Epic Fails and Instant Regrets

I'm having a hard time with focus.  Too much time on the computer, too much time on YouTube, too much time being tempted by the algorithm into watching hours and hours of a category of video called Epic Fails or Instant Regrets -- clip after clip of dinners being ruined, drapes going up in flames, roofs being fallen off of, merchandise sliding off shelves, structures collapsing with the builders still on them.   I find myself hypnotized by what I can't disagree are failures of epic proportions captured on video and assembled (many of them apparently by AI) into socially irredeemable entertainment.  The alternative is torturing myself with videos that bystanders have helplessly taken to document scenes of violent absconding of neighbors, co-workers, strangers by jackbooted masked thugs in out-of-state pickup trucks with makeshift generic insignia on their army/navy surplus in a cosplay of officiality.  The videographers often interject themselves into the video in an attempt to get the thugs to answer to them; failing that to shame them for destroying the fabric of the community, for abandoning their humanity, for emulating Nazis.  I wish these heartfelt interjections were more satisfying to behold.  I find myself wishing for more from the citizens standing in for me and especially from the faceless mooks facelessly destroying peoples lives and homes with an infuriating entitlement.  More shame hitting its mark, more anger making a dent in the armor, more immediate retribution and restoration of justice from the injustice unfolding before our eyes.  More pain returned to the source.

I am aware that it's happening in parts of the heart of the metropolitan area I live in.  I have yet to see evidence of it with my own eyes and I haven't even watched the local news about it, but I have overheard local anchors referring to it (passing through the room with the tv on) and I have of course seen clips of it here and there.  It’s surreal to me at this point.  Just another drip drip drip in the feeling that the world has gone to shit and more reason to worry about how / whether/ if there will ever be recovery from it.

The whole Trump/ Project 2025 agenda seems like something out of the twilight zone.  The chaos of the episode is explained in the reveal that we are no longer on earth but have been somehow transported to a Dumbass Planet where dumb is smart, smart is dumb, bad is good, good is bad, beautiful is ugly, ugly is beautiful, lies are truth and truth is a lie.  People may have voted to give booting immigrants a try not dreaming that that might mean they themselves if they are themselves immigrants.   Or that it could mean that the future of labor in America is the necessary underpaid hard work that has been opened up by the expulsion of the immigrants who have been doing it.  As though people had voted to stop the cannibalizing of immigrants only to find out that they were now on the menu.  Hey! It’s what you voted for!

I want to think of the Trump and the Trumpers and the minions who eagerly serve as Trump's death camp drones as the D Students.  And I realize that some students do poorly in school because we don’t know how to educate them or care to but these are proudly D Students who do poorly because they are spoiled rotten assholes.  Because brains are how you get empathy for other people but these D Students are consumed with feeling only for themselves.  Because of their class or their race or simply their status as white males they’ve never been punished for being poor at thinking.  Au contraire, they are daily rewarded for it because their interactions with the world are a lot like a rock’s with a small precious creature.

I like to think that if I encountered a group of ICE bros tormenting a neighbor I would find the reserves of strength to not let it happen.  It amazes me how civilly these invaders are treated in so many of the snippets of documentation that you come across on the web.  But I am getting the idea that in the moment there is not much one decent person can do in the face of a mob of violent armed authoritarian doofuses.  In the meantime, as I scour the recs put before me by the algorithm, I am holding out hope for some Epic Wins and Instant Gratification.

The Quiet Part

 Truthout tells us what we already knew: Former Top Biden Spox Admits Israel Sabotaged Ceasefire Deals as US Blamed Hamas.  This comes two months after a related non-revelatory revelation from the same "spox"--  Matthew Miller--that "without a doubt" Israel committed war crimes throughout the period that at the State Department podium, Miller repeatedly asserted that it had not.  Lying is part of the job according to Miller: “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government.”   And yet, as the articles and interviews make clear, the Biden Administration was behind the scenes fully aware of the truth.  So how were these lies the conclusions of the United States government?  The reality is that Matthew Miller, John Kirby, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other officials and representatives of the government were tasked to lie in keeping with the US's longstanding role as enabler and abettor of Israel's genocide against the Palestinians.  And Miller, Kirby, Blinken et al rose to the task.

From the article:

Miller’s latest statements make it clear that the statements blaming Hamas were a lie. In April of 2024, for instance, Netanyahu announced that Israel would cross Biden’s supposed “red line” and invade Rafah, even as Biden was publicly calling for a ceasefire at the time.

“But in the middle of that proposal being submitted to Hamas, the prime minister publicly said that Israel was going to invade Rafah, whether there was a ceasefire or not,” Miller said. “You can imagine how much harder that made it to get a deal over the line.”

Then, he said that U.S. officials would even try to outmaneuver Israel when announcing Biden’s ceasefire outline in May — only for Netanyahu’s office to “leak” to the press that the plan was not what Israel had agreed to.

“We told the government of Israel only an hour or two before the speech because, frankly, we spent the last few months seeing the government of Israel, at times, try and sabotage an approach to get to a ceasefire, and we were determined not to let that happen here,” he said. “It is consistent with the pattern we saw for many months.”

Later in the program, Miller recalled statements from Netanyahu at a war cabinet meeting toward the beginning of the genocide, saying that he wanted to continue fighting in Gaza for decades.

Blinken told Netanyahu that Israel was “‘making it impossible to realize the dream that the state of Israel has had since its founding. You’re going to be bogged down here fighting this war for years and decades to come,’” Miller recounted. “And the prime minister said, ‘You’re right. We are going to be fighting this war for decades to come. That’s the way it’s been. That’s the way it’s going to be.’”

If it were serious about the ceasefire, the Biden Administration could have exposed Netanyahu's duplicity in order to shine a light on the intransigence of America's partner in the Middle East and shame Israel into doing the right thing.  Instead it chose to signal its commitment to not hindering Israel's goals.  Learning to what extent this is due to ideological commitments to the Zionist project and to what extent due to more venal motivations of the ruling class may perhaps need to wait for a future casual truth bomb that Miller, ex-spox, feels free to drop.

