#and he used that as evidence of how biden fucked up america

[cuntwrap--supreme]

What is it about me that makes old white men think I'm a conservative? I need to know so I can change that.

[mariacallous]

I plan on voting for Biden in November.  But it’s terrible.  A vote for him is still a vote that will not significantly improve our deepest and most troubling social problems.  He won’t give us Medicare for All or any other badly needed boosts to social programs.  He will probably continue to support policies that actively oppress BIPOC.  He will not help us.  He’s also a sexual predator.  Truly, I do not want to vote for this man.  This is not the man I wanted to vote for.  I don’t want him in office.  He is simply not good enough.  This man doesn’t represent what I want at all.

But if I don’t vote for Biden in November, I feel like I’m making it that much easier for Trump to win another election.  And I want that even less than I want a Biden presidency.  I don’t want another 4 years of what we have now.  No fucking way.  No.

I’m so conflicted.  I feel like there is blood on my hands.  I feel like I’m casting a vote for death and misery if I’m not voting for a progressive candidate with a progressive platform.  I feel like I’m committing nothing short of an atrocity no matter what I choose to do.  I don’t want to harm people, and yet, won’t I essentially be doing exactly that?  I just want to do the right thing.  I don’t want to bring harm, or perpetuate harm towards anyone.

Trump will probably win anyway.  He’s doing all he can to ensure that, and it will probably work.  The impending climate disaster will kill us all because we will clearly continue to do nothing.  Our bodies will be riddled with micro and nanoplastics.  America will become an even more of an inhospitable police state.

 Nobody will hold Biden accountable for anything if he wins, and he’ll never give us the public policies we desperately need. 

“Is this what hope feels like?  I’d forgotten,” you tweeted recently.  How?  And for what?  I see nothing but bad things to come.  I feel a deep sense of hopelessness and despair.

There are plenty of reasons to feel hopelessness and despair right now, but with regard to Joe Biden, you are wasting a whole bunch of negative emotions on a giant pile of shitty beliefs that just aren’t true.

First, and let me be very clear on this one, Joe Biden is not a sexual predator. He’s just not. Believe me, I would be shouting it from the rooftops if I thought he were. When Tara Reade went public, I took her allegations very seriously. I gave her extra helpings of the benefit of the doubt, but it turned out there was a mountain of evidence suggesting that Reade has always been a lying, manipulative grifter (which I didn’t want to be true), and there was another mountain of evidence suggesting that the predatory behavior alleged by Reade is simply not in Biden’s character (which I was very reluctant to trust). There was a time when I was hopeful that Reade’s accusations might even knock Biden out of the race, but I’m not the kind of person who believes a thing merely because I want it to be true. It’s fine if you want to criticize Biden for what appears to be a history of awkward or retrospectively inappropriate behavior. Hell, you can even buy into all that “Creepy Uncle Joe” bullshit, but you’re just plain wrong if you insist that Joe Biden is a sexual predator. (Obviously, the same cannot be said of Donald Trump, who is a straight-up serial rapist with a list of at least twenty-five women who have publicly and credibly accused him of sexual assault.)

As for your policy concerns, I understand your frustration. I would love to be voting for a far-left ultra-progressive firebrand of a candidate in the upcoming general election. That would feel wonderful, right up until the moment that she loses in a landslide, and I guarantee you, a far-left ultra-progressive candidate would get her ass handed to her by Trump. That’s not an outcome we can afford as a species, much less as a nation. You understand this, which is why you still plan on voting for Biden. Good. I’m really glad you’re not being a purist asshole about this. The evil garbage monsters in the GOP just love a left-wing purist who refuses to vote responsibly. Republicans are desperately praying to their imaginary white Jesus that all the Green Party crunch bars will fuck it up for the rest of us like they did back in 2016. We cannot let that happen again.

Listen, I’m not gonna try and convince you to like Joe Biden. You’re already gonna vote for him, so I’m perfectly fine if you hate his breathing guts. What I do want from you is a little maturity, some vision, and a realistic sense of scale. No one candidate will ever be the solution to our problems — not Bernie, not Liz, and certainly not Joe. At best, a candidate is a vector, a course correction, a desperately needed step in the right direction. That’s all we can expect from Biden, and he is bringing it. He’s bringing it every single day with a list of policy positions that are more progressive than any President’s in the history of the United States, and he most certainly brought it with the selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Biden recognizes his place in history. He knows he is little more than a national stop-gap, a post-Trump tourniquet to stanch the bleeding. His Vice-Presidency and eventual Presidency will be a line of demarcation between two very distinct chapters of American history. This is more than just bridging the Boomer/Millennial generational divide. In the distant future (if we have one), it is my sincerest hope that Biden will be remembered as “The Last of the Old White Men,” a happy warrior who marked the end of a certain kind of Modern America and who helped usher in a new kind of Postmodern America. Those terms are clunky and loaded and absolutely will not stand the test of time, but we’re not the ones who get to name what we’re about to become. We’re the ones who have to keep doing the hard work to finally get us there, and that’s why I really need you to change your whole fucking attitude. 

This shit is going to be grueling. The fight will be brutal if not bloody, and there is absolutely no room for whiners and layabouts. You want to improve our deepest and most troubling social problems? Great. Quit moaning about doing harm with your vote and go do some actual good with your own two fucking hands. Pulling a lever in a voting booth every couple years is the bare minimum. In terms of civic duty, it is the absolute least you can do. Of course Biden won’t give us Medicare for All. Neither would Sanders or Warren. That’s not how any of this works. Presidents don’t give us shit. We do it ourselves. We demand it, loudly and with force, and over long stretches of time, with enough solidarity and sustained action, laws are enacted and policies change. 

I was around when the Clintons tried deadlifting their universal health care plan off the ground back in 1993. Maybe you remember it, maybe you weren’t even born yet, but that’s how long this shit takes. It’ll have been three fucking decades and two fucking generations of Democrats trying desperately to kick that gutbucket up Capitol Hill by the time we finally get around to some semblance of a single payer healthcare system. Thirty fucking years, my friend. That’s the kind of patience and perseverance the American experiment demands of us, so quit your fucking whining. Enough with all the pearl-clutching and hand-wringing. Take all your conflicted navel gazing bullshit and toughen the fuck up, buttercup.

You are on the right side of history. You are with the good guys. Quit your fucking bitching, and get out there and help us win.

[lady-raziel]

I'm angry. I'm really, really furious right now. I am absolutely livid that when the stakes are so high-- not just for Americans at risk from project 2025, not just for people in Europe being threatened by Russia, not just for people in Palestine, but for pretty much widespread global stability-- that the elites of the Democratic party would dare, would have the fucking gall to let Joe Biden run for a second term in the first place, and then when the magnitude of their own hubris is revealed, would not correct the mistake. And even worse, now, after what we've seen over the past two weeks-- that many of them, including some of the most progressive, would look out upon the people who they claim to be champions of, the diverse and varied America who will suffer at the hands of the conservatives' agenda--and they would EVER dare to say that YOU are wrong to point out the truth before your own eyes.

After the NATO press conference, where Biden absolutely had to prove he was not on the decline, and resoundingly failed to do so, I was appalled to go on Twitter (I'm still not calling it X, sorry) and see favored Democratic insiders claiming that the performance I had just seen was GOOD. That I should be PROUD of this. That I should WANT to vote for this.

How dare you. How dare you say that I should be proud, should wholeheartedly endorse the candidate at the head of a party who, time and time again over the past 30+ years, has only ever chosen to raise up its own aging elites, and occasionally younger people if they met the right demographics to portray the image of the "diverse party of the people."

No. It became evident a long time ago that you only ever cared about yourselves and consolidating your own power. Time and time again you have destroyed the chances of any candidate that strays beyond what you consider the bounds of acceptability for yourselves. There were good candidates in 2004-- and instead, the Democrats gave us John Kerry and handed the Republicans another four years of Bush. Hillary Clinton first ran for president in 2008-- had Barack Obama not been so compelling, had the idea of having the first African American president been so appealing, would you have allowed him to stand a chance? In 2016 you again and again ignored what the average person had to say, ignored concerns that had been brewing for decades that your commitment to "diversity" only mattered if it could be wielded against conservatives and used to prop yourselves up, and destroyed Bernie Sanders' campaign in service of an elite no one wanted.

The seeds of Donald Trump had been brewing for a long time, and instead of doing something about it then, you rested on your laurels and held on to your power instead of raising new people up to move the mission forward. And now, when the situation is MORE CRITICAL than it has EVER been-- still you refuse to listen. Still you refuse to change. Biden literally said in that press conference they aren't listening to polls anymore--is there ANYTHING that will get you to see that you are fucking this up???

So no, Biden campaign surrogates on my Twitter feed, DNC donation-prompt texts, endless barrage of emails one after another-- I see no reason to my proud of this. For many of us, this election as well as the last one was ALWAYS a strategic calculation to prevent worse things, empower local-level candidates, and allow a party structure to exist in some form in hopes of change. This was ALWAYS a dispassionate choice made with the full knowledge of complex situations in order to play the long game.

How dare you say I too should wholeheartedly believe the emperor is dressed in robes of splendor when he and the rest of you have lain bare for the longest time, while those of us trying to keep things from getting worse have to convince the rightfully angry people who still care to ignore the nakedness of who you are--to prevent people cloaked in blood from taking the reins. Shame on all of you, honestly. I wish I could say that this might be a learning moment for the Democratic elite, but I have little hope, and I expect to hear you pontificate on end regarding how "young people just don't understand the political process and that's why we lost" as we all go down together.

