I was going to write another election post, one that involved phrases to Trump voters like, “be a rationalist for one minute longer, voter, what is your analysis?” – but I just couldn’t.

But I still want to reach out to those mostly straight white guys who don’t understand why queers, people of colour – hell, women in general – are in such fear this election, when they aren’t. And it’s actually pretty simple.

It’s because there are pretty much zero straight white guys for whom this election is existential. That’s the difference, right there. Polling data relayed by fivethirtyeight.com indicates that, for heterosexual white men, as a demographic group, this is being seen as a fairly normal election – one with extreme rhetoric and a particular contempt for the Democratic Party’s candidate, but “normal.”

But there are lots of people, including me, for whom Mr. Trump’s stated plans are specifically existential matters. See Mr. Trump’s friendliness with white supremacists combined with the GOP’s plainly racist vote suppression efforts, and Mr. Trump’s history of legally actionable racism. See Mr. Trump’s pledges to jail Ms. Clinton if he’s elected. See Mr. Trump’s pledge to appoint justices only if approved by an organisation which thinks states should be able to make me illegal by fiat. See Mr. Trump’s well-known and continuing contempt for women – and as a blinding nexus of misogyny and racism, can you imagine what the reaction would’ve been to Mr. Obama had he sired five children by three wives, talked about how sexy is daughter was, and bragged about grabbing women’s pussies? Ye gods.

Now, I’m kind of used to every election being existential for me. But one of the things Mr. Trump has done has expand that sphere of targeted groups, and that’s a huge shift. By making the white supremacist and virulently misogynist ~~alt-right~~ a political factor, by making all that awfulness campaignable, he’s extended varying degrees of that horrible state out to pretty much everybody not a straight white guy.

(That speech about the secret cabal of international bankers controlling the world a couple of months ago, that really brought out the anti-Semites. He hit every keyword and phrase short of “dirty Jew” in that one.)

So now everything’s existential all the time, and every election is life or death, is citizen or not, is everything-short-of-bombings political war. And republics do not work when elections become existential.

Oh, they can tolerate it for small enough minorities, as the experience of queers over the last couple of decades shows – but not for large percentages of the population. And thanks to Mr. Trump and his courting of the “alt-right” – and the Republican Party’s general abandonment of the idea of a “loyal opposition” – that’s the path we’re on right now.

So maybe this does come back around to my original theme after all. Where are we? Not just you, whoever is reading this, particularly straight white guys for whom the existential nature of this clusterfuck has not yet come to apply – where are we all?

Look at what’s happened over these last many months. Look at where we are now. A victory by Mr. Trump makes this election – this lunacy – the new normal.

Be a rationalist for one minute longer, would-be Trump voter, and tell me – what is your analysis?

I want to write an essay, some of which I’ve written before, the rest of which I have explained in person many times; it’s about how the Republican Party lost the idea of the loyal opposition. But it’s hard to write.

It’s not hard because it’s all that complex; it’s not hard because it’s difficult to explain. It’s just too intimidating, too nerve-wracking in the context of an authoritarian movement wagon-hitched to a misogynistic racist who likes to talk about jailing his political opponents, ordering war crimes, reinstituting torture, throwing nuclear weapons around in the middle east, and still pulling 45% in polls.

It’s not supervillainy; I could, obviously, get behind that. But supervillainy… supervillainy is a whole different story to this kind of raw lust for oppression, this clamour for unrestrained power, and the ending of opposition in any form.

We like to talk big, vampires do. “I’m going to destroy the world.” It’s just tough guy talk. Struttin’ around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. You’ve got… dog racing, Manchester United, and you’ve got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It’s all right here. But then someone comes along with a vision. With a real… passion for destruction.

— Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

No, this isn’t supervillainy; this isn’t art. This is the slow, grinding, boot in the face. I mean, sure, almost every election of my adult life is existential to one degree or another; that’s what happens when a political movement decides your existence is an offence to their ravenous, all-consuming god of lust for violence. It’s not fair, and it never gets better, because fundamentalism never gets better, and it grinds.