 

Victory At Sea

Because I am really struggling to find anything more to say about the horror show we find ourselves in but am not yet ready to throw in the towel on this blog writing thing, I am presenting yet another rant on the topic of the piss poor electorate that proves yet again that people can not be trusted with democracy.* The below is from yet another correspondence with a leftist who felt it important not to reward Kamala Harris with his vote on election day.  Out of the blue, he shared with me a series of Bluesky skeets on the topic of the deserved unpopularity of Biden's senile Gaza policy, which was fine and truthful.  But the Bluesky poster (skeeter?) who wrote the thread could not resist tacking on the name of Kamala Harris to every other post in a clear attempt to tar her and those still regretting her loss with the same brush.

~ ~ ~

In the long series of generally insightful posts by [poster who I will refer to mercifully as "Skeeter" rather than by his Bluesky name] on Biden and Gaza, it’s ruined for me by the very stilted insertion of Kamala Harris in every other post.  This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy.  Take her out of it.  It’s only done to make yourself (Skeeter) feel better about your complicity in Trump’s victory.  Nobody’s fooled.  Nobody fuckin knows what KH would have done as president.  You (Skeeter) are not absolved.  

Casually slipping her in to the conversation really trivializes Biden’s psychopathy in my view.  We all know why you’re doing it.  I don’t forgive you!   (Skeeter)  ^_^  You ruined your excellent points about Biden. C’mon man!

I know it makes you feel better to assert that Kamala would have continued Biden's Gaza policy unabated.  But what’s the point?  She didn’t win.  We lost—meaning we who preferred our chances with Kamala because we were determined to stop Trump.  We lost already.  Everyone else won, including the people who did not want Kamala to win simply because they were for reasons of principle not particularly focused on the difference between Kamala and Trump.  

Kamala did a very bad job with people who have an unsophisticated notion of politics.  That was her bad, that was on her.  She fucked that up irreparably.  It’s the bulk of why she lost.   She did bad with every one else too, but part of a sophisticated understanding of politics is that in an election one of two futures will win.  The choice will be stupid because everybody, even those whose understanding of politics is so sophisticated that they understand both futures are deficient, use one day to administer to their politics and it is the wrong day because it’s already too late to administer to your politics on election day.  "None of the Above" never wins.  Your vote has consequences.  You did not want Kamala Harris to win.  You got your way.  Behold the consequences.  I am unceasingly annoyed by the endless justification for not taking election day seriously, for squandering it on a performance.  

I will stop reflexively complaining about this when people stop trying to rationalize to me why they squandered their opportunity to prevent harm.  I don’t really want to see proof that Kamala promised that if elected she was going to equal Biden in Gaza.  She was told to say that.  She didn’t have to, and that’s on her.  But no one could possibly equal the demented, brain deficient psycho Joe Biden on Gaza.  She lied like a politician and also like a weak vice president (who was reportedly shut out of policy discussions for the entire administration.)  Anyway.  Not to re-litigate but those who did not vote for Kamala should frankly shut up about the election.  It’s unseemly to gloat about a victory—especially when your part in the victory was sweeping the obstacle of yourself out of the way of the guy who won.

~~~~~

* For the sake of the people, Democracy has to be left to chance.

Taking the Plunge

A political podcast I watch frequently recently had an interview with Osita Nwanevu, author of the forthcoming The Right of the People (subtitle: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding) his book on electoral reform.  The book will be well-discussed in political circles as it is one of those rare attempts to take seriously the problems we all know exist with our political system-- among them, the exclusive influence of money, polarization, politicians who do not represent the desires of those who elect them-- and do nothing about.  From what I gather the author proposes radical reform of our political as well as our economic system, and the cosmic void knows we are overdue for both.  I am always looking for the next thing to read so I have wish listed the book, but to be honest, I am skeptical that it is going to go far enough toward particularly the political changes that I am convinced are needed in order to shake up our democracy for real.  In particular, I've read the introduction and Nwanevu appears to offhandedly dismiss the classical Athenian system of sortition-- the selection by lot among all eligible citizens of a body of decision makers (a mini-public to use the terminology) for short, non-consecutive terms, much in the way we select juries for criminal cases-- as something that is clearly no longer how we think of democracy. 

Nwanevu quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration from Thucydides as the description of the vaunted strengths of the Athenian system:

Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors', but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. 

Nwanevu dismisses this as "nonsense" on the basis that of course in actually existing sortition, the pool of citizens was limited to landed males.  Women, slaves, immigrants and eventually even those with less than two Athenian born parents were excluded from the process.  That there could be a fix for these shortcomings is beyond the scope of what Nwanevu appears to have in mind for his book so is never discussed.

To the contrary, I am convinced and reconvinced daily by what our electoral system has wrought that it is sortition with the proper obvious tweaks to the qualification standards to make them as inclusive and representative as scientifically possible*-- even as unfamiliar as the concept has become-- that is the only truly democratic alternative to electoral politics worth replacing our current system with if we're  going to take the trouble of replacing it.  Furthermore I would propose sortition as the most powerful means of setting a chart for the major course correction required if humanity hopes to make amends for the planetary ravages of capitalism and its most nightmarish successors.  The alternative to transitioning quickly to sortition is yielding to the uninformed, brain-dead bad science fiction fantasies of the unself-aware class of billionaires who have insinuated themselves into ownership of our political system and who are  too overconfident in and full of self-regard for their talents at representing the needs of humanity for skepticism about their goals, with the result that in their hands the planet is too choked from the way that they would have with it for the survival of life as we know it.  

In brief, the system I would propose is one developed by Terry Bouricius at Democracy Creative in which the logistics are entrusted to a number of panels each of which is peopled by random selection from a pool of volunteers each of whom would serve non-consecutive terms of varying (albeit short) lengths depending upon the office.  For instance, one panel might determine the methods for random selection and other rules and regulations of the process; another would solicit and compile proposals for legislation; another would solicit expertise and identify and evaluate the best information on the proposed legislation.  For the actual passage of legislation,  "juries" would be selected by lot from among the entire population for mandatory service.  The juries would convene to be informed of the issues to be decided upon and to debate and deliberate on whether more study is needed or to vote on the legislation.   Counterpart systems could be set up for the executive and judicial branches as well replacing and vastly improving the current corroded structure for those institutions as well.

It's a system even the left couldn't fuck up.

Some points I would highlight in making a case for sortition over electoral politics:

Sortition is exclusively about governing the people as we would govern ourselves.  The process is streamlined to 1) Identification of the problems to address;  2) Empowering a randomly selected scientifically representative mini-public of significant size to inform themselves about the same with the same expert information; 3) Informed discussion about the options and goals;   4) devising proposed solutions and taking a vote on their adoption on our behalf (or, if deemed appropriate by the selected body, in a public referendum). 

Electoral politics busies us with a convoluted, purchased process of choosing among self-selected careerists as a way of distracting us from its inability to give us the consent of the governed.  The goal of sortition is governing well; the goal of electoral politics is winning.  Winning is the wrong goal of government.

While it doesn't have to be this way, the way our society is structured now ensures that in every election there will be winners and there will be losers.  The stakes are high and the money spent on the contest is both a result of it and the primary reason that campaign financing perpetually escalates.  Our politics is no longer (if it ever was) concerned with improving outcomes for the electorate but merely with kicking the opposing team's ass.   No less than half the country is thus kept in misery for the duration of the winning teams' term.  This is no way to run a country, but it is an excellent way to run a country into the ground as we see happening around us every day.

Sortition is not about defeating half the country; not about parties or personalities or war chests.  It is strictly about government charting the course we ourselves would chart given our current predicament, the best information about what to do about it and ample opportunity to deliberate and the power to decide our future for ourselves without having decisions imposed upon us.

Understanding the resistance to revolutionary democratic change, I look forward to filling in the blanks in my understanding of what Nwanevu proposes.  May the best re-making win.

