#if you want to capture votes from the third party you will have to make your platform more closely resemble the thrid party's platform

[adrift-at-c]

How does calling, writing, or protesting exert pressure on a politician? These are all ways of making a request of a politician, why would that politician grant that request? Only because not doing so costs them something. What does ignoring a letter cost a politician? Mostly support. Why would a politician want to avoid losing your support?

Because they might lose your vote.

Calling, writing letters, and protesting* are all ways to tell a politician "Do this or I will not vote for you." Protesting* in particular is a way to say "Do this, or not only will I not vote for you, I will hurt your public image, which will convince others not to vote for you." If you are not willing to follow through with this threat and withhold your vote, ignoring these requests has no cost to the politician. Ignoring you is perfectly safe.

That isn't to say that withholding your vote is always the best strategy, but it is a strategy, and like all strategies it has tradeoffs. If the politician ignores you, you take the risk that a worse politician will win, in exchange for the possibility that future requests will be granted now that the other politician knows your threats are genuine. This makes sense only if the cost of losing is low, and the benefits of being heard by a politician are high.

The opposite tactic of voting for a candidate regardless of whether or not they listen to you makes sense if the cost of losing is high and the benefits of being heard are low. However, this too has tradeoffs. You can ensure the worse politician doesn't win, but you are giving up any leverage you might have over the better politician to do so, and can't expect them to listen to your requests. You don't get to ask that politician for anything, because they now know that if they refuse, you will say, "I understand, and I will give you whatever you want anyway."

I think that in this election, the second strategy makes the most sense. But if you intend to use it, you need to be realistic about what it will cost. You can't have your cake and then base your strategy on eating it too.

*Protesting has the ability to make use of threats other than withholding your vote, and can still exert pressure if you can find one. The college protests earlier this year took this form. "Divest yourself of holdings in companies contributing to the genocide in Palestine, or I will prevent your campus from operating, costing you increasing amounts of money with each day you refuse." However, if you don't explicitly make such a threat, your protest can only communicate a threat to withhold your vote.

I have no idea what Harris' actual views on I/P are, but even if she is fully pro-Palestine wouldn't she still have to meet with Netanyahu? I mean realistically any change the US can possibly make would have to involve talking to Israel, right? Presidents meet with Putin even if they hate him/Russia's actions because that's how international politics works, it doesn't mean they like/agree with him

Well, theoretically, there's a bit of political game playing involved yes. But because the ICC has issued warrants for Netanyahu's arrest, if we're strictly following international law, Netanyahu shouldn't have been meeting anybody, he should have been arrested. But we're not doing that because the US currently thinks the ICC is wrong, which is a bad look for the US and which undermines the strength of international law, so I think this is bad and also wrong, but that's what's happening at present. And although US presidents etc have historically met with Putin, they would not at this point because Putin also has warrants out for his arrest. The difference between how the US has treated Putin v Netanyahu is, as it seems, pretty hypocritical.

Practically speaking, as you say, meeting with Netanyahu is a bit of a political game. The US has historically been a very strong ally to Israel and the US has historically been very much involved in the normalization of relations vis a vis Israel and the rest of the Middle East, and the US would very much like to remain involved in brokering a lasting peace, which involves not seriously alienating Netanyahu and Israel et al. Netanyahu and his far-right government are the ones holding up the ceasefire, and the US is only able to exert pressure so long as they are a valuable ally to Israel - if Israel has nothing to lose, in other words, the US loses its ability to exert pressure. And Harris wants very much to hang onto that ability, because she's setting herself up to exert more pressure than Biden has.

Harris has been critical of Israel. Harris is the highest-ranking Dem that has been critical of the situation in Gaza. She has been upfront about highlighting the suffering in Gaza. She's not oblivious to the conversations going on re: Palestine and the ongoing genocide. She's not sticking her head in the sand on it.

