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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Facebook Gems From the Top of June


What can I say?
My windswept look brings 
all the reacts to the FB yard.
Just a reminder. The world being what it is right now, some of my usual focus has been fractured and I'm doing a bit more writing than I normally do on my public Facebook page in more "bite-sized" chunks. 

I've decided to bundle those posts twice a month to help pad some of my flagging blog content. 

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.


I keep hearing the voice of my mother speaking out to white people with that tone she always used when she would ask me what it was **I** did to make the dog bite me or the cat scratch me.

"Well, maybe next time you'll THINK about that before you uphold white supremacy for four hundred years."




Could there be a moment more emblematic of the modern Republican party and its leader than calling for a violent suppression of one's own people while brutally dispersing a crowd who are protesting racial injustice so you can go to a special fancy church with lots of opulence in order to be seen doing a high profile photo-op with a Bible that actually proscribes literally everything you just did....and then not noticing that you're holding it upside down.



The protests are too soon to see a spike in Covid-19 cases. Especially as early as a couple of days ago when the claims started rolling in.

What's NOT too soon to account for that spike is the initial start of the cases from Memorial Day. When all those fucking states that just HAD to reopen because not going to Chili's for dinner or a beach party is tyranny.

Now go look at the state-by-state breakdown and compare that with the cities that had protests. I'll wait.



I apologize for snorting derisively at the folks who had "3rd Amendment Struggle" on their 2020 Bingo cards.



Here is a really good story that is emblematic of the reason that the further left you go, the more the rhetoric isn't willing to consider the family member you think is a good person or the occasional moral actors as a counterpoint to the unethical system all police participate in (and the unethical laws all police uphold).

Here's a protester in his seventies who was pushed down and harmed, and while he bled, they walked past him. Then all those police in this photo (basically) closed ranks, lied, and said that he tripped. Like ALL of them participated in that deception (and if one of them had told the truth, that would have been the person who got fired, censured, possibly attacked by fellow officers). The official report was "tripped and fell." Until......it turned out someone was filming and, oh look, he didn't trip after all, but was pushed.

Then when the two people who pushed him got a suspension, 57 officers (that's the ENTIRE BPD emergency response team if you didn't know) closed ranks even further on the A-Brutality B-Brutality that they KNEW was brutality because they knew they needed to lie about it. C-The LIE about the brutality and D-Consequences for the officers involved in the brutality by simply quitting.

So, somehow, not one of BPD's 57 emergency responders saw ANYTHING wrong with anything that happened.......except of course for the consequences.

This is systemic. This is an unethical system that is designed to lie to protect itself even when it knows it's doing wrong. And will further ask and give solidarity to those who behave unethically.

And it's not like you have to look far to find a zillion examples of this Thin Blue Line™ shit. How many officers must know they work with a white supremacist or someone who has control or anger issues and say nothing because that's the culture. How many would actually be penalized if they did bring it up these concerns because that is the culture?

THAT is why people want to focus on the unethical system and do not consider your Uncle Bob, your really not-so-bad cop family member, to be a "checkmate" counterpoint to that examination. The actually good cops who would speak out, report, tell the truth, or support consequences for officers behaving badly all got fired during their first month. And what is left is a system that is rotting to its core, and might need more than just a few "tough reforms."



This is a collection of pictures/comics/tweets/memes that draw attention to how problematic "ALL lives matter" can be.  https://www.facebook.com/chris.brecharge/posts/3154887584531802



I've seen this in action. It really works.

That this works at all is really all you need to know about white privilege, the "no choice" the police have, and about a dozen narratives that come up around civil unrest.

That it works SO well should slap people advancing these narratives across the face, and the fact that it doesn't means they don't WANT to understand.







A lot of people are gobsmacked that I make money writing (enough to do it outside a lot of major metropolitan areas without a side gig), but when I drill down, I find them extremely reluctant to take small steps. They want to one-and-done their career. Even when I explain that the process of getting to this income has taken me seven years where I (very) gradually phased out my day jobs, they still talk about selling their book and just BEING a working writer. BAM! And the one thing that seems to set most modern working authors apart––even a lot of the insta-success stories that sort of gloss over the years of work before "the phone call"––is their willingness to do a lot of work even to achieve baby steps.

Check in on the folks who couldn't be bothered with slow progress ten years later, and they're STILL retooling that one novel and looking for their big break and unwilling to make cell phone bill money with crowdfunding or try to write a short story for a $500 prize.

I think there's an extremely elegant metaphor there for a lot of different situations, personal, professional, and political. Hail Mary's do happen (especially if you've trained all your life to throw and/or receive them), but if your goal is the endzone, you're going to fail way more than you don't (and lose pmuch all your "games") if you are too good to work the ball down the field with some smaller plays because that's not "enough" progress to satisfy you.



I gotta tell you, that the entire police response to their brutality is a "how dare you hold us accountable," escalation is some classic abusive shit, and if you look at it through that lens, the taking-a-knee and the giving ice cream cones to kids and shit fits a much more sensical broader pattern than the idea that only a few of them are bad and the head scratching as to how it keeps happening.




