Archive for September, 2025

On Messaging…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on September 21, 2025 by chemiclord

For nearly the last year, the political left in America has been obsessed with “messaging,” and “strategy,” and have been very, very loud in their displeasure that the Democratic Party “leaders” aren’t doing it right, at least, not certain leaders.

There’s a degree that this obsession is understandable. We are desperate for an answer. Something we can do that will sway enough people in our direction. That we must have made a mistake, and that if we just do [x] or [y] different, that will be enough!

But let me offer this possibility: What if “messaging” and “strategy” don’t actually matter as much as we want it to, and all these beatings we’re giving each other (and ourselves) aren’t going to really make that much difference?

Strategy and messaging is fine and all, but it all hinges on a potentially dangerous assumption. That the units in play are actually competent enough to understand the message, and cares enough to take it to heart. It is not the slightest bit clear that the “Average American Voter” is either of those things.

Imagine sitting down at a chess board, and you discover that half of them are Monopoly pieces, another seven are actually glued to the board, the two bishops are both on black squares, and four of the pawns are actually on the other side of the board.

At that point, any strategy you might have had needs to go out the window.

Oh, and every five turns, the rules change into an entirely different game. The “Average American Voter” is not only dreadfully incurious, they also have the object permanence of a demented goldfish that had meth sprinkled into its tank. What they care about now is likely not what will matter to them five weeks from now. And frankly, all it would take is one squirrel with its tail on fire running past them, and all your carefully crafted “messaging” will matter slightly less than fuck all.

So, my advice? Take a deep breath. Don’t hurt yourself or others. There’s a degree that you can do “everything right,” and it’s just not going to sink into the heads of a good chunk of people. Worrying too much about messaging right now is a fool’s errand. We don’t have to do this to ourselves.

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When You Get What You Wish For…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on September 11, 2025 by chemiclord

I am not even going to pretend to celebrate the miserable life of Charlie Kirk. Not for someone who willfully created this political environment expressing truly heinous and disgusting “opinions.” A man who willfully stoked hatred, and who called for the oppression of the oppressed. A man whose only real guiding principle appeared to be pushing the boundaries of what would be considered proper discourse. He was a real life Twitter troll manifest in flesh, and that is nothing to laud.

If Charlie Kirk wanted people to speak kind of him in death, he probably should have tried not being a worthless, vile, antagonistic, miserable, deplorable piece of rancid pig shit in his life.

I’m not even going to pretend to mourn the death of a man who up until the day he died held the belief that people dying to gun violence was an “unfortunate” acceptable cost for the right to bear arms. Though I suppose one could say that he died for his beliefs, I guess. That’s more than most of his ilk can claim. So, I guess he has that going for him.

And I’m certainly not going to mourn his death when other far more deserving victims that damn day were shot in a school in Colorado. I also think there was another shooting incident elsewhere, but my short digging couldn’t find mention of it thanks to Charlie Kirk burying pretty much all other news outlets in horrible pandering to some sort of comity that he absolutely did not deserve.

I’m also not going to try and shame the reaction from a growing number of the left celebrating the monster’s demise. I really don’t give a shit how uncouth “polite society” might think it is. The amount of political violence aimed towards the left is so tilted against them, that I am not at all surprised that a relatively large segment is going to cheer it finally turning the other way.

This is the world that the right wing created, so the idea that they are appalled that the left would finally start pushing back with the same sort of bitterness and bile should not be the slightest bit surprising. Patience and understanding runs thin over time, and this has been an environment that the political right wing in America has been shaping for a very long time.

Though I strongly suspect, like most of these amoral cretins that perpetuate these shootings, we’re likely to discover that trying to plot their political leanings will be a lesson in futility. The sort of person that decides that shooting someone dead is the next rational step in their lives likely holds very little rational beliefs at all, with the only consistent trait among them of being shaped by the cult of violence that is increasingly finding purchase in every corner of American life and society.

So no, I neither celebrate nor mourn the life and death of Charlie Kirk. He doesn’t deserve my, or anyone’s sympathy. He doesn’t deserve mine, or anyone’s, sorrow. To put it more crudely, fuck Charlie Kirk, the horse he rode in on, and the casket he leaves with. Good riddance, and rest in piss, asshole. You, at least, got exactly what you wished for; which is something I can’t say for most of the victims of gun violence in this country.

If there is one thing that I mourn beyond those who did lose their lives tragically yesterday (it’s actually not entirely clear if anyone in Colorado has died outside of the shooter, because even trying basic current updates for that gets Charlie Fucking Kirk news spit back out by the goddamn AI algorithms), it’s that I already know where this political violence takes us, and it is nowhere good.

As satisfying as it feels to learn that the vile gun advocate died due to gun violence, absolutely no one is going to have the epiphany that all of this is heading towards a massive cliff, and once this train flies over the edge, it’s going to lead to a whole lot more people across all walks of life, winding up dead with their blood flowing in the streets.

The tit-for-tat has only started. Now begins the escalation.

Good luck, America. We’re gonna need it.

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On the “Progressive Problem”…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , , on September 3, 2025 by chemiclord

So Chelsea Clinton is running for office.

Maybe.

Possibly.

At least, according to right wing rumor mills. But that rumor is all that left-leaning social media needed to get lost all up in their feelings, and reveal more about themselves than they realize.

Now, as far as Chelsea Clinton goes, I know next to nothing about her. I don’t know anything about her politics. I don’t know if she even has any intention of actually running for any office, much less Jerry Nadler’s seat in New York. I also don’t care. I wouldn’t care if she was running for office in Michigan (the state that I live in).

See, I’m not afraid of names. My view is that anyone who wants to run for office should run. If Chelsea Clinton has problematic politics (the fear of which seems based entirely on her last name than anything she has ever said), and the primary voters select her anyway, that tells me we have a problem with the electorate.

But I suppose I can be flippant about that because I already know that’s true. The electorate of the United States of America (and honestly pretty much anywhere) is filled with profoundly shitty people who hold extremely shitty views of the world around them. I also know that these people aren’t “brainwashed” or “manipulated” or “misled” or “distracted” or whatever. People aren’t empty vessels in which shitty content is poured into and mixed. Humans, in general, are broken in so many ways that it can be relatively easy to weaponize them for whatever cause you want.

And that is what has my fellow left-leaners scared. Deep down, despite all their bluster, they know they are a minority. They know damn well that they don’t represent more than a significant minority of the public no matter how much they claim that there are a legion of closet socialists just waiting for the right message. We just hate admitting it to ourselves, because that admission would require there is long-term work to be done, and if there is one thing the trust-fund babies who fuel the leftist and progressive themes on social media hate more than liberals… it’s work.

That’s the “Progressive Problem.” It has nothing to do with our message. It has nothing to do with the spats with “libtards” and “dirty centrists.” It’s that we don’t want to do the ground level work to make our minority a majority. It’s because then we’d have to accept there are, in fact, good faith criticisms of the model we propose. We’d have to acknowledge that things could go very wrong with our model, and actually do the fucking work to address those problems. We’d have to acknowledge that (gasp!) an all-or-nothing approach is a terrible approach to pretty much anything in life!

It would also require us to acknowledge that we fall victim to the exact same flaws of personality that we scoff at others for falling for, and that a cadre of very loud “fauxgressives” with bullhorns posting breathless screeds about Chelsea Clinton on BlueSky are probably really poor figureheads for any sort of political movement.

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