Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Speak

Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

~ Faiz Achmed Faiz.


I'm not sure I can adequately describe how both terrified and infuriated I feel.

Terrified because I'm old, and weakening, and poor, and alone. My supposed "fellow Americans" just spit on everything I believe, empowering the worst of our nation's past, present, and future. I am confronted with the horrifying certainty that I will be faced with the awful choice between Vichy and Resistance, knowing the gruesome fate awaiting most resistants

Yet I am so furious I cannot lie down before this. Especially now that the Traitor Trump has promised to use my Army for the greatest treason since the War of the Rebellion, using my brothers to round up other Americans - knowing that they WILL take them up, innocents alongside all the drywallers and berry-pickers and bodega grannies and the layabouts, petty crooks, and assholes, for the "crime" of just being here - to herd into the camps practically identical to those that we built for the last betrayal, to punish our fellow Americans for the crime of being Japanese.

And I'm insane with fury that I'm forced into this, like a man caught in a moving train, for no more reason than millions of dumb fucks couldn't vote for a woman, didn't understand fiscal reality, or were terrified that the cutie in the corner booth was sporting a cock under her cocktail frock.

I don't want to have to face down angry cops. I don't want to have be arrested, gassed, beaten. I don't want to risk jail, or worse, for standing up for simple human decency and political sanity, and I'm viciously enraged that millions of people have forced that on me.

But I don't see how I can not do all those things, run those risks, and live with myself at the end of the day.

And that's terrifying.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Today in "Republican is the New Stupid": How do you say "Deportee" in Japanese?

Scott Lemieux at LG&M has a long-form piece on the disaster-to-come that will be the Trump47 deportationpalooza. This from Radley Balko:

"Trump approached the presidency like he ran his businesses — like a mob boss. He thought the Justice Department should have been his personal law firm, and has vowed to weaponize it against his opponents should he win again. It isn’t at all difficult to imagine how, once in place, this deportation force might be used to enforce Trump’s other authoritarian impulses and campaign promises, like infiltrating blue cities to “fight crime,’“ arrest homeless people, or to beat — and possibly shoot — people who stage protests against his policies.

Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economyInflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression.

Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support.

Trump and Miller aren’t going to deport 15 million people in four years. It just isn’t possible. But the important thing — the thing that ought to be immediately disqualifying — is that they plan to try"

Very much yes.

But - here's the Extra Stupid Special Sauce; you want to see an industrialized nation with what amounts to  a de-facto complete immigration ban?

Japan.

"The number of vacant houses in Japan has surged to a record high of nine million – more than enough for each person in New York City – as the east Asian country continues to struggle with its ever-declining population.

Abandoned houses are known in Japan as “akiya” – a term that usually refers to derelict residential homes tucked away in rural areas.

But more akiya are being seen in major cities, such as Tokyo and Kyoto, and that’s a problem for a government that’s already grappling with an aging population and an alarming fall in the number of children born each year.

“This is a symptom of Japan’s population decline,” said Jeffrey Hall, a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies in Chiba. “It’s not really a problem of building too many houses” but “a problem of not having enough people,” he said."

No matter what fucking Nick Fuentes - a Peak Republican Dumbfuck if ever breathed - "thinks" (if that's a valid term for the residual electrical impulses in his fat head), the American public, and American women in particular, aren't going to start popping out his sprogs enough to wash the dishes, wipe the asses, pick the crops, and clean the chicken carcasses.

Kids are fucking expensive! And hard, unpaid work! Remember the GOP mantra: "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em." Amirite? Well..?

Kiboshing divorce and abortion ain't gonna help, either.

The bottom line is that most large industrial nations see an overall decline in native resident births as the dearth of needs for farmhands and shop assistants become obvious and kids become, in effect, a luxury good, an indulgence.

The planned Operation Endlösung (look it up...) is fucked up for many reasons.

But, like so much of Trump47, the bottomless stupidity is one that is far too often left unsaid.

Again, I'm not nearly so arsed at being ruled by evil traitors.

It's the being ruled by these fucking dumbfucks that really stings.

Update 11/14: Bill Scher at Washington Monthly has a worthwhile long read

"Overall, immigration is good. You wouldn’t want to live in a country where nobody wanted to get in. Without a steady flow of incoming workers, businesses—particularly in specific sectors such as agriculture, meatpacking, and construction—would strain to find workers. Some companies would shutter, and others would provide clunkier service while increasing costs. Small-to-mid-size cities would lose population and revenue, forcing cuts in schools, police, and so on.

