Tag Archives: Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Zionists are the Most Precious Snowflakes 3

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By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Well, dearest motherfuckers, apparently I’m an anti-Semite. I know! I had know idea either. But if being a mild mannered critic of Israel like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar makes you a rabid anti-Semite then color me Adolf fucking Eichmann because there is nothing mild about me. Being an openly anti-Zionist drag queen pretty much makes that biologically impossible. When a state walls in an entire group of people based solely on race and then systematically starves them to death, I call that fucking genocide regardless of which end of the rifle the chosen people happen to be on. Pardon me all over the goddamn place for having a color blind moral compass. But apparently that’s all it takes because Zionists are the most precious snowflakes.

I say Zionists because Jews have nothing to do with this. A Jew is a member of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. A Zionist is a Jewish supremacist who believes Israel should be a fascist satellite of American imperialism and many of them aren’t even Jews. But apparently these revanchist goyum have been awarded the Jehovah given right to proclaim anyone who doesn’t agree with their insane foreign policy or the apartheid regime illegally occupying Palestine to be a stark raving, goose-stepping anti-Semite. And based on the limp-wristed, half-assed, back-peddling, Israel critics in the DNC that they’ve stapled this red scarlet letter to, a flaming, unapologetic, Israel-basher like me is all but guaranteed to make their voluminous shit-list. Good riddance. They can kiss the queerest part of my ass.

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The Councils Before Maduro! 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: , ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Venezuela is fucked up. A nation hanging from the edge of a cliff by its broken and bloody fingernails. Thick noxious clouds of acrid black smoke gather around the capital of Caracas as the bodies continue to stack up. There is all out chaos in the streets as warring clans of half-starved people open fire on each other indiscriminately. The sides are ill-defined. There seem to be leftists, soldiers and cops in uniform on both ends of the melee. The government of Nicholas Maduro rounds up scores of hellions, holding the ones who don’t get shot in the streets indefinitely in unknown locations. Meanwhile the western vaunted opposition launches full blown terrorist attacks, killing scores of soldiers and civilians alike. There are no clean hands in this fist fight. Everyone has lowered their standards of human decency to meet the standards of their nations new era of depravity. Few things are clear here. The streets and social media alike are awash with rumors and hearsay. One thing that is clear is that we’re not in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela anymore. The once robust egalitarian experiment of Bolivarianism has devolved into violent statist hell and this was the point.

Venezuela is fucked up because its been fucked up, subjected to a concerted campaign of economic sabotage that started long before Maduro’s absurd Dengist market socialist reforms. The United States launched this campaign through its numerous tentacles, public and private, in response to a democratic revolution that also began long before Hugo Chavez became its benevolent figure head. Under this relentlessly oppressive regime of crippling sanctions and monetary manipulation, a nation state of any kind would crumble beneath the pressure. Just add the constant threat of coup de tats and a return to the western sanctioned petro-fascism of past decades and even the most egalitarian experiments will take on increasingly statist and authoritarian policies to protect their revolution and the people it serves. The cruel irony being that by taking these desperate measures they adopt the very same attributes they’re attempting to stave off in the name of a revolution that these very trends betray. An almost operatic tragedy of the commons.

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A Few Thoughts About Another Goddamn Shooting 1

by • Health and Medicine • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Land

I had every intention of writing a polemic on the American Empire’s latest shit show in Venezuela this week, another erudite contemplation on the sour virtues of imperialism in some violent dirt floor theater, time zones away from my small town tranny middle class existence. But this week violence came to visit me through the all too common place spectacle of the active shooter situation. It’s so fucking cliche that I bite my tongue just saying it out loud but you really do feel like that’s a problem that happens somewhere else but not here.

