In our perfected world, whatever that looks like, from sea to shining sea all will live under a universal guarantee of human rights.  But billionaire-owned media selling tax breaks for themselves with fear of the underprivileged, well, it’s got a big swath of the middle of this country in a death grip.  It does not matter one jot what the actual majority of people in those states want*, the ones favored by gerrymander have decided it’s time for jim crow, prison farms, gaybashing, bookburning, and elimination of any religion but christianity from the public sphere.  And, in this moment, they’ve won so decisively that they are very likely to work the levers of power to eliminate democracy in the USA for decades to come.

In the meantime, the excuse they’re using is state’s rights.  States should have the right to murder their own citizens to meet the cruel whims of Blood Jesus.  Why don’t you understand these things?  It’s only right.  The flipside of this coin is that it may allow blue states the power to pass strong protections for human rights, and might allow for a lot more.

The state of California has so many people, so many resources, that when they pass laws that are technically only enforceable at home, any business that wants to do business in that economy has to conform or gtfo.  Chik-fil-A can deep fry trans people in Arkansas (I assume) but not so much in the city of Compton.  In fact, it’s pretty likely that Cali has everything they need to just ignore the entire rest of the USA economically and use their access to shipping in the Pacific for anything they lack.

They are exceptional in that respect, but a number of coastal states can still pull a pretty strong flex if they want to – which is why it greatly heartens me that my own state has a democratic governor.  During the strife around covid, there were meetings between the governors on the “Left Coast” about how they should respond, almost as if… they had the power to tell the District of Columbia to kiss their asses?  I dunno.  I’m interested to see what’s possible if these leaders are bold enough, when the time calls for it.

It’s not right that in order to maintain their human rights, many people will have to flee their home states.  But as long as states are being allowed some say in these issues – and as long as some states are powerful enough to take that say whether it’s allowed or not – there are places in the USA where hope is a little less crushed.

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*74 million fascists in a country of 300 million is NOT the majority.

How do you act without despair, when you’re too realistic to genuinely hope or think your actions will have an effect?  One route is Absurdism, which is a more specific philosophy than you might be aware, and is probably not for everyone.  However, it did help one person survive a hate movement of thousands, so could be worth looking into, if you’re curious.  It was, after all, born from resistance to the nazi occupation of France.  Unfortunately relevant once again today, and has been for a while.

Another way is to focus on your actions that do have an effect.  Yeah, they won’t save the world, won’t individually defeat the monstrosity of this movement, but your actions could save other people, could save yourself.  That matters.  You don’t have to be the world’s buffest antifa kickboxer to carve some good out of a grim world.

First up, do things you enjoy, that also move your mind.  Reading, listening to or creating music, making art, writing, playing video games.  Doesn’t matter as long as you take a little care to do it in a reasonably balanced way – don’t let it round a corner to becoming unhealthy.  Hard to imagine how it could happen with some of those items, but somebody would figure out how, lol.  Second, do the things you don’t want to do, but will be glad to see done, like washing your dishes and take out the trash.  Just do what you can to be OK.

Something I forgot to mention in the inaugural post of this expanded thesis is that my real reason for doing this is my growing awareness of people in my life and in my readership who are physically hurt by stress, sadness, anger.  The rest of this blog network, especially Pharyngula, is apiece with the deathscroll vibe of the leftosphere at large.  That isn’t healthy for anyone, but for a significant subset of people, it’s extremely harmful.  For you more than anyone, self-care, buddy.

If you’re doing well enough, see what you can do for others.  This can include animals and plants in your life, or if you got the sauce, people.  For my part, at the moment, these posts are as much as I can manage.  The feedback I’ve been getting tells me it’s a good thing.  I will get to the end of my supply sometime next week, but I will have done something worthwhile for a minute.

Water the cats, feed the plants, give to medical fundraisers, give to charities, talk to lonely people, try to soothe people who are worried or upset – whether it’s about politics or not.  Careful with helping people that it doesn’t blow up on you, of course.  Never know when a guy you smiled at in the Starbutts will turn into a stalker.  But take the risks you feel comfortable with.

When it comes to politics, the best thing you can do is help people overcome the hurdles that rethugs put between the righteous and a voting booth.  It’s relevant even now, with the next elections a ways off.  In part, because people who were successfully kept from voting this time might still be struggling to get registered.  I know this is true – I spoke with a very old Native American woman from Arizona that was facing some inscrutable bullshit from that state just the week before the election.

