#capitalist fucks who steal and abuse and get away with it because we live in a capitalist society

[chieana]

AI is not the big bad evil

Capitalism is

Always has been

[thatheathen]

“Seize the day. Then set it on fire.”

We are living in that cyberpunk dystopia now, the very type Philip K. Dick warned us that could happen and is slowly creeping its way into our personal lives/minds and that's mainly due to big internet providers and the fascist governments whipped by corporations hijacking all modes of freedom even virtual freedoms. everything is connected in the system the ruling class decided and you are a slave with in that caste system until you die. oh gee fun. 

I feel bad for the devs that are forced to time crunch for this month. CD Projekt RED better compensate their workers for pushing this game out for them greedy selfish CEOs who are attached to this game that will no doubt be a hit and make tons of money, but at what cost? video game developers need to desperately unionize before its too late to even do so as most triple A games are made by wealthy liberal and or centrist elites who pretend to be progressive but actually hate unions, socialism, sharing, comradery, solidarity, grassroots fund raising cuz that’s all anti-capitalist and bad you see.  

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and that's exactly what cyberpunk is; it's a genre of unchained sci-fi yeah but it's also showing capitalism on steroids, corporations gone rogue and eating up all the earth's resources just to produce enough power and energy to run a whole city now requires a while country of power to push harder and harder to keep that light pollution at the maximum. animals should be going completely extinct in a cyberpunk future, what do humans even eat? 

To my mind cyberpunk should be about breaking away from cultural programming that makes us hate each other, fight and kill, it always boils down to those who have and those who have not social structure. That's a lot like Feudalism and a false sense of safety for all people. Cyber-feudalism is how it's structured underneath the veil. “Seize the day. Then set it fire.” 

Cyberpunk seems like a countercultural idea within the hyper-capitalist world that's still very male dominant. The feminine exist only to tantalize the masses, domestic females to slaves of profits and glamour. The brutal police forces ignoring human rights laws daily. Journalism is remotely impossible. So is the world of cyberpunk really a world of freedom and choices? Cyberpunk can be seen as a connection of like minded folk hungry for freedom and not need to fall into crime to survive. For many that’s the world you’re forced to live in or die in. rights are not natural handed from god, they are taken. cyber-rights seems like a fruitless fight in a hyper-cyber-capitalist reality; big brothers eyes everywhere. mass surveillance that would make PKD’s jaw drop.  cyberpunk-world cops are thugs beyond what we could imagine and could kill you on sight if they chose and nobody will care or not be able to do anything. nobodies memories can be trusted unless you express a certain class. all the punks, rejects, anarchists, anti-corporation, hackers, etc. are all outsiders, terrorist suspects. Every queer person or Muslim or any kind of marginalized group of that era is vulnerable as the system doesn’t favor them nor see a reason to protect them, with fascist-leaning politicians WANTING certain groups of people to literally die out. Those who struggle in any unequal world are going to be feeling the most pain. Lots of pain may mean; drug addiction to numb this awful reality, mod addiction to be less human maybe or change your identity completely. Lots of pain could also mean lots of anger towards the system and the state that’s making life so miserable for the 90% the citizens who have no power. cyberpunk 2077s idea is an “anything-goes” kinda place. here’s a sci-fi GTA/Witcher3 sandbox about a fucked up capitalist future that’s super fun and action packed!! It’s okay it’s not real though. Meanwhile capitalism as it exists today is grinding down the working class including the Dev employees working on Cyberpunk as I type this. long hours for the same pay. was it worth it? will it be worth it? will cyberpunk be the GAME that will end labor abuse in the gaming industry? 

People who are different, people who reject authority and anti-human social constructs, people who are spiritual without an organized religion, people so different and taboo to where the ruling elites see them as a threat, mocking those gross punks/queers/dissidents, but love their style and aesthetic because the rich have no soul and ZERO creativity. stealing is what rich assholes do best. rich people steal everyone’s aesthetic claiming it as their own and you begin to see YOUR aesthetic in the media regardless if it's offensive, it’s just unfettered anarcho-capitalist-land, there's no more restrictions to anything really. like ayn rand vision that would result in Bioshock’s world. that was a steampunk nightmare to an extent. point being the rich can do anything. money is power and it only matters to those who thirst for power. Many people just deal with money and hate at the same time cuz what other choice do people have? Poor people get no choices and all the bad days.

