収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Republican Senators will file TODAY for cloture on SB-9, an anti-trans bill in the US Senate. The actual vote could be today, tomorrow, or Monday. Axios reports it’s probably Monday, BUT IT COULD BE TODAY.

What does this mean and why is it bad?

Cloture is Senate noises for ending debate. Ending debate requires 60 votes, which means the Republicans can’t win this vote by themselves. They need seven (7) Democrats to defect. Unfortunately, some of them are very wibbly. At least a few will go over. We have to keep it down to six or fewer.

If the Republicans can force cloture now, then they’ll be able to pass the bill later on a party-line vote whenever they want, and it won’t take long.

This is where we stop this bill. Not later. Here. Now. If this vote goes through, then the bill itself can be approved with only Republican votes, and it will be.

So contact your Senators TODAY. February 27, 2025. TODAY. Thursday. TODAY.

Preferably in the morning, because while the vote is probably Monday, you just don’t know with these fucks.

If you don’t know who your Senators are or how to call them, here’s a tool to find out.

If you don’t know what to say, here’s a script. But try to put it in your own words. It’s always better if you’re not reading a script.

CALL YOUR SENATORS. TODAY. SAY NO TO CLOTURE ON SB-9, the so-called “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025,” an explicit anti-trans hate bill. TODAY.

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Remember yesterday, how I wrote about the Musk/Trump/Vance administration defying court orders and black-letter law?

We’re there.

A federal judge on Monday said the White House has defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate.

The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered Trump administration officials to comply with what he called “the plain text” of an edict he issued last month.

Particularly of Federal workers, but not just of Federal workers, I ask:

Are you ready to defy illegal orders?

Best get to it.

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Okay, so, Vance is out there saying that the courts have no authority over the executive branch’s “legitimate power” – as defined by the executive branch – so we’re ramping up into full-on, overt refusal to comply with court rulings.

It’s a great time – if you’re them – to be moving on this kind of shit, because nobody’s paying attention. It’s Super Bowl Sunday. Nobody’s watching and nobody cares about anything but the championship.

So what’s going to need to happen is that rank and file workers and management are going to have to be the ones saying “no, the courts said that’s illegal,” and they’re going to need to be ready to do that first thing Monday morning.

That’s going to get real scary when DOGE and Project 2025 people call the US Marshals in, like they threatened at USAID in order to force employees to give them illegal access to systems.

Would the Marshals do it? Are they ready to act as the local shock troops for an illegal Trump regime? That’s going to be a wildly important question in the next week or so.

States are going to have to be ready to refuse executive orders too. If your state has a law preventing National Guard from other states being deployed to your state without your governor’s permission, that’s a good thing right now. If your state doesn’t have this, it might be a good law to get into place immediately, if you can. (Washington State is in the latter category, and is actively putting said law into place at Governor Ferguson’s insistance, which is good. It means he’s aware.)

I’m not sure how to say “there is no Constitution if they do this,” or how to say “there is no United States if there is no Constitution,” but that’s basically the situation, and maybe that’s how to say it. This dissolves the compact, de facto if not de jure, and I they’re hoping to conquer the several states through emergency decrees, intimidation, and maybe just outright force of arms.

Trump wants to invoke the insurrection act. Trump wants to suspend the Constitution.

This is probably as good a way to do it as any.

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Here’s the latest: Musk and Trump are cutting off the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children unless they delete all LGBT-specific information and start deadnaming trans kids.

This will hurt LGBT children and straight children of LGBT parents.

They know. That’s the point.

This is because they want to hurt the queer kids (and straight kids with queer parents) and they’re perfectly happy to hurt straight kids with straight parents along the way.

They like hurting children. My entire life, they have always wanted to hurt children. From opposing anti-bullying law because it might protect queer kids to waxing nostalgic and openly rhapsodising about how they miss being able to hurt LGBT children and how they want to be able to do it again, THEY WANT TO HURT CHILDREN.

They say so. In those words.

THEY WANT TO HURT CHILDREN.

THEY SAY, OUTRIGHT, THEY WANT TO HURT CHILDREN, AND ENJOY HURTING CHILDREN, AND WANT TO DO IT AGAIN.

This is who they are.

This is who they have always been.

I used to think this would have weight with people. Even Republicans. But honestly, I don’t think all the times I’ve documented this – sometimes in gory detail – has ever changed a single goddamn mind.

