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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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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Got No Memes

I want to do something for International Down With Cis Day, but ideas fail me.  Every year since I started at FtB has gotten materially worse for trans rights and the well-being and safety of trans lives.  I hold the shitbird governor of Texas as especially emblematic of the whole situation – blatantly using open bigotry to score political points, bible bashing while using rhetoric generously provided by terfs, pushing for the worst anti-LGBT policies this side of China or Iran.

So I think, meme his ass.  Political cartoon like this was 1922.  But nothing comes to mind except depictions of him on the receiving end of terrible violence – you know, madame guillotine putting in an appearance, somebody setting him on fire and kicking him off a cliff, etc.  Not funny, not a good look.

Hm…

https://www.google.com/search?q=respect+existence+or+expect+resistance+trans

Not bad, but still feels wildly inadequate to the struggle right now.  We’ll see what we’ll see.

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I Stopped Reading FtB

Nobody in my immediate life is affected in any way by abortion bans.  We don’t have the equipment for pregnancy or it doesn’t work – not a functional uterus in sight.  And yet somehow reading about the “kill the doctors and the patients” anti-abortion bill from Texas was the final straw for me being able to follow news.  I just can’t handle it anymore.  The most cogent response I have to that is bargling death threats.

“What can men do against such reckless hate?” asked King Theo in nerdwad movie.  To the people capable of engaging with these fights, I say “Long live the fighters” (from different nerdwad movie).  Good job, people.  You’ll always have my votes and other support as possible.  Right now, I can’t handle reading about that or anything else wrong with the world.  It’s gotten too stressful again.

I don’t follow political tumblrs though I catch dribs and drabs of politics on there.  On FtB there’s always a blog on top of the newest fuckshit, and as long as I have a sidebar of “Recent Articles on FtB” I’m going to compulsively read all of them until blood shoots out of my ears.  I blocked that element in my browser, and I likewise I left the FtB discord for the same reason.

That also means I’m missing any non-stressful news or cheeky posts.  If anyone sees anything fun elsewhere on FtB don’t link me to it, but give me the short version in the comments here, if you’ve got a moment.  I don’t want to look directly at the articles and see the titles of the “Previous” and “Next” ones.  And thanks.

As for my own posts, I’ll continue the little random things I’ve been doing, though without news input, it will be less topical.  Also less despairing and angry!  So that’s something to look forward to.

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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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Don’t Be a Coward

It’s hard to judge what a reasonable level of fear is in reaction to shitty events, and there are plenty of extremely shitty events going on in the world right now.  (Thanks, fascists!  Please eat shit and die at your earliest convenience.)  That said, there are a loooot of people on the internet right now stoking panic.  Like Putin makes a lazy threat about hacking our shit and tweets and subreddits explode, telling you to run for the hills immediately lest you fall victim to supply chain banditos.

Harden the fuck up, you ridiculous cowards.  You make it harder for people to judge what that reasonable level of fear is, by ratcheting every little thing up to “cannibal holocaust.”  You spread anxiety and dread and turn stomachs and ruin people’s days.  The way you talk, I imagine you trembling like little chihuahuas with urine running down your thighs as you clack out your terrified tweets.  Yeah, especially those of you with guns.

Do you live in America?  Are you not a member of an oppressed minority at the moment?  (No, xtians don’t count.)  You’re going to be fine.  Some bad stuff will happen.  Wildfires burning up your cabins, rising tides taking out your timeshares.  But compared to people in Ukraine, or Russia, or anywhere near the Equator?  Your life is going to be a cakewalk – at least until you’re old and infirm enough to be considered disposable by republicans.  Drink in the freedom, manbabies.  Calm the fuck down.

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Last Climate Doompost

I have a bad time thinking about climate change, clearly.  Maybe that’s something I have in common with the blitherers who oppose action on it?  Aside from love of pounds and pence, who knows what goes on in their unthinkable heads?  Anyway, I intend to stop posting about it for the foreseeable.  I expressed my main thoughts about it on this blog and in the FtB podcast on the subject, that should be enough.

But I want to leave one last prediction for the way this is going to play out, have this on record.  There is going to be a holocaust heat wave at some point somewhere in the tropics.  It could happen as soon as this summer, or maybe ten or more years from now, but it most assuredly will happen.  There will be a heat wave so severe that literally millions of people will die within days.  There will be mass graves, mountains of bodies in this incident.

I say this with confidence because where I live we, just last year, had a heat wave that smoked all previous records by more than ten degrees.  A few small towns were disintegrated by wildfires so fast people barely had time to escape – certainly no time to pack.  Hundreds of people died.  This is the Pacific Northwest of North America, as moderate of a climate as exists anywhere in the world.  What happens when a similar heatwave hits Delhi?  Hyderabad?  Jakarta?  Jerusalem?

