The Antisocial Socialist

Always remember that if they had the money to bomb Iran, they had the money for universal healthcare, affordable housing, USAID, even egg subsidies if y'all* were so hell-bent on cheap eggs that you'd elect a fascist.

( cut for some impolite thoughts )

* Not you, obviously. Or you wouldn't be reading my blog, which has beaten the "don't invade other countries" drum since the early 2000s when I started it.

 Really didn't have "the CIA is overthrown by a right-wing coup" on my 2025 bingo card but you gotta savour the poetic irony of it all.

I am so fucking sorry about your country. Dear Americans with uteruses, I'm thinking of you and raging for you.

The social contract, such that it ever was anything more than a myth, is broken. The sooner ordinary people realize that their minority of shrivelled old masters have never considered themselves bound by it, the better. The sooner ordinary people realize that this means they are not bound to it either, the better.

These so-called justices should never get to know a moment of peace now. If they are going to invade your ovaries and your privacy, all freedom-loving people should ensure that they do not have a private life. They have addresses, which you can find circulating around Twitter. These places should be considered public campsites and gender neutral washrooms. They go to restaurants, but they have lost the privilege to dine in silence, and their meals should not be spit free. They should be harassed and harangued like a terrified teenager trying to get reproductive health care at a Planned Parenthood. They should not be able to sleep in their beds at night with the vuvuzelas and the sound systems and the screaming.

Dear Americans I do not recommend sending bodily fluids through the mail but a tampon dipped in food colouring will probably have the desired emotional impact. If you find a politician that is particularly interested in the contents of your reproductive organs, why not show them?

These wizened old men are cowards. Violence may not be required. They are scared if you yell at them in public. This is something Democrats are afraid to do. Democrats still think that civility exists. Dear Americans, it does not. The time for being civil is long passed, if it ever existed. 

Dear Canadians, I see you looking smug. You can cut it out right now. Indigenous women are still routinely sterilized against their will and their babies abducted. Black people still face higher maternal mortality. Abortion is impossible in large parts of the Maritimes and the North, even though it's in theory legal. The Tories, should they come to power, will be emboldened by the atrocity to the south. Do not make the mistake of believing they're beholden to consensus reality. They are not. They are every bit as vicious as American Republicans and if we don't stop them at the ballot box, we will have to stop them in far less convenient ways.

We can fight these monsters and win but the gloves need to come off.

 I'm sure the "I choose my choice" anti-masker types whining about bodily autonomy will be the first in the streets to protest the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They're probably out there right now.

Right?

Right??

My American friends, I am so truly sorry.

When Trump got elected, I kinda figured there wouldn't be another election. You give a guy like that the keys to your car, don't be surprised when it winds up at the bottom of a river. He made it clear what he was about, Americans voted for him anyway, and I'm pretty sure this year is going to involve the White House on literal fire at some point.

This said. I think there will be an election and here's why.

First, Biden is a really weak candidate. He may very well be the lesser of two rapists, but it's hard to imagine anyone being really passionately for whatever it is he stands for. He wears his politics like he wears his mask—wrong and useless. 

Trump, conversely, is a monster, but he's a strong candidate. The people who love him really, really love him. They are a death cult who will do his bidding, even if it kills them. 

The incumbent gets to gerrymander, so where the borders are drawn and who gets to vote will be decided by the ruling regime.

COVID-19 will not be gone by November. It's likely to be in a second or third wave by then.

Liberals mostly understand the science of epidemiology, conservatives do not. The Republicans will make sure there are fewer, more crowded, less accessible voting options in Democrat-friendly ridings; Democrats are more likely to stay home if the choice is "vote for Biden" vs "not dying of the Rona." Republicans don't care; they don't believe that the virus is real, let alone more important than voting for their God-Emperor.

So an election favours Trump, therefore he'll allow it. I would, if I were one of his advisors. Which I wouldn't be because I'm too smart and not a relative.

What we're seeing now is fascism with American characteristics. The US isn't really going to be Nazi Germany. One of the problems with the reification of WWII and Nazi Germany as our primary means to understand fascism is that anything that doesn't look exactly like that gets discounted. There are other fascist and authoritarian models to draw from, and I think the US is rapidly devolving towards one. India, at least at the national level, has managed a quick hop, skip, and jump into something that is essentially fascism while still maintaining the overall look and feel of democracy. Brazil did it. The Philippines did it. 

