#i wish every republican politician a very die

[ruthlesslistener]

As far as I am aware, New Mexico is still the only state where the license plates explicitly say USA on them despite being some of the prettiest (imo) and most recognizable plates in the country. So yes, they do not realize that New Mexico is not a part of Mexico.

I know I shouldn't be surprised by American stupidity given the fact that this is a country that places more value in giving teenagers permanant brain damage over education but also. Good fucking lord. Why are they so fucking stupid

[sweetpaintedladie]

i’m scared after these past two days. i’m sad too. i’ve barely stopped crying to be honest.

but i’m sad for 11 year old me, watching hilary lose and having no idea how that would effect the rest of my life. i’m sad for 13 year old me who started to enjoy watching kamala harris debate, saying one day i hope she runs because she would be great. the joy i felt when she was chosen as vp, the joy i felt when she was elected.

i’ve harbored an ill will towards the government for a very long time. i told myself i never wanted to vote because i wanted the electoral college to be abolished and because i felt i would never once feel optimistic about who i was choosing. how at 18, i registered independent and looked in fear of who ran on that number. looked in fear of who ran republican. looked in fear of who was running democrat. it was the day kamala harris announced her candidacy, i felt hopeful. like i could vote in good conscience for someone i felt would protect me, that right, and be someone who i’m glad children get to see as the person in charge. not someone based in hate. a fiercely intelligent, caring, qualified woman who could do amazing things for people here and people elsewhere. i voted with happiness because i was voting for 11 year old me, 13 year old me, and 14 year old me. and i voted for every other 11 year old girl too - so she wouldn’t have to feel the fear i felt.

it’s hard to explain how you feel when you reckon with the fact you failed your 11 year old self. that you were failed by countless people in your own country who proved they don’t care if you live or die, they care about the price of their gas. they don’t care about the kids they let be shot, or miscarried. they don’t care that young men turned out to vote because in 2016 they didn’t see the beginning of their rights vanishing they saw someone who allowed them to spew the hate and bigotry they felt.

i feel lucky enough to have grown up with obama being the first president i remember. that the person i saw lead the country was a young, well spoken politician who cared about all people. who spoke not in hateful rants but eloquent speeches, who spoke highly of his wife and daughters, who despite hate spewed towards him he remained cordial to his opponents. in other words, a leader. how kids now have to grow up with a man child, a rapist, a felon as who they see. someone that shows young men not that there is power in respect, diligence, kindness, but that shows them that you can say you want to grab women by the pussy and be elected. twice.

i wish kamala harris and tim walz won, of course, but i wish they won for the people who have to live in the world and don’t know better. how children can’t look upon their television and see a woman who represents what once felt impossible become possible, who would lead with them in mind. i voted for her not for myself, but for the minorities who will be effected by the other sides regime, for the children who deserve more than this world is ever going to give them now, for the women who now have to live in fear of ever being in charge of their bodies again. i didn’t vote for myself, but clearly the majority did. as a young women will die in a parking lot after being denied medical treatment, a man will be able to buy gas for $2.07. a human life is less important than a luxury in a man’s, and unfortunately an entire new generation of women had to learn that today.

i’m heartbroken. i feel i failed the future of my country when i did the best i could. kamala did more in five months than most could ever dream, shattering glass ceiling after glass ceiling to get where she was last night. i wish it was her. i wish it was her for so many women today, and young girls of tomorrow.

unfortunately, it was proven that backwards and in heels is still an understatement. she had the world against her and got so far. as a first time voter, my fears came true. as a woman, my fears came true. as an american, my fears came true. as someone who had to watch women in my life cry in 2016 and not understand how much that would effect me now, my fears came true.

this isn’t the end. its okay to feel scared and hopeless. but think about how far we came in the past 5 months. kamala harris will go down in history for so many reasons, and this is one of them. she lead where she could with strength, dignity, understanding, and love. when it’s realized that’s missing, we’ll feel it. her impact certainly does not end here.

[tshifty]

I actually do blame people for staying home. Trump will be even worse for Palestinians. Choosing not to go vote for Kamala is going to result in more harm for EVERYONE. If you can even help any number of marginalized people suffer less by voting and you don’t, I just can’t understand that thought process. This isn’t at you since I know you said you would be voting. But also from a strategic standpoint, democrats aren’t doing to start listening to leftist until they can show they are a reliable voting block and that takes time. I wish liberals/leftists could play the long game like republicans always do and look how far they’ve moved the party right.

I think this is a really important conversation to have right now, so I am going to answer this very earnestly in a long form. And I don't purport to know the right answer-- honestly I don't think anyone knows the "right answer" or if there really is one atp. But I do want to share my perspective on this, which is a bit contrary to yours.

TLDR; bc this is very long: I think that political and social change is more nuanced than simply "voting is right or wrong", and I think that we are about a decade into fundamental systems change in this country which does add a layer to the conversation.

I think as a baseline, we can agree on a few points:

Voting is an important tool that we have in the system we live in

Trump is objectively, on every issue, worse than Harris

If Trump gets elected, more people will die, and faster

Shifting our political culture and system is long-game

So now a few of your points that I am going to disagree with.

"Democrats aren't going to listen to leftists until they can show they are a reliable voting block" -- this is something that I used to also believe to be true, but I don't anymore. I don't think the Democratic party is ever going to in truth embrace leftist policies, because those policies by nature weaken the grip of our 2-party system, and thus lose democratic party leaders and politicians a lot of money. The Democratic party has shown time and time again that they are very willing to do whatever it takes to prevent a leftist, or a democratic socialist, or a progressive whatever label you use, to rise through the party ranks and succeed. The party endorses in down-ballot elections against progressives; the party bankrolls moderates to defeat progressives; the party spreads disinformation and works to cause fragmenting within left spaces. Unfortunately, the Democratic party is at the end of the day one side of the electoral machine; and while the GOP is worse on policy issues, I would say that the parties operate the same in many functioning ways.

"People who choose not to vote are (at least partially) to blame for the result" -- again, something I wholly used to believe, but don't entirely anymore. At the end of the day, I believe the blame lies with those in power. I blame the Democratic party and elected officials for being morally decrepit and absolutely incomprehensibly unstrategic. I blame politicians for being spineless fucking freaks who either are actively trying to harm people, or refuse to do what is needed to actually create the change they run their platforms on every few years. While I do personally still believe that voting is an important tool even given the context we are seeing in 2024, I cannot bring myself anymore to blame those who are continually spit on by the Democratic party, for not voting for them. So while I do agree with the sentiment that voting is important to the extent that we vote to choose our enemy, I do not believe that it is really those who don't vote that are wholly to blame. I think this system is designed to hurt people, and I can't blame people for refusing to vote for politicians who continue to harm them and their communities.

"Liberals/leftists should play the long game in a similar way that republicans have"-- I halfway agree with this and halfway think we may disagree. I agree that Republicans, as fucking morally decrepit as they are, have as a collective deployed some pretty brilliant and terrifying political strategy over the past many decades to achieve their goals. I agree that the Republican party plays politics much better than Democrats, and that it's pretty embarrassing to watch Democrats and leftists etc. fail to do so. However. I disagree in the sense that, I don't think this political system that we have is even worth fighting for. I think that fascism is knocking at our door red or blue; one is just going to happen faster and more intensely than the other. The Dems are running towards fascism at 20mph; the GOP is running towards fascism at 200mph. So while I am going to vote for the 20mph option bc that buys us more time to prepare, I do unfortunately now believe that we have crossed that point of no return. Our politics will never be "as they were". I think that for the past 10-15 years, the US has been in a stage of political and social revolution (and let me be clear, NOT in the way i have seen many self-proclaimed communists talk about in that revolution is some big event, that shit is stupid as fuck), and that we also have a long ways to go. The US is a very young country, and historically we have been due for this for a while. I think the next 4-8 years are going to dramatically accelerate our democratic backsliding, and I honestly am at a point where I am going to spend my energy to prepare for how to operate in that reality, than I am going to spend my energy trying to save an outdated system. I do think we have to play the long-game, and to me that looks like reimagining how we want our government and politics to operate, and being extremely pragmatic about what that will entail and how we can leverage power to get there. I believe that social and political revolution and change takes DECADES, and ultimately that the change will not come from within our current system but from outside it. Also to be clear I believe that armed revolution in the context of the United States would be fucking stupid bc that means going up against the US military and ultimately that is truly just some stupid half-baked notion coming from very privileged people who don't believe they will be the first to get shot.

So this has gotten extremely long and I do apologize for that lol.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Elliot Kaminetzky

Published: Jan. 24, 2024

It’s the lie that convinced a thousand parents — and, increasingly, politicians across America.

As a psychologist specializing in child-behavioral issues, I frequently talk with parents misled into believing their child will commit suicide unless allowed to transition genders.

Suicide fears have led medical professionals to threaten to call Child Protective Services if parents don’t affirm their child’s chosen gender identity.

Governors and lawmakers have given in to the same fear.

The mere mention of suicide stops them from enacting laws that protect children from undergoing unproven and experimental medical procedures.

Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed such a bill, saying it could lead children to kill themselves.

The Legislature overrode his veto Wednesday.

Good thing, too.

Those who use the threat of suicide to encourage children to go down a transgender path either don’t understand the research or are being deliberately manipulative.

Worse, they may be encouraging the very suicide they want to prevent.

It’s obvious why suicide is front and center here.

It horrifies every decent person, especially the suicide of a child.

Parents have likely heard some variation of “Better a live son than a dead daughter,” and for years, activists and their allies have flogged reports that large percentages of children who identify as transgender are suicidal — more than 50%, according to the Trevor Project. 

President Biden has repeated this statistic, and as states have banned medical treatments for trans-identified minors, it has been aired more than ever to prevent reforms. 

But this narrative is false.

Biased researchers typically reach their conclusions based on nonrandom, online self-report surveys — not exactly a scientific approach.

What’s more, they conflate suicidal thoughts such as “I wish I was never born” — something many angst-filled adolescents feel — and suicidal behavior, which is categorically different and fortunately far rarer.

And using such low-quality statistics to claim medical procedures will lower suicide is another logical leap, not borne out by evidence.

Any “researcher” who fails to make these distinctions is spreading dangerous misinformation, misleading therapists, parents and politicians on an important aspect of child mental health. 

We need to look elsewhere for a more truthful picture.

When Oxford University researcher Michael Biggs examined the scandal-ridden, soon-to-be-shuttered Gender Identity Development Service at the United Kingdom’s Tavistock clinic, he observed four suicides in 11 years among 15,000 adolescent patients.

