The Antisocial Socialist

Look I don't give two shits about the Democrats and think Biden is reprehensible, but these feelings are vastly outweighed by my burning desire to see Cheeto Benito dragged kicking and screaming out of the Oval Office like an oversized toddler, and the icing on the cake is that Philly—a city where I have never been but I'm a big fan of—was the deciding vote. And, well, my best friend is an American, and I have a great deal of American friends for whom I worry and care very deeply, and I am massively relieved that y'all get some breathing room.

Feel free to celebrate in the comments with your best Gritty memes, recipes for schadenfreude pie, or just sighs of relief.

 Boosted from thisfinecrew 

Can be done from home,
estimated time: 5-30 minutes,
Deadline, July 30th

Instructions here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HOhkkOhi9fA8LQUIWU233tc-z8XPXIhMUnWTSganxlw/edit

ICE is asking the public to apply to be part of their vigilante "Citizens Academy". Well, let's give them what they asked for: thousands of applications! Except our applications are going to be...a little different.


The goal is to ruin their application process by flooding them with fake applications. That’s where you come in! We need thousands of people to take 5 minutes to submit an “application” before the deadline of Thursday, July 30th.

I actually had a really good day today for unrelated reasons, but whenever I'm having a bad one, I will remember the image of Roger Stone, who has a Nixon tattoo on his back, being perp-walked out of his house after a raid by furloughed FBI agents, who eagerly volunteered to do it for free*, in his PJs.

It is 2019 and this sentence makes sense.

* Even evil has standards.

 Pity the lot of the schoolteacher, who as a diligent worker and attentive to her students does not check her phone during the workday, and thus came home and had to wonder why everyone was talking about the mushrooms from Super Mario Bros.

And then found out.

 I think what folks don't understand—intuitively speaking, I'm not assigning any sort of blame here—is that all laws, customs, and procedures were created by humans and can be undone by humans.

I posted the "You Can't Say That You Didn't Know" poster to Tumblr (I know, I'm opening myself up to a world of shit), and someone, quite reasonably, commented along the lines of "I know ICE are evil, but what do we with children in families who cross the border illegally?" They listed a bunch of bad options, such as keeping the families together in overcrowded prisons, leaving the kids alone and at the mercy of traffickers, etc.

It's kind of an obvious thing to wonder. Because to a young person (or even a middle-aged person with a regular, fallible memory), ICE has always existed. DHS has always existed. We have always had to take our shoes off at airports. And so on. But all of these have happened not just within my lifetime, but within the past two decades. Some authoritarian shitbag decided it was necessary and did it without asking the rest of the world whether it was a thing we needed.

Same with The Economy. If average people understood, even slightly, how the markets worked, they'd fucking revolt en masse. We talk about economics as though it's a force of nature rather than the product of human decisions made by people who are only slightly more qualified than I am to make those decisions, and in some case less so.

The best part of Yanis Varoufakis' talk that I saw last month was when he deconstructed the idea of economics as a science. If a weatherman with a reputation for accuracy makes a prediction that it will rain tomorrow, he may be right or wrong, but the prediction will not affect whether or not it rains. Whereas if an economist with an equally strong reputation makes a prediction that stocks will fall, this can affect whether they do or not. Because the former is a natural system, and the latter a human system. (On the quantum level, this is possibly less true, but I am not a scientist.) 

One of the most fascinating phrases I hear all the time is, "the market is nervous," or "the market is jumpy," as if The Market is a mercurial, living beast that must be fed, frequently, with the blood of workers lest it go on a rampage. What they actually mean by this is that white men in suits are having feelings, and this will affect whether you have a job tomorrow or not.

It's easy to fall under the fallacy of natural order because we experience existence as individuals, and as individuals, we do have relatively little power. And as a culture—speaking of the West here, and North America in particular—we have been very carefully trained to avoid thinking of ourselves collectively in any unit beyond that of the family or nation state. And also, because our memories are short. I don't remember a time I didn't feel old and tired, but I must have not felt this way, once. Hell, when I started this blog—what, 15 years ago?—the tag "orwellian dystopias" actually made sense because the idea that mass surveillance was something undesirable was mainstream, rather than us happily giving up all our info to Big Zuck.

So when we ask, "what can be done about children separated from their families," the answer is, "stop detaining families at the border." Border patrol, borders, laws concerning the crossings of said borders, and even the current socioeconomic forces that have required families to flee their homes and attempt crossings of said borders, are all artificial phenomenon that we have very recently created, and none of them are inevitable or irreversible.

When we decide that there is nothing to be done about separating babies from their families and herding them into rape camps run by private military contractors in a disused Walmart with a fascistic mural of Donald Trump on the wall, we have not only entered the worst kind of cyberpunk dystopia, but we have forgotten that the forced separation policy has existed for a year or two, ICE has only existed since 2003, and Walmart, though around since the dinosaurs walked the Earth way back in 1962, has only really been in a position where it closes stores, leaving them to be converted into rape camps, in the past decade or so. Even Donald Trump, though it feels like he has reigned forever and probably will*, has only been president since 2017.

What I'm saying is that we don't need to simper or pray for half-measures. You could literally tear up the whole border policy and open the floodgates tomorrow and it wouldn't affect the average American one bit, except that you'd pay a bit less for fruit. It's not ordained by God, or natural laws, or any sort of complexity. Some dudes made decisions and you can make them undo it with just a little political will.

* I am pretty sure that if a Republican ran on the platform of, "no more of these pesky elections and uncomfortable talking about politics that spoils every Thanksgiving," he would win in a landslide.

Assad is a fucking butcher and the reports of gassing are real.

American bombs are not going to help the situation.

Even if they did, announcing your military strategy on Twitter is a piss poor idea.

There, it's not that hard, I promise.

 It's heartening to see a stream of thinkpieces about how this is it for Cheeto Benito this time, for realsies, it's all coming crashing down. I want to believe this is the case.

But I lived through four years of the Honourable Wifebeater here in Toronto, and I just have no more confidence left that there is anything too outlandish, treasonous, or debased for the American far-right.

I do want to see Kushner go down, though. Sounds like he's next. I have a particular hatred for Jews who pal around with neo-Nazis, what can I say?

There's a good William S. Burroughs bit called "Did I Ever Tell You About the Man Who Taught His Asshole To Talk."


Imagine that, but instead of one man, it's many men, and not one asshole, but many assholes, and someone has obtained a transcript of the conversation the assholes have amongst themselves, and then they got Trump elected.

 (Actually, we're just the left.)

 Things can't possibly get any worse politically, right? I mean, we're already in the Darkest Possible Timeline. What is Cheeto Benito going to do next, open a portal and just up and summon Cthulhu—


"Hold my beer!"

Yeah, we're all fucked.