I Hate It Here

Choose Your Hill Wisely

Buckle up, buttercup. This one’s going to be a ride.

My friends keep telling me that I should be more upset about Trump. I say: since when does panic help? We’re a month into Armageddon and I feel fine. Canned goods, artillery, and stockpiled toilet paper ease the anxiety some — and there’s a lot to ease, God knows. If it’s this or the fiscal cliff, we’re all screwed anyway.

The Trump Speed Circus is back in town, and it’s a howling beast of a thing: raw, unfiltered, DOGE tearing through Washington like a Cocaine Bear meet-cute. The air’s thick with confusion, a swirling fog of half-baked policies and wild-eyed firings that’s got the so-called Resistance stumbling around like drunks at a funeral. You can smell the panic, taste the disarray. It’s February 25, 2025, and the machine’s spinning so fast it’s throwing sparks — nobody knows where to plant their flag.

Friends, hear me. That’s the whole damn point.

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Hyperbole Is Literally Deadly

Consider the following:

– People have the right to identify themselves as they see fit.
– Mislabeling groups of people is an effort to dehumanize them.
– Dehumanization is the first step toward legitimizing pogroms.
– Mass vilification is the second step.
– Ya know who mislabeled people in order to vilify and eliminate them? Nazis.
– Therefore, anyone who misapplies the label “Fascist” to their political enemies is a literal Nazi.

That last step is of course a logical fallacy; it’s employed here deliberately in order to illustrate that calling people fascists merely because one dislikes them is in point of fact the identical fallacy. Even if one applies it to only those with an authoritarian bent is dangerously inaccurate; Stalin and Mao were both absolute rulers, and each was about as far away from fascist as it’s possible to be and still lead a cult of personality.

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I Am Not Spider Jerusalem

Those who know Spider Jerusalem already know this, and those who don’t know him could care less.  Too many of you don’t know him.

Twenty years ago there was a new comic book out under one of DC’s fringe labels — yeah, Vertigo.  “Transmetropolitan”.  Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson.  I stole their art.  I don’t get paid for this; they can sue me.  Either way:  Read.  It.  Read it now.  Go out and buy it and read it.

It was some serious brain-twisting, a mess, a work of paranoid comic genius that showed a horrifyingly plausible (more…)