“The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time - we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”

But she's trying to walk a very careful line on public sentiment re: Israel and Palestine. She's going to be very cautious to condemn anything with even a whiff of antisemitism in strong terms. She's going to be very cautious to affirm Israel's right to exist and to defend itself, which she does in the article linked above, with the caveat that "how it does so matters." But her willingness to call attention to the crisis ongoing in Gaza and her willingness to imply wrong-doing by Israel in how that crisis has been created signals to Netanyahu that her government will have stronger limits than Netanyahu has encountered previously. Will she be a perfect candidate? No. Will she always align with my moral compass? No. Will she be totally evil? Also no.

As voters, what does this mean for us and how we support Gazans and Palestinians?

To me this is very simple. Harris is a candidate who is willing and able to exert pressure on Israel to end the genocide and, ideally, to broker a long-lasting peace. Trump is a candidate who is willing and able to exert pressure on Israel to blow Gaza off the face of the earth. Between "willing to tell Netanyahu this is unacceptable" and "willing to tell Netanyahu to break out a nuke," I'm voting for the former every fucking time.

Not voting or voting third party doesn't actually tell Democrats anything except that you didn't care. They don't have a list of people who would otherwise have voted blue if only they'd taken harder pro-Palestine stance, they're not cross-checking your voting status against your social media posts and going, oh, nuts, we lost that one. Not voting or voting third party doesn't exert pressure on the Dems to go more left, you're not "teaching them a lesson," you're not making a point. It's non-information. It's not a boycott - it's a white flag. It's giving up.

You know how you exert pressure on politicians? You call. You write. You protest. Are you still calling your representatives about Gaza every day? Are you going to town halls and asking them about what they're doing to stop the genocide? Pressure is exerted through participation.

Progress is made by the people who show up.

If the Dems lose, you can pressure them all day and it won't make a difference because they don't have any power to make a difference. And the racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Middle East far right won't be listening no matter how much you shout.

I'm not giving up on Palestinians just because some greyface anon on the internet tells me I'm a bad person for choosing to vote for the candidate I can pressure to make a change.

I'm also not going to give up on people here at home who's lives are hanging in the balance. I'm a queer woman with a uterus and a pre-existing condition - I simply do not have the luxury or the privilege to stay home in November. I do not have the luxury or the privilege of being a single issue voter. I'm not going to give up on trans kids or immigrants or BIPOC or women or disabled folks or poor folks. I'm not going to give up on healthcare or on libraries or on public schools or on the environment or on the court systems. I'm not going to give up on safe workplaces and livable wages and safe products. I'm not going to give up and let corporate monopolies and censorship and AI and five rich dudes decide what the future will be.

Don't you care? Don't you look around you and care about the people in your own communities? Or are those people too real, too complicated? Do you only care when you can win points off it in someone else's inbox on tumblr dot com?

Is Kamala Harris going to be the perfect pro-Palestinian candidate? No. But I'm not inviting her to brunch. I don't need her to be my bestie. I don't need her to be my moral compass - I have one of my own, thanks.

I just need her to step forward instead of back.

Progress is made one step at a time.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When parties fail, movements step up

This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

Does anyone like the American two party system? The parties are opaque, private organizations, weak institutions that are prone to capture and corruption, and gerrymandering's "safe seats" means that the real election often takes place in the party's smoke-filled rooms, when a sure-thing candidate is selected:

https://doctorow.medium.com/weak-institutions-a26a20927b27

But there doesn't seem to be any way to fix it. For one thing, the two parties are in charge of any reform, and they're in no hurry to put themselves out of business. It's effectively impossible for a third party to gain any serious power in the USA, and that's by design. After the leftist Populists party came within a spitting distance of power in the 1890s, the Dems and Repubs got together and cooked the system, banning fusion voting and erecting other structural barriers.

The Nader and Perot campaigns were doomed from the outset, in other words. Either candidate could have been far more popular than the D and R on the ballot, and they still would have lost. It's how the deck is stacked, and to unstack it, reformers would need to take charge of at least one – and probably both – of the parties.

