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okay but like... Georgie took a picture. and if I’m not mistaken it’s still partly in the camera, being developed, after Penny saves him.

so what’s that picture gonna look like when it’s developed

anyway the best part of this is how nonchalant Georgie is at the end compared to the last panel with the Losers’ faces, and also Pennywise’s confused-as-fuck ‘you... wanted... to scare... ME???’ face

#it (2017)#littlekiwifrog #pennywise #georgie denbrough #bill denbrough #mike hanlon #ben hanscom #richie tozier #turned good au #pennywise why are you singing in the sewer

littlekiwifrog

abyssal-god replied to your post “[[MOR] // Draw a monster. Why is it a monster? More Turned Good…”

I’m gonna die of this, you can feel Penny’s existential crisis. did he originally intend to attack Georgie here?

Yup!! The text in the background is the lyrics to Oranges and Lemons, which is used in the movie soundtrack when Pennywise is about to or is attacking. I’ve also always found that nursery rhyme super unnerving. Penny is still working through some Things.

abyssal-god

@littlekiwifrog ok I’m finally reblogging to respond cause carrying on this conversation in the replies will get obnoxious even though I ‘technically’ quit tumblr ayyy

also ack this got really long I just have a lot of emotions about this au could probably discuss for hours orz

but also dude, that just makes the whole comic even more incredible to me. based on some of the previous talk in the tag, I’m assuming that Penny returned the bike because he wanted to try and get rid of the existential crisis by evening the gift-debt, but Georgie just had to be Pure and give him the popcorn and the cocoa, so now he has to even it again by giving Georgie some of the cocoa – but now that he’s done that he can finally eat this annoying human child like he should have.

except not really. it just freezes up and can’t do it and it doesn’t know why. so now does it think its sick, or something?

anyway. another thing I just find interesting is the contrast between Georgie in this au and Bill in the movie. Bill’s always insisting that Penny isn’t REAL, that it’s tricks or illusions. here, Georgie insists that Penny IS real. definitely real. for sure.

littlekiwifrog

I also have a lot of emotions about this AU!!

And yes! I wanted to play with how Penny would respond in a non-survival based conflict (other than just saying fuck it and immediately killing the cause of said conflict), and since Georgie doesn’t pose a physical threat to Penny, there’s this conflict of gift-debt from these sort of offerings they’re leaving each other. And Penny is a reclusive and pretty secretive thing by nature, so no one’s ever left it offerings or gifts even in attempt to ward It off.

So then why did Penny freeze up and not attack/eat Georgie? Well, Penny doesn’t really eat people, remember– It eats their fear. And this kid not only isn’t afraid of Penny, he likes Penny because of this prolonged gift exchange, which has also never happened before.

Can you imagine what fondness smells/feels like to a creature that gets all drool-y and twitchy around someone that has the potential to be afraid? Gross.

abyssal-god

mmmmm. And then you have a double (triple?) whammy -- Penny not knowing how to deal with the gift-debt, and also thinking that it should be eating Georgie -- but Georgie smells so unappetizing that it doesn’t want to eat that, and that just gets all wound into the gift-debt thing. It’s like they’re amplifying each other.

but it’s probably so used to people being even mildly uneasy around it, if it’s so reclusive, that Georgie is now coming totally out of left field for Penny. it doesn’t know what to do with this human or how to react to this situation. contributing both to the confusion and to the possibility of a bond forming, ofc. god I love this

and on a totally different note from the Pennywise psychoanalysis: Penny you dumb spider clown that isn’t how you sit on a chair

#littlekiwifrog #turned good au #pennywise #georgie #it (2017)

littlekiwifrog

abyssal-god replied to your post “[[MOR] // Draw a monster. Why is it a monster? More Turned Good…”

I’m gonna die of this, you can feel Penny’s existential crisis. did he originally intend to attack Georgie here?

abyssal-god

@littlekiwifrog ok I’m finally reblogging to respond cause carrying on this conversation in the replies will get obnoxious even though I ‘technically’ quit tumblr ayyy

also ack this got really long I just have a lot of emotions about this au could probably discuss for hours orz

but also dude, that just makes the whole comic even more incredible to me. based on some of the previous talk in the tag, I’m assuming that Penny returned the bike because he wanted to try and get rid of the existential crisis by evening the gift-debt, but Georgie just had to be Pure and give him the popcorn and the cocoa, so now he has to even it again by giving Georgie some of the cocoa -- but now that he’s done that he can finally eat this annoying human child like he should have.

except not really. it just freezes up and can’t do it and it doesn’t know why. so now does it think its sick, or something?

