Me and Sadako McGee

I’m so close to the bottom of the well (get it get it) on my daily posting it’s fuckin’ wild.  I get the feelin’ the way PZ and Mano work is by reading their news and social media, and commenting on anything that seems worthy of comment.  I don’t follow news or social media on purpose.  FtB is the condensed version run thru the filter of people who share my principles.  Good enough.  Could I just do posts reacting to what they’re posting?  Blogly shadow puppetry?  Nay.  I don’t even feel like making a two sentence comment under most of their articles, no offense intended.

As much writing a chapter a day of novels was a frenzied dash, at least it gave me something to work with.  On the other hand, I seriously doubt I have the sauce to write fiction every day.  I imagine what I would write and immediately it all seems so high effort.  Even cheeky nonsense involves craft, way more than you might expect.

What would Groucho Marx do?  If I recall he was a well known epistler.  That’s like blogging but involves ponies and shotguns, I’ve heard.

Recently I’ve been watching The Dead Milkmen‘s vloggish thing on yewchoob, called Big Questions with the Dead Milkmen, and getting a mental picture of their lives.  Those guys had a hit almost everyone over forty has heard, in “Punk Rock Girl,” but they never stopped needing day jobs for at least part of the year.  The lead singer is at an age where some emeffs are retired and he still has an office job of some kind.  Royalties for the artists ≠ living high on the hogg 4 lyfe.  What hope do the rest of us non-fame-adjacent slobs have, of escape from tha Grind?  We all know PZ should be retired by now for health reasons, but can’t due to financial concerns.  Work sucks.  Everything fucking sucks.

Chill, me.  Chill.

That’s a bit off topic, but maybe it is a better topic for discussion.  Being a “creator.”  I’ve long wanted to put it all together as an artist, to assemble the palace of my perfected works, to accomplish whatever bare minimum level of public self-expression that would feel like “enough” when it’s bucket kicking time.  But to what extent is the public element necessary?  Should I be building an aluminum foil throne room in a storage unit or composing ten-thousand page novels about sentient tornadoes that will be found in shoeboxes after I’m floating out the crematorium pipe?

The world is glutted with motherfuckers.  There are a million bajillion artists clamoring for attention, a great howl reaching up into the unfathomable cold.  To be one more vainglorious mausoleum builder, this feels just pitiful.  Uncool, and you know I want to be cool.

But still, it gets me, thinking about how I have to toil most of my life at things I don’t want to do, while my imagination burns with things I’d prefer to be working on.  And the certainty that if society wasn’t a giant pyramid scheme to keep business nazis in boats, if I literally had to plow fields, I would have vastly more free time to pursue my craft?  That’s a ten thousand degree knife thru my braincase.

Chill me.  Chill.

Anyway, if the daily posting train comes sputtering to a stop very soon, do not be surprised, nor concerned.  I’m as well as anyone can be, given the current circumstances of the world.  Thanks for reading this foolery as long as you have, and even if I return to erratic and much less frequent posting, I will most likely be here until FtB itself is pushing up daisies.

See you around!

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The Corporate War is Here

The rich have always controlled civilization, one way or another.  Who those rich are and what that wealth looks like have changed a lot over time, but the anprims are right about this much:  civilization itself seems to exist solely to promote inequality.  I’m not meaning to invalidate all the volumes that have been written proposing ways societies should guarantee rights and safety to their denizens, just to say that such ideas are aspirational, and in practice I don’t know if we’ve ever quite made the grade.

My homeland is now dominated by open fascists, who still have the gall to refuse that name, to call themselves by other cutesy little nicknames like “conservative” or “republican.”  Whatever.  Not here to talk about that.  I’m trying to express my perception of power in this country and in the world, and what that power is going to do, so that we can be as emotionally prepared for it as possible.

Wealth feeds itself endlessly, like a virus.  It can’t stop devouring any society in which it exists, until that society is utterly destroyed.  The billionaire class ate and ate until they became so powerful they functionally ran the world, but didn’t seem to realize this until now.  They did understand a lot of their specific powers – pay any politician any amount of money to get laws to hand you even larger sums, assassinate your worst opposition and pay for the dirty tricks to keep any investigation from getting far, have friends in DC sic the CIA on leftist movements in South America, etc etc etc.  But I think shitler’s public alliance with apartheid junior really shows they didn’t understand what that power meant until now – because you can see them desperately scrambling to define the borders of their fiefdoms.  Something busted this flywheel.

