socially acceptable, fuck my personal safety, I’m gonna whack those fools.”

That makes perspective the main difference between this terrorist and me at my worst.  I don’t like that.  And that perspective makes me think maybe I should try to be more peaceful in life, in the struggle, despite the violent oppression of our times.  I don’t like that either.

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Thinking about the Cyberpunk Apocalypse

CW: another grim /apocalyptic one, avoid as required

We’re clearly living in a cyberpunk era. Enough could be said on that to fill a book, but I’m more likely to turn it into a blog post, if anything. Marx and many others had ideas about the stages of history, the progress of civilization. I don’t know how well any of those hypotheses have played out, but from our vantage point now, the current and next stages of civilization are easy to see: Cyberpunk Dystopia, and collapse into Post Apocalypse. I just want to jot down this thought before I forget it, for future reference. One recurring theme of cyberpunk fiction was an inversion of what we’re going to see.

To thinkers back then, cyberspace was a sad fake realm of delusions that ultimately perpetuated human woe. While the internet has helped promote hate crimes and establish fascism in our time, that’s a case of a good thing being manipulated to evil ends. Much like how con artists exploit positive social instincts of trust and enthusiasm to rob people, I don’t think that reflects negatively on thing that was exploited.

Cyberspace is a good thing. We’re able to come together and make good things happen like never before, enrich each other’s lives, pool human knowledge and creativity and compassion. Selling out net neutrality, allowing monopolies for the mega-rich, these are killing the experience by tiny cuts.

And ultimately, it’s all going away. The infrastructure will collapse and we’ll lose this. For some people, that’s already the case. Rural areas in the USA already have garbage for service. Morpheus’s ideal – everyone walking away from the illusion to embrace the desert of the real? It’s not going to edify or elevate us in any way, but we’ll still have to experience it.

The collapse of the internet will be a good defining bound between the Cyberpunk and Post Apocalypse eras. And it’ll just be another signpost on the slide into extinction.
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Inktober 2018 Drop

I’ve just got the first 8 days. I’m not going to put a proper visual caption on these. They’re OK for a bit of visual distraction if you can see, but they just aren’t worth the effort to describe. It’s so much digital ephemera. For this (my first) Inktober, I’m combining the Monsters & Mythology prompts plus the Official Prompts.

Going with the spirit of Inktober I didn’t allow myself much digital work. For example, I allowed myself no additional strokes or distortion / warping. I don’t have every color in the universe, pen-wise, so I did allow myself subtle use of adjusting contrast, hue, saturation, brightness.

You can still tell I did the under-drawing for all of these with a yellow sharpie, so I couldn’t erase it. I think that kinda stuff looks fun in a drawing but I know some people hate it, so sorry about that.

Allow me to use this opportunity to call out the official Inktober writers for being cheesy bastids, turning the phrase “roasted chicken“ into two separate prompts and using another to complain this job makes them “exhausted.” Proceeding thus,
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Right Wing Projection Wave

Content Warning: Wearying Endless Hope-Destroying Fascist Evil, Apocalyptic Crapola. “wontbehere4long” don’t read this. You’re too high strung, kid.

Projection is a phenomenon in psychology whereby a person protects themselves from awareness of their own flaws by accusing someone else of having said flaws. I’m not the racist, that guy is! Sadly, this is so widespread among right wingers that one could make a serious case that it’s a defining feature of the motherfuckers.

Dave Futrelle at We Hunted The Mammoth has been facing a fucknado of fascist irony victims, defending their most transparent act of projection to date: the spreading of the “NPC meme.” Let me see if I can break down the background of this situation to a simple timeline:

In video games, non-player characters are the guys you interact with that have just a few pre-programmed things to say and never meaningfully change.

Random fucklord says he sees people he doesn’t like as NPCs, thoughtless and soulless.

Projecting fucklords who speak in “kek” and “cuck” notice that social justice advocates use some jargon and assume it’s the same sort of group-affirming dog barks that they use.

Projecting fucklords adopt random fucklord’s meme and promote it.

