This is not part of the on overcoming the fear of spiders continuity; Lena Oxton is Tracer, not Venom. It is a standalone story, in an AU which is still pretty much canon-compliant as of July 2017. It would be set in late 2077 or early 2078, in universe. [AO3 link]

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"It is not easy to explain," said the Widowmaker, looking frustrated, fixated on her game screen and sitting next to Hana Song, who of course had her own pro rig and client.

Widowmaker had said that, not Amélie, and it was very important not to get that wrong. The Widowmaker didn't like it, and if Amélie had an opinion - or was in there at all - she never spoke up.

The blue assassin was playing a shooter game, but not as a sniper - as a melee character, high DPS, fast - not entirely unlike Tracer. She always played the same character. Tracer wasn't sure what that meant; Angela told her not to read too much into it, but she knew that Lena tended to think of it as a good sign anyway. It's still shooting people, but it's shooting people in a different way, and Lena couldn't help but feel a little flattered that if the spider was emulating anyone, it was her.

"I exist," the spider continued, as her character on screen ran across open field between buildings towards some sort of objective. "I am here. I exist by right of existence. I do not wish not to exist." Realising that - she knew, herself - had been a big step for her, one she had managed on her own, one taken before she escaped from her controllers with a surprisingly complete list of Talon embedded agents to exchange for her sanctuary.

"And Talon didn't agree with that, did they." Tracer replied.

"No. I was supposed to be an asset, not a person."

"And Angela doesn't entirely either, does she." It was a statement, not a question.

Widowmaker glanced briefly at Tracer, just with her eyes, just a little surprised, before her focus snapped back to the game. "No. She still thinks I am some folded-up version of her former friend. I am not."

The spider saw that Tracer nodded her agreement. Of all the people here, she thought, only Tracer seems to understand even this much. Perhaps it was the younger woman's experience as a ghost, after the Slipstream accident. Perhaps it was being an Omnic War orphan. Perhaps it was just her nature. The spider didn't know.

Tracer watched the two women game, but really watched Widowmaker think. She's close to something, I can feel it, she thought to herself.

"Is this why you won't let Angela undo any of Talon's work?" Widowmaker had adamantly refused any attempt to reverse any of the physical changes Talon had made, though she tolerated anything she could decide qualified as an "improvement." That included giving her control over her own emotional dampers. Handling that was still a learning process.

"Yes," replied the blue assassin. "I am me. I am not that other woman, even if she was the source for some of my parts. I cannot be her. I do not want to be her."

"I get that, luv," said the Londoner. That part didn't matter to Lena. It was easier, for her, if Amélie was dead, if she was gone, and buried, and this was Widowmaker, another person entirely, just happened to look a lot alike. "Y'know, personally, I like the blue," she said. Makes it easier, she thought.

"You may be the only one, myself aside," replied the spider.

"Hey, n00b," Hana said, "Cover your flank or you're gonna get p0wned."

"Thank you," Widowmaker replied, sweeping left, hitting far more than she missed. D-pad instead of mouse or rifle, she was built for aim.

"Nice shot! For a game controller. You should level up to a real interface."

"Perhaps never," said the assassin.

"Okay," replied the gamer, "don't listen to the professional."

"...point taken," replied the blue woman, as the round ended, with scores D.va 100, bad guys 12, Widowmaker 10.

"I'm outta D.ritos. Want anything?"

"No thank you."

"Just ate, luv, but thanks."

"Be right back!" she said, as she jumped backwards over her chair and headed out to the hallway.

Widowmaker leaned against the rec room's couch, watching the game's idle screen. "I like the character I am playing, more than the game itself. I think that is not too unusual, no?"

"Sure!" Lena answered, encouragingly. "That's why there are fan sites and hangouts and stuff. What do you like about her?"

"This character I play," Widowmaker gestured to the screen, "within the confines of the game, she is a person, like me - no, that is wrong, she is not like me, except in that she was... constructed. It is part of her story. Built, for a purpose. As I was, by Talon."

Built, thought Tracer. "Like Omnics, you mean?"

Widowmaker shook her head, no. "I have thought about it, but I think not. Neither of us are robotic, I do not think it is the same, and I cannot really ask our occasionally resident Shambali master to be sure..."

"Yeaaaaaaaaah," agreed the younger woman. "Probably never."