I don’t know what the wisdom is, with fighting the ratfucking dirtbag “leftists” that discourage people from voting.  I know a lot of them are foreign – a weirdly large amount of them from Brazil and Argentina, the next largest contingent from Eastern Europe – which puts them out of reach of the ol’ sockarooni.  If the answer to bad speech is more speech (dubious), then you can just reach out and touch people you know, people who are non-voters, and encourage them to get it together.  That is itself a serious challenge, because you won’t win ’em over with condescension or screaming, but goddamn is that tempting.

People like me might be well-qualified for that task, on a good day.  When I interviewed for my current job, I cited my experience helping poor people with communication difficulties in customer service at muffuckin’ walmart.  With the shit I have to do at my current job, I feel like my ass could get nominated for sainthood by now, so I’m probably doing something right.  Maybe take a job in social services?  If they’re hiring and you have serious fucking neurotypical sauce.

I don’t have a rousing endpoint for this.  I’ll just reiterate the thesis.  You can do things, and even little things matter.  More grandiose things can come if you’ve got the strength, and that may be at some undefined time in the future.  But if all you’re doing is cleaning your goldfish’s bowl, thank you.  You’re also cleaning the inside of your skull.  Heal.  and then go kick some fucking ass.

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Oh yeah, I’d meant to mention my Hellstar Reminism philosophy.  Maybe another time.

As I’ve mentioned before, political doomerism is part of what cost us the country.  But even now, when fascism is flying its freak flag unimpeded down Main Street, when so many shitty things are going to happen, political doomerism is wrong, and it can cost us more than we’ve already lost.

To the doomer, nothing can ever be changed so don’t even bother.  Smoke ’em if you got ’em and learn to laugh at horror.  Like eco-fascism, it’s something with a compelling ounce of truth, but taken in a bad wrong direction.  And so easy too.  So easy I’d characterize it as fucking lazy.  If you think the world is coming to an end, find something more interesting to do than sit there, c’mon.

The element of truth in environmental doomerism is that we are well past the point where the beautiful world we were born into can be preserved in anything like its current form.  Vast swathes of species will go extinct, including much of the “charismatic megafauna.”  Places that are right now beautiful forests will become inhospitable wastelands.  Plastic and pesticide and biotic interchanges that never should have happened, and now we have politicians even more eager to accelerate us into that future.

BUT.  Life has survived worse, and no organism in the history of the world has had the problem-solving powers of a human mind.  We may be able to get through all that.  But we’ll never know if we don’t try, right?  And those efforts have short-term benefits galore.  Environmental doomerism keeps people inert, coasting on a deadly momentum, fulfilling its own bullshit prophecy.

Political doomerism is the same.  The true aspect is that the federal government is far more powerful than it should be in the USA, and that has been lost wholesale to fascists right now.  But there are still reasonable people who are in there, able to sometimes, some ways, fuck up the program for the jerks.  The fash will get away with doing an awful lot of damage, but some of it will be blocked, one way or another.

And Washington DC isn’t where the rubber meets the road on legislation.  This stuff needs states to enforce it, and while some are hijacked by the worst tyrants this side of Mecca, many states are going to work around or even fully block the effects of bad laws.  They can’t stop all the bleeding, but they can stop an awful lot, if they put their minds and resources to it.  If you’ve got a blue or even purple government, press your politicians to do whatever it takes to keep their constituents safe.

And government isn’t the end-all be-all of politics.  Street level, we can kinda do whatever the fuck we want?  As long as we’re willing and able to face the consequences.  The multifarious US right wing terrorists live by that credo; no reason we can’t too.  Ideally, to be doing things like helping humans survive, making love not war, but still.  You could literally do anything you are physically capable of, if you want to.

This election was lost by blue voters not showing up.  Culturally GOP people actually improved, with many of them staying home, and I thank them.  It was too much to hope for that many would switch to blue, like those prominent few did.*  It is people who might have voted blue that tossed this thing.  Some were misogynists, which is still a problem so much more pervasive and deep than most understand.  Some were single-issue voters who hated dem heel-dragging on Palestine, somehow too dense to realize this can do nothing but make things worse for the muslim world as a whole.  But I suspect, having seen endless rounds of the “it’s cool to not vote” discourse on social media from ostensible leftists, that a great many had just given up hope.

Political doomerism, like all doomerism, makes doom happen.  Resisting that is crucial to salvaging anything good in the future, and very importantly – and very possibly – to making good things happen in the present.  Fight doom!

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*as it turned out, the number of trump voters was almost exactly the same as it was last time.  the cult is devoted, what can we say?

