Total Anarchy and Can’t Nobody Stop Us

I want to devise a virusTo bring dire straits to your environmentCrush your corporations with a mild touchTrash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrusI want to make a super virusStrong enough to cause blackouts in every single metropolis’cause they don’t want to unify usSo fuck it total anarchy and can’t nobody stop us
-Del the Funky Homosapien, Virus, from Deltron 3030 (2000)

Do you have respect for the law?  Fucking why?  Some laws are good guidelines for being a good person, like no passing in a school zone, pay the taxes that fund social programs libraries roads etc.  But if it ain’t one of those laws?  Who could possibly give a shit, that’s worth listening to?

Do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want, however you can.  If the government says “penalties now,” well, fuck the government.  They have to catch you first.  Now.  Tall talk coming from a bitch that almost never commits crimes because I’m afraid I’ll get caught, but still.  I think part of the despair of living in a land where laws are unjust is the feeling you will be subject to those laws.  That isn’t always true, strictly speaking.

This is one of the great ways blue states can protect people from shitty federal decrees.  Commit to non-enforcement, like they did with marijuana.  There’s precedent for this.  But on a personal level, same thing.  Who’s going to bust you for shielding immigrants from ICE?  Anybody whose opinions you value?  Anybody you’ll feel so sad about disappointing?  Didn’t think so.

If you’re brave enough to risk the consequences, you can do all sorts of excellent things.  And there are places and situations in which getting busted is massively unlikely.  Try to arrest somebody for sodomy in Haight-Ashbury at this point in history, see how far that gets you.  Try to throw somebody in federal prison for jailbreaking their modem to prevent youtube ads, see how well that goes over with the public – assuming you could detect that they’d done that in the first place.

Part of the catastrophizing I’ve heard sounds like, “if it’s illegal to be me, i’ll just have to do what they say and stop existing.”  That is just weird, guys.  Another part is the idea there will be death camps for trans people, which is very unlikely for other reasons.  But even if some flavor of that happened, were you planning to save them the effort by offing yourself?  Were you planning to walk up the chute like a cow to a slaughterhouse?

Given how many people violate traffic laws every day on every road in the country, it’s hard to believe you’re all that passive and law-abiding.  It’s time for the “be gay, do crimes” slogan to be put into action.  Although you’re probably already driving too fast in school zones.  Not that crime.  The other one.  Yeah, you got it.

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funny video, useful information

couldn’t help it; had to post another one by zane golia.  i love this stuff because it isn’t mean.  you can watch this if you’re a jerk about guy fieri, but it’s even better if you have some affection for him and his persona.  like the frakes videos.  btw, if either of those dudes is a milkshake duck, don’t tell me.

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Hope Without Hope

How do you act without despair, when you’re too realistic to genuinely hope or think your actions will have an effect?  One route is Absurdism, which is a more specific philosophy than you might be aware, and is probably not for everyone.  However, it did help one person survive a hate movement of thousands, so could be worth looking into, if you’re curious.  It was, after all, born from resistance to the nazi occupation of France.  Unfortunately relevant once again today, and has been for a while.

Another way is to focus on your actions that do have an effect.  Yeah, they won’t save the world, won’t individually defeat the monstrosity of this movement, but your actions could save other people, could save yourself.  That matters.  You don’t have to be the world’s buffest antifa kickboxer to carve some good out of a grim world.

First up, do things you enjoy, that also move your mind.  Reading, listening to or creating music, making art, writing, playing video games.  Doesn’t matter as long as you take a little care to do it in a reasonably balanced way – don’t let it round a corner to becoming unhealthy.  Hard to imagine how it could happen with some of those items, but somebody would figure out how, lol.  Second, do the things you don’t want to do, but will be glad to see done, like washing your dishes and take out the trash.  Just do what you can to be OK.

Something I forgot to mention in the inaugural post of this expanded thesis is that my real reason for doing this is my growing awareness of people in my life and in my readership who are physically hurt by stress, sadness, anger.  The rest of this blog network, especially Pharyngula, is apiece with the deathscroll vibe of the leftosphere at large.  That isn’t healthy for anyone, but for a significant subset of people, it’s extremely harmful.  For you more than anyone, self-care, buddy.

