Hillary or Trump? Two Candidates, Three Visions of the Future

The upcoming American election has brought out hysterics, vacuous trolls, and borderline-violent wackadoos in profusion, each more adamant than the next that life on this planet will end if his candidate is not chosen.  This is normal and expected, however, it is amplified by the internet as bottom-dwelling nutjobs everywhere turn their brief attention spans away from porn to voice their opinions on Which Rich Person Gets To Rule the World.

Dutifully and gullibly they file to their local polling places, blackening ovals and getting a red, white, and blue sticker for their efforts.  Somebody wins, and by somebody I mean somebody in the top echelons gets richer at the expense of the bottom and middle, whose kids cannot afford college without staggering debt or who have to go into medical bankruptcy.  But I digress.

In this essay, I will postulate three scenarios for two candidates.  One is a toupeed Cheeto version of Spongebob with racism Tourette’s.  The other is a shrill, deafening, umbrella stand-worshipping genocidal maniac in a pantsuit.

One guaranteed way to drive any devotee of the collapsing Democratic party to her Xanax cabinet is to casually mention a possible Trump presidency.  Upon this suggestion, which I would recommend executing online in case she has access to knives, a flame war will occur in which both you and the Flabby Burnt Sienna Nutcracker will be compared to a megalomaniac dictator faster than you can say Reductio ad Hitlerum.

Of course a Clinton presidency is presumed, so nobody faints or goes apeshit looney tunes upon its suggestion. Clinton is the holy resurrection of Obama, and Obama was the resurrection of George W. Bush, or at least G.W.’s policies on war, finance, and other trivial matters.

As I mentioned earlier, two candidates, three scenarios a piece.  Scenario One is Best Case Scenario, and/or Highly Unlikely Unicorn Fart and Sparkle Rainbows Version.  Scenario Two is What Is Most Likely to Happen.  Scenario Three will be Worst Case Scenario.

Since it is still assumed he will lose, let’s start with Donald Trump, shall we?

DONALD TRUMP WINS, BEST CASE SCENARIO:

Defeating all of his critic’s expectations, Donald Trump actually follows through, beginning his presidency by reducing the US’s role in NATO and ending military buildup in the Baltic states.  His investment in US infrastructure and schools creates jobs.  He creates legislation that forces some American companies to manufacture their products within the US, driving up the price of goods and services.  A brief economic slowdown is experienced prior to a boom that ensures his 8 year presidency.  He demolishes environmental regulations, resulting in unprecedented pollution of rivers, streams, and air, but nobody thinks long term (not even those with children) so whatever.  Let the great-grandkids deal with new and exotic cancers.  His restrictions upon immigration and enforcement of existing immigration laws drives wages upward. He hits Control-Alt-Delete on Obamacare as promised and replaces it with an enhanced version of Medicare for all.  There are slightly fewer mass shootings because the demonic male population is just so damn happy, they don’t feel like using their guns for anything other than assassinating innocent animals in the forest.

DONALD TRUMP WINS, WHAT IS MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN VERSION:

You start comparing Trump to Obama by year 2 of his presidency, not because of an increase in self-tanner usage but because his policies turn out to be almost exactly the same as the former.  A stalemate in Congress prevents him from ending Obamacare, so that broken parasite of the last of the middle class’s wealth lurches onward, leaving a swath of medical bankruptcies in its wake.  You find that when you get sick, you cannot afford to go to the doctor.  Trump is able to pass a few laws that help small businesses, which keep the economy from total collapse.  He finds himself held hostage by the usual cadre of psychotic bankers and neocons, and therefore unable to withdraw from the dozens of skirmishes, regime changes, and proxy wars the US was embroiled in under Democratic rule.  Slightly more money is allotted towards people who served in the military.  Trump becomes known as the most hated President of all time, mostly for his dismally unedited soundbites, ridiculous family members, and lack of filter.  

