Be careful what you wish for

I realised a strange thing this week. Through the power of the internet I saw a Natzi go from blustering about his power to weeping in fear that police might shoot him. The comment section was full of people holding him up as an example of the fundamental weakness of Natzis as a group. Something about it seemed familiar. A also saw a young man who marched with Natzi’s and thinks that multiculturalism is cancer but swears he isn’t a Natzi complaining about getting death threats over the internet. Something about that seemed familiar too.

I realised that they were experiencing what it’s like to belong to a minority. They’ve been saying for years that white men are the ones who are really oppressed and now they get to find out what that’s actually like. You see when a woman fails she fails on behalf of all women. When a person of colour breaks the law the reaction is disproportionately harsh. When any member of a minority sticks their head above the metaphorical parapet someone will try to shoot it off. One needs privilege to survive mediocrity and incompetence.

I have no illusions that it will last. Either things are going to get very dark or the Natzis will climb back into their holes for a while and people will forget that there are still Natzis in the world. Very soon it will again be possible for white people to espouse the beliefs that sent millions to the gas chambers and plunged the world into war and other white people will pretend that they don’t really mean it.

But for a while perhaps thost of us who really do face discrimination and oppression are allowed a little schadenfreude at the idea of Natzis finding out what it’s like. They really don’t seem to have the constitution for it.

Well suck it up, buttercup. This is what life is like for everyone who isn’t an able-bodied, cis-gendered, heterosexual white man. This is what the rest of us put up with while you’re whining on the internet about how women oppress you by refusing your advances or sleeping with men you don’t approve of. While you’re blaming immigrants for depressed wages and affirmative action for keeping you out of your ‘rightful’ job the rest of us have been working twice as hard for half as much and being told that we should be grateful for it.

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I can deal with the pain it’s the frustration that really hurts.

So the CBD oil that I’ve been talking about in previous posts here and here is definitely working.

My background levels of pain have greatly reduced and it’s now easier to deal with breakthrough pain. However my right knee has clearly decided to be a horrible bitch about things. It’s swollen and it’s grinding and it won’t reliably bend and it hurts whenever I do foolish things like stand up or sit down or roll over in bed.

And something else has decided to flare up. Something really painful. Something that I really need to see a doctor about but I was too late this morning to get an appointment and I have stuff to do tomorrow that can’t be moved and if I leave it till Friday to see the doctor then I will have reached my own personal defcon 10 of pain.

That’s not 10 out of 10 on the pain scale. That level of pain is just screaming until it stops. Defcon 10 is out of my mind with pain, distraction and frustration. It’s a result of having to just put up with a level and type and location of pain that no-one should have to put up with. Defcon 10 is dangerous because it makes me want to knife 40 people at random. Hopefully the CBD oil will help with this kind of pain.

If anyone is interested I will post links to the kind of vape pen, cartridges and oil I’m using.

+++ZEPPELIN FORECAST FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE+++

+++PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP CALLED NEW HAMPSHIRE A “DRUG-INFESTED DEN” DURING PHONE CALL WITH MEXICAN PRESIDENT, JANUARY+++

+++TRUMP SAID,”I WON NEW HAMPSHIRE BECAUSE NEW HAMPSHIRE IS A DRUG-INFESTED DEN” AND “KIDS ARE BECOMING ADDICTED TO DRUGS BECAUSE THE DRUGS ARE BEING SOLD FOR LESS MONEY THAN CANDY,”+++HE CITES MEXICO AS THE SOURCE FOR THE SUPER CHEAP DRUGS+++

+++NEW HAMPSHIRE RESIDENTS OBJECT TO THE PRESIDENT’S CHARACTERISATION OF THEIR STATE AND POINT OUT THAT ALTHOUGH HE WON THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY HE LOST BOTH THE POPULAR AND THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION+++

Ok, that last bit was me joking but the rest of the story appears legit. There is a genuine opiate problem throughout the US and New Hampshire has been particularly badly hit with a tenfold increase in deaths from opiate overdose from 2011 to 2015. I don’t think this increases the chances of Zeppelin sightings since this is clearly a long standing problem however it does suggest a new runner in the apocalypse stakes.