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Feminism Against Chauvinistic Feminism 19

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Men and Women, Sexuality and the State • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I’ve long considered myself to be a feminist, even before I realized I was trans. It’s always seemed like basic common sense to me that people shouldn’t be defined by the contents of their genitalia but by the quality of their character. Regardless of where you stand on rape culture or abortion or Hillary goddamn Clinton, that’s really what it all comes down to. That and realizing the basic fact that our society treats women and anyone perceived as feminine like second class citizens at best. If you ask most people, left, right, or center, on these basic realities of American life, they’ll generally (if begrudgingly) agree with you. Then why is feminism still such a controversial subject? Try casually mentioning it on almost any given message board and count the seconds before a dozen trolls threaten to rape and gut you and leave you for dead by the highway. Seriously, fucking try it. I have. The very word feminism seems to bring the worst out of people online.

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Dancing On America’s Grave 2

by • American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Washington is a fucking zoo. The entire town seems to be teeming with an almost demonic energy that’s usually reserved for Third World capitals hours before the fall of some CIA funded cannibal despot. We have had fucked up presidencies before, about 44 of them if memory serves correctly, and the temptation is always rich to proclaim the current bastard the worst, but the Donald is a very special flavor of fucked up and his ADHD appears to be contagious. For the first time in centuries, the crumbling ghettos surrounding the District of Colombia look downright pristine compared to the cracked ivory white domes that have long cast shadows across their project courtyards. If you look real carefully through the purple haze of the Sour Diesel and Sherman Hemsley of Potomac Gardens you can just barely see a teary eyed Mike Pence in a West Wing window, dreaming of some place that’s green.

All across the vast expanse of Trump’s America this chaos is spreading like lice. Peep through the blinds of any given ranch-style rambler from Pittsburgh to Peoria and you’ll witness tableaus straight out of a Flannery O’Connor novel. Grotesque creatures ranting and raving across the dinner table at one another over their supposed loved ones’ refusal to despise the right villain in this sick Southern Gothic horror story of a country. Brothers at war with brothers over two sides of the same foul oligarchy. Republicrats or Dempublicans? Crips or Bloods? Kind of grants the concept of ‘White People Problems’ a sick new irony. How much for a room at the Gardens again? I desperately need some sleep and even gunshots beat the sound of gnashing teeth and cable news.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his Botox poisoned limousine liberal nemesis, Nancy Pelosi, continue to play one side of the country off the other, shutting down our crooked federal government over some fictional crisis manufactured in the middle of the fucking desert. Prison guards and TSA gropers are expected to sexually violate the public without a paycheck while Trump bets his staffers $6 billion that he can piss over that 12 foot wall.

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Panarchy as Full Spectrum Intersectionality 1

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile In  Happy Valley

Solidarity is the guiding principle for any egalitarian philosophy. The basic idea is that all oppressed people face the same enemy and the only way any of us can defeat our collective oppressor  is with the collective force of a diverse people united against it in all its demonic manifestations. Today they call this principle intersectionality. The uncivil union of big government and big business that calls itself the state murders black people, rapes trans folks, objectifies women, dehumanizes workers, and bombs the third world into, well, the third world. Separated we are weak, impoverished, crippled. But united we are dangerous, we are a force to be reckoned with.

In my mind, the natural objective of solidarity and intersectionality should be anarchy in one form or the other and only the concept of panarchy allows for one form or another to be properly explored. In spite of their once lofty ambitions and their recent rise in trendiness, state socialism and communism don’t destroy the class system, they just replace it. Ultimately the only difference between a bureaucrat and an oligarch is a title. The Bolshevik interpretation of the Marxist Dictatorship of the Proletariat is just asinine.

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Lessons From Rojava Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military • Tags: , , ,

A very important read. Absorb every word of this.

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

This holiday season was unusually kind to the anti-imperialists among us. Trump shocked the world the week before Christmas by actually putting America first for a change and calling for the immediate withdrawal of the some 2000 troops still illegally occupying North Eastern Syria. Regardless of his motives, which I’m sure had very little to do with anything vaguely resembling the Christmas spirit, it’s hard to deny that this executive decision was a decisive win for peace.

