#rb this on mu but i want it here too!

[jinlix]

🐕💫

[amarynceus]

Political Blitherings, et c.

Preface 0.1.  Politics, race issues, anger.  Part venting, part thinking. Below the cut.

Questions? Responses?  Acknowledge my right to exist and equal treatment, and I’ll debate almost anything.  There’s an ask button, use it.  Fail to acknowledge that basic point and we are done, full stop.

Preface: NDN = decendant of indigenous peoples of the continents located between Western and Eastern Eurasia, in case you didn’t know.

Second preface; I hope even if you don’t agree with me on very many things, so long as you agree on my basic premiss, that you will read this through if you care about current events.  I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you already like one or two of the drawings I’ve made, if you’re still watching me at this point.

I’d just like to note that I might be occasionally strident and political from time to time for the next, well, foreseeable future, as long as we have an ACTUAL. FUCKING. TOOL. OF.THE. KREMLIN. IN. WASHINGTON.  I would prefer just to paint sailing ships and stupid pones, but times are what they are and people like me are now under attack from my own fucking government in this climate.  I love the Socialism.  I hate Fascism, Soviet communism, and their various interbred ancestors and descendants, and hate the idea of them growing stronger here.

Creating art is an essentially political act, and don’t let any two-bit neo-nazi pieces of shit tell you otherwise.  What difference it makes is debatable, but what isn’t is that silence is complicity.  Do not be silent.  Do not let others tell you that your fear, that your oppression, that your experience and your identity do not matter.  Do not be gaslighted.  There are four lights, and let no one tell you otherwise.

My first President, and the last I felt any respect for, was Carter.  The first I could vote for was Clinton, and I couldn’t stand him.  The first I could actually vote FOR, rather than against, was Obama, and only the first time around.  I’m an NDN.  I hate the fucking United States, the agent of physical and cultural genocide, that destroyed so much of my people and my culture and my very social fabric.  I hate the flag, I hate the government, I hate every shred of this godsdamn pathetic farce of a Republic that has the balls to call itself a Democracy.  I want to see the US burn, fall, fail harder than Rome ever did.

But.  I still live here. This is my land.  My ancestors’ land, ripped away by the white man’s (and woman’s - the white woman’s complicity in colonial oppression is deep and rarely conveyed) violence and greed.  We have been here, and I mean my cultural group, the NDNs of the Columbian Plateau, TEN THOUSAND years at a BARE MINIMUM -- even white anthropologists and archæologists, some of the most racist academic disciplines, acknowledge this.   When humans in the middle east were first starting to put one sun-fired brick on top of another, we were figuring out how to balance the recources we had and the needs we had.  For thousands of years, my people lived a way that did not degrade the land, and did not require war, or conquest, to maintain that way of life.  What kind of mis-steps led to such a thing, I do not know - I have long assumed that some kind of gross overharvesting/overexploitation of the available resources led to the realization that resources must be managed, and human populations controlled, if there was to be any balance between humans and the landscape that gives us life.

So.  Where am I going?  I don’t know.  I’ve had a cider and just now a beer.  So I’m just expressing at this point, because I’m starting to feel a tiny bit comfortable about my audience here, small (but growing! thank you!) as it is. 

Basically, silence is no longer an option at this point.  Those of you still in your early twenties or so (I don’t want to assume, but demographics say almost half of you are under 24), might not really get what an important place we stand in, right now.  But let me say this directly right now.  Even if you’re well aware of it.

All of our values, and all of the values our founding folks held (regardless of their hypocrisies or defects, etc., etc.) are under attack right now.  The very essence of what is a ‘fact’ is under assault right now.  Science is under assault now.  People who are not white, straight, and devoted to the myth that this is a white, straight nation are under attack right now. 

If you’re white, stop criticising the anger and rage of POC right now.  If you’re male, stop criticising the anger and rage of women right now.  If you’re a Nazi, kindly fuck off and live in the most excruciatingly painful manner possible.  If you see a Nazi get punched in the face and you say ‘well, but...’  fucking ditto, I have no time for your temporizing.  Say ‘well, but...’ one more time, and as a lifelong pacifist who has never yet dirtied their knuckles on anything more offensive than a sheetrock wall, I will happily break your nose and dislocate your testicles, free of charge.

We need to pull together.  I’ll say for one time, and hopefully one time only, I have a hard time with white liberals.  I’ve been betrayed so many times by them.  But we do need you to come to your senses and stop attacking the rest of us who are now genuinely under threat.  Unless you thrust the topic under my nose, I don’t intend to bring it up again (might RB stuff about it tho).  But y’all have had the reins for centuries now, sit down, shut up, and listen.  And that’s the end of that topic.

