#also the problem is not voting the radicals are not trying to get people not to vote

[jackawful]

I fucking hate that "firebombing walmart" has taken off as a way to mock radicals on this webbed site. we could be having real conversations about both arson as a tactic and security culture around property damage but y'all ain't ready for that. it's going to become the norm to deny that anyone's doing radical action and also to claim that it's unrealistic and impossible and voting is the Only Thing & that is, in fact, a bad way for site culture to go.

like people firebombing cement mixers in atlanta seems to be working pretty well actually, but you would never know if one of your tumblr mutuals were doing that because you have to shut the fuck up about it for it to work. no one smart is posting the explicit details of their crimes online, asshole.

listen i am not american. i understand that even democrats fucking suck and its a genuinely shitty situation to be in. im so sorry. but hey, hey look at me. why are you guys bullying people for saying "you should still vote blue?" Like im curious about the alternatives youve got. voting red? firebombing walmart? tumblr user catboyssepticbutthole, i know you will not be firebombing walmart.

[unforth]

Y'all have got to stop virulently hating men. Like, I'm sorry, I fucking hate the patriarchy too, but the patriarchy isn't just men and saying it is just exculpates complicit women. I am the mother of a young boy, and I look at this precious, empathetic 8 year old boy I'm raising and I don't know where online is safe for him. Places like this will say he's evil just for his gender, and other places will say "we'll be your friend if you hate with us," and still others will radicalize him in other ways. Where is he supposed to go? Why are we saying the radicalization is the fault of the kids just trying to find a place to hang?

Like this is seriously getting urgent. You have got to fucking stop conflating the patriarchy and men. 53% percent of white women voted for Trump. Men aren't the problem. White supremacy and Christian patriarchal structures are two examples of patriarchy-reinforcing structures that aren't solely couched in maleness. Men aren't the problem, and pretending they are drives more men into more welcoming extremist spaces and also ignores all the parts of this that are forwarded by people who aren't men.

What I see happening all over is scared, depressed, lonely people looking for someone they're allowed to hate automatically, unquestioningly - someone they're allowed to place all the blame on. Fascism says people of color, non-Christian people, queer people, etc., are the ones they're allowed to hate.

And way too many of yall answer that no, it's leftist to hate men instead. You are doing *the exact same thing they are.*

Fucking knock it off.

The answer is we're not supposed to hate anyone automatically based on their immutable personal characteristics. Hate the specific people who've hurt you. Hate the self-reinforcing systems that let them get away with hurting you. Hate the strangers who prop up those systems. Hate the fascists. Hell knows I hate Donald Trump, but it's not because he's a man, it's because he's a piece of shit.

Hate the pieces of shit, not the gender.

But don't hate men just because they're men. That's unhelpful, stupid, insane, and entirely counterproductive. Fucking. Stop.

[elsaclack]

Yeah okay so like I said in the tags of the last post I’m rising from my tumblr grave to say that the ban on TikTok is symptomatic of a MUCH larger and more terrifying problem. Because yes, on its surface it’s silly dances and asmr and cooking videos and whatever, but in truth and at its core, TikTok single-handedly revolutionized the way 170 million Americans communicated with each other AND the rest of the world. Non-Americans love to point out how America-centric Americans are, but fail to realize that we are purposefully raised in an isolated, insulated environment where we are told from basically day 1 that America Is The Best and not to even bother taking a look around because it’s all downhill from outside of here. TikTok has, for MANY Americans, single-handedly destroyed that notion and allowed them (us!!) to broaden our world-view and realize that actually, things are better in other countries, and it did so in a kind, empathetic, and compassionate way.

And yeah most people wake up to the truth of that on their own as they get older, but holy shit!! The VAST majority of the Americans on TikTok are millennials and gen z (and even some older gen alpha)!! People who are becoming disillusioned with “The American Dream” (said with the HEAVIEST sarcasm) while they’re still school-aged or are just entering young-adulthood!! People who are entering - or TRYING to enter - the American workforce who suddenly have an unfiltered window into non-American lives and are wondering why tf we’re struggling and penny-pinching and toeing the line of poverty while our rich elected officials sit around and fight and argue over everything that actually matters to the citizens they supposedly represent and get richer all the while. THAT is why they’re banning the app, and that fact alone should terrify every single American citizen.

Not to mention the precedent it sets for other social media platforms!! You think some nebulous, unproven, and unfounded “threat to national security” will stop with TikTok?? They’ve already censored Adult Material on tumblr, who’s gonna stop them from coming back and doing it again or getting rid of it altogether for the exact same reason? It’s a blatant act of censorship and a direct attack on the American first amendment right to free speech.

NOTHING radicalized me the way tiktok did. I watched people in my life who were STAUNCH Trump supporters in 2016 AND 2020 wake up to the truth and vote blue for the first time in their lives BECAUSE OF TIKTOK, and did so with al the nuanced understanding that even Democrats are severely failing this country, but are at least better than the alternative. That level of awareness and presence in the average US citizen scares American politicians.

The fact that the vast majority of them - including the ones loudly opposing the ban!! - bought stock in Meta BEFORE the ban was legalized/upheld by the Supreme Court?? That Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were legally allowed to lobby congress to ban TikTok when BOTH stood to DIRECTLY financially gain from their biggest competitor being banned in the US and are guilty of unethically gathering data and selling it to MULTIPLE third parties?? The fact that Trump is now teasing that he may or may not intervene to save TikTok when he was the one who talked about banning it in the first place AND ALSO OWNS HIS OWN COMPETING SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM??

It’s the burning of Alexandria. It’s the loss of a significant chunk of culture. It’s the sharp and sudden loss of contact with the rest of the world for more than half of all American citizens. It’s the loss of $240 BILLION dollars in the GDP when the country is already TRILLIONS of dollars in debt. And on an individualistic level, it’s the loss of millions of small businesses and primary income streams for so many individuals and families who found their primary audience on TikTok. Is the app perfect? HELL no. Are there significant changes needed to make it a safe environment for all users? ABSOLUTELY. But that can also be said of ANY social media platform. TikTok openly fostered connection and communication and creativity and compassion that is completely unique to that platform! It made so many people - myself included!! - feel less alone. I get the feeling I know what the general consensus is about TikTok on this site, but the ban on this app should scare the shit out of everyone.

[tanadrin]

Well that's both the beauty and the frustrating thing with a multiple-party system, right? Even if a party is in the governing coalition, it's a coalition, so their more radical ideas get smoothed out by compromise. Slows things down, which can be good or bad. I've lived in germany all my life and know I'll never get any party's pure program as government policy, so I choose based on who is likely to win and what effect different parties' ideas are likely to have in the positions theyre likely to end up in. I don't think that is considered particularly weird here, actually.

And yes, to your other question, a lot of people I know who take a similar approach do split their votes and vote e.g. SPD for the direct mandate if that's more likely to win, and green or left on the proportional vote.

Hope this doesn't come across as confrontational - i'm not trying to debate. I find the different perspectives on voting interesting and wonder if it's related to being used to a 2-party "winner takes all" system vs a multi-party system, or if my sample in germany is just not representative (i.e. mostly people who are above-average informed about politics)

But even if a party isn’t going to get its full policy program enacted, to get *any* policy program enacted it has to get into government—which requires winning enough votes that it’s not likely to be relegated to the opposition.

Now, Die Linke also has this problem where a big party like the SPD regards them as anathema and would rather ally with the CDU or the FDP than bring Die Linke into government (which is stupid, IMO), and Die Linke voters can’t really change that. But I still would prefer the party I vote for to be part of government rather than remain in opposition, you know? The idea you would vote for a party so that it could just participate in debates and not actually govern is the thing I was reacting to.