But that's not cause for surrender – it's a call to action. In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal) sets out another locus of power, one with the potential to deliver control over the party to its base: social movements:

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/ordinary-people-by-the-millions

It's been done before. The parties are routinely transformed by power-shifts within their internal coalitions: since 1970, corporate Dems have consistently pushed the party to the right, making it the power of white-collar professionals and relying on working people showing up and marking their ballots with a D because they have "nowhere else to go."

Bill Clinton was the most successful of these corporate raiders, delivering the parts of the Reagan Revolution that Reagan himself could never have managed: dismantling tariffs and bank regulations, passing the crime bill and welfare "reform." He came within a whisper of (partially) privatizing Social Security.

This set in motion the forces that made Trumpism possible: when Dems told deindustrialized workers to "learn to code" and blamed them for the destruction of their communities, it opened a space for Make America Great Again, the (empty) workerist rhetoric of the GOP. The Dems' plan of putting "really smart people" in charge and letting them run things was a (predictable) disaster. "Really smart" isn't the same as "infallible" and really smart people can be spooked or bulled into doing the wrong thing – like Obama "foaming the runways" for the banks with the houses of mortgage holders, and leaving the bankers responsible for the Great Financial Crisis unscathed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

"Really smart people" can't get us out of this mess. Instead, we need the kind of muscular political action – the "whirlwind" – that characterized FDR's New Deal: "complete reformation of the banking industry.. just about every other industry as well. Regulation. Social Security. Public works. Antitrust. Soil conservation."

FDR got there by alienating his former classmates and refusing the go-slow entreaties of his cronies. He got there because there was a mass social movement that made him do it ("I want to do it, now make me do it"):

https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/i-agree-with-you-i-want-to-do-it-now-make-me-do-it/

Every time in US history where one of the political party duopoly listened to its base, it was because of a mass social movement: the farmers' movement (1890s), labor (1930s), civil rights and antiwar (1960s). As Frank says:

Social movements succeed. They build and they change the intellectual climate and then, when the crisis comes, they make possible things like agrarian reform or the New Deal or the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s.

Today, we see the seeds of those social movements: the new union movement. Black Lives Matter. Neobrandeisians with their "hipster antitrust." These are the movements that are creating "ideas lying around": ideas that, in time of crisis, can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink:

https://doctorow.medium.com/ideas-lying-around-33a28901a7ae

They are setting in motion another transformation of the Democratic Party, from its top-down, "really smart people" model to a bottom-up, people-powered one, kept in check by movements, not party bosses. As Frank says, "They require the mass participation of ordinary people. Without that, I am afraid that nothing is possible."

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/17/popular-front-of-judea/#speaking-frankly

[deadpresidents]

another question about 2004: if kerry wasn't your first or second or third choice, who was if you don't mind sharing?

As the 2004 campaign cycle was starting to get moving (in 2003), I was actually hoping for a Biden candidacy. I was always a Joe Biden fan and thought that the timing was finally right for him in 2004, but he didn't even dip his toes into that race. I also held out some hope that Bill Bradley would jump in the 2004 race. I supported Bradley -- a former U.S. Senator from New Jersey (and Hall of Fame basketball player in the NBA and college) -- early on in the 2000 Democratic primaries before Gore ran away with things, and he was our version of a maverick progressive in 1999.

Once it became clear that Biden and Bradley weren't running and Gore showed no interest in once again running for an office that he had won four years earlier only to have it taken away by a party-line vote of the Supreme Court, I quickly shifted my support over to Howard Dean. Those of you who weren't old enough back then will think this is crazy, but for a few weeks in late-2003/early-2004, Howard Dean was a rock star and looked like not only a sure bet for the Democratic nomination, but for the White House. Al Gore actually endorsed Dean in December 2003 before the first primaries and caucuses, and that was a HUGE deal at the time. The Bush campaign did NOT want to run against Howard Dean, and 20 years later, I still think he would have beaten Bush.

