Fuck Off Forever, Liberals

I thought this meme was a little over the top, but after seeing it irl I can tell you, it’s 💯. Fuck off forever, #NeverBernie #VBNMW “i vOtEd fOr bIdEn bC hEs nOt a fIReBrAnD” MSNBC watching, Pod Save listening, neolib centrist pieces of shit. Your politics are fucked. Like, you’re smart enough to resist the crudeness, willful ignorance, and hatred offered by conservatism, but you have nothing but excuses for why meaningful reforms can’t happen. You are so captured by your media figures, you don’t realize they’re not your friends, they’re employees of very rich network owners who love getting advertising money from pharmaceuticals, energy companies, and others whose only motivation is profit. They offer you ideas, things to hope for, things to post about on the socials and your good friends like and your bad friends leave shitty comments and it feels so darn GOOD – Russia investigation, impeachment, #NeverBernie, #RidinWithBiden . You’re smart and you care about people, you should be doing so much more with that. It’s very sad. You can’t see the things that are very clear and obvious to me and it’s so sad.

Talking Politics 2020: Libs Are Children

So this liberal friend of a friend posted some bullshit about Republicans justifying sex criminals in their ranks and I commented (I shoulda known this was a bad idea) “Tara Reade would like a word.” He responded by kind of agreeing, admitting that she was poorly treated. And then he said “Joe Biden should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” which to me, sounded like absolute bullshit, like lip service. Like something you’d say to a child, you know that there’s no chance of that happening but you say it to comfort them.

I asked him, when and how he could be held accountable (idk why he brought up Law, idgaf about Law in this case), and he was like “I genuinely don’t care.”

Bringing up the Law was such a surprising move. We’re talking about Former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden here. The law doesn’t exist for people like him. The only consequences that mattered were not in courts of law but the court of public opinion. I found it most frustrating that this supposedly smart, nuanced understander of politics would frame the thing like that.

I responded saying something to the effect of, “wow you’re more Jokerfied/Blackpilled than I am, hat’s off to you, but seriously you can’t decontextualize this issue, there’s an election in a few weeks,” I said this because, in Reality, any accountability for Joe, for this or anything else, is a boon to Republicans. In fact they’d be the ones doing it. You know they’re going to be gunning for his ass from the jump, they want revenge for Trump getting impeached.

At that point he got huffy and ended the conversation. Few minutes later his wife (who is my friend from HS and I love her to pieces even though she was a Liz Lady and a staunch Anti-Berner) made a separate comment and laid out the situation; voting for a 24 time accused rapist or a 1 time alleged rapist with a penchant for sniffing. She made the Lesser Evil case for Joe, but here’s the important part, she never said any platitudinal horse hockey about Joe being held accountable in the future. This morning I replied to her saying thank you for not indulging in the fantasy of a future reckoning for Joe Biden. Few minutes later, I’m blocked.

Am I the asshole? I know I shouldn’t have started the whole thing but I was feeling froggy. I would have let it go but the fucking thoughtlessness of saying that stuff about holding Joe accountable as though that’s something that could happen, and then doubling down on it. I couldn’t let that go, partially because he’s a pretty smart dude, like he has writings about feminism and shit. Only thing I can think is, the way my comment and the subsequent thread drifted further and further afield from his OP and he just got offended that his precious post had been hijacked. I mean he did it to himself with that “hold Joe accountable,” nonsense.

Vote Even if it Breaks Your Heart

Today I’m casting my primary vote for the ONLY progressive candidate in 2020 #Bernie2020. I know, at this point it’s just to boost delegate count and it won’t make much of a difference.

When I found out, back in March, that my donating, phonebanking, and other activities didn’t mean anything next to a few well placed phone calls by a certain ex president, I was distraught, heartbroken. The constant whine of #VoteBlueNoMatterWho #RidinWithBiden people since then…

“Biden wasn’t my first or even my fifth choice, but I will Crawl Over Glass to #VoteBlue “

“2020 is too important”

“We can’t let tRump win”

These are the same people who oohed and ahhed at the prospect of a Michael Bloomberg as the nominee:

“wowee, he could crush Trump, he’s a REAL billionaire”

“Look, he’s hiring microinfluencers to do ads for him, neato”

Turning the most vile aspects of that person into virtues. He’s rich, that means he worked hard right?

As an aside, his little “microinfluencers” move, such an obvious bullshit move, if it worked, he’d basically be doing an Uber on campaign advertising. Making all those influencers into contract employees and underpaying them for their work.

But enough about Bloomberg, everyone forgot about how they bigupped him five minutes after he was over, after he’d done what he needed to do, help fuck over Bernie.

