USA, More Weimar Than Weimar

A few years ago it was hot to compare the USA to the short-lived Weimar Republic of Germany, the one that was replaced by the nazis.  The situation in Germany was largely attributed to the punitive treatment of country after World War One.  Somehow (demonizing socialism, never meaningfully addressing any crimes the US committed, never willing to face the hateful core of America’s real values), we did this to ourselves, no major military loss necessary.  Congrats?  Anyway, the comparison never stopped being valid.

Right now we are even closer to nazi rule than we were under Trump himself.  The way power is structured in this country guarantees the GOP a seat at the table, and they’ve gone full goosestep.  Many states are already falling under laws that are equivalent to the book burning at the Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.  Don’t say pronouns law?  Rampant book banning?  The dismantling of a single university in Florida under that state’s governor?  The exact mirror of Bolsonaro’s raids on universities in Brazil.  Expect it to go nationwide as soon as we have a nazi president.  I’d say republican but at this point that is fully redundant.

The howling jackals of fascism are gearing up for total conquest, and all they need is the executive branch to clinch the end of our weak-ass imitation of a democracy.  It’s just a matter of time.  They will get the presidency again.  One possible way to prevent a future nazi president from devastating this country with executive orders would be to curtail the powers of the president substantially.  I’d like to see that happen, but power fucken looooves power, and will never put meaningful restrictions on new powers that have been allowed.  The same way we can’t make meaningful taxes happen on the rich once they’ve been given breaks.

I was put in mind of this by the way there are good things happening right now, mostly from executive action.  There are executive orders, but also appointed heads of government agencies making progressive policies within their remit – like the way you can, for the moment, change your gender marker on your Social Security card or passport without need for proof documents.  Expect all of that to be reversed with a single pen stroke under the next nazi president.

It’s best to just be prepared for it, emotionally and physically.  Think, what will my role be under nazism?  We can’t all be armed fighters.  Some of us will have to settle for smaller acts of resistance.  As republicans expand their hate campaigns and shore them up in the legal systems of their states, anybody who murders a trans person, no matter how flagrantly, will be let off the hook – like Emmett Till’s killers.  For that matter, expect all reproach or rebuke for killer cops to end.  Many who have already been jailed will probably get pardoned.  At least the white ones.  Under a republican president, we may see concentration camps for trans people (we never stopped having them for immigrants), probably gay folk as well.  The idea has already been floated, in Arizona I think?  Jewish people will be far from safe.  I have no idea what kind of crack fucks like Ben Shapiro are smoking, that they are willing propagandists for the nazi side.

That’s the obvious stuff, the stuff they’re already announcing as future plans.  But what about the stuff that hasn’t been stated yet?  That is historically part of the fascist agenda?  Military conquest.  Fascism fucks a country up, and to maintain the illusion it’s a reasonable way to do things, they need to sack resources from other countries.  The easiest targets will be Cuba, Haiti, and other Caribbean countries.  Might see an Axis-type alliance with Brazil if things go sideways there again.  Ultimately Canada and Mexico would be occupied territory.  Hopefully no nukes will be used, but given the expansion of first strike capabilities under Trump, it’s anybody’s guess.  I’m guessing the Mexican resistance will do some righteous terrorism on our asses.  Maybe the resistance under Vichy Canada will also impress?

Eventually US fascism will fall to whatever nonsense comes next.  But consider this.  Even in nazi germany, some people could live almost sorta kinda normal lives.  Have love, have children, work, nurture, make art, etc.  Bad things will happen on a terrible scale, but life will go on, and eventually the worst things will pass.  Fight if you can, live if you can’t.  Don’t give up hope, because, ultimately, anything can happen – including your own happily ever after.

As always, long live the fighters.  Death to fascism.