We all have our own concerns.  I’m not exactly proud, but I have a difficult time in a lot of political debates concerning race, due to the fact that NDNs are consistently shut out.  I try my best to rally myself behind other folks’ suffering, but when it’s usually <this group this group us us us us> or <that group that group me me me me> one gets left on the sidelines sometimes, it is true.  Trumping another victim’s card with your own weighty suit is bullshit, though.  The IDEA of the White Man has fucked us all.

Let me come back to that, because I think it’s important.

THE IDEA OF THE WHITE MAN HAS FUCKED US ALL.

The IDEA of unique importance.  The IDEA of a special place in history and destiny.  The very IDEA of anyone being inferiour.  The IDEA of a mandate over others not of our own people.  The IDEA of absolute rule.  The IDEA of divine right.  The IDEA that being stronger and more violent has anything to do with superiority.

Sadly, all of these are pretty much true of us all, regardless of time or place.  Humans are pretty shitty.  But a certain concatenation of events conspired to place white European males at the temporary top of the heap of worldwide power intrigue, and they went fucking crazy with it.  Crazy in a way that the world has never before seen sort of crazy, setting aside all those cautionary tales of Mu or Atlantea or whatever.  Crazy as in this-single-way-to-live-is-the-only-way-or-else-I’ll-kill-you sort of way (which is, sadly, almost universal).  Whether it be the worship this dead man on a stick or die, or dig gold or die, or slave-in-the-fields-because-you-happen-to-be-darker-than-me-therefore-you-deserve-to-die-horribly-because-this-guy-who-has-the-building-with-the-gold-but-don’t-die-until-I’ve-extracted-every-last-bit-of-labour-I-can-without-expending-any-capital-or-indeed-meaningful-effort-of-my-own.

Again, do I have structure here?  No.  I don’t care about structure.  I’m fed up with being constrained on discourse.  I’m done with letting conventional liberals, white or not, dictate the path and the method by which I expound ideas and express my emotions.  I’ve had a Cider and a Beer, and these days that’s about enough to make it slightly difficult to type straight and copy-edit as I go.  Make that two Beers as I’m half through with the second.  I’m just done with excessive self-restraint in general - though that’s my limit with drinks.

I think that’s my limit on discourse here, though.  I streamed all day, and chatted all day, which was fucking awesome (seriously, you know who you are, I appreciate your support and your interest).  I’m worn out -- by now some of you know fairly well just why that is, and in time all of you who stick around will.  Like so many who differ from the norm, I’m tired of defending the very basics of rational discourse.  I’m tired of Nazis.  I’m tired of Nazi sympathizers.  I’m tired of racists.  I’m tired of those who will ally themselves with racists to further their own worldviews.  I’m tired of White Liberals who try to balance everything because it all comes out of a fucking Textbook and -- well, I’d disgrace myself totally and forfeit any right whatsoever to rational discourse if I posted the clauses I just deleted. D:  Let’s just wrap that up and say I’m tired.  Unless you’ve got a serious legacy of oppression and trauma in your own life as well as your family’s -- this is the time to shut up, sit down, support, and spread your ears wide fucking open.

You might be ‘white’ right now and you might have this shitty legacy of oppression, too.  It’s important to realize that ‘race’ is such an arbitrary constrict -- a good modern starting point is ‘Whiteness of a Different Colour’ (ISBN-13: 978-0674951914) -- and that many of you that might be considered ‘white’ now weren’t ‘white’ a mere century or less ago.  If you’re of Irish, or Scottish, or Italian, or any country with any modicum of Catholicism, or anywhere near Poland at all (for fuck’s sake I want the US to burn but I wish I could apologise for those Polish jokes), I hope you’re nodding right now.  ‘Whiteness’ has always been a fluid definition, subject to the convenience of those who are in power.  Sometimes you’re in, sometimes you’re out.  A lot of people last year were convinced along these lines, alas. Especially white women -- it’s hard to say, but I am deeply disappointed in any gender whose space I drift into regularly --- where’s my fucking third option, thank you very much, please, reality, let LeGuin’s writing instantiate.  The amount of white women who voted for a... thing that despised their very gender was, quite frankly, so astonishing, even disgusting, that it was hard to credit. 

So at this point I think it’s important to distinguish between two groups: those that explicitly benefit form the current regime, and those who don’t.  Establishing the basic premiss that I’m not particularly inclined to either nuance or compromise at this point, I think I can draw the lines thus:

With the Orange one are Nazis (or Neo-Nazis if you want to split hairs, I see zero fucking difference), other forms of White Nationalists, the KKK, Kremlin sympathizers, and a general cadre of the most ignorant and least qualified set of people ever set to take government positions, even factoring in the presidencies of Grant and Hoover.  These people deny science, deny facts, deny the right of people like me to exist.  I don’t believe in anything but the serious danger of absolute belief.  But I do trust and have some shred, some modicum of faith, one might even go so far as to say, in scientific method, rational skepticism, tolerance, and love.

