Check ya Baskets

There’s a dark-eyed junco mom who has made a nest and laid her eggs in one of the hanging baskets on my back porch.  They are ground nesters who find a mass of vegetation (such as the flowers in your hanging basket) ideal terrain.  If my husband didn’t notice her, those eggs would have been drowned, and mom might have gotten low key rekt from the hose as well.

Other stressors in the neighborhood include a driveway being torn up and replaced like twelve feet away this weekend, and people setting off fireworks every night from about June 1st to July 30th.  The basket hanging from a chain may have shock absorption qualities, but still.

There’s also us.  We have to walk past that nest, within a few feet of it, every time we want to do something behind the house.  If she notices she’s getting noticed, she abandons the nest for a while, and eventually comes back.

Lastly, there are other birds that peck around those baskets.  I doubt a chickadee or wren would be too dangerous, but a scrub jay or stellers jay would totally eat those eggs.  They tend toward the baskets closer to the outer edge of the awning, and are more drawn to ones with coconut core they can loot for nesting material of their own, so likely to miss our sneaky lil gal.

I’m annoyed she’s imposed on us in this way, made us have to be concerned about her.  Also, she’s impossible to look at, because she’s so well hidden in there.  On a bright day you can see a specular highlight on her peepers and a pale beak, deep in the leaves.  But if you see her that well, she’s likely to get nervous and jet, so we don’t really get a nice birdwatching experience out of the deal.

Anyway, if you have potted plants outside your home, watch out for nests.

–

I Hurt Yer Daddy, Sunshine

Medley in my mind this morning, sort of a downbeat for a low mood.  I’ve alluded to the existence of this particular horrible song before, but I mention it again – “Father’s Grave” by Glenn Danzig and Melissa auf der Mar – because it was the starting point.  I might have been thinking about sex-adjacent things and Danzig at the time, and that tune emerged from the shadows to punish me for it.

Song Two:  “Hurt,” the original Nine Inch Nails version.  Song Three:  “Age of Aquarius,” but just that “Let the Sun Shine In” part.

Anyone else music-accursed this Sunday?

Oh hey, happy Father’s Day!

–

In Praise of Italian Anarchists

First of all, would you even want to be called Italian?

I’m reflecting recently on the history of fascism, for unfortunately current reasons, and that included a brief tour of the wikipedia page on mussolini’s assassination attempts.  I had mentioned in fond terms the Irish woman who tried to kill him, tho it seems likely she was more motivated by mental illness than ideology.  In checking out that page I also found a few archetypal “bomb throwing anarchists,” which got me thinking about them.

I have only a slim outside idea of the history, and who knows how much of it is real, how much propaganda?  Sacco and Vanzetti were names that made a brief appearance in a junior high textbook.  I once saw a blogpost about the history of anarchy among Italian immigrants to the usa, how they aggressively threatened priests who had evangelized to them.  I imagine some of them volunteered in the Spanish Civil War.  Serious characters.

What happened to them?  Was their movement broken?  Did their kids all quietly integrate into the mainstream?  Or did they never go away?  Are they still around, still at it?  An unbroken chain of political culture going back to the days when lil benny and his wife got strung up?

Did they exist before Italy existed, among its various provinces when they were still city-states?  Did they emerge as resistance to the nationalism that forged the modern state?  Would they resent being called Italian, preferring Florentine, Lombard, Sicilian?  Was the whole movement centered in one province?

Hey, maybe I’ll copy-paste this whole line of curiosity to a chatbot, following the links it provides or taking them with salt.  Meanwhile, I just leave you with vague meanderings.

It’s hard to imagine a radical left community having that strength, coming from my shithole country.  Anarchists here are scattered college kids, a vanishingly tiny fraction of the population.

Italian anarchists, or whatever nationality you prefer, if any, I salute you.  From what I’ve heard about Italy’s current government, your work is not done.  No gods, no masters.  Long live the fighters.

