#Gay Power stance

[agathaandbrienneslesbian]

What in the Gay Power Stance… 👀

Mother is being mother again ✨✨❤️❤️❤️

(And the cap… Can we talk about the cap?)

[lazylittledragon]

i finally got to go OUT out last night and dance away all my frustrations

also thank you drunk me for getting home at 2am and realising you hadn't taken any photos of your v cute outfit

[imadhatt3r]

"First gay experience", "first gay date", "first gay sex"

[vero-niche]

ngl if i saw this before my imminent death i too would've fallen in love soso fast

[ceilidhtransing]

Something that's so important to grasp is that oppression fundamentally isn't about the nuances of your identity; it's about how a bigot sees you.

Straight people can experience homophobia (think of women with short hair just assumed to be lesbians, or flamboyant men who apparently “must be” gay). Non-Jewish people can experience antisemitism (perhaps because some fascist looked at them or heard their name and decided they were “definitely Jewish”). Non-Muslims can experience Islamophobia (Sikhs who wear turbans, for instance, are frequent targets of Islamophobic violence).

If you're the target of some bigot's homophobia, or transphobia, or antisemitism, or racism, or ableism, or whatever, then the fact that you're not actually gay or trans or Jewish etc doesn't change the nature of the bigotry.

I see this idea so often that trans men in particular are “misgendering ourselves” when discussing experiences of misogyny. But misogyny doesn't neatly contain itself to the contours of womanhood. It's not bigotry that delineates the boundaries of identities, full stop. Being a man won't stop some people from being misogynistic shitheads to you, nor does that experience make you any less of a man. It's the bigots who are doing the misgendering, not us.

It's really time to get rid of this personal-identity-focused view of prejudice and oppression, and instead see these as complex social systems that are inflicted in an often scattergun way on anyone whom the bigot thinks is an appropriate target, not just those who on paper fall into certain categories.

[b-blushes]

bringing a certain "huh? what's going on?" vibe to the mini supermarket ✌️

[arionawrites]

will byers deserves better than this

[ronanlynchdefender]

The political stances of The Raven Cycle characters are so fascinating to me. You got Blue over here who is very much a progressive activist in the making. She recognizes things like misogyny and is not afraid to call those things out even when it concerns her closest friends. Because of that, I definitely see her as the type of activist who would be in the front lines at protests whether that be at the Capitol, college campuses, at the border, or as is the case in the dreamer trilogy, tied to a tree. She is the type of person who demands change in our current system and would demand it loudly and through acts of protest or civil disobedience.

Then you have Adam who displays no strong desire to change the system and whose only desire is to rise up in that system. He wants to climb the social ladder and assimilate to those of higher social status which is partially why he envies Gansey so much in the beginning because Gansey was born into it. Adam still tries to do this in the dreamer trilogy by essentially pretending to be a Gansey-like figure while at Harvard despite hating it. Eventually, Adam gives up on trying to belong within this higher social class and "climbing the ladder" but then strangely enough becomes a fed, which means just integrating into another form of hierarchy and power structure. And I feel like a more interesting arc would've been rejecting being a part of these societal systems altogether.

Which I suppose now leads us to Ronan who is a literal anarchist. He actually rejects all societal systems and rules and it permeates every aspect of his life. But actually, I shouldn't say all because there is one societal institution which he does enjoy partaking in: religion. With the exception of his catholicism, he does not engage in any other societal institution: education, law, politics. He hates it, in fact, It is antithetical to his being which is what makes his characterization so perfect because of course a gay farmer god would hate oppressive rules and structures (except for religion). That's not even mentioning that he is a canonical ecoterrorist that cost the US government a billion dollars. But what is really interesting about his character (and where his and Blue's political stances differ) is that because he rejects these systems he has no interest or stake in changing them. He'd sooner tear down the system than try to reform it.

