#jrrm

Last year I was sharing an early draft of some work I was planning to publish on my then-nonexistent substack and it included the phrase “it’s all made up,” and the person I shared it with commented that was where I lost them.

If y’all don’t understand that we humans made all this shit up, and if it ain’t working for ALL OF US then we can make up something else that does, I can’t help you.

If y’all persist in believing that most of us have to suffer in squalor so a few of us can live in splendor, I can’t help you.

If y’all insist that some supernatural entity made you and your ppl lord of all and better than other ppl by dint of your random-ass birth, I sure af can’t help you.

I look at Dany this season, and I see how they’ve crafted her as someone who walks down both those paths. Dany is very much a rich noblewoman, highly educated and getting more and more politically experienced for the last 4+ years. Danny dresses for power like Sansa does, and she by all outward appearances could resemble Sansa a great deal.

But there’s the dragon part of Dany that is very similar to the wolf part of Arya. Dany also spent time in a culture of violence, learning what she could from it and moving on. Dany ate the horse’s heart, rode beside her Khal husband, and she is a killer, up close and personal. Her weapons are dragons not blades, but even in war she gets on her dragon and prefers to go into the fighting rather than stay in her castle. She’s mastered the dead-eyed stare that appears right before someone’s gonna die. I think it’s also significant that the conflict between these two halves of Dany contributes to some of her missteps as a commander. Dany is constantly wavering between these two versions of herself, and she’ll probably wrestle with that for her whole time on the show.

Take, for example, the American South. It’s totally okay to hate on the South from a non-southerner’s perspective. Folks will happily talk all kinds of shit abt a place they’ve never even been. They will happily believe that the South is some monolith full of stupid white racist inbred poor ppl, and that we would be better off if they all just fell off into the sea. And y’know what happens when I show them the truth? They ignore me. Entirely fucking ignore me.

Republicans have had a chokehold on the South and southern government institutions for at least 30 years, double that in some states. All of these states are so fucking gerrymandered the US government had to pass a law requiring the worst repeat offenders to have their redistricting plans approved by a federal judge—at least until the Republicans used that law to line their litter boxes. So now, they can be fucking gerrymandered w impunity, and the Republicans are using that to maintain their power in states that are entirely fed up w their shit. There’s a reason these guys are more extreme in their cruelty, more vicious in their control—they know they’re abt to lose it all. They’re passing laws that 70-80% of the population is staunchly against. They’re being protested constantly as they consistently go against the will of the ppl and I’m telling y’all, as someone born and raised in the South who has lived in 4 southern states: any movement that writes off the South as a lost cause will fail.

Remember your dialectics: if you’re seeing some wildly fascist politicians resorting to increasingly desperate lengths to control and limit their ppl, it’s bc the ppl are acting out of line w their interests and need to be put down.

Go to California or the Pacific Northwest or wherever you imagine the high concentrations of lefties to be and you’ll see some of the most benign, milquetoast, utterly placid mfers masquerading as socialists. They know they don’t have to be radical or disruptive to be heard, so they don’t bother. You wanna know why LA has “riots”? They’re why. They have no actual interest in the destruction of capitalism—they have fucking stock portfolios and a lot to lose. But they will talk a lot of shit abt the South.

These folks should be overjoyed to learn that there’s a thick vein of radical leftism in the South that the capitalist powers that be have been actively and brutally suppressing for a couple hundred years, but for some reason they feel better dismissing us all as filthy fucking losers. If you do this, maybe ask yourself why, maybe unpack your beliefs for a minute, maybe update your perspective.

Start by listening to southern folks when we tell you: liberate the South and we’ll liberate the world.

Remember: ain’t nothing clean unless a human expended the effort to go clean it. A fashface will tell you animals don’t clean up after themselves but humans do, that this is what separates us and makes us higher. Cleanliness is next to godliness. The humans who live in what they see as squalor are not better than animals. They have the power and the right to control those ppl.

None of that is true, by the way. Animals clean up after themselves, especially if they don’t want a predator to follow them, or if they don’t want their prey to catch wind of them. And their idea of cleanliness is something ideal and unnatural, something that separates them from the Earth, which is dirty. If you’re wondering, that impetus goes alllllllllllllllll the way back to the dawn of this “Western Civilization” that fascists tend to think of as the be-all and end-all of human existence.

You can see it in their images, which are all ai. You can see it in their idealized future, which is always as clean as it is silent on who cleaned it and how they live. You can see it in the demands they make on themselves and each other.

They hate creativity bc it’s messy. They hate the creative process bc it’s messy, bc you have to fuck around and try new shit to see what works, you have to be willing to make something ugly to find its beauty. You ask me, this is the main reason fascist movements always lose—they strive for something unachievable. They imagine themselves gods and then get smacked upside the face w reality. The cognitive dissonance that’s festering in their own minds will eventually explode, and it won’t be pretty when it does.

