#Status quo libs

[autistic-ben-tennyson]

Prismatic-bell has been accusing Palestinians asking for donations of scamming people. They also are acting like they know better than Palestinians on what’s good for them and are using the old conservative whataboutism regarding how poor people can’t have anything nice unless they’re lying by bringing up Palestinians living in poor conditions while still having access to gofundme and wifi while also bringing up the war in Ukraine as par for the course.. They blocked me for calling them out but have no right to say this when they don’t care about Palestinians at all.

[taisorato]

if you can't understand that loudly, publicly saying that you will not vote for a political party until they stop committing a genocide is an actual, viable political strategy, then i'm sorry, i understand that US democracy is fundamentally broken, but you don't actually know how a democracy is supposed to function.

real quick, tell me how you think you're going to convince the dems to stop doing a genocide when you've voted them back in on a platform that promises more genocide. or is that simply not urgent to you?

[ramsei501st]

I HHAAATE YOU DALINAR KHOLIN!!!!! I HATE YOU!!! 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

[tryworks]

id rather vote for biden and have him collapse in office in a year than have trump win and for him institute even more conservative supreme court justices that will control legal decisions in the us for 40-50+ more years and the fact that more people arent genuinely afraid of project 2025 and the ramifications of trump winning is insane. sorry

[thevagueambition]

me, my brother and my dad: it would be great if medically necessary dental care was part of universal health care

grandfather: well but it's not because we as a society has chosen that it shouldn't be

okay??? that was decided like a century ago?? we would like to change it?? wdym lmao

[barrymccaulkinem]

"if your vision of justice is killing the right people you're just calling for mob rule and all its potential atrocity" true and obvious, yes

but i feel like ppl are trying to twist this into saying that we can make it to a life worth living where we can prevent a lot of harm before it ever occurs without killing some people along the way, and thats fucking asinine

[kohakuhibiki]

It's so tacky when white liberals attack communist online on the behalf of the poor people who had to suffer the communist (vague) regime in their homeland. I mean if anything communist was a slur I was called in school until I looked it up then realized maybe it's interesting, especially given cultural context, and kind of bold that some people not only reclaim it, but look into it. Because the problem in many case wasn't communism, but corruption and that comes with every political system and turns out that if these people really wanted to genuinely sympathize with us that much and were sincere instead of just oversensitive and doing a shit effort to preserve a good image, well, they'd drop any ounce of patriotism for their own culture, and do the effort to actually analyze its real impacts. But given the current circumstances and various before, I doubt that ever happen. Like if I have to pick between white american kids reclaiming communism or liberals who appopriate every whatever cause to speak on the behalf of people they won't ever try to genuinely understand I wouldn't even hesitate a fucking second.

[wolf-skins]

also pushing this narrative that people who protest the genocide, spoke out about joe biden, criticize the dems in any capacity, etc, "want trump to win" deliberately lays the groundwork for people to blame palestinians and arab americans if the democrats lose the election. they will use it as another excuse to be islamophobic, and in these ways will be no different than trump supporters who claim the elections were stolen from them.

"if u criticize kamala u want trump to win we have to project purity and unity or else you're a russian bot" or maybe u have more of a surface level analysis of politics than u think

[tamamita]

its kind of insane seeing libs respond to the stance "america's current political framework is diabolocal and should not exist" with 🤓 ummmm. it does exist though. what now? 🧐 then get mad at you when your answer is "well you have to actually get rid of it first" and not "keep using the framework but pretend it's good this time"

We've had since the Truman years time for people to organize, but Americans are so bound by their exceptionalist mentality that whenever they're challenged to make any significant changes in the status quo, they feel threatened. When MLK started talking about White moderates, they all turned against him. The same thing happened with BLM, when they knew that protesting and rioting was meant to be disruptive, they took distance, just like MLK in his years. White Liberals love to act progressive, but feel threatened whenever they are challenged, they'll start consent manufacturing, often calling every leftist a Russian/Chinese psyop when they're told to stand up, ultimately ignoring every call for a change through class solidarity. And even if there's change, they'll call quits once the bare minimum has been fulfilled and never bother with anything else until a republican is there to threaten their way of life.