That’s a tragedy, yet it reflects an annual suicide rate of 13 per 100,000, which is only slightly higher than the US suicide rate of 11 per 100,000 among all 10- to 24-year-olds.

And there’s more.

Of the four individuals who committed suicide, two were on Tavistock’s waiting list while the other two were receiving the medical interventions that were supposed to save them.

This fact casts doubt on the “transition or die” trope, indicating other factors may be at work. 

While activists typically pin the blame on society’s ostensible hostility to transgenderism, evidence shows gender-questioning children often have psychiatric comorbidities, such as anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder, along with neurological or developmental disorders, such as autism.

These factors likely contribute to assertions of gender dysphoria as well as suicidality.

Treating these conditions and mitigating suicide risk must be medical professionals’ — and parents’ — top priority, not rushing children to hormones or surgeries after just a single visit.

The falsehoods about child suicide are bad enough, misleading parents and policymakers; perversely, they may also encourage suicide.

Activists and media outlets frequently hold up gender-questioning children who commit suicide as courageous heroes because of their struggle, suggesting a similar fate awaits others whose chosen gender isn’t affirmed and medicalized. 

Yet suicidologists warn against attributing suicide to a single factor, which can actually lead to increased suicidality in individuals who relate to the factor. 

In online transgender communities, children often receive coaching on using the faulty suicide statistics to persuade their parents to support a transition. 

Such actions break the cardinal rule of suicide discussion: Never dwell on suicide or lionize the deceased because doing so can inspire others to take their lives.

That’s especially true since evidence suggests suicide can be socially contagious. 

The lies about suicide are a gross disservice to children, parents and society.

Struggling children are being pushed toward lifetime involvement with the medical system in lieu of the true mental-health care they need.

The best way to protect children is to pass common-sense laws grounded in facts, not misleading scare tactics. 

Elliot Kaminetzky, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, founder of Serenity Parent Consulting and the Center for Child Behavioral Health and a visiting fellow at Do No Harm.

[getcuboned]

Okay but lets not pretend that that's not a reason to be upset and wish to remove the entire system. I want nothing to do with the fake democratic system that makes me have to vote between a Hitler and a Mussolini.

The TikTok ban was spulled together so fast that the mask slipped. The farce that American politics wears lost its composure. The idle threat of 80% of a generation being not just Pro Palastine, but being 80% Pro Palastine while Congress was still unwilling to do anything about it. A generation that got that way because the knowledge bypassed media censoring and was making the "Good Guys" in American politics look bad. Our proverbial Homelander can't let the plane land so he refused to save anyone, because do save anyone is to risk his image collapsing.

Congress is a geriatocratic state authority with vested interest in the ongoing party struggle. Republicans don't Really want to win for more than a few years and neither do the Democrats. Republicans think up the most evil bullshit they can to appeal to a mean spirited demographic and Democrats lord themselves as masters of their own high horses for rescuing the public from Republicans.

Its All Fake Bullshit. When Real People Die in the World at the Hands of Dictators and Theives the Republicans say its not American Problem and the Democrats say they can help in 2 - 3 Economic Quarters. Then they pit the U.S. public against itself in a debate they control about "wether or not to help".

Its a deliberate and nearly obvious method of procrastination and control. But the Moment a story Congress didn't approve of gained tracion on an unregulated media platform, the while script changes. They descided all at once that Singapore "Spyware" that they had been ignoring for years was suddenly a major threat to the public, and passed a bill that lets them squeeze a company like that to death if they want to operate in the U.S.

Within two weeks. Two Weeks. This is the Congress that was debating if building a special dock in 8 months in order to deliver human aid around blockades was viable. They looked at Blatant human rights violations and said "Well, if the Evil politians say do nothing, and the Good politicians procrastinate with a nice sounding plan, the public will have plenty to keep them pascified as we get into the election season". Then over the space of Two Weeks a bill for TikTok being banned pending its state mandated media censorship was passed.

The U.S. Congress has the power to do anything. They have the power to send supplies wherever they want. They have the power to put necessary restrictions on ultra wealths businesses operating in the Caribbean. They have the power to force companies to reserve enough money to continue to pay operational costs through hardship. There is No Sane World where a business is doing well if it threatens bankrupsy over 3 month lul in travel and yet.

I lived in Bliss thinking that I would try to vote Republican against Trump in the Primaries, with the intent to Vote Democratic against him in Finals. I lived in Bliss thinking that we just need a younger generation in Congress.

The Truth is that every member of Congress has a Vested Interest in the state of affairs going unchanged for the next 40 years of their life (for the young ones). The elders are teaching the young how the game works and when the real threat came along, Uncensored Media Coverage, they showed they very much can elliminate it.

I'm probably gonna Vote Democrat. Probably. But it makes my blood boil and my teeth itch and my vision to go red because I Know that I am participating in a farce. I Know that when it comes down to it they will fake the results to get what they need.

By existing as a citizen in and paying taxes to the imperial core, we automatically hold complicity in imperialist oppression because we are literally footing the bill for it. That is just the basic nature of being born to privilege in systems of oppression in general. We can be disadvantaged and marginalized in every single other consideration and we still have to understand and cope with this, and ensure we leverage it as effectively as possible.

Voting abstinence/sabotage does not absolve us of our responsibility to do everything in our power to lessen harm, but it DOES show that when our personal morals aren't satisfied, we retreat into (imperialist, this time) privilege to 'wash our hands' of the situation and declare it's not our fault and it's not our problem.

[flippedorbit]

I wish all Republicans a very die.

If I have to hear another old white person say how the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a win I might just fucking go batshit. I literally did a presentation in my government class earlier this year on that case. It is bullshit that those assholes are so willing to have a peace of this countries history overturned and ignored as if it never fucking happened. It’s fucking stupid as all hell and I hope anyone who is pro life get s slapped in the face with the reality of how bad it is that Roe v. Wade being overturned is gonna be. Roe v. Wade is so fucking important and yet these old ass white people act like it getting overturned is some kind of reason to celebrate. I hate this fucking country and every stupid ass pro-life politician in it.

[dwestfieldblog]

A VERY REMOTE ENGLISH TEACHER

Where meditations, rants, reverie and absent seizures cross over... closer to one gun with one bullet, the rose of ruby and the cross of gold...uff, and MENTACIDE IN THE TIME OF MASQUES. Although I have never suffered from the guilty masochistic torture of ‘pleasure anxiety’, Bacchus hath indeed drowned more men than Neptune.  So I stopped drinking for 18 days to fool myself I was doing something positive and threw away enough things to be minimalist again. Arf. Beauty and/or function uber alles.  

Been treading water for three years and trying not to drown...big round of one hand clapping for the former poet. Meanwhile, in this temporary world and perception I have created of it, I am looking at a very possible exile one way or the other...my ‘plan’...a long phased withdrawal or hasty retreat. My wish is to stay, but once I leave, it might well be very hard to return.  Read as many metaphors as you want into that but in spite of my dislike of the conservatively minded Aristotle’s ‘either/or’ nonsense, there do indeed appear to be only two this time. And appear is the operative word. Appearances can be deceptive and emotions (unless raised and focused) cloud over what should be clear. Pain has a tendency to breed worry and fear too but let’s draw a veil over that for now eh? Suppress, suppress, release comes later...breathe deep and try not to cough, onward we go where the game gets rough...Just like Tom Thumbs Blues 65.  

Remember Roman Protasevich...As Lukasenko himself said...‘Belarus stood at the edge of an abyss and I helped it take a step forward’. Look good on your tombstone that will Al. Fecking outrageous the Indian PM only admitted in May that covid was transmitted in the air. He needs removing... as do two thirds of all the other world leaders East and West. Hello Bollsanaro. People are very easy to manipulate when they’re are scared or angry...and right now the world majority are both. But, ‘there is a crack in everything... that’s how the light gets in’... and ‘things could change’, doesn’t have to be for the worse. It can take decades to realise this as actual truth, but still nice to read and try internalise the following last week.’The odds actually favour the optimists, since dissipate structures are more likely to evolve into more information rich (intelligent?) forms than into primitive or chaotic forms.’ All my friends bar my best one are optimists..Hello you:-)

Ever onward deeper downward with Orban in Hungary and his mission of ‘Christian values’, which involves a familiar routine of arresting, beating and disappearing dissenters in the name of Christ and taking over the universities to replace professors with those who understand on which side their bread is buttered. Decent judges long gone. Nice fascist communism...and ex soldiers in France and the Czech republic warning of civil war...

And now spiraling we go into the black hole vortex of Disaster capitalism, ‘Let the bodies pile high’. There’s gold in them thar ills....ISLAND PARANOIA and PERFIDIOUS ALBION! A country which demands a contract, agrees, signs to it and then refuses to honour it. We look worse than ridiculous, we look deceitful. Gentlemen, your places please. Boris Johnson is a clumsy, inept, disgraceful charlatan, con merchant and LIAR. A blustering master bullshit artist, the only decent thing about his recent secret wedding is that now he legally has one less bastard child.  

Recently I read that British people are displaying signs of Stockholm syndrome...in that they dislike those who hold power over them and make the rules but during the time of pandemic, they are the ones who will release the saviour vaccine and get everything moving again. So rather than rocking the boat and daring to express dissent at the DIABOLICAL handling of the last 18 months, they have mostly kept quiet and voted for the same endlessly failing, corrupt and venal politicians who made a bad situation far worse. (That said, it bears repeating that there are a few million in the UK who didn’t quite understand that that the spread of a highly contagious airborne virus can be slowed by the wearing of masks/applying basic hygiene and even took offence at being told what should have made sense to any adult homo SAPIENS half capable of cogitating for themselves. Morons and scum. Same where you are?

By the way BBC...the colossal dearth of stories about the endless government failures in relation to Covid, death, corruption and the NHS...ever since they blackmailed you with threats of revoking the TV licence fee and got you to change Directors has been noted. Long may Have I Got News For You continue the satire and balance needed in a DEMOCRACY. Obey your public servants? Why, when they do not serve few but themselves? Power OF the people? Which ones...the mob? The same bleating pricks who follow populists?

Four eyed beanpole fop Rees Mogg, with his wonderful line that the benefits of Brexit will be seen ‘over the next fifty years’...well yes, that is why most people vote in democratic elections eh?...So they will be dead or ancient before the change they hoped for comes...and the politicians who lead them now, will have all long moved on to revolving door chairman of the board offshore limited liability company paradise. Bread today jam tomorrow fairytales. What I tell you three times is true.  

