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mariacallous · 1 month ago

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A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; ��Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

These days, everybody talks about spaces: the “gastronomic space,” the “podcast space,” even, on N.F.L. podcasts, the “analytic space.” Derived from some combination of sociology and interior design, the word has elbowed aside terms like “field” or “conversation,” perhaps because it’s even more expansive. The “space” of a national election is, for that reason, never self-evident; we’ve always searched for clues.

And so William Dean Howells began his 1860 campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by mocking the search for a Revolutionary pedigree for Presidential candidates and situating Lincoln in the antislavery West, in contrast to the resigned and too-knowing East. North vs. South may have defined the frame of the approaching war, but Howells was prescient in identifying East vs. West as another critical electoral space. This opposition would prove crucial—first, to the war, with the triumph of the Westerner Ulysses S. Grant over the well-bred Eastern generals, and then to the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party, drawing on free-silver populism and an appeal to the values of the resource-extracting, expansionist West above those of the industrialized, centralized East.

A century later, the press thought that the big issues in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were Quemoy and Matsu (two tiny Taiwan Strait islands, claimed by both China and Taiwan), the downed U-2, the missile gap, and other much debated Cold War obsessions. But Norman Mailer, in what may be the best thing he ever wrote, saw the space as marked by the rise of movie-star politics—the image-based contests that, from J.F.K. to Ronald Reagan, would dominate American life. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire, Mailer revealed that a campaign that looked at first glance like the usual black-and-white wire-service photography of the first half of the twentieth century was really the beginning of our Day-Glo-colored Pop-art turn.

And our own electoral space? We hear about the overlooked vs. the élite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young—about the dispossessed vs. the beneficiaries of global neoliberalism. Upon closer examination, however, these binaries blur. Support for populist nativism doesn’t track neatly with economic disadvantage. Some of Donald Trump’s keenest supporters have boats as well as cars and are typically the wealthier citizens of poorer rural areas. His stock among billionaires remains high, and his surprising support among Gen Z males is something his campaign exploits with visits to podcasts that no non-Zoomer has ever heard of.

But polarized nations don’t actually polarize around fixed poles. Civil confrontations invariably cross classes and castes, bringing together people from radically different social cohorts while separating seemingly natural allies. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, like the French one of the eighteenth, did not array worn-out aristocrats against an ascendant bourgeoisie or fierce-eyed sansculottes. There were, one might say, good people on both sides. Or, rather, there were individual aristocrats, merchants, and laborers choosing different sides in these prerevolutionary moments. No civil war takes place between classes; coalitions of many kinds square off against one another.

In part, that’s because there’s no straightforward way of defining our “interests.” It’s in the interest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to have big tax cuts; in the longer term, it’s also in their interest to have honest rule-of-law government that isn’t in thrall to guilds or patrons—to be able to float new ideas without paying baksheesh to politicians or having to worry about falling out of sixth-floor windows. “Interests” fail as an explanatory principle.

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.

As much as television was the essential medium of a dozen bygone Presidential campaigns (not to mention the medium that made Trump a star), the podcast has become the essential medium of this one. For people under forty, the form—typically long-winded and shapeless—is as tangibly present as Walter Cronkite’s tightly scripted half-hour news show was fifty years ago, though the D.I.Y. nature of most podcasts, and the premium on host-read advertisements, makes for abrupt tonal changes as startling as those of the highway billboards.

On the enormously popular, liberal-minded “Pod Save America,” for instance, the hosts make no secret of their belief that the election is a test, as severe as any since the Civil War, of whether a government so conceived can long endure. Then they switch cheerfully to reading ads for Tommy John underwear (“with the supportive pouch”), for herbal hangover remedies, and for an app that promises to cancel all your excess streaming subscriptions, a peculiarly niche obsession (“I accidentally paid for Showtime twice!” “That’s bad!”). George Conway, the former Republican (and White House husband) turned leading anti-Trumper, states bleakly on his podcast for the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion site, that Trump’s whole purpose is to avoid imprisonment, a motivation that would disgrace the leader of any Third World country. Then he immediately leaps into offering—like an old-fashioned a.m.-radio host pushing Chock Full o’Nuts—testimonials for HexClad cookware, with charming self-deprecation about his own kitchen skills. How serious can the crisis be if cookware and boxers cohabit so cozily with the apocalypse?

And then there’s the galvanic space of social media. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, we were told, by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Daniel Boorstin, that television had reduced us to numbed observers of events no longer within our control. We had become spectators instead of citizens. In contrast, the arena of social media is that of action and engagement—and not merely engagement but enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets. The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry. The algorithms dictate regular mortar rounds of text messages that seem to come not from an eager politician but from an infuriated lover, in the manner of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”: “Are you ignoring us?” “We’ve reached out to you PERSONALLY!” “This is the sixth time we’ve asked you!” At one level, we know they’re entirely impersonal, while, at another, we know that politicians wouldn’t do this unless it worked, and it works because, at still another level, we are incapable of knowing what we know; it doesn’t feel entirely impersonal. You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.

If the cultural advantages of liberalism have given it a more pointed politics in places where politics lacks worldly consequences, its real-world politics can seem curiously blunted. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden before her, is an utterly normal workaday politician of the kind we used to find in any functioning democracy—bending right, bending left, placating here and postponing confrontation there, glaring here and, yes, laughing there. Demographics aside, there is nothing exceptional about Harris, which is her virtue. Yet we live in exceptional times, and liberal proceduralists and institutionalists are so committed to procedures and institutions—to laws and their reasonable interpretation, to norms and their continuation—that they can be slow to grasp that the world around them has changed.

One can only imagine the fulminations that would have ensued in 2020 had the anti-democratic injustice of the Electoral College—which effectively amplifies the political power of rural areas at the expense of the country’s richest and most productive areas—tilted in the other direction. Indeed, before the 2000 election, when it appeared as if it might, Karl Rove and the George W. Bush campaign had a plan in place to challenge the results with a “grassroots” movement designed to short-circuit the Electoral College and make the popular-vote winner prevail. No Democrat even suggests such a thing now.

It’s almost as painful to see the impunity with which Supreme Court Justices have torched their institution’s legitimacy. One Justice has the upside-down flag of the insurrectionists flying on his property; another, married to a professional election denialist, enjoys undeclared largesse from a plutocrat. There is, apparently, little to be done, nor even any familiar language of protest to draw on. Prepared by experience to believe in institutions, mainstream liberals believe in their belief even as the institutions are degraded in front of their eyes.

In one respect, the space of politics in 2024 is transoceanic. The forms of Trumpism are mirrored in other countries. In the U.K., a similar wave engendered the catastrophe of Brexit; in France, it has brought an equally extreme right-wing party to the brink, though not to the seat, of power; in Italy, it elevated Matteo Salvini to national prominence and made Giorgia Meloni Prime Minister. In Sweden, an extreme-right group is claiming voters in numbers no one would ever have thought possible, while Canadian conservatives have taken a sharp turn toward the far right.

What all these currents have in common is an obsessive fear of immigration. Fear of the other still seems to be the primary mover of collective emotion. Even when it is utterly self-destructive—as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic.

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not.