After the scream that basically ended Dean's campaign, Dean clearly started to lose momentum and when he didn't win the New Hampshire primary (a state that seemingly favored a candidate like him, particularly since he was from neighboring Vermont), I jumped off the bandwagon and started supporting General Wesley Clark. I still think General Clark was a pretty good candidate, too, but he never gained much traction, either. He was at a bit of a disadvantage because people didn't know him very well as a political figure and it wasn't even clear what party he belonged to before announcing his run for President. If he had a bit more name recognition and had some more time to be known as a political candidate rather than a soldier, General Clark would have been a tough opponent for President Bush, too. But I think Clark eventually ended up dropping out before Dean did and neither of them won any major primaries.

All along, John Kerry was quietly winning nearly every primary. John Edwards won the primaries in his home turf of the Carolinas, Dean won his home state of Vermont where he had won five terms as Governor, and General Clark won the Oklahoma primary, but Kerry swept the rest of the field and just became unstoppable because he kept capturing delegates. I guess Kerry ended up being my third choice (after Dean and Clark), but it was basically by default. He was well on his way to the nomination by Super Tuesday and there was no way I was going to support Husband-of-the-Century John Edwards, who remained in the race later than most of the Democratic candidates. I did consider Dennis Kucinich at one point -- Kucinich was 2004's version of Bernie Sanders -- but I didn't have any hope that he could give President Bush any sort of challenge in a general election. I also didn't want to take Kucinich away from his important work making cookies with the rest of the Keebler elves.

[zedecksiew]

BLOGGIES 2023 ADVICE WINNERS

With the third week of voting over, I now have the final results of the BLOGGIES 2023 ADVICE category.

Behold: your winners, their medals, and acceptance speeches!

(I asked these eminences for some thoughts about their winning posts---why they were prompted to write them; what responses they received from people who followed their pointers; how they feel about winning.)

+++

BRONZE BLOGGIE FOR ADVICE POST:

🥉RANSACKING THE ROOM🥉 from Mindstorm

Ty:

The BLOGGIES are a wonderful celebration of the RPG scene, and I was ecstatic to be nominated, let alone winning bronze for my little post. So much of the hobby and industry is built solely on word of mouth, and the more we write down and preserve, the more knowledge we can collectively pass on to newcomers. Ransacking the Room is a fun little framework that I've been using while running games and it was a interesting exercise to write down and codify it. My favourite thing about the post is the comment section and the follow ups I've received—people taking the framework and adapting it to countless other situations that I hadn't even thought of. To blog is to be part of a wider community, and I've felt the love with the Ransacking post and Mindstorm as a whole.

+++

SILVER BLOGGIE FOR ADVICE POST:

🥈How to Handle Parley as an OSR DM🥈 from Goblin Punch

Arnold:

Lots of roleplaying games don't have much roleplaying in them. We've been misled by our habits, I think. We've gotten so used to thinking about tabletop as a game of hard numbers and sharply defined processes, that we attempt to apply the same logic to social interactions. But this leads to blunted, unsatisfying mechanics. There's no beauty in spherical cows in a vacuum. An even worse approach is to elide conversations in their entirety. ("If there are no hard rules about roleplaying, how can you trust that the DM will rule fairly? Better to remove all stakes from conversations." Fie.) I believe that roleplaying encounters can have as much depth, drama, and tension as a combat encounter, but it requires a radically different approach than what we're accustomed to. It's a softer science, but a science nonetheless. If combat requires a mathmatician, then roleplaying requires a psychologist. A few DMs have managed to trace the silhouette of compelling roleplay (Gus L. and Chris McDowall come to mind) but it's still a challenge to capture it, much less to teach it. The lightning shuns the bottle. It's an ongoing conversation, and I'm proud to have contributed to it. But there are other people that will be able to articulate it better. I'm looking forward to reading the essays that are yet unwritten, because I believe that there is still a lot to be said on the subject of how to make roleplaying tense-yet-open, dangerous-yet-fair. This is all a roundabout way of saying that if you disagree with me, you should blog about it and let us all read it. Our hobby will be richer for it. Thank you, everyone who organised and contributed. You guys rock.