And then there’s Gansey who doesn't seem to engage in politics and would rather spend his days reading his little Welsh books and going on his fun adventures. Of course, he is able to do this largely because he has the privilege to not worry about politics or social class. It seems that Blue's influence changes this as they are both chaining themselves to trees in protest during the dreamer trilogy. Other than that, I don't really have a lot to say about Gansey and his politics. But I find it very interesting that Maggie has created this close-knit group of characters with such varying relationships to how they view politics and social structures. I tried to draw out a 2-axis grid to show their differences, but I don't know if it really works because I feel like Gansey kinda screws it up but nevertheless I like how they each represent different ends of a spectrum sort of.

[cazort]

Why I'm Enthusiastic About Kamala Harris

I've seen so much negative talk about Trump and we all agree with that, but I want to highlight what I like most about Kamala Harris and why I'm actively enthusiastic and excited about voting for her:

She is pro-abortion rights and pro- comprehensive sex ed

She would appoint good Supreme Court Justices.

She respects people with a diverse range of political views and would include some voices from both progressive and conservative perspectives in her administration.

She is unambiguously pro-LGBTQ rights, including not just on gay rights but also trans rights.

She would represent continuity with the Biden administration, an administration that I think has done a good job on most issues.

On the issue of Palestine/Israel/Gaza (where I am most critical of Biden), I think Harris is a significant improvement over Biden, and also offers the better path of the only two viable candidates, towards ending the genocide. She has spoken out against the civilian deaths and she has snubbed Netanyahu which is a huge plus in my book.

She has shown a willingness to change her views, such as how she moved from being opposed to decriminalizing sex work in 2008, to being supportive of it in 2019, and being initially skeptical of marijuana legalization in 2010, but coming to support it in 2015. I like a candidate who can change their views, but more importantly, she is changing in a direction I like.

She would be good on the economy; she opposes tariffs, and would continue the Biden administration policies which have led to economic prosperity.

She has a solid and fairly diverse track record of experience, working as attorney general for the largest state, then senator for that state, then VP.

She has worked to combat over-incarceration and cruel treatment of people in prison, doing things like reducing mandatory minimum sentences and working to reduce recidivism, opposing solitary confinement, ending private prisons, and ending cash bail. She has also pledged to use the president's clemency powers to release a lot of people who have been imprisoned unjustly or given unfairly harsh sentences.

She has a concrete plan to enact immigration reform that would adequately fund the processing of asylum applications and fix the backlog of immigrants at the border. And the plan has broad bipartisan support.

On top of this she also has already done some things to address the root causes of migration in Latin America, particularly people fleeing Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador

She is pro-net-neutrality.

She supports universal healthcare, but also has concrete recommendations for how to improve the current status quo.

She is pro-science, including on issues like climate change, COVID, vaccinations, and health and nutrition. Her mom was a scientist!

She is pro-Ukraine, wanting to keep Russia out of Ukraine and ensure Ukraine wins their war of defense and maintains their independence.

She is across-the-board better on women's issues, not just reproductive rights but also sexual violence and domestic violence, workplace equality and the pay gap, and women's issues in Latin America (which is related to the immigration pressure I mentioned above.)

She generally takes stances on foreign policy I agree with, being skeptical of leaders (Putin, Orban, Netanyahu) I want us to be skeptical of, and working with and looking up to the ones I want us to work with and look up to (Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron). She already has a working relationship with many of these leaders too, and has a reputation of being both personable and tough, just what I'd want.

She's smart, well-educated, and surrounded with smart, well-educated, and wise people. Her campaign is stable and well-run, and I trust her to put together a team of competent advisors and run this country competently, probably even more so than Biden has done, and Biden has done a pretty decent job, exceeding my expectations even.

Harris also has an impressive list of endorsements. I can't possibly be comprehensive here, but it includes people as diverse as the most progressive Democrat Lawmakers (Bernie Sanders and AOC), some of the most conservative former GOP legislators (Jeff Flake, Liz Cheney), and over 100 former GOP staffers including a disturbing number of insiders from the Trump administration. This is telling! You don't see this sort of whistleblowing and defection from within the Biden administration.