O, but the English do so love to be told what to do by dumb posh boys who treat them like dirt. Some are forelock tugging and some are self flagellating middle class upper class wannabes who will never get there but still feel proud they are not street level proles. Doby the house elf alien hamster Michael Gove found guilty of breaking the law. Nothing. Internal inquiries run by those connected to the money changing hands find nothing illegal. Corruption for all to see...and ignore. ‘Well, what can we do?’ The uselessly inept serial failure Dido Harding to be in charge of the National Health Service? (she of the collapsed Woolworths, Talk Talk and the 22 BILLION pound loss of the Covid Track and Trace program where non working consultants/insultants, were paid 1000 pounds a day). American style privatisation is coming where only the wealthy or criminal can afford to be repaired and well. Sick.  

Meanwhile, All our imported nurses out, and all the lobster red fat Spanish costa de la sol criminals back in. Great exchange, fair trade and forward thinking. The Kremlin are manipulating/supporting Scottish independence... I read years ago about their base in Edinburgh for Russia Today (the foul insert in The Daily Telegraph) and they were already encouraging it. Rees Smug has accelerated and supported their freedom with his snobbish utterances on countries in the UK other than England and their ‘foreign languages’. With every patronising, arrogant pronouncement, the Eton trifles fuel the fire in Scotland which has a long bitter history of being tortured, murdered and subjugated by their southern masters. Perhaps the chumocracy in Downing Street believe the Celts to be as easily cowed as the middle and working classes down south. Here’s hoping not. ‘Rebellious Scots to crush’? Not this time pal.

As for the future of Britain? A dystopian open prison where the lower social classes toil only at the pleasure of their masters. The higher caste getting richer and all others cast into a living Hell of debt, crime, and sickness. Serve until you die and be thankful we allow you to exist. Increasing in utter irrelevance to the world, other than as an example of how wrong a former democracy can go. This future started decades ago...its baobab roots truly deep now. Better education and critical thinking for the masses in the UK (or anywhere else) is highly unlikely now. Optimism huh? As long as I am not in England, I will still be able to tap into it, but once enclosed long term in the group mind there...trapped in a grey quagmire. Keep smiling...

Several weeks ago, I watched a video on YT of apparently English protestors running after the police in London, some attacking and throwing things, one pulling off the pandemic mask of an officer and all shouting abuse at the outnumbered cops who had to keep pulling back. As always, to get my caffeine rush of fury going, I read the comments and was surprised to see two or three from Chinese names. Almost all comments were against the government (fair enough) and dumb against the lock down, masks, vaccinations etc. Checking again, I saw the video had been posted by CGTN...a media company owned and run by the communist party in Beijing...and not one author of diatribes had mentioned this, nor speculated with a critical thought as to why such an organisation might enjoy turning people against their own democratically elected government (however mind rippingly foul and corrupt they are).

I copy pasted the Wikipedia paragraph about the company onto the page and hoped someone else would make the connection. I wouldn’t mind so much IF there were a credible and decent alternative other than the diseased populist poison for which the demonstrating goons chant. China really cares about the standard of democracy in Britain eh? Persuade your enemies to weaken themselves. Destroying countries by encouraging their ‘patriots’.

(That was written on the anniversary of Tienanmen Square...a few days later Xi Jinping gave a speech saying ‘...a lovable and respectable’ China must be presented to the world and must ‘expand its circle of friends’. Tell that to your teenage ‘dissidents’, Muslims, Falun Gong and Tibetans being tortured and brainwashed in prisons or being used for organ harvesting. Tell it to Hong Kong and Taiwan.) 

Unholy America...against abortion and the pill, sex education’s not Gods will and in the Name of Christ they kill...if truth be known, we’ve failed the test...but Jesus was a Socialist and Republican conservatives hate them. The founding fathers of America were Very clear about separation of church and state with damn good Reason. Another part time Christian, Mike Pompeo wants to be president. Q Onan deepstorm morons/Kremlin stool pigeons aka POLEZNYYE IDIOTY continue to push for Trump and his Big Lie...He with the brain where ‘In the left, nothing is right and in the right, nothing’s left.’ Arf.

Over the last two decades, the dumb have been finding their voice and are now louder and prouder of their dumbass ignorance. 74 million in the US alone, their egos unable to retreat in the face of endless evidence to the contrary, they all double down. Like children sticking their fingers in their grimy ears sing songing ‘la la la can’t hear you’. 74 million versions of Eric Cartman, loud, proud and wrong. And uuff, Megan Markle,  Majorie Taylor Greene, walking Picasso collage (bad car driver) Caitlin Jenner and Ivana Trump in politics...not exactly holding a proud lantern for women eh? I’d like to buy them for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth. Not very PC?  

That was the point. Could easily been written about all of the men written about here too. Next examples follow...

Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones compete for who can be as mentally ill as trump. The Miami school where the husband and wife directors told teachers not to return if they had HAD their vaccine shots because their proximity to students was interfering with menstrual cycles and uuuufff...The sickness of utter mind buggering stupidity. I had my first shot, now waiting to turn reptilian when the 5G masts triangulate my position. Fnord. Covid appears to be killing more overweight meat eating males than females...perhaps testosterone is not useful for the coming Race of non binary mutant hermaphrodites...and look out for the end of the Y chromosome, coming to a temporary universe near you...in 4.6 million years. Yes, really.  

Glad Netanyahu is out at last, smug corruption is never a good look unless one is a rich criminal. Ha.  The Promised land of Israel...If I was in court for serial murder, breaking, entering and stealing and then defended my actions by saying that God had told me to do it, would the Judge; A. Call for a psychiatric report, B. Disregard the statement as unprovable and pass the appropriate sentence, C, say Ok mate, you’re free to go, good luck to you. ? Moses had a good schtick.

The law is only to punish the poor, do you feel as if you suffer from empathy? Once you know, you no longer need to believe. What does ‘reality’ seem to be? The more certain you are, the stupider you get and belief is the death of intelligence. The machine is running the engineers. What is the definition of rationality...the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic. 

Nothing is, but thinking makes it so. Epicurus.  

EVERYTHING NOT COMPULSORY IS FORBIDDEN.

The glamour illusion of the mass of pointless hot influencers needs a constant renewing of the Banishing Ritual as much as all the pigslop bile coming from Fox News and Sky. Bloody long haired commie liberal faggot they cry against any not identical to them. Some days I have only flamethrowers of hatred for these idiots. Other days...not exactly self doubt, just questions...most of us seem to believe our opinions are more valid when there are emotions connected to them. Including me. Again, this seems like a very weak version of ‘truth’, unless disciplined, channeled and focused to a certain end.

Life appears to exist in order to become via chaos.

Most of us are working only not to be homeless, some because of the joy in our chosen work regardless of finances. Until ‘reality’ kicks in the door...the bondage gets tighter when you struggle. How much hardship is the individual willing to endure these days by choice? Surrounded by a universe of distraction and destruction, Maya mewling for our attention. Five years of Trump, rampant populism and Brexit doing a Hexagram 23 on democracy, compounded by the pandemic...all on top of ‘normal’ daily life. The ego feeds and the immune system breaks down. Hard to ignore without being on a mountain or in a parallel dimension and emotion free other than compassion. But BY GODDESS IT CAN AND WILL BE DONE. Ladies of Life Nin Khursag, Isis, Kali, Aradia...Love one, Love ALL. At very least have respect for thyself but be not thou proud of thine arrogance nor thy suffering.  

Or just Remember where you came from, what you were, seem to be and will become.

Heal, heal, more work to do, more love to give, more love to feel, Heal. Stay in drugs, eat your school and don’t do vegetables. Impose your own reality upon and through yourself, breathe, exhale, repeat, and continue, LOVE UNDER WILL. Experience and absorb but ‘It’s a house of tricks, ignore the world’’.

Stay well, be seeing you:-)

[smonk-wonk]

This seems to frame the existence of the KOSA bill as a nonissue (or lesser issue) and taking action against it as arbitrary. You can care about both things at once but more importantly- the KOSA bill will affect our ability to openly speak about Palestine the way we have been. It is a censorship bill, and will result in surveillance and be counterproductive in advocating for Palestine. Republicans definitely would not pass a censorship bill and allow the type of content we've been spreading over the last months under their watch. I personally do not think it was an afterthought to attempt to pass the bill now as we will of course prioritize Palestine which makes it very difficult to address something else.

If we ignore KOSA, the ability to access information like updates on Palestine, resources that provide aid to displaced Palestinians, and related matters will be compromised. Additional to that, resources for those in abusive situations, in need of (especially) LGBT resources and mental health resources, will be censored. Palestinians will die, as will children in abusive situations. They are taking advantage of the fact that we need to focus on Rafah, on Palestine, on the 2 million displaced Palestinians. Next thing we know information about it is being surveilled and hidden, information that saves lives and spreads awareness and has allowed the Free Palestine movement to gain the support and power that it has.

Do not stop talking about Palestine, but do not imply that KOSA is a nonissue. With KOSA, inevitably people will hear less about Palestine. People may stop talking about it or forget about it. Seeing less related content is no justification for forgetting about Palestine but like it or not that's just what's going to happen with more people than we can afford it to. I'd still continue to post every day in these tags but I'd be fucked up if my posts were censored or removed. I can't afford that and neither can anyone else. It's going to target and allow for the deaths of more Palestinians and many minority groups, many people in need of life saving resources, queer youth, so many people will be affected and people will wish they'd understood the full intentions of these politicians and done something.

Here senators are at a hearing admitting that they want to target "anti Israel" content, clearly expressing belief that pro Palestine content encourages terrorism and endangers children. I don't believe everyone would actually have to upload a government issued ID, but there would still likely be various forms of "identity verification" used widely, jeopardizing the safety of a lot of people. The bill will compromise much of the anonymity we are currently allowed that keeps us safe. We cannot focus on Palestine if we allow KOSA to pass because we're "too busy", because they are not separate issues. They are counting on our dedication to Palestine to overlook the fact that their bill will be used as a cover to censor a wide variety of important resources and Palestinian voices under the guise of protecting children.

Focus on Rafah BY not allowing KOSA to pass. Do not discourage action against KOSA, it's more dangerous than you think even if you mean well. They will have a full say in what information on various platforms would endanger children and must be suppressed or erased. And it's scarier knowing that they will have more access to the identities of those speaking against Israel or in support of Palestine. If you don't think republicans would allow unfiltered free speech for those talking about Palestine and anything that doesn't kiss Israel's soggy little pancake ass then you'd probably be wrong, given how they feel about pro Palestine content. Everything I just said would probably not make it very far if allowed to stay up at all

"but the kosa bill is going to be signed !!!"

