#500

So here is the problem. The problem is simple, and the solution is simple. It's just that no one wants to see it, I guess, out there where they wear suits and ties and have nice timepieces to wear on their wrists.

The problem is you see a dictatorship destroying your country. 

They are actually doing everything you have ever read about dictatorships doing in Africa, in Eastern Europe and Russia, in Latin America, in Indochina and the South Pacific, in all these places that used to be comfortingly somewhere else, all these magazine article places and Hollywood movie trend places--it is finally happening here, as was always warningly spoken but never followed through, like, never a "and then the thing to do is..." because the idea was the warning should be enough.

Kids have been hurting themselves in spite of the dire warnings provided by their parents for 500,000 years bare minimum and STILL somehow we think warnings are ever enough.

Anyway, it's happening, and the reason no one seems to know what to do is they seem to be looking for a legal solution to the problem.

But though the problem is simple, sadly, there is no legal solution. That time was before. The Rubicon lies some ways behind us.

When dictators are in power, acting against them, trying to deter them in any way, even to disagree with them, is immediately framed as antisocial and from there, criminal. That's why the news people and the congresspeople and the feds that suddenly aren't feds anymore don't want to see it. To actually resist this process is to risk that precious bank account, that vaunted feeling of safety and accomplishment that comes with having been favored and eventually beatified by the system.

That is over now. 

To resist autocracy is to be a criminal. There is no other way. This is because in an autocracy, to say that the law is more important or more powerful than the people in charge is to break the only law that matters anymore.

If you are not a criminal, you either will be in due time, or you are on the other side of things, for as long as that is allowed to last.

That is why the executive and the sycophant bloc in "congress" turning against the judicial system has been so swift and complete. It is why they can never again admit wrongdoing or weakness, no matter the blunder or callous disregard--those days are past. It is why our intelligence security and military power was so immediately and swiftly compromised--so that the instinct of wounded animal is awakened within that institution, and it can be turned towards conquest, and the deterrence laid upon other conquerors might be lifted.

Dictators do not deter, they only aggress. They only take vengeance. They respect only strength, for awhile, but in the end they respect nothing, and will destroy themselves in their attempt to destroy the world, for the world is God's, not theirs, and that is unforgivable. 

That's the kind of people that they are.

When it comes to the type of people that are currently brandishing their chainsaws and putting other people on lists, the only reason not to fuck you today is to fuck you later.

Redress for the failures of the political left is not forthcoming. They will continue to fail. To hope otherwise does not strike me as prudent, though, as always, I could be wrong in each particular and the general sense, too.

Not that I concede that. It's a dictatorship now, and shit is very bad. This here, all this, I am calling it. I'd call it at this point anywhere else geographically, and we the American people have proved something beyond the final shadow of a doubt: there is no exceptionalism here. We are all of us the same shitty primate the world over and there is no soil or water that will cure any of us of our human, all-too-human marks of hubris, hatred, pettiness, and self-annihilation.

When it comes to the type of people that are currently brandishing their chainsaws, the only reason not to fuck you today is to fuck you later.

*

So. So! The solution is simple: join or decline. I hate the word resist; it has been truly stripped of every last shred of its meaning or resonance by modern pseudo-activism, coupling the word as it does with lawful obedience to the status quo in all things, every habit of mind and deed.

To decline means to risk everything you have and everything you are, while you are alive. But that's all right, because the chances are extremely excellent you will be executed by the state. It's never been a more flatly impossible time to rebel against state power--the technology that me and the boys dreamed would free the world and help us achieve a heroic new stage in human evolution has been completely and entirely consumed and weaponized by predatory wealth mechanisms and fascist surveillance ghoul-and-devil butcherwork--a mechanism to turn the clock back rather than bravely step forward. 

Guess it's the only reasonable thing to do, though, unless you just want to pretend it isn't happening or pretend acting normal long enough will mean it blows over like most bad things do. I know it is very idiotic to be told that everything is against you and there is no advantage and you should still fight.

Hey, shit. Maybe. 

Declining really is the only thing, though. So it goes. It doesn't feel great to me either. Nobody wants to be told that it's time to choose to die. 

*

Hey, you know what? I'll offer an out. I like Heidegger, and he turned in his mentor Husserl to the Nazis so he could live in Nazi Germany and teach in Nazi universities in hopes he could renounce it all later--if he is to be believed. He was a cuck, and his choices made him a Nazi even if he wasn't one in his heart, and he was never sorry because he made an admittedly impermeable philosophical argument that showed no one ever has to be, for anything.

