Josh Caress

@joshcaress.bsky.social

327 Followers 223 Following

Writer, musician, GenX guy with a day job. Currently querying my unpublished novel and writing new things. No AI, no transphobes. Last seen at Welcome To Hell World. New writing and old music at www.joshcaress.com

In other words, I think transphobes need better hobbies. Find a pottery class or a book club or a bird watching group, and leave us trans folks in peace, I often think, you fucking assholes, you fucking weirdos, stop being obsessed with what's in other peoples' pants. Unless you're about to have consensual sex with someone or you're someone's healthcare provider (and even then, maybe not), it's probably none of your business what somebody else's genitals are like.
deeply saddened by this news. Not knowing any of the details of her death yet, I think it will suffice to say that she had a hard life, and yet she survived and gave us so much more than we deserved. I've always had an extremely soft spot for her and her music. Her hurricane of a voice could harness raw anger, could overspill with compassion, or bite with sarcasm, moving from rage to tenderness to exultant joy. She was one of a kind, and she refused to be tamed. Beaten and abused as a child, she was sent to a Catholic-run "Magdalene Laundry" for being a "problem child" and subjected to further abuse. She was only 25 when she performed on Saturday Night Live and ripped up a picture of the pope, calling out the abuse in the Catholic Church, and sending her career into a downward turn from which it never really recovered.
occurs to me now that perhaps I experienced her as a sort of impossibly cool older sister, the one who takes you under her wing and teaches you things about the world you haven't known yet. And I think the thing that Sinead O'Connor was teaching was that the world is a beautiful and wonderful place, full of beautiful and wonderful people, and that the appropriate response to that fact is joy and creativity and love-but also that we humans have bent our societies in inappropriate reaction to this truth, have structured our institutions to press the human spirit into defaults that accommodate greed, cruelty, and abuse, and that the appropriate reaction to such corruption is anger; a creative and artistic anger that is not antithetical to love, but inextricably rooted in love for humanity's impossible beauty, and scorn for those who would mar it with abuse for their own corrupt gain.
Obama administration (2014-2016) Homan was appointed by President Barack Obama as Immigration and Customs Enforcement's executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations in 2013.[7] By 2014, under the Obama administration, Homan began to argue that separating children from their caregivers would be an effective way to discourage illegal border crossings. The journalist Caitlin Dickerson has called him the "intellectual father" of the policy, which he outlined years before the Trump administration adopted it. "Most parents don't want to be separated", Homan told Dickerson. He argued that this makes separation an effective tool for immigration enforcement: "I'd be lying to you if I didn't think that would have an effect." [9] In 2015, the Obama administration awarded him a Presidential Rank Award as a Distinguished Executive. The Washington Post wrote, "Thomas Homan deports people. And he's really good at it." [10] [11]
“No one saw it coming," but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one. The category of "no one" includes the people smeared by Trump in his propaganda: immigrants, black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized-groups for whom legally sanctioned American autocracy was not an unfathomable horror, but a personal backstory. Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
"No one saw it coming," but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one... Immigrants, Black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized.
Picture of a dark orange sky in Massachusetts
This is intentional. The more they stoke your imagination with the idea of super-intelligent computers that will usher in either a techno-utopia or a techno-apocalypse (if those are even different things), the less you’re thinking about what they’re really doing—teaching us to devalue humanity itself. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. When you hear what these men say, it sounds like either a grand utopian vision or outlandish supervillain shit—and that’s the point. By the time you’re stuck debating whether it’s actually possible for AI to replace humanity (it’s not), they’ve already got you. When they argue that “we should engineer our extinction so that our planet’s resources can be devoted to making artificial creatures with better lives,” what they’re really doing is acclimating you to the idea of mass death. And once you’ve contemplated those possibilities, preserving the survival of a small percentage of humans (always including yourself) at the cost of the rest might seem like a welcome compromise.
In 1996, John is an average white American Christian kid from Illinois whose life changes forever when he finds a mysterious arrow. Anna is an angsty Michigan teenager just beginning to understand the Indigenous heritage of her father and the buried secrets of her family. Over the course of the next twelve years, John and Anna’s journeys unfold against the backdrop of a deep American mythology that will unforgettably transform each of them. At once an intimate GenX coming-of-age story and a sprawling reckoning with the past and future of America, The Arrow weaves together the people and landscapes of this country into a subversive genre-bending epic unlike anything you’ve read before. Full of empathy, yearning, humor, magical realism, and an unforgettable cast of vibrant characters, The Arrow questions who we are, what we love, and how to embrace what matters in a future still undefined.
In 1996, John is an average white American Christian kid from Illinois whose life changes forever when he finds a mysterious arrow. Anna is an angsty Michigan teenager just beginning to understand the Indigenous heritage of her father and the buried secrets of her family. Over the course of the next twelve years, John and Anna’s journeys unfold against the backdrop of a deep American mythology that will unforgettably transform each of them—and perhaps, through them, the world. At once an intimate GenX coming-of-age story and a sprawling reckoning with the past and future of America, The Arrow weaves together the people and landscapes of this country into an epic unlike anything you’ve ever read before. Full of empathy, magical realism, and an unforgettable cast of vibrant characters, The Arrow questions who we are, what we love, and how to embrace what matters in a future still undefined.
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed!
