#Political bullshit

[12-dragons-in-a-coat]

Honestly, even if Tiktok is “Back” it’s not what it was, it wont be the same and i cant trust it anymore. The way it came back online was way too weird. I will use the extra time given to save the videos i enjoy and follow the rest of the creators i enjoyed. But seeing these politicians claiming that our “voices were heard!” Is such complete and utter bullshit that i don’t buy for a second. It is political bullshit and I don’t trust it.

[catbountry]

It's been a year since the premiere of Trigun: Stampede. The series, despite the fears of the fans of the '98 anime, actually turned out really good; Yasuhiro Nightow is a big superhero comics nerd, and wanted to have this new anime adaption be an adaption similar to the adaptions of the MCU, back when those movies were consistently enjoyable, and I daresay a bunch of the people watched Trigun probably were either already anime fans, or they were nomad fans who may have been really into the MCU at one point.

I have a lot of thoughts on an American perspective on Vash the Stampede as a character, with a lot of comparisons to American comic book superheroes. And while Trigun wasn't my first anime, I was hooked on it, as someone who grew up around Batman and Spawn's 90's popularity. During my first Otakon in 2001, I must have seen a dozen Vash's and Wolfwoods. I remember the year there was a Wolfwood cosplayer whose Punisher gun was shaped like the Star of David instead of a cross, making him a rabbi. That shit was amazing. The larger point is that I've loved this character for more than half of my entire time being alive, and I haven't seen a lot of discussion of Trigun viewed from a more political lens, and why it resonates so much with Americans (or at least me, who is an American) in particular.

Buckle up, kids, this is gonna be long and rambly.

There was a period of time where I watched nearly every single new MCU movie in the theater. It was exciting seeing adaptions of comic books that would have probably never gotten a movie before the success of The Avengers. And I don't think it's a mistake that the most comic book-y of the movies are usually the best; Guardians of the Galaxy and its sequel remain as probably my favorite MCU movies. Nightow was working directly with the studio making a new Trigun anime and reportedly got the crew to watch a bunch of Marvel movies to set the tone for the anime as an adaption; it's why Vash got a completely new redesign that freaked all us old fans the fuck out. Though it appears that once again, Trigun tried and failed to get that massive Japanese audience that most successful anime have. But boy, oh boy, do us westerners fucking love Trigun, especially us Americans. Nightow's love of superhero comics bled into Trigun, and it just so happened that he was incredibly influenced by Spawn, Hellboy and Batman as much as he was influenced by Akira Toriyama and mechanical art. McFarlane Toys released a Vash figure that is McFarlane'd the fuck up. Nightow loves all superhero comics but especially the Blade trilogy.

Just look at this and imagine being 13 years old and seeing this on a screen for the first time with the instrumental hard rock opening.

Also, I wouldn't actually get around to reading Spawn until I was an adult, but you know what? It's pretty good. The writing is definitely weaker than the art, but holy shit, that art goes hard and I still think that shit's cool as fuck.

As stated before, around the early 2000's Trigun was considered peak anime, though it's been more overlooked in recent years in favor of Cowboy Bebop, an anime that has aged gracefully by comparison. But while Bebop has that sort of timeless cool and level of quality that drew the attention of filmmakers like the Wachoski sisters, Trigun has that very specific kind of adolescent sense of coolness that comic book fans get, especially back in the 90's before this sort of thing would be smothered to death by MCU's Joss Whedoning of superheroes. Spawn, Hellboy and Batman are still cool. And Trigun also has a shitton of guns, obviously, given that Vash being an incredibly OP gunslinger in a world where everybody has guns.

And America loves guns.

I think the contrast of Vash's pacifism while still wielding a gun is extremely interesting because it's not something you see very much (I bet if I watched more westerns, I'd have a better idea if this is a trope in them at all). Batman does not use guns and doesn't kill people, which is why there's still discourse around Tim Burton's Batman films to this day still; I don't think Kevin Smith has budged on this. Other more morally grey superheroes will use guns (by this definition I'm counting The Punisher even if he doesn't have any superpowers, unless you count severe PTSD as a superpower). And a lot of them had huge surges in popularity in the 90's around the time Nightow was making Trigun. Vash posed like Batman or Spider-Man looking brooding (like the gif above) happens a lot in the earlier issues even though that's not really his character.