Though Trump can be situated in a transoceanic space of populism, he isn’t a mere symptom of global trends: he is a singularly dangerous character, and the product of a specific cultural milieu. To be sure, much of New York has always been hostile to him, and eager to disown him; in a 1984 profile of him in GQ, Graydon Carter made the point that Trump was the only New Yorker who ever referred to Sixth Avenue as the “Avenue of the Americas.” Yet we’re part of Trump’s identity, as was made clear by his recent rally on Long Island—pointless as a matter of swing-state campaigning, but central to his self-definition. His belligerence could come directly from the two New York tabloid heroes of his formative years in the city: John Gotti, the gangster who led the Gambino crime family, and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. When Trump came of age, Gotti was all over the front page of the tabloids, as “the Teflon Don,” and Steinbrenner was all over the back sports pages, as “the Boss.”

Steinbrenner was legendary for his middle-of-the-night phone calls, for his temper and combativeness. Like Trump, who theatricalized the activity, he had a reputation for ruthlessly firing people. (Gotti had his own way of doing that.) Steinbrenner was famous for having no loyalty to anyone. He mocked the very players he had acquired and created an atmosphere of absolute chaos. It used to be said that Steinbrenner reduced the once proud Yankees baseball culture to that of professional wrestling, and that arena is another Trumpian space. Pro wrestling is all about having contests that aren’t really contested—that are known to be “rigged,” to use a Trumpian word—and yet evoke genuine emotion in their audience.

At the same time, Trump has mastered the gangster’s technique of accusing others of crimes he has committed. The agents listening to the Gotti wiretap were mystified when he claimed innocence of the just-committed murder of Big Paul Castellano, conjecturing, in apparent seclusion with his soldiers, about who else might have done it: “Whoever killed this cocksucker, probably the cops killed this Paul.” Denying having someone whacked even in the presence of those who were with you when you whacked him was a capo’s signature move.

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. Self-defined as a showman, he can say anything and simultaneously drain it of content, just as Gotti, knowing that he had killed Castellano, thought it credible to deny it—not within his conscience, which did not exist, but within an imaginary courtroom. Trump evidently learned that, in the realm of national politics, you could push the boundaries of publicity and tabloid invective far further than they had ever been pushed.

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Just as Trump’s support cuts across the usual divisions, so, too, does a divide among his opponents—between the maximizers, who think that Trump is a unique threat to liberal democracy, and the minimizers, who think that he is merely the kind of clown a democracy is bound to throw up from time to time. The minimizers (who can be found among both Marxist Jacobin contributors and Never Trump National Review conservatives) will say that Trump has crossed the wires of culture and politics in a way that opportunistically responds to the previous paralysis, but that this merely places him in an American tradition. Democracy depends on the idea that the socially unacceptable might become acceptable. Andrew Jackson campaigned on similar themes with a similar manner—and was every bit as ignorant and every bit as unaware as Trump. (And his campaigns of slaughter against Indigenous people really were genocidal.) Trump’s politics may be ugly, foolish, and vain, but ours is often an ugly, undereducated, and vain country. Democracy is meant to be a mirror; it shows what it shows.

Indeed, America’s recent history has shown that politics is a trailing indicator of cultural change, and that one generation’s most vulgar entertainment becomes the next generation’s accepted style of political argument. David S. Reynolds, in his biography of Lincoln, reflects on how the new urban love of weird spectacle in the mid-nineteenth century was something Lincoln welcomed. P. T. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: the tiny General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. Lincoln saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of sensation; he even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife—as much a violation of the decorum of the Founding Fathers as Trump’s investment in Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. Lincoln understood the Barnum side of American life, just as Trump understands its W.W.E. side.

And so, the minimizers say, taking Trump seriously as a threat to democracy in America is like taking Roman Reigns seriously as a threat to fair play in sports. Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

In any case, the panic is hardly unique to Trump. Reagan, too, was vilified and feared in his day, seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the culture of the image, an automaton projecting his controllers’ authoritarian impulses. Nixon was the subject of a savage satire by Philip Roth that ended with him running against the Devil for the Presidency of Hell. The minimizers tell us that liberals overreact in real time, write revisionist history when it’s over, and never see the difference between their stories.

The maximizers regard the minimizers’ case as wishful thinking buoyed up by surreptitious resentments, a refusal to concede anything to those we hate even if it means accepting someone we despise. Maximizers who call Trump a fascist are dismissed by the minimizers as either engaging in name-calling or forcing a facile parallel. Yet the parallel isn’t meant to be historically absolute; it is meant to be, as it were, oncologically acute. A freckle is not the same as a melanoma; nor is a Stage I melanoma the same as the Stage IV kind. But a skilled reader of lesions can sense which is which and predict the potential course if untreated. Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

And so the maximalist case is made up not of alarmist fantasies, then, but of dulled diagnostic fact, duly registered. Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue. Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high. ♦

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voidwizardwholikestheshadows · 2 months ago

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please please talk about pogtopia era c!discduo I would love to know what you think about their dynamic and why c!dream had this sudden shift and started being really cruel to c!tommy in exile or maybe you think he didn't shift. I just am collecting as many opinions for this as possible

Sorry for getting to this so late but let’s crack in lol.

Let’s start with this, I Definitely think that c!Dream’s behavior changed when it relates to Exile. Something I feel like a decent amount of people don’t note is that Dream and Tommy used to be pretty close friends. Plus he even left a letter explaining his motivations and such to Tommy during Pogtopia. Even left Tommy his weapon.

“I have trusted you with my most prized weapon which was used to kill you by Schlatt on the day before the election. Only fitting that it be used on him in retaliation.” This is part of Dream’s letter to Tommy. Here is another part where he recognizes that people saw himself as the villain and he wished to stay out of it.

“Last time I tried to take a stand on behalf of the Dream SMP, I was touted as the villain. This time, I can not involve myself. Schlatt is technically a democratically elected president and I can’t overthrow him. If you need my help, I am here but it must be from the shadows. I can’t be caught breaking the peace treaty even if the people I made it with are no longer involved.” This is definitely not the Dream we see after getting the Revive Book and cutting off everyone he cared about. This is not the Dream who has his guard up constantly. He has shown that he truly does want to stay out of it.

Now, the reason is that Dream wanted L'Manberg back was simply because of Schlatt threatening what power he held over the rest of the SMP.

I think Wilbur points this out another interesting piece pretty well. “Dream only gave you that gear, so that you could cause this conflict. You see?! That’s what this is all about! Dream- Dream doesn’t want us to win. Dream just wants both Pogtopia and Manburg to be weak! That’s it!” While I do agree that Dream wanted both Pogtopia and Manburg to be weak, I do believe that he would have preferred L’Manberg. He even states it in his letter that L’Manberg is not weapons or armor but just a group of people.

“Schlatt is ambitious and that’s a bad thing. He’s- He wants power, he wants land, he wants to expand… You guys, having your own little server where you just- You frolicked around in the flowers, that’s fine by me. I don’t care.” Dream clearly does care given that he had an entire war about it but Dream wants that more than he wants Schlatt trying to take more of his land. L’Manberg simply did its own thing and while Dream wasn’t Happy about it, it wasn’t his main concern.

Now we can move on to how he shifted. He threw away a Lot for the Revive Book, that much we all know. However, Dream was griefing builds with Puffy a long time before Tommy even touched George’s house. Plus even George Didn’t want Tommy exiled. Dream pushed and pushed for it. Dream even taunted Tommy within whispers to try and push Tommy into getting more angry.

“<Dream whispers to TommyInnit: :)>

TOMMY: Dream..? He’s taunting me. He’s sending me smiley faces. He’s being all…

DREAM: No, no, I’m- I’m not… Oh, come on now. C’mon, Tommy…

TOMMY: What’s a nice way to put this…? Um…Uh…. He’s being a huge bitch. And it’s just making me- I’m really-“

He even flat out denies it but he is clearly trying to rile Tommy up to make some more mistakes given that Tubbo was on the right path for a simple negotiation.