Yang was entertaining at least, but a closer look at his policies showed that he was a libertarian techbro in a progressive ballcap. Yang deadenders are especially sad now, going as far as promoting Bret Weinstein’s incredibly lame and obvious astroturf #Unity2020

Worst, by far, were #Warren ppl:

Constant twoface positioning, “oh, I’m with Bernie”/”Bernie is going too far”

The misogyny allegations, got so much more attention from Liz Lads and Liz Lasses than anything Tara Reade said, 1000s of times more substantial tho her claims were.

Body language experts, how many houses, what’d he say about Castro, essays from 50 years ago, RussiaRussiaRussia, and then, when we started getting primary results, it was clear and obvious:

No one was voting for her. All the bluster and selfies and doggos couldn’t hide the fact.

But she hung in there long enough to seal the deal on Super Tuesday, tipping the scales just enough to hand Biden at least two states and maybe more. And the gullible Warren ppl were all “she doesn’t owe you anything,”

Now these same clowns all think they know what they’re talking about b/c Rachel Maddow or the PodJohns told them something about how Biden’s the most progressive, and it’s just like, do u know how full of shit you are, or do you actually believe this???

Taking The Grill Pill

On one hand, the saying, “if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention,” rings truer today than ever. Any reasonable awareness of the state of the world should lead to anger at the holders of power. But, we’re in this information landscape (all the ways we get information – media, socials, etc etc) where it’s known that content that inspires anger is catnip. Savvy tech companies use the anger chemicals in our brains to keep us sucked in.

The knock on effects of this can go two ways, both of them negative. One, you get overwhelmed by the evil so clearly evident in our world, and maybe think, fuck, nothing can be done, woe is me, etc, so you do nothing. Two, you get righteously pissed off and fight back using the same vessels that got you in this angry state. So you post, argue, flame people on twitter, etc. That’s cool and all, but it’s doing nothing to combat the Big Evils that overwhelmed you a minute ago.

So what can we do? Chapo Trap House’s Matt Christman suggests taking what he’s dubbed The Grill Pill. In a nutshell, taking the Grill Pill means, to cultivate acceptance of the suffering of the world (yeah, it’s got a Buddhist flavor), specifically through becoming immersed in the concrete things directly in front of you. Something not online. This is important, b/c one thing about Online is that it rewires your brain circuitry to over respond to those stimuli, and Grill Pilling is about re-establishing stimuli in the offline world. It’s a mistake to call Offline the Real world, b/c the horrible things we learn about Online are real af. What I’m trying to say is, the goal is to have emotional responses that are proportional to your minute by minute, your Now, if that makes sense.

Another way to describe this is learning to manage emotions by having the emotion, feeling it, and recognizing that it’s not helpful to stay in that emotion.

Lately that’s gotten me cooking with real effort instead of just throwing some stuff together. Started playing the guitar again. As we Grill, we haven’t forgotten about the Evils, we know they’re still there. This activity is about self-care, self-soothing, and it helps draw your focus away from Online. For almost everyone, the quickest way to truly meaningful action is to do something offline. That doesn’t mean you can’t use Online to find that Offline activity, right? Like Meetup, Facebook groups, etc. And that’s where we can find real ways to reduce suffering and fight the baddies. Here’s a condensed explainer on it from Matt. ❤

Jo or Joe? My Response

My thing about voting is, everybody should do it, I’m very much in favor of voting every single time you have the chance, but be prepared for disappointment. I really like the saying, “Try again, fail again, fail better.” Voter apathy is this self-perpetuating thing where people don’t think voting does anything and low voter turnout makes sure of it, and that spiral continues.

Voting is just one political act. This last year, I donated, I phonebanked, I drove to Queens for a rally, etc. I did all that stuff because I was convinced that Bernie Sanders should be the next President. Now it looks like that was all for naught, and for a while I felt really shitty about it. I still feel shitty, but I used to, too. It sucks getting owned. After doing more reading and learning about the way political movements go, I get the idea: most of the time you’re going to take the L. Try again, fail again, fail better. I made a few friends along the way, I’ll take that as a win.

I’m voting in CT, which is a pretty reliable Democrat state, so it’s not like my one vote’s going to mean a lot, at least for POTUS. I’ll probably vote for Party for Socialism and Liberation – PSL candidate Gloria La Riva. I like the Jorgensen campaign’s Q and A section, the ability to say yes or no directly is admirable. But so many of her answers are completely opposite my political goals. So, gun to my head, Jo or Joe, it’s probably Biden (I’m going to throw up now).

But let’s not forget, we’re heading into an election that a hell of a lot of people have already decided is going to be illegitimate. What’s going to happen November 4th and beyond? It’s probably going to suck, but we should be kind to each other.