FOCUS ON RAFAH

FOCUS ON RAFAH

FOCUS ON RAFAH

FOCUS ON RAFAH

FOCUS ON RAFAH

FOCUS ON RAFAH

FOCUS ON RAFAH

FOCUS ON RAFAH

FOCUS ON RAFAH

[darrenhen98]

The Descendants

The Descendants

Book 1:

Genesis

Chapter One:

November 4th, 2024. Edison New Jersey, Earth.

We had done it. The efforts of hundreds, if not thousands of people had come to fruition: a landslide victory for the brand new Equalist Party of America. Diya Anand scanned around the party office, taking in the momentous joy that had suddenly erupted amongst the volunteers and workers.

Just moments ago, the last state still counting their votes finally finished, putting the Equalists well ahead of both the Republicans and Democrats. It was assured, Dominick Moore would be the nation's second African American President, and her the first female Indian American Vice President.

As Diya walked amongst her colleagues, they began congratulating her on a job well done, wishing her the best of luck in the years ahead and most commonly, saying how happy they were to see a new face in the White House. Diya smiled, nodded and thanked all those who came up to her fervently shaking their hands and even shed a tear for one.

What she was really trying to do was transverse the crowd to get to the podium where Dominick was standing, since it is customary and necessary to address the people as their new leaders. As she reached the top, Diya smiled wide,

“Congratulations on your victory, Mr. President” , being sure to emphasize his new won title.

“Congratulations to you too, Madam Vice President” he said, returning the respect with a hint of playfulness which was hard to catch through his thick Nigerian accent. “Are you ready to change the nation for the better?

“I wouldn’t be standing here if I wasn’t Dom you know that” she replied. He began to say something else but just then news reporters pushed through the doors and poured in to stand in front of the podium. Like normal, they started barraging them with a multitude of questions, about how they felt, what would be their first actions and others that were lost in the torrent of sound.

After a few moments, Dominick finally got them to settle down as they needed to soon broadcast their victory speech. The camera’s soon flickered on, streaming their image to every news station in America and world-wide. Both Dominick and Diya were dressed in their cultures traditional attire: a well tailored Dashiki and Sari respectfully. The usual suit and tie and gown and pants had been thrown to the wayside at least for this instance. The American people needed to see the ethnic leaders they had voted for, and the new reality that was about to set in.

Dominick took the mic in hand, pushed his mask to the side and began, “I’d like to begin with stating how overjoyed I am. Not about winning the election but at the resolve of the American people. For the past eight years, we have had to fight countless battle after battle: wildfires in the west, massive storms and earthquakes in the Midwest, hurricanes and flooding in the east and two pandemics that changed the very core of our society. The past administrations had failed us, and we sought out new leaders, a new vision for the country. One that would let us tackle the challenges of climate change and other life changing issues…”

While Dominick kept speaking, Diya stood behind him smiling and nodding to the cameras whenever he said something that fell within the party’s platform. He was a great speaker, unlike her who most of the time did exactly this, stand behind him as he ran the show. But then it was her time to come up next to him and share her thoughts. As she did, as she spoke to millions of people across the world she couldn’t help but remember one thing in the back of her mind. She never even wanted the job in the first place.

As Diya was driven home by her security detail, she began to ponder how she had gotten to where she was now. She had been a judge, the closest she had ever wanted to come to politics. Many questioned her, how being in government meant you weren’t political but to her it was the best place to be apolitical. 

You didn’t have to conscribe to any agreed upon base of actions, when a case reached her desk she went at it with the ethics she cultivated through her life and an understanding of the law she so fervently loved. But it all changed in 2020.

Everyone knew the presidential election was going to be a decisive one, but no one knew just how much. No one could tell who truly won, over a dozen states were flagged as “improper” because of their voting systems. The problems worsened as the incumbent president refused to leave office in a gambit to maintain power and the resulting riots tore through the nation. Every major city was hit, hundreds killed, thousands inquired and billions of dollars in property damage. 

Through it all, Diya had stayed home wanting to weather out the crazy climate with her parents and siblings. She could still remember the fear in her families eyes, how they were utterly convinced this was the end of the life they knew. And as the riots raged, more tragedy struck.

Since so many young and capable people had been out protesting in such large numbers, another massive pandemic swept through the country. And then a super-hurricane hit Florida, an massive earthquake in the four corner states and… A lot of tragedies at once.

The next four years had proven to be one of extreme change and humanity for us. People started to band together like never before. Every place that was hit with something was helped by the very people in it. It was the citizens who helped themselves out of flooded homes and crushed buildings. It was parents and children who constantly made meals and clothes for the hundreds of homeless and sick. We didn’t ask our governments if we could, we just did. 

And so Diya did just that, help all those she could. She quit as a judge and began organizing everything under the sun. Foodbanks, marches, fundraisers, if it was an event she was behind it. It was this type of cross-cultural, apolitical connectivity that the Equalist Party liked. They had formed under the noses of everyone, suddenly popping up around the nation with aid for all those ailed by the tragedies. No one really knows how they formed, but everyone knew how much they helped. In the end, the support they garnered was immense.

By 2022, the amount of support from the polls put them around 20% of the population. The following year, over 50% of the population. The online rallies broke the communication industry, almost every new politician that switches parties immediately gained thousands of followers. Which is where Diya's’ interactions with the Equalists started.

Having to coordinate resources and capabilities from her volunteer organization with the Equalists own outreach efforts, Diya virtually became a superstar overnight. Not that she wanted to in any way shape or form, helping from the shadows was her go to plan for the future. Work hard, help everyone, retire old, die older; that had been the plan.

Diya stepped out of the car waving a farewell to her driver only to be escorted into her home by the home security detail in front of her house. She smiled to the bodyguard as he held the door open and she walked in as the automated lights flickered on. She was about to put down her bag and wind down when her cell phone began to vibrate within.

“Hello?” she answered inquisitively, as she hadn’t known the number.

“Hey Diya, it’s me Leo,” the caller said.

An unexpected but gratuitous call. Diya immediately smiled and perked up a bit at the sound of his voice. Diya had met Leonidas, or Leo, over four years ago during one of the outreaches she had organized. They had immediately taken a liking to each other, having an unexplainable connection from day one. They had stayed in contact over the years, but with so much going on in his and her life, calls became less and less frequent.

“Oh it's great to hear from you, using someone else's sat phone this time? Diya asked, making the conclusion on her own.

“You got it. I hope this is okay, I just wanted to congratulate you on your amazing victory!” Leo exclaimed.

“Haha yea, amaaazing.” Diya groaned, emphasizing the sarcasm. “But you know what’s new with me and I have been talking about it for hours. How’s things on your end, last we spoke you just finished training”

“Yes Ma’am” Leo replied, realizing now that Diya was technically his superior. “I shipped out about about a week ago with the fleet. We’re somewhere in the Bay of Bengal, waiting to meet up with the Indian and Chinese before we make landfall. I called because I’m part of the second wave.”

“I see… well you know I’m not much for words, but I can make the exception for tonight” she mused.

“Haha thanks Diya, there are definitely a few things I want to get off my chest.” Leo continued. Leo and Diya talked things over for the rest of that night, never truly talking about anything important but that didn’t matter. Anything that could distract them from the different realities they now faced, was a blessing they couldn’t interrupt.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

After the agricultural revolution, human societies grew ever larger and more complex, while the imagined constructs sustaining the social order also became more elaborate. Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called culture’.

During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars taught that every culture was complete and harmonious, possessing an unchanging essence that defined it for all time. Each human group had its own worldview and system of social, legal and political arrangements that ran as smoothly as the planets going around the sun. In this view, cultures left to their own devices did not change. They just kept going at the same pace and in the same direction. Only a force applied from outside could change them. Anthropologists, historians and politicians thus referred to ‘Samoan Culture’ or ‘Tasmanian Culture’ as if the same beliefs, norms and values had characterised Samoans and Tasmanians from time immemorial.

Today, most scholars of culture have concluded that the opposite is true. Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms and values, but these are in constant flux. The culture may transform itself in response to changes in its environment or through interaction with neighbouring cultures. But cultures also undergo transitions due to their own internal dynamics. Even a completely isolated culture existing in an ecologically stable environment cannot avoid change. Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change.

For instance, in medieval Europe the nobility believed in both Christianity and chivalry. A typical nobleman went to church in the morning, and listened as the priest held forth on the lives of the saints. ‘Vanity of vanities,’ said the priest, ‘all is vanity. Riches, lust and honour are dangerous temptations. You must rise above them, and follow in Christ’s footsteps. Be meek like Him, avoid violence and extravagance, and if attacked – just turn the other cheek.’ Returning home in a meek and pensive mood, the nobleman would change into his best silks and go to a banquet in his lord’s castle. There the wine flowed like water, the minstrel sang of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the guests exchanged dirty jokes and bloody war tales. ‘It is better to die,’ declared the barons, ‘than to live with shame. If someone questions your honour, only blood can wipe out the insult. And what is better in life than to see your enemies flee before you, and their pretty daughters tremble at your feet?’

The contradiction was never fully resolved. But as the European nobility, clergy and commoners grappled with it, their culture changed. One attempt to figure it out produced the Crusades. On crusade, knights could demonstrate their military prowess and their religious devotion at one stroke. The same contradiction produced military orders such as the Templars and Hospitallers, who tried to mesh Christian and chivalric ideals even more tightly. It was also responsible for a large part of medieval art and literature, such as the tales of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. What was Camelot but an attempt to prove that a good knight can and should be a good Christian, and that good Christians make the best knights?

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction.

Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care.

Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.

If, say, a Christian really wants to understand the Muslims who attend that mosque down the street, he shouldn’t look for a pristine set of values that every Muslim holds dear. Rather, he should enquire into the catch-22s of Muslim culture, those places where rules are at war and standards scuffle. It’s at the very spot where the Muslims teeter between two imperatives that you’ll understand them best.

- Yuval Noah Harari, The arrow of history in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

I’ve spent a couple of days in New Hampshire this past week and keep on realizing I’ve already been places. I pulled into a brewery at the end of a dark, windy road (is everything out of a Robert Frost poem up here?) and recognized the refurbished barn from another candidate’s tour of the place. I drove up to my hotel and remembered that I’d eaten in its restaurant four years ago. The snow is the same as in 2016, too; big flakes that catch in your eye and make you wish you’d thought to bring waterproof mascara.

