Category: Politics

In which I still ain’t right

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, WritingLeave a comment

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If you ever needed proof that I make foolish decisions: I decided to release a book during what I think may literally have been the stupidest and most rage-inducing week of my entire life.  I mean, there was probably a week during the Bush administration that at least came close somewhere.  Hell, there was probably more than one.  But right now hell if I can remember when that week might have been, and perhaps more importantly I didn’t have a wife and kid near me to remind me of my need to keep my shit together, and it has been fucking hard to come home from work each night and force myself into editing and creating mode instead of staring dully at Twitter and thinking thoughts that I ought not to be thinking.

I have never hated Republicans more than I do this week.  I have never been more exhausted and sick of white men than I have been this week.  I have never been more embarrassed by men in general than I have this week.

I cannot imagine how any of my women friends feel, and I can’t believe my wife is even still standing after all this shit.  The rage has nearly incapacitated me and I haven’t been putting up with entitled assholes like Brett Kavanaugh my entire life, like virtually every woman I know has.

Oh, and today at work involved transcribing a bunch of witness statements and having to find a way to get a four and a half minute, 500mb video of a kid in one of the scariest meltdowns I’ve ever seen in a school off of an ancient Android phone with a broken screen and to the cops.  I will say this: I have never been shy about criticizing cops when I feel like they’re doing a shitty job.  Our SRO took what could have been (what already was) a very, very bad situation today and, while it did ultimately lead to the student being taken out of the building in handcuffs (and still fighting the cops the whole way) it could have been much, much worse with a different police officer.  He was an absolute model of using minimum force required and attempting de-escalation the entire time (and it was the police officer who asked our security guard to start recording the incident) and the decision wasn’t finally made to take the student to the police station until the parent of the student, who, it should be pointed out, started the shit in the first place, refused to come and collect their child and actually told the SRO to take the student to jail.

Which … Okay.  But then I’mma come get you, and you’re going to jail too, you fucking asshole.  Ain’t no goddamn universe in existence where somebody calls me and says they need me to come get my baby and the words “Just take him to jail” come out of my mouth.

It’s been a very, very, very fucking rough week.

But I’m going to get this book done, and it’s going to be available this weekend, so go check me out on Patreon so you can have it once it’s ready.

Fuck Mel Hall, Chapter 4: Never Mind, Fuck Everybody

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

There was another anti-Jackie Walorski flyer, paid for by the Indiana Democratic Party, in my mailbox when I got home this afternoon. Once again, the flyer makes no mention of who the flyer-ers think you should vote for, only that you should not vote for Jackie Walorski.  Now, the last time this happened, I was kind of wondering just how much Hall’s people had had to do with it, since he was never mentioned.  Well, his radio ads are all about “Washington Walorski,” so even in his own stuff for his campaign he can’t avoid using Republican frames.  I’m not going to bother talking about the entire flyer.  Let’s just talk about this part of it:

 

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This is a photoshopped image.  It was photoshopped by an asshole at the behest of another asshole.

The general theme of the ad is that Walorski voted for the tax bill without knowing what was in it, so she’s “voting blindly.”  Get it?  She’s covering her face?  Or at least someone’s manly hands have been photoshopped over her face?  It’s the exact same hand in a different image on the other side, so this isn’t even a good photoshop, and don’t think that I haven’t noticed that it appears to be a man’s hand they used– rumors about Walorski’s sexuality (she’s married, to a man) have been floating around for literally as long as she’s been in office.

And then there’s that fucking gesture again.

Let me be one hundred percent clear:  that image is photoshopped.  It is not real.  Even if it is an actual image of her using that gesture and only the right arm is added on, it’s still a photoshopped image and therefore by definition the entire thing is suspect.  Which means one of two things:

  • That somebody affiliated with the Indiana Democratic Party deliberately decided to use an image of Jackie Walorski making a white power gesture in an ad and then not call attention to it, basically just doing it as a dogwhistle to both white supremacists and antiracist leftists; or
  • That they were unaware of what they were doing.  In September of 2018, just a couple of weeks (how the fucking hell has it only been a couple of weeks??) after Brett Kavanaugh’s asshole assistant caused a rather substantial brouhaha by making the same gesture behind him at his confirmation hearing.