Hard but not impossible. The doves of the progressive left have enthusiastically jumped through their own pinched assholes to stomp on McGovern’s grave with talking points straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook. Sadly, their onslaught of non-stop pro-war agit-prop, aided and abetted by the rabid war junkies of Trump’s own administration, may have worked. The perpetually spineless Trump has moved the goal post for the pull-out from 30 days to 90 days to 3 months to ‘maybe later, we’ll see…’

Regardless, the rift within the Pentagon is likely irreversible and the chaos its caused can only be interpreted as the official failure of America’s 6 year imperial project for the region. Being the peace-loving bomb-thrower that I am, the one part of this splendid fiasco that feels truly tragic to me is the increasingly likely implosion of the Rojava Revolution.

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12 People Who Don’t Suck! 2

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By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Every year since I started this blog I’ve written a Shitlist of all the cunts who drive me to near homicidal ideation. And every year since I started this blog I’ve countered that poison pen cocktail with a more altruistic list to bring in the new year, a list of people that miraculously don’t suck (I know, right?). It’s often a hard list to write because so few people deserve to be on it. I often have to struggle not to put the same damn people on it every year. This year I’ve decided to leave out my holy trinity of repeat offenders, the patron saint of the Fifth Estate, Julian Assange, and my online mentors, Angela Keaton and Thomas Knapp (consider this sentence an honorable mention), and try to put nothing but first timers on this list. I came up with twelve, and like my shitlist, not everybody is going to agree with my choices. But with me, someone is always going to have to go fuck themselves. Like it or loath it, these are the holy handful of dearest motherfuckers who have kept the proverbial pistol out of my mouth in 2018, and I feel duty bound to salute them.

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Anarchism and the Mentally Ill 1

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Health and Medicine • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Like many of my posts, I’m writing this piece from the clerical unit of my local psych rehab. There are all kinds of people here around me; black, white, old, young. But the one thing we all have in common, the one thing that brings us all together here, is that, for lack of a better word, we’re all fucking nuts. Schizophrenia, bipolar, a vast rainbow across the autism spectrum, I personally enjoy a zesty melange of depression, social anxiety, gender dysphoria, and agoraphobia that have plagued me for most of my life and my family for generations. We come here for a lot of reasons, for work, for recovery, but mostly we come here to belong. Because it’s the one place where we can be who we are without fear of being censured by a society that has deemed us defective.

I am mentally ill, dearest motherfuckers. But what does that really mean in this day and age. In the modern world, a mentally ill person is essentially someone who is pathologically ill equipped to take part in society. But considering the state of society, is that really a disability? We live in a country that prizes mindless obedience to authority and no holds barred consumption to the point of ecological genocide. If you ask me, the people who aren’t freaked out are the fucking sickos.

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Godspeed William Blum Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

William Blum, a role model, a hero, and the author of my favorite book, Killing Hope, died this past week at 85 in Arlington, VA, from complications related to kidney failure. Blum pulled zero punches when it came to his acidic criticism of America’s imperialist foreign policy or its shameless defenders in the mainstream media, like the loathsome New York Times, those fine folks who brought you the Iraq War, who penned a pissy little obituary about a real journalist titled, “William Blum, US Policy Critic Cited by Bin Laden, Dies at 85“. I sincerely hope that I’m not alone when I wish those creeps blackouts, toothaches. and indigestion for Christmas. Morons like Mr. Sam Roberts aren’t fit to dig Blum’s grave, much less piss on it.

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HW: Death of a Dick 2

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It seems like just last week we finally fucking buried John McCain’s stinking corpse and it’s already time for another 24/7, month long, imperial funeral marathon. Since the very second former president and well known war criminal George HW Bush finally dropped dead (What was he, like 900?), every channel from CNN to Nickelodeon has been surgically attached to his decomposing dick. “Oh, what a great man!” “What an American hero!” “His breath smelled like roses and his jizz tasted like mayonnaise!” Judging by the coverage, you would have thought the man cured fucking cancer rather than twiddling his thumbs while a whole generation of queer people died of a plague he refused to even address so he could keep cutting checks from those Millennarian fag-bashers in the Christian Right, OH WHAT A HERO!…

We’re all told how humble our 41st president was, yet his obnoxiously opulent funeral put some of the African dictators he bankrolled to shame with all the subtlety of a goddamn Master P video. Pre-pubescent quires and blazing guns and fluttering doves and balling bitches. I’m surprised they didn’t drag his gilded casket away behind a solid gold tank. I’ve seen North Korean missile parades with more modesty. The bastard even had some saccharine Josh Groban knock-off warbling philosophic about his Greek godlike achievements- “He swung his golden sword, and spilt blood for our lord, and when he unsheathed his dong, his interns swore it twas a gourd…” I would have burst out laughing if I didn’t have to swallow a mouthful of vomit.