Several years ago, there was an attempt by a conservative thinktank to discredit a bunch of Hollywood actors saying that gun violence in America is a serious issue and contrasted their statements scenes of them shooting guns in movies, but if we're being real here, gunplay in movies can be really fucking cool. Again I invoke The Matrix, or movies by Robert Rodriguez and John Woo. Look at video games, and compare the decline in violent crime that's been happening here since the 70's and 80's, as culture warriors bemoan movies and video games for becoming more violent. Remember when Wayne LaPierre, vice president of the NRA, brought up fucking Splatterhouse as a reason why Sandy Hook happened? Do you know what Splatterhouse looks like?

It looks like this.

You know how these guys constantly say the only way to counter a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun? Usually, the inference is that if the "good guy" with a gun shoots, he's shooting to kill. Deadpool and the Punisher would shoot to kill. But Vash is constantly trying to avoid it. And I remember as a teenager finding that really cool? And the manga and anime don't shy away from how impractical Vash's pacifism is. It's a bit more realistic than Steven Universe's ending, but also Steven Universe was made for children.

I know Avatar: The Last Airbender is often invoked when criticizing Steven Universe's philosophy, but I haven't really seen Vash's similar philosophy criticized in the same way, and I think a lot of that has to do with the presence of Wolfwood, who is the "I think we're gonna have to kill this guy" guy. I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen art of this yet. I may have to get on that. I already drew Vash horrified at the Trolley Problem.

Vash is a character designed with maximum coolness in mind, but also an overpowered being who is capable of killing millions, and in the anime, he somehow destroys July City without killing anyone directly, but the destruction of the city led to a bunch of people dying. He's so deeply committed to not wanting to kill anyone that he's probably killed more people than he would have if he just shot Knives. The best Batman stories acknowledge that Batman's refusal to kill Joker has similarly results in the deaths of people Batman could have prevented if he killed one guy, and this could also apply to Vash's relationship with his brother Knives, who was kind of destined to be a mass murderer with a name like that, let's be real.

Online, we tend to joke about bringing out the guillotines, or justify not feeling an sympathy for billionaires who die in a sub trying to view the Titanic. But if you were given a gun and a real human person begging for their life, what would you actually do? Do you honestly think that you would be the ethical Death Note user?

Vash has guns but he chooses not to kill people; he prefers to not even use them unless he has to, instead opting to run away and look cool doing it somehow.

He really, really doesn't want to kill people. He doesn't become numb to people dying. It hurts him every single time he watches someone get killed. In reality, most of us that aren't sociopaths would be distressed at the thought of killing someone. The only reason armies in real life work is that they become inoculated to the idea of violence and dehumanize the enemy. Vash is no soldier. He is idealistic, he is empathetic, and he sees every human being as a person worthy of life. Batman refuses to use guns, as that's how his parents were killed in front of him. Vash has to use guns in order to protect people from getting killed. He has the ethics of Superman but the tools of a comic book antihero. He's the logical conclusion of an shonen anime protagonist in a world that chews up anyone with that kind of optimism and hope and spits them out. And yet... he still keeps going. He remains committed. He's still cheery, goofy, lovable Vash.

Batman used to kill people, in the earliest comics. With the Comics Code Authority, superheroes could no longer kill people. In the 80's, comics were getting darker and edgier, taken more seriously. While Alan Moore's Watchmen delved into the moral complexities in a world with superheroes that was similar to ours, Frank Miller was keeping Batman consistent, even as Gotham got darker and uglier.

Batman is a vigilante. The police can be helpful or they can fuck up everything, depending on what's needed for the story. In Batman Year One, there's a scene where Batman crashes a party attended by the elites of Gotham, politicians and mobsters mingling.

Seeing this during the Bush presidency blew my mind. I don't want to get into just how perfectly the members of his administration seemed to resemble a rogue's gallery of sorts with the shared goals of making a lot of money and bombing the shit out of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was extremely anti-war even before the 2000 election as a very opinionated 14 year-old watching, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and feeling relieved that a grown-up was able to see through all the bullshit; it helps when the guy who's against the war and killing people is funny. I remember writing in my diary at 12 years old after Columbine happened that I wanted to take all of the guns and melt them down in a pot, similarly to that scene in Superman IV where he throws the entire world's nuclear arsenal into the sun. But also that same year I would fall in love with The Matrix... and not long after that, Trigun.