Tommy fucking loses it during this time which brings up to the Spirit debacle which then leads to Dream’s famous Spirit Speech. I won’t say that Tommy didn’t do anything wrong because he did. They were so close to a negotiation but Tommy really did just go a bit too far. However, Dream talks about how his only attachments left are Tommy’s Discs.

“DREAM: I have an attachment to your discs.

TOMMY: Why would you care- Why would you- Why would you-?! They are my discs! Why would you- Why do you even care about the-

DREAM: No, nononono. Tommy, Tommy. They are my discs. I’ll get them, I will keep them, I’ll put them in my ender chest and I will keep them for the rest of the server.”

Which leads to Exile, blah blah blah. I’ll go on a rant about Exile later.

I won’t say that Dream isn’t an emotional person. In fact I think he Is a Very emotional character. However, I do think exile was a long thought at plan that was slowly put into action. It’s not just because Tommy was chaotic. All the things that Dream pinned on Tommy was things other people in the server has done. Plus we all know that Tommy is more of a follower than a leader. It’s quite obvious with Wilbur. But I think that once Dream got his hands on the Revive Book, something in him changed. I’m not entirely sure on that something since we don’t know his prospective. I think I’m going to end it here but let me know if you want to hear more or my thoughts on Exile.

#dsmp #dream smp #c!tommy #c!dream #c!discduo #dsmp analysis #My essays

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fromchaostocosmos · 6 months ago

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(Because I don't know if/when this article will get put behind a paywall I'm putting the whole thing here)

This weekend, Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Detroit, appeared at the “People’s Conference for Palestine,” where she called for the voters to punish Joe Biden at the ballot box. “It is disgraceful that the Biden administration and my colleagues in Congress continue to smear [anti-Israel demonstrators] for protesting to save lives no matter faith or ethnicity,” she exclaimed, “It is cowardly. But we’re not gonna forget in November, are we?”

Also this weekend, the Washington Post reported on plans that Donald Trump is sharing with donors to crush protests by deporting non-citizens participants. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” he promised. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”

In short, Tlaib is so angry at Biden for denouncing antisemitic rhetoric at pro-Palestine protests that she wants to elect the man who is promising to deport them from the country. (And while she phrased it coyly, telling people to punish Biden’s “disgraceful” behavior in November can only describe one kind of recourse, because November is when people vote.)

There is something irrational, at least on the surface, about this horseshoe alliance. Many progressives are already pleading with the anti-Israel left to reconsider its determination to punish Biden, whose campaign it has spent months attempting to disrupt or target with harassment. And some protesters surely do hope merely to move Biden as far left as possible and will climb down eventually.

But the position Tlaib revealed this weekend does have a real logic to it that suggests she may not merely be bluffing.

Tlaib, like the groups organizing the protests, opposes any two-state solution to the conflict and uses the slogan “from the river to the sea” to denote her demand for liberation of the entire territory controlled by Israel. Her speech this weekend confirmed the militant thrust of her position. It contained not even a word of condemnation of terrorism, any mention of the hostages, or acknowledgment that Jewish Israelis possess any rights to live under any future settlement. She treated criticism of antisemitic rhetoric at the protests — the extent of which can be debated, but the existence of which cannot — as nothing more than a smear.

She understands the conflict as one of pure good versus pure evil, with the side of good having no obligations and incurring no guilt, and the side of evil having no rights.

Trump has the same belief structure but in reverse. While Tlaib lambasts Biden for continuing to support Israel’s right to self-defense, Trump and his allies attack him for attempting to constrain its exercise.

David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel and the leading candidate to hold the same position in a second term, told Marc Caputo that Trump sees the conflict as one of good versus evil. “It’s a far less nuanced approach,” he said. “Trump sees adversaries in two buckets: Are they people who are loyal to America or share American values? Or are they people who threaten America and hate American values? Not everyone fits cleanly in those buckets. But in the Middle East, they do.”

Likewise, Matthew Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, explained Trump’s position as a “blank check” to Benjamin Netanyahu. “He’s giving the Israelis a blank check to go in and do what they need to do to destroy Hamas and eliminate the threat in Gaza from Hamas. And what he’s also saying, which is actually true, he said ‘but do it quickly’ because time is not Israel’s ally right now.”

Netanyahu has always tried to maintain some balance between the demands of his right-wing coalition partners to maintain control over all occupied territory and the hope by American presidents to create a two-state solution. Netanyahu has putatively left the door cracked for peace while doing everything in his power to make it impossible: from allowing settlers in the West Bank to terrorize Palestinians with total impunity to shoveling money to Hamas in hopes of marginalizing any Palestinian figures who might want to negotiate peace.

Netanyahu is a one-stater. Trump is increasingly signaling his support for a one-state solution. Tlaib likewise supports a one-state solution. And while Trump and Tlaib obviously have opposing visions for how that single state should be governed, they share an incentive to discredit the forces of compromise that stand in their way and an unstated commitment to some violent future conflagration that will settle the struggle one way or another.

#rashida tlaib #antisemitism #leftist antisemitism

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jennicatzies · 3 months ago

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holy shit i absolutely adore your au!!! can other characters ever break from their scripts or will ham and burr suffer alone together?

HELLO I APOLOGIZE FOR THE ROYALLY LATE RESPONSE,,,

Thank you SO much, this au makes me insane 🙏🙏 glad to know other people are interested haha!!!

Alright discussing the question . Unfortunately, Burr and Hamilton r the only AWARE aware ones. Sad times. howEVER there are SOME characters who are a tiiiiny bit aware or at least has cracked a little bit Once. But that's about it. Next run their memories r wiped and they start from 00:00:00 again.

I thiiiink I remember talking ab Jefferson and his faulty script wiring? I'll dive more into it again here tho haha. Yapping about other characters with a drop of awareness under the cut

The main guys we already know are Hamilton, Burr, Seabury and Bullet [ even though SeaBullet are on the side of the stage ]

But what about. Other characters.

Okay I wanna talk ab my favorite scenario/minor ish plot point ever

Southern mf democratic republicans. STAY WITH ME I'LL ELABORATE

OKAY they're. INFURIATINGly funny. Conceptually. Though not as severely as Burr, they have caught glimpses of stage elements or even the audience at some points, though that's about it and their memories get wiped at the end of each show.

Jefferson's handling/POV: okay uh. You know those lil bits in the musical where he "interacts" with the audience/people off stage. Aka blowing a kiss to the audience in What'd I Miss and handing someone off stage a copy of the Reynolds Pamphlet. Canonized. Ish. These could easily be translated into in universe terms by his script wiring, but sometimes he just. Sees the audience. Ultimately he doesn't give a damn. He's having too much fun to worry about it.

Burr has tried to like, get information out of him about this, but hey since he doesn't know what in the world Burr is tweakinh out about he just goes like, "mann I think you just need sleep. Or water. Or water and sleep. Or you're insane. Good luck" and skips on his way ODHRJJEOR

Madison's handling/POV: Madison time yayy. Sickly. Sickly guy. He's also caught lil glimpses of the audience or stage elements seeping into his scripted vision, but also ultimately doesn't think much further about them. Since he's. Quite aware that hes Sickly he kinda just goes "damn guess we got Mental illnesses now. Fml" and moves along

Burr's also tried to talk to Madison about it, but he insists that he himself is just really tired or Sick.

