I Voted

If you’re in a red state and think your vote doesn’t matter, well, it doesn’t matter until it does.  How many republican voters have been killed or crippled by being weirdos about covid?  While minorities in “essential” jobs were disproportionately hard hit and they’d typically vote blue, most of those folks are not politically engaged, just getting by.  Meanwhile, the republicans who were shittiest about covid were the most politically engaged.  Also, shifting demography across the country will eventually tip these scales, no matter how gerrymandered and fucked apart the scumbags make it.  And if nothing else, your shout into the void is appreciated, by me if by nobody else.  Do it.  Vote.

I live in suburban Washington, in the district that gave republican scumbag Dave Reichert his political career.  Let’s see if a motivated anti-trumpist wave can kick the fuckos out of local offices and congress hereabouts.  If you live in a blue state, vote local, vote whenever the chance comes up.  Yeah, this ain’t november, but if this state gets any redder, that just ain’t cool.  Fuck shit up for La Resistance, and if you think voting is insufficient funds, do what works for you, but vote as well.

Votety votety vote, votabulistical votation votatage my votistas, and a votely votely vote unto thee.  Vote?  Vote.  This is the thing to do.  Presently.  And futurely.  Make it so.

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Coming to Grips with the Cyberpunk Dystopia

Knee-jerk objection to AI technology has become for the left what objection to vaccines was for the right.  That’s not to say AI and vaccines are at all comparable in terms of benefit to society and in how they affect our lives, but I have witnessed lefties bring up AI completely out of the blue in an unrelated context specifically to ferret out the lefty credentials of other people in the room, reverse McCarthy style.  Stalin style?  Are you now or have you ever been amused by an application of AI technology?  Go thou presently unto hell.

I’m not telling anybody how to be lefty or that they have to love AI, but I am saying this is a losing fight, and tying yourself to cement blocks when you’re out on the water might not be the wisdom.  If any of you imagine for a second this genie can be re-bottled, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.  AI in visual art (the domain I most understand) is much like the invention of photography in almost every respect – nobody could keep that technology from happening, they aren’t going to stop this one either.  AI in all other aspects of technology, it’s like the invention of the wheel.  This is the dawn of an extremely different world.  Unless you plan to go full an-prim, you need to figure out how you’re going to live in that world.

AI is a problem but it is also a solution.  It’s being used for horrible things and for great things.  It will be used for both horrible and great things regardless of what we wish would happen, so we have to stop wishing and start dealing with it.

I saw an article about how AI could run certain chemical tests a thousand times faster than human scientists and some well-meaning lefty said “this is terrible.”  It objectively isn’t.  As long as all appropriate measures are used for quality control on the products of those operations, this could accelerate the development of cures for every human illness in a massive way.  Don’t see the benefit in that?  You must’ve lucked out and not picked up any of the myriad failures the average human body accumulates over time.  But you will join us in Cripland someday, and at that point, I hope no luddites have slowed medicine to save work that sensible scientists don’t even want to be doing.

On the flip, AI is being used to gather intelligence for marketing and manipulation of the masses.  Ooh.  Scary.  Some version of this has been happening for decades, and just because it’s happening faster doesn’t mean the fundamental issues aren’t still exactly the same.  Change government, change society, and you can change how technology is used – for or against the masses.  Hacktivists can absolutely use AI as well, and frankly, they should.  Fuck up the program.  Fight the AI, but if you want to keep up, you are going to have to use AI.

This hit lefties in the feels because it’s going to hurt writing and art jobs, and because we’re still in love with “the human soul” in our secular way.  It’s also going to hurt music jobs, though that hasn’t happened as much yet.  Pretty much every field of human creativity is going to be invaded by AI in some way, and as long as we live under capitalism, as long as we live in a technologically advanced world*, it is going to impact your ability to make money as an artist.  If it hasn’t happened yet, brace for impact, because technology this useful literally cannot be stopped.

What are the plans for stopping it?  Legal action to protect your property rights?  (Slightly amusing that intellectual property has become a leftist concern but I’m not getting into that.)  Anything that involves law is going to favor the moneyed.  There’s no labor victory in that scenario.  The best you can hope for is the ability to protect your future creative content from being used in AI – legally, but of course it will still happen illegally all over the place – or for temporarily expunging AI datasets that use “unethically” harvested content.  All that does is set the tech back a couple of years, and when new datasets emerge with “ethically” obtained data?  What’s your argument then?  What’s your legal recourse?