(I have lived my entire adult life in countries with proportional representation; I get how it works! Please don’t think I’m some confused American hick who’s just too puzzled by the complexities of your sophisticated MMP system to appreciate its nuances. The objection I have is that I think politics ought to be treated as a means to power, not an instrument of individual self-expression. Politics is for Doing Stuff, as it were, not achieving a personal feeling of vindication. Plenty of Americans and Germans both treat it as the latter, and I disagree with all of them.)

[acheronist]

........so what do u think peglar's childhood was like? 👀👂

WELLLLLLLLLL......

so his dad was a gunsmith in westminster & henry was the younger sibling of two (elizabeth was a few years older than him, and she also received henry's arrears from the franklin expedition after everyone was pronounced lost & dead. she was married at this time and was henry's immediate next of kin. so presumably their parents had died by this point...) but he and elizabeth got dunked in a 2-for-1 baptism like john torrington & his sister did tho which is so funny. pov you have one baby and underestimated how much work babies actually are, so you forget to get it baptized on time, and then by the second baby rolls around you've got a better grip on parenting, so you take both kids in on the same day. lmfao.

anyways back to the childhood tho. they lived like... a few blocks away from the river thames so he'd probably already had a fondness for water, i think, just based on my own childhood of having two older brothers and living near a semi-important river (lol)

but that made me wonder if like... he and elizabeth ever played army...? because i definitely was made by my brothers to play army and soldiers a fair amount. and if my dad was a gunsmith and i was an opinionated little freakboy who wanted to be a navy sailor when i was older, i'd definitely try and sneak into dad's work and play pretend a little bit. and i wonder if sarah peglar (mum) ever scolded him for not including elizabeth or vice versa when they was out playing with the neighborhood kids...

they lived in a pretty well-populated neighborhood and he attended the blewcoat school "for poor families" WHICH ALSO ALLOWED GIRLS TO ATTEND so maybe henry and elizabeth went there together. cmon get up we have to walk to school on timeeeee. i think he was probably a little bit dyslexic tho based on how his spelling was in 1845-47... i think the only formal education for reading and writing would have been at this blewcoat school in westminster , so i wonder if the writing backwards was a trick he pulled out to impress his classmates... don't notice how bad his spelling test grade was!! just look how cool and clever harry is!!! he can write a whole paragraph backwards!!!! whoaaah!!!! idk i just hope he had a gang of friends he was running about and causing silly lad antics with. i hope elizabeth followed them around and was begrudgingly included in the antics because they were supposed to be keeping an eye on each other during the afternoons or something. based on the amount of times he mentions keeping an eye on his friends on terror / mentions tom by name in the wallet papers i think it's not too hard to imagine henry was protective over people he loved.... i assume this extended to his sister, too. also like.. not that this was his childhood necessarily, but his dad's gunsmith shop was literally down the road from the big ben clocktower which would have been under construction (1843) during the same time he was ashore between ships (post hms wanderer & pre hms terror) so i wonder if he ever went home to visit the family and was like FUCCKKK SORRY I'M LATE FOR DINNER TRAFFIC SUCKED. CONSTRUCTION FOR THAT CLOCK IS SO ANNOYING. that would be very funny to me.

ok anyways back to childhood: john peglar (henry & elizabeth's dad) voted for francis burdett so there's at least some indication that their household was like... fine with being politically radical and heavily opinionated. (i would also point out that there's a fair amount in henry's wallet and diary that's just him having a gossip session by himself. opinionated indeed.) but also henry doesn't seem the type to really get into trouble tho... based on his career history he generally rolled his eyes kept his head down and did his job unless he was pushed hard enough, in which case he had no problem speaking out. in 1833 on the marquis camden, henry was lashed two dozen times for "drunkenness and mutinous conduct" but i've also read that the captain of the ship at the time was a Notorious Asshole Who Loved To Use Lashing As Punishment? so jumping to conclusions without real evidence, i think henry probably saw his fellow ABs getting treated badly by the captain, had 3 more beers than he should have, and said FUCK THIS GUYYYY!!!!!!! and then got punished for it. we're not going to think about the lashing scars opening back up again in the arctic btw. so anyways the point of all this is to say i think henry was probably fine with protesting when things suck, which he probably learned from his dad. maybe there were nights when john and sarah were talking politics and henry sat on the other side of the wall listening when he wasn't supposed to. maybe elizabeth would come sit with him and he'd have to shush her because neither of them were supposed to be listening because it was past their bedtimes but they sat and listened together anyways. scurried back into bed trying not to get caught even though john and sarah definitely knew they were there.

but also he was 13 when he entered the marine society ("a charitable organization for helping destitute boys and training seamen") so maybe he saw the navy as a chance to help out his lower-middle class family..... maybe they had a hard time and henry wanted to help out now that he was sort of almost grown up!!! and he clearly excelled thru this sailor training camp because after a month they tossed him onto hms solebay where he would have learned more hands-on stuff about working on a ship. knots and such. maybe this is where he realized how good he was with ropes... he could have been the best lad in his "class" when it came to knots etc. he also would have learned properly how to use a gun here, but again, his dad's a gunsmith. he probably would have had an experience advantage over most of the other boys w/ shooting and loading and managing a gun as a tool. so it's not surprising i think that he was in and out of 'training camp' really quickly. his first real ship was hms clio and he was a spare ship's boy and quickly got transferred to hms magnificent, WHICH WAS A HOSPITAL SHIPPPP and worked in the sickbay as a ship's boy and was earning a real paycheck. in my heart this was probably a very formative experience, and gave him a basic understanding of medicine/nursing? which i bet came in handy during the expedition when things were getting desperate and everyone was sick. i know amc had bridgens playing pinch-hitter nurse for terror camp but i wonder if in real life, maybe henry took up that role? maybe he even managed to keep his own illness under wraps for longer than most of the other expedition men Because he could recall things he learned on hms magnificent... idk.....

anyways at this point we start getting into henry's teen years. does this count as childhood? he saw two men get killed by lightning strike at age ~16 and he jumped around between ships pretty often and his conduct was generally either 1) bored and unremarkable or 2) normal and good :) and then he got lashed for being a petulant "mutinous" teenager who likes beer too much, as previously mentioned, and afterwards he just kind of hangs out until he's 22 and joins the gannett and meets 💞thomas armitage💞 and now i need to stop typing . lest i begin rpf-ing on main a little bit too much.

ok thanks ummm he's my most special guy unfortunately. henry my best friend henry :-(

[donnerpartyofone]

I'm trying really hard not to be mad at the people who spent the whole election cycle talking about how Biden and Trump are exactly the same because dems and republicans are effectively one party and voting doesn't matter because everything will just carry on in the same bad way as ever. And while I totally understand that line of thinking, it also seemed really, really obvious that with Trump specifically, things were likely to get worse in new and insane ways that would be hard or impossible to undo, and that would affect many, many more people than just those who are stuck with this country. I mean how could it have been any clearer that there would be uniquely grave consequences to this one specific guy assuming power. Maybe I'm naive but I thought it was a big enough problem that he affects the public's emotions in such a destructive way, that he's so good at whipping up the kind of bloodthirsty hysteria that we're always told is a key ingredient in a fascist uprising. But it also seemed really, really clear that he posed a radical threat to the functioning of this country -- and like many such threats were made out loud, on the campaign trail, this was never a figment of the liberal imagination -- and while the specific things that are happening right now can make you feel like you're living in a cartoon show, they are ultimately not a surprise. I know it's arguable that we live under a one-party system, and that fact can make you so angry that you want to shout it into the faces of people who aren't awake to it, but I don't understand how anyone could have gone around smugly declaring that Trump was just going to be another version of the same guy we elect every time; like if you think there's anything specifically rotten about him, then you're just a democratic shill with unserious opinions. It was so clear that this was going to be a problem.