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Support the Houthis Reply

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By Nick Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Growing up I was obsessed with the counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s, so much so that I now instinctively associate a lot of it with my own childhood even though I grew up in the 90’s and 00’s. Shaved Fish and Let It Bleed play like soundtracks to my teenage years. Some of my first crushes were on righteous babes in arms like Angela Davis and Leila Khaled. And I spent hours pouring over my parents vintage magazines, devouring articles on the Black Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army. What can I say, I was a weird fucking kid. But my fixation with radical chic felt very appropriate during the Orwellian miasma of the Bush years and in some very sad ways, it feels even more appropriate today.

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Vote or Don’t (the Brick and the Ballot Box) Reply

by • Electoralism/Democratism, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Like any twilight empire, America has some strange and perverse rituals that are generally excepted as normal by our unblinking masses. There’s the fascist war prayer of the National Anthem, which you can lose your livelihood for betraying with a knee. There’s the Kidz Bop chant version known as the Pledge of Allegiance, my own childhood protest of which had my archdiocese contacting the nearest exorcist. Then of coarse there’s the incessant soldier worship which mandates us all to repeatedly thank everyone who has ever served in our colossal armed services for preserving our “freedoms”, regardless of whether they launched drone strikes from Las Vegas cubicles or shot Cuban gardeners on golf courses in Grenada. But all of that jingle brained jingoism pales in comparison to the peer-pressure-palooza that is the right to vote.

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Make Halloween Dangerous Again! 1

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By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Halloween is quite easily my favorite holiday. A heathen celebration the Christians failed to conquer, it’s a time of joyful chaos and youth rebellion decorated by skeletons, scattered leaves, flickering jack-o-lanterns, and bonfire smoke. A holiday where serial killers are lionized and everyone dresses in drag, betraying conformity to expose their darkest desires to be whores and outlaws. It’s the one time of year when a genderfuck malcontent like me can feel halfway normal without having to sell out. It’s also arguably this stupid countries only truly anarchist holiday, or at least it was and it still should be.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Halloween meant one night a year when kids owned the streets, wandering unsupervised from house to house dressed in disguise like demons and monsters, appropriating candy from random strangers under the threat of vandalism like tiny unions of egoists. Trick or Treat began as a threat. You could hand over the good stuff (and it better be good) or you could get your house fucked up in a toilet paper draped act of propaganda of the deed, letting the whole neighborhood and any other passing horde of hoodlums know who fucked up and why. In certain parts of the country there was a completely separate holiday called Hell Night, when children engaged in mass acts of gleeful sabotage against the parents, teachers, clergy, and cops who made them feel powerless during the rest of the year. Windows were broken, tires were slashed, and a sense of justice was returned to the universe.

Halloween and Hell Night weren’t like Christmas or Easter. The only gifts you got where the gifts you took, the gifts you earned. It was an empowering event that celebrated lawlessness and the collective power of us against them. So it should come as little surprise that the thems of this world have conspired to neuter this heathen celebration of unfettered youth power, by badge, bible, or checkbook. Over the last couple decades Halloween has been transformed into something truly monstrous, the worst kind of monster, a fascistically vanilla monster called “normal”. A pejorative so hideously fowl that it could have only been created by an adult, dead from the heart up.