That’s my prediction.  There was a major volcanic eruption this year and sometimes that cools the global temperature for a while, so we may have some reprieve on this.  That’s time to prepare, to prevent deaths, but will it happen?  It sure as fuck isn’t happening in Louisiana or Florida.  Now that you’ve heard the prediction, hear my request, my call to action.  Because this will not be prevented, due to greed and politics, it is a request for what you should do once those mass graves show up in your news feed.

If you are in the company of anyone who spouts off denialist or petrol-defending rhetoric after that happens, I want you to do them violence.  At very least slap them hard, knock them upside the head.  Preferably knock out one of their teeth, and I wouldn’t be disappointed to hear if you stabbed them in the gut.  Spit on them.  Curse them.  Let them know what they’ve done and that this particular holocaust is the end of the line for tolerance of their worldview.

If there is one thing that will tilt majority opinion on the globe in favor of radical action, it’s another holocaust.  It’s gotta be.  I know it won’t convince everyone but it has to be enough to convince a majority of those in power.  Right?  Right?  Maybe one more thing to say.  FUCK YOU, JOE BIDEN.  You fucking ignorant rich trash.  You murderous greedlord.  You fucking waste of space.  I hope your death is painful.  I hope you hate every second of it.

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No Win

Content Warning: Despairing Rhetoric re: Politics, COVID, Environmentalism.

Fighting antivax beliefs, and indeed reactionary thought as a whole, feels like dealing with an insurgency.  There is just no good solution at this point.  (Government crackdown on facebook’s fascist bullshit algorithms in 2015 might have helped, but there’s no political will to make that happen even now.)  You’ll never win the hearts and minds of people deluded into feeling like brave defenders of an invaded homeland, any effort to force compliance will just lead to more terrorist reprisal.  We’ve already had a taste of that, in destruction of medicine, in obstruction of vax sites, and in many cases of physical assault all across the country.

Given all that, how does one adjust to this new world of biological gods and ideological monsters?  Knowing what endemic COVID looks like will be a good start for that discussion.  Funny to think if I live to my seventies or nineties I could be killed slowly and painfully, asphyxiated and brain damaged by a disease that could have been strangled in its infancy two years ago.  By funny, I mean all rethuglican fucks please eat shit and die ASAP, it’s the least you can do for us.

No, no, Satan.  Calm down.  These are human beings, this is humanity.  The same humanity that supports Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro, that has LGBT Jamaicans assaulted every day, living in vacant lots and scrounging garbage to eat, that packs megachurch pews to fund murderous hate around the globe, that scapegoats anybody and everybody to pursue short-term political and financial gain while ensuring the extinction of your species.  You have no choice but to live with these people, or to die.  They are here to stay, for as long as humanity continues to exist.

I don’t know.  We can just keep having these conversations, every day until we die.  Very tiring.

 

 

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The Fvckpile

Capitalism as practiced in most of the world – but especially the USA – revolves around one principle: I got mine, Jack, Fuck everyone else.  The future doesn’t exist, consequences don’t exist.  And as we see in fuckos like Biden, when the consequences do come home to roost?  It ain’t as bad as it looks, it wasn’t my individual fault specifically, it’s somebody else’s bad, somebody else’s duty, somebody else’s problem.  If he saw things clearly and accurately, if he wasn’t huffing the statue of liberty’s ass vapors, he’d know that by being rich he has no small amount of personal liability for it, and as president every moment that he doesn’t exercise his massive executive powers to fight AGW, he’s taking on much much more personal fault for the destruction of life as we know it.  He’d be wracked by grief, but spending all his waking effort to make right what has transpired on his watch.

I’m not going to write this story because it’s too bleak to focus on for the length of time required, but take in the short version, if you will.

Upper middle class family.  Dad’s a contractor, mom’s in publishing, they own their own home.  They have  more than a million in assets, but much less available for day to day things.  Nonetheless, a life of comfort.  The only worries they have are ones they brought on themselves by keeping up with the Joneses.  The kids all grow up to be similarly successful, but have fewer assets.  Their mortgages are less generous, housing prices massively higher, but still.  Not shabby.

One of the kids breaks the mold.  He’s a stand-up comedian, turned actor and screenwriter.  He gets a few hot breaks and is pulling royalties off of some kids movies he co-wrote, getting character actor parts with minimal effort, bringing in that cheese.  He is a millionaire with no quibbles – Where his parents had over a million in assets, he has more than a million in the bank.