(A lot more people than usual are feeling that grind this year. Folks, this is every election, for queers. Welcome to the horrible, horrible party. I’m sorry.)

The thing is – this wasn’t inevitable. It was a process, one that started decades ago, with the rise of modern political fundamentalism in the 1970s. They helped get Ronald Reagan elected, changing the course of American politics, launching a long Republican cycle.

But they didn’t get what they wanted out of Reagan. Not really. Sure, they got anti-abortion/anti-equality votes, and they got a government that was perfectly happy to let AIDS kill tens of thousands of queers while they crowed about it as God’s Punishment Upon the Homosexual, a particularly specific plague – if you ignored Africa, which they didn’t care about either – and they got a long-term squeeze put on women’s health. But not what they wanted.

And they’re not stupid; they didn’t get all that much of what they wanted because they didn’t get the real force of the party behind them. So they complained about that, inside the party, and they were told: you’re with us, but you’re not of us, you haven’t put in the work to build the party, like everyone else has. “Put in the work,” they were told, “and you’ll get your turn, just like us.” That’s how party politics works.

So they signed up. They started putting in that work, filling out those volunteer positions, moving up the ladders of power.

But the funny thing about political parties is that they aren’t just workplaces. They’re social environments. They’re clubs. They’re circles of like-minded friends. Arguably, as of late, they’ve been tribes, which is every bad.

The same is true of fundamentalist movements, and – particularly in the American South – churches, which are often the social nexus of smaller communities. They have norms, informed by their beliefs. They have assumptions, and rules, and ideas about themselves and others, and such ideas are contagious.

Now, American evangelical fundamentalism has a long history of being enamoured with the Book of Revelations. They like it about as much as they do the old testament books, particularly those which lay down punishments upon others, like Leviticus. Being obsessed with the end of the world, and the return of Jesus, it’s very attractive.

And back as they were working their way into becoming the GOP – and going into the end of the millennium – they started spending a lot of time on Revelation 3:15-16. You’d hear it on fundamentalist radio, a lot, specifically in religious-political programming. To wit:

(15) I have known thy works, that neither cold art thou nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. (16) So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

That’s Jesus (or Jesus as channeled by John), if it isn’t clear. The way they’ve taken this – and the way they were teaching this, most specifically in a political context – is that there’s no such thing as moderation. There is no neutral ground, be hot or cold in my mouth, or I will spit you out. You embody fervent support with no upper bound to the fervency – more is always better – or you’re the opposition. Moderation is as bad as opposition to JESUS.

That’s problematic enough before you add in that for these religious evangelical fundamentalists, religiously speaking, opposition is literally Satan himself. And since fundamentalism is all about living your religion, is that religion incorporated into your social life? Oh my yes, absolutely.

That is the social and political culture the fundamentalists brought – already fully formed – into the Republican party. Hot, or cold. Fervently LIVING JESUS, or demonic evil incarnate, with no limits, respite, or quarter morally justified.

And politics are social. It’s also policies, some, sure, but mostly, there’s a lot of who you get on with, and how. As the evangelical fundamentalists moved into the party ranks, and made friends, they brought their culture with them, and those attitudes – well, in a competitive political environment, they’re going to be awfully useful. Awfully useful, and awfully attractive, even if you don’t really believe it.

Which is how you get claims that Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama are literally, personally, demonic entities floated around by people close to the Republican nominee.

Can you imagine – ever – Warriors For God, self-assigned paladins, accepting the literal devil winning an election? Is that ever going to be recognised as legal? As legitimate?