One of these possibilities is disgustingly cynical at best and actively slanderous at worst.  The other possibility is proof of utter fucking incompetence.  And neither of them are fucking okay.  I hate these people.  I hate this fucking election, and I hate the fact that I’ve now had to spend two fucking posts defending Jackie Fucking Walorski, who is also an asshole, but who still doesn’t deserve this shit.

A pox on the lot of these fuckers.

 

Fuck Mel Hall, part 3 of an endless series

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

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You may recall parts one and two of a series that wasn’t originally called “Fuck Mel Hall,” but to hell with it, this is my blog and I get to rename stuff if I want to, plus: fuck Mel Hall.  Mel, if you’re not aware, is one of two Republicans who is running for my district’s House seat, IN-02.  The incumbent, Jackie Walorski, is a Republican who says she is a Republican.  Mr. Hall, who received barely 40% of the vote in the primary, somehow is the Democratic nominee, but is not a Democrat.  He has made it repeatedly clear that he has no interest whatsoever in advancing the goals of the Democratic party and has never identified himself as a member of the party in any advertisement– radio, TV or print– that I have ever seen.

I will not be voting for him.  I think he’s a prick.  I vote for Democrats; he isn’t one.  If I’m going to be represented by a Republican I want to be represented by one who is honest about it.

Now, an interesting fact about Ms. Walorski:  she only got about 3/4 of the vote in her primary, and the person she was running against literally had no campaign at all.  Not a website, did no campaigning, nothing.  But he was a dude, so 25% of the Republican primary voters voted for someone who they literally knew nothing at all about other than that he had a penis and their current representative didn’t.  Mel Hall supposedly got 40% of the vote in the Democratic primary; the other two candidates running were significantly more progressive than he was and he has continued to run as a Republican anyway.  I pay attention; there was no enthusiasm for this man anywhere during the primary and the lack of enthusiasm remains today.  He will lose and lose badly.

Anyway, take a look at that flyer up there.  My wife got one; I didn’t.  That’s unusual– neither of us ever miss an election, so generally whenever we get any election-related flyers, we get two of them.

Take a close look and see if you can figure out what’s going on here.

Also: be aware that an election cycle or two ago, faced with no significant races in the Democratic primary, my wife cast a vote for the least objectionable candidate in the Republican primary.  All you have to do in Indiana is ask for a ballot and they give you one.

This flyer, paid for by the Indiana Democratic party, appears to be trying to peel Republican voters away from Jackie Walorski, but never once mentions who they ought to vote for instead.  The entire damn flyer is Republican-framed: Democrats tend to believe government is actually good for something, so the bullshit “Washington Walorski” nonsense isn’t really going to get any traction with us.  I want my representatives to be experienced and good at their jobs, goddammit, and Walorski has been in office for six years, not thirty.  I don’t even like her and I recognize a bullshit attack when I see it.  Another tell?  Every person in the ad is white.  Democrats don’t send out ads like that.  Republicans, who know good and fucking well that their base mostly doesn’t see people of color as human beings, do.  And apparently we’re not above buying into their racist asshole framing if we think it’ll get, well, somebody some votes.

Fuck every single thing about this flyer, in case that isn’t clear.  Fuck the cynicism embedded in it, fuck the racism, fuck the sexism, fuck the candidate that it doesn’t bother to mention, fuck the bullshit nickname, which comes from the same asshole impulses that led the Republicans to call Joe Donnelly “Mexico Joe” in some of their bullshit ads, fuck every single thing about it.

I need better fucking representation around here, across the goddamned board.

Two very important questions

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Politics16 Comments

Please, wherever you see this, I’m begging for as many answers as I can get– either here, Facebook, on Twitter, wherever you happen to be able to find me.

  1. Are there any Republicans running for office in your district or your state who are using bipartisanship or “both sides are to blame” type rhetoric and explicitly declining to identify themselves as Republicans?
  2. For parents: did you keep your kids’ baby teeth?  If so, what did you do with them, and do you still have them?

Very different questions, I guess.  I NEED ANSWERS!