#I'm in schrodinger's tumblr right now ignore me #littlekiwifrog #it (2017)#pennywise #georgie #turned good au

This blog is dead

So before you follow it, please ask yourself why.

If you have been following and you know me RL, please just continue on as you were. My tumblr absence is going to continue otherwise. If you have been following and don’t know me RL, the blog is dead.

necromancer: RISE.

necromancer: RISE. RISE UP.

necromancer: RISE BEFORE ME

necromancer: RISE MY CREATION

bread: *does nothing*

necromancer: fuck i forgot the yeast

#its me #i am the necromancer

Listening to one song on repeat while drinking alcohol -- especially one that is very slow, rhythmic, and full of long notes -- is another really good way to get into a sort of trancelike state.

(I’m talking about “Gone with the Sin” by HIM, if anyone cares to know.)

#trancing #gibbering #nightblog

I’m unfollowing a lot of people to clear up my virtual air and breathing space. Please don’t be offended if you’re a real person who knows me in real life and I unfollow you.

I will be selectively refollowing over time.

pervocracy

He wasn’t as flagrantly bad as Trump, but let’s not completely rehabilitate George W. Bush into a nice old man who likes to paint and can’t handle his raincoat, okay?

-signed, someone over thirty

sw-or-gtfo-deactivated20211219

dubya looks cutesy-pie now, but plz know he was the trump prequel, an utter buffoon and public embarrassment who lost the popular vote and stoked the ugliest brand of patriotism to bring us to a war with no purpose but personal and crony profit. he was a trump test run and worked magnificently

plz also know he is test running how we are expected to treat trump in retirement, as a delightful buffoon who wasn’t responsible

he is absolutely a buffoon

but he also created a war of no purpose (thus opening the way for future presidents to declare war personally, needing no congressional approval or oversight)

make fun of him because he is evil and deserves mockery, not because he’s just an adorbs old man who seems cutely befuddled

eronthebender

And don’t forget how he let a shit ton of Black people die or lose everything when Hurricane Katrina happened

merinnan

That global gag rule that Trump just signed in? Yeah, W reinstated it after Clinton scrapped it, and killed thousands of women worldwide because of ir.

halfhardtorock

Im deeply concerned with the popular idea that Trump is a singular, isolated problem and not the plausible outcome of where the modern GOP was always headed. Like he’s the natural possible outcome of the rise of the tea party, their racism, their slow inexorable capitulation into anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, nationalism. Bush was part of that development. We’re not going to be miraculously all better if we impeach Trump.

bemusedlybespectacled

don’t forget that the bush administration supported a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, and continued to support it until well into his second term

I’m convinced the only reason it never actually materialized is because cheney’s daughter is a lesbian and cheney was the actual power behind the throne there

agirlwithachakram

and if we do impeach Trump, and I’m pretty sure the GOP will when it’s strategically useful, remember who that leaves us with.

annleckie

Right! Here’s what I did this morning, bright and early, as soon as offices in DC opened: I called my (Republican, as it happens) Congressperson and said to the nice intern who answered the phone, “I have a simple, direct question to which I would like a simple, direct answer. When is Representative [N] going to begin impeachment proceedings against this president?”

Citizens. For the first time, the nice intern, who I have spoken to a few times by now, seemed taken aback, and asked me to hold on while he went after something to tell me. The eventual answer was “There are no plans at this time” but I told them I would be asking the question regularly and remembering the answers when it came time to vote.

Imma do it again in a few days. Join me if you can? If you can’t, postcards? Or whatever else you can do, it’s all good, every little thing.

chonquee-monquee

To all my American followers, try and do this as well, or email (can you email congress people?) if phoning is too much for you, or just reblog and share around

annleckie

You can totally email!

There’s a lot of contradictory information going around about contacting representatives, but this is what I’ve heard from someone who used to work for Congress:

First of all, phone calls are NOT the only effective way to communicate. Snail mail letters and postcards are absolutely fine. So, it turns out, are emails! HOWEVER.

