In What Fucking Universe?

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By Neko Case 8/2/26

This last week I was just cookin’ along minding my business when I suddenly found myself quite depressed. Was it the stifling heat? Well, that didn’t help… but that’s not something that usually makes me depressed. It took me days to figure it out, but after some soul-searching, and a well-timed poster adorning a London bus shelter, I found the answer. There it was, like a sad turd at the bottom of a punch bowl; another shitty, spoiled man was being lionized by people all around me, even people I know. Or think I know? The bus stop poster was a PSA against sexual harassment and shitty conduct. It read “Sexual Offenses and Harassment have Consequences” my brain immediately screamed “In what fucking universe!?”

The man in question had died (no, that was definitely not something I wished upon him) and several people reached out to me with condolences thinking we were friends, but the fact is I loathed him. I had almost managed to put it out of my mind, but then I made the mistake of going on social media earlier today, entirely by accident and now here I am; disgusted and pissed. The social media hell-scape I wandered onto was a gallery of proof that horrible men get away with everything. Every outpouring of “love” and “condolence” was a sharp, tetanus-y pin in the bottom of my foot. The men kissing his ass didn’t surprise me, but seeing the outpouring of love from women was downright shocking to me. I’m not sure why, as I already knew (and managed to suppress) when I would tell them about the things that happened to me and others, I would be met with the toilet refrain of “oh, well… he’s really sweet to me.” Yes, women are just as shit as men at listening to bad things that happen when it comes to famous or “attractive” men. And yeah, before you paint me with the monster brush, I do feel genuinely bad for his family, but it’s way down the list after other shit I feel. The first thing being a very specific flavor of life-long rage.

What did he do that was so bad you ask? Well, he was on a tour opening for the band I was in, and just when I thought that he and the other fellows were treating me like a fellow musician and even a friend, he thoroughly humiliated me by asking me to fuck the bass player in his band. I guess as some kind of favor?! I was mortified. I had thought the bass player in his band so kind, and I really thought we were becoming pals, and then he gets dude to proposition me? What the fuck?! He was treating me like some kind of groupie in my own fucking house! Big mistake. And the propositioner had that much faith in his own charm that he had the completely misguided balls to actually ask me. On a better day I’d have punched him in the throat and insisted they be removed from the rest of the tour, but I was genuinely hurt and utterly confused. I had, at that point in my life, just begun to be brave enough to even call myself a “musician,” (even if just on my tax returns) because I didn’t feel like I “deserved to.” Too much life conditioning that “girls can’t do shit good” had fucked me yet again. I just had to make it to the end of the tour. Puke.

The really sad part was, that at some later date in Los Angeles, I ran into said bass player with some of his bandmates. I flashed hot when I saw him. “Oh, hey _bass player name here_, I’m gonna fuck your stupid brains out,” I hissed very sarcastically, in front of everyone. I could tell by the look on his face that he had NO idea. His asshole bandmate had taken it upon himself, freelance, to “set up” his pal. I felt horrible, and of course I’m sure I lost a friend because of my venomous comment. I have never seen him since. I told people what happened. No one gave a shit.

The next action was just as disgusting if not more so. Near the end of the aforementioned tour a couple friends came to the show. One brought his 19 year old sister as a guest. Dude was all over her. Touching her body, hands and hair without asking and cooing “Oh god, isn’t she beautiful!? She’s so beautiful…” etc on and on. He wouldn’t stop. I don’t think he even knew her name. My friends and I were mortified and very uncomfortable. Everything was moving in slow motion. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t tell what the sister thought. Since he was “famous” and/or “in a band” maybe she was flattered? She could have been screaming inside for all I knew. I had to go onstage. I could only trust that her brother would look after her? I don’t remember clearly what I was told happened with dude, and also it’s not my story to tell, BUT the gross part that happened in front of and was spoken TO ME is. Maybe she’s even adding her own “tribute” on Instagram. Whatever. But that night, watching him treat her like that sickened me.

See, men like that have class systems for the women they “know.” They spoil and flatter the women they NEED things from, business associates, press people etc. The “mother” part of the mother-whore complex… They consume the sex princesses like it’s some big favor they are handing out, as well as their basic right. Then there’s women like me, the underlings. We don’t need to be treated well or with basic respect. Men like that often confuse using their charm on us as “respect” at times, but we all know it’s just a big fat manipulation when it works and when it doesn’t. Just another fucking day at the fucking office.