"I have been told that he says he does not carry a grudge, but I can tell that he carries a grudge, and I do not even blame him." She paused for a moment. "I am far more surprised that you talk to me than that he does not."

Lena bit her upper lip for a moment. "T'be honest, I am too."

Widowmaker hummed a little, a note that signalled her acknowledgment of the situation. "Why do you?"

Lena tilted her head back and forth a little. "...I dunno. That night in King's Row was the second worst of my life. I felt so angry and so betrayed, and I'd've done anything to undo it, but I couldn't. And you couldn't even tell me why."

"I did not know," she replied. "Or care. The question, it struck me as so unimportant, so silly. It was the first time I'd ever laughed. It may have been my first real, unprogrammed... thought."

"I didn't know that," said the Overwatch agent. Her first thought was... laughter? Wow. "But it hurt, then. Still does, a little. Less, now that I know you really aren't Amélie."

"My emotional range is still limited, but... I think I am sad about that."

"Maybe that's why, then. Maybe I can tell. Maybe that's why... somehow, here I am."

The eyes of the woman who had been made from Amélie Lacroix narrowed in thought at those words.

"Winston was built, too, genetically," said Tracer, changing back the subject and realising as she said it that it didn't fit. "But that's really not the same either, innit? He still grew up. You didn't. I think I get it, you just... came online, all at once, didn't you? 'Here I am, ready to kill.'"

The spider's gold eyes flashed to Tracer, but not in anger, as was so usually the case with that look. "Yes," she said, grabbing Tracer's hands. "Yes. I had a purpose, already. And then I had more purpose, that fit with it. No doubts, no hesitation, just purpose. Do you actually understand?"

Lena's heartbeat jumped as the spider grasped her hands, but she didn't let herself flinch, at least not more than with surprise. She touched me, she thought, intentionally. Woah! "I," she gathered her thoughts, "I think I do. I mean, not emotionally, right? I grew up too, and looked for somethin' to do with my life. But... in my head, I kinda get it. A little. You're not there, and then you are, all at once. And you already know why. That's, that's, that's, a kind of perfect, innit? It's..." she groped for the right words, "...flawless."

"Yes," she said, squeezing Lena's hands tightly. "For a reason, and with a purpose, and she," she gestured to her head to the screen, "is like that, and also biological, also for a reason, also for a purpose."

Lena put the rest of the pieces together. "...and nobody else in the whole world is."

The Widowmaker pulled Tracer against her, suddenly, roughly, and put her head on the Overwatch agent's shoulder. Lena could hear the spider breathing and found herself dazed, wrapping her arms around the assassin before she even knew what she was doing, asking only as she did it, softly, "...is this okay? Do you want a hug? 'Cause I can stop..."

"...no. I think I do."

She is so lonely, thought the former test pilot. And she don't even know it. Maybe that's why I don't mind this. She held the cool blue woman carefully in her arms. "Did you lose it, somehow? Your purpose?"

The spider did not say anything.

"Did you stop believing in it? Was that it?"

"It was... I could not stop... thinking. I was perfect, and whole, and content, and I brought exquisite deaths, and then I... and then I laughed, and I was not perfect, and not whole, and not content, and I could not fix it."

"And you miss that purity of purpose."

"So much."

"Would you go back to it?"

"I cannot."

Tracer nodded, and hugged a little tighter, as she said, "Because it's part of being a person. That's why you're here, innit?"

Widowmaker lifted her head from Lena's shoulder, looked her in the eyes, and whispered, "You do know."

Lena Oxton met the spider's gaze, and was not afraid. "This much, yeh. I do."

The spider laughed, just a little. Another thought, all her own. "May I hug you again, later?"

Tracer surprised herself by nodding agreement at once. What am I doing? She... she's who she is. She's built to kill. I can't ignore that. "'Course you can."

"Thank you," she said, and went ahead and did it right then, as well.

I can't ignore what she is, but maybe, Tracer thought, as Hana burst back into the room with grotesque amounts of junk food, ...maybe I can learn to live with it.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth. Please comment there.

I finally wrote up the design document for Coexistence Alpha. (Link goes directly to an .rtf.) Does this read coherently to people?

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I think it's an appropriate time to remind any actual conservatives out there that the last thing to make Marxism really popular - I mean, actually, legitimately popular - in the US? Fascism.