–

Edit to Add:  Here’s what Claude Sonnet had to say…

Here’s what I can tell you:
Did Italian anarchism predate Italy?
Sort of — but not in the way you might imagine. The earliest signs of anarchism in Italy appeared in the 1850s and 1860s, emerging from the dominant republican and nationalist movement headed by Garibaldi and Mazzini. So it grew alongside the Risorgimento (Italian unification), not in opposition to some ancient city-state tradition. The fight for unification created a generation of revolutionaries who then turned around and questioned all forms of authority, including the new Italian state itself. In that sense, the anarchists were the radical wing of the very movement that forged modern Italy — and then immediately became its most committed enemies.

On the identity question — would they resent being called Italian?
This is fascinating. Italian anarchists’ relationship to nationalism was the exact reverse of ordinary long-distance nationalists. Their ideology was anti-nationalist, and their project was not to build the nation-state but to abolish it. They were, however, deeply connected by shared language and culture, and remained committed to political struggle in their homeland. So they’d probably bristle at the label — not in favor of Florentine or Lombard pride, but because they rejected the whole concept of national identity as such.

The Spanish Civil War — yes, you were right about that. Among the almost 3,000 foreign anarchists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, more than 100 came from the United States, and Italian-born anarchists were among them. The Spanish Civil War proved to be their last great campaign in a meaningful sense — the Republican defeat of 1939 meant anarchism permanently lost its last mass base of support.

What happened to the movement? Was it broken?
Fascism crushed it at home brutally but couldn’t fully kill it. The fascists assassinated and detained most of the leaders of the anti-fascist movement, which was completely dismantled by 1924. But remarkably, anarchists immediately threw themselves into armed struggle in the Italian Resistance after Italy’s surrender in 1943, establishing autonomous partisan formations in Carrara, Pistoia, Genoa, and Milan.

Are they still around?

They never went away. The Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was founded in 1945 in Carrara, took it upon itself to carry on the legacy of the Italian Anarchist Communist Union suppressed by fascism in 1926, and continues to publish Umanità Nova, an anarchist newspaper originally founded by Errico Malatesta. That’s an unbroken institutional thread. And anarchists are today present nationwide, involved in all principal social and political conflicts, with more than 60 active spaces and an articulated presence online and in the militant press.

There’s also a more militant and controversial strain: an Informal Anarchist Federation (a separate, insurrectionary network) officially appeared in 2003 and has since carried out a series of mostly non-lethal bombings and letter-bomb campaigns against EU officials, financial institutions, and military targets.

The geography question
The movement wasn’t centered in one province, though certain places have symbolic weight. Carrara — a marble-quarrying town in Tuscany — is almost mythologically important to Italian anarchism; it’s where the postwar Federation was founded and where major congresses were held. The industrial north (Turin, Milan, Genoa) was the heart of anarcho-syndicalist labor organizing. But the movement was genuinely national, and its immigrant branches stretched to Argentina, the US, and beyond.
The immigrant question in the US
You’re right that you’ve seen something real. Italian immigrant anarchism in the US was serious and well-organized — figures like Luigi Galleani ran influential publications and networks, and the Galleanist strain was the most militant of all, associated with bombings in the 1910s–20s. Sacco and Vanzetti were part of that milieu. The Spanish Civil War proved to be the last great campaign of America’s diminished anarchist movement — after that, between McCarthyism, assimilation, and the death of the immigrant radical networks, the US branch pretty much dissolved. The kids did, largely, integrate into the mainstream.

The Italian branch is a different story entirely. Whether you call it an unbroken chain or a series of revivals is a matter of interpretation, but the culture, the institutions, and the publications have genuine continuity from Malatesta’s day to the present.

–

Waiting for the Murk

That trillionaire fuck been in the news again for (possibly) the biggest evil he’s committed since ending usaid condemned millions to death:  using his xitter to incite and inflame neo-nazi violence.  Reminded me of when I speculated on what might get him assassinated.

This is a strong contender.  Remember when that old Irish gal went all the way to shitaly to take a shot little benny musso?  Rest in power, Violet.  Anyhow, apartheid junior, by some metrics, has more power to make the world a worse place than the original fascist did.

