Facebook Compilation (October)

For years, I didn't count all the bite-sized chunks of writing I was doing on Facebook as "writing." But it's a post here and a post there, and sometimes I spend an hour or more a day working on that writing, so it's high time I acknowledge the fact that it "counts." 

By October, I was starting to deal with the all the tests and procedures that would eventually lead to a colon cancer diagnosis. I was still getting adjusted to living in a new place with some kids who were not entirely sure quite what to make of the new person in the house and still having trouble finding my writing time. And yet…a few gems showed up.

Here is a collection of the BEST statuses (and a few of the most popular memes) from my public Facebook page over the period of Oct 1st-31st. (You're welcome to follow me there to see the not-quite-the-best ones, but read up in the Facebook FAQ [last question] if you want to send me a friend request.) 

Just so we're clear.

The ACA is about to save my life for the second time since I signed up for it, so I'm absolutely going to have skin-in-the-game feels when you tell me there's no point to voting or both parties are the same or that you're SO leftist that there's no such thing as harm reduction.

There are some people's views on political non-participation that I grudgingly respect-but-disagree-with particularly among certain demographics, but those who look at the same proletariat they absolutely need (if that revolution they talk about is ever going to happen) and sneer at their lives, livelihood, and health as beneath their concern just make me have complicated feels about BEING a leftist.

As a literature major, a science fiction fan, a staunch feminist, and an anti-colonialist who has actually studied postcolonial literary tropes, my feelings towards Dune are pretty much forever going to be….complicated, no matter how good the soundtrack or acting are.

Yes, this is foundational sci-fi. Yes, I know the source material well enough to see Herbert falling into cultural assumptions even as he challenges others (kinda). Yes, it isn't as simple as bad portrayal/good portrayal. 

But it is literally one of the original "white savior" stories (even if it's not quite as bad as Avatar) with a group that is a barely disguised analogue of "desert people sitting on a precious resource the civilized folks need." One of the major plots of Dune is a group of uber-manipulative women who dedicate generations of their power to creating a more-powerful-than-them messianic dude while all the most powerful and interesting women in the story are in some way subservient to men (their Duke, their chosen one, etc…)

Oh, I'll see it (oh yes), but my problem isn't EVER going to be how faithful the adaptation is or how well done the effects are. We just get this one story over and over again. I  wish we got a version of A Small Place every decade or so.

Back in the very early aughts, I worked as a manager at Old Spaghetti Factory, and for a hot minute I was also moonlighting as a server at Marie Calendars. 

After a couple of months, I was really burnt out from working 75-(or more)-hour-weeks in food service, and I gave my two-week notice at Marie Callender's . I sort of hoped I might be able to come back during busy seasons to make a few extra dollars or have the possibility in the wings of another place I could serve if I went back to serving full time. (I was beginning to suspect at that point that I did not actually like management very much.) The general manager pulled me into the office before my shift to make sure I knew that he would never hire me back.

Me: "Even though I've given you notice and time to replace me and I'm trained and I like it here and all your managers love me and I WANT to come back?"

GM: "I just don't like people leaving. I'm not going to hire you back."

Me: "Well, I guess if that's your position, there's no real reason for me to give you two weeks."

GM: "What?"

Me: "I'm really burnt out. In fact, I think I'll go home now. Good luck with all my shifts. Especially today."

GM: "This is really unprofessional."

Me: "Yeah, it was! I couldn't believe you did it. Normally, I would never do something like this, so that I could stay in good standing. But your lack of professionalism makes me think why bother."

GM: "You might need me for a reference."

Me: "I manage at another restaurant. I'll use them if I need a reference for my employment during this period."

GM: "You should know better than to pull this shit, Brecheen."

Me: "Honestly A_ _ _, YOU should know better. I would never treat an employee like this who gave me the professional courtesy of a full two weeks, and might be able to save me a few hundred bucks in training a new employee when they came back. Good luck."

I like to imagine he was the reason that particular Marie Callender's closed up shop just a couple of years later. But more relevantly, I think about this story a lot lately when I see people taking FAR less shit from their boss as soon as they have an alternative that isn't starvation.

