numb3r_5ev3n

EDIT: This post has sort of mutated since I posted it last night, as my emotions keep going back and forth ("We're gonna fight Trump every step of the way" to "fuck it let everything burn" and back again.)

I didn't want to have to write this post, but here goes.

Since the election on Tuesday, a short story by William Gibson, aka "The father of Cyberpunk," has been popping into my head. That story is called "Fragments Of A Hologram Rose."

This story, witten around 1980, is about a future American society on the brink of economic collapse, and the immediate aftermath of that collapse when it happens. Some of the details are different than the actual future we are now living in: in 1980, it was expected that the USSR would still be around in about 100 years or so (and maybe they were prescient: since Vladimir Putin is basically getting everything else he wanted, he might as well get that too!) And Japan was also expected to still be an economic and technological powerhouse well into the future, to the point of eclipsing America (it seems no one expected the early 1990s crash that they still have not completely recovered from.)

But aside from all that: the story is about a young man who has escapes his indentured internship from a megacorporation as society collapses and descends into chaos and food riots, and what becomes of him afterwards. It's a story of how the world people knew in the early 1980s gradually develops into the Cyberpunk setting of Neuromancer and Gibson's other stories, through this character's eyes.

But, as with a lot of William Gibson's stories, it may soon reflect reality more than we'd like.

Face it, you know the meme: Baby Boomers were promised interstellar travel and flying cars. Gen X was promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and it looks like this is the future that is panning out.

But I think just the phrase "Fragments Of A Hologram Rose" is an apt metaphor. The shattered, decaying remnants of a beautiful illusion. Right now, that sounds like America to me.

I'm seeing posts like "I'm not going to let MAGA snuff out my light!" and I'm like, cool. But I'm tired of "Hopepunk." To continue with the William Gibson references: instead, I want to channel the rage of Molly Millions dueling with the corporate ninja on the Killing Floor. (From Johnny Mnemonic. The short story, not the film that was inspired by it.) Or giving Riviera a hot dose (in Neuromancer.)

A refrain I have heard a lot since Tuesday is, "MAGA just won. Why are they so mad?" And my response has been: because someone probably just explained to them how tariffs work for the first time in their lives. But also, because they expected us to still be shocked and despairing to the point of surrender. They didn't expect our defiance and rage. They didn't expect people angrily exclaiming "no, you stupid shit, he wasn't just bullshitting- he said he's going to do that stuff, and he meant it. No, this is how tariffs work."

The hangover is already setting in for some of them. There are reports trickling in of people who are already losing their jobs and having their bonuses cut because of the tariffs they just voted for. Some of them are starting to realize that cheaper groceries may not be in the cards after all, and they just played themselves.

The thing is: once Trumpers realize that Trump's policies are not just going to affect the people they hate - once they realize how badly they screwed themselves - they are going to first beg for, and then demand, our understanding, help and compassion. They'll demand our sympathy, after years of openly fantasizing about murdering everyone they don't agree with. They do not deserve it. But if by acting to resist Trump and protect ourselves, we prevent some of the hurting that these people have gone out their way to inflict on themselves, then I'm ok with that.

But I don't think the incels who are going around telling women "your body, my choice" realize that their only true source of relief, pornography, is about to be criminalized. I'm sure they've bought into the idea that once no fault divorce is gone, they'll be able to compel a woman to be with them - as if that is going to fill the empty, shrieking abyss of self-inflicted loneliness and existential despair in their hearts.

Remember Gamergate? The movement of angry adult-aged little boys with mommy issues, who freaked out about Evil Feminists like we were going to personally come to their homes and take their video games away, just because a woman in a plaid shirt and large hoop earrings talked about a lack of equal representation for women in gaming? The ones who were instrumental in Trump gaining momentum with young men in 2016? I wonder how they are going to take it when violent video games, the laziest scapegoat for the school shooting epidemic, are banned under Project 2025. And that's if they can even afford to update to the latest video hardware and/or next generation consoles after the tariffs kick in. Haha, oops.

