Morning Mess, May 30 2023

Hey there kids, after a bit of a mental health break I’m back and at it.

Me Stuff

I’ve changed the title of this newsletter to reflect the shift in focus away from me and more toward news and comment. Necessary URLs will be set up with redirects so old links continue working.

You can skip to the next header if you don’t care about internet drama.

I’m not going to go on about this too much because it just feeds the beast, but this is once again a pattern that I’ve been observing for a long time.

Close friends with whom I’ve discussed it over the years know that I’ve suspected the source for well over a decade, but they finally slipped and outed themselves beyond any reasonable doubt when trying to recruit yet another troll to do their dirty work last week.

This person’s behavior is rooted in whisper campaigns and back-room antics, ingratiating themselves to the clickbait crowd or not realizing they outed themselves many, many times over the years.

It includes calling my new roommate – within literal hours of my changing my address on my voter registration and domains, who I’ve mentioned previously has a terminal stage four cancer diagnosis so that’s totally on-brand for le stalker, they did the same to my parents’ last years – to harass them with similar lies, which was pointless.

It’s gross, sick, and obsessive. The person responsible has been involuntarily committed to psychiatric confinement in the past, and has tried repeatedly to con me into committing myself…often in response to some emotional distress I’m experiencing that they actually inflicted.

Going into the ugly details of that person is more attention than they deserve. Unfortunately I have a triggerable mental illness and they know it and they know my triggers because they’ve been trying to cuddle up to me for a quarter-century so it has to be spoken about a little.

The evidence is sufficient for me, but not likely to be enough to take to court and get a restraining order that wouldn’t do any good anyway.

Eventually they’ll crash and burn and end up back in the nice white room with the soft walls, the only reason they’re not there now is they’re predatory as hell and keep attaching themselves to insecure women with lots of money (this isn’t speculation; more than one of his partners has asked me to get him to stop in the past, as though that’s within my power). Their endgame for me is to leave me with nowhere else to turn so they can play hero, like a fire-fighter who sets the fires themselves so they can get the praise for putting them out.

The bottom line is this person has been trying to push me over the edge of suicide for about twenty-five years because they resent me talking them out of their own (and leaving them no honorable way to rationalize it), and every time it doesn’t work they escalate with a new low. In the end there’s no punishment worse for that person than having to wake up every day being who they are and knowing they’re too weak of character to ever be anything else.

So now, I’m still quite down and not feeling greatly motivated but I’m forcing myself to get back on the ol’ horse and keep riding now because if I let this keep me idle much longer it’s only going to further damage my work and reputation. Enough of the personal drama, let’s get on with it.

The (Actual, Very Late) Morning Message

Two stories I want to look at quickly today.

The first is the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas, which is doing a great job of getting the “capitalist, let’s keep up appearances” fascists arguing with the “we’ve won so let’s stop pretending this is about anything but gaining power” fascists.

To be clear, Paxton’s behavior being illegal and unethical isn’t what’s driving this. What’s driving it is the risk that allowing him to get away with it anymore will tend to tip off the marks and people will start looking more closely at how the GOP does business. As a sidebar it helps get lefties cheerleading part of the GOP and attempts to create a narrative that the whole party isn’t completely off the rails into full blown fascism, which of course is not true.

Keep your eye on this situation and watch for one GOP faction to try leveraging it as a redemption tour, “see, we’re not all bad!” They are.

The other story is the launching and subsequent detection of a massive new fascist disinformation/propaganda campaign designed to troll people susceptible to such things into outing themselves and following fascist agitprop pages.

Particularly insidious about this run is that the majority of it is couched in appeals to nostalgia and military worship in the US, including active duty personnel and their families. Pages with names like like “I Love US Military” interspersed with “cute animals” and “hey old people who aren’t real good with computer literacy, don’t you long for the good old days?” bait to reel people in, then they start seeding fascist messaging to see who drops, knowing what whoever’s left is a prime target for their work. Probably the most important story I’ve ever written, and probably going to be ignored until some lone-wolf stochastic terror attack leads back to one of them.

Sorry it’s a little short and boring today, but there it is. We’ll see you in the actual morning tomorrow, hopefully!