I mean it. Seriously. Actual fascism - and all it entails - managed to turn a rampaging monster like Stalin into our pal "Uncle Joe." That ... that took a lot.

So when you're thinking about exactly how hard should you hold onto your reflexive alliance with white supremacists and neofascists like Bannon and Milo, think about that history. Think about it real hard.

Because right now, you've got a whole generation of people who have grown up being told that online death and rape threats and doxxing, and systematic harassment, is just something they should deal with. Conservatives have been saying all that is just Free Speech, and embracing the abuse organisers and agreeing that the solution is that women should "just log off." They don't even bother addressing people of colour.

Like you can fucking log off. That's saying, "stop being in society." That's "hide thyself in a nunnery." That's "give in," that's "go die," that's "accept being absolutely without value to us." It's the opposite of an answer - it's support for the abusers.

Meanwhile, at the same time, and in response to this same situation, the so-called "liberal" side of things has been giving fuck and all of a response, with occasional dishwatery tsk-tsk statements and a lot of hand-writing about violating the rights of people who are literally trying to organise ethnic cleansing.

On the other hand, the Marxists were out way in front, talking about this in the context of economic politics, racial politics, and how fascism is the natural end-state of late-stage capitalism. Who is on the ground fighting the fascists? The antifa (anti-fascist) movement, which while not by any means universally Marxist, is generally very left.

When Richard Spencer - who has personally published articles supporting genocide - got oh-so-deservedly punched in the face on camera, who cheered? Everybody who has been targeted - almost all the women and a decent number of men of an entire generation, a lot of women of all generations, and a decent number of other men besides.

And, of these political factions, which said "about FUCKING time DO MORE OF THAT" and who, by contrast, lectured about how you have to have polite and respectful discussion with people who are literally planning your mass murder?

Conservatives, and mainstream liberals, you want a roadmap to actual popular Marxism? Guess what: you don't need a fucking roadmap. You've already built the road.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

Upright Republicans - ones to whom any of the supposed small-government principles ever mattered at all, or, for that matter, one to whom any of the claimed GOP principles ever mattered at all - need to understand that the GOP is no longer their party.

And if they want to take their party back, they need to cause the GOP to lose in 2016. There are times, no matter how much you don't like it, that you need to lose an election to win the future, and when you do that, you need to do it in a clear and visible way.

Fortunately, there is a clear and visible way to do that, and the way to do that in 2016 is to vote for Gary Johnson. Gary gets 5%, and it will be an extremely clear message: you can't win without us.

Because right now, at this moment, the GOP is an unrestrained horde of overt racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, and absolutism, it is a party of chaos and strong-man leadership, the opposite of law, the inverse of order. A GOP victory in this condition would be a tremendous loss for all the principles of small and hands-off government. Both parties will be mass rule, and the one least historically aligned against that will have won with that as their standard, and will not turn away for decades, if ever.

The GOP must lose this election, and it must be clear why.

Gary Johnson won't win; the Libertarian party is a joke. I say that as someone who has voted big-L more than not. A lot of people will say, therefore, that you are "throwing away your vote."

That's horseshit. This election, if you're on the small-government side, it's the only way not to throw away your vote, and it's the only shot at not losing the GOP to the mob.

The GOP must lose 2016. Badly. And it must be clear why. Responsible, upright Republicans must vote Gary Johnson in 2016. He won't win - but you will.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

Okay, a lot of people are linking to Brett Arneds's opinion piece on Marketwatch, wherein he "blows [the second amendment] baloney into a million pieces."

I'm not gonna link it, and I'm not even going to argue the merits of gun control. Instead, I'm gonna repost something I posted elsewhere, because this is the exactly sort of thing that starts getting to me about gun control advocacy.

Hamilton was writing about (and directly referencing) Article I, Section 8, and Article II, Section 2, of the then-proposed American Constitution. He was not referencing the second amendment, or any part of the Bill of Rights, because it DID NOT YET EXIST.

Yes, you heard me, AMENDMENT II DID NOT YET EXIST when he wrote this article. It would not even be proposed for ANOTHER YEAR AND A HALF. He cannot have been writing about it.

I mean, read the damn Federalist Paper he linked, if you've been cheering that article. It talks about whether States or the Federal government should control the Militia. It's Federalist No. 29 - "Concerning the Militia."