The Satanic Temple is Still Bullshit

I remember this cute chubby wild-eyed dude breathlessly extolling satanic ideals when The Satanic Temple was newer, on some TV interview, I feel like it was in the great lakes area?  Principled blasphemy seemed their higher calling, something I can really get behind.  So when I found out they were egregiously exaggerating their ability to help people get abortions to snake funds from real abortion activists, that the founders are an unashamedly ableist eugenicist and a buddy to alt reich fucks, that they are shady as all hell on the business side, and that they are willing to dump millions of donated dollars into SLAPP suits against their detractors?  I was like.  Fuck.  I’m fed up with living in a world run by liars and thieves.  I gotta go take a nap.

But shitheads never sleep, so they’ve appealed the latest round of their repeatedly failed SLAPP suit against some queer satanic people in my home state, while still also suing a half dozen other people who don’t deserve it.  Give if you can, to my homies or to anybody who is opposing these crypto-fascist con artists.

edit to add: SRSLY THO

Anybody not bothering to read this for comprehension because it’s about those guys that made you chuckle one time, consider that if I had more traffic on this blog, they would already have hit FtB with another SLAPP suit, like the Richard-Carrier-ass hateful bitches they are.

 

Wanna be a Mastodon?

I’m not joining Comrade Hornbeck’s FreethoughBlogs-flavored Mastodon Instance myself for a few reasons, most notably that I didn’t have a Twitter to replace, never found that school of social media-ing appealing.  But if you want to join, you can comment here with the handle you’d prefer.  I can see your email in my admin panel and pass along word to HJ within 24 hours or so, and help him vet entrants with the relevant info.
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With Ecstatic Music On

That’s a Björk reference in the title to this post.  And she had an album called Post, so you know, approps.  I’m getting little episodes of mania, not necessarily rising to the level of needing treatment, but they give me glimpses of a worse life.  Insights.  I think this is a good example of the way mania messes with artistic types:  I have a novel to be writing.  So far it’s gone well, I was feeling the character and the action was compelling.  But as I have time to write on it this morning, I just want to listen to wild music, daydream about being a rock star.  Or at least doing cronchy electro-goth covers of The Go-gos, Danzig, Van Halen, and Madonna, doing videos for yewchoob where I act like a freak.  That’s what I’ll do with my life, yeah…  Fucken useless.
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Hobo Flotilla vs Hamster Plague

Another night during my battles with insomnia I had a vivid dream with cinematic scope.  Kyle MacLachlan in Dale Cooper mode played a government bureaucrat who by twist of fate was put in charge of a British industrial ship, during a time when a weather crisis had messed up global trade.  Most of the ship’s crew had been allowed to go home with a generous buyout, so the skeleton crew that remained was able to just maintain the boat in a lazy mode.

The plot of the movie revolved around a decision by Kyle to have the crew do something positive with their idle time.  This was treated feel-good and uplifting.  He got them to build a floating city to help with homelessness.  It was originally going to be in a foreign country – they got the parts somewhere like Indonesia or the Philippines – but they negotiated to have it parked outside San Francisco instead.  The city charged $100 rent to floating city tenants.

Years later Kyle was married to somebody from that crew and looking at retirement.  The couple were toodling around the ocean on a personal craft, and by talking to some aquatic hobo, found out the floating city was then moored in the neighborhood of Long Island.  They went to visit and found various people of limited means living there.  The landlord types had complaints about the students being rowdy and polluting.  They also talked about other issues in the community, like finding a humane solution for pest control, since feral hamsters had become the city’s rats.

Despite not being a class of people who would ever need income restricted housing, the couple settled there, for poetic reasons.  At this point in the dream the couple became my boyfriend and myself, and my brother was hanging around as well.  I had to take care of my cats, which included the late Momo.  For some kind of basic care, I had to routinely cut off all of Hecubus‘s legs.  It’s OK; they would grow back.  I was pondering to myself that maybe I could get away with not cutting off those legs this time around, or only cutting off one of them, and my brother was finding it bizarre that I ever had to do it in the first place.
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Mo FtB Mo Problems

I’ve been having the insomnias, and with only 2 days of sick leave in tha bank, I needed to get it under control.  I’ve been doing Zzzquil and melatonin every night.  Well, until last night.  I was so tired, I felt like, maybe I can do this with just a lil’ help.  So I only did the melatonin.  I woke up at 5:30 and it took a while to sleep again.