The fact that Harris has racked up endorsements from people spanning the whole political spectrum from solid-right to solid-left and everything in between, impresses me. This is the sign of someone who is going to be good at getting people to work together, someone who will listen to a wide range of viewpoints and develop better policy and take better courses of action as a result. It's what I always want in a president.

In some elections I have been frustrated that I'm voting for a "lesser of two evils" but this time around I actually feel actively enthusiastic about Harris. I am excited to vote tomorrow and excited to finally be done with this election, and I am cautiously optimistic that it is going to turn out really well.

I encourage everyone to vote and make sure to make sure everyone close to you is also voting!

[autolenaphilia]

It's interesting how intellectually inconsistent the arguments against "problematic" kinks like fauxcest, CNC and ageplay is. Like the anti-kink people get very heated about those kinks for "fetishizing/romanticizing" abuse. And the thing is, that's true for bdsm in general. It relies on roleplaying power inequalties, which would be very abusive if they were real.

That was in fact the argument of the 70s radfems who created the type of anti-kink discourse that relies on exploiting feminist concerns about abuse. They were against all forms of bdsm, including among (cis) lesbians. They used the same arguments we see against fauxcest and CNC today, for what is normal bdsm play.

And the radfems kinda lost this battle of the feminist sex wars, probably because it alienated a lot of the cis women they were recruiting from. Nowadays queer people of all genders do a lot of bdsm and anti-bdsm views don't get a lot of airtime.

Nowadays you see this anti-bdsm rhetoric mostly among proud terfs who use it to prove their hardcore bonafides. (Although I've seen some tenderqueers who admit that they think all bdsm is problematic too.)

And i think that's because the anti-kink people have decided to do a strategic retreat on this question. The radfems took a too extreme stance and alienated people who they otherwise could have recruited. So they have gone for easier targets. Kinks which are seen as extreme compared to "normal" bdsm, like fauxcest and CNC. And they target individual transfems accused of being into or even just "defending" these kinks with callouts and mobbing instead of condemning all the cis gays and lesbians into bdsm.

This leads to intellectual inconsistency. It's fine to play with whips in the bedroom,but doing CNC play is evil. One type of roleplaying abusive relationships is fine, but the other is bad. It's obvious hypocrisy to broaden the appeal of the message.

And of course, their transmisogynistic bias is obvious and I and others have noted this before. And even if the anti-kink people weren't transmisogynistic bigots, they will naturally target us for their moralistic crusade out of opportunism. We transfems are easy targets for callouts on these subjects, because transmisogyny primes people to easily view us as perverted sexual predators and those doing the callouts tend to have tme privilege over us.

And as I said before, the 70s radfems anti-bdsm position and their transmisogyny were intertwined. Janice Raymond literally diagnosed trans women in "The Transsexual Empire" with sadomasochism, something she views as inherently pathological.

And of course their arguments are bullshit anyway. Like sure a lot of kink fetishizes abuse, but I don't see that as a reason to condemn the people doing it. I don't see why I should care if someone gets off on a rape fantasy or CNC roleplay, because it's Not Real. I don't care about fictional murders for the same reason. Most arguments to the contrary tend to rely on the arch-reactionary concept of sexual degeneracy: "if you do enough fauxcest and CNC it will warp your mind and you'll eventually rape your relatives for real, or inspire someone to do so." It ignores the material societal conditions that lead to abuse in the real world.