In which I give this more attention than it deserves

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics4 Comments

DmR4hllU8AIQdfa.jpg-large.jpegLet’s talk about this asshole for a second, and the shape her hand’s making.  Would I rather be talking about something else?  Yeah, probably.  Should this be a series of Twitter posts and not a blog post?  Well, maybe.  Am I still sick, and is this what I’ve come up with for tonight?  Yeah.  It’s my blog, so if I wanna waste time on nonsense I can.

The following things can all be true at the same time, and the majority of them are undeniable fact:

  • The woman making the gesture in the picture is of Mexican and Jewish heritage, which would make one think she, generally speaking, is rather unlikely to be a white supremacist;
  • but she still works for Brett Kavanaugh, so in this particular case “she can’t possibly think that because of her racial background” is, shall we say, somewhat less sound reasoning than it might otherwise be;
  • One can be Latinx and white at the same time!  The identities can overlap!  You can absolutely be Mexican, white, and a white supremacist at the same time.
  • You can also be Jewish and a white supremacist!  Ever heard of Jared Kushner, son in law to the person in the White House?  Hitler his fucking self was a quarter Jewish, for God’s sake.
  • I know how photographs work, and I know that sitting in one seat for hours with cameras trained in your general vicinity can lead to all sorts of ridiculousness.  It is entirely possible that she’s popping a zit in this picture.
  • 4chan originated the idea that this gesture meant “white power” as a troll move a couple of years ago;
  • but since then it has started to be used by actual, non-ironic white supremacists;
  • and part of the point is that it, as a fairly common gesture, will always be deniable.  That you will always be able to find pictures of, oh, Barack Obama making the same hand gesture and point at it and go “See!” and you can always make anyone making an issue of the white supremacist flashing white supremacist hand signs look foolish, by laying out the precise chain of reasoning I’ve set out above.  That’s.  The.  Fucking.  Point.  

So: Do I think that Brett Kavanaugh has white supremacists working for him, and do I believe that Kavanaugh himself may be one?  Absolutely.  100%.

Do I believe that this woman is, herself, a white supremacist?  Except insofar as it would not surprise me for any member of Kavanaugh’s staff to be one, I had never heard of this lady yesterday and will have forgotten about her tomorrow.  So maybe!  Maybe not!  I dunno.

Did this woman deliberately decide to take the time out of the however-long-she-had-to-sit-there to randomly and quietly flash a white supremacist hand sign at the cameras?  Ehh.  Try as hard as I might, I can’t figure out what the point might have been of doing something like that, and, importantly: it doesn’t really fucking matter, because they’re about to steal another fucking Supreme Court seat.  

The end.  I’m going to bed.

UPDATE: In which I’m not voting for at least one asshole

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Last week I had some things to say about my House and Senate race.  I remain powerfully conflicted about my Senator, and am very carefully monitoring everything he says and does regarding a certain Supreme Court candidate; if he votes to confirm, he loses my vote and will not be regaining it.  I’ll send some money to Beto O’Rourke instead and see if him beating Ted Cruz can offset Donnelly losing his seat.

As for Mel Hall, as of this mailing today, that ship has officially sailed.  I will probably be just leaving the House line on my ballot blank, but part of me is seriously thinking about voting for Jackie Walorski because I would rather have a Republican in office who is honest about her party affiliation than a “Democrat” who is going to stab the party in the back at the earliest opportunity.

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That last paragraph?  Nope.  I’m done with you, Mel.  You don’t get to run as a fucking Democrat and guarantee that you’re going to vote against Nancy Goddamn Pelosi and still think I’m going to vote for you.  Newsflash, asshole: I’d rather have her in office than you.  And “personal responsibility” is what Republicans talk about when they feel like they can’t say that poor people deserve to be poor.  Fuck “personal responsibility.”  It’s a dogwhistle.  And fuck you.

The flipside of the flyer is all about Jesus:img_7608.jpg

So, yeah: rich, white, male, old, CEO, Jesusy, and anti-Pelosi.  All that says Republican to me.  And once again the word “Democrat” doesn’t appear anywhere on the flyer except for the part where they talk about who paid for it.

I am not voting for Mel Hall, because I vote for Democrats.  He isn’t one.