When I finally did get to the land of nod, it was a furious mash of dream waste.  Stock BS in elaborate detail.  I was at some kind of christmas event in the gold-drenched lobby of a hotel that was grading into a mall.  Looking for a place to sit I found some show for kids was the best spot, and took a seat there.  Conscious of the possibility I’d be seen as a pedo, I avoided looking at anything but the show.  I had a ziploc bag full of melty holiday cookies to eat.  The show was live entertainment at first but became a montage of celebs in holiday specials.  Charles Bronson was in the mix, with a grotesquely squishy face and surprisingly high singing voice.

At some point the dream switched to being about FreethoughtBlogs and the administration thereof.  One of the bloggers that posts less often was on a tear.  This wasn’t a real FtBer, but was something of a median persona as a middle-aged dude.  He had a regular enough post about politics or computer programming or something, but randomly at the end of it and without warning, he embedded a video of himself fully naked, masturbating to completion.

Seeing a chubby middle-aged dude masturbate to completion is not a turn-off for me when I’m awake, so in the dream I was copacetic with it, the full ethical ramifications beyond my sleeping mind.  I did, however, consider the possibility other people may be bothered, and wondered if I’d have to go in the back channel to reconvene an FtB ethics committee about it.  I think he was starting to attract comments from people wondering what the hell he was thinking by the time the alarm got me.

Possibly something in waking life put the kernel of that dream in my mind.  Who can say?
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Body High vs. Head High

I sometimes write about characters involved with drugs, but don’t know much from firsthand experience.  This is something I just randomly remembered from when I was in high school.  Sometimes people would talk about a body high or head high, more often the body high.  I feel like it was in reference to LSD.  That was in the ’90s.  Do any of you remember this, and can you explain to me what it means?

I suppose I could dig up the facebook for my old home boy Try-Anything-Once Todd and ask him, but I might need a facebook account for that, and no thanks.
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Who Are You? (Owl Impression)

Politics, amirite?  Hooboy.  This will be the last article in my attempt to top all categories of FtB articles, unless some sneaky fucker edges me out of one of the categories I already topped.  Get it, I’m a top.  I kid, you know I switch.  OK I’m probably a pillow princess but you know I got a bad back.  LL Cool J would rap about banging my girlfriend if I had one.  Remember that line?

OK, so politics, I know I’ve been thinking something about this lately, what was it?  Hm…  Oh yeah.  Last night while I was non-sleeping, I was trying to explain myself to the mute audience in my head, and felt the need to preface my arguments with who I am, politically.  I haven’t felt the need to put that into words much, so here it is.

I’m a personal anarchist.  I think society should have laws but that all people should be willing to break them, as needed, to suit our personal ethos.  Be willing to do the time for your crimes, but be willing to do the crimes you feel are most necessary.

I’m a socialist, maybe even a communist, at the end of the day.  No allegiance to the ghost of the USSR, no worries in that Charly.  I just know that in a world where every inch is owned by either the government or billionaires, there is no room for any person to truly meet all their own needs.

In the USA we live by that myth.  All our laws are constructed around an idea grown more absurd every day, that every person can work, and that the fruit of that labor can be sufficient to care for us through our whole lives.  If we, the poor, can’t have one fucking thing that isn’t fragile as hell, can’t have any social safety net to pick us up when getting worked at this rate inevitably breaks us, then the government needs to step up with cradle-to-grave social services, given generously and without stipulation.  And as far as the commune goes, that isn’t just breaking your back with a hoe.  I think all Hollywood movie-making and corporate art should ultimately be destroyed and replaced with artists working communally to make art for its own sake, profit as incidental rather than the sole motivating factor to make or do anything.  And tech and science and education and child-rearing.  There are many things that can be done communally.