As they always fucking do, they form a massive wall of hive-minded tools bargling at decent people about how we’re mindles soulless conformists.

They do this kind of shit all the time. Any given anti-feminist argument, for one small example, is repeated VERBATIM by forty thousand fucklords who somehow feel like they came up with the idea.

The reason that it’s ironic this time? The projection is an accusation of conformity and mindlessness.

Now, despite this being a fresh incident with that minty taste of a new twist, why does this feel instantly wearying and soul crushing? I didn’t get it, but then I reflected. Right wingers always do this shit. Fucking always. “You want to take away our religious freedom!” “You want to control our lives!” “Atheism is the real dogma!” “You want to censor us!” “You hate freedom!”

This last couple of weeks has been hard as fuck. For me, the worse part of it was the newest report on climate change. Like the scientists sounding alarms since the fucking industrial era began, I’m feeling that Cassandra Complex. It’s worse now because we’re in the 11th hour and there actually is nothing anyone can do to stop the hell that’s coming. It’s about mitigation and we can’t even get the demons in power to do anything about that.

Humanity is so consistently foolish and venal that we’re destroying ourselves and taking down most of the biosphere with us, when we have the ability to do better. It’s just that grain of thoughtfulness and compassion is always overwhelmed by fear and loathing.

Because white right wing cattle vote with their spleen, we’re down to hoping we can shape the apocalypse instead of preventing it. Will it be Mad Max or 1984? A little of both, but an increasingly safe bet there’s no humans left on the other side of it.

And these chucklefucks are jeering and capering while the ship goes down. Thanks guys. You wanted to “pwn the libs”? You got me. I’m “pwn’d.” Not in the sense I’ve come to realize you are the super geniuses who were right all along. No, I’m owned in the sense that I understand you’ve won, and I feel bad about it. And the “I told you so” we’ll get as we all die? Doesn’t make me feel better about it.

Fuck, y’all are so pig ignorant and compulsively projecting, you’ll figure out how to blame us for that too.

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Blue Wave Ain’t Gonna Happen

I’m calling it now with reasonable certainty. Lots of people would vote if they could, but they can’t, so they can’t help. Meanwhile, the roaring heyday AmeriKKKan fascism is enjoying at the moment? Very empowering. Tons of the wrong people are going to vote – including people who hadn’t even bothered to vote their fuhrer in. Baby nazis who stayed home during the last election because they felt hopeless to affect it until the upset? Or who couldn’t vote then but can now because they’re 18? This beer with kavanaugh thing. This is their time, my people.

Look to Brasil. It’s always rough but it is diving straight into neofascist hell right now. They’re fucked even worse than we are – and we are pretty damn fucked. Anyhow, look to places like Brasil, like Spain under Franco. Capitalist democracy has handed some of the most populace countries in our hemisphere to pure evil, and the only progress we’re going to make is by fighting every bloody inch, breaking laws, risking our lives.

We might have a few democrats flip a few seats, but it’s not going to be what they hope for, what we need. I’m not saying don’t vote. Vote, knowing you’re going to lose. What I’m saying is be emotionally prepared to suffer and fight every day and still lose everything, because that is what being a good person in a fascist state looks like.

Long live the fighters.
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Dookie Speculation

To further my reputation as the most eminent thinker on this blog collective, I humbly submit the following informal hypotheses. Content warning: feces, of course.

Random thoughts from last night. Old folks sometimes have terrible dookie stink. It’s kinda sickly sweet garbagey like a dumpster of rotting fruit. Unfortunate.

That’s me in just a few years, so I wonder. Why? And I came up with two possible answers, which could be tested by a scientist with the facilities and inclination. (Or maybe the answer is already known? Whatever, I finish my thoughts.)

The Fresh Trash Hypothesis: The aged digestive system cannot handle food as effectively, meaning the stool has more under-digested components. They smell stronger because they’re not as chemically burned up / denatured.

The Shitbarf Hypothesis: In honor of the prolific graffiti tagger of Seattle, Shitbarf… esquire? Anyhow, I think the gatekeeping of the digestive tract breaks down.

