TDoV Fundraiser, White Rap, Cringe On

GOAL ACHIEVED – FUNDRAISER CLOSED
This post will remain for historical purposes.

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HEY!  I had a telework meeting earlier this week and since I wouldn’t get harassed on the bus by doing so, I dressed like a lady.  Little did I know I was two days early for the Trans Day of Visibility.  I’m visible, babes.  Be the fat middle-aged white lady you want to see in the world.  I’m lovin’ it.  But still..

image of your blogger great american satan

Like many trans folk today I come to you with cup in hand.  I’ve had medical issues burning up my leave at work, and for some abdominal surgery in late April I’m going to use at least a week of leave without pay.  To make my bills less ouch, I’d like to fundraise.  Here is the incentive:  Donate at all, and you can choose a word I will rhyme in a rap.  If five people choose orange, I’ll try to come up with five shitty sorta-rhymes for orange.

This will be strictly words on digital paper, maybe starting below and then compiled in a blogpost, unless we reach goals.  At $500, I will do an audio performance of the rap.  At $600, I will do a video.  These productions, if they happen, will be lo-fi as all hell, because I just don’t have the time for big effort.

I will run this through midnight April 21st, so I have time to make the audio or video if necessary.  If you like my terrible styles and enjoy cringy embarrassment, please give me a ko-fi, as it were.  And if you like donating to FtBloggers, throw our recently unemployed mans Brinkman a bone too.

link to my ko-fi

 

 

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.

Andvaka

Flashing Light Warning on this video:  It doesn’t actually have flashing lights, but the jarring camera movement and hard cuts between scenes in chiaroscuro lighting might have the same effect.  Also the music is intentionally cruel to the ears, but artistic.

Andvaka is the Icelandic word for insomnia, which isn’t terribly meaningful in itself, but as Iceland gets a season of excessively long daylight, they probably feel it harder than we do.  Last night I got to sleep about 2:00 AM and woke up hard at 5:30.  Time to get ready for work rolled around at 9:20 and I was still awake, so I had to call off.  As I type this it’s 4:30 PM and I’m flagging badly, glad I had the luxury of a paid sick day so I’m not making potentially ruinous mistakes right now.

I had a night a little over a year ago that was similar.  I couldn’t sleep, and my mind kept turning paces.  At that time, I was going over what I’d say if I was being interviewed by Rachel Maddow, over and over and over again.  Last night, it was a little more varied and less grandiose, but I think it dipped into talk show interview territory for at least a bit.  This seems like textbook mania, for a bipolar person, and there’s every reason based on my immediate family to think I have some risk of that.  But it doesn’t happen often enough to be a major problem.  Still, fingers crossed it doesn’t get worse.

There is something else related to my family health history that was on my mind.  I’m mutated.  I’m a mutant.  Seems to be from my father, and possibly my brother has the same issues.  We all have arthritis and degenerative disc disease in our lumbar vertebrae.  Last week I found out I have a mutation that increases risk of certain cancers of the abdominal organs.

it's a riverdale reference

This made me wonder if there’s a connection between the cancer risks and the spinal stuff.  Call it a developmental biology question.  As an embryo’s cells divide and differentiate, they move and branch.  Grossly inaccurate, but you could imagine it like a river delta branching fractally as it runs to the sea.  A mutation is like a stone near the head of the delta changing the shape of the waters downstream.

The mutation is known, but the mechanisms by which these things cause health problems are less understood.  I’m just wondering, when I was an embryo, did the mutation throw some shit in the river, neighborhood of my lumbar stem cells, that made both the spine and internal organs “downstream” from it more likely to fuck up?

Do the pancreas and colon even come from the lumbar part of the embryo, or do they grow in a different segment and migrate to their respective positions?  If the latter is true, my notion doesn’t hold up.  Every DNA-having cell in my bod has the same issues, whatever they mean.  I also have two other mutations that could mess up children if I had them, so good thing I’m no breeder, and another mutation with unknown ramifications.  It might explain the telekinesis and laser eyes.

Something bad happened in my not too distant ancestry and that’s life, babey.  Something to think about when you aren’t sleeping.
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No Solutions

Content Warnings:  Mental Illness, The Failure of Social Services, Poverty, The Failure of US “Democracy,” Child Abuse, Murder, Paranoia, Doomy Thoughts.  But I’m OK, don’t worry.