Like portrait painters when photography was invented, all creatives – including writers like those on this network – have to figure out what our role will be in a world where our labor can be simulated with technology.  We can console ourselves with the weakness of that technology now.  AI art can be samey or deformed, AI writing is basic pabulum and incoherent in long form.  But those weaknesses can be solved with time, training, and tweaking.  What then?

There will still be call for human creators.  Oil painters, marble sculptors, writers, comedians, guitarists, and more.  But their labors will be inherently less valuable as corporate media replaces them all with sufficiently marketable simulacra.  The masses will be into it.  The quirks of AI will inform their artistic sensibilities, and they will start writing like the AIs, kids trying to sing like vocoders.  You will be able to market the fact that you are human, and – for now – you are noticeably superior to AI art.  But will you be able to make a living under capitalism?  Not in art, not anymore than teamsters can make a living as coachmen for horse-drawn buggies.

Personally this doesn’t bother me, because the vast majority of art right now in most fields is nearly as robotic and half-assed as AI art.  The most human art is also just the worst, the stuff where creators are flaunting their prejudices, fetishes, or inadequacies.  If, as an artist, I end up being Wesley Willis on the street corner with a casio keyboard, this is what it was going to be.  If, on the other hand, human artists can overcome the divisions wrought by capitalism, forge a new world of creativity outside of economy, outside of money, maybe something, idk, as cyberpunk as the world we now live in?  Maybe you’ll keep hearing my voice, maybe you’ll see robo-me on corporate internet and think, hey, I’ll go for the real thing instead.  All artists have is the attention of the audience and what they choose to do with it.  If they find the AI preferable, and someday soon they just might, there is fuck-all we can do about it.

If you’ve been able to make a living as a lefty writer (who the hell has?), you’ve been able to make money from selling a revolution that will make your money obsolete.  But is it possible to make revolution happen by doing profitable things – even in some chump change way?  Or will a genuine revolution always be the work of people with nothing left to lose?

Bringing it back to the point, this tech saves labor as much as the wheel, in different ways in different contexts, and as long as humans value anything – even in a post-capitalist context – labor-saving technology will advance and persist.  Rage against that particular machine too hard and for too long, you’re eventually going to look completely ridiculous.  We live in a cyberpunk dystopia.  Figure out how to live in the world you have, or monkey it up with the anarcho-primitivists.  The people with medical technology will be available at the nearest city when you are done.

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*This entire thesis is rendered meaningless if society collapses tomorrow.  As we near the actual end of history, all the theories about how this was going to play out have given way to a clear last two stages – Cyberpunk Dystopia, then Mad Max.  In Mad Max, AI is nobody’s problem.  I hope you’re not looking forward to that.  There is literally one alternate path in this billionaires-choose-everybody-else’s-adventure scenario, which is Solarpunk/Ecopunk Utopia.  Not feelin’ likely.  But if it does happen?  I’d love to have AI there making life easier for everyone.

Crosspost from Tumblr

Gotta let my two followers on tumblr know I keep it real:

AnarchoTumblr Fuck Off

Leftoid tumblr in general has gotten my motherfucking goat so many times, I’m done with it.  Hell, the only reason I have a political tumblr is as a spleendump for shit that comes across my dash I feel obligated to spread.  Honestly, I’d be better off completely unplugged from the political attitude on here.

It’s funny because I know the popular tumblr funnyman types that are pushing radical left positions now were pushing fascist shit as teenagers.  They just grew up and transed up enough to realize gamergate was a mental dead end.  But they still have that 4chan influenced nihilistic fuck-the-world attitude, paired with the snooty holier-than-thou sanctimony of the very liberals they are always shitting on.

I ain’t a political liberal.  A lot of my personal beliefs are radical left, particularly by ameriKKKan standards.  But just because I believe voting dem (when there isn’t a better local alternative) is crucial harm-mitigation and shouldn’t be discouraged, these fuckoes would have you believe people like me are genocide apologist bootlickers.

There are people on this site and especially elsewhere who are either sincerely faithful in the democrats, or just feel like spreading any negativity about them at all will harm their odds at the polls.  I don’t love those positions and I try not to RB that shit, but those people are still doing much less harm to human lives than vote discouragers.