[cookinguptales]

Finally putting down some political thoughts, and put under a cut because I am not going viral for a political post, not again.

I suppose something that I've been grappling with is... how do you deal with reactionary politics?

I do not believe, for the record, that there is something innate in men that makes them more dangerous or self-centered. But there is very much a problem with men right now. We are seeing misogyny of a virulence and magnitude that I have never seen in my life. Like... "your body, my choice?" That sounds like something an editor would have axed for being too on-the-nose twenty years ago.

And I understand that many of us have been socialized to take responsibility onto ourselves. Some of this is the way that women are generally expected to do heavy emotional labor for those around them, and some of this is... well, I'm going to be kind and say it's control issues. (That I see in myself, as well.)

If we made this happen, if it was our actions that made men hate us so much that they've done all this, then we can also fix it... right? We're supposed to be loving, nurturing, understanding, and patient, so if all of this was a failure of those "intrinsic" traits, then... we can fix it by being those things, right? We can love them into not hating us anymore, right?

I think what's more likely is that what we're seeing is a radical pendulum swing. It's happened so, so many times through history. There's a period of intense social change, often with a greater sense of freedom for marginalized groups, and then there is a severe backlash to that. This doesn't just apply to women; it's happened to people of color, queer people, ethnic/religious minorities, etc.

Hell, I'm even seeing people getting angry at disabled people (like me) for being too "rude" and "demanding" and "entitled" when asking for our legally mandated accommodations.

It's scary because... okay, so this is a backlash to us getting rights. It's a backlash to the ADA. To Obergefell. To trans rights. To Obama. To #MeToo. It's a backlash to women getting bank accounts and no-fault divorce and Roe and workplace protections -- to women not needing men in order to have a financially secure life anymore.

It's a backlash that's been building for decades now, but which really seemed to hit a fever pitch during the Obama administration. Not only did we have a non-white president, but that president enacted a lot of protections for marginalized people.

It's a backlash born of people who had lots of power now worrying that they will have less. It's men worried that they can no longer control women. It's white people worried that POC and/or immigrants will "supplant" them. It's straight people worried about some kind of widespread queer conversion. It's people who are financially unstable blaming these problems on social change. It's people who are billionaires worrying that they might have a single penny less.

It's a backlash that's happened more times than I'd care to count; you just have to watch pre-code movies to realize that progress is not always linear, and that we have had short-lived periods of freedom in the past.

It's a backlash. Okay. But so what? What do we fucking do about that?

I understand that every time one group gets more rights, the groups that previously had a monopoly on those rights are going to fucking lose their minds about it. But how do we assuage that? We can't just stop trying to progress. We can't just stop fighting for our rights. Even knowing that they're going to come down on us even harder in the future, we can't just give up and let them destroy us.

Like... when there is no pleasing a group except by surrendering all power to them, there is no compromise, not really. But then how do we prevent these backlashes? These periods of horrifying, cruel conservatism that are a direct response to periods of progressive liberalism?

Obviously strength of numbers in the voting booth didn't work. Nor did protests. Threats didn't work -- nor did kindness, for that matter. Fight, flight, fawn. None of them worked.

It's something that I keep coming back to. Like... you simply cannot depend on appealing to the humanity of oppressors. It does not work. Yes, of course I believe they have humanity. But so many people leave that behind the second they feel threatened.

The best I can think of, maybe, is coalition-building. Not with the people trying to kill us. I'm sorry, tumblr, but that's fucking stupid. But... god, I've noticed a shift in the past decade. There's been a lot of very purposeful division sown between the groups that will suffer most under the rule of Republicans. Women and POC and queer people and disabled people and immigrants and the impoverished... They've been training us to turn on each other, and then they've reaped the rewards.

It's one of the reasons why I finally deleted Twitter this week. I just could no longer take the amount of finger-pointing and in-fighting amongst the downtrodden while Republicans trotted around like fucking show ponies. Oh, this is the Latinos' fault. This is the white women's fault. This is the black men's fault. This is those damn self-hating women and queers. Boomer-ass cripples, etc.

This is your fault. No, this is your fault.

This is my fault, this is my fault, this is my fault.

Like damn, at a certain point they won't even have to destroy us if we do it for them.

But at the same time, I'm not going to feed you some Pollyanna shit about how we all just need to join hands and work together. There are internal prejudices and power structures that are impeding us here, and I don't think it's right to pretend those don't exist so we have the outward appearance of solidarity. To some degree, that's probably part of what got us into this mess.

If we can't at least unite against such a horrifying threat to our very existence, though... like... we will be destroyed.

After the debacle that was COVID... I don't know. It is harder to believe that people will work together to protect the most vulnerable of us, or even their own interests. But I also just do not see any other way forward. We're not going to just convince them to give us our rights back. These shitty alt-right fuckheads see kindness as subservience, not as bridge-building. That's why they take all of our concessions, absorb them, become more powerful, and then give us absolutely nothing in return.

Things are about to get a lot worse before they get better. And the only thing that might save us is numbers and solidarity, even when we have problems between us.

I feel pretty despondent about the odds of all that right now, though, so like... I don't really know what to do. :(

At the very fucking least, though, stop making posts about how their abhorrent actions are our fault for being angry and afraid. I've seen it on tumblr, I've seen it on twitter, I've seen it on reddit... The past few days I've seen more thinkpieces about how women made men this way than I can count, and it's unbelievably frustrating. Like... when women felt threatened by men, they didn't enact sweeping reforms taking away their bodily autonomy. They just wanted to be left alone. These two reactions are not the fucking same.

Sorry that you ran into some traumatized women who didn't want to keep trying their odds! Weird that you decided to become a Nazi about it! Seems like maybe this is less about a woman who's been repeatedly sexually assaulted posting "I hate men" on twitter and more about systemic social messaging that you are being deprived of your ~god-given power~ by those who should be beneath you, like women, immigrants, POC, disabled people, queer people, etc.!

I swear to god, this is just the same "oh but the shooter was bullied at school and ignored by girls" rhetoric in a new coat of paint. Maybe if you really want to talk about how men aren't intrinsically bad, you should stop assuming that they have no choice but to become comically evil at the slightest provocation.

"Your body, my choice." Come the fuck on.