People get overwhelmed, look at the whole of everything that’s wrong in the world, or just their lives in particular, and feel hopeless.  Generally, I think that’s depression or some other problem messing with you.  Life can be made bearable or have OK moments for almost anyone.  But I have to admit, sometimes in life there are problems with no solutions.

That’s the kind of shit I deal with at work sometimes.  I got somebody on the phone with paranoia, wanting help in protecting herself from imagined oppressors.  What the fuck is the recommended wisdom for helping people with paranoid delusions?  Do you humor them and act like you’re taking it seriously, but not facilitate any actual pursuit of their claims?  Do you tell them gently that they’re imagining things?  Tell them sternly?

Any action you take will only result in more paranoia, more delusion.  The best case scenario is that they get distracted and forget they talked to you in the first place, but unfortunately a lot of paranoid people have excellent (if warped) memories.

Sometimes at work* I have to tell people that they have no income, have a massive new debt, and are facing months of travail for a mere chance of setting things right.  Basically, “If you don’t have family to lean on, welcome to your new home eating rats in the underpass.  Or go back to work even though you’re disabled and stay doing that until it kills you.”

Technically, this is a problem with a solution:  Overthrow of the US government, or at least a progressive rout of the whole system.  But that magical probably-not-happening future does nothing for people fucked to death by the laws and policies of the here and now.

I wrote my senator about the need for progressive reform and her underlings sent a form response with clear tells that the message was skimmed at best, not really read for understanding.  That senator is literally the perfect person to write about the issue, sitting on a committee deciding the relevant laws.  Too bad, so sad.

Mutual aid is probably the only way the masses will survive late capitalism, but we’ve been systemically divided.  I don’t know the rotating cast of neighbors in my apartment complex and they don’t know me.  We have every reason in the world to regard each other as potential thieves and creeps.  We’re all busting our humps at work too much to do the emotional labor of establishing a community.  Instead we’re fighting over parking spaces, as the jacked up rent has the number of tenants per unit exceeding capacity.  There have been a few murders and attempted murders in my little apartment complex, and it’s not even considered one of the bad ones in my city.

One of those murders may have been the solution to a problem – a child stabbing a (possibly) predatory adult in the household many times.  But you know what happens to that kid next, and it looks like less of a solution in the end.  As common as child abuse is, most likely it was the motive, but I did open the article talking about paranoid delusions, and the murdered person may have been innocent.  Who can say?  As the meme says, the world is a fuck.

The idea that things can always get worse looks more true every year, with a natural end point for that in human extinction.  With a complex enough system there are thousands of ways for things to go wrong and very very few ways for them to go right.

But, you know, keep taking care of yourselves and each other, and maybe this will look less dire on the other side.  And in the meantime, if somebody can eviscerate Matt Walsh and use his entrails to hang JKR from the parapet of her castle, please do.  The sun will come out tomorrow, haha.

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*This is the best job I ever had, in terms of recompense and security, and my only hope of clearing the traps of poverty in what’s left of my life, so changing jobs is not an option at the moment.  How’s your line, lately?

I Can’t Even

An international cadre of professional transphobes building on the work of internet terfs were a significant source of our current problems, and while I’m powerless against the moneyed side (see my slam poetry), we can all do our part to cut off / isolate / quarantine the internet creeps.  The Heard trial and the downfall of RvW have been a field day for terfs creeping into regular people’s reblogs.

So I had a good idea for a new side tumblr: “I steal the good ideas from terfs so you don’t have to reblog them.”  If it got popular enough, people could have a single blog for feminist posts that for sure isn’t tainted by terfery.  Of course it would take some discernment making sure the abortion resources they link to are legit and not fronts for terfery, making sure any feminists quoted aren’t eliminationist zealots, etc.

The thing is, I can’t even.  I don’t have much time between my personal and professional life in the first place, can’t keep up with chores.  I have nothing left for the fight.  That’s why one of my daily hashtags is #long live the fighters – because I’m not one of them.  To my comrades in the streets or on these internets, great love and esteem.  Thanks for doing what a lot of us cannot.

I need to rejimmy my work benefits to name my boyfriend as my beneficiary for any monetary value of them should I cark it.  Maybe while I’m at that, I can reduce or eliminate the savings plan and turn that into a recurring donation to local abortion funds for red states.  Something where I don’t have to lift a finger.  What would Hell have of its humble servant..?

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Somebody Oughtta Do Somethin

Content Warning:  Back on that Climate Doom Bullshit.

