Stop Freaking Out

Does freaking out help you to engage in political action that improves the world?  Get you to rally to the defense of the oppressed?  Make you vote when you have to?  Does it paradoxically cultivate in you an ability to lucidly prepare for disastrous circumstances through communal organization and grass roots activism?  Then get your freak on, I guess.  If it doesn’t, maybe shut the fuck up before you spread more hurt and pain than necessary to people around you.

This may seem ironic from person who has engaged in no small amount of public political and climate despair, but I’m coming around the bend on that.  Been talking again with somebody who is harmed by amped-up fear in comment sections, like, even when he doesn’t believe it on a rational level, the tension immediately gets him in the nervous system and ruins his day.  And as he’s trying to calm his nerves, he’s complaining about the level of fear people are promoting on the internet, how useless it all is, and I can’t help but concur.

It’s very easy for me to imagine a trans person who in fear of a trans holocaust just offs themself on election night.  (My erstwhile despair commenter wontbehereforlong is no longer in the comments, and that might be why, afaik.)  I don’t care if the fuckheel wins and ameriKKKa goes full nazi.  Don’t kill yourself, please.  What if we reach temperatures like the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the icecaps melt and all the beautiful megafauna of the world go extinct, replaced with ugly ratty little things squabbling over bones in the wasteland?  Don’t kill yourself, please.  What if somebody is finally enough of a creep to use nukes and a small exchange renders some of the urban centers of the global north uninhabitable for a while?  Stick around, babe.  What if plastic pollution reaches a kind of critical mass disrupting reproductive cycles and cellular activity, causing populations of all organisms to crater until natural selection works out the kinks over a thousand barren, burning years?  We have each other, kid.

We have things to do, and you’re invited to the party, mon frere.  Life can go on, if you try to live.  There are so many places in the world right now that have to live with ten times the ugliness the USA is bringing on itself, but people there live on, as best as they can.  Trans and gay people exist in the most oppressive countries in the world.  Women have abortions where that would get them life in prison.  People read banned books wherever they’re banned.

This isn’t Grand Theft Auto, where you accumulate stars from doing illegal shit, and when you have five, every cop psychically intuits your exact location and showers you with machineguns from helicopters and APCs, and suicide bombs you with crown victorias.  The illegality of being trans or jewish or cetera doesn’t instantly mean complete extinction of your kind or even you personally.  You have friends and most of you are going to live.  Hell, even truly universally reviled people like convicted pedophiles have somebody in their lives who would try to help them survive when the whole world says “die.”

It ain’t over til it’s over, and when this election is done, even if the nazis win?  It still ain’t over.  People are hurt by panic and fear.  Also, you’re giving bullies exactly what they want, and what are conservatives if not bullies in their purest form?  When that islamophobic mass shooter in New Zealand filmed himself killing people, some progressives on the internet (looking at you, wehuntedthemammoth comment section) said they felt obligated to watch the video, “to be informed,” or because bearing witness to the senseless deaths would grant those lives a meaning in their heart, or whatever.  OK, sure, whatever.  But you know what the killer wanted?  He wanted you to watch the video (and pewdiepie).  So score one for nazis, again.

This is a significant part of why I unfollowed James Stephanie Sterling on youtube.  They’d beat that drum, day in day out, about how trans people have no political allies, nobody cares about them, they’re all gonna die.  It’s nonsense, even on Terf Island.  Trans people have some amount of allies everywhere they exist.  Jewish people in WWII had some small number of nazis and imperial japanese people smuggling them out of the line of genocide, besides resistance people of every other stripe.  The USA isn’t going to instantly transform into The Man in the High Castle because a little strip of land in Washington DC got taken over by nazis.  The idea that regressive states are the only ones that can rebel is kinda silly.  New York and California have the numbers by population as well as economy, and they aren’t just going to say, “cool, we’ll kill all our gay people for you now.”  Don’t be fucking absurd.

I know you can’t control your fear, much like my bud can’t control his limbic system’s response to panicky people.  But maybe you can just think twice about hitting the keyboard and making some innocent third party feel as bad as or worse than you do, when it achieves fucking nothing.

Am I wrong?  Is publicly shidding your fucking pants every ten seconds helping us win the next election?  Fuck me then, keep dropping those deuces.  If not, maybe step away from the computer and take it down a notch.  Touch grass, smoke grass, whatever.  Deal.

This is directed at me in 2016.

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Conservatives are Boring and Predictable

That bitch dobnal trunk is saying if u don’t vote for him democracy goes bye-bye, when any emeff with eyes has known for years now that if creeps like him or desampnis win, democracy does indeed go bye-bye.  Just another predictable predictable predictable case of right wing projection.  I’d ask if these fucklords could get a new script but they’d probably start communicating in monkey torture videos and christian music.