[blonkk]

man it’s so annoying to see people act like the trump win is such a huge mystery, why are so many WOMEN and PEOPLE OF COLOUR voting for this guy???? as if those demographics automatically owe democrats/liberals/what have you anything at all

the economy is in the gutter. the working class has been stretched to their absolute limits. things like immigration and asylum seekers coming through has become a problem, has put a strain on peoples lives. women’s rights to speak freely and have access to private spaces is actively being taken from them. children are being abused and pawned by the pharmaceutical and medical industry.

these are things the dems don’t recognize as problems or won’t acknowledge the severity of them in the interest of being politically correct. this type of apathy pushes people away, eventually pushes them to another side of the political spectrum. and then anyone who dares to sway is labeled a bigot, racist, sexist, fascist, everything in the book. the democratic side is, at its centre, not the inclusive party dedicated to improving the lives of americans; it upholds the status quo, and kisses the butts of powerful lobbies (juuuuust the like republicans).

and the people who voted third party have the nerve to label these people as bad. and the nerve to label kamala voters as supportive of genocide. like at least they voted for something; your super special performative nonmaction did fuckall. palestine will be no better off.

if millions of women and poc and whoever else voted for the caricature of the evil right winger it’s for a reason. don’t act all shocked then tell women theyre “transphobes” and “bigots” when they want to call themselves women and protect children. don’t tell poc theyre racist when they question why so many more flood in and strain resources, and also impact crime rates (not petty; see rape, sex trafficking, dv etc).

left wingers are so disingenuous and untrustworthy, just like far right wingers, but they can’t see it. they too cover the truth, and exaggerate to push their own agenda. they too ignore people who speak against them or challenge them.

it’s so fucking frustrating. at the root, the country is scared, people are just trying to do what’s best for them as americans. it’s depressingz personally i don’t see anything radical about a brown female president, being brown and female myself — that’s just normal to me. i don’t judge her by those things. i don’t think because she’s a woman, she’ll magically be the best choice for us, or for brown people. all i see is a political acumen and background, competency, dedication and a true desire to try her best for people. i don’t agree with her on nearly everything at all. i do believe she and her party do have responsibility for maligning these female and poc voters. but again, i don’t think that because she’s the democratic rep, and happens to be brown and female, that she automatically will get these votes.

you’re not supposed to agree 100% with you’re chosen candidate. that is literally not even possible. you’re not supposed to define yourself as solely democratic or republican; it’s normal for you to change and reassess priorities, and same with each other party.

i do think there was hesitation in electing a woman, even though she was the sitting vp for a term and nothing crashed and burned. people are dumb if they considered this a reason not to vote her in imo

digression as always lol. anywayyyssss DONT act like women and poc owe you shit. DONT ignore them and then get all googoo eyed slack mouthed when they go for someone who does hear some of their complaints, while, yes, seemingly not caring for others. this shit is clearly important if trump got those votes by acknowledging those concerns and harris’s lack of acknowledgement didn’t.

[windandwater]

political ramblings from a recovering news junkie (I had to stop following this stuff, it was giving me health problems)

anecdotally it seems like a lot of people are/were sick of trump and don't want him back, and they just needed a new candidate to actually be excited about.

everyone's takeaway from 2016 was that America just hates women too much to elect one over a racist white man but I said from the beginning that the problem was Hilary herself, whom everyone had too many reasons to hate. imo mostly imagined reasons especially compared to the egregiousness of her opponent. but democrats really underestimated how much people in red states still carry a grudge against her, leftover from the 90s.

but due to America's still-real hatred of women,and racism, I've been wondering whether Kamala really can win against this jackass and I keep thinking about something my boss (another politics wonk, NOVA grown and has worked in journalism and interned in the white house) says, which is that America hates losers, and trump has proved himself a loser--and a criminal, in the actual courts, which the right can try to spin as politically motivated but I think to anyone not following every move it just looks bad. same thing as what happened with the emails investigation with Hilary--people just assume that if there's smoke there's fire. and I don't think most people's mouths are wrapped around the fox news hose of information tight enough to be able to justify every bad thing that happens to republicans to themselves. so I think people have been waiting for an energetic challenger to trump for a long time and they're jumping on this moment. all over the country, not just in what we think of liberal outposts. and I think most Americans are capable of seeing a candidate and not a scary person who doesn't look like them, especially since she's so charismatic and genuinely fun.

I also think we need to reckon with the effects of gerrymandering and really do something to combat it if we get any kind of administration and congressional change because the majority of Americans are not represented at all. you see that in the polling but I've also seen it firsthand when leaving my little liberal city and talking to people in supposedly blood red states. we agree with each other on a lot of things and if we went back to the old way of compromising on bills and issues and stopped this crap of one party being up the ass of corporations and the death cult of the evangelical right, we'd see a lot of real progress. but since that's not really an option, steamrollering over them over and over until the party is destroyed and a new one emerges is the only option for the future here, I think. and to do that we gotta have representative districts. because I think it will happen naturally if Americans are represented.

all of the above applies to voting rights as well.

I like Kamala Harris even though she's not the candidate I would pick. but I also don't think necessarily the progressive base of the party should pick the presidential candidate, in this race we clearly need someone who can pull the party together and build coalitions and it looks like that's her. it's been really interesting to see the country agree with me when normally I don't think I'm on the same page as moderates in this country. maybe the center of the country is finally moving left? or maybe the far right radicalism/fascism has finally hit its breaking point?

I feel the way I did in 2016; absolutely terrified of the election. but it's mixed with the way I felt in 2008; that maybe there's light in the world.

[stellanix]

my opinion on the voting discourse is that the fascist running for president can be barred from power if enough people stand in line for a bit and fill in the bubble next to other person's name on a sheet of paper. like cmon it's the easiest thing and maybe we should try it

yes i know that voting won't fundamentally change the system and that the democrats also suck. yes i know the democrats are actively supporting the genocide in gaza. the republicans are too. the election won't change that. but one side openly wants to eradicate queer people on top of that, and as a trans person i would greatly appreciate it if y'all could stand in a fucking line for a bit to maybe prevent fascists from trying to eradicate my entire demographic

it's a purely pragmatic and strategic decision. like idk why people are moralizing so much about this. do y'all think there's some communism fairy hovering over your shoulder who will dock points if you vote for a liberal?

i know voting isn't the end-all-be-all of politics. but i'm not telling you to dedicate everything to campaign for kamala harris or whatever. you can literally do other stuff like organizing and protesting and direct action in addition to voting. i cannot emphasize enough that voting takes up a little bit of one day. you can even get ice cream or something afterwards if you want

our society has A LOT of problems that voting certainly won't solve. but a fascist movement is trying to use electoral politics to gain power. voting is one small tool in the toolbox of political action and it is the simplest and most appropriate strategy for this specific problem

you can talk about revolution and more radical strategies all you want, but if the fascists gain control of the government in this election they will try their hardest to crush every last bit of leftist momentum in this country, cuz that's kinda what fascists do

so for the sake everyone the fascists hate, please find some time on november 5th to stand in line for a bit and fill in the bubble next to the name that's not donald trump. i promise you don't have to keep the "i voted" sticker if it makes you feel cringe

[greatwyrmgold]

Thinking about US politics.

Thought 1: Neoliberal capitalist-democracy is failing.

The contradictions between the egalitarian rhetoric of democracy and the hierarchical structure of capitalism—not to mention liberal egalitarian rhetoric in general and the various bigotries which we have yet to fully extinguish—are becoming more obvious every year.

On top of that, something is causing problems. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer; the droughts get drier, the storms get stormier. Some people try to deny some of these problems, but on the whole, everyone can tell Something Is Wrong.

The only questions are what and why.

Thought 2: The Democrats remain the party of neoliberal capitalist-democracy.

They support egalitarian democracy and hierarchical capitalism simultaneously. They repeat liberal egalitarian rhetoric while...let's say they have a mixed history with the various bigotries that contradict that rhetoric. Some actively uphold systemic inequality, some fight against it. Most just try not to rock the boat.

As long as the status quo is fine for most people, maintaining the status quo is at least defensible, contradictions and all. But when the status quo isn't fine, people want Change.

And the Democrats used to promise change, change we could believe in. That change amounted to little more than an attempt to reconcile the fundamental contradictions in neoliberal capitalist-democracy. They stopped promising change a while ago, thanks to a certain someone...

Thought 3: Trump promises a solution to the world's problems.

It's not a solution that I, personally, think would work. Nor do I think his diagnosis of the problems is accurate. But Trump agrees that something is causing problems and says he'll solve them.