Of course not. There is truly no such thing. And while there’s a good chunk of the GOP that knows better, that genuinely aren’t lying when they say that’s not how they see it…

…that’s still how they react to opposition victory, emotionally, because that’s their social environment now. And the non-fundamentalist Republicans will invent reasons, find rationalisations^*. Excuses that would hold absolutely no traction applied to their own tribe become INCONTROVERTIBLE! when applied to the Enemy, and they’ll build up opposition into the evil that is socially necessary to force them to vote for their side’s candidate – even if it’s a candidate they kind of hate.

Myths about Ross Perot costing Mr. Bush an election? Myths about birth certificates and secret homosexuality? Conspiracy theories about mass election thievery where the lack of evidence becomes proof of fraud? All obviously true^** in that mindset.

Because Satan. Because pure, unmitigated evil, and all the rage that goes with it, whatever that is. Currently, it’s assigned to Ms. Clinton. But it will be assigned to any opposition leader.

If all this sounds overblown, consider, if you would:

Hillary Clinton faces intense animosity as she approaches White House
The Toronto Star – October 30, 2016

WARRENTON, VA.—”She’s a whore,” said Jim Brewster, a 62-year-old farmer, as he walked into the bakery for some coffee.

“Murderous, rotten, no-good, pious … bitch,” said Waldo Ward, a 60-something retiree, as he left Walmart with Halloween candy for the neighbourhood kids. “She should be taken out and shot. Absolutely.”

“I confess that I’m a Christian, and I shouldn’t hate, but it’s awful close,” said Charles Graves, a smiling 71-year-old recently retired from a career in logistics.

“It’s not like I’m not a Donald Trump fan,” said Rusty Gibson, 47, an electrician. “But it’s like good versus evil.”

It’s like good versus evil.

Because, in their social environment, it is. It is good versus evil. That is the social climate brought to the Republican party by the evangelical fundamentalist movement. Scratch off a couple of layers, and the opposition is Literally. Satan. Because Jesus.

To expect acceptance of opposition victory (on any front), to expect quarter, to expect them not to be mapping out their impeachment proceedings before the election even takes place is naive at best.

How else could a party which claims to participate in a republican form of government talk seriously about a “permanent majority”?

Well, spoiler: it doesn’t. It has to give up on one, or the other, and what they’re giving up on right now is democratic elections. That’s why they’ve nominated a demi-strongman, that’s why they’re forthrightly engaged in massive voter suppression (and being sued in three states and counting)… and that’s why they’re falling back into line behind Mr. Trump.

This is a fantasy; it doesn’t actually happen. Most of Mr. Trump’s rise in the polls
is Republicans abandoning Mr. Johnson and coming home.

And all of that is why the overtly racist, misogynist, and demi-fascist “~~alt-right~~” loves all of this so very, very much. Mr. Trump is a crisis, but Mr. Trump isn’t the crisis. Mr. Trump is a symptom. The cultural implosion that is a religious fundamentalist ethnoparty’s growing abandonment of democratic politics – that is the crisis.
 
 

*: There’s a whole ‘nother article to be written about how the recent generalised recognition that people are more likely to rationalise non-rational decisions than make rational decisions to begin with is making it easier to abandon rational decision-making by providing an excuse, an “out,” a reason not to even try to apply rationality. This also feeds into authoritarianism.

**: There’s another ‘nother article to be written about how fundamentalism judges the truth and value of evidence based upon whether it supports pre-existing “Biblical” conclusions; it’s their entire response to empiricism. It’s the core of “scientific Creationism” and “Biblical science,” and everyone else calls it “confirmation bias” but held up as an ideal. Knowing confirmation bias exists in order to compensate for it to see more clearly is one thing; embracing it as the only valid approach to truth is another entirely. But that, too, is an effect of the social and cultural merger of the evangelical fundamentalists and the GOP. Everyone has confirmation bias; fundamentalism turns it into a deep, deep fetish. But, well, neither this nor the immediate above fit here.

I wanted to make a Pharah (from Overwatch) helmet for Halloween. I’ve never worked with armour before, so I went to a workshop at VCON to learn the basics, and started trying to find a design online.

