#democracy starts here

[coolandspicy]

Tumblr Catboy Polls

In this most sacred of democratic rites I ask you to look within your heart and ask yourself the simple question: who is the best catboy? I will do my best to provide a fair and balanced description of each boy’s qualifications in their individual matches but ultimately the decision must come down to your steadfast judgement. I heartily thank you for participating in civic duty.

1 vote = 1 head pat

Round 1

Ichimatsu Matsuno (Osomatsu San) VS Catboy (PJ Masks)

Cecil Aijima (Uta no Prince) VS Zacharie (OFF)

Kuro (Servamp) VS Raymond (Animal Crossing)

Sunny (Omori) VS Miya Chinen (SK8 the Infinity)

Ikuto Tsukiyomi (Shugo Chara) VS Natsume Hyuuga (Gakuen Alice)

Niko (One Shot) VS Gin Ibushi (Your Turn To Die)

Kyo Souma (Fruits Basket) VS Ryoma Hoshi (Danganronpa V3)

Chat Noir (Miraculous Ladybug) VS Nico the Catboy (Adventure Time)

[on-a-lucky-tide]

Well, after watching the second richest man in the world throw a sieg heil and the media pass it off as a "weird autistic gesture", I've just submitted my application to join the Army Reserve.

[doctahchang]

just had a very epic thought that for the most part we didn't see janeway in starfleet in a literal sense but rather, we saw her living out her idea of it. no wonder girl seemed to be struggling in prodigy

[nostalgia-tblr]

it's not that i'm not sympathetic to movies loki, but he already murdered one neglectful parent so it's not like he's opposed to doing things like that on principle, is it?

[i-c-u-p]

going to start using this platform like twitter again and by that i mean posting relentlessly and going on rants in the tags

[opha]

has anyone noticed the religious side of tumblr getting increasingly weird and regressive since the porn ban? i know a lot of us had an eye on the evangelical xtian explosion here, but i now see a pretty uniform resurgence of the sentiment that you can't vocally hate/disrespect/even disbelieve a religion for any reason, sometimes extending to the point of thoughtcrime-ifying privately held convictions, even among leftists

[jesuis-snips]

girl help! the dictator won the elections in my country.

[omegamoo]

found some of my essays from a world history class i took... you know the essays you spend two nights prepping and panicking for and then scramble to write during the bell period... well i found one about the universal nature of war in response to a class project and What the Fuck was I On when writing that. What The Fuck

[mercurysnitch]

I’m sorry to be so political today, but personally I find the “I disagree with this candidate on one thing so I’m not voting/protest voting” stance infuriating. Admittedly I live in a country with compulsory voting so maybe I’m just more used to picking whoever’s the best fit and putting up with anything you don’t agree with. Sometimes there are no perfect options or even great options so you go with the least worst.

I keep wanting to say at least there’s term limits if Trump does get back in but I can’t shake the feeling he’d try to get rid of them. I would have thought that would be difficult but I don’t know enough about what would have to happen to be confident in that,

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.

[irnhero]

if i see one more article, post, or news anchor talking about how joe biden is old, i'm putting my fist through a window. i feel like i've gone through the fucking looking glass.

this is project 2025, trump's plan for what he'll do if elected. whatever you think is in there, it's worse. watch a breakdown of the highlights here. this man wants to unravel the fabric of our democracy for good - this all aside from his vitriolic hatred of poc, his determination to start ww3, and the fact that he can't string a sentence together without telling outrageous and easily verifiable lies. his administration will start their crusade to exterminate trans people on day one, and they won't stop there.

do not talk to me about how joe biden is old, as if that could ever matter to me more than my life or the lives of my friends and family. my little sister is 14, she's trans, and i don't know what to tell her when we talk about politics, because one of these people wants her dead and the other one is old and some of you are still acting like those problems are equals.

i can't fucking stand this. i'm not hearing it this time, we are not repeating 2016. refusing to vote is not an act of protest, it is an act of complacency, and our most vulnerable will suffer for your negligence. vote like your life depends on it, because for some of us, it really fucking does.

[diamondnokouzai]

i feel like all kamalas answers are meaningless buzzwords. when theyre not just a fourth grade current events report about bidens presidency.

[antikate]

I see the occasional piece of discourse slide past me on this website (but also in other places) that goes something like this:

Every four years the democrats tell us our democracy is in danger and we have to vote for them or else! When will the centrists liberals stop holding us hostage like this! Why don’t they fix it for once and for all?