And I can accept that. Dying is final, and sometimes we have to choose life, not for ourselves alone but for those who cannot choose, for a distant but more vital hope than I have in my own life. I just can't accept it from myself. But I can accept it, for reals. I am not a person of blame or recrimination. And I am asking a lot after laying out some stark terms. I can be an asshole--even a hypocrite. I don't like hypocrisy, but I don't think anyone's immune.

*

Yeah, it should be recognized that I'm stepping forward with some real big talk for a no-account rascal. I realize that. What are any-sized words worth, coming from an unemployed paranoiac artist with no social life, no social gravity or pull, and no resources beyond the house he increasingly has problems leaving? I have never joined a protest or march of any kind because I do not believe in such things and plus because crowds of that type freak me out and I am allergic to being subsumed by group dynamics. I am not a member of any party or movement or club or lodge or anything at all resembling that. 

Still, I have my dignity and my principles, even if I don't have shit-all else. And I have my words and this stupid blog. So.

*

Donald J. Trump is no king of mine and the cadre of sycophants and stormtroopers under him are criminals and fascists. I demand their recusal from their positions, I deem them unfit to serve the public, and I name them renegades who speak and act in bad faith and a spirit of spite and underhandedness. I do not accept this government as legitimate and do not trust that it will loose its grip on power at the duly appointed time. 

Nothing I can do except say so, but I do say so, in the strongest possible terms.

Further, to repeat: I decline. I decline to abet or aid in word or thought or deed the actions done in this cruel and vengeful spirit, this waking nightmare that dogs our shared reality and our collective unconscious.

No. Fuck that. It is paramount to act against it and vote against it and speak against it and think against it. 

I am an American citizen and I recognize no king and no tyranny of any kind, not of any oligarchy or theocracy, not of the economy, not of the masses, not of any person or party, and in no uncertain terms I want to state that no man is my master simply because he has wealth and I do not. As a citizen I am free in body and mind and spirit and will not be compelled to submit to any other justice than the true law of this land, as laid out in its constitution. The law which though imperfect seeks justice, not the scribbled writ of tyrants or the jingling of some robber baron's pockets. The law. 

No tyranny of any kind. It will not be borne.

*

Kind of wish I could have had fun with the five hundredth post of my shitty stupid blog, but times being what they are, futile gestures come first.

--JL

#499

The third best webcomic as stated on the "links" area of Factually Pointless is drawing to a close--Unsounded, by Ashley Cope. It is a fantasy graphic novel. In my rough and humble estimation, Unsounded represents the pinnacle of the field and indeed, the genre. This is all information that I have relayed to the reader before in this space. It's really the best webcomic; all three of them are and I should probably even link a few more.

Anyway, the reader may be further interested to know that I have had to step away from my computer just to messily weep--and had to walk away again when I came back because I, a grown man who has buried friends and family in the cold earth, the winner and loser of hundreds of knock-down-for-blood physical battles and other hardcore-type confrontations, was in fact not ready and started to cry again as soon as I laid eyes on it. The last twenty-odd pages of this work of art have been an emotional experience so intense that I am actually kind of scared for myself, for the author, and for all of us who have followed this tale to its transformative crescendo.

But I am also ready.

*

Apropos of what I was saying yesterday, these drooling godforsaken orcs are pulling the devil's own trick around here, "arresting" people for "antisemitic" behavior and holding them without a charge after whisking them away in an unmarked van. Deporting people beause--why? State secrets. You know what that is? That is gestapo shit. That is gulag, fucking deep up the ass of the iron curtain dictatorship-style shenanigans and they are an unmistakable sign that your civil society is about to break down into militarized terror-fascism. Well, open militarized terror-fascism.

I refuse to equate saying that Israel is doing genocide in Palestine with antisemitism. At best, I will modulate the word "genocide" to "inexcusable war crimes carried out in full recognition of the fact." The inclusion of genocide might be a part of that. Not for me to say legally. As far as I'm concerned, if your warmaking incurs this many civilian casualties and this kind of destruction of life-supporting infrastructure, I don't care if it is because your opponent is flaying innocent people alive and wearing their skins around as a disguise. You are not trying hard enough. Plus you are having people do the settling thing as it all happens. Difficult to look away from that, I guess. I call it genocide. Call me what you want about it, except an antisemite. Bullshit. 

Anyone can do genocide. I wish suffering genocide erased your capacity for genocide, but if it worked that way, we would have left all that shit behind long, long ago.

Genocide is about groups and power, that's it. That's all. Groups and power. Strip everything away, all the nonsense and the propaganda, and you will see very clearly what is happening.

No one has to seek justification or revenge. We just need to demand that it stop. That it stop and not resume. 