So I no longer think it does.

Motherfuckers are straight up torturers of children and it doesn’t mean a single. goddamn. thing. Not to anybody.

According to the article, NCMEC is cooperating. Going along. I’m sure they have their rationalisations and I don’t give a single fuck about any of them. Fuck the American voter, fuck Trump, fuck Musk, fuck this entire goddamn child-raping country.

Write your own goddamn ending, because right now, I just fucking can’t.

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Let me pick one way Trump is working to destroy the United States. One petty way, designed to cause long-term harm. One internal way, striking directly at Americans.

Last week, Trump ordered drawdowns of water from Federally-controlled reservoirs in California. On Friday, those drawdowns started.

This is what he was talking about when he lied about the US Army entering California and “turning on the water” to fight the fires.

(He also lied about water flowing from Cascadia south, which literally cannot happen as there are not pipe connections over the mountains separating our watersheds, but that’s a secondary issue.)

Trump opened winter storage reservoirs in California’s San Joaquin Valley to throw a bunch of unexpected water downstream. For no purpose, other than sabotage.

These reservoirs are nowhere near the LA fires. They do not affect water supplies in LA. No one downstream can use the water; in fact, state and local engineers had to rush to avoid damage from the unplanned and unexpected outflow, and convinced the US Army Corps of Engineers to slow the release to this end.

Here’s where they are:

You’ll note that’s northeast of San Francisco, and nowhere even remotely close to LA.

A little of that water will seep into the ground. Not much.

Most will go out to the sea, unused and untouched.

And so, it will not be there in the summer, when it is actually needed, for the purposes for which it was actually being stored – mostly, for agriculture. There will be less water for crops.

Will there be enough?

Maybe. This is in the north, so we’ll hope so. But we don’t know.

This is Trump fucking California, and the citizens of California – an American state – because he can. He will, of course, blame Democrats, and some number of his cultists will believe him. I don’t know how many, but it will be somewhere between “most” and “all.”

There are so many more stories like this. So many more, many of higher priority and importance, and who knows how many more further down the scale.

The breadth of that attack is the point, because his goal is not and has never been to “save America.”

His goal is to destroy it, for personal profit, and own the ruins.

When I say that Trump could not do more to harm this country than if he were a paid Russian agent?

I mean it.

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I’ve been saying since the election that the most useful phrase we may well have over the next several months to years is this:

“Why are you complaining? This is exactly what you voted for.”

You may add, “you stupid-ass motherfuckers” onto the end as your taste dictates.

And we have our very first true case already, as the Fraternal Order of Police have condemned Donald Trump for doing exactly what he said he would do in pardoning January 6th insurrectionists, including those who attacked police.

All together now, everyone! Three, two, one:

Why are you complaining? This is exactly what you voted for, you stupid-ass motherfuckers.

Now. Isn’t that nice?

After all, it’s not like he didn’t tell everyone who would listen. Over and over again.

This is what people get for voting like complete fucking morons, voting with the single goal of hurting people they don’t like.

You see, there’s a fact here, and it’s very simple:

Every psychopath who tells you they’ll deliver your retribution and pain onto others will not hesitate for a single goddamn second to turn around and deliver it onto you, too, if they decide it’s in their interest.

Or that it would just be fun.

And to those people, I further say this:

Get smart, dumbshits, and for once in your useless goddamn lives, learn something.

No. I do not intend to be gracious. Not about any of this.

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The first anti-LGBT executive order is out. On the surface, it seems mostly anti-Trans, with strikes at non-binary people, but it’s also striking equally at intersex people, and provides the first nose under the tent of attacks on lesbian and gay people in general, and tacks another legal plank to “personhood at conception” as well.

It’s got hate for everyone!

Oh, here’s a node to Erin Reid’s rundown on Bluesky. She was the first person I’ve seen talking about this accurately at all. Some of my read is similar to hers, but I think she missed some important parts of the EO – particularly the point of the first section. It’s all even broader than people are recognising, and we need to fix that.

So let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

The first two paragraphs of this EO describe trans and nonbinary people as intrinsically false, a fake and a fraud, intended and intending to harm women. Similarly to the anti-gay initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s, it declares trans people to be dangerous, immoral, and wrong by feat of existence.

