Month: July 2022

My Hot Take On The ‘Prince Of Pegging’ Kerfuffle

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It’s times like these when I struggle to understand why Great Britain continues to, well, exist. Great Britain is the last multi-ethnic nation is Europe and, lulz, still has a monarchy to boot.

It would make a lot of sense to do away with the royal family, break the country up and maybe start thinking about making England the 51st state of the United States. There is so much untapped potential in the component parts of the UK that would be unlocked through its dissolution.

That is all very, very fantastical and fanciful, but stranger things have happened. Of course, the way things are going, the USA is going to be too busy either becoming an autocracy or imploding into civil war to worry about taking a newly republic England into the fold.

But let’s get to the point — what the fuck is going on with the royal family these days? The latest kerfuffle is the “Prince of Pegging” scandal. I knew the limies were freaks in the sack, but having an heir to the throne into pegging with someone other than his wife is enough to make your eyes bug out of your head.

It does make you wonder, however, how the US press would handle such an accusation against a fictional JFK-like modern president. What would happen — unless there was absolute proof — is what’s going on in the UK right now. Twitter would talk about it like crazy but, over all, the mainstream press wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot poll.

It happened — at first, at least — with the Clinton scandal’s “Blue Dress” and it’s happening here with what’s going on in Great Britain. Anyway, for the time being, it’s all a lulz. So what?

It’s a summer nadir diversion for people on Twitter. Let’s just hope the Queen doesn’t keel over unexpectedly in the next few days.

You Can’t Edit A Blank Page

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While I’m quite pleased with where things are with the novel I’m developing and writing, I have to also admit that even at my best I’m not writing as well as my literary hero the late Stieg Larsson.

Stieg Larsson

There seems to be a lot of elements of development that he did that I simply don’t know anything about. Given that I’m approaching the same age he died at — and sold three novels — I feel like the clock is ticking. I need to dramatically improve my writing if I’m going to get this novel (and the five subsequent novels) published before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Anyway, you can’t edit a blank page, as they say. And my personality, from what I can discern, is very different from Larsson on a number of different levels — I can’t write as dark as he did and I’m not a conspiracy theorist — but I do have my charms.

At least in my own mind.

So, once more unto the breach as they say. The key thing is I have to manage my expectations. I have to accept that for me to get through the various gatekeepers that stand between me and getting traditionally published that a fair amount of luck is involved.

But I really enjoy the process of learning how to tell a story in novel form. I can’t help that it’s taken me as long as it has to get to this point.

CPAC Is Hungary Like The Orban

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about America’s drift into autocratic fascism is it’s all happening in broad daylight. It’s not like the American Right is hiding its infatuation with people like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. In fact, CPAC, one of the major organizations for fucking American cocksucker fascists keeps wanting to have a mass fuck session with him, it appears.

Viktor Orbán

In short, people like CPAC are very vocal in how much they want the United States to turn into a Hungary-style autocratic state. As I understand it, Hungary’s style of authoritarianism is bad, but not Russia bad. It’s essentially a one party state but, on the surface at least, it’s a functioning democracy. But it’s an “illiberal” democracy.

The exact term is “managed democracy.”

So, back to the United States. There are two major things to consider going forward as the United States drifts into autocracy. One is, because of the natural ebb and flow of what’s left of our democracy, it’s inevitable that a fascist Republican will become president again and that will be that — Trump, or someone like Trump, will enact the “Schedule F” idea and purge 50,000 civil servants.

These civil servants will be replaced with MAGA toadies and we will find ourselves with an actual Deep State — in this case, a MAGA Deep State. The very idea of a “Deep State” comes from Middle Eastern countries with a history of autocracy that can’t get anything done when the autocrat is toppled because of the “Deep State” that is still loyal to the autocrat. It’s this Schedule F bullshit that will be the thing that causes the average person to notice a change in their relationship to the Federal government.