+++

(In lieu of a medal, Gold winners will get a linocut print; here’s a design inspired by Sacha's post: a dragon curling around, linking, and being party to geography.)

GOLD BLOGGIE FOR ADVICE POST:

🥇Re-inventing the Wilderness: Part 1 - Introduction🥇 from SachaGoat

Sacha:

I've always cherished the fantasy wilderness. Having now run most must-try sandbox settings, trekked through the worlds of Pariah and Wolves Upon the Coast, and recently concluded a substantial Dolmenwood campaign---I wanted to explore how we can make it better. Dungeons are great but the overworld's permanence makes it a defining part of the campaign identity. A lot of the community feels the same way---there's been so many posts on how to make exploration captivating. The wilderness shouldn't be just a backdrop or sideshow. The bloggers and designers exploring these ideas today are poised to shape the role of the wilderness in dungeon-games going forward. Oh and let this be a testament to those considering starting a blog. My debut post, part of an unfinished series that mused on par-boiled ideas, won in its category. You could win the next BLOGGIES - you just need to start. We want to read your ideas. We want to build our games and worlds off them. I put it off for too long. Please blog.

+++

Yes, 100%---please blog!

(Special thanks to Martin / Sharkbomb for his assistance tidying up the medal graphics.)

[dovahkiin-official]

Ontario voter here, usually NDP voter. I’m glad stuff went through the house to make some promises on Israel-Gaza, but at the same time, all I’m thinking about with the NDP is how they treated Sara Jana (Ontario MPP) for how she stood up for these same ideals. It really put me off them, and it was eye-opening to me as a new Canadian just how much political capture there is from Israel.

I’m conflicted, but I guess that a change in NDP policy, six months later, at least shows that there’s some flexibility in thinking and their ideals, but mostly I’m thinking about how it’s just pandering to populism - which is another conflicting idea, because parties and government SHOULD represent its citizens.

Not intending to sway thinking one way or another; I’m writing here to try and figure out my own thinking. A third party is important. I just don’t think it is as important to vote for a party as it is to vote for a person, unless we’re looking for tactical and strategic wins (ie blocking Tories or other parties with policies I disagree with).

What do you think?

I'm not really familiar with the Ontario candidates so I just looked up Sarah Jama just now. I find it unfortunate what happened. Back in October, it was very difficult to speak out against Israel compared to now. That doesn't make it right, but it does make more sense with that context. I'm glad the NDP have shifted their opinion on this. Populism? Perhaps, I agree with you there.

I think I agree with you on most things except strategic voting. The first time I voted it was for Trudeau because I didn't want Harper to win. I've come to regret that decision a lot, because I don't support a lot of the things he's done. I would rather vote for someone who will do things I find conscionable. In some cases, that might be an independent.

I think some concessions are expected when it comes to negotiating with the Liberals, and I think NDP has better odds of negotiating with them than an independent, but that's just my view on things.

[reasoningdaily]

In the hierarchy of Black male hairstyles that capture the complex duality of his position in America, none is higher than the Jheri curl. By itself, the hairstyle is a chemical manipulation of one’s God-given curl pattern that creates luxurious, flowing curls. During the 1970s and the late ’80s, Jheri curls were the preferred hairstyle of West Coast gang members, making the mashup of stern-faced violence and soft (possibly even moist), flamboyant curls strange bedfellows. The dichotomy was an opulent disturbance, a menacing luxuriousness. A juxtaposition of wealth framed by violence — both impending and imagined.

A beautiful mess.

Ice Cube and Tucker Carlson are jumbo shrimp.

They are amazingly awful. They are icy hot.

Carlson is the Jheri curl on top of Ice Cube’s head.

It makes no sense. And yet here we are, in the year of our Lord Beyoncé, with the sentient soggy boat shoe and the man who gave us “Fuck tha Police” joining forces to vibrate over their nonconformity.

