terminalpolitics

[terminalpolitics]

For the last two years…

I’ve written @terminalpolitics as an explicitly Leftist political blog. When going through my archive, I noticed that some posts written months or even years apart could be assembled to tell a short story: the core of my political message.

The above posts weren’t intended to link-up, but they are all bits and bobs from the same perspective – the only perspective that I have. If this shows the simplicity of my thinking, I don’t mind, because it also shows that I’ve been consistent over the years.

I’m just about done here. I hope you’ve enjoyed the content and those who are interested can take a look at my own #archive tag for the posts I thought were my best.

Take care, comrades.

[terminalpolitics]

You deserve happiness and love and respect. And you will find it.

I promise.

#GrowingUpUgly When guys in middle school would get dared by their friends to ask you out and see if you say yes as a joke

[terminalpolitics]

I derive all my political positions from my affection for my cat

Some days, I don’t feel particularly hopeful about the future of humanity. Some days, when I see the cruel and terrible things humans are capable of –both individually and as a group– I think negative thoughts like: “Humanity deserves to choke on its own fumes.”

On those days, I go sit with my cat…

Now, I like my cat. I like him a lot. My cat likes me back, but mostly he likes my arm. He likes when my arm pets him, and he likes to sleep on my arm. I try not to wake him when he falls asleep on my arm – that just wouldn’t be right.

But while he’s asleep on my arm, I can’t do much. So I think.

I begin to think about how other cats beside my own exist. Many cats actually. And some of those cats probably like sleeping on human arms. Until cats develop a technology to just grow arms in vats, they will need humans.

Humans and all life on this planet are in danger (cats are too but that’s too much for me to think about). We are destroying our environment and we are killing each other. We have already put a limit on our species’ time on Earth, we just don’t know it yet.

But cats need humans, so we’ve got to find a way to save the human race. The greatest destruction and the greatest threat to life today comes from capitalism. Just changing our behavior as individuals isn’t going to save us from destruction or even slow it down. We need to dismantle the capitalist system and we need to do it fast.

People message me fairly frequently and respond to me in posts telling me that I am a member of this or that ideology. But I’m not. I don’t have any deep ideology.

I just want to make sure that cats have an arm to sleep on, and practically speaking, that requires a global revolution.

[terminalpolitics]

The core of my belief

It may be too late to save most life on this planet from corporate-sponsored climate destruction. We have definitely passed the point of no return for global catastrophe – that is inevitable now.

It may also be the case that we cannot beat capitalism in its race to destroy the world.

But we cannot stop fighting. We cannot surrender to our fate.

Right now, capitalists look to other planets – they are preparing their escape from the hellhole they are creating on Earth. While the rest of the world burns, drowns, or starves, capitalists are preparing to use technology and wealth and their police state to protect them from the devastation they have wrought.

They intend on having front-row air-conditioned seats as fire rages across the continents.

And once the planet becomes truly uninhabitable, they (and a group of select friends) will blast off for stars unknown and they will start again – in a malignant and murderous reverse-panspermia.

They will become the patriarchs whose children grow more innumerable than the sands on their native Mars. Then, the very worst that humanity ever offered will do this again and again until our species is finally extinguished.

That is their goal – even though it sounds like bad sci fi – that is how these people think. What rational people would destroy their own planet if they expected to remain on it?

We may not be able to stop the destruction of this world, though we must do our best to slow it and preserve as much life as we can. And even in that we will likely fail.

But we have no choice but to organize and to fight on. Though we cannot save this planet, we can make sure those who destroyed it die right alongside it.

We need to reach out and drag them back down into humanity’s funeral pyre.

So that if anything survives, if the planet recovers, if new life grows out of the wreckage… should any human still live to witness it, the idea of exploitation will be as alien to them as capitalism would be on the surface of Mars.

We might not be able to establish communism in our lifetimes but we do have the power to make sure capitalism dies with us.

[terminalpolitics]

I'd like to express my appreciation

For the years of support from all my followers and mutuals.

Special thanks goes to: @jonpertwee @williamlegal @themoonfell @thesacreddraught @guruwithin @thinkveganworld @monitorchakas @progressivemillennial @indirispeaks

And to Kesi.

[terminalpolitics]

*The God Exception

The *God Exception is when we would happily call out a person for immoral/sadistic/evil/assholish behavior but we make an exception in the case of God. God can be as immoral/sadistic/evil/assholish as they want.

Obviously, this isn't an issue for nonbelievers or in some religions but it is a big issue in Christianity which happens to be the dominant religion of the most heavily-armed empire on the planet. So, it warrants a little discussion.

There are lots of posts on Tumblr that call-out billionaires for not helping people: "Jeff Bezos and friends could end poverty!" That's all true and we recognize that Jeff Bezos and friends are immoral assholes for allowing a great evil to occur when they have the power to stop it. Likewise, posts point out how historically those in power have turned a blind eye to genocide -- that too is truly evil.

But for Christians, when it comes to God, we have a double-standard... or more accurately an exception because we are unwilling to hold God to any standard.

