I've been quiet for a while. It's been due to a number of factors, the most prominent of which is poor health.

I need surgery, and I'm stuck in limbo. Please help.

www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding...

The sole thing I'm content with? I saw this shit with LA coming.

...In fact, thinking about it, the DOGE part was the only stuff I got wrong...

...Hmmm.

I'm genuinely checking the news regularly and waiting to get a feel for how everything's likely to shake out so I can rewrite it. I've been doing this for, oh, six months.

So, what happened to the near-future novel I was writing?

It's parked on ice. Plot was solid, tested really well, but I made the crucial mistake of being way too optimistic about the progress of fascism in the USA.

However, I also overestimated their competence in executing their schemes, frankly.

It absolutely is; I wrote a short story on the topic jthornburyauthor.com#shortstoryar...

My hard tilt to utopian fiction would cause a small thunderclap.

Compare and contrast with what the legislators of other countries have done in response to things 1/100th as bad.

But mainly, the American public needs to realise the Democrats also serve the ultra rich, and are just as happy for an economic crash that lets Berkshire Hathaway etc buy everything.

"What do you want them to do?"

Actually disrupt and block all government business, and use every opportunity to tell the American public that a fascist takeover by oligarchs has happened and the republic has fallen. Then say things in congress that everyone else would be renditioned for.

That long speech in the senate? No call to direct action, no articulated plan for the public, and it didn't really disrupt anything that mattered. The Democrats are masters of using symbol without substance. But it did let Chuck Schumer interject, get on TV, and reform his image to be more active.

Going to be real, the current vibe of the Democrats and the popular protests is this comic from 2005.

A government against protest is authoritarian, and Authoritarianism becomes Fascism as soon as shit hits the fan.

Check out Sinan's video: it's good, actually.

More generally, please support voices like Sinan's by liking and sharing, especially outside your usual circles. We need this pushback.

If all the Americans asking Canada to save them through annexation were serious, what they'd actually say is "I want to be Canadian." That they don't is really telling about how they see Canada's role: in support of American protagonism.

Today, we are announcing the formation of United Videogame Workers-CWA, an industry-wide union formed by @codecwa.bsky.social and @cwaunion.bsky.social 💪🎮

We're launching at #GDC2025 this morning to build a video game industry that works for us. We're done playing.

Staring into the cold, dark void into which every society on earth is slowly being tipped, and asking "At what point do we admit this arrangement has failed, and eat the rich?"

Cynic in me thinks AOC, pretty captured these days, is the sanctioned opposition to the current Democratic leadership , and her job will be to head off the "Replace the incumbents!" movement by taking the lead and making sure their replacements are still fundamentally libs (despite fiery rhetoric).

All the criticisms I've made of Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying programme, how it's smiling and polite eugenics against the poor and disabled, applies here.

If you don't take a stand against this, I'm sorry, but you're sitting by while they gear up to murder the disabled. You have been warned.

Listen, I do appreciate the positive focus and I'm glad you're finding ways to be upbeat, but I'm sorry to say that's not quite what this post was about. It's not-so-lowkey about labour exploitation facilitated by mental health rhetoric as a coercive tool.

Man, when even fucking Colbert is criticising the Democrats for doing nothing, they're really far out on a limb.

Best they can come up with is "This guy is a narcissist in it for attention, no, really, believe us," while photoshopping him and getting court artists to draw him like a cartoon villain.

But man, he's called fucking /Luigi/. He's even got a hero's name. It's not sticking.

They've got nothing in the tank. He's hot, principled, from a good family, got a sympathetic story, and he's exactly the kind of white where they can't pull the "Not really white!" card without igniting a firestorm of more sympathy from Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Polish Americans...

Love the strategy they landed on for trying to monster Luigi Mangione:

"Everyone says he's hot so... how about we try to portray him as a narcissist? Yeah, he did a thing people universally approve of, but he only did it for attention!"

How do they soft launch it?

"Hot guy made sex tapes!"

All those "Showing gratitude increases mental wellbeing!" studies you hear about: how many of them control for actually having something to feel grateful about? Seems to me that would be the more crucial component, no?

Anyone else noticed how Employee Appreciation days/weeks/months have morphed from being appreciation of the employees by their employers to being opportunities for employees to "show gratitude" to each other?

Real Wile-E.-Coyote-refusing-to-look-down moment we have right now.