[artbyblastweave]

I have this distinct memory of encountering a YA fanartist on here a couple of years ago, prominent within their fandom niche, who had the tumblr-standard-issue cutesy twee autobiographical chibi avatar they used to answer asks. And I remember them getting an ask about their stance on gay marriage, to which their cartooned response was just blisteringly homophobic (little drawing of themselves entering a bunker before responding with the Marriage-between-a-man-and-a-woman line, a whole autobiographical teach-you-a-thing cartoon about this!) and the juxtaposition of that particular artistic idiom with that political stance had some real goddamn stopping power, It was like Steven Universe turning to the camera and calling you a slur.

And it occurred to me, oh yeah, Tumblr's been around since 2007, well before gay marriage, so there probably would have been a sizable stretch where a lot of the recognizable artistic idioms of fandom on this site would have been forming, without those idioms being necessarily joined at the hip to progressive queer-inclusive politics, those things wound up largely associated with each other but they never inherently had to be. Funny old world

[allthecanadianpolitics]

sorry if youve gotten this question before, or this just isnt what you focus on but considering all the things happening in the us right now would it be advisable for me (a trans guy) to move to canada? like how are you guys holding up in terms of policy around trans and gay people? and what city/providence would you most recommend, if any?

Things are mostly ok within the larger cities (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, etc) but some rural communities in bible belts have not been safe spaces for LGBTQ people.

One major concern is that the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada is a transphobe, and based on the polls consistent over the past year or so, he has a very real chance of becoming Prime Minister.

There has been a large rise in homophobic and trans phobic hate crimes in recent years. Its definitely not as bad as the USA, but things are not necessarily trending down either.

As far as which regions in general are safest:

Canada's most left party (NDP) is in control of two provinces, British Columbia and Manitoba. The party is very LGBTQ friendly. Additionally the Liberals are in power in Newfoundland & Labrador and Yukon and are also generally pretty supportive. All other provinces in Canada right now have Conservative governments. The territories of Northwest Territories and Nunavut don't have party affiliations.

There have been some Premiers who have taken transphobic stances and policies in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Alberta (all are run by Conservative governments).

Moving to Canada is also very expensive, very time consuming and is far from guaranteed unless you have jobs lined up for you, are wealthy, etc. I'm not saying to give up on the idea, just make sure you do the research and know what you're getting into.

Canada has a higher cost of living with especially high rent prices, particularly in Vancouver/Toronto and the neighbouring areas of BC and Ontario. So make sure to keep that in mind.

Hope this helps. I'm Trans too (Trans Femme) and happy to answer any other questions you have.

[ceilidhtransing]

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.

[heartwrrm]

it's immediately clear that both the creature and victor find some of their greatest comforts in nature and that's one of the key features that connects them and proves they're not so different from each other, but i've also noticed that they tend to admire different TYPES of nature

victor tends to amaze at "the high and snowy mountains [...] immense glaciers [...] the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche [...] the supreme and magnificent mont blonc" (65), typically finding the most comfort in the "savage and enduring scenes" (64) which tend to be colder and rougher yet unchanging; while the creature found that his "chief delights were the sight of the flowers, the birds, and all the gay apparel of summer" (94). there is probably something to be said about the creature's affinity for spring and summer, the seasons of rebirth, of NATURAL and beautiful life, a direct contrast to his unnatural, coldly scientific, "wretched" rebirth that he abhors so much

i was discussing this idea with a friend, who added that victor finding solace in the frozen and dead beauty of wintery environments, a typically less-favoured season, could reflect how victor often refuses himself the typical joys of life. throughout the novel, he struggles with his self-worth because of the guilt induced by his creation of the creature and the deaths that then followed, and the only reason he even desires peace and comfort is because he knows he needs to present himself that way to his family in order for them to be happy ("i [...] wished that peace would revisit my mind only that i might afford them consolation and happiness" [62]). i built on her idea by noting how the creature acknowledged that he "required kindness and sympathy; but [he] did not believe [him]self unworthy of it" (94), a completely contrasting stance from victor, who finds himself undeserving of the many comforts offered to him by his family

