What Should I Say?

A wiser woman than I said we should all give dems the spurs on trans rights, specifically to say we’ll stop supporting them with votes if they stop supporting us.  My initial reaction is to think of just how much I despise all the leftists who said it was OK not to vote this time around.  It was potential dem voters staying home that caused us this crisis in the first place, and the margin was so massive it must have had multiple causes.  Misogyny, racism, transphobia, vote suppression (i have firsthand knowledge of some, but it doesn’t explain the big shortfall by itself), apathy caused by a campaign relentlessly focused on fear?  Discouraging voters was surely one of the causes, as well as single-issue voters like pro-Palestine people not wanting to sully hands.  This campaign would be both of those things, right?  Single-issue vote discouragement?

On the other hand, voting for the lesser of two evils only makes sense if it actually does prevent some amount of evil from happening, undoes the evil that was done the last time their opponents were in power, something…  Like, I’d accept that my demographic had no legal protection and was royally fucked, if there were some kinda super-genius badass legislative masterminds successfully making great things happen to, say, benefits for the poor, or environmental legislation, medicare… something important.  The dems, and left parties around the globe, have been unbelievably useless at this.  Biden should be using the last days of his executive power to make baller moves, but there’s no indication that’s going to happen.

As an example of that, I thought about pardoning Leonard Peltier.  No dem was ever gonna do that, but I haven’t looked into the subject much.  I just assumed that since a lot of thoughtful people think he is innocent, they probably had good reason.  A brief look into the subject brought up this slanted-ass bootlicking NPR article that was covered top to bottom in e-begging.  (How long has NPR been sucking fascist balls?)  If there is reasonable evidence supporting his innocence out there, getting people OK with releasing him would be as simple as presenting that evidence, right?  I dunno.

How about something less controversial.  Commute the penalties of everyone on death row to life imprisonment.  Full pardons for everybody on death row where the police or prosecutors are legally proven to have fucked up the truth for the sake of a lynching.  Last time the billowing bowelsack was on his way out of office, he accelerated the rate of executions, including those of people who had strong evidence of wrongful conviction.  Just do the opposite thing.  That’s an obvious good deed that would not be easily reversed.

One factor in how the election was lost: the dem hesitation to simply stand for anything.  If there was a case being made outside of “at least we won’t kill you,” I didn’t hear it.  It may have been spoken, but the threats were so much louder.  All I saw was them using terror to ransack the wallets of the base, and making wacky jokes.  I dunno if anyone was paying attention when Clinton lost, but all the night show funnymen were joking in overtime, didn’t make a difference when it counted.

Having lost, it seems to me, puts dems exactly where they want to be, doing what they do best.  Tut tut ineffectually from the corner, play the good cop role in our persecution, and so lend a veneer of legitimacy to our deeply anti-democratic government.  They make themselves reeeally hard to defend, especially the centrists like Pelosi.

As much as I feel a nigh-murderous hatred for anti-voting tumblr anarchists, they represent a genuinely felt position among many lgbt people – particularly trans women – that nobody in power honestly cares about them or is willing to protect them from literal genocide.  That belief was stoked by social media cryptofascists, especially foreign ones, but it would have been there even without that encouragement.  Dubya’s government tried to use disgust of gay people to bolster their political power, unsuccessfully.  Us trans folk are even more disgusting to the masses, so using us has proven more successful.  Or has it?  The gasbag barely got more votes than he did last time.  Again, this was all about our side staying home, and not theirs achieving anything besides holding the base.

I’m conflicted.  This is an important enough issue for obvious personal reasons, as well as for all the trans people less privileged than myself, that it’s easy to see making it the one issue to vote on.  So are the other issues though.  US support of genocide abroad, anthropogenic global warming…  As I used to say a lot, everything is on fire and nothing isn’t.

But in the end, no, I won’t join the crew in saying I won’t vote dem if they don’t support trans rights.  I would implore whatever passes for human decency in them to throw us a bone, but I can’t say I’d one-issue this, as bad as the dems are.  The nazis are just so god damn much worse.  I say vote dem anyways, and if they ever win again (lol), don’t assume that’s the end of it.  We’ll have to fight them for what we need; it’ll just be easier to fight them than the fourth reich.  Maybe fight them like my comrades are trying to, with this campaign, if it makes sense to you.  I can’t join them in making those vows of non-voting against spineless dems, but I like to think I have other types of fight in me, when it counts.  Who even knows until you’re on the line?  None of us should have to be living through these struggles.

Either way, the country is going to be so gerrymandered and vote-suppressed in four years that dems will be lucky to win participation trophies, so I’m probably overthinking it.  Just done and tired, waiting for the hurricane of hammers to drop.  And still viciously, viscerally furious with the proselytizers of non-voting.

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EDIT:  forgot silver lining.  yes i think dems are not going to win next time without the republicans literally having a child sex orgy on prime time basic cable and using the blood of a vivisected vietnam vet for lube (that was a bit off color jeezis).  but people survived fascism in spain and we can do it here too.