Recently, Carlson, the perpetually stiff business suit, and O’Shea Jackson, bka Ice Cube, the fitted baseball cap, appeared on video for a conversation about topics like the police, race, inflation, Black people, more race, cancel culture and race.

Cube labels himself an independent thinker and believes that this scares most in the mainstream, who are locked into the matrix of sheep thinking. He believes that because he’s defiant in his independent thought, he’s finding himself on the outside looking in with most conversations.

“I tried to go on ′The View’ — they didn’t have me on ′The View,’” Ice Cube told Carlson.

“A few of the [hosts] ... just really didn’t like where I was coming from,” he continued. ”That’s what I was told by the producers. I don’t know if the producers was just copping out and using some of the hosts to not have me come on and explain myself.”

It didn’t occur to Cube that “The View” didn’t want anything to do with his unvaccinated ass. Or that they had no use for his quasi-Republican position on politics. According to Cube, the issue was that he’s not willing to “go along to get along.”

See, Ice Cube is a Black man who believes he’s at the unique precipice of free thought. Not quite hotep and not full MAGA, he has what he believes are unconventional thoughts on how Black America can not only survive, but thrive in a two-party system that doesn’t appear to care about Black people’s needs. And this is where Ice Cube isn’t wrong. Democrats take Black women for granted, which is wild when you realize that they are the backbone of the Democratic Party. Black women not only disproportionately vote Democrat, they have actually saved America more than a few times.

But that doesn’t mean you completely abandon the party. Ice Cube seems to believe that cozying up to the opposition — which includes bigots like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, the former president turned indictment hound — is the way to Black America’s promised land. But Cube completely misses that those he’s spending time with are partly to blame for why we’re here. Carlson is not an impartial participant; he’s grand wizard No. 1 of pot-stirring a potential race war. He’s built his entire career around saying the things that racists believe while acting as if he’s not a racist.

Like defending the “great replacement” theory but not calling it out by name:

I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.

Or claiming that “criminal white supremacy ... doesn’t exist”:

Or going on and on about his apparent hatred for diversity:

Ice Cube is not a stupid man. He’s one of the few early hip-hop stars who has parlayed a rap career into a successful acting career and turned three-on-three basketball with washed-up NBA players — which could have easily been a laughable exhibition — into something of a sport. So it’s disingenuous for Cube to act as though he’s just sitting across from a journalist and having an exchange of thoughts when Carlson is not only an architect of chaos, but using his platform to spread vicious stereotypes about the people Cube claims to love.

So the two men do the dance — Carlson, the perpetually wide-eyed bigot who acts as if he doesn’t know that Cube has crossed over to the dark side, and Cube, the prophetic lyricist whose narcissism can’t handle that his “Contract With Black America” wasn’t warmly received by Democrats.

Oh, you didn’t know that’s what started it? Then let me take you back. In 2020, Cube created a manifesto born of the Black uprising after the police killings of unarmed Black men, women and children. Cube considered it a living document that would be a start to address, among other things, police and prison reform. Democrats liked the plan but didn’t act on it. However, Trump’s 2020 campaign reached out to Cube to incorporate portions of the CWBA into a document it was working on, called the “Platinum Plan.” While Cube never met with Trump, that didn’t stop the campaign from clout-chasing off Cube’s name.

“Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate,” Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the 2020 campaign, wrote online after noting that Cube helped with the Platinum Plan. “Thank you for leading!”

Cube then went on a world news tour explaining himself while losing more ground.

“Every side is the Darkside for us here in America,” he tweeted, while defending his work with Trump. “They’re all the same until something changes for us. They all lie and they all cheat but we can’t afford not to negotiate with whoever is in power or our condition in this country will never change. Our justice is bipartisan.”

Except it isn’t. There are limits to this shit. Not everyone is privy to the conversation. What’s saddest about Ice Cube filming an interview and car ride around Los Angeles with Carlson is that he’s not even wise enough to realize he’s being played. The conversation isn’t furthering race relations in this country; it’s actually empowering Carlson’s beliefs about the ineffectiveness of Barack Obama’s presidency and the Black Lives Matter movement. And it’s difficult to hear Carlson call Cube one of the “least obedient entertainers in LA.”

