Tiw's Day Thing: June 28, 2022

Where The Fuck Have You Been?

Soundtrack: The Dresden Dolls, “The Perfect Fit”

A measure of wisdom each man shall have,
But never too much let him know: 
The fairest lives do those men live
Whose wisdom wide has grown.

A measure of wisdom each man shall have,
But never too much let him know: 
For the wise man's heart is seldom happy
If wisdom too great he has won.

A measure of wisdom each man shall have,
But never too much let him know: 
Let no man the fate before him see
For so he is freest from sorrow.
- Hovamol (Bellows trans.) 54-56

Yep, it’s been almost a month. Here come the bullets.

• I mainly vanished from the interwebs because I fell into a deep depression that fed/was fed by a vicious cycle of insomnia, and laying on the couch binging Longmire reruns until 4 AM then sleeping for 4 hours felt more doable than writing anything. I haven’t had one of these in a long while, not since the brutal crash during lockdown in NYC, where I seriously begin contemplating checking out in a very thoughtful, matter-of-fact way. I don’t think it was specifically triggered by anything other than bad chemistry; I’d like to say there was some particular train of thought or occurrence that made it seem like a good idea to sit around like a zombie contemplating oblivion between work, but that sort of reasoning is post hoc a lot more often than we believe.

• I spent one of my better days with a colleague/mentor that drove out from NJ to go shoot with me, wherein I got to finally take the Canik Rival I treated myself to last month for a spin. I won’t turn this into a gun review blog, because it feels wrong to steal jobs from big hairy dudes on YouTube, but oh my god what a fun pistol. IT JUST WANTS TO KEEP SHOOTING.

• Husbandmouth and I celebrated our Leather Anniversary (3rd) this past week. Among other things, we drove out to Gettysburg, where I sold the first rifle I ever bought (a Norinco SKS) and an antique single-shot 12 gauge Fathermouth took from his alcoholic brother-in-law so he wouldn’t shoot my aunt with it and left in his closet from before I was born and gave to me a few years ago when he was cleaning his house. We had only used it once- Husbandmouth shot our Thanksgiving turkey with it 2 years ago and got his nose cut open by the recoil- but I had no sentimental attachment to it and have much better shotguns already. We used the proceeds to treat Husbandmouth to his first pistol, a vintage .357 magnum revolver on the Remington 1875 pattern. The plan is to find me something similar this week and get matching his and hers holsters from a local leatherworker as our anniversary gift to each other. Gaaaaaaaag.

• I recently joined a fairly local HEMA club focusing on Viking martial arts. As I’ve probably mentioned, we lost a ton of friends during the pandemic and subsequent move, and I’ve been grasping at things to join in our area to try to meet people- the hyperextroverted part of my soul has definitely been withering in the past year (and man is it painful sometimes), despite all the important work that needs doing. Viking club was a kind of homecoming- it’s a long drive, and the meetings have been infrequent lately because of life upheaval (prez and vice prez are both about to be dads and their wives are also members), but it’s been a reassurance that yes, I will actually make new friends and am not just in a permanent exile to await the apocalypse with my nuclear family. Martial arts have been the saving grace to my mental and physical health (they’re the only kind of exercise regimen I’ve ever been able to stick to, and I gained enough weight in the past 2 years to be really depressed about it quite often) so many times in my life. I was very pleasantly surprised by the number of other women in the club- I have never had an easy time keeping female friends, but I think the move to a rural environment has put me around more women with similar hobbies.

• Current events. Yes, there have been some. I’m not going to go into a deep dive on my feelings about Roe v. Wade or abortion as it invites pointless conflict about stuff I don’t want to use my stack for. I have highly nuanced views on the broader issue of abortion and will just describe myself as “moderate enough to piss off absolutists on both sides” and leave it at that.

  • If I’m going to talk about the recent happenings around Roe at all, I’d rather focus on the events themselves as I think they’re more interesting (and important) than relitigating abortion as a social issue for the millionth time. I strongly believe the leak about the possible vote (which, of course, did eventually happen) was a calculated action by party operatives or allied activists to force SCOTUS to act well in advance of November to make abortion a polarizing wedge issue to stop the DNC from hemmorhaging voters, betting that abortion will create an army of “single issue voters” who will forget their disgust at everything Brandon has done to them for a year and a half.