What's he quoting and paraphrasing? Article I section 8, Article II section 2, not any not-yet-extant Bill of Rights text.

The paper was published Thursday, January 10, 1788.

The fleet of proposed amendments which were winnowed down to become the Bill of Rights were introduced June 8, 1789, 18 months later.

His article is a lie, a lie that relies on you not reading what's linked and not putting dates together and not knowing what you're actually talking about to "prove" something it does not in reality prove.

In this way, the gun control movement has long been exactly as callous towards reality as the fundamentalist movement has been about queers and abortion rights, and is what drove me away from it, because I have had that weapon turned against me my entire life, and I will not have it.

I simply won't.

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eta: In response to comments elsewhere: I feel that Arneds is quite intentionally conflating discussions on control of the militia with discussions on the right of individuals to bear arms in the second amendment, and the people forwarding it around are taking that bait with alacrity and doing so quite directly. I believe both points were intentional, which is why I called it a lie, as it was intent to mislead. That's what I was reacting to. No, he never literally states, "Federalist 29 is specifically about the second amendment," but he's sure as hell setting that up.

Quoting myself from elsewhere:

I assert: Arneds's article takes the "collective right" model of interpretation as given. Without that, talking about the ideas over who controls the militia is irrelevant. Do you agree?

If you agree: assuming A (collective right, in this case) to be true, when B (individual right, in this case) and A are mutually exclusive, automatically invalidates B.

However, because the truth of A is assumptive, rather than proven, asserting that A is true proves B is untrue is a falsehood. Or, in this case, because I have seen the rhetorical structure of this article used by fundamentalists with deceptive intent against queers my entire life in their efforts to exterminate me and mine, it is something I read as a lie. Beyond that, I react to it badly, but that doesn't change the structure of the situation.

And that claim above is the claim this article makes; if I assume A, then because if A is true then B is false, therefore I have proven that B is false. That's what the NYDN commentary does, that's what all the people I was responding to in my post collectively have done, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it pisses me off.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

The GOP establishment has actually gone to war against the demi-fascist Mr. Trump now. It's fascinating.

I mean, they've been ramping up. They've been throwing bits of everything at him hoping something might stick. They're quietly telling more vulnerable members of Congress that they won't be punished for distancing themselves from Mr. Trump if we wins the nomination. They've even been blaming everyone else for the monster which is their creation, pulling their usual externalisation/I'm-not-crying-you're-crying projection tricks:

The media, licking its collective chops, cannot wait for the GOP to become the party of racists, misogynists and authoritarians that liberals have always portrayed Republicans to be.
--Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post

But none of that has been working. So now, they're really cranking it up, threatening their rank-and-file with the worst, an out-and-out party split. They're telling everyone, break ranks, endorse Trump, and we will end you. Your career is over at that moment, they're saying, in pretty much those words, and Chris Christie is being made an example of right now. Any other hints of disloyalty will be treated the same.

So now, we're seeing a real party civil war. But the question is - how will the oligarchs weigh in? And on which sides?

It's hard to say. The Koch brothers, for their part, are saying they're staying out of it - which is most certainly a vote of no confidence in the GOP Establishment, even if it's a lie, as I presume it is. If it's not a dodge - they do lie a lot - it's also probably an implication that they think they can have more control with a newer party. (They've tried that before.)

The rest will probably fall down on one side or another in the next couple of weeks. Can't keep track of 'em without a scorecard, getcher programmes right here!

What a spectacle! What a show.

eta: Oh look, they've rebooted Mitt Romney!

eta2: And the LA Times have pulled out one of my favourite words, "inchoate," for their editorial. Excellent, said Mr. Burns.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

Seanan McGuire posted an article today on why you need to leave reviewers alone. Authors Behaving Badly is kind of a perennial lol-topic in reader circles, and a stunning percentage of those stem from authors reacting – badly – to negative reviews.

She has a bunch of good reasons why you don’t engage such reviews, even if they’re just being mean. And all that’s fine. But a couple of people have posted about how hard that is, and I realised there’s something Seanan didn’t say, to wit:

If you’re staring at a negative review and itching to say something, don’t, not just because of all the obvious reasons, but because being reviewed at all – no matter how negatively – is a kind of compliment in and of itself.