America falling under control of the most corrupt businessman since Ea-Nasir has opened up the battlefield.  Through lobbying and cutthroat financial maneuvers the corpos have been building their power, like the modernization of armies in the run-up to World War I, packing the powder keg for purposes they didn’t fully comprehend, and now it’s all-out war for the top spots.  Apartheid junior is the first billionaire to directly control government agencies with no authority except his bank account, and now everybody else realizes they need to get a piece of that action.  Who will win?  What will their victory look like?

I know shitler won’t be around for it.  We all know that.  But he was crucial in making this possible, so the corpos have to be very careful how they handle his exit from the stage.  If I was them, I’d make him die from “natural causes” fuckin’ immediately, before history has fully vindicated his naysayers, so more competent tools can control the damage, spin his hagiography to my brand’s advantage.  If he lives long enough for the world to be completely fucked apart in a way that unambiguously points to him as the cause, the damage to business interests will be huge.

If beezus, murdrock, et al are thinking along those same lines, his days may be very short indeed.  Then it’s beardo mccouchfuck as bribe recipient in chief, and mfsk will find himself suddenly faced with a lot more competition for that access.  This will not look like it used to.  There was a kind of detente or gentlemen’s agreement between corpos that what was good for one was good for all.  Deregulate deregulate deregulate, and poison the earth to grow your filthy lucre.  The peace is over.  It’s time for Shadowrun.

Or should I say Cyberpunk?  I’m referring to the old TTRPGs where transnational megacorporations were no longer content with mergers and acquisitions, but paid goons to slice throats in the night.  Cyberpunk by R Talsorian Games was the first, but its name is too easy to confuse with the genre writ large.  I’m gonna stick with Shadowrun.

Shadowrun was a successor to Cyberpunk in the same genre, but with added fantasy elements – elves and magic alongside “chrome” and “street samurai.”  Within that world, shadowrunning was doing the illegal bidding of corporations as a mercenary.  Such a mercenary would be called a shadowrunner, which is a cool name.  I’ve already made reference to this game in another post.

Anyway, shadowrunners IRL.  Cool name, bad people.  Were those Boeing whistleblowers whacked?  Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia?  Expect more of this, and more overt.  Amazon security will, at some point, turn live ammunition on Amazon employees, and get away with it.  Any news you read that makes a business look bad, you can trust it was only able to be published because it benefited a competitor who owned the media platform on which it appeared.

I’m pretty confident in my lil thesis here, but still haven’t come close to my first aim – prepare myself for what’s next – because there are so many possibilities my head is spinning.  First order of business will be taking over different aspects of government or political regions, like cities or states.  Texas, a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil.  Social Security – Goldman Sachs.  How much say will the congress or even the president have in altering these contracts, when resistance will be met with dioxin poisoning, blackmail, even mass murder?

No idea.  Used to be medicine and caregiving were the growth jobs, but crapitalist medicine and fascist corporate influence has hospitals closing left right and center, the remaining staff massively overworked.  The new growth industry will be shadowrunning.  Learn to hack with artificial intelligence.  Amass blackmail dossiers.  Join private security trained by alums of CIA death squads.

That’s as far as I can go with this for now.  Might revisit in the future.

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ERposting

composing this in “hall bed” at emergency room, drankin saline solution thru stigmata.  was weak all day and slightly short of breath.

not lookin forward to the bill.  the way the insurance tango works i might not know the final tally for months, or might find out in a week.  that is to say, i might come to y’all with hat in hand again at some point in that time frame.

fun how so few people here wear masks.  minimizing my household’s exposure to crud by having no company in here.

i’ve queued this post so if it goes live with nothing after this point, you can assume i’m dead or otherwise unavailable.  be concerned if the rest of my queue starts rolling out one day at a time, posts with titles but no text other than a hasty note to myself or a keysmash.

i’m sure it won’t be like that, but this is a weird one for me, and who knows?  will it be better for them to discover nothing or for them to find out i have something annoying or expensive to treat?

will i contract covid in here?  will the visit be worse for my health than muddling thru without help?

will check in later…

nothing!  they found nothing.  i don’t think they ran the most expensive tests so i’ll probably be coo.  just gotta get up the gumption to stop smoking my sick leave.

yeah, back home, had dinner, feel better – if a bit frail.  what will i feel like tomorrow morning?  stay tuned lol.

