#conservative movement

[ask-a-queer-jew]

Today is Yom Kippur

Shout out to all the queer Jews who have to explain this holiday to their queer friends.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who have friends that respond with laughter, or calling fasting child abuse, or asking why you even bother.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who feel conflicted over this holiday.

Shout out to all the queer Jews forced to participate (you deserve to make your own choices).

Shout out to all the queer Jews who are in traditional communities, and will read in tomorrow's torah reading that being queer is wrong

Shout out to all the queer Jews who feel the need to repent for their queerness (you are perfect the way you are).

Shout out to all the queer Jews who are tired of lying, and tired of repenting for lying.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who can only think of all the times and all the people they are lying to every time they read Al Chet (על חטא)

Shout out to all the queer Jews who think of how many less sins they'd commit if only they weren't queer.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who do not feel safe today.

Shout out to all the queer Jews who do not know if or when they will ever feel safe on Yom Kippur.

You are all accepted here. You deserve a voice. My DMs are open if you need someone to talk to. This holiday can be challenging, but you will make it through.

[lgbtally4ever]

He read, (and explains), the entire Project2025 playbook, so you don’t have to. Please watch, and heed the warnings!

THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

[thedailyapple1]

The hypocrisy is MAGA oxygen. It's what they need to survive.

[tmarshconnors]

"Nobody ever leaves the KGB, by the way. Once you're there, no matter what you say you've done next, nobody ever leaves the KGB."

Rush Hudson Limbaugh III was an American conservative political commentator who was the host of The Rush Limbaugh Show

Born: 12 January 1951. Died: 17 February 2021.

[greencheekconure27]

hey what's your beef with peta? if it's that they operate "kill shelters" you might want to read the newsweek fact check https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-peta-responsible-deaths-thousands-animals-1565532 (tldr: "Just as a hospice has a high mortality rate, so does a shelter that takes in those near end-of-life, feral, aggressive, dying and discarded animals." "Cherry-picking animals to only allow in the most adoptable at shelters with limited admission (otherwise known as 'no-kill') policies doesn't help and often leads to people dumping animals, or neglecting them in other ways,")

Oh no it's so much more than that.Constant spreading of pseudoscience and misinformation, ableist campaigns (such as "drinking milk causes autism", racist and antisemitic campaigns (comparing pig farming to the Holocaust for instance), sexist campaigns under the guise of feminism (veganism is feminist because cows have a womb they are women too) more misinformation and pseudoscience, financial scams, at least one instance of abducting someone's beloved and cared for pet to euthanize it, harassment, using emotional manipulation on children ("your mommy is a murderer because she eats meat" etc), harassing and breaking into zoos and research labs , frequently killing the wild animals they rescue, that one bullshit monkey photograph lawsuit, being against ALL animal agriculture and hunting EVERYWHERE, being opposed to pets (yes cats and dogs too), actually paying people to abuse farm animals for staged videos, cultish behavior,absolutely insane ideas, and oh, misinformation and pseudoscience.

As to kill shelters, it's the lies and the hypocrisy that bothers me, because these are the same fucking people who will insist they're doing good by keeping animals alive when they have no quality of life to speak of anymore. One moment they're gushing over some poor piglet born without trotters or blind legless bird being kept alive and miserable for months, the next they're all pro euthanizing healthy animals en masse, all while they collect donations for both.

I know a lot of people donate to them in good faith but don't. Even if you are vegan. They're not doing anything good with that money.

[ravensvalley]

#TheRavenKeeper

I'm still very busy but I always have the time between 2 trails for a quick stop to say hi.

So Hi Folks! And hope you all having a good day so far.

[ranthaven]

For a second there, I was trying to figure out why you were hating on a bass amplifier manufacturer. Genz Benz, in case you were wondering.

But, hey, don’t beat up your generation too much. The disinformation campaign, foreign election hacking, and mainstream media long term collapse didn’t help anyone at all. And young people are raised to some degree to think like their parents. And social media… Well, the less said, the better, I’d say. I would have honestly been surprised to see an entire generation of people unified enough to defeat an effort nearly a century in the making.

Handy historical reminder for everyone: this shit has been coming since Eugene V. Debs was jailed for speaking the truth and unionizing (1894 & 1918). Then FDR fixed the Great Depression with amazing liberal solutions (1930s/40s). Dwight Eisenhower spoke out about the military industrial complex, but not until the end of his presidency (1953-61). The “southern strategy” was developed in response to the civil rights movement (1960s). I could go on, but you get it. 130 years of “conservative” planning and plotting to take America back. Back to the early 18th century.

I'm so mad at genz. I genuinely blame my generation for fucking this up for the rest of us. I cannot believe we let Trump win again.

[alwaysbewoke]

[lady-raziel]

hilarious that with each new day that passes a new bit of dirt from JD Vance's past gets discovered and plastered over the internet...it's almost as if this is why presidential campaigns have always announced their running mates well before the convention...so that if glaring issues with a candidate came to light quickly there would be time to replace them on the ticket before they were officially locked in...it's almost as if certain things in political campaigns were done for a reason, donald...because the very same critical failures had happened before...but no i'm sure you and your guys attempt to recreate a fantasy version of history while ignoring all the reasons that history was a disaster will work this time...because you are built different and the 10000th time trying fascism will work like a charm...

[wachinyeya]

From water-testing polluted rivers to measuring radiation levels, ordinary people are taking environmental research into their own hands.

[relaxedstyles]

[philosophicalconservatism]

Are the angry American women who are flirting with embracing South Korea's 4B movement also going to embrace that movement's rejection of Transgenderism?

[queerism1969]

[leaning-right]

4B

To all the liberals abstaining from sex during Trump’s next presidency… thank you for making your ideals extinct!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A rare view of the Statue of Liberty from the balcony on its torch. This point of view has been closed since 1916.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 01, 2024

Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.

During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.

Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. That government was so widely popular that political scientists in the 1960s posited that politicians should stop trying to court voters by defending its broadly accepted principles. Instead, they should put together coalitions of interest groups that could win elections.

As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of “Movement Conservatives” who were determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.

In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans.

When voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Movement Conservatives’ image of the American government became more and more prevalent, although Americans never stopped liking the reality of the post–World War II government that served the needs of ordinary Americans. That image fed forty years of cuts to the post–World War II government, including sweeping cuts to regulations and to taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, always with the argument that a large government was destroying American individualism.

It was this image of government as a behemoth undermining individual Americans that Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 with his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it is this image that is leading Trump voters to cheer on billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as they vow to cut services on which Americans depend in order to cut regulations and taxes once again for the very wealthy and corporations.

But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.

Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.

The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In the early years of the American nation, defending the rights of individuals meant keeping the government small so that it could not crush a man through taxation or involuntary service to the government or arbitrary restrictions. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—explicitly prohibited the government from engaging in actions that would hamper individual freedom.

But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.

To protect individual opportunity, Lincoln argued, the government must work to guarantee that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education. To keep the rich from taking over the nation, he said, the government must keep the economic playing field between rich and poor level, dramatically expand opportunity, and develop the economy.

Under Lincoln, Republicans reenvisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial stand against a strong government, memorialized by the Framers in the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike. They enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality.

Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.

Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.

To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.

Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

It is that system of government’s protection of the individual in the face of the stresses of the modern world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the presidents who followed them until 1981 embraced. The post–World War II liberal consensus was the American recognition that protecting the rights of individuals in the modern era required not a weak government but a strong one.

When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ravensvalley]

#WildHabitat

It should be built the simplest way as possible to not disturb the environment… always in tune with nature. Be concerned with protecting the natural environment and the planet.