#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.

[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

[itoshikinozomu]

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

[conceptofjoy]

yay the post i said id make about the blood aspect and why every vantas exudes blackness. is this a vantas only thing, or a blood bound thing? let me start by saying, you can make white or white coded characters blood bound, that's not what i'm trying to get across. it's just that blood as an aspect, when put through the lens of race specifically in america is just so fucking black.

redirecting you to the karkat specific, "why do i think he's black" thing :)

i get that the extended zodiac is kinda horoscopey, but like just a refresher on blood as a thematic element. you know how the majority of the exposition about the ancestors hinges around the signless and his civil rights movement? the fact that he tried to change alternia sets up the web of characters and reasons for them meeting in the first place.

you literally only need a rudimentary understanding of american history to know about the civil war and the civil rights movement. its not a secret that people who are oppressed form groups to protest their second class status. its also not a secret that major movement leaders get assassinated by people in power to keep that status quo, and their deaths never mark the end of their message. was hussie trying to do an mlk and malcom x parallel with the signless and summoner? LMFAO PROBABLY. that kinda just cements how inescapable race is when you're making an american centric comic.

i can end the post there lol, but here comes the question about where KANKRI fits into all of this... its tough explaining this really, if i call him one of those talented tenth believers to a black person they would just nod and be like ohh yeah... hm.

ok you know how there r some gay cis men who get away with some crazy misogyny but thinks it cancels out because they're gay? there is still something at the end of the day to be gained because they are men. it doesnt matter if they are seen as lesser than, as long as they can "pass" then they can get a spot at the leopards eating people faces party. FOR NOW. nothing that kankri says does he really mean fully. there's something to be gained by telling a woman why are you raising your voice?? when you mow them down with bullshit and they realistically get upset. he's a hardcore lib with conservative leanings.

actually speaking of, the commodification of unity. alternia's a capitalist and colonialist wheel, every instance of comradery comes in the form of quadrants, or how you serve the queen. karkat wants to be a threshecutioner and form bonds that way because he cannot think of anything different. kankri commodifies his own identity so he can be misogynistic and ablest. the signless breaks free from those preconceived boundaries, and tries to instill change to the system.

i dont rlly have a structure for all this or a note to end this on, here are some prev posts from a few days ago where i was thinking about the subject. 1 2 3

[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

[fullmetal-scar-simping]

Fma 2003: The cycle it presents is predominantly that of the Elrics, where both boys cannot truly divorce themselves from their reliance on a system of unequal bartering with an unknowable power (alchemy) as a means to achieve impossible goals, always falling short by design, desperately attempting to save the other sibling, sacrificing more and more of the world, themselves, and others until they are on opposite sides of a cleaved reality, in the purgatories of their own making. All of this is underpinned by the machinations of an industrial fascist police state repeatedly destroying non-white countries and funneling incarcerated and low class peoples into its alchemy-derived military industrial complex, to which naive ignorance and voluntary conscription form the backbone of this status quo.

Mangahood: The cycle of violence is when humanoid non-humans form a shadow government who makes ~good patriots~ do wars and then some genocide victims do violence back (horseshoe theory for libs). The answer is not retribution except when it is retribution to end the secret cabal to spruce up the military dictatorship. Slavery and monarchy started all of this and we gotta blame a once enslaved non-human who became a tyrant ruler, but whose genocidal country he created we are somehow meant to interpret as worthy of preservation and reform because the patriots believe in the noble ideals of good apple policing and soft takeover colonialism.

[spaceguy44]

2024 US Election Post-mortem

I need to get my thoughts out about the election. I'll split it into a few main parts. (This will be long) 1. Why did Kamala lose/Trump win?

There's 2 main reasons for the result.

1. The biggest thing isn't that Trump gained a lot (he did somewhat), but that Kamala lost hugely. Kamala ran an "strong" but status-quo style center-lib campaign. This was not the right move to capture the electorate in today's America. It hasn't been since 2012. People at every part of the political spectrum have expressed disdain with the way establishment Democrats have run things. People want change! They have since 2008. Obama convinced everyone that he represented change. Hillary lost in 2016 because they didn't get that change after 8 years, and wanted something new no matter what. Biden did a good job in 2020 of being somewhat of a change candidate, but it was really COVID that allowed him to win. I do think Trump would've won in 2020 if it weren't for the pandemic. Kamala had momentum at first because she literally was "change." Biden was hugely unpopular, and people didn't like the return to liberal status quo, even if he did do more than even Obama to bring (domestic) left-wing policies to the forefront imo. Kamala represented hope at first that we could get away from the Biden that everyone hated, and bring in a whole new kind of politics and movement that would take us out of the neoliberal malaise that was the again Biden. What happened in stead was the establishment decided that there was a contingent of Americans that were allergic to left-wing politics, and they need to be captured.