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In Defense of National Anarchism 2

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

When I first learned that I had been published on Attack the System, a site notorious for being something of a safe space for national anarchists, I was both confused and intrigued. Intrigued because the national anarchists have a rather unsavory rep among their fellow anti-statists as being a kooky breed of quasi white supremacists. And confused because I happen to be an aggressively queer Marxian syndicalist. But also being a hard-luck, technologically challenged, writer who’s shit is often too radical even for the fringe, I decided I could hardly look a gift horse in the mouth. So I said fuck it, why not?

Then something very strange happened. The national anarchists turned out to be human beings and they seemed to legitimately dig my shit. So I put them to the test. I sent them all of my posts, not just the ones I thought wouldn’t offend their traditionalist sensibilities. I sent them candid posts about my own complex gender identity. I sent them posts referencing my past dalliances with communism and my continued admiration for the Black Panthers. I sent them posts in which I openly and gleefully derided the very notions of biological race and gender. I didn’t write these posts with the national anarchists in mind, it just happened to be the kind of shit I write about and I made zero attempt to shield my new audience from it. To my surprise, not only did every single one of those posts get published, they were a hit. Attack the System even went so far as to make me an editor, which was particularly kind considering that I can barely edit my own work, let alone anyone else’s.

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My Shitlist 2018 Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

This blog is a lot of things to me. It’s art. It’s therapy. It’s a bullhorn from which I can shout my radical diktats to a small horde of loyal followers whom I lovingly refer to as my dearest motherfuckers. Hopefully it’s a launching pad for a future revolution that will liberate poor people once and for all from the shackles of big government and big business (or do I repeat myself.) But when it all comes down to it, lets face it, I’m here to bitch. That’s why once a year I drop all artistic and political pretenses and simply make a list of all the people who piss me off the most. I call it my shitlist and 2018 has provided me with no shortage of shit. Now if I put everyone that chaps my ass on this list it would be longer than fucking Gravity’s Rainbow, so I’ll just pick a handful in no specific order to roast like pigs on a spit. So here it is, dearest motherfuckers, My Shitlist 2018.

John McCain–  After a lifetime as America’s most celebrated war monger, the one thing that John could do for the world, the only act of mercy that that rapacious murder junkie should have been capable of performing is to finally do us all a big goddamn favor and just fucking die already. But no, John McCain even has to die like a fucking dick. Over a week, a goddamn week of funerals and parades and tributes and memorials and animal sacrifices and imperial orgies, all of them carefully planned by that ego-drunken light bulb factory bomber, to celebrate his foul legacy of homicide advocacy like a goddamn pharaoh. By day five of this ordeal, I was screaming at the TV set “Just give me a goddamn shovel! I’ll bury the cunt myself!!” All I have left to say to the first dead man to make this list is bon voyage you putrid butcher of civilians. Tell Satan that Armageddon’s going great.

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Voluntary Tribalism: Why Not? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I’ve always found it absurd that white nationalists bitch the loudest about identity politics when they’re the winy snowflakes who fucking invented the goddamn concept. White isn’t even a race for Christ sake. There is no Whitestan. There is no traditional white tribe. It’s a class concept designed to justify an oligarchy without a royal bloodline. I’m pretty sure that the first “white” guys were just a bunch of slave owners who settled on the superiority of their lack of melanin after they finished taking inventory on eye color and penis size and came to the conclusion that skin was the one thing they had in common that the field hands couldn’t lay claim to. In today’s divided states of America identity politics are mostly used to keep different genres of poor people at each others throats while the one percent rapes their wives (often literally) and pollutes their land.

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Looking Left to Panarchy 2

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I haven’t always been an anarchist but I’ve always been a radical. After being raised in the pro-life movement I discovered the Communist Manifesto as a 14 year old lapsed malcontent. I didn’t understand every word of it but the inflammatory anti-clerical rhetoric lit a fire in me that never went out. After spending several years as a teenage anarchist, influenced in equal measure by Subcomandante Marcos and Johnny Rotten, I turned to state socialism, inspired by the bold anti-imperialist antics of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution. It was also around this time that I became enamored by tales of the Bolsheviks, Che Guevara, and those dastardly Castro brothers. Marxist-Leninism and Democratic Centralism made sense to a twenty-something closeted agoraphobic. Like my life it felt preserved in formaldehyde. It felt safe.