You want to be direct and clear in your email or letter. Best is to choose one issue. If possible, open with something personal. “As a parent whose children attend public schools,” that’s personal, that’s where this issue hits home for me, “I am absolutely opposed to the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education. She is unqualified and will be a disaster for Missouri’s public schools.” And then a specific, actionable request. “I’m calling on you to oppose her nomination.” The personal bit could also be “I have a lot of friends who will be affected by” or even “I am very concerned/upset about…”

One topic per letter or email. Use your own words. The emails that are actually useless are useless are the form emails that various orgs try to get folks to sign onto–they’re all identical, it’s obvious they’re not the person’s own thoughts, and they’re easy to dismiss. They’re mostly effective as fundraisers for the orgs that set them up. But YOUR own email, that you send, say from the official’s contact form on their website, that you wrote in your own words? They see that. They count that.

I’m seeing some assertions that with phones down, fax is next best, but I’m told that by and large faxes arrive as email attachments, so you might as well just email.

ONLY CONTACT YOUR OWN REPRESENTATIVES. If you are not a constituent, you will be ignored.

I want to point out, too, that considering the Senate’s phones have been essentially melting down the last couple days, the cries of “ONLY PHONECALLS WILL DO” seem even more off-target. The phones might go down, and voicemails fill up, but the USPS keeps delivering those letters and the mailroom keeps processing them. So don’t feel like you’re doing something second-best if you’re “only” writing letters or emails.

And as always, be polite to the interns answering the phones. They get paid a pittance and work long hours, and they’re not in charge of anything but taking your message.

consultingreaders

A note about busy lines/full voicemail boxes: If you prefer to call, given how quickly everything is moving these days, find your Congressperson’s district office number. This line is far less likely to be busy. Your Senator likely has more than one district office, so if the line at their office in your state capital is busy, no worries: try an office in one of the smaller towns.

smilesandvials

Science communications has to change.

It does. It’s important that we change now. We should have done it before.

And I don’t know what changes need to be made but I do feel like science communications and outreach has a few really glaring problems.

1. We mostly talk to children. That’s fine. They are the future. But they aren’t the now and when we don’t get their parents engaged to, we’re asking them to clean up a mess when they’re old enough. And when I say children, I really mean children. I don’t know the last time I was at an outreach event that focused on high schoolers or was made for a high school audience.

2. We’re mostly talking to people who will already be fairly well educated. That’s fine to. But we’re missing people who either have little interest in actively investing in education and people who don’t have access to it. We’re mostly getting contact with people who are already in school.

3. We are talking to people who already agree. We are preaching to the choir. That makes sense – they are who shows up. I don’t know how to talk to people who already think I’m wrong or a waste of tax payer dollars but I would love to find out. Negin Farsad might have some tips, though.

4. We exclude people. We do. We often implicitly exclude religious groups. We often implicitly exclude people who don’t have a higher education. My mother, even, was nervous about having dinner with my undergraduate advisor because, “[she doesn’t] have a doctorate, [she doesn’t] know how to talk to somebody that smart.” I don’t know how to stop that impression but I would love to.

5. Maybe, too many of us are career scientists. That’s fantastic – we have a job we are passionate about. But…then it is a little easy to write off our excitement. I’m not always that impressed by how cool math is when a mathematician gets excited about it. But if my barista got excited about a proof – wow, that must be a really cool proof, right!?

6. We don’t always have the communication skills. This is obvious because the seminars I go to are not as exciting to me as a TEDTalk, even if the subject matters to me more. We need to hone those skills. For me, I’m hoping to take improv classes. Write more. Try different things. But we need to include professional communicators or theater departments or artists in our efforts.

I am 23. I am not a seasoned science communicator. I might not even be a seasoned communicator. I can’t find the answers to all of these but I know they are problems.

the-unabridged-journals

On this note:

There’s a whole academic journal (open source, free to subscribe to) called “Communicating Astronomy to the Public” (CAP) that’s worth checking out. I also recommend the @ realscientists twitter account if Twitter is your thing. Lots to learn!

allthingslinguistic

Something that I did not know until I had been writing about linguistics for the public for several years (and being paid to do so!) is that there are whole degrees and conferences and associations for science writers and communicators. The #sciwri and #scicomm hashtags on twitter often have resources, as do websites like the National Association of Science Writers, Canadian Science Writers Association, Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, and so on.