Look at the Palestinian genocide, every Liberal was convinced that Hamas was at fault and refused to acknowledge prior events, eating every shit the Zionists threw at them. They, the whites, thought that they knew the best outcome for the Palestinians. Months later, they acknowledge the genocide, but instead of actually trying to stop that old man from supporting and abetting genocide, they'll throw the Palestinians under the bus and talk about domestic issues and how to prevent Trump from making everything even worse. The only solution they believe is to uphold the Bourgeoise dictatorship and once Biden's position has been secured, they can go back to their way of life only for the next country to be targeted by the US War machine in their never ending thirst for imperial gains. Keep the GOP out is their only mantra.

White liberals are the biggest threat to the western hemisphere, to the global south, to the entire world even, and they continue to perpetuate the cycle of violence.

[theculturedmarxist]

I think a big part of what is driving libs to double down on Biden is the fact that they really don't have any other (electoral) choice. In the US, the entire electoral process is run by the two big parties, which the government (that they just so happen to run) has decided are in fact private clubs and can do whatever they want and more or less run the election process however they want.

Liberals as a group are comprised mostly of two cohorts: the comfortable and the comfortable-aspirant. The first are made up of the professional classes which have the wealth, credentials, and connections to basically be okay except in the most dire of circumstances. The other are the otherwise comfortable or comfortable adjacent which are threatened by the policies of GOP and rely on the largess of the Democrats to get by, hopefully long enough for them to escape into the comfortable category.

Both of these constituencies want Biden (or whatever creature the DNC dredges up) to win because Democrat control is essential to their comfort, which is their primary concern. The Comfortable would just as soon vote Republican if it served the same purpose. The Comfortable-Adjacent are usually in more of a client position and more reliant on a Dem being in control for their comfort, real or perceived.

Stopping genocide, fighting fascism, protecting minorities, whatever, none of these are actual concerns of these groups, though they do make useful moral bludgeons. Their central concern is their own comfort, and because of that they are devoted to the status quo which provides it. Any alternative requires a greater or lesser degree of discomfort, to put it mildly. There's the discomfort of confronting their own complicity in the whole rotten system for so long. There's the discomfort in having to cut ties with friends, family, colleagues based on having values other than their own well being. There's the discomfort of having to do the actual work of building alternatives to the current political system. There's the discomfort of that system reacting oppressively to you trying to subvert it.

So for the liberal, there really isn't any actual alternative to Joe Biden. They're either already in or trying to achieve access to the best of all possible worlds, a world which they have no interest at all in trying to upset via anything except the most painstaking of incremental changes, much less destroying with something as uncomfortable as revolution.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Austin Grossman’s ‘Fight Me’

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In Fight Me, the novelist and game developer Austin Grossman uses aging ex-teen superheroes to weigh the legacy of Generation X, in a work that enrobes its savage critique with sweet melancholia, all under a coating of delicious snark:

http://www.austingrossman.com/fight-me

It is, in other words, a very Gen X kinda novel. Prodigy (AKA Alex Beekman) is a washed-up superhero. As a nerdy high-schooler, he was given super powers by a mysterious wizard (posing as a mediocre teacher), who gave him an amulet and a duty. Whenever Alex touches the amulet and speaks the word of power, reaclun (which he insists is not "nuclear" backwards) he transforms into Prodigy, a nigh-invulnerable, outrageously handsome living god who is impervious to bullets, runs a one-minute mile, and fights like a champ. Prodigy, he is told, has a destiny: to fight the ultimate evil when it emerges and save the world.

Now, Alex is 40, and it's been a decade since he retired both Prodigy and his Alex identity, moving into a kind of witness protection program the federal government set up for him. He poses as a mediocre university professor, living a lonely and unexceptional life.

But then, Alex is summoned back to the superhero lair he shared with his old squad, "The Newcomers," a long-vacant building that is one quarter Eero Saarinen, three quarters Mussolini. There, he is reunited with his estranged fellow ex-Newcomers, and sent on a new quest: to solve the riddle of the murder of the mysterious wizard who gave him his powers, so long ago.

