Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Do people seriously not do the basic fucking self-examination of "OK, if this exact same news item were happening with the parties flipped, would I be having the same reaction?"

Evidently not. Seems like basic Intellectual Integrity 101 to me. But honestly? If we were the ones storming the White House, you know deep down in your heart we'd all, INCLUDING ME, be spouting rationalizations about why this is legal and fine. And the conservatives, naturally, would be screaming about how it's a war against them and a coup and the end of democracy forever. And they, too, would be idiots. *sigh*

Sorry, that's just the way humans work. And if you have a rational about why it's Different For Us... well, that's nice. People always do. ALWAYS.

I'm not saying that we DON'T have a superior cause, nor that that cause might not indeed better justify us invading the Capitol. I'm saying that we both know damn well most of our reactions to this have NOTHING to do with those detailed reasons nor any serious thought into them, and EVERYTHING to do with the same dumb in-group/out-group shit that's always plagued humanity.

Doesn't mean the people in the Capitol Building are not wholly (a) wrong (b) bad (c) seditionist (d) criminal or (e) proto-fascist at best. It just means that just like them, when the chips are down, we think being "NOT the bad guys" -- i.e. just belonging to the right club and mouthing the right dogma -- is enough to justify what we do, even if it breaks the law or hurts people.

There's a parallel universe, I PROMISE YOU, where we fell for a Stalin-grade leftist narcissist who played us like fiddles and YOU AND I ARE FUCKING LOVING IT and have zero moral qualms about any of it.

Or maybe in that universe, you just got tired of my handwringing and up and shot me. That's fine.

Yes, dear, that's because Twitter leftists have the approximate attention span of an infant, the emotional stability of Blanche DuBois, and the approximate ability of Roast Beef Kazenzakis to recognize hope when they see it.

So fucking tired of this.

It *is* an entirely fair counterpoint, BTW, that the guy at the security gate is not only also a fucking bear, but was seen drinking out of the same bottle of Everclear. :p

And yes, they were invited in by that other bear that's been hanging out in the backyard for the last four years. But Animal Control has already been called, and it still doesn't mean that there are gonna be one, let alone, fifty drunk bears still there in a week. :p

So yeah. It's still really bad that drunk bears got inside the house. We are sure as fuck gonna have to replace the carpets, the drapes, and perhaps a few dozen of the people.

BUT IT STILL DOES NOT MEAN BEARS NOW OWN YOUR HOUSE FOREVER, GOD FUCKING DAMMIT, SO STOP ACTING LIKE THIS IS A REASONABLE CONCERN. BEARS ARE FAR TOO STUPID TO COMPETENTLY SIGN A LEASE. GOD DAMNIT IT, YOU SAW THAT ORANGE ONE TRY. :)

(I'm not yelling at any of you in particular, least of all the multiple folks who quite reasonably extended the metaphor to include Trump and DC police. The yelly all-caps part is directed at... sigh... leftist Birdsite, mostly.)

@monsterblue I would sell all y'all out to the Saturnian hypnosquid in a heartbeat if I had the chance, but only because they seemed to have a pretty damn good thing going, certainly relative to us. <3

@Leucrotta I solemnly assert there is no style parodist better than Alfred Matthew Yankovic, there never has been, and there never will be. Virtually every time he sets out to do a song in another artist's style, he has nailed something fundamental about their sound. (See also Franks 2000" TV, i.e. the best REM song, and Dare To Be Stupid, a DEVO song so good Mark M himself professed his good natured rage at Al for doing it so much better than him...)

@monsterblue I wonder how many people realized all the alien mind-control RP I did for all those years was intended as a sincere and serious political manifesto. XD

The whole invasion of the Capitol is admittedly pretty scary-- it's just that's it's scary like being in the proximity of a really drunk brown bear.

People are still gonna suffer. There's gonna be a lot of noise and a lot of teeth-gnashing about how the fuck a bear got a hold of a fifth of Everclear AND got inside. It demonstrates a very clear and present security risk, not to mention some serious questions about local wildlife policy.

But the odds of the bear sustaining any focus or achieving any goals is zero. The bear has no plans. The bear is just blindly angry. Taser the damn bear, drag it outside and figure out how to keep it from happening again. This seems like a reasonable alternative to running around screaming "OH MY GOD THE BEARS ARE TAKING OVER!"

@001zlnv I really had my heart set on it containing drinking establishment reference, though. ;(

Democracy works just fine.

It's human brains that are terminally clusterfucked.

@001zlnv I just got done saying the same thing on Twitter. *high five*

I'm still trying to figure out a dismissive enough name for it. Maybe the "Biker Bar Putsch" or the "Applebee's Putsch."

@Leucrotta Huh, it looks like ricotta made from sheep's milk is very common. Do you have any better tolerance of that? I seem to be seeing that it's at least *lower* lactose but I dunno your sensitivity/threshold... Dammit, I want you to have cannoli. :D

@Leucrotta Aw, shit, I skimmed right over the "you can eat" part. I'm really sorry, I've done this multiple times to you today. D:

STILL. I am not daunted. I might look for a lactose-free cannoli recipe and send you up something stuffed into Brocato's shells. This is a joyous occasion.