I tried to post a fun cheesy music video from the ’90s today and in googling “paul stanley chest hair” i had to find out about “paul stanley regurgitates christofascist-filtered terf talking points.”  If you’re gonna be a gender non-conforming transphobe, Paul, why doncha come up with something more original?  Like, “trans people are gonna take over the world with dubstep and use the cis for slave labor on the rings of saturn.”  Oh, I know why you didn’t do that.  Because you’re a boring and predictable conservative doing the most obvious shit humanly possible.

Fucking off now.
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Affirmative Action

Ah, affirmative action.  I’d forgotten about it.  It just doesn’t come up much in my life.  There are some institutions private and public with policies of inclusion that set a minimum amount of hiring or selection of women or people of color, or other traditionally oppressed or marginalized peoples.  It’s a classique bogeyman of racists, to the extent you can hear it called “affirmative blaction” (get it?) by the wrong uncles.

Anyway, somebody remembered it exists and acquired a raft of assholes to sign on a statement against it, posing as an academic paper.  The beef, as usual, is that there may be talented cishetwhitebros who are being excluded from these institutions and privileges because a lower-scoring person who met certain demographic requirements was forced into place by critical race theory jewish social marxists or whatever they’re called.

It’s hardly worth arguing about, but it occurred to me, in looking at this trash fire, that I would rather have a person with a significant cognitive impairment in charge of a scientific endeavor than any of the people who signed to that paper – if the cognitively impaired person was capable of honest inquiry, of accounting for their own biases in their work.  Why is that such a rare quality in this world?  At least among those privileged to be holding the bullhorn.

Very tiring.  I take a nap now.
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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.

Organized Atheism Also at Fault

I’m pretty quick to point out that terves very much share blame for the recent losses on women’s rights.  Transphobia was one of the levers that helped buoy fascists and autocrats in elections across the globe recently.  But this isn’t a terf blog network, it’s an atheist one.  That’s our beat.  So to that end, let me just reiterate this point I’ve made before.

Organized atheism should always have been a force for progressivism, against the barbarity of religious belief.  But nope.  The idea of listening to even the mildest of feminist critique caused all our talking heads to leap headlong into bed with fascists, to promote the movements that ultimately led to Trump’s election and the current slate in the supreme court.  DickDawk can whine all he wants that he’s liberal, that we should believe that counts for fuckin’ anything, while he engages in piteous dickriding transphobia and platforms the hero of incel mass shooters everywhere.

There is a straight line from elevatorgate to gamergate to altright white supremacy to cheeto hitler to the end of Roe v Wade.  Terfs did their part, but we were in the game of ruining civilization as we know it when those bitches were barely getting started.  We had a lot of friends along the way in building this theocracy, but we should never lose sight of our part in subverting our own ostensible ends.  Like terfs – they should never be allowed to forget they helped set feminism back eighty years, and we should never be allowed to forget we set atheism back as well.

My own part was small.  I let a subtle brew of ableism and islamophobia drive me to participate in boosting new atheism, participating in the comments and the discourse, not doing enough to change the rotten core of the movement or start a better one.  I’ll own that.  I wonder if the narcissistic thunk leaders of our defunct movement will ever process the same, ever feel that as they fade from the earth.  I doubt it.

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Department of Bad Ideas – Mass Shootings

Content Warnings: Murder, Ableism, Suicide, Abuse, etc.  This is me being a shitty edgelord for a minute.

Nobody likes mass shootings, even rethuglicans.  A few people carry out the practical end of Fucker Carlston’s stochastic terrorism and gun control looks reasonable – the NRA doesn’t want that, even if they don’t give a shit about a mountain of dead children.  Nobody who knows one of these killers is surprised by them doing the deed.  Sometimes they’ve even been ratted out to the authorities, who were too slow to act on the information.  This suggests to me a solution.

If you’re very pro-gun and you know somebody who is going to kill lots of people, murder them before they can do it.  They are usually troubled enough you could make it look like a suicide easy, and who is going to believe this as a motive for murder?  You’ll know in your heart that you saved lives – you were the fabled good guy with a gun, putting one in the back of your friend’s dome like George did Lenny.  And you’ll know you helped prevent bad press for your beloved assault rifles.

Literally everybody wins.  The children live, the guns keep their good name, you get the joy of committing a murder which is something I know you all desire so richly, and your troubled friend is released from all earthly suffering – their boiling rage allowed to cool and subside into the earth along with their physical corpus.

