Mandate of Heaven, Evil Edition

Some prominent dems have signaled willingness to work with the repugnant. Should they? Or should they just stonewall and annoy, as much as is possible from minority positions? I don’t know. Yes, everything the nazis have said that they desire is literally evil, the kind of stuff that should be opposed by all decent people with everything they have. On the other hand, this is what the US wanted. The nazis have a mandate.

Literally speaking, it isn’t what the people actually wanted, right? All the polls say those positions would fail if given simple majority polls of all people in the US. But that isn’t how things work. You have to vote. This is the thing about red state people saying “my vote doesn’t count”: Yes, it doesn’t decide the election, but it helps set the tone of the national conversation. By not caring enough to show up, you said, “nazis, fuck it, take it all.” Now they have, and they will get to goose step all over our asses, for as long as they can stave off self-destruction.

And it will have to be self-destruction, because without earth-shattering numbers of people voting blue next time, it will be impossible to break through the wall of voter obstruction they are going to erect the second they take office. We know americans are too bitchy provincial and lazy to make that shit happen, so we are officially at T minus X days til more than a decade of fascist rule.

So what do you do, as a non-genocidal body filling the loser seat on Capitol Hill? Oppose and obstruct as much as you can, or play some kind of ball? If one of the ball-players manages to wheedle the fascists into being 2% less deadly to innocent people, that’s worth doing. It will be degrading, humiliating, frustrating, and tragic to behold, over and over and over again. So much failure ahead of them. But still, some lives might be saved?

Any dems with that in mind are going to have to pick their battles. Obstruct on some days, play ball on others. It’s just how it is now. At many times over the last few decades, it’s the way it has been – only now it’s a lot worse, and going to stay that way. Meanwhile, smarmy anti-voting anarcho-fools will point to AOC signing off on some reprehensible bill as proof they’re all out to get you, even when it was the best thing she could do to eke out a better chance of survival for her constituency.

America didn’t want fascism, but didn’t know enough or care enough to stop it, and they will not have a choice next time around. So for those of us who are vulnerable, it’s all about picking our battles. For some, that will mean never coming out of the closet, leaving the country, shining stormtrooper boots on monday and trading illegal art on tuesday. For some, it will mean joining La Résistance. For many, it’s going to be some combination of the two.

At some point you’re going to be forced by circumstance to play nice with your mortal enemy. (Black people have to do this every time they get stopped by a cop.) Don’t let it defeat you, in your heart. Keep keeping on, my friends. Eventually, we’ll get through it. And if we don’t live long enough to see the other side, we can still live well, in whatever ways we can find. Power on.

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Sorry, I never explained the title. It’s kind of obscure to most of us in the USA. There is a concept from part of Chinese history that overlaps with mythology, that you can win the blessing of rulership from Heaven itself, if you get a cool magic artifact or whatever. I half-remembered that when I thought about our incipient theocracy. The dominionists threw a little lasso around the foot of a golden toad, and now they can ride behind him as he leaps across the night sky, raining despair and violence like sweat as he goes. Blessed be.

Unimaginable Nationalism

Any kind of nationalism is kinda fucked up and weird to me. Born and raised on stolen land, soaked in blood and slavery, the whole nine yards. I don’t belong here but I don’t belong anywhere else either. Citizen of the world? Except you can’t be. Every inch of every place that hasn’t had the natives fully eliminated is staked out, by people who would die for the dirt, kill for the dirt. Give me this dirtpile or give me death. But better to give you death, other people who I have decided should not be here. Nationalism, like colonialism, is the seed of genocide. Some flavors of it are so mild and banal that you could miss it, but it’s always there, waiting to blossom.

It’s especially wild to me that some people want to kill or die for land in the Middle East. There are much nicer or more interesting deserts and plains and beaches, and most of them don’t have nearly as many genocidal terrorists or fascists, don’t have as many centuries of decapitations and flayings and immolation and destruction. If any place in the world is hell, it’s the holy land. If I was Jewish, I’d be glad to be nowhere near it.

Might feel some type of way about it, since the history of the shituation is very different from that of my ancestral island. What would it be like, to have lost your homeland for over a thousand years, to never be allowed to feel at home anywhere in that entire time? To at last be given a promise of a return there, of a homeland – a promise literally predicated on nationalism and colonialism both – and to see that come to exactly what anybody with an ounce of wisdom could have seen a hundred years away? Poison gift. I’d keep Brooklyn, thanks.

Seriously. People who feel magical about that piece of dirt. What even? I can’t imagine a worse place in the world. Here I can walk down main street and feel the ghosts of natives choked in disease, driven from their homes, murdered in the wilds. Not great. There, I’d be walking the same streets where so many people were slaughtered in so many ways it’s fucking near unimaginable. I’m willing to bet there is not a person in the entire region who is without genocide in their hearts. How could you live through that history and not want to see everyone on the other side of the conflict disappeared? With cruel violence? At least on some level. I know there are peace activists in Israel and bless their hearts. But how often are they tempted to just give up, and join in finishing the job on their opposites?

The overwhelming hate of it all. For dirt. If I was born there, I’d have left and never looked back. The USA is bad enough, but at least I’m not living on a land mine, living in torture alley between people who want nothing more than to see each other reduced to shreds, to blood and then dust. Ain’t no god and ain’t no land and ain’t no ideal worth living in hatred.