This … sort of exists? I one person who would let you download their pattern for “free” if you signed up to back their Patron for some level, which is not free, and kind of annoyed me. And I found another non-authorised pattern being listed for sale at £35. (Kind of smelling a scam there.)

So I started poking at it myself and wow yeah this is not easy, which explains the paucity of Pharah cosplay I have seen, because damn. I went through a couple of complete-failure papercraft attempts and decided, “okay, I’m gonna wireframe this, by which I mean, with actual wire.” And that got super-frustrating and SOLARBIRD ANGRY! and I kind of quit and then I picked it back up a little later and suddenly it kind of started coming together.

Wireframe

The liftable mask isn’t really right and also wants to be both larger and smaller to be correct at the same time, because fuck you CGI, but it’s… in the neighbourhood. And even wearable! It fits on my head! And stays on!

I cut a couple of papercraft element pieces using the wireframe as a pattern and they are very different to my straight-to-paper attempts, so I wasn’t even close before. I just don’t have an intuitive grasp of how bends in 3-space affect projections into 2-space I guess. So this really is how I’m going to need to do it.

Obviously it’s too late to finish this year, but I think I’ll keep working on it. I’d like to at least get the helmet together, right? That’d be neat.

I haven’t been posting much lately, and that’s because honestly, I’m just too strung out to do it. 18 days ’till the American elections, and while this is Cascadia, this is American-occupied Cascadia, so I can’t just laugh nervously and hope they don’t invade, they’re already here.

Leannan Sidhe sent me a new song a few days ago, and I’ve learned something: Ab (and all variants) are the Satan of chords for irish bouzouki – at least, in my tuning. It’s so much so that chord charts just skip over it completely. I was all, “…did I miss something? Is it in back for some reason?” NOPE IT’S JUST NOT THERE. Of course, I can come up with a few, but they’re stupidly up the neck and sound wrong in context, or they’re missing important things like, oh, the 5th.

Really, this is one of those cases where having very flexible fingers doesn’t make up for having small hands. Some five-fret reaches, I can just barely make. (See: all F chords.) Some four-fret reaches, though, I can’t – and while the “take G and make it a bar chord” approach is my best shot at getting an Ab that isn’t insane, well, yeah, it hurts.

So, anyway, yeah. I’ve been quiet, because stressed the fuck out, and it won’t be ending real soon. Mr. Trump is most likely going to lose, appears to know it, and appears to be setting up to denounce the result as fraudulent… all so he can corral, I dunno, 20 million of his hard-core alt-right supporters into his new television venture, which will, given what we’ve been seeing, become the new voice of white supremacy and overt misogyny.

It never ends, really, does it. It. never. ends.

Whelp, wave one/two are mostly past us, and so far, we’re still up! We had three short outages overnight, but nothing the UPSes couldn’t handle – the longest was about 10 seconds long, nothing actually serious.

Tonight could get dicey in the early afternoon; tomorrow afternoon, though, will be the biggest event. It’s a separate system, we aren’t in some kind of eye; Songda doesn’t have an eye any more, and is continuing to weaken. They’re thinking more “2006” than “1962” at this point, so those winds will most likely top out in the 90-100kph range.

Still, in 2006, we lost power for two days, and neighbours lost theirs for nine. So it’s still to be taken seriously.

I’m still working on a project for some people in Great Big Sea fandom, helping them recover a badly-degraded cassette recording of a concert from 1993. It’s… wow yeah, it’s a mess. Definitely one of those, “I’ve got this to the point where it’s… pretty bad! But here, listen to the original for comparison…” projects. I think I’ve managed to make wide sections of it listenable, in that you can make out lyrics pretty much all of the time now, you can hear choruses, the weird continuous rumble is gone, the particularly fierce for some reason tape hiss is gone, things like that. But damn, the distortion is pretty fierce at times. I’m pretty sure they were overdriving the microphone.