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Fascism is Misogynist First

You can imagine a fascism without misogyny.  Many have, especially misogynist fiction writers in the 20th century – see the alien world where men have been enslaved by vixens in silver lamé.  Leaving aside that frivolous example and just daydreaming, you can see it, right?  Not from Shitler.  Maybe his sidekick, Couchfuck McBeardnazi, could in some world in some way be totally respectful to women, keep them close in his counsel in the tower of Mordor, march arm in arm with them to burn and oppress.  In practice, it never happens.  Misogyny is a first principle of fascism, in spirit and deed if not always in word.  As it happens, we also have it in word here.

As primary caregivers under patriarchy, women are primary authority figures over children.  To keep peace, rule one for the unruly kinder is “be nice to each other.”  Don’t hit people, think about their feelings.  Basic liberalism born of practicality.  To forge a brave new world without mercy, where violence can be wielded without restraint by the cool sexy stormtroopers, we must first remove the authority of anyone who would tell you to play nice.  We must chain mom to the house and beat her if she dares to speak.

Maybe that’s it?  Maybe not.  I’m sure you can find dozens of essays from antifascists like Umberto explaining the principle, or even writing from fascists telling on themselves.  I wonder if, in some unrealized golden future where all prejudices and bases of oppression are falling away one by one, misogyny may be the last one to fall.  Far more than racism, antisemitism, transphobia, etc, it has traitors within the oppressed group lining up to enforce its agenda.  Misogynist women are the fucking pits.  Not that there aren’t racist members of oppressed races, antisemitic jewish people, and transphobic trans people, because there are.  It just seems like a worse issue with women’s rights.

I haven’t been perfect on feminism by any means, especially the deeper you go into my foolish past (pre-blogging), and am not trying to pose like a saint of the practice.  Just pointing some shit out.  The real meaning of “woke” is “maintaining awareness of oppression, especially for self-defense.”  I want the world to wake up to the insidious omnipresence of misogyny and do some real shit about it.  We persist in our fascist coma.  Big sigh.

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Another Goddamn Tapout

I was working on my lotto ticket this month.  I have a lot of stories to tell, gonna do some up proper eventually.  Self-publish, most likely.  The lotto ticket?  Not like the others.  I was going to omit queerness, make the main characters white, and follow a conventional thriller outline – sell out, maximize appeal to stodgy industry scum.  It was to be the last thing I bother trying to pitch, but I couldn’t hack it this month.  My brother came over for a big visit with his kids.  More than one person in my life is getting pressed by mental illness.  I just don’t have the time right now.

But man, I wanna get this done.  Any of it.  I’m tired of only going part of the way.  And as far as lamestream publishing, I need to try at least once.  I needs loot.  I’m sure the advances ain’t anything like they used to be, when they happen at all, but who knows?  That’s why it’s a lottery ticket.

I gotta pay off this fucken mortgage before the chaotic nature of this dystopia ruins my life, and the lives of the people that depend on me.  If it wasn’t for shitler, I’d feel a lot safer in slow and steady, but it ain’t like that anymore.  The job security I once enjoyed is a distant memory.  The evergreen advice of the Wutang Clan somes to mind again, “You can’t just get by anymore, you gotta get over.”

Man, FtB was dead as hell yesterday.  Wonder what it’s looking like as this post comes up? … …

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How Fringe Figures Wield Outsized Influence

Had some people doubting my assertion that the gnu atheists significantly contributed to the rise of fascism.  My life is fucking microwaving my brain right now.  I’m having a bad time in part because people around me are having even worse times.  I shouldn’t be writing this right now.  I should be helping people I care about get thru their shit.  But I’m running out of queued posts and this is something I can generate a few words about.  So here I am, really profoundly not fucking feeling it, but committed to the bit of daily posting.

Celebrities advertise the positions they endorse.  Advertisement wins new converts, but importantly, it can reach the people who matter the most to global power – moneyed fuckoes who want to hear their power justified, who want a religion or belief system that exonerates them from the egregious injustice their privilege itself represents.

Remember the NYT puffing up the Intralectural Dork Web?  The Yooniversity of the Intellectional Durk Werb at Austin dot org?  Whatever that shit was called?  If you’re a big enough asswipe, you can make a bank fulla money just saying the fuckshit you believe, because the kochs or millers or rockefellas can give u a shower of gold.  A golden shower, if you will.

One thing feeds the other feeds the other feeds the other.  The game goes like this: get famous, say evil things, watch evil men line up to pay you for promoting evil that benefits them.  Via hyper-incestuous thinktanks and lobbies and yacht parties and media juntas, the thousand-headed hydra of conservative bobbleheads normalizes fascism and emboldens politicians to put that ideal into practice.