The rich and powerful will indulge in the vices of the poor to get another experience; meanwhile the real poor struggle to survive in this electronic hell world and your only choices are to fight and kill these hyper-corporations that run the planet's economy basically and that sucks. seems prophetic in a way to see what the future would be like if capitalism still stood and there was business as usual. I think a true dystopian cyberpunk world is full of dark skies and contagious air due to the extreme pollution i.e. climate change the previous generations of humans ignored and still ignore because profits and luxury and drugs and opulence and legacies and authoritarian rule is far more important to uphold you see. "human nature" is always condescendingly professed as an argument killer to why capitalism is the only way because hooomons are deep down real mean and violent... which is not true. 

Human infants literally can't live without being held and nurtured in a healthy environment. Humans are wired to love and communicate. humans lived a long time cuz they worked together. Humans lived even longer when they learned to domesticate animals leading to agriculture. only in the last 20,000 years have humans begun to grow their ego and misunderstand its message and purpose. fascists and billionaires take advantage of human minds and fool people into thinking there's no other way to live. it's a fucking lie. human beings are disconnected with nature. wires and cables are not non-nature, those are materials derived from nature. everything is nature, but not everything is natural like human concepts fabricated by civilizations.

“Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.” ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

I want a cyberpunk game where it's a good kind compassionate civilization, a star trek like society, full of infinite exploration into the cosmos and into our minds... I want a cyberpunk world worth protecting, protecting the people from sneaky politicians (demagogues) and authoritarian thugs ready to install the capitalist religion of endless self-destruction and pain. remnants of evil scatter and reform, we must always help people who struggle under capitalisms spell.

[moondonky]

Watch what they've done

Could they live with themselves, sunrises of blood.. r they in control, or are they running tails tucked, ashamed, should be nervous, will they even help, or just send more guns, will they tell the truth, or let chaos ensue... Armageddon a war stretching to all four corners,, are they prepared, did they think this through, will we lose,, is this the surrender is this the excuse.. count our loses, lick our wounds, we are not an empire.. it was aways inevitable, dont be so hard on yourselves

They dont get sent to the frontlines,, it is always men in there prime, we do the most, including die,, eyes for eyes, real men walk the line..

Salty fuck for a reason,, for the most part I dont give af,,, society is not designed for me, does not value me, but expects everything from me,, expects me to keep my integrity,, work hard play hard, deal with life's difficulties, pay them taxes, for people who don't do anything,, living a better life than me.. thats crazy,, paid more for having fucking disabilities,, while I work 12 hr days 6 days a week, I didn't go to no college, parents didn't give af about me,,, no cosigner no benefits no vacation no ira 401k, no nothing,, but theyll gladly take 30k from me every year in taxes, and I still can't afford a house, still cant afford to like have children, I have no security,, just pockets of money, in an inflated econmy, I will still be drafted, because I am not a fat fuck, because my back never hurts, because I am not mentally disabled... because I am a man, and aint noone gonna follow anyone else into fucking battles,,

Men are selfless we do shit noone else can, we put on our blinders, workhorse just trying to ignore all the pigs and dogs and chickenshits n sheep, and rats, plowing fucking field so the rest can get there meals,, that is how it feels,, and then when we break our leg, its likea bullet, no other use, maybe turned to glue.. its hard not being a stubborn ass about it,, because if someone is disabled they should still live a good life,, gratefull for my ability to even work,, theres a fine line between those who need it, and those who don't, those who fake, steal an early retirement, take advantage, abuse the system, which is not designed to be socialist and capitalist,, its cheating america, just flares me up to witness.. because I dont,, I obey everchanging laws to the best of my abilities, I make my money honestly, clean, skilled trade I invested to learn.. I flinch when they take out taxes, mailman and social workers are the only sectors of government I have any respect for, at this point fuk all that other bullshit,, the rest suck at there fuking jobs, not even theft, straight extortion at this point...

I keep doing my part, its weird, cuz I see the struggle, in the chaos, all the corruption,, can seem confusing, effin millenial why not,, why i just watch, because the problem was always there, kinda growing in the backround for years, borderline treason, and it is what it is, but a complex problem none the less, just a combination of all sorts of shit, and if u where to attempt solving that problem,, this would make sense,, most people couldn't handle the truth, ignorance is bliss,, but either way truth won, higher consciousness.. people be realizing sumthing globally, lol u dont have to move to America to be american, theres a reason dictator governments censor the borderless internet,, all over the world, people are educating themselves, kinda noticing its governments that fear each other hate each other compete and fight each other, we are ants, they are grasshoppers.. first one to jump becomes the enemy lets see what happens..

