infamousbrad

[infamousbrad]

Roko Basilisk's whole journey summed up in two panels:

[infamousbrad]

"Proud of your country?"

I've been seeing the question for 30 years, since I read James Loewen's 1995 best-seller Lies My Teacher Told Me, and whether or not any American wants to hear this on Fourth of July, the very question, "Aren't you proud of your country?" feels more and more gaslight-y to me, the more world history, and world statistics, I learn.

Because honestly, the more I learn, the less different from each other every country seems. There are practical and historical reasons why they came into existence and need to exist, but they're all good in some ways, bad in other ways, and mostly good or bad in sync with each other, all get better or worse around the same times at the same rates.

Yeah, I can name things that various Americans did, including some elected American governments, that were pretty great. But you lift your head from what's right in front of you and you find that usually some other country got there first and other countries got there later and we're usually somewhere near the middle. And it applies to the monstrous things too. Any differences are minor matters of degree, not kind, and it usually averages out in one lifetime or less.

This one is my country, I was born here, I live here, but that's not something to be proud of or ashamed of, it's just a neutral fact. Telling me that I should be proud of it because it's way better than any other is just gaslighting. Telling me that I should be ashamed of it because it's way worse than anywhere else is just as farcical.

The United States of America just exists, a country like every other. It's just like how everybody says that their dog is the best dog ever, their child is the best child ever; it's not a measurement of any objective reality, but of the speaker's degree of emotional attachment (and capacity for self-delusion). When I hear somebody say that they're proud of their country or that they're ashamed of their country I have to remind myself that I, too, was once that ignorant.

[infamousbrad]

Out of cheap chain-link fencing held together, it looks to me, with zip-ties. In single-wall tents that have already flooded once before the first detainee or guard has arrived. An hour's commute from the nearest place any of the potential guards live. Hiring and retention of guards is going to be a sad attempt at a joke.

When those detainees realize just how badly they outnumber the guards and just how little stands between them and escape ... well, if the guards weren't just about guaranteed to be the worst people in the world, I'd almost feel sorry for them.

"Alligator Alcatraz" my ass. The mosquitos will make short work of ICE before the first escapee even sees an alligator.

[infamousbrad]

Who are they going to hire?

Going by my favorite unemployment measure, the prime-age employment/population ratio, unemployment is the lowest it has ever been. And almost every deportation is one less worker in the overall economy. Where is ICE going to find 18,000 new agents?

(One speculates that the answer might be "they can't." Or that, if they can, the answer will turn out to have been "the absolute bottom of the barrel.")

[infamousbrad]

So I was reading a newspaper interview, not many years ago, with a sex worker who'd just published her auto-biography, complete with mini-biographies of every other woman she'd worked with, and more than anything else, one thing jumped out at me.

Some do-gooder (social worker or the like) made the same argument you just made and the sex worker she brought it up with said that the reason she was working as a prostitute instead of working retail was not just that prostitution had more family-friendly working hours and paid better, but because she faced less workplace sexual harassment in sex work, and was raped fewer times too.

It's not the sex work that puts women at risk. It's late-stage capitalism you should be hating on.

So like, it's obvious to me reading the comments on my post that anti-porn people are largely like, afraid of porn. Like the concept of a sex video is really spooky to them. They're not making thoughtful critiques of the porn industry, which is genuinely a really fucked up industry, they're mostly just spooked by the concept of a sex video and what it could Do To You If You See It.

I said this in another post, but it's like, the difference between "a ton of coffee is produced using slave labor" (valid, important criticism of the coffee industry) and "coffee turns people into raving coffee addicts who forget how to interact with anyone because they're so obsessed with their coffee" (objectively not true, insane viewpoint).

It's literally just sex videos. They really cannot hurt you.

[infamousbrad]

The Nazis sought to kill Wilhelm Reich for saying sexual repression is public health menace number one, the root cause of most mental illness and quite a bit of distressing physical illness, and he brought the receipts.

(Yes, Wilhelm Reich got pretty nutty later in life. Get hunted by Nazis for defending solid medical science for a decade or more and see what that does to your sanity.)

Stop being ashamed of wanting to have sex. Stop being ashamed of other people finding out that you enjoy sex. Sexual shame is bad for you and bad for everybody else around you.

So like, it's obvious to me reading the comments on my post that anti-porn people are largely like, afraid of porn. Like the concept of a sex video is really spooky to them. They're not making thoughtful critiques of the porn industry, which is genuinely a really fucked up industry, they're mostly just spooked by the concept of a sex video and what it could Do To You If You See It.

I said this in another post, but it's like, the difference between "a ton of coffee is produced using slave labor" (valid, important criticism of the coffee industry) and "coffee turns people into raving coffee addicts who forget how to interact with anyone because they're so obsessed with their coffee" (objectively not true, insane viewpoint).

It's literally just sex videos. They really cannot hurt you.