Fuck you.

[davidtennantgenderenvy]

A Letter From An Ex-Conservative To Her Parents On November 6th, 2024

Mom and Dad,

     When Trump got shot this summer, I remember you saying that this was all because the Left wouldn’t stop calling him Hitler. How we needed to “turn down the temperature” and stop “inciting violence.” I don’t think you understand that when people compare Trump to Hitler, it is not, in fact, just because they do not like him, but because he uses Hitlerian rhetoric on a regular basis. Obsessing over an imagined past version of a country that never truly existed. Saying that (insert frequently dehumanized other) is “poisoning the blood of the nation.” Before Hitler began the Final Solution against Jews, what did he say he planned to do? Deport them, until he realized it was too costly. I don’t think you understand that Hitler did not start putting people in death camps the second he came to power. Trump is currently in about the same position Hitler was in in the 1930s. Is it going to take him putting undocumented people in gas chambers for you to believe me? 

     You might think that I’ve only come to my current conclusions about Trump because of the lies of “the mainstream media”, which, as I’ve said numerous times, I don’t even watch. But it’s actually been largely due to the things Trump himself has said. I understand that you don’t like Biden calling Trump’s voters “garbage”, but the language Trump uses to describe his political opponents is at least as disturbing. He’s disparaged fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.” He’s proudly boasted about being the president who got Roe V Wade appealed, regardless of the estimated thousands of women who are dying because the medical treatments they need fall too close to the legal definition of abortion. A massive portion of his campaign advertisements are explicitly anti-trans. He thinks Palestinians should be moved off their land because it would make “great beachfront property.” He regularly speaks positively of and rubs elbows with the most disturbing members of the alt-right, such as Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes. He’s a bully. (you voted for a bully. Remember when I was bullied?) And if Kamala’s plans are incoherent, which admittedly some of them are, Trump’s are even more so. He doesn't have a plan. America is just another failed business to him. 

     I don’t think you’re bad people. But I do think your party is bad. This is far more than just one guy. My journey has been less one of changing any of my beliefs than realizing that the Republican Party never represented those beliefs to begin with. It is the party of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, of stripping the oppressed of their means to succeed and then asking them to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” Your precious Reagan was a racist. There’s recorded evidence. His policies were racist. He enabled denial and misinformation about AIDS until it was too little too late and millions had died. And you proudly display his book on your shelf, right next to Rush Limbaugh and Pat fucking Buchanan. Your son is a gay man. How could you. 

     Being a conservative, whether you think so or not, is inherently about preserving the status quo, about making sure things stay the way they are, that the people who are down stay down, and crushing anyone who tries to make things better. I didn’t vote Democrat because I am one. I voted Democrat because it would be easier under one such administration to push this country in the direction of equity and liberty. Project 2025 was intended for the next conservative administration. Trump may deny involvement, but the foreword of one of the sections was written by none other than his own vice president. And with the House, Senate and Supreme Court all red now, it’s going to be easier than ever for him to pass any portions of it he likes. 

     I’m writing you this letter so that you know that if a nationwide abortion ban gets put in place, if schools and parents who support their children’s gender affirming care (which does NOT mean surgery) start getting investigated (which some already are), if Israel continues bombing Gaza until there’s nothing left, if billionaires continue to take up larger and larger percentages of the nation’s wealth, if immigrants who’ve lived and worked in this country for years start getting deported in droves because they couldn’t get the right paperwork, that it’s on you and people like you, even as you continue deny the very real damage done in Trump’s first presidency, the awful, awful people who felt empowered because of him. I tried for a while this summer to see if I could change your minds, but all it did was screw up my mental health and make me realize something truly painful: that you aren’t the people I thought you were. Not when your reaction to police shooting students the same age as your own daughter with rubber bullets because they don’t want their university to be complicit in a genocide is “well, what are they supposed to do? They’re the police.” Not when a man can say immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation and you still vote for him. 

     It breaks my heart that you and so many people I love have been so deeply conditioned to vote against their own best interests, to think that a government that actually helps its people without actively harming others is a childish, fanciful expectation. I think I truly believed to the depths of my soul until last night that this wouldn’t happen. That we were better than this. That we wouldn’t reelect someone who objectively ran a terrible campaign, who conducts himself with boorishness and indignity, who genuinely, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, represents everything that made me scream "Fuck America" out Laura’s car window this summer. But why should I be surprised America likes fascists? My own parents certainly seem to.

     But I hope you’re happy with your lower grocery prices, I guess. Which we probably won’t be getting anyway, because that’s not actually what Trump’s policies are going to do. 

     You sold out my friends, and entire marginalized communities, for cheaper groceries. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you for that.

Lauren

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

Listen to me right now, genuinely.

You should vote in November. You really should, but I don't really want this post to be about that. I have a pretty profound distrust of the average liberal "blue no matter who" crowd on here. I am not of the belief that you should willingly suspend your capacity of criticism and accountability of people in charge. If that can be extracted out of you, they will not give it back. Democrats are not a party full of people who love you and want to do everything you ask of them: they are a party who support the capitalist system first and foremost, and their interests are more beholden to the system than they are to us.

BUT, speaking as a trans woman right now, I'd personally really not rather see Trump get elected, obviously. If you're the type of person who sits and goes "I don't believe in politics", I want you to really listen to me. I get it. I truly do. American politics suck. Our politicians are chronic liars, they make promises they don't even try to keep. But there is almost one thing they never lie on, and that's the people they intend to oppress and stomp down. Trump wants to legislate and use his executive powers to push trans people out of existence. He can't be allowed to do that.

BUT

BUT. Voting cannot be the only thing you do. A bunch of the blue no matter who posters on here are going to do one of those things come November

Trump will win, and despite any evidence to the contrary, they will blame the like 50 communist bloggers on this website for ruining the election chances of the entire country. It was Russia yet again, somehow.

Biden will win, they will pat themselves on the back for a job well done, and proceed to sit on their hands until they find another reason to blame leftists for the actions of conservatives.

Trans history is full of examples of us being left behind. Your political plan for the future CANNOT just be to show up at a polling booth. You need to do more than that. What you will need to do will change somewhat depending on who is in charge, but I'm begging those among you to start taking action both now and after the elections.

Make sure your trans friends are safe. Check to see if they still have access to their medications. Check to see if they need money to get out of the country. Work to protest regressive and transphobic policies. If you're a lawyer, it's time to get ready to defend the cases of trans people against libelous suits. Plenty of you can do this pro bono.

Build mutual aid groups among your neighors and peers. Show up to a local LGBT organization and see what they need. Volunteer your time and money and often time spare clothes for other people. Educate yourself on our history, educate yourself on political theory, support organizations that help out the homeless directly.

Learn how to defend yourself and others during a protest when it faces police brutality and state sanctioned violence. Learn how to effectively neutralize tear gas, learn how to cover your self up so that you cannot be tracked by the pigs. Learn how to break kettle formations, learn your rights.

Never stop protesting against the people who feel it is their God given right to turn America into a theocratic dictatorship (which is not in the Bible by the way. I feel I should mention this. This is not a Biblical belief, the conservative Christians who tell you otherwise are lying out their ass.) Never stop protesting to stop the exploitation of the Global South by tech companies. Never stop protesting to end the genocide in Palestine. Never stop fighting so that the people of Sudan can be heard.

Just voting does not make you a politically active citizen, or really, a politically active person. It takes work, work that is very easy to burn out on. But if we can't rely on the American government and the Democratic party to do the things we need in order to avert the twenty crises looming over the horizon, then yes, we need to do more as a united people than fucking vote.

[qqueenofhades]

Think what strikes me about something like "we can't vote because the system is rigged! Ban the electoral college!" is the big underlying implication of it.

That there is no multiple solutions or paths, only the one correct path and everything else is worthless.

And that's incredibly frustrating because there are two levels of problems with it:

is the utter dismissiveness of anything other than their specific solution, which ignores how any degree of positive change cannot occur with only just ONE idea, it's usually the result of many ideas that lead to change.

The fact that it feels like they're skipping every step in between the current situation to this end result, or actively fixating on themselves having the correct solution, but only by literally getting everything in between completely wrong in the process.

Like, the latter point in particular is like a complex math equation: Just because you got the right answer doesn't mean you can just ignore every difficult step in between, or just assume that all of the WRONG processes become validated retroactively because you stumbled into the correct answer. You'd literally get failed and be forced to redo the problem if you tried that shit in math.

I saw a poll the other day claiming that support for abolishing the Electoral College had now reached 65% of all Americans. Now, I take all polls, whether good or bad, with a grain of salt, but this does reflect a growing awareness that the EC is a horrible racist anti-democratic dinosaur only applied to the presidential election and only used for electing Republicans who don't win the nationwide popular vote, and that there's a genuine groundswell of support to abolish it. See the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which could possibly collect enough state-by-state ratifications to go into effect into 2028 (in the best-case scenario). So even all the bitching about how "the system is rigged" (which. WE KNOW! WE KNOW! There's not a single Democratic voter going to vote like WOW I LOVE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE CAN'T WAIT FOR MY VOTE TO DEPEND ON HOW MUCH IT COUNTS THANKS TO THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE WHEE OLD DEAD WHITE GUYS!) blatantly ignores that a possible seismic change IS possibly in the offing, because people put in the work to make it happen!!! The fact that the EC might soon be superseded or disempowered is FUCKING MONUMENTALLY HUGE!!! It has existed literally since the beginning of America and arbitrated every single presidential election!!! And let me tell you, the people working to make that change and fundamentally reshape American democracy are absolutely not the Online Leftists, whose grasp of civic and political theory starts and ends at "wah the system is rigged I do not vote I am very smart!"