Lol jump i dare you,, wherever u land that sea of ants will consume you, in american eyes every government is a terrorist organization, there all mafias, there all gangsters, fuk them crowns, fuck them religious sceptors, those are the governments boarders not the peoples.. rasicm is obsolete, vicariously seeing through all that centralized controlling propaganda , tools of satan are the biggest polluters if u were to ask me, a history repeating

[selphplusplus]

Forgotten

This time last year still sick form COvID

I can remember the fever dreams vividly.

We were microorganisms, defending our puddle from invaders. It was very dynastic-conquest-esque.

As we fought survival wars, there as a class of shaman that could manipulate genetic matter and cause our people to evolve, a mix between Ender’s Game and Spore, the evolution and civilization emulation.

I was very baby leftist at the time and had no theoretical understanding of what an epidemic could do to a society. I still thought Bernie could change things, that we could just vote all this away. We had yet to see how utterly abandoned America was going to leave the poor.

But the dream did trigger a curiosity. I was frustrated often in that dream, my people were at war with an Other we didn’t understand. I was like a leader of a batallion, not one of the higher ups that had us fighting. And being there felt very much like real life. It reminded me of high school football. As cliche as that sounds, the close bonds I formed with teammates battling it out against a far superior team. Only it wasn’t touchdowns we were giving up. It was our lives. Watching someone you’ve grew up with die right beside you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Hell, you don’t even know why you’re fighting.

Even though it was “just a dream” it wasn’t unusual to wake up with tears, or utterly dejected.

Why were we fighting anyway. Later this would become a metaphor for class war. But last March I didn’t understand those dynamics.

It lasted 3 days. Recurrent I wasn’t even keeping track of time and I slept most of those 72 hours only waking up to use the bathroom and get some fluids. The dream world was the only thing my subconscious kept returning to. And it was a weird but profound experience. I’d never dreamt consecutively of the same thing like that, and never so lucid and impactful that I could remember it when I woke up.

So I was stuck on the question of protecting society from a biological threat. How apropos that it coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic.

A few months later I reread the Communist Manifesto. It hit different that time.

Having just come out of 7 year disconnect from society proper, living as a lumpenprole (though I didn’t have that concept yet), having just got out of my first real stint of jail time that was thankfully cut short with a COViD inspired plea deal (do 1/3 of your time, plead guilty, no fees, no probation, just go—and seeing the judge just a day before that agreed release, it was an easy “here’s my signature, I’m not guilty of these trumped up bullshit charges, I was having a drug induced psychosis and needed a hospital not a jail cell, but OK I’d rather be not in jail...Fine, I’ll plea out.”) bit I digress—

In the coming months I went from liberal “left”

progressive by American standards to guillotine Bezos, but unironically, today, unapologetic communist. A tankie, and a badge I wear proudly. When I say COVID-19 radicalized me, I mean literally. It was the combination of the futility of individualism that was instilled by the successive failures of my Avatar in the dreamworld to save my people. For a fantasy land, the emotions of rage and sadness and loss left a lasting imprint.

And then i got to see it play out in real time. To my actual people, the poor and marginalized in the US. The forgotten—or intentionally ignored—the most vulnerable told to fuck right off.

Told to go die for to keep making the bosses rich.

Told what they already felt about themselves, that their lives didn’t matter.

And we heard that loud and clear. The George Floyd cold blooded murder by a sociopathic pig (daily “Fuck the police” mantra by the way). That was a catalyst. That they tried to excuse it by painting the man as a fentanyl abuser, as an addict and a criminal, enraged us even more.

How the fuck do you think we survive in a system that demonizes us, shuns us because we fell into the spiral of addiction!?

Of course we fucking do crime. No one will hire us. Medical help only exists for a select few who win the lottery of the bare bones funding for social work.

And not just that, but you gotta get an addict in for help immediately. When they ask for it, they’re at that rock bottom place, probably suicidal, and the intake process is “wait three weeks” and by then, if they’re still alive they probably don’t wanna do to rehab. And that’s the reality of the cycle. (Unless you have money of course and you can pay your way in same day. But let’s keep acting like class doesn’t exist.)

