Facebook Gems (Bottom of June)

What have I been up to?
I took a page from Riker's 2nd season book, and grew a beard.

Remember as long as Covid-19 has bequeathed me the attention span of a gnat (with ADD), and I'm doing more of my writing in smaller chunks on my personal Facebook account, I'm going to be posting some of my best posts every couple of weeks. It's partially to have an extra "jazz hands" article to toss up every couple of weeks so it doesn't look like I'm over here writing one or two posts a month, but mostly it's to remind everyone that my writing happens in different places during times of turmoil––and that's all we've gotten in the last half a year.

Be sure and scroll down to check out "The Smoulder™"

We'll be doing a lot of admin and "jazz hands" posts this week, so that I can have a bit of vacation with my quarantine (and take care of a shit ton of adulting that has been backing up while I worked 60+ hours a week between, but I'm still writing behind the scenes so that next week can be awesome.

I'm pretty sure when quarantine is over,
it's going to be very similar to exactly this.

You couldn't say science was ONLY wrong about evolution and global warming, so you attacked all of science.

You couldn't say medicine was ONLY wrong when it contradicted your ideas of sin, sexuality, and gender, so you attacked all of medicine.

You couldn't say experts were ONLY wrong when they took umbrage with the policies that helped the rich or devastated certain communities or your insistence that your religious dogma was unassailable, so you attacked all expertise and put everyone's "beliefs" on an equal footing with years of education.

You couldn't say the media was ONLY wrong when they told the truth about your corruption or how your policies played out, so you attacked all of media.

You couldn't say that government intervention was ONLY bad when it was doing things you didn't like, so you attacked all government intervention.

For forty years.....

And now here we are. You have created an entire wing of the political landscape of this country that is PERFECTLY engineered not to trust Medicine, Science, Expertise, The Media, or Government Interventions, which turn out to be the all things you need to depend on the most during a global pandemic if you don't want mass casualties. And so we have 4.24% of the population and 25% of the Coronavirus cases and deaths. Because you attacked entire institutions rather than face that you might be wrong about a few things.

This is on you.

Remember, folks:

I will happily engage you in an honest to goodness online debate.

It will only cost you twenty-five hundred dollars a month. Sign up for my Patreon today!

Reward tier: "Debate me!"

$2,500 per month

Once per month, on any topic of your choosing (including the humanity of others or any tenet of social justice), I will debate you with maximum good faith and not ban, block, or remove it. I will prepare for two hours, debate you online for a full 24 hours––accounting for the fact that I need to sleep for eight hours on roughly US West Coast time––doing nothing else but giving you my full, undivided attention.

[Of course, there are some lower reward tiers as well....]

There's not enough "THIS!" in the world to "This!" this with.

Going out with people I like is actually quite awesome. Strictly speaking, I don’t hate DATING. I rather love it, and miss it during Sh.I.P.

The part I don’t like about dating is the skeet-shooting phase. Where you fling yourself out there, and as soon as someone gets a good look at you, they shoot you down.

Incidentally, that’s exactly the phase I’m in right now. It suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

So......here's the thing....

The place I order groceries from limits you to like ten boxes of Cheez-It Sharp White Cheddar grooves per month. Ten of those little boxes usually lasts me about 20-25 days or so. I make do.

I ordered my ten little boxes. (I mean they WILL get eaten––it is me after all.) And I thought there was a glitch that erased them when I saw the number next to the product was zero. So I reordered.

So here I am now with.....TWENTY boxes, half of which are FAMILY SIZED and about twice as big. You can apparently order ten OF. EACH. SIZE.

So roughly thirty boxes worth. Or about 2 1/2 months of fucking Cheez Its in my pantry.

My cup runneth over.

I might be a perv.
I took about ten seconds to get this whole thing.
Perhaps it's helpful what a common phrase it tends to be around here.

You know, I've had "really hard jobs" before but they all involved consequences for my failures. I cannot think of a single job I've had where if I failed so badly that I actually broke the law, I would then be protected from the consequence of even having to be arrested, charged, and tried––never mind not being fired on the spot.

Today a major chunk of the police force of Atlanta are basically saying that none of them will do their jobs if ANY of them should ever face so much as due process for extrajudicial murder....ever. (Also a classic echo of the "Fine, I'll just leave" abusive response to having bad behavior so much as pointed out.)