This also reminds me of the recent idiots in my notes complaining that Biden was a) not "genuine" in supporting the striking auto workers, that b) Don't You Know He Broke The Rail Strike (the follow-up where he gave the railworkers what they most wanted with that strike was conveniently never mentioned), or c) that he wasn't "doing it for the right reasons" (whatever the fuck that means). Which accurately reflects their belief that the way you do politics, or praxis, or anything at all, is just by having the Really Goodest Mostest Purest Intentions really hard, and that's it. Like. Aside from the fact that it's impossible to prove why Biden is privately motivated to do anything, we have a long track record demonstrating that he is a person of genuine Catholic faith who has been moving more and more to the left overall, and has been the most pro-union, pro-labor president in American history. So first of all, complaining that "he's not GENUINE!!!!" in supporting the strikers is impossible to prove, and contradicted by actual evidence. But the Online Leftists gotta feel More Gooder Than Him somehow, so.

Likewise: as I said in one of my previous posts about Hillary Clinton: I do not give a fuck if she was privately the most Neoliberal Corporate Centrist Shill Ever To Shill (and as I also said, none of those words means what the Online Leftists think they do). I do not care about the American monarch president's personal feelings, unless they reflect directly on the policy that they make and the real-world effects that it has. I don't care if Clinton killed puppies (or dreamed about killing puppies, which for the thoughtcrime police is equally bad), as long as she appointed 3 new liberal justices to SCOTUS and throughout the courts, instead of the hacks that Trump forced onto the bench and literally everything else he did. In the same vein, Biden could secretly be like "hahahaha fuck all workers BIG CORPORATIONS FOR LYFE but I gotta support the workers and get them their rights so they'll vote 4 meeee" (not that I actually think he is, but still) and hold onto your hankies, children: I DO NOT CARE! Because the tangible real-world effects of that policy that he is working hard on making results in a better economy for those workers and substantial redistribution of capital away from the oligarchs for the first time in a generation! Not to mention, I kind of like the idea that a president decides to make himself most appealing to workers instead of bosses! But for the Online Leftists, if this action isn't done with the Sufficiently Pure Motives, it is Wrong and Bad and Not Good Enough and Blah Blah Biden Sekrit Republican.

Anyway. Yes. That. The end.

[headful-of-worms]

I agree with everything except your second point. Wanting the dems to run a different candidate is a not a good enough reason abstain from voting for Biden but it’s not an inherently shit strategy to primary an incumbent. There isn’t any real evidence that say whether or not primaries hurt incumbents. Yes there’s examples of past incumbent presidents getting primaried and then losing but maybe thats people primary those candidates cuz they’re already unpopular. Some more news actually just put out a really good videos that talks about all this.

The bigger obstacle to the Dems running another candidate is that there’s not really anyone else who’s been set up to run and it’s just too late at this point.

Also Biden might not be solely at fault for the genocide going in Gaza right now but he is particularly soft on Israel. Mother Jones put out a good article about how much Biden overwhelmingly supports Israel and has for years. As a senator he proudly talked about how he attended the most APAC fundraiser and pushed for the US embassy to be moved to Jerusalem. In 1992 Biden argued against H.W’s demand for Israel to ends it occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and then undercut Obama’s efforts to revise peace talks as a vice president. After speaking with 15 former administration officials, editor Peter Beinart concluded that “during a critical period early in the Obama administration, when the White House contemplated exerting real pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to keep the possibility of a Palestinian state alive, Biden did more than any other cabinet-level official to shield Netanyahu from that pressure.”

Trump’s Project 2025 is more than enough of a reason to vote for Biden but let’s not undersell how fucking terrible he is on Israel.

Links to the video and article under the cut

There’s some common threads I see in the anti-voting posts going around, and I feel like I need to discuss some of them. Let’s start with the biggest one:

Voting to punish evil. I see lots of variations of this. Biden is supporting Israel, therefore we can’t vote for him. Is there any viable candidate who would stop the genocide? I don’t think the anti voting crowd actually cares. They are appealing to moral feelings rather than political strategy, because strategically, you have to realize that voting is not going to change foreign policy, and that change has to be pushed by other means. It’ll probably be something in the long haul.

Democrats should run someone else. First of all, this is a shit strategy. You don’t primary your president in the second term unless your party is falling apart. This may come from people from countries where replacing the head of government is easier, but the POTUS is the de facto party head. Also, going to the lack of thought to the goal — do you know someone willing to primary Biden and able to win who would do the things you want?

Biden hasn’t done anything anyway. This is just a way to bat away pro arguments. There’s plenty of lists of progress on lots of things. Student loans, insulin price caps, regulations, anti-trust.

Putting the entire Palestinian genocide on Biden. I’m not saying there’s not culpability there, but understand that the entire US government is in support of Israel, on both sides. It was a miracle we got a handful of Senators to call for investigations. We should cut off aid, absolutely. Who’s running to do that? And keep in mind that Israel chose to engage. US officials would have liked a more limited response, not out of care for Palestinians, but because they know from experience that it will come back to bite Israel in the form of newly radicalized Hamas recruits.

Liberals just have no hope for change. This is a new one. Just some idea that people are stuck in a rut and that’s the reason the two party system exists. The two party system is a mathematical consequence of the way we vote. There is reason to hope for change. The change, though, whatever means you choose, will take decades. Keep working at it. The hope is not that this election will fundamentally change things. The hope is that many small political actions over the years will push things forward.

Funnily enough, I haven’t seen a whole lot of third party promotion, just lots of this rhetoric aiming to punish. When voting, ask yourself:

Is this problem I have with this candidate something that the other candidate would be better on?

Are there other political actions I can take that will help?

What things can change with a different President or Congress, and what needs to be pursued by other means?

Withholding your vote as a punishment isn’t really going to help. Biden doesn’t know who you are or why you are not voting for him, and there is no one with a chance of winning that will do everything you want. But you have other means. Protest, organize, donate, build up alternatives, advocate for a different system.

Vote to give yourself space and get a little bit. Do other things to keep things moving.

[books-and-cookies]

Best lines from “Death to 2020″

(Death to 2020 is a comedy on Netflix, that came out on December 27th)

* “fire, a radicalized, angry form of air”

* “Davos [summit] is basically Coachella for billionaires”

* “[Greta Thunberg] is this teenage girl who’d become famous even though everything she says is depressing. Kind of Like Billie Eilish”

* “The U.S. president was facing an impeachment trial, which is a traditional ceremony that Americans perform to work whether their president has gone off.”

* “What Trump needed was a distraction, either something big, like a goose flying through the window, or something small, like World War 3″

* about the Iranian general, Soleimani: “the Beyonce of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard”

* the queen about Meghan and Harry: “Sadly, I believe they felt there is a degree of prejudice in Britain. Which is why they moved to America, where race has never been an issue at all.”

* about the “diversity” of Oscar nominees: “You got Marriage Story, two mopey white people trapped in an affluent marriage; Ford v. Ferrari, that’s white guys on wheels; Little Women, four white girls standing on the cusp of Karenhood; and Joker, whose lead actor performs in whiteface, thereby appropriating his own cultural identity while denying a role for a genuine clown. Oh and 1917, which was the year the movie was set, and the number of white people in it”

* “so, the democrats claim that Trump pressured Ukraine into digging up dirt on the Biden family and their only real “evidence” of that is a transcript of him doing it”

* “I think to many Americans, Biden is uncle Joe. He’s been a part of their lives for centuries. As familiar as an old armchair, and nearly as sharp-witted.”

* about the beginning of the pandemic: “now, those who’ve closely studied the history books, knew that this was strongly reminiscent of the time the White Walkers led their army of the dead towards the warring factions of Westeros”

* about Tom Hanks being infected with the virus: “it showed the virus could also pass from humans to icons, which raised the possibility it may one day infect God. And God is older than the universe, which puts him in a high risk category”

* "across the USA, supplies of masks, which, unlike guns, cannot be cheaply and easily manufactured, run low”

* “Trump seemed to feel that the virus was one of those things that goes away if you ignore it, like a wasp or a wife”

* “by the end of March, lockdowns have been rolled out right across the planet, making them the most successful global franchise since the Marvel cinematic universe”

* “the monarch only addresses the nation on special occasions, such as christmas or the end of the world, so this was a huge moment”

* about Boris Johnson recovering from covid: “Incredibly, the virus didn’t seem to have affected his abilities in any way. He still didn’t have any.”

* “That ought to be the number one sales feature for the iPhone. Fuck your “Megapixel Display”. How about put “Exposes Police Brutality” on the box?”

* “The president skilfully placates the situation with some soothing incendiary comments, and in Washington, he orders peaceful demonstrators to be gently dispersed with some courteous state violence”. 

* “You had corporations going woke too, asking themselves how can they support Black people without actually paying them.”

* “I live on my own and after a while I got so lonely, I developed a multiple personality disorder on purpose, so I could keep myself company. But then, of course, I had to try and keep two meters away from myself at all times. Don’t know if you’ve ever tried doing that, but it’s a bloody nightmare”

* “Also, there were questions about his fitness to govern, in part because of the way he had to drink a glass of water using both hands, but mainly because of everything else he did”

* “But then I got into this show called America, which was amazing. Have you seen it? It’s on the news channel. It’s totally mental. Just one twist after another. They had this sort of election fight happening between a bloke who looked like a ticket inspector on a ghost train and an inflatable orange maniac who didn’t seem to be dealing with the plague.”