By implication, it also does the same for intersex people, as intersex people are first de facto and then de jure grouped in with trans and nonbinary people in this order.

The third paragraph builds on the first two to assert that the existence of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people is intrinsically criminal and harmful, and a threat to the rights of ‘real’ women. This section conclusion is critical, because the combined framing put into place by these three paragraphs together is not just propaganda, but a presentation of trans/nonbinary/intersex people as a threat to the “dignity, safety, and well-being” of others, specifically women and the “American system” as a whole.

It is, in other words, an assertion that TNI people are an intrinsic harm as a class. As such they form a criminal class, a status which historically exempts people from civil rights protections and authorises pre-emptive legal prejudice against them. In the same way that professional thieves cannot claim for civil rights protections as a criminal class, they are declaring that trans/nonbinary/intersex people are a criminal class too, one to be bound but not protected by law.

They did the same with gays and lesbians in decades past. Just a reminder.

Now. In that context:

Section two provides a series of definitions using terminology we’ve seen in fundamentalist and TERF circles, decrying the very idea of “gender” as a dangerous “ideology,” while defining “female” and “male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and “a person belonging, at conception, the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” (emphasis added)

This is a nudge towards personhood-at-conception, by the way. Expect more of this as they push for a national comprehensive abortion ban.

But aside from that – this is a really weird way of saying “XX WOMAN XY MAN” without saying it. I think they’re either trying real hard not to say that, though I don’t know why. Either these definitions will catch couple of percent of “assigned female at birth” and “assigned male at birth” people and throw them into the opposite categories, or they’re trying to avoid that in a way that makes the attempt to avoid genetics self-nullifying, since the only “at conception” marker is genetics and it’ll fall back to that in practice no matter what.

Given that science knows at this point of multiple cases of women who have given birth to babies they carried normally despite having XY chromosomes, they’re gonna create a bunch of legal “men” who have given birth to children.

But they won’t care.

So.

Section three starts getting into the meat of some of the immediate attacks. Skipping down a little, here’s where things get spicy:

Section 3F starts justifying a federal ban on bathroom use by trans, nonbinary, and intersex people in businesses and schools. It doesn’t go directly there by name, but it declares the legal framework supporting TNI people to be invalid. Section 4D, further down, goes directly to that goal, banning TNI people from all “intimate spaces” – which, naturally, includes bathrooms.

As part of making that happen, Section 3B orders said agencies to use civil rights protections against trans/nonbinary/intersex people to “protect men and women as biologically distinct sexes.”

This is not a new strategy of attack. Similarly to how Trump in his first term tried to use civil rights law to attack health care availability for lesbian and gay people – declaring in regulations that carte blanche denial of medical care to queers was a religious right and to be defended by the Justice Department – here they are ordering weaponisation of civil rights law against trans, nonbinary, and intersex people.

The intent here is to assert that any accommodation – or even the mere presence of – TNI people is a violation of the civil rights of anyone who objects, and agencies are directed to side with the complainant in all cases.

They follow through on this explicitly in the entirety of Section 5, which explicitly orders the Economic Equal Opportunity Commission, the Civil Rights division in Justice, and several other groups within the Federal government to take the position that the 1964 Civil Rights act and all other civil rights law are to be used to attack trans/nonbinary and intersex people in workplaces and “federally funded institutions” (schools et al) as violations of women’s rights.

The plain-text intent is that trans, nonbinary, and intersex people are an intrinsically harmful / criminal class and are to be persecuted by law. TNI people’s existence violates the rights of women, and will be punished accordingly.

They promised eradication; this is the first wave of attempted delivery.

Now, I left out a section, which contains an important additional change:

Section 3D raises the spectre of State Department travel document revocations. Passports. IDs.

I’ve read this a few times and I can’t tell if the wording specifically does or does not allow revocation of existing documents (as happened in Florida and Texas) or only on renewal or new issuances, and that’s an important question.

Given that these departments will get packed full of Heritage Foundation ideologues, I again warn everyone to expect maximalist interpretations and enforcement.

We should have a clearer idea on this pretty soon. Accordingly, it’s critical to watch for document revocations starting to happen. Particularly with passports. I suspect the lowest-hanging fruit will be passports with an “X” marker, as opposed to “M” or “F.” If that starts to happen, assume they are already crawling through records to find anyone whose documents they can revoke.