You can’t expect that to last forever, kid.  You’re gonna be old and wanting the kind of loot that lets you pay for black market organs someday.  So how do you get it?  Pay a money guy, don’t ask questions.  It doesn’t matter what he does to increase your wealth – he just says that he can and has a track record of measurably succeeding.  You have proof it isn’t a ponzi scheme.

Money guy says all the B list celebs are getting theirs from real estate.  Not houses anymore.  It’s all about apartments.  All you have to do, comedian, is give me the money – and I’ll give you a reliable return every day for the rest of your life.  Money guy pools money from various Hollywood types to start a “property management company” that buys up apartment buildings around the country.  Now comedian has a partial stake in apartments from Florida to Oregon.

The apartments are any cheap pile of moldy lumber, with more effort put into faking a good look for the exteriors than any structural or maintenance issues.  They look alright from a distance but once you get in the door you realize it’s all falling apart.  PropertyCo still jacks the price up every year until people are forced to move into still cheaper places – owned by companies like PropertyCo.

Since these apartments are businesses designed not to deliver an essential service but instead to rob poor people blind, moneymaking schemes are added to moneymaking schemes.  Require pet rent, renters insurance, parking rent, etc.  Cut deals with shady insurance companies that will give you a slice if you coerce your customers into using them, or better yet toss together your own insurance company based out of a server in a Connecticut basement.  Have the price for units so high that people can only afford them by having more adults in a single unit than they were designed for, meaning more cars necessary for commuting than the parking lots were designed for, so that in desperation people who work late park in fire lanes and get their cars towed – by tow companies you have other shady deals with.

Inevitably a certain amount of people can’t afford to stay or pay timely due to losing work (possibly by having their only ride to work held hostage for thousands of dollars) or other bad luck, and they get evicted.  You have debt you can sell to a collection company.   It’s basically impossible to lose money as a property management company.

Some sixty year old lady with poor health is among the evicted and she manages to beg her way into the household of one of her children.  At her new residence she starts receiving harassment from a collection agency.  Story cuts to Hyderabad India where a call center full of crash course English speakers follow their scripts to hound people to desperation and suicide, while their company compounds interest on the debt every time somebody sneezes.

How do you convince a decent human to be a collections agent?  It probably helps to hire as many violently twisted people as possible, but no way there are enough people like that in a given community to comprise the entire staff of a given call center.  I imagine there’s some indoctrination session, like, “These are scum, criminals who don’t pay their dues.  They deserve all the scorn you can muster.”

Story follows a guy who took the job.  It paid better than anything else he could find and he needs it because rent is going through the roof, but he senses something wrong, messed up.  Still, he powers through it.  One day that he has inflicted exceptional cruelty upon the “clients,” he snaps out of it, like coming out of a dream.  He has become a horrible person and blames the business.  He burns the place down.

The debt collection agency gathers its insurance and ponders options.  Hey, the corrupt government has made it very easy to do organized crime against targets overseas, you have experience running a call center, just start over with an explicitly criminal call center.  Now the indoctrination is a little different.  “Americans are all greedy fat cats ruining the world for fun and profit, their old folks and disabled people have money but are too stupid to hold it.  Tell them you’re calling from a government agency and they’ll be in big trouble unless they give you their social security numbers, mother’s maiden name, bank account info…”

The new call center cuts deals with US telecoms to acquire thousands of US local phone numbers, makes it look like their calls are coming from within the US, and hits the phone book.  They dial everyone, but whenever they have a hint somebody might be old or disabled?  They hit them ten times as hard, calling round the clock, trying to scare someone into slipping up.

They call the comedian’s mom and pop, get enough info to run massive fraud on them.  Because of their assets they have higher credit limits than most of the call center’s victims and the scale of loss is immense.  Well, you know, even modestly rich USians get enough deference from financial institutions they could probably get out from under the damage, but it’s scary to get scammed like that.  Mom and pop spend the rest of their lives not answering phones, paranoid and scared.

It’s the circle of life under capitalism.  And notice I didn’t even invoke the evil of billionaires, easily the most destructive class in human history, with more resources than god emperors.  I kept the story down to millionaires at the worst.  Money chases money chases money, until the people who have the least are hounded into the grave.  And even people with resources know on some level that vultures are nipping at their heels.  They’ll blame taxes and the government, but it’s the whole sick-ass world.

This property company thing is real.  Mid-tier celebs from Fox News talking heads to liberal Hollywood types are all making their loot from stuff like this now.  I’d say, might be cool if somebody created a property company whose selling point was doing business ethically – minimizing the travail of tenants, not doing business with collection agencies, etc.  But if somebody did come up with that as a sales pitch for the millionaire investors?  It would be nothing but a snowjob and the apartments would still be horrid slums.

Anyway, smash the system, down with everything.  I’m gonna go back to sleep for a while.

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