Is This True? (see pic)

I shared the following on social media, and a friend asked if it was true. Below is the original image and my answer.

The full book can be found here: https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/13/130AEF1531746AAD6AC03EF59F91E1A1_Killing_Hope_Blum_William.pdf

It is a quote from the book, that is true and accurate.

As for the things he’s saying in the quote, what I imagine you’re really asking about, I mean history is complicated. And my mans here is using absolute language (every, not one, etc) so maybe you could catch him on a technicality. Just off the top of my head, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea could be said to be a socialist/communist experiment that has not been all the way crushed, despite the best efforts of America and allies in the Korean War and in wielding soft power (sanctions etc) afterward. The Soviet Union was not directly crushed, but so many wars were carried out on smaller communist states trying to get their thing going and they were collabing with USSR. Of course USSR also had massive internal problems, especially by the 1980s.

You could say, for almost any gov’t, that they have internal problems. When a gov’t fails, there’s surely many contributing factors (history is mad complicated). I’m not saying this to hedge the claims here, just to put them in perspective, so we are clear that we’re not saying anything so myopic as “US intervention is the *only* reason” for this or that gov’t falling.
As for the examples we see in the quote, Russian rev, Nicaragua, China, Salvador, the ones I’m not as familiar with are China and Salvador. By Russian revolution I think he means 1917 and the entire run of the USSR, including the Cold War. Nicaragua/Sandinistas, I was alive during those events (lol like that means I know anything about them) but I’ve done some learning since then, the CIA book Ghosts of Langley touches on that.
The Korean and Vietnam Wars were both attempts to stop communist governments from forming/thriving. And the US was unimaginably brutal in both. They dropped more conventional bombs on Korea than the entire Pacific theater of WWII.

Speaking of WWII, look up Operation Gladio. Stay-behind forces making sure that the locals in various European countries did not meander over to socialist/communist styles of government.

Iran 1953. Chile 1973. Venezuela 2003-ish(?) and 2019-20, they attempted to do a coup on Chavez and now Maduro. Cuba, Bay of Pigs and numerous assassination attempts on Castro. These are all in the public record, admitted acts of fuckery by the CIA. There’s a new book called The Jakarta Method, haven’t read it but I’ve been hearing a lot. It talks about the Indonesian genocide and how that became the blueprint for running coups all throughout South America.

To sum up, I’d say, in general, yeah, he’s saying true things. Also I found a pdf of the whole book, check it out. Thanks for the question bud 💗

Michael Brooks, Rest in Power

I normally don’t give many fucks about public figures’ passing (more about that: as much as we may love the work of well known people, I have to recognize that in most cases, I don’t have a connection to that person except through their work. The thing that does make me sad is thinking of how others’ are grieving. For example, when Prince died a few years ago, it was quite stunning, but I didn’t cry until I thought about how my friend Lonnie was going to be sad about it, and I hate the thought of my friend hurting like that. So), but this one hit me different in a few ways. First, this is a figure from online media, which is necessarily more personal due to the production values, much denser in terms of content. Also common to online media is no small measure of audience interaction, both with live callers and within comment sections, chats, and other online spaces dedicated to discussing the content. Second, good Christ, this guy’s so young, this came literally out of nowhere, dude’s younger than I am, so much going for him in his career. He’d just released a book, his show was growing, things were popping for this guy. I think part of it is that, in my head I view Michael not only as a comedian, journalist, interviewer, but primarily as a teacher. His work taught me so much about the project of international leftist politics, the struggles of marginalised people all over the globe. This alone hugely broadened my scope of understanding. Feelin sad rn, Rest in Power

Portland Protests and Unconstitutional Detainment: Cause and Effect

In general, it’s a mistake to view the various BLM protests as primarily a Cause rather than an Effect. This is the mistake I’ve been seeing from many friends, particularly Libertarians, or at least I think that’s the mistake they’re making. It’s a completely inaccurate way to view the protests, it makes the protests out to be a bad thing, a thing that has disturbed the order and peace in the realm.

The truth is, the protests are an Effect that has been caused by the innumerable, unconscionable, egregious, heartless, vicious instances of inhuman treatment of human beings, performed and abetted by agents of government. That is the Cause, that has given way to this effect. The protests aren’t a Thing To Be Corrected, they are The Correction, or an attempt at correction. This is how we must frame it.

What’s In A Preference?

My thesis statement on dating preferences is, “The heart wants what it wants.” As I talk about dating preferences, I will try to make the case that dating preferences are personal and not something that a person should make broad “I do this,” or “I don’t do that,” statements about.