~~~~~~

* Randomness guarantees diversity at the top, in sharp contrast to the depressing sameness of our whiny self-selected elite.  No wonder those motherfuckers bitch about diversity.  The actual diversity that would result if our leaders were randomly chosen gives the lie to their artificially uniform, curated monopoly.

Death by Smugness

Since I'm basically still on vacation, guest host Francesca Fiorentini compiles a buffet of the comically self-confident suicidal spite of the Republican electorate that threatens to take us all down by virtue of being in power and garnishes it with a lean paté of eloquent whoop-ass.

What I Wouldn't Give

I am finding "I don't give a fuck" to be a little too much a part of my vocabulary these days.  (As in, I don't give a fuck that ICE is a Federal law enforcement agency.  They're fucking Nazis. ^_^)  I don't want to be stuck in a rut, so I occasionally mix things up with  "I don't give a shit."  But this is hardly an improvement.  In Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt introduced me to an Irish variation, "I don't give a fiddler's fart."  Are you noticing a pattern?  What I need is both a lot more variety and for the sake of the children, some restraint in the subject matter.  As I also happen to need to pad out my postings for the month, I'm sure you wouldn't mind if I tried out a few alternatives here, would you?  (Go ahead and ask me if I care enough to hold on for your response.)

Without further ado, how about ...

I don't give two toots.  For extra effect, I don't give two toots in a tin can.  As in I don't give two toots in a tin can, Mister.  You are not signing up for interfaith beach volleyball.

I don't give a flying Finnegan what you do in the afternoon when I'm not here as long as you clean it up before I get home.

I don't give a Pringle or an Utz what you do on Election Day as long as it isn't vote.

I don't give the hide off a road-kill sneetch what you think of my sideburns.

I don't give a crawling thingamajig who's going to win American Idol.

I don't give a Vivian Vance who popped my dongle as long as they pop it back.

I couldn't give 2 shakes of a dollar store maraca how much I could be making if I purchased tax liens.

I don't give a wit or a whistle what the square root of 59,814,756 is.

I couldn't give an interplanetary plotz that there's another dumpling left.  

I don't give a puckered penguin what you have behind your back.

I couldn't give a belch in a windstorm who's on Fallon.  I'm going to bed. 

I wouldn't give the eye off a french fry to cure my social anxiety.

I don't give a pan fried cricket what you say,  It's cold in here!

I wouldn't give a twice read copy of last week's TV Guide to find out what happened on Happy's Place last night.

I don't give a Gen Z Conservative Fashion Victim who you think I think I am.

I don't give a gibbering id! *

I don't give a thimbleful of quinoa!

I don't give a continuous nibble! 

I don't give a good beef jerky!

I don't give a steaming bowl of bibimbap!

I don't give a frizzy whisker what Elon Musk's IQ is!

I don't give the shadow of a she-goat how you get here.  Hurry!

I don't give a hamster with a herniated hamstring what Florin said behind my back!

No Buffalo Bob, I don't give a flipped flapjack what time it is.

I don't give a yak wool thong what you do with your half of the money!

(The next four are from actual phrases encountered on the internet involving the "It's giving..." meme.)

   I couldn't give major Persona vibes.

   I couldn't give Lindsey Lohan Y2k.

   I couldn't give Zimbabweans.

   I couldn't give Ohio.