Fight a war like it is 2025 and you give a fuck. This is a plea. I really believe that a different strategic philosophy could yield surgical success while minimizing casualties. If I am wrong, I would love to ever see a cogent argument that can prove how bombing the living shit out of hospitals is better than not doing that. Variations on whether they deserve it, fuck their hospitals, etc. are not valid to me.

Solutions that maximize the well-being of both groups as they curtail bad actors and work towards resolutions that point confidently towards lasting peace are about all that I'm accepting at the front desk these days. Oh, is that difficult? Fuck me, guess I'm being unreasonable.

*

Circling back to the domestic picture, this shit? Masked whoever-the-fucks who don't show a badge whisking people--people known to be harmless--away at 5:30 p.m. off a public sidewalk, no charges filed in any system? They're on a list for something they wrote? 

People need to understand. This is what they do to their own populations in "third world countries" because the Central Intelligence Agency taught them how because they learned it from the Soviets who had it from the Nazis who believed deeply in Teutonic methodologies for unearthing witches and demons.

And by the way! The incompetence and stupidity are part of it! Do not mistake them. The imbecilic blunders are calculated, their chaos and weakness planned, and they are a smokescreen for the deeds done in the dark with perfect competence and deadly intent. Mark me on that, if nothing else in this scribble*.

People absolutely need to understand that every single day that they do this shit and get away with it, it takes one more year to get things back to something resembling a free state and a civil society. And they absolutely need to understand that it is never stays at the level it is or pulls back by itself, but always, always ramps up, always always. They move the schedule along and before you could react--how? the news didn't say it was going to happen--it is having to wear government-issued badges or get arrested off the street, it is armed checkpoints between neighborhoods that were never walled and are now walled, and people disappearing all the time for stuff they said or might have said or for no fucking reason; they will disappear a grandmother just to keep a neighborhood on its toes, just to scare a grandson into silence because they need him where he is. They will lynch people to make examples and there will always need to be examples made until one day there are no more examples and it's the muzzle of a gun for every single person and eventually themselves. That's how these death-cults finish. Bullets and poison and whole countries burning.

They will eat this place alive from the inside out so that when some outside force comes to put a stop to it it will all collapse inward like a rotten pumpkin and the stench of the grave will rise to the heavens. Or it will get so bad, so unbelievably bad--no one would have believed how bad it would get, they will say, but they had precedent to look at and I am saying it now: it will get so bad that it will topple from the inside, but you will not believe how bad it would have to get before that happens. It rarely does, you see. People will tell you things are fine well beyond the previous limits of your imagination. You might hear it out of your own mouth, and somewhere deep inside you, your past self will scream in horror--and you will pretend not to hear.

*

 

This is not a partisan thing. When things are this crazy, the pendulum swing back to the opposite pople has an excellent chance to be even crazier. Terror fascism is bad, but it's not worse than terror collectivism. I mean, they are the same, a profoundly intertwined dipole. Wish it hadn't somehow become controversial to present that fact. It's in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and it has stayed true. 

To me it does not matter if my face is ground into a filthy poster of DJT before they put the barrel to the back of my neck, or a filthy poster of AOC. Both of these parasites are the same to me, save that one is--like Taylor Swift--roughly my age and will likely fuck up my patience for a long time yet, and one is a doddering mummy kept alive only by high-quality cocaine, spray-tan preservatives, and the warm blood of the young. End of the day, both are merely stand-ins for elemental human forces; not to deny them their basic humanity, but history hands us each our roles and that's that, I suppose.

Think that it is not real or not your problem all you want. Think yourself a beneficiary? Look, I'm trying to lend emphasis, but I'm not screaming or shaking or anything. I am speaking to the best of my knowledge and the direct experience of one whose life has been defined by these social realities when I say that the chances are low in the extreme that the direction things are taking is good or healthy for anybody, even and maybe especially those calling most ardently for it to happen and those making it happen or aiding and abetting.

Conversely, if you are letting yourself become radicalized to the point that staring into this abyss has given birth to a dragon in your spirit, best quench yourself before you fuck everything up for everyone.

What we need--again!--is to stop for a minute.

* 

Call it harebrained, but I finally came up with something resembling a cogent solution, at least for the issues facing the United States. It's dramatic, which I feel fitting, but probably impossible to pull off and maybe no one would want this, but I've been mulling over a few years now and I think it might be time to say fuck it and throw it at the (obscure, unobserved) wall and see if it sticks (it will not).