Unless it's the very off chance of jeff and mads' "error" syncing up, they never really like, acknowledged this that much. Maybe the occasional "hey what's that" "what's what" "nvm I'm just sleepy" but that's pretty much it. The part already broken doesn't develop with each run rkjeorkerk they just kinda get The Visions occasionally and shrug

No illustrations for this but! Washington! My friend and I kinda cooked something with this, but the drabble's theirs n' I don't wanna share w/o their knowledge hfhdjfjd

Not really a loop aware or stage aware thing but. His mind. The way he thinks. Happened in like ONE run and that's. That's all the crumbs we get for Washington. Sorry :(

For Washington, it was during the Meet Me Inside number. He just notices that Hamilton's line delivery isn't as... angry as expected. And so he's like... oh. Oh shit. Wait what.

He still!!! Feels angry!!! Because he's scripted to!!! But he doesn't want to be angry anymore!! But he is!!!! Internal conflict!!!! It confused him because his brain is telling him to be mad because Hamilton upset him. But he. He doesn't want to be upset in that moment. Oh well. Fuck

There MIGHTTT be more crumbs for other characters but. It's the middle of the night and this is all I can rack from my brain. Ask about the state of some character and if you're lucky you Might get crumbs

#jenniaskzies #33zl66gr #untitled timeloop au

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cartermagazine · 1 year ago

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Today We Celebrate Labor Day

The Pullman neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side is a small community that changed the country.

Pullman is central to understanding industry, labor and civil rights in America and the tense conflicts that led to the creation of Labor Day and the first African American union.

When George Pullman, the industrial titan, who created an empire building and servicing train cars that felt like hotels on wheels, dismissed the requests for arbitration, Jennie Curtis, president of The Girls Local Union 269 & seamstress in the repair shops, along with the exasperated workers decided to walk off the job. Their strike was relatively small, but it came shortly before a national American Railway Union (ARU) convention hosted in Chicago. At the ARU convention, members considered whether to throw their national weight behind the Pullman workers.

The ARU did come along, though. Eight days later, with Pullman’s heels still firmly planted, 125,000 workers on 29 railways refused to move trains that included Pullman cars. Train travel throughout much of the country ground to a halt.

The strike came at a heavy price. Despite the best efforts of ARU President Eugene Debs to maintain calm, workers, law enforcement and rail management went toe-to-toe over who controlled the railways around the country, leading to significant violence. When angry strike supporters set fire to a railcar full of U.S. mail, President Grover Cleveland and his attorney general, who had previously worked for railway owners, used the incident to criminalize efforts by the union leaders and sent federal troops to Chicago to crush the strike.

Crushing the strike deeply undercut Pullman’s reputation as a visionary and threatened political support for Cleveland. The president was the leader of the Democratic party, which had strong labor support. Just as Cleveland was coming down hard on the side of management, he signed legislation that would make Labor Day a national holiday.

CARTER™️ Magazine carter-mag.com #wherehistoryandhiphopmeet #historyandhiphop365 #cartermagazine #laborday #blackhistorymonth #staywoke #blackhistory #carter #history

#carter magazine #carter #historyandhiphop365 #wherehistoryandhiphopmeet #history #cartermagazine #today in history #staywoke #blackhistory #blackhistorymonth

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itsclydebitches · 2 years ago

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Clyde, I'mma be real with you. I can't feel for either Ruby nor Jaune during their supposed breakdowns because - in context, they're both at fault. Jaune's white savioring a bunch of paper people who don't even want his help - and given how the backstory sequence of the paper people and Jaune's relationship came about, it's rather skeevy because of its (unintentional?) historical accuracy of how indigenous people were treated by colonizers. (1/2)

I totally get what you’re saying about Jaune. It’s one of those situations where I think that’s probably what the story was going for, but it’s just so badly done I can’t personally buy into it. Yeah, fans are totally justified in having a “Jaune is white savior-ing a bunch of locals and that’s A Big Problem” because that’s the message of the girls calling him out for not listening to the Paper Pleasers (to say nothing of his coded-as-racist rant about how stupid they are). However, I’m personally too caught up in the overall vibe of Ever After—that is, one of manipulation that heavily implies Jaune is right about the tree—as well as the crucial fact that this is not some generic [insert cultural difference here], but a heavy suicide allegory. If Volume 9 had done more work in episodes 1-6 to position the tree as something culturally foreign, but ultimately beneficial (as opposed to the exact opposite) and had chosen for the tree to do something other than actively kill its visitors (because let’s be real, coming back as someone with a different age, a different personality, different alliances, and a goal forced on them by some higher power that MUST be obeyed lest they be forcibly remade again like the Caterpillar sounds a lot like a kind of death to me...), I’d be totally on board with dragging Jaune for this. As it stands, I’m honestly stuck on the whole, “So the show wants me to criticize him for… not letting his friends kill themselves? Like, I get that this is framed as a cultural difference, but the actual reality of the situation feels pretty important to me.”

As for Ruby, that’s another complicated situation. Once again yeah, you’re totally right. This was a group idea and Jaune is not blameless for how things went down. However, I personally still hold Ruby accountable. Why? Because she’s the team leader. That’s kinda the whole conflict here. Putting aside my problem with Ruby complaining about something she chose, her breakdown hinges on her actually being in charge. If we then say she’s not really in charge—that this was a democratic effort in which everyone had equal say and weight in the decision; everyone is equally responsible for the bad outcome—then what is Ruby upset about? (Beyond other obvious stuff like Penny.) The story can’t say, “Ruby is crumbling under the pressure of being leader of this group because that's Such A Huge Responsibility” and simultaneously go, “But Ruby isn’t really responsible for the decisions that led to this outcome. That was all Jaune and/or a group effort.” Either Ruby is in charge or she’s not. She’s either justified in being angry that she has to lead, or she’s delusional because what are you saying, Ruby, this was always a team effort! Which is it? Do we blame Jaune for the plan, thereby thoroughly undermining Ruby’s “I’m the leader and that’s getting to me” meltdown? Or do we acknowledge that she has always had the final say in what the group does, thereby justifying her breakdown?

I lean heavily towards the latter. A leader isn’t just someone who comes up with plans, they decide whether they’ll carry them out. That’s what Ruby has always done. When Jaune said, “I have a crazy idea… let’s steal an airship!” Ruby’s response was “Hell yeah!” and as leader that, to me, now makes her responsible for the plan. As leader, she has a duty to judge whether these plans are sound, worthwhile, safe, etc. and reject them if they’re not. Ruby has consistently been given advice that—like with Qrow—she’s rejected and, again, that makes her responsible for the decision. Leaders don’t work in a vacuum, they are given support in the form of ideas and criticism, but what they choose to do with it… that’s on them.

So yeah, I think a lot of fans are hung up on the fact that so-and-so first suggested this part of the plan, or that they all collectively thought it was a good idea, but if we believe what the narrative is telling us—that Ruby has been acting as leader and that responsibility has been a huge weight on her shoulders—than she is ultimately responsible for what has gone down (at least within what she could feasibly impact). Ruby agreed to Jaune’s airship plan and disregarded Qrow’s concerns. Ruby insisted on continuing a fight with Cordovin. Ruby alone decided to lie to Ironwood and ignored the group’s concerns about that. Ruby was also one of the first to hit on the Staff idea, got swept up in everyone else’s agreement, forgot about Cinder, and then lost the fight. Yeah, I get why people want to blame Jaune for this, but the show has spent Volumes with Ruby actively calling the shots, usually against someone else's warning, all of it leading up to this outcome... so it feels really disingenuous to me to suddenly try and put that on Jaune's shoulders or yes, even to seriously split the guilt, not after years (from our perspective) of Ruby overriding her friends' disagreements, pushing for stupid/dangerous actions, and generally demanding that she call the shots. I can't reconcile that Ruby with a "It's not your fault, we all decided this together" reading. No they didn't. If anyone had disagreed with the Staff plan, Ruby would have simply overridden them, just like we saw with lying to Ironwood and mere episodes ago when Yang and Weiss didn't want to visit the King. What Ruby says goes and once she's demanded that responsibility, she is now likewise responsible for the outcome. It is now her job to think these things through. You lead because you supposedly have more experience and perspective to make those hard decisions.

