WARNING

The following blog entry contains triggers and adult subject matter. It is intended for adults only.

In New York, we have Andrew Cuomo to thank for mass confusion and bitterness. Last year a blogger outright blamed the death of his in-laws from COVID-19 on Cuomo.

Look, I’m not going to sit here and defend the man. In the article linked above, his behavior is described as “skeevy” which sounds worse but means less than what he’s been accused of. I’d call his behavior downright creepy. He had been vetted as a demigod by the press, and thus made untouchable. Many who have met him, but cannot know him as those closer to him do, have defended him with an alarming amount of zeal and venom. Being a democrat, I am disappointed and frightened.

Because the democratic party doesn’t need this. Any bad publicity is dangerous to this country’s political future. After January 6, 2021, no person should ever question the threat Republicans have become.

That doesn’t mean we should endorse cover-ups. The article leaves no doubt that watchdog journalism is lagging, biased left or right, the truth trapped somewhere in between.

CNN did in fact practically deify Cuomo, regardless of his brother having a show on the cable channel. And I will admit, that, while Andrew Cuomo did a fair job with his press conferences, he also ended up using them, and the positive feedback from them, for self-aggrandizement and a book deal.

Because. They always write fucking books, don’t they?

Then they actually sit and have conversations about who will play their role in the movie. They’re all the same, and with Trump saying that he will be back in office by July, and a bunch of loopy idiots believing him, Democrats needed to come out of the elections looking better than this. He’s a stain, Cuomo is, impossible to cover up, impossible to miss. His ego is sickening. And, yes. He cooked the books and lied.

The blogger said his relatives were casualties of Covid who should never have died. No one can truly judge the ultimate outcomes in a pandemic; it is a case of everything we know being inapplicable because of chaos mathematics. Because people in a closed system, a house, a village, a city, a province, a country – will behave in unpredictable ways and render all casualty projections crude guesswork no matter how many programmers are running variables through a system. Human behavior cannot be reduced to an algorithm.

Cuomo compensated his ego by lying during a crisis that never needed to be downplayed. The truth was what everyone needed, and now he’s just a character in a horror flick, one so bad that no director would touch it.

But if anything, the blogger found someone to blame. Isn’t that what we all want? Someone to blame for anything bad that happens? And if there isn’t anyone to blame, don’t we just pick the easiest target and throw the worst accusations, however crazy they are, at that target?

Oh, wait: I forgot to mention one thing. The blogger kind of tossed in the accusation that Democrats are engaged in depopulation.

For pity’s sake, not that again. Fuck that’s old. Make it go away, God!

A recent PSC featuring Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama stressed the fact that while they urged people to get a Covid vaccine, it was up to them, that they had a choice.

That, in the most devastating pandemic since the Spanish flu, getting the shots was still your choice to get or refuse. That’s freedom.

Trump, the man who cried “hoax”, was vaccinated. He did not shout it from any rooftop. But he got it.

Meanwhile, after leaving office as the most dishonorable and dishonest president in history, he started his own blog. When millions of readers failed to log on, he shut it down like a petulant little boy whose birthday party no one showed up for, breaking his few presents and holding his breath until his face looked like an overripe strawberry.

But here, we get back to my central point: we have the freedom of choice.

The pandemic was no doubt made worse by the poor choices of people all over the world. When countries initiated border restrictions and social distancing, and businesses shut down, many defied the rules and spread the disease. Nursing homes were hit so hard that some had trucking companies spot reefer trailers on their lots. That’s because assholes who visited them infected them. Nobody to blame. No conspiracy theory; just people who had no honor and would not face the fact that it was they who exposed the elderly to COVID-19…and basically killed them.

Some weren’t supposed to have a choice, depending on where they were. Lockdown meant, “Stay in your house.” A lot of rumors came from countries around the world, but I know that here, parties went on, masks weren’t worn even after the initial shortage was over, and people still went and made choices that we cannot deny got people killed.

Andrew Cuomo heavily restricted gatherings and travel in New York, and people were threatened with fines should they choose to defy those restrictions. He talked a good talk and most listened. Largely out of fear of dying, not any fear of the law.

