#and astronaut jesus just below???? makes me INSANE

[rig-a-rendal]

OUGH. american gods season 3 episode 8.......

[kittywildegrrl]

MamaCat Has Been Sick of This Conspiracy Theory Crap Since Before This One Existed

Yea, though I stagger through the final bloody chaotic days of the Trump “presidency,” I shall fear no evil, for the Constitution is with me. Kamala and Joe, they comfort me.

On the real though: scared shitless of the evil.

Rightfully so, for here is the welcome some of our fellow Americans have for the incoming Administration. Almost makes ‘em seem... un-American. May these creeps fail mightily and may Inauguration Day be free of violence.

“‘He has an obligation to them’: Attorney for ‘QAnon shaman’ asks Trump to pardon rioters,” says Politico. “He felt like his voice was, for the first time, being heard,” Watkins said. “And what ended up happening, over the course of the lead-up to the election, over the course of the period from the election to Jan. 6 — it was a driving force by a man he hung his hat on, he hitched his wagon to. He loved Trump. Every word, he listens to him.”

Ugh. There it is. The continental divide between objective reality and Trumpism reality. “Every word, he listens to him.” I saw a classic strongman dictatorship rising, somebody else saw Jesus. I saw my least favorite showman in my lifetime doing his best P. T. Barnum a la Mussolini, somebody else saw the only plausible leader for troubled times.

Perhaps as many as a few thousand of those somebodies attacked our Capitol, and I am not over it. Some more of those somebodies, who knows the actual number, are contributing to online chatter about setting loose further chaos in the next five days.

It’s literally insane, and a lot of it is attributed to the Q conspiracy phenomenon. Two crazy ladies who buy into it have been sent to Washington, D.C., as elected representatives (rollcall.com).

A week after the attempted coup, as the wheels of a second impeachment were grinding over his legacy, the Dear Leader of those who used to watch “The Apprentice” delivered a disingenuous, if carefully-worded, video. In it he denounced the violence. He also employed the No True Scotsman argument, perhaps my favorite of the logical fallacies.

I didn’t buy it, but it wasn’t for me. No, it was for his base, and for his attorneys. Whether he made the attorneys happy is not for me to say. Allegedly Rudy Giuliani is his attorney, and allegedly Rudy’s not getting paid.

No, it’s the latest iteration of Q nonsense on my mind this snowy morning. That video? I saw a beaten man, a would-be Caesar, out of options, doing as he was told for once. Somebody else saw a Q message. Go on over to secondnexus.com and check it out, I’ll wait. You’ll enjoy the screenshotted tweets.

Adding to MamaCat’s recent attack of nostalgia, one learned recently that a former lover, a very bad boyfriend from days of yore, had passed on. Big, strong, handsome, witty, fantastic in bed, cruelly abusive, and possessed of sketchy background, he was champion and nemesis to me in those bizarre days of the mid-90s, when (among other things) I experienced a noticeably short second marriage and met some conspiracy theorists. May he rest in peace. I, for one, am actually relieved. Talk about smart women making foolish choices. I got a million of ‘em.  But the mind will cast its glance backwards at such moments.

Wait till you’re old and crochety, kids, your stories may be wacky and bizarre one day too!

So there was this couple, both my late problematic boyfriend and my second husband knew them, so in the course of things I came to know them too. They seemed like a pretty cool couple, we had interests and friends in common. Then one evening at their house, they began to explain, very carefully and for my own good, about Area 51, Ancient Astronauts, and why the income tax is illegal. Why I should read Ayn Rand, become a Sovereign Citizen, and stock up on guns & ammo.

I was insecure enough in the first place, so at the time, it seemed like the polite way to avoid confrontation was just to listen and not argue too much. I was at their place, without my own car, thinking maybe this won’t go on all night, how can I change the subject to Star Trek… but when we got to the taxes portion of the presentation, I just couldn’t stop myself.

“What about the roads and bridges?”

There was a lot of incoherent babbling about per-use fees and private property and so forth. And as I sat listening, politely, hoping my ride was about ready to go, I was thinking, “They don’t understand how any of this works. They’re grown-ass adults, regurgitating faulty reasoning, telling me mad re-interpretations of what the 1st and 2nd Amendments mean, and they really don’t know how little they know. It’s like an alternate reality. I want to go home.”

(Think about it. The Internet barely existed yet. This was mainly spread face to face and via phone trees at the time.)

That friendship didn’t blossom much after that. Nice enough folks on the face of it, but the crazy talk kept returning to the word, “militia,” and I was not a fan. At that time in my life, I was actually a pretty decent shot, with a number of different firearms (not an owner, though). I let go of this friendship, and not long after, I let go of guns. What I couldn’t let go of was the nagging sense that if this sort of conspiratorial thinking were to get out of hand, become somehow mainstreamed, the only logical outcome would be eventual violence. You can’t combine hatred for the notion of government itself, with fantasies about actual extraterrestrials, with disdain for taxpayer-provided goods and services, with guns and ammo and militia identity, without eventual violence.

And for just a moment, late last night, it felt like the intervening 20 -25 years had never happened. In my actor’s imagination, I could see it like a film cut, from the sepia tones of that living room in New Mexico so long ago, to the craziest damned January in American memory. Nonexistent voter fraud, Q, rightwing hate media; these lie along a straight line from that Sovereign Citizen baloney my friends served for dinner that night. A straight, incredibly white, line.

I really, really hope that the Biden administration comes on like gangbusters in the first hundred days. I hope people’s lives improve drastically, quickly, especially for people who think we voted in Stalinism or something. I really hope we can raise the standard of living across the board (below, say, $250k/annum, you $250k+ guys are actually fine up there). I really, really hope we can address the pandemic. I don’t see any way to controvert the conspiracy-based thinking, unless we just take this opportunity to actually govern for a change, and lift everybody up.