I know there’s a small vocal faction in FtB comments who are die-hard that speech inciting evil should never itself be considered evil, by whatever definitions and terms they prefer.  Like they regard my position here equivalent to accusing the fash of thought crimes.

While racists are burning immigrants out of their homes in northern Ireland, while my nuke-happy nation is in the hands of neo-nazis, don’t bring that ignorant idealistic shit in my comments.  Thanks.

Meanwhile, violets are being sown.  I’d love to see a bumper crop.  edit to add: and you can call that a thought crime.  👶🤙

–

Happy Juneteenth, Nobody is Free Until Everyone is Free

I’ve got a bit of a grudge going for Dave Chappelle.  I don’t think about things or people I hate all the time, so it doesn’t come up much for me, but when it does, I’m like, fuck that guy a lot.

There was an episode of his show where some goofy pimps time traveled to the days of slavery, and one of them shot an overseer.  The meta-laff was that this was supposedly a skit that had been cut from an earlier show by execs who didn’t think killing slavers was funny.  I had a good time watching that a million years ago.

For those who don’t remember his story after that point in his career, he had a nervous breakdown and broke contract to abandon the show and chill out in Africa for some years.  Comedy Central ran what was left of his show as reruns for a very long time – probably still does.  Then, at long last, Dave emerged from the earth like Punxsutawney Phil, to chip into the discourse of our times.  What did he purchase with the remainder of his cultural cachet?

He defended shitler’s “grab them by the pussy” remark like a month ahead of his first election.  Then he fucked off again for a while, during which time he did some few standup shows.  At one of these, he was photographed partying with Apartheid Junior and some other Bay Area heels.

After that he really got my attention by going full transphobe.  One of the subjects of his “humor” was a trans woman who subsequently committed suicide.  I imagine she had other reasons as well, but still.

But let’s back that up a moment.  Chappelle has partied with the guy who is currently egging on white supremacist riots in northern Ireland, who unambiguously heiled hitler at the grabber’s second inauguration.  Do you suppose the has-been comedian has any misgivings about the company he’s kept?

I’m sure he doesn’t, because like the terfs who thought they could defend cis-women’s rights by killing trans women, like the working class white ameriKKKans who thought they could protect the working class by killing mexicans, he makes this one important mistake.  He believes you can discriminate against one oppressed class of people without empowering the oppressors of your own people.

It can’t be done.  You cannot separate out the struggles of the oppressed and say one group deserves it, one group is a reasonable sacrifice.  This is basic fucking shit, as basic as it gets.  Freedom can only be protected by solidarity between the oppressed, whatever their differences.

You don’t have to like or even care about other people on your side, as long as you can stifle your shitty mouth when you’re tempted to let your prejudice run – when you’re tempted to give aid and succor to the Fourth Reich.  Do people like Dave Chappelle care about his fellow black people?

I don’t buy it for a fucking second.  Like the recurring theme in Russian folk tales of a decent pauper who becomes a shitty prince, people get X amount of dollars and decide they hate taxes more than they love human rights.

Biggie Smalls once said, “Fuck the world, don’t ask me for shit. And everything you’ve got, you work hard for it.”  I say many hands make light work, and nobody in the fucking world should have to truly work hard, as many hands as we have.  If everybody who hits the sixth zero in their bank account turns nazi, it’s time to make sure nobody gets that dollar.

Freedom for all oppressed people.  Traitors eat shit.  Long live the fighters.

–

Your True Name

Charly recently raised a question that on the surface seems reasonable, but when applied to ameriKKKa, becomes a bit of a mess.  Why is there a problem with requiring ID to vote here?  Wasn’t that already required?

It depends on a lot.  I don’t recall specifically presenting my ID to vote, maybe once at an in-person location a few decades ago?  You have the option of registering to vote any time you renew your photo ID or driver’s license, and I think also when you submit a change of address at the post office.  I’ve been doing mail ballots for ages now.