Then it’s to the revolving door of the recovery industry, enriching the parasites that have found a way to profit off of misery. They deserve a special place in hell in Dante’s fourth circle: greed. Ain’t late stage capitalism grand?

So a black man who happens to be caught in this terrible maelstrom of tragedy and somehow deserves a cop standing on his neck, wailing in agony in his final moments, because he may have been a drug addict!?

Fuck you.

Fuck you entirely.

If this what you think, that an addict’s life is some how lesser or less than, I hope you kids die of an overdose; I hope someone trying to get their fix snatches your purse, steals your car, robs your house. I want you to understand the real gravity of the situation. We’re not abstractions. And we deserve a dignified life and a society that gives us a chance.

But instead, when things weren’t so dire, and you could just forget about us, and we could scrape out a meager existence funding out habit to escape a society that’s already written us off, we just thought as long as we stayed invisible your opinion about us was indifference.

When we saw a pig murder a man, on repeat. Replayed over and over on national fucking media outlets and social media—

When the state sanctioned a killing and we saw people debating a man’s life as he begged for mercy—

After he had done noting wrong, it’s quite audacious that you’re upset about a few burned buildings.

We heard you loud and fucking clear. You don’t see us as forgotten. You see us as unwanted.

And here we are a year later. $1800 dollar puttiance. (Be happy with what you have, peasants) yet we saw other countries, even capitalist countries, shut down, lockdown, pay people’s salary, protect their workers.

Vaccines that favor the rich. (Yet a the socialist nations developed their own, even exported them with no strings attached because that’s the right thing to do.) and here’s American companies like Pfizer, trying to manipulate South America for USA imperialist conquest. promising vaccines for trade, just a no-fault contract “so we’re [Pfizer] is indemnified if we fuck you over, oh and a military base. Or your people can just for from COVID, no pressure.”

Business owners bailed out. And the poor having to go literally risk their lives to make some money rich fuck with a yacht richer. Nah. The answer to my dream-prompted questions, it turns out we’re already answered by a German philosopher and the thoughts and societies built by his predecessors. Socialism has given us a real life

example on how to take care of my people. And that together, with revolutionary love. That’s why we do this.

“When it’s our time, we will not apologize for the terror.” You wrought this on yourself.

[sunsinherbranches]

The Evolutions Of Hell

Thiess the Livonian Werewolf had a very straightforward Hell to invade: a physically accessible place, located beyond a watery passage to the underworld (which seems likely to me to be a survival of something related to the Slavic myths of Veles, in which the chthonic cattle-lord god is ruler of the waters, and who, post-Christianisation, was partially recast as a Devil figure). It contained stolen things – field fertility, cattle blessings, and so on – which could be retrieved for the good of the community. (And indeed the earlier court conflict which made Thiess’s werewolfing more known in his village seems to have raised his status, possibly because people recognised him as someone who would go to great lengths for the common good.) For all that it was framed in Christian terms, it was not theologised in a Christian form – it was a thieves’ den staffed by the enemies of God, not otherwise made more complex with matters of sin, punishment, or even damnation. The nuances of orthodox theology were lost on Thiess, who claimed not to understand them.

It is less clear in what I know of this narrative what the Devil’s sorcerers got out of their end of the deal. Access to the food and resources stolen from the collective, perhaps, or magical powers inaccessible to ordinary folk – presaging, perhaps, the capitalist-imperial model in which certain forms of wealth and power render one immune to consequences. A guess might be that the sorcerers wished to be removed from the risks of community – when the collective status rose or fell, they did not wish to be bound to the same fate as others, and would make whatever deals it took to protect themselves and their families.

It is quite likely that they felt that those stored-up supplies were rightfully theirs – after all, they worked to bring the grain to harvest as well. Crop failure wasn’t fair, and wouldn’t anyone do what it takes to stave off starvation? “You wouldn’t want to see my children waste away, would you?” they might say. Security, certainty, the preservation of life itself, those were worth a deal with the Devil, who was, after all, only building a granary.

Perhaps the werewolves seemed to them the one on the Devil’s side. “I’ve done everything I can to protect my own, and here come these thieves in the night. They steal cattle and tear them apart to fund their burglary, they venture into the granary I helped build, they take the seed that I helped put there….” You can see it, right?