That's appealing. Well, I don't find it appealing, but that's because I recognize that he's tilting at windmills at great cost. If I thought it might work, it would be appealing. And there are a lot of people predisposed to believing that cruelty to foreigners and minorities and "degenerates" can solve problems.

Thought 4: The Democrats are trying to rely on being better than Trump.

Pretty straightforward. Ever since 2016, the Democrats have run not on "Change!", but on "Stop MAGA from changing stuff". This isn't true of all individual Democratic political candidates, but it's how the party as a whole markets itself and a core component of both Biden's 2020 platform and Harris's 2024 platform.

To be fair, it's a pretty compelling platform. To anyone who doesn't see Trump as the solution, it's not hard to be less bad than Trump, and avoiding Trump's reign of terror is a pretty high priority for a lot of people. In theory, the Democrats could top the polls. However...

Thought 5: No one wants to vote for the status quo!

I think this is a big part of why the Democrats struggle in elections, even when they lead in the polls. Yeah, the Republicans not promoting candidates people would be sexist or racist to definitely helps win over the sexists and racists, but also the Republicans have a platform.

Racists and sexists don't just vote for Trump because he's a white dude; they vote for him because he's a white dude who promises to make racism and sexism more mainstream! He promises to make active changes to the USA that make it more like what racists and sexists want.

The Democrats are kinda all over the place, if I'm being honest. You can't make many statements about their politics that aren't either contradicted by at least one prominent Democrat or unhelpfully-vague. They range from "mostly less extreme than MAGA" to "as radical as you can get without alienating too many wealthy donors". But the median Democrat is usually the one who gets promoted, so the party focuses on the party line of "no big changes".

But that's not popular, because as previously noted, neoliberal capitalist-democracy is failing, and the world needs big changes. "No big changes" makes you sound more appealing than the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. That affects which party you choose on a survey, but it doesn't do much to energize you. And you need to get energized to leave the house and vote.

Thought 5b: There's more on people's minds than Trump/Harris comparisons

This is tangential to what passes for a thesis on this post, but voters don't just care about the kinds of issues the Democrats are marginally better about.

If the Democrats are slightly better than the Republicans on (for instance) not being racist, POC might slightly prefer Democratic candidates for that reason, but it wouldn't be hard for that slight preference to be outweighed by other considerations. Backlash against an incumbent for bad economy, say, or an unclear platform on other issues, or a friend who really likes Trump for some reason.

Thought 6: Do the Democrats even care about winning?

Prominent Democratic politicians tend to be old cishet white men, upper-middle to upper-class. They're more likely to elevate young/queer/POC/woman politicians than the Republicans, but they still tend to be privileged. If Trump enacts a twenty-year reign of terror against social minorities, most of them will be mostly fine.

In fact, depending on which things Trump and his buddies manage to enact, their lives might be better. Trump wants to empower rich cishet white men at the expense of people who are POC, queer, poor, or female. Most of the problems Trump makes are not problems for the kind of person who usually gets elected to Congress. They will feel bad if Trump outlaws trans people or whatever, but doing something about it might cost their privilege, which would also feel bad.

Besides, Trump's existence and continued success makes campaign season a breeze. You don't need to manage the diverse needs and opinions of your coalition if all of them are terrified of the Leopards Eating People's Faces party! You can just point to the leopards and say "I won't tell them to eat your face". You don't even have to try very hard to restrain the leopards—as long as you egg them on less than Trump, you look like the better choice for anyone afraid of leopards.

Thought 7: What Now?

[beardedmrbean]

Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., faces fresh controversy after a resurfaced 2018 video showed him praising a Muslim cleric, who once shared a pro-Hitler propaganda film and celebrated Oct. 7, as a "master teacher."

In the last few years, Imam Asad Zaman has used his Facebook page to share official Hamas press releases, blog posts from antisemitic sites and a 2015 link to a pro-Hitler film, "The Greatest Story Never Told." Zaman also posted on Oct. 7 that he and his organization "stands in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli attacks."

On Fox News’ "Outnumbered," Chicago-based correspondent Mike Tobin reported on The Washington Examiner unearthing a video of Walz speaking at an event hosted by Zaman's group, the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, on Feb. 16, 2018.

At the event, then-gubernatorial candidate Walz said of Zaman, "I am a teacher, so when I see a master teacher, I know it. Over the time we’ve spent together, one of the things I’ve had the privilege of is seeing the things in life through the eye of a master teacher, to try and get the understanding."

TIM WALZ HAS TIES TO MUSLIM CLERIC WITH ANTISEMITIC VIEWS, GAVE STATE FUNDING TO HIS GROUP: REPORT

Despite Walz referring to having spent time with Zaman, the Harris-Walz campaign told Tobin, "Gov. Walz does not have a relationship with [Zaman]," and "strongly condemns Hamas terrorism."

This was not Walz and Zaman’s only public appearance together.

"We start to see more appearances with Zaman and Gov. Walz in 2019, January, April and May. At one point, Zaman delivers an invocation to the state of the state address," Tobin reported. "He appeared with Gov. Walz in May of 2020, calling for calm in the George Floyd riots, and again in 2023 following a string of vandalism at mosques."

"Sam Westrop of The Middle East Forum says Gov. Walz has been willfully ignorant of Zaman’s radicalism because he relies on the Arab or Muslim voting bloc and cannot do anything that would make him appear Islamophobic," the Fox News correspondent said.

Westrop said, "This is a serious problem. Under a Walz-Harris ticket, given Walz's ability to embrace really just the worst kind of radicals within the Muslim community, one can only imagine this will be replicated at the White House level. Walz clearly doesn't want to know about the extremists he embraces."

Walz’s administration has also donated over $100,000 to Zaman's group, according to state records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

The Minnesota Muslim American Society is a chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS), which the United Arab Emirates designated a terrorist group in 2014. MAS faced criticism in 2019 when a video emerged of children at a Philadelphia chapter event calling for Jewish people to be killed.

Federal prosecutors have described the MAS as "founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S.," according to court records, the Examiner first reported.

[jewishbarbies]

https://www.tumblr.com/jewishbarbies/767892090786037760/yeah-can-we-not?source=share

this is something I had to learn myself, this year actually. I think this might also be the reason that leftist antisemitism is so prevalent as well. Something I had to learn this year was that everyone deserves basic human rights. Crazy, right? You’d think that I’d just get that. But I’ve realised that all forms of discrimination, whether it be racism, antisemitism, homophobia, etc, are ways to strip humanity from different groups of people. Everyone is really just fighting to be seen as a human being. Which is why no matter how much you disagree with people’s opinions, ideologies, and the like, you must not strip away their humanity. You must not dehumanise them in your mind. Leftists don’t get this. Because they hate MAGAs (as do I), they strip them of their humanity. Because they hate “Zionists,” they strip them of their humanity. But they think that that’s an appropriate response to the deaths of gazans, which is why they do not see leftist antisemitism as antisemitism. That is why they have no problem with it. They don’t seem to understand that they’re similar to the far right and extremists in that manner. The Nazis did not see Jewish people as human. The slave owners did not see black people as human. Groups like ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc, they do not see the civilians as human. They see them as cannon fodder.

Society has gotten too comfortable wishing death upon others. Too comfortable stripping others of their humanity in their eyes.