* “And then the debate started and straightaway it was like a rap battle in a senior home. But worse.”; “I’d say it was a trainwreck and a shitshow, but that would be unfair to trains and shit.”

* “Following the debate, the only positive news for Trump is his coronavirus test result”

* “all eyes turn to the crucial state of Pennsylvania, where Trump has been on a winning streak. Until officials stubbornly insist on counting Biden’s votes too.”

* “Mr. Trump doesn’t know the meaning of the word “concede” and he was furious when they told him.”

* “No 5G vaccine for me, thank you very much. It’s made in a laboratory. And you shouldn’t trust anything that’s not natural. I read about it on Facebook.”

Please, please watch this, it’s fucking hilarious.

[beardedmrbean]

Looks like Biden is banning Russian oil sales while of course not increasing production in America just to keep fucking us over.

Biden says decision to ban Russian oil and gas will cause further price hikes at the pump

President Joe Biden said Tuesday that the decision for the U.S. to ban Russian gas and oil imports is going to cause soaring domestic gas prices to rise even further – but warned fuel companies that it is “no time for profiteering or price gouging.”

“The decision today is not without cost here at home,” he told reporters. “Putin’s war is already hurting American families at the gas pump. Since Putin began his military buildup on Ukrainian borders – just since then – the price of gas at pumps in America went up 75 cents. And with this action it’s going to go up further.

"I’m going to do everything I can to minimize Putin’s price hike here at home,” Biden continued. “In coordination with our partners we already announced that we are releasing 60 million barrels of oil from our joint oil reserves.”

“To the oil and gas companies and to the finance firms that back them – we understand Putin’s war against the people of Ukraine is causing prices to rise. We get that. That’s self-evident,” Biden also said. “But it’s no excuse to exercise excessive price increases or padding profits or any kind of effort to exploit this situation or American consumers.” ________________________

"I’m going to do everything I can to minimize Putin’s price hike here at home,”

No, no you aren't. You hold a good chunk of the responsibility for why we're where we are.

____________

I like how he's already blaming price gougers instead of anything related to his policy that's put us in this situation.

Saw talk about easing up on Venezuela sanctions so we could buy from them too.

I don't see how people don't understand that it's far more earth friendly to do as much of the production as we can at home instead of having the massive pollution machines that are oil tankers bring the stuff across the ocean.

With all of this it just seems like he wants to lose their control of congress for midterms

[tw-koreanhistory]

By Joyce Xi, Opinion contributor

In response to horrific attacks against Asian Americans across the country, the Biden administration has announced a new initiative to combat anti-Asian violence, xenophobia and bias. Days later, a federal court denied my family recourse for the anti-Asian violence and xenophobia the Obama-Biden administration subjected us to several years ago, when the Justice Department and FBI falsely accused my father of sending sensitive technology to China and treated him as a Chinese spy.

Mainstream narratives around anti-Asian violence have often overlooked a simple fact: The same federal government that recently expressed sympathy for Asian American communities has long perpetuated harm against our communities, and continues to do so.

As the country moves from righteous outrage toward the longer-term work of protecting our communities, we must also look at the bigger picture. Truly combating anti-Asian racism will require addressing the government’s role in it.

An ongoing nightmare

In 2015, the FBI raided my family’s home one morning, woke us up at gunpoint and dragged my dad, Xiaoxing Xi, away in handcuffs in front of my mom, sister and me. We were confused and terrified. Later, we found out that the Justice Department was accusing my father of illegally sending sensitive technology to China. They threatened him with 80 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

After the Justice Department publicized its charges against my father, newscasters surrounded our home and tried to film through windows to get a glimpse of our family. The FBI rummaged through all our belongings and carried off electronics and documents containing many private details of our lives. For months, we lived in fear of FBI intimidation and surveillance. We worried about our safety in public, given that my dad’s face was plastered all over the news. My dad was unable to work, and his reputation was shattered.

The government’s accusations were entirely false, and based on emails about academic collaboration between my dad and his colleagues that had nothing to do with the technology the government claimed. Eventually, the Justice Department dropped the case, but not before leaving us traumatized and saddled with enormous legal fees. To this day, we carry many scars from our experience. The government has never explained why it got things so wrong.

These were anti-Asian acts at the hands of the U.S. government. My dad, an American physics professor, is nothing close to a spy. He does not even work on sensitive research. Yet prosecutors recklessly charged him with crimes based on his Chinese heritage, as part of a broader effort to crack down on China and its supposed spies. Without legitimate evidence, the government was able to deploy its powerful national security apparatus against us, including intrusive and secretive surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the process, it upended a family. We pursued a civil rights lawsuit to seek some semblance of justice, but now our legal claims for damages have been dismissed.

History of racial profiling

The unjust prosecution of my father was not an isolated incident, but one of several targeting Chinese American scientists. People like Wen Ho Lee and Sherry Chen, among others, have been painted as spies and had their lives turned upside down, only to have their cases dropped by the government.

Under Donald Trump, this problem grew more pernicious. FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly doubled down, casting students and researchers of Chinese descent as potential spies and stating that the FBI views China “not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat,” requiring a “whole-of-society response.” Trump’s Justice Department launched the China Initiative in 2018 to target these supposed spies. Many more individuals and families have already been impacted.

The Biden administration has continued this initiative, despite civil rights groups’ calls to end it.

While there are legitimate concerns regarding the Chinese government, there is a major human cost to casting suspicion on entire communities based on national origin. The FBI’s record of racial, ethnic and religious profiling has left a devastating trail, including in Muslim, Black and Indigenous communities. As anti-Asian — particularly anti-China — sentiment and bias continue to grow, I fear the U.S. government will cause many more people to experience what my family did, especially if there is no opportunity to challenge the government’s wrongdoing in court.

The government’s scapegoating of people like my father is part of a broader history of anti-Asian violence and xenophobia. Asian communities in America have long been viewed as perpetual foreigners and national security threats, dating to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred people from China and the Asia-Pacific region from immigrating to the United States for decades.

During World War II, the government infamously incarcerated 112,000 Japanese Americans in the name of national security. The United States has promoted wars and militarization in places like the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos that have dehumanized Asian people in the public imagination, and that have killed, traumatized and displaced many.

Now, the U.S. government is deporting Southeast Asian refugees who fled these wars. After 9/11, law enforcement vastly expanded its surveillance, harassment and criminalization of Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities, discriminating against them in the name of national security. And when COVID-19 hit, Trump resorted to blatant racism, calling it the “China virus” and “kung flu.”

Against this backdrop, countless Asians in America have been subject to violence and vitriol. The recent anti-Asian attacks have various causes, but with the government’s own xenophobic actions and rhetoric, it is no surprise these assaults on our communities have been widespread.

Like many, I worry for myself, friends and family amidst these hyper-visible attacks. But I take no comfort in the federal government saying it will protect Asian Americans by increasing the power of the very agencies that helped create conditions for violence. To meaningfully address anti-Asian violence, the U.S. government must end its own racist policies and account for past wrongdoing. And my family will be appealing the court’s dismissal of our claims. We will continue to fight to end racialized targeting of our communities.

Joyce Xi is the daughter of Xiaoxing Xi, a Chinese American scientist who was wrongfully prosecuted by the U.S. government.

it’s good asian americans are speaking out about this especially now with the biden regime that will continue and expand obama’s mass surveillance and spying on asian americans.

but wtf? in the middle of this op-ed, usatoday injects a link to a story that’s not even related...

fucking usatoday anti-asian anti-china bullshit. wtf?

seriously wtf usatoday? fucking US media. fuckers. do you know how fucking insidious US western media is? fuckers.

[gay-jesus-probably]

I’m not American so maybe I’m not looking at this from the same perspective, but like. Voting is literally the bare minimum. Don’t get me wrong, I hate Biden too, but we’re a bit beyond that point now. You’re either going to spend the next four years under President Biden or President Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo. That should not be a difficult decision. There are many, many things that you can and should say about Biden and Harris, but at least they give one iota of a fuck about democracy.

Literally nobody is saying you should vote and then kick back and let our lord and saviour Joe Biden fix everything. They’re saying you should vote for Biden, and then continue with the protests and petitions and activism, because there’s actually a chance that Biden will be held accountable for his actions. Trump, not so much.

The fact that this is even an argument says a lot about America’s culture of toxic individuality and puritanism. Joe Biden will be a better president than Donald Trump, and we’ve already seen literally all the evidence we need to prove that. Y’all remember 2016? Y’know how in the middle of that clusterfuck of an election we were joking about wanting Obama and Biden to stay for a third term, and it was just meme material because literally everybody knew that Obama and Biden would be stepping down without any problems. Well, does anybody genuinely believe that Donald Trump is going to leave the White House of his own free will? Because if Trump had lost the election in 2016, we all knew there was no chance in hell he’d give a concession speech. And if he loses the election in 2020, it’s pretty clear he will refuse to step down. And god help us all if he does get a second term, I really fucking doubt Trump’s going to pack up and go home in 2024.

So yes, Joe Biden will be a better president than Donald Trump. Biden could start every day by drop kicking puppies into woodchippers and bathing in orphan blood and he’d probably still be better than Trump. Because Biden’s a piece of shit, but he’s a piece of shit that’s not going to try and declare himself Dictator For Life. And he’s not going to try and get fucking ad revenue out of the Oval Office. And he won’t go golfing every weekend at his own resorts and force the Secret Service to pay him thousands of dollars to follow him onto said golf courses. And he won’t give all his children cabinet positions or make his son in law one of the most important people in the country.

