Help that isn't coming
It's not like we haven't known for a long time that there was no such thing as a real opposition party in this country but it is nonetheless still kind of jarring to see the fact made plain.
Again.
"I have great respect, by the way, for what Schumer did today," Donald Trump said. "He went out and he said that they have to vote with the Republicans because it's the right thing to do. I couldn't believe what I heard, but, you know, I think he's going to get some credit for it."
I swear these elected Democrats are like the guy in the parable of the drowning man. God has sent them another somehow even more odious and villainous piece of shit for them to fight righteously against and save themselves and save us all and they're refusing to take the fucking hint. Waiting for a different kind of help that isn't coming.
I thought this was a pretty good description of where we stand from How Things Work.
Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush Jr. and Obama all to varying extents did awful things and all to varying extents are responsible for the progression of the state of our politics to this point, but they also all believed themselves to be constrained by a set of guidelines, norms, and political realities that no longer exist. Even their most immoral policies were shaped to maneuver through public opinion and economic demands and historic traditions and laws that have now, effectively, disappeared. The playbook that political veterans used to operate in that old world is a set of directions to a house party that is already over. If you show up there you will only find an empty house. The action is elsewhere now. Chuck Schumer continues to pull up in front of that empty house each morning, blinking vacantly, knocking on the door with a bottle of wine in his hand, wondering what is taking so long.
As I've been saying there are only three paths left out of this which are 1) massive and sustained country wide strikes and protests 2) international capital getting burned enough to do something or 3) a third funny thing. Which have you got your money on?
The other day in here I shared a piece by Gareth Watkins titled AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism. It perfectly encapsulated my feelings on this fucking con artist garbage.
"No amount of normalisation and ‘validation’, however, can alter the fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that ... is its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn’t want it. They would be repelled by it."
Today Watkins writes for Hell World on a related matter: The proliferation of AI-generated "deepfake" pornographic images, Melania Trump's (perhaps) well-intentioned efforts to address them, the domineering masculinity of the "traditional" conservative family structure, and the inevitability of the right using such a law to only harm their critics.
“And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.”
You can guess who said that I'm sure.
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More from me down below on the metaphor of the week, my current favorite songs, the poem of the week, Luke's Movie Corner, the worst headlines of the week, and a quick story about using poppers.
Jeanette Winterson too?
The most gullible (or easily bought off) motherfuckers alive are really jumping the gun on having the "do androids dream?" debate for an advanced spell-checker software.
Listen I love sci-fi about whether or not robots and clones have souls or whatever. Are they capable of appreciating or creating beauty? All that shit. I'll guzzle that piss down. But the idea of any of that being relevant right now or any time soon is so fucking stupid. That's like 50,000 things down the line if we even make it there.
Does Microsoft Word mourn deleted files?
Is Ask Jeeves trapped in Hell?
Does my smart dishwasher have a soul?
No but let me ask something of the purveyors of this "AI" nonsense: Do you?
Deepfakes and the Right’s War on Women
by Gareth Watkins
The sexual psychology of right wing males is dull and predictable. Conservative parents, fathers in particular, are encouraged by the vast ecosystem of religious child-rearing manuals and their own suspicion of empathy to be strict, emotionally remote and often physically abusive. The family home is the nation-state or God’s kingdom in miniature, and the father is head of state and God’s representative on Earth. He isn’t fun, he doesn’t joke around, he won’t play dress-up, won’t have a dance party in the kitchen, and he won’t engage in any recreational activities that aren’t competitive or cruel (sports, hunting etc.) He is, as he should only be, a stern authority figure. One assisted by the mother, who acts as his executive officer. It’s important, parenting manuals say, that the mother not be too compassionate or it will turn male children “sissy.” Her role is to make sure that bruises don’t show up at school and to explain to children that their father “forgets himself sometimes” but that he “still loves you.” (He does not).
The child of conservative parents grows up seeing that their father’s power is intimately connected to cruelty. And so he must be cruel to maintain his power and he must maintain his power in order to continue to enjoy cruelty. Whether that cruelty takes the form of emotional neglect, physical abuse or sexual abuse, a female figure is almost always close, able to help but unwilling. When the conservative child is an adult, he will continue the cycle. It’s hard to imagine a world without power, and harder still to exist in this one while renouncing a simple way to have one’s needs met. That could mean expecting free domestic labour from a woman maintaining a “traditional” household, or feeling powerful by hurting somebody weaker than you. The child of conservative parents has no choice but to Be A Man, and will grow to fetishize male power and cruelty while despising the entire gender that failed to protect him from it.
Compounding matters, the child of conservative parents discovers when he is older that, providing he is heterosexual, women have an incredible, visceral power over him. He despises them for their silliness, their Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Eras Tour, but he will crawl over broken glass to get their attention. If he doesn’t get their attention then the people he actually respects, other men, will think less of him, but he nonetheless must court women in a way that enforces gender hierarchies or he’ll be dismissed as a “simp.”
Enter Melania Trump. Traditionally, First Ladies launch blandly inoffensive, unobjectionable programs while their husbands handle the transfer of wealth to the already wealthy. Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No, for example, or Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move. (Admittedly, Republicans did manage to find something objectionable about youth fitness coming from a Black woman.) Melania Trump’s initiative is the Take It Down Act, initially introduced by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar after the former met with 15 year-old Elliston Berry and her mother. Berry had to wait a year for Snapchat to remove sexually explicit, AI-generated deepfakes of herself, and very understandably she would like to spare other women and girls from this ordeal.