The Limits of Compassion: So You've Opened Your Heart to Radical Empathy and Recognized the Deep, Sacred Humanity in Every Living Being You Connect With Online...But What About THAT Fucking Guy?

Note: This is cross-posted from the paid tier of my new Substack. I am now aware Substack has issues, but not yet able to untangle that from the issues Patreon has when I'm wholly unwilling to leave Patreon despite its problems. So I've cross-posted this here for those of you who don't want to involve yourselves with Substack, which I fully understand. With the tire-fire of Twitter, I'm experimenting with other platforms, not committing to anything yet--except Patreon, for whom, and for you, I am ride or die.

But this isn't what I would call a Mad Fiction Laboratory essay. Few of what I end up posting over at Substack will be. They'll be more political and a lot less cozy. So I hesitate to say I'll cross-post everything, because I value this being a cozy space for all of us! Protecting this space is a big priority for me. So here's this one, yay! But I want this little world to stay warm and kind, so forgive the intrusion of politics. 

This will not replace this month's usual Patreon essay.

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One of the things I want to do with the paid tier of this Substack is essays like this one. Essays I could put up openly, full of thoughts I completely and fervently stand by and would have no issue proudly attaching my name to. Essays that, were they to go viral or achieve any sort of popularity, would attract whining, shrieking nonsense from every fucking moldy gutter of the internet, taking up my time and energy and VERY CONSTANTLY TESTED PATIENCE to wade through with a normal, healthy blood pressure.

Things I want to say and find important, but honestly? I just don’t want to fucking hear it from the real and actual people I’m talking about, who’ve developed the nasty narcissist’s habit of actually responding to low-traffic commentary about their cultural malfeasance because it’s all a fun game to them and the prize is feeling talked about. That, or sending their drooling shitbat-horde to harass anyone who dares to breathe maybe you are being a bit of an asshole right now what with your hating everyone and calling for a lot of groups’ deaths could you possibly not we are all very tired and busy thank you.

I just don’t always want to play goalie against the shitbat team.

But if you’ve paid to be part of this little “newsletter,” (and oh my god, thank you, hi, I remain amazed anyone did) I figure you’re more or less okay, and probably at least 30-40% on my team, so you’re probably not going to tell Ben Shapiro I’m about to call him a shitbat (which I am). Possibly more importantly, I’m willing to take the bet that you’re really unlikely to start frothing at the comment section about how I myself am the shitbat, and also glue, such that foul calumny bounces off them and sticks to me and also vaccines are made of billions of tiny demons which can mysteriously be defeated with the power of refreshing peppermint essential oil.

So I’m going to get into something that troubles me pretty often, and I’m trusting you all to come along for the ride.

I talked a big game about love in Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things. Love each other. Love things. Love people. Talk to human beings and listen to them. And that is a very easy thing to say, especially for someone like me, who really and genuinely does love a fuckton of things and people, who loves talking AND listening, who’s watched Ted Lasso an embarrassing number of times, and whose day job fundamentally requires me to be able to empathize daily with any and every kind of person from the best to the worst, and flip from one to the other on a dime.

Yet even as I was writing the talk and listen and love part, a little rude chain-smoking donkey-voiced barfly part of my brain went: yeah, but you only mean people you like, you sneaky bitch. You don’t really mean to listen to people on the internet with a whole heart, because “people on the internet” are super hyped Sunday-Monday to tell everyone that the President is a clone, vaccines cause pronouns, and Democrats drink adrenochrometinis on the reg during their moonlit sabbats at Pizza Hut.

And you know, I have to face the cynicism I’ve developed just as much as the hope. Because a whole lot of “people on the internet” have devoted their whole lives and more importantly, livelihoods to a level of malevolent science fiction no professional could dream of unless they are L. Ron Hubbard, which, fine, yes, we are also capable of being top-tier shitbats, we’re not special.