The Newcomers – an amped-up ninja warrior, a supergenius whose future self keeps sending him encouragement and technical schematics backwards through time, and an exiled magical princess turned preppie supermodel – have spent more than a decade scattered to the winds. While some have fared better than Alex/Prodigy, none of them have lived up to their potential or realized the dreams that seemed so inevitable when they were world famous supers with an entourage of fellow powered teens who worshipped them as the planet's greatest heroes.

As they set out to solve the mystery, they are reunited and must take stock of who they are and how they got there (cue Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime"). With flashbacks, flashforwards, and often hilarious asides, Prodigy brings us up to speed on how supers fail, and what it's like to live as a failed super.

The publisher's strapline for this book is "The Avengers Meets the Breakfast Club," which is clever, but extremely wrong. The real comp for this book isn't "The Breakfast Club," it's "The Big Chill."

When I realized this, I got briefly mad, because I've only had two good movie high concept pitches in my life and one of them was "Gen X Big Chill." Rather than veterans of the Summer of 68 confronting the Reagan years, you could have veterans of the Battle of Seattle living through the Trump years. One would be on PeEP, one would be an insufferable Andrew Tate-quoting bitcoiner, one would be a redpilled reactionary with a genderqueer teen, one would be a squishy lib, one a firebreathing leftist, etc. The soundtrack would just be top 40 tracks from artists who have songs on "Schoolhouse Rock Rocks":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!_Rocks

Every generation has some way in which they seek to overthrow the status quo and build a new, allegedly better one, after all. "Big Chill"'s impact comes from its postmortem on a generation where it was easy to feel like you were riding destiny's rails to greatness thanks to the sheer size of the Boomer cohort and the postwar prosperity they lived through. A Gen X Big Chill would be a stocktaking of a generation that defined itself as a lost generation reared in the Boomers' shadows, armored against the looming corpo-climate apocalypse with the sword of irony and the shield of sincerity.

Which is basically what Grossman is doing here. What's more, doing this as a superhero story is a genius move – what could be a better metaphor for a teen's unrealistic certainty of destined greatness than a superhero? Superhero fantasies are irreducibly grandiose and unrealistic, but all the more beautiful and brave and compelling for it.

You know, like teens.

At 52, I'm a middle-aged Gen Xer. I've got two artificial hips and I just scheduled a double cataract surgery. My hairline is receding. I'm an alta kaker. But I wasn't always: I was a bright and promising kid, usually the youngest person in the room where we were planning big protests, ambitious digital art projects, or the future of science fiction. I had amazing friends: creative and funny and sweet, loyal and talented and just fun.

We're mostly doing okay (the ones that lived; fuck cancer and fuck heroin and fuck fentanyl). Some of us are doing pretty good. On a good day, I think I'm doing pretty good. I had a night in 2018 where I got to hang out, as a peer, with my favorite musician and my favorite novelist, both in the same evening. These were artists I'd all but worshipped as a teen. I remember looking at the two selfies I took than night and thinking, Man, if 15 year old me could see these, he'd say that it all worked out.

But you don't get to be 52 without having a long list of regrets and failures that your stupid brain is only too eager to show you a highlight reel from. No one gets to middle age without a haunting loss that is always trying to push its way to the fore in order to incinerate every triumph great and small and leave ashes behind.

That's why there's a "Big Chill" for every generation. Each one has its own specific character and meaning situated in history, but each one has to grapple with the double-edged sword of nostalgia. Not for nothing, John Hodgman (a bona fide Gen X icon) calls nostalgia "a toxic impulse."

Grossman really makes Fight Me work as a Gen X Big Chill. He's a great Gen X writer; his first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, was a knockout debut about superheroes and supervillains that had a very "The Boys" vibe, you know, that neat little move where you contend with the banal parts of a super's life and show how super powers don't make you a good person, or even a competent one.