Linguists often complain that the public doesn’t know very basic things about our field, like that language can be investigated analytically or that linguistic discrimination is real discrimination, and one way of expanding this would be to build more bridges with science communicators as we’re doing all kinds of public outreach.

In the meantime, I leave this here so at least a few more people know about it, along with links to two posts that I wrote when I was figuring out pop linguistics from scratch Advice for writing pop linguistics articles and Differences between writing pop linguistics, teaching, and even other pop science.

noseforahtwo

As a chick married to an ex-cop, I say this all the time to people close to me, but it bears repeating here: No cop is your friend after you’ve been detained.

Get rear ended by a drunk at a red light? That cop will direct traffic around your vehicle, document the accident, sure. Call animal control on your piece of shit neighbor? You’ve got a pretty good chance the officer who shows up helps out in a meaningful way.

But after you’ve been arrested, when a police officer says, “Just be honest with me and I’ll do the same.” or the old “Help me and I’ll help you.” Politely ask for a lawyer. Shake your head. Ignore them. Pretend you’re Hollywood royalty being asked for a selfie. “ …mmmm… Sorry, but no.”

Keep your mouth shut. Don’t do their work for them. Wait for a lawyer.

yourbigsisnissi

Ask for an attorney and then shut up. Whether you get a public defender or retain a private attorney, invoke your right to council and shut up.

kokokitty

Same goes for if you’re just being “detained”. You don’t have to say anything and the less you say the better.

literalchemy-deactivated2025052

The narrative that Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Turkey are being treated differently because Trump has business ties with them is missing the crucial additional context that all three countries have been staunch geopolitical clients of the United States. All three countries purchase USA arms and equipment, and perform military actions at the USA’s behest, and Turkey is currently a crucial forward base for NATO’s ambitions in Syria. It’s not just Trump money and these countries did not just start receiving special treatment with this administration. They have always been key US interests and collaborators in the Middle East.

owaztu

The omission is intentional. “Liberal” establishment bastions are happy to personally attack Trump but would never criticize America’s accepted status quo of imperialist foreign policy.

dr-archeville

Donald Trump has called for a shutdown of the Internet in certain areas to stop the spread of terror.

In a speech at the U.S.S. Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on Monday, Trump referenced the use by ISIS of social media as a recruitment tool. He recommended a discussion with Bill Gates to shut off parts of the Internet.

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet,” Trump said. “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.‘ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.”

Some totalitarian governments do it

The notion that the Internet could be shut off is not completely off base. North Korea does it. Some countries have been known to shut off Internet service to their citizens in times of crisis. Egypt restricted the Internet during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising.

Other countries block certain Internet services and sites. China is the most famous example, forbidding most social networking sites as well as websites that deal with subjects the government doesn’t want its citizens to know about.

Most Western countries, including the United States, regulate the Internet very loosely. There are few restrictions about what American citizens can do and say on the Internet. Child pornography is one example of forbidden Internet activity in the United States – Google is barred from linking to it, and websites cannot display images of it.

Why the United States can’t do it

But a full-on “closing up” of the Internet “in certain areas” would be an impossible task. There are so many players with so much redundancy built into the system, that the Internet is not just something that can be turned off with a wave of a magic wand.

Virtually every part in the United States has multiple Internet service provider options.

Comcast, (CMCSA) Time Warner Cable (TWC) and the other major broadband companies don’t overlap much. But Verizon (VZ, Tech30), AT&T (T, Tech30), Sprint (S) and T-Mobile (TMUS) all provide the same service to roughly the same areas. Satellite companies also provide Internet to most parts of the country.

Removing Internet service in certain areas of the U.S. would require those companies to turn off their cell towers and fiber networks, and to restrict satellite access to people living in those regions.

America can’t shut off the Internet overseas either

Shutting down Internet service in foreign countries could be even more difficult.

Despite a common belief to the contrary, the United States does not control the global Internet. Servers on foreign soil serve up the Web and other Internet services to people living abroad.

So foreign Internet infrastructure would need to be disrupted or shut down to turn off service in certain areas – already a tricky task made even harder if the countries and companies controlling those servers and cell towers abroad don’t cooperate.

Whatever, Donald Trump wouldn’t want the Internet shut off anyway. Then he couldn’t tweet.