Sorry Robert Reich, I don't give a vintage pledge week tote bag what happens to the husk of what’s barely left of PBS.

~~~~~

* This and the next four entries were inspired by random purple passages from Benjamin Lorr's  The Secret Life of Groceries.

Getting Tenth Up In Here

Can it be 10 years?  Apparently it can.  I had an empty blog for more than 5 years before something got into me and made me use it to share a video of a Hungarian group I had discovered in the course of wading into that language.  I practically had to cover my eyes to hit the Publish button so terrified was I of you, dear Reader.  Look at me now.  Where have the years gone?  Part of the answer lies below, not a best of but sort of a compilation of some of the moods we've shared for the past decade.   To another ten. 

2015 -  BIN JIP's Dinner With A Demon - The first and still the best.

2016 - I want to blame Trump - Prove me wrong.

2017 - Bobbing for Decimals - Synchronized Swimming Hungarian Style.

2018 - Happy?  - Pretty much sums it up.

2019 - It's a Jungle Out There - A little contemporary urban angst.

2020 - Ludic Freedom - What makes a mosquito tick? 

2021 - The Forest for the Trees - An American family

2022 - Confessions of a Philistine - And a proposal for a different word for it.

2023 - An elegant solution - Considering abolition.

2024 - A good life - Can't we have one?

Quantum Relations

When I got my first iPhone -- the iPhone 4 circa 2010-- one of the ways I devised to increase my time with it was reading iBooks.   My Motorola Razr had died just as I was being courted by a new firm at the lowest ebb of my time at the old one, and somehow I managed to snag the new job without the use of any mobile device just through the clever use of my personal voice mail which I was able to access from my work phone.   The new job was a welcome change after 20 years of slow decay into depressing nothingness at my old firm.  I had gone from sharing an interior closet with 3 others in a flavorless block downtown to my own office with a door and a window in what was formerly a TV station situated in a pleasant neighborhood on a hill overlooking the city across the street from my favorite deli.  I had gone from looking forward to nothing but retirement if I didn't die first to a brand new beginning full of hope and opportunities to engage my intelligence and creativity for gainful employment.  The iPhone was a treat to myself in keeping with the new era of possibility.

I was in the habit of carrying around books for my daily commute at the time, so being able to carry them in my pocket was a revelation and a revolution in my habits.  iBook "pages" turned much more like the pages of a book at the time adding to the delight.  It was somehow appropriate that the first books I tried on the phone were the works of Bertrand Russell whom I'd never read before, but whose very name evoked my first encounters with the giants of the Twentieth Century on the spines of books in my oldest brothers' burgeoning collection of college texts when I was undergoing puberty around the time of Richard Nixon's curtailed second term.  I picked Russell because his titles were in free editions, but it didn't hurt that he was an engaging writer with a surprising sense of humor and a style and outlook as fresh as a spring morning 100 years later.  Reading Russell was like a communion with my younger self, with the state of the world before Reagan and Thatcher got their vampiric fangs on the life of it just as I was entering adulthood, an adulthood that has been oxygen deprived ever since (along with the rest of us-- even those of us too young or too braindead from the encounter with neoliberalism to know what we were missing).

Recently, I've been re-experiencing that sense of revival with another eBook.  This one is by the Italian theoretical physicist and science writer Carlo Rovelli and it's his short 2020 book for non-physicists on the question of how to conceive of quantum dynamics, Helgoland, so named for the Danish/German archipelago in the North Sea where Werner Heisenberg on a working visit had the brainstorm that led to the development of Quantum Mechanics.   Rovelli is a notable scientist himself as the co-developer with Lee Smolin and Abhay Ashketar of the theory of loop quantum gravity.  He's also a gifted writer; and Helgoland is full of lively gossip about Heisenberg and the contemporaries and influencers who charted the way for scientists, philosophers, political figures, artists like Niels Bohr,  Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Alexander Bogdanov,  Carl Jung,  Pablo Picasso-- and others into the strange, often paradoxical mysteries of a reality based on quantum science apart from the safety of materialism and classical physics.

Chronicling his own experience building a foundation of understanding of quantum mechanics which he has characterized as Relational, Rovelli discusses such unexpected byways along the way as the writings of 2nd century Buddhist Abbott, Nagarjuna, author of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way), and the political dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov over whether quantum mechanics was revolutionary enough.  Bogdanov argued that Comrade Lenin's impulse to purge science of uncertainty that did not fit with a materialist understanding of history was itself counterrevolutionary if it denied how the cosmos worked.   On the contrary, the new understanding of physics, dependent as it was on acknowledging the equality of all perspectives in understanding Nature was itself supportive of the upheaval of classical structures that Lenin's revolution represented.  

In the end, Lenin's adherence to classical materialism won (and maybe contributed to the finitude of the era of actually existing socialism).  But Bogdanov is featured prominently in Rovelli’s Acknowledgements, with a photograph, right next to Heisenberg whose anecdote is the basis for the title of the book. In the course of explaining his belief that subjective reality is actually not “a problem” for a scientific understanding of consciousness, but rather an indicative example of what quantum mechanics teaches us about the fundamental importance of the relations of objects to each other in the scheme of how the cosmos works—as in crucial and wholly in keeping with quantum mechanics’ discovery of how matter comes about and behaves  (think Schrodinger’s cat and Uncertainty and Entanglement and the importance of the observation to the measurement and for that matter General Relativity—the connecting tissue being that nothing is “real” except in relation to every other thing), Rovelli tosses out a brutally to the point quote from Bogdanov:  

The individual is a bourgeois fetish.

Rovelli himself puts it this way:  

Everything we have been able to accomplish over the centuries has been achieved in a network of exchanges, collaborating.  This is why the politics of collaboration is so much more sensible and effective than the politics of competition . . . [ellipses Rovelli’s]

Reading Helgoland was for me a deep and beautiful experience.

A Hole in One

Last summer, after Joe Biden's stupendous pratfall of the first debate, after Trump's weird iconic brush with death in Pennsylvania and with Biden's hard-won ejection from the race and the substitution of his Vice President at the top of the Democratic Ticket freshly transpired,  I saw one of the most frightening videos I think I had ever seen.    It was a digest of a golf game played for charity -- eighteen holes. Trump played with a golf pro I don't recall the name of at one of his clubs, I believe in New Jersey.   The pro was a clean cut bro with obvious barely contained admiration for his partner.  (They referred to each other as "Partner" so frequently between the two of them that I wanted to call in a gay marriage priest for them after a while.)

The video I learned later was taped within days of the debate-- one of the strangest moments of which involved Biden caught in a fib about his handicap and both candidates talking trash about the others' game-- but before Trump's momentous Pennsylvania rally and Biden's exit from the race.  In the video, Trump did not take advantage of Biden's absence or his sensational weakness to rub his face in his embarrassing self-exposure as a genuine dotard.  The subject of politics-- or of Biden's golf chops-- in fact never came up.  Instead the content of the video was a friendly and lively game of golf with Trump appearing to be in complete control.   He joked amiably, talking only golf as he drove the cart, arm draped over the steering wheel, speeding along the narrow path like he knew what he was doing. On the links he solicited and followed the sage, Caribbean-lilted advice of his wizened caddy, Neville, an oracle on the approach to take on each hole given current conditions and wind speeds and directions.  

I'm no golfer, but to my mind, Trump's game looked top notch.  I thought if Biden had stayed in the race, and this video had gone viral, it would have been over for the Democrats, and probably should have been. It was still a bit early to have formed an opinion about Kamala's chances, but the Trump of the golf video was immensely charismatic and dare I say, likable.  The decency of Trump keeping Biden's name out of his mouth when he could reasonably have been expected to lord his capacities over the dubious shell of a candidate-- of a human, and no doubt of a golfer-- that Biden had exposed himself to be was especially appealing.*

But there was a reason Trump had never seemed so likable to me: he was happily occupied with something other than absconding with the American treasury and imposing fascist rule on the rest of us.  The contrast with how Trump had been at the reins of American power made the point for itself: instead of making himself and the rest of us miserable with the nastiness of a return to political office, why did he not just retire to a life of unmitigated golf for the rest of his days?  What did he need with the headache of some dumb office he had already held that he was frankly lucky to escape with his life from?  Wouldn't it be better for him to happily engage in an activity that I admired his skill at rather than one at which his pathological incompetence kept me in a state of unrelenting pissed-off-ness.  Wasn't it better to have my admiration?  How could I convince him?

Maybe he'll read this and reconsider this fascism thing.

From https://trumpgolftrack.com/ June 30, 2025.  Woodrow Wilson (another presidential dickwad) reportedly played over 1000 rounds of golf in his 2 terms but he had only a 100 handicap. Wilson's green time makes Trump (on track to match his previous term's achievement of over 300 rounds for a total of more than 600 rounds in his two terms) look like a piker but in spite of a reputed tendency to take liberties with the game, Trump has an estimated handicap of 2-- a presidential best.  His habit has cost taxpayers an estimated $52M since January.  Come on, Partner.  It's time to retire and hit the green like you mean it.