Nationwide truth and reconciliation hearings, at the community, town, city, county, state, and regional level. Our groups and classes need to reckon with the past interactions of power between them. Understanding must be found, between the people and by the people. Dragged to it if need be, but these conversations must be had. The truth must set us free. It is time for all the sweet-sounding prophecies to salve our brows, but we must reach out to one another in order to accomplish this. 

The impetus for this great undertaking will be a parallel undertaking of equal scale, scope, and impossibility: it is time to call a fresh constitutional convention, with a delegate stucture that shatters the two-party system and replaces it with a more modern solution in one fell swoop as it drafts a constitution modified, condensed, and expanded to steer the nation into this millenium. 

A non-partisan and bipartisan referendum government should be installed in order to handle the maintenance of services rendered unto the people and the operation of the courts and military, but congress and the executive will be suspended until the production of a restructured model for their operational scope. The opportunity should be especially taken to curtail corporate power, especially as concerns interactions of corporate behavior and species-defining data processes and the guidance of technological paradigms. 

*

Hey man, if I'm crazy--isn't it still pretty much worth the moonshot? I'm aware that there are countable infinities of details, problems, and impossibilities in the way of this, but I also know that summarized like this in three paragraphs, it makes a decent pitch if you've got the balls to want to try it. I would hope a lot of people had those kinds of balls, but who knows. Plus crazier things have worked. It can be suprising what people will agree to, and what energy that fresh direction can produce.

*

Though we are not like to find out. In truth we will all likely be living under a Chinese proxy state soon enough.

Just had the need, the desperate futile drive, one last time I hope, to call it out as it is happening and say what could be done. I'll try to go back to farting out bullshit and talking about all the dang books I read and video games I piss my life away with. That's my whole plan of action through all this, by the way; that and painting. 

Ever a wastrel of no regard or influence, me, but these days, that could still get a guy in a lot of trouble, huh?

PEACE, FUCKS

whatever like I give a shit. proxy state more like pussy state amirite boiz

--JL

*seriously, remember that

#496

Can't understand politics anymore. The reason for this is, while it was difficult for me to understand what President Trump was saying back when the only half-loaded cock in his mouth was Vladimir Putin's, it has become absolutely impossible now that Elon Musk has improbably wedged his insecure penis into that ancient craw. The Three Amigos, as it were.

So I have no idea what people are talking about anymore. Is it because the president cannot possibly make himself understood that there appears to be no government?

No, it is because his opposition is as useful as a dog that was shot three days ago and not been moved from the spot where it lay down to twitch and die. 

Glitterati fistfucker ultimate victory, with technocrat chaser on the back of the christofascist and mindgamed masses. Hell yeah, boys. Peak civilization. Should we call it the Reverse Arab Spring or simply the Suicidal Reflex?

*

At this point I'm even prepared to entertain the idea that I am wrong, and that this monstrous crazy horseshit really is the best thing for the country and the world, after all. Just to make myself feel a little better. And, look. I mean. I am not privy to classified data! Try to read a lot of history and keep up with current events, but all of our knowledge is so incomplete in the face of the vast complexity of ten billion human stories which are sequels to fifty billion other stories, set in a world made out of stories. If some of the internet I read in my youth was as prophetic as some of the other internet that has proven prophetic, at the end of all this chaos and destruction we will see that there was an endgame all along, and that endgame will be good, Good, even Real Good--The Fuckin' Tight Sweet Redemption of Western Civilization or something. 

What the fuck do I know? Maybe, man! Maybe.

Anyway I would be prepared to entertain that notion. If there weren't individuals like Stephen Miller running around actually doing shit. If you know what a person should know about that piece of work, you know how deadly-ass close we are to the kinds of genocide and extralegal uses of military force that really stick with you, maybe make it into classrooms all around the world. Stuff dudes get tried at the Hague for--but not before they get away with it.

So there's not a lot of fun penis jokes I can write around that. Steve Bannon didn't pull this double-barreled blitzkrieg to make DJT the president. That would be funny and I would barely care to comment, frankly. He did it for Stephen Miller and the people like him currently hard at work with no apparent holds barring them, which is decidedly not funny and I am remiss in my duties as keeper of record, a writer, an artist, and a human being if I don't say so plainly. This will be tragic in the extreme if it truly runs its course.

*

Shit though, what do I know from funny or tragic? What do I even know about shit? Maybe I want to feel better. Fuck it. The alternative is to meditate on all the years I spent enduring being the immigrant, all the work I put into becoming a citizen, all the taxes I've paid and the work I've put into my communites, all for the twist of having to witness democracy collapse and the killers and thieves rule the roost--the same reason I emigrated in the first place. 