A lot of the voter talk is the same as four years ago, too. Namely all the cynicism and worry — What’s the matter with America? and What’s the matter with the media? kind of stuff. The only thing that’s different this year is that it’s coming from Democrats.

When you see candidates campaigning or voters listening to a stump speech, you don’t see a lot of unbridled merriment or excitement. Instead it’s a business-like frenzy to, as Democrats see it, pull the country back from the brink.

“It’s horrible to say but there’s more dumb people than I realized, or gullible people that don’t listen,” Catherine Michel, 69, told me. We were standing flush to a wall in a VFW hall in Somersworth, watching a Joe Biden event break up. The former vice president had arrived in the gray morning light in his aviator sunglasses, lenses that have been glued to Biden’s face quite a bit these days as he looks to project the cool that seems to be rapidly leaving him with every passing poll.

Michel was there with her husband, David, and they were anxious to see Biden before they made their choice. They couldn’t bear to see President Donald Trump on TV anymore. “He reminds me of Mussolini giving a speech, how he juts his jaw out and cocks his face,” David said. The Michels wanted to know what candidate could puncture that air of abrasive confidence in the president. “Trump is that dishonest bully and dishonest bullies often win,” Catherine said. “It’s really scary. So while I might support Bernie Sanders as the guy to stand up against a bully with lots of energy and just die punching him, is that the way to go? Or pick someone in the middle?”

Jim and Mary from Dover, 78 and 74, stood outside waiting to see Biden board his bus. Both said they would vote for the former vice president, but they’d entertained other options — Mary had been impressed with Amy Klobuchar’s performance during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings. But Jim, a former registered Republican, said the senator from Minnesota didn’t stand a chance in the 2020 fray. “In normal times, she might have a chance, right? But this is a war. This is not a nice political process. This is a war and the poor Democrats think they’re going to have a political process and a campaign, and Trump is just gonna fight dirtier than anybody can fight,” he said. He brought up a friend who likes Rush Limbaugh — Jim is not a fan — and I asked if he thought the country’s political climate was in part the fault of the media. “No, it’s a citizen problem,” he said. “If you watch a cable program with these terrible slams, then you have to make a point of watching the other slams. Then you blend the two and hopefully you read a newspaper somewhere.”

Mary considered his point. “So what you’re saying is people should work harder at making their decisions rather than depending on the media to spoon feed it to them?”

A few hours later, voters in North Hampton nursed beers as they waited for actress Ashley Judd, an Elizabeth Warren surrogate, to arrive. But those at one table I approached hadn’t realized they’d walked into a political event. John and Deanna of Hollis, 67 and 58, were friendly, but John told me he’d given me a fake last name — media distrust is a constant theme on the trail. Far from seeking out the political, the couple told me their Republican friends don’t even know they’re Democrats. They only talk politics to each other these days, so as not to rock the boat. “All it would take was one conversation to blow that all up,” John said. He said it’s uncomfortable for them because their friends “talk like everyone feels the same way” about Trump and politics. Lately, John has found that people make assumptions about what you’re OK with. He’d been on a work trip in Texas and, “I sat in a car with a group of people that were customers and I heard them make racial comments and a few years back they wouldn’t have.”

When Judd got up to speak, it was a brief approximation of a politician’s speech — she talked about her humble roots and her connection to Warren and called Trump’s State of the Union “a moral injury.” You get used to hearing anyone with a microphone at events like these say the same sorts of things. But then Judd said something else.

“Earlier today we had a very extraordinarily moving panel with the incredible people in New Hampshire who work at stopping intimate partner violence and stalking,” she said. “It’s a sad thing to say but American men kill American women at a rate of three to four a day and that event was open to the press and none of the media chose to come.”

I’d seen the email for the event. I think I thought the drive was too far, simple as that. If I’m really being honest, I didn’t think about it all that much. Probably because American men do kill American women so often and probably because men have been killing the women they know and love since the dawn of time. Sad, but wholly typical. But it was lacerating to hear the statistic in that cozy New Hampshire bar; you are alive and they are not.

What’s so often lost in the primary rush — the horserace ups and downs — is the primary reason for government: a need to regulate ourselves, to instill order and some semblance of justice in society. But justice is often as wide as the chancellor’s foot — which is to say, wholly unjust. Still, the sense that society has to wrangle some order is agreed upon. What elections are about is what sort of order to instill — economic, diplomatic, militaristic.

Sometimes the little things like keeping people alive gets lost in the shuffle. So too do our individual sensibilities — everything becomes so zoomed out that you can only see a mass of people moving one way or the other, not the component parts. It’s easier to tell that story on television or in 1,200 words.

Catherine Michel’s father was a Trump supporter. He passed away, but when she spoke about him, it was in the present tense, since parents are always on your shoulder, wherever you are. She was explaining to me, I think, that he wasn’t defined by the last presidential candidate he supported. “He raised five girls and a boy. He’s very democratic and loving and liberal and education for the minorities and charity and global warming, of course,” she said. “But then when he listens — the media. …” She sort of paused, looking for the words. “The media has to be really careful.”

[tshifty]

Biden vs Trump

Yeah. This is where we’re at. And this is a post that very clearly needs to be made. We’re gonna preface with a couple things here. 

1. If you even breathe that “Bernie suspending his campaign doesn’t mean he is dropping out” I swear I will hit you over the head with a packet of the FEC regulations which are WHY that language is used for every campaign that drops out of a race. Bernie is no longer running. Biden is our nominee. Denial won’t change that, but it will allow Trump to win. Get your shit together. 

2. I fucking hate Joe Biden. I really, really cannot stand him, not as a person and not as a politician. But guess what!!! It’s him or Trump. That is the reality. And I’ve seen so much shit about Biden and Trump being the same. They are not the same, and that narrative is both ignorant and dangerous. 

So below I’m going to list the main fucking reasons I can think of to vote for Biden. Of course there are more reasons than I am listing below, but the list is already very long. Because right now? This is about democracy vs fascism. This is about human rights. This isn’t about voting for a great candidate or even someone I can truly believe in. I wish it was!! But it isn’t. 

The majority of my information is coming from ontheissues.org

So without further ado, why should you vote for Joe Biden? 

The italicized text is going to emphasize where the fucking bar is with Trump because some of yall seem to have forgotten and that’s dangerous!!

--------

Women’s Rights

Joe Biden supports a women’s right to choose. He believes Congress must act to protect a women’s right to choose. He has recently said he now opposes the Hyde Amendment, which would prohibit federal funds from being used for abortions.  He has committed to have women on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has committed to having a female Vice President. He supports the Me Too movement. 

He isn’t trying to literally strip women of their human rights and take away women’s rights over their own bodies. 

Civil Rights

Joe Biden supports the Equality Act, and wants to enforce the Civil Rights Act to protect LGBTQ+ people. He supports allowing transgender peopel to serve in the military as a right. He supports gay marriage. He has endorsed a diverse slate of candidates for Congress. 

He isn’t a violent racist who welcomes the support from white terrorist groups like the KKK and wants to abolish gay marriage and have conversion therapy. 

The Environment

Will immediately rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. Will work with international leaders to reduce pollution around the world. Is open to developing nuclear technology to combat climate change. Will take away billions of subsidies that are given to oil companies. He introduced the first climate change bill ever in 1986. He wants to give tax credits for homes with solar panels. Invest in batteries to improve solar power. Prioritize climate change as the existential threat that it is. Supports the idea of the Green New Deal and will build off it. Supportive of carbon markets. Invest heavily in renewable energy. 

He doesn’t literally reject science and put an oil man in charge of the EPA and allow coal and fossil fuel companies to absolutely destroy every climate thing we have accomplished federally. 

Gun Regulation

Passed the Brady Bill, which requires a waiting period for handgun purchases as well as a background check for anyone purchasing handguns. He is a strong advocate for gun regulation and for controlling the NRA. He says there is a moral obligation to diminish senseless gun violence. He wants to maintain the assault weapons ban, and close the gun show loophole. He wants to maintain that lawsuits can be brought against gun manufacturers for gun violence. He wants to require background checks at gun shows.

He isn’t allowing the NRA to run around lobbying every Republican politician into allowing gun violence to continue to run rampant in this country and allow people to die every single day because of gun violence including children in their schools. 

Immigration

He is a strong supporter of DACA and of DREAMers. He wants to allow citizenship for DREAMers. He wants to reunite families at the border and end the horrid treatment of locking children in cages at the southern border. He says that asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants, and someone crossing the border to seek asylum is in need of help and must be assisted. He wants to focus on ending the violence that is displacing people from their homes particularly in the Northern Triangle. He wants to improve the visa system and ensure that immigrants get better jobs. He believes we are strong and great because of diversity. 

He isn’t literally locking children in cages and trying to build a physical wall on our Mexican border and trying to stop immigration particularly with inherent underlying racism and he doesn’t literally call all Mexicans rapists. 

The Economy

He supports the creation of green jobs, and believes working to stop climate change can create 10 million new jobs. He wants to increase the minimum wage. He wants to enforce corporate responsibility. Focus on preparing workers for new jobs they’ll need in the future. Supports labor unions which have built the middle class. He wants to extend unemployment benefits, and ensure that there can be no job discrimination by sexual orientation. He wants to push for better free trade agreements that don’t hurt consumers or businesses and supports a transatlantic trade agreement. He wants to double the capital gains tax. 

He isn’t allowing the rich and wealthy to run away blind and he isn’t increasing taxes on the poor and reducing them on the rich and isn’t trying to use his Presidential power as a way to fill his own fucking pockets. 

Healthcare

He is an avid supporter of Obama Care, and wants to build off of it. He wants to reinvest in health agencies to deal with pandemics like coronavirus. He wants to limit the grip of insurance companies on the healthcare industry. He supports funding for cancer cure research. He wants to modernize and expand health insurance. He wants to focus on prevention as a way to reshape healthcare. He wants to limit co-pays to $1,000 maximum. He supports capital gains taxes at bracket levels in order to pay for his health plan. 

He isn’t stripping people of their healthcare because of preexisting conditions and he didn’t literally fire our national pandemic response team before a literal fucking global pandemic and he didn’t refuse help with testing from the WHO and didn’t downplay a global pandemic as a way to stay “politically popular” and allow for Congressional inside trading before the state of emergency was announced. 

Foreign Policy 

He is supportive of NATO and of democracy around the world. Wants to protect the Uighurs in a non-military way by speaking out against China at the UN. Wants to promote LGBTQ+ rights worldwide. Approves $750 million to Central America to address the root causes of migration and displacement. Wants to repair US relations around the globe. Wants to work with China to see a peaceful and equitable rise. Believes that foreign policy requires the informed consent of the American people. He spoke against the US abandoning the Kurds. He wants to rebuild European alliances and keep NATO strong. He wants to work together with Russia on issues that we can even with disagreements. He refute’s George W. Bush’s unilateralist foreign policy approach. He says the US should not police the world. 

