#and i think it's the Republicans

[spnexploration]

America really never moved past the Industrial Revolution, did it? In Australia, if you are a full-time employee you are entitled to 4 weeks paid leave per year, minimum (separate to your minimum entitlements of sick leave). Part-time employees earn this too but pro rata.

Some workplaces let you 'purchase' extra leave (ie be paid slightly less so you can have more leave a year) and/or offer more leave per year as a way of attracting employees. But even the crap ones, you get 4 weeks if you're full-time. It's the law.

[sophsicle]

here's the thing. whenever u say "eat the rich" the rich automatically make a sad lil face :( :( :( and go "well that's not very nice. what if we turned around and said eat the poor, huh? that wouldn't make you feel very good, would it?" which is. an insane statement to make. because baby, honey, sweetheart. you are eating the poor. every goddamn day you are eating the poor. and worst of all. you aren't even fucking hungry.

[kobebibebi]

their digital footprint must be insane,,

[mugiwara-lucy]

Guys….i have to say it….i was wrong trying to get you all to vote for Kamala all these months and not President Trump who was saved by God….President Trump just exposed something inhumane about her!! That witch wants to give us HEALTHCARE!! 😂

How communist of her! It’s not like Doctor and Dental Care is expensive as shit! No let’s vote in the reincarnation of Jesus Christ himself President Trump who wants to make it to where votes will no longer matter and it’ll all be fixed for us after four years!!

(/s for Sarcasm if that wasn’t obvious 🤣)

[ahaura]

im sure its been said already but as the election draws near more and more liberals will come out of the woodwork to shame people with a conscience to give away their vote to the democrats for free. i'm already seeing posts saying "why aren't people more concerned about a trump presidency?" you want to know why? it's because people already know he's bad. everyone already knows what he is and what he's done and what he'll do. there's nothing to discuss. he's a racist despotic worm of a man. there's nothing else to say.

biden is currently president. the genocide is happening under his watch. he's the one funding isra*l and arming them; he's sidestepped congress more than once to give them weapons. by oct. 27, the biden administration already knew that "Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets." the state department/biden have engaged in atrocity propaganda, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the death toll recorded by the gaza health ministry, and so on. the united states is currently in the process of trying to pin the "war in gaza" on netanyahu (see sen. schumer's speech) after months of backing blatant genocide as a means to act as if they're "doing something" about the genocide (Instead of, say, threatening to cut off all aid to israel with the condition that all hostilities in gaza, the west bank, and occupied jerusalem are halted immediately and permanently, allowing palestinians freedom to travel, allowing aid into gaza, etc etc etc.)

the long and short of it is that liberals view their own lives as being worth more than palestinians'. that's it. they'll vote for another 4 years of the guy ushering in genocide and supporting apartheid + settler colonialism because he isn't outright attacking them (despite various laws and rulings happening both at the supreme court level and at the local level all over the country that will endanger people). they'll settle for the illusion of safety and security and shame anyone with a conscience and accuse them of "supporting the republicans" when in an actual democracy you would be able to use your vote as leverage to extract concessions from those who want to be elected. that's how it's supposed to fucking work.

democrats are not owed people's vote. if biden loses, it will be biden's fault; it will be his campaign's fault; it will be the democrats' fault. trump is bad; the republicans are bad. we already know this. this is not an endorsement of either. but if democrats are too cowardly and feckless and servile to the motivations of the american empire and never do anything for their constituents then why the fuck should anyone vote for them. you want to get mad at someone, why don't you do something useful and stop worrying about team-sports with a purely selfish basis and start hounding the people in power who are supposed to serve you, the voter.

[arson-09]

Have been seeing some discussion again about tamlin being a good High Lord or not and I just have to remind everyone of one of the best little facts from acotar I never really seen mentioned.

Acotar, Chapter 25 Page 221

She [Alis] simply said, "Summer Solstice. The main celebration used to be at the Summer Court, but... Things are different. So now we have one here, too. You're going."

"so now we have one here too..." Because of amarantha and Tamlin being just a good person he allowed anyfae from any court to come to spring. And because no one could really go back to their courts for their respective solstice celebrations, Tamlin made sure Spring Celebrated all of them

I just think that's such a cool fucking thing. That Tamlin cared for the people coming to spring for safety, and he made changes to help everyone feel comfortable and at home. He cares about the people who live in Spring, he cares so damn much :(((

[snekdood]

"if we make america worse and more of a dictatorship that will be even harder to unravel and make it the way we want the country to be, maybe then everyone will join our Glorious Revolution!" bb girl you cant even be in the same room with someone who thinks you should vote, how in tf do you think you're gonna unite people to fight in The Revolution with you? it's gonna be you and your 5 friends, i hate to break it to you.