These people that are scrabbling for the levers of power have none of these things.  They want unquestioning obedience, slavish devotion, denial of diversity.  They want us to believe their lies, their ‘alternative facts’ or whatever the shit was that’s so ridiculous my fore-brain refuses to scrabble for the correct terminology.

But this isn’t the 1920s or the 1930s.  Remember that the well-nigh universal lesson from that time regarding Fascism is that people didn’t strike back hard enough, fast enough, strong enough.  Don’t succumb to the idea that it’s worth your while to debate people who don’t accept your simple existence and your equal rights as a basic, fundamental point.  If they don’t, punch them if you can.  Or find a bigger friend to punch them.  Kick them in the balls -- most of these Nazis have balls, I know not how -- or hit them with a bat, or a bat with nails in.

Remember.

If.

They.

Do.

Not.

Unconditionally.

Acknowledge.

Your.

Right.

To.

Exist.

As.

A.

Basic.

Premise.

There.

Is.

No.

Intellectual.

Debate.

Nazis and their ilk don’t want people like me, or many of you, to even exist.  (I look at every follower’s profile, you delightful people and sometimes perverts [me too, no worries - even some aces get saucy every few dozen moons or so!  I love you all, apart from those strange porn blogs, I don’t draw naked anything yet, please go away.])  Even after deflecting myself there, I re-emphasize that:

DEBATE CAN ONLY OCCUR WHEN BOTH PARTIES AGREE TO A CERTAIN SET OF FACTS AND PHILOSOPHICAL PREMISES.  Foremost in 2017 being: an acceptance of the scientific method and of the complexities and conclusions of modern science, an acceptance to the basic freedoms of the press and of political discourse as established from our flawed founding fuckers to the current day, and an acceptance of the basic rights of all human beings irrespective of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.

Anyone who can’t agree to this basic, fundamental, and fundamentally inoffensive set of premises is not worth your time or energy.  If they try and throw sand in your face, avert them.  If they put up a mask of civility, state the basics and deflect them.  If they assault or insult you, ignore them, or if appropriate, punch them -- at this point, they deserve it.  As a life-long pacifist -- they so deserve it.

Keep your thumb outside of your fingers, please.  I want you to be able to draw even after you punch Nazis.

Remember:

Anyone who does not acknowledge your right to exist has not established the most fundamental level of Rational Discourse.

I’ll try as best I can to keep this blog to mainly just art, but I refuse and reject all notions that I should keep politics out of my art.  The act of intentionally creating a piece of art is an essentially political act, it always has been, and it always shall be.

On that point, I’ll allow one exchange to give you a chance before I block your arse on whatever platform.  I DGAF about followers, sales, or bottom lines, tiny though they may be. All I want are people who I can have a rational discourse with.

I wish I could say I’m sorry to be so angry. 

I am absolutely not

.  I refuse to let my anger dominate my day to day living, but I also refuse to put it aside, and I think you should too.  Don’t let go of that anger, but don’t let it eat your heart (it will eviscerate you in a breath if you let it.)  Forge it into a sword, into a shield, into a bow and arrows to give cover to your loved ones.  This is not a time for complacency, for conciliation for those who would not have us live at all.  Recognize that there is a point at which rational debate has come to an end, that there are those who want us dead and are not at all joking with all those oven threats. NAZIS FUCKING EXIST RIGHT NOW.  Just as their vile counterparts have existed at so many times throughout history.I could name to you ancestors that were killed, or sent to prison, or locked in mad-houses, or worse, simply because they were NDN and said that we should have rights, that we should be treated like human beings, that we DESERVED to EXIST.  I have zero patience for the establishment or the White Man in Washington.  I have some patience for the White Woman, even though they have often been a worse oppressor than the Man (seriously -- look at the treatment of ‘Natives’ in ‘America’ and Indians in India in the periods when it was just the by far majority male explorers, trappers, traders, etc, compared to when the women come in -- rapid swings between Tolerance and Accomodation, to Prejudice and Exclusion, all overcome with the Sickening Sweet Smell of Straight-Laced Biblical Morality and okay I can’t go on, if you are still reading I haven’t completely offended you and I would honestly not prefer to do so excessively.)  but it’s really hard to trust in straight white women at this point.  So many sold us out to a self-confessed ‘p*ssy grabber’ in November. ANYWAY. Anger blah blah arg razzle frazzle argiuhalsdkfgjalkdfgjh lasidfuyao psidgyoiasdygoi asydfgo iasdygpoiasdo et cetera, et  cetera, et. cetera. yeah. welcome to 2017. Let’s all go punch Nazis.  Or, if we can’t punch Nazis, let’s all support those who do. Because what’s more American than punching a Nazi in his (or her) Godsdamned face.