Here’s the interesting trick to it: regardless of whether or not I would place each of those people among the Devil’s partisans, all of them are opposed to this theological concept of Hell, this place into which the essentialities of life vanish and leave people bereft. For the most part, people have worked to close the gates of the Hell that they understand. Some may do it out of concern for whole communities, a more expansive care; others may do it to secure a better place for themselves, their families, because being able to provide for others gives them status and security, or whatever else. But the Devil’s party and those who steal back from them, whichever political faction one aligns with them, are agreed that their communities need food and there must be mechanisms to attain that end.

So, with this underlying model of Hell, we see that, over time, people as a collective close the gates of Hell when they find them and feel able, more or less. There is a general trend to come up with technologies, understandings, and worldviews that make existence feel less threatened. And this has two effects, for an ontology of Hell.

One is that the techniques to close a Hellmouth are just as effective at opening one. Perhaps more so. And it doesn’t take much to get people to use them – to decide that their own personal power or wealth (or greater certainty of survival) is worth a price that other people will pay. There is enough food produced in the world, at the moment, but its distribution is affected by corporations, by individuals seeking power, by forces that are rather abstract and inaccessible on the scale of the individual human. And many of those forces are at best indifferent to humanity as a whole, and even less invested in the non-human web of being, and easily harnessed by someone operating as one of the Devil’s sorcerers, wanting to secure their own position at the cost of the common good. (And this gets worse for topics other than food – though gods know there are plenty of Purity Of Food arguments out there in various forms and I need to write more food theology – I mean, how many people have thought that the way to abolish the Hellmouths of War was to have weapons too scary to actually use? That’s the entire fucking Cold War in a genetically engineered nutshell.)

And it’s easier to be tempted to the Devil’s party than it used to be. As the networks go global, the consequences to the community are more likely to wind up Not In My Backyard. If several tons of food are destroyed here, well, it’s not the people here that might suffer, it would’ve been shipped thousands of miles away. The runoff from that leaky pipeline isn’t in my water, it’s in water over there, and maybe I need that oil, did you ever think of that? “You wouldn’t want to see my children waste away, would you?” And the massive structures that make it possible to produce the bounty create vast separations in place between the people commanding their operations and the people doing the work, as any study of the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker’s wages will reveal.

The other effect is that what counts as an existential threat gets a whole lot more abstracted. People who do not have immediate fear of starvation, plague, or warfare might well get more and more sensitive to anything that hints in those directions, trying to recalibrate the same level of anxiety about mortality to different conditions.

It’s easy, of course, when things can be treated as an easy analogy to the primal fears of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Consider the response to the AIDS crisis in the ’80s: here was plague and death, and it was concentrated in communities that were seen as undesirables (queer people and drug users). The response was twofold – to cast those suffering the plague as being condemned and damned (keeping in mind that that is a Christian theologisation of Hell, there, and not terribly compatible with the lupine one), and to encourage fear of contagion among other populations. To, in short, suggest that HIV was something that could steal the life essence from the community, and that – rather than working to close that Hellmouth with medical science and compassion – the appropriate action was quarantine, isolation, and panic, and being very clear that it must not be allowed to steal from us, and make sure that we never slipped into being like them, the ones from whom that theft was acceptable and correct. It was a Devil’s bargain, made by the Devil’s sorcerers, and they had the power to not only condemn so many to wasting, brutal, and isolated deaths, but to seed fear and steal more lives for Hell.

It was left to the people who would venture into Hell and care for those stolen lives – who were seen as tainted, risky, and treacherous afterwards – many of whom were already at least half-monstrous due to their own queerness – to steal back as much as they could.

Then there are times the analogies, the sense of existential threat, are framed a little bit differently, but we can still see the echoes of it. Consider the shape of the discussion as framed by certain parents of autistic children – how many of them speak of that language of Hell and theft. They say their child was taken from them, stolen away, they want to steal that person back – the person that they imagined existed, the phantom, the imaginary person – to put that person in place of the child they have. Meanwhile, actually autistic people have to fight to be heard, to get a place to speak, there are countless stories of having discussions of autism in the world dominated by people who are not autistic. (I’ve read several of them recently, but do I have the links saved? No, that would take forethought and realising they were going to be relevant to something the next week.) That narrative of theft and recovery, that sense of struggle against the Devil’s minions, whatever incomprehensible forces have stolen our children, it speaks to something primal, something compelling, those old werewolf stories… that is, if one forgets that those autistic people are still here and have their own perspective to offer.

