Covid Inbound

EDIT: THE FUNDRAISER IS OVER.
Stretch goal reached!
Look for my rap video, most likely before the end of the month.
O___O

 

Somebody in my household just blew hot for the Creepin Crud.  The Corvide.  The 2019 Gift That Keeps on Giving.

There are three of us.  One is fortyish and too disabled to have a day job, one is 65 and  works in an office five days a week, and there’s me in the middle at forty-six, working in a mostly empty office one day a week and telecommuting another three.  Our resident senior citizen, unfortunately, had the largest exposure, works with covidiots plague rats (forgot my policy), and brought that stuff right home to us, breathing in our grits relentlessly until the hot test less than a half hour ago.

So we’re pretty much gonna get it, and I’m probably going to have to reschedule the procedures I have scheduled for the 25th and 27th of this month.  Vexatious.  Tempted to be pretty fucken mad at our senior citizen because she is a lot less conscious about keeping her mask on than we are, but she can’t help being a dingus, and she does mask more than most people in the USA right now.

I’m hella PO’d tho.  As ever, motherfuck the United SnaKKKes for treating the pandemic as a chance to practice capitalist medicine on the rest of the (more) civilized world, squatting over the medicines like dragons on gold, guaranteeing this will go on forever and ever.  I never stopped masking.  I surely never will.  But will that keep me from getting covid?

Fucking of course not.  Still worth it to lower viral load and minimize long-term symptoms, but yet another reminder you can do everything in the world to take care of yourself and your people and still get taken the fuck out by the scumbaggery of others.
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Who Are We Occupying This Week?

Russia invaded Ukraine, which blows.  Murderous dickbags gonna murder.  Anyway, I’m supposed to stand in judgment of that, but I’m in a glass house.  Gotta check out the periphery before I throw Slava Ukrainis.  Who is the US military occupying this week?  Who are we raining mutilation and ruin upon?  How about our buddies, like the Saudis?  Israel?  I’ve lost track again.
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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.

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?

Happy Gunpowder Day

Happy That-Time-of-the-Year-When-Gunshot-Murders-Take-Longer-to-Investigate-Because-They-are-Indistinguishable-From-Asshole-Ideas-of-a-Good-Time Day.  Happy Explosion Day.  Happy Give-Songbirds-and-Some-Humans-Heart-Attacks Day.  Happy Increase-in-Dog-Bites Day.  Happy Celebrate-the-Nation-Built-on-Genocide-and-Slavery-that-is-Still-Fucking-Your-Own-Personal-Rights-Apart Day.  Happy Your-President-Proudly-Does-His-Part-to-Facilitate-Human-Fucking-Extinction Day.

Death to America, babey.  Death to America.

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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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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.

A Trans Wrath Minute

Content Warnings: Transphobia, Violence, Suicide, Cussin’.  I cuss.

I’m not usually a poet but I woke up with a few lines coming to mind,
and had to spend some time fleshing out the whole thing.
It’s open mic night, babes.  Drink up ~~~

Grab your “Down with Cis” t-shirts and get on the bus

It’s time to bash back before the fucks get to us.

Every fascist from Kremlin to Pittsburgh PA

Has decided that trans is worse now than gay.

Transition’s irreversible so you better not try

Make yourself cishet or make yourself die

And god forbid nature make your gender ambiguous

Carve up your babies, so you can pass off as cis.

Black transphobes think this some “white people shit?”

Marsha was out while you were sucking hind tit

Prob’ly killed by a black guy ashamed of sucking her dick.

So many black queer folk I won’t sully their names

Bringing them down to my white level and rage.

Sick of hearing about queers? Then get our names out your mouths

We can’t be like Bill Tipton and keep our lips zipped when

Your friends in the senate order genital inspections

“I didn’t write those laws, they just reflect my positions.

It’s so many words, can’t do no one wrong.”

Mein Kampf has a death toll ten million strong.

This time’ll be different, you nazi fucks learned your lesson

There’s no need for mass graves when you can just disappear us

Use disgust powered media to make Joe Public fear us.

Pricky Gervais I’mma rip off your face.

Just Kidding Rowling will likewise be howling.

Fuckass Mulaney in such fucking pain he

Won’t know what the hell’s left of David Chappelle.

You think I give a shit about your fucking celebrity?

I’ll slap the whole fucking Oscars but why limit my enmity?

Fuck this whole goddamn world that won’t save a trans girl

And suck my motherfucking dick.

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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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Fucking Poaching … Srsly?

Pornography.  Watch parts.  Dating services.  Quack COVID cures.  Mail order brides.  CBD products.  Roofing.  Drywall.  Bridal party planning.  Eyeglasses.

The constellation of services being pitched by spambots grows from time to time.  New to my spam traps – ads for people who want to kill endangered African wildlife.  Come on a poacher safari!  Shoot rare beautiful things while they still exist!

Readers of this blog, if I let that out of the spam trap, would you click the link?  Risk spywares and malwares and such for a chance at such a wonderful experience?  No?

I have a theory the outrage is the idea.  I’m supposed to see that and get curious about it in my anger, get suckered into contact with dangerous con artist types.  Or maybe they’re legit trying to give great white hunters tha hookup, for relevant fees.  Either way, that’s grody.  Thanks, fuckers.

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