@troodon I'm glad they have a place to hide from me. XD XD XD

@Leucrotta Shit, hit us up in a month when it's clearer which way this is all gonna go, and I'll send you a box from Brocado's. I really do think you deserve something nice for popping your Twitter jail cherry. It's a rite of passage innit. <3

Just don't point at a circus and tell me it's a conquering army. Armies march in straight lines and have a leader. This is a gaggle of armed clowns, and while a bunch of bumbling costumed jackasses with guns is undeniably very dangerous, I think you radically overestimate the sustainability of such a mob.

I reserve the right to revise my opinion. Who knows what kind of monster might rise up and turn these people into something effectual. But in the immortal words of Gaz Membrane, "They're so bad at it."

I expect their impact will be a lot like ISIS and Al-Qaeda... which will be convenient as hell, because it gives us a really good narrative platform to condemn them from. This is a BIG TACTICAL MISTAKE on their part IMHO.

There will be an occasional attack. People will actually get hurt. It will be tragic and needless and infuriating. They will remain UTTERLY impervious to any suggestion that their hypocrisy has driven them to become terrorists themselves. They might even a be a persistent force in uspol for a while.

But if there's one thing I've learned over and over and over again from being a strategy gamer: there's a REAL BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE between "able to harass an opponent effectively in a skirmish," "able to conquer actual territory," "able to HOLD that territory," and "able to govern that territory effectively."

We already KNOW they can't do the last one. Honestly? How the fuck can you people even pull doom out of this, when the Republicans are AT EACH OTHER'S THROATS over this already?! What the fuck is it with radical leftists being determined to pull defeat from the jaws of victory?

@Leucrotta My feelings towards this are roughly those of the Mafiosi in Goodfellas when Henry Hill took the fall for selling bootleg cigarettes.

You done good, kid. You made your bones. It ain't so bad, you'll be out in a couple days. I'll buy ya a cannoli.

@troodon I'm glad you can do that, because I can offer only a dungeonful of angry zebra kobolds armed with itching-powder grenades and rolled-up centrist newspapers right now. :)

Everybody's just blankly speculating on this and running off in whatever direction provides the best narrative and it really feels like everybody on my feeds is determined to experience this more like a movie than a real thing goverened by real laws of real causality.

Fuck it. I just got a raise. And I don't believe this "coup" will succeed in the slightest. (Dammit, just look for half a second at how successful their *legal* challenges were. And then look at the average Trump fanatic's physical build, military expeirience [read: "Call of Duty"/"I like guns a lot"], and willingness to endure even trivial hardships. Listen to how hard they're WHINING about even the faintest, gentlest tap on the nose from the cops. Look at how fast the GOP is turning on each other -- EXACTLY like the troll farms on Livejournal, EXACTLY as I called it in 2016.

And I am VERY VERY VERY willing to make money off Masto's biases.

So I'm willing to place a multi-hundred dollar wager on this. To wit, that four years from now there will not have been any meaningful removal of power from the DNC by paramilitary force.

Any takers? I would love to take your Doom Money.

And I'm dumb too. But good god, I try to restrain myself a little from pretending that I somehow know how everything is going to turn out, and letting that judgment be based entirely on my emotions. I work my ass off to debunk myself. And sometimes it does really feel like, as often as I do fail, few people on either side even motherfucking TRY.

My cynicism about my fellow leftists' ability to process facts and information any more sensibly or cautiously than rightwingers was already as low as I thought it could go.

So I don't even have to stop doomscrolling. I can just simply blow this shit off. Because I just don't trust my allies to know what the fuck is actually going on anymore.

Especially not after seeing people scream "COUP! COUP! IT'S STARTED! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!" the other day over the unseated Senator... without bothering to get the little detail right that it was a STATE senator.

Up your game to "consistently gets basic facts correct" and *maybe* then I'll believe we're fucked. But you gotta get past TWENTY YEARS of everything from "we will never see gas below $4/gal ever again" to "they're DEFINITELY going to assassinate Barry before he gets out of office" to "I have it from a 100% reliable source that Bush is going to invade Iran in a few days," all real assertions from leftist friends of mine, all of which proved to be 100% bullshit.

Just so mad at everybody in general right now. Not saying we're NOT fucked. Just saying if I come to believe we're fucked, the source for it that finally convinces me is absolutely, categorically not coming off of Queer Leftist Twitter under any circumstances whatsoever.

Never, ever, ever again. I've been failed one too many times by the same kind of magical thinking, logic that takes place purely in the symbolic realm, judging people's entire character purely by the demographic (not even ideological! accidents of birth! fuck you!) groups they do and don't belong to, and conspiracy-style rationalization of emotionally powerful narratives into very very shaky "facts." It embarrasses the shit out my every time I see one of us do this. I'm fucking DONE.

Sorry not sorry. Still love you all individually. Collectively, I'm coming around to the opinion that the leftist fediverse is dumber than an amoeba. This still puts them above the American right, who are dumber than soot.