God in Christianity is all-knowing and all-powerful, so they could solve any problem that they wanted to solve... unlike humans. If we believe in the Bible, we must believe that God has taken direct action when it suited God and when they were acting in their own interest. Christian belief hinges on the fact that God will take direct action.

So we must assume that God is actively choosing to do nothing in the face of totally curable suffering.

Now, I'm not the first person to point this out. Christian apologists have struggled with the problem of "why does God allow evil" for 2,000 years with limited results. Usually they victim blame: "bad things happen because... something something... human nature... mumble... free will." But that doesn't explain why we have things like diseases beyond human control or cure that cannot reasonably be attributed to the actions of humanity.

If a landlord put your grandmother in a toxic building that gave her cancer, you would be outraged and want revenge. Yet God has put countless grandmothers into a world that has given them cancer and we sing more hymns about the "limitless goodness" of God.

And please, let's not try the "God works in mysterious ways" con. We could just as easily claim Jeff Bezos is working mysteriously and behind the scenes to cure your grandmother's cancer and he is objectively more likely to be working on it than God -- and Jeff Bezos doesn't give a fuck about your grandma.

And the question "why does God allow evil" misses the mark because God only allows SOME evil. God has a short list of "evils" that are worth manifesting in this world and smiting people or cities over. Usually these evils involve disrespecting God.

The point of all of this isn't to say "haha your religion is dumb" or to convince you that there is no God. I want you to honestly think about what sort of God you really believe in. I want you to stop exempting God from judgment and standards of behavior and morality. If anything, God should be held to the highest standard.

This isn't about destroying your belief. I want you to question the character of God because I would like you to question the nature of all authorities. Because the thing is, we don't really just have a *God Exception -- we have an *Authority Exception. God is just one example.

We constantly and willingly abdicate our moral responsibility when it would require us to judge our authorities. That authority may be a government, a particular thinker, our parents, our favs. Consider how in the mythology of America, the United States is always working in mysterious ways to bring freedom even when it is hiring death squads to kill community activists. That is another form of the *God Exception.

The *God Exception is our failure to even consider applying any standards of behavior to those under whose power we squirm. We continually and intentionally hold power unaccountable -- even when it comes to imagined authorities like God. We have shaped our psyches to the feel of the lash and the taste of the boot.

To live in a just world, we must close the loophole. We must call authority to account. The first step takes place in our minds where we must rebel against the authorities we have given space in our heads.

In a just world, there will be a different *Authority Exception...

All things *except authority.

[terminalpolitics]

[terminalpolitics]

“A significant number of people conform to a given norm not because of its correspondence to their dispositions, but simply to avoid the sanctions of deviation.”

— Erik Olin Wright, In Defense of Genderlessness

[terminalpolitics]

Two US citizens detained by a Border Patrol agent for speaking Spanish

Ana Suda and her friend, Mimi Hernandez, were born in the United States. They live in Montana. On early Wednesday morning they went grocery shopping. A uniformed Border Patrol agent heard them speaking Spanish to each other and demanded to see their identification. When they asked him if they were being racially profiled he said, “Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here, and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here. It’s the fact that it has to do with you guys speaking Spanish in the store, in a state where it’s predominantly English-speaking.“ He detained the women in the store’s parking lot for 35 to 40 minutes before letting them go.

When the Washington Post contacted US Border Patrol for a response, a spokesperson said, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and officers are committed to treating everyone with professionalism, dignity and respect while enforcing the laws of the United States. Although most Border Patrol work is conducted in the immediate border area, agents have broad law enforcement authorities and are not limited to a specific geography within the United States. They have the authority to question individuals, make arrests, and take and consider evidence.”

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/21/two-us-citizens-detained-by-a.html

[terminalpolitics]

I saw someone on twitter disapprovingly talking about my “post-Leftism” (aside: ffs twitter?! People shouldn’t even be wasting their time taking about me on tumblr). Now, I’ve also had people say I’m a “primmie” and anticiv before.

I cannot honestly claim to be any of these things.

What they really mean is “I disagree with this person therefore they must be part of this movement I also disagree with even though I know nothing about it.”

I wish I could claim a cool indie orientation but all my takes are actually pretty mainstream Leftism.

I ask people to refrain from trying to smear other perspectives by associating them with my vanilla ideas.

[terminalpolitics]

Making a point to my piano teacher

Please reblog if you are a cop infiltrating Leftist circles.