[arkangelo-7]

Okay, but, imagining Clark Kent and Lois Lane, ace reporters, being in charge of moderating the presidential debate is fucking hilarious.

Like—it’s a shit show from the beginning. Lois is too much of a boss bitch to allow anyone to talk over her and you bet her ass she’s turning off the mic the MOMENT one of the presidential nominees goes over their time limit or tries to interrupt her.

She also religiously fact checks both parties right in the middle of their rebuttals, and it gets so bad that she actually ends up debating both the nominees at one time. Total chaos. No one has any idea where she stands politically because she’s just arguing with everyone and calling out the BS on both sides of the aisle.

And then there’s Clark.

Clark, who, don’t you forget, is actually a damn good reporter. (You don’t skip that much work without getting fired if you aren’t just fucking spectacular at your job, this guy’s got to be like the Kobe Bryant of reporting.) Even though he’s not entirely sure that he should be moderating a presidential debate (he’s technically an immigrant and has, technically, been illegally voting in elections since 2008), he ends up doing very well.

Clark asks a lot of insightful and relevant questions, but gets so irritated when neither of the candidates actually answer the damn question that he has to take a five minute break to keep from burning the studio down with his heat vision. He’s also not as effective as one would think at corralling Lois, which means she spends half the night drilling into these presidential candidates while Clark is in the background trying very hard not to loose his shit.

The debate ends with two thoroughly angered politicians, an indictment by FOX news, a cease and desist from CNN, a formal twitter apology from the Daily Planet, and two very pissed off (but patriotic) reporters.

[homoquartz]

i hope crystal recovers enough of her fashion knowledge to tell edwin he looks like a young republican

[anghraine]

I'm trying to redirect my political thoughts from my fandom escape blog again, but I found something interesting enough that I thought I'd talk a little about it.

Occasionally I choose suffering (looking at the more granular 2024 exit poll breakdowns rather than the summaries that I mostly don't trust much at this point). Anyway, I did find something intriguing, if not particularly surprising, in the CNN exit polls, which were done in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin with a sample size of 22,914 voters.

(I mention the specific states forming the sample because this pretty notably excludes any blue states while including some reliably Republican ones.)

Anyway, most exit polls including CNN's let respondents identify their place on the US political spectrum: conservative, moderate, or liberal (reminder that "liberal" in US usage can be a pejorative for "less leftist than me" but also a shorthand for "radical leftist" but also for "anyone who doesn't seek a cishet white Christian ethnostate", but also can be a more neutral synonym for progressives and/or leftists and is often used that way, as here). So you can look at the election results for each of these ideological factions and what share of the overall sample size they represent.

The interesting thing: this "liberal" category accounted for very similar proportions to 2020 of the overall vote in the sample (24% in 2020, 23% in 2024—a difference well within the margin of error of exit polling). There is no need to explain liberals/leftists staying home in 2024: at least in terms of proportions of the overall electorate, they didn't. Just under 1/4 of voters in 2024 were liberals or leftists, just as in 2020.

Okay, if the most leftwards faction of the US political spectrum actually formed a similar proportion of the electorate, then who did they vote for?

Harris. In CNN's own exit polls from 2020, 89% of this faction voted for Biden, and (surprisingly!) a full 10% voted for Trump. God knows what motivated that 10% Trump share after four years of his hellscape of an administration at the height of COVID, but in any case, that support cratered in 2024. 91% of this group voted for Harris and only 4% for Trump. It's an estimate, but it looks like these very peculiar Trump voters had enough of him in 2024 and around half either voted third party this time or for Harris.

So which faction is Trump's victory coming from? Further consolidation of the far right?

In part, yes! 90% of conservatives voted for Trump in 2024, vs 85% in 2020—likely, some conservatives who voted third party or even for Biden in 2020 came "home" this year. However, conservative turnout was actually a little down in 2024, proportionally speaking: conservatives dropped from 38% of the sample in 2020 to 34% in 2024.

But there's one more major faction in all this: "moderates" or centrists. To be clear, we're talking about the US version of centrism, given that this is a US organization polling US voters about US politicians, not "Bernie would be center-right in Denmark" or whatever. This moderate faction jumped from 38% of the overall sample in 2020 to 42% in 2024, and they swung hard towards Trump, though Harris still won a plurality of them. In 2020, 64% of moderates voted for Biden vs 34% for Trump. In 2024, 57% of them voted for Harris vs 40% for Trump—that is, the Democratic lead among centrists dropped precipitously from +30 to +17.