His followup to Invincible came six years later. YOU is a coming-of-age story about the games industry with a second-person narrator (think "Zork"). Grossman is an accomplished game dev (Tomb Raider Legend, Deus X, Dishonored, etc), and he uses YOU to really plumb the depths of what games mean, what fun is, and how working on games isn't just work, it's often really shitty work, the opposite of fun:

https://memex.craphound.com/2013/04/16/austin-grossmans-you-brilliant-novel-plumbs-the-heroic-and-mystical-depths-of-gaming-and-simulation/

Grossman's last novel was Crooked, a very daffy alternate history in which Richard Nixon is a Cthulhoid sorcerer locked in a Lovecraftian battle of good and evil. This is a purely hilarious romp, wildly imaginative and deliciously certain to offend reactionary jerks:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/26/austin-grossmans-crooked-the-awful-cthulhoid-truth-about-richard-nixon/

All those chops are on display in Fight Me: a book that covers its brooding with wisecracks, that spits out ten great gags per page even as it drives a knife into your heart. It's a great novel.

Fight Me doesn't come out in the US and Canada until tomorrow (it's been out in the UK, Australia, NZ, etc for more than a month). Normally, I would hold off on reviewing this until the on-sale date, but this is my last day on the blog for two weeks – I'm leaving on a family vacation early tomorrow morning. I'll see you on July 14!

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/01/the-big-genx-chill/#im-super-thanks-for-asking

[jokin-around]

I actually believe more people are concerned with their own wellbeing than they are with creating any actual direct change in the world or in their own communities, 1 year of gencide and I've seen Liberals more pissed at leftists than they have been at Isreal or genuinely fascist policies regarding the unhoused , you live in fucking utah, name one "leftist" you know that isn't just someone reluctantly voting for harris in a majority red county? you people are fucking vile and begging for literally any reason to lambast the people directly threatening your status quo of consumerism, individualism, colonialism and willful ignorance, I hope you're fucking proud to call yourseves American cuz I'm not and every lib tech ceo or landlord or cop happy to support policies that create more suffering in brown and lower class communities while empowering cartoonish evils like Bezos and Musk have 1000% times more power over my quality of life than any Dumbfuck trump supporter or dirt poor leftist ever will, this place is a goddamn joke

[serial-unaliver]

The person in your comments arguing for how *these* US sanctions are actually good and altruistic… every time you think you’ve met every kind of tumblr loser they create a new one. I can comprehend voteblue fanatics better than whatever’s going on with that person. At least tumblr libs admit Biden sucks most of the time now, they just benefit from his status quo so his flaws don’t bother them too much. What’s the sanctions defender getting out of it??

i'm tired this morning because I stayed up until like 2am arguing with that person

[shinobicyrus]

Liberals aren't freaking out because Biden had one bad debate performance. They're freaking out because the writing has been on the wall for years and meaningful discussion & concerns have been staved off by an aggressive enforcement of the party line by Democratic leadership, public assurances from White House officials, and glowing anecdotes from media allies about a "sharp" President Biden who exists behind closed doors, just trust us. If you tried to voice valid concerns about Biden's age, criticized his policies, or his stubborn support of Israel despite its egregious and endless war crimes, you were accused of "handing" the election to Trump.

But after the country watched that 90 minute travesty (or talked to people who did, or watched clips of it online), those years of suppressed and buried concerns have burst free all at once like a broken damn, because they were never properly addressed.

Now, there's calls for him to resign his candidacy. There's talk of an open convention. There's murmurs that maybe the reason why party officials agreed to such an early debate was so if it went disastrously bad (as they might have suspected, knowing the truth), they might have time to change course.

In less than 90 minutes, Joe Biden single-handedly flipped the status quo from "libs so terrified of Trump that they'd vote for Biden no matter what" to "libs so terrified of Trump they can't afford to support Biden."

Good.

[coveredinmetaldust]

The discourse around the OceanGate situation is making me really fucking mad. You are getting a lot of posts like this one where people are decrying how inhumane it is for people to meme on the situation instead of grieving for the kind of people would work you to death if it meant a 0.002% stock price increase.