You’ve had four years to get over yourselves and accept that the democrat candidate in 2020 would inevitably suck shit. but still be better than the alternative. It’s 2020, Biden sucks shit, but he’s still better than Trump. Grow the fuck up and vote for him. Because if Trump wins in 2020, you might not get to vote at all in 2024.

[qqueenofhades]

Re: the post you reblogged about Bush. I'm 21 and tbh feel like I can only vote for Bernie, can you explain if/why I shouldn't? Thanks and sorry if this is dumb or anything.

Oh boy. Okay, I’ll do my best here. Note that a) this will get long, and b) I’m old, Tired, and I‘m pretty sure my brain tried to kill me last night. Since by nature I am sure I will say something Controversial ™, if anyone reads this and feels a deep urge to inform me that I am Wrong, just… mark it down as me being Wrong and move on with your life. But also, really, you should read this and hopefully think about it. Because while I’m glad you asked this question, it feels like there’s a lot in your cohort who won’t, and that worries me. A lot.

First, not to sound utterly old-woman-in-a-rocking-chair ancient, people who came of age/are only old enough to have Obama be the first president that they really remember have no idea how good they had it. The world was falling the fuck apart in 2008 (not coincidentally, after 8 years of Bush). We came within a flicker of the permanent collapse of the global economy. The War on Terror was in full roar, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their height, we had Dick Cheney as the cartoon supervillain before we had any of Trump’s cohort, and this was before Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden had exposed the extent of NSA/CIA intelligence-gathering/American excesses or there was any kind of public debate around the fact that we were all surveilled all the time. And the fact that a brown guy named Barack Hussein Obama was elected in this climate seems, and still seems tbh, kind of amazing. And Obama was certainly not a Perfect President ™. He had to scale back a lot of planned initiatives, he is notorious for expanding the drone strike/extrajudicial assassination program, he still subscribed to the overall principles of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, etc etc. There is valid criticism to be made as to how the hopey-changey optimistic rhetoric stacked up against the hard realities of political office. And yet…. at this point, given what we’re seeing from the White House on a daily basis, the depth of the parallel universe/double standards is absurd.

Because here’s the thing. Obama, his entire family, and his entire administration had to be personally/ethically flawless the whole time (and they managed that – not one scandal or arrest in eight years, against the legions of Trumpistas now being convicted) because of the absolute frothing depths of Republican hatred, racial conspiracy theories, and obstruction against him. (Remember Merrick Garland and how Mitch McConnell got away with that, and now we have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court? Because I remember that). If Obama had pulled one-tenth of the shit, one-twentieth of the shit that the Trump administration does every day, he would be gone. It also meant that people who only remember Obama think he was typical for an American president, and he wasn’t. Since about… Jimmy Carter, and definitely since Ronald Reagan, the American people have gone for the Trump model a lot more than the Obama model. Whatever your opinion on his politics or character, Obama was a constitutional law professor, a community activist, a neighborhood organizer and brilliant Ivy League intellectual who used to randomly lie awake at night thinking about income inequality. Americans don’t value intellectualism in their politicians; they just don’t. They don’t like thinking that “the elites” are smarter than them. They like the folksy populist who seems fun to have a beer with, and Reagan/Bush Senior/Clinton/Bush Junior sold this persona as hard as they possibly could. As noted in said post, Bush Junior (or Shrub as the late, great Molly Ivins memorably dubbed him) was Trump Lite but from a long-established political family who could operate like an outwardly civilized human.

The point is: when you think Obama was relatively normal (which, again, he wasn’t, for any number of reasons) and not the outlier in a much larger pattern of catastrophic damage that has been accelerated since, again, the 1980s (oh Ronnie Raygun, how you lastingly fucked us!), you miss the overall context in which this, and which Trump, happened. Like most left-wingers, I don’t agree with Obama’s recent and baffling decision to insert himself into the 2020 race and warn the Democratic candidates against being too progressive or whatever he was on about. I think he was giving into the same fear that appears to be motivating the remaining chunk of Joe Biden’s support: that middle/working-class white America won’t go for anything too wild or that might sniff of Socialism, and that Uncle Joe, recalled fondly as said folksy populist and the internet’s favorite meme grandfather from his time as VP, could pick up the votes that went to Trump last time. And that by nature, no one else can.

The underlying belief is that these white voters just can’t support anything too “un-American,” and that by pushing too hard left, Democratic candidates risk handing Trump a second term. Again: I don’t agree and I think he was mistaken in saying it. But I also can’t say that Obama of all people doesn’t know exactly the strength of the political machine operating against the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda as a whole, because he ran headfirst into it for eight years. The fact that he managed to pass any of his legislative agenda, usually before the Tea Party became a thing in 2010, is because Democrats controlled the House and Senate for the first two years of his first term. He was not perfect, but it was clear that he really did care (just look up the pictures of him with kids). He installed smart, efficient, and scandal-free people to do jobs they were qualified for. He gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to join RBG on the Supreme Court. All of this seems… like a dream.

That said: here we are in a place where Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are the front-runners for the Democratic nomination (and apparently Pete Buttigieg is getting some airplay as a dark horse candidate, which… whatever). The appeal of Biden is discussed above, and he sure as hell is not my favored candidate (frankly, I wish he’d just quit). But Sanders and Warren are 85% - 95% similar in their policy platforms. The fact that Michael “50 Billion Dollar Fortune” Bloomberg started rattling his chains about running for president is because either a Sanders or Warren presidency terrifies the outrageously exploitative billionaire capitalist oligarchy that runs this country and has been allowed to proceed essentially however the fuck they like since… you guessed it, the 1980s, the era of voodoo economics, deregulation, and the free market above all. Warren just happens to be ten years younger than Sanders and female, and Sanders’ age is not insignificant. He’s 80 years old and just had a heart attack, and there’s still a year to go to the election. It’s also more than a little eye-rolling to describe him as the only progressive candidate in the race, when he’s an old white man (however much we like and approve of his policy positions). And here’s the thing, which I think is a big part of the reason why this polarized ideological purity internet leftist culture mistrusts Warren:

She may have changed her mind on things in the past.

Scary, right? I sound like I’m being facetious, but I’m not. An argument I had to read with my own two eyes on this godforsaken hellsite was that since Warren became a Democrat around the time Clinton signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, she sekritly hated gay people and might still be a corporate sellout, so on and etcetera. (And don’t even get me STARTED on the fact that DADT, coming a few years after the height of the AIDS crisis which was considered God’s Judgment of the Icky Gays, was the best Clinton could realistically hope to achieve, but this smacks of White Gay Syndrome anyway and that is a whole other kettle of fish.) Bernie has always demonstrably been a democratic socialist, and: good for him. I’m serious. But because there’s the chance that Warren might not have thought exactly as she does now at any point in her life, the hysterical and paranoid left-wing elements don’t trust that she might not still secretly do so. (Zomgz!) It’s the same element that’s feeding cancel culture and “wokeness.” Nobody can be allowed to have shifted or grown in their opinions or, like a functional, thoughtful, non-insane adult, changed their beliefs when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. To the ideological hordes, any hint of uncertainty or past failure to completely toe the line is tantamount to heresy. Any evidence of any other belief except The Correct One means that this person is functionally as bad as Trump. And frankly, it’s only the Sanders supporters who, just as in 2016, are threatening to withhold their vote in the general election if their preferred candidate doesn’t win the primary, and indeed seem weirdly proud about it.

OK, boomer Bernie or Buster.

Here’s the thing, the thing, the thing: there is never going to be an American president free of the deeply toxic elements of American ideology. There just won’t be. This country has been built how it has for 250 years, and it’s not gonna change. You are never going to have, at least not in the current system, some dream candidate who gets up there and parrots the left-wing talking points and attacks American imperialism, exceptionalism, ravaging global capitalism, military and oil addiction, etc. They want to be elected as leader of a country that has deeply internalized and taken these things to heart for its entire existence, and most of them believe it to some degree themselves. So this groupthink white liberal mentality where the only acceptable candidate is this Perfect Non-Problematic robot who has only ever had one belief their entire lives and has never ever wavered in their devotion to doctrine has really gotten bad. The Democratic Party would be considered… maybe center/mild left in most other developed countries. It’s not even really left-wing by general standards, and Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates for the nomination who are even willing to go there and explicitly put out policy proposals that challenge the systematic structure of power, oppression, and exploitation of the late-stage capitalist 21st century. Warren has the billionaires fussed, and instead of backing down, she’s doubling down. That’s part of why they’re so scared of her. (And also misogyny, because the world is depressing like that.) She is going head-on after picking a fight with some of the worst people on the planet, who are actively killing the rest of us, and I don’t know about you, but I like that.

Of course: none of this will mean squat if she (or the eventual Democratic winner, who I will vote for regardless of who it is, but as you can probably tell, she’s my ride or die) don’t a) win the White House and then do as they promised on the campaign trail, and b) don’t have a Democratic House and Senate willing to have a backbone and pass the laws. Even Nancy Pelosi, much as she’s otherwise a badass, held off on opening a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump for months out of fear it would benefit him, until the Ukraine thing fell into everyone’s laps. The Democrats are really horrible at sticking together and voting the party line the way Republicans do consistently, because Democrats are big-tent people who like to think of themselves as accepting and tolerant of other views and unwilling to force their members’ hands. The Republicans have no such qualms (and indeed, judging by their enabling of Trump, have no qualms at all). 