While Trump clearly doesn’t know the first thing about how the internet works (outside of his Twitter account), don’t let “it couldn’t happen in America” blind us to some very real ways in which the internet can be made less free, less accessible, and less useful for things other than government propaganda and surveillance. And don’t doubt that President Trump (and his party) would be happy to implement them.

winterlive

the time honored tool of every dictator, censorship is one of the first things out of trump’s mouth. this is real censorship, as opposed to when someone tells you you’re wrong on twitter.

it should come as no surprise whatsoever that 45′s pick for FCC commissioner, ajit pai, is SUPER excited to strip net neutrality from american citizens. if you didn’t know, net neutrality is the principle that currently allows you to access whatever internet site you want, at the same speed as all the other sites, without your ISP spying on you TOO much. the US regulations that protect you in this way are an annoying speed bump for ISPs in their quest to wring you like a wet dishrag until all your money falls out, and of course Team Spraytan works for them, not you.

and hey, if they do want to enact the fuckin lunatic censorship proposed in the article above, getting rid of these protections will be their first stop. what’s the most likely target of this anti-internet offensive? obviously, it’ll be american activists, scientists, and anybody who’s ever used the phrase “tiny hands” – or, as all those folks will be called in newspeak, terrorists.

just one more thing you should keep on your list of Horrible Things To Yell At Representatives About.

disparition

I want to talk about this whole “punching nazis” thing, which I have been thinking about for some days.

To start, let me clarify that I have no moral or ethical qualms with Richard Spencer getting punched in the face on tv. I’d be happy to see it happen again.

But I do have a couple issues with much of the dialogue that has emerged in the wake of this event.

A lot of the people suddenly talking about nazis right now are people who didn’t seem to even realize they existed in this country prior to this election.

A lot of people seem to have gotten some strange ideas about how and where nazis are typically encountered, or who they actually are.

So, I’d like to talk about some of the times in my life when I’ve encountered nazis.

Before I do that, let’s try to establish a definition. There are a lot of different stripes of fascists and white supremacists out there, with varying agendas and varying degrees of organization. In the US we’ve got many types, ranging from the KKK and Aryan Nation to various unorganized skinhead rabble to the newish group calling itself the Alt Right. It seems easiest, at least for the sake of this argument, to lump those all together under one general “nazi” category. But does that really make sense? I’ll come back to that. But for now, in most of the examples I will describe below, these were people who openly called themselves such.

Also, I want to establish a bit about who I am. I don’t like to discuss any of these things publicly, but I also feel like I kind of have to, to explain where I am coming from. So: I am Jewish, I am bi, I am neurodivergent. Due to this last thing, I have certain issues navigating the physical world. I am physically fit but not athletic. I have very little self defense training. By occupation I am a musician.

And lastly I want to point out that these examples are from 15-20 years ago and describe some of my earliest encounters with these forces to provide context. And I’m going to start with some clear cut cases:

I first became aware of the existence of modern nazis my first year in high school. This was in the suburbs of San Francisco. I had a few friends who were into punk music and culture. I heard about “white power punks” and nazi skinheads who would sometimes show up at shows. When I started going out I would see them every once in a while. When I started going up to the city, at that time there were places that were absolutely notorious for nazi skinheads. I never interacted with them, I always steered clear of them, and never really fell in with the punk scene anyway. But that’s when I first became aware that there were people in modern America who called themselves nazis and directly advocated for white supremacy.

To be honest I did not think of myself as their “target” because (in my mind, at that time) Jewish culture in the SF Bay Area was practically invisible and unlikely to be on their radar. In fact I didn’t think too deeply about who their target was. I mostly thought they were crazy people who loved violence and called themselves “nazis” because it was the meanest thing they could think of, that they were in favor of “white power” because it was so obviously wrong. At this time, there was fair amount of tension in the state around the issue of immigration from Mexico. But it did not occur to me then that there could have been any relationship between the xenophobia I saw expressed by mainstream circles in conversations about Proposition 187 and the blatant, violent white supremacy expressed by the skinheads on the periphery of local punk scenes. (also please note that I am aware that not all skinheads are nazis and that there is an anti-racist element within skinhead culture as well)

In college, in Pittsburgh, I lived on a store with a convenience store on one end. One of the people who worked in this store was a skinhead who wore a jacket covered in various white power/“rock against communism” band logos. He had a group of similar buddies that often hung around nearby, a couple of whom had aryan nation tattoos. On several occasions when I woke up in the morning I would find leaflets distributed up and down the block decrying the Holocaust as a “Jewish scam to make money”. These flyers were attributed to Church of the Creator, one of the more active neo-nazi groups in Pennsylvania at that time. Every once in a while I would cautiously engage in arguments with some people on the fringes of that crew of guys who hung out in the area. Things were sometimes tense but never got physical. Soon after 9/11 most of them disappeared. I don’t know why or where to.