Remember that. Even vendetta reviews are compliments, really, because they mean the reviewer thought you were important enough to talk about, even if just to try to take you down.

And leaving aside vendetta reviews – like the Rabids attempt to game Goodreads – a sincere but negative review also means they thought you were worth the actual time they spent. Even if they don’t admit it, the facts on the ground are that you were worth the time they spent actually reading or listening to or watching your thing, and the time they spent writing a review about it.

Remember: no matter how much they may’ve hated whatever they’re hating – and let’s say they hated it a lot – they still cared enough to take the time to write and post a thing about your work. In a world flooded with opportunities to read/watch/listen to/react to material, they listened to yours, and wrote about yours, which means that you’re worth that much to them, at very least.

And it’s not symmetrical. They’ve handed you the big advantage. After all – you’re not writing about them, now, are you? No.

Good. Keep it that way.

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Over on Facebook, people are getting weird and panicky, and posting various bits of data out of context. They're freaking out more than I think they should about the Baltic Dry Index, in particular, and are starting to do things like quote Superstation 95 as a source. (Pro tip: SUPERSTATION 95 IS NOT A SOURCE. DO NOT QUOTE IT. EVER.*)

Anyway, here's a cross-comparison chart you should consider before panicking about the Baltic Dry Index; it's oil price against BDI. Fuel is a meaningful part of the cost of shipping. Note that the BDI follows (in part) the chart of oil, and oil hasn't been this cheap in a while:



Note further that crude oil imports in North America are at lows not seen in a long time due to domestic production; consider the implications of that on an overbuilt shipping fleet. Note further further that China went off its binge of years-in-advance commodity buying a few years ago and a couple of years ago dropped out of that entirely. Note the effects of that on copper and other important industrial commodities, and the effects of that on the value of shipping any of those things around, and the effects of that on demand for shipping and - therefore - price demand ability of an overbuilt shipping fleet.

Get the picture?

I'm not saying shipping isn't slowing. It is, for all the reasons related above. Earnings are also disappointing this season, and the economy is showing stress. Automobile demand isn't great, for example. But these are secular realities in a commodities slump. This happens. Don't panic.

Really, I have to wonder how much recessions (and impressions thereof) are going to change once we get a generation of people who haven't been looking at an alternate mode of civilisation under a completely different economic system (the Communist bloc), and for whom each recession is not some sort of existential crisis leading to straight to international communism. I'm not even sure the millennials will be able to get past it - this might very well take another generation past that. We'll just have to see.

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*: Superstation 95 is, in fact, a front for a white-supremacist revolutionary organisation (Hal Turner's, specifically), heavy on the conspiracy theory. A few days ago, they posted a "story" that got passed around through various blogs and ended up on Zero Hedge unquestioned, claiming that all ocean shipping had stopped. All of it. This was horseshit - even the graphic they posted showed cargo ships en route - but that didn't stop people from taking it at face value. Their goal is destabilisation through fear in order to launch a race war. They also claim to be a New York City radio station; they are not. There is no such license. If they exist at all on the air, it is as a pirate station.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.

The Puppies made another attempt to game a system last week, but it fell apart rather hilariously.

The first notice it got was a lot of very negative commentary all at once on a negative review of one of the oberpuppyführer Vox Day’s collections; Lis Carey left a note about it in File 770‘s comments section. And File 770 also found a post about it on Vox’s blog. (Linked via DoNotLink).

Well, it gets dumber from there. Sean O’Hara started poking around, and found that there was a Secret Puppy Goodreads Group*, formed with the explicit intention of gaming the site by bombing “SJW” reviewers and authors with negative reviews and ratings, and uprating all Puppy-affiliated works. The problem is, while it was a limited-access group – well, I’ll hand it to Sean:

Too bad for him the only thing keeping out the SJWs was a challenge question that could be answered with a simple Google search. By Saturday night I had access to the group. I didn’t know what to do — undermine him from the inside, play Serpico and leak screenshots on a piecemeal basis, or save them up for a big reveal. The last one seemed the best way not to get caught until I had a good collection of dirt, and I was strongly leaning in that direction.

But after reading File770’s news roundup yesterday, which included a story about someone being ganged up on by Day and his goons, I decided it might be better to give warning where I could.

Here are a collection of screenshots from that group.

And apparently, while Goodreads is a bit of a mess sometimes, that was simply too much for them, and they banned the whole lot of them, with Vox himself being singled out for permanent lockout.