I really need bed reviews to include a category for how well they stand up to a pounding. Like are they going to squeak like all hell? Fall apart the first time you try "The Pile Driver"? Shift around the room? Is some important part going to break off every single time the frame thwacks against the wall? 

These are the real questions.

Chris's Pass/Agg theater of the day

I don't know how to tell you this kindly, but just the fact that we disagree on whether or not spending one Tuesday afternoon a year engaged in the harm reduction of trying to ensure that the people who govern us will either be "disappointing capitalists who know that the political will doesn't exist to do everything leftists want to do" or "literally fascists who write policies designed to harm us" does NOT make me a centrist.

It does NOT make me a centrist.

I don't know how to tell you this, but when you say Democrats are just as bad, you've told me that my life (saved by the ACA) means nothing to you. And to how many others—who you are going to need for your vaunted “revolution”—are you sending the same message?

My politics are what makes me a leftist, not my opinion on the praxis of voting. Your assumptions of my leanings are just wrong. I'm usually further left than the very same people up in my face telling me that my vote somehow makes me a centrist. And frankly, you're fucking insulting in your purity dogma…..in a way that a political ideology that CAN'T win an election doesn't have the political clout to be. This is why no one in this country takes leftists seriously.

I’m right next to you 364 days a year building parallel infrastructures, protesting, and writing about what total fucking tools mainstream Democrats can be. 

But I'd like people alive and not putting every resource they have into panicking about their health, livelihood, and safety while we try to win their hearts and minds. You may not agree about the way to get there, but that doesn't make me a centrist.

Facebook Gems Top of June 2020

Maybe don't try telling a six year old that
someone who will enjoy you doing it for an hour or so
is one thing you're actively hoping to find in a partner.

Since shelter in place and global pandemics and political landfill infernos tend to fracture my already ADD attention, I've been doing a lot more writing during Shelter In Place in bite sized chunks on Facebook. I'm still writing, it's just fewer long hours of focus on a single good article a day. So until Sh.I.P. ends or my ADD gets used to the new normal, I'm going to put some of my best posts (including some of the memes) every couple of weeks into a compilation post.

If you are demanding that fascists, bigots, and Nazis get a seat at the table and be heard out because "The Marketplace of Ideas!", but dismiss "defund the police" or socialism outright as worth listening to, you are less about boundless and limitless free speech than you think you are, and a LOT less slick than you imagine about covering up what ideas you're kind of okay with.

Ack!
Stop that!

The word “set” has 430 different definitions and the word “run” comes in a distant second at nearly 400, and we successfully manage to work out from context which one is meant.

Which is just to say, I’m fairly certain English, Western Civilization, and the future of humanity will be okay if “literally” joins “cleave,” “oversight,” and “sanction,” as a contronym.

The left and the right have different meanings when they talk about "cancel culture."

For the left it is often a nuanced issue when an individual is harassed (in very abusive patterns and for a very long time) by their former peer group, in stark contrast to the claims of valuing restorative justice, and usually with exact proportionality to their social marginalization. (Cishet white men are not held as accountable and given WAY more second chances.) It intersects with ableism as people with rejection sensitive dysphoria and various mental illnesses can be severely traumatized, often for years, by many of the most commonly used tactics, simply for not being contrite enough, fast enough. I'm not going to say where I land to someone who isn't smiling at me over broken bread, but it IS complicated.

For the right and it's staunchest critics "cancel culture" is pointing out that dead white slavers maybe don't deserve to be lionized on an actual pedestal. Or it is celebrities receiving literally ANY consequence for bad behavior, even as minor as a few all-caps tweets that hurt their feels in response to open, naked bigotry.

The sooner that little disconnect is understood, the easier it is to deal with the fact that our terminology and harm-reduction introspection will be commandeered to shame us for looking sideways at their ideologies the MINUTE they hear of it.

I really think it's time for Gen X to do the work of our generation and make a difficult choice.

