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Quick Thoughts

Democrats had all the time in the world to codify Roe (50 years) and they didn’t because running on the possibility of Roe getting overturned gave them a huge amount of leverage. Even people who don’t give two ratty fucks about electoral politics (me) still turned out in crucial elections because fundamental health care was being held hostage.

Now that Roe is most likely over, it’s time to consider what that means. First, neither Democrats nor Republics actually give a shit about babies or a woman’s right to choose. They have a mutual class interest to protect and running on abortion will always win elections regardless of whether or not it’s legal, and obviously this dead horse has been beaten clear into the underworld, but an abortion ban, just like any other issue of accessibility, does not affect rich people. 

That was the first thing. 

The second thing is that capitalism is contingent upon a large, inexhaustible, exploitable labor force. The birth rate in the US has been trending downwards so the logical answer is force people to keep giving birth. Babies come into the world poor and just like their parents, they’re going to stay that way. On the plus side, in 18 years we’ll have a fresh crop of Amazon warehouse workers.

Finally, this doesn’t stop at Roe. If the court is basing it’s opinion on a fundamental right to privacy, that basically makes all health care subject to government oversight. I wrote at length about what’s happening to trans people here and cis people acted like it was someone else’s problem. Legislating bodies is legislating bodies. Once the first domino is tipped, the rest are sure to follow. 

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Mask On, Mask Off

I feel the same way about masking as I do about voting or recycling. It’s good and you should probably do it but it won’t make a measurable difference in a society that simply doesn’t care whether you live or die. Admittedly this is a grim outlook but it’s not wrong. 

Economy Before People appears to be the guiding philosophy of the Biden administration under the banner of a “return to normalcy”. Maybe you haven’t noticed but normalcy in this country looks like no health care and no overarching adherence to public safety. That’s why we’re the mass shooting capital of the world and why the UN called the explosion of homelessness here a “human rights crisis”. Covid is just another thing that kills people, but since we treat low wage workers like a renewable resource, it doesn’t really matter. 

A million people dead and the tag line is “thank you for your service”. A million people dead and it’s not enough to reevaluate our health care system. A million people dead and the prevailing attitude is that most people are tired of hearing about it. 

What’s left to say?

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ACAB Includes NextDoor

The NextDoor app is a menace, a truly despicable place full of the worst humanity has to offer. 

If you’ve ever thought, “Wow, I wish I hated my neighbors more” you should create an account and see what Carol from two streets down thinks about the labor shortage. It’s not good. I will tell you that much. 

And it’s funny too because I live in a Yard Sign neighborhood where “No Human is Illegal” AND YET these people will snitch each other out for breathing too close to their perfectly manicured, utterly useless lawns. It’s like the Stanford Prison Experiment, except we’re all simultaneously the guards and the prisoners doomed to scroll through post after post about “what this city has become”. 

And jokes aside, this feverish obsession with crime is concerning both on a community level and a psychological level since I am convinced that most of my neighbors spend their days glued to their living room windows in a fit of paranoid delusion hoping against hope that having 911 on speed dial will finally pay off. 

The hottest topic in my neighborhood is the homeless. There are a lot of homeless people here, extensive tent cities, trash and RV’s lining the streets. 

The general consensus is that this is both undesirable and inconvenient. Joan, whose house is currently appraised at 900,00 dollars, thinks it’s an eyesore and can’t understand why the city wants her to trim her tree limbs growing too close to power lines but won’t do anything about “those people in OUR neighborhood”. 

Well, let me tell you Joan, if you’re reading this, homeless people also do not want to be homeless. Shocking, I know. In fact, most people prefer to piss and shit in doors, take hot showers, and sleep in beds. Imagine that! 

But it just so happens that we live in a rapidly deteriorating capitalist nightmare that’s propped up on people living and dying in the most inhumane ways imaginable.

Just this morning there was a post about a person laying motionless in a store parking lot. The poster suspected that the person had frozen to death, and even though they didn’t stop to check or call emergency assistance, the anonymous parking lot person had “been on their mind”. 

Now, I broke my own rule and read the comments, a rookie mistake I know, and mostly they were from people who believe that this is the inevitable outcome of what they assume was most likely drug related. Oh well. 

Obviously none of these brave commenters have heard the expression about what happens when one makes assumptions. Double oh well. 

The thing is, snitching, hand wringing, and complaining doesn’t make people less homeless, or in the case above, make the parking lot person less deceased. 

It just makes people afraid. It takes us out of community and places us squarely at odds with one another, entrenching us in class warfare wherein one group deserves what they have (*cough* *cough* generational wealth) and the other group should be punished for existing (something something personal responsibility something something). 

And the thing is, I don’t know one person who hasn’t made A Bad Decision, but I do know lots of people whose class and wealth status insulate them from having to suffer the same consequences that the parking lot person did. 

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Late to the Party

I decided to start a blog this morning because the alternative is doing my made up email job and I don't feel like it.

This is not a blog *about* anything. It is simply a thought repository living in the void on a platform clinging to relevancy (analogous to my own life). 

I am also starting this blog because dropping diatribes about Fidel Castro in the group chat at 7 in the morning is, apparently, annoying. 

What I am actually thinking about today is our national inclination towards fascism. I will not call it a descent when we’ve been here all along, but it does feel that way, partially because for a moment in time it seemed like a movement towards liberation was building. Personally, I never felt more patriotic than I did in 2020 when Twitter was full of pictures of burning police precincts. But, much like the precincts fires themselves, that energy has fizzled out and now here we sit in a capitalist hellscape of our own making. 

Cities are unlivable. Land is unobtainable. More and more people are freezing to death on sidewalks in front of unoccupied billion dollar high-rises. Fish are like 80 percent plastic, and the LGBTQIA+ community is under constant attack by politicians and for some inexplicable reason, the lady who wrote Harry Potter.

Since there’s so much to unpack in that last paragraph, I guess I will start with issues facing the LGBTQIA+ community, and because I am feeling particularly hateful towards the Harry Potter lady, trans folks. 

In case any of you reading this are suffering from similar brain rot, I would like to remind you that trans people have existed since the beginning of human civilization and will continue to exist right up until the very end. Our understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality may have changed, but that is an indisputable fact. 

Because of this indisputable fact, the likelihood that you have shared a restroom with someone who is not of your same biological sex is as certain as my mom is that I should have done more with my life. 

There is no nefarious plot by the trans community to infiltrate bathrooms and commit assaults. The moral panic around this completely made up and baseless scenario is alarming on So. Many. Levels. especially because it is mostly centered around a fixation on child sexual abuse. If these toads (no offense to actual toads) really cared about that, they would focus on the areas where it occurs most often - the family and the church, but because the nuclear family and the church are two pillars upholding the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy we call home, that will never happen. 

We must then conclude that this was never really about The Children and was only ever about neutralizing any threat to the aforementioned white supremacist capitalist patriarchy we call home.