I think a lot of it stems (aside from propaganda) from the deep desire to not feel empathy toward people we think are evil, and a lot of people assume humanizing someone means having to empathize with them at gunpoint. and it’s just not. you don’t have to feel sorry for bad people in the sense of excusing their behavior. but you do have to grapple with the uncomfortable truth that you CAN relate to things evil people feel, you CAN empathize with evil people, because human thoughts and feelings are universal. it doesn’t make YOU a bad person, that’s what nuance is.

yes, this person is evil and nothing excuses it, and I still understand the feelings they’re expressing. they’re not justified for the evil person’s logic, but I understand it. human beings will always be human beings no matter what they do or say. being so scared of feeling the same human things or thinking the same human things or just understanding where someone is coming from only makes it easier for evil to continue and spread. we have to be able to reckon with nuance.

I understand struggling to feed your family and empathize with people suffering economic hardships because I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck and bread slice to bread my entire life. and I don’t condone voting Trump because of that struggle. I can empathize with parents worried about their kids, not being able to afford life saving meds, going hungry, etc., and still not support the choice to vote for fascism or trying to restrict the rights of others. those people are not less human for falling for propaganda.

there’s nuance to everything in every part of life. fighting it will only hold us back and open a door for radicalization.

[antoine-roquentin]

The previous part of this series, Part 2, is available here.

In the world of internal Democratic Party politics, the chosen party of the professional-managerial class, fighting for a role in the party hierarchy is done by resume-padding. You have to have worked the correct jobs under the right managers with subsequent letters of recommendation from your patrons, showing both that you care but your primary commitment is to the job itself, not to the cause you were purportedly fighting for in that position. In that sense, Allard Lowenstein fits the bill as a typical upwardly mobile member of the party in the same way Pete Buttigieg does today. If America knows Lowenstein at all, it's from his role in the popular PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement Eyes on the Prize, especially episode 5. The emotional climax of the episode comes over the party machinations to keep the alternative slate of black voters from being seated at the 1964 Democratic convention, which LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and his protege Walter Mondale succeeded in because of their superior knowledge of debate club tactics. A series of copyright claims by rightsholders for whom licenses had expired kept this show off the air in the 90s, but early filesharing advocates got to work promoting the show across the internet. After all, if they were trying to ban it, it must be important. The clip here is from that episode.

Lowenstein got his law degree at Yale, did his stint in the military like an honorable American, and then got a job from Eleanor Roosevelt directly, always the most powerful player in the party from her husband's death to 1960. However, Lowenstein also cared to an extent. He wanted the black people of the American south to have a chance to vote, based to a large extent on what he witnessed on a fact-finding tour of Namibia, then an internal colony of Apartheid South Africa. His passion was such that he was a major player in the movement to prevent LBJ from being renominated in 1968, recruiting Eugene McCarthy to run against him. This was because they were both politics nerds in the West Wing sense. Young guns, they believed they knew better than the Democratic machine politicians what voters wanted. They knew the people wanted an anti-war candidate who satisfied liberal pieties and who thumbed his nose at the old hierarchies. The result was three unsuccessful campaigns for presidential nomination and Lowenstein himself becoming a one-term congressman. As Gus Tyler, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (himself a young rebel against an old guard at one point, now an old man leading younger women) said, Lowenstein was leading politics "away from economics to ethics and aesthetics, to morality and culture", and ultimately "to the Republican Wolves".

The problem here wasn't that Lowenstein cared too much, as most of his contemporaries wrote. Rather, he'd performed like a racer trying to slipstream/draft who had spun out of control. This was because of Lowenstein's background and training. As the consummate liberal striver, he'd managed to become president of the National Student Association in 1951 (note this in particular for future posts). This was a union of students' unions, which was basically the debate club to end all debate clubs because that's all student unions are. Even today, but especially so in the 40s and 50s, the only reason to get involved in student politics was because it was a training ground for how parliaments and congresses work. All they do is argue over arcane resolutions on mundane subject matter, until one manages to land a blow strong enough to gain a majority in favour. It's a weirdo politics junkie's dream.

Lowenstein brought that energy to organizing black people in the American South. Even before his role in organizing 1964's Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the project for which Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered, he was already getting on the nerves of more radical black people. James Forman, right of MLK in the pic below, ended up on the wrong side of Lowenstein at the 1956 NSA convention. Lowenstein didn't want passage of a more progressive civil rights platform than the one the Democratic Party had adopted. At one point, he literally shoved a black man to the microphone to speak on his behalf, according to Forman. He won, of course, because he knew his debate club tactics better.

7 years later, Lowenstein and Forman butted heads over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's work in Mississippi and Alabama. Forman notes that he arrived almost unannounced, and yet many of the white volunteers suddenly claimed that they were under his orders to do what they were doing, including going to towns that were centres of white violence and had no organizing done. As a Yale alumni, Lowenstein probably had links to major white supremacist orgs to protect these people given that Yale was the university of choice for white southerners in the Ivy Leagues. On the other hand, Lowenstein's line was against black radical politics and towards conciliation. Forman found that Lowenstein often worked hand-in-hand with Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and John Lewis (far right in the pic above), and were close to Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington's Socialist Party (eventually Democratic Socialists of America), bankrolled by Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers union. He was particularly piqued when they went to the Dominican Republic as supposedly independent observers and certified the election of the pro-American candidate not long after an American invasion, despite the well-known popularity of his opponent Juan Bosch.

This rankled Forman because the struggle in America for the civil rights of black people was part and parcel of the decolonization struggle abroad, or so he thought. To have America going around and imposing governments on nations through its military industrial complex and arcane intelligence apparatus reeked of what South Africa was doing in Namibia. After all, there was a reason the SNCC had adopted the phrase "one man, one vote" for its 1964 Freedom Summer campaign: it had been a slogan of the 1958 All African Peoples' Conference, the first meeting of black revolutionaries from all of Africa in history.

This conference was convened by the newly independent Ghana, the eighth independent nation in Africa and the first of a long wave which gained independence between 1958 and 1994. The resounding waves of this action were felt in America. Martin Luther King Jr explained in an interview that year "This event will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world. I think it will have worldwide implications and repercussions—not only for Asia and Africa, but also for America… At bottom, both segregation in America and colonialism in Africa are based on the same thing—white supremacy and contempt for life". But "Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent", incoming Ghanian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah declared, which is why the All African Peoples' Conference had to be held.

Nkrumah did not learn his debating skills from the NSA. As a student in America in the 30s, he'd given sermons in churches across New York City and Philadelphia, talking always about Africa. Yet it was his experience of American segregation that radicalized him. Being told he was only fit to drink from a spittoon was one of many insults he faced from white Americans. At times, he would buy a subway ticket so that he had a place to sleep. He knew the civil rights struggle was the same as his own, and this followed to the rest of his government. When Ghana became independent, it had virtually no skilled workers because universities in the country barred black students and everybody who had the ability travelled to America to learn. In 1958, Nkrumah spoke at an NAACP dinner in Harlem, telling black American dignitaries that the next step in their fight for civil rights was to send their well educated members back to Ghana, where they would receive a warm welcome and teach their fellow Africans to build a strong, independent nation that could one day bring together a united Africa to rival America.

The opening salvo in this project was the call for all freedom fighters of Africa to send representatives to the AAPC. Nkrumah welcomed them personally. First came Tom Mboya (keep your eyes on this guy) from Kenya, a trade unionist official and future Minister of Justice who one day soon would ensure a member of his tribe, Barack Obama Senior, made his way to America to attend university. Future successful and failed revolutionaries like Joshua Nkomo, George Padmore, Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda, Frantz Fanon, Dr. Felix-Roland Moumie, and Holden Roberto, as well as notable black US Congressman Charles Diggs, were among 300 delegates. Perhaps the most important delegate was accidental. Joseph Kasavubu had initially been invited as the representative from the Congo. However, when the plane to Ghana stopped in Leopoldville/Kinshasa, Belgian authorities had stopped him from getting on, recognizing him from anti-colonial speeches earlier. However, they did allow Patrice Lumumba and two comrades who had impressed the plane's passengers with their rhetoric at a bar to join in. When Nkrumah met Lumumba, he was deeply impressed and called for a photographer to record the moment.