The modern American Republican party has become a vehicle for no-holds-barred power for rich white men at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone else, and if your rationale is that you can’t vote for the person opposing Donald Goddamn Trump is that you’re just not vibing with them on the language of that one policy proposal… well, I’m glad that you, White Middle Class Liberal, feel relatively safe that the consequences of that decision won’t affect you personally. Even if we’re due to be out of the Paris Climate Accords one day after the 2020 election, and the issue of climate change now has the most visibility it’s ever had after years of big-business, Republican-led efforts to deny and discredit the science, hey, Secret Corporate Shill, am I right? Can’t trust ‘er. Let’s go have a craft beer.

As has been said before: vote as far left as you want in the primary. Vote your ideology, vote whatever candidate you want, because the only way to make actual, real-world change is to do that. The huge, embedded, all-consuming and horrible system in which we operate is not just going to suddenly be run by fairy dust and happy thoughts overnight. Select candidates that reflect your values exactly, be as picky and ideologically militant as you want. That’s the time to do that! Then when it comes to the general election:

America is a two-party system. It sucks, but that’s the case. Third-party votes, or refraining from voting because “it doesn’t matter” are functionally useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

Either the Democratic candidate or Donald Trump will win the 2020 election.

There is absolutely no length that the Republican/GOP machine, and its malevolent allies elsewhere, will not go to in order to secure a Trump victory. None.

Any talk whatsoever about “progressive values” or any kind of liberal activism, coupled with a course of action that increases the possibility of a Trump victory, is hypocritical at best and actively malicious at worst.

This is why I found the Democratic response to Obama’s “don’t go too wild” comments interesting. Bernie doubled down on the fact that his plans have widespread public support, and he’s right. (Frankly, the fact that Sanders and Warren are polling at the top, and the fact that they’re politicians and would not be crafting these campaign messages if they didn’t know that they were being positively received, says plenty on its own). Warren cleverly highlighted and praised Obama’s accomplishments in office (i.e. the Affordable Care Act) and didn’t say squat about whether she agreed or disagreed with him, then went right back to campaigning about why billionaires suck. And some guy named Julian Castro basically blew Obama off and claimed that “any Democrat” could beat Trump in 2020, just by nature of existing and being non-insane.

This is very dangerous! Do not be Julian Castro!

As I said in my tags on the Bush post: everyone assumed that sensible people would vote for Kerry in 2004. Guess what happened? Yeah, he got Swift Boated. The race between Obama and McCain in 2008, even after those said nightmare years of Bush, was very close until the global crash broke it open in Obama’s favor, and Sarah Palin was an actual disqualifier for a politician being brazenly incompetent and unprepared. (Then again, she was a woman from a remote backwater state, not a billionaire businessman.) In 2012, we thought Corporate MormonBot Mitt Fuggin’ Romney was somehow the worst and most dangerous candidate the Republicans could offer. In 2016, up until Election Day itself, everyone assumed that HRC was a badly flawed candidate but would win anyway. And… we saw how that worked out. Complacency is literally deadly.

I was born when Reagan was still president. I’m just old enough to remember the efforts to impeach Clinton over forcing an intern to give him a BJ in the Oval Office (This led by the same Republicans making Donald Trump into a darling of the evangelical Christian right wing.) I’m definitely old enough to remember 9/11 and how America lost its mind after that, and I remember the Bush years. And, obviously, the contrast with Obama, the swing back toward Trump, and everything that has happened since. We can’t afford to do this again. We’re hanging by a thread as it is, and not just America, but the entire planet.

So yes. By all means, vote for Sanders in the primary. Then when November 3, 2020 rolls around, if you care about literally any of this at all, hold your nose if necessary and vote straight-ticket Democrat, from the president, to the House and Senate, to the state and local offices. I cannot put it more strongly than that.

[emangel2718]

Before I go any further let me say that I am not speaking on behalf of anyone other than myself from here on out. It generally hasn't been my intent to already but it seems like I need to make it clear.

It is not vote or do other things. You can do other things and also vote. You should do other things. I'm only saying that you should also vote because that has a potential impact in a relatively short timeframe that other things don't have, just as other actions have potential effects that voting doesn't have. Even if the electoral college exists and is bullshit as it is voting can only help. Of course you should also vote on your congress people but once again that is not mutually exclusive to the presidential vote.

"Either you're with us or you're-" Can you not? We have all seen this so many times and it NEVER goes anywhere good. This is not about in-group and out-group this is about how our actions affect our world.

Now in the presidential vote specifically your choices lie in the primaries, which you should also vote in, and then, practically, in the nominated candidates, the democrat one and the republican one. There is zero evidence of any third party having enough popularity to win at this time unless you seriously think that you can convince and organize enough of the country to vote for a single one.

Either a democrat or a republican will be elected president in the next election whether you vote or not. The most good you can do is to do your part to pick the one that isn't making its campaign on criminalizing lgbt people and doesn't have a major backer that wants to push them to destroy what actually democratic (the general meaning not the party) elements exist in our system of government and hasn't had a recent president that tried to remove over 200 safety and environmental regulations.

In terms of the vote if Biden gets re-nominated then there will be nothing that can be done in terms of genocide. There are, of course, other things that you can do. You should do them. Unless, however, we end up with a democratic nominee that is not going to support israel there is no way we are going to end up with a president that won't in that election. Any republican nominee absolutely will.

If, despite anyone's best efforts, we end up in that situation we must look at the net differences between the possibilities.

Now in regards to Biden himself, I think you'll note that anything I have actually said about what I think of him is, in fact, very critical. Frankly, I don't believe he can be pushed. Not only has he already made it clear that he has no intention of changing course despite his team allegedly saying that it's becoming untenable, I've recently learned of a very likely motivation. I saw recently, from several sources, that Palestine has several oil wells within it, some of which have already been promised to extraction companies.

If my understanding of him is correct, he's a greedy, heartless, abominable person, and as such we should all do what we can so that he's not our republican alternative, like voting in the primaries. Maybe the party won't listen to our primary votes. Maybe they will. We can't know unless we try.

If my understanding of the republicans is correct, they're also greedy, heartless, abominable people. They're also overtly genocidal toward a much wider variety of people and overtly aim to remove what little obstacles there are to big corporations abusing/hurting/killing the rest of us.

There is a very real chance that these two will be our realistic choices for the president of the united states of america.

It's an absolutely fucked choice. I genuinely hope we can make that not the choice. It still might be it.

"I'm not going to choose either." The choice will be made for you then.

I absolutely encourage anyone and everyone to do what they can not just to improve what that choice ends up being but also to take other actions that improve the whole government situation in the US and if posts saying to do those things were what I was seeing several of we would not be having this conversation.

To my memory though, this conversation and one other post are the ones I've seen saying that you should do those things. The message has largely not been "Don't *just* vote" but rather "Don't vote", and even the ones that do tell you to do other things have been exceedingly antagonistic.

That is what I take issue with.

[meloncubedradpops]

Repo! The Corona Opera: Final Countdown

This is the third and final installment of Repo: The Corona Opera. In the first piece, I made the argument that the surreal events we are experiencing in 2020 remind me of the world in the movie Repo! the Genetic Opera. My second essay compared the characteristics of fascism with the same movie. Here we will tie together ideas in both works to highlight a dark path that America is on, based on what we know about Repo!, in the hopes that we can reject the evils of those who are sacrificing our health and safety for their own selfish reasons. 

When I began thinking about this movie through the lenses of COVID-19, I saw uncanny patterns that just years ago seemed like an exaggerated storytelling. Millions of people dying from organ failure. Yeah, but how? 

Then 2020 happened. Oh, that's how. Sure the disease doesn't affect everyone in the same way, but its wrath and potential to harm are tremendous. The death toll in the United States alone is, as of today, is 231,000. At least, that is the death toll we are know so far. It will take time when the dust settles and we can analyze the excess death data to truly know how many of our fellow Americans have died. 

And while our world does not currently emulate those opening comic scenes in Repo, the impact from the sudden loss of life will be felt for a long time. There are a lot of really great themes in Repo: the concept of the family, drug addiction, the impact of corporate monopolies, and let's not forget it's a gothic coming-of-age story too. I am going to highlight three concepts that weave together our current reality with the world of Repo: the parallels of the Trump and Largo family, the Graverobber as the symbolic "other", and organ repossessions is genocide.

As mentioned in my previous entry, I highlighted the ways that Rotti Largo is a fascist. I went into detail supporting the argument that his company GeneCo holds tremendous and unyielding power in the city we see in the movie. And despite his efforts to save humanity from extinction, his assumed heirs and blood-related children are nothing short of entitled mediocrity. I will draw many parallels between President Donald Trump and Rotti Largo throughout the duration of this essay, but let's take a few minutes to talk about their children. Believe it or not, this meme was made by myself and my friend FOUR years ago, almost to the day! 

But unlike 2016, I had no idea that I'd find multiple comparisons to draw upon. And frankly, if we all knew how bad this presidency would be, for both America and the rest of the world, we might have made less jokes from our complacency. I ask the the real question though, which Trump and Rotti offspring are most alike?

Now, I've wanted to do this thought exercise since the inception of my essays. The surface level combinations would look something like, Amber and Ivanka (since they're both women, obvs), Donald Trump JR as Luigi (oldest child), and Eric Trump as Pavi ("you're just his useless brother!"). 