Here’s the plugin stack, from memory:

• repetitive noise reduction (-18db)
• MASSIVE LEVELS AUTOMATION OH MY GOD YOU DON’T EVEN WANT TO KNOW
• low pass filter (more hiss)
• high pass filter (rumble)
• 10-band bandwidth-adjustable equalisation (with deeply gnarly settings, this was not a good recording)
• multi-band compressor (to reduce crowd noise as percentage of signal)
  right about here it starts to sound like a normal, if low-quality, recording
• second 10-band bandwidth-adjustable equalisation (basic general EQ)
• second low pass filter (because asymmetrical EQ curves aren’t a thing)
• standard compressor (oh look something almost normal!)
• 20-band notch equaliser (fixing dents in the curve, I thought, “let’s try this” and it worked)
• some very short-duration reverb to hide many remaining sins (waveform smoothing)
• fast look-ahead limiter on master bus (kind of a circuit breaker, for peak protection, should do absolutely nothing) and done.

It’s kind of a lot. The automation in particular is pretty hilarious – the recorder had automatic recording level adjust and they used it (NEVER USE THAT) and I’m kind of undoing all of that the best I can. I’m also fixing dropouts, stuff like that.

(Seriously, never use automatic recording level, I’m pulling entire lines of songs back out of noise.)

If any audio engineer is reading this: I know. I know. But I can’t combine those EQ passes, I tried – the processing between them matters too much. And of course, this is a no-pay project, because it’s fannish – but I volunteered, and every time I do one of these things, I learn something.

Okay, now we’re getting more power flickers, so let’s post this while we can still echo it around. Adventures!

So apparently we’re being one-two-three-ed by big, and I mean big for us, windstorms over the next week. High wind watch tomorrow, followed by Typhoon Songda (or the remnants thereof, which we’re still talking 75-80kph sustained winds on the coast), then maybe a Tuesday chaser.

And that’s if Songda maintains its current path and doesn’t shift south. If it does – hoo boy. Cliff Mass – a popular weather blogger in Seattle, he’s a research scientist at UW – is describing the Songda as “a highly dangerous windstorm with the potential to be an historic event” which would exceed the worst storm ever to hit here, back in 1962.

Plus, the timing is terrible – mostly, the leaves are still on the trees. That makes them giant sails.

So basically all that combines to mean we’ll probably have to bunker in, lose power, and end up offline for a while. Possibly several days, if Songda moves south a bit. The music page will stay up ( http://music.crimeandtheforcesofevil.com ) throughout, of course, and blog page echoes live here:

Livejournal (complete blog echo)
Dreamwidth (complete blog echo)
Tumblr (partial echo plus have I mentioned korrasami and overwatch?)

And, of course, there’s the band page on Facebook and my Twitter account.

Hopefully we’ll get lucky and it won’t be so bad. Nobody thinks of us as having storms, but boy howdy, we do this time of year, and this is looking to be a bad one – particularly as a combined wave. Wish us luck.

I will, when I see a good one, post about a nice Supervillain Lair up for sale. This is not that, but is still a listing that I’m posting because damn.

‘Unique one of a kind finishing completed by a professional!’ Yes, that professional, I am certain, being Kevin, from Desert Bluffs.

Something very, very wrong happened in Avon, Connecticut.

More suburban hellscape here

I’ve been doing some better organisation/re-organisation of file systems around here, particularly on Dropbox which I’ve used historically to store larger files for this blog. I’m pretty sure everything’s okay, but if you notice anything broken – let me know? Thanks.

VCON starts today! My concert is Sunday afternoon, in the concert block, which starts at 2:30pm. See you at the hotel, I hope!

Minion Paul says I should make the full movie of this Tiltbrush scene I painted into a backdrop for my next online show. You know, have it greenscreened in behind me. 😀

Jem and the Holograms only wish they had this much animation

That’s a narrow crop of the inside of a sphere I made out of animated brush effects. Here’s a movie which makes the ‘sphere’ part a little more obvious. It’s kind of okay in 2D, but totally amazing in a 3D space environment. (Link is to a 33mb mp4.)