For fucking MAGA cocksuckers, they will get a boner from this change in practical administration of the “administrative state” until, of course, things get personal and they have to figure out how to get their drunk relative out of an ICE camp because they call President DeSantis a fucking cocksucker. (That would be me, by the way.)

Matt Schlapp, head of CPAC

The other thing to consider is America isn’t Hungary. America is very diverse in a variety of ways that Hungary isn’t. As such, it’s pretty easy to imagine once CPAC gets that white Christian ethno state they want so bad that things are going to get A LOT more severely autocratic than just Hungary. Especially in the South, there will be a natural inclination on the part of autocratic state governments to go after African Americans.

Once the connection between the governed and the government doesn’t exist anymore, then some pretty dark shit can start to happen. I still believe that there is a real chance that, in the end, MAGA will result in more deaths that the Nazis.

Let that sink in. And those of us who survive are going to be left wondering how it happened to a nation like the USA, just like they do now with Germany. Good luck. Get out if you can.

My Hot Take On Why America Is So Fucked Up Right Now

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

America, we have a problem. With the news of Trump’s “Schedule F” concept where he is going to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with his fascist cronies, I find myself dwelling a lot more on the implications of how fucked up America is right now.

But how did we get this way in the first place?

A number of different things are rushing to an endgame around 2025. The “Fourth Turning” if you believe in such stuff. (I don’t, the authors of that pseudoscience book were just lucky.)

But if you really think back when everything started to change in the United States, something about the general last few years of the Obama Administration drove the Right completely batshit insane. They’re all a bunch of fucking racists and I think they assumed, at first, that Obama being elected at all was something of a lark that they could forgive.

When he was re-elected, however, it sank into their racist cocksucker minds that not only was America Changing, but they had at last lost the soft power culture wars. As such, a lot of Traditionalists — the bedrock of any stable democracy — decided to become Good Germans in Waiting. They no longer believe in democracy and actively want white Christian minority rule, damn the consequences.

But wait, there’s more.

Another thing that happened starting around 2012 was smartphone ownership probably reached a critical mass to the point that one might say both that we experienced a “Petite Singularity” and the “Modern World” as we know it officially began.

And, last of all, there was a generational shift starting around 2012. A lot of young people took it for granted that being gay was a good thing and adopted the basics of what the Right would come to call “the woke cancel culture mob” mentality.

A lot of good has come from the generational shift in perception — #MeToo being among them — but there have also been a great deal of excesses that have led to Reds getting Redder and Blues getting Bluer. America is tearing itself apart and either we become all Red (Trumplandia) or we have a “National Divorce” with Blues serving the papers….and have a civil war.

Anyway, what’s going on is Reds are so enraged by the soft power of Blues that they conflate that power with the real hard power of passing laws. At least two things are at the very forefront of my Traditionalist relatives’ minds — an abstract fear of being “canceled” for being conservative and the idea that the Left literally wants to turn everyone gay.

They won’t shut the fuck up about either one of these two things. It’s really grown rather ridiculous.

Which path are we going to take? I honestly don’t know. All I know is the next few years will be very, very historic and bumpy. And I also know you probably need a passport.

Democracy Is America’s Birthright

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

This talking point within the Right Wing echo chamber — that the United States is a “constitutional republic” — enrages me because it’s simply an effort to negate any debate about how MAGA wants to end American democracy. It seems to me that MAGA New Right conservatives are so intent on making us believe we’re not a democracy because then all the rest of their racist, fascist bullshit fits behind it quite well.

Now, some context.

Yes, under the most technical of definitions, the United States is, in fact a “constitutional republic,” but that definition misses a very important element of American history — Americans believe we’re a democracy and, as such, when we strive to make a “more perfect Union,” we strive to make our democracy stronger.

Once you are able to establish in people’s minds that “democracy is mob rule” and all that fucking fascist bullshit, then it’s easy to justify white minority rule. I mean, isn’t that what the whole debate about what our form of government is, is all about?