We can either keep responding to Artax memes with "TOO SOON!" some thirty-six years later in a display of entire-generational trauma, or dropping paragraphs about how the Skeksies legit fucked us up, and thus acknowledge that the kids movies of our day were sort of the media equivalent of the playground with the corrugated sheet metal you could tetanus-cut yourself on and the teeter totter that would send you to the hospital...

OR....

We gotta stop giving today's kids' movies shit about how fluffy they are. By which we usually don't mean "fails to tackle real, topical, and serious issues by allegory," but rather "doesn't have characters or scenes that are immediately traumatizing." 

HAAAAAAAVE to.

Let us do this ONE thing to better the world instead of just watching millennials and boomers yell at each other as we eat Honey Nut Cheerios for dinner.

I had an avocado tonight as a capstone on dinner. But I didn't eat any toast. And it had been an hour since I had a bread product of any kind.

So hopefully I haven't destroyed my financial future forever.

If you ever want to “get it,” run a nice big page for a while. Compare the reactions to a few bigoted slurs or naked bigotry itself to the reaction to “irregardless.” See what makes people actually angrier. See about what they equivocate and about what they are unyielding. Notice what moves them to vitriol. See the patterns in the big numbers merit out over and over.

It’ll be quite the experience for you.

It's probably worth it for anyone at the upper end of social hierarchies to consider how many interactions happening at the social/cultural level, couched in slick language and well rehearsed scripts (and injected with everything from politics to motive), still boil down to this:

Person 1 - You're hurting me.

More powerful person - No I'm not. And if I am, you deserve it.

There's an op-ed in the NYT by Paul Krugman identifying this moment as the total breakdown in the US response.

It is.

This is the moment Trump decided to cheer protestors because they were protesting Democrats who had shut down businesses in response to the pandemic. He did this because they had (D)'s after their name, and he has come to see Democrats as his enemies because he is an egomaniac and everything is about him. 

And they don't properly fellate his genius. 

In cheering on those protesting a (reasonable) leadership response to the pandemic, he signaled several things at once.

1- He abandoned leadership. Basically, by not having a federal response, he told the states they were on their own.

2- BUT he cheered the protesters who were protesting the governors of those states that weren't doing what he wanted. So he may not have overtly and outloudly coordinated zero response, but he clearly favored it.

3- He signaled to every governor in the country that he would support their ignoring the virus and condemn any leadership response to it. He emboldened those who were calling it a hoax or overblown and cowed those who were trying to keep their citizens safe.

4- He engaged in a very official, top-down, conservative response (even if that response was to do nothing). He voiced official support for coordinated, well-funded, backed-by-billionaires, totally-not-grassroots political protests calling for ZERO response to the pandemic (trading lives for jobs). He may have done this as a personal move because those people were protesting his political enemies, but in doing so, he firmly put himself on the side of those rushing to reopen despite having no control.

5- He essentially ginned up the folks who would become the anti-mask movement today--,wearing masks being the ONE thing people could do to make everyone much, much safer, and the one thing other countries are doing that is getting them back to (a somewhat adjusted) normal.

Dudebro: I am an egalitarian. An equalist. I would march for equality. I would fight for equality. I would DIE for equality.

Peep from marginalized group: What I would like you to do is name this and acknowledge the particular ways that inequality affects me.

Dudebro: YOU HAVE LOST AN ALLY TODAY.....

I think it's very likely that we just have to start thinking of masks in the same way we do shirts. I mean you might see someone without one, but indoors it'll probably get some stiff glances. And mostly, it'll just be something people wear.

Find a comfy one that you like and matches your outfit. If you don't the tight one you have, invest in the looser ones. Have a whole set with logos that fly your geek or nerd or sports or whatever flag high. Get ones with some snarky political statements on them.Go unapologetically Disney. Find the tie or loops that you like the most. Fashion statement with your mask. Consider rhinestones!

("Oh, that mask does NOT go with your pants. Wear THIS one. Much better.")

Get used to it. This is probably going to be our lives now. Possibly forever. We don't even know how well a vaccine will work, especially not with an active antivaxxer movement. New normal. Adapt.