Also among them was Horace Mann Bond as a representative of the African American Institute, a group funded by western mining interests but staffed with academics from major American black universities like Howard and Lincoln. He brought along a reporter named Bob Keith, who was arrested during a closed session of the congress with bugging equipment. Bond was also president of the American Society of African Culture. AMSAC had deep pursestrings, bailing out a number of black groups soon after it was founded, and sponsored Bond as well as CUNY professor John Aubrey Davis, who reported on all the proceedings to former National Student Association president and current AMSAC leader James Theodore Harris Jr, according to AMSAC's archives. A third group that attended the conference was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, who sent white AFL-CIO leader Irving Brown. AFL-CIO in turn sponsored International Ladies' Garment Workers Union member Maida Springer, one of the few black women. One thing that AAI, AMSAC, AFL-CIO, and CCF shared was an explicit commitment to anticommunism in their charters, even as some claimed apoliticality otherwise. CCF sent its future president, South African poet Ezekiel Mphaphele. Some CCF funding came from the Fairfield Foundation, a charitable organization that sent its own observer Patrick Duncan, a white member of the South African Liberal Party. Other funding came from the Ford Foundation, which sent white University of California Santa Cruz professor John A. Marcum on its own. Marcum and Brown helpfully offered to translate ad hoc between French (spoken by Lumumba) and English (spoken by Nkrumah), and the two report an unknown American helping them with all their conversations.

I note these people because they or the organizations that sponsored them were all revealed to be CIA fronts or conduits by the magazine Ramparts in 1967 (Brown's one time boss at the CIA's International Organizations Division, Thomas Braden, wrote a response entitled "I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral'"). Many of them defended themselves by saying they were unaware of where the money was coming from or that they did not know the people they reported to were compromised. As Ramparts was drawing primarily on IRS information that had been leaked as well as corroborating testimony, they did not know the full extent of their integration into the intelligence apparatus. As many of these organizations folded in the 70s and 80s after these revelations their archives were given over to universities for preservation. They were rarely perused, two notable exceptions being by Frances Stonor Saunders and Hugh Wilford in the 90s and 2000s respectively. What they revealed was not wholesale domination or complete innocence, but rather a joy that the CIA was funding them to do what they knew was the right thing combined with strident insistence to the conduits for their funding that they not be forced to do anything that would contradict with their politics. When Farmer, of Forman's Lowenstein faction at CORE and SNCC, went on an AMSAC-sponsored tour of Africa, he criticized Malcolm X's beliefs as "apartheid and… worse", then got into arguments with diplomatic staff for his criticisms of American policies towards South Africa, Portugese Africa, and most of all the Congo. He later claimed that seeing apartheid abroad helped to calcify his opinion the American government. When Brown became harshly critical of Nkrumah, Springer, his subordinate and mentee at AFL-CIO, explained decades later that the 1958 conference gave her "goosebumps" and was more significant than the fall of the Berlin Wall in her opinion.

Evidently, many of these liberals, like the more radical leftists they battled, viewed the American civil rights struggle as an anti-colonial one. So too did the CIA, given the similar manner in which they infiltrated both through the liberals. However, portrayals of the struggle in popular culture like Eyes on the Prize show nothing of the sort. They tend to show a struggle from the streets right into the Democratic Party. This pattern also befits all of the above named associated with the CIA, albeit with the ones less inclined to support whoever the current president was also ending up becoming less powerful. Typically, they emerged in academia rather than politics, ie the other glorified debate club. In contrast, the radicals tended to find themselves sidelined or shot. Forman was an early supporter of the Black Panthers along with his associate at the SNCC Stokely Carmichael, but as the group descended into factional infighting, his former comrade stuffed a pistol in his mouth and threatened to shoot, giving him a nervous breakdown. He went into academia and helped ensure his son, now a Yale Law professor, could do the same. To co-author his autobiography, "The Making of Black Revolutionaries", Forman picked Julian Bond, son of Horace Mann Bond.

‘Irving Brown was never a CIA agent’, said Cord Meyer, the head of the International Organizations Division of the CIA. ‘The very notion is laughable. He was as independent as you could get, and very strong-willed. What the CIA did was to help him finance his major projects when they were crucial to the Western cause. But in his operations he was totally on his own’.

[deathsmallcaps]

(USA based sorry)

I’m definitely speaking into an echo chamber but like.

Nearly every algebra student I tutor ends up with a word problem involving the gender wage gap. And they’re all confounded by it and have no clue.

And a guy in my fucking Calc 3 class was like “wait you guys were serious? That’s real?” When it came up. BRO YOU’RE ABOUT OLD ENOUGH TO DRINK???

It’s amazing what is and isn’t common knowledge. Feminist history isn’t taught past “and then women got their right to vote :)))))).” With occasional mentions of Title IX and the late 1900s waves of feminism. Of course only in in-depth history classes, not general Ed. Wow.

I am not in training to be a historian or a history teacher, but by all that is right in the world I hope it becomes more normalized and common to speak about shit that is LESS than 100 years ago in depth when it comes to American History & culture. Wtf. I swear even when I took AP history* the professor was afraid to touch on that stuff. For some reason (happily) my English teachers were a lot more willing to teach about modern history & minority stories.

And this is just what affects my white anglo cishetallo abled-passing housed female life personally. I cannot truly imagine the feeling of personal erasure & irritation one of comes to other identities & issues that have only relatively recently been resolved, addressed, acknowledged or even only pointedly ignored. I am fucking angry FOR you and can’t wait for things to change. You ALL deserve better. Don’t forget that.

It’s not your job to educate these people or their children (unless you’re literally a history teacher or something) but I want to shake the people who decide these what gets taught until the cowardice & insecurity & thoughtlessness & malice & election-based anxiety shits out of their assholes and leaves their hearts hungering for intelligent, thoughtful & interested discussions on modern issues and genuine history that should not be squeezed into the last pages of textbooks out of fear of offending paper white & paper thin pride.

Human rights deserve attention. Human rights should not have to be a radical talking point. It should be both as natural and expected as breathing clean air & as ingrained and knowable as to be accessible in math problems.

There is so much to be done. And it is exhausting. But please know that you are not alone.

*interesting tidbit below but basically irrelevant to the above post

I took AP america history to learn about the parts of American history that are never, or barely, covered in history classes throughout the grades. Basically, if it happened outside of the Puritans-WWII, it’s got a poor chance chance of in-depth coverage. And while the class did teach me good analysis skills and some interesting facts, it mostly covered the exact fucking periods I mentioned above.

And you know what? Literally right before we took the AP test, our teacher told us “study up on periods 2-7” (im pretty sure there are 9 periods of American history, forgive me it’s been like 5 years) “they never test on 1, 8 or 9”. Guess what the essay questions were on. And guess what time periods 1,8 & 9 are? If you posited precolonial america, the mid 1900s and modern day, ding ding ding you’re the winner! :))))))

(AP classes are worth it if you’re bored and/or trying to cut down on the amount of classes you’ll take in college & thus save money. But a lot (not all) of the AP certified teachers will try to convince you it’s the be all, end all of learning in high school. Also the weighted GPAs are a scam. No one looks at those. If you’re worried about keeping a good average, stick to the class level that fits within both circles of ‘not boring’ and ‘not going to wreck your life’. You can take an AP test and have it count and not take the class. Just be warned it is genuinely difficult.)