EDIT:  Having thought about it for a few more minutes, I’m making the somewhat more obvious choice and writing in Pat Hackett’s name for IN-02.  I’m going to vote for someone I actually want in office.

VENTING: In which I’m going to vote for assholes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments
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Hey, Mel?  Joe?  This is what they think you are, and you aren’t going to trick these fuckers into voting for you.

I live in Indiana.  I live in one of the bluest parts of Indiana, don’t get me wrong, but I was born and raised in this state and for whatever the hell it’s worth I’m likely to die here.  I am, as a mostly-lifelong Hoosier (I lived in Chicago for nine years in there, and still occasionally refer to myself as a Chicagoan when the mood and necessity strike me) used to being ruled by Republicans, although Indiana is not remotely as monolithically red as most people who live outside the state think.  I’ve had a Democrat as a Senator for most of my life, a couple of Democratic governors, and most of my House representatives have been Democrats.  In fact, Joe Donnelly, my current Senator, used to be my House rep. He is only my Senator because he read the writing on the wall after redistricting and decided he would lose his seat and then lucked out against a truly abysmal Republican opponent.

Jackie Walorski became my Congresscritter after that election and has been re-elected a couple of times since then.  She’s running against a guy named Mel Hall right now.  I didn’t want Mel Hall to be the Democratic nominee.  I didn’t want to vote for another old white guy, I could detect no enthusiasm anywhere for his candidacy, and of the three he seemed to be spending the least effort trying to be my candidate.  Pat Hackett, who I voted for, and Yatish Joshi, who I didn’t vote for but wasn’t at all unhappy with, were everywhere, and they were both visibly working for votes.  Mel Hall was just the default old white guy.  I seriously thought, judging from what I’d seen, and in the absence of polling, that he was going to come in third, and I was shocked when he won.

My problem with Mel Hall, now that he’s officially the candidate, is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mel Hall doesn’t want to be the Democratic nominee either.  None of his TV ads mention being a Democrat, and we just got a flier from him today and the only place the word “Democrat” appears on it anywhere is the legally-required little line in the corner about who paid for the damn thing.  Instead, it talks about how he used to be a minister.

I don’t vote for ministers.   I sure as hell don’t vote for ex-ministers who decided to go show the poor people of Detroit the way and the light until he and his wife had kids and then decided that being a missionary wasn’t important any longer.  You were already a shitty minister and then you stopped for a shitty reason– and then got rich as a businessman, so fuck your religion one way or another.  Not one single thing Mel Hall has released as a political candidate has given me a reason to consider voting for him.  If I wasn’t the type to pay attention, I would think that we had two Republicans running for office.  Which is what he wants.

And Jackie Walorski is going to spend the entire campaign calling him a fucking liberal anyway.  Everyone to the left of any Republican is a liberal.  That’s how it works.  There is no such thing as a centrist to Republicans.  There is them, and there is the demonrat liberals, and that’s it.  And Mel Hall’s TV ad, which doesn’t mention the fact that he’s supposedly the Democratic nominee, does find time for him to say that “both parties are to blame” for Washington’s dysfunction.

Fuck you, Mel.  We have a center-right party in Washington and we have a party that is rapidly degenerating into fucking fascism if it’s not already goddamn there and I don’t wanna hear shit from you about “both fucking sides” right now.

Which brings me to Joe fucking Donnelly.  This fucking asshole is actually running an ad right now with video footage of the person claiming to be the President praising him.  Meanwhile, I can’t watch a fucking home renovation show on Hulu without seeing six dozen ads about how he’s a filthy liberal who wants open borders and hordes of illegal Mexicans to come rape all of our pristine pure white women.  One of their ads actually calls him “Mexico Joe.”  That’s not an exaggeration.