Look, if you want my Game of Thrones/House of Cards piping hot take, what is happening with schools isn't any goddamned different than anything else the GOP does. They may want things to look like they're back to normal, but that's not WHY they're doing this.

They walk in, break things, and then shout, "THIS IS BROKEN. WE HAVE A POLITICAL IMPERATIVE TO GET RID OF IT." They did it with healthcare. They did it with SNAP. They've tried to do it with welfare to some success. They are trying to do it with social security, but they have to tread lightly or they'll lose the over-65 vote they can't win without. They can't get their way when most people LIKE the programs they want to eliminate, so first they have to sabotage them.

Now they're doing it with schools. Because public education costs a lot, and private education can bust the public school teachers union and otherwise circumvent many of the reasons WHY public education is expensive (usually at the cost of the the teacher and/or the quality of education, but who cares about that when there's money to be made).

They are going to CREATE a teaching crisis by causing a body count. By forcing everyone back into physical classes, hundreds of thousands of teachers will either die, get terribly sick, or be out for weeks––and those are the ones who don't quit or retire early. And then the Republicans will swoop in: "Shame about that public education system that is collapsing! Good thing we have vouchers and privatization."

That's my piping hot take. This is the long game for them, and they exploited a global pandemic to get their way because literally nothing is beneath them.

But, of course, at this point, Machiavellian doesn't matter. The consequence-oblivious sledgehammer has joined the fray.

About three days ago, Trump threw his ego into the argument (and everyone who says no to his plantation-sized, but two-year-old mature ego,"hates him"), so now schools will reopen and if he has to bluster because it's about HIM and his "authoritah" instead of children and health (or even the long game of breaking public education). He will threaten governors and take to twitter and turn yet another aspect of managing human health and safety into a partisan issue. Which means folks with Republican governors and purple states where people won't stand up to him are going to be even WORSE off.

The worst part is being absolutely 100% certain that there will be viral videos of openly weeping parents wishing to anything and everything that they could just go back and let their kid have a shitty semester or two.

Epidemiologists in April: Close the schools.

The Trump administration actively ignoring epidemiologists in June: Open the schools! Or I'll defund your asses.

I hate to be the one to point this out, but when you apply the law of big numbers to low statistical chances, you get SOME results. This is absolutely going to cause the deaths of tens of thousands of teachers. That's just the math of it. And hundreds of thousands more will be hospitalized, have organ damage, or be out of school for weeks.

But kids are going to die too. And no one thinks it'll be their kid until it is. Covid-19 affects kids less (and thank the UNIVERSE for it), but it doesn't NOT affect them at all, and by ten that fortuitous resistance is all but gone. So as soon as you start having MILLIONS of kids go back to school, the law of large numbers will kick in, and the math will show no mercy. Some are going to be in hospitals. Some are going to have lifelong organ damage. And some are going to die.

This isn't the absence of leadership. That's not actually even an accurate appraisal of our Coronavirus response.

It's ANTI-leadership.

Trump didn't just ghost his executive duties and abdicate to the states––in many cases explicitly.

He abdicated to the states and then kneecapped the ones who made him look bad by doing a good job. He got on stage and said shit that was actively harmful. He's out there consciously undoing the state and local leadership that has tried to step up into his vacuum of initiative.

"Lack of leadership" doesn't even cover it.

Disney parks didn't reopen because it was safe.

Disney parks reopened because they got indemnity shielding from the government (slickly folded into one of the stimulus packages). Translation=Disney parks reopened because now they can't be sued unless someone can PROVE Disney "intended" to violate the already lax social distancing rules the government has set down.

I like Disney as far as evil corporations go, and I am generally pretty happy with what I get back when I give them my money, but they are NOT looking out for you.

It is now statistically more dangerous to go out than it was in April, we're still in the first wave. There are people I love and haven't held in four months. Most countries have this thing under a semblance-of-normalcy-returning degree of control, but our numbers are in a "runaway scenario" because we have anti-leadership and no check on base behavior so abhorrent that it is telling us to get over the deaths of ten thousand kids and a hundred thousand teachers so we can have a good financial fall.