While traveling alone in Slovenia, I nearly ran into a parade of about 40 skinheads chanting and marching in the street while I was on the way back to where I was staying. I do not know what specific group they were affiliated with but wore patches with the common “celtic cross” symbol used by far right/white nationalist groups all over the world. At that time, fascist graffiti covered Ljubljana.

Those are just a few of the more blatant examples from that time. These experiences were not rare. The KKK and various neo-nazi groups held public parades and rallies all throughout this period, and sometimes showed up as counter protestors or forces of violence at protests for progressive causes. They marched through downtown Pittsburgh - with the local government’s blessing - and many other cities in that region.

There were protestors at those marches, and there were people who fought the nazis directly, but the general consensus in mainstream liberal circles at that time seemed to be that nazis had the right to march just like anyone else, that any violence against them would be bad. It certainly wasn’t at all common to hear college educated, NY Times-reading liberals talking about the glories of “punching nazis”. This is a problematic but very complicated phenomenon: they were to be tolerated up until the point at which they’ve come into power.

But let me explain why _I_ didn’t go around punching the nazis I saw, during those times when I encountered them personally. To some extent, part of me did follow that logic mentioned above, but that’s not the real reason. The real reason is pretty simple: most nazis are a lot better at fighting than I am, they do it more frequently, they usually travel in numbers, they are often armed, and in almost every circumstance when I’ve encountered them the odds would not have been remotely in my favor had things gotten physical.

Richard Spencer was alone and unarmed standing in front of a video camera busily talking about an internet meme while he was sucker punched. This occurred in broad daylight in a very crowded, open area with a ton of media and police present. While I applaud the anonymous puncher for seizing upon that opportunity, that’s not really a typical situation in which one encounters nazis.

Recently, Richard Spencer posted a video in reaction to this incident. In this video he mentions that the Alt Right will not succeed if they are unable to be who they are in public. I’ve seen a lot of people pointing to this video as a sign of victory over the Alt Right, a sign that they are scared. I think the latter half is true but not the former. What Spencer is saying is that they are going to ramp up security. And I would anticipate that these people will begin to receive even more protection from the current administration.

So, this is one conclusion I’d like to leave here - in most cases “punching nazis” means getting involved in serious physical violence in which your life will be at risk. And that risk is only going to increase in the future. Fantasizing about punching some idiot talking about a frog on tv is fun, but I think it ignores the realities that many have faced and many more are about to face. And while many of us have disabilities that hinder us in this department, I think it would behoove anyone who is serious about getting physical with fascists to study and learn how to do so before getting involved in a situation you are unprepared for. I would also think long and hard before making that demand of anyone else. But that’s not the most important point.

I’d like to circle back to talking about definitions. The examples I gave above are obvious. These were people who, in almost all cases, were openly wearing the actual logos of white supremacist organizations. So let me bring up a different example:

About one year after 9/11 I was in Budapest, taking an overnight train to Amsterdam. I had a spot in a sleeper compartment on a train. I got on and a couple other passengers came in. One of them was a young guy, a little older than me (I was in my early 20’s at this time). He spoke English very well and we got to talking. It turned out he was an Austrian who worked in finance. Middle management at a major bank. He bought us a couple of beers and we were getting along. Inevitably, the topic of 9/11 came up. Seemingly out of nowhere, he explains to me how “there were no Jews in the building that day”. He then goes on to explain how 9/11 and the entire War on Terror that was then unfolding was all a Jewish plot to direct money to Israel’s armed forces. And hinted that the Holocaust was a similar plot. I tried to argue with him for a bit (without letting on that I was Jewish) but it was nearly impossible to get through to him, and he soon became surly and then passed out. I tried to do the same. But what caught my attention was that this man was well spoken, dressed conservatively, he looked every bit the upper middle class finance professional. It was difficult to imagine him in a street fight. No one would have described this person as being on the fringes of his society.

