Category: Politics

Brynn Tannehill on the road to genocide

From twitter this am. She studies genocide. She’s moving to Canada from the US in 2021… she hopes.

What is interesting to me is watching for the warning signs:

* Rising infant mortality
* Demonizing government propaganda
* Us v. Them narrative
* Mythological past free of a minority
* Populist government
* Breakdown of democratic norms
* Politicized court beholden to party 
* Removing minority from federal service
* Legally establishing that minority doesn’t have same rights as everyone else
* Encouraging stochastic violence
* Preventing access to health care system
* Preventing access to education
* Mandatory segregation from general population under penalty of law
* Requiring something that outs people as the minority (ID, worn item, name, etc) * Random arrests
* Indefinite “black hole” detentions
* Testing to see if foreign governments will move to stop abuses
*Minority groups fleeing the country
she says the last two are signs it’s too late

today’s non-events

Got into a beatdown with a bunch of one of the most self-righteous pot activists (like there’s another fucking kind) on twitter today.

Come ON I smoke, but I don’t smoke and blow smoke in the faces of the allergic and the elderly, and they’re announcing it’s their RIGHT, because this is VANCOUVER, home of TOLERANCE. Yeah I’ll believe that when Canada gives back the unceded lands, you unregenerate failure of logic. I’m like a homophobe for harshing their mellow. Srsly. Got accused of equivalency to homophobia for objecting to people dousing the entire west end in pot smoke for their stupid fucking 420 festival (which leaves heaps of trash mounded everywhere and they’re all cryface because they didn’t get a fucking permit.) F*ck me!

I realized that when you put asterisks in f*cking swearwords you’re putting a leedle asshole right in the meedle of the word and since when you’re swearing there’s usually an asshole involved, it’s mesmerizingly poifect.

I love Buster, he’s an amazing cat. And he loves me too, I know it. I don’t think Miss Margot cares if I live or die, but Buster does.

My latest piece of fanfic smut has more than five hundred likes (it’s cute and hot, so there)

I’ve written a BDSM scene in the same ‘verse but I’m not happy with it yet. I had to put in about 200 words about how the scene is ‘necessary but non-consensual’ which kinda blows (or not!) since scenes need consent if they’re to resonate with me writing, at all. So it’s like “We’ve talked about this – I hate it when you want me (and need me) to top you but I’m s’posed to read your mind – and topping when you’re angry at your partner is a bad bad bad idea” followed by “Do what ya gotta, man, just hit me really hard.” Oh, and there are minor children in the house while this sh*t’s going down, just to make it even more like real life, and our heroes must deal with the domestic consequences of Daddies fighting. I LOVE A CHALLENGE. After all, continuing to have interesting sex after kids *is* a continuing challenge in real life. People want carefree smut? they can look elsewhere; to me smut always has a cost. Who bears it depends on who’s being responsible, or not.

Not that anybody wants to know, but I’m really not into any of those behaviours in real life. Nagging at volume is sort of where I max out, ask any of my exes.

Continuing to have the poly life discussion with someone. It’s painful. Really painful. I feel like I have my nose up again a particularly interesting window. I can smell bread baking. But no. G*ddamned heteronormative uncommunicative bushwah (on their end, not mine.) But at the same time there’s NO F*CKING POINT to becoming an elder if you don’t understand that real life takes time, opportunities for growth don’t wait, and if you don’t consider who’s going to be impacted by your decisions, your years, your grey hairs and and your learning means squat. I am still 22 in some corner of my persona, for my enthusiasms still have all the joy of my youth; I just can’t write everyone affected by my behaviour out of the script any more. I do from time to time, but not all the time.

Fortunately, since I’m pushing 60 with a broom, I can contemplate my greed like the gorram caged bear that it is. Still here, but not running the show.

Katie is still having a rough time and she and Alex are both sick again.

I am not having a rough time. I feel pretty good, all things considered. I have another two weeks of full time work. If that changes, I’ll deal with it. I actually have a plan to deal with it that I think will make almost everyone happy, at least temporarily.

Rogue One is a fucking fantastic movie. Getting eaten by Disney was the best thing that ever happened to the franchise.

Now to check if my money transfer has come through.

sideways thought

I’m a left-loonie, so-far-away, no brain, no balance sheet, no COMPETITIVE VIGOUR kind of person, except for my fondness for guns.

How on earth can I justify such a thing?

Well, I had never tried to, and then an Organizing Principle appeared from the writhing and fuscous depths of my sensorium: why not make a list of who else carries guns in Canada and, you know, compare and contrast?

I’m not really that much of a left-loonie I guess, since I have these libertarian and anarchist stripes, which I need to bury under a more ancient way of knowing.  No anarchist or libertarian ever fucking learned to live inside an ecosystem without destroying it, and the ancestors of the current First Nations actually had that well in hand, from the Haudenosaunee to the Gwich’in and all the peoples many days’ journey around and between.