But there’s nothing radical about safe and when I came out of the closet to take my life back from mental illness and gender tyranny, I was ready to dream dangerously again. The suspiciously early demise of Hugo Chavez followed shortly by the cataclysmic failure of his signature revolution was the final straw. Chavez did everything right but when he dropped dead the revolution dropped dead with him. For me, that was the last nail in the coffin for state socialism or state anything for that matter. I was drawn back to anarchism by the unexpected triumph of the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria and the prison writings of the man who inspired it, another post-Marxist anti-statist named Abdullah Ocalan. But I’ve remained both conscious and unapologetic of my tangled radical roots and my objectives have always remained the same, the creation of a classless post-capitalist society.

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A Politically Incorrect Guide To Not Being a Dick 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Land

Political correctness is a fucking bust. It may have started with the best of intentions but so was the Russian Revolution and both ended in bourgeois tyranny. Political correctness has been more or less the law of the zeitgeist since the early Eighties when the radical feminists teamed up with the puritanical Reaganites to poop the raucous party of the Seventies, after the CIA unleashed AIDS to kill all the fun faggots (I’m only half-kidding). And in the proceeding decades the PC revolution has achieved absolutely nothing. Black and brown people are still poor as dirt. Women and femmes are still roundly violated on a daily basis. And the prison state has never been stronger.

The only thing political correctness really achieved was making it easier for bigots to hide behind the facade of good manners. Based on policy alone, the Clintonian Democrats clearly despise brown and queer people as much as those knuckle-draggers in the alt-right, they just know how to cover their ass with careful newspeak like “super-predators” and empty gestures to people who disgusted them three weeks ago when they weren’t politically viable. Personally, I’ll take an open bigot like David Duke over some squishy closet-basher like Alec Baldwin any day of the week. At least that silicone supremacist will call me faggot to my face.

So the current backlash against the malign influence of political correctness in not only totally natural, it’s also totally necessary. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a fucking dick. The reality is that marginalized individuals such as myself do have plenty of reasons to be pissed off and straight white cis-folk could strongly benefit from learning why and realizing that their mainstream cache does afford them some privileges that the rest of us don’t have. I’m willing to bet that most of you can enter a public restroom without having to seriously consider the possibility that somebody might set you on fire for having the wrong genitalia. But nothing gets solved without conversation, so I’ve decided to put together a few suggestions on how to be politically incorrect without being a total dick.

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Who’s Afraid of Comrade Hermit? 35

by • Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Its recently been brought to my attention by a well respected member of the libertarian literati that my writing more or less sucks. I wont name any names, god knows I’ve burned enough fucking bridges, but suffice it to say you would know who he is if I did. This isn’t a new complaint. I’ve heard it before but the certain terms of his criticism and the fact that I actually respect the son of a bitch made its way through my armor like a spear. Unfortunately for him, the only way I know how to cope with such turmoil is through my bad writing.

His gripe was a tired old sawhorse often tossed about by white cis-gender libertarians. What it basically amounts to is that he’s uncomfortable with my “personal” style of narrative. He’s revolted by all the I, I, I’s. I this, I that, I hate war, I have feelings, and I share them with my work, and apparently I shouldn’t fucking do this. Fair enough. My writing is personal. I’m a personal person. Things like war and the state effect me deeply so I express those feelings honestly through my prose. Apparently this along with my penchant for profanity makes my work unpublishable by the big shots of libertarian online journalism. Apparently my work is too unconventional to meet their sterling standards of literary integrity.

Well fuck them. Apparently those cunty know-it-alls have never heard of New Journalism. If it was up to these self-appointed Mandarins of the fifth estate Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Matt Taibbi would have never been published. Apparently they skipped class the day their staunchy universities taught about Gonzo Journalism. The basic message that I’ve gotten from these people is that I’m too different. And they call themselves libertarians?