Up until a year ago, if I told this story to a European, or to an American person of color, they were unsurprised. But if I told it to a white American their reaction would usually be “yeah, well, that’s Europe for you”.

But that’s never been the case.

One common narrative is that many of the groups of fascists have figured out that they aren’t going to get very far if they are seen just thugs who march around on the street wearing in leather jackets getting in scraps. many of them have figured this out some time ago, and have been infiltrating mainstream education and corporate life. And yes, that is happening.

But there is a big problem with that narrative: it ignores the fact that many of America’s institutions and businesses are, themselves, organizations that promote white supremacy. Many of our banks, many of our police departments, our prison system, much of our media. Does these mean they are all “nazis”? Not really. But what it does mean is that white supremacy is not some outside force that just suddenly popped out of Steve Bannon’s suitcase. It’s been here for a long time. It is deeply engrained in our society. Fascism is not some new danger that we suddenly need to prevent from being “normalized” - for much of America, fascism has been the norm for a very long time.

Here’s my point with all of this: sooner or later, Trump will be defeated. This regime is monstrous, but I have seen the power and anger and sheer volume of opposition to it, and I do not think that this regime will last. My worry is, once this most obvious of enemies is defeated, the liberal establishment will go right back to completely forgetting that white supremacy and fascism are a major problem in this country. The sad fact is, even when Democrats in power, even when the POTUS is the most progressive sounding person electable, the nazis are still here, white supremacy is still here, fascism is still here. And not always on “the other side”. We need to remember that, we need to keep pointing to them and ostracizing them and speaking out against white supremacy and fascism even when it looks like things are more comfortable, because that comfort is a trap.

blackwoolncrown

I love you and I love this and it’s a perfect manifestation of the complexity of the issue- something that I’ve been feeling constantly but have not been able to congeal into words. I think, from my perspective, the two main cautions are this: 1) Remember that not everyone can be expected to go around punching this problem (that is far bigger than just individuals on the street) and 2) When this is all said and done, will we do the REAL work of constantly rooting out and ostracizing these mindsets? Social policing is a responsibility we have to take on to some extent if we want a peaceful society. Peace is something that must be maintained, not a state where nothing needs to be done and nothing is threatened. Well, not in *this* layer of reality, anyway.

sashayed

I heard something amazing last night: a longterm Congressional aide who said “I got 30,000 calls a week to impeach Bill Clinton. I’ve gotten 5,000 this week about the ACA.”

That’s partly because we communicate differently now than we did in the 90s, of course. But in my opinion, it’s a sign of something else. This first-week offensive of jaw-droppingly vile legislation is intended to fragment the opposition. We can’t all fight every battle–and if we try, the aides we speak to won’t tabulate us in all of them. So while 30,000 or more of us may be calling, some of us are focusing on the ACA and some on Jeff Sessions and some on the wall and some on the Muslim ban and on and on and on.

This is important and necessary. We must and will focus on the many, MANY different issues that brought us to this point. But it is also time to pull Congress’s attention to one, and that one is impeaching Donald Trump.

When you call your reps tomorrow, try something like this. (Feel free to send me corrections.)

Hi, my name is [your name], I’m a constituent from [your town], and I want to tell [representative’s name] that Congress needs to act immediately to impeach President Trump. Not only has his behavior been unhinged, but he is in direct and obvious violation of the Foreign Emoluments clause of the Constitution. He is empowering deluded bigots like Steve Bannon over national security experts. He is dangerous and unfit to lead. As a [parent, lawyer, child of immigrants, friend and neighbor of immigrants], I have a stake in this fight, and I will personally work to remove any member of Congress who doesn’t stand against Trump. Thanks.

This is ESPECIALLY important if you have a Republican representative. Make it personal for them. Tell them how hard you and your community will work to ensure they lose in the next election if they don’t stand up to Trump.

Mike Pence is a nightmare, but he’s not a nightmare who wants to put Steve Fucking Bannon on the National Security Council. He’s not a nightmare with populist cachet. He is not the nightmare that makes David Duke and Richard Spencer so fucking happy. We must and will fight him as President – but we will be able to do it on our terms. Impeach this motherfucker now.

oak23

Honestly I don’t even know how to react to people saying Pence is better than (or less of a nightmare) Trump when he has a history of making AIDS worsen and his anti LGBTQIA stance on torturing us in the community he has led in, especially when Reagan’s AIDS epidemic is still within living memory