The Antisocial Socialist

Spotted in my neighbourhood.

If I read one more thinkpiece about the poor neglected American white working class men I swear to fuck I'll scream.

Their lives suck, sure. Hillbilly heroin and outsourcing. Their lives suck because of decisions made by rich maggots like Cheeto Hitler. Boo-fucking-oo. Their lives will continue to suck under Trump, in exactly the same way, except worse without Medicare and the ACA or whatever else half-assed government programs y'all have down there.

I ask you: Where were these guys when we were in the streets protesting NAFTA in the 90s? Voting for Bush, calling us terrorists and anarchists for holding up traffic, that's where. Yelling at us to get jobs.

But you know who else's lives suck? Black working class men and women. Trans working class men and women. Latino working class men and women. Muslims and Jews. Immigrants. Disabled people. None of whom are rich, coastal elites. And their lives are going to get worse in the same way that white working class men's lives will get worse, only exponentially more because their government has now declared open warfare on them. Losing your job is shit, trust me, I know; losing your job and then getting beaten to death by some brownshirt wannabe fuckhead is apparently something most whites can't empathize with, so why should they get empathy in return?

To the extent that any working class people actually voted for this bargain basement Mussolini, they have rendered themselves undeserving of your sympathy and understanding.

P.S. Same with white American women, though I see less pity pieces about them.

My sincerest condolences to my American friends, and even more so to the many around the world who will feel the consequences of Americans' decisions and didn't even get a say.

I have a lot of worries, too many to name. Stay safe, y'all, and stay fighting.

I keep being reminded throughout the day. I mean, it's pretty hard to avoid the subject. Especially when the Board sends you that general form-letter about how to talk to children about mass shootings. Seriously, that's a thing that they have to do, because the NRA is out of control.

I don't really have anything to add that hasn't been said by wiser people. This one hits a lot closer to home than most senseless mass shootings, though. I just feel sick and sad and furious and queasy, somehow.

As—once again, wiser—people have pointed out, there is no point in asking America to get its shit together. If a school full of six-year-olds wasn't a wake-up call, a club full of queer Latinx who most of their leaders seem to want dead anyway is hardly going to stir them into action. Fucking fuck. That's it, that's my contribution. Fuck all of this shit.

There was some kind of incident at UofT today. Turned out to be nothing, but multiple buildings locked down and so on. I don't usually feel unsafe, but days like these feel pretty unsafe, y'know?

Anyway here are my cats being gay and cheering me up:

Today my kids asked if the Canadian government shut down too or just the American one. I should have told them that ours shuts down every time Harper has his ego bruised, which is all the time. It doesn't seem to affect the country much, to be honest.

Apparently some Democrat called some Republican "anarchist," I guess in retaliation for Republicans calling Democrats "socialists" and "communists," or, more charitably, in reference to Chesterton's awesome quote: "The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all." Dear Americans: Words mean things. You already ruined "libertarian" for the rest of the world. Please call the Republicans or Tea Partiers or whatever what they are: fascist douchecanoes. I may not be an anarchist anymore but anarchism is a legit political theory that has a pretty specific meaning.

This is the only article about it I've bothered to read. I've been busy.

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On a completely unrelated note, I'm very slowly changing the look of my LJ, not that anyone would likely notice besides me. I was overhauling my Proper Website and accidentally deleted my banner (which I was hosting there), then decided not to put it back up since the photo barely looked like me, or Marinetti, anymore. I don't know if my current banner is just a placeholder or not; every time I see it, the kittens look so joyful. I can't help but think that kittens, pie, and communism sums up the vast majority of my blog entries.

I killed the blogroll, though. Half the links were broken and half aren't things I read anymore, or even support. Not sure if I'm going to put a new one up; it would seem useful, but I'm terminally lazy.

Listening to a CBC segment on Edward Snowden and wondering at the attempt to force a sort of ambiguity on a situation that really has little in the way of moral ambiguity.

Historical memory is a funny thing. We venerate individuals who stood up to political evil, whether their actions were legal or otherwise, and they do tend to be otherwise, so long as the evil has passed. I've been assembling a collection of photos and quotes by and about Nelson Mandela, who, when he began his long journey as an activist and well into it until the anti-apartheid movement became acceptable by the mainstream, was derided as a terrorist by the likes of David Cameron and many other upstanding Westerners. Civil Rights activists, Soviet dissidents, the few Germans who resisted Hitler, the protestors of the Arab Spring, all acted outside of their country's legal structure. Even in our popular culture, we cheer for the underdog freedom fighter, the Katniss Everdeens and Mal Reynolds and Rebel Alliances that stick it to the big totalitarian governments, a habit we've no doubt picked up from having 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 on high school English class reading lists for approximately forever.

And yet when history is actually being made, when we're inside the narrative, suddenly it's somehow less clear. (It isn't, but there are a number of very powerful interests working very hard to muddy the waters.) The U.S. government behaved badly in a way that, if it had occurred on a TV show, would be classic Evil Totalitarian Government behaviour. In fact, it's kind of the classic Evil Totalitarian Government behaviour. And it obviously affects people far beyond the U.S. They were, and presumably still are, spying on all of us, not just their own citizens.

One does not politely ask an Evil Totalitarian Government to kindly stop doing that bad thing it's doing. Well, one can, but one is unlikely to meet with a very useful response. No, we've all seen the movie, we know what the proper response is. The truth must come out.

History will vindicate Snowden, which does him little good at the moment. In the meantime, there's handwringing about whether he broke the law and violated the national interest, as if the law is something sacred and immutable and given to us by God rather than written by human beings, as if the national interest doesn't include any people. It displays a profound ignorance of how nasty regimes are allowed to develop into nasty regimes in the first place. It strikes me, from my position in this quaint little backwater property of the Empire, as so deeply absurd and myopic that I can't honestly believe that people are making these sorts of arguments. I can't believe that my own government is not at least contemplating granting Snowden asylum, as it did to Igor Gouzenko for doing essentially the same thing as Snowden did with less altruistic motives. (Well, I can, but only because my government is currently trying to be more actively evil than the American government.) It's not that I disagree with these arguments, though I do, it's just that I completely can't understand the mentality that would cause someone to make them. One would have to stand completely outside of the constructs of ethics—which a good many people do, apparently—and the lessons of history in order to stake a claim that this man did anything other than the right thing.

Can someone explain to me why everyone cares about where Petraeus puts his dick than about how many innocent Iraqis and Afghans he's slaughtered?

God bless Amurrca.

I won't say, "Congratulations" because to be honest, you guys should get with the rest of industrialized civilization and have universal healthcare. This is, like, a minor adjustment to a major problem, which is that for-profit healthcare is murderous.

But I do like to see a right-wing fucknut get all red in the face, and it's been a good day for that. So. Yay?

WHAT

How is this a thing that happened in the world?

Apparently women are more concerned with making babies than making money and therefore it's just fine that gendered pay discrimination exists.

Oh Wisconsin. I know it's hard to compete with Arizona and Texas for Worst State Ever, but do you have to be so blatant about it?