Note that the slave based culture of MesoAmerica did not prosper.  They fucked up their water table and had armies of drones to support one big hereditary family of fucking parasites (who made nice art possible, sure, that’s the Eurocentric response and it was but an armature for later development like the Enlightenment and Oh Look there are still Royal houses in Europe bla bla bla.) Yeah, they put too many people on too little land and last few generations of the lower classes were in such rough shape that it’s amazing they gave as good an account of themselves as they did when the Spanish arrived.

The people who figured out the buffalo, and the salmon, and the caribou, and the three sisters, now THOSE are people we should respect.  We don’t even know how many of them lived here before white people came, but it was a fuckton, and if they didn’t leave much behind maybe it’s because they didn’t ruin everything.

 

Current count 5813

What an amazing 57th birthday I had!!

I ate a meal I didn’t cook for brekky (left over Desi Turka chicken tikka masala with rice pulao), I ate a meal I didn’t cook for lunch, for Jeff feasted me at Switzerland Chicken, and I ate a meal I didn’t cook for dinner, as Mike feasted me with pan fried oysters and new potatoes.

We watched all the rest of Black Sails more or less because we couldn’t help ourselves.  Then I watched the season 3 teaser trailer just to drive myself nuts; god willing and the crick don’t rise I’ll have more in January around Conflikt time.

I brushed and degunked Margot and avoided being killed on the stairs by Buster.  My rapid increase in wordcount you can tell for yourself and I shipped off some new stuff to mOm.

I got phone calls wishing me a happy birthday from Mike, Katie, my mOm and ewishes from Patricia and DJD. Absolutely nobody on facebook wished me a happy birthday.  258 facebook friends and you get a prompt for friends’ birthdays, but not a sausage (hey I needed the message about social media not being as important as my flesh and blood friends…)

I slept over at Mike’s so we had just enough to drink to be festive but not to drive, and I do not feel muzzy headed this morning so I think I titrated the dose properly.  ASBACK BRANDY BE GREAT YO. Tecate Beer tastes like a man complaining of an unhappy marriage.  I shall not drink that beer again. I even wrote 185 more words last night while I was here.  It was a particularly writing sort of day.

I got prezzies! A foot soaker tub and a headrest pillow for air travel.  SO HAPPY and so very unexpected, but I’m not too old to appreciate it.

I wrote a letter to my MP and ran a load of laundry and backed up my documents.

am I not awesome!?

Lots of writing yummy food and yes I know I am a big kid. And we’ll feast again on Katie’s bday on Friday, yay!

Weather’s the pits and the wind’s going to come up but I’m snug where I am and it’s wonderful. Vitamin D and probiotics make me a better person.

 

OH AND ONE LAST THING. I have an interview with a job agency on Wednesday.  Just came right out of the blue.  Isn’t that a perfect thing to happen on my birthday?  Nothing likely will come of it but you never know, and I got all those nice new work clothes from EShakti, and nicer bras and underwear too over the last six months so if I DID get a job I wouldn’t be going O M F G what do I wear tomorrow. So really, a spectacular day.

While I’m all bubbly and babbly….

TOBY STEPHENS PULLS HIS BEARD AND IT MAKES ME HAPPY gratuitous Black Sails reference. Especially since it’s really his beard, and did you know he’s Maggie Smith’s younger son, and married to that Plowman actress who played Sarah/Osiris for 4 seasons on SG1?  Screw Kevin Bacon SG1 is where the connections really fly.

Facepalm

Yesterday evening I tol’ my brO that I was marking up the margins of Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, what mOm loaned me.

She was okay with it, just like I expected, but when he learned of my gaffe Jeff looked at me like I’d produced a minute long Giardia fart with bean and beer top notes.

Keith gets it next.  Hope he doesn’t mind my markups.

My response to a post about a gun being marketed with a bible verse on it (this in Floriduh, natch):

And the arm has got a hand
in it’s habitual place
these days you understand
why it ends up on my face
You’ll say something indefensible
and in the worst of taste
and that is why my hand
will end up on my face

Facepalm facepalm facepalm

Jeremy Corbyn has been elected head of the Labour party in the UK.  He is being decried with tweets like this ARRANT HORSE MANURE coming from David Cameron’s office.

The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security.