(Meanwhile: even if we never see a release of Elder Scrolls 6 at this point, my rig will be able to run Skyrim, Morrowind, and Daggerfall Unity indefinitely. My collection of ancient Bethesda games are smiling at me, Simperials. Can you say the same?)

Trumpers don't seem swayed by the number of women who have died since Roe vs Wade was repealed: but then, we also know from school shootings and the pandemic that mass death isn't real to them (unless it's the "mass death" of clusters of cells that haven't become a human being yet.) The actual human cost isn't real to them, unless it somehow affects them personally. Only then does it become a tragedy.

Immigrants have been the backbone of food production and construction in this country for decades. What happens when they're forced out? One thing I hear a lot is, "once all the illegals are deported, Americans will take those jobs again." Hahaha. Ahahahahhahaha. Do they really think Americans who have been indoctrinated to see those jobs as "demeaning" will "lower themselves" to perform manual labor for cents on the dollar? Immigrant workers shouldn't have even had to do it under the conditions and for the pay they were doing it for. They deserve living wages and benefits, whether or not they were born in this country or came here legally.

But this may be exactly how people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have envisioned it: deport everyone currently working those jobs, then starve everyone else to the point that they'll accept serfdom and feel gratitude for it.

I don't think people are ready to "embrace the pain" as Elon Musk is telling them they're going to have to do. But the pain is coming. And when it does: well, if schadenfreude is going to be the one pleasure we are afforded, it is one in which I will partake. And remember, above all: they wanted this. They voted for it. As we will be reminding them, over and over and over again.

"I didn't think the leopard would eat *my* face!"

Shortly before the election, I re-watched 1977 Ralph Bakshi film Wizards. It's a movie I grew up with. I suspect it was how I got "Elfpilled" (though Tolkien has an equal share of the blame for that.) And once you get past the framing device (nazi mutants vs cartoonish hippie/barbarian Fairies and Elves, and a comic, cigar-chomping Wizard) and the underlying message, "science and technology are inherently bad and always lead to war and oppression," (which is representative of the anti-nuke cold-war era hippie mindset that permeates and informs the movie) it does seem eerily prescient. A parable about the ways that propaganda can embolden and enable fascism and destroy democracy.

How can we "smash the projector" when it's a screen in everyone's pockets?

My first action after the election was called for Trump was to delete Reddit. We were manipulated into thinking Kamala Harris had the election in the bag, by a media that was desperately trying to milk as much engagement and clicks and revenue as possible by socially engineering a fake horse race narrative. This same media has been breathlessly anticipating Trump's return to power since 2020; because anxious, scared people stay glued to their screens, and that "engagement" makes them money.

EDIT: I've sort of changed my mind about "Echo Chambers." Especially since Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez made the point that an echo chamber basically won the 2024 election, and she's right.

But it seems clear at this point that Elon Musk's goal of buying Twitter was to do exactly what he did: in the words of Catherynne Valente, to take the world's biggest microphone, set it to reverb, and shove it up his own ass. To shut down communication and organization on the left, and to spread disinfo and radicalize everyone else.

The best time to delete Twitter was in November 2022, and the second best time is now.

For a while now, I've been evangelizing a return to Web 1.0. Personal websites, webrings, PHP forums, IRC. Platforms that bots, Russian trollfarms, MAGA, and Alt Right simps aren't looking for, are not tracking, and may not even be aware of because for a lot of them, it was from before their time. That, or Mastodon.

People used to bemoan the fact that Google doesn't categorize Dreamwidth pages. Now this could be to our advantage.

Other than that: wake the fuck up, samurai. Once again, we have a Democracy to defend.