What are dating preferences? Broadly speaking, we could define them as the particular attributes that people desire in potential romantic or sexual partners. Ok, but what are they really? Orientations is one way to generally categorize. For simplicity let’s start with the two classics, heterosexual and homosexual. If we want to look more closely at either one, we realize that the identity of the person in question matters. If you’re a male heterosexual, you’re attracted to women, and so on. Also, when it comes to dating, you’d like someone who is also attracted to you. So now, as a hetero male, you should consider only hetero females as potential dating partners. Further, there are more than two genders, so to fully describe what’s going on, we need more orientations. Bisexual is also a thing, I didn’t mention it earlier b/c it doesn’t depend on the person in question’s sex/gender. Pansexual is a label that takes into consideration the full spectrum of gender, though bisexual is acceptable and not thought of as being an endorsement of a gender binary. There are also orientations that aren’t exclusively about sex/gender at all; sapiosexuals get a brain boner, demisexuals can’t get it up unless they get emotionally invested, and so on. These alternate orientations can take place alongside the basic ones, for example a female hetero sapiosexual is attracted to smart men, supposedly. Some people don’t like the idea of these alternate orientations, saying that you shouldn’t get a whole other orientation just b/c of a particular trait that you like. I’m not doing this to try to name and describe all the different orientations, gender identities, etc., what I’m getting at is, what’s the common factor? What is going on under the hood, regarding dating preferences?

Let’s focus on one group, cisgender heterosexual males. Cisgender means you identify as the gender you were assigned at birth. Have you ever been in a room full of cisgender heterosexual males and listened to them talk about what they find attractive in women? It can be a lot of different stuff. I read a book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, written by some computer nerds that looked at Google’s data and figured out some really cool observations about people and the things that turn us on. Sometimes a man might say he’s attracted to one thing but end up falling in love with a person that has the opposite trait; I don’t mean settling, I mean giant, heart shaped heart thumping out of your chest, “Lady,” by Styx starts playing when you see her, you transform into a wolf and let out a big howl, LOVE man! It could be Lust, but that also speaks to dating preference, as dating preferences imply fucking preferences and vice versa. The point to this is, we can be surprised by our own tastes as they are revealed. We have a lot of ideas about why certain things are attractive but they don’t always hold. The things people are attracted to are deeply personal, it would seem.

When people talk about dating preferences, we can’t think that they are hard and fast rules that they must always live by. As we saw above, it’s possible for Cupid’s arrow to blindside you. When people talk about dating preferences, we could see these as search parameters. When you sign up for online dating, they work from the general to the more specific. You start with “I’m a man seeking a woman,” and from there they get more detailed. The search parameters are a starting point, you can always refine the search as you learn more about yourself and the world.

I think, underneath everything, anybody could find themselves smitten with anybody under the right circumstances. Therefore all this talk of labels is, in a certain way, attempting to write something in jello. It’s like that ancient greek philosopher saying, you can’t put your foot in the same river twice, b/c when you take your foot out, the river changes and it keeps changing. A lot of people want to get hung up on labels and man I’m just not with that scene.

I said all that to address this particular bit of dating preference-talk: when someone says, “I don’t date x,” where x is some kind of demographic. I want to stay focused on the internal experience of the person. When people make these statements, there could be many social reasons as to why they aren’t speaking truly. People say all kinds of bullshit to be coy or to hide their true intentions, because socializing is part of the mating process. If you’re more concerned about the social value of these kinds of statements, whether they’re problematic, sorry, I didn’t think of the speaking of dating preferences, only the having of dating preferences. For the record, I don’t like people saying these kinds of things, but also, whatever, people are gonna do what they’re gonna do.

In general, when people talk about themselves that way, saying I do this or I don’t do that, I feel like it would be more accurate in many cases to say “I have done this every time before, therefore I will most likely do this” or “I have not done that in any of my previous experience, so it’s not likely that I will do that” but of course people say I do this, I don’t do that b/c it’s shorter and exceptions are understood. So, instead of, “I don’t date trans women,” someone could say, “I have not dated a trans woman before, therefore it’s not likely that I will.”

In conclusion, I think I’ve shown that the common factor of our dating preferences are personal to the point where we may be surprised by our own desires; and that when people self-report their preferences, they may be deceptive or inaccurate. The heart wants what it wants.

#GeorgeFloyd is Worldwide

Call me soft, but the gatherings of people uniting in solidarity in other countries, I find it quite touching. It’s happening in a bunch of countries. The one that gets me misty eyed though, had to be Iran. If you ask most Americans, they’d probably count Iran as an enemy. And they’re right, our sanctions are killing them, especially now with Rona going on, we’re testing them like an enemy and they have every right to be like fuck em. And yet, there they are, saying the name of George Floyd. I can’t stand it 😭