Why do I need to write this? Rage, bitch. The “president” of my country is a pedofile rapist facing zero consequences, duh. Its essentially legal to rape a woman or a child in the United States. When Ryan Adams was busted for sexting an underage girl I was shocked anyone gave a shit! SO. MANY. PEOPLE helped him get away with being a fucking spoiled asshole for SO long. He treated people abominably for years. People in his solo band would let him abuse them on stage and literally come back for more. Fuck the Ryan Adams’ of the world! And FUCK THOSE MERCINARY FUCKS who hang around dicks like that for the proximity to a “famous” asshole, while insisting it was a “job.” You are star-fucker enablers! You knew who that guy was! Do you think I’m overreacting? Well, I’m used to being the person who says shit and is thought to be “overreacting.” Whether it be to a titty comment, public belittlement and racist tirade from Charlie Louvin, or me warning someone “not to be alone with that guy, he’s abusive,” or to literally stopping a creep from raping my passed out friend at a party. I “overreacted” to a 19 year old raping me when I was fourteen, so I guess I’m an expert overreacter as I started so young, right? I’m never going to shut up, because you see, the problem is not with me, but with a world of assholes unwilling to be BRAVE ENOUGH TO LISTEN, and stand up for what’s right.

And just remember, the guy who is willing to say shit out loud, even when no one believes them, is most likely THE ONLY person willing to put their body on the line FOR YOU. Men aren’t going to do it. So fucking value us.

I’m sorry to disable the comments, but this post stands alone. As per fucking usual.

Karine Polwart performs “James Hutton and The Restless Earth”

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Award winning Scottish folksinger, songwriter and storyteller, Karine Polwart celebrates the 300th anniversary of James Hutton’s birth, the Scottish scientist and philosopher known as the father of geology.

With specially performed music and song, she explores one of Hutton’s most radical and challenging concepts – deep time. Hutton was the first to hypothesise that the formation of the Earth had taken unfathomably long stretches of time, far, far longer than the eight thousand or so years that studies of the bible had suggested. And that radical theory would be confirmed by a discovery Hutton made when he and his two companions stepped ashore from a boat trip to Siccar Point on the east coast of Scotland in June 1788. What he saw was sandstone eroded away to reveal sharp vertical shards of the rock greywacke laid down some 60 million years earlier -what geologist today would call an unconformity.

Recreating that journey for the programme Karine is joined by geologist Dr Angus Miller and David Farrier, writer and Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh.

Angus explains just how influential Hutton’s theory became through the writing of his companion on the trip – John Playfair

“The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible to how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.”

The truth that Hutton revealed was indeed far stranger than fiction, not only upending the received wisdom about the age of the Earth but would have far reaching consequences, giving successors like Charles Darwin a timescale that would allow the incremental changes of natural selection to take place.

For David Farrier Hutton’s discoveries opened up not only the deep past but the prospect of the deep future. His book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looks at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future.

Karine weaves these ideas together in the music threaded through the programme blending the events of Hutton’s visit with these challenging ideas about our responsibility to those far off generations to come.

The idea of seeing intimate, human connections to the geology of the planet is taken up by the artist Illana Halperin. Her work explores where human time and geological time scales intersect most notably in how she shares a birthday with the Icelandic volcano Eldfell that she visits on every major milestone as they age together.

The programme builds to a crescendo of all these ideas overlaid and blended into a powerful message of how we’ve become a planetary force capable of great feats for both good and ill.

Written, composed and performed by Karine Polwart

Sound design and additional music by Pippa Murphy

Piano: Dave Milligan

Producer: Peter McManus

Trump and American Enshittification

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IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK

By Rick Wilson

You feel it and see it, everywhere, like an ambient, grating sensation that everything is worse, and getting more so by the day.

Your airline seat is narrower than it was ten years ago, and you paid extra for it. Your insurance company denied the claim through a system designed so that appealing it takes more days than the cancer patient has left without treatment. Your groceries come in a smaller box at a higher price. The brand you love was bought out by private equity and cheapened, a logo stuck on something made in a Chinese slave factory.

The app that used to just work now wants a subscription. The doctor gets four minutes. The customer service line is a machine that says it understands, then hangs up. The hotel charges a resort fee for a resort that doesn’t exist. Every institution you interact with has quietly discovered that it can degrade the thing it sells you and lose almost nothing, because where exactly are you going to go?

Cory Doctorow named this process enshittification, and the word went viral because everyone in America recognized their own life in it.

They’re good to you at first, because they need you. Worse once you’re stuck. Worse still once being stuck is the entire business model. He was describing tech platforms, but the idea scales to the whole country.

This piece is bleak, even for me, because thus far there’s no immmediate cure for enshittification [ . . . ] Read full piece on Substack