~~~~~

* Which, granted, could have been edited out by the channel it appeared on.  It's not like he wasn't capable of it.

Midsummer Intra-Traumatic Dance Disorder

Ladaniva - Shakar

Celia Cruz & Johnny Pacheco - Quimbara

Fcukers - UMPA

Gang of Four - I Found That Essence Rare

Jun Miyake - Lilies of the Valley

Atarashii Gakko! - Candy

Hayk (apricota) & Arni Rock ft. Sone Silver - Taran Taran

Mike Kelley - Tijuana Hayride (from Day is Done - ft Tricia Ridgway)

Jermaine Stewart - We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off

Pascuala Ilabaca y Fauna - El Baile del Kkoyaruna (Dance of the Miner)

Oliver Tree - Swing and a Miss

Angela Autumn - Dancer

Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble - Chollima on the Wing

Cloth - Polaroid

Imani Coppola - Legend of a Cowgirl

Suburban Lawns - Flavor Crystals

The Yardbirds - Over Under Sideways Down

Ian Dury and the Blockheads - Wake Up and Make Love with Me (Live)

Mahala Rai Banda - Mahalageasca (Live)

Strategery

Before:

After: 

They knew what they did.*

~~~~~~~

* See here for an instance of the pot calling the kettle black: 

[Eric] Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” ... Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs.

They knew not what they did

I've seen a few too many videos lately of leftists barely able to contain their delight over the plights of formerly ardent Trump supporters and voters in the last election who "f'd around and found out,"  a dismayingly large number of whom are immigrants who never dreamed that Trump's campaign promise to deport millions and revoke the citizenship of "criminals" in the process could be made good on themselves or their loved ones.  Several of these made TikToks or social media posts mocking the notion that Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric could have anything to do with the "good ones" like themselves and their extended families.  The priority for these voters was terminating Bidenomics and replacing it with an America made great again by Donald Trump.  

Then there are the teachers and school administrators in Red States who voted for Donald Trump because that's who they are, but who are now shamefully faced with the fact that Trump's delivery on his promises to cut waste in government including elimination of Federal funding from the Department of Education in the service of fulfilling the long term Republican dream to do away with free public education for all threatens their livelihoods and their lives' work.

Lastly there are the laid off government employees and those whose work was funded (or produce purchased) by USAID money.  Again, the priorities they pushed to the fore in making their decision in November were the result of calculations that did not include their own vulnerability to Trump's fulfillment of his promises to his billionaire enablers.

Still to come, those Trump voters suddenly finding themselves dropped from the rolls of Medicaid or finding themselves up shit creek with the Social Security Admin without a paddle or void forbid being inconvenienced along with the rest of us by the impending termination of the US Postal Service.

There's no question that some of these voters were never going to vote for anyone but Trump for all of the reasons that leftists and liberals detest-- right along with the immigrants who needed to believe Trump was talking about other immigrants were farmers and teachers now facing their own unforeseen difficulties as a  result of voting to give ejecting millions of immigrants the try they thought it deserved if it meant a restoration of an America that may never have existed to begin with.   I can understand enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at their compulsive conservatism coming back to bite them on the ass.  

But I derive absolutely no pleasure from the horrified regret of the millions who voted for Trump out of a desperate need to believe that it had to be better than repeating the Presidential politics that they surely thought lay behind the misery of their lives in the 2020's.  For their votes I blame the Democrats for not prioritizing the needs of their immiserated electorate, and I blame the media for having its thumb stuck up its ass (as usual), as much as I blame the self-serving deceitful seduction of the Republicans who are masters at amassing enough votes to get within range of winning for their suppression tactics to succeed and remorseless in punishing the saps who were duped into voting for them with the power they needed their votes to get.  I blame those who let Joe Biden run again unchallenged in spite of his ongoing deterioration (never mind the myopic lunacy of letting him run at all in 2020 in his already decrepit state).  I blame the finality of Election Day.  I blame the founding fathers for devising such a fucked up system and misnaming it Democracy.  

The Democrats assumed the modest infrastructure spending and stabilizing of the domestic economy would help the public to forgive the administration's priorities in foreign affairs characterized by its spending of billions to enable conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.  Foreign wars aside, whatever good Biden did domestically was cancelled out by his eagerness to restore things to the way they were before COVID-- as though prematurely cancelling the relief instigated in the early Trumpian days of the pandemic that accidentally exposed the ability of the Federal government to marshal the resources to make people's lives easier, keep them housed and out of debt would be greeted with gratitude.  Biden thought he was doing a good thing bringing things back to how they were before the pandemic, but people's lived experience belied the rosy news in the business pages and on Wall Street.*

I don't blame low information voters who pinned their hopes for better times on a change in the White House.  I don't blame those so turned off by the process that they didn't vote.  I still have a hard time forgiving those who knew well enough that a second Trump term would be bad news but who withheld their votes from Kamala Harris anyway.  They knew what we were in for with Trump's re-election, but take none of the blame for letting it happen because they are satisfied with what it accomplished: punishing the Democrats.  As if being a democrat isn't punishment enough.

Is anybody happy?  Does misery at least still love company?

~~~~~

* According to a University of Chicago study, a good economy is always good for Republicans.  But who is the economy good for?  More jobs don't necessarily mean better jobs.  When in the last 40 years has the average American experienced anything like the relief from hard times that they got during the COVID crisis that the elite were so eager to bring to a close?