Here’s the thing: you can’t permanently get rid of fascism. We had a WORLD WAR that killed 75 million people to try to get rid of fascism and it just keeps on popping up again. It’s a weed that will always come back because it grows in the fertile soil of human misery, and until we end human misery for good, our soils will be rich and productive for a long time. Fascism flourishes when people are scared, unhappy, and suffering, because it gives humans easy solutions to complex problems.

Anyway… We! The Royal we! Need to stop thinking of voting as one weird trick to fix things forever and start thinking of it as weeding. Every four years you’re going to have to weed this fucking garden. For the foreseeable future. Now put your gardening gloves on and get to work, otherwise you’re going to end up with a fascist garden growing nothing but the thorn bushes of oppression and subjugation.

[thesocialgremlin]

I've been meaning to sit and write a proper post for a while. I am so exhausted with life. I'm so tired of being alive in this era. Why should I have to earn a living when I'm alive? Why am I slaving my life, my body, my hopes, my dreams, my relationships, everything and anything that ever mattered to me. Why indeed?

My dad slaved away, but at least he could sustain his wife and three kids. Meanwhile, most people my age have to put in the same effort, just so they can afford a roof to starve under. And why? All so some rich asshole can have more money than they can even conceive?

Since Covid "ended", the cost of life skyrocketed. I've been working in the retail industry, different places since then. Retail prices used to be cost plus 30, 35%. Now, it's cost plus 40, 50, 80% on lower priced items. And why?

I can assure the wages haven't changed. What has changed is record breaking numbers every fucking quarters. Management going off on extravagant meetings outside of this forsaken country. I'm trying so hard to survive, to get by, working for these people who waste wealth when their people desperately need it.

I'm so over it, my hands are shaking as I type. They could have their fancy meeting in a fancy hotel in the city. Instead, they flaunt hundreds of thousands to get their ass down South while leaving the baseline staff to handle affairs.

Mind you, affairs seem to run hella smoother without management than it would if even one or two of the baseline stepped out for a day.

We don't need them to do our job, but they need us to make their money. They tell us it's like a family, and they treat us like it; work hard, go above and beyond, all day, every day. Do it all, we'll give you a pat on the back. A freebie you never asked for to make you feel better. Anything but pay you and treat you with human dignity and respect. The same dignity and respect we DESERVE because we are ALIVE and we are PEOPLE.

The world is broken.

I never wished for anything extravagant; If I were living on my terms, I'd happily live in a small shack, working part time in a cafe, dedicating myself to all the writing and reading and researching and adventuring my soul craves.

Instead, I'm caught grinding my soul away. My life beating to the rhythm of a business shamelessly exploiting me. My hopes and dreams to live my own life wither as my government choses to wage war on vulnerable children instead of fixing any real problems.

All I wanted was to live a peaceful life and make art. I had no agenda but to live my life. Now, I have to fight for the life stolen from me, so the next generation may yet see a better world.

[nevermind-i-forgot-whats-that]

Sometimes, as much as I love internet communities and spaces, I really think a lot of people have spent so much time in sanitized, morally pure echo chambers that they lose sight of realism and life outside the internet.

I live in Alabama. My fiancée and I cannot hold hands down the street without fear of homophobic assholes. We have an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. We are one of the poorest states in the US with some of the lowest scores on metrics related to quality of life, including maternal mortality, healthcare, education, and violence. It’s not a coincidence that we are also one of the most red, one of the most Republican states in the Union. In 2017 the UN said the conditions in Alabama are similar to those in a third-world country.

Trump gave a voice to the most violently racist, sexist, xenophobic groups of people who, unfortunately for most of us in the Southern U.S., run our states and have only grown more powerful since his rise to power. The Deep South powers MAGA, and we all suffer for it.

We have no protections if they don’t come from the federal government.

I know people are suffering internationally and my heart is with them. However, this election is not just about foreign policy - we have millions of Americans right here at home living in danger, living in areas where they have been completely abandoned by their local leaders. We need this win.

No candidate is perfect, but for the first time in my voting lifetime I’m excited to vote. I’m excited for the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket because they are addressing the issues close to home. They’re advocating for education as the ticket to a better life, but without the crippling student debt. They’re advocating for the right to love who you love without fear and with pride. Kamala has always been pro-LGBT+ and so has Tim. Again, if you’re queer in the South, we don’t have support unless it comes from the federal government, and we absolutely will not have support if the Republicans regain the White House.