He isn’t literally going around hanging out with dictators and isn’t Putin’s fucking puppet and isn’t trying to systematically tear down our democratic society and isn’t flirting on the edge of literal fascism. 

A Brief Collection Of Other Reasons

The Supreme Court: Biden will appoint a progressive to the Supreme Court, which will ensure that it doesn’t permanently slide so far to the right that we cannot bring it back. The Supreme Court is for life. Kavannaugh will be there until he retires or dies. The Supreme Court has the ability to overturn gay marriage and Roe v. Wade. This matters a lot. Not to mention how Trump and the GOP are systematically trying to take over lower-level courts and are placing in violently conservative judges to try to work at overturning vital progressive rulings. This can be seen particularly with abortion at the State level courts. 

The Press: Trump has literally come out swinging with attacks against the press since day one of his campaign. Journalists are the canaries in a coal mine. When a politician attacks the freedom of the press, they are coming after our democracy. That is a slippery slope towards fascism. 

Down Ballot Races: The Presidency is not the only thing on the fucking ballot!!! We still need to keep the House of Representatives, and we need to take back the Senate. We also need to push Democrats at State and local level elections. We need to vote blue all the way down the ballot. We need democrats in their State Senates and State Houses, we need them on their school board committees, we need them in our Congress and we need them in the White House. Voting for Joe Biden will help ensure all of that. 

Gerrymandering: We need to end gerrymandering and systematic racial discrimination in things like districting and housing. Trump and the GOP are furthering these racist policies. Biden and the Democrats will work to undo them, as they already are. If we are to maintain our democracy, we MUST get rid of this. This is about maintaining our future. 

JOE BIDEN AND DONALD TRUMP ARE NOT THE SAME. I am not asking you to like Joe Biden... I don’t like him that much either. I wish he was not our nominee, but he is. That is the reality, and now it’s time for us to all rally the Democratic party. We CANNOT afford for people to pull the same bullshit as in 2016 with Hillary... because look where that got us. We need to rally together, we need to support Democrats at every single place in our political system, and we need to hold our fucking noses and go vote for Joe Biden on November 3rd. 

[destructiveurges]

“We Are All Going To Die” by Black Oak Clique (USA)

An open letter and anti-manifesto to Climate Offensive, Extinction Rebellion, Earth Strike, and other nonviolent movements

When the world ends, people come out of their apartments and meet their neighbors for the first time; they share food, stories, companionship. No one has to go to work or the laundromat; nobody remembers to check the mirror or scale or email account before leaving the house. Graffiti artists surge into the streets; strangers embrace, sobbing and laughing. Every moment possesses an immediacy formerly spread out across months. Burdens fall away, people confess secrets and grant forgiveness, the stars come out over New York City...and nine months later, a new generation is born.

(CrimethInc.)

We’re going to die?

"The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses." But us – me, you, even those who are killing the earth? We’re going to die.

In the worst case scenario, you drown, you starve, or you succumb to heat stroke. Not figuratively. You will drown, you will starve, you will succumb to heat stroke. Perhaps there’s the small chance that you will survive the mass migration to the last reaches of habitable land in and around the poles.

Perhaps.

But let’s be realistic here: In all likelihood, you’re going to die. A slow, horrible, excruciating death at that. We would like to say this is the future we’re hurtling towards at an ever-increasing rate. But it isn’t: it’s the present, the material, graspable present. Islands are sinking into the ocean. The poverty-stricken are freezing to death on the streets. People are burning to death in gigantic wildfires. The collapse is not to be a single event. It’s a process, and it’s currently underway. In the best case scenario, death is liberation. Perhaps the real “you” – your body, your consciousness, your soul, what have you – won’t die, per se: instead, the abstract “you” – your way of life, your social relationships under capitalism, your system of meaning that’s been drilled into your head since day one – will die.

Can’t we reform the system?

No. We can’t. The system is the problem, and the system runs deep. The problem isn’t just capitalism. It’s also the state, but it also isn’t just the state. It’s the ideology of consumption itself: that beings – plants, animals (including humans deemed to be subhuman), fungi, even inanimate natural “resources” – are objects to be bought, sold, and eventually, consumed. This ideology is perhaps the deepest ideology we have. It permeates every form of knowledge: from science, to art, to politics. It seeps through our language (one must think how often we refer to feeling, living beings – ones with the capacity to suffer – as “it.”) It permeates our relationships. It is the very basis of our societies, if it cannot be deemed our “society” itself – the group of capital-h Humans deemed to be worthy enough to be circumscribed by the abstract Community, that constructs itself in opposition to literally everything else.

Your favorite pet politician isn’t immune to this. Not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not Bernie Sanders, not Jill Stein. Not the Democratic Socialists, not the Green Party, not the CPUSA, and not anyone else, either. Perhaps their hearts are in the right place – but sadly, that isn’t enough. To quote the amazing piece Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos:

Some people oppose capitalism on environmental grounds, but think some sort of state is necessary to prevent ecocide. But the state is itself a tool for the exploitation of nature. Socialist states such as the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China have been among the most ecocidal regimes imaginable. That these two societies never escaped the dynamics of capitalism is itself a feature of the state structure — it necessitates hierarchical, exploitative economic relationships of control and command, and once you start playing that game nothing beats capitalism.

What about nonviolence?

Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

(Malcolm X)

The struggle against ecocide was never nonviolent, and it never will be, because it cannot be. That’s because ecocide is violence: violence against me and you, against animals (wild and domestic,) against the trees and the grass and the water and the mountains. Climate insurrection is self-defense. Strict adherence to nonviolence – that is, the rejection of violence – is complicity in the face of ecological destruction. It is not “offensive,” it is not “rebellion,” and it’s not a “strike” at climate change. Many of us do not have the privilege of being nonviolent – namely, those of us who already marginalized. We will be the first to go. We’re the rural farm workers and their families being sprayed with pesticides. We’re the houseless freezing to death in polar vortices. We’re the indigenous peoples whose homes are being swallowed by the sea. We’re the poor who will not have the capital necessary to complete the long trek north to the last remaining habitable lands. If we aren’t violent – if we don’t rebel against the system that oppresses us – we will be crushed. Don’t be complicit in our death, in your death.

What’s climate insurrection?

Perhaps the only hope me or you have. It’s destroying that which destroys us - by any means possible.

Wouldn’t that hurt the movement?

No. A better question would be: what has “nonviolent” protest won us in the long run? The answer: absolutely nothing. Many supposedly “nonviolent” movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, were incredibly violent. There were hundreds of riots throughout the United States, and of course, the existence of armed paramilitary groups such as the Black Panthers, or the Brown Berets. One could make the argument that this narrative of nonviolence is pushed by the very people whose power would be threatened by violence, because violence means (perhaps immediate) change. Hence: why those in the US celebrate Martin Luther King Day, a federally recognized holiday; but not Malcolm X Day. Even the most-oft example of nonviolent resistance, the Indian independence movement, was not so. Bhagat Singh, who after his execution became a folk hero of the cause, was inspired by French anarchist Auguste Vaillant to bomb the British Raj’s Central Legislative Assembly. Less than a year before, he had assassinated a British police officer in retaliation for the death of the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai.

Wouldn’t it be counterproductive?

Counterproductive to what? Getting meaningless reforms passed? Getting empty pyrrhic victories in the legal circuit? Performing impotent marches through major cities that don’t achieve anything other than receiving lukewarm press from second-rate newspapers? Ask the battery hen liberated from cramped cages by animal activists, or the old-growth forest protected indefinitely by logging saboteurs (and all the animals who call those forest home): is direct action productive?

Anarchist action— patient, hidden, tenacious, involving individuals, eating away at institutions like a worm eats away at fruit, as termites undermine majestic trees — such action does not lend itself to the theatrical effects of those who wish to draw attention to themselves.

To quote the great illusionist Georges Méliès, "I must say, to my great regret, the cheapest tricks have the greatest impact."

If insurrection is so great, how come people aren’t doing it now?

They are. You just haven’t heard of it because the media is smart enough to hide it. Hearing about the heroic stories of those who fight back would be too dangerous for most to hear – it runs the risk of radicalizing them. Movements like the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts, have been waging war against ecocide since the 1970s.

I don’t want to go to prison.

We dream of a world without prisons.

I’m scared.

We’re scared too, friend. We should be, but we should be

strong, too

What can we do?

We’ll let the great animal activist Keith Mann speak for us.

Labs raided, locks glued, products spiked, depots ransacked, windows smashed, construction halted, mink set free, fences torn down, cabs burnt out, officesin flames, car tires slashed, cages emptied, phone lines severed, slogans daubed, muck spread, damage done, electrics cut, site flooded, hunt dogs stolen, fur coats slashed, buildings destroyed, foxes freed, kennels attacked, businesses burgled, uproar, anger, outrage, balaclava clad thugs.

What if I don’t have the ability to fight?

You do, even if you can’t physically. Despite the tone of this letter, we aren’t totally opposed to above-ground action. In fact, in some cases, we think it’s necessary. Groups like the Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Group and the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group are active in representing and advocating for operatives. As Sinn Féin, the Irish political party once associated with the militant IRA has been described:

Both Sinn Féin and the IRA play different but converging roles in the war of national liberation. The Irish Republican Army wages an armed campaign... Sinn Féin maintains the propaganda war and is the public and political voice of the movement.

What happens next?

We don’t know. But with any luck, we’ve laid out our options.

(via Heresy Distro)

[hope-for-olicity]

I have been thinking, like so many people this week, about rage. Who I’m mad at, what that anger’s good for, how what makes me maddest is the way the madness has long gone unrespected, even by those who have relied on it for their gains.

For as long as I have been a cogent adult, and actually before that, I have watched people devote their lives, their furious energies, to fighting against the steady, merciless, punitive erosion of reproductive rights. And I have watched as politicians — not just on the right, but members of my own party — and the writers and pundits who cover them, treat reproductive rights and justice advocates as if they were fantasists enacting dystopian fiction.

This week, the most aggressive abortion bans since Roe v. Wade swept through states, explicitly designed to challenge and ultimately reverse Roe at the Supreme Court level. With them has come the dawning of a broad realization — a clear, bright, detailed vision of what’s at stake, and what’s ahead. (If not, yet, full comprehension of the harm that has already been done).