People in gerrymandered-out hell states are making moves right now, making changes that directly save human lives because they don’t buy your shit, or aren’t here to be reading it.  I’m proud of those people, even the ones who are deluded right wing assholes about other positions, because I value the lives they are saving.

The rethuglican party is a murderous death cult and every inch of power you cede to them is lives lost.  Even in red states where “your vote doesn’t count.”  It only doesn’t count until that glorious day when it does, and it’s starting to happen.

VOTE.  Crush that shit.  Smash that motherfucking like button.  After that, be as radical as you wanna be.  I don’t give a shit how many cops or shinzo abes you detonate.  Just vote first.

Right now, it’s like that.  If you discourage voting, choke to death on your own shit.  You’re spending enough time up your ass, it’s right there.  Open up and say glug.
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Meanwhile my non-political tumblr is a much better time.
The usual memes, no political crap interspersed through it.  Enjoy.

 

It’s Down With Cis Day!

i log into the tumblr
i oppress the cis
—officialcisally  (lotta dead links in this post, i edit from 2024, leaving them be)

It’s International Down With Cis Day, suggested by tumblr user queernightmare to commemorate the birth of a meme.  On this day last year, a creepy transphobe with the handle “foreverhonest” posted a patently false story of being assaulted by trans people.  Behold the majesty:

Here’s a thing that happened to one of my friends. I was there.

Basically, we were walking down the sidewalk, talking about something meaningless. I think it had to do with a movie. Then this bus screeches up, stops next to us, and a bunch of people with “Down with Cis” shirts climbed out and started beating him up. I was punched and kicked a bit too, but I managed to avoid brutalization by going for their faces. After figuring out what’s happening, I started attacking them back, getting them off of him. He was quite injured but I called 911 and he made a full recovery at the hospital. I was fine, with only a cut on my arm that they patched up.

It had to be a joke, right?  If so, it went over the heads of people looking for reasons to hate trans folks.  Tumblr user chandra-nalaar compiled “some highlights from all the people who believed the ‘down with cis’ post.”  Follow that link at your own peril.  Well, clearly FH didn’t expect anyone to believe that, right?  Their post history (not linking to it) shows they are in fact an open transphobe, so what did they mean to achieve if it was a joke?  The clear aim is to spread transphobia.  Perhaps the laughably obvious lies from someone going by “foreverhonest” were meant to establish plausible deniability.

It doesn’t matter because it quickly became a meme.  Before that cisgender man, no one had ever uttered the grammatically bizarre phrase “Down With Cis.”  Now, it has been reclaimed by trans people and their allies, adding to the legend.  Some write improbable stories of their own patterned after his, others use the phrase and variations as a cheeky rallying cry of the oppressed or just to indulge in cathartic silliness. (warning for flashing animated gif on last link)

Lida Frank art of three puppies with cute accessories over a rainbow heart, text added reads

Why all the hubbub, bub?  You may find yourself wondering, might not even be familiar with the terms in play.  Let me see if I can break it down to the basics:

    • Some people are transgender.  Possibly oversimplifying, this means the gender they were labelled with at birth doesn’t feel right for them.
    • Acknowledging this means we need a word for the non-transgender people, preferably avoiding words like “normal” which might make members of minority genders feel further ostracized. Science provides us with the prefix cis-, which is used in biology and other fields as the opposite of trans-. Thus, most people reading this are cisgender.
    • Transgender people suffer from a truly appalling amount of discrimination and poor treatment, perhaps the bitterest from people who are progressive on other issues and should know better. The term for anti-transgender prejudice and systemic abuse is transphobia.
    • Some cisgender people believe it is possible for transgender people to oppress them back. They call that cisphobia.
    • Cisphobia is not real. A transgender person could literally say “I hate all cisgender people” and it would not constitute oppression. Why? Because a small minority of humans reviled by a huge amount of ignorant humans cannot in any meaningful way “oppress the oppressors.” Their scorn lacks the weight of an entire culture backing it, so it can’t cause harm in the same way.
    • Just like christian fundamentalists in the US who think any laws short of xtian theocracy are somehow oppressing them, transphobes (often those same xtians) can become really committed to the idea they are threatened by violent trans oppressors.
    • Hence the fictional gang of violent transgender people, inflicting violence on those they magically sensed were cisgender, at the start of this perverse tale.
    • Every transgender person alive today has experienced a lifetime of transphobia and can experience incidents of it almost every day. Even those few who “pass” as cisgender completely can still have terrible feelings dredged up by the cisnormativity that completely saturates most cultures around the world.
    • In this toxic transphobic world, cursing out your oppressor, just disrespecting the hell out of them in your own spaces, can be a needful emotional release for transgender people.
    • Down With Cis – a phrase coined by a transphobe and put into the mouths of an imaginary violent transgender mob – is a delightfully short and punchy slogan for achieving that catharsis. Unlike the earlier “die cis scum,” DWC isn’t even violent. It went from being a tool of transphobic oppression to a meme for transgender empowerment.