There are very few people in the world with the power to course correct on the capitalism-inflicted extinction of humanity, but the facts that are as clear as day to you and I?  Those privileged few are as blind to them as we are to (most*) ultraviolet light.  I mean that.  We can be surrounded by UV, soaked in it, and not perceive it with our senses or minds.

Privilege is a powerful blinder – even at the feeblest levels.  A middle class person one medical situation away from crushing poverty is measurably less empathetic and less generous compared to the poor.  Take that effect and multiply it by a billion.  Musk, Gates, Saudi princes – they could have the plainest truths immediately in front of them, blotting out anything else, and rather than see it they will simply go blind to everything.  Hence the ludicrous fantasia of space escape.

That’s why they don’t take action.  I’ve said before capitalism is a blame diffusion engine par excellence.  Millionaires, politicians, people with hands on levers and buttons of that could theoretically take action – they want to take care of themselves and their own, can always leave it to someone else to take the meaningful action, always have an excuse.  Billionaires are wealthy enough to have a real chance of escape from that game.  The existence of trillionaires?  That means we’ve officially reached the point where a single person could easily plow through all those mirrors and illusions and games, could just decide to do something about the problem and make it real.  But they won’t.  They don’t.

I feel that blinded by god emperor privilege, maybe they can’t?  Maybe the argument that capitalism is an inevitable expression of human nature and that anything else is sky-eyed impossible dreams, while facile and defeatist, might be completely true.  But I’ll take it a step farther than the people who use that as a defense of capitalism – If this argument is true, we’re all gonna fuckin’ die like (most**) dinosaurs.  We’ll be lucky if there’s an organism like Lystrosaurus left to eke out a future for tetrapods of any kind.  I’ve said before that I think some few humans are likely to survive the climate apocalypse by merit of our social and mental powers, but if we are truly as greedy and useless the capitalist beast?  We won’t make it.

I don’t remember why I started writing this article.  I claimed once before I was swearing off climate doomposts, but originally this wasn’t meant to be about that.  I think I just wanted to expand on my “angler” thesis with some recent insight I’ve had.  What was that?  I’m too warm to think.  That kind of design flaw isn’t gonna be helpful in short order on this bitch of an earth.  Hm…

Fucking hell.  I have completely fucking forgotten my point.  This sucks ass.  I fucking despise summer.

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*I had a feeling I should double check that, given the depth of complexity and weirdness and nature, and found an article to undermine my simile.  Ignore that, please.   **I knew this I just wanted to say the phrase “die like dinosaurs” because like many clown-ass writers I like alliteration.  Then I felt guilty about it, hence this edit.  Now it looks ridiculous for other reasons.

Got Antisocial PD?

I was thinking about different kinds of people I’ve known, or known of, and the things they got going on.  In their heads.  Which made me think about my sister, who got the formal diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder – the condition informally known as sociopathy.  If you’ve gotten to know somebody well who has that diagnosis, it might still be easy to think of them as soulless, hollow, robotic.  My sister can look sad, more often look mad, say she wants this or that out of life, but pathologically she returns to the same behavior pattern she’s been doing since younger than age four – allying with one party to emotionally torment another.  She easily rewrites her own history and seems able to genuinely believe the new story.

The condition has a grip there.  She can’t seem to do anything that contravenes it.  Abusing people is, for her, like breathing.  It is, metaphorically, autonomic.  (i’m fucken pretentious tonight)  But who is she, outside of that?  Does she have something like a heart?  Does she have feelings?  I haven’t seen her in more than twenty years but I bet I know her better than anyone she’s met since, and I don’t really know the answer for that with certainty.  But I feel like it’s Yes?

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Fuccing Breakthru Cases

I have an online acquaintance I don’t know very well.  She’s been bitching about shitty family risking covid constantly – including a lady whose children have no father because of it.  My acquaintance got vaccinated and… currently has covid, surely from one of those family members.  Meeting at my workplace a week ago.  Guy says “I know three people fully vaxxed still that got covid,” boss says, “I keep hearing that at these meetings.”

Any luck and my acquaintance won’t so much as lose her sense of taste, though she’s about as old as me and it makes her more likely than the babes to come off of this scathed.  I told her I wouldn’t blame her for pistolwhipping a family member’s teeth out.  Motherfuckers got to know their limitations.

How are your vaxxed up people doing?