DONALD TRUMP WINS, WORST CASE SCENARIO:

Puffed up by a wave of prosperity, success once again goes to Trump’s big orange puffy head.  China tries to annex Taiwan and Trump tries some punitive war-games, like heavily taxing all imports from China.  Trade with China is fractured and a war nearly breaks out.  Trump, wanting desperately to be liked, soothes the hurt fee-fees and goes back to business as usual.  The US goes into another long recession and Trump is rightly blamed.  Racist cops continue to harass and murder black people and other people of color without interruption.  

HILLARY CLINTON WINS, BEST CASE SCENARIO:

The economy lurches on, bolstered by constant war and the continued gutting of the middle class.  A renewable energy bubble combined with a new oil discovery in one of the US’s client states results in a slightly less oil-dependent America.  By mistake, a referendum is passed that enables a single-payer health insurance system that accidentally demolishes the old system.  There are slightly fewer mass shootings because gun control laws are made and semi-enforced.  The TPP being passed results in a short-term burst of economic prosperity.  Marijuana is legalized at the federal level, further demolishing the old health insurance model and making way for new forms of medicine.  

HILLARY CLINTON WINS, WHAT IS MOST LIKELY TO HAPPEN:

Cost of living and housing prices continue to climb.  That neighbor of yours who could not get a job because he was holding out for 80K a year becomes homeless and effectively disappears, becoming a nonperson.  Your health insurance bill goes up… again.  Everyone inches ever-closer to not being able to afford their lives, except for the people in the rich neighborhood.  Some new country is chosen for regime change and refugees stream outward.  The weather gets weirder and weirder, with 107 degree temperatures in April in some places.  Planned Parenthood is given more funding, which causes Christians everywhere to lose their minds despite the Bible being hunky-dory with abortion. Oil prices rise when Clinton is re-elected to a second term and fracking begins to come back at the end of her term.

HILLARY CLINTON WINS, WORST CASE SCENARIO:

Clinton “accidentally” bombs a hospital or orphan’s home in St. Petersburg despite treaties and agreements being firmly in place.  In return, Putin says: “Just stahp.”  Clinton does not listen and lobs a small, thinkable (according to Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama) nuclear weapon at St. Petersburg.  Russia responds by shooting it out of the sky somewhere in space and annihilates Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas in return.  

Psycho Hillary and her neocon puppet masters return fire, taking out all of Russia’s oil fields and thus crushing Russia’s and Europe’s economy.  Oops.  Russia responds by annihilating the rest of America outside the three previously mentioned cities, turning the entire northern hemisphere into a chilly, lonely, radioactive glass factory for the next five hundred years.  All of these events take place within the span of 30 minutes.

At least global warming was prevented!

How To Collect A Special Snowflake Award

Sure, you are unique, just like the other 7.whatever billion people on this planet.  But are you a Special Snowflake?  Can you stomach the rigors of demanding attention wherever you go, even in situations that may be considered “inappropriate” or “dangerous”?  Can you suspend your ability to discriminate long enough to maintain the profound delusion that the world owes you good fortune, a living, or untold riches…  just for being you?  

You know you want it.

If you answered Yes, you just might be a Special Snowflake.  

If your hobbies include gazing fondly in mirrors and meticulously planning every detail of your future life (the one that will happen when you are fabulously wealthy for no logical reason) then you just might be a Special Snowflake.  Other pursuits that may provide fulfillment are:

-Decanting your own farts
-Masturbating to images of people who look suspiciously like you
-Pretending to submit your will to gods that promise eternal life for your special snowflake soul

Remember, being a Special Snowflake takes work.  You have to earn it.  Here is some advice if you want to achieve the pinnacle of Special Snowflakedom:

1. Cultivate ingratitude.  Do not, under any circumstances, appreciate what you have!  The trademark state of a Special Snowflake is constant, unrelenting, shameless, bitter disappointment in the way everything has turned out.  So what if there are people struggling harder than you -- do not rub the sheen off your sacred Special Snowflake self by empathizing with them!  Are you able to afford fresh fruit in both wintertime and summertime?  Bah, who thinks about that, besides inner city dwellers and ancient Romans?  Not you.  Time off on the weekends?  Ridiculous, as no true Special Snowflake should ever have to do an activity as demeaning as work.  Cute boyfriend?  Nice, but you’d rather have a celebrity.  A nice, rent-free house to live in?  That’s nothing.  Sofia Coppola’s dad bought her many houses and a directing career.  It’s Paris (Hilton) or bust -- if you can’t have the life of a pampered, coke-snorting heiress, you might as well kill yourself.  Don’t kill yourself though, because that could make you ineligible for a Special Snowflake Award!

2. Complain, complain, complain.  Since you are more intelligent than everyone else, you need to make your dissatisfaction apparent or else those dumbkofs will get the impression it isn’t all about you.  On an airplane because a doting relative bought you a trip to Hawaii?  Complain about the bad service and cramped seats.  Walking through the park with another person?  Wrinkle your nose in disgust at a homeless person on a nearby bench.  In a restaurant?  Threaten to leave because they don’t have an item you want.  Be a diva.  You’re a star!  Getting along is for chumps and poors.

3. Go vegan, and then go back to eating meat.  This one is CRUCIAL.  In order to convince the world that you are one of a kind, hijack a tiny part of the most important social justice movement of our time and make it about you for as long as you can stand, say six months to a year.  You have to do it long enough so you can get much-needed attention and investment from people you can dupe into thinking you have a conscience. The advantage of pretending to be vegan is you can optionally create a blog about your transition, monetize that blog, and then renege on any faux promises you made to the animals, sucking in even more clicks and ad revenue.  Don’t forget to pepper the internet with declarations of “I listened to my body and it told me to eat meat” and “I couldn’t live without bacon” so you can appeal to the masses who desperately want to validate their dairy, meat, and egg habits.  If you end up gaining weight or getting sick as a result of going back to eating flesh, chicken abortions, and titty squirts, make sure you hide your illnesses as much as you possibly can.  Remember, God will give you an afterlife of blowjobs and deep fried chocolate ice cream if you repent at least three seconds before you die, so whatever you do in this life, including atheism, cheating, exploitation, or murder, makes absolutely no difference.  

Just a word of warning: Special Snowflakes, especially Special Snowflakes who win awards, age faster than the average Snowflake, mostly because they are so very tired all the time.  Colossal, all-consuming, morbid self-interest is an exhausting occupation.  

New!

Newness is an obsession in our world, at the direct expense and devaluation of the old.  In some ways, equating newness with superiority is practical.  New car runs better than old car.  Freshly baked bread tastes better than old bread.  New teacher replaces crusty retiree and brings needed positive energy to classroom.  

There are real downsides to fetishizing newness, and they are currently biting our society in the ass pretty hard.  Here are a few examples and their results:

New electronics!	Planned obsolescence and teeming landfills.
New clothes!	Child sweatshop labor in Bangladesh in collapsing buildings.
ZOMG kitties and puppies at the mall pet store!	Any shelter animal over 6 months of age dies there, usually by injection or gas.
Under new management!	New pantheon of grotesquely overpaid paperclip jockeys who assign you at least 3x more work at the same pay.
She’s a virgin!	License to commodify and rape because maleness is evolutionary suicide.
She’s pregnant!	Fetus alert!  Preserve the unborn’s life at all costs, including the woman’s autonomy, health, finances, and future.

If you want to understand the problems inherent with newness-obsession, rent or steal yourself a viewing of any big-budget American film made after the year 2000.  Preferably the film should be a SEQUEL or a REBOOT, but any crappy blockbuster that involves superheroes or aliens will do.  

'Murica!

 What you are looking for is a portrait of ‘Murica, a relatively new Empire that churns these crappy reboot/sequels out at a rate of at least 20 per month during peak moviegoing season.  Like the milksop children of a fervid Evangelical and his crispy-poodle haired, dead-eyed walking uterus of a wife, the offspring of American big-budget film directors is disturbingly homogenous, as if one giant super egg split off into various smaller eggs a la the asexual reproduction process described in Brave New World.  