If you were caught walking without a mask, most NYPD officers just gave you a mask.

Now people have more freedom and with it more choices.

It’s fascinating that few people chose to read Trump’s blog, but it means nothing because he’s clearly become more delusional since leaving office and might be unmedicated to boot. But the weird movement he started with Steve Bannon and a party of psychopaths hasn’t gone away. It won’t go away.

And if he’s unable to tweet, that shouldn’t lull you into thinking that the rot within the GOP will fade away. Like ship worms, the rot and evil are eating the party alive and no one has the balls to try to stop it. That…is their choice. Republicans have sold their souls in exchange for power, and, like all deals with the devil, been forced to commit to something which will be their undoing, yet can cause much collateral harm: we are in trouble.

And…Facebook might let Trump back on. His ban was six months, not permanent, to be reviewed after the suspension expired.

In my recent post about incest, I failed to make a critical distinction. It’s regarding choice, the right to choose, and the right-wing habit of placing blame where it doesn’t belong because they never want to appear responsible for practically anything, and anything that will further their cause will be used to frighten you.

What I’m getting at is my reference to a porn addiction which began when I was a child and was shown 8mm movies by my parents, with a sibling also watching.

I must clarify one very important thing: I am not anti-porn. Viewing pornography is anyone’s choice to make. If it is restricted after becoming so widely available, nothing good can come from it. That’s repression, and it involves the basic human function of sex. Sexual repression is nihilistic and will cause way too much harm. This article I found by accident, but I had already noticed that major internet porn sites had gone through a shakeup; something had happened, and I didn’t know exactly why.

It was as noticeable as it was puzzling.

The changes involved format, content and the ability to download it. This was startling; I knew it was legal in nature as soon as I saw it, but what had happened to make such a change necessary?

My god. The porn industry was policing itself!

It had before, but never like this.

Over the years, AIDS-infected porn stars have caused tremendous fear in those they’ve worked with, beginning with Mark Wallice, who was accused of falsifying test results after he knew he was positive. According to Wikipedia, that’s questionable, and yet it’s not. Because the health of another person in any job shouldn’t depend on one man’s honesty. In the porn industry, it does, but that’s really an illusion since testing is not prevention, and to this day, condoms are rarely used. But still, in 1998, before smartphones and broadband availability or affordability, the amateur and piracy markets had not yet become pervasive, limited largely to VHS tapes and a few DVDs. A shutdown of the main porn industry was extraordinary.

This is nothing like those days. Any time a part of any service industry begins to police itself, whether it be hospitality (which could use a shakeup) or entertainment, including music, film, TV, video games, it means the wagons are being circled.

It means that a legal fight is coming, and leaders of a particular industry know that repressive policies and laws are being drafted that will curtail the scope of their audience and therefore the profits they currently enjoy (few actors in porn ever got rich, but studios and distributors did).

The gaming industry was under such a threat in the early aughts because of violence. Not so much with Medal of Honor, but when Grand Theft Auto 3 came to the PS2, my god. You’d think the Battle of Armageddon had started; it was surely the end of the world!

To prevent congressional attacks and laws restricting content, the industry leaders, mainly publishers, agreed on a rating system that would warn consumers about content and whether it was appropriate for minors. It worked, although parents did not always pay attention. Some only noticed ratings after watching their children playing the game, at which point they freaked out. They tried to sue, but they didn’t fare well because the ratings system was in place and had been widely reported.

It was left to parents to be responsible for everything their children could see, hear or play, an argument that went farther into the past than they knew.

The conservative vultures fly in circles above internet porn. It is something that they believe is appealing to right-wing voters. It’s become a crisis, they say. And if banning all internet porn can be done in one state, namely Utah, the promise is that it can be banned by legislation in 15 other states. But there’s this thing about conservative politics lately that should scare everyone. Voter suppression bills are being drafted in multiple states which lost to Democrats last November but technically shouldn’t have; some of those are red states. And if I tell you that even in a blue state like New York, Andrew Cuomo has caused harm and resentment, even if some of that resentment is misplaced owing to conspiracy theories, then be very careful; conservatives are working at this moment to take away the rights to choose what you watch and who you vote for and without proper resistance, can actually do it.