Apocalypse watchers I give you the Drug Apocalypse. This is the apocalypse where an increasing reliance on drugs blinds the lower classes to class iniquity and allows the super rich to hijack democracy leading to an inevitable societal breakdown. It’s the only possible explanation for the drugs being so cheap. If the super rich weren’t subsidising the drugs there’s no way that they could be cheaper than candy.

There’s now a page on the blog collecting all the Zeppelin related material: Zeppelins!

 

My problem with body positivity

I don’t have a problem with the Body Positivity movement as long as it’s your body we’re talking about. You look fabulous, by the way.

I just can’t be positive about my body because there’s nothing positive about it. My problem is not that I’m fat. Fat is not a problem. My problem is that my body is a worthless piece of toxic trash that has been torturing me almost from birth.

I hate my body. Everything I’ve achieved I have achieved in spite of it. All it does is slow me down. I can’t rely on it. It turns the food I eat into dysfunctional fat cells that lock the energy away. I can’t access that energy and the cells just build up on my legs looking fucking hideous, hurting and stopping my joints from working.

I’m trapped in this fucking cage. It doesn’t work. I can’t fix it. It’s made my life a living hell. There’s nothing I could ever have done to fix it. I’ve been struggling my whole life, blaming myself, thinking that I was a failure and the whole time it’s been beyond my control. I was doomed from the start.

If there was any justice in the world I’d be offered a do-over of some kind. But there isn’t so I’m just stuck here until this body stops working completely. I feel like my entire life has been wasted. Not just because this body sucks but because I’ve wasted so much time blaming myself for something that was outside my control and trying to fix something that was never going to work.

No more. Fuck this body. I’m done putting up with its bullshit.

Well I say that… but even as I type this it’s making a spirited attempt to get me to stop. My back is cramping up. The pain is all I can think about. My body is demanding that I stop typing and go back to bed or something. Realistically there isn’t much I can do about it.

Still not feeling it

Sadly I am still not feeling like writing anything constructive or useful. I had planned another commentary on a film or another post full of advice for young writers but I’m on strike.

I am on strike because the world continues to be unfairly messed up.

In the United States politics continues to be a shit show. The ongoing argument about the extent to which the Trump administration is corrupt, incompetent, or in the pocket of Moscow may distract people from the attempts to ninja a terrible new healthcare act through the Senate.

In the UK our Prime Minister risks restarting armed conflict in Northern Ireland in order to hold on to power. She’s trying to do a deal with the DUP – a party with longstanding links to loyalist terror groups; a bunch of climate change denying, creationist, homophobes who hate Catholics.  There are just a few massive problems with this.

1. It risks breaching the Good Friday Agreement.
2. It’s pissed of Sinn Fein so much that there are rumours the might take up their seats in the Westminster Parliament.
3. The DUP will resist the hard Brexit demanded by much of the Conservative base because they don’t want to reinstate the border with the Republic of Ireland.
4. So will Sinn Fein if they do take up their seats.
5. The only genuinely popular Conservative politician in the UK, and leader of the Scottish Conservatives, is a Lesbian who’s engaged to an Irish Catholic woman.

The British media has spent most of the last five days telling us that a second Scottish independence referendum is dead because the SNP only won a clear majority of the votes, not the overwhelming landslide they won last time. Both the Scottish Conservatives and the Scottish Labour Party are claiming a victory. Even though both of them put together have just over half the seats of the SNP.

Every day the news is full of stuff that makes no sense. I have had enough.

 

Not the post I wanted to write.

I had a couple of ideas for today’s post. I had one in mind that was full advice for young creatives. I wanted to write something for my daughter who has trouble finishing things. But then some arsehole blew himself up inside an arena full of teenaged girls and suddenly that seems inappropriate.

I was flicking through Facebook and Twitter, not wanting to know more but unable to stop when I spied a comment from a right-wing journalist. I’m not going to link to the tweet or name the journalist because attention only encourages people like this. I will include the full text of the tweet though.