  • I don’t believe it will succeed for a few reasons. Dems and the MSM (but I repeat myself) have been willfully misrepresenting the Roe decision to their most ardent followers, leading to a memeworthy emotional meltdown and explosion across the country that has been the cackling delight of abortion opponents and simple anti-leftists alike. The misrepresentation has been, simply, a blurring and reframing of the SCOTUS decision as “SCOTUS just outlawed abortion/took away your right to abortion.” In the tradition of “hands up don’t shoot” and “Trump said drink bleach,” it’s an example of “a lie goes around the world three times before the truth puts its boots on” or the Irrational Primacy Effect or “people are fucking stupid.” Once you’ve told people something emotionally compelling, absolutely no one will hear, care about, or remember any nuance, clarification, correction, or even retraction about it. Pelosi stood in front of a bunch of people making her weird squirrel face and doing her weird squirrel hands and said “women are under assault” and that’s what the mobs are going to go with… except.

  • Except they didn’t do that, and after a few days and weeks of weird ugly people that will never impregnate or be impregnated by anyone twerking in front of the White House, people who live in NY and California and Oregon (and most states, for that matter) are going to notice absolutely nothing has happened to their right to an abortion, because all SCOTUS did was kick the decision back to the states, where Constitutionalists believe it should have always been, and in any case- as has been self-evident to anyone in America who pays any attention to abortion- states have already more or less crafted a climate around abortion that reflect what their political alignment will be post-Roe anyway, it will simply be codified by law instead of through economic gerrymandering. In super-progressive blue states, abortion is heavily funded and state laws already exist that you can basically bash a newborn baby’s brains out with a cricket bat and call it abortion¹, and in red states with strong anti-abortion culture, clinics are sparse on the ground if at all, funded as little as possible and so heavily regulated as to make it challenging at best to discharge their services. My prediction is most people won’t notice any appreciable difference in their access to abortion- assuming they want any in the first place- with the possible exception of the 11 “trigger law” states that will now have the freedom to upgrade their heavily-restrictionist-but-legal situation to total bans that have already pledged to do so as soon as Roe was overturned. The caveat to this is if some states succeed in following through on their threats to criminalize seeking abortions out of state, which I think is a REALLY bad idea as it would undermine the very principles of states’ rights that will enable them to outlaw abortion in the first place (and I don’t think such an approach will be politically viable as it will come off as vindictive to moderates, which the vast majority of Americans are on the issue).

  • So, if people are really, really angry, upset, or worried about the reversal of Roe, their meltdown energy is better directed at activism in making sure their state passes abortion laws they can live with (one way or the other). Or moving. Not trying to murder judges, not burning people’s offices that have nothing to do with passing state legislation, not with weird, dumb protests in D.C.

  • ANYway, between the immediate problems that greatly overshadow Roe for most voters and the fact that this furor will die down once the lies around the SCOTUS decision don’t pan out, I don’t think this will be the Hail Mary that Dems think it will.

• On the other hand, I’m increasingly concerned that the people with their hands up Brandon’s ass will get their war with Russia despite their mostly-failing attempts to get anyone excited about the idea- maybe even fewer people than they got excited about lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I’m getting a distinct sense from the news I follow that there’s a “look, this is HAPPENING, whether it looks logical, viable, justified, or not at this point, so get used to the idea” vibe to the whole thing: that it’s already been choreographed² and all the party favors have been bought and the catering hall has been booked and your mom already flew in from Albuquerque SO FOR FUCKS SAKE RACHEL JUST GET ON BOARD WITH THIS. The US military absolutely does not want this (sane minds are rightly way more focused on China as a realistic threat), the American public don’t want this, Russia doesn’t want this, Putin doesn’t want this (but will certainly play if he must). Despite all this, we can get dragged kicking and screaming to the party by NATO, which is why all the transnational PTB seem to have focused their efforts on pulling those strings now. I believed, and continue to believe, that US interventionism in Ukraine began as a PR stunt and distraction and because so many American politicians have dirty laundry in Kiev that a full Russian capture of government secrets there would make the Epstein/Maxwell client list look like a ticket for jaywalking (and we never even got that one). But now- maybe for those original reasons or because war serves some broader, more sinister globalist agenda- we’re seeing the same sort of doubling down on intervention- spending billions, moving materiel around, and tempting Russian bombers with juicy target-rich events and mindless repeating of Putin talking points that almost no one believes anymore.

Real article Wednesday. Just wanted to pop my head up.

1. A thousand fact-checkers heads just melted.

2. It’s amazing how well this song still works after 25 years.