Uninspired, yo. Drawing a big blank recently. Probably because it's still warm enough to do boring perfunctory outside shizniz and this is keeping my brain in end-of-summer-fry mode rather than letting it slide naturally into magic winter swamp-consciousness.
Hate it when that happens, and I know it's boring for anyone reading this so I apologise. I'm even having a hard time listening to music and had to force myself to throw a Björk mixtape out of sheer fucking bloody-mindedness; the effect was startlingly somatic, like someone pumped my veins full of lemonade and the bubbles were crawling along my interior walls. Hormones? Moon phase? Mental illness? Ticks all boxes, rolls up questionnaire, inserts into nostril, lights end on fire.
Hate it when that happens, and I know it's boring for anyone reading this so I apologise. I'm even having a hard time listening to music and had to force myself to throw a Björk mixtape out of sheer fucking bloody-mindedness; the effect was startlingly somatic, like someone pumped my veins full of lemonade and the bubbles were crawling along my interior walls. Hormones? Moon phase? Mental illness? Ticks all boxes, rolls up questionnaire, inserts into nostril, lights end on fire.
Also: politics. Le Pen face-planted in France which is fantastic and perhaps signals that the world's trifling ho voting bloc is actually seeing the Trump novelty presidency for the defective carny trinket that it is. But I've learned never to underestimate the global net volume of stupid and with all this greasy right wing tonnage (feels like squid guts, smells like Kardashian bum cleft) dumped on our unsuspecting doorsteps by various leagues of petulant morons, I'm starting to share their confusion re the political spectrum and where my fat arse sits on that lateral.
| I mean, I am, in many ways, the right-wing/conservative nightmare; vindictive feminazi, refusenik uterus, fagfancier, potty mouth, pervert, indifferent to performative capitalist mores- the list goes on. I don't care about patriotism or social status and no amount of academic credentials will diminish my entitlement to scrutinise and understand your shit on my own terms. You can't reach me with advertising or shame me with popular conventions. Organised religion disgusts and amuses me so you might as well wet-fart into a cyclone as apply the prospect of hellfire. Demagogues and -isms can't get traction with suspicious weirdos; even the Green Party I vote for would feel the sharp end of my critique stick, if they ever bothered to engage with hardcore environmentalists 😐 And it harm none, IDreallyGAFlyingF what you do is probably the closest I can get to any concise personal statement. |  |
All that has always felt like liberality to me. I've gotten even more that way with mileage, in inverse to the usual hardening of the ideological arteries into supposedly inevitable conservatism. But am I liberal? I ask that lately because I do actually judge the living shit out of a lot of stuff and some of my most strongly-held convictions aren't very fluffy.
Examples: I'm absolutely, 100% fine with the death penalty, for homicide and other violent crime involving cruelty, premeditation and long-term offending. Enthusiastic, even. Fuck forgiveness and empathy. There's no robust ethical case for feeding and housing recidivist scumbags (especially when their victims receive no such consideration) and I'd lose bugger-all sleep flipping any number of kill switches on a volunteer basis. It's true that I cannot actually support a death penalty implemented by a State and adversarial justice system skewed into the ground against the non-rich and non-white, but my objections are purely, utterly practical. How do you like me now?
Then there's my loathing of negligent breeders (all genders). In countries with access to birth control and abortion, people who have more than one whoopsies kid without the means or inclination to support their brats to a reasonable standard really, really piss me off. Not because of their reliance on welfare or tax subsidies, to which their blameless children are certainly entitled, but because they have voluntarily disadvantaged their offspring, dumped a shit bucket of consequences on the rest of us and that is demonstrably fucked up. I feel like a lot of people should care enough about kids to not have any. Sometimes I'm even fairly sure I could be entrusted with the codification of those restrictions. As did Hitler. Don't get me started on the arse-whipping I'd like to hand out to environmental rapists and their gold digging collaborators (all of whom could be gainfully employed elsewhere. I know this because I know plenty of you.) Twenty to life, sluicing out mercury-tainted tailings dams in jandals for those bastards. Good behaviour doubles your sentence because it just proves you knew better all along. I'm not joking.
Examples: I'm absolutely, 100% fine with the death penalty, for homicide and other violent crime involving cruelty, premeditation and long-term offending. Enthusiastic, even. Fuck forgiveness and empathy. There's no robust ethical case for feeding and housing recidivist scumbags (especially when their victims receive no such consideration) and I'd lose bugger-all sleep flipping any number of kill switches on a volunteer basis. It's true that I cannot actually support a death penalty implemented by a State and adversarial justice system skewed into the ground against the non-rich and non-white, but my objections are purely, utterly practical. How do you like me now?