I have to admit, this one surprises me a little. In the migration waves from Florida, they were very happy to see queers leaving – in some cases actively taunting refugees on “X” and other social media from government accounts, telling them “that’s what we want, get the fuck out.”

One might accordingly expect they’d want to leave travel documents in place to encourage national departures, but this implies otherwise.

I should also mention Section 4A, 4B, and 4C, which I never got to above. 4A and 4B bar trans women from rape shelters (despite being at high risk of rape; they see that as a benefit, not a problem) and women’s prisons. 4C further “shall ensure that no Federal funds are expended” for any transition support; in Florida, language like this has been used as part of a wider programme of forced detransition.

One can imagine a sequence where maximal enforcement leads to not just travel document revocation but prosecutions for applying for documents while trans, leading to prison sentences where you are forced to detransition. It’s the sort of thing they’d like to do, but there are a lot of steps between here and there. For now.

There are more sections; they are less sweeping. 3A requires agencies develop 30-day action plans to implement all this. 3C instructs all Federal agencies to discard the use of “gender” in favour of “sex,” and specifically the definition of “sex” described above, as part of all this. Sections 3E and 3G are all about “thou shall not talk about gender, only sex” and spending no money to support even the idea of “gender.”

Section 7 is an implementation deadline and revocation of all previous Biden administration protections of LGBT rights, and I say LGBT rights because they are specifically revoking an anti-bullying programme protecting all queer kids. They also specifically revoke a protective order for intersex children in this section, which is the de jour inclusion promised above.

None of this is an accident, if you’re unsure. They wax nostalgic about how much they loved bulling queer kids, how much fun it was and how they want to do it again. No, really. Sometimes in those exact words. See the link right there, in this very paragraph? It’s an example of some of them saying exactly that.

They love hurting children. It’s genuinely sick.

Anyway.

It’s a full declaration of war against the existence of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people. Under no circumstances should it be read as anything but that. It does, fortunately, acknowledge that some of this EO cannot take effect without changes in law, as passed by Congress; they will attempt to include those changes in law in his demanded “one big beautiful reconciliation bill” this spring.

People do not understand what this EO really is. Most politicians won’t understand what this EO really is. The political media will not inform them.

Once again, it’s up to us.

Tell everyone. Tell your reps. Demand better. You likely won’t get it, but, well… you might. And you have to try, or you may as well go ahead and strap Elon’s inaugural Nazi salutes to your own arm now.

And keep a weather eye out for passport revocations.

That’s going to be the canary in this coal mine.

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Now that Elon Musk’s experiment with Twitter has succeeded, Mark Zuckerberg is following suit with the MAGAfication of Meta – meaning Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. More, they’re pushing to take all of this hate parade out past the US and into other countries, as a fairly-openly-declared plan to boost fascist and near-fascist far-right movements across the globe.

I told everyone that Musk’s experiment would be repeated, and here it is, being repeated, exactly as I said it would be.

These are grim times. There are no longer good outcomes, there are only more and less bad ones – we’re most certainly doomed to miss some critical windows now.

It’s still worth fighting for the less bad outcomes, mind you. It’s still desperately important to do so, because the sort of nightmare unfolding in the LA fires right now will not be going away on its own, and there’s still a big difference between “oppression” and “pogroms.”

The question has now become how many disasters we can prevent, rather than can we stop them from happening at all.

So.

It may surprise you that unlike with Twitter – where the stakes were both obvious and even higher – I don’t really know what to tell you about Meta. Despite functionally designating LGBT people, immigrants, and women as fair game – while occasionally being downright petty about it – the situation overall is… a little less clear.

No, honestly. It is. Bear with me on this.

You see, the crux of the argument to leave Twitter – “X” – came down to two key factors:

First: X was an experiment to see whether you could take over a major social media site, turn it into a fascist disinformation and propaganda platform, and survive. While that hasn’t worked out – yet – in direct financial terms, it’s worked out in terms of getting Trump back into office, so has worked out in indirect power-and-money terms… which means it’s worked.

Second: Elon Musk was and is actively on the side of the fascists. He’s promoting them, having his algorithm promote them, paying them outright to be there, censoring left and critical voices throughout, and making it as clear as possible that his foot has been on the goddamn scale as hard as it could be. (Yes, he said repeatedly that wasn’t true. We call that “lying.”)