[infamousbrad]

I think I know what Viv was thinking (Helluva Shorts #5)

No doubt about it: Helluva Shorts #5 ("Mission: Orphan Time") is the grossest and most morally reprehensible episode of Helluva Boss yet, and judging by what I've seen so far, fan reaction is mostly mixed to negative. In particular, the question keeps coming up, "How do we square this with the wholesome ending of the last full episode?" (s2e12 "Sinsmas")

I've got a pretty confident guess as to what Viv told guest writer Lyle Rath who wrote this episode.

Remember that one of the plot developments of the last full episode was that Blitz's deadliest killer, Millie, just found out she's pregnant. Remember also that Spindlehorse put out a press release announcing that the voice actress who plays Millie's even deadlier sister, Sallie May, is joining the main cast when full episodes resume.

If that's because Millie is going on family leave or joining Stolas on desk duty, then we need to jump some plot hurdles to explain why Blitz would bring in Sallie May when Loona is already right there. Why not just promote her to field work and give Millie her desk job?

I think that's why this episode was crafted to be as morally repulsive as possible specifically to Loona, to make her kill someone who is exactly the kind of hero she needed, and didn't have, when she was young. I think that between this episode and when the full length season three episodes begin, we're going to see Loona have to explain to her dad why, no matter how much he needs her to be his backup, she can't do it.

[infamousbrad]

In one of the earlier essays I wrote for my old LiveJournal I did the back-of-an-envelope math of what it would cost just to operate and maintain a Berlin-wall-style border wall the whole length of the US/Mexico border. Long story short, federal taxes would have to more than double. And that's not even counting the initial land acquisition and construction costs, that's if the thing was entirely free somehow!

(I did it that way because the operating expenses were easier to calculate and already too expensive, so why even get into construction financing?)

I also pointed out that the Berlin Wall didn't even work. It posed no serious obstacle for the CIA, who bribed their way in with forged paperwork through the official port of entry, or to many defectors each year going the other way, who either did the same thing or who went over, under, or around it.

I have long-since learned that it does basically no good to tell people this. They heard the idea once, and they want it badly, and, well, they're the kind of people who think that vox populi vox dei, that if the public wants something badly enough it must be possible, that the only reason they don't get it is because of nefarious conspiracy by the "deep state."

But as even Ronald Reagan said, "facts are stubborn things." That wall is never getting built. But most people will never listen to the reasons why not, so they're going to keep voting for a mix of people who are just as uninformed as they are, or willing to lie about it.

“Texas’ border wall plan appears to be facing a sad, silent death

Texas Republicans quietly stopped funding for their state’s border wall, seemingly acknowledging that the plan has been a waste of time and money.

June 19, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT

By Ja'han Jones

Texas appears to have quietly stopped funding its plans to construct its own border wall with Mexico, which could mark the end of an embarrassing boondoggle designed to bolster one of President Donald Trump’s early campaign slogans.

For years, conservatives have framed the idea of a border wall as essential to immigration enforcement, despite a chorus of critics denouncing it as costly and ineffective. And Texas Republicans’ decision to defund the project seems like a tacit acknowledgment of that reality.

The Texas Tribune was first to report that a new state budget signed into law earlier this month includes no money for the wall, which was envisioned as covering more than 800 miles. But only a fraction of that was ever completed — at great cost to taxpayers.

According to the Tribune:

Four years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would be the first state to build its own border wall, lawmakers have quietly stopped funding the project, leaving only scattered segments covering a small fraction of the border.

That decision, made in the waning hours of this year’s legislative session, leaves the future of the state wall unclear. Just 8% of the 805 miles the state identified for construction is complete, which has cost taxpayers more than $3 billion to date. The Texas Tribune reported last year that the wall is full of gaps that migrants and smugglers can easily walk around and mostly concentrated on sprawling ranches in rural areas, where illegal border crossings are less likely to occur.

Some Texas Republicans seem intent on spinning this retreat from their ill-conceived idea as a victory of sorts, or at least downplaying it as a sign of GOP backtracking. A spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott told the Tribune that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has allowed the state to adjust its enforcement plans. And state Sen. Joan Huffman, the state’s lead budget writer, told the outlet that rather than paying for the wall, the budget authorizes money for state entities that are aiding Abbott’s immigration crusade: a controversial project known as Operation Lone Star, which also has been denounced as a tremendous waste of time and money.

The idea of a “big, beautiful wall” between the U.S. and Mexico has become deeply ingrained in the MAGA movement — Trump’s followers have used chants and costumes to celebrate it. And yet, the idea appears dead as a doornail in Texas, a state virtually under total Republican control.

And at this point, the scattered remains of the state’s border wall seem like little more than shrines to the president’s ignorant policies.”

[infamousbrad]

Nixon: "If the president does it then it is not illegal."

I swear, I need to make up a sign for the July 17th protest that says:

the US CONSTITUTION

has its flaws but it

IS BETTER THAN

WHAT WE HAVE NOW

[infamousbrad]

I'm sorry to be a downer but ...

... the problem with being a professional chronic depressive is that sometimes you have to put in the work. And the truth is I woke up in a horrible mood today, and I feel like it's not my turn to put on a happy face.