And I have known autistic people who have taken comfort in changeling stories – in hearing of children who were “taken away”, replaced with someone strange, who knows unfamiliar words, who does not act like the other children do, quite. Who have said, “That is me. That is a story about me.”

But those stories also have changelings burned with hot pokers and abused and killed, in the hopes that the fairy folk would return the “real” lost child. And this is something that is still done to autistic children today.

Much like it is done to queer ones, to gender-variant ones, to all of these things that lead someone to conclude that someone has stolen a rightful child and taken them away to Hell. And because we cannot find the gates of Hell that hide that stolen property, we try other means to get it back.

Perhaps that’s how we can decide which side is the werewolf and which the sorcerer: which person thinks that other people are a property that can be stolen from them, or an item which can be dismissed.

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” “It’s a lot more complicated than that–” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–” “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

– Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

When I look at some of the blocs that comprise what’s called the alt-right, I see a lot of people operating from a condition of existential threat. Sometimes that’s quite explicit – consider all the cries of “white genocide”, for example, from people who are afraid of being outnumbered, as if being outnumbered (and having a number of recessive genes) is an intrinsic pathway to annihilation. Sometimes it’s more veiled, though not all that veiled – the *Gator obsession with the idea that people wanting games they found interesting, or critiquing aspects of existing games, meant that they were going to destroy the brainless shoot-em-ups that they wanted. Or MRA obsession with women having sex with people other than them, or women they find unattractive having sex at all, or other such things. This threatens them at a core level, on an identity level, in a way that they cannot respond to with anything less than a Horsemen-are-riding scope of agitation.

And it’s broader still than that. Dominionist theologies are all about trying to enforce a particular flavor of Christianity on people who do not follow it, demanding compliance with a particular form of power. And when challenged, the cry is the same as it has always been: “You don’t want my children to waste away, do you?” A simple “I don’t subscribe to your religion” from someone who does not want to be bound by those principles is seen as a core attack, as a Devil’s play to destroy them. They have an invasiveness about them, a prurience, that holds that other people conducting their own lives must conform, because they truly believe that they have a right to the Devil’s granary of stolen lives and stolen power. Those people who want to steal back the right to go about their ordinary daily lives unmolested by the dictates of godbotherers are attacking what is rightly theirs, their holy right to call down damnation.

But “damnation” only means “we’ve decided to give your life to the Devil”. That’s all it means. All that so-called holiness and the accumulation of power is just the means to steal lives – black lives, queer lives, Native lives, disabled lives, women’s lives, so many other lives – and feed them into Hell, and profit off those storehouses. No amount of “It’s for your own good” and “this is your salvation” can repay a stolen life, no amount of saying “We are opposing Satan!” can make up for a single person thrown into Hell. You do not oppose the Devil by feeding souls into his engines.

As long as other people are an acceptable sacrifice, as long as there are people whose lives can be consigned to Hell, then there will be sorcerers. Who they think is expendable will vary – there will be not just the ones that we know as popular bigotries, but there will be those who want to condemn people of other political parties, or people who have been victims of particular crimes. There will be people who want to consign people who write the wrong kind of story or play the wrong kind of game to expendability, and make bank on their marginalisation. There will be people who find other people’s marginal status, their relegation to the brink of reality, to be very handy, since someone whose life depends on finding a job might well be someone who will do anything. Be any thing, and for a pittance besides.

People. Are. Not. Things.

Not pawns in a cosmic game, not win tokens, not items to bend to the will of power or destroy if they displease. They do not exist to be stacked like cordwood in the bellies of slave ships or the depths of warehouses or set to slave in governor’s mansions or shackled to jobs that cannot even pay them what it costs to live because others can afford to expropriate their life, steal their breath, and store them away in Hell.

(And if you want a Kemetic version of this rather than a lupine one, try my post from last year, in response to the Pulse shooting: Put It All On Trial. Look, I say the same thing, over and over again, in different metaphors.)

But this is what Hell is, now: those Hellmouths of simpler times, when humanity’s worries were tangible, concrete, and we could imagine walking into Hell and carrying out seeds and thereby saving the world are not gone, but they are, in at least some ways, buried under other, more intricate ones.

The Horsemen are still riding. You can hear their hoofbeats, and they sound something like this:

It’s not that we want you to starve, but surely you don’t think you’re entitled to food? Starvation is bad. Just do the work. It doesn’t matter that the work doesn’t need you to do it, and you are replaceable, interchangeable, meaningless to the system: the system needs bodies and time, and your life is your problem. Send it to Hell for all we care.