I'm a broken record on this, but what we are seeing the limits of liberal democracy. This is another problem—the conflation of liberal democracy with capitalism. They are not only uncomfortable bedfellows, but they don't really need to be sharing a bed at all. China has proven that it's perfectly possible to do capitalism better than liberal democracies do it. It's entirely possible for the US to develop a system like, say, Russia's, where ostensibly there are elections but lol as if anyone other than Putin would win. 

I'm not saying this to depress you, by the way. My silver lining is that I never put all that much faith in elections as a primary driver of social change as most people do. Like by all means vote for your team, and if they win, there are really tangible improvements that will happen. But it's not the only thing or the most important thing.

Related: Really glad I saved a slice of cake for tonight as a reward for getting through today because I feel like several different kinds of crap.

I was going to make a post about the latest Drug Fraud shenanigans, but you know what, I'm tired and this is funnier.





That feel when your cute little galaxy dress and leggings would conceal you better than the American Space Force uniforms would conceal its members from aliens or whatever they think they're hiding from.

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.

 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.

 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?

Well, that was something.

Despite my awesome powers of prognostication, I did not expect Cheeto Benito's Alt Reich to act as quickly or decisively as they did. My entire experience with authoritarian far-right governments in North America has been that of a slow-burn, frog-in-boiling-water type situation where most of the bad shit goes down in ways far too complex for the average citizen to understand. But this is different. This is a week, and we're all in such turmoil that it is impossible to keep track of all of the horrible shit happening at once.

This is by design, of course. You are meant to be confused and overwhelmed. The point is chaos and disruption. Much of Trump's moves won't stick, can't stick, but the intention is to screw fast and hard, to leave any opposition or resistance bewildered and under-resourced.

One of the reasons why I no longer identify as an anarchist (though I still have many anarchist sympathies) is that I actually believe that a big, lumbering bureaucracy is a healthy thing. It stops, for example, one psychopathic manchild elected by a deluded fraction of the populace from acting on every single chubby he gets when he's sitting on his gold toilet. I may not be that familiar with the US political system, but there are supposed to be checks and balances to prevent this kind of thing. Trump has decided to cut through all that, and because the US government is not typically accustomed to a sole petty tyrant doing whatever the fuck he wants, it is not in a position to respond immediately. And this is what cause the massive clusterfucks at the airports.

This is the age of immediate gratification, and the US now has a Führer who acts only based on immediate gratification. The system may respond, but it's a few hours behind, and those few hours can mean a lot if the bad guy's only plan is to smash and destroy as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

There are a number of avenues for resistance, as many are currently circulating. To be honest, I'm mainly concerned with the ones I can help with as a Canadian. I'm super-pissed, by the way, in the way you can only be when you have a full, normal life going on and you need to halt it because every action that is not directed towards removing Trump from office seems like a wasted action*. In the next few months and years, I may be a stop along an underground railroad, but it can't just be action on an individual or even small group basis.

So here are a few things:

Trump is a Nazi, and anyone who supports him is a Nazi. This is how you need to view things from now on. No compromise, no quarter, no platform. Do not allow representatives of the American state to enter your country. Cut ties with your Trump-supporting relatives. Picture them all in Stormtrooper helmets or SS badges if it makes it easier. They have voluntarily given up their right to be considered humans.

Any company that supports Trumpism is the enemy—more so than regular capitalists. Delete the Uber app. You shouldn't have it in the first place—I never have, because I look at them and I see the last chance for a peaceful social democracy in which workers are able to earn a living wage yanked from under us. Punching Nazis in the face is good, but punching them in the wallet is just as effective.

Donate to the ACLU. They are the first line of defence, as we saw this weekend. I just donated and you should too.

Write, call, email, tweet your MP or whatever elected representative you have. Any government that does business or maintains ties with the US is practicing appeasement, and ought to be treated with the respect due to Neville Chamberlain or Vichy France. We should all be withdrawing our ambassadors, shuttering our embassies, and threatening to cut business ties. I don't even care if the latter is realistic right now—these are not realistic times.

Trudeau's tweets are not enough. It is public grandstanding, not actual policy. The quota was capped at 1000 and is now closed again.

Fight fascism wherever you are, in any way you can, be it with your words or fists or finances. The discourse is changing. Nick Kouvalis, officially the Worst Person In Canadian Politics**, gets away with calling people "cucks" on Twitter now. Fight them. Fight them all. We are at war.

* Incidentally, though, in the future, can we please allow the entire world to vote for US presidents, not just Americans? If your actions are going to affect everyone, we ought to get a say.
** Campaign manager for Rob Ford and now Kellie Leich.