The first item is no longer applicable. His experiment worked. It gained him both money and power, even if “X” is still losing money had over fist as an individual company. (That, too, may be temporary; he’s asserted many times that ad boycotts should be illegal, that companies should be required to give him money, and as de facto Co-President, he may in fact see that happen.)

The second item is … less clear with Facebook/Insta/Threads. It’s quite possible that Fuckerberg (Suckerberg, Cuckerberg, there are so many variations) may plant his foot on the algorithmic pedal there, as well.

If he does – as Musk did with Twitter – then “stay and fight” becomes truly nonsensical and the only option is to leave. You can’t fight a propaganda war when the algorithm makes sure that no one is allowed to see you. All you’re doing at that point is raising money for your own oppressor.

But until that happens, “stay and fight” might be a valid option.

Is it?

I don’t know yet.

One of the reasons I don’t know yet is that unlike with “X”, the employees are reportedly generally up in arms about this. Will Suckerberg institute mass firings? Will he push out all the women, queers, and BIPOC like Musk did at Twitter?

Maybe. But Facebook is far, far larger than Twitter ever was, and far, far more complex. It will not be so easy as it was for Elon.

I don’t think we know enough to know what to do, yet. Certainly, protest. Certainly consider leaving. Certainly, see if you can pull your friends to other social media.

If you have group obligations keeping you there, it’s time to move them to another service if you can. I myself have managed to get one group which required my professional attention onto another platform; perhaps you can, as well.

Preparation for evac in these situations is always good.

But unlike with Twitter, even with all this vileness, I can’t say for sure that “stay and fight” isn’t a valid response. It might well be one.

Until it’s clear that Zuck’s putting the Bad Succ on Meta display algorithm, it might just be a legitimate option.

And it’s worth considering, because honestly, if I couldn’t get people to leave Literal New Daily Stormer, I don’t see how in hell we’ll get people to give up Instagram.

Particularly once TikTok is gone.

I imagine – as things unfold over the next few weeks – we’ll get a clearer view. I hope so, at least.

Until then, well… play it by ear – and by conscience, too, of course.

That may well be all we really have left.

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I am very much enjoying watching the leopards of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party eating each other’s faces. There is simply not enough popcorn in the entire world for this and I am thrilled.

If you’ve managed to miss this so far, it’s incredibly delightful. Here’s a good thread. Here’s a another one, basically a summary. But in short form, all of the worst people in the world are going at each others’ throats, with Laura Loomer figuring out, “Hey wait, you’re racist like we are but not racist enough and you don’t want all the immigrants out! You think people from India count as some kind of white!” and then Vivek going off about American culture producing sad mediocrities, which Loomer and Bannon and a bunch of their friends took real personally. Anyway, it’s broken out into a general Old MAGA vs. New Tech MAGAnates war, and that’s hilarious.

I was expecting a purge, of course, because you’ve got to have a purge when you have a new authoritarian, a new dictator. That’s because the first thing you have to do as new dictator is demonstrate to everyone who helped you get into power that your power doesn’t depend upon them. Instead, their power – and in general, their literal lives – depends upon you.

But this isn’t being instigated by the orange authoritarian fuckface. This is being instigated by his weird latecomer sidekick, the sidecar accessory who spent $44 billion on turning a popular social network into a fascist propaganda fountain and was supposed to go hang out with Third Banana Vivek and wank about budget cuts, kind of like a rocket-obsessed Jack Kemp.

What set this off in particular is the H1B visa programme, which – surprise! – Musk and Ramaswamy want to keep, and which core MAGA doesn’t like any more than they like any other immigrants who aren’t mail-order brides from Europe.

But that’s not important right now.

What’s important is that Elon has absolutely been throwing his whole weight around, escalating this at every single opportunity. He’s taken gold stars away from a whole fleet of original MAGA, and temporarily banned Loomer herself. He also disabled all of her subscriptions – thus de-monetising her on X – which is hilarious. She got real spicy in response, and that quote’s only one of many.

So now Elon’s big mad, so he’s declared war on original MAGA, calling them “contemptable fools,” and saying they have to be pulled out of the party, “root and stem.”

Got news, hon.

They are the party.

You get rid of them, and there is no Republican party.

But leaving even all that aside…

…where the hell is Trump?