MAGA wants white minority rule by using the least democratic elements of an overall democratic document — the Constitution. MAGA hates voting because they want fascist, autocratic rule. And, of course, despite this being quite obvious, most MAGA people get QUITE upset whenever you point out how fucking racist they are.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) gestures toward a crowd of supporters of President Donald Trump gathered outside the U.S. Capitol to protest the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory Jan. 6, 2021 at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Some demonstrators later breached security and stormed the Capitol. (Francis Chung/E&E News and Politico via AP Images)

I think a lot — maybe too much — about the origins of MAGA fascism in the United States and all I can come up with is racism. The decline in white babies — the so-called “Birth Dearth” — is the origin of all the troubles we have. And either you don’t mind that this is happening, or it’s the demographic end times and you want white minority rule.

The ultimate irony of all of this bullshit flung off by MAGA fascists is once we really are not a democracy anymore, they’re such fucking crybabies that they’ll be the first to freak out when the autocrat shoots a loved one in the back of the head using ICE for calling him a cocksucker drunk at a bar. Or the moment their 15-year-old granddaughter can’t get an abortion after getting raped THEN, THEN suddenly they will whine about the Good Old Days when we were a democracy.

That’s because the only red line that MAGA Republicans have is the personal. They are so busy burning everything to the ground because they had the “woke cancel culture mob” that wants to ruin their life “just for being conservative” that they don’t notice that overall everyone is served by us living in a Western democracy — even them.

But, I hate to tell you folks, we’re fucking doomed. This is it. Either we have a civil war or we implode into a fascist, autocratic state. If we’re lucky, we’ll look like Turkey or Hungary. If we’re not, we’ll be a lot more like Russia or Nazi Germany.

Get out while you still can.

A Meta Death Spiral: Imagining A Post Facebook World

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Facebook (Meta) has a problem. In fact, it has a specific problem, one you might call the Blockbuster Conundrum. How do you innovate when you have a vested interest in pretty much keeping things exactly the way they are? With Blockbuster, they struggled to the advent of streaming. Meanwhile, Facebook (Meta) is having a real problem with how the audience they want — tweeners — have moved on to various other networks including Tik-Tok.

Network of the living dead.

So, in a panic, Meta is scrambling to turn not just Instagram into a Tik-Tok copycat, but Facebook itself. This is potentially a recipe for disaster. We’re talking potentially a MySpace death spiral.

All of this leads to the idea of what might come next?

Well, given how much money Facebook has, I think it’s safe to say that whatever happens, Meta can just buy itself out of the situation eventually. That’s why they’re trying to be cool and call themselves “Meta.” But there is a real risk that the gap between the MySpace-like death of Facebook and the real birth of the metaverse might be so long that we live in a “post Facebook” era for a little while.

What that look like?

Well, in a sense, we’re already in that era because only the Olds still use Facebook and that’s because of a combination of entropy and the fact that Facebook serves the same social purpose as the phone book to Olds.

So, in a sense, while Facebook is very unhappy about losing all that sweet, sweet tweener eyeball traffic and disposable money, they’re doing just fine and will probably continue to do so.

Living In Oblivion

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m a nobody. After a few blips of micro fame in my wasted youth, I find myself drifting through life just wondering when the end will arrive. My only hope is that maybe, just maybe, I might write a novel that sells. And, I suppose, that if I happen to fall into some extra money I might buy photographic equipment and try to be a fashion photographer.

But, sad to say, at the moment, it definitely seems as though I’m just going to fade away.

Having said all of that, at least once a year, someone with a career and whatnot stumbles across me and something interesting happens. They usually use the Internet Archive to do due diligence on me, recoil in how weird I am and then I never hear from them again.

Ugh.

But, like I said, at least once a year, for one, bright shining moment I feel like the outside world gives a shit. And, yet, as I grow older, I am far more confident in my skin. I don’t need the validation of others as much as I once did. I am who I am and if you don’t like it, fuck off.