From Blakullafarden to Akbank Bunka

Halsing Suite No. 1 for Guitar: IV. Ganglat "Blakullafarden" A traditional Swedish folk "walking song" from the Hälsingland region arranged for guitar and performed by Jakob Lindberg:

 From the same Suite of Suites of Swedish folk tunes this time from Dalecarlia,  here is Dalecarlian Suite No. 1 for Lute: I. Preludium:

Lindberg's younger brother is Christian Lindberg, a premier trombonist, conductor, and composer of some wildly different music.  Here for instance is Lindberg performing his own Elvis in Memoriam from his Asa Suite with the Australian Chamber Orchestra:

Lastly, here is Turk Jazz, the 3rd movement of Lindberg the Younger's Akbank Bunka suite, performed by Pacho Flores on trumpet with the Arctic Philharmonic based in Tromsø and Bodø, Norway:

Bonus: While we're talking Swedish folktunes, here's one from the region of a quarter of my ancestors, Skåne.  The tune is one of my favorites, Lönsbodapolkan performed by Tvåtakt:

Gimme

Some questions we know the answer to immediately.   Others we have to think about.  There's a class of question that due to the circumstances in which you encounter it demands an instant response but that always gives me pause.  This is a question I encounter more and more at the payment card pad at the retail establishment checkout.  

The first time I remember seeing it was at a PetSmart.   I had swiped my debit card and before I was asked for my PIN I got an unexpected insertion: How much did I want to contribute to homeless pets?  There were an assortment of choices, ranging from nothing to $5, with possibly an option for Other for those finding themselves in a superlatively generous mood.  My reflexive response was "Why does PetSmart want to know?"  It grated at my sense of injustice that some faceless big box store, a black hole of wealth and finance masquerading as a pet shop having opened up my wallet for the purchase of essentials had found some way to coax me to voluntarily open it further ostensibly for the benefit of unseen, merely evoked immiserated animals-- but who knew what actually for?  At best I could imagine PetSmart was shaking me down for their own glory-- cajoling me into funding what some suit fancied to be a PR coup for the company.  At worst, they were performatively seeing how much extra cash they could trick their customer base into coughing up for nothing at the register. I reflexively refused the first several times I encountered the option.

I don't remember when or why I gave in, but I now pretty regularly give the dollar every time.  My working theory is that what happened was COVID-- somehow the knowledge of an increase in homelessness among pets due to the COVID deaths of their owners or other misfortunes related to the upheaval of the disease may have done some work on me and inspired me to use the occasion of the cash register question as an opportunity to satisfy myself that I was in a some small way contributing to the solution of a crisis.  Once I had experienced the ease of giving a buck on top of the hundreds of dollars I was spending each month on my pets, it soon became habit.  Occasionally it occurred to me to question whether my acquiescence to the pleading was serving anybody but the corporation, but it was always after the fact, when I was walking out the door with my purchases and never when I could actually do anything to get to the bottom of the problem.  In fact, it wasn't until just now when I googled "Who benefits from PetSmart's cash register charity?" that I learned that the recipient of PetSmart's customer's spontaneous cash register largesse is "PetSmart Charities LLP."

According to its homepage, 90 cents on every dollar collected at the cash register goes toward the care of homeless pets. But why take PetSmart Charities' word for it?  It takes some digging, but of course there's dirt if you look for it.  Knowing what I now know, I'm sympathetic to my gut resentment at a corporation for expecting me to just hand over money to let them do as they see fit with it with no accountability, no accounting of how it's spent, no input from me in what is done with it.  I don't doubt PetSmart owes a debt to the society we share that lets them grow unfettered-- but I'm uncomfortable with leaving the repayment strictly up to the corporation.  Will it cause me to break the habit of donating?  Probably not.

PetSmart is of course not the only establishment wheedling money out of its customers as long as they have their credit cards engaged.  Drugstores, restaurants and supermarkets among others as I'm sure you're aware also engage in periodic campaigns of fundraising.  My usual supermarket has recently initiated a drive to raise money to combat hunger for vets.  I have seen the prompt the last 2 times I've checked out, and confess that much like my initial response to the homeless pet question at PetSmart, I have found myself reflexively refusing.  

I admit I bristle at the easy sleasy "patriotism" of corporations falling over themselves to lead the mandatory chorus of "Thank you for your service" to soldiers and veterans. What service?  Interfering in democratic elections abroad in order to impose crackdowns on popular socialist movements?  Installing dictators of the corporate class's liking where the US might otherwise have difficulty imposing its hegemony?  Killing innocent foreign citizens with bombs?  Killing American citizens with drones? Thwarting peace, threatening war, crushing autonomy, making the world safe for neoliberalism, finance and corporate exploitation and unsafe for freedom for regular people especially if they're dark skinned and poor?  Shaming Americans into thanking the military for its service is a smokescreen for the owner class's responsibility for how unsafe for true freedom worldwide-- including in America-- the US Military's mission has been in my lifetime.  I can't think of a single military operation that hasn't benefited the haves at the expense of the have nots.  Its ever expanding budget taken largely out of American taxpayer's hides* squeezes out spending that would actually make people's lives easier. Our military is deployed on the wrong side of every conflict and never on my behalf.  And its outsized demands for energy and resources is largely responsible for the planetary climate crisis that is fueling conflicts worldwide.

On the other hand, I realize that the pathways to becoming a soldier or a vet are more complicated than my feelings about the military, and it is an injustice that the country that expects young men and women to volunteer† for the overseas adventures of its small but dominant overclass takes such poor care of those who have served that many of them starve or go homeless.  Take better care of your proxies yourselves, you ungrateful bastards!  