But sure, let's talk about how these bad apples are so, so few.

Every summer we Americans go through this.

People hang on the SCOTUS decisions and cheer or hiss or breathe a sigh of relief. And the rulings that really affect our lives are almost never 6-3 or 7-2.

They are 5-4––often along ideological lines.

And yet by November, the Russian psyops and the conservative false flags and the purity politics, and everyone who has (ironically) gone to so SO, SOOOO much trouble to convince folks that their vote doesn't matter, will have created this pervading sense that there's no appreciable difference between the two parties or their presidential offerings.

There are many harmful overlaps between Democrats and Republicans and it is sophistic and naive to be unaware of them, but for anyone who thinks there's "no difference," I hope this moment each summer we white-knuckle our way through is a reminder that they are not the same. RBG is pushing NINETY. And Scalia is a reminder that we can't really know HOW many justices a single president will get to replace. So unless you're 100% sure your ENTIRE revolution is going down before NEXT summer, we have a way to reduce harm.

Pretty much fuck everyone who won't take this seriously.
I'd like to get laid again some day.

No, YOU just spilled olive juice all over your shirt after just two fisting an entire can of California black pitteds by putting them on your fingers.

CN: Abuse

My younger years were marked by a number of emotionally abusive relationships, and one of the things I noticed, as I was getting therapy and getting better, is that people on the outside who were enabling that abuse would often deconstruct a moment that had happen at the height of my frustration and anger and desperation.

When I was younger, it was a slammed door or raging tears, but as I learned that my emotions would be used against me, and that I had to shut them down, it might only be a raised voice or a badly chosen word. But the point was, it was always something. THERE WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING I HAD DONE IMPERFECTLY.

These people would ask why I had done that, ignore the entire context leading up to the moment and say, "Well no WONDER they were upset," and use that moment to invalidate the entirety of the abuse. To their minds, unless I was the perfect victim (which I could never ever ever EVER be by their rubric), I had to go back to the abuse and further endure it.

I think about this a lot when I see white people arbitrating that civil unrest means the entire struggle for equality is nullified. White supremacy is abusive, but white complacency enables that abuse.

Remember, KPOP stans and TikTokers did not buy out assigned seating and thus CAUSE a low attendance. Trump's staggering loss of support pulled that off all by himself.  

What KPOP stans and TikTokers DID do was waste Trump and the Trumpsters time, money, and make them look very, very foolish by registering for MILLIONS of RSVPs that cost everyone from some T-shirt maker, who now has tens of thousands of dollars in Trump t-shirt inventory, to security companies and police who just stood around waiting to manage a crowd that never showed up to the RNC's millions in prep they never needed (for an event they probably would have canceled if they'd known how low the turnout was going to be) to flooding them with fake data that will still take them hours of work to sift through after the bots are done. Not to mention the sheer schadenfreude of getting them to crow for weeks ahead of time about how fucking BALLER their guy was to get those numbers, for what turned out to be smaller than an Oasis reunion tour.

You're just going to have to trust me that this Tumblr Post about the LGBT islands and all its subsequent replies (which goes on longer than its viral post a few years back) is absolutely gold.

I have some relationships based on mutual sarcasm,
but there's always a way to use your "safeword."
And it's a real "read the room" skill.

It's probably worth unpacking the sorts of signals you send to disabled folks (maybe even friends and family who are watching you) when you skip over things like Trump's white supremacy and his horrifying political decisions and the harm he does and his lies and his ego and his.....(ad nauseam) to make fun of the way he drinks water or his need for a ramp.

These things are not what make him a bad person and a worse politician, and if we're going to talk about his hypocrisy and the fact that he can't seem to admit that his body is having some problems, I'd be really careful to focus on the HYPOCRISY ITSELF because it's a short jump from that to ACTUALLY making fun of disabled folks...

...which, just to be clear, is something we were mortified that HE did.

So maybe the idea that the ends of his political destruction justify any splash damage is something worth considering. There are PLENTY of reasons he is unfit to hold office, and the fact that he himself would make fun of someone who couldn't one-fist a glass of water might even be one of them, but when we tear into that, we really show what our society considers important. ("Go ahead and be a Nazi, just don't let 'em see your hands shake.")

Them: But I didn't use any medical data. I just made fun of people who think this virus is a big deal. You said that was okay. Why did you ban me.