Playing D&D online through Roll 20.

Literally ALL of my "Sponsored" posts just became Dungeon, the video game.

Facebook, if you're going to listen THIS goddamned close, here's what I really want: send me a cute geek who likes pizza, video games, social justice, intersectional feminism, horror and/or sci-fi genre, Star Trek, A:TLA, reading, and the various franchises on Disney Plus, plz. Also who is really ready to add ONE person to their Shelter In Place options. 

Bonus points for severe cuties.



"He was probably a terrorist."

That's what this amounts to.

Days after declaring the decentralized non-organized group of just about everyone opposed to fascism in anything more than a non-committal root-for-the-allies-during-WWII-movies-kind-of-way to be a “terrorist organization,” he then offers an explanation clearly not the reality that anyone saw.

And no one will believe him, but a few people will "believe" him. And moderates (and no small number of liberals) will get caught up in "proofs" and analysis and the ARGUMENT even though it's clearly, obviously a post-hoc lie.

And all the while they are quibbling over what "provocateur" means, or how a 75-year-old man would even be able to fling himself with perfect timing at the ground when (actually) pushed in order to accelerate his fall, or psychoanalyzing whether or not Trump himself wrote provocateur correctly when he can't spell hamburger or coffee, or examining video to show people that it was a helmet Gugino was holding, the bigger picture gets glossed over that the head of the executive branch is Tweet-exonerating police brutality, lies about that police brutality, and the grotesque rank-closing that police everywhere have participated in to basically say, "We ARE the law."

By naming a very vague group a terrorist organization, his insinuation (which could apply to almost anyone who strongly dislikes him) that someone is a member of this group then justifies anything that happens to them.

THAT--not whether he's technically right about provocateur, or if Gugino was messing with police scanners, or if it was "really" him Tweeting––is what should scare the fucking SHIT out of people.

The President is now essentially modeling to his pissed off militarized enforcers how to get away with anything––even murder.

"Could have been ANTIFA."

*shrugs* "He was probably a terrorist."


RISE UP!!


"How would we even DO that?" asked the society that had spent the last forty years defunding literally everything else.



Me: You know it fits into CLASSIC abuse patterns to get mad and escalate at the people who are calling you out for your brutality. It's like....page one of the abusive tactics handbook.

Police: Fine, we'll just leave. You'll be lost without us. You'll never make it alone.

Me: Okay....so.....moving on to page TWO....




Person on my Facebook Page: Please ban me if you're going to be all political.

Me: K



Woke up, fell out of bed
Bunch of transphobes in my thread
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup (tea)
And banned all their asses even if it made me late

Shook-KA Shook-KA Shook-KA




Part of being a good ally––perhaps the most important part––is listening to marginalized communities tell you that something is a problem instead of informing them that you've decided it isn't.



Folks (usually white dudes) who pride themselves on being surrounded with lots of diametrically opposed opinions and being oh so willing to ENGAGE in the marketplace of ideas over and over and over and over (no matter how much the underlying premise of some of these conversations hurts anyone watching said conversation like, say, their OTHER friends on social media watching their humanity be the subject of an intellectual debate) should really make an effort to understand how the SQiD (Status Quo Defender™) works.

See, your average SQiD never changes. They begin every "debate" with "Prove to me that is even a problem." They attack expertise. They propose ludicrous narratives that rationalize clear-as-day statistics. They argue from bad faith. ANYTHING that would require them to believe that their current world view is anything but utterly unimpeachable must be countered. And if you should ever incontrovertibly "win" such a debate, you will find they often have to depart suddenly. And whether they quit or stay and get trounced (rare), in the end they announce that it has been very stimulating and thank you as if you just had a vigorous martial-arts sparring match with them. Then they must go, but appreciate the discussion. (At least as long as you never got "emotional.")

Then it happens.

The next time you run into them to discuss that issue again they have returned to initial positions like it's a new chess match and not a growth process, which is exactly what they see "debate" as. So they do their favorite opening move: "Prove to me that is even a problem."

And since they never move their "square one," those willing to have that conversation with them ad nauseam are engaged in an endless tango.

If you don't learn that actually there are SOME conversations that are absolutely NOT worth having, you will be quagmired there forever as the Status Quo marches on.

I'd say this is white supremacy TBH.
Privilege means never having to think about it
so long as you steer clear of those pesky "SJWs" on social media



This is a number of images about what it would actually look like if we slowly defunded the police.  https://www.facebook.com/chris.brecharge/posts/3152257644794796




Someone from my Facebook Page: Can we not have posts like this one?

Me: Absolutely. I'll make sure you never see another one.




Just so you know, between having a relatively easy and non-fatal bout of Covid-19 and wearing a mask, I can absolutely tell you that being sick with 104 fever and the chills, coughing up the lava that it feels like is in the bottom of your lungs so frequently that your throat is aching and raw, being completely unable to move for several days, and having to ride out a full-on quarantine for a full week after your last symptom goes away....

....is way more inconvenient than the mask.




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