Republicans like to scare the shit out of everyone. If they can cite a study that backs them up, or worse, inspires them, they’re all over it and men from the pulpit to the senate floor will start a panic if they can. It’s what they do, but if you look at what they’re doing, you’ll become a human lie detector. Because the fearmongering is built with lies on a foundation of biased or outright fabricated studies and reports. Often written by men and women with letters behind their names, these studies are so entrenched in lies that some are unintentionally funny. In the late 70s, dry cleaning fluid, bacon, tea and a few other major products were declared carcinogenic. No, I’m not lying; you can’t make this kind of stuff up. Paul Harvey got so fed up with the cancer nonsense that he described it like this: “they take a bunch of lab rats, pump something in through tubes constantly and when they die, they (the scientists) say, ‘See, they can’t take it’.”

But did anyone stop these stupid biased studies?

Nope. They just made worse ones. And money, usually in government grants, powers these goofy endeavors.

Take the afternoon I spent circa 1994 listening to Rush Limbaugh for example. Normally he moved from one segment to the next covering various stories. Not this day. He went on and on about some study that concluded that women will “reject” the sperm of a man who cannot afford to take care of or provide for them. I couldnt turn it off because he was serious. He believed it and was using it as a theme for the might of white men educated and all smug about their futures.

He managed, in one day, to discredit himself as an intelligent man; he further offered proof that women “on welfare” couldnt possibly have children and men out of work couldn’t possibly be fathers, and furthermore, that women had the supernatural ability of Darwinesque natural selection in their vaginal tracts.

What horseshit, because he’d made a living insulting everyone who ever took money from the government when in times of need. If women had such innate superpowers then where did all those babies he referred to as “welfare kids” come from?

How could he, claiming to have intelligence “on loan from God,” not understand that no such study was possible in the first place? Did some creeps at a university watch women have intercourse and then get them into stirrups and watch as every sperm cell was “rejected” and accounted for?

This is what Republicans do. It’s their trademark, bigotry, lies and fearmongering. Imagine if a marriage was canceled because of a woman hearing this and deciding her fiancee might not keep his job and be able to get her pregnant. Because the worst thing about Republican lies and fearmongering is that someone always believes them.

In the battle brewing over pornography, they’re doing the same thing. Calling it addictive and a mechanism for a threat to public health.

Hypocrites! They resisted measures that would have kept people from dying of Coronavirus complications. Plain and simple. They’re about as concerned for public health as a mass shooter armed with an AR-15.

The arguments against porn are, but are not limited to: it encourages violence against women; it is easily accessed by minors; it gives young people a distorted view of sexuality; it is addictive by nature and constitutes a risk to public health.

Good points, but misleading. My case is not a common one. And besides, because of my prevalent PTSD, I must correct what I called an addiction and instead label it as compulsive. It doesn’t feed any sexual need for arousal and merely floods the brain with more dopamine and serotonin than I’m getting, and usually it calms me and allows me uninterrupted sleep with no nightmares. With the chemical reaction, anyone can argue that this constitutes an addiction, but that’s flawed analysis. When not viewing adult material I do not have any withdrawal symptoms at all; indeed, I’ve gone for months, even years without it, and I was the same in every way.

However, the shame and the stigma with it are overwhelming for some people. I had neighbors in my last neighborhood who were so nosy that in a house with seven bedrooms, they must have stared at my windows, watching for any sign of movement. Due to a budgetary situation the house was, as a group home, not adorned with the most private window coverings. With curtains closed, and from a block away, a certain neighbor apparently was able to see my computer activity. Don’t ask me how he managed it; it remains a fact.

One day, I made the mistake of leaving my computer on, signed in and everything. A staff worker named Kelly used the time I was out to get hold of a partial search history and then forward it to a neighbor who was a police officer. As unprofessional and illegal as it was, soon a group of neighbors had printouts of my entire history and were across the street, reading it and commenting quite audibly that I was one “sick motherfucker” and that they would all join forces in monitoring my behavior.

That’s the stigma of living in a group home. That’s the stigma of looking at porn. It’s everything you can imagine it is, humiliating, embarrassing and terrifying. Nobody should ever know such a horrible situation.