Settling A New Planet Would Be Incredibly Difficult

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have an idea for a novel that would take the principles of The Martian and apply it to not just one person, but, say, 1 billion. If an Alien Empire could zap a big chunk of Humanity to a new, inhabitable planet on the conditions that we work together and we could only use existing 2022 technology to do, how would you do it?

The answer, after thinking about this for 15 years is — it would be very, very hard.

The chief reason is bootstrapping a new civilization on a new planet would take far, far longer than you might think. Think of all the different products we use everyday that would be extremely difficult to build without a number of years of development to get there.

Even under the best of conditions — say, the Alien Empire gave us the absolute basics of electricity and the Internet — where would people live? You might have a very surreal situation of people using laptops and cellphones while otherwise living in some pretty primitive conditions. A least for a few years, maybe a few decades.

And then, there’s one of the biggest issues — how do you organize your new global government and society? The most obvious answer is you use the USA as the basis of your new mega colony. If you were trying to settle that 1 billion people on a new planet, you could use 200 of the 335 million Americans as the core of the settlement.

But that, unto itself, would be the source of a great deal of conflict. Which, if you were trying to use all of this as the basis of a novel or a movie would be GREAT. And, of course, using the USA as the basis of a global civilization would allow you to pander, hard, to your American audience.

The whole thing is a lot of fun to think about because there are so many different ways to look at it.

So, What Will Be August 2022’s Catastrophe?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, here we are again. Just about to reach the nadir of the year when all the Blue Checks go to Martha’s Vineyard and prepare for Burning Man where they do butt stuff with an anonymous Plebe while on shrooms.

Inevitably, of course, fate strikes and Something Big happens, usually at some point in August. My favorite blog post of all time is about this very thing. Anyway, what might be the thing or things that force all the Blue Checks back to the office to write up a think piece about What It All Means?

Well, the most obvious Bad Thing that might happen this August would be one of any number of Really Old But Powerful People might croak. It’s a testament to how close we are to the so-called “Fourth Turning” that there are many, many old people in powerful positions across the globe. I mean, I can name three people off the top of my head — Queen Elizabeth II, Joe Biden and ugh, Donald Trump — who’s passing would shake the world to its foundations to varying degree.

Other possible clusterfucks for August to feature might be some sort of COVID or MonkeyPox mutation that suddenly made a shitty situation an Oh My God Situation. Another clusterfuck that might happen could be some sort of major terrorist attack — apparently, Iran has already said it wants to get some revenge against the West by taking out a few notable people.

Then, of course, there is the perennial favorite of the DPRK. It could test a H-bomb or shoot off an ICBM missile again that scares the shit out of Americans. Or, they could just go tits up altogether and the the US would have to deal with two major regional wars — Ukraine and Korea.

Anyway, maybe this time we’ll get through August without Something Bad happening? Hopefully? Maybe all the bad juju of August will swirl the drain until November when Republican fascists gain power of the House again and start impeaching everyone they can possibly think of.

I Don’t Know What To Make Of Vice President Harris

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I struggle to understand how someone like Kamala Harris, who showed such promise in the Democratic primaries would turn out to be such a meh veep once in office. It’s all very curious.

It makes you wonder how much of her tough-as-nails persona was just an act. She keeps making unforced errors to the point that it’s a little embarrassing. The thing with the clarification about her “pronouns” that happened recently is part of all of this.

It seems like she was pandering to what MAGA would call the “woke cancel culture mob.” But I suppose it’s good politics for her. Shrug. But it definitely only makes matters worse with the bonkers Right wing nut jobs who are blinded by their racism towards her.

I suppose there’s not much she could do with them, anyway.

I think some of all of this is just that I’m an Old. The Youngs have established this woke orthodoxy and if you don’t abide by it, you literally risk being “canceled.” But all I know is, I’m more than happy being canceled if it means I get to live in an otherwise traditional Western democracy.

Fuck fascists.