Jaune is guilty of having really bad ideas. But as leader, Ruby is guilty of indulging them. It's on her head for responding, "Yes. Let's do that."

#rwde #rwby #mymetas

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darkmaga-returns · 3 days ago

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10 shocking stories the media buried today.

The Vigilant Fox

Nov 22, 2024

10 - Megyn Kelly exposes where the “Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset” hoax came from.

“This was started by Hillary Clinton. She started the Tulsi [“Russian asset” hoax] because Tulsi was a rising star within Democratic politics. She had all the boxes checked. She was a woman. She was a minority. She was the first this and the first that. And she was a combat vet, beautiful, well-spoken, like amazing [person],” Kelly explained.

As you can imagine, this made Hillary Clinton very jealous. And once Tulsi started aligning more with Bernie Sanders’ politics than Hillary Clinton’s, the narrative shifted, and the hoax began.

“And then she [Tulsi] started to be kind of open-minded to what Bernie Sanders was saying and maybe had some problems with the Hillary Clinton messaging and having Hillary shoved down our throat as the Democratic nominee back in 2016,” Kelly detailed.

“She [Tulsi] spoke up about it and started to make enemies in the party because of that. And then [she] was outraged when she found out the DNC cheated on behalf of Hillary to try to make sure she got the nomination and screwed Bernie. And she was angry, and a rift was formed.”

“Then Hillary Clinton called her a Russian asset,” Kelly continued. “just like Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the one that made up that Donald Trump was a Russian asset... Those were lies made up by the Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton absolutely loved making up lies. And her campaign spread them about the Russians interfering against anybody who she didn’t like or wanted to undermine. Tulsi was just one of them.”

Kelly shared how Gabbard’s opposition to the Ukraine war and her meeting with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad added to the “Russian asset” hoax.

But to put that in perspective, Trump famously met a much more hostile leader, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, in an effort to make peace.

Longtime Democrat turned Trump voter Jillian Michaels responded to Kelly’s explanation of the Tulsi hoax, saying, “This makes perfect sense to me.”

She added, “Diplomacy means you talk to your enemies,” arguing that it is even “more important than talking to your allies.”

H/T: https://x.com/EndTribalism/status/1859437072555155876?t=bIKLmSn_vuRsPxo9GY2NXw&s=19

(See 9 More Revealing Stories Below)

9 - Jesse Watters Goes OFF After Guest Reveals the Corrupt Medical System’s Conflicts of Interest

1. Almost 50% of the FDA's budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry.

2. Revolving Door: In the past 20 years, 11 of 12 FDA commissioners went on to take high-paying jobs at pharmaceutical companies.

3. “In 2020, the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee, 95% of the panelists had conflicts of interest with the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry.”

4. “The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics… not only do they own stock in ultra-processed food companies, but they take gifts from ultra-processed food companies as well.”

5. “The food pyramid was a pyramid scheme to get certain people rich and other people fat and sick.”

8 - Cenk Uygur Stuns Liberals, Tells Them to ‘Take the Win’ on Cutting Government Spending

“Why would we fight them on a thing we agree on?”

Earlier today, Uygur got a reply from Elon Musk when he said the first place to cut government spending is The Pentagon.

“Hey, Elon Musk put me in charge of the Pentagon: 400 billion, easy. That’ll get you 20% to your goal of 2 trillion right out of the gate,” he posted on X.

Uygur also found it “fantastic” how Don Jr. agreed with him when he said we should ban conflicts of interest by preventing retired generals from taking cushy jobs with defense contractors.

UYGUR: “... I have one suggestion already. The generals are not allowed to get a job with defense contractors for ten years. They authorize so much wasteful spending because they’re going to get hired by those same companies.”

DON JR: “This is a great idea that has been discussed.”

7 - Seth Meyers Goes Quiet as Ex-NBC Anchor Torches Democrats for ‘Insulting’ the Working Class

“It is tough love time for the Democratic Party. I think it needs to be stripped down and rebuilt.”

Here's how they alienated working-class voters, according to Brian Williams:

1. Ignoring Rising Costs: "A 12-pack of Bounty [paper towels] is $40. Rich folks don't feel that. Poor folks already switched to Sparkle during the COVID lockdown."

2. Touting Stock Market Success While Ignoring Economic Hardship for Regular People: "I think telling them that the Nasdaq is gangbusters is further insulting. It's insulting."

3. Downplaying Border Issues: "I think the biggest unforced error of the Biden administration by far was the border.... To tell people it's not a problem is insulting."

4. Providing Benefits to Migrants While Ignoring Citizens: "For the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards, and motel rooms is probably insulting as well."

5. Failing to Address Biden's Cognitive Decline: "I want to know who thought it was a good idea that Joe Biden stand for another four years at 80 years of age and 37% popularity."

6 - MSNBC Accidentally Proves Pam Bondi Is a Perfect AG pick.

“She will be every bit the loyalist that Matt Gaetz would have been, just with a little more legal experience and a little less baggage.”

Pam Bondi is also:

• ferociously against “Venezuelan prisoners coming straight into our country.”

• a believer that Trump actually won the 2020 election.

“She even stood by Trump's side during his Manhattan criminal trials and defended him outside the courthouse.”

That all sounds pretty darn good to me.

While you’re here, don’t forget to subscribe to this page for more daily news roundups.Subscribe

5 - Just When You Thought Illegal Immigration Couldn’t Get Worse, Biden Does This…

4 - Ice Cube Explains Why He Rejected the COVID Jab

3 - Trump Breaks His Silence on Mike Rogers Leading the FBI

2 - Musk, Ramaswamy Reveal DOGE Blueprint To Cut Government Waste

1 - Disgraced Bob Casey has officially conceded in Pennsylvania.

Scott Presler writes, “Congratulations to Senator-Elect Dave McCormick! We won’t forget that democrat Bucks County commissioners tried to steal this election. We’re still coming for your seats.”

BONUS #1 - Bill O’Reilly Drops ‘Meteor Story,’ Leaves NewsNation Panel Speechless

BONUS #2 - Heart Attack Crisis Unfolds on Heavily-Vaxxed County

BONUS #3 - How to Get Ivermectin, Z-Pak and More

BONUS #4 - Six Healthy Reasons to Eat More Real Cinnamon (Not Its Cousin)

BONUS #5 - The Shocking Truth About Skin Cancer: What You’re Not Being Told About the Sun

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masseffectdoctor · 8 months ago

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I keep SEEING this fucking idea circle of how the US got where we are with this fucking election cycle bullshit of Democrats saying "I'm the only option to defeat Republicans!" And then immediately becoming the "boohoo I can't the Republicans stop me!" Even though Republicans push forward whatever the fuck they want despite the outcry of disdain and it all comes down to this.