Yup, these fucking losers are equating willfully creating a death trap and killing 5 other people instantly to a car accident.

I don’t even entirely disagree that yes, it is tragic. I’d rather they didn’t die from an implosion caused by their metal death-tube crumpling in on itself because the arrogant shithead CEO decided that all these safety standards other subs adhere to were getting in the way of innovation. Obviously it would have been preferable to find them drifting on the ocean surface a day later shaken but ultimately unharmed.

No, I’m mad about how blatantly lopsidedly this flavor of moral outrage is always applied. You never see these people on Reddit, Twitter, etc crawl out of the woodwork to denounce the people saying “well he was no angel” when a person of color is gunned down by the police. You never see these same multi-paragraph posts decrying how immoral it is to say “play stupid games win stupid prizes” when this shit happens to the poor, disenfranchised, etc.

You don’t see it, because the people currently on their high horse are the same people who would call you a fucking idiot if you were on this submarine.

If the entree fee was $250 and five working class people were killed I can guarantee you'd see these same people joking about Darwin awards instead of saying stuff like this.

But no no, suddenly now is the time to stop victim blaming and start grandstanding while clutching at pearls. Now is the time to get indignant and accuse people not of feeling empathy and being inhumane sociopaths. There are now were entire call-out topics on Reddit where they organized and briggaded anyone who dares to say anything bad about these poor billionaires. Where the FUCK was this outrage during, I dunno, pick any one of the numerous fucking examples of brutality and/or exploitation occurring within the last three years. Oh right, these dopey fucks were too busy wagging their fingers at the victims and telling them to take Personal Responsibility™. Too bad, if only they were born rich—then maybe these paragons of virtue on social media would go to bat for them.

But you know what the worst part of this discourse is? I can’t quite put it into words, but it’s so blatantly fucking obvious to me that all of this is insincere—this is actual virtue signaling. You can just tell by the tone, the regurgitated talking points, the slimy smug indignation. This is false empathy over people they couldn’t care less about and won’t even remember in a week, because the point isn’t to being a compassionate person.

No, this to grandstand and get that dopimine rush by calling people out. This is being done to score points for some political ideology and Own The Libs/Commies/Socialists/[insert any slightly left of center ideology]. This is so the Panglossian shitheels of social media can maintain the status quo and feel superior by stamping out any act of defiance or rebellion.

None of these of these people seemed to care about how disrespectful this kind of disaster tourism is for the victims of the Titanic. (Victims, who, were mostly lower class since the wealthy were the ones who were allowed to escape.) They don’t care that these rich assholes were profiteering off a tragedy and making a spectacle out of visiting a mass grave. No, they save that smug, condescending, and cynical response for the people who call out these rich assholes.

It makes me want to throw my computer into the ocean.

Now, if you are one of these people I’m screaming into the void about, and you genuinely do not understand why people are memeing the situation so hard, you need to take a step back and recognize that this is, objectively, an absurd and cartoonish situation. This could have easily been a plot for an episode of The Simpsons. This whole goddamn situation reads like something thrown together by a room of writers who were trying to out “yes and” one another until one stopped everyone and said: “Woah woah, hold on. The CEO’s wife is a descendant of the Titanic victims? Isn’t that just a little much?” And then everyone else ignored this person and just kept fucking going.

In short: it was the perfect storm of absurdity, coincidence, hubris, tragedy, and stupidity.

But that's just a surface level explanation which ignores the context of the last hundred or so years. Ask yourself: "why are so many people so unsympathetic towards these particular victims?" Well, there are a multitude of reasons that contributed to how we got to this point and this guy does a much better job of explaining it than I ever could:

[miraclemaya]

one of the types of guys who really piss me off are people who like get really up in arms about "let them eat cake" and pretend it's like because of feminism. because none of these people ever spare a single thought to the uncountable number of peasant women who were suffering. like it's the same thing with guys who really are like "well the french revolution killed a lot of people so it's bad" like what do these libs think monarchy should have been voted out? like your fucking ideals are based on this event. but i guess let's not kid ourselves the only thing libs believe in is the status quo