Then there's my loathing of negligent breeders (all genders). In countries with access to birth control and abortion, people who have more than one whoopsies kid without the means or inclination to support their brats to a reasonable standard really, really piss me off. Not because of their reliance on welfare or tax subsidies, to which their blameless children are certainly entitled, but because they have voluntarily disadvantaged their offspring, dumped a shit bucket of consequences on the rest of us and that is demonstrably fucked up. I feel like a lot of people should care enough about kids to not have any. Sometimes I'm even fairly sure I could be entrusted with the codification of those restrictions. As did Hitler. Don't get me started on the arse-whipping I'd like to hand out to environmental rapists and their gold digging collaborators (all of whom could be gainfully employed elsewhere. I know this because I know plenty of you.) Twenty to life, sluicing out mercury-tainted tailings dams in jandals for those bastards. Good behaviour doubles your sentence because it just proves you knew better all along. I'm not joking.
Then there's the flatulent elephant in every fucking room at the moment: immigration. The idea of unrestricted or even poorly-administered immigration appals me for a lot of reasons, and this is possibly something I struggle with most in my distaste for state-imposed sanctions against personal freedom.
As a relatively (on a planetary scale) privileged individual born into a western democracy, the stinking NIMBYist hypocrisy of all this is like something pulsing, pink and tentacular wrapped around my forehead, but I just can't with the prospect of ten million more people filing into the country of my birth. I'm not talking about refugees; sneaky conflation of the two entirely separate issues is grotesquely sleazy and pointless. And it's not a race thing; I dislike everyone pretty equitably. It's just that we're already up to our tits in the kind of greedy denialists who make a humane existence for everyone else here an impossibility. There's no room for more.
It's an icky slope, isn't it? You can dress up your personal disinclinations in specificities- for instance, I don't consider not loving the idea of hundreds of thousands of socio-religious conservatives turning up on the doorstep quite as gross as slack-jawed racist objections, but the effect is largely the same. Would I support a wall if we didn't already have the Pacific? Shit, I don't know. Have you, in the privacy of your own conscience, asked yourself that one yet?
This is one of the great contemporary failings of liberal philosophy. Many of the people who claim to regard everyone as manifestly equal and march against immigration restrictions are also the people who selfishly gentrify and benefit from segregationist policies whilst calling wall-supporters nazis. That's just the herpes-crusted, donut-loving truth. I've never met a liberal who could articulate a solution to the global demographic clusterfuck. They're like me; they don't want xenophobic restrictions on immigration, but nor do they want to find themselves another bobbing mass in a dangerously crowded stew of incompossible anthropoid elements.
What the fuck are we going to do and why is the honest/humane answer so obscure in comparison to the nasty/stupid one? What's the pokable difference between me and your average low-functioning triple-chinned conservative anyway?
As a relatively (on a planetary scale) privileged individual born into a western democracy, the stinking NIMBYist hypocrisy of all this is like something pulsing, pink and tentacular wrapped around my forehead, but I just can't with the prospect of ten million more people filing into the country of my birth. I'm not talking about refugees; sneaky conflation of the two entirely separate issues is grotesquely sleazy and pointless. And it's not a race thing; I dislike everyone pretty equitably. It's just that we're already up to our tits in the kind of greedy denialists who make a humane existence for everyone else here an impossibility. There's no room for more.
It's an icky slope, isn't it? You can dress up your personal disinclinations in specificities- for instance, I don't consider not loving the idea of hundreds of thousands of socio-religious conservatives turning up on the doorstep quite as gross as slack-jawed racist objections, but the effect is largely the same. Would I support a wall if we didn't already have the Pacific? Shit, I don't know. Have you, in the privacy of your own conscience, asked yourself that one yet?
This is one of the great contemporary failings of liberal philosophy. Many of the people who claim to regard everyone as manifestly equal and march against immigration restrictions are also the people who selfishly gentrify and benefit from segregationist policies whilst calling wall-supporters nazis. That's just the herpes-crusted, donut-loving truth. I've never met a liberal who could articulate a solution to the global demographic clusterfuck. They're like me; they don't want xenophobic restrictions on immigration, but nor do they want to find themselves another bobbing mass in a dangerously crowded stew of incompossible anthropoid elements.
What the fuck are we going to do and why is the honest/humane answer so obscure in comparison to the nasty/stupid one? What's the pokable difference between me and your average low-functioning triple-chinned conservative anyway?
 | Well, I'm cognisant of, and concerned and embarrassed by our lack of viable direction. That makes me at least perceptive and enquiring. I'm in my forties and I've found you can generally neither truly enlighten nor embarrass a right wing fuckwit. And, tragically, I don't consider myself currently qualified or even entitled to incinerate child molesters or deny unsightly ignoramuses the chance to be diminished and grifted by their preferred religions. That's probably... well, it's not a bad thing. In the end, being tolerant can mean just not caring enough about humanity to bother restricting its access to healthcare or shaming its perversions. I swing between wanting to brutally extirpate great swathes of flagrant arseholes and not giving a shit about anything in underwear. Behold the liberal snowflake. |
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