It's capitalism. That's why it's no war but class war. He "can't" stop Republicans because his business interests that get him elected don't let him.

He's ceded so much ground just like every Democrat before him that we exist in a christo-fascist state on the brink of total authoritarianism dictatorship that's a complete all hail to any business interest that'll line a pocket because it's all a capitalist shill game.

And NOW we're at a point where I'm angry people won't vote because Biden is basically the only hopeful option at this time because 3rd party candidates are so benign in the grand scheme they basically need to spend 4 years campaigning even for the smallest possible position to make a name for themselves and they're too cowardly STILL to dedicate to saying actual centrist/leftist ideology because they ALSO need the money from big corps to even be able to MANAGE the kind of campaign a presidential run gets them.

Our best options is to vote in the primaries, get as much of a foothold for justice democrats as we possibly can and pray they'll pretend to make laws for the common people as opposed to the corps that actually pay for their campaign and their bills.

However on the anger of not voting thing, how can I even be MAD?! Like the guy is advocating openly for a genocide that I get a front row seat to every single day. Every drop of Palestinian blood lies on his geriatric war criminal hands. The only thing I can think to even say is the trolley problem where we HAVE to make the choice to elect him because our other option is fucking Project 2025 which is literally just full blown facism eroding any semblance of a democracy. Displayed clearly by this meme I've been sharing consistently because it's literally a fucking fact of my existence as a trans queer in a purple state that'll probably become a "Front Line State" in any coming fucking conflict.

And yes it IS an incredibly privileged mindset to think we DONT need to utilize any and every tool to eliminate fascism in any and every way. Even if it just delays the inevitable. But it's STILL demoralizing every single day where they feed on chisling away at the very soul inside of you until you're to bruised and depressed to even groan in agony.

And at the end of it, it may not even MATTER if we vote. The fucking dictator cheetoh puff has these deranged facists in positions of power so that even IF he loses he's going to do his damnedest to completely overthrow the fucking government anyways.

So even IF you TRY to think of this from a trolley problem of "well we can kill the fewest and prevent direct genocide in our own nation as we advocate further forward for change" it all may be totally meaningless and end up in total armed conflict anyways!

Even on a local scale because he's got these fucking people deranged and at arms thinking they're all the second coming of Christ. We still have to try anything and everything in our power because if we don't then we've essentially given up to our own mass death, but how the fuck does this not completely demoralize you on every possible scale with the bullshit process they've created and let get infected by capitalism?

So yeah we keep ending up here because capitalism goes with the ideology that breeds the most financial gain for the people in positions of power. That's facism, specifically totalitarianism/authoritarianism.

Within those two ideologies they don't have to pretend to give a fuck about unions, or whistleblowers, or journalists, or human rights organizations, or even human rights at all. They buy their ticket that only they can afford and they have their ride to power and authority because they have money.

Tired of a union leader causing a ruckus? Congrats you can just get them arrested, or even killed/assaulted so bad they back down. Tired of a whistleblower? Well we've all seen how Boeing is going right now and they don't even PRETEND to give a fuck.

The idiots and the bastards on an individual scale want trans people dead. Those are the people who want POC to go back to being fully oppressed, and want tradwives, and all the other shit. For the people on top all of that shit is just more people dumped into the meat grinder for their profits. They don't ACTUALLY fucking care. They MIGHT find a connection to those ideals to some extent but at the end of the day, whether it's subconscious or conscious, the ideals are a means to an end of complete power and authority for them.

So yeah, here's to another election cycle of hoping that voting for the lesser evil is even enough this time, because if it isn't me and my communities may very well be dead or in outright armed conflict where we spend every second fighting for our lives. Which basically sets us on a nice time frame of probably about a year and a half or so before we're concealed carrying at best and waiting for us or someone like us to be struck down before our eyes.

#soapbox #politics #us politics #capitalism #biden #jeff bezos #fuck bezos #democrat #democrats #justice democrats #social justice #queerness #queer #trans #transgender #me #im just so tired

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hookechoes · 16 days ago

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one of the sick joys i've had over the past couple of days is watching/listening to political podcasts and seeing them publicly eat shit. i actually like the pod save america bros despite their whole elite cringe Thing, but there is a little bit of schadenfreude in seeing them chastened and humiliated by all this. it is a delight seeing Jon Favreau get actually angry, though. he seems like one of the most genuinely kind conflict-averse people in the democratic commentator world but he was mad enough on the pod yesterday that the snappy gay hand gestures started coming out

#pod save america #personal things #politics

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sprites4ever · 1 month ago

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Some more Definitions of Political Words cause y'all need it

Terrorism: Warfare that aims to defeat an enemy by destabilizing their civilian society via fear. A lot of methods are terrorist, but bombings of public spaces are done the most, due to their effectiveness at achieving the aforementioned.

Terrorist: A person who commits terrorism

Imperialism: The political agenda of expanding one's influence over other nations and people

Imperialist: A person who commits imperialism

Colonialism: A form of violent imperialism in which military forces are used to occupy foreign territories that are remote from the imperialist

Expansionism: A form of violent imperialism in which military forces are used to bring territories neighboring the imperialist under their control (annexation)

Fascism: The political notion that natural laws govern human society, based on a misinterpretation of Charles Darwin's concept of 'Survival of the Fittest', fascists imagine humanity to consist of multiple 'races' and desire to become the strongest, 'purest' 'race' through conflict; through the destruction and subjugation of other 'races'

Nationalist Socialism/Nationalsozialismus: The version of fascism used by Adolf Hitler, Imperial Chancellor of the Weimar Republic of Germany and later self-declared 'Leader'/'Führer' of the 'German Empire'/'Deutsches Reich', it focused on misapropriating socialist themes that were popularized in Europe through the communist revolution in russia 1917

Nazi: A short form of Nationalsozialist, coined by the allies in WWII. The Nazis themselves never used this term and referred to their state as the 'German Empire'/'Deutsches Reich' (not to be confused with Deutsches Kaiserreich, which was the monarchy that predated the Weimar Republic of Germany, while the 'Deutsches Reich' was a military dictatorship that overthrew and replaced the Weimar Republic of Germany

Socialism: The political notion that capitalism and religion oppress the collective of workers who form the backbone of modern society, and that the collective of workers must fight to get what they deserve in society

Rebellion: The act of organized disobedience toward a given authority, committed by (a) subject(s) of said authority

Insurgency: The act of organized violence with the goal of seizing power from a given authority, committed by (a) subject(s) of said authority

Revolution: A successful insurgency

Holy War/Jihad: Warfare with religious motivation (Jihad means 'Sacred Struggle' in Arabic, the term does not necessarily imply violence, but even Islamic peoples usually do not use the term for the peaceful spreading of their religion)

Democracy: The principle of the grand majority of the people getting their desire fulfilled (IT IS NOT A STATE FORM)

Republic: From the Latin term 'Res Publica'/'Subject of the People', a state form based on limited democratic systems that allow the grand majority to get its desires fulfilled while protecting the minority from them. (e.g. an angry mob burning a person at the stake is an act of democracy, and a republic protects the person from the angry mob) The term is frequently abused in the modern day by autocrats, in order to appear democratic.

#politics #terminology #terrorism #terrorist #imperialism #imperialist #colonialism #expansionism #fascism #nationalist socialism #nazi #socialism #rebellion #insurgency #revolution #holy war #jihad #democracy #republic

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bopinion · 9 months ago

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2024 / 07

Aperçu of the Week:

"Time isn't the main thing. It#s the only thing."

