Facebook Compilation (Top of February)

For years, I didn't count all the bite-sized chunks of writing I was doing on Facebook (particularly during "interesting times) as "writing." But it's a post here and a post there, and sometimes I spend hours a day working on that writing, so it's high time I acknowledge that fact that it "counts."

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 Feb-1st through Feb-15th. (You're welcome to follow me there but read up in the Facebook FAQ [last question] before you send me a friend request.) Once we've caught up, these will only land once every two weeks.

If there's a specific context that's important to one of the posts, I'll add it in at the top, but remember this would have been before, during, and just after the Senate impeachment trial of Trump.

I have seen the regressive left. I have witnessed first-hand an online mob that cares more about cyber bullying than restorative justice. I have watched in real time as people have lost huge chunks of their friends and chosen family networks because someone with greater “leftist cred” (usually Ship of Theseus’ing a personal incompatibility into a social justice “sin”) has dragged them publicly. These aren’t boogeymen made up to point baseless fingers at a community with absolutely zero cause for some self-reflection.

But when someone like Bill Maher or some people throwing their support behind a TERF or some vast moderate, right-of-center chunk of the Democratic Party who are sure they could win elections if everyone harmed by the status quo would just stop talking about it are the ones complaining, what they are complaining about is CONSEQUENCE CULTURE.

Chris's Pass/Agg theater of the day:

If you're going to run back to your wall to get support from your peeps, that's cool. We all do it. And we all cast ourselves in the best possible light when we relay our conflicts with others. (Well….most of us. Some of us question ourselves for the rest of time even if we were clearly being abused.) 

But when you start to maybe replace what happened with a few embellishments and maybe leave the part out of the screenshots where you were absolutely behaving unconscionably and got called on it, and topping the whole thing off with a bold determination of bigoted intentions that literally no one INCLUDING MEMBERS OF THE GROUP IN QUESTION (which it should be made clear that you are not) thought was actually happening…..

At that point, you should probably check out the Ship of Theseus question. Because that thought experiment is starting to become very relevant. And I see this shit in leftist circles all too often.

At what point does your representation of the exchange alter SO many details to your favor or the other's castigation that it's not even really what was said?

In the writers room, moments before the concept of SG-1 gets pitched:

"So, what if we had a show kind of like Star Trek, but instead of the prime directive, they basically do…just…. the TOTAL FUCKING opposite? They just show up and jack the shit of EVERY culture they see. Show them tech. Say where they’re from. Interfere left and right. They don’t even PRETEND not to meddle if they have a contrary value system.

The sooner Democrats learn to just say, "It didn't seem to bother you when Trump was president," the better we're all going to be. 

Fiscal hawks and the claim that you can't punish someone if they're no longer in office are the argument dujour, but it'll work in SO MANY situations!

I know the GOP think they can do the Jedi Mind Trick with gaslighting and just get away with that abusive bullshit, but I distinctly remember "Lock her up" being chanted OH….ONCE OR TWICE at rallies. So what do we say?

And where to even begin with deficit spending….JFC, the things Trump did. So what do we say?

"It didn't seem to bother you when Trump was president."  

Phrase that pays, Dems. Learn it. Love it. Say it a LOT.

Do you know what it was that Gina Carano said that upset people? Can you find the exact words? Are you capable of looking it up across almost any medium in the known world?

That's freedom of speech. The fact that she wasn't silenced means she has it.

Everything that has happened since? Just consequences of her actions.

Stop. Just stop. 

None of these people cares if Gina Carano "learns," or "is allowed to develop." (Neither of which requires employment by Disney to occur.) They just don't want there to be consequences for this speech. They walked right past the fact that she did NOT learn when people objected to the last months of her hateful bigotry. No apologies. No backtreading. No learning to at least shut the fuck up with a public profile. Just double, triple, quadruple down and add worse and worse hate speech. And they want people to be able to use hate speech without consequence.

"Any speech!" they will claim, but this is not accurate. Certain people socially censured will earn a shrug and a "that's what you get" or "something something something free market something." It happens every day, and with far more insidious replatforming tactics than someone getting fired from a position where their public political views will cost a major corporation.

How do we decipher this hypocrisy? Well, actually it's piss easy. You just watch what they defend and what they are conspicuously silent about. Anti-social justice is seldom about people being WRONG with their rationalization. It's just about calling out the double standard. They're a lot less slick than they think they are.

But if you don't trust yourself, know that EVERY. SINGLE. STUDY. done on this reveals the same thing: people start to defend "free speech" in situations where it doesn't actually apply when the ideas being discussed more closely align with their own. Because they recognize that they may suffer consequences for their OWN beliefs.

I have basically watched people this last year make (informed) decisions that lengthen and worsen this pandemic for my loved ones, many of whom have had no choice due to their status but to treat it with an abundance of caution. I'm not even talking about maskholes and hoaxers. I don't really know any of them. [Incidentally, I'm also not talking about careful people who got Covid despite their precautions. It's been a while, but don't forget that I WAS one of those.] I'm talking about people who were just…..done. Like a bad driver at a stop sign who yanks their car out in front of a semi because they've "waited long enough."

I'm talking about people who just decided they were not going to let the pandemic slow them down TOO much. They gathered, they exposed themselves to high risk without quarantining, they mixed pods with pods with pods until they were "podding" with dozens and hundreds of people by proxy, and they did risky stuff while assuring everyone they were "being careful," and they didn't seem to care that they were acting like a turd in a pool and ruining things for everyone who couldn't be so cavalier with their risk assessment. (Some of them even acted shocked when they GOT Covid.) 