And while I can, for the space of a few hours, hold in my head a great and surpassing love for my species in their horror and majesty…like…come on. I’m not any kind of saint or zen teacher or even professional soccer coach. Anyone who knows me can tell you I’m not. I hate shit all the time. I think human consciousness was as much of a mistake as the human appendix every hour on the hour. I’m just not the kind of enlightened person who can actually extend infinite loving compassion and understanding to everyone even when they are a fucking chittering doucheroach. Even if intellectually I can at least nod sagely and think correct nice progressive hurt people hurt people kinds of thoughts and certainly understand that Donald Trump has a real human wounded heart probably, and imagine that he went through a lot of trauma and abandonment and pain as a child because his parents were 2/3 of Satan’s neighborhood bridge group.

I still don’t fucking care because at the end of time and space I deeply hope that there is still one lonely alien monastery out there on one lonely alien asteroid solemnly tolling out a bell until the last breath of the universe that in the language of their most sacred faith sounds exactly like fuck you in particular, Donald John Trump.

So to be an honest person, which is a thing I, as a biped and an artist and a person who enjoys being listened to sometimes, and believes you get listened to by being as honest as possible, I have to look at myself and ask: When I say listen and learn and love and engage and open yourself up to the strange and the wild…how far does that go?

Am I willing to be open to the strange wildness of the guys who think JFK Jr is rising from the grave to be Vice President? What about the less obviously cracked off thought leaders like noted shitbat Ben Shapiro? Jordan Peterson? Andrew Tate, whose current situation will never stop making it rain popcorn? What about human xenoshart-vuvuzela Marjorie Taylor Greene? The Puppies and Gamergaters of old who rebooted Naziism just to (entirely fail to) kick girls out of “their” clubhouse? Actual cannibal Peter Thiel? Can I listen to these howlers with an open heart just in case it’s me who’s in a bubble and I am wrong about everything? If I can’t, what if that makes me no better?

And what about the harder ones? JK Rowling, who clearly has enough soul in her to write something beautiful that virtually all children love, but not enough to cease being a screaming fuckcannon all the time? Dave Chappelle, who I once adored? Elon Musk, who I never did, but surely once assumed had an IQ somewhat greater than an old gumdrop in a half-dried up puddle outside a Circle K?

And I’m not gonna both sides it, but don’t think I don’t know there’s a whole dingus parade on my own side, too. Who in some ways I’m even less willing to call out because they are on my side but mostly they are not actual fucking criminals (Even if there is definitely plenty of left-grift), insurrectionists, active deliberate sadists, or eagerly looking to do a fascism or a genocide, whichever seems more fun this week. They may not use terms correctly, or miss a trick with fact-checking, or go ham on people pretty damned close to on their side when a little restraint might be in order, or misunderstand some things I wish they didn’t, or even agree with the right on things I really wish they didn’t, but people on the left don’t believe clownshoes bonkers science fictional scenarios that change their doomsday clock and worldbuilding week by week, you know? Am I willing to be talked around to the conviction that violent anti-capitalist revolution is the only answer and will definitely result in a more progressive system rising from the ashes? Not really. But I can dance to it without having to TURN IN MY REALITY CARD.

But where does that leave the other side I can’t fuck with? Where does that leave “love the small and the weird and the new?” What about Trump and DeSantis and poor dumb closeted Lindsey Graham and the rest of the ravening horde? What about Ron and Jim Watkins, Q themselves? Am I willing to extend warm mother-goddess energy to Brett Kavanaugh and consider what pain made him who he is? What about my skinhead meth-dealer uncle out west who posts seriously disturbing American History X style TikToks? (We all have families, and just cause I can write pretty doesn’t mean mine’s fancy.)

Because OF COURSE I FUCKING DON’T HAVE ANY BEAUTIFUL PATRONESS OF THE OASIS SPIDER ROBINSON MR ROGERS MISS MAINE WORLD PEACE ENERGY OR COMPASSION OR BURNING MAN DRUM CIRCLE LOVE FOR THEM GOD DAMN I’M NOT A SELFLESS BOSOMY FAIRY FROM A FUCKING HYRULE FOUNTAIN.