The officer had expanded the partial search Kelly gave him. No warrants, no questioning, no arrest and no conviction, but suddenly I was the neighborhood sex predator. It got worse.

I got several emails that were being sent to people in my area, and it said a sex offender lived in the area, and was recognizable by a limp and a cane. At the time I needed surgery and I did use a cane.

Even when I arrived at a new place the emails continued. I should have consulted an attorney. If my name ever showed up, I would have.

You should be free to do whatever is legally your right to choose. But you’re not. Watch anyone you know go through what I’ve described and you’ll be filled with rage. You should be. Violating someone’s privacy and then engaging in harrassment over anything you find is against the law.

I wish it worked that way. But from the minute you logged into your first computer, you started an electronic footprint that anyone can see. You may be blackmailed, fired from your job, divorced, expelled, harrassed, bullied, maybe eventually murdered. Because some people don’t respect your freedom to choose anything at all. They think if you don’t go to church, you can’t possibly be a Christian. Or that if you watch hardcore porn, then you’re secretly gay or bisexual, if you’re a man. Because hardcore porn has penises in it. They really say these things and they believe them. The homophobic hate is the scariest because people die when it gets worse. And it always gets worse.

If you are on disability, you’re taking taxpayer dollars because you’re a lazy person who doesn’t care about working for a living.

I’ve been accused of just about everything except for the failures I freely admit to. People act all sympathetic and say I can’t blame myself for the deaths of my children. As a father, yes, I can, and I don’t have the right to dodge whatever responsibility, however small, I had. But the sympathy dries up when it comes to freely talking about what I’ve freely done. There are many things I can blame on my parents and others. Watching porn isn’t one of them. Maybe they showed me something I found more interesting and appealing than what was being done to me. I don’t know.

The injuries I sustained during my childhood are many and run deep. But if I can blame certain things on them, then there are some things I cannot. Perhaps it’s true that I was conditioned for sexual preoccupation, and that may have contributed to my promiscuity as a teen and younger man. Or compulsive masturbation or whatever. But some things I can’t fix blame for on anyone.

Conclusions

I’ve seen arguments on both sides about porn. It’s disgusting. Five years ago I read several articles, at least one from an official Christian leaders guide, that gave a large percentage of porn downloads to pastors and church computers. The protestant and catholic churches were in a real quandary: how to stop something that ultimately would be seen as damaging to the credibility of church leaders? How does one stop a man from doing anything in private?

The issue remains in limbo.

So too is it a major activity for Republicans, which makes everyone fighting porn a hypocrite of the highest order. I doubt legislation will pass restricting internet porn, but if it does, they’ll know all the loopholes.

There is scant evidence of social harm from pornography. It’s probably even saved a few marriages. I can’t side against that, because a divorce is not always the answer. Divorces destroy. It’s even true that a couple watching a movie will better communicate their needs, thus strengthening the union.

Porn is sometimes offensive even to those who regularly watch it. Many have no stomach for B&D. Extremely negative for women, breast rings are painful and likely cause deep tissue damage along with vascular and nerve damage. Men lose their penises or their ability for erections because of restrictive rings. And films where mouths contact the rectum don’t have disclaimers about the chances of getting quite sick. But you have a choice as to what you watch and what you do.

Outlawed and bootleg porn are even more extreme. I saw one involving a young woman and a horse. To accommodate the horse, she laid upon a raised table and spread her legs. The horse didn’t thrust right away, and the girl thought she was safe. She was not; one powerful thrust went all the way in and she immediately pulled away. She walked, in shock, to a wooden deck and sat down. She later died of peritonitis.

Extreme sex is therefore best avoided, in porn and in practice. But in general I have to defend your right to watch it and the government has no business trying to stop you. The comparison to voting rights restrictions is appropriate. It’s all about Republican muscle and the fight to continue their fascist rule in 2024.

If you let up…if you don’t pay attention to suppression and oppression, soon you will have no rights left. No abortions regardless of whether your life is in danger. No choice in news networks. Or schools. Or churches. Your children and grandchildren will grow up in a different world, one you cannot imagine.

But you should try to.

Because they’re going to have someone to blame.

You…and me.