There are of course multiple reasons this is a bad idea.  Conservatives are spectacularly bad judges of where the violence and abuse in society are coming from.  Youth Pastor Handsy?  Solid dog.  Coach Concussion?  Made you into a real man.  Officer Beatdown?  The thin blue line.  Autistic Steve with the tics?  Who let him be a janitor?  Somebody should part him out for organ donations.  Making this ask to the kind of people in a position to carry it out is both advocating murder, and asking them to be as ableist as possible about who they choose to kill.

I just felt clever in a terrible way for two seconds and had to share my faulty math.  I hope you enjoyed it as dark humor and forgive me if you did not.  Thanks.

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Great Idea re: Muskworld Twitter

When tumblr was bought by one ridiculous corporation for a huge sum of money and immediately resold for peanuts, the remaining users there cheered in amusement.  Look how much money we cost these corporations by just being useless freaks!  That contributed in part, I think, to this idea: Everybody delete their twitter on the same day and tank the stock.

There are reasonable reasons for people to not participate, but for a lot of you I know twitter is nothing but an unhealthy tax on your minds and you could use an excuse or motive to excise it from your life.  Why not make it a form of direct action and kick Apartheid Jr right in his spaceballs?  Delete your Twitter at the appointed hour.  Huzzah!

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Some Lies Should Be Jailing Offenses

The laws of the USA are profoundly generous to liars and con artists.  I don’t know from legal history, but some court said there could be “common sense” limitations on freedom of speech, like “no shouting fire in a crowded theater.”  I could google that easily enough but whatever.  I bring this up because the problem is not alerting people to fire, it’s unnecessarily causing a stampede when there is no fire.  The problem is the lie.

What do you charge that liar with?  Reckless endangerment?  Malicious mischief?  Anyone who has ever lied about covid for political or financial gain should have spent time in handcuffs.  Of course, a creepy enough liar can believe almost any lie they tell, at which point, is it a lie?  That would be a common defense if we ever arrested people for that shit.  “What?  I really believe the vaccine helps them control you with the 5g.  Prove I don’t believe it.”  I don’t know how to deal with the actual prosecution of such cases.

But there are no such cases in the first place, no consequences for telling world-ruining lies, literally strangling a million people to painful miserable death with your flaming bullshit.  Those lies lead to lies lead to lies, a circular firing squad of fascist dreamers creating a world of illusion.  And now we have honest, earnest true believers in these lies.  People who believe in antivaxxing like they believe in jeezis.

In my day job I hear their stories.  One woman had a health problem blood clottish and blamed the vaccine.  One man’s wife took the shot and died from a stroke, perfect health before that he says.  She took the shot and he didn’t.  His faith affirmed, he will one day have a chance to lay in a hospital for a month with his body ravaged in unimaginable ways, his lung’s function replaced with machinery while they run out the clock, if that hospital doesn’t have to triage his ass straight to hell.

Because this lie was sold with conservative cultural identity, most of the victims are fascists, and I can’t feel too bad for them.  Lest we forget,

But it isn’t only fascists that buy these lies.  Mainstream anybodies can be swept up in memes and swindles, and they are – great swathes of them.  I don’t know the numbers but I do know a lot of people in this fairly urban part of a blue state are complete rubes about this shit.  People I know, people I’ve known.  They’re at a risk of death and at a risk of killing people they care about, not to mention all the people they don’t know or care about.

This could have been stopped by aggressive laws against demonstrably dangerous lies.  But politicians on both sides of the aisle, plus the corporate world (and all the incestuous crossover between the two) benefit from dangerous lies just often enough that they don’t want to take that tool off the table.  Freedom of speech is freedom to lie.  Any policies we currently have against that are defanged or shot full of loopholes that are barreled through by fuckers in monster truck convoys from sea to shining sea.

I’d just love to see people like the pink-faced sack of shit in that picture purse their lips and wonder – will this be the one that sends me to the penitentiary?  Please.

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Hey Conservatives

Lately you’ve been trying to kill people a little harder than usual – kill people who get abortions, drive trans people to suicide, killing the old and the infirm with covid, torturing refugees and stealing and raping their children, legalize killing protestors – as long as it isn’t your own nazi buddies…  Anyway, I’m just thinking, anyone who is so horny on killing should absolutely be horny on being killed.  If you push this stuff but don’t want to be murdered, you’re being hypocrites.  I don’t even need this to be an even split.  Let’s say for every five oppressed people you kill, I wanna see one of your figureheads take their face apart on national television with their weapon of choice.  Get on it, motherfuckers, or I don’t know, stop being such homicidal fascists for TEN FUCKING MINUTES PLEASE.

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