Thoughts

On premium services

No trust-fund or money, but I would send you 1% of my money for help figuring out what to do.

Okay, sure. I’m open to this. If you would like me to be your lifestyle consultant or personal mentor, we can discuss terms. 

Any of you who are interested can reach out.

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Thoughts

On violence and change

The violence won’t change a damn thing, you stupid, evil little cunt. Grow up already.

Your fear of change is palpable. It is your single greatest weakness, and you are blind to it. That’s why you’re so easy to manipulate. It’s why you’re so easy to control. 

Let’s talk about violence for a moment. I’m against it. You seem to be against it, so why do you keep coming back here to fight me on this topic over and over again? Why do you get so riled up when I call you a fascist? Why do you ignore the very real, perpetual, and systemic violence being done to Americans by our militarized police state, our prison-industrial complex, our failed war on drugs, and our grotesque war on poverty that has always been a thinly veiled war on the poor. Violence has been built into our system by design since its inception, and yet you come at me with this weak tea bullshit mythology about the plight of “small family-run businesses” during this brief spasm of civil unrest. 

You’ve picked the wrong fucking battle, my friend. You cry out about “livelihoods” but not about actual lives. Every time you come at me with an argument, you find a fresh way to put property over people. You try and humanize it with stories of “an old man being KO’d or an old lady crying,” but it’s painfully clear that all you care about is order. It’s why you get so outraged when I call you a fascist, which is naturally why I keep calling you one.

You get furious with me because I am indifferent to your point of view. You keep filling my comment section and my inbox with the same small-minded take, each time a bit angrier, and you expect me to what? Change my mind? No. You just need an outlet. You want someone to fight, because you are so filled with impotent rage and that paralyzing fear of change. 

Of course, I know better than to take any of this personally. I rather enjoy being called a stupid, evil little cunt. It’s fun for me, and though I’ll proudly agree that I’m a stupid, evil little cunt, I am also deeply committed to the part where I try and help you. I can see how much pain you’re holding in your chest and in your shoulders right this very second. I can feel you taking that breath and trying to keep it all balanced, trying desperately not to let any of it tip over and leak out. I’m happy to be your digital punching bag. Better me than someone else in your life, but what I’d really rather be is the reason you let some of that poison out of your soul by changing your point of view. What I’d really rather do here is help you recognize how even you aren’t safe from violence — and when I say violence, I mean the real kind, the perpetual kind, the systemic kind. Even you are a victim of it. We all are. 

As much as you are desperately hoping I will see you in your stories of small business owners in fear of their livelihoods, what I really see is how you are relentlessly playing your sad little part to prop up a violent, broken, and unjust system, even as the system itself slowly kills you. That rush you just felt to defend capitalism? That’s how predictable you are, and it breaks my fucking heart. I want better for you. I want more from you. 

I can hear you uttering the words “cringe,” and still, I recognize it as a defense mechanism. It’s not your fault. Your coping skills are what they are, but it’s never too late to reject your programming. It’s never too late to grow as a person. I promise, it really is better over here on the right side of history. I get to “work hard,” just like you. I get to “create value,” just like you. The difference is I’m not filled with fear. 

My anger is born of hope. Yours is born of fear. That’s the real reason you hate people like me.

Still, you’re welcome to join us any time.  

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Thoughts

On participating in democracy

I plan on voting for Biden in November.  But it’s terrible.  A vote for him is still a vote that will not significantly improve our deepest and most troubling social problems.  He won’t give us Medicare for All or any other badly needed boosts to social programs.  He will probably continue to support policies that actively oppress BIPOC.  He will not help us.  He’s also a sexual predator.  Truly, I do not want to vote for this man.  This is not the man I wanted to vote for.  I don’t want him in office.  He is simply not good enough.  This man doesn’t represent what I want at all.

But if I don’t vote for Biden in November, I feel like I’m making it that much easier for Trump to win another election.  And I want that even less than I want a Biden presidency.  I don’t want another 4 years of what we have now.  No fucking way.  No.

I’m so conflicted.  I feel like there is blood on my hands.  I feel like I’m casting a vote for death and misery if I’m not voting for a progressive candidate with a progressive platform.  I feel like I’m committing nothing short of an atrocity no matter what I choose to do.  I don’t want to harm people, and yet, won’t I essentially be doing exactly that?  I just want to do the right thing.  I don’t want to bring harm, or perpetuate harm towards anyone.