This is the only thing we have, when fascists rule the day. The freedom to have moments of peace in our hearts. Because above all they love hate, and we have the ability to love life. They can’t be happy unless horrible shit is happening to someone, somewhere. We are capable of living for good things, and they aren’t. We win even when we lose, given that. What if we didn’t have the option tho? What if we were born into an endless war, gestated in amniotic fluid poisoned with cruelty, with lust for annihilation?

I advocate a no-state solution. Everybody lives as refugees in other countries for another thousand years, and moves back when they’ve learned to play niceys. I used to be more flip about the idea all the holy cities should get nuked (rome, jerusalem, mecca – ideally with everybody moving out first), and I’m not that grody nowadays. But should anybody be living there? No. What’s the half-life on genocide? How long before that land is no longer glowing with hatred?

My guess is that for the remainder of humanity’s time on this world, there will be nothing in Israel or Palestine worth preserving, except for people – who would be much better preserved by leaving that hellhole behind. The touristy beaches, the shopping malls, the ultramodern gleaming skyscrapers, the perfectly irrigated fields – yeah, even the nice parts. They are not nice, because of what they cost. Leave them.

With my nazi-ass country in your corner, Israel, things are about to get even worse. So much worse than you’ve ever imagined. To those of you who love genocide, you may find that getting what you wished for is the worst possible outcome for your people, for humanity. And your day in the sun won’t last. Your whole country will be destroyed. And then rebuilt again, I’m sure, with or without you, and whoever lives there? Probably gonna be genocidal zealots as well, of some flavor. It’s in the dirt.

Fuck dirt.

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pay raised

got my annual pay raise, works out to about $75 per biweekly paycheck. that’s better than a punch in the scro, but considering this only comes once a year and the cost of everything can quadruple when a billionaire sneezes, kinda getting nowhere. it’s alright. i know i can sell my screenplay and make a bank full of money. i know it.

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too mad

i’m turning into an edgelord, talking violence too often. politics, maaaan. gotta shut it off, focus on other things entirely. sometimes when i hear other people talk, who are being upset by the same things that bother me, it helps me look at the same issue more calmly. a weird quirk, i wish i could call up on command. works more IRL than online, where i more often get the opposite effect.

;slkjgrdlkagjlskjrgfkjvrak i tells ya.

but i’ll be alright.

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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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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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The Anticipation Kills

What horrors will happen in 4 years, and with their power cemented by all the things they can get away with between now and then, what horrors will happen after that, and for how long? Don’t answer that question. We all have some pretty good ideas, I don’t need ’em spelled out. But my mind can’t help but ask, like the way we think “why?” when we feel pain. Doesn’t have to make sense.

I just hate it. It’ll be more bearable to me if they at least lose their vile messiah. Leave us in nazi hands, apparently we asked for it, but just lose the hideous smug face and insufferable voice at the top. Fuckin ben shapiro’s uncle tom ass lollipop guild voice would be more bearable. Entropy i pray, please do your inexorable magic, disintegrate the life, steal it away, reduce this horrific waste of flesh to atoms, and then to nothing.

If you’re one of the few tender souls who doesn’t think we should wish death upon the worst of us, take heart that this is as useful as thoughts and prayers, and can do no harm. Shit, you know he’d be proud and pleased to be despised by people like me, so if anything I’m doing him a favor. Even knowing my ardent desire for his extinction might cause his desiccated member to twitch, I can’t help it. I need it so much.

I have wondered in life sometimes who I hate the most. Con men tended to be number one, followed shortly by nazis, transphobes and misogynists somewhere down the way as well. These were always categories, not individuals, but how apt that all are rolled into this creature, the number one category embodied there with primacy. Just cease to be, bitch. It could happen any day, or not for twenty years. The luck we’ve had, you know which is looking more likely. But fuuuuuck. Let it be.

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Silver linings,ugh, lemme see… Just the usual. I think for most of us our lives may be negatively impacted but they will not end, we will survive and love our people and go into the night the same as we would have in a better world. Stick around, my friends.

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Another one: I don’t feel homicidally cranky about these fuckers all the time because I don’t think about them all the time. If I’m thinking about them, I want them dead. But mercifully my mind allows me to think about other things during the day. I can lean into that.

In fact, I’ve been queuing posts, and by the time this one comes up, I’ll probably be a lot more chill.

Satire is Dead

Seriously, what is anybody going to joke about now? It’s over. I cannot imagine ever laughing at anything related to politics ever again, not that I was laughing much in the year leading up to the end. The cackle of demonic glee I might get from seeing one of the new clowns get brutally murdered? Doesn’t count. Mirthless. The second the SNL people put on their wigs and get to doing impressions again, it will just be a demonstration of the fact. Is Colbert cracking wise? I wouldn’t look it up to find out. All of the court jesters should just go home and call in sick for the rest of their lives.

We are all the joke now, and the only people laughing are the worst people in the goddamn world.

I gotta stop thinking about motherfucking politics like right the fuck now. Woof.

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Great American Satan

Opposing any & all Status Quo Warriors

The great pizza conflict

A common thread among billionaires