But this is a state that isn’t powerfully motivated to suppress voter will, unlike the rethuglican political establishments of the Southeast, where black people are often a majority in urban centers.  In those states, ID requirements are a very useful tool of voter suppression, precisely because on the face of it, they’re a reasonable requirement.  The trick is how difficult it has become to obtain and maintain a photo ID.

ID requirements are also a great tool for kicking the poor off of social benefits, of keeping them homeless or imprisoned, of getting them to die from preventable health conditions.  The closer you live to the ground here, the more likely you are to be evicted and lose all of your possessions.  To be incarcerated and have your wallet “lost” in the process.  Old folks and people with vices are easy to rob.  At the level of the homeless, they tend to have their every last possession stolen at least once a year, by other homeless people or by corrupt cops.

Over-policed populations like people of color, lgbtetc people, the poor, the homeless, can be arrested at higher rates and lose their rights and possessions that way.  If your ID expires in prison, good luck getting it renewed when you get out.

At the federal level, “Real ID” (a creation of the fascist Patriot Act) or a passport is required for air travel and a few other circumstances.  States can require it for a lot more than that, at their discretion, including voting.  To get one of those, you need your social security card, birth certificate, a mailing address, and more.

Mailing address is tougher than you’d think.  Poor people get priced out of their circumstances often enough that we move a lot.  I’ve moved well over a dozen times in my adult life; some move every few months.  To get my birth certificate took three months.  What if I didn’t have the money to pay for it?  Very few parts of this process are free.

There’s a lot more that could be said on these things but I don’t have much time these days for research.  Some amount I know of due to my job, but I can’t elaborate on that.  I wonder sometimes if the sheer size of this country makes it harder to administer than Europe, even if the colonial linguistic hegemony makes many things easier.  Certainly the lack of political will to properly fund the government is a problem.

If you live in the USA and you have all your papers in a row, keep them in a safe place, as much as that’s possible.  If you don’t have all your papers, get crackin’ whenever you’ve got a stable circumstance, because you never know when you’ll lose that, and potentially lose much more.

–

Oh yeah, I named this article before I wrote it.  What’s with the title?  I thought I was going to get into this more.  You may have heard people use the phrase “legal name” as if there is one definitive database where these things are kept.  There isn’t, and even where there is, you might be surprised by what’s filling out the fields on those computer screens.

Did you remember to update your citizenship when you got it?  Your name when you got married?  Divorced?  Did you do it with just the court, the DMV, Social Security, or all three?  What about your passport, if you have one?  Department of Education for your student loans?  The IRS?  All of these agencies could have different names on file for you.  Maybe even different dates of birth or places of birth, due to typos.  If DE for Germany was mistakenly entered in a state of birth field, congrats, you were born in Delaware.  That doesn’t automatically make you a citizen because that’s a separate field that could say anything as well.

That’s probably the most important thing of all now – consistency.  Government computers have become more integrated in recent years and people who never had a problem from these inconsistencies in decades of life are suddenly having problems with them now – couldn’t file taxes, couldn’t fill a prescription, couldn’t vote.  Make sure your biographical details are accurate.  Pick a name and go with it, and make sure all of the agencies have all of your names in all the right fields – first, middle, last, suffix.  Honestly suffixes can be more trouble than they’re worth, might consider losing that.  Some computers have a separate field for it, some just tack it onto the last name, and if they disagree you could find yourself locked out of something.  Whatever you do though, do it consistently, because this is not automatically done for you.

Legal name evokes the old magical idea of a “true name.”  Who are you?  Your name is words that, like all others, are trying to simplify a reality that can be much more complex than syllables can convey.  Even your own country may, in important ways, have no idea who you are.  Fascism’s trying to fix that for you.  Thanks?

Financial institutions and government have relied on Social Security Number to verify people’s identity for a long time, but with leak after hack after leak, practically every SSN that exists is compromised.  Hell, does DOGE still have read access to the Social Security Administration and Department of Treasury?  I’ve heard they have been reduced in prominence, but never heard anything concrete about them being shut out of the access they were initially granted.