furthermore, it seems that victor finds beauty in glory & majesty ("[the scenery] spoke of a power mighty as Omnipotence--and i ceased to fear, or to bend before any being less almighty than that which had created and ruled the elements" [64]), while the creature finds beauty in warmth & growth. both characters seem to find what they desire(d) in the versions of the natural world that they admire most

to reference what i said in the beginning about the connections between victor and the creature, this observation only contributes to my understanding that victor and the creature are incredibly similar, and many of their identical traits involve a rejection or a reversal of the other; they both ardently wish for each other's destruction, they both ruined each other, they're the reason that the other is simultaneously a victim and a villain in their own sense, they both hate themselves but for reversed reasons (victor hates himself for what he's done rather than what he is, while the creature hates himself for what he is more than what he's done), and now this--they both find solace in nature, just opposing kinds. like father, like son

[ot3]

just more of me talking myself into circles about the election again since i got my ballot in the mail and i need to sit down and try and put my thoughts in order.

like ok no trump is not going to start rounding up lgbt people and put them into camps. categorically, logistically, that's not going to happen. it's ridiculous how many people are acting like the imaginary camps they could theoretically get put into is a treat to their wellbeing on par with the actual, already existing camps we have in this country for latino immigrants.

i think a lot of people are forgetting that we had 4 years of trump before and for the vast majority of americans life was more or less normal. the real problem the trump presidency has to offer is the gradual chipping away at hard won regulations that the dems seem to have no interest in reinstating once they're in office. yeah trump's presidency saw a lot of stripping back of food protections. but the massive listeria outbreaks currently happening are happening in Year Four of biden's presidency. I've done some cursory looking around and it doesn't seem like the dems have had much to offer in terms of protecting the basic health and safety of american citizens

covid is still ripping through the country and permanently disabling huge swathes of people, who have no choice but to infect others because our right to not be exposed to infectious diseases is trumped by the right of business owners to maintain a coercive workforce. not only that but state mask bans are going uncontested with federal action, denying people some of the only means of protection against covid they have access to. similarly, they're doing extremely little to grant federal protections to abortion and transition as individual states crack down further on that as well. remember how protecting roe v wade was one of this administrations most significant campaign promises? and like i mentioned earlier, putting brown people in prisons and camps has always been part of the dems policy but we're seeing truly staggering amounts of anti-immigration rhetoric that is borderline indistinguishable from what was considered hardline rightwing talking points for most of my life.

but ultimately. at the end of the day. even if the dems were perfect on literally everything else i would still be a single issue voter on genocide. that's the bottom line for me. it doesn't matter what other logistical or material concerns may be on the table, i can't bring myself to care about any of it when slaughter the likes of what we're seeing in palestine is occurring. even if i truly believed that the first action donald trump would be taking in office was bulldozing my house and making it illegal to be gay i still could not justify voting for kamala harris when her stance on israel remains as it is. i am willing to give up whatever concessions must be made in order to avoid consenting to genocide.

a lot of blue no matter who types have had the talking point that this mindset is just to instill in people like me a sense of moral superiority, who value our own perceived purity over any material reality. they say that this is not the time for trying to take the moral high ground. and i just don't understand that? for me my sense of morality is the baseline for all of my decision making. i'm not sure what criteria people are using to make their actions if right and wrong don't factor into this. why can we allow our politics to be separate from our morality? i just can't wrap my head around it.

not once have i ever told people not to vote for kamala harris and i'm not even saying that now either. ultimately everyones choice is their own. what i HAVE said and what i still stand by is that people need to at least be willing to pretend they wouldn't vote for her. the fairytale of pushing a candidate left once theyre in office is for children. the only leverage we have against our politicians is the means to deny them power, and in being unwilling to even threaten to use that leverage, regardless of whether or not you actually meant it, you have consented to the full suite of policies that comes with the administration. a vote for kamala harris is a vote for her stance on israel regardless of how personally torn up you feel about it.

