#I've seen my own marriage rights be granted at state level. and I've seen them fully revoked

[basuralindo]

Always remember that there are active fights going on. Every big swing incites a big pushback. These people who have been elected aren't going to sit around doing nothing, they will be fighting for us, because the world will not end and there will be something after this, but also things happening during all this.

The fact that we've won these battles, that there are now states with rights more deeply cemented than ever before, even while losing the presidency, means something. The bigger the threat we're seeing, the harder people are working to defend against it, and those defences do actually work.

Just remember that there's no such thing as a losing battle at this scale. It's a constant battle and a constant swing, and it doesn't end. It rises and it dips and it keeps going, and that means this isn't the end.

In four years that orange bastard will be gone, but there will be civil rights protections put in place to combat him that will remain for decades. The next decent leader will lay more groundwork for more little victories, and the next bastard will have to work twice as hard and often fail to erode them, and that's how we've been inching forward and it's how we will continue. And there is no end.

Everything feels awful right now but it isn't really. We still don't officially have a winner, but regardless of how the presidential election ends up, I wanted to take a minute and find what lights I can in the 3 a.m. darkness. Here's what I know:

* Kentucky overwhelmingly rejected an attempt to undermine the public education system by offering private school vouchers:

* Delaware has elected a transgender woman to the House of Representatives, the first out trans person of any gender ever elected to congress:

* For the first time in history, two Black women will be serving in the senate at the same time, and they are only the fourth and fifth Black women ever elected to the senate:

* New York State has passed a constitutional amendment enshrining the rights of pregnant people (including the right to an abortion), LGBTQIA+ people, the disabled, immigrants regardless of legal status, and other at-risk groups:

* Democrat Josh Stein has beaten self-avowed Nazi Mark Robinson to become governor of North Carolina:

That's everything I know off the top of my head. It's not many bright spots, but it's not zero. I'm going to try to find more and I'll add them to the post. It's the only thing I can think of to do that isn't sobbing and throwing up or looking up Canadian immigration rules.

If you know more good news, I encourage you to add it in reblogs.

[rametarin]

Not excited about Harris

However, Trump cannot be president. Anything other than, "Russia must lose and be defeated" is unacceptable in a president.

Putin and Russia at large is not your guy. And the fact he invaded Ukraine just proves it. You don't just accidentally invade like this, seize a tenth or more of a country (talking about 2014) and then "oops I'm accidentally a whole capital city/government."

And the irony is, in decades passed, the republicans would've been very hawkish about this. But, because ideological opposition chose to try and undercut both their emphasis on opposite sex marriage and the cultural institution of a consistent marital buddy system, which the conservatives feel very strongly about, not only telling them they're wrong but enshrining in federal laws contradictions to things they find self-evident and true, they went into cloud cuckooland and just became this.

Were it just the 80s or 90s still and the surviving crowd that was living and relatively young to middle aged then, you would've not only seen oodles of funding and goodies for Ukraine, but droves of Jane Doe motherfuckers piling into boats as volunteers just to shoot Putin's regime to death.

Instead we get the most obnoxious punk queer fringe antagonizing the population of Grandparents with Strong Opinions(tm), and this slow walk of a national conversation on the basis of trans rights for this scenic farce.

Those specific republicans (because it's not the entire population of the ideological base) are so indignant and furious about more or less losing that cultural argument on a legal level, that they saw Russia as a possible alternative and port in the storm. And it didn't have to be this way. The most obnoxious elements of the far-left made it far worse than it had to be, and there's no sign of it stopping anytime soon. And they don't care to what extremes the conservatives go in their indignity; all the better, they imagine, as it defeats their own position.

And then shit like this happens, and boy it sure would've been nice if a bunch of angry, passionate nativists and patriots were sober again and willing to vote to fund resistance in Ukraine against a tyrant, rather than being put into such a defeatist state at home they see this aging Slavic poor man's Ivan the Terrible as a potential savior.

And the biggest irony is, the ideological hard-left doing that was itself sponsored by Russia. And likely, still is. It's just a strain of financial sponsorship that has been present since Soviet times, in education and public institutions where unions are strongest. Encouraging the left to try to institute things that would sow discord and dissent and bolshevize the enemies of Russia. And for better or worse, gay and then trans rights certainly does that.

In being so cavalier and radical about LGBT rights at the time they did, they instituted a hyperallergenic response to it from the traditionalists on the right, which has wrecked utter havoc for domestic peace.

And the worst part is, while the left can somehow see every connection between right wing commentators financially, real or imagined and taken for granted because, "you know the right-wing Nazis are all working together!", they deny Russian Nationals do the same shit with the far left. When they have, have always, and continue to maintain those sponsorred saboteur and cultural antagonists among the left wing. They just cannot imagine they, also, are being used.

It doesn't help that the republicans just point at that and yell, "SOROS!", no. Oh my god, shut up.

But alright. I've gone decades of my life knowing the Russian connection to western academia and social movements was wagging the dog. If what it takes is the brief period in time in which they managed to finally find some purchase in the republican imagination to see the infection in their enemy to finally see it in themselves, so be it. It's progress, albeit, at a cost.