And maybe that makes me a shitbat, too. Because I may not know how to use Substack or Mastodon very well yet, but I know how to write a great villain. And the way you write a great villain is to simply imagine they are not a villain at all, and construct a worldview in which that is an unalterable truth. In which up is down, war is peace, Tuesday is Sunday, white people really are superior, women really are evil, venal chattel, gay and trans folk really are monsters, the Jews really do control everything (they fucking don’t), abortions cause hurricanes, and God is factually going to punish the earth if we don’t fall in line.

In their world, they are right and virtuous and brave, they are truthtellers and rebels and fighters for a just cause, they are keepers of a light that they believe is both precious and under threat, and even writing any of that makes me want to barf, because it’s not a light, it’s a horrid little poisonous radioactive intestinal worm of hatred.

But I suppose it does cast a shadow.

And that is how they see themselves…or at least how they would like others to see them seeing themselves. Because I’m not convinced they actually are great villains. I’m not convinced they truly believe any more than one or two of those, and that only because they themselves are white or straight or rich, and thus that state is obviously super cool and correct. I suspect narcissism is their only non-negotiable stance. And even when I am most shocked by the behavior of some people on the left, I never really think they’re not at least acting from a place of authenticity, if not exactly playing by Daniel Tiger’s rules.

WAIT I’M SUPPOSED TO BE COMPASSIONING WITH THE SHITBATS.

When I was younger and had more patience, I did listen to Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing radio hosts every once in awhile. Just to see. Just to hear. Just to be able to make a good argument if I had to. And my grandmother, with whom I lived, was an early adopter of Hannity and Colmes as a nightly lifestyle, so I heard all that syphilitic sophistry without my consent. (Did you know Hannity used to have a pet liberal on a leash to beat up every 24 hours?)

If I die younger than I should, it’s probably because I exposed myself to that toxic morass. But I can’t do it anymore. I get physically ill too fast. But I know they do, too, if they chance on anything outside their bubbles. And that troubles me a lot.

Because I was exposed to all that shit. And not once was there even a moment where it was a possibility that I might start believing it. Why? Why was it so easy for my grandmother to fall into it, my uncle, everyone’s grandmothers and uncles? Not because I’m so super duper smart I could never fall for anything, I definitely could. Not because I’m such an amazing stingent fact-checker, I have 100% repeated things I heard but did not research and had to double back and own up to being a dumb asshole.

In my darker moments, I wonder if I was never susceptible because I occupy too many of the categories the right hates to be able to line my ass up and salute my own death. AFAB, neurodiverse, gender non-conforming, queer. An artist, a freelancer, a formerly homeless person. And if that’s the only reason, well, I can’t call it virtue, because it’s the other side of the same self-interest.

Shouldn’t I be able to empathize with them and accept them if I expect them to be able to do that for me? And yet, that feels an awfully lot like the old media trap of liberal journalists gnawing their own bellies open trying to reach out to Trump voters in the Diner of Derangement in Dipshit, Ohio to ask them pwease Mr. Guy Who Electrocuted His Own Gay Son and Isn’t Sorry, what we can do to make you like us and not vote for hell to be unleashed on earth?

I would like to think it’s more that I’m a historian by training, an ancient historian who is sort of required to look at the way these patterns form over and over again without fruit, and who comes out on the right side of history, and who was a shitbat than, would be a shitbat now, and never had anyone’s best interests’ in mind but their own. Because absolutely none of this hasn’t happened before. It only happens faster now, because we can talk faster, lie faster, spread news faster, protest faster, fall apart faster.

Maybe put ourselves back together faster.

Maybe not.

I can look at Ben Shapiro and see a privileged rich kid much like all these other privileged rich kids (the ones who weren’t privileged middle class kids or poor kids with a bad meme-set and a grudge) who never had to really work or struggle, who grew up in a deeply conservative religion that profoundly favors boys (does it even matter which one honestly?), whose cousin was a famous child actress and whose father was a composer while his sister, not him, was the inheritor of the music bug. I can imagine growing up having your every word treated as gold. I can’t relate, but I can imagine. I can even extrapolate that maybe he still felt insecure and unfavored because of his size and his voice and his religion and even his intelligence, because he clearly is smart, unlike a lot of these people. I can see how he’d sort of miss the part where you turn 18 and get out there and meet people who aren’t like you and figure out you’re not the only real person in the world because Shapiro smoothly transitioned at an incredibly young age into the political world where he expected that to stay true and it DID, as long as he stayed just this far right—because of course Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew, so his fascist bona fides come right up to the edge of condemning his own identity and stop there.