(Miles Davis, American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer - and among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of music)

Bad News of the Week:

Sometimes things get rough in the political business. Sometimes you get pelted with eggs, as the unification chancellor Helmut Kohl once did in the East. Or with a bag of paint, as happened to Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. Or even end up in a wheelchair like Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble, who was stabbed. However, all these incidents - as tragic as they are - are isolated cases. In which an individual perpetrator, often with a psychological problem that was not diagnosed in time, commits an individual act. It is certainly not possible to speak of a systemic problem. This seems to be changing in Germany.

The increasing aggression against the Greens is becoming more and more frightening. The platform of this party has always had a tendency to polarize. After all, they want to achieve fundamental change. And unlike The Left, which also wants this, they are regularly involved in governments. And stand out more in the context of the otherwise dominant "Keep it up..." - keyword "prohibition party". Of course you can be against it, comment on it on social media, take it to the streets and demonstrate. But please do so in a civilized manner, as it has to be in a democratic society.

Unfortunately, this discourse has not been civilized in recent weeks. It started when the Green Minister for Economic Affairs, Robert Habeck, was prevented from leaving a car ferry by angry farmers. There was a scuffle with the police, and the public prosecutor's office is now investigating on charges of coercion. And now a Green Party rally - on the traditional "Political Ash Wednesday" - had to be canceled at the last minute. Again because of angry farmers blocking roads. This time, several police officers were injured, cars were demolished and fires were lit. Even Interior Minister Nancy Faeser from the rival Social Democrats considers this to be unacceptable, calling it a "brutalization and poisoning of the discourse". She is quite simply right.

Good News of the Week:

Once a year, the Munich Security Conference MSC, the world's most important security policy meeting, takes place in Munich. It is characterized not only by the official conference programme, but also by the various meetings that take place behind the scenes. One pleasing example: Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at war for years. Under the mediation of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, both heads of government have now met in Munich. And then actually announced that they wanted to resolve their conflicts peacefully.

The primary topic was, of course, the Gaza war with a tendency towards a full-size Middle East conflict. The tone towards Israel is becoming harsher. At the MSC, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called for a Palestinian state to end the "vicious circle". And is even receiving support from China: this is the only way to achieve peaceful coexistence in the region, said Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who was also present. It is fitting that French President Emmanuel Macron announced after a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II in Paris a few days ago that he does not want to close his mind to the recognition of a Palestinian state: "We owe this to the Palestinians, whose expectations have been trampled on for too long."

Naturally, the Ukraine war was also in focus. President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed for further support at the security conference. There is a lack of long-range weapons. Kremlin leader Putin must not succeed in turning the next few years into a catastrophe. And the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who has just died in a Siberian prison camp in an as yet unexplained manner, is a victim of Vladimir Putin, just like Ukraine, says Selensky. Shortly beforehand, he had signed a security agreement with Germany, which provides the most military aid to Ukraine after the USA.

Other remarkable things also happened in Munich. For example, US Vice President Kamala Harris reaffirmed that the USA is firmly rooted in NATO. Out of responsibility, but also out of self-interest. Donald Trump's current statements on the subject obviously make this statement seem necessary. "Take him at his word, take him seriously. He means what he says," said former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was also present in Munich.

And finally, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned: "What happens today in Ukraine could happen tomorrow in Taiwan." China's Foreign Minister Wang nonchalantly replied that "Taiwan (remains) part of Chinese territory and the Taiwan issue (is) an internal Chinese matter." Overall, I find it gratifying that even in these times, people are still talking. You get the impression that diplomacy and negotiations are not yet at an end.

Personal happy moment of the week and other categories...

I'm sorry: this week (which piece was published quite late anyway) left me no time to deal with "lighter topics". Next week!

Post Scriptum

It has become apparent: Donald Jessica Trump has been convicted of fraud in court in New York City. The fine amounts to a total of 463.9 million dollars. Many assume that he does not have this in cash. And therefore has to take out a loan or borrow against real estate. Curiously, this fits in with the proceedings - because they were about how Trump manipulated property values in order to obtain cheaper loans. This will now work neither for this personal loan, which he now needs, nor for future deals. That undoubtedly hurts him.

Another decision by Judge Arthur Engoron will hurt him even more. He not only stripped Trump of the management of his own company, but also banned him from doing business in the state of New York for three years, Donald Jr. and Eric for two years and the top managers Weisselberg and McConney for life. In short: the entire top management of the Trump Organization no longer has any say. Engoron transferred their supervision to retired judge Barbara Jones, who thus effectively became Trump's superior.

In Europe, we can only shake our heads at how a legally convicted fraudster and sexual offender can stay in the political business. In Germany, for example, several top politicians have already had to give up their careers because of incorrect citations in their doctoral theses. "He's been a fraud his whole life," commented author Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote Trump's manifesto "The Art of the Deal". "Today it's just become official." Now it just needs to have a deterrent effect on his voter base. Dreaming will probably still be allowed...

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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U.S. President Joe Biden’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war, especially his seemingly preternatural support for Israel, has been criticized across much of the U.S. political spectrum. An NBC News poll published Nov. 19 found that just 34 percent of registered voters approve of how Biden is handling the war. Many younger voters in particular are angry; and some Arab and Muslim Americans are telling pollsters they won’t vote for Biden in 2024 because of his stance.

The Democratic Party itself is deeply divided on the issue, with even some moderate Democrats urging Biden to do more to restrain Israel. And inside the administration, the president is seeing dissent from staff in the White House and State Department of a kind these two authors never witnessed during our government careers. Biden has even been accused of supporting “the genocide of the Palestinian people” by a member of his own party.

Yet given the president’s long and deep attachment to Israel, the brutality of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and the lack of policy alternatives in the first several weeks of the crisis, it’s doubtful that Biden could have followed another course that would have been more successful. Standing by Israel, deterring Hezbollah and Iran from escalating the conflict, and pursuing negotiations to secure the release of hostages as well as buy time and space to ameliorate—though admittedly not end—the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza have proven to be the right, though hardly perfect, choices.

Still, having tethered U.S. policy to Israel’s war aims—the eradication of Hamas—Biden now finds himself in a bind. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the exponential rise in the deaths and suffering of Gaza’s civilian population have undermined U.S. credibility at home, in the Arab and Muslim world, and in the international community. Going forward, the success or failure of U.S. policy may well rest on whether Biden can reshape Israel’s military campaign, alleviate the humanitarian situation, and engage Israel and other partners in coming up with a workable plan for post-war Gaza.

Like most of the world, the Biden administration was stunned by the timing and severity of the Hamas attack. But the potential damage to U.S. interests was clear from the get-go. The administration had previously concluded that a major effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue given the Netanyahu government’s priorities would be futile and had shifted focus instead on negotiating an Israeli-Saudi normalization accord. The Hamas attack, along with Israel’s punishing response and the rising death toll it has caused in Gaza, put that on hold, as did the increasing danger of a new front opening along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Preventing an escalation and widening of the war that could pull in the United States was now a key priority, as was trying to limit the damage to U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim world as Israel’s military action claimed thousands of Palestinians lives. Securing the release of the estimated 240 hostages—including at least 10 Americans—kidnapped by Hamas also moved to the top of the administration’s priorities, both for moral reasons and to create humanitarian pauses in fighting in exchange for their release. In an effort to regain some ground with the Arab states and Palestinians, the administration began to talk about the importance of not going back to the Oct. 6 status quo, the U.S. commitment to a two-state solution, and the need to create a new post-conflict reality in Gaza.