Vox has, of course, claimed victory. (Also a DoNotLink link.)

It’s kind of sad at this point, really. The problem is that the crazy neighbour is only so funny, because sooner or later, they might just bring in a bunch of friends from out of state and take over a wildlife refuge centre, and then it’s not so much fun anymore.

And since we’re talking Puppies, I might as well point at this takedown by Scott Lynch of John C. Wright’s accusations against Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Worldcon, supported by all witnesses who aren’t John C. Wright. I don’t think anyone outside the reactionary rightist circle has a lot of fucks go give about Mr. Wright – remember, this is the guy who came to my blog threatening to sue me for libel after I quoted him accurately and in context. That’s the kind of reality-disassociated sad muppet he is. But I saw his new post, “Stormbunnies and Crybullies”, responding (quite negatively) to George R. R. Martin’s recent call for winding down this fanwar, and one paragraph stood out:

But I am a forgiving man, jovial and magnanimous. I make the following peace offer: Go your way. Cease to interfere with me and my livelihood, do your work, cease to libel me and meddle with my affairs, withhold your tongue from venom and your works from wickedness, and we shall all get along famously.

Emphasis added.

Don’t write what I don’t like, and we’ll get on fine.

I’m the kind of person he doesn’t want to exist. I’m several kinds of people he doesn’t want to see being written about. (You might recall John as the person who so passionately hated Korra from The Legend of Korra, explicitly and specifically because she’s bi. He’s one of those hate-the-sin love-the-sinners whose idea of “love” is making people like me illegal.)

So if we all just stop writing about uppity women and those horrible queers and faggots – all of whom, as you’ll recall, should be beaten to death with ax-handles and tire irons – we’ll get along just fine.

The only ‘peace’ these guys can imagine is complete and utter submission to them. No wonder they have such a fascination with ISIL and the like; it’s a mirror. So do everything by their rules, on their terms, all the time, and always, always give them exactly what they want and do nothing else, and we’ll be just fine.

Stalin would be proud.

I was thinking about pasting in one of the stop liking what I don’t like memes as an ending for this post, but that doesn’t really work, because that’s just about childish frustration and confusion. This, by contrast, is childish frustration and confusion pupated into man-child quasi-fascism, and I don’t have a properly-fitting caption.

But I might have a good animated gif.

Even Kylo Ren is a more complex character than any of these people.

And I just don’t know where to go with that.

*: eta: The original post is missing. I don’t know why. This was the original link: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/9683209-you-all-owe-me and here is a still-valid Google cache as of 2016/01/05 21:45 Cascadian Standard Time.

 

---

This is part of a series of posts on the Sad/Rabid Puppy candidate slate-based capture of the Hugo Awards, and resulting fallout.

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Over on Tumblr, I was asked, in response to an offhand comment:

earlgraytay asked:
Hey, do you want to talk about your GOP theory? I grew up worshipping at the altar of Reagan.

Hoooooooo boy here we go.

Okay, so it’s really not that complicated, but we do need to lay a bunch of groundwork, which is the part that makes it look complicated, so bear with me.

First, you have to remember that there was once a GOP that wasn’t batshit insane. Yes, it’s always had batshit insane hangers-on, but that’s pretty much true for every party. (And in some parties, that’s all there is, Wildrose Party of Alberta, I am looking very pointedly in your direction.)

This was back when one of the big things that defined “Republican party” as separate to the “Democratic party” in the 20th century - back when the GOP was the anti-racist party, before Nixon and the Southern Strategy - was that a democratic government - small “d” - could not legitimately exercise unlimited power. It must be contained, and the best way to do that is through representation, not direct democracy, and by strict observation of constitutional law.

This comes from a variety of sources, and goes back to the American revolution, and was then hammered home by watching the French revolution which followed.

In practical terms, one can obviously talk about this being more seen in the breach than the observation. But it was still more than lip service; it was a legitimate philosophical tenant. The Democrats had thrown much of this idea overboard during the Great Depression, but the GOP held on to it.

Obviously, that shit is over. You see, after Richard M. Nixon lost the 1960 election, he decided that the New Deal alliance that built the mid-century Democratic Party couldn’t be broken unless the Confederacy stopped being a single-party all-Democrat bastion. So he, along with his cohorts, started steering the GOP away from anti-racism and towards coded pro-racism - the Southern Strategy - just as the Democratic Party was being lead in the opposite direction by its northern wing. And it got him elected in 1968.