There will be lots of car chases, explosions, and at least one unattractive yet funny sidekick. Exploration of human relationships will be limited to token happy heterosexual romance between a dominant male and a skinny woman, some beloved parent or mentor conveniently dying either on or off-script, and the rescue of a pregnant woman or young child in distress.  Plot?  There isn’t one, however, there are loose ramblings about Our Hero needing to protect the Earth from Apocalypse.  

Said Apocalypse is caused by whatever CGI supervillain can be conjured out of the psychological morass of manufactured Islamophobia and deindustrialization-anxiety zeitgeist that constitutes current thought. Now with more Earth-magma slurping prostheses

Notice how important newness is as a factor in the film.  It’s almost the starring role, isn’t it?  The explosions are bigger and brighter.  There are more of them than last year/decade.  The actors are either young or aggressively Photoshopped to look that way.  The hero has new powers, a new vehicle, a brighter, shinier costume.  The alien/villain adversary is a “NEW DIMENSION OF EVIL” and can perform new evil deeds with his large, enhanced, Earth-core sucking appendages. In which newness begins to SUCK  

What everyone fails to realize, let alone mention, is that newness can suck.  That first sexual experience?  It’s routinely awful, awkward, and weird for at least 50% of those involved.  The machines designed to keep grandma alive despite her kidneys and liver failing?  I wouldn’t call that form of subsistence a life.  All those new human “miracle” babies being born to the tune of 350,000 plus per day?  They’re leading us down the quick garden path to the possible near term extinction of life as we know it.  All that new technology that was supposed to save us from the consequences of human greed and reckless environmental omnicide?  Clearly not working.

That aging celebrity (maybe he was in the movie you watched!) who sired a child at age 68 and whose plastic surgery attempts to look younger have rendered him as a ghastly, perpetually-surprised burn victim version of his former self?  

Wouldn’t it be better if he just let himself GROW OLD?

Rapists Gonna Rape: An Open Letter To Those Writing Open Letters to Brock & Dan Turner

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

This is not another open letter to Brock Turner or his father! This is an open letter to all of those who would write open letters to rapists and the parents of rapists.  This is a letter to all of those people who are outraged about a white rapist skipping merrily through a less than six-month sentence in jail, not prison.  This is a letter to everyone except rapists who, much like King Louis XVI of France, could not be reached at this time.

Rapists gonna rape.

Rapists rape because that’s what rapists do.  Rapists are an exceedingly common breed of demonic human male.  As the inferior sex, many males are wired for rapey violence.  They have possibly genetic-level damage that makes them unable to limit themselves to consensual sexual behavior.  

There are rapists of every color, creed, and financial level.  No matter what economic circumstance they are born to, rapists believe they are entitled to other people’s bodies from a young age.  The bodies in question can be those of women, girls, boys, non-human animals, whatever.  Of course it does not help that nurture abets their flawed nature, and patriarchy assists them in their pursuit of stealing what they believe is already theirs.

So enough of your cute entreaties that try to paint a picture of Brock Turner’s victim’s humanity for his rapey dad, okay?  Neither Brock Turner nor his dad give a shit, no matter what you say.  No rapist ever thought of his victim as human and he never will.  Haven’t you seen A Clockwork Orange?  

Brock Turner can and will rape again.  

So will 99% of rapists put in prison.  If you keep them in prison long enough, perhaps their preferences will turn to other males out of necessity.  This is not better. 

Most of the time, rapists do not spend a lifetime in prison for rape on the rare occasions they are caught.  They will get out; they will rape again.  You just won’t recognize their victims or have outrage about it because caught rapists will either:

A. Hide their future rapes more effectively

B. Do it to somebody you don’t care about as much, like an incarcerated transwoman, a woman of color, or a prostitute 

There is but one punishment that will stop rapists from raping, and neither does it involve castration nor does it enlist a butch incarcerated gentleman to introduce the rapist to the charming realm of forced anal and oral penetration.