Fluids meant for the stomach end up in the esophagus or duodenum, those meant for the duodenum end up in the small intestine, etc. So basically, old folks could be passing some amount of fresh bile.

I am not googling the answer. Not curious enough yet. Maybe when I’m olda.

I just hope I never get like the person who stinkbombed the “Rapid Ride” bus when it first started in my town. For some reason, one of those busses ended up smelling hella rank, only becoming bearable several months later.

It smelled like one of those Europeans that used to eat mummies went on to become a mummy that was fed to a cruise ship on platters of norovirus shrimp, and the bus was used to ferry passengers to the hospital, with several dying en route.

Dookie. I don’t like it.

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Just Go Ahead Now

     

Some weeks ago, I was at work and the radio chanced to play “Two Princes” by Spin Doctors. I was in a silly mood and felt the kitsch, was amused by the thing as I went about my labors. Some time after that, I was at home, remembering the song and vaguely recalling the video. My judgment skewed by the afterglow of that moment, I looked it up on youtube.

At work I only heard a bit and at low volume. At home with headphones on, the band in front of me? Something else.

I didn’t last a minute. That song is pisschristing horribad. It is the Abyss, and when you gaze too long, it tips its hat and says “milady.” It shivered my fucking timbers, matey.

Since then, I occasionally have moments when I think about it. It’s tempting to view the song as emblematic of something terrible in the American character at the time.

Grunge was a thing, and it had lessons for the masses. People can’t subsist on music about dancing and fucking. There’s more to life than that, and sometimes it’s best expressed with unpleasant nonsense words and guitar feedback.

But some people took the wrong lessons from that, decided Seattle = cool, expensive coffee, big sweaters, shitty facial hair. Two Princes was the dawn of the Starbucks playlist.

That part of our culture is what I like to call NPR liberalism. It’s about being just progressive enough to feel good about yourself and refusing to look with any depth at the class war, racism, misogyny, and cisheterofascism underlying this whole shitshow.

NPR liberals aren’t always bad people. A lot of them are swell, just obnoxiously blind to important shit.

They give at the church but never look at what the church does with that money outside the congregation. No matter how many times you tell them, yes, your church really is exporting violent homophobia, they will forget that shit like a goldfish.

They’re the moms that misgender you constantly because they will never in their hearts acknowledge your identity. They’re contrite when caught, but will never change because their cutesy memories of how they saw you as a child? More important to them than your real mental and physical health as an adult.

They just can’t remember anything that isn’t somehow nice or cute or reassuring. The extent to which they can remember what the big bad republicans are up to is only the extent to which it can be put back in a box with a sassy soundbite, put on a mug, put on a sweater.

NPR liberals have faith in the “blue wave” and the forward trajectory of history. Just wait, you don’t have to be loud. Go with the flow, have fun.

Two Princes is like “Don’t Worry Be Happy” for white people, but eh, maybe Don’t Worry Be Happy was the Don’t Worry Be Happy for white people. I think Chuck D said something about that once.

So the song puts me in mind of that strain of thought in the USA, and of how prevalent it was in my high school, in media of the ’90s. The dualism of our country then was the liberal sense you should be nice to people, with the anti-PC-flavored chuckles from the bros on the other side. Dharma and Greg were walking hand in hand, apple pie, yellow ribbons and A-10 warthogs.

Because the NPR liberal is committed to making nice, they never offered any opposition to the advance of American fascism. The belly piercing girls and darwin fish boys from my school grew up to be the moms and dads telling you family is more important than politics when you get pissed at grandpa Bruce and baby Braden for chatting holocaust denialism at Thanksgiving.

It’s tempting to look at the dopey grin and scragglebeard on that dude, at the floppy flaps on his shitty hat, to hear the Walmart-friendly “alternative” hootenanny jam, and to see that as emblematic of the blind eye people turn to keep things nice, reassuring, simple, peaceful.

It’s tempting, but surely just overblown nonsense. Mental vomit in response to the overwhelming saccharine smell.

So if you want to call me baby, just go ahead now.

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