But fuck all that.  Maybe we should have code names known only to our favorite people.  Or is that what internet handles are?  Boochie Flagrante and Buttfucker3000 are truer names than any birth certificate can contain, I say.  Power on, comrades.

–

Scampering Animals

nothing special in the dream post, just getting discourse off the top of my blog.  this morning i had the fifty millionth iteration of “this cat in my home isn’t actually my cat” dream.  this time the dream had an excuse for the infiltration; my mother-in-law was fostering them without bothering to give us a heads up.

before i found that out i’d put them outside, assuming that’s where they came from.  then i had to go bring them in again.

there was another animal out there i didn’t recognize at first – a red ruffed lemur.  some visual particulars were more like the blue-eyed black lemur, but i was convinced of the former id.

some zoo employees came around and captured the beast, one of whom i recognized as the dude who was feeding them when i went to woodland park zoo irl.

the details of the dream got sloppy before disintegrating.  some more unreal creatures were around, roommates i haven’t seen in decades, etc.

what was the last animal you saw in a dream?

_

Toxical Disk Horse

I chose a life in the Great Social Discourse of Doom when I helped push Atheism Plus to establish a blog network of its own, back when that was a thing.  It’s a lot of work though, and I’m not usually up for it.  But I potentially poked that bee’s nest on my last post, so I need to clarify my position.

If someone hates it enough, they’re welcome to go talk shit about me somewhere else.  If they agree, they can agree quietly because I don’t feel like discussing it.  My hope is that, especially if you’re a trans woman, you will be neutral to it.  You will not necessarily agree at all, but you’ll be willing to let a well-intentioned comrade abide.

This is my opinion on all SJW discourse at the end of the day.  The project is to make the world a better place, not to establish an orthodoxy to which all good people must conform.  You need to be OK with disagreement, or we’ll keep having the stock leftist struggle of never achieving a coalition, always being buried beneath the power of conformity found in the fascists.

Agree with me or don’t, but I hope if you find something strongly disagreeable in what follows, you’ll still be able to tolerate coming around here most of the time, because most of the time I’m not discoursing like this, right?  And I like to see your pretty faces.  For now, let the acrimony begin…

–

So, I’m kind of an outlier on FreeThought Blogs in that the only social media I use (unless you count this blog as social media) is tumblr, aka trunglr, aka the blue hellsite.  As I understand it, the dominant early user culture was teenage girls who used to post onceler slashfic on deviantart and who, around the time I sarted using it, had just grown up to post thirsty gifs of aol-time-warner-disneed-marble’s the revengers.  dot com.  And Sexy Demon Hunter Bros and Captain Whom’st and Stanklock, I forget.

These girls, some amount of which went onto become boys or somewhere inbetween style creatures, were at that age where social justice discourse becomes a thing – trying to converge on an acceptable way to be, to separate yours from theirs, with yours being the good and theirs being the unacceptable.  This was against an internet backdrop of gamergate/MRAjr culture battling liberal nerd culture types who framed all their feminist articles in terms of baby wizard shit.  Innocent times, but the bloom was coming off the rose.

The way I see it, the main political successes of tumblr were, in chronological order: making asexual youths sad, organizing the terf movement, and getting young leftists not to vote, condemning us to fascist hell forever.  All the political projects you’d want to succeed did not.  Still, compare that to facebook et al helping coordinate ethnic cleansing, and it’s not quite so bad.  All social media sucks major ass, but it’s replaced other forms of reading in our collective consciousness, it’s got us hooked.  I quit it sometimes, only to find myself needing to fill my brain with something in a quiet moment where music and other good things aren’t quite tenable, and it’s just right there, you know?

The current thing making me want to quit tumblr forever is trans infighting.  Terfs love that shit, but the fighters are locked in, and can’t escape.  Particularly the trans women.  Personally I think it all started with oppression olympics, and is an object lesson in why you should not fuck with that shit.