I will never ever forget that it is because you groomed your base to be anti-science, anti-media, and anti-expertise for thirty years, turned masks into a culture war issue, exploited a pandemic to slide through ever more ultraconservative policies that even you constituents wouldn't want if they were paying attention, covered up your criminally negligent failures (and your just plain criminal scandals), cared more about the stock market than literally anything, and assumed that hundreds of thousands dead was a conspiracy to make your cult leader look bad.

And guess what? Our economy's tanking anyway because you won't actually fix what's WRONG with it.

I can be compassionate, empathetic, love nuance, and still be so angry with you that my fury burns like ice.

I just hope I'm not alone in that long, long memory.

Conservatives: Free Market free market freemarket freemarketfreemarket.

Liberals: Okay but human live–

Conservatives: FREE MARKET!

Walmart: We've determined that it's in our long term financial interests to require masks given the customers we will lose and "lose" if we don't.

Conservatives: Not....like.....THA **NAZGUL SCREAM**

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.

Best of FB [Bottom of May]

I'm doing a lot of Facebook writing these days on My Public FB Profile, and added up it is hours of work, so I've decided to repost a compilation of some of the most shared posts here. It's a public account, so you can read it even if we're not friends or even if you don't have a FB account. (Gotta read the rules, agree to play nice, and send a friend request with a PM saying you did so if you want to comment though.) 

The U.S. has justified the absolute "necessity" of being in an official armed conflict for 222 out of 239 years of its history as a country, was founded on the genocide of the natives living here and built with brutality and violent slavery, actively brutalizes its non-ruling ethnic groups (BIPOC), and has enshrined the right of every single citizen to own a lethal, long-range, semi-automatic weapon, but its ruling ethnic group (white people) will absolutely stand there with a straight face and tell marginalized folks that violence never solves anything.

Cops are kettling even peaceful protesters and bystanders so they can brutalize them more effectively during a protest of....police brutality, but sure, let's talk about how violence never works, makes you squeamish, and you're really opposed to it.

This one is a slew of pictures so you'll just have to go check it out.

https://www.facebook.com/chris.brecharge/posts/3141733492513878

Reminder that the ACLU has an app called “Mobile Justice” for recording police interactions. Bystanders have power. If you record directly from that app, it streams your video to the ACLU for safekeeping, just in case your phone is taken from you at the scene. It can be accessed in the future if it becomes important. In California the app is called “CA Justice,” and it streams directly to an ACLU chapter in California. You never know when you might need it.

Hi, fellow white people,

It's going to be very, very important for us to stifle the urge to inform Black folks that we "agree with 'the cause' but this isn't helping" or some variation. Or to say that to each other.

Or at all.

Because 99% of us don't have the first goddamn clue what actually helps and doesn't. We're actually WRONG when we say shit like this. Demonstrably inaccurate.

The way we envision perfect protests hasn't changed anything in over half a century. Our teddy bear MLK who we love to use as a cudgel to silence justifiably angry people who are hurting our feelings had some pretty choice things to say about riots and how they are the language of the unheard, and he could NOT condemn them.

The vast majority of us haven't been doing this all our lives. We do not have extensive expertise in activism and "what is effective." Hell, most of us don't ever show up to the peaceful marches. For the vast majority of us, our "agreement" with the cause is absolutely conditional on our fragility never ever ever being challenged and our feelings never being hurt.

We certainly, most of us, aren't aware of how civil unrest puts pressure on the local D.A.s to not sweep things under the rug as is their wont. [June 4th edit: and while we will never know what would have happened without civil unrest, the charges have been upgraded and the other officers charged––which is pretty unusual.] We don't have a peek behind the curtain to know that the officers who gave Freddie Gray a lethal nickel ride were only indicted after Baltimore was subjected to days of violent civil unrest, and that every cop around the same time who killed a Black person in cities that didn't have civil uprisings rarely even faced charges, and sometimes didn't have a gap in their employment.