However, too much immigration in a short period causes acute disruptions. States and cities struggle to find sufficient lodging. Schools can’t handle sudden increases in students who need to learn English. As with just-right inflation, Goldilocks immigration policy engineers an amount that’s just right—relatively slow, steady, reliable, and predictable."

I've been banging this drum for literally decades.

"So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything will be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by Real (i.e. white) Americans who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.

As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your business when your neighbor's house is on fire."

Fuck but these people are so goddamn stupid it's astounding they remember to breathe. The problem is vast and involves dozens of polities and millions of people. Using "deport the brutes" to solve the problem is like trying to fix a pocketwatch with a hammer.

But watch these idiots do it.

Thursday, November 07, 2024

Arming up for the new civil war

Paul Campos has it exactly right:

"Donald Trump won the election, and that reality has to be acknowledged and lived with, because at least for the moment the alternative is worse. But the last thing Democratic elites ought to be doing at the moment is signaling any willingness to cooperate with his completely explicit goal of trying to destroy the democratic process that just put him back in power. When dealing with fascism, the difference between cooperation and collaboration is non-existent, and statements like this obscure that critical absence of a distinction.

The options for defenders of liberal democracy are to resist, flee, or surrender. Bipartisan cooperation isn’t on the menu with Trump and Trumpism, and anybody who claims otherwise is either a fool, or thinks that they can cut a deal with Donald Trump while somehow still keeping their own hands clean at a time like this"

There is little enough I - an old man alone in a shitty Northeast Portland apartment, struggling with late-life health issues, post-divorce loneliness, and the blues - can do to "resist".

But what I can do, I will. Starting here.

I will be "the enemy within" of all things Trumpian, MAGAt, Republican, fascist (but I repeat myself) and any and all who "cut a deal" with them.

I will use my words. If need be, I will use my body.

I cannot see how it ends well. They control all the levers of power and a monopoly on force.

Most partisans are killed.

 

But I can't keep my own hands clean. Not and live with myself.

Wednesday, November 06, 2024

"We" also know who "We" aren't "The People"

Yes, it's a shithole.

But I have friends I stay in touch with on what I usually refer to as "The Goddamn Facebook" and I'm too lazy to use old-school snail mail.

One of them - a former GI who worked for me - posted this picture yesterday.

I lit up.

"Seriously? I'm supposed to be all cool and polite about how we're "one nation" when millions of people voted to come after my Social Security and Medicare, come for my gay and lesbian friends, come after my daughter and her OB/GYN if her pregnancy goes wrong, come after me - since I despise Tubby I'm "the enemy within" - and my liberal pals, come for my investments (fucking "Tariff Man? Fuck right off with that Gilded Age horseshit!) and probably my Army retirement, too? Because we're "We The People"? As the old joke goes, what you mean "we", kimosabe?"

Once I'd cooled off, though, that got me thinking. 

Who, by our new Leader's own words, a no longer going to be part of "We The People"?

Well, me, the enemy within, that's for sure, and my dirty hippie liberal commie pals.
Anyone not straight.
Anyone Muslim, and probably anyone not the "right kind of Christian", if they're troublesome enough.
Anyone poor, especially anyone who needs "entitlements" like Social Security and Medicare to get by (that's me, too, BTW...).
Anyone darkish-looking; Tubby wanted to shoot at the BLM marchers, so Black Lives Don't Fucking Matter anymore, if they ever did.
Anyone who criticizes The Leader or any of his goons. Hi there, Bezos? You think sucking up is gonna save you if your paper reports the gross corruption we're gonna see from Tubby again? Hahahahahah..!
Anyone who runs crosswise with the no-longer-standing-back Proud Boys.
Anyone with a pre-existing medical problem.
Anyone whose pregnancy goes dangerously wrong.
Anyone who tries to save the pregnant woman and in the process has to take a risk that it will kill the kid inside.
Anyone protesting anything Tubby does; the BLM thing again, he wanted to shoot "rioters" and you know fucking well that the slightest violent act will be enough to make any street protest a "riot".
Anyone else Tubby hates and, as I've probably mentioned, he's a real good hater.
Anyone...

Should I stop? I can go on. There's LOTS more people the MAGAts hate.

That doesn't even take in the people outside this country who need its help; Taiwanese and South Koreans and Ukrainians. 

Anyone on Tubby's pal Vlad's hit list. 

I'm sure I can think up more if you want.

Oh, and while I'm here...

I know this is like bitching about the boring TV programming in the middle of a typhoon, but...