Whose side is he on here, anyway? Either? Both? Is he trying to figure out which of these two groups are the SA and need to be stabbed to death in the night? Is he doing anything to try to calm this down?

Loomer in particular has started signing on to the whole “President Musk” thing and she does not like it, which may be the only time she and I would ever agree on anything. Her side’s already saying that the movement has been co-opted by “big tech” – meaning Elon and friends – and that free speech is just another big lie.

And, of course, Musk has decided to purge them all.

So. Which side’s gonna be this iteration’s Trotsky? Will they be using an ice axe, as per tradition? I hope so. It seems fitting.

And once again…

…where the hell is Trump?

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…but Europeans (and maybe Canadians), bear with me, there’s important stuff in here for you, down a bit.

Okay. So.

If you’re reading this, you’re most likely not who I’m going off about. If you’re reading this and have been working against Trump – I mean actively working against him – you’re very definitely not who I’m going on about. In fact, why don’t you scream along with me, won’t you? You’re welcome to join in. It might be… fun? No. Cathartic? Maybe.

Regardless, if this doesn’t apply to you, then it doesn’t apply to you.

But if you did help Trump into power? If you voted for him?

Jesus fucking christ, you fucking imbecile.

You moron. You clown. You fool.

Or worse – you contemptible looting parasitical fuck, because that’s what fascism is, that’s what the urge to loot, to take, to own the lives and labours of other is – it’s parasitisation, pure and simple.

You are not some kind of Übermensch. You are a leech upon the body of humanity.

I don’t know which you – as an individual Trump voter – you might be, but you either had no idea what you were doing (I think that’s maybe a third of you) or you’re part of the cadre who did think you knew what you’re doing, in which case, you’re still complete fools, because you genuinely do not know what you have done.

Particularly you, Putin, you evil old Soviet remnant fuck. You have no idea what rough beast you’ve helped slouch into power. Vladimir, do you truly not know what lies directly beneath the Trumpian surface? Do you think that barrier will survive his inevitable – probably natural, I should stress – death? Do you not know?

Because I do, and I have screamed to the nine hells and the five heavens about it, I will not reiterate myself here except to note that their plan for fundamentalist white man Christian domination of all aspects of society globally to bring about the end of the world is both well documented and explicit. I will say that you deserve it – but nobody else does. Their inevitable eventual failure will scar the planet. The only question is how badly.

Europeans who are reading this – you need to realise that amongst other things, you are now a military alliance. Keep NATO but throw the US out of it, at least, assuming you don’t want your American NATO participation to rely on staying in Elon Musk’s good graces and letting him set up fascist propaganda fountains in your countries. Arm up, and get ready to get your hands dirty, or rather, dirtier.

Keep Canada, if you can. Hell, bring Canada into the EU if they’re willing – I assure you it’s going to be very much in their interests if they want to remain Canadian.

If the UK actually come to their senses, let them back in too. If they don’t, get Scotland, if they wiggle themselves free. But be aware that if the Atlantic Current shuts down that those islands are going to get a lot colder and much more quickly than you expect. Fancy being Celtic Denmark, Ireland? Scotland… Celtic Norway? Nobody really knows, and I know no more than anyone else. But that and worse are well possible.

As part of that, get ready to deal with the reality that the US is going to shift into dramatically higher carbon output, not lower. Trump’s plans will undo what progress has been done – I’m hearing projections of that being by a factor of two, unless he wrecks the economy so badly that we go into demand failure and a second Great Depression. If we don’t, I suspect that’ll end up being a lowball estimate, given how much energy “Generative AI” is burning right now.

If you’re wondering, the only one who pretends to give even half a fuck in his administration is literal plaguemonger RFK, Jr., whose official answer is regenerative agriculture and whose unofficial answer is mass death. The funny thing about regenerative agriculture is it can be a legitimate carbon store, and at some real degree of scale! But there’s absolutely no way in hell that it’ll cover the new American flood of carbon dioxide. What with him being a self-deluded shithead, I have no idea whether he actually believes his shit or not.

But it doesn’t matter. We’ve blown past 1.5°C and we will blow past 3.0°C, and what Europe needs to do now is decarbonise as quickly as possible not to stop it, but to delay it some, and soften the blow.

I mean seriously. Look at the endgame of 66m of ocean rise. See what that does to your shorelines. See what that does to Paris.