So it's really rich of us to suddenly be armchair experts on how best to go about achieving desired outcomes in a criminal justice system that has never been dismantled from the days when it was ABSOLUTELY DESIGNED to uphold white supremacy and has, as a matter of record and fact, been infiltrated at every level BY white supremacists.

In fact, our judgemental arbitration of rioters' "credibility" is so absolutely north-star predictable as a script in upholding white supremacy that white (and often law enforcement) provocateurs will often kick off the violence just to get us to start harrumphing and being ten times louder about some burning trash and broken windows than the LIVES lost in the first place.

If we care about the cause, let's just give time, money, and energy to the cause without caveat and addendum, and certainly without using our declaration of milquetoast support as our "free pass" for getting to dictate to people how they ought to struggle against their own oppression.

And you do you, but it's probably worth unpacking the assumption that the "best" way to fight a multi-generational struggle for equality happens to align perfectly with what makes us the most comfortable and is the easiest to ignore.

Usually my most shared things are political.
Usually.

Please remember:

Even those places that are being super careful (states, cities, etc...) are STILL not reopening because it is "safe."

They are reopening because there are enough beds in the ICU and PPE to handle the size of the spike they predict will happen.

Source :
https://mobile.twitter.com/groby/status/1250989032336551937       

I think about teachers a lot right now. I know a lot of teachers. And most reopening plans are trying to get them back into their classrooms in some capacity in the fall.

I'm really worried about teachers.

I think people should be absolutely clear and blunt with the language they use around schools reopening. We should pull no punches about what we're talking about when we demand teachers go back to work despite no vaccine, and a sort of half-ass commitment to try to spread kids out in classrooms and wear masks and sanitize more. (This from district after district that assured their people there was simply no money to reduce class sizes or increase janitorial budgets.)

There are 3.7 million teachers in the U.S.

I can't really "run the numbers" because we don't have reliable enough statistics. This isn't official. I'm no epidemiologist. Someone could even check these numbers and if I'm blowing them up, I'd be relieved. But even conservative estimates paint a grisly picture. A lot of teachers are going to get sick. A WHOLE lot. Teachers deal with dozens of students, and the chances that at least one of those students will be spreading Covid at SOME point is outrageously high.

And from what we know just from our own numbers in the U.S so far, roughly about 35,000-40,000 are going to die for every million who get sick. Getting THAT number down would require health care reforms. So I don't know exactly how many teachers are going to get sick, but it will be hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. And that means the cold, unforgiving math we're looking at is that tens of thousands of teachers are about to die.

Tens. Of Thousands. Of Teachers. Are. About. To Die.

This is what we're talking about. This is why mincing words and skirting bluntness is so dangerous. Euphemisms about sacrifice or jingoist catchphrases about the bravery of essential workers don't bring this into focus. That's why I worry so much about all my teacher friends.

And why? Because we couldn't wait another semester or two or keep trucking with a better investment in online learning. Because kids at home need supervision and parents are less productive when they have to do it themselves. We wanted things "back to normal" so bad that we dismissed the consequences.

Yes, it's no good for kids' long term mental health to keep sheltering in place. If there were a good solution, I'm pretty sure we'd just pick that one. But let's not dance around what we've chosen here. 

And if I could keep being a Debbie Downer, that's just the ones who die. Covid-19 isn't a dead/okay light switch. There are a lot of outcomes in between the two. At any point, you might have thousands of teachers in the hospital for weeks who will live but will be hospitalized (unable to teach and requiring substitutes). And you will have tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands out sick for a couple of weeks or even a month. (Would YOU want them coming back as soon as they felt up to it with YOUR kids at risk? Or would you want an extra week padded on there for good measure?) And they will be getting their own families sick during this process and adding even more horror to the show.

Even if you don't think that's a humanitarian horror for a choice we could have simply NOT MADE, from a purely pragmatic point of view, it's going to cause a runaway teaching crisis. And then you get people who haven't been properly trained doing the teaching. And then the quality of education suffers. And then privatized education makes inroads. And then the student achievement gap by income grows further. And then......