Wow. Yes, it is a little bleak written out like that. I guess I don't regret it, though. I love being an American, and I have loved being an American and living in America. It has not been perfect, but it has been fun and extremely generous with freedoms and privileges. I tried to do a good job, give back, earn my keep, all the stuff they say is right and proper.

Ah, but killers and thieves have always lolled in the sun while I worked the night shift. There was always a blood price being paid for the fun I had and the ease I took. Should I resent it when it comes due?

You know what? No. In fact. It strikes me in this moment that I don't have the right. 

When things looked good for us--according to my perhaps optimistic perception, all of us, a human family with all its flaws and glories, marching bravely into an egalitarian future that would transcend poverty and hatred--I said to myself that things were working well enough to that end given the realities of this weary world, and anyway I could expect them to continue to improve while doing my most basic civic duty and tending to my garden as virtuously as possible. I thought that by speaking the truth and setting a good example, that by merely living a life for its own sake, it would all come to pass--right before my very eyes! Global truth and reconciliation, hossana in the highest, etc.

Well, that wasn't enough, and to let myself think so was perhaps a kind of delusion. Not that there is anything wrong with just trying to live a simple life trying to be a good person--on the contrary, it is the highest attainable goal. I just mean that maybe I should not have shipped my oars and chilled to the music of the spheres. Should have joined model U.N. after actually accepting that invite to Cranbrook Academy, gone to MIT or somesuch, and accomplished something major in order to be most useful to my fellow citizens. Instead I opted to get really good at wearing leather jackets and cultivating an ultimately unwieldy body of (perhaps excessively fiction-based) knowledge and non-utile principles. Also drugs.

Service, when necessary, must come before self-cultivation. Perhaps I have failed to live up to this truth. That of duty, and rising up to meet it. Such is the tattered attraction of a degenerate culture, I suppose! Service in the service industry, I suppose, lacks the necessary gravitas that is granted to say, a diplomat.

*

Really, though. End of the day, fuck these people. Fuck them. Cretinous poltroons. Dog-livered cowards with cockroach minds. Fucking cuck simp bitches. Look to your own houses! That's all I have to say to you wretched, thrice-damned afterbirths. The cowards doing violence and the cowards letting them.

Because, see, it's not fuck red, or fuck blue. It's fuck the Man. Fuck the whole Man, that whole guy. Not half of him. The motherfucker himself, always. These are the optimal times to say it loudly, perhaps even feverishly. Screaming it might be appropriate, or typing it out as if you are screaming; perhaps, even, screaming as you type.

--JL

#495

There are but two main sources of comfort and useful counsel that I find are able to supply me with anything like the peace necessary to get through these days without flipping my lid.

One is to simply ignore the outside world and throw myself completely into my stuff. Stuff lately has included many layers of spray paint added to existing works, as well as a finishing or in-process coat of lacquer. That lacquer is some interesting stuff. It has also included finally getting seriously into NieR: Automata: The End of YorHa Edition. An experience I am glad to have squirreled away for these troubled, muddled, times. A world wiped clean of this too-human life--the perfect place to be right now.

The second thing is the retroactove consolation that even though the country I emigrated to in my childhood has fallen prey to the exact same breakdowns in civil society as 

a) the country I was born in, so, delicious, sweet, horribly painful irony. Venezuela! Yes! These fuckers can just say whatever they want about me and ship me to El Salvador for nothing! For whatever! For typing these very words! Who gives a fucking shit!

b) the Weimar Republic, so, just ugly and exasperating and exhausting and stupid, but

corollary consolation: the cake was a lie, and the country's propaganda about itself was crazy overdeveloped and self-defeating. It was an empire of genocide, lies, graft, brute force, and total bullshit. This is karma for far, far less the due portion merely than for what was done to the varied peoples of this continent in the name of "civilizing" it; but the project was a lie told by uncivilized peoples, whose stolen time is finally ending in a futile, repetitive, cacophanous fart. 

Sometimes the fact that doom is logical and consequential is the best thing we can cling to. The last bulwark. Who are you going to complain to, when two plus two came out to four yet again?

*

So let it all fall down. Best you can do is hold on. Hang tight. As I like to say, strap in. 

Because this is it, people. I want to say it clearly in case anyone need to hear it from me, for some obscure reason.

American fascism is no longer creeping, no longer covert. Democracy has completed its course, as useful and real as it was useful and real, and as much a sham as it was a sham. American fascism is now open and rampant, and the entrenched political forces are unequal to the task of containing it--even if it corrects itself, they have shown they are unfit to govern. 

Shit is real.

*

Hey hey! Let's try to eat lunch today. 

And.

*

Let us try once again to inculcate and nourish the best power we have: to love our fate; the higher the stakes, the better.

--JL