They look at images like this one and go “eww.” They make jokes abt the diseases you might get. They are afraid of folks who look like this and they mask their fear w disgust. They look down their wrinkled noses as they talk abt eradication and gain power by convincing folks to be afraid of each other. The main thing they’re afraid of is dying, which is the one and only thing everyone as a human must do. The other thing they’re afraid of in the meantime is that they’re not seen as better than other people. They believe in the right to conquer and impose their will on others. Their freedom entails a freedom from, not a freedom to. They can’t imagine a world in which we all embrace each other as siblings, but I can—and I bet you can too.

Confronting your fear is likely to piss you off just like someone else pointing out your fear makes you defensive. From the heart of your fear you desperately fling “I’m not scared—you are” and hope it sticks. Know that it’s not your fault, that the system was never designed to work for you, that the system was designed to kill you, at worst. At best, the system is entirely apathetic to your existence. You might start to wonder why tf you bother to uphold something that ain’t doing you any good. Take a brick off the wall.

If someone tells you to be disgusted by something, what they’re really doing is telling you to be afraid of it—afraid of contamination. The system loves the language of contagion bc it uses your fear to increase the distance between you and anything that might cause you to question the system. The system knows your disgust will gradually grow into hate and from that hate new fears will blossom. The system depends on your inability to dissect those fears and understand what put them there and what makes them tick. As you start unpacking, you take down a brick, and another, and another.

The system doesn’t want this. The system depends on your belief that it is natural and right and proper and good. Eventually the brick you take down will be load-bearing. The system will collapse and you’ll finally see the sun. It starts w a simple question, the one adults get pissed at toddlers for asking repeatedly: WHY. Why lays the system bare. Why causes the causeway to crumble and reveals a different path—one that’s a little bit messier but a lot more fun.

I know I know you mean it like “middle class” and “upper middle class” and all these other arbitrary distinctions that aren’t reality-based. But by the time you get to the left, you’re talking to folks who are already well past that bullshit. It’s only predominantly white middle-class suburban folks you’re gently scolding, like omgosh Stacey some ppl don’t even have a pool in their backyard! Show some respect!

Also, it sounds like charity. It sounds like some call-your-senator virtue signaling. If you were actually down here on the streets you would not be talking like that. Everybody I organize w is broke as a joke w no punchline and lemme tell you, we’d fucking love for some suburban soccer moms to put down the phone and run w us, but they won’t, usually citing safety concerns. Sounds like y’all all abt solidarity only as long as it doesn’t involve getting your hands dirty.

Quit larping. We know you only care enough to tamp down the oppression to ignorable levels so you can enjoy your brunch in peace. Unfortunately, the ownership class doesn’t actually recognize your proximity to power as a sufficient condition for your ascension bc they know the real VIP passes are the ones you can’t buy from Ticketmaster.

You’re not embarrassed millionaires—you’re lucky bums. If you don’t feel safe, it’s coz you’re not. Welcome to humanity—none of us are.

This is for the folks who think when you equate generativeAI w fascism you’re overstating the truth:

Listen, y’all—I was born and raised and spent all but 3 years of my adult life in the South. Hyperbole is a southerner’s favorite mode of communication. We never met a fish that couldn’t be bigger nor a tale that couldn’t be taller. As Mark Twain once said, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

The difference ofc is that this isn’t a “good” story. The reason generativeAI is coming after artists and creatives first is that fascists hate creativity. They despise it. They need to control the vision of the future so they can paint a bleak and fearful picture and get folks to cower behind them, and those of us who still have the compunction to think for ourselves get in the way of that, bc alternate visions of the future sow seeds of doubt and there is no room for doubt in a world of absolutes.

Fascists don’t want you to think for yourself, which makes it p convenient that you have ai to “think” for you. Fascists don’t want you to create for yourself, so they’ve found a tool that will create for you. Fascists especially don’t want you to have any hope, so they’ve engineered a machine to kill it.

The fact that this machine rapidly consumes the life-giving resources of the planet in the process ain’t a bug, y’all—it’s a feature. Divest yourself from dependency on the killing machine, before it’s too late.

Listen to the artists, the visionaries, the dreamers. Hang out in our pockets of hope, that those pockets might overflow and spill out into our communities. The picture fascists want to paint of the future is one full of hate and violence and terror, and they’ve commissioned genAI to produce it. The tech broligarchs, most of whom were raised on post-apocalyptic sci-fi, believe this hellscape is inevitable. They believe they are powerless to prevent it. Thank fuck they are a countable few. It’s not too late for you—not yet.

And you might think “but I’m just one person, what difference does my piddling usage really make” bc you think the point of not using something is to destroy the company that makes the thing and if you can’t do that, well what’s the point. And I’ll tell you, it’s taking a fucking stand that’s the point. You can’t promote the supposed benefits of something that’s doing such monstrous harm—the ledger’s still tilted, the bad far far outweighs the good. You can’t fuck around w this shit without destroying lives in the process, so by using it you’re indicating that you think your laziness is more important than someone else’s fucking existence.