But this is what happens when money grows up. In truth, Tucker Carlson and Ice Cube are just two abundantly wealthy men riding around Cube’s former neighborhood and laughing from the comfort of their chauffeur-driven vehicle. At one point, the two men end up behind a tour bus taking riders through historic movie locations in Los Angeles. It’s a surreal moment, as the back of the bus is emblazoned with photos of a young Cube from his days in the group N.W.A. At one point, Carlson asks if Cube wants to get out and say “hi” to the people on the bus, who are surely his fans.

“No,” Cube says emphatically. “Not unless they want to give us money.”

And there it is, folks. No need to stare longingly for the person Cube used to be, as even he wouldn’t recognize himself. Tucker Carlson and Ice Cube are just two capitalists sharing a moment that doesn’t look like anything we ever thought we’d see, and yet somehow it makes sense.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

How the right tore themselves apart

The fratricidal instincts of America's GOP are extreme and alarming. Simon Kuper: When US Republicans spent four days fighting each other over choosing a Speaker for the House of Representatives, even as skilled a fabulist as the newly elected Congressman George Santos was overheard muttering: “You can’t make this crap up.” 

What happened in the House is simply a dramatisation of what’s happening to rightwing parties across the west. They are being torn apart between two opposing right wings. In most countries it’s the mainstream right against the far right, and in the US the far right against the very far right, but everywhere rightist coalitions are crumbling. Across the five biggest western European countries, the seven biggest in Latin America, and the US, Canada and Australia, only one traditional centre-right party runs a government: the British Conservatives, who expect electoral decimation next year. For all the reports of the supposed death of social democratic parties, the centre-left is winning.

The conservative-far-right alliance was captured by the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch in his 1953 play Biedermann and the Arsonists. Biedermann is an upstanding businessman, a producer of hair tonic, when one day he invites two arsonists into his treasured home. Predictably, they end up burning it down. It was Frisch’s post-Hitler metaphor for what happens when conservatives fool themselves into thinking they can control the far-right. Today’s arsonists attack institutions such as parliament, the judiciary and corporations. They suppress votes, fight culture wars, flirt with Putin, cry “fake news” and push house-burning schemes such as Brexit. They are anything but “conservative”. 

Still, when the arsonists first appeared, Biedermann conservatives welcomed them into their homes. Together, the two rights made big wrongs: in 2016, the homeowner-arsonist alliance delivered Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency. The Biedermanns gradually discovered that their new friends didn’t have their interests at heart. Boris Johnson, whose genius was that he appealed to both homeowners and arsonists, said “Fuck business”, then showed he meant it with his EU trade deal. Trump cut taxes, but then encouraged a mob to storm Congress.Centre-right voters are still disproportionately drawn from the wealthier classes, write Tim Bale and Cristóbal Kaltwasser in their book Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis. 

These people value their homes and their hair-tonic companies. They don’t want to overthrow the establishment. They are the establishment. Before 2016, they supported parties that were “loyal to the political system” rather than out to destroy it, write Bale and Kaltwasser. The Biedermanns share little with the arsonists beyond an aversion to immigrants and a fear of what they call “woke”. Now the centre-right parties face a dilemma: stick with the arsonists or lose elections by themselves. Alone, they are weak. The old conservative small-state recipe has lost appeal in an era of pandemic, war and energy crisis. Meanwhile, gay marriage has superseded their moral codes. Germany’s Christian Democrats, in power for 32 of the last 39 years, lost to the Social Democrats in 2021. In the recent French elections, the centre-right Les Républicains scored just 4.8 per cent. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi has shrivelled to junior partner of his former junior partners on the far right. In Britain, Liz Truss’s tax cuts for the rich — a traditional conservative offering — were remarkably unpopular. Spain’s centre-right Partido Popular can probably only win the next election in coalition with the arsonists of Vox.