In the meantime, now that I've talked it out, I've decided: I will do what I can to help out fellow exploitees of the system at the cash register.  Fuck it!  Solidarity!

~~~~~

* And less and less out of the overstuffed pockets of the tax shirking owner class whose sloppiness and greed and hostility to the rest of the world cause the emergencies that members of the military are then tasked to risk life and limb and mental health to deal with.

† It was considered a victory when the draft ended in the fallout from the American public's disenchantment with Vietnam.  But truthfully, in a more democratic society (one much more democratic that the US), military service that serves the people should be a duty that is shouldered by all citizens.  Perhaps if everybody had an equal chance to be selected for military service, a more democratic congress would be more selective about the engagements that call for military deployment.

The door is open

My brother thirteen is ready for a General Strike.  Laid off from work in the days of COVID, he has lately been participating in more than his share of the many marches and demonstrations that have sprung up in response to the plethora of outrages coming out of the Trump II White House.  Marches have their place- but there is something to be said for the General Strike as an effective weapon against the authoritarianism that is threatening to turn Americans into complicit abettors in TwentyFirst Century Fascism.  

My brother thirteen is all about the General Strike.  He was ready May 1.  In principle I support the idea-- I find the daydream of a work stoppage across the land a tantalizing fantasy, but the May 1 movement my brother informed me about remained a daydream when the day rolled by,  I told thirteen I would gladly  participate in any organized General Strike as long as it wasn't just a Bluesky thing.  It needs to be The Big One-- a voluntary mass stoppage of work and of commerce participated in so broadly that it causes the severe pain in those it is designed to communicate to.  It needs to be a threat that normies take seriously.  I will commit to it the day I overhear my work colleagues discussing it. There is talk of General Strikes if you look for it-- but you have to want to find it.  But until it is a phrase buzzing from late night talk show hosts' lips, and tossed about in the banter that precedes workaday meetings, I don't think I'll be joining.

Taylor Lorenz recently made a video about the "Someone Needs to Do It" Meme.  I can wholeheartedly relate to the sentiment.  A General Strike would be better because it's something we could all pull the trigger on. How satisfying would that be?  But while we wait for a movement to congeal around an act that demonstrates the power and the seriousness of the anti-fascist masses, I concur with Taylor Lorenz that hoping for the vicarious thrill of some anonymous working class hero's taking of matters into his or her own hands is not an unpleasant way to pass the time.  It's just too passive a pastime, and history suggests there are ways for the non-violent among us to spring into action.

I think of G.A. Cohen's parable of the self-imprisoned man from Karl Marx's Theory of History:

A man is in a windowless room whose door he mistakenly thinks is locked. Unlike a man in a locked room, he can leave it. Yet since he does not know he can, he is not likely to try the door. One reason why people sometimes do not exercise their power is their lack of awareness that they have it.

Now is the time for us to collectively walk through that door.  Whenever we agree is Now. 

Not to put too fine a point

Toward the end of a long piece for Spectre Magazine in which socialist writer DK Renton carefully builds a history-based counter-argument to the notion that Trump's second administration is exhibiting signs of fascism, he writes:

Trump isn’t a fascist yet, his party isn’t in its core politics, his voters are largely the Republicans of 2012 and 2008, rather than an army committed to certain outcomes in advance. But the distance between him and fascism has narrowed to such a fine point that it would take very little to cross it. 

As some boob on the internet with no reputation to protect, I have the luxury of not concerning myself with strict formalities.  From my perspective Donald Trump is eagerly embracing the forbidden mantels of fascism and authoritarianism that I'm surprised as someone closer to his age than I'd like to admit (he could be my oldest brother's oldest brother) he did not internalize an antipathy to in the wake of Hitler's defeat in World War II.  Then again, what I am witnessing seems to me to be the apotheosis of the easy sociopathy exhibited so freely by members of his class in the 1960's of my youth. 

I try to get inside his head to understand, but there's no room in there.  The space is completely occupied with "Me".  But in their unfettered lack of self-awareness, he and his loutish accomplices remind me very much of a cross between  a certain type of suburban New Jersey blue blood in whose homes my father, a self-employed poorly compensated floor scraper would often ply his trade and the more successful than he nouveau riche contractors he would frequently work with.  Somehow I experienced both, and though my father never talked about it, my invisibility when he would bring me and my twin brother thirteen, preschoolers, along on rare jobs, felt like a blindness on the part of the blue blooded dames who would casually toss about racism and contempt for the poor, careless of my father's feelings and without filter as though my brother and I in our food-stained little outgrown hand-me-down shirts and shorts with our impressionable little brains weren't there.  The loud and crass contractors who simply ignored us took for granted that my father would have no objection to their racist complaining and liberal sprinkling of the n-word in casual conversation on the job when thanks to their discrimination no black people were anywhere around.  In church we learned and sang that Jesus loved the little children of all colors, but he was exceptional.  Most adults it seemed, especially the comfortable ones -- maybe because change was so much in the air in those days -- were preoccupied with their hatred and satisfied with white society's stinginess toward those who were fighting for fairness with their slice of the pie.  Rich people assume the non-rich hate them because they envy them.  In my case, the hatred comes from my formative experience of them.  Among the worst, most contemptible people I've ever met, and I'm convinced Donald Trump and his posse are the same.  These are the tax shirkers and wealth hoarders and planet rapers who complain about the entitlement of the poor. And Trump and his team are emboldened to be doing something about it.

In their recent article on the subject of End Times Fascism in the Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor make a distinction between the fascism of 100 years ago, focussed as it was on creating an earthly utopia from the ashes of the world it sought to destroy, and today's kind of illiberal go for broke state sponsored capitalism, utterly and intentionally conscious of the ravages it is wreaking on what's left of the planet it's been destroying with an escape plan reserved strictly for the traitorous oligarchs who are carrying it out.  A small but powerful group using the fragments of state power dutifully servile to it in the person of amoral autocrats such as Trump, Israel's Netanyahu, Hungary's Orbán, India's Modi, etc., in order to shut every one else out.  It's the culmination of a project described in recent works like Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism, Douglas Rushkoff's Survival of the Richest and Yanis Varoufakis' Techno-Feudalism.

There are definitions and lists of characteristics of fascism, but I am finding Google's AI list among the most succinct and useful:

Extreme Nationalism: Fascism emphasizes the nation's importance and often includes a strong sense of national pride and a belief in the superiority of the nation. 

Militarism: Fascist regimes often prioritize military strength and glorify war, viewing it as a way to achieve national greatness. 