[terminalpolitics]

Leftist Tumblr Anon-Hate Form Letter

Dear:

[ ] comrade

[ ] sjw

[ ] capitalist-roader

[ ] fuckface

I am writing today on behalf of:

[ ] myself

[ ] my commune

[ ] the revolution

[ ] the proletariat

[ ] a law enforcement agency

Your recent post about:

[ ] Marx

[ ] Capitalism

[ ] a popular blogger

[ ] my favorite TV show

[ ] Postmodernism

Was:

[ ] bullshit

[ ] problematic

[ ] counterrevolutionary

[ ] revisionist

[ ] idealist

[ ] a product of civilization

And I think you are:

[ ] an asshole

[ ] a Fed

[ ] a member of the bourgeoisie

[ ] a primmie

[ ] strangely attractive… heh… post more pics… heh… hope this doesn’t sound creepy

I urge you to:

[ ] delete

[ ] die in a gulag

[ ] read Mao

[ ] get a sense of humor

[ ] abolish culture

I hope this letter finds you:

[ ] well

[ ] in tears

[ ] before I do

[ ] by warrantlessly tracking your mobile device location

Sincerely:

[ ] go fuck yourself

[ ] self-crit

[ ] die in a fire

[ ] send nudes

[terminalpolitics]

supporting ethnocidal dictators to own the anarchists

[terminalpolitics]

It's time to take an indefinite Tumblr vacation again

Every couple years –sometimes every six months– I take a break from Tumblr. I’ve noticed these have been getting longer and longer.

I find myself saying the same things and making the same points over and over. And older versions of my same arguments already circulate on here. There are only so many ways to say “kill capitalism.”

I dislike that I am kept active on Tumblr trying to refute bad faith readings of my arguments and outright smears. That’s a waste of energy – ultimately what people say about me isn’t important enough to warrant the attention.

And I’ve noticed that old “bad takes,” when they aren’t being out through the spin-cycle of a handful of big follower blogs, are actually pretty popular and resonate with a lot of Leftists. Attempting to defend myself against lies about me as a person hasn’t been as successful as just letting the old posts speak for themselves. So, this blog is probably more effective on autopilot.

There are one or two subjects that I’d like to address before I go. Mainly it’s about creative Leftist art. So for the next however long that I have the energy to keep posting, I’m going to focus my original posts on art topics–especially writing.

I will keep reblogging interesting things as things wind down.

I appreciate all the support I have received from my readers and I will make sure that I find some new and innovative ways to disappoint them one last time.

[terminalpolitics]

Writing as Revolution: writing the books you want to read

Some of my longtime readers will know that a couple years ago I was fortunate enough to turn my fiction-writing into a legitimate second-career. Now, I don’t believe in credentials or authority and all that but, as someone who writes books, I want to say that YOU have it within you to write them too.

And not only CAN you write books, you NEED TO write them. Let me explain why…

There is only one kind of book worth writing and that is the book that you have always wanted to read.

@neuropunk-travesty made a small post last week about issues with some literary genres (namely fantasy) and suggested “occupying” the genre – I agree that this is a great idea.

When we talk about something like “The Western Canon” the viewpoints, contexts, and backgrounds of the works are extremely narrow. Each work has been added to the Canon because it adds to a meta-theme of “canonicity.” This is an intentional act of curation of “acceptable” ideas and directly privileges certain ideologies over others.

For a long time the publishing industry served the same function. As it existed under capitalism, publishing embraced ideas of “market” and “demographic cross-over.” The silencing of certain perspectives was always chalked up to “market forces” – sorry, kid, nobody would PAY to read that…

But these industries don’t just cater to the tastes of a paying audience, they shape these tastes. They reproduce over and over certain formulas and tropes until the presence of the trope/formula becomes mandatory – Nice YA Dystopia you got there, kid, but where’s the love-triangle?

The homogeneity of ideas is not a failure of capitalism, it is in intentional product of it.

You will rarely find works of resistance published, and when you do it is always about “inverting tropes” – thus reifying the “reality” of these tropes even by criticizing them.

If you want to find radical politics in a paperback, good luck. Even something like feminism only appears in its most status-quo-friendly and commodified form. I spent the last week looking for lists of “Feminist Fantasy Lit” and multiple lists big-upped Game of Thrones. That’s a problem.

We will never see the books we want to read unless WE write them.

Now, you might write your book and then it won’t make it through the many ingenious gates of the traditional publishing – and that’s okay. Nothing truly radical ever did.

But today we have the technology and the digital infrastructure where you can self-publish and get your message out. And honestly, fuck it – you can always write it long-hand in a notebook or pass around your hand drawn illuminated manuscript and other people will READ it.

Because that’s the thing: a book does not exist until you actually WRITE it. Talking about it and planning it are all great but it isn’t a book until it’s read by someone.

Every single person reading this has something in them that only they can say. Every person reading this has within them a book that only they could write.

Our goal is to create a better world. But we can’t create a better world until we have imagined a better world. We must produce our own radical fictions and revolutionary futures. We need to seize the means of producing literature.

You don’t think your ideas are revolutionary? We have been taught to fear and revere the thoughts held in books. That’s because access to books is easy to control and censorship is facilitated by the publishing process. My friend, just the act of writing your own thoughts and placing them next to the “sacred texts” is a revolutionary act.

You have something to say. You have a book to write. You know that there exists a book that you have always wanted to read.

You will never be able to read it until you write it. WE will never be able to read it until you write it.

Get typing.

[terminalpolitics]

Sacramento

[terminalpolitics]

I wonder if I can get my deposit back on Stalin next.