Why do we suspend politics when a terror attack happens? I want to know how our politicians plan to stop these attacks. Or don’t they know?

Oh dear lord. Where to begin?

Well for one thing they don’t know how to stop attacks like this because we don’t know what happened. There’s still an ongoing investigation. Maybe we should wait for the police and the security services to work out how it happened before we decide what to do about it?

Of course if you start by believing that Islam is inherently evil or brown people are less human than white people then I imagine you think you know what we should do. I’m sure that this particular journalist isn’t suggesting any of that. Plenty of other people were, though. I’ve heard a rumour that a certain other right-wing ‘journalist’ even used the phrase ‘final solution’.

We know where this particular road goes and I think most of us don’t want to go that way.

To answer the first question; we suspend politics in the face of terribly tragedy like this because Britain is a civilised fucking country. Making political capital out of terror is morally reprehensible.

To continue electioneering in the face of a terror attack is also fraught with danger. The ruling party shouldn’t be campaigning at a time like this it should be ruling. The parties in opposition could stand on the side taking cheap shots but if they win that way then the victory would be cheapened and they risk distracting the government. The government could deal with the distraction by calling the opposition unpatriotic and mobilising public opinion against them. The opposition could blame the government for the attack.

Then you’d get two factions drawn up against one another along party lines. The country would be divided. The terror attack would have damaged our democracy. Which was precisely the point.

Not a real person.

One of the things I struggle with a lot is the feeling of not being a real person. I think some of it is imposter syndrome and some of it is a throwback to the bullying I grew up with. When everyone tells you that you’re ugly and stupid and worthless you tend to start believing them. If you’re smart enough to know that it’s not true you still can’t help suspecting that you’re not a real person because who would treat a real person like that? Real people have rights. Miss-treating real people has consequences.

But lets not forget that for a lot of people I am not a real person. I am a poor, disabled, depressed, fat, middle-aged woman. You’d be surprised how many people will lose interest in my humanity the moment one of those trigger words is mentioned.

There are a few men for whom no woman is a real person. They might not express it this way but it’s clear that to them personhood is a uniquely male quality. That’s why they think that rape is not a thing. Because they think that only male desires count. If you think of women as objects then of course you don’t care about consent.

There are a larger group of men for whom women are people but with an asterix. They say woman* or female* but that asterix leads to some mental footnote that defines a woman according to some personalised criteria. If you listen to them long enough you find out that woman means a cisgendered, hetrosexual (or bisexual but only for male entertainment), able-bodied woman, between the ages of 17 and 35, with a BMI in the underweight or normal weight range with an attractive face (and if she’s a woman of colour she’d better have a really attractive face) and “good” breasts. The rest of woman-kind doesn’t count as female because we have failed in some aspect of our femininity. Remember that to them the primary purpose of a woman is to be decorative. It doesn’t matter who we are or what we do only how we look.

There’s a lot of people for whom poor people aren’t really people. That’s why they don’t care about minimum wages or benefits or social housing. The assumption is that poverty is some kind of moral or intellectual failing rather than a necessary side effect of capitalism.

Some people make similar assumptions about both physical and mental health. There’s an almost superstitious belief that ill-health and injury must be a punishment for something. There’s also a surprising number of people who are happy to declare that depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, OCD and autism are “all in the mind”. Which of course they literally are. They are illnesses of the brain. They cause changes in brain activity, neurochemistry, and sometimes in the physical structures of the brain. No amount of willpower is going to remake the chemistry, activity or gross anatomy of your brain. You can’t just get over it.

I don’t understand why it’s so hard to agree that people are people.

Regardless of skin colour, nationality, religion or lack thereof, political affiliation, age, sexuality, gender identity, nationality, wealth, health, ability or IQ there is only one Homo Sapiens species. We all belong to it and we are all people. Even me. Even when I don’t feel worthy of it. Even when people in power are trampling all over those rights that I have but for some reason can’t use.