I think What In the Everloving EFF is this?  They must be terrified of him! Did Stephen Harper’s handbasket end up in Cameron’s office? And as for the ‘Labour’s no good they didn’t elect a woman’ argument, that won’t wash.  The two women who ran were accommodationist Blairites and shouldn’t have won for that reason alone.  Feminism means that some of the women candidates will be shite, not shining beacons of whatever political philosophy your Weird allows you to favour.
Corbyn will f&** Cameron’s sh*t up in Question Period for the next three years, before he resigns to make way for someone electable/Prime Ministerial/photogenic/good God man don’t you own a tie?  Cameron will respond with personal attacks because he’s easily flustered and then get his sh(t f*cked up by the Speaker.  All in all I’d say Corbyn’s a good pick for keeping a small corner of Cameron’s soul capable of emitting a squeak of truth once a week.
And look how scary he is in terms of reinvigorating the party.
Now some truth from Alice Dreger. Unca Dave useta say, “The pain is still there, but you just don’t care,” and in fact I used that line in my song about Sol Starr. “I can feel it, but I just don’t care, I got my load on Doc.”  Dave’s experience with opioids came after substantial and scary electrical burns.
No words yesterday.  I am watching Longmire S4 and reading the above-noted non-fiction, which I suspect will help me with the novel.  Less than 10K words I will END YOU!

What the hell is wrong with some people

Huckabee says Dred Scott is still the law of the land in the US.  It’s like the 14th amendment didn’t happen.  W T F?

Jim Wright, in response to a completely different discussion said, and I quote:

 

Wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. You’re wrong. You couldn’t be more wrong. You’re the creamy filling of wrongness in the middle of the wrong donut with brightly colored sprinkles of wrongness on top. You’re wrong.

 

There is a two sentence discussion regarding free will in the second book in the trilogy I’m working on.  The human knows there’s no free will, and the alien provides a semantic argument in support of it, which is me being an ass, since it’s a recapitulation of an argument I had with my mother, for whom I’m writing the novels.

My mOm is science-y in that she buys the deterministic model. I’m hand-wave-y but I know I’m wrong.  I’m filled with resentment about being wrong and I know I’ll be a better person when I take my spoonful of “there’s no free will” meds every morning until I’m cured. I’m going to get the giant economy size, this may take a while.

Here’s a nice long talk about free will, and how there ain’t none.  There are many thought provoking implications for theology and jurisprudence.

And here’s an article which is pretty much where I am with self-help nowadays.

On Jeb Bush telling Americans to work longer hours

Were I an American, I might say something like We- ordinary Americans -are converting to solar and building robots as fast as we can; relocalizing agriculture, working on some long overdue anti-racism, taking back the right to grow hemp for food, drug and fibre, moving away from places that will be floating in 20 years, and this limb of Satan wants us to work longer hours at a Walmart in a flood plain. Long be the years he has to go **** himself in, and may none of them be while his prejudices and mean-spiritedness are under a Presidential seal. But I’m Canadian, so I’ll wring my hands instead.

Isn’t it the strangest thing?

So there was a fooferaw in the press after the service for Rev Clementa Pinckney at which Barack Obama sang a few staves of Amazing Grace.

I don’t give a shit about what the white conservative pressgong said; they all lick rich naughty bits for baubles and won’t leave a lasting mark on human affairs.  I was much more interested in what the black & activist voices said on my twitter feed, being spoken in what are individual and human voices.

A lot of them were mildly approving, but a bunch of them said, “It should have been “Lift every voice and sing” instead of pandering to sensitive whites with Amazing Grace”, which as a song, in memetic terms, has long ago gone beyond parody and flown up its own semiotically charged ass.

Now, being a Unitarian… Marcy I hope you’re reading this, because it should give you a chuckle…the first thing I do, ten days later, but I did follow up, is go to the internet and check the U*U hymnal and make sure the damned song is in there.  O committee of U*U musicians, what hath thou wrought???? yup, it’s there, and my easily clenched shamey bits relax somewhat. Good work folks!

Then I go unto the internet, o weary ones, and read the lyrics.  Because that’s how we DO.

Then I go to youtube and randomly pick a rendition with lyrics.

It wasn’t until the second time through on the lyrics that I realized that the words native land appear in the last verse.

SETTLER COLONIALISM enshrined in a black hymn.

Yar.  Arg har.  Bleeble bleeble.

Okay, so first off I’m giving Barry a hall pass, the ****er’s unsingable, so he picked Amazing Grace as being a sound compromise in an emotionally and politically volatile public event.  I got no problem with that.

Second I’m thinking wow I’m going to filk that.  A better tune is coming, but the lyrics, except for the last verse which is where the song makes a right turn from social justice into God this and God that and God on every line, are OUTSTANDING.  I mean it.  Read the lyrics and tell me what you think.

It is now two in the morning.  It’s possible I’m cool enough to sleep.

 

side note, ever see that using U*U as a short form for Unitarian Universalism makes our symbol look like you’re mooning someone and showing your asshole?  I couldn’t love Unitarianism more now if I tried.