Let’s play that game for a second.  Who has it the worst in the world right now?  Trans women, especially black, indigenous, and people of color.  Gold medal, congrats.  OK, there’s no medal.  Actually, your prize is an abiding paranoia that is richly rewarded and reinforced by the myriad people who are, in fact, out to get you.  RIP to the far too many women who have been murdered recently.

But focusing on your fear is no way to live.  It isolates.  It harms.  It helps you dust yourself off the planet so your enemies don’t have to lift a finger.  I had to stop following Stephanie Sterling on youtube because the constant drumbeat of “nobody loves us and everybody wants us dead” was not just depressing, it wasn’t true.  I don’t need that shit in my life.

Back to the oppression olympics.  Trans women win, but they should not be playing the game.  The primary motivation for constantly reminding everyone how bad you have it is to keep us conscientious of the situation.  Cool, but see my doomerism policy in the sidebar, and focus on the reasoning for it.  For some people, this raises consciousness.  For other people, it makes them commit suicide.  You gotta figure out how to moderate your voice in the discourse.

Tumblr’s CEO and moderation staff are actively hostile to trans women and have been nuking their blogs on sight, all while gaslighting them and throwing a rainbow wash on the platform.  Bad times.  Parallel to this, some acrimonious discourse was breaking out between trans women and basically everyone else – but especially trans men.  I don’t know who shot first and I don’t care, but let me give you the short version, like the ESPN commentator at the oppression olympics.  You hate to see it, as the meme goes…

TME/TMA.  Too much enformation / too much anformation.  I mean TransMisogyny Exempt and TransMisogyny Affected.  These could be useful information in the context of discourse, like, where somebody falls on that binary contextualizes anything they say on the subject.  Sure.  On the other hand, from a certain childish point of view, it is putting a shiny sticker on trans women.  The prize in the oppression olympics?

Remember what I said the other day about AFAB people being hammered with conformity more than AMAB people?  You see this play out in LGBTQIAetc discourse as them seeking validation.  The asexual movement was like 95% AFAB (as far as I could tell) and felt the need to assert the legitimacy of belonging to an LGBTQIAetc identity.  This was roundly mocked on tumblr, leading to the asexual sadness I mentioned above.

Who else is AFAB and largely invisible’d by queer discourse?  And might find a desperate need for validation compelling them to the kind of discourse that some self-righteous and dominant personalities might regard as cringey or offensive?  Trans men, it’s your turn.

The idea of Transandrophobia was introduced.  If transmisogyny is a thing, could there be a special type of difficulty trans men are subject to, deserving of a name?  A lot of the hate they catch is just misogyny directed at them by people who won’t see their manhood, so a new term would be gratuitous right?

The main argument against it goes like “this is oppression olympics being played by someone who got jealous of our shiny TMA sticker.  Transandrophobia doesn’t exist for the same reason androphobia and misandry aren’t real.”  To that, I say if you think trans men don’t have it even worse than butch women, who have it pretty bad, you’re huffing your own ass vapors.  It could be reasonable to want to put a name to that, whatever the merits of the actual discourse that has taken place, or the term that has been proposed.

But to everyone involved in all of this, I say who benefits from trans men and trans women disliking each other?  Kiss and make up, motherfuckers.  Still, it’s entrenched.  If someone has become a partisan in that fight, it’s all over.  No small amount of tumblrinas have avoided the conflict -not become partisans- which is the only reason parts of tumblr are still habitable.  But this crap is all over the place.  Stanky.

As I mentioned on a previous post, I think AFAB children are more strongly abused and neglected into a sense that they need to conform to be accepted than AMAB children.  The ruinous ace and transandrophobia discourse are good examples of it.

This isn’t an all people in all situations thing.  Any boy raised by Ruby Franke had it worse than a girl raised by Jodie Foster, right?  But acknowledging the pattern matters.  If it doesn’t, then no kind of feminism matters.  Are girls systemically treated worse or not?  And few cisheterofascist parents would ever know their trans girl is a trans girl, knows their trans boy is a trans boy.  How they treat them comes from the brand forced upon them at birth.