Trump will probably win anyway.  He’s doing all he can to ensure that, and it will probably work.  The impending climate disaster will kill us all because we will clearly continue to do nothing.  Our bodies will be riddled with micro and nanoplastics.  America will become an even more of an inhospitable police state.

 Nobody will hold Biden accountable for anything if he wins, and he’ll never give us the public policies we desperately need. 

“Is this what hope feels like?  I’d forgotten,” you tweeted recently.  How?  And for what?  I see nothing but bad things to come.  I feel a deep sense of hopelessness and despair.

There are plenty of reasons to feel hopelessness and despair right now, but with regard to Joe Biden, you are wasting a whole bunch of negative emotions on a giant pile of shitty beliefs that just aren’t true.

First, and let me be very clear on this one, Joe Biden is not a sexual predator. He’s just not. Believe me, I would be shouting it from the rooftops if I thought he were. When Tara Reade went public, I took her allegations very seriously. I gave her extra helpings of the benefit of the doubt, but it turned out there was a mountain of evidence suggesting that Reade has always been a lying, manipulative grifter (which I didn’t want to be true), and there was another mountain of evidence suggesting that the predatory behavior alleged by Reade is simply not in Biden’s character (which I was very reluctant to trust). There was a time when I was hopeful that Reade’s accusations might even knock Biden out of the race, but I’m not the kind of person who believes a thing merely because I want it to be true. It’s fine if you want to criticize Biden for what appears to be a history of awkward or retrospectively inappropriate behavior. Hell, you can even buy into all that “Creepy Uncle Joe” bullshit, but you’re just plain wrong if you insist that Joe Biden is a sexual predator. (Obviously, the same cannot be said of Donald Trump, who is a straight-up serial rapist with a list of at least twenty-five women who have publicly and credibly accused him of sexual assault.)

As for your policy concerns, I understand your frustration. I would love to be voting for a far-left ultra-progressive firebrand of a candidate in the upcoming general election. That would feel wonderful, right up until the moment that she loses in a landslide, and I guarantee you, a far-left ultra-progressive candidate would get her ass handed to her by Trump. That’s not an outcome we can afford as a species, much less as a nation. You understand this, which is why you still plan on voting for Biden. Good. I’m really glad you’re not being a purist asshole about this. The evil garbage monsters in the GOP just love a left-wing purist who refuses to vote responsibly. Republicans are desperately praying to their imaginary white Jesus that all the Green Party crunch bars will fuck it up for the rest of us like they did back in 2016. We cannot let that happen again.

Listen, I’m not gonna try and convince you to like Joe Biden. You’re already gonna vote for him, so I’m perfectly fine if you hate his breathing guts. What I do want from you is a little maturity, some vision, and a realistic sense of scale. No one candidate will ever be the solution to our problems — not Bernie, not Liz, and certainly not Joe. At best, a candidate is a vector, a course correction, a desperately needed step in the right direction. That’s all we can expect from Biden, and he is bringing it. He’s bringing it every single day with a list of policy positions that are more progressive than any President’s in the history of the United States, and he most certainly brought it with the selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Biden recognizes his place in history. He knows he is little more than a national stop-gap, a post-Trump tourniquet to stanch the bleeding. His Vice-Presidency and eventual Presidency will be a line of demarcation between two very distinct chapters of American history. This is more than just bridging the Boomer/Millennial generational divide. In the distant future (if we have one), it is my sincerest hope that Biden will be remembered as “The Last of the Old White Men,” a happy warrior who marked the end of a certain kind of Modern America and who helped usher in a new kind of Postmodern America. Those terms are clunky and loaded and absolutely will not stand the test of time, but we’re not the ones who get to name what we’re about to become. We’re the ones who have to keep doing the hard work to finally get us there, and that’s why I really need you to change your whole fucking attitude. 

This shit is going to be grueling. The fight will be brutal if not bloody, and there is absolutely no room for whiners and layabouts. You want to improve our deepest and most troubling social problems? Great. Quit moaning about doing harm with your vote and go do some actual good with your own two fucking hands. Pulling a lever in a voting booth every couple years is the bare minimum. In terms of civic duty, it is the absolute least you can do. Of course Biden won’t give us Medicare for All. Neither would Sanders or Warren. That’s not how any of this works. Presidents don’t give us shit. We do it ourselves. We demand it, loudly and with force, and over long stretches of time, with enough solidarity and sustained action, laws are enacted and policies change. 