81 million of you turned out to vote against Tubby in 2020.
Only 67 million - so far - bothered to vote against him yesterday, when it was obvious that he's crazier and more vicious than a shithouse rat than he was four years ago.
 
Where the fuck did 14 million of y'all go? Disneyland?
 
Tubby got 2 million FEWER votes than he got in 2020. If y'all had showed up...

Well..?

Well, at least we know who "We the People" are...

In a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity the American public has chosen to elect a gibbering idiot who pines for the Gilded Age and dreams of Hitlerian policies towards everyone he hates - and he's a good hater - and his clutch of little Nazis who will take an axe to the 20th Century to ensure that no drag queen ever reads "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" to second graders again.

To the extent they can, the GOP will root out workplace and environmental regulations and undo the already too-threadbare social "safety net". They will increase the already too-high economic inequality to ensure we become ever more an oligarchy.

Their open lunatic anti-vaxxer, anti-"Obamacare" crowd will undo public health and make us sicker and weaker.

In 1933 the German public had endured war and starvation, hyperinflation, militias fighting in the street, the punitive effects of Versailles...and STILL did not vote in the Nazis.

What's our excuse? That the cutie in the corner booth might be a transwoman in a cocktail frock?

That the roofers next door might be here illegally?

At this point all I can do is echo this comment from the election thread over at Lawyers, Guns & Money:

"The bottom line is that there are more fucking assholes in America than anyone wants to acknowledge.

More immature, misogynist, racist, greedy, myopic fucking assholes than anyone is comfortable admitting to; more really rotten, selfish human beings who choose hate over love, exclusion over inclusion and "fuck you, I got mine" over any sense of humanity.

It's time to face the facts. The fucking rot is wider and deeper than any of us want to admit, and it's growing.

It all makes me want to puke, and the worst of it is that I honestly don't know how to combat it all. All I DO know is that we must all keep fighting, because to capitulate is to descend into madness."

The madness is upon us.

We're in a Project 2025 World now.

Updated 11/6 p.m.: I know this is like bitching about the boring TV programming in the middle of a typhoon, but...
81 million of you turned out to vote against Tubby in 2020. 
Only 67 million bothered to vote against him yesterday, when it was obvious that he's crazier and more vicious than a shithouse rat than he was four years ago.

Where the fuck did 14 million of y'all go? Disneyland?

 Tubby got 2 million FEWER votes than he got in 2020. If everyone who voted for Biden turned out yesterday...

Well..?


Monday, November 04, 2024

Weave Eve

On top of everything else - the threat to my income (Army pension, Social Security), my healthcare (Medicare, Tricare), my investment portfolio - that that orange lunatic proposes to take a hammer to, the idea that tomorrow millions of my supposed fellow-Americans want to force me to listen to the unhinged sonofabitch's goddamn addled "weave" for FOUR FUCKING YEARS makes me furious that you never seem to have a rocket-propelled grenade when you REALLY need one.

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Snapshot from a vacation

My kid sister came out to visit last week.

We did Portland then drove out to the coast, so we had a long car ride just to talk. During a conversation about politics sis mentioned unnamed “friends” who were Republicans but were “nice people”; not overtly racist, sexist, etc. She lives in a piece of rural New York state, so I find that entirely believable that she knows these kind of people.

“They’re Nazis.” I replied. “Nazis are never “nice people”; they’re Nazis. We fought a whole war and incinerated whole cities full of them.”

“But…these aren’t bad people.” she insisted.

“Yes. They are. Just like there were sweet old grannies and kind men and cute kiddies in Dresden, they’re Nazis. You can’t excuse them because they’re “nice”. They have to be fought, and, if need be, killed.”

She was silent. But couldn’t agree. Just didn’t want to face that.

And that’s why we’re here.

“And when their Orange Fuhrer wins, and he sends his soldiers out here to Portland, and they shoot me down in the street because I’ll fight rather than surrender to Nazis, your “nice” Republicans will be happy about that, now, won’t they?”

And she had nothing to say.


Update 10/28: Bret Devereaux says the same things better and more completely.

"And while right now you may have many reasons and many concerns, if you sign your name to this fascist and a fascist government takes power as a result…your many reasons will no longer matter. No one really cares what Franz von Papen or Victor Emmanuel III or NSDAP or Blocco Nazionale voters were concerned about or their pet issues. It no longer mattered. Once a fascist government took power…they were fascists.

And that was all that ever mattered."

As Tubby himself said; this may be the last time you get to vote.