Let's see what people think when they start getting exactly what they voted for. It just sucks that the rest of us are going to get it, too. They might be screaming "this isn't what I voted for!" before long, after what they very much did vote for starts happening to them. But for the ones who literally did not vote for this, things are really going to suck for a long time. We're going to have to resist what and where we can, and we're going to have to show up for each other and be there for each other.

current mood:

The shooter is the typical white male, registered Republican gun enthusiast: not antifa, or any other demographic. I suspect that this is what happens when you urge people to go out and hunt down "pedophiles" and "groomers," and then your candidate for political office turns out to be a pedophile and a groomer, if the recently-released Epstein Files are anything to go by.

Other than that, it ultimately doesn't change anything. The media will figuratively pee all over itself in breathless excitement over it, probably for weeks. But I'm not sure it's going to sway people who were always going to vote for him, or who were never going to vote for him the first place. EDIT 7/17/2024: This is now confirmed. Trump hasn't gotten a polling boost after the shooting.)

Ultimately I have the same thoughts about Biden's verbal gaffes from last week. They're both old men, but people pretty much know the stakes and the score, and are going to be voting either for or against Project 2025 (or whatever the GOP decides to rebrand it as.)

I'm scared, but not actually as scared as I was in 2016. Maybe it's all the shit going on in my personal life right now. I'm still voting for Biden, if he does end up being the candidate by the time November rolls around. If not, I'm voting for Kamala Harris or whoever else is running against Trump. I'm voting to defeat Trump.

Current Mood:

This right here.



This was the moment when I realized something that had kind of been surfing around the edges of my social and political awareness, but it took this to bring it to the forefront.

The Right Wing is primarily concerned with preserving cultural markers. The Left is concerned with preserving actual lives. The Left wing wants to protect people. The Right wing wants to protect things.

Look at this, and look at everything he's attacking. At no point does he mention any actual violence. But you know, in a situation where anything in his rant were to actually come to pass, fascists and right wingers would be reacting as if he were.

I want to reference Lindsay Ellis's excellent video essay on the current Star Wars sequels, which I think goes into a little bit how fascists and the right wing place more importance on cultural markers than actual lives, even their own. They're conditioned to believe that their lives, our lives, everyone's lives are meaningless when compared to the precious, sacred cultural markers that they have been taught to revere.

This is really what we are up against. This, right here.

Full disclosure: I was a "9/11 truther" until the report came out sometime in 2004. The part of me that still has truther sympathies is kind of worried right now, because last time a Republican president was ridiculed this hard, a major terrorist attack happened on US soil, and suddenly everyone was buying yellow ribbon magnets and wearing crying eagle sweatshirts, and talking about how we had to "respect the office."

After the report came out it still wasn't a good look for the Bush administration, due to epic bungling. 

For years I was of the opinion that the Bush administration knew something was going to happen, but did nothing because it was convenient for them - one of my first LJ entries was on that subject. Then my opinion changed, and I decided that they had just been incompetent and complacent - but that they used the event after the fact as an excuse to drum up support for Bush, and for war in Iraq, even though none of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqi, and there was no Al Qaeda presence in Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

According to some stuff I remember from the time, Bush had wanted to go back to war with Iraq prior to 9/11, but there was just no support for any kind of action, and no intel that anything was happening there for us to be worried about. Saddam Hussein was soundly beaten in Desert Storm 1991 - but it wasn't the "redemption" for losing in Vietnam that some people wanted it to be, because he'd escaped.

And if they knew something was about to happen and did nothing to stop it, it may not technically qualify as a false flag - but it still served its purpose of getting people to line up behind GW Bush and support a military action against Saddam Hussein that no one was in support of before.

But then 9/11 happened, and the Bush admin railroaded us to war. And the "we have always been at war with Eastasia" doublethink that conservatives adopted after 9/11 and leading up to the Iraq war laid the groundwork for what is going on right now with Trump. They want to be right, and they want reality to reflect what they think it should be rather than what the evidence says is actually going on. They want to feel good about themselves again after Vietnam and Nixon and Iran Contra and eight years of GW Bush. And everything they do to that end makes them look worse and worse, and deep down they have to be aware of this. But as usual in cases like this, they double down on the fantasy.