I was around when the Clintons tried deadlifting their universal health care plan off the ground back in 1993. Maybe you remember it, maybe you weren’t even born yet, but that’s how long this shit takes. It’ll have been three fucking decades and two fucking generations of Democrats trying desperately to kick that gutbucket up Capitol Hill by the time we finally get around to some semblance of a single payer healthcare system. Thirty fucking years, my friend. That’s the kind of patience and perseverance the American experiment demands of us, so quit your fucking whining. Enough with all the pearl-clutching and hand-wringing. Take all your conflicted navel gazing bullshit and toughen the fuck up, buttercup.

You are on the right side of history. You are with the good guys. Quit your fucking bitching, and get out there and help us win.

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Thoughts

On the end of trump

Am I wrong for thinking Trump needs to suffer and die in a very public way in order to atone the world for what we’ve gone through?

You’re wrong to imagine there could be any societal atonement in the suffering and death of one man. It’s an easy mistake to make in a culture steeped in Christian dogma, but that’s not how the world really works.

Don’t worry, though. There is plenty of room for justice. Aside from the gigantic fuck-pile of state and federal charges Trump and his associates will eventually face, Trump’s personal hell will begin with the unrelenting social exile he and his family will face the very second he leaves office. He will live out the rest of his orange-tinted days in a post-presidential prison, surrounded by psychopaths, sycophants, and other assorted lickspittle, unable to leave his own crumbling shit-hole properties without facing a wall of seething hatred, or worse, total fucking indifference from celebrities and world leaders who are happy to pretend he’s not even in the room.

His life will become a wasteland of permanent irrelevance as the rest of us go about our days erasing any trace of his presidency, strengthening the foundations of the institutions he damaged, and ensuring that his legacy is cast as little more than America’s brief, slightly painful, and magnificently stupid brush with fascism at the hands of an addled, narcissistic clown.

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Thoughts

On apples and oranges

How is a man choosing to identify as a woman not as offensive as white people “identifying” as black? Being black is not a feeling, and neither is being a woman.

You are conflating race and gender as social constructs with race and sex as biological classifications. You are also doing a little trick with the concepts of choice and identity. In other words, your question presupposes similarity where there isn’t any while also blurring the idea of what’s really a choice. Allow me to point out the fallacy in your framing with the following two statements:

A man who chooses to identify as a woman is merely in drag, whereas a male who has no choice but to identify as a woman is a transgender woman. 

A white person who chooses to identify as a black person is merely in blackface (or co-opting blackness or appropriating black culture), whereas a person of European descent who has no choice but to identify as a person of African descent isn’t actually a thing.

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Thoughts

On sex and gender

You must know that scientists and biologists disagree on the trans women debate too. For some issues we must also use common sense. Pretending that there is no difference between women and trans women is painfully ignorant, Coquette.

I’m not pretending that there is no difference between cisgendered and transgendered people. Those two prefixes (cis and trans) quite conveniently spell out the very obvious difference.

You’re the one pretending that there is no difference between the social construct of gender and biological sex, and it’s why you’re so maddeningly wrong. Your invocation of “scientists and biologists” makes you seem even more ridiculous, because this stuff has been settled science for decades. There is no serious scientist in any field who disagrees on the distinction between gender and biological sex. I can’t stress this enough, your resistance here isn’t scientific. It’s purely philosophical. You have a fundamental belief that is wrong, as is typical for anyone who invokes the painfully stupid concept of “common sense.” That’s okay. You are fully capable of changing your mind. 

Before we dive into the philosophy, we have to agree on the meaning of certain words. If I say man or woman, I am referring to gender. If I say masculine or feminine, I am also referring to gender. If I say male of female, I am referring to biological sex. A male is not equal to a man, and a female is not equal to a woman. Masculine traits are not equal to male traits, and feminine traits are not equal to female traits. For example, if you insist that an XX chromosome determines a woman, you are wrong. An XX chromosome determines a female. If you insist that having a penis is a masculine trait, you are yet again wrong. Having a penis is a male trait. If you refuse to accept these fundamental distinctions between biological sex and gender — which are settled fucking science, by the way — then there is no point in continuing this discussion. Hopefully, you aren’t a complete fucking idiot, and we can have a healthy philosophical disagreement. 