(Seen elsewhere: “How badly did we fuck up the world that ‘Robots can now do much of the necessary work’ is seen as a crisis?”)

It’s not that we want you to go to war, fight, be maimed, die, we support the troops. But you know those people Over There hate us and our freedoms, and we need to put the hurt on them so they know who’s right. They can go straight to Hell, am I right? What do you mean, joining the Army was your only hope of getting an education and a better life? Isn’t that a bit of a Devil’s bargain?

It’s not that we want you to get sick and suffer, but really, if you were responsible, this wouldn’t have happened. Are you sure you’re not too fat? Are you poor on purpose? Why didn’t you go to the dentist before this happened? Someone probably should’ve looked at that injury at the time but now it’s way too late to do anything about it, sorry. What is that, we couldn’t possibly give treatment to that, is it even a person?

It’s not that we want you to die, but people like you shouldn’t exist. They’re trouble, you know, the cop was probably afraid for his life. You know what they say about the wages of sin being death. She defied God’s will. It’s a mercy, you know, someone shouldn’t be forced to live like that. It’s the lügenpresse’s fault. Couldn’t she have been nicer when she turned him down? Someone should do something about people like you.

How many ways does this rhetoric send people to the granaries of Hell each day? Hell is no longer content to glean our seeds, it demands our selves as its tithe. Sixteen tons, and what do we get?

The Devil’s sorcerers may not outnumber the rest of us, but many of them are powerful and their bargains have bought them powers that the rest of us do not have: affluenza, say, or the position to be so far removed from damage one causes that nobody can imagine bringing it to trial (though hey, someone’s been charged with involuntary manslaughter regarding Flint’s water, that’s a news story recently, how novel that someone who had some responsibility for poisoning an entire town might actually get charged with something), the ability to literally get away with murder, at least so long as the victim is one of the ones already damned.

People are not things. People are not optional. A rhetoric that says, “Well, sure, you exist now, but in an ideal world that wouldn’t be the case” is a rhetoric of annihilation, and a tool of the Devil’s sorcerers.

But the Devil’s sorcerers, too, are human, and forgetting that is a path towards becoming one of them, and storing up and expending lives into Hell.

The Harrowing of Hell shall not be complete until, as Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed has said, the last sinner is dragged kicking and screaming into heaven. The Hounds of God must steal them all back.

Hey look, this turned out to be Universalist theology too. Go me. I’ll add it to the categories tickies and maybe someday someone reading my UU backposts will be amusingly confused.

As I’ve been writing this post, I’ve been following developments on two news stories.

The fire in a low-income apartment building – Grenfell Tower – is one of them. Here we have lives stolen by landlords who were unwilling to use a recent renovation to put in anything like building sprinklers (and who may have damaged some of the safety precautions intended to slow the spread of fire in a building), most obviously, but there are layers beyond that – that austerity measures reduced the funding for fire brigades notably, that an attempt to introduce legislation requiring such housing to be “fit for human habitation” was defeated by a Tory vote (and that many Tory politicians are landlords). And, further, that part of the reason so many were saved was the Muslim inhabitants, awake because of Ramadan, noticed the fire and started getting people out; the diversity of the population there was preservative.

The other is the shooting in Virginia, in which a man armed with a rifle shot at the House Majority Whip, aides, and others, injuring several. (And, because he is a white man, he was initially taken into custody alive.) And I cannot say that after all these years of “Second Amendment solutions” I am surprised by the terrorism there, even as I recognise that it is terrorism, is anti-democratic, is as hostile to the underlying nature of governance as the administration this man might well have thought he was fighting. It is actively difficult to deal with people who one believes are Hell’s partisans without losing an understanding of their humanity. People have wrestled with this one for ages. But one must be so very careful with unleashing Hell’s tools, those Horsemen – of bringing out Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death and setting them riding – because they leave the gates of Hell open, and they go where they will once unleashed.

It is by acting as a community that we save each other, and ourselves. Including from violence. Deliverance is in the hands of the shapeshifting other who we welcome home. Have each other’s backs. Know what it costs to venture into Hell, even if you cannot do it today, and know that building a home to come back to is why the werewolves can change their skins.

The Evolutions Of Hell was originally published on Suns In Her Branches | Kiya Nicoll