If you’re doing well enough, see what you can do for others.  This can include animals and plants in your life, or if you got the sauce, people.  For my part, at the moment, these posts are as much as I can manage.  The feedback I’ve been getting tells me it’s a good thing.  I will get to the end of my supply sometime next week, but I will have done something worthwhile for a minute.

Water the cats, feed the plants, give to medical fundraisers, give to charities, talk to lonely people, try to soothe people who are worried or upset – whether it’s about politics or not.  Careful with helping people that it doesn’t blow up on you, of course.  Never know when a guy you smiled at in the Starbutts will turn into a stalker.  But take the risks you feel comfortable with.

When it comes to politics, the best thing you can do is help people overcome the hurdles that rethugs put between the righteous and a voting booth.  It’s relevant even now, with the next elections a ways off.  In part, because people who were successfully kept from voting this time might still be struggling to get registered.  I know this is true – I spoke with a very old Native American woman from Arizona that was facing some inscrutable bullshit from that state just the week before the election.

I don’t know what the wisdom is, with fighting the ratfucking dirtbag “leftists” that discourage people from voting.  I know a lot of them are foreign – a weirdly large amount of them from Brazil and Argentina, the next largest contingent from Eastern Europe – which puts them out of reach of the ol’ sockarooni.  If the answer to bad speech is more speech (dubious), then you can just reach out and touch people you know, people who are non-voters, and encourage them to get it together.  That is itself a serious challenge, because you won’t win ’em over with condescension or screaming, but goddamn is that tempting.

People like me might be well-qualified for that task, on a good day.  When I interviewed for my current job, I cited my experience helping poor people with communication difficulties in customer service at muffuckin’ walmart.  With the shit I have to do at my current job, I feel like my ass could get nominated for sainthood by now, so I’m probably doing something right.  Maybe take a job in social services?  If they’re hiring and you have serious fucking neurotypical sauce.

I don’t have a rousing endpoint for this.  I’ll just reiterate the thesis.  You can do things, and even little things matter.  More grandiose things can come if you’ve got the strength, and that may be at some undefined time in the future.  But if all you’re doing is cleaning your goldfish’s bowl, thank you.  You’re also cleaning the inside of your skull.  Heal.  and then go kick some fucking ass.

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Oh yeah, I’d meant to mention my Hellstar Reminism philosophy.  Maybe another time.

We Talked About It

The cool thing about livestreams on yewchoob (the way we do our podish sortacasts) is that when they’re done you can go back and watch them.  I think we did a passable job at talkin’ about the bad week.  I’m sure it’s grim, but hope it wasn’t too grim.  At the beginning and end there’s a little foolery related to our technical difficulties, kinda chuckleworthy.  Oh, also, once it was going, I couldn’t really read the chat, so I am going to go back and read that stuff now.  –EDIT:  I used to be able to look at the chat after the fact, but can’t seem to do it now.  Is it just me, some setting on the video?  Oh well.  If you wanted to say anything to us about the video, holler in comments here or there.  I’m personally only likely to see them here tho.  –EDIT EDIT:  I got the comments to load and checked ’em.  Thanks for showing up and discussing, ye all.  Much love.  Altho I think half the views on the video are from me checking it out again to feel some gender euphoria lol.

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Why Doomerism Must Stop

As I’ve mentioned before, political doomerism is part of what cost us the country.  But even now, when fascism is flying its freak flag unimpeded down Main Street, when so many shitty things are going to happen, political doomerism is wrong, and it can cost us more than we’ve already lost.

To the doomer, nothing can ever be changed so don’t even bother.  Smoke ’em if you got ’em and learn to laugh at horror.  Like eco-fascism, it’s something with a compelling ounce of truth, but taken in a bad wrong direction.  And so easy too.  So easy I’d characterize it as fucking lazy.  If you think the world is coming to an end, find something more interesting to do than sit there, c’mon.

The element of truth in environmental doomerism is that we are well past the point where the beautiful world we were born into can be preserved in anything like its current form.  Vast swathes of species will go extinct, including much of the “charismatic megafauna.”  Places that are right now beautiful forests will become inhospitable wastelands.  Plastic and pesticide and biotic interchanges that never should have happened, and now we have politicians even more eager to accelerate us into that future.