Again, we come back to the idea of someone using a gun, a weapon designed to kill people, and using it in pursuit of the exact opposite. That resonated with me. I myself was very idealistic, and the political climate of my teenage years seemed to do almost everything to stamp that out of me. Things feel just as fraught two decades later, but in slightly different ways. Pacifism is looked down upon, as indicated by the backlash to the ending of Steven Universe, and how one crazy lady called Rebecca Sugar, a Jewish person, a Nazi for writing it that way. But for Steven, things worked out. For Vash? Well, he still has hope somehow, despite everything. I think the fact that he strives to protect human life, even when someone is a complete monster, is admirable in that it cuts to the very basic desire to not see people hurt. But we're also selfish, and scared, and sometimes it's hard to conceive of a solution to a problem that doesn't involve violence. Seeing dead bodies on TV or the internet upsets us, but we're often paralyzed by feeling like we can't do anything, and even if we tried, we'd likely perish in the attempt. We desire revenge, punishment for those who transgress by inflicting violence, and we can rationalize using it against the right targets. Vash the Stampede would have a fucking breakdown dealing with the state-backed violence that's been a part of geopolitics pretty much as long as there have been states and geopolitics. Vash would try and solve the bombings of Gaza with an impassioned plea for both sides to stop fighting before he would somehow wind up making things worse and it would eat away at him inside, no matter how brave a face he puts on as he tries to find some kind of hope in a hopeless situation. And... you know what? I kind of wish more people would be like that. Maybe if there were enough people like that, these sorts of things wouldn't happen in the first place. I wish more people could look at human suffering and feel compelled to try and stop it, not discriminating against one side or the other, trying to understand why people are doing what they do. Seeing anti-war protestors in Tel Aviv brings back memories of protests against the start of the War on Terror, and how hated America was internationally during those years, even when most Americans approved of the war. Michael Moore was booed at the Oscars for condemning George W. Bush and the War on Terror. It's terrifying that those in power want us killing each other and have conditioned us to support it. I want so badly for human beings to come together to just stop the violence, but it feels impossible, like we're destined for failure, like we might somehow make things worse or become worse versions of ourselves full of hatred and ugliness. But we should want to try, even if it's hard or unprofitable or we have no idea how to even do it. Somebody actually dedicating themselves to trying to fight our violent impulses out of love is appealing, and if they're more powerful than us, and can do more... well, I want the biblically accurate angel with every mental illness willing to martyr himself over and over again. But it is more fun when he's Bugs Bunny about it.

[amalgamasreal]

[dixxiemaegraphics]

I don’t like talking about super SUPER serious (or political) stuff on here, but a friend said something that sat with me weird and I’m putting it out there. One, to get it off my chest, but also to see like… what people think of her opinion.

I’ll try to keep it brief.

I mentioned how my spouse and I are looking into moving out of the country because of how scary and potentially unsafe the current state of things in the US is becoming. My friend said that that is a privileged decision and that I should reconsider because not everyone can just up and leave, and it’s better to “stay and fight” (and insert other positivities I’ve heard before).

She is white and comes from a family with money. I’m biracial and do not come from money. Sure we are both queer women/fem-identifying people BUT there are still differences in how we live our day-to-day.

I personally thought it was kind of weird for HER to tell me choosing to move would be privileged. I know it’s not untrue—I acknowledge that SO MANY are stuck with the landscape we’re in. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a wrong or immoral choice on my part. Dicey to say, sure, but I don’t like being softly guilted for my choice.

Second to that, I tried to explain to her that I have done my part, I have done the work to help in ways I can and I am tired. I’m older and tired and just want to live. There’s a little something insulting and weird about her telling me about what I should do and what privileges I have or don’t have while she is a well-off white woman.

But I didn’t want to bring that up because this isn’t the struggle Olympics.

But am I wrong for thinking and feeling anything of this? Because I feel crazy.

[antlersofthevoid]

//vent

Hate to bring up politics on my blog but jfc if this bullshit continues i'm gonna need stronger depression meds. I didn't want my semester to start off like this, i've already missed a day in each of my morning classes because of panic attacks over the decisions of the orange man.

I'm. Literally about to lose my damn mind.

[bitstitchbitch]

Big sigh.

Pre 2020 election / COVID madness, Utah was proud to be one of the pioneers of widely implemented mail-in voting. Practically everyone does it here regardless of political party. While other states rushed to implement mail-in voting, we were just business as usual. But our red legislature (and executive branch) keeps getting more extreme and now they’re trying to take it away. Along with overruling all our voter initiatives.

my legislators will be getting emails from me

[njelruch]

I'm starting to hear people get nostalgic for the George W Bush days again, and I realize that most people on this site were infants and small children during W's presidency, but no. Just no. I'm not even talking about the war crimes. Pretty much all presidents enable a war crime or two. But the Bush Administration was directly responsible for so much of what's fucked up about US politics in general and the GOP in particular that it's hard to even describe to someone who wasn't there for the before and after. Seriously, if I could time travel once, Quantum Leap style, I would absolutely Leap to Florida before the 2000 Election to sort out their ballot fuckery early so the Supreme Court couldn't hand the election to W. (If you're too young to remember that mess, googling "Election 2000" "hanging chad," and "Pat Buchanan" will give you the gist.)

