Notices by A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck ? (juliusgoat@mastodon.social), page 9

I would maybe like people to stop declaring Trump the winner of the election ahead of the fact because of this or that. Not sure that accomplishes anything. He's still a deranged fucking creepy weirdo, it's possible people don't want him back. Just please and thank you etc.

Not the most terrifying thing but perhaps the most infuriating: every last thing we said about these fascist Republican fucks has proved true and each time the people who assured us that what is happening could never happen smoothly pivot to it's happening but it will be fine.

What happens when people with the institutional power to fight evil people don’t fight is those without institutional power despair.

You can blame desperate people for the suffering that’s coming their way, if you want, but doing so doesn’t distinguish you from fascists.

Did you know that this is the first weekend that my book of essays, VERY FINE PEOPLE, is available to purchase?

Maybe you didn't. Maybe you did. I think those are the only options.

Either way, check it out:

https://www.armoxon.com/books/very-fine-people

One thing that anti-woke “comedy” is good for is exposing differentiators between normal decent people, for whom freedom is simply the right to exist without being dehumanized and bullied, and conservatives, for whom freedom is mostly the right to dehumanize and bully others.

What Trump said is that there are "very fine people on both sides."

That would be the side counter protesting against the Nazis who organized a pro-Confederacy protest.

And then the side full of Nazis and those who found common cause with Nazis. That's the "both sides."

Trump, a malignant narcissist, knows the trick of using weasel phrasing and world salad to give himself deniability for anybody who wants to exonerate him, to pick and choose and take at face value whatever phrases will let him say what he means while holding himself innocent of saying it.

Let's do the sleight of hand, first. The article chooses to answer the question "Did Trump call Neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'?

This answers the wrong question, which is what is done when the goal is avoiding the actual questions.

So yes, Trump didn't come out and say 'The Nazis are very fine people." But this isn't the actual problem with Trump's words, and it never was, and the first problem with the Snopes article is that it pretends that was the problem, and frames it as a fact check.

I want to dig into this, since my book VERY FINE PEOPLE comes out today, and it's in large part about precisely this sort of polemic trickery in service of bullshit apologia of supremacy.

There's a sleight of hand at the start that catapults us into a massive lie.

So the self-appointed community defender pulled out his people-killing tool—the ownership and use of which is seen as a fundamental right in this country—and issued some commands, and the child obeyed, because he was being accosted by an armed stranger.

Afterward, the story reported that the child wasn't following the man's orders.

The man, who saw himself as the protector of his community, decided that the child was a danger because he had decided that it was his job to decide who was dangerous and who was not.

The kid was returning a BB gun to a mall, which is not something that carries the death penalty last I checked.

The man—who was a danger—decided the child—who was in danger—was a danger.

He was encouraged to do this by our dominant cultural narrative.

https://www.the-reframe.com/cruel-luxuries/

I know framing the story like this is likely to raise objections from the gun-defender crowd, including a knee-jerk reaction against my calling a 17-year old a "child." It's one way I know using killing tools to execute teens is something that's seen as a fundamental right.

In the name of community safety, the community protector shot the child six times in the back, according to the story, so this must have been an extremely dangerous-seeming child, especially the back part of him.

However, the community protector was unsatisfied with the child's compliance, so he killed the child.

This is also seen as a fundamental right in this country, provided you're the kind of person who is allowed by our dominant cultural narrative to appoint yourself a protector.

What was he doing? I will be asked. Why was he there? I will be asked. What did that BB gun look like, though? I will be asked. How was he holding it? You're making my point, I will answer, feeling far more tired than I did before.

Empathy is a challenge in a culture that scorns empathy, in a culture that so often looks at killing and explains to you why your distress is dangerously wrong-minded, and why you ought to take the more realistic view, which is to numb yourself to increasingly murderous cruelty.

But I have children around that age, and if some maniac who fashioned himself a community protector decided to murder them for some self-created reason, I would mourn a child, because of course I would, and so would you, I would presume, if you are still capable of empathy.

First, every bad guy with a gun thinks they are a good guy with a gun.

Second, our dominant cultural narrative will often keep the "good guy with a gun" story going for you even after you've proved yourself to be the exact sort of menace to society you presumed you were protecting everyone from.