patchwork of pilfered posts

President itself used to be a much more humble word before it got associated with politics. It was the title picked because it was used for stuff like the leader of your local horse riding club or whatever the fuck.

Like even if the president is an evil dirty rotten nepo baby, he’s supposed to be just some guy. A very powerful guy, but still just some guy.

It’s like how during triumph processions in Ancient Rome they had a guy there to whisper in the general’s ear “remember that you are only a man” to remind them that this was a temporary honor and if they got too ambitious they would be put down.

A president needs to be seen shoveling ice cream into his face. A president lives in a relatively tiny apartment above the White House. A president lives in tasteful but relatively humble surroundings. The White House doesn’t belong to him after all. It belongs to us. The Americans. And anything he does to fuck up the White House he’s doing to our goddamned house so he’d better watch himself.

President 47 is an extremely weird case. Because he wants to be a king. Clearly. But the White House is too humble for a king. It’s not a white palace. It’s a White House. Very important distinction. More important than you probably think.

It doesn’t even belong to him though. So he decided to act like it belongs to him anyways. To treat it like a palace. And it looks bad and the courts keep blocking him from building his gaudy ballroom with real gold decorations.

Why the fuck are we paying for real gold decorations? That’s us paying for it. American taxpayers. Why does it need real gold? Genuine question.

It doesn’t. That house doesn’t need a ballroom. It doesn’t need gold. The gold that he’s putting up is being held on by superglue.

Like his design sense is somehow the cheapest looking and most offensively expensive looking “improvements” that have ever been done to the White House.

Previous presidents added like. A basketball court. A vegetable garden. Solar panels. Some offices. You know. Stuff you’d need in a big house that you invite guests into and also functions as a government office space.

This guy is adding… a ballroom? With gold hubcaps on the outside? Why the fuck do you need a ballroom in a house?

Answer: you don’t. You might need one in a palace though.

The message is clear. He’s not even trying to be just some guy. And does that matter?

Probably not as much as a lot of other things that he’s done, but still yes. Because since the very beginning it’s been fully understood that the president of the United States must constantly be reminded that he is but a man. This guy is doing his very best to remove all of those reminders and make himself the cheapest looking expensive palace he can imagine.

Who the fuck are you?

Fuck you for the anxiety you gave me from getting a letter from a name and address I don’t recognize.

Fuck you for the time you made me waste having to open that letter.

Fuck you for the complete bullshit feeling of finding out that you literally just wrote “hi” and expected that to communicate anything or resolve anything.

I don’t know your stupid douchebag ass, and I don’t want to. Fuck all the way off.

You say hi. You start with hi in a conversation. DMs and similar are conversation areas. This isn't even about emails and letters.

Web chats are asynchronous. By the time the other person even sees your meaningless “hi”, you may be AFK or asleep.

You wouldn’t just call someone, say “HI”, then sit in silence and make the other person ask you who you are. No, you say “This is [name], calling you about [topic].” within the first few seconds.

You wouldn’t just mail someone a letter in an envelope, just to write “hi”, and make the other person send you a reply to ask you who you are. No, you put your whole message right there in that letter.

Even in real life, you wouldn’t step up to a stranger and blurt out “HI”, then stand there grinning like a creep and staring right into their eyes to pressure the other person to ask you who you are. No, you start the conversation up with an ice-breaker, like a compliment, the question you actually want to ask, or just a rhetorical small-talk question.

This isn’t demanding you to “start a novel”. This is telling you to actually start a conversation like a normal fucking human being can. This is basic manners.

You people are terminally self-centered and have no respect for the time, social battery, and boundaries of others.

P.S.: On a similar note to “No hello”, here’s “Don’t ask to ask”:

"too many authors in the current market are focusing on selling 'spice' instead of telling interesting stories"

"oh yeah, i agree. i started reading one that i heard a lot about and it just wasn't-"

"and it's all of these women reading their fucking mommy porn out in public like FREAKS"

So out of fucking nowhere there's this motherfucker by the Tumtum tree, just fucking standing there in uffish thought with this vorpal blade!

THAT BITCH WENT SNICKER-SNACK!!

So here he is galumphing back with my fucking HEAD and I'm just left there dead.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.