Now, to be fair, W himself was not the main problem with the Bush presidency. W was an idiot burnout nepo-baby, but if that's all we had to deal with, it probably would have been mostly okay. But the idiot burnout nepo-baby was surrounded by a crew of Reagan-era ghouls led by Darth Cheney, and Karl. Fucking. Rove.

Cheney's team and KFR are responsible for most of what sucks in politics today. Cheney's team took the excuse that 9/11 offered to ramp up state surveillance, further militarize the police, and cement the idea that questioning the (Republican) government was unAmerican in the brains of the general public. "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide," was the quote of the day.

That fucker Rove is directly responsible for the rise of Fox News. "Alternative facts?" that's Rove. If you've ever seen Stephen Colbert's "Colbert Report" bit, the whole "truthiness" shtick came out of that. Others may have tried it, but he successfully married Evangelical Christianity to the GOP to the point where they're basically interchangeable and elevated being anti-choice and anti-LGBT to major selling points of the GOP platform. (Google "snowflake babies" if you want to get a taste of what was going on.)

W also gave us "No Child Left Behind," which has damaged at least 2 generations of kids at this point. I could keep going, but it's late. The point is, don't let the fact that he wasn't literally a live-action version of a Captain Planet supervillain blind you to the fact that W's presidency was one of the worst things that ever happened to the US. Bush sowed and fertilized the seeds that produced Trump.

[errorcritical]

"don't pressure people to vote" IM SORRY BUT ITS TOO FUCKING LATE NOW

you can do your little "I don't like/trust anyone so I'm just gonna sit out" bullshit when we're not literally a hairs breadth from disaster every election

[anachrosims]

THE DANGER of PROJECT 2025: Directed at my fellow voting-age USAmericans--

This fash shit is out there getting promoted* and y'all who call yourselves ~LeFtIsTs~ are saying you won't vote Dem in the presidential election because you demand total ideological purity from someone who made it to the top of the USAmerican political system.

Sure, it's your right to vote or not vote in whichever way you please. (For now.) It's also your right to not know how domestic and foreign policy works; or to not understand that fixing deep-rooted systemic problems takes decades of work.

It's also my right to say this is not the time to get picky.

Things are JUST starting to get a little better. Don't fuck this up for the rest of us and the world at large.

*-video itself is not promoting it. Just discussing that it exists and what's in it.

[fraiserire]

I want to scream, I want to cry, I want break things, I want to rip things apart, I want rip myself apart, I want to punch something until I break every bone in my hand and it’s left raw, I want to kick, I want to fight tooth and nail, I want set everything on fire, I want to claw my way out, I want to claw my very heart but still nothing seems to be enough for the all the rage and anger and astounding amount of pain that is lodged into my very being, heart and soul.

[the-fruit-tea-devil]

The same people that say “kill all TERFs” “TERFs deserve to die” are usually the same exact people to turn around and say “just because Palestine is a transphobic nation doesn’t mean the people deserve to die”

[catbountry]

It probably says something about the kind of people I follow on this hellsite, but I haven't really seen very much hand-wringing over the morality of celebrating the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Quite the opposite, in fact. And honestly, I feel much the same.

Like, obviously, this never should have come to this point. There should not be an entire billion-dollar industry with the business model of being an unnecessary middleman between people and healthcare that maximizes profit by denying those people care. There should not be an industry that profits off of letting people die slowly, in pain, in debt, when they could easily cover the costs of whatever care it is they need. They just don't because that's not profitable enough. They might even, in fact... lose money. The horror.

When such an industry built upon the foundation of such obvious cruelty exists, when it's recognizable even to conservatives who fully buy into the temporarily embarrassed millionaire mindset and that they're totally going to run their own successful small business, when our elected officials who are supposed to represent us and work in our best interest turn away and do nothing... what other choice is there but violence? The people that run these companies, that power this ugly machine with our blood, are not simply going to concede out of the goodness of their hearts. No. They are selfish motherfuckers, unable to even conceive of the life of the average American, insulated by bubbles where none of these things are concerns to them. If they cannot be counted on to act morally on their own principles, if they have proven that they have no real principles aside from accumulating wealth and maybe being kind of nice to the people directly around them if you're lucky, then it stands to reason that the only real way to motivate them is through fear of retribution. And since our justice system is far more committed to imprisoning poor people who turn to crime out of desperation... all you have left for possible recourse is vigilante justice. Quite frankly, it's surprising that something like this hadn't happened sooner.