Some trans women get bothered by this, which to me seems like feeling insecure in their womanhood.  Yes, you were never a boy, any supposed privileges of being a boy were oppression to you.  I’m not going to defend the idea that “male socialization” is a thing.  But there is a type of oppression AFAB people got that you did not.

Was it worse?  I don’t give a fuck if it was or not.  I told you what I think about oppression olympics.  But it was there, right?  Most people who were regarded as girls had been so roundly neglected or chastised for every little thing that by the age of three this shit is set in stone: X amount of their mental processing power, for the rest of their natural life, will be hijacked by concern for whether people like them, whether they are acceptable, whether they are valid or allowed to be.

You might have that too, tho I’d argue the flavor hits different.  Could it be worse?  Could be.  But none of it’s good.  And the kind that they got did flow from their assigned gender, which you did not share.

It’s hunting season for trans women on tumblr, and some amount of them are blaming trans men.  There’s a whole other dimension of this shit I’ve alluded to in other recent posts that I’m not going to get into here.  But the paranoia this engenders has led to the ever-useful firefox extension Shinigami Eyes becoming fairly less useful, as various trans men have been labeled as transphobes by those oppressed ladies.

Oppression olympics start with the understandable feeling that your oppression is both terrible and particular, and people around you should understand it – need to understand it.  But when any kind of comparison begins, the shit begins.  Don’t be fooled again.

Although I’d say the democrats are long overdue for a riot at their convention, so maybe stay fractious long enough to make that happen.  Somebody hit Fetterman with a folding chair.  I’ll say nice things about you.

–

That’s it.  No more discourse for now.

–

Thinkin About Conformity

A long time ago I was hunting for a word and while “conformity” had occurred to me, it didn’t feel quite accurate.  I don’t know if Pierce Butler’s persuasion in the comments percolated these million years or if a different aeon’s perspective was responsible, but I do think it’s the word now.

When we talk about the different flavors of oppression such as misogyny, transphobia, etc, there are a few ways to describe them: like white supremacy, in terms of what you want to promote; like racism, in terms of the category by which you are discriminating; or like anti-blackness/misogynoir/etc, in terms of the specific target of oppression.  Conformity is the first one – a description of what you want to promote, the implied target of the oppression being nonconformists.

I don’t have anything deep to say about it tonight, but I’m just feeling it, turning it over in my head.  I’ve seen a group of nice people, mostly women, having a genial social gathering, and realized they were relentlessly conformist about it.  I realized this was practiced.  One of the ways AFAB people are oppressed under patriarchy is being told that they are only acceptable if they behave in certain ways – a stronger expectation of conformity than is heaped on the AMAB (not that anyone is exempt, of course).

This leads to constant seeking of reinforcement that whatever you’re doing is acceptable, normal, or valid.  Validation, I guess.  I see this as a key component of what I call “amirite ladies” culture.  “We all think the same thing about this issue, right?”  “Oh yeah, sure.”  Girl who isn’t quite on that page in the corner: “I mean I dunno, is it OK I maybe don’t, if it’s not too much, i’m sorry, I’ll go away if you want me too!”  Generous conformists in that moment:  “It’s OK because we agree in this other way, you are valid.” …and everyone gets along.

It’s not a terrible way of being, but it does cause people who are further outside of the clique to self-select their own exclusion.  Like everyone is fanning out about Stranger Things or Space Shooters, and the person who never understood fan culture sighs and stands in the shadows, hands in their pockets.  Go kick rocks, weirdo.

I’m coming to understand a good sign someone may be a high-functioning person on the autism spectrum is that constant feeling of being excluded or alienated from the people around you.  I can’t say I’m at all educated on the subject, but it keeps coming up in random discourse and personal anecdotes I’m seeing.

Anyhow, nonmutual types, especially (but not exclusively) those who were smashed with the AFAB hammer and feel eternally invalidated:  Props.