For Biden, though, backing Israel wasn’t a hard choice; it was virtually guaranteed. His Oct. 10 speech—one of the most powerful of his presidency to date—set his frame: The United States would give Israel the time, space, and support to do what it believed it needed to do against Hamas. U.S. policy began to evolve as the deaths of Palestinians and destruction in Gaza began to rise. But despite growing opposition, that frame has remained remarkably consistent.

Biden faced an Israel that had already been moving sharply to the right and was now thoroughly traumatized by Hamas’s sadistic and indiscriminate killing of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. An Israel, in other words, primed to respond with extreme violence and disinclined to worry too much about Palestinian civilians. Indeed, like Hamas, which doesn’t regard Israeli civilians as innocent, some Israelis—especially Netanyahu’s far-right political allies—consider Gaza’s population to be complicit in Hamas’s atrocities. The fact that Hamas uses civilians as shields against attack reinforces this attitude.

The Biden administration also faced an Israel that saw this moment as an opportunity to deal decisively with threats from Lebanon and Gaza that it has been living with, if uneasily, for years. And because Hamas’s rage was unleashed on Gaza’s border communities, which contained a disproportionate number of liberal Israelis who notably detest their current government and favor a two-state solution, it unified Israeli support on the right and left for a crushing response. Moreover, because the attack was made possible by Israel’s own blunders, the government felt that it needed to restore perceptions of power and its willingness to use it. This all pointed to a no-holds-barred counteroffensive.

Biden has dealt with these obstacles as well as anyone could.

To manage the risk of escalation, Biden did two things—one privately and the other publicly. Privately, he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israeli preemption against Hezbollah in Lebanon—a very real possibility early in the crisis—was a nonstarter. Washington would not support it, and for Israel to proceed would damage U.S. interests; not a good idea when Israel was isolated internationally. Biden then deployed two carrier strike groups—a total of 180 fighter bombers—to the Eastern Mediterranean and beefed-up U.S. military power in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.

The message to Hezbollah and Iran was clear: Don’t start anything. Thus far, both adversaries have indicated publicly and privately that they got the message. Yes, Hezbollah-Israel exchanges have been at their heaviest since the 2006 war. But both parties have pushed but not exceeded the rules of the game. The threat of a regional war that could suck in the United States is, for the time being, in abeyance.

Through Biden’s visit to Israel, as well as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s repeated trips and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s visit, Biden made it impossible for Israel to launch its ground offensive in Gaza until the United States had at least weighed in and the Israeli fury had cooled somewhat. He bought time for Washington to influence the pace and scope of Israel’s campaign. The reason U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Glynn, who commanded the U.S. forces that participated in the anti-Islamic State campaign in Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq, was dispatched to Israel ahead of the planned ground offensive was to caution the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against a scorched earth strategy and suggest ways they could meet their military objectives in Gaza without the kind of wholesale destruction the United States unleashed on Islamic State-occupied cities in Syria and Iraq.

Granted, there was no way this warning would influence the Israeli air campaign already underway in Gaza, especially in its initial phase—partly because the violence was expressive but also because Hamas had deliberately tunneled under heavily populated civilian areas, and the IDF had no good ideas about how to deal with the situation without bombing.

Biden was also successful in compelling Netanyahu to accept the need for humanitarian corridors and resume the flow of water and now fuel to Gaza. Without Biden’s intervention, it’s a safe bet that none of these Israeli concessions would have been forthcoming. Indeed, it’s unlikely the current humanitarian pause, which has allowed more aid into Gaza and significant hostage releases, would have happened without Biden’s personal effort and U.S. intervention. Israel on its own would not have gotten there until things were much worse, if ever.

Could the Biden administration have forced Israel to embrace a more permanent ceasefire, as many have urged Biden to do? What threats might it have used? A halt to U.S. military assistance would have sparked a firestorm in Washington, destroyed Biden’s demonstrated influence on Israel’s crisis response, and pushed Israel to rely on less precise weapons, leading to more civilian deaths—and all likely without changing Israel’s actions.

Imposing conditions on Israel’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons is another option being raised not just by progressive Democrats but by a few more centrist ones as well, though the latter group is so far just asking questions and requesting information rather than pressing for restrictions. Such an approach would have to involve looking at individual weapons: how they are deployed, what are legitimate military targets, and whether Israel has carefully calibrated the impact on civilians in the area. This seems almost impossible in the middle of an active warzone and in any event likely would not alter Israel’s operations.

Should the United States have withdrawn military support for Israel in other ways, such as by redeploying the carriers in the eastern Mediterranean, the U.S. destroyer in the Red Sea, and the U.S. X-band air defense radar installation in Israel’s Negev desert? Doing so would undermine the U.S. objective of deterring Hezbollah and Iran from escalating the conflict and likely trigger an Israeli preemptive war against Lebanon. Such a step would, in effect, play into Iranian hands and undermine, not strengthen, deterrence.

Recalling the U.S. Marine expeditionary force whose missions include embassy and country evacuations, hostage rescue, and other special operations would undermine U.S. readiness for any number of contingencies. Voting against Israel in the United Nations can be guaranteed not to move Israel’s needle one bit. The administration might have considered using U.S. forces to protect aid convoys entering Gaza against Israeli wishes, but this would pose risks that would truly be incalculable.

As the Israeli ground campaign now renews, so do the greatest challenges for the Biden administration’s policies. The United States cannot prevent Israel from resuming military action in northern Gaza or the more worrisome unfolding of a major military campaign to root out Hamas’s infrastructure and kill its leadership in the south. With nearly half of Gaza’s population displaced into the south and disease and lack of necessities taking their toll, a massive ground campaign in densely populated areas there would be disastrous. Indeed, when comparing pre-Oct. 7 Israel-Hamas conflicts with the appalling Palestinian death toll of the past month and a half, it’s clear that Israel is being far less discriminating this time around and has expanded its rules of engagement in attacking Hamas targets embedded in or near civilian areas.

The question is whether Biden can, through pressure and persuasion, reshape Israel’s thinking and create the requisite time and space not just for safe zones but for reliable channels to deliver humanitarian assistance. Having had Israel’s back over the past 50-plus days, the U.S. president is in a position to wield influence over what may well be the most important juncture in Israel’s war against Hamas. Still, Biden must be realistic: Stopping Israel from dealing Hamas’s military capacity a death blow was never in the cards.

The other issue is how to bring the Israelis around on the elusive question of an endgame in Gaza. Privately, the Biden administration has been hammering the Israelis to think this through, though Netanyahu has been reluctant to engage largely because of the demands of his extreme right-wing coalition partners.

Blinken has already laid out publicly a number of “nos” for post-conflict Gaza, including no reduction in territory, no forced relocation of Gazans, and no use of Gaza as a platform for launching terror attacks. We still have no idea how Israel sees the future, other than the certainty of some Israeli presence and perhaps buffer zones until some new reality that can guarantee Israel’s security could be established. But who does Israel envision governing Gaza? And what will Gaza’s relationship to the West Bank be? Biden has called for renewed negotiations for a two-state solution. Both that issue and the future of Gaza will ultimately depend on whether and how the war reshapes Israeli and Palestinian politics.

Uncertainties abound—hardly an unusual state of affairs in the middle of a major Middle East conflict. Yet despite all of the criticism and the grim death toll among Palestinians and Israelis, and given the constraints and things beyond his control, Biden has fared pretty well so far in preserving U.S. interests and preventing matters from getting worse. For a crisis with so many moving parts, that is no small achievement.

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