However my boyfriend raised a great point that had me rethink this: Donald Trump Jr is ACTUALLY Amber Sweet. When I took out the gender aspect out of the equation, it made so much more sense. In my next point, I will go into drug addiction in a much more dignified manner. But let's just take a moment here to consider the following. 

We know that Amber Sweet is addicted to two things in life: surgery and pain killing drugs to make surgery bearable. Amber Sweet's character provides an incredible insight to the daily life of the people in Repo. If you subtract the Zydrate Anatomy scene, you would hardly even know that zydrate is devastating lives of the people addicted to it. We hear about zydrate in the graveyard as a commercial and the media spends its first opportunity asking Rotti about zydrate's "use and abuses". After Sweet becomes a no-show in the presser, we quickly learn that she runs a support group for fellow addicts, or at least she is supposed to. 

How does this relate to Trump Jr? Quite simply, many are speculating that Trump Jr abuses cocaine. The most compelling evidence is his speech during the Republican National Convention. Now, obviously we don't have solid evidence that he is indeed consuming and abusing cocaine, and quite frankly if he is, that would not be incredibly surprising or even a huge deal. 

But the conversation doesn't end here. President Donald Trump did not hesitate to bring up former vice president Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden and his battle with addiction during the first Presidential Debate. It was a low jab, especially considering that the United States is going through a crippling opioid crisis, which he even admits is exacerbated by covid-19 and related lockdowns. Both Donald Trump and Rotti Largo exploit their own children in this manner. I mean, Donald Trump helped fucked up the Trump Foundation where his children were held prominent positions, which was caught stealing from a charity intended to help children with cancer! Every time we see Donald Trump Jr on our doom-screens, we get another glimpse into Jr's downward spiral. And with every additional crime that all of president Trump's children become implicated in, the more and more we can see that this family is rotten to the core. 

If Trump Jr is Amber Sweet, then Ivanka is Luigi. In Repo, Luigi can be described as nothing short of a homicidal maniac. I am not saying that Ivanka commits murder, at least not directly, but she does hold a lot of power in the White House. Spend any time learning about the machinations of the White House, particularly in the early days, and you will learn Ivanka competed with Melania for a voice in the administration, and still works for the White House today. Even if you exclude all of the shady business ties, such as the dozens of Chinese patents (including for voting machines!!!) Ivanka has filed, clearly the boundaries of nepotism do not exist for this family. Luigi somehow kills multiple people in the movie and faces no consequences for it. How can this be? Obviously corruption, but that is too simple. If there were multiple checks and balances at one point that would have forced Luigi to face justice for his crimes, they have obviously failed to come to roost in the movie. The obvious common denominator between today and the world of Repo is that those who want power will do anything to obtain and maintain it. Does the public know about every murder committed by Luigi? Does the public know about every crime committed by Ivanka (and also by proxy her husband Jared Kushner, who by the way, failed to pass mandatory security clearances but still has access to the intelligence of our government)? Jared intentionally made it difficult for many of the states hit hardest by covid-19 in the early weeks to acquire the necessary medical supplies because the electorate did not vote for Trump in 2016. That. IS. MURDER. Just as Luigi calls the common citizens in Repo "filthy mice", “Jrvanka” (and the Right at greater) frames the nation as two groups: us and THEM. Luigi is much less calculated, but the comparisons are there. If given the chance, the Trump and Largo family will kill because of their sociopathy, greed, and egos. 

Admittedly I don't have as compelling of a comparison for Eric Trump and Pavi. However I will say that both Pavi and Eric do the bidding for their father's empire, and I would also argue that both feel like they have to compete to get a modicum of attention and love from a paternal figure devoid of basic empathy. And at the end of the day, they do not reject their father's tyranny. And honestly that is enough of a comparison for me. 

Last but not least, I can't ignore the fact that the official Republican Party platform for the 2020 election is loyalty to Trump in the absence of any other political or philosophical idea. A majority of the speakers at the Republican National Convention were members of his family. Their pitch to Americans is “Just Trust Us”. However, a quarter million Americans aren't here to agree or disagree with that statement. With each passing day, more and more Americans are getting sick, to the tune of tens of thousands of cases a day on average currently. The Largo family and GeneCo are not much different. Remember that scene in 21st Century Cure where Shilo and Graverobber are in a mass grave where we can see truck loads of humans being added to the pile of corpses? 

The only real thing separating the corpses from the rest of the city is a poorly constructed brick wall and the years of propaganda that normalizes what I imagine would be a terrible pungent smell of death. 

The entire Trump family came into the first presidential debate without masks. The president was literally sick with a virus that statistically speaking, could kill his opponent; and he was on stage shedding this incredibly contagious virus screaming and shouting, spreading his droplets everywhere. The Trump family failed to show up early enough to be tested for covid before the debate. 

This was not an accident. Jared Kushner bragged to journalist Bob Woodward back in April that Trump was going to take the country "back from scientists". As of this past weekend, we learned that Trump is floating around the idea of firing our nation's leading disease expert Anthony Fauci in a time where our cases, deaths, and hospitalizations from covid-19 are surging. It is almost grotesquely poetic how similar this is to GeneCo. GeneCo is a company in the healthcare industry, but they exploit the worst parts of society, which I will go into very soon. And in its effort to achieve maximum quarterly profits, the ends always justify the means, even if that results in fascism and excess death/suffering. Rotti's body guards kill the doctor who gives him his grim diagnosis. Trump didn't kill the doctors treating him during his recovery with covid, but information we got from the White House doctors were straight up WEIRD. We witnessed a Gentern being killed by Luigi in the Mark It Up Scene for no other reason besides existing in the proximity of him. Trump has spread misinformation about how there's more money to be made when a doctor declares a death as a covid death. I am finding it hard to see the difference. I think I've made my point regarding the parallels of the Trump and Largo family quite clearly, but you may see additional points I bring up as the rest of my essay unfolds. 

Society is complex with more nuance than we give it credit to. The different ways that various groups of people interact with are endlessly interesting, and one of the reasons I love Repo so much is because there's an incredible amount of unpacking that you can do, even in the absence of written dialogue about it. 

If you don't know, Repo started out as a story originally penned as "The Necromerchant's Debt", which gave the Graverobber character a more active role in the world crafted by Darren Smith and Terrace Zdunich. When watching the movie Repo! The Genetic Opera, the Graverobber is certainly a character seen in multiple scenes, but in a lot of ways, his importance is left out. An entire scene was cut from the film, see Needle Through a Bug below if you're interested. 

Regardless the parts that we do see are still greatly impactful. Graverobber is essentially the symbolized "other" living in a world that is greatly stratified by social class, and he's doing what he can to survive. 

Now if you have been living on this planet we call Earth and have ever paid attention ever, you probably have noticed that there are a lot of power structures that influence the resources and opportunities that aid in our development and maintenance of our needs. The access to being able to elevate ourselves above basic survival are typically contingent upon a few things, one namely our ability to draw a paycheck. As I mentioned in my last essay, so many things went wrong to have what would equivalently be either a drug trafficking felony in today's terms or maybe theft, result in permissible extra-judicial murder. And I am not saying that Trump's bragging of the extra-judicial murder of an ANTIFA activist is at all related, but look at the way Trump compares his dissidents with the way GeneCo treats Graverobbers.

 We are experiencing the early stages of economic collapse, millions of people are hungry, soon-to-be evicted, jobless. And yet, the Republicans in power just HAD to rush through a Supreme Court justice. When arguing against lockdowns that would have saved lives, the Right spent countless hours arguing about increase suicide, drug use, poverty, domestic abuse, blah blah blah, you know all the things that were there and as equally as important pre-pandemic? And they did NOTHING to help mitigate this disaster beyond the bill that was passed this spring. The house passed the HEROES Act back in May, and senate majority leader Mitch McConnel declined to take a vote on it. 

Never mind the fact that landlords are still expected to pay the banks their mortgages on their investment properties. Never mind the fact that rent wasn't cancelled. Never mind that the Trump administration sought to prevent any oversight into the first bill passed previously to prosecute fraud. So you know, we can make sure the money went to small business owners, and not instead to the many, many crony ties to the administration who were approved for huge amounts of money. Honestly to think about this is kind of sickening, particularly when you relate it back to Repo and my essay I wrote on fascism.

I could probably talk all day about our failure with the "War on Drugs", but I feel like you can probably see based on the efficacy of its policies that drugs still exist and people are still abusing them. I bring this up because the Graverobber's occupation is essentially a drug dealer. However he sells a counterfeit of zydrate derived from the body of a bug who naturally borrow in a corpse's body, which is and also isn't stealing from the corpse / their estate, but is somehow still "bad" enough that you can legally be killed "on site" if a Gene Cop thinks you're harvesting the blue brain goo. I mean this entire concept makes my brain hurt. 

The Graverobber, as a concept, is a perfect example of the enemy who is simultaneously the biggest and the least threat, and the only way to stop them is to kill them before they can appeal before the jury of their peers or go to prison to pay for their crimes. And I am sure the propaganda that justifies this is beautifully orchestrated. It literally mimics Russian propaganda, AKA the biggest foreign intelligence threat since, I don’t know, the Cold War? I can picture authoritarian stump speeches now: 

"Here the Graverobber who comes in the night, tempting your children. They sell the promise of a good time, but did you know they are raping your daughters for this drug?? They can get your husband hooked on zydrate, and you won't know it's coming until he comes home unrecognizable. These thugs are stealing your grandmother's ring off her corpse, and you will find her half-rotted corpse thrown askew across her tombstone when you go to pay your respects."