As it comes into view, I am of course livid at the Republican Party that has been working toward this for decades. These right-wing ghouls — who fulminate idiotically about how women could still be allowed to get abortions before they know they are pregnant (Alabama’s Clyde Chambliss) or try to legislate the medically impossible removal of ectopic pregnancy and reimplantation into the uterus (Ohio’s John Becker) — are the stuff of unimaginably gothic horror. Ever since Roe was decided in 1973, conservatives have been laboring to roll back abortion access, with absolutely zero knowlege of or interest in how reproduction works. And all the while, those who have been trying to sound the alarm have been shooed off as silly hysterics.

Which is why I am almost as mad at many on the left, theoretically on the side of reproductive rights and justice, who have refused, somehow, to see this coming or act aggressively to forestall it. I have no small amount of rage stored for those in the Democratic Party who have relied on the engaged fury of voters committed to reproductive autonomy to elect them, at the same time that they have treated the efforts of activists trying to stave off this future as inconvenient irritants.

This includes, of course, the Democrats (notably Joe Biden) who long supported the Hyde Amendment, the legislative rider that has barred the use of federal insurance programs from paying for abortion, making reproductive health care inaccessible to poor women since 1976. During health-care reform, Barack Obama referred to Hyde as a “tradition” and questions of abortion access as “a distraction.” I’ve spent my life listening to Democrats call abortion a niche issue — and worse, one that is somehow repellent to voters, even though support for Roe is in fact among the most broadly popular positions of the Democratic Party; seven in ten Americans want abortion to remain legal, even in conservative states.

You can try to tell these Democrats this — lots of people have been trying to tell them for a while now — but it won’t matter; they will only explain to you (a furious person) that they (calm, wise, knowledgeable about politics) understand that we need a big tent and can’t have a litmus test and please be reasonable: we shouldn’t shut anyone out because of a difference on one issue. (That one issue that we shouldn’t shut people out because of is always abortion). Every single time Democrats come up with a new strategy to win purple and red areas, it is the same strategy: hey, let’s jettison abortion! (If you object to this, you will be told you are standing in the way of the greater progressive project).

I grew up in Pennsylvania, governed by anti-abortion Democrat Bob Casey Sr.; his son Bob Jr. is Pennsylvania’s senior senator now, and though he’s getting better on abortion, Jr. voted, in 2015 and 2018, for 20-week abortion bans. Maybe my rage stems from being raised with this particularly grim perspective on Democratic politics: dynasties of white men united in their dedication to restricting women’s bodily autonomy, but they’re Democrats so who else are you going to vote for? Which reminds me of Dan Lipinski, the virulently anti-abortion Democratic congressman — whose anti-abortion dad held his seat before him. The current DCCC leader, Cheri Bustos, is holding a big-dollar fundraiser for Lipinski’s reelection campaign, even though it’s 2019 and abortion is being banned and providers threatened with more jail time than rapists and there is someone else to vote for: Lipinski is being challenged in a primary by pro-choice progressive Democrat Marie Newman. And still, Bustos, a powerful woman and Democratic leader, is helping anti-choice Lipinski keep his seat for an eighth term. So I’ve been thinking about that part of my anger too.

Also about how, for years, I’ve listened to Democratic politicians distance themselves from abortion by calling it tragic and insisting it should be rare, instead of simply acknowledging it to be a crucial, legal cornerstone of comprehensive health care for women, people with uteruses, and their families. I have seethed as generations of Democrats have argued that if we could just get past abortion and focus instead on economic issues, we’d be better off. They never seem to get that abortion is an economic issue, and that what they think of as economic issues — from wages and health care to housing and education policy — are at the very heart of the reproductive justice movement, which understands access to abortion to be one (pivotal!) part of a far broader set of circumstances that determine if, when, under what circumstances, and with what resources human beings might have and raise children.

And no, of course it’s not just Democrats I’m mad at. It’s the pundits who approach abortion law as armchair coaches. I can’t do better in my fury on this front than the legal writer Scott Lemieux, who in 2007 wrote ablistering rundown of all the legal and political wags, including Ben Wittes and Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Cohen and William Saletan, then making arguments, some too cute by half, about how Roe was ultimately bad for abortion rights and for Democrats. Some like to cite an oft-distorted opinion put forth by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has said that she wished the basis on which Roe was decided had included a more robust defense of women’s equality. Retroactive strategic chin-stroking about Roe is mostly moot, given the decades of intervening cases and that the fight against abortion is not about process but about the conviction that women should not control their own reproduction. It is also true that Ginsburg has been doing the work of aggressively defending reproductive rights for decades, while these pundits have treated them as a parlor game. As Lemieux put it then, it was unsurprising, “given the extent to which affluent men safely ensconced in liberal urban centers dominate the liberal pundit class,” that the arguments put forth, “greatly understate or ignore the stark class and geographic inequites in abortion access that would inevitably manifest themselves in a post-Roe world.”

Or, for that matter, that had already manifested themselves in a Roe world.

Because long before these new bans — which will meet years of legal challenge before they are enacted — abortion had grown ever less accessible to segments of America, though not the segments that the affluent men (and women) who write about and practice politics tend to emerge from. But yes, thanks to Hyde and the TRAP laws and the closed clinics and the long travel distances and paucity of providers and the economically untenable waiting periods, legions of women have already suffered, died, had children against their will, while columnists and political consultants have bantered about the necessity of Roe, and litmus tests and big tents. In vast portions of this country, Roe might as well not exist already.

And still those who are mad about, have been driven mad by, these injustices have been told that their fury is baseless, fictional, made of chewing gum and recycled copies of Our Bodies Ourselves. Last summer, the day before Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation from the Supreme Court, CNN host Brian Stelter tweeted, in response to a liberal activist, “We are not ‘a few steps from The Handmaids’ Tale.’ I don’t think this kind of fear-mongering helps anybody.” When protesters shouted at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings a few weeks later, knowing full well what was about to happen and what it portended for Roe, Senator Ben Sasse condescended and lied to them, claiming that there have been “screaming protesters saying ‘women are going to die’ at every hearing for decades” and suggesting that this response was a form of “hysteria.”

It was the kind of dishonesty — issued from on high, from one of those Republicans who has inexplicably earned a reputation for being “reasonable” and “smart,” and who has enormous power over our future — that makes you want to pull the hair from your head and go screaming through the streets except someone would just tell you you were being hysterical.

And so here we are, the thing is happening and no one can pretend otherwise; it is not a game or a drill and those for whom the consequences — long real for millions whose warnings and peril have gone unheeded — are only now coming into focus want to know: what can be done?

First, never again let anyone tell you that the fury or determination to fight on this account is invalid, inappropriate, or inconvenient to a broader message. Consider that this is also what women and marginalized people are told all the time about their anger in general: that they should not express it, not let it out, because to give voice to their rage will distract from their aims, undermine them; that it will ultimately be bad for them. This messaging is strategic. It is designed to get angry people to keep their mouths shut. Because if they are successfully stifled, they will remain at the margins, isolated, alone in their fury. It is only if they start letting it out and acting on it and working in tandem with others who share their outrage that they might begin to form networks, coalitions, the building blocks of movements; it is when the anger is let loose that the organizing happens in earnest.

Second, seek the organizing that is already underway. In the days since this new round of state abortion bans have begun to pass and make headlines, secret Facebook groups have begun to form, in which freshly furious women have begun to talk of forming networks that would help patients evade barriers to access. Yet these organizations already exist, are founded and run by women of color, have long been transporting those in need of reproductive care to the facilities where they can get it; they are woefully underfunded. The trick is not to start something new, but to join forces with those who have long been angry about reproductive injustice.

“Abortion funds have been sounding the alarm for decades,” said Yamani Hernandez, who runs the National Network or Abortion Funds, which includes 76 local funds in 41 states, each of them helping women who face barriers getting the abortion care they need, offering money, transportation, housing, and help with logistics. Only 29 of the funds have paid staff; the rest are volunteer-run and led with average budget sizes of $75,000, according to Hernandez, who said that in 2017, 150,000 people called abortion funds for help — a number up from 100,000 in 2015, thanks to the barrage of restrictions that have made it so much harder for so many more people. With just $4 million to work with, the funds were able to help 29,000 of them last year: giving abortion funds money and time will directly help people who need it. Distinguishing the work of abortion funds from the policy fights in state houses and at the capitols, Hernandez said, “whatever happens in Washington, and changes in the future, women need to get care today.”

And whatever comes next, she said, it’s the people who have been doing this work for years who are likely to be best prepared to deal with the harm inflicted, which is a good place for the newly enraged to start. “If and when Roe is abolished,” said Hernandez, “the people who are going to be getting people to the care they need are those who have largely been navigating this already and are already well suited for the logistical challenges.”

The fights on the ground might be the most current and urgent in human terms, but there is also energy to be put into policy fights. In 2015, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee authored the EACH Woman Act, the first serious congressional challenge to the Hyde Amendment, which came after years of agitation and activism, especially by All Above All, a grassroots organization led by women of color and determined to make abortion accessible to everyone. Those who are looking for policy fights to lean into can call and write your representatives and candidates and demand that they support the EACH Woman Act.

Rage works. It takes time and numbers and a willingness to express it, but it is among the most reliable catalysts of social and political change. That’s the story of how grassroots activism can compel Barbara Lee to compel her caucus to take on Hyde. Her willingness to tackle it, and the righteous outrage of those who are driven to end the harm it does to poor women and women of color, in turn helped to compel Hillary Clinton to come out against Hyde in her 2016 primary campaign; opposition to Hyde is now — for the first time since it was passed in 1976 — a part of the Democratic Party’s platform.

In these past two years, fury at a Trump administration and at the Republican Party has driven electoral activism. And at the end of 2018, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 2018 was the first year since at least 2000 in which the number of state policies enacted to expand or protectabortion rights and access, and contraceptive access, outnumbered the number of state restrictions. Why? Because growing realization of what was at stake — and resulting anger and activism, pressure applied to state legislatures — led representatives to act.

Of course: vote.

Vote, as they say, as if your life depended on it, because it does, but more importantly: other people’s lives depend on it. And between voting, consider where to aim your anger in ways that will influence election outcomes: educate yourself about local races and policy proposals, as well as the history of the reproductive rights and reproductive-justice movements. Get engaged not just on a presidential level — please God, not just at a presidential level — but with the fights for state legislative power, in congressional and senate elections, all of which shape abortion policy and the judiciary, and the voting rights on which every other kind of freedom hinges. Knock doors, register voters, give to and volunteer with the organizations that are working to fightvoter suppression and redistricting and expand the electorate; as well as to those recruiting and training progressive candidates, especially women and women of color, especially young and first-time candidates, to run for elected office.