They're so deep in their fantasy right now that they're okay with Nazis. This is how far it's gone. When confronted about the worrying fact that so many white nationalists have essentially taken over the Republican party, the standard response is "You libs will call ANYONE a nazi" even though they straight up called Obama Hitler for eight years.

I think that the dissemination of the Richard Spencer punching video may be a wakeup call for some, but others I have talked to are like the "Nice Neighbors" from that one macro, who never rocked the boat and never spoke out of turn, or made trouble for anyone - and who refused to worry about their neighbors being dragged away by the SS or the Stasi.

The problem boils down to the fact that they just don't want to have to think about it.

I mean they can't even admit that Trump's just a trashy reality TV star who closelined Vincent McMahon and cheated on his wives and "grabbed women by the pussy," defrauded college students, and sold shitty vodka and subpar steaks. They have to act like he's some kind of anointed god to even be able to cope - something that they accused Democrats of doing with Obama even though there hasn't been any documented evidence to back this up, as there has been with Republicans doing so with Trump and George W. Bush.

It would be better if they just straight up admitted "we know he is a trashy reality TV star, we just voted for him as a protest vote and to piss everyone else off." But that doesn't make them feel good about themselves. And Republicans are reactionaries who respond to primarily to feeling.

This wasn't something I realized until someone in a FARK.com thread explained it to me, using Newt Gingrich as an example. Republicans experience no cognitive dissonance when New Gingrich, a serial adulterer, talks to them about Republicans being the party of "family values" - not because of the evidence of what he has done, but because of how his words make them feel.

You can present evidence to Republicans until you're blue in the face, and it won't matter - only feelings matter to them. They primarily respond to emotion. And they want to feel good about themselves.

This is why they hate "Social Justice Warriors." They don't want to think too hard about how the things they say or do may effect other people, and they don't want to be made to feel guilty for it. Their reaction is not introspection; their reaction is to angrily lash out at "Social Justice Warriors" because they made them feel bad. Yet the fact that feel bad means that on some level, they know what they are doing is wrong.

Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.

They voted for a hostile, blustering, psychopathic narcissist who has promised to do things which will hurt his own base the worst, if he is allowed to do it; because we made them feel bad.

Think about that. Think about it especially the next time one of them calls you a "snowflake."

There is also an opportunity here for social engineering on a mass scale, if we'll take it - especially if we manage to use the Church Of Kek's own playbook against them. It's just that so many leftists feel like ain't nobody got time for that anymore. But if there is another terrorist attack, or anything of you nature, you can bet the Trumpettes will take advantage of it and rally the fence-sitters into full compliance - exactly the way they did after 9/11, and leading up to the War in Iraq.

 Before posting this, I went looking to see if someone has actually already connected Dylann Roof, who has now received the death penalty for killing nine of his fellow Americans, with the concept of Stochastic Terrorism - which is the phrase which has been coined to describe what happenes when hate speech inspires a "lone wolf" to commit atrocities, leaving the source of the hate speech free to proclaim their innocence, and deny any responsibility for the act. 

This is the only one I've found: "Someone Taught Him To Hate," which was posted on DailyKos back on June 18, 2015.

I won't mince words here - I think it's time we started prosecuting incidents of stochastic terrorism. The First Amendment only goes so far to protect hate speech. Pundits who spew violent rhetoric need to be held accountable for the next time when their hate speech triggers another attack or mass shooting. If the computer of a "lone wolf" shooter or bomber is searched, and stuff like Free Republic and Stormfront and Breitbart comes up, there should be actual repercussions if said "lone wolf" was targeting the people vilified by those websites. There should be fines at least. Gag orders. Something.

The next time some rando shoots up a Planned Parenthood clinic, the authorities need to pay attention to what they might have been reading and what sites they might have been going to, and the people involved should be held accountable for the violence that they're helping to inflict. Authorities should treat hate crimes committed by Christian religious extremists the same that they do crimes committed by Islamic extremists. Get rid of the double standard. It's all terrorism.