–

Playing with Fire in a House of Decay

I didn’t really intend to bring up this subject when I set out to write the post but it feels like necessary preface, and it’s something that deserves to get explained at some point, if I’m going to lay out my personal biz in the way I’ve been doing.  I love my husband a lot, but it isn’t that ardent romantic love you feel when you are young and foolish.  By the time I met him, I’d burned out on that concept.

I’d take a bullet for him and likely vice versa, so it’s like, who can get in front of that thang first?  On the other hand, I’d take a bullet for a stranger and he’d probably take one for a dragonfly.  We do love each other.  But there’s a bloody edge to the way humans love when we’re new, something more dire and deep.  Worse, I think it’s permanent.  Didn’t Dante turn his high school crush into an extra special angel in the Divine Comedy?  Even tho he had been married to someone else for ages?  I wouldn’t be so crass, but I understand why he did that.

This really sucks for my dude because he has never been involved in those kind of feelings, feeling them or having them felt about him, which ain’t good for your self image.  But in fairness to me, we are equally mild about each other.  It’s a love that takes care of business, doesn’t mess around, gives us something essential like vitamins, but it’s not desperate heart-throbbing and sobbing, falling to your knees and howling at the wind styled love.

Is it important to experience that “something special” level of passion?  Romance stories say yes.  I say no.  It sets you up for disaster.  Hell, most of the people who feel something like that should never be allowed to lay a finger on their intended.  You know what I mean?  Just because you feel like that doesn’t mean it’s going to be reciprocated.  When I did, it wasn’t.

And if it is reciprocated and the big passionate romance is realized, what happens when something goes wrong?  You get those situations where a person dies within three months of their spouse.  It’s unnecessary sorrow and pain.  Some amount of sorrow is well and good, but that shit should not lay you in the ground.

So I loved like a maniac and had my feelings burned out, once upon a time, and now it’s gone.  Good for everyone involved.  One of the more annoying things about that intensity is that the feelings for the individuals never really seem to go away.  I still have this bullshit-ass romantic feeling about a few people I haven’t seen in decades.  Boo!

I had a dream last night that my husband had given me permission to go hang out with one of these people I had loved.  IRL this would be a bad idea because those romantic feelings are such that judgment could be impaired.  I might do infidelity I’d never do under other circumstances.  As it happened, in this dream I did not, because I walked through the events in a dispassionate daze, like I was as sleepy in the dream as I would have been were I awake.

We looked younger in the dream than we do in real life, but mi amor had some kind of degenerative condition of his teeth and of the bones in his feet that made him take extra care with what he ate and how he walked.  He was living with his family, despite being an adult, presumably due to hard times.

Aside from meeting one of his cousins in junior high, I’ve never met his family or seen where they live, but I knew it was rural.  In my head this turned into a log cabin lodge, very spacious in the common areas but cramped in rooms.  The stairs were drawers for extra storage but could be left pushed in or pulled out in ways that made the distance unpredictable and a little dangerous.

The place was a mess, hoarder style, and the other family members were all mild-mannered rednecks – adults involved in chores and little boys running amok.  There was a very fat lady wearing nothing but lingerie, trying to relax on the couch, and say something about her philosophy.  I was open to the lesson but couldn’t understand the words.

Upstairs I was in his room.  We avoided saying anything earnest and dangerous with each other.  Seemed like we were just going to pass again, ships in the night.  Then I noticed every surface in the room had silverfish and maggots wriggling across them.  Not coated in the things, like maybe a density of one per four square inches.

This was not as disgusting to me as it would be in real life, but I did insist we go somewhere else to hang out.  Down the dangerous stairs we went, careful with his feet, past scampering boys and philosophers and rednecks, into that dark place where your alarm clock goes off and puts you to work.

I don’t think there was anything truly interesting in this dream, but felt the need to write it out.  Probably a sense of significance derived from that old flame.  If the alarm hadn’t gone off, would I have cheated on my husband in my sleep?  In my heart?

I do not know, but it reinforced for me the sense that should the opportunity arise to get in touch with this man again in real life, I should not.  Fortunately, that will not happen.

–