Come with me now as I shift our discussion from the settled science to the unsettled philosophy. I can’t know what’s in your head, but I’m speculating that your resistance is grounded in the theory of gender essentialism. That is to say, at some level you believe there are certain fixed, universal, and innate qualities that distinguish men from women. You believe there is an underlying feminine essence to a woman, and you believe that there is a separate underlying masculine essence to a man. Honestly, I can almost get behind that idea. It’s a bit limited and binary, but there are some pretty obvious differences between men and women, and I bet we can agree on most of them. The problem arises when you insist that these qualities are fixed and universal, and the problem becomes intractable when the only fixed and universal quality you consider is what’s in someone’s pants. 

It’s childish, really. That’s why I treat people who can’t make the distinction between sex and gender like children, which is a bit unfair to the average child, because most kindergartners are capable of grasping this concept. Besides, I probably lost you the moment I suggested that having a penis is a male trait rather than a masculine one. (I would absolutely love to watch your head explode during a conversation about the differences between the masculine and feminine penis.) I bet that’s most of the issue here, that you insist a penis is inherently masculine and a vagina is inherently feminine. They’re not. Scratching your balls may be inherently masculine, but simply having them is neither masculine nor feminine. It’s just male. Same with menstruation. It is a female biological function, but how we choose to feminize it is entirely a construct of gender. 

I could keep explaining this stuff all day, but if you refuse to acknowledge the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender, then there’s really no point. You’re just fucking ignorant, and your shitty beliefs have the potential to cause harm to a lot of people. 

I hope you’ll come around one day. I really do, but until then, from the bottom of my heart, please go fuck yourself.

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On the basics

A woman is an adult human female. Nice try though.

Aww. How adorably essentialist of you. Are you a full-fledged Trump supporter, or are you just a confused JK Rowling fan? Either way, I’d be happy to provide you with a basic lesson on the difference between gender and biological sex. While we’re at it, maybe we could catch you up on the fundamentals of social constructionism.

Of course, we both know you don’t need those wikipedia links. You’ve already done the reading, and you just don’t care. You simply refuse to eat your vegetables. You’re a spoiled toddler who only wants chicken nuggets, and even if I make airplane noises while spooning them into your whiny little face, you’re still gonna resist swallowing even the tiniest morsels of postmodern theory.

To that, I say fine. I’m not your fucking mom. If you want to stuff your head full of garbage, I really don’t care. The rest of us adults are happy to carry on our conversation without you. Good luck getting out of that high chair.

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On vitriol and motherhood

You seem to have a LOT of vitriol about motherhood and women with children now. Is this about loss-reduction because you are past child-bearing age, loss-reduction because of COVID/racist cops/Biden is our man and he’s not that strong (therefore it’s likely a terrible time to have a kid), or something else? I have read and loved your work for years, and your tone about motherhood is not what is was. It stands out to me. I don’t disapprove. I just notice it. What happened?

I’m not past child-bearing age, and if there’s any vitriol it’s about the cultural expectations of motherhood, certainly not women with children. I can’t be bothered to cite my own references, but I’ve been saying the same shit for over a decade. If the tone has changed, it’s because world has changed, and everything is a bit more serious now.

You might also want to be more careful with your underlying assumption that not having children is some kind of inherent loss that requires reduction. It’s not, especially in 2020.

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On wearing a mask

Do you think there is any threat, at all, of being required to wear masks in certain places becoming bigger and bigger until we live in some sort of messed up Gilead-esque nation?

I feel like some people see being required to wear masks as a small step towards our loss of freedom in bigger ways and that is why they are protesting against it.

If you’re worried about this country becoming Gilead, please aim your concern at the steady erosion of reproductive rights during the Trump administration. That should be what upsets you, not wearing a mask in the middle of a fucking pandemic.

The people who consider wearing a mask to be a “small step towards our loss of freedom” are selfish, coddled idiots easily influenced by fear-based, right-wing propaganda. They aren’t protesting. They are throwing tantrums, and they deserve to be ridiculed and ostracized. 

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On solidarity

Regarding your “Fuck Bernie Sanders” tweet, would you vote for Bernie if he won the nomination, or stay home?

If Bernie won the Democratic nomination for President, I would donate all of my time, money, and bodily fluids to help get him elected. I would vote for him. I would kill for him.

That said, Bernie should sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. His time has passed. He’s not the fresh voice anymore. His platform will be better articulated by younger, stronger candidates, and his nomination would all but guarantee a third party independent who would split the vote and get Trump elected to a second term.

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