And so, without giving any thanks to the creep that unintentionally started all of this, let us celebrate International Down With Cis Day.  If you’re transgender, nonbinary, genderfluid, whatever, grab a t-shirt and get on the bus.  If you’re cisgender and leave a rainbow cake on your stoop at midnight while singing hosannas to Laverne Cox, the bus will pass you by.  The rest of you?  Down with cis!

 

Woofin’ and Beefin’

I used to work with a young lady that described someone else’s belligerence as “woofin’ and beefin’.”  I love that language.  But I do want to avoid fights with others in the neighborhood.  I’ve already had a pretty negative interaction with one other blogger on this network and decided to just drop out of that scene instead of pressing it.  I made my feelings on the general topic clear here (my islamophobia post), but will not address that specific conversation or go back there again.

Likewise, I have been affiliated with and linked to people who have had some rough interactions with another prominent skeptic blog site.  I agree with their point of view completely, but I don’t want to say anything negative about specific other people in the progressive atheo-skepti-sphere, from my little corner.  That is to say, if I have a problem that I feel compelled to address, I’ll do as before and avoid naming names and getting into specific exchanges.  But I will post my feelings on the subject in general.

I hope that doesn’t seem too passive-aggressive or cowardly* to the people who need advocates the most. If it becomes a problem for any of you, let me know how you feel.

*Per a thoughtful suggestion, I might stop using this word on my blog. I’ll have to change the mouse-over text on the tab for the site if I do. Still thinking about it.

 

‘Net H8rs R a Bunch of Arch Hall Jr. Characters

This is a reblog from previous versions of G-A-S

Arch Hall Jr. as The Sadist

There’s this old Arch Hall Jr. movie called “The Sadist,” which doesn’t feature a sympathetic portrayal of one who engages in a risky kink ethically. Rather, it’s about a criminal in floods who enjoys psychologically tormenting his victims.

Arch Hall Jr. as The Sadist

The character has a catch phrase which I think befits the underlying psychology of the internet’s sundry hate mobs perfectly: “You think you’re better than me?” Then he’ll stalk menacingly at you, looking like he’s carrying a massive deuce in his drawers. No offense to AHj, this character was supposed to be creepy and job well done.

There’s clearly a sense of aggrievement on their part. They feel upset at being scorned. Our side is motivated by compassion for the victims of abuse and the desire to make the world a better place. The less self-aware on their side might feel like they’re into these goals as well, but find that overwhelmed by the outrage that someone might be looking down on them. You especially see this in the response to things like Schrodinger’s Rapist. No matter how kindly or carefully parsed, any idea that could be perceived – correctly or not – as a criticism of them (or the kind of person they imagine themselves to be) raises this knee-jerk response. You think you’re better than meee?

So then they start doing the poopy pants walk while waving guns around (metaphorically and literally) and make things so much worse. To borrow a much more sensible catch phrase, guys, don’t do that. Seriously, even if you fundamentally disagree with social justice advocates on every issue, just agree to disagree and strut. If you honestly believe your position to be the right one, you have a million motherfuckers to agree with you and coddle your shared privilege. You wouldn’t feel the need to freak out about the fact someone else has a different belief unless – on some level – you think they might be right, and that their rightness would make you feel bad.

You don’t have to feel bad about yourself to accept the truths SJWs be spittin’ – at least, not much. Because no one has to be perfect, we can all learn from our mistakes, all try to be better people. And honestly trying is good enough. Doing something racist/sexist/transphobic/etc doesn’t make you a bigot, outside of that moment. Being unrepentant, being so chickenshit of the possibility of your own imperfection that you double down and make it worse – even make it a part of your raison d’être – this is deciding to wallow in bigotry.

Come off yourself, calm down, drop the fucking keyboard, take a day off. Even if your beliefs don’t change, at least recusing yourself from participating in a hate movement is a step in the right direction. Be cool. Get steppin’.