Dawkins et al were definitely part of that, and still are.  They spend more time promoting fascism now than fighting against oppressive religion.  He has become an absolute second stringer.  Fuckin’ Candace Owens and any number of rappers and standup comedians have bigger seats at the table than Dawkins now.  But I watched this happen.  We all did.

I’m just gonna assert again what I did the first time around.  Elevatorgate was one of a rapid-fire series of reactionary movements that helped convert misogyny into a broad tent fascist movement.  Misogyny was the starting point, but it eventually incorporated conspiratorial thinking and fringe beliefs, racism and xenophobia.  Amusing to think about old dicky wondering why o why his side includes the flat earthers.  Keep thinking about it.  Maybe you’ll figure it out before you die.

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Throwing the Game

A thought follows from my recent bothsiderism post.  There have been a lot of situations like this in recent years, haven’t there?  A group or individual devoted to a cause decides they hate some oppressed people so powerfully that they ally with opponents, and set their own cause back by decades.  The obvious example is terfs aiding fundies to absolutely devastate women’s rights, all because trans women are yucky.

The slvmepit queen’s contribution to fascism set vaccine acceptance, research, and availability back decades, when that was originally her cause.  If memory serves.  Maybe she was more of a nü atheist, whose raison d’être was pwning christians, and didn’t spend much digital ink on pro-vaxxing.  It’s been a long time.

Dawkins, Harris, etc set atheism back a lot.  One of the sorest groups of burned atheists has to be the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who recently had to watch christian bigots gloating as they excluded women from military careers, had to watch the executive branch that controls the military go from being the most inclusive it had ever been in history to literally labeling DEI as a hate movement.  But, y’know, having to respect people on their own terms is a tall ask.  Better to hand the world over to theo-fascism, right?

Man that last group really hacks me off.  Terfs are just comparable to nazis to me.  They’re gloating, gleefully evil moustache-twirling freaks, living their best lives at the expense of the human species.  Consistent in their evil, right?  Anti-woke atheists are such mealy-mouthed little creeps, weaselly motherfuckers acting like there’s a centrist or even liberal way to oppose social justice, man, I wanna slap the shit out of them.  Don’t ever let me meet that little old man.  I don’t know how well I could restrain myself.

I wonder if there are any environmentalists out there who got environmental protections overturned because somebody asked them to be nice to black people.  I wonder if there are any black power activists who got racist politicians elected because the alternative was a woman.  I wonder if there are any women who … eh, we all know that story now.

All I’d like to say in conclusion is this:  If your support for a cause is so weak that you’ll throw the game that hard, maybe don’t get involved in the first place?  Nobody needs friends like you.  Fuck’s sake, atheism is probably worse off now than if Dawkins had never picked up a microphone.

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A Moment of Bothsiderism

The gnu-flavored atheist movement was founded in part by people who favored military adventurism against muslim-majority countries, chiefly Christopher Hitchens.  That movement quickly morphed into a broad liberalism which appealed to less bloodthirsty people like you and I.  That was revealed to be paper thin cover for a reactionary mindset during Elevatorgate, which is why FtB is so much smaller than SciBlogs had been before the schism.

Elevatorgate’s queen was Abby ERV, who basically abandoned pro-vax activism in favor of a 24-7 misogyny campaign.  Together with Gamergate and the MRA and incel movements, these were the foundational kernel of the neo-nazism that has taken over the USA.  If you meet a rethuglican bro under fifty, he probably spent some time in one or more of these online communities, or their descendants.

If we take that piece of shit ERV as being an icon of atheo-skepticism who contributed to fascism, what of her opposite number in the anti-vax movement, Jenny McCarthy?  Anti-vaxxing (and medical woo in general) used to be strongly associated with liberals, with left of center people.  When conservatives embraced anti-vaxxing, those people swung hard.  I’ve had the misfortune of talking to some of them.  Maybe they have a left belief or two among the gallery of monsters in their skulls, but they are ardent supporters of shitler, and many are Qanon as well.  Both pro- and anti-vaxxing contributed to fascism.

So here’s my moment of bothsiderism.  Who contributed more to our present political ruination, gnu atheists or antivaxxers?  Abby ERV or Jenny McCarthy?  Even tho the actor was much more famous, I honestly do not know the answer to this question.  Both movements had some amount of access to the halls of power via lobbyists or cultural prestige.

In composing this post, I found myself reflecting on the strange political moments and movements that added up to Nazi USA.  That broad tent is wild as hell.  It’s so much easier to take the world apart than to make it better.  The locust swarms flow into and out of each other, devouring hope and love.

