So where the hell have I been these past few days. Here, just living. As many of you know, I am a delicate flower who is very sensitive to my environment and change. I mean I handle it fine and will go through with whatever, but whenever there is significant change there’s internal turmoil for a while. So after a couple of weeks of that I finally became accustomed to the new normal and Joelle and I are in a good routine, so we’ve just been working, going to the pool, watching an episode or two of a show each night, and then calling it a day. And with the time zone difference, by the time I go to write something, it will be ten or eleven there on the east coast and I just say fuck it I will write tomorrow.
Joelle has her knee surgery on Monday, so we are not going to be going anywhere for a while so you will probably see much more of me.
I’m glad to see Mistermix posted that Popehat piece earlier. I had posted it on bluesky and have just sort of been shaking my head at the reactions to the UHC shooter (whom they have taken to calling the “Adjustor” on various social media.
The reactions were so bizarre. The first group of people who were acting the fool were the purity police, who any time you mentioned the shooting if you didn’t explicitly state it was wrong or show sympathy for the guy was to freak out and say “Murder is wrong I thought you were better.”
Well sure, murder is wrong and if you are following me you must know something about me and are aware I don’t support murder and in fact have been warning about this kind of shit eventually happening for oh I dunno twenty fucking years. Second, people die in the worst way possible every single day, and many of them are far more deserving of my sympathy. I mean ffs, maybe people should work harder to live a life that doesn’t lead to someone planning for months and then staying up all night to shoot you in the back? Don’t get mad at me because my reaction is “yeah that’s bad” and nothing more. Hell even the famous internet sleuths who love identifying people and tracking down shit said “nah we’re gonna pass we don’t care.”
The second group is the people who were treating the UHC shooter the way Republican low info voters treat Trump, which is to just use him as a blank slate for their hopes and dreams despite, you know reality. Lot of people are shocked to know that he is not in fact a left wing class warrior starting the revolution, but instead a rich techbro with a range of weird beliefs who apparently lost it when he personally suffered a great deal of pain. Of course he’s a weirdo. Doing what he did is NOT normal. It’s not normal behavior to spend thousands of hours devising a complicated plot to murder someone. I know our tv shows and books and whatnot make it seem super normal, or murder for hires, but in reality it is just not happening that often. It’s fucking abnormal behavior.
And the final group making me laugh are the people thinking this will lead to real change. It won’t. The only changes you will experience are insurers hiring more security and establishing more security protocols and probably hiring people to do frequent real time threat assessments for their top brass. And who does what in the organizations will be harder to find and they will become more private, and I bet their approval/denial decision making will become more opaque than it already is, but do I expect them to stop looting the American people. Good god no. There is way too much fucking money in medicine, health insurance, and pharmaceuticals, and we are now on the edge of widespread looting of every sector for the next few years.
So no, I don’t think there will be any change. I think things are going to continue to get gradually worse and people will get used to it, and then it will get even worse and people will adjust. This is what happens in plutocracies. We know this because we watched it happen in Eastern Europe for decades and history is rife with examples. It’s why this fantasy some left wingers have about the revolution is so absurd. And maybe in the distant future there will be some sort of uprising, but for now I just expect things to get shittier and shitter for the average American for at least the next 2-3 decades. The party of the rich will just keep chumming the waters with other targets, like those Springfield residents eating your dogs or the Mexicans taking your jobs or the handful of transgender kids in your state who are ruining everything.
I mean this has worked for them since 1980, why stop now? Hell, now they even control the media.
To end on an up note, here is Thurston Howl in his new thundershirt for the holidays:
Wretched beast.