And yet Graverobber defends himself:

"Industrialization has crippled the globe (Enjoy GeneCo's day and nighttime formula of Zydrate) Nature failed as technology spread (Ask a gentern if Zydrate is right for you) And from this wake a market erected (Buying Zydrate from an unlicensed source is illegal) An entire city built on top of the dead! And you can finance your bones And your kidneys For every market a submarket grows But best you be punctual With making your payments Lest it be you on the concrete below It's quick! It's clean! It's pure! It could change your life! Rest assured! It's the 21st century cure! And it's my job To steal and rob GRAVES!" 

He then goes into detail about how this is just the cost of doing business with his modern world. How many of our current and future stories by those who will not make a single sentence in our history books will be casted as enemies of the state who were ultimately just trying to make end's meet? You can deport the illegal immigrant but neglect to prosecute the American company who hired them to work here? How is that much different? If the people in Repo need this drug to cope with the deaths of their loved ones and their livelihoods, then what does that say about the soul of their nation? 

If you are still with me at this point, I want to thank you so much. I am going to conclude on a fairly heavy topic, but it is one worth having. Organ repossessions in Repo are genocide and in America, we are currently also committing genocide. 

The whole premise of the film is the justification that those who fail to make payments on their surgeries deserve to have their organs repossessed, because what other reality is there with unrelenting end-stage capitalism? People are losing their whole lives as I type this, through no fault of their own. Most Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency expense pre-covid-19. Millions are unable to pay for basic life expenses, such as rent, healthcare or food. Our president specifically shoved a Supreme Court justice because he wants the American Healthcare Act to be deemed too unconstitutional for public policy. Never mind the 100+ million Americans with pre-existing conditions. Never mind the millions who acquire their healthcare through the ACA marketplace. Never mind the fact that we are in a once-in-a-century PANDEMIC. Never mind that we spend more per capital on healthcare than anywhere else in the world. Never mind that the Right does not have ANY sort of plan to replace something in its place. How could MILLIONS die in an organ failure crises in Repo anyways? We already know that the Trump administration already stopped caring about covid deaths when we learned it was hurting people of color disproportionality than the general population. 1 out of 1000 black Americans have died from covid. Reread that sentence. If you don't believe me, go out and seek those facts for yourself. When we think of genocide we think of Hitler killing thousands of people via gas chambers. But there are SO many other steps that lead to the normalization of that. 

Undesirables, aka the "others", are easy to discard. Is it a surprise to anyone that ICE gynecologists are removing the uteruses of detainees? I almost made my whole essay about that one controversy alone. Genocide is insidious like that. 

"Oh but if she didn't want that hysterectomy, she shouldn't have tried to come to America for a better life, even if that's what my ancestors did." 

Of course not, she's the "other", and you're the law-abiding citizen. You were able to afford the extra $30 a month for the upgraded booby package that gave an otherwise unremarkable kidney transplant a fun twist by including breast implants. The orphan who works the streets because his parents died during the plague who needed a new pancreas because insulin became too expensive is threatening your suburbs. Bonus points if the orphan has a hint of melanin in his skin or if your daughter shows favor towards his antics, completely ignoring the fact that his mommy and daddy were killed by preventable disease. I have no idea if this was intentional or not, but look at the makeup of people who get their organs repossessed in Repo and try not to tell me there's a trend. Yes it could have been the coincidence of casting, but nevertheless it is worth mentioning. We don't see many people of color in this movie, but of the few we see, they get murdered by GeneCo/Wallace. And I don't care how stupid coincidences are because that is exactly what is happening with covid-19. The so-called essential, working class citizens (who are disproportionally POC) are putting their whole life on the line to serve everyone else who works at home. 

The ends justifies the means, kill enough elderly and the federal government won't have to pay out on social security. Force everyone to get back to work and fuck you if you think you deserve money for the hours you weren't allowed to work (oh and by the way we want to make it so you can't sue for covid-19 related liabilities). Oh you lost your job, "try something new", as told by Ivanka Trump earlier this summer. 

My main point is if you let fascism get control, they will normalize genocide and put you in jail for even making the connections of corruption. "Millions of people dead from organ failure, what's adding a few more to the pile in the name of law and order?" "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat". Once again, I am failing to see the difference. 

Okay I threw a lot at you just now, and the fact you made it to the end is a miracle. If you skip around because you have a squirrel brain like me, I thank you as well. The fact we get out of bed everyday and do anything right now is a miracle and I know attention can be finite. 

I am writing this on the eve of the United States General election after having wanting to write this since June of this year. I am tired. We are ALL Shiloh right now. Our lives have been on pause. "I must be brave", "I'll capture it", "Run back inside". Yeah girl, same! I haven't talked about her much throughout any of my essays, but I have to give credit where credit is due. 

Humans are a resilient creature. We have millions of years of experience on this Earth, and much of our survival has been based on pure dumb luck. But we have blown so many other species out of the water in one way alone, and that is our ability to communicate. 

We don't have to let people who exploit our weaknesses control us. The sociopaths who try and run our society did not historically aid in our survival. They didn't care if we ate the mushroom that killed us or would have protected us when threatened by wildlife, it was our tribe. The Right has successfully hijacked that bond between the self and the tribe so that it can fit the needs of sociopathy and greed. It is not normal for a president to tell a nation that "it is what it is" when over 100k citizens die from a preventable disease. Do not let the sociopaths throw us in that tiny pine box in a mighty small drop in a mighty dark plot, hastening the trip to our epilogue. Because every inch you give, they will take a mile and charge you by the hour. Never forget that.

[angrybell]

“My fellow Americans,

As I look out through bulletproof glass across this sacred American scene of fences and razor wire, I know, or at any rate infer, that under your helmets and visors, your eyes are shining with a deeply American inspiration. That inspiration is inspiring, number one and number two deeply American, but what I really appreciate today are your weapons, which are here to enforce the true meaning of our creed. I’d like to thank General Milley and the joint chiefs for the predator drones and other air cover. [Applause.] This deeply American ritual of the peaceful transfer of power would be deeply impossible without air cover.

Each time we gather to inaugurate a President, we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We resolve, as George Washington resolved, as John F. Kennedy resolved, as Chester A. Arthur resolved, to get some sort of handle on social media. Unlikely? Extremely. Useless? Absolutely. But we are Americans. We are dreamers and we are doers. We, we are the sort of people who sort of believe our own hooey. I make a plea today to my fellow Americans, as Lincoln did at Gettysburg, as Washington did at Valley Forge: stop fucking posting that crap, you fucking assholes. [Applause.]

Our no-Facebook dream is a dream firmly rooted in the American dream, the dream of Martin Luther King, of Fannie Lou Hamer, of Cesar Chavez, of Millard Fillmore. As they taught us, we must live out the true meaning of our creed. Now, we completely disagree about what that is, for we are Americans. But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles, whatever they may have been, requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action; and that collective action demands much more effective surveillance of you, my fellow American citizens.

The message I bring with me today from Delaware is one of healing. If American history teaches us anything, in all seriousness, it is that our healing begins with putting down the insurrection, a few random shootings of demonstrators, and mass arrests. [Applause.] We will find you and we will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. [Applause.] Once the American people see that resistance is futile, we can begin to recover from our partisan rancor. As Barack Obama said: “There is not a red America and a blue America, but only a camo America.” And Barack Obama was a pretty good president. All of you look to be the same color from my vantage point up here above you.

But today I’d like to go even further and say there is not one America, but many. There is an African-America, an Asian-America, an as-it-were Latin America (hola, my homies!), a mildly gay America, a gay America, and an extremely gay America. That’s why I appointed one of each. My cabinet looks like America, or at least like America looked before everyone put on helmets and coveralls. How powerful is it for a child to see an HHS secretary that looks like them, or would look like them if all you saw was race? I have no idea, really. No one does. [Applause.] And once again, I urge parents from minority groups to turn on the record player and expose their kids to words. Maybe that’s where I went wrong with Hunter.

Members of the armed forces, I have one question for you today: how many of you are Trump supporters? Let’s see a show of hands. General, could you disarm those people immediately?[Brief firefight ensues, and medical evacuation; eventually, Biden emerges from the Secret Service dogpile and resumes.]

Mass incarceration, I want to emphasize, was really not my fault. Green jobs of tomorrow, blah blah blah. Education. Science. Etc. Who’s with me? Wait, don’t answer that.

We have come through a dark period of our history indeed. But, incomprehensibly, I’ve never been more optimistic. As my dad, who was a blue-collar, hard-working 19th-century American from Scranton Pennsylvania, used to tell me: “Little Joey, as things spiral downwards, as they inevitably must, optimism still sells. And when you sell optimism, you sell you.” [Applause.] Then he added, “Believe Science, little Joey.”

This generation of Americans, like those that went before, has been tested by crises that collapsed our resolve and crumbled our resilience. But things are looking up. Call me an optimist or dismiss me as psychotic if you like, but I firmly believe, in the face of all the evidence, that America’s best days are ahead. Our national struggle with Covid is coming to an end, unless the microbe keeps mutating. The terrible economic slump caused by not doing what China tells us to do ends today. America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world of rising walls demands: credulity, hostility, and, above all, weaponry.

My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it—so long as we seize it together. [Cheers and applause, gunfire and explosions.] Wait I didn’t mean “seize it” literally. Hey Pence, which side you on? Back the fuck off! And God bless our troops. [Exit, pursued by a shaman.]”

[johnrossbowie]

LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat.  Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

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[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.