If that’s somehow not enough – if you’re one of those millions of millions of people who pretend to care about climate change but don’t let it affect anything you do – then you also need to do it to prevent your own economic irrelevance, because carbon fuels aren’t going to be an economic driver that too many people give a fuck about in another eight years or so. China knows this. They make no secret about it, and they’re right.

By electing Trump – assuming he follows through on his evil promises – Americans have doomed their own country to either be a long-term economic laggard akin to late-coal post-industrial Britain or out and out economic irrelevance, hanging on as a militant fundamentalist agricultural state with islands of civilisation. And while you should never confuse the end of a Republic with the end of an Empire, Americans have more firmly ended the American Century than they’ve ended the Third American Republic.

I mean that. It’s over. The fallout will be nasty, brutish, and long.

Don’t believe me? Look at the reality.

If you have any goddamn sense at all, you know the Republicans long ago became a party that never met an ally they wouldn’t betray. For decades, there was consensus against that, but it’s gone now. Since America’s now highly variable value as an ally will depend entirely upon who wins the next election, nobody should be dumb enough to rely on it; you simply can’t form a foundation on that kind of ever-shifting sand. America’s great export was stability, and we’ve done run plumb out of that.

Accordingly, if you want to keep anything of the post-world-war-II world order – in particular if you want to keep the agreement that wars of conquest are not okay and that peoples have a right to exist – it’s gonna be mostly up to you, Europe.

And don’t make the mistake of thinking this is just the Christofascist right. It’s not.

American Liberals are absolutely onboard with the old global order, particularly but not only those parts. The left kinda sorta theoretically is onboard with those ideas? But not really. Even amongst the non-tanky American left, so very, very many people are way, way more personally invested in seeing Democrats lose than keeping fascists out of power. That makes their theoretical positions moot, and their operative positions the same as those of MAGA.

Over the last several months, I have come to a much better – or much worse – understanding of the “Bernie Bro to Trump” pipeline phenomenon. In just the last few days I watched someone I otherwise like … I don’t know if they’d call it gloating about Harris’s loss? But that’s what it was, posting about going at liberals to make them angry, enjoying it with a “hee hee die mad,” and most of all, blaming liberals for everything. Not the fascists, not the people who voted for him, oh no, it was “the libs” and “the Dems.” The ones who actually tried to stop him and keep him out of power.

Seeing someone so very clearly looking forward to liberals suffering under the boot heel of fascism absolutely repulsed me.

I don’t want to single them out, they’re far from the only one. They’re just the person who came closest to me while saying it most recently.

And the more that I watch that kind of shit, and the more I talk with people from the 2016 Bernie movement, the more what I see is a group of people who came in new to politics with enthusiasm, came astonishingly close but lost their first fight – as one almost always does, no matter who or what it is – and then most of them – not all, I hope, but the loud ones, most of the ones I’ve met – just decided fukkit, we’re burning everything down because we didn’t get our way the first time we tried.

(If you push them on it, they say 2016 was “fixed” because had neither Sanders nor Clinton won a majority of delegates it would’ve become an open convention, and the superdelegates would’ve become able to vote on the second ballot, and they’d’ve voted for Clinton, and that would’ve been cheating. That’s the “fix.” The stone cold reality that Clinton got more votes than Sanders and had an outright majority of regular delegates – she won that campaign 54-46 – doesn’t matter to them. Not really. Does that also sound familiar? Because it sure should.)

The real tragedy is that they took a near miss – one which was in a very real way a triumph and a dramatic showing of future strength – and tossed it into the bin. They could’ve built on it – it would’ve taken a while, but with enough determination it would’ve worked, and they’d’ve been a if not the dominant force in the party by now. Instead, well… here we are.

It appals me, but like so many things that are true despite my hated of it, I accept it as what it is. My disgust does not make it less real. Like I said:

I understand the Bernie Bro to Trump pipeline a lot better now.

The real shock horror of it all is that what I think needs to happen now is that the Democratic Party needs to move left. Sharply. Fuck, I thought it needed to move more left this election, and now that it’s not incredibly demoralising to the actual-anti-fascist political workers who were working their asses off trying to keep fascists out of power rather than sabotage Harris – I’m free to say that I thought at the time that Harris’s rerun of Obama’s “centrist” play was a big mistake, even if this election still had to run on the old rules for one last time for reasons I detailed months ago.