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Pondering the Future of Life

HUGE CONTENT WARNING – APOCALYPTIC CLIMATE DESPAIR

It’s possible that humans, at the far end of this hellride (maybe a hundred years off), will have eradicated all life on this planet except the most intense extremophile bacteria and archaea.  I think even from where we stand now, assured of calamitous devastation, surfing the edge of an extinction event in progress, that does not seem likely.  The way that would happen is if the completely runaway global warming that is already too late to stop snowballs into temperatures that rival the Hadean Eon.  I don’t know how possible that is.

But it is surely probable for this heat to become globally devastating in a way we’ve never seen before.  It’s a pretty safe bet that all large mammals will go extinct outside of enclosed environments, and 90% of what else is living beyond the artificial spaces will go extinct as well.  That’s enough to make a nature lover miserably sad and some of us fit to suicide bomb a petrol exec or politician.  Looking forward to more of that happening, because this stuff does have me miserably sad, and I’d love to see the fuckers eat shit and die.  Zero qualifications regrets or backtracking on those words.  If you’re petrol or a political enabler, please, set yourself on fire on live TV for me.

But this post is about none of that.  I am inclined in this random moment to think about the life that will survive global warming.  Because unless we successfully turn Earth into Venus, this warmed world will settle into some kind of equilibrium eventually.  Birds and reptiles are much better at surviving heat compared to mammals, and despite the insect apocalypse going on at the moment?  You know those lil bastards will bounce back.  Again, huge numbers of species will be gone forever, but those that remain?  Will ultimately repopulate to exploit the niches that remain.

I know less about plants.  Obviously if they don’t make it through, the rest of life is in a bad way.  Goodbye to all tetrapod life if that happens, probably – no lizards no birds no rats.  But I suspect there are plants that will do well enough, even in a world that reaches a hundred sixty in the summer, choking in fire every year until the last scrap of tinder is mingled in deserts of ash.  The poles will not be quite that hardcore, some cool weeds will probably stick around and wait for a chance to spring back.  That will give a foothold for some insects and some kind of tetrapods.

If humans are lucky in all that, we’ll be living in tightly controlled environments with smaller populations.  Maybe underground.  We’ll be living off of vat-farmed algae and recycled garbage.  But what I’m most curious about in this moment of detachment is this – what animals will be the best survivors?  Who will be the lizards and bugs and weirdos that scrap back, diversify and repopulate the Earth?  If we’re lucky enough to still have dinosaurs, who will they be?  Ducks and chickens pulled off this feat once before, I bet they could do it again.

For the comments, I’d like to see people placing their bets on what animals survive this mess.  I, for one, believe that humans will be one of those animals – for good or ill.  But aside from eyebrow lice and gut flora, who will we be sharing the world with?

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Eating Genesis Pi

Genesis 3:14:  And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

Injustice that calls itself justice, hatred that calls itself love, is foundational to the abrahamic faiths.  The serpent in the garden was a cartoon villain with no motivation but the joy of evil itself, taking the text at face value, but any cursory examination of the events of the stories as written exonerates all villains save god himself.  Of course he made the serpent to love evil, made men and women to be curious, and so on.

And as abrahamic faiths are foundational to western civilization, the injustice is baked into who we are and how we do.  Poor people deserve to suffer because whatever people have or lack in life is according to his will, is “just” by divine fiat.  We must have done something wrong to deserve this.

I am put in mind of all this because today my ramen noodles smelled and tasted like cigarette ash.  Having smelled that, why did I proceed to eat them (with a lot of butter and salt added)?  I didn’t want the ramen to go to waste and I’d already added the packet by the time I smelled it.  I thought about why I’m eating cigarette ramen.

Maybe somebody rich is adulterating ramen with literal garbage just for spite.  Or maybe some poor filipino working in a ramen factory, knowing he’s gonna die in economic hell and unable to do anything else, tipped an ash tray into the flavor packets, knowing it would find decadent western mouths, and fuck those guys.  I won’t blame the worker, as shit a thing as that is to do.  I blame the global system built on exploitation, making us poor folks as cruel as what the rich have given us.

And capitalism, as much as it runs contrary to the hippy shit young jeezy preached, is a perfect piece with the justice that runs through most of the bible.  I’m a serpent, I’m gonna eat my dust all the days of my life.  Or maybe I’ll rise to the middle class, where I can eat chaff instead, and rain dust upon my lessers with a sense of righteousness.  All is as it should be on god’s earth.

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EDIT to add:  I’m living on my belly as well – more crippled this week than I’ve ever been in my life from throwing my back out.  Had to miss 3 days of work.  I turn 45 in a few days, so I probably got another 45 years of this worsening to look forward to.  It’s OK tho, I’m cool.