Cult of Personality: Fascist leaders are often portrayed as charismatic and infallible figures, and their followers are encouraged to worship them. 

Suppression of Dissent:  Dissent and opposition are harshly suppressed, often through violence and intimidation. 

Social Hierarchy: Fascism often features a belief in a natural social hierarchy, with some groups seen as superior to others. 

Control of the Economy: Fascist regimes often exert significant control over the economy, sometimes through state ownership or regulation. 

Racism and Xenophobia:  Many fascist movements have embraced racism and xenophobia, targeting minority groups and promoting national purity. 

Use of Propaganda:  Fascist regimes often use propaganda to manipulate public opinion and create a sense of national unity. 

Rejection of Democracy:  Fascism is typically opposed to democracy and free elections, viewing them as weak and ineffective. 

 The rest I feel emboldened to say is quibbling.

Beautiful Worlds

A timely tune-- Devo's Beautiful World featuring Booji Boy himself in exciting 3-D -- from 1982.

Beautifully covered by the Ooks of Hazard at the Cerritos (CA) Library from the summer of 2011.

Finally a solo cover by Lauren Lusardi performing as PLASMIC.

The Thing That Wouldn't Die

A Kamala abstainer of my acquaintance recently shared as his latest salvo in our ongoing debate about electoral politics a paragraph from a Nation article, The Lost Millions by Kali Holloway, (not online as of this writing):  

The Democrats' takeaway from Trump's victory should be that a party's political priorities must resonate with the identities of its base.  But they have fundamentally misunderstood this assignment, yet again.  

The consequences of that misunderstanding-- or refusal to understand-- were reflected in 2024's turnout, when, by some estimates, a staggering 19 million people who votged for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home.  It's not that Dem voters became Republican en masse this election.  In fact, in "nearly a third of the top 50 counties that flipped from Democrat to Republican, Trump's vote actually declined from his 2020 numbers," writes Steve Phillips of both the Guardian and this magazine. Trump increased his vote total by just 2.8 million over 2020/. The far bigger problem was Harris's nearly 7 million vote shortfall. 

No argument Harris's campaign disexcited people.  But there was more to it.  Greg Palast, an investigative journalist, discovered millions of people who voted had their votes thrown out due to strategic republican challenging. According to him those votes would have won her the election.   

... Palast claims that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris would have defeated Donald Trump by 1.2 million votes in 2024, if not for widespread voter suppression tactics. According to Palast, the actions of Republican officials, including the purging of Black voters from the rolls and the rejection of ballots, ultimately cost Harris the election.

Palast ... concluded that, if all legal votes had been counted, Harris would have won the popular vote by 3.5 million votes in addition to claiming key battleground states.

“If not for the mass purge of voters of color, the disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, and the new ‘vigilante’ challenges in swing states, Kamala Harris would have won,” Palast said. He cited data from the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, which revealed that over 4.7 million voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls.

It’s a combination of factors.  There's enough blame to go all around. Especially on Biden and his team which became Harris's team. But also on the cheaters. And I have a hard time forgiving influencers who pretended or acted ignorant to the threat Trump posed because it inconveniently diluted the opportunity to punish Biden (who was no longer running). Kamala was the sacrificial lamb anyway. Those people won their election but will not take credit for it. 

Not saying it was a deciding factor. Just that I have a hard time forgiving it, I think because I can't escape my perception that the opportunity to avoid Trump was squandered on a performative spoiling of the ballot. My wing of the left and the influencers have an irreconcilable difference probably about the relevance and effectiveness of that protest on that particular unrepeatable date. If I carp on it it’s because I don’t want people to squander opportunities to reduce harms like Trump in the future.  People who voted for Trump are starting to have regrets.  People who consciously and deliberately voted against Kamala will never have to reckon. As I say not the deciding factor but a peeve I can’t seem to get over.  Maybe spelling it out will help. 

I sense a lot of self-satisfaction on the left about the defeat of the Democrats in November and it's causing a change in my viewing habits.  A Marxist intellectual I have been edified by in the past was given space recently to pontificate on the meaning of the chaos we're witnessing as a result of the failure of the neoliberal party to win in November.  He and his interlocutor were not prepared to call the new regime fascist though they felt the chaos was instructive.  The previous day it was Sabby Sabs and Briahna Joy Gray who I deliberately tortured myself with which predictably undermined my mood.  That I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting myself to be annoyed by a certainty that the US/capitalism is going down as though that takes some kind of political genius to discern and also as if the impending end of it alone is something worth wasting your breath on.  I guess we’re supposed to just endure not-Fascism for now while history takes its sweet time. Ok I was already doing that.

Re-reading some correspondence from last year I remembered how no one but me wanted to challenge Joe Biden in the primary, and no one but me wanted to stop Project 2025 from happening and now that it’s happening no one is taking credit for it. 

If hatred of Dems leads to socialism I’m down with it. If it leads to Trump not so much

I reiterate. I hate establishment dum dum Dems too. But in no world would Kamala Harris be dismantling Social Security, Medicaid, USAID, the Department of Education, the Post Office.  In no world would she be stepping up ICE's kidnapping and black holing immigrants and blackmailing and memory-holing civil rights, and terminating juridically established rights and commandeering Universities and cultural institutions, and forcing coercion of law firms and media outlets and threatening to send US born dissidents to foreign gulags.   In no world would she be defying the Supreme Court.  Would her foreign policy be as misguidedly destructive as Biden’s? I hoped not. But it would not be as reckless as Trump's. Too late to merely regret the fuckup of last election. Let’s hope that ultimately, regardless of what we're going through socialists (who seem to be AWOL) win the war without too much socialist or innocent blood shed,  and bucketfuls of evil motherfucker blood spilt. And not the opposite which is what the Project 2025 architects promised. 

I’m selective in my blame for where we are right now.  We have been lied to about electoral politics. Dems take our votes and do whatever the fuck their donors please. Republicans at least do the harm they promise they’ll do which is mistaken for honesty by the ovine electorate rather than as just making good on their threats. So I don’t blame the ovines. I do blame dem strategists for their blindness and ineptitude and asshattery. 

I also want more from my fellow leftists than empty powerless pissing away of votes and futile anger churning nihilism, let the consequences be damned. "None of the above" never wins.  Who does it teach?  What is the lesson?  The Online Left wants to say it teaches the Dems and the lesson is listen or lose my vote but the reality is it teaches powerlessness and nihilism to people vulnerable to both. Who does it serve?   Trump.  It places, too much importance on Election Day without taking the obligation of that day seriously. It’s anger-based not strategic. Understandable anger to be sure. It’s infuriating. But James fucking Carville Carvilles on no matter who wins or how badly Dems lose.