These fucking assholes are not going to vote for you, Joe.  And it would be a really good idea for both of these two shitbirds to realize who their goddamn base is and maybe try to goddamned motivate us to vote for them.  Because here’s the thing: as much as I piss and moan about it, and as much as I’m going to hate doing it, we’re not in a position right now where I am capable of not voting for the Democrat on the ballot.  America is in too much fucking trouble for me not to.  I’ve said “fuck your conscience” on this blog and on Twitter a whole bunch of times, and “fuck your conscience” applies to my ass too, as much as I don’t want it to.  Hall, as much as I hate to admit it, might have an outside chance if enough sexist assholes look at him and look at Jackie and decide that even a shriveled white librul Demonrat penis is better than no penis at all.  Maybe.  But I kind of doubt it.  But Donnelly?  Donnelly has nothing to offer to Republicans that his opponent doesn’t offer more of.

Gimme a reason to vote for you, you assholes.  Just one.  Some fucking thing I can hold on to when I vote.  Because the thing is, there are a lot of us out there, and while I’m going to be in that ballot box come November there are a lot of people who just might not bother if they see no one who represents them.  And frankly, if either of these two loses, they kind of deserve it.  I’d hate for control of the Senate to hang on whether Joe fucking Donnelly gets re-elected in Indiana or not, but it very well fucking could.

So get out there and act like you want the goddamn job, you milquetoast pricks.

EDIT:  I should make something clear here, actually: while I would really like to vote for someone who is at least as far left, if not farther, than I am, I am aware that the majority of this state and even this district are more conservative than me.  I’m well used to voting for people more conservative than me, and I’m not even that bothered by it.  It’s actively working to avoid representing the party that you’re running as a member of that is pissing me off so much about these two.

In which I’m an asshole but I’m trying to stop

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, PoliticsLeave a comment

91f2oZK0TILI used to discover new books by going to physical bookstores and spending a pleasurable hour searching through the shelves.  That method is effectively obsolete now, as damn near everything I read is something I discovered online (on Twitter, more often than not) and added to my Amazon wish list.  Sometimes I end up at Barnes and Noble anyway, though, and for whatever reason every time I set foot in that place nowadays it leads to a blog post.

I came across Christopher Ruocchio’s Empire of Silence at some point in the past few days; I don’t remember exactly when, but comparing something to Dune is guaranteed to get my attention and I added it to my wishlist.  We ended up celebrating my birthday tonight with steak and book-shopping, and I happened to find a copy of the book on the shelf somewhere.  I wasn’t familiar with Ruocchio– I think this is his debut novel, but I’m not 100% sure, and he’s definitely a young guy– and my first thought upon seeing his author picture was … well, judgmental.  I’m not gonna bother saying how, but he’d done nothing to deserve said judgmentalness.

And then I noticed that his author bio mentioned his Twitter feed, and so I pulled my phone out and went to look at his Twitter, specifically to see if he was posting anything on Twitter that would give me an excuse to not buy his books.  And I came across this Tweet:

Here’s the thing: my opinions on politics are very very apparent from my Twitter feed, and still pretty goddamn apparent from my blog posts.  I am absolutely certain that there are some people out there who might enjoy my books but won’t/wouldn’t have given me the chance because of my politics, and that’s okay.  Anyone who doesn’t want to read my work for any reason whatsoever is absolutely free to not do so, as none of you owe me anything.

My personal rule on the politics of authors and various and sundry other artists who I support is You Don’t Want None There Won’t Be None.  I’ve never deliberately gone looking for someone’s political ideas before deciding to check out their work before, but there have definitely been some authors– Orson Scott Card and Dan Simmons come to mind immediately, and I threw away a John C. Wright book unread once I found out what a piece of shit he was, and I’m sure there are others– whose work I no longer read or never started because I find them to be such odious people.  But if you either keep your shit to yourself or if you put it out there you do it in such a way that you don’t immediately convince me that you’re a boil on the asshole of humanity, I’ve never been one to go looking for bullshit.  But if you put it out there, well, there might be consequences.

But that’s exactly what the hell I was doing– trying to comb this dude’s Twitter feed for a reason not to buy his book, because something about the way he looks set me off.

I don’t like the fact that I’ve turned into that person.

Long story short, I bought the goddamn book, which I was gonna do anyway, but as soon as I realized I was trying to find a reason to write this dude off and not buy his book I decided I had to buy it.  And I’m gonna try harder to rein in my own dickishness in the future, because this shit is ridiculous, and I don’t want to do it again.

Now I just gotta hope to hell I like the thing.  🙂