The one thing that stops a rapist is a bullet in the back of his skull where neck meets head.  

Sweet, permanent DEATH

Upon the revelation of concrete evidence, such as, oh I dunno, two men on bicycles riding past a dumpster where some dead-eyed white suburban manchild is raping a woman he just met that night and could not successfully seduce, the rapist should be arrested and quietly taken to a quiet place and executed.

No trial, no family or highly-paid attorney making up excuses about how Brocky boy just wanted a little nonconsensual “action”.  

Just death, and he never rapes again.  

It’s not kind to the rapist, for sure, but it is exceedingly beneficial to the individuals the rapist will never get a chance to rape.  Execution not only ensures the rapist will never use any instrument, including his penis, to rape another human being, it guarantees the rapist will never inculcate his own progeny or pals with the type of selfishness and greed that culminates in the sexual violation of someone else.

Speedy execution also sends a crystal clear message that rape as a manifestation of male pattern violence will not be incarcerated, tolerated, gently reasoned with, or molly-coddled until it surely happens again.

It won’t happen again, at least not by that rapist in particular, because he will be dead.

Our society, as much as we like to grandstand, is not progressive.  We are backwards, ineffectual, liberal wafflers who look the other way when priests rape children and when TV stars known best for hawking frozen pudding desserts trick aspiring stars into eating roofies and then victim-blame them for being trusting souls.  We enslave our fellow human beings for cheap clothing and dumb stuff like chocolate and coffee.  We abuse and enslave animals and use up their habitats by reproducing our own narcissistic flesh mirrors.  We are disgusting and as a species, as contemptible as we are shallow.  We love injustice and worship the rich and powerful among us.  We don’t punish wrongdoers, instead, we joke about rape in prisons (where the incarcerated are mostly poor people of color who turned to selling drugs because they couldn’t make a living under the current oppressive oligarchy) because that’s easier than dealing with our own weaknesses in punishing those who actually deserve it. That’s just us.

The Audacity of Change

We could change our wimpy ways though, and with an exponentially-expanding population of over 7.4 billion of us at time of current writing, I don’t think anyone would miss a few Brock Turners.

If life on a planet of 7.4 billion is cheap, then the life of a rapist should be BARGAIN BASEMENT GOING OUT OF BUSINESS CLEARANCE SALE cheap.

I'm always full of ideas!

If the state won’t punish the Brock Turners of the world (or do anything else, such as provide affordable housing, education, clean water, health care, etc.) we have no choice but to take it into our own hands.  It’s up to us to punish the Brock Turners of the world, and that means:

-Not giving them jobs

-Not dating or marrying them

-Not letting them have a nice time and a normal life if they move into our neighborhood

In other words, we need to make life NOT OKAY for Bill Cosby, even though he’s not in jail yet and may never be. When Bill Cosby or Brock’s dad shows up at a party, they should have to worry about a small amount of powdered poison, perhaps the dried leaf of one of many common house plants, in their food.  They shouldn’t be able to own a car they’re not apprehensive about parking in a public place, because they just know some vengeful asshole from the community at large is going to dump a bottle of nail polish remover on their engine hood, flatten their tires, or spray paint RAPIST or PROUD DAD OF A RAPIST on their driver’s side door.  Again.  Their ridiculous wives, girlfriends, and mothers should be shamed and excluded both online and in real life for standing by like idle automatons.  

Hackers, crackers, and all of you writing nasty little bits of code to destroy random computers.  Isn't it time you found targets who actually deserve it?  Brock Turner's father looks like a Window's PC/Yahoo email sort of guy.  That stuff is child's play.

We can make rapists pay without shooting them in the back of their skulls, and until we progress to a point where we can destroy rapists in a sensible way, guerrilla tactics will have to suffice.