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Notes From a Sputnik Leftist Reply

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By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Russophobia has become America’s new favorite form of bigotry. You can’t jaywalk in this goddamn country without being accused of first degree Putin puppetry. This cold borscht of xenophobia has been brewing for some time but it has taken on a whole new spiciness with Robert Mueller’s blockbuster witch trials and the alleged pervasive Putinist conspiracy to subvert our so-called democracy. The shocking thing, to me at least, is that even stalwart elements of the radical left have been effected by the fumes of the latest Red Scare. One of my favorite writers, CounterPunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair, has taken to referring to Russiagate critics such as myself as the Sputnik Left. It’s cute. I kinda like it, but then again you are talking to a non-binary person who takes tranny as a compliment. I’ve never been particularly hesitant to embrace the role of the villain. After all, who else is going to blow up the system? But there are still bones to be picked and I’m just the bitch to pick them.

The general stereotype of the Sputnik Left is that we’re a bunch of bitter, Putin loving, conspiracy theorists who ingest RT like cheap caviar and maintain a decidedly myopic view of Russia’s alleged involvement in the 2016 election among other nefarious acts of Rusky skulduggery. Jeffrey recently described us as “political activists who rigorously apply Chomsky’s lens to the NYT, WashPost, and the Guardian, but regurgitate as gospel whatever they read or hear on RT or Sputnik”, and like even the least of Jeff’s work there is a grain of truth here. I have friends who fit that description to a tee but it’s an awfully broad brush for a diverse crew. I can’t speak for all of us but I figured one of us might as well attempt a rebuttal.

First off, Putin: I am not nor have I ever been a Putin puppet. As a genderqueer anarchist, I’m sure that Vlad wouldn’t think twice about chucking my radical faerie ass into a gulag. Like all politicians, Putin is greedy, vain, stupid, and shallow. People in his country starve while he hobnobs with the kind of cruel oligarchs that were rightfully strung from the lamp posts during the Revolution. But the western notion that Putin is the worst thing to happen to Russia since Stalin is just fucking silly. The man may be a greedy egomaniac (and likely closet queen) but he has shown an enormous and at times downright shocking amount of restraint when confronted repeatedly by western aggression. My and others recognition of this fact doesn’t make us Putin apologists anymore than the critics of the Second Gulf War were Saddam apologists.

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Who Cares About Dirty Brown Genocide? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The scene was apocalyptic, like something out of a George Romero movie gone horribly wrong. Tiny bodies littered the shattered concrete, stained pitch black with soot and blood. Some of them were as still and stiff as calcified ventriloquist dummies, breathing nothing but smoke. Some of them rived in agony, mangled limbs throbbing and kicking, eyes rolled back in their battered little skulls as they screamed in agony to an indifferent god. The landscape that surrounds them is a bleak, smoldering, landfill overpopulated by a seemingly random collection of twisted metal and charred body parts; Arms, legs, heads, jagged fragments of bones and bubbling molten globs of shredded viscera, and every here and there a haunting sign of the casualties battered innocence; A doll with a heat warped plastic face, the busted half of a pink plastic lunchbox, and at the center of it all, a boy no older than 7, sitting upright, covered in his playmates blood, with an oversized UN-blue backpack still strapped to his bony shoulders, staring a thousand yards into an abyss that no one that young should ever see. They were children. They were all just children. And they were obliterated by an American bomb.

This was the latest chapter in the endless horror story called the Yemen Civil War. But it’s not a civil war. A civil war requires two sides on the same playing field. Whats going on in Yemen ceased to be a war at all long ago. This is a slaughter, a genocide, a holocaust. It’s latest victims were children on a school bus, coming home from a picnic, miles away from anything resembling a military installation. Over 40 dead, scores injured, many if not most of them under 10. This was a deliberate act of terrorism perpetrated by our “allie” Saudi Arabia with the full aid and support of these fine United States. We supplied the weapons. We fueled the planes. We provided the precise logistics that told our proxies exactly who they were murdering. We did everything but pull the goddamn trigger. And as usual nobody in this timezone or the next could be bothered to really give a shit.

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