I understand Harris’s decision, and I understand why she did it, and maybe if I were a Black woman, I’d understand it even more. But it sure looked like a mistake to me. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, maybe it would’ve been even worse if she hadn’t. I couldn’t change it either way so didn’t try, and we can’t know.

Regardless, what’s important now is that I’m pretty sure the Democratic Party really does need to move left as part of rebuilding. But I see all this post-election sneering and gloating on the existing Left, and I see how they hate the Democrats and “the libs” so much more than they hate actual fascists, and I don’t know what good it’ll do.

Nothing will be enough to bring this so-called Left – the Bernie Left – onboard. Nothing. Because the real motivator isn’t fix shit, it’s fuck the libs and fuck the Dems.

It’s a little like watching “South Park Conservatives” all over again. Trey Parker and Matt Stone once said that oh yeah, they hate conservatives… but they really hate liberals.

What they meant, of course, was that they mostly just hated liberals.

So here we are with “the libs” being the only ones who have been trying to keep a Republic for a while now, with a two-front war of the former-conservatives now-fascists on the right, and a left that in large part doesn’t give a single flying fuck about anything but their beautiful love affair with failure in everything except burning the Republic down to get back at “the Dems” for not nominating Bernie in 2016 and looking for any reason they can to make it happen.

Some of those reasons are super valid, though. In isolation. (And if only they were in isolation! Life would be so much better! But they’re not!) Because you’ve got the whole “complicity with genocide by voting for Harris” thought-stopping rage-trigger line and that actually makes sense and is right and just if and only if the person you help into power is on the other side of the issue and is not even more super invested in the same genocide.

And if you’re one of those people, well, guess what, pop-tart, he fucking well is super invested in that genocide – way more so! – and is also invested in another genocide in Ukraine, and wants to start a couple more at home on top of those, too! So ding dong, dipshits, you did not keep your fucking hands clean by helping him into office. In reality, what you did by helping hand him power is sink yourself up to your neck in blood.

Well done. Well fucking done.

There was no “hands all clean” route here. It wasn’t a goddamn option, and holy shit, did you blow it, and you’re still going to blame it on “the Dems” because you’re still mad about Bernie, even when he really, sincerely isn’t.

And all of that is a really very long and roundabout way to deliver the point I’m making, which is not to expect the Democrats to make a comeback real soon. The attempt to revive the Third American Republic has failed. I think the next opportunity to start something new might be after Trump dies of natural causes, not unlikely while still in office.

But all that’s just me guessing, at this point. Maybe the American electorate will surprise me at long last. Maybe Trump will trigger all the disasters his plans will trigger if implemented and people will go “oh shit, that was a bad choice” and Republicans themselves will revolt. Or who knows, maybe the American Left will get the fuck over itself like it needs to if it ever wants to mean anything at all.

I know, I’m hilarious, aren’t I?

But maybe. So if you call yourself part of that Left and you have any ability to pull your friends into the actual fight against the actual fash, and you’re going to try? You have my support and my gratitude. I don’t have the “fuck the Dems” cred to try to make any of it stick, when I try. Little old me who only has the experience of being actually illegal and routinely beaten down in the street just for existing just gets screamed and/or sneered at and told how I know nothing about oppression. But if you have that credibility, and have started to realise how completely the current strats haven’t been working, and want to do something about it? Gods be with you and good luck. You’ll definitely need it. If you can use my work to help, please do.

Or better, maybe it’s time to just start a different Left entirely. One that actually goes after fascists and Christian Nationalists more than they go after Democrats and liberals.

That really would be refreshing, wouldn’t it?

Something to consider.

Because seriously. Fuck those guys.

…

I’ve got more I could say. I could go off about climate change, and how absolutely nobody gave a single fuck about it in their voting decisions. It changed no minds, as far as I can tell. Not a one.

I really hope I’m right that oil won’t matter in eight to ten years. Maybe that’ll leave enough margin for saving civilisation. Maybe.

I sure hope so.

But I gotta tell you…

…I just don’t know.

Other than… maybe I do.

Maybe it’s time for a completely new Left.

Maybe that should start today.

Maybe that should start…

….with you.

You’ve made it this far. You clearly have some stamina or you would’ve already bailed, and I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest. This is a real horse pill of a post.

Whaddya think, though? Are you ready? Can you be ready?

Does it start with you?

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.