BUT.  Life has survived worse, and no organism in the history of the world has had the problem-solving powers of a human mind.  We may be able to get through all that.  But we’ll never know if we don’t try, right?  And those efforts have short-term benefits galore.  Environmental doomerism keeps people inert, coasting on a deadly momentum, fulfilling its own bullshit prophecy.

Political doomerism is the same.  The true aspect is that the federal government is far more powerful than it should be in the USA, and that has been lost wholesale to fascists right now.  But there are still reasonable people who are in there, able to sometimes, some ways, fuck up the program for the jerks.  The fash will get away with doing an awful lot of damage, but some of it will be blocked, one way or another.

And Washington DC isn’t where the rubber meets the road on legislation.  This stuff needs states to enforce it, and while some are hijacked by the worst tyrants this side of Mecca, many states are going to work around or even fully block the effects of bad laws.  They can’t stop all the bleeding, but they can stop an awful lot, if they put their minds and resources to it.  If you’ve got a blue or even purple government, press your politicians to do whatever it takes to keep their constituents safe.

And government isn’t the end-all be-all of politics.  Street level, we can kinda do whatever the fuck we want?  As long as we’re willing and able to face the consequences.  The multifarious US right wing terrorists live by that credo; no reason we can’t too.  Ideally, to be doing things like helping humans survive, making love not war, but still.  You could literally do anything you are physically capable of, if you want to.

This election was lost by blue voters not showing up.  Culturally GOP people actually improved, with many of them staying home, and I thank them.  It was too much to hope for that many would switch to blue, like those prominent few did.*  It is people who might have voted blue that tossed this thing.  Some were misogynists, which is still a problem so much more pervasive and deep than most understand.  Some were single-issue voters who hated dem heel-dragging on Palestine, somehow too dense to realize this can do nothing but make things worse for the muslim world as a whole.  But I suspect, having seen endless rounds of the “it’s cool to not vote” discourse on social media from ostensible leftists, that a great many had just given up hope.

Political doomerism, like all doomerism, makes doom happen.  Resisting that is crucial to salvaging anything good in the future, and very importantly – and very possibly – to making good things happen in the present.  Fight doom!

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*as it turned out, the number of trump voters was almost exactly the same as it was last time.  the cult is devoted, what can we say?

Another Addendum

As I dash out these political posts, I find I’ve forgotten some points I’d originally meant to include.  Another one on “how to not fear conservatives”:  Many of us are wondering “How can they believe these asinine paranoid ludicrous things?”  It’s important to note, they’re living in a bubble that is very hard to penetrate.  And if you were experiencing the same carefully curated “reality” as US conservatives, you’d be hard-pressed to see the dangers those beliefs pose to people, to the country, to the world.

This comes from tv, newspapers, billboards, magazines, popular musicians, and screaming loud a thousand decibels out of the internet.  I think, in the name of focused advertising and improving “engagement,” almost every social media platform does its best to make sure we only see things that we will find agreeable, based on shit like, where we live and who’s on our friends list, etc etc.  Of course they wanna reach across the aisle to show us nazi content sometimes, but probably got bots to calculate what’s the maximum amount of that we’ll tolerate before we log out permanently.

All this is to say, there may be more or less normal, friendly, non-horrifying people, who are just thick as two planks and taking the world around them as they can see it.  Those are not people who are coming to kill you with machetes and pitchforks.  A lot of them would be in the camp my husband calls “Dorito voters” – if they got stung economically between elections, they vote for the other party and hope that’ll fix it.

World-ruining fools, but somebody is fooling them, and nobody deserves to get fooled.  If a meaningful revolution ever comes along, it will require scrupulous regulations on political advertising to keep this dogshit from happening again.

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Random Thunk I Fergot

EDIT: This turned out to be dead wrong, but my other posts less so.  Disregard this one.

I’m in a rush as I’m doing these political posts and I forgot a significant one, on “how to not fear conservatives.”  the number of people who voted that way was *less* than it had been last time around.  that point of view has become measurably less popular.  just a compelling piece of data, i think, in support of the idea the taste for evil isn’t as strong as it appears from its most visible and ardent proponents.  –the number of tr*mp voters this time was weirdly similar to last time.  at least he isn’t gaining followers, tho sick and sad that the ones he has are that loyal.
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How to Not Fear Conservatives

It is important to not waste your life hating or fearing conservatives.  Disregard their entire-ass existences, shun them, cut them out of your lives, piss in their wheaties, and fight them in whatever ways you can, but do not waste any more of your precious life than they’ve wasted of their miserable own.  I’ll talk about the hate in another post; this one is about the fear.