a lot of people are quick to point out that there's not any chance of the situation in gaza improving under trump and that's absolutely not a point i have any interest in contesting. but what i do find interesting is that the people who are most vocally concerned about the integrity of the US political system don't seem to be of the opinion that successfully running a 'progressive' campaign with full untempered support for an ongoing genocide does anything to threaten this perceived integrity. having the only two viable candidates for president be actively genocidal is business as usual, but having the wrong person carrying out that genocide is the real threat to the fabric of our nation. Why?

obviously the answer is, whether or not anyone would admit to it, that they see arab lives as an acceptable bargaining chip in domestic issues. That's an Over There problem. Trump is an Over Here threat. Throughout my entire life, the overwhelming US sentiment towards arab nations and arab people is that they are at best disposable and at worst something that needs to be stamped out in order to Protect Freedom. there is no way for any severity of political turmoil in the middle east to reflect badly on the american people no matter what part we may have played in it because the presumption is that these conflicts just happen to spontaneously generate there as a result of whatever unfavorable characteristics Must be immutably present in the arab race if you're a conservative, and their culture if you're a progressive.

there isnt any takeaway here. it's horrible. it's all horrible. once, god willing, this all ends, i don't think im going to be able to look back and feel like i did anything to meaningfully help anyone. i dont even know what i Could do. but i do want to be able to look back on the actions i am taking now and be confident that i was not ever willing to give any ground to normalizing what we're currently seeing, even for a single moment.

[eastgaysian]

okay here's one post i have to make. Finally racism confirmed real in succession. other people have talked about this before but it is a huge blind spot of the show not to acknowledge the intersection between racism and capitalism, and the excuse that the characters are the 1% and the 1% are vastly white is pretty weak. the fact that the show sidelines its existing characters of color while every now and then broadly gesturing towards race makes this worse, especially as the show more directly focuses on fascism and just Doesn't bring race into it. like i don't even think race is totally absent as a concern of the writers but it's clearly not a priority. i think a lot about how mo's widow is a filipino woman

anyway. ken and rava's conversation in this sense doesn't really qualify as, like, revolutionary in terms of succession's commentary on race esp since it's a discussion between two white parents about their brown daughter without her present. the point of interest to me really is that kendall completely fails to recognize racism as a systemic issue, much less that he works for and is trying to sustain a company that actively works to perpetuate that hegemony. his questions are why was sophie on the street? why wasn't rava there? in the same episode where he calls matsson homophobic for saying the numbers are gay. socially aware king

it's not particularly revelatory to say that a rich white man doesn't grasp the concept of systemic racism LOL but i do think it's more than that for kendall, and i also think this trait is something his siblings don't share. it's like how he doesn't realize he's in a position of power over anna and she was pressured into attending the recny with him, and his adoption of a faux-feminist stance in s3 while continuing to treat women like shit. kendall's whole concept of Everything, including systemic social issues, goes back to logan. there's no system outside of dad. the doj doesn't find the cruises evidence compelling? that's because they're scared of logan. logan's the source of the evil in the world, therefore opposing him is inherently progressive, leaving kendall with even less of a coherent moral framework after his death. and he's completely unable to process the idea that he could be participating in and benefiting from the greater racist or sexist system, because that's fundamentally incompatible with his logan-based idea of his own identity.

i don't think roman or shiv or even connor share this particular nearsightedness. roman 'we do hate speech and roller coasters' roy knows what's going on but he doesn't really care and he doesn't believe it can be changed (or, maybe more accurately, that there's any point in trying). he doesn't buy into fascism on the ideological level, exactly, but the spectacle appeals to him and he does believe it's profitable to align with it, so he's perfectly happy to do so. i think he's the most similar to logan in this regard. and shiv and connor have actual political ideologies, even if they're far from being meaningfully opposed to fascism, which requires a base awareness of the fact that We Live In A Society and That Society Has Systems In It. for kendall it really boils down to logan and logan alone