I kind of expected shit to go sideways as soon as Trump took office. I’ve been readying myself for it for a while, after all, so I had a pretty good idea of what his government would do, how’d they do it, and how that would go. I didn’t expect it to be as grand and sweeping a shitstorm as it is, but we’re still within (the admittedly far end of) my projections. What has surprised me, though, which maybe it shouldn’t have given how the election went and how the party behaves over all, is how the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And not only are they not doing anything, but they’re actually supporting some of the confirmations of Trump’s horrible, unqualified, and incredibly disastrous government. They’re not trying to reformat themselves into an opposition party. They’re not even trying to PRETEND to be acting against him! What they’re actually trying to pretend, with a few exceptions, is that this is a normal governmental transition. Which is whack! It’s fucked up, even! This shit isn’t normal and the fact that they literally made a goddamn vote deal so they wouldn’t have to work on the weekends is abhorrent, ESPECIALLY after the first aerial crash that came as a likely result of Trump attempting to gut the FAA. This isn’t normal! They should try to do fucking anything at all! Literally anything! People’d be lining up to support them if they did! No one likes this and even the people who like this are going to stop liking it as soon as more air traffic accidents start happening, disease via food contamination runs rampant, and the next plague breaks out! The first two are a foregone conclusion [I wrote this on the morning of the 31st, before the second collision, so I feel kinda bad but also very justified in writing this, even as SOME Democrats have begun to do something that still falls short of what feels like the minimum I’d expect from an opposition party] but the last thing seems increasingly likely as bird flu and fucking tuberculosis start to pick up and the systems that might have warned us they were coming are being dismantled by a mixture of pettiness destructiveness and incompetence!
Continue readingFascism
A Bunch Of People Are Either Pro-Fascist Or Really Fucking Stupid. Or Both.
The last couple days have been rough. Rough enough that I’ve not only failed to fix my post buffer but let it entirely disappear. Sure, I’ve got drafts aplenty, but most of them are ideas from a week ago or from earlier this week, back when the world looked different. More anxiety-inducing, sure, but better. I’ve never handled uncertainty well because there’s really not much you can do about that, you know? Once you know, once the many possibilities have collapsed into a single reality, at least then you know what you’re dealing with. Today, though, as I’m wearily writing this post after a couple long nights of not sleeping very much, I miss the way I felt on Monday, as I went to bed before the day of the election. Sometimes uncertainty is better than reality. Not yet knowing is better than knowing. I’d rather go back to before I knew that the majority of US voters wanted fascism. Or at least were stupid enough to fall for the fascist con-man’s spiel. Because that’s the thing, you know? It is literally only one or the other at this point. There’s literally no excuse for choosing to vote for Trump other than wanting authoritarianism, fascism, bigotry, and hate to win, OR being too stupid to tell that the giant orange doofus is lying to you when he says that he’s not going to do all the things the people who are going to be in his administration say he’s going to do. Sure, he SAID he’s not going to ban abortion care, but he literally spent part of his presidency setting it up and is a part of the whole goddamn political party who has been relentlessly trying to do that ever since Roe v Wade. What the fuck did you think was going to happen?
Continue readingToday Is Election Day In The United States Of America (2024 Edition)
And what an absolute crock of shit it is. On one hand, we have a candidate who is supposedly left-leaning but would be seen as being to the right side of the center-right position in most European countries, not to mention some of the human-rights violation stuff like supporting Israel’s genocide efforts and somehow supporting whatever the hell is going on at the US border. On the other hand, we had a literal fascist felon who supposedly has a secret plan to become president even if he doesn’t win the election, running on a far-right platform that is more and more exactly the nazi platform. It’s fucking wild, let me tell you, to be a person in this country who has to help pick between these two miserable human beings. I mean, the choice is clear and super easy to make, but it sure feels bad that this is where my country is at. This asshole (Trump, to be specific) should have been laughed out of the area a decade ago. He should have been in prison even longer ago, given all the fraud. Only by the virtue of being a “rich” celebrity has he managed to get this far in life without any time in prison. The man’s a wannabe mobster and is so blatant about it that the entirety of US culture has shifted in order to not lose their minds over how much blatantly wrong and illegal stuff this man and his campaign for presidency have done over the last ten-ish years. I really wish I could say that I don’t and can’t understand how anyone could think of Trump as a viable president or as anything beyond someone who deserves life in prison, but I do and can because I’ve seen it happen. I watched it happen.
Continue readingDigging Into The Subtext Of Fullmetal Alchemist
Very recently, out of a desire to have something to do that didn’t require any input or attention from me (well, and to continue teaching Crunchyroll what kinds of stuff I liked), I started watching Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. This is easily one of my favorite anime since it is a remake of the Fullmetal Alchemist story that closely adheres to the manga by the same name, which is absolutely my favorite manga series. I am not a fan of the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime since it seems to go in some odd directions pretty much immediately (largely because the anime series was made well before the manga series was finished), but I know plenty of people who watched it and enjoyed it. I’ll admit a level of bias here since I started reading Fullmetal Alchemist as one of my first manga series right as the first two volumes were released in the US and I didn’t miss a new volume until the series concluded. I read through it at a very formative time in my life and the story has stuck with me for years, standing up to scrutiny each time I read through it again and sometimes revealing things I missed the first time. Which is what I’m finding now as I watch the anime and think my way through the bits of the manga that it skips past or trims to fit a different media format. There’s a whole major aspect to this story I never really considered all that deeply despite how integral it is to the setting. Sure, it isn’t something that’s addressed explicitly by the manga or anime, but it’s not only a major aspect of the setting and worldbuilding, but a active backdrop that helps develop every single character in the series. After all, the story wouldn’t be even close to the same if it wasn’t about power struggles and working towards the good of all within a facist, authoritarian state.
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