Fascists loooove fear.  It literally makes their cocks hard.  Picture anime villains with no eyebrows and rippling tongues, reaching for their crotches while stylized schoolgirls are spraying tears like sprinklers.  Well, the only thing they deserve out of you is blue balls.  Don’t give them what they want.

But aside from what’s right and wrong, deserved or not, fear is an element of how we got here today.  Again, I’ll talk about it more on a later post, but evil benefits from the surrender of good, right?  Common sense.  Aside from shooting their goo, it’s the reason they’re so invested in fear.  Because it’s a game and a strategy for them, a certain amount of the threats they’ve made have to be a bluff.  Of course there are genuine beasts among them who are not bluffing, we must do what we can to keep a good defense and offense running concurrently, but on the whole?  Conservatives are not monsters.

The majority of the people who voted for ShitTrickler & Dickslime were not fans of every last policy they have promoted.  Some were lulled by a sense of cultural identity – they liked the branding, thought this was a vote for how america should look.  But when it comes to actually looking people in the eye and hurting them?  They may find it does not suit them.  Many of the voters – especially those who had any chance of swinging – were just voting against inflation.  Life got economically worse for them and they figured it’s time to vote for the guy who wasn’t in office when it happened – which is why this country swings on a pendulum.  Many people voted for Biden with the exact same motivation, not giving a fuck about human rights – just their bottom dollar – and showing their ass about how little they understand fucking anything.

All that’s to say, if they were really going to try to make death camps in the USA, or breeding pens for womb-having chattel, they’d be shit out of luck, because most of the people who voted for evil are not as evil as all that.  You can write fucked-up laws until your hands turn into ashes, but you need actual monsters to enforce them.  Who is going to be willing to do that?  Some tiny selection of fuckos, who will not be nearly enough to overcome the opposition.

Some bad things will happen.  Some people will die, and I hate that and am not trying to minimize that in any way.  They shouldn’t have to die and I would proudly shoot two republicans in their unthinking faces for every one person who dies to their policies.  But we were sold mortal terror as part of a political game between Evil and Evil Lite, and the reality is not going to look like that.

It is vitally important that you feel this is still the land of Dunkin Donuts and strip malls.  This is not a dark fantasy novel.  The reality in this country is not the spank material of swastika fetishists.  It is where your aunt martha is a shithead about gay people but does not want to see people die – is not interested in killing them.  She is a shithead about abortion, but she just blithely assumes anyone can get an exception if they really need to, you don’t need to codify that in law.  Or assume that exceptions are never needed, some shit like that.

They are fools, they are hateful, and they will get some people killed, but they are not demons, they are not a mindless zombie legion that will sweep over hills and valleys to murder you and everybody you love.  They are just a bunch of shitty tools, a bunch of craven bullies having a laugh.  But they are human, they have something sort of vaguely resembling hearts in there somewhere, and when it matters, enough of them will abstain that the real monsters will not be able to achieve their worst excesses.

And we are not without protection from those that are truly that bad!  We have people who will fight for us.  We will fight for us.  And there are powerful state governments that will step up to curtail much of the shit that comes down those pipes.  I encourage anybody who is pining for Canada right now to consider Washington, Oregon, New York, or California first.  It ain’t paradise, but neither is Canada, and they make it very hard to become a citizen up there – or even a tolerated resident.

They are not going to get us here.  It’s not gonna fucking happen.  They will do harm, it will be sad, but for many of us, life will barely change at all.  You can, if you pull yourself through the shocking wretchedness of this moment, find a way to live, and possibly even to thrive.  Those of you that can’t make it on your own, look for allies, because you do have them.

And don’t imagine that Bob Utah is coming to personally kill you and turn your trans nephew into a concubine.  Fight them up and down the line, but don’t be paralyzed by grotesquely inflated fears.

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one example of this is book bans.  they can ban books in schools, but can they ban them on amazon?  it ain’t happenin.  bezos has the billionaire veto and wants to maximize sales.  these guys can be bought for the price of fucking cheeseburger.  politicians in the US are cheaper than sex workers and nowhere near as ethical.