THIS IS THE MAIN POINT OF FAILURE FOR BOTH HILLARY AND KAMALA. I do not believe there is a (large) population that is inherently right-wing, and another that is centrist, and another that is left-wing. I do think there are some that you could never convince one way or another, but it's just impossible that so many people could vote for Obama, and then turn around for Trump if people had some sort of weird internal political compass that they adhered to regardless of policy. No, Trump (and the right more broadly) MADE his base. This is the other reason Trump won.

2. Trump did make some gains, though I believe the right campaign from Harris could've overcome that. I think the Trump gains are more indicative of what Harris lacked. Kamala tried to adjust her campaign to match an electorate. Trump didn't give a fuck. He said what he wanted, and people liked that. They don't care about decorum. They don't care about "unity". They want someone they think will "fight" for them. People saw Kamala bringing in the Cheneys and just saw another neolib that would flake on any conviction to grab a vote. People don't want a policy. People want a candidate with conviction. Trump was also adept at playing on people's fears and insecurities. He MADE them into Trump supporters by playing on those fears. Harris did not try to make Harris supporters by playing on fears (at least enough). She was best with the abortion stuff, but that wasn't the issue that exit polls showed people care about. The top issue was the economy. Yes, "the economy" is objectively doing better if you look at the stats, but people don't feel like it because prices are still high despite the buying power of the dollar recovering (inflation was reduced!). People felt that because corporations kept prices at pre-inflation reduction levels. Harris briefly flirted with price capping, which would be the exact sort of populist policy that directly addresses people's fears/insecurities and breaks from the status quo that could excite a mythical "Harris base" that maybe existed for 2 weeks.

It's the same with immigration. Trump created a "big lie" about the border being in crisis, and played on the truly hurting average middle-American's insecurities. You have a population that is hurting for corporate consolidation destroying small local business, that has been devastated by opioids, and is seeing the towns and culture they grew up with decay and seemingly leave them behind. Are Trump's policies going to uplift them? Hell no! Does he talk to specifically them all and directly address their insecurities though? Absolutely. In stead of addressing these people (these are the ones on the red arrow map that's been going around), she accepted the lie about immigrants and rejected making any radical policy change from the system that threw middle America under the bus.

I should say I am literally living in a small rural city in a deep-red state, so I know what they're saying. These people aren't necessarily bigots. Some are, but I think most think they aren't. I think anyone can be prone to getting caught up in a hate movement if the right buttons are pressed, and Trump deftly presses those buttons. What needed to happen was pressing the right buttons to address their insecurities and fears that doesn't rely on hate and scapegoating. This is what I think Bernie Sanders does well in general polls, but there's too much movement within the Dems to preserve the liberal status quo. That needs to change or, the Dems die. LIBERALISM IS DEAD. We address the fears that made people Trump voters, or democracy dies! Here are 2.5 other smaller reasons: 3. Sexism, Racism, and Religiosity. I will not deny that these do play a part in certain parts of the electorate. However, I don't think they're insurmountable hurdles in a general election. I think Obama's campaign is proof of this. But we shouldn't deny that there are a significant portion that wouldn't vote for Kamala for purely bigotry reasons. Hell, I know some personally. But I do think it is a mistake to blame these for our failures. WE LEARN NOTHING OTHERWISE! 4. Believe it or not, but there's just a lot of people out there that just don't care or avoid politics all together. These people aren't bad or deficient, but they just don't include thinking about politics constantly as a part of their lives. They think about the election for a few days, and then get on with their lives for 4 years and tune out everything. Generally, these people are privileged, though there's also some that have been so hurt by our system and policies, that they tune out in pure nihilism about it all. These people vote on vibes, they vote based on what those they care about support, and many just sit out the whole thing. Voter apathy is definitely a thing, and it hurst especially the left imo. I do believe the majority of people would loath Trump's policies if they actually knew what they entailed, so this apathy only takes away from the left. 5. Kamala did NOT lose due to the Gaza protest. She might have lost a bit of support by not being an empathetic foil to Trump's "glass the whole strip" rhetoric, but I don't think it made a significant difference. And I'm gonna be real with y'all; Tumblr is mostly full of it if they think they can accomplish anything with a protest vote for Gaza. I learned this in 2016. That action won't do anything, and it's too risky when a literal fascist is on the other side of the ballot. Yes, I hate that Kamala did not oppose the current Biden policy of letting genocide happen, but Jill Stein/no vote can't pressure these people in the establishment without hurting their campaign financing. The votes are in, and 3rd party votes would not have saved Kamala.