I haven't said anything. But I see it.

Stargate SG-1 understood the microaggression of saying people's names wrong 23 years ago. Every person who basically power-disrespects the Goa'uld says their names wrong ("Like Goold.") The races that respect them pronounce it correctly. And Daniel alternates depending on whether he is speaking academically or with his emotional hatred. 

Twenty-three years ago, they got this concept that it's intentionally shitty to not say someone's name correctly. It really cuts into the plausible deniability of the "Gosh, whatever could the problem be?" faux innocence an entire generation later.

Regarding the freezing storm that hit Texas

This would be one of those times when it's super uncool to do that "You call that an earthquake" or "You call this cold?!?" one-upmanship, and remember that if an area is getting weather that they basically NEVER get, they will not have the infrastructure in their building designs or utilities or the cultural knowledge ("lifehacks") to deal with it in the way that a place that gets more extremes on the regular will.

Of COURSE it's just about the sexism and the racism and the world order where white men ran EVERYTHING (instead of just, like, 85%). Of course it is. Of COURSE it is. JFC. Do you think they're harkening back to the halcyon days of strong unions, 90% tax brackets, and the entrenched New Deal?

Of all their bullshit, "Make America Great Again" has been the easiest to decode for exactly what it is.

It’s funny to me how much of “awesome” alien future communications tech from shows even as recent as the 90s basically amounted to Zoom.

The Senate voted on jurisdiction days ago, voted that they had it, proceeded, and then a handful of Senators walked out of the chamber having acquitted Trump, popped right over to a media microphone, and practically boasted that the main reason they voted to acquit was because they didn't believe they had jurisdiction*. 

[*It's not. They did it because Trump had an (R) after his name. But that keeps them arguing about the legalese instead admitting to what they're actually doing, which is exonerating his behavior for the sake of party loyalty. They're washing their hands just as fast as they can and with as much plausible deniability as they can muster.]

But in case you think that's slick of them, basically here's what just happened: the party of law and order just did the Senate version of Jury Nullification….practically bragging about it to avoid defending Trump's ACTUAL behavior.

It takes a special sort of moxie for a lawyer to get up during the due process part of a procedure and argue that their client isn't getting due process.

Regarding the firing of Gina Carano

The irony is that people at Disney—paid to do analyses about shit JUST. LIKE. THIS.—almost certainly knew exactly what the blowback was going to be, and her words were SO hateful they said, "We have to do this even if it means we weather a controversy. Loud. Proud. And NOW! Because over time she will lose us MORE money." Like they didn't even bother to do it quietly or write her gently out of the show or just let her go for some ostensible other reason.

That's how awful she was. That a team at Disney sat down and said, "Here are our projections with or without her and we've decided to do something." This is a company that DOES NOT take a stand on social issues and that quietly ignores its controversies until they go away. They didn't even release a statement or show up to answer congressional inquiries to speak to their involvement with Xinjiang slave camps. SLAVE CAMPS. They don't take a stand on anything "moral." They do things that protect their bottom line. And they took one look at the continuing consequences and noped out.

They're never going to get 17 Republicans to turn on Trump, and they know it. 

What's really on trial is the 50 Republican senators. What they're really doing is putting the narrative that this was no big deal (just some angry people blowing off steam) and "we can just move past it with a shrug" on trial. And those senators will have to go on the record in all their partisan glory and say "No big."

How come, in TV and movies when they shoot something and it goes down for a while but then reveals itself to have REGENERATIVE POWERS and it's not really dead, the next time they shoot it, it just stands there laughing? But there's no reason for it to be stronger. It didn't grow armor or anything. It just regenerates. Bullets should do the same amount of damage, and technically shooting it should make it go down for the same amount of time. Every time you shoot it, you buy yourself the same couple of minutes. If you have enough bullets, you might have hours or even days to plan something, just as long as you remember to shoot the thing every once in a while. 

It could be done intense like that BSG where the cylons showed up every 33 minutes, or kind of funny where the person is like, "Oh crap, it's 30 seconds over. I'm going to have to listen to the monologue about my doom now." "I SHALL FEAST UPON YOUR––"  "Yeah yeah." BAM!

I say let them filibuster. But old school. They can't just use the bylaws of the Senate to THREATEN to filibuster. In front of CSPAN cameras with a scrolling newsreel in front of them that tells every single American what they are so desperate to block that they can't even risk a vote, they have to hold the floor without so much as a break. Let it go on for days. Weeks. All hours of the morning. (An earlier version of this said don't let them lean or sit, which is [on reflection] ableist bullshit, but if this rule is going to exist, they have to HOLD THE FLOOR.) 

Put their complete inability to compromise and or suffer a regular vote in a representative body on full display for every single vote they want to block, instead of framing the fillibuster as some twee little check-and-balance rule that keeps bad legislation from eking through rather than the blunt and ostentatious obstructionism that it really is. If cloture can't happen, make them show everyone their true colors like in 1964, when Southern senators held the floor for SIXTY DAYS in opposition to anti-lynching legislation.  Force them, on camera, to be on the wrong side of issue after issue and willing to waste the taxpayers' money reading Dickens to prevent a floor vote instead of just doing their fucking job.