And now it's become a huge wake-up call, to everyone. These CEOs are human, vulnerable, made of the same flesh and blood as the rest of us, and fated to one day die, the same as the rest of us, and just as vulnerable to bullets. I don't want to condone murder but like... shit, dude, how the fuck else are we supposed to get the message across that we hate these scumfuck leeches aside from celebrating when one of them gets gunned down in the street like a dog?

Fuck you. Your cruelty and ambivalence towards the lives of your customers has been echoed back to you by the millions that you have consistently fucked over, who may not make any money off of the death of one of your own, but feel a little less helpless in our current system knowing that someone has finally drawn your blood while you've been bathing in ours. You have positioned yourself in opposition to the majority of the country, and you are vastly outnumbered. And now all their eyes are on you.

None of this would have happened if you had the capacity to act like decent human beings and hadn't let untold thousands die because it was simply more profitable for you if they just hadn't had any pesky medical problems. You know, the entire justification for the existence of your businesses? To pay for these things because Ronald Reagan (it's always fucking Reagan, isn't it?) convinced the wives of doctors that socialized medicine was for communists? Your business model is evil. You are evil. You do evil things. You should be ashamed of yourselves. If the lesson you learned from this is to stay inside more and to beef up your security, then you are a deeply evil fucker. At least Ebeneezer Scrooge was capable of seeing the error of his ways when faced with the specter of death, and the consequences of his actions.

Christmas is coming up and you bastards are worse than the most iconic Dickens villain, one defined by his hatred of Christmas and his greed. And now a lot of people are looking at this assassination and praying for a repeat of the results of Shinzo Abe's.

When you corner a wounded animal, you can't act surprised when it bites you.

[troythecatfish]

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, the world’s most prolific liars now have plausible deniability for real world events people painstakingly documented. Politicians around the globe have been swatting away potentially damming pieces of evidence - grainy video footage of hotel trysts, voice recordings attacking political opponents - by dismissing them as AI generated fakes. Adding to the confusion, actual AI disinformation is flooding the internet, making it even harder to understand reality.

[veritasrose]

If y’all really want viable third party candidates in the US, we need to vote in the smaller elections. We can’t just swoop in with a democratic socialist president. We need to have third party senators and governors and freakin school board members! Build up the presence from the ground up and then, then there might be enough support structure for a third party president.

I know everyone is hung up on the big ticket this year, but look into the smaller races and start backing those candidates. Find who is starting their political career and boost them, so they have a chance to get their foot in the door.

Seriously y’all, we need to start paying attention to these ballots. My city has a more progressive mayor, and she has declared, with police backing, that no one in our city will be charged with any crimes related to abortion. They are refusing to prosecute despite the state laws.

That is the difference your vote can make. Especially in smaller elections!

So do some research, find representatives who you actually want to support, and then do that! They all have to start somewhere, and in smaller tickets, we can essentially decide which seeds we want to water.

(I mean there is also the Burn It All Down option but that always leads to most the damage falling on marginalized communities. And I don’t think people relying on social programs should pay the price for revolution. We should at least try a more social based change first.)

[delicehm]

"Be gay do crime" I'm gay and do some minor illegal actions that can get me into prison for from a few weeks to a few years(literally just say some things online and offline, my country is weird), but those two things about me are not connected. Do I do it right?

[chaosdisorganized]

Tumblr mobile pissing me off because I was going to make a political post about abolishing the two party system and I had a screenshot of George Washington's Farewell Address and Tumblr fucked up the formatting.

Anyways here's the link

Here's the screenshot I took, maybe Tumblr won't fucked it up this time

Ahh it worked. I was going on a long rant about how to abolish the two party system and what we as voters should do to rise against its corruption but Tumblr ate the post after fucking up that screenshot. Fucking hell. Not that anyone would even listen to me anyways I know my political beliefs are kind of out there and bizarre but uhh vote 3rd party, stop supporting and upholding the two party system, we will never see true meaningful government reform if we keep doing the same thing we've been doing for centuries. Needless to say I hate all the president candidates for 2024 and I wish the US would stop supporting the two party system which continuously breeds corruption in our government. Thanks.