I do not fault anyone for feeling doomed and destroyed, but I still have hope for all of you, that you keep it together, that you enjoy the things you can, and you don’t feel too overwhelmed by the overwhelming circumstances.  We’ve got each other and we’re still alive, baby.

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I Said No Motherfvcking Backsies

The US government told people it would give them a thing, then it said psych!  jk lol.  OK, this has happened many times, but the one I’m thinking of most recently is student loan forgiveness.  This is backsies, and I say, no motherfucking backsies.  Now some might say that about us loser ass chumps who didn’t caveat our emptors before agreeing to the loans in the first place, but no, we signed those agreements based on the fabulous careers the education was supposed to provide us.  That shit ain’t real, therefore the education was never worth the asking price.  It was, as so many things in the United Snakes are, fraud.

So when we were told forgiveness was on the horizon, just do this and that, pay what you can in the meantime, we’ll work this out, and then… hard no.  Because fuck us for being poor, that’s why.  cool, cool, cool.  I’m just gonna be over in the corner sharpening this big piece of metal to hang in that wooden frame over there, hang it on a string.  It’s modern art, don’t worry about it.  After all, I have a bachelor’s degree in fine art.  You told me it was worth a lifetime of debt, so it must be legit.

Supposedly, the type of forgiveness I’m in line for was not one that has been kiboshed.  It was part of a court ordered thing, the government telling a slew of sheisty business schools to eat shit.  So perhaps it will come to pass.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps they’ll slap the irons on me when debtor’s prisons return in force.

The way federal employee pensions are calculated includes an average of your highest three years of earnings, and at some point the Big Beautiful Bullshit included a change in that math that would result in federal employees getting less money when they retire.  You’re promised one thing, you pay in, you get arbitrarily told psych, jk lol, no.  This is backsies.

Poor children dying of easily prevented causes was making states look bad, and they got a lil federal money to reduce the body count thru a program you may have heard of called Medicaid.  Thanks says the state, collecting funds to save poor people’s lives.  Psych jk lol, no.  They can eat shit and die now.  Backsies.

Anyway, don’t tell me you’ve got something for me and then take it away.  No motherfucking backsies.  Thanks.

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Selection Selection

You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, just look at the most recent post, or whatever.

we know natural selection and sexual selection.  it’s pretty clear complex species have a kind of sociological selection, even if it isn’t the darwinism some would imagine.  what other kinds of selection could be happening?  all that’s needed for selection is a variable thing and another variable thing that filters the variety of the first.  what if there’s a kind of selection we haven’t identified yet that drives the cycle of mass extinctions?  people point to certain astronomical and geographical cycles but i’m thinking something more abstract.  i once wondered why diseases hurt and kill, when they could proliferate more if they did not do those things.  maybe what selects for them to cause harm is something we haven’t thought of yet (tho there were other explanations from commenters which seem more likely).

might be that sociological selection is understudied.  i could be using the wrong term and i don’t know the literature, don’t even know for sure that sociology is the field in which study would happen.  the way unregulated capitalism guts itself and ruins the world is actively selected for in some way.  superficially you can look at specific actions like the repeal of glass-steagall, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon which is out of control and strangling democracy.  i guess that one would be studied by radical economists, even tho it shouldn’t be radical because it’s blue-sky obvious from outside the schools that spawn alan greenspan clones.

i dimly recall some scientists believing that sexual selection was just one aspect of fitness selection and didn’t deserve equal footing.  people fond of the fascist version of natural selection would apply it very broadly, but i’m sure there are non-nazi justifications for doing so.  then again, that could just be humans trying to cram the natural world into neat little boxes for ease of understanding, when complexity and chaos are the true way of things.  If sexual selection is just natural selection junior, then natural selection (as fitness to the environment changing rates of mutant gene expression in populations) could itself be a concept nested within a larger framework, and in company with myriad categories of related phenomena.

i’m gonna start with the types of fitness i’ve discussed so far and list any others i can imagine off the top of my head.  feel free to add more in comments, or whatever you please.

type of selection — variable A — variable B / the filter
natural selection — mutation — environmental fitness
sexual selection — costly displays — weird fetishes
sociological selection — cultural behavior — success of the culture
invisible hand shit — supply — demand (lol fake)
political corruption — personal ethics — lobbyist money
sexy water droplet on laura dern’s wrist — goin different directions — chaos

i never did get at what i was feeling, something bigger… but that’s all i got for now.  waking up for work in six hours…

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