bedlam updates

I overheard three dudes talking about George Harrison. My Sweet Lord was playing and they were talking about The Beatles going to India and getting into a guru and CULTURAL APPROPRIATION and I thought well welcome to fucking hell. Welcome to a world where anguished fresh adults go over the past with a fine tooth comb without learning a single thing in the process. Here's a thought, while we're talking about appropriation, how about you leave the past alone, you fucking thieves. 

I'm looking at a trailer for a new Johnny Depp movie and thinking about how he was cancelled. People projected all their own inner shit on him and pronounced him Bad. Stories came out, there were highly probably lies, but that didn't matter because the stories were fed into the current habit of outrage without reflection. I don't blame outrage though, I blame the Without Reflection bit.

I'm on an exciting new Facebook break for 30 days. I was targeted, reported and banned, which is almost routine at this point. I was booted off twitter a few weeks ago, permanently. I could change my identity and open another account, but that misses the point of what I've been doing all this time. Anyway, I'm going to post here as if it's both twitter and facebook. I don't care if anyone reads or not. 

My latest twitter account has been nuked. No warning, no proper appeal process, it's just gone. Hey, I've got an idea! Maybe if people on twitter put some energy into free speech issues this wouldn't happen? Then again, the problem of folks getting caught up in bullshit so they can't focus on real problems is not the real problem. The real problem is twitter is an out of control money making machine. So is Facebook. The social media giants would be mad to walk away from all that money and if they did anything real about the online hatefest they'd be walking away from lots and lots of lovely money. So what we need is something like a carbon offset program for the social media giants. It's unfair to ask them to divest from Hate so we should instead pay them to store hate in trees, pump it deep into the earth's crust and even suck it into machines that will turn it into fuel to run our industries and public and private transportation. Yes, this is a good idea...

It's the 90s all over again. Remember Sensitive New Age Guys? Yeah, it was horrible and it did nothing to dismantle Patriarchy. In the 90s dudes got sucked into the SNAG shit and became simpering, smug little pricks. They didn't become better, they became useless. When people try to deal with real emergencies with bullshit that has no grounding in anything real, you just create more arseholes. Almost any hastily thrown together protest is far better than bullshit demands of normal people that they change who they are. But, telling follks to Be Better suits a lot of people who are neither action nor ideas oriented. Or about outcomes. It's one big performance. Unfortunately we're storytelling creatures who sometimes delusionally use story telling techniques to try to force people into a new story. It has never worked. Movements can't be driven by slogans and our real stories shouldn't be compressed into the solid cube of a hashtag. We *are* better than...