(And the guilty, empathy-riddled lefty gnaws deeper into her own intestines asking am I any better, am I any better…)

And I can understand how, once you get a position like that, where people are listening to you and giving you money and influence that only increases with the extremity of the things you say, once you’re getting all that attention that some part of you either never got as a kid or got way too much of and couldn’t live without, I can see how it becomes an addiction and you can’t stop even if you know there’s something deeply wrong there. Just as Woody from Toy Story, everyone can be a good person as long as they’re getting love and attention exactly the way they need it. And everyone can turn into a monster if they’re not.

Like I said. I know how to write a villain. Lack of love, lack of attention, lack of validation, lack of boundaries, these are all great motivations to write, because we all understand them on some level. And we can understand how they can curdle and go sour.

I picked Ben Shapiro because he’s kind of low-hanging fruit, honestly. I don’t want to think about the people who feed him that deeply. It’s just an example and I don’t care about him. I just wanted to see if I could pretend to for a second, because if I can’t, I’m lost.

And all of that, every word of it, can be true, and I can still say fuck Ben Shapiro into someone else’s sun because ours is too nice for him. Is the feeling I get writing that morally superior to the jolt right-wingers get typing out “demon-rats” for the millionth time? Well, it’s not much of a jolt, I can tell you that.

And that’s kind of where I end up with all this meandering guilt. None of this makes me feel good. Not even the angry parts, or the parts where events manage to play out to prove me right. It brings me no joy to know or think about these things. I don’t get the dopamine-adrenaline boost the Qs do when they see a magic number that fits into the Myst-puzzle they’ve constructed in their heads. I don’t really look forward to the future, while they salivate for their fictional world to come true.

The truth rarely makes you feel good. This world is hard. The revelation of it can sometimes feel vindicating, but if a truth was hidden to begin with, well, it probably wasn’t much fun.

So when I say too seek out the small and the weird, to love people and listen to them, I suppose what I mean is do that, but be wary if some of that weird comes at you trying to make you feel excited all the time. Especially if it tries to make you feel excited about witnessing harm experienced by others. There’s a whole pipeline in the crunch/pagan/yoga/motherhood community to the alt-right, but you’ll notice however benignly it seems to start, there is always a kernel of they are doing it wrong. Let’s enjoy watching them suffer together and imagining the reasons for it. We are the good women and they are the bad women and those two aren’t even the same species. Now we all enjoy a little schadenfreude from time to time, but this kind of thing is almost always about enjoying suffering that could and sometimes does end in death. There is always an angle that results in someone else suffering. Vaccines are evil and it’s ok if your baby or someone else’s suffers without one. Masks are evil and it’s fine if the world suffers without them. LGBTQ+ people are evil so it’s right that they suffer. And while they rarely start out saying BIPOC people are evil and should suffer, they never take too long to get there. Then all of it ends up at anti-Semitism sooner or later, though I’ll be god damned if I understand why that is just 100% of the time a huge portion of the endgame for the right-wing thought experiment.

It will never cease to amaze me that Dave Chappelle of all people got up there on SNL and said it wasn’t crazy to think Jews run everything because there sure are a lot of Jews in Hollywood (the Ferguson comment does not redeem that given his closing line) instead of doing the kind of history lesson that made him famous and pointing out that just maybe there are a lot of Jewish people in Hollywood because Jewish people built Hollywood. Out of nothing because dipshits wouldn’t let them work within the system as it existed and these three kids from villages in Europe barely twenty miles apart fled to California and started the three biggest studios that ever existed. Of course there’s a lot of them, it’s their home. Gentiles moved in and took over, not the other way around.

But no, because that doesn’t offer the sneaky little pleasure of imagining that hey, maybe Jews can suffer a little more, as a treat for non-Jews. Which is beyond fucked, but that’s the snickering, venal, horrid, nasty little joy that anti-Semitism offers up, and a lot of other antis as well, including anti-Black and anti-trans rhetoric. It offers up a proxy victim that isn’t the speaker themselves, someone to offload the injustice of the world on to ward it off their own experience of life in this vale of tears.