You can also protest, go to rallies. Join a local political group where your rage will likely be shared with others.

Above all, do not let defeat or despair take you, and do not let anyone tell you that your anger is misplaced or silly or in vain, or that it is anything other than urgent and motivating. It may be terrifying — it is terrifying. But this — the fury and the fight it must fuel — is going to last the rest of our lives and we must get comfortable using our rage as central to the work ahead.

[crimethinc]

Life in “Mueller Time”: The Politics of Waiting and the Spectacle of Investigation

For almost two years now, faithful Democrats have waited for special counsel Robert Mueller to file his report about collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian attempts to interfere in the US election, not to mention Trump’s involvement in obstruction of justice. Whenever Trump’s activity provokes them or a subterranean rumbling within the Justice Department emboldens them, the faithful take to the streets and social media with hand-held cardboard signs and internet memes to proclaim that Mueller Time is close at hand. Yet even if the Mueller investigation concludes with Trump’s impeachment, the spectacle of the investigation has served to immobilize millions who have a stake in systemic social change, ensuring that what comes next in the United States will be politics as usual—not liberation.

When you’ve fallen on the highway And you’re lying in the rain, And they ask you how you’re doing Of course you’ll say you can’t complain If you’re squeezed for information, That’s when you’ve got to play it dumb You just say you’re out there waiting For the miracle, for the miracle to come

-The 20th century’s greatest messianic thinker, Leonard Cohen

Within weeks of the beginning of the investigation, there were already think pieces and t-shirts proclaiming “It’s Mueller Time.” Let’s take the t-shirts at their word: maybe it’s been Mueller Time all along. Maybe Mueller Time is not a specific date that is about to arrive, but the era we’ve been experiencing these past two years.

In that case, Mueller Time is not an hour on the clock, but a way of experiencing time, a kind of time—like crunch time or quality time or go time, but the opposite of all of them. It is not a scale of time, like geologic time, or a time zone, like Eastern Standard Time—Mueller Time is more like the End Times, perpetually anticipated.

To be precise, Mueller Time is the political suspended animation in which the Democrats have waited for a repeatedly deferred deus ex machina to deliver them from this unbearable pres(id)ent. This condition of waiting, itself, rather than any of the grievous injustices that have taken place during it, is the very essence of hell.

Dante, the Marco Polo of the Abyss, located Limbo, the residence of those who wait, in Inferno, not in Purgatory. Waiting is not transformative or redemptive—it is the sort of sin for which the punishment is the crime. “Limbo” shares a Latin root with liminal—it is homeland of those who tarry on the threshold, those who are on the fence.

If you can get people used to waiting, you can get them used to anything.

To understand Mueller Time better, we can begin with its namesake. “Miller time” is a time to take a load off, to ease our pain by drugging ourselves into oblivion. It’s a profound expression of despair—“I can only relax in this world by deadening my senses”—disguised not just as relief but as celebration. What is the glee with which Democrats invoke Mueller Time if not an admission of their own abject powerlessness and dependence? “Rejoice,” says the Democrat, “Justice will be done! And thank goodness, as usual, the FBI will take care of everything.”

Miller Time and Mueller Time are both chronotopes, to use the term popularized by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin: they are specific relationships to time. You cannot understand a group of people without understanding how they experience the passing of time. Peering between chronotopes produces strange refractions, like looking through a glass of water. How different the world appears to a person whose activism consists chiefly of waiting, in contrast to how it appears to those for whom waiting and acting are opposites! It is the difference between spectator and athlete, between the consumer and the inventor, between those who suffer history as if it were weather and those who make history as a side effect of understanding themselves as the protagonists of their time.

And Miller Time and Mueller Time are both marketed chronotopes. Miller Time is the “5 o’clock somewhere” that unites wage labor and intoxication in a mutually reinforcing false opposition—but even more importantly, it is the branded colonization of that time. Likewise, Mueller Time is not just the “he’ll get his” which all people of conscience wish for Trump, but a particular deferral of responsibility. Both are successful advertising campaigns that concentrate capital in certain hands precisely by inducing people not to take their problems into their own hands.

“The politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis,’ and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing.”

-Walter Benjamin on how Social Democrats permitted the Third Reich to come to power in Germany

All this is familiar to those who were raised as Adventists, believing that the outrageous sinfulness of the prevailing world order indicates the imminence of the Resurrection and the necessity of repentance before authority. Mueller Time is the redemption, the arrival of the Millennium, when the legitimate authorities will reassert their dominion and the obedient will be rewarded for their patience. Good Christians have awaited this for two thousand years; they have made a religion out of waiting. You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

To keep people waiting for salvation indefinitely, it helps to shift every once in a while from one source of dramatic tension to another. Some hoped Trump would run the country “like a business.” Now that the signature forms of evil associated with capitalism—nepotism, profiteering, corruption, race baiting, sexual harassment, misinformation—characterize the presidency, Democrats are proposing to return to the good-old-fashioned signature forms of evil previously associated with government: bureaucracy, clientelism, experts deciding the fates of millions behind closed doors. All the things that helped Trump come to office.

For the purposes of relegitimizing government, it is ideal that Robert Mueller is not just a “good” authority figure, but specifically, a white male Republican—an FBI director who first made a name for himself overseeing the killing of Vietnamese people. He is everything the average Democrat would oppose if Trump had not moved the goal posts by pursuing the same Republican agenda by potentially extra-legal means. Mueller represents the same FBI that attempted to make Martin Luther King, Jr. commit suicide, that set out to destroy the Occupy movement. Under Mueller’s leadership, the FBI determined that the number one domestic terror threat in the United States was environmental activism.

Mueller Time is a way of inhabiting the eternally renewed amnesia that is America. This is the real “deep state”—the part of each Democrat’s heart that will accept any amount of senseless violence and murder and oppression, as long as it adheres to the letter of the law.

“Definitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment—the status quo threatens to preserve itself. Progress—the first revolutionary measure taken.”

-Walter Benjamin

What will be the fruits of Mueller’s labors?

Rank-and-file Democrats still don’t understand how power works. Crime is not the violation of the rules, but the stigma attached to those who break rules without the power to make them. (As they say, steal $25, go to jail; steal $25 million, go to Congress.) At the height of Genghis Khan’s reign, it would have been pointless to accuse the famous tyrant of breaking the laws of the Mongol Empire; as long as Trump has enough of Washington behind him, the same goes for him. Laws don’t exist in some transcendent realm. They are simply the product of power struggles among the elite—not to mention the passivity of the governed—and they are enforced according to the prevailing balance of power. To fetishize the law is to accept that might makes right. It means abdicating the responsibility to do what is ethical regardless of what the laws happen to be.

In the struggle to control the law-making and law-enforcing apparatus of the US government, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have secured a solid majority. They remain at an impasse. The most likely explanation for Mueller’s delays is that he has been biding his time, waiting to see if the balance of power in the US government would shift enough that there could be some consequences to his report.

The wait The wait The wait The wait

The wait The wait The wait The wait

-Killing Joke, “The Wait”

Ironically, the only thing that could guarantee that Mueller’s report will have an effect would be if this impasse were disturbed by forces outside the halls of power—for example, by a real social movement utilizing direct action. If millions of people were in the streets preventing the Trump administration from accomplishing its agenda, then the power brokers in Washington would consider sacrificing Donald Trump to preserve business as usual.

In standing back and waiting, affirming the authority of the FBI and Congress to take care of matters, Mueller’s fans make it less likely that his investigation will pose a serious threat to the administration. The rank and file Democrats are left gazing at their screens, watching the bureaucratic equivalent of the spinning wheel of death.

In this case, the more you clap your hands, the less Tinkerbell exists.

I’m in the waiting room I don’t want the news—I cannot use it I don’t want the news—I won’t live by it

But I don’t sit idly by I’m planning a big surprise I’m gonna fight for what I wanna be And I won’t make the same mistakes Because I know how much time that wastes

-Fugazi “Waiting Room”

The arc of history is long, but it curves towards—death. There is no excuse to delay. Tomorrow will use you the way we use today.

What would it mean to stop waiting?

It would mean to stop looking to others to solve our problems, no longer permitting a series of presidents, Speakers of the House, FBI directors, presidential candidates, and other bullies and hucksters to play good cop/bad cop with us.

It would mean figuring out how to deal with the catastrophes that Trump’s presidency is causing directly, rather than through the mediation of other authority figures. It would mean building up social movements powerful enough to block the construction of a border wall, to liberate children from migrant detention facilities and reunite them with their families, to feed the hungry and care for the sick without waiting for legislators to give us permission to make use of the resources that we and others like us maintain on a daily basis.

Remember when we shut down the airports immediately after Trump took office? It would mean doing more of that, and less sitting around waiting on politicians and bureaucrats. That was our proudest moment. Since then, we have only grown weaker, distracted by the array of champions competing to represent us—the various media outlets and Democratic presidential candidates—all surrogates for our own agency.

Let’s stop killing time. Or rather—let’s stop permitting it to kill us.

“We live the whole of our lives provisionally,” he said. “We think that for the time being things are bad, that for the time being we must make the best of them and adapt or humiliate ourselves, but that it’s all only provisional and that one day real life will begin. We prepare for death complaining that we have never lived. Of all the people I know, not one lives in the present. No one gets any pleasure from what he does every day. No one is in a condition to say On that day, at that moment, my life began. Believe me, even those who have power and take advantage of it are plagued with anxieties and disgusted at the dominant stupidity. They too live provisionally and spend their whole lives waiting.”

“Those who flee the country also spend their lives waiting,” Pietro said. “That’s the trouble. But one mustn’t wait, one must act. One must say Enough, from this very day.”

“But if you do not have the freedom to act?” Nunzio said.

“Freedom is not a thing you can receive as a gift,” Pietro said. “You can be free even under a dictatorship on the simple condition that you struggle against it. A person who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is free. A person who struggles for what she believes to be right is free. You might live in the most democratic country in the world, but if you are lazy, callous, and servile, you are not free—in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave. Freedom is not a thing that can be begged from others. You must take it for yourself, in whatever share you can.”

-Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine

Further Reading

Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom

The Centrists

[daemosghost]

I cant say this on twitter dot com because then the feds would be at my door but I wish every republican and politician in general a very I hope you die from “mysterious” causes especially if you were born during the jim crow and segregation era