Me: Yeah, look, if you want to just lie low and get your "You should be writing" memes, you should LIE LOW. When you pop up and get yourself noticed by being a dillhole, it turns out I **JUST** might mouse over your user icon. And then I'm going to notice "back the blue" banner. And then.....well....then you're sort of in trouble....

Because then you've shown me TWO things that are all kinds of awful, and I know I really don't like you, and don't particularly want the further input you might drop on future posts if I do not rescind the invitation into MY SPACE.

Shoulda kept that low profile. But you just had to....what's the phrase you diaphanous ego fuckstrudles use? Oh, right. VIRTUE SIGNAL. You HAD to virtue signal.

Bye, now.

When I say we’re totally gonna hit 1 million dead (lowball), this is why. The GOP has spent 30 years basically perfecting half the country into a mindset that is singularly unable to handle medical, scientific information or expertise delivered through media with public safety enforced (or even just encouraged) by government. Or to take seriously anything liberals take seriously. Because that was politically expedient for them to do.

Folks in that culture (every single one of them) are going to have to see this up close and personal before it feels real to a critical enough mass that we might see a shift. Right now they absolutely, genuinely think they know better.

The Venn diagram of people who won't wear masks despite the laws and people who tell BLM protesters that they "deserved" police brutality because they "broke the law" is pretty close to a circle...

But what they haven't realized yet (and would be pearl-clutchingly incensed to have pointed out) is that the overlap part is labeled "Just made it piss obvious they're racist."

Alright. I didn't want to have to do this, but you leave me no choice.
Here comes.......The Smoulder™

There's a lot on the news about the U.S. "giving up" the Covid-19 fight. Based on folks' pictures, it seems like a lot of peeps have traded in Shelter In Place for "fuck it."

And these are MY liberal friends (and even so leftist that they consider "liberal" an insult). This is not a cross-section of Americana.

I won't wag my finger. It's been an unbelievably rough four months, and cities and states reopening with nary a care, and an honest-to-fuck "anti-mask" movement like something out of Rick and Morty means that pretty much until there's an insta-test or vaccine, we're doing this indefinitely. I know some folks can make calculated personal risks that don't put vulnerable populations at risk, carefully invite people into their family bubble, and maybe even snap a selfie.

Okay, Boo. You do you. I've amped my risk when I knew I had five days to sit around and see if I got sick before I had to see anyone I care about, so I'm not here to judge. But let me just add one thing as your concerned Uncle Chris. Something that I almost never see when people are spouting mortality calculations like there's no real reason to be afraid:

As someone who almost certainly had this in early April, please let me remind everyone that you don't roll a cosmic set of two D&D ten-sided dice and only have a bad outcome if you get a 01 (if you're young and mostly healthy). And then you either drop dead or stroll on with your life having ducked the scythe once more.

You get a hospital visit on a 02 or less (which is much more likely than you think if you haven't actually PLAYED D&D). And that's if you're young and in perfect health. Age and preexisting conditions could drive that number up as high as 17 or more. (Though, to be fair, I don't see too many 85-year-olds ignoring social distancing.) And if too many folks in your area have been taking the same chance, the hospitals might be overwhelmed, and then your chances on that life/death roll get a lot worse.

No one knows the numbers yet, but you might roll for permanent organ damage. Or just MONTHS of recovery before you're really better. Could affect your lifespan in the long run. Lung scarring after this probably means that if a bus doesn't get you, pneumonia before your time surely might. That's a pretty shitty roll too.

And oh boy howdy, since I'm talking to folks in the US, please think of the medical bills......

I suspect most people here are being responsible and quarantining after a gathering because I don't have wildly inconsiderate friends and, for the most part, they know they could feel okay for several days while being contagious, but one of the worst things, if you're being cavalier about this, is that you could FORCE everyone you come in contact with to make the same roll. Maybe even someone with a much worse "outcomes chart" than you have to roll on.

And even if you roll pretty darn well––as I did––you get laid out with the worst sick you've ever had In. Your. Life. (With the possible exception of one flu where I couldn't keep down water.) Burning lungs. Raw throat. Impossible joint pain. Twisted guts. And when you're all recovered, which could take two weeks if you're lucky, or a month or even longer if you're not, another week at least of quarantine, which for a lot of people means roughly a month without pay at a minimum.

So please don't forget to factor that into your calculus.