As I dash out these political posts, I find I’ve forgotten some points I’d originally meant to include.  Another one on “how to not fear conservatives”:  Many of us are wondering “How can they believe these asinine paranoid ludicrous things?”  It’s important to note, they’re living in a bubble that is very hard to penetrate.  And if you were experiencing the same carefully curated “reality” as US conservatives, you’d be hard-pressed to see the dangers those beliefs pose to people, to the country, to the world.

This comes from tv, newspapers, billboards, magazines, popular musicians, and screaming loud a thousand decibels out of the internet.  I think, in the name of focused advertising and improving “engagement,” almost every social media platform does its best to make sure we only see things that we will find agreeable, based on shit like, where we live and who’s on our friends list, etc etc.  Of course they wanna reach across the aisle to show us nazi content sometimes, but probably got bots to calculate what’s the maximum amount of that we’ll tolerate before we log out permanently.

All this is to say, there may be more or less normal, friendly, non-horrifying people, who are just thick as two planks and taking the world around them as they can see it.  Those are not people who are coming to kill you with machetes and pitchforks.  A lot of them would be in the camp my husband calls “Dorito voters” – if they got stung economically between elections, they vote for the other party and hope that’ll fix it.

World-ruining fools, but somebody is fooling them, and nobody deserves to get fooled.  If a meaningful revolution ever comes along, it will require scrupulous regulations on political advertising to keep this dogshit from happening again.

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The dems, at the end of the day, tried to sell this election to us with fear.  A lot of people felt very afraid, so why did it fail?  Because what gets one person to the polls gets another person hiding under their bed with a shotgun, not daring to go out in public.  (of course there are multiple factors, but this is one.)  This is why Abe Oceanoxia says climate despair is the enemy – if you think you’re all fucked forever, that carries the implication there is nothing you can do about it.  No matter how much you yell “unless you vote!,” people’s hearts and minds shut down after the first part of the sentence.  I’ll talk about that more another day; here the observation is preface.

Over the next week or so, I’m going to expand on the thesis in the Momma Mia post, and this post is about the reason why.  I feel the need to do my part to heal the damage caused by this climate of terror, because barely anybody else in a position of responsibility is looking at it this way.  We got skullfucked, and as long as we want to survive, we gotta get unfucked.

There are legit reasons to feel sad and battered.  Every human right and human need is going to take massive hits, starting before the end of January next year.  People are already dying because of Fascism Part One’s supreme court appointments.  It’s gross; it’s sad; it should never have been like this, let alone as bad as it’s going to get.  BUT.

People have been overselling how bad it will be, and badly.  While everybody will have their lives diminished in some way, at least tangentially, the vast majority of people will survive!  And I mean you, my transes!  If anything, the lack of immediate goose-stepping murder parties will probably leave people feeling lied to, feeling like the dems were full of shit, which also leaves them open to facilitating that gradualism HJ wrote about.

Also, it was already bad here!  The USA – and most of the world at this point – have been run by short-sighted and callous greed for a long time.  By discriminatory laws used as bait to get bigots to vote against their own interests.  The democrats themselves are rich people protecting rich interests, which is exactly why they fight so half-assed:  they profit from losing.  Just hang out in the wings being the “reliable opposition” and paid for tut-tutting while republicans make them and their families fabulously wealthy off tax cuts and raiding the public treasure.  They are very much the lesser of two evils, and we’d be in a better position to fight if they’d won, but at the end of the day, most of them don’t give a flaming fuck about you and me.

So, bad as it has been under both parties (always measurably worse under the elephants), when it gets worse now, how noticeable is the difference going to be?  For the most vulnerable people, it will be.  But me: queer enough to not be emotionally damaged by manmoding to survive the daily, good job security, a mortgage i can afford (for now), living in a nicely blue state?  Don’t cry for me Argentina.  And that tells me that a lot of you can survive as well.

We have been royally burned, and in turn, the entire world has been burned.  But you still have every day of the rest of your life to live, and you can live it well.  For some of you, it will involve grievous challenges.  For some few of you, it may be cut short unnecessarily in any of hundreds of ways that conservative policies increase our odds of dying.  BUT.  Within that time you have, there is room for love, friendship, video games, violent radicalism, anything that brings you joy.

I am on this rampage because there has to be a realistic middle ground between foolish hopes and suicidal despair.  Do not let the terrorists win, my friends, my comrades.  Do not take yourself out for them!  Live, like a motherfucker, live!  Survive.  You might even thrive.  The world will be a sadder place, and we’ll all be sad about it, but within that, life is possible.

And I need all of you to do this.

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