Tl;dr—ideologically speaking, this data suggests that Trump owes his victory to gains among both right-wing and centrist voters rather than some faction of would-be leftists or progressives apathetically staying home or voting third-party or otherwise deserting Democrats (because they're insufficiently radical or for any other reason).

Oh, and if you're curious as to how this compares to CNN's 2016 exit polls, I also checked those! Harris's 84-point lead among the most leftwards faction is a significant improvement from HRC's 74-point lead in 2016. Trump also got 10% of that group in 2016, as in 2020, so it's this campaign—not Hillary's or Biden's—that managed to eat into whatever the hell is going on with that group.

Harris's +17 with moderates is actually a slight improvement on Hillary's +12 in 2016. Biden's jump to a +30 lead among centrists in 2020 represented either a backlash against Trump from centrists, or Biden's own rapport with that group, or some mysterious issue some of those voters had with both HRC and Harris (I wonder what it could be!!), or some combination thereof. Regardless, there are a lot of actual ideologically centrist voters in the USA and not just would-be leftists who haven't heard the good news of Marx yet. And Trump has an iron grip on the right wing at this point: he beat Hillary with conservatives by +65 in 2016, then beat Biden with an even larger margin of +71, then leapt to a 81-point lead over Harris with right-wing voters this year.

[visenyaism]

can you give an example of fascism in an interesting way in literature that you talked about in the tags against mishima’s work? I don’t mean it in a sarcastic way btw I’m genuinely interested in what you meant

ok so my least favorite book we ever had to read in high school was the sound of waves by known tortured gay japanese fascist yukio mishima.

i described it as “fascist in a boring way,” which i stand by. down on his luck (because the americans bombed his fishing boat) fisherman kid Shinji meets beautiful traditional virginal pearl diver Hatsue, but must compete for her affection with gigachad caricature Yasuo with his digital wristwatch terrible work ethic and general enmity for nature standing in for the concept of modernity. meanwhile evil jealous bitch Chiyoko spreads rumors that Shinji is a rapist because she’s jealous that Shinji does not return her affections (meanwhile Yasuo actually is an attempted rapist but gets thwarted because he gets stung like on the dick by a hornet in the attempt. nature does not like him.) It all comes to a head when Shinji and Yasuo are both working together on a fishing boat but Shinji works harder and is more willing to brave the typhoon that hits them. Then he marries Hatsue after proving his worth, they both pray that things will stay the same forever at the local shrine, the fish return to the sea, and her rich and powerful father adopts Shinji as his own son, which is what he’s always wanted since his father died in the war.

We were supposed to like death of the author it as far as I can remember, but to me the book is really only interesting with the added personal and historical context of the author. like this is a desperate childish dream of a Japan that cannot exist and probably never really existed. it will never be the same after the war and there is no going back. Mishima’s personal angst about being unable to participate in the heteropatriarchal institution of the military is very clear.

books about fascism tend to be about 2 things before anything else: power and masculinity. obviously there’s plenty of interesting ways to write about this. I think that books about fascism get waaaaay more interesting the second that they acknowledge that there is any amount of cognitive dissonance happening in the minds of people who are all-in true believers because there are many irreconcilable worldviews within the fascist narrative that just cannot coexist. Sound of Waves as I remember it was way more prescriptive just like this is how the world should be and that’s just less compelling than unpacking why anyone would think like that.

[qqueenofhades]

I’m thinking it’s more likely this was a legit attempt, but in comparison to the last attempt I think the evidence for it being staged is way stronger. It was on Trump’s own property aka a way more easily controlled environment, the guy was much further away than Crooks was and he never actually got any shots off so no one even got hurt, he survived long enough to be taken into police custody, and this is all happening less than a week after a very bad debate performance and an endorsement from a woman so influential we have the data to name an Effect after her. Like again I think it’s more likely a legit attempt but either way it’s still a nothing burger.

I mean, didn't Trump and Vance just tell us to "get over" gun violence and that it was a "fact of life" in between their busy schedule of inciting racist mobs on Springfield, Ohio?

Did something change between now and then when the MAGAs are suddenly so concerned with preventing white Republicans from having access to guns?

Weird.

[vermillionbedfellow]

This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

[quatregats]

Saw this post and had exactly one (1) thought

[doomdoomofdoom]

When I said "Vote Blue now so you can vote Third Party in the Future. Because if you don't vote Blue now, you may not be able to vote in the future at all", I wasn't exaggerating.