Now, I realise all that’s all very well known, but I wanted it out there, because this set the groundwork for what happened later.

And that foundation having been laid, let’s skip ahead to the late 1970s and early 1980s - Reagan’s epoch and later.

The Southern Strategy has paid off, Reagan has broken the Democratic stronghold. LBJ’s prediction upon signing the Civil Rights Act - that the Democrats would lose the South for three generations - has effectively come true.

With that has come the beginnings of a cultural shift. Parties are, after all, made up of their constituents, and that culture shapes party culture.

The Democrats had a big enough alliance that Dixie culture was one part of many. You had the socially-very-liberal New Englanders, you had the quasi-Nordic social-democratic and socially-liberal northwest (small but material), you had the unions of the midwest, and so on. The fundamentalist Baptists of the South (and their expatriots in California) were equals amongst peers

That was not so much the case with the GOP. They’d attracted a lot of religious voters, and had done so quite intentionally, in taking on the South; that included a lot of fundamentalists - the size of the party grew substantially.

But those fundamentalists were new to the party, and in the early 1980s, even after working for Reagan, they found themselves not getting what they wanted, and not getting what they felt they’d been promised.

So in response to internal protest, what they were told, and what they believed and acted upon, was that they may have supported the party, but they weren’t of the party. The old GOP was very much turn-based and seniority-based; they needed to get involved in the rank-and-file and work their way up. Not just turn out and vote; start working for the party. They had to join the club, as it were.

So they did. And as the fundamentalist revival took over more and more of the Southern Baptist (and similarly-oriented) denominations, that interlink became more and more toxic.

That’s because - and this is probably the critical factor - not only is one of the key tenants of modern American fundamentalism that there is there no legitimate opposition (because the religious is the personal is the cultural, and the religious opposition is, literally, Satan), but that there is no legitimate middle ground. Compromise is criminal; excessiveness is a requirement.

Dig down a bit, and this comes out of Revelations, 3:15-16, and let’s go with King James because they love it so: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

Cold or hot; there can be no “lukewarm” middle ground; the middle ground is actually worse than Satan.

They’d harp on this constantly. You cannot findJesus except through ever-increasing fervour. And by the early 1990s, this had become a general cultural value - one spoken about openly. I didn’t have to dig for this; they were saying it outright. And then, as is inevitable, the cultural value became a political value, and the last remnants of the old GOP were swept away.

I monitored a lot of fundamentalist radio at the time, listening to the things they said to each other, things not intended for greater-public consumption, transcribing and emailing it around so people would know what the political fundamentalists were saying when they thought it was just amongst themselves. By then, they’d hammer on this explicitly as a political value - a political necessity.

Then, just a few years after that, they added “spiritual warfare,” which was spiritual “armour” you’d don in your mind to be impervious to the temptations of the enemy - the words of the enemy, the thoughts of the enemy, the discussions of the enemy.

That’s when I started sending up warnings to anyone who would listen, because I know how this goes. That didn’t go over any better than my warnings about that little experiment the Pakistani government was running in Afghanistan - but I digress.

And as the fundamentalist population took over the organisational structure, the day-to-day working of the party, this attitude became contagious - first common, then pervasive, taking over the secular members of the party as well. That’s just because humans are social animals - they go along with their friends, on most things. It’s what they do. And that’s the culture which spread.

And now, well, we’re here. You have a Democratic party which only now is beginning to understand the chasm and cultural issues; you have a Republican party which is functionally a fundamentalist movement on whatever axis it chooses to follow, whether that axis is actually “religious” or not, as that has become its cultural core.

Even if the religion part itself went away - if it vanished overnight - the cultural value of unipolar validity, of the intrinsic invalidity of middle ground or compromise and the illegitimacy of any opposition wouldn’t vanish. That isn’t going anywhere peacefully, except through long-term failure, followed by ageing out of the primary population - something that’ll take another decade or three. That doesn’t mean they’ll hold power that whole time; I mean it’ll take at least that long for this cultural phase to fade away to irrelevance.

So, there you go. If you made it all the way through this, congratulations! It’s a lot.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comments at Dreamwidth.