Because here's the thing. Objectively, things are not any worse this year than they've been since, well, at least since 9/11. Take, for example, the current administration's thuggish ethnic cleansing -- it's fallen behind Biden's ethnic cleansing of the same people, behind Obama's, behind Bush the Younger's.

The same thing about the trans panic. There's always a moral panic. And it always gives license to closet-cases to puritanically abuse their less-closeted kin, to try to escape bullying by joining the side of the bullies but, even given that, after this morning's SCOTUS ruling, this time it's not even as bad as, say, the anti-gay brutality was during the early AIDS panic, if only because this time it's not coming down from DC, this time some states are escaping it.

You can go down the line, and for every horrible thing that's taking up the news today, I can point to a time in living memory where, by any kind of objective measurement, it was even worse. But this time it feels worse, because however ineffective today's moral imbeciles and bullies are, there's a gracelessness to their affect, a thuggishness, that's emotionally exhausting in ways that the prim, or bureaucratic awfulness of years' recent past just weren't.

Back at the end of the second Bush administration, Cintra Wilson put it best in his 2008 parody, Caligula for President:

When your government stops bothering to lie to you, it seems like they just don’t care. It’s like letting the White House lawn turn brown and walking out to press conferences with a bottle of Seagram’s gin ’n’ juice, wearing a polar fleece house coat streaked with Egg Beaters and a shower cap and screaming unintelligible obscenities into the microphone. It gives You People the impression that your dictator isn’t even trying.

[infamousbrad]

Holy fuck the attendance for the Trump birthday parade in DC is so bad I almost feel sad for the army dudes riding in tanks waving at the crowds of like 5 people

[infamousbrad]

Math vs (Militant Centrist) Vibes

[infamousbrad]

[infamousbrad]

I'm in this photo, and I like it.

[infamousbrad]

Thank you @kimaofvord and everyone who got me to 3000 reblogs!

Gurathin's (and my) Nightmare

In the books, the human character I identified the most was Baradwaj, who seemed to put the most real effort into understanding SecUnit out of all its friends clients, like I imagine I'd want to do. But in the show, I finally realized that the reason Gurathin is breaking down so hard is that he's living out my second-most-common recurring nightmare.

They've already alluded to some backstory that doesn't come up in the books for several more volumes: with Mensah's help, Gurathin defected from a really horrible situation in the Corporation Rim. With Mensah's help, Gura managed something almost no contract labor slaves ever get away with, broke his contract, escaped to a place where slavery is illegal, virtually impossible.

And his whole found family say that they know that hating the Corporation Rim is personal to him in a way it isn't for people who are native to Preservation. They're (trying to be) empathetic with the suffering he experienced, they're (trying to be) supportive, they SAY that they understand.

But Mensah was coming back to the Rim with or without him. Nobody could stop her. Which means that she's dragging him back to the scene of a half-a-lifetime's worth of trauma. And when he warns them, from hard experience, just how much danger they're in, they nod, and they say that they understand, and they thank him for educating them, but then they don't do ANYTHING he warns them to do, they run straight into situations that he warned them to avoid.

Because what he says sounds to them like exaggeration, like his trauma speaking instead of plain facts. Because they literally can't understand, not yet. They have no frame of reference to compare to what he says. They can't imagine that he's speaking literally.

Man, I wake up from nightmares like that at least twice a week, have done so for at least 40 years. I'm invested now. Gura, my brother, I see you.

[infamousbrad]

[infamousbrad]

Gurathin's (and my) Nightmare

In the books, the human character I identified the most was Baradwaj, who seemed to put the most real effort into understanding SecUnit out of all its friends clients, like I imagine I'd want to do. But in the show, I finally realized that the reason Gurathin is breaking down so hard is that he's living out my second-most-common recurring nightmare.

They've already alluded to some backstory that doesn't come up in the books for several more volumes: with Mensah's help, Gurathin defected from a really horrible situation in the Corporation Rim. With Mensah's help, Gura managed something almost no contract labor slaves ever get away with, broke his contract, escaped to a place where slavery is illegal, virtually impossible.

And his whole found family say that they know that hating the Corporation Rim is personal to him in a way it isn't for people who are native to Preservation. They're (trying to be) empathetic with the suffering he experienced, they're (trying to be) supportive, they SAY that they understand.

But Mensah was coming back to the Rim with or without him. Nobody could stop her. Which means that she's dragging him back to the scene of a half-a-lifetime's worth of trauma. And when he warns them, from hard experience, just how much danger they're in, they nod, and they say that they understand, and they thank him for educating them, but then they don't do ANYTHING he warns them to do, they run straight into situations that he warned them to avoid.

Because what he says sounds to them like exaggeration, like his trauma speaking instead of plain facts. Because they literally can't understand, not yet. They have no frame of reference to compare to what he says. They can't imagine that he's speaking literally.

Man, I wake up from nightmares like that at least twice a week, have done so for at least 40 years. I'm invested now. Gura, my brother, I see you.