One Man’s Psychic Vampire

If you’re coming at it blind, Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible can make for a rousing rebuke of christian BS.  Particularly the idea you should love your enemy is mocked as hypocrisy and foolishness.  Well, I don’t know if one should feel as bitter about one’s enemies as I do, but the idea of loving those bastids is profoundly wrong.

That said, the book is rotten to the core.  Much of it was repurposed from a proto-nazi book called Might is Right, and another big influence was Rand’s objectivism.  Dude said evil is live backwards, christians be asking us to live shadows of a real life, so doing evil equals living, something something yadda yadda.  But somehow this morality shook out to being much the same as mainstream christianity in LaVey’s country – this wonderful land of genocide and slavery.  The poor and the disabled are only allowed to live until they’re inconvenient.  Anybody you regard as an enemy can be completely dehumanized, oppressed, segregated, exiled, or slaughtered.  Real daring, Anton.

The specific part I want to address is his big tirade against “psychic vampires” – people seeking sympathy or help from you, who always take and never give.  We all know people who drain our mental health, one way or another.  (I believe there was a big running joke on What We Do in the Shadows about it, but I’ve only seen gif compilations of the show.)  Sometimes they just have an energy that hits you the wrong way and they ping you with it so hard that you lose hp by the minute.  Bip Bip.  Sometimes they really do need more of you than they can ever give back – the gratitude won’t make you even close to whole after the ordeal is done.

But most of us need to get less selfish, not have our callousness reinforced with polemic.  That thesis is ableist as all hell.  Either we think the disabled should be helped or we don’t, right?  The sloppy middle ground as it plays out in reality is bad for everybody.  And there will be disabled people who drain your emotional reserves, but they need help just the same, from somebody somehow somewhere, or their suffering is just another failure of our species to live up to our potential as thinking creatures.

I’m getting into all of this because I’ve been thinking about people with paranoid delusions again recently, for some reason.  They’re so freaking exhausting.  Here’s an interesting wikipedia article on a guy, James Tilly Matthews, whose ideas may sound familiar to you.  Supposedly, near the end of his short life, his delusions had fallen away.  May the same happen for everybody with such problems, and not at the expense of their well-being.

I’m given to understand that the recommended way to handle paranoid delusions is to not question or contravene them, just see what you can do to help the person in unrelated ways.  Like at an old folks’ home, a lady with dementia thinks all her things are being stolen, you say “That’s terrible, what would you like for lunch?”  I’m sure there’s no one-size-fits-all for it.

But equally sure we don’t need to banish all the exhausting people from our lives wholesale, leave them in the terrifying margins of civilization.  We don’t all have to put ourselves out any more than we can, but we do need to figure out how much we can do, and do at least that.  One man’s psychic vampire is another’s disabled person that needs whatever help we can give.

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Fvcking Dracvla, Man

had a dream i had some kind of side hustle scrubbing the area around the tracks in the seattle metro bus tunnels for chump change, which involved busting up hijinks down there sometimes.  first i came across miho hatori who was putting on a concert with some other alt culture clown on the keyboards, and a pet monkey named “smeek.”  they were passing a roach back and forth while she sang a cover of bjork’s “i play dead,” with new lyrics that implied miho literally eats joints.  as the lil reefer butt dwindled she ate the ashes.  morrissey and some standup comedian who might have been seinfeld came thru causing incidental ruckus, fleeing an unknown menace like abbott and costello.  in the process any number of these people may have been disintegrated, which i had to explain to a bored metro employee.

the menace turned out to be dracula, played by some newer actor whose name i don’t recall, but in reasonably effective bela lugosi drag, with more contemporary textural elements, like vampires in 90s or 10s movies – like he was partially made out of stone.  i barely glimpsed him as i chased his bumbling sidekicks.  forget who they were.

the point is, i found drac’s victim: my husband, who had lost his wallet and possessions to the vampire.  i woke up while fruitlessly searching for his wallet.  before that i had found contracts of my husband signing over bank accounts and personal property to dracula, like a will.  this included the sale of a debt owed by lindsay lohan to him.

in case you missed it, as i lost my streak yesterday i’ve decided to go back to intermittent posting, so i may miss days at a time.  sorry y’all.

i close my eyes again now.

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The Streak is Broken!!!

I had been doing at least one post a day for months, but on 11/30/2024 I made no post whatsoever, even accounting for time zones!  And with this break in my streak, I feel free from the pressure to continue it.  On the other hand, sometimes it feels like I need to pick up where others be slacking, try to keep this scene alive.  I dunno tho, I feel the same global malaise and lethargy and sense of being wreck’d by life that anybody else feels.  Short-ass little shitposts are the best I can do, most of the time.  Does that really help anything?

I resume less frequent posting, unless something changes, and it may.  Until then, see you when I see you.

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