You know those Main Street Electrical Parade “ooooooo” buttons some people have? I have those buttons, and this is hitting some of them.

Anyway, yeah! VCON! See you there!

The New York Times have run a wretched little sob-story sympathy article about how conservative evangelicals feel “cut off” over how their Culture Wars have gone, and by Mr. Trump’s GOP nomination. They focus on an old couple – the Odgaards of Iowa, “religious liberty ambassadors” for the Ted Cruz campaign – who decided to sell their commercial property to the fundamentalist church they attend rather than comply with anti-discrimination law.

Really. How sad.

How about how I felt “cut off” fighting their ballot initiatives criminalising me? Clearly, no one at the New York Times has any goddamn idea what that feels like, or what it’s like to go door to door arguing for my right to exist, or they wouldn’t write such lovely paeans to my vicious, unrelenting oppressors.

Hey, how about an article how queers deal with the long-term multi-impact trauma of having almost. every. single. election. of our adult lives being existential questions? Hey, New York Times, how about I how feel “abandoned” there?

How about how queers feel when this very year, Mr. Trump has promised to nominate only judges endorsed by Heritage Foundation, which thinks states should be allowed to make our existence illegal?

But no, who gives a fuck about queers, we’ve got to talk about sad ol’ Grandma and Grandpa Whitey Bigotsson. How sad they feel “cut off,” how they aren’t adequately represented by their presidential nominee! How abandoned they feel now that they can’t fucking have the state kill me.

Ever been handed a pamphlet calling for your own execution? I’ve said it before, but I have. It wasn’t even this new one from 2015, it was a previous version! They’re still making new ones!

And that is the the kind of thing Grandma and Grandpa are just fine with. That doesn’t make them feel “cut off” or “abandoned” or sad or anything! Oh, they might think that’s a little far, these days, but don’t get it wrong: that’s what they go for when they think they can get it.

I note, by the way, that both Their Guy and Mr. Trump accepted the endorsement of that pamphlet’s author, and stood on stage with him, just best buds 5eva.

But The New York Times apparently wants us to understand how sad they feel. How bereft. How “abandoned.”

“It all flipped, so fast,” said Mr. Odgaard, a patrician 70-year-old who favors khakis and boat shoes. “Suddenly, we were in the minority. That was kind of a scary feeling. It makes you wonder where the Christians went.”

They talk about the decision to sell their building to their church. How sad it is. “It’s like losing a child,” said Ms. Odgaard.

No, you know what’s like losing a child? Making your children homeless and destitute because they’re queer. Like their movement did, and still does.

Queer kids are a big, big chunk of homeless youth – last time I saw a figure, it was 40%. And it’s because their movement encourages it, with their people telling each other it’s the necessary and godly thing to do – assuming the legal torture programme known as “conversion therapy” doesn’t work out, of course.

I’ve written about this before, but I’m never letting it go – Beverly LaHaye, founder of Concerned Women for America, on her nationally-syndicated radio show through the 1990s, telling her listeners that this was critical, that they had to deprive their children of all shelter, all hope, all recourse, all home – for being queer. Listening to her console her listeners who did it, supporting them, encouraging them as they sobbed into the telephone about what was happening to their own children who they had made destitute.

That was fun to transcribe, let me fuckin’ tell you. Those kids show up on the street in Seattle, and other towns, and they’re – go figure – complete wrecks. A lot of them – a lot of them – end up dead.

I guess that’s less “losing a child” and more “killing a child,” but hey, they’re fag kids, who cares, am I right? None of that’s half as poignant as poor ol’ Grandma and Grandpa Bigotsson selling their building to the fundamentalist church they attend instead of complying with anti-discrimination law.

So “cut off.” So “abandoned.” So sad.

Good.