[autogeneratedkahootnickname]

Ok stuff's been happening in the world of UK politics and I need to share it with you before I scream.

So first, some important context. Way back in the 1920s when Ireland left the UK, the province of Ulster, by this point predominantly Protestant, remained, splitting from the rest of the nation. However, as is always the case with partition, it wasn't a clean break: people got stuck on sides of the border they weren't necessarily happy with, and over time, historical political and cultural divides were exacerbated by a new concrete separation that culminated in the Troubles, a period of violence in NI between the 1970s and the 1990s as radical nationalists (the IRA) clashed with the UK military over control of the region. This was largely ended in 1998 by the Good Friday Agreement, tearing down the hard border across Ireland and facilitating free movement of goods and people. In order to preserve the peace, a power sharing mechanism was implemented in Stormont (NI's assembly) whereby the government had to consist of two equal and codependent parties. The first minister was from the party who won the elections, the deputy minister was from the opposition, etc. This system worked well enough at suppressing Unionist/Nationalist tensions for about 20 years and was considered one of the greatest diplomatic achievements of British and Irish history.

Flash forward to 2016, and the UK votes to leave the EU. Overall. Within the nations, it's a different story, and while Scotland's desire to remain gets most of the press, Northern Ireland also voted disproportionately to remain. And as the Conservatives would discover, they kind of had to.

Because you see, a big part of the reason why the Good Friday Agreement worked is because both parties were EU members, so they were already part of the Single Market, meaning free movement of goods and services wasn't an issue since it was already European policy. Now Britain wants to leave the Single Market, we have an issue.

If you were looking at memes around 2017, you'll be familiar with the term 'Hard Brexit'. What that means is the UK is fully cut out of all the various levels of EU membership: the free trade, the external tariffs and, most importantly, the regulatory framework of the Single Market that allows goods to be easily traded across borders. As you may also know, the EU takes regulation very seriously, so ensuring imports are up to code is a lengthy and time-intensive process. If Britain wants a Hard Brexit, and they're cut out of the Single Market, there has to be a point where goods being traded in and out of countries still in the framework are checked. Say, for instance, in Ireland.

One problem: this entails a hard border. Not for people, perhaps, but for products, and people need products to make a living. On top of that as well, Northern Ireland would be cut out of the free trade area and potentially face massive import duties, massively increasing costs and threatening demand. Even on a symbolic level, its a firm dividing line across Ireland. And the Good Friday Agreement is very clear about the No Borders thing because Look What Happened The Last Time There Was A Border. If the Conservatives try and surround the UK with a hard customs border, Northern Ireland will fall.

But the alternative is either not having a Hard Brexit, the entire point of their manifesto, which would be political suicide, or leaving Northern Ireland behind basically in the EU, creating a border not across Ireland but across the UK. And if that happens, Northern Ireland will fall because of the radical unionists.

(Alternatively the solution was 'No Brexit in the first place' but too late for that now ig.)

David Cameron resigns before having to sort this out. Theresa May spends her entire premiership trying to sort this out while part of a coalition with the DUP (the leading Unionist party, at this point the largest party in Stormont and basically NI's Tories) and she can't, forcing her resignation. Then Boris Johnson comes along and finds a 'temporary' solution to get the paperwork signed: put the border between Great Britain and Norther Ireland, keeping Good Friday intact, until they can find a better way. Until then, Northern Ireland abides by EU trade regulation and future amendments: the Northern Ireland Protocol. And they wait. And they wait. And they don't.

As this shitshow is going down, Northern Ireland is getting increasingly tired of Westminster's routine (and the DUP's dumpster fire coalition attempt) and pivots towards new kid on the block, the party of compromise, Alliance. The Nationalists, led by Sinn Fein, lose votes through this too, but to a far lesser degree. DUP loses 10% of the vote share in the 2017 election, putting them and Sinn Fein neck and neck.

And in 2022, for the first time, Sinn Fein wins Stormont. The nationalists are in power in Northern Ireland. Or rather, they're half in power.

Because as we established, Northern Ireland has a power sharing system. And the DUP have boycotted Stormont. They aren't happy with the potential of being pulled away from the UK, so they decide if they can't have NI, no-one can. By refusing to participate in the coalition government, the Sinn Fein half is prohibited from governing alone, forcing the government into shutdown.

That shutdown has lasted for a year.

This happened around the time Boris Johnson started sinking over Partygate, followed by whatever the fuck happened with Truss, so NI got overshadowed in the news cycle but over the course of 2022, order has been breaking down in Northern Ireland as radical unionists begin to stir trouble. Indeed, it looks like Northern Ireland is heading straight back to the Troubles, and no-one seems to want to do anything to fix it. In fact, the Conservatives seem to want to declare war with the EU through a proposed override of the Protocol, dismantling decades of diplomatic hard work and plunging the continent into anarchy.

In October, Rishi Sunak is 'elected' Prime Minister, and he sets out to solve the Northern Irish issue. For all her many faults, Truss was pretty cordial with Europe, and Sunak continued that trend well into his premiership. Combined with the looming threat of Russia over European stability, the EU is in a compromising mood, and agrees to help work out a new system that tears down the border between the UK and Ireland. The plan is: separate goods going to Northern Ireland and goods going to the EU. Why it took them 7 years to sort that out I don't know but huzzah, a solution. But on top of this, they also implement the Stormont Brake: whereas before, EU law applies automatically in Northern Ireland, Stormont can veto proposed amendments from applying in Northern Ireland if they're too radical. This is a hugely generous concession by the EU since this is a major compromise on a lot of their core principles, since Northern Ireland is now part of the Single Market but theoretically exempt from following it, and by extension a huge win for Rishi Sunak. While the DUP have lost all credibility, this will hopefully be enough to get them back into Stormont. This new arrangement is called the Windsor Framework, and buries the final major hatchet in the Brexit divorce proceedings.

OK, LENGTHY context complete, lets discuss what's happened. Because turns out, there's opposition to this new framework.

Who from?

WHY ITS BORIS JOHNSON AND THE CHUCKLEFUCKS.

Basically, leading members of the Johnsonian and Trussian governments (including both PMs) explicitly said they wouldn't support the deal. They don't have an alternative. A plan. Anything. They just won't support it.

Joining them is, you guessed it, THE FUCKING DUP. No matter what happens, they're refusing to go back to Stormont. Just to spite their rivals.

Some more important context, the Conservatives are on the verge of self destructing since vast swathes of the party believe Johnson is a martyr and Sunak is not the True King, so getting the Conservatives to vote together is a massive challenge. If this vote passes, it'll give the Tories a lifeline to the next election, possibly their one positive achievement since 2016 outside of 'not actively backing Putin'. If it fails, the Conservatives are history. Making matters worse in the best way, Keir Starmer pledges Labour's plurality in support of Windsor, saying, to paraphrase, 'if you fucks can't get it together we'll do it for you.' Iconic. By doing so, Labour guarantee the vote passes unless the entire Conservative party rips itself in twain, but potentially force the PM to rely on the OPPOSITION over his OWN PARTY to pass groundbreaking legislation, which is almost worse for Sunak than the bill failing.

The vote took place today and the Conservatives, despite a massive rebellion, barely managed to vote in favour on their own majority alone. Barely. We're talking single digits. Two dozen Tory MPs rebelled, and 3 dozen more abstained. With no alternative. They would rather have chaos in Northern Ireland than be forced to work with the EU when the EU is bending over backwards to make this happen.

Today is a positive for the UK's future, but it reaffirms that the Conservatives need to go now more than ever.