A sin-eater, I suppose. A scapegoat.

It doesn’t work.

Geeks online enjoy things together. They do not enjoy consuming the pain of other humans together. It is not a bonding activity. That’s what I was aiming at, but I worry I didn’t quite hit it, because the alt-right and their kin absolutely know and agree with everything I said in that essay—that’s why they are constantly infiltrating weird geek communities to recruit from, and it really does take vigiliance and awareness of certain kinds of rhetoric to avoid getting sucked into thinking TrevortheBrony97 is your friend and confidant and understands you even while he’s getting real weird lately. You still want to support him, because he supports you and the non-geek world offline is cold and cruel. And thus we have the Puppies and the Gators and the breadmaking Nazis (yes I’m serious) and so on and so forth throughout so many fandoms. I used to look around and ask why the fuck are you guys here? But the answer was always so obvious: because no one was stopping them, because it was easy to bond with lonely people, because those spaces were vulnerable and unprotected because they wanted to share without fear, and a virus needs to propagate to survive.

I just feel sad and tired. I wonder if there’s any saving shitbats whose entire identity relies on remaining shitbats.

I’ve used that word a lot, and it was deliberate from the start. At this point we’ve all learned that bat caves full of moldering shit and darkness are perfect places for viruses to spring up. And all these people working so hard to spread all this hate are doing it for the same reason a virus does—to reproduce and copy themselves, not because it’s good, but because without more and more resources and hosts, it cannot survive. I’m not doing the “mind virus” thing, although it’s very telling that Musk and his friends have turned that one around and pretended it was always about the left the way they’ve done with so many other phrases. I’m saying that once you’re in that ecosystem, you have to keep getting more people more seriously involved to keep yourself afloat. Satan’s MLM. Need those downlines. Every time a new conspiracy theory works its way up through the improv circuit of 8chan or 4chan, the shitbats get working on spreading it, because that brings new hosts, new resources, new food. Sometimes that food is money, but mostly, it’s attention. Validation. Love. The feeling of being seen by something that can feel like a village.

Because the prize is being talked about. It always was.

It truly is the dark side of the connections we form for good in our geeky niche communities.

Oh look, I can empathize after all. Happy fucking new year with this grim shit.

But there is some hope, if a dim one, because if you can do it and you can stand it, the only way I’ve ever talked anyone around from the bad stuff is to offer empathy and attention and trying to really see them. And get them to see me. It’s hard as hell, but it works sometimes. For awhile. Even online when you can’t be face to face. I’m aware that for all my letters and identifications, when it comes to the right wing, my whiteness helps a lot with getting them to listen at all. My gender definitely does not. We are all just so hungry to be seen. To not feel alone. I can’t be much of a Pollyanna when it comes to human nature, but most of the worst things anyone does is just to get some kind of attention, love, recognition, admiration, validation, control. Because those are all so fucking hard to find—and because it’s usually easier to get it by screaming than by loving.

That’s as close to gooshy optimism as I can get. I mean, yeah, enough love can fix a lot, but you try loving a shitbat and not getting bitten. It’s hard and we all have a lot going on and I wouldn’t want to try it with Ben Shapiro or any of them because they have their source and nothing anyone else can offer them will be as heady a high. Until that high goes away (look up what Lauren Southern is up to these days) and can’t be reclaimed, they have their bag and they won’t let go. The money is only a representation of the love.

It’s late now and I think I’ve depressed you all enough. Just be careful when you reach out to the truly weird. If it calls out to you asking you to enjoy a little suffering along with your geeky interests, step lightly. Remember the shitbats.

And remember the good. Remember Diaryland and the little things. Remember the first time you really felt like someone truly saw and accepted you, even for a moment, even with all your faults and differences and quirks, and what a rush that was, how it might have even changed the course of your life. Try to understand that that feeling, whatever it might be called, is what all eight billion of us are dying to get hold of. But that doesn’t mean forgiving the places some of us are going to dig it out of the dark.