The rich bore me as much as they oppress me.  Their idea of the good life, of what is worthwhile at all, it’s a cosmically bad joke.  I’d be OK with them existing, with their cheek implants and lambos, if they could just leave it at that and not suck us dry at every opportunity.  They can’t be trusted with what they have.  Class war now, babes.

I keed, I keed.  Or do I?  I do.  Unless..?  Ahaha, I had you going.  Or maybe…
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EDIT – I DID IT!!!! I’M NUMBER ONE!!!!  for as long as it lasts.

No Regrets in The Struggle

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE FtBlogger atop all the main page categories of FtB articles.  Gimme the prize!

Anyway, I just flew in from Social Justice and boy are my arms tired.  I mean airplane food, amirite?  Wocka wocka.

Some of my articles in this series have been quasi-thoughtful, but I’m running out of power.  What can I do?  Social justice, social justice, what can I say about that?

You know, there’s an idea you would sometimes see come up in comments in the early days of the Deep Rifts 2.0, when many of us were becoming “woke” for the first time.  It was a sense of gratitude that women were bringing to light the way they’d been mistreated, that it was opening up all these other conversations, and that this would give us a chance to become better people.  To truly realize the equality we’d always just assumed was part of the movement, in contradistinction to the naked sexism of christian fundies.  I just want to bring that gratitude back for a moment.

I love that we broke up the atheist movement.  The crudlords and fogies are still out there, somewhere, embarrassing themselves in Elon’s Thunderdome.  But they forever have to sit there in full awareness that they have been rebuked.  That a sizeable chunk of their former bedfellows just said “Fuck Y’all” and never looked back.  Everybody said their piece, then went their separate ways.

Can they even understand what we feel?  I don’ t think they can.  Dawkins can only conceive of this as us being led astray, bewitched by the sorcery of women in glasses and colorful hair.  He doesn’t know how good it is to look at society as it really is, the same way he’d look at the physical world as it really is, and know what you’re going to do with that, do with your time here.  We’re gonna be good, as good as we can be.  We’ll make mistakes but we’ll learn, because yeah, we woke up to the importance of social justice.

I’m still proud to be an SJW.  Power on, comrades.
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The Ivory Tower

I won’t say I woke up this morning with a mission because that would imply I slept last night, but now I’m trying to write an article in each of the categories of FtB articles. There are some categories in which I rarely appear.  I’m a BFA, I shouldn’t talk about science.  But I’m gonna talk about science.

I think Chunderf00l said it best, when he did a video about how Ivory Tower shouldn’t be derogatory for science boyz because ivory towers are cool and shiny and hold up THA TROOF for all to see.  Then he switched gears to chortling through his tears about Anita Sarkeesian for a decade.  Yewchoob atheism, amirite?  Is this thing on?

Science can be real cool.  I think my favorite blog ever has to be Tetrapod Zoology.  The universe, especially at the very local level of this planet, is chock full of interesting shit.  Some of it is beautiful and inspiring, and so there’s a tendency to latch onto that, as the tool to promote a sort of positive atheism.  We don’t need the majesty of some false vision of glorious afterlife, we can marvel at the world we inhabit to feel inspired.

But science is always a mixed bag.  Darwin knew it.  Nature is full of fucked up repugnant shit.  There are animals that can only reproduce like the fucken Alien xenomorph, their entire existence predicated on nightmarish cruelty.  Not just a species here or there, but clades full of species that do the same nasty nasty.  And within our own lives, we can marvel at human beauty and compassion, but are also stuck in a species with fucking millions upon millions of actual fascist motherfuckers.  Brains so ugly they can turn you to stone.

I don’t think there is an inspiring or magical or fun version of atheism, frankly.  Sorry, Ivory Tower.  Sorry, Science.  Philosophical materialism has one solitary advantage over all religions.  It’s true, and it is brave to look at things as they actually are, to deal with the world you actually live in.  That bravery makes it possible to do greater things than any religious person is capable of – to give of yourself fully knowing how precious every second of your brief life is – but it doesn’t guarantee that we will do those great things.  Many of us are just unreconstructed shitbirds.  But we love us some science!
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