This, of course, does not account for how many kids will get each other sick (from their teachers or each other) and bring Covid-19 home to their parents from the added übervector of schools. And the number of teachers "lost" also doesn't count a lot of teachers who would rather retire, retire early, or just plain quit than literally risk their lives to provide the daytime child care that this is really about.

Every single proposed adaptation for social distancing in school has made me think, "Wait, have these people ever actually BEEN in a classroom?" If you put the kids six feet apart in a typical class, you're going to have about seven or eight kids. And you're telling me that suddenly there will be money in the budget to go from teachers cleaning their own rooms because the district can only afford janitors once a week to proper and full sanitization?

We're about to shove teachers into a meat grinder, and mincing words about it isn't doing anyone any favors. Least of all the teachers.

They can be easy to mix up when you've only ever experienced one.

This mask thing is SO fucking emblematic of the United States where our cultural values mean that we will never succeed at any variant of the prisoner's dilemma.

People: I'm not wearing a mask because it doesn't help me.

CDC: Actually it does, but you're right that it's not much. You're wearing it to protect everyone ELSE. It really reduces the droplets you SPREAD. So if everyone is wearing masks, you'll be safer. But the social contract means you have to wear one too.

People: It doesn't help ME.

Republicans sometimes try to act shocked that Trump is SO bad, but I can't think of a single odious thing he does that isn't really just a Power Move Caliber Version™ of exactly their own general behaviors.

• Racism. Usually mostly with some plausible denial focusing on a more mainstream acceptable racism-adjacent issue, but not really fooling anyone, and stick around long enough and the quiet parts will be said out loud.

• Sexism. Oh, patently offended if you suggest it, of course, but hard to deny. And with a strange problem about anyone who might point out any kind of misogyny. Ever. In any context.

• Religious. But mostly only when it's being used as a cudgel to achieve political gains and justify bigotry. Pragmatically movement through the world is with a healthy disrespect for every single spiritual and conceptual precept of the religion itself.

• Lies, cheats, steals, and then accuses the other side of doing those things in a breathtaking display of macro-abuse dynamics (in this case DARVO).

• Claims to love groups (like LGBT+ groups) while signing legislation or executive orders that obliterate their support, options, and even rights.

• Talks a good game about democracy, but will undermine it in a heartbeat if not winning.

• Tries to rewrite everything so that they were unimpeachable (sometimes literally unimpeachable)

• Wants to rule more than actually govern. Would rather be a minority authoritarian ruler than actually deal with a democratic pluralistic society.

• States rights when passing the buck or trying not to take a stand on civil rights but "respect federal authoritah" when it comes to environmental protections or making voting easier.

• Takes victory laps even when the democracy has been rigged for decades (gerrymandering, voter suppresion)

• Drums up the support of whites.

• Is never––NEVER––at fault, even if with a rubber-stamp majority and an opposition that can't do more than voice objection and leak stories.

• Hypocritical in that brazen, breathtaking way like all those tweets from four years ago somehow don't exist.

• Has a real problem with truth being objectively reported. And facts.

• Utterly disrespects all forms of earned expertise and instead values showmanship.

• Obsessed with Obama and undoing his legacy to "pwn the libs" even if it means there's no pandemic response team, for example.

• Claims to be a culture of life for grandma's sake when trying to keep insurance companies flush in cash, but gets pretty darn "sacrifice the weak" when it's time to actually protect her from a pandemic.

• Nothing really matters more than the economy. No, not that. Not that either. Definitely not that.

• Fuck your feelings. Cruelty is the point.

This isn't some anomaly. This isn't a weird "how did that ever happen moment." The Republicans scratching their head are either hoping you'll buy it, go away, and stop holding them accountable for the people they hand power to, or have been paying absolutely no attention to the culture of their own party for, oh, about fifteen years. This is the paragon of the modern GOP. He is their avatar. If they all stepped into a chamber, Trump would step out saying "The merging is complete."