Kamala speaks in length about re-entry programs to reduce recidivism and help people who have been arrested and imprisoned regain their lives. Tim Walz supported restoring voting rights to felons. In the South, you know who comprise the majority of felons? Members of minorities. It’s one of the major tools of systemic racism and mass disenfranchisement, and arguably the modern face of slavery (there are some fantastic documentaries and books that explain the connection between the post-Reconstruction South and the disproportionate rates of imprisonment for BIPOC). Having candidates who recognize this and want to restore the freedom and rights to people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system? And keep them from having to go to prison in the first place? That’s refreshing. That’s exciting.

I would *love* to live in a country where women’s rights are respected, where LGBT+ rights and protections are a given, where we treat former criminals and individuals experiencing mental health crises with respect and dignity. I would *love* to live in a country where education is free of religious interference and each and every citizen is entitled to a fair start and equal opportunities.

But I don’t live in that country. Millions and millions of Americans find their rights and freedoms up for debate and on the ballot.

Project 2025 poses the largest threat to the future of our democracy as we know it. We are being called to fight for the future of our country.

We have to put on our oxygen masks first before we can help others.

You don’t have moral purity when you wash your hands of the millions of us who are still fighting for own freedoms right here.

The reality is that a presidential candidate is a best fit, and not a perfect fit. But comparatively speaking? Kamala is pretty damn close.

[deathanddogs]

Translation:

Jehan: "Revolution without the guillotine", how I've longed to hear that phrase!

Jehan: Had you been there for the French Revolution, the great poet André Chénier would not have been decapitated

Jehan: I wished to convey that splendor, so I wrote a poem.

Jehan: It is called "The Poppy: Blooming in the Snow"

Grantaire: You are all like the sons of the French Revolution

Grantaire: The rights of the people, the Republic, democracy, civilization, progress, religion, revolution

Grantaire: What's the point of such things?

Grantaire: There are other things to learn: The best coffee is to be had at the Cafe Lemblin, a wonderful chicken dish to be had at Mother Sauget's

Grantaire: Good lasses at the Ermitage on the Boulevard du Maine, that sort of thing.

Courfeyrac: Then why did you follow me?

Grantaire: ...ah... I don't know either

Grantaire: ....... hello~

Grantaire: My apologies for the mess

Grantaire: Forgive me, I am Grantaire

Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras.

He had need of Enjolras.

That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it,

and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him.

[agentoffangirling]

As the Supreme Court is now hearing arguments on the TikTok ban, I feel like this is an excellent time to remind everyone that getting rid of TikTok is NOT a good thing

And the reason I bring it up specifically on here is bc I have seen far too many people claim that the ban is for the better, that they're so glad it's gone, that people spend way too much time on it (side note, that's social media in general, it's not just TikTok babes. You're spending 15 hours on Tumblr alone, I'll bet). Even if you don't use TikTok and you absolutely hate its guts, trust me when I say you'll want it to stay

Firstly, there's been very little evidence that TikTok's Chinese owner, Bytedance, has been data mining Americans on order of China. Majority of the evidence has not been released to the public and the stuff that has has been censored. Of course the risk that it could exists-- but you cannot simply assume it's doing this all the time, 24/7, when no current evidence has been presented

TikTok has been taking massive steps to insure that American data is protected, primarily with Project Texas. All American data is stored in the United States and controlled by Americans. Again, American data is with AMERICANS

It is also one of the very few apps that is not dominated by American companies. Does no one find it odd that the only foreign-owned application is being singled out, when companies like Meta and Google have arguably done worse damage? Is no one pointing that out?

Due to this, it allows for less mainstream news to flourish on the app. Palestinians have been able to raise their voices and call to attention what is happening in the region, and activists have pushed the crises of Congo and Sudan to the forefront. No other major social media app and news organization has done this, in fact, Meta censored pro-Palestinian content and immediately toggled on a feature for all users that limited political content

And TikTok is just the start. If it gets banned, do you really think everything else is safe? You think you're safe here on Tumblr? On Ao3? On Instagram? NO

At some point they are going to start going after other apps. They'll celebrate and pat themselves on the back that they "protected democracy" but really they limited free speech. They limited alternative voices. It is not an "if" but "when" they begin going after apps that do not conform to their every single standard

If TikTok goes down, they all do