2. What happens now? What is a 2nd Trump admin like?Maybe this is a bit of copium, but I do think that Trump will still be overall very incompetent and unable to enact the worst of his policies. Terrible things will still happen (and I'll get to that later), but I think some of the catastrophizing is a bit overblown. Let's take the mass deportation policy for example. This would be a horrible campaign on the level of the worst historical genocides. He would need to create an ICE apparatus so large that it would rival the fucking gestapo. Just think of all the agents and infrastructure that would need to be developed to round up ~20million people and transport them to the border and detention facilities. There's no practical way to deport that many people. The logical end point is concentration camps. Yes, we have them already to an extent (I mean the euphemistically named "immigrant detention facilities"), but we don't have anything that could handle "mass deportation." Building the facilities, hiring the agents, buying the buses and trains, and executing the warrants all takes a lot of time and money. None of this goes unnoticed, and it won't go without resistance today. Congress still controls the purse, despite what the supreme court says about Trump's immunity to do whatever he wants. SCOTUS said he can't be prosecuted for committing a crime, not that he can break a constitutional rule. The margins are too thin in the new congress, and I genuinely do not think that he has the political tact to navigate around how much resistance he'll get. My main evidence for this is the border wall. He had all the support he needed within congress and his base to try to "build that wall." The GOP even controlled both branches of congress, and shutdown the government multiple times to try to get his way. They had a majority in the house his first 2 years. It meant nothing! He got a regressive tax cut passed, and that's about it. I know there's a lot of bullshit he can pull to push terrible things through, and he'll have ghoulish cronies that will be the actual brains behind things, but honestly, they're dumb as shit too. They're too evil for their own good. They will eat themselves alive through infighting and liberal resistance before they can start a genocidal campaign on American soil. That's not to say there will be some horrible things. Here's what I do think he'll be able to do: - Ban abortion nationwide either through the Comstock Act or SCOTUS. - Completely fuck up half of our federal institutions that keep us informed and safe (ie. dismantling or gutting of Dept. of Education, EPA, FTC, NSA, HHS, and more). - Allow for more religious integration into our public institutions like schools - Essentially turn our government into an oligarchy (or more of one than it already is) - Reverse gay marriage rights (overturning obergefell) and restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ in the public sector overall. - Exacerbate the Gaza genocide - Let Putin have his way with Ukraine - Royally fuck up the economy with Tariffs - Probably get us into some kind of overseas war - If he survives to the end of his term, I do think that our democracy will be incredibly fucked. Like, I think they'll be able to push through so many bullshit rules that we won't be able to come back unless an actual leftist populist makes huge rounds.

Overall, it's gonna suck, especially if you're LGBT in a red state. I think he'll also continue targeting undocumented migrants, but I doubt he'll be able to put together the infrastructure to genocide them. Yes, Hitler and his regime were incompetent too, but it was really the enabling act post-Reichstag fire that allowed for him to start pushing the policies that would become the holocaust. It was only at that point that he had no more resistance, and could order whatever he wants. We're definite not there yet with Trump.

3. What do we (the left) do now?Honestly, just stay vigilant, be active within your community, make connections (even with Trump voters), and don't give in to the despair. Once you're hopeless, it will only make it easier for them to keep winning. We fight against the fascists until the bitter end. The only endpoint of fascism is self destruction. I am a leftist, but I am not a revolutionary. I think armed action rarely leads to good outcomes, and history shows that. However, if we get a Reichstag fire moment or an enabling act moment, that's not the point to lose hope. If people start turning their neighbors into the gestapo-fied ICE, that's not the point to hide. These represent the time where politics should be abandoned, and an actual violent fight for freedom and liberty should begin. I pray we never come to that point. Hopefully, these next four years will look like a continuation of 2016-2020. We'll have a slow degrading of our rights, but if too many of those we all care about are hurt, we can come together and help to reverse it. I know things are super polarized and we all have our own little bubbles in society, but there comes a breaking point where too many people are hurt, and even the biggest MAGA head will have someone they deeply care about that is very hurt by Trump. This is my hope, though it unfortunately relies on things getting worse first before becoming better. 

[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

[karl-marxio]

The US shows once more what happens if there isn't a real left-wing party. If the right-wing party offers change, while the libs fight for the status quo, the people will vote for the right-wing, even if they are worse. In Switzerland, we are lucky to have the Socialdemocratic Party of Switzerland, which has not succumbed to neoliberal policies, even if certain forces want it to.

[mesetacadre]

i giggle every time i see that post because the notes increase and i can visualize the arguments. also because it’s one of tje most true posts ever made.

not a lot of people argue there actually. the post on my old blog about "I prefer the temporary violence of a revolution over the permanent and constant violence of the status quo" went to shit because libs started "essay"posting about the french revolution, the hunger games, les miserables, other media