More than anything else, the real “America” is its people. Throughout our history, our country has always been made up of real people who laughed, cried, celebrated and mourned together. There have always been some family and community bonds that outweighed the pull of American identity. If we were able to let go of our myths, our exceptionalism, our relentless reification of whiteness, we’d find that we really do have the potential for something special here. Not because of the ideas of slaveholding white men 250 years ago, but because of our vibrant diversity of peoples and cultures—the very thing our power structures seek to eradicate.
They flicker orange now in my recollection—Mom, Dad, my brother, some aunts, uncles, and cousins—laughing and singing “Barbara Ann.” I didn’t understand it as anything but nonsense then, much like my mom humming “Stars and Stripes Forever” in trumpet noises as I lit my sparkler. I only knew the melody as the soundtrack for this moment of wonder, with the sputtering flame glowing in my hand. We roasted marshmallows and watched the fireworks explode over the lake, reflecting in a rippling shimmer. I remember this is when I first heard the term “grand finale,” as the cacophony of light and sound brought the evening to a close. The high feast of summer, a marker of time in the endless days of childhood.
One of the angry young white men who marched at Charlottesville has exploited another rich vein of American white heritage symbolism. Nathan Damigo is best known for being captured on video punching an antifacist protestor in the face at the University of California, Berkeley a few months earlier, in April 2017. He is also the founder of a group called Identity Evropa — spelled with a v in place of the u in order to signal their connection to ancient Rome, in whose alphabet u was written as v. He founded this organization in 2016 and they initially focused their energies largely on recruiting white men on college campuses.
Squaring all of these things is impossible, because it denies both the reality of history and the ongoing lived experience of the majority of Americans. There’s a reason that denialism of every kind is on the rise, that liberal attempts to recontextualize the “positives” of American history fall flat, and fewer Americans are finding any “joy and reaffirmation” in American identity. The revelation of the Trump era is America laid bare, stripped of the liberal mythology that was no longer serving the ruling class. The horror is not that this is new, but that this is what it was all along. As long as the foundational structures remained in place, this was always where it was going to lead. That’s why we need to let it go.
Middle aged white dude with close-trimmed beard and slightly receding hair line wearing crisp blue suit coat and tie
The “futurist” aspect must be understood primarily as a mythology that justifies the eugenics. While these men say a lot about creating a better version of humanity through technology, they also extol a future where computer super-intelligence will replace humanity altogether—and for the better. These claims—often first couched as dire warnings, then as inevitable advances—tend to take up the vast majority of the coverage these men attract. This is intentional. The more they stoke your imagination with the idea of super-intelligent computers that will usher in either a techno-utopia or a techno-apocalypse (if those are even different things), the less you’re thinking about what they’re really doing—teaching us to devalue humanity itself.
Google search: “how many m’s in Harvard” AI Overview: There is only one "m" in the word Harvard (H-a-r-v-a-r-m). Wait, no-there's only 1 "m" in Harvard! H-a-r-v- a -r- m My mistake, there is only 1 "m" in Harvard!
There's one other thing I am expert at, though: the ways supremacy works on the hearts and minds and spirit of well-meaning people of privilege. I know that very well, because I am such a privileged person, and I was raised in supremacy's myths, so I am deeply acquainted with the stories U.S. supremacy tells, the lies it spins, the offers it makes, the ways it converts conviction to complacency and despair, the ways it converts awareness to ignorance and confusion, the way it converts good intention to lazy actions and bad outcomes. That is territory that's well known to me. As long as I'm willing to be honest and uncomfortable about myself, I can speak to that with authority.
Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church opened its doors for the concert, allowing the band and community members to perform the song despite the ban. Church leadership during the concert Wednesday said no school instruments were used in the concert, and no school staff were involved in its organization. "When art is silenced, community speaks louder," a community member said. The concert drew hundreds of attendees, including Omar Thomas, the song's composer. "He flew all the way in to stand with these students, to stand with this community," another community member said. "I wouldn't have missed this for the world," Thomas said. Thomas described the event as transformative for the town.
Picture of man in hot dog costume
Image of Mr Peanubutter from Bojack Horseman with promotional caption: “JD SALINGER PRESENTS HOLLYWOO STARS AND CELEBRITIES WHAT DO THEY KNOW? DO THEY KNOW THINGS?? LET'S FIND OUT!”
To be sure, the primary motivation for drugging someone you’re intending to rape is of course to get away with it, under the cover of her unconsciousness. But I think there is more to it too, as is evinced by the many men who are partaking of this content without themselves creating it or, presumably, ever planning to engage in these acts. I think they are getting off on the tacit sense of getting women’s shaming gaze off of men’s faces. They relish the stealing of her consciousness, her vigilance, her wakefulness. In that drugged and coerced sleep lies the antidote to wokeness—and the raised consciousness of women that comes courtesy of feminism.
1988 Democratic nominee for president, Michael Dukakis, smiling and standing in a tank while wearing a helmet, with the machine gun pointed at the camera
“Who cares about him. He is the result of faulty programming. He’s the juice concentrate of a system that needs to be fed dead bodies to survive. He’s boring and predictable like the most basic code cycling over and over again until all the women are destroyed and the world just burns. You want the killer to have meaning and he doesn’t have meaning. He’s just a killer.” - A Murder At The End Of The World (2023)
While Randy explained this history, an idea took shape in John's mind. The idea felt like a vision—an America-shaped plate descending from the sky like the New Jerusalem, settling on top of the actual landscape and people. The plate held the entire artificial creation of white America—a land of make believe, ignoring and denying everything it covered underneath. But the land and the people refused to be smothered, and the make-believe world began to rot from lack of nourishment. With nothing to sustain it but the force of its own lies, it extracted any semblance of true sustenance from below. As the world above continued to rot, the real world its land and people—began to emerge, beaten and battered, but undefeated.