Some centre-right parties are following the US Republicans in their march right. Eric Ciotti, the latest leader of the French Républicains, seems intent on turning it into the country’s third far-right party. But even if the arsonist vote currently looks bigger than the Biedermann vote, it’s rarely big enough to win power. The right lost winnable elections in Chile, the US and Brazil largely because its candidates, José Antonio Kast, Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, were just a little too arsonist. Alternatively, the centre-right could return to the centre. That seems to be UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s strategy: making nice with Europe, ideally without upsetting the arsonists. Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni, raised in the arsonist tradition, is attempting something similar. But as they eye the centre, they see their soft-left opponents already in residence. Joe Biden, the one-time Socialist Party minister Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and Labour’s Keir Starmer have all grasped an obvious truth: a vacated centre offers the easiest route to power.

[h/t Scott Horton]

[staticespace]

[ID: Text from the screen captures of a post made by @ three--rings on Tumblr:

In the 2000 election, a bunch of people wanted to send a message. They wanted to send the message that the environment was important and climate change was real and the US needed to do something about it.

So they voted third party for Ralph Nader and the Green Party.

They cost the Democrats the election. So instead of noted environmentalist and climate change activist Al Gore, we got George W. Bush.

But they sent a message right? They made a stand for their cause right? Surely it helped their cause, right?

It {caps} ended {end caps} the Green party single-handedly as well as Ralph Nadar's career, because they were blamed for splitting the vote and getting a moron nepo-baby oilman into power.

Bush was able to stall for eight years on even admitting climate change existed, while making tons of money for his friends in the oil industry. AND he started two decades of wars that are still ongoing to this day. Literally millions died.

Next time it might be birth control rights. It might be nuclear war.

The genocide? Will escalate. More will happen in other parts of the world. Maybe here, who fucking knows.

I voted for Nader in 2000. It was my first Presidential election vote. It was my friends who went into warzones at the order of the man who took office as a result.

Your elders are {caps} screaming {end caps} at you to please learn from history.

End ID]

This is what I mean by, "I'm not sure who third-party presidential voters think they are 'punishing' when they vote third-party in a two-party presidential system."

Yes, it's a system that needs to change. No, it will not happen with a single election. Yes, you have to work between presidential elections to make these changes. No, I severely doubt will happen quickly in a system that has existed for over 100 years.

Both major parties are currently vying for Israel. I do not like that.

Democrats, at least, are vying for a ceasefire. I DO like that. If that's as close to what I want as I can get right now, okay, that's how I will vote.

But I don't see myself voting for a dream of what I want to happen that's further from reality, only to get the nightmare that was waiting for failure.

With Kamala/Walz going up DAILY, I've seen more people talking about voting third party/Jill Stein (EW) and I believe the above screencaps from @three--rings can explain WHY Third Party votes NEVER work NOR is this the election to screw around in.

Everyone....like she says above.....PLEASE LEARN FROM HISTORY!!!

(Because if Trump gets in, he's NEVER LEAVING).

[dankusner]

How Joe Rogan Remade Austin

The podcaster and comedian has turned the city into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other “free thinkers” who happen to all think alike.

It’s a Tuesday night in downtown Austin, and Joe Rogan is pretending to jerk off right in front of my face.

The strangest thing about this situation is that millions of straight American men would kill to switch places with me.

Centimillionaires generally pride themselves on their inaccessibility, but most weeks you can see Rogan live at the Comedy Mothership, which he owns, in exchange for $50 and a two-drink minimum. About 250 tickets for each “Joe Rogan and Friends” show go on sale every Sunday at 2 p.m. central time, and disappear within seconds. When you arrive at the Mothership, the staff locks your phone in a bag, which both ensures that you cannot leak footage online and makes you think you’re about to see some really forbidden shit.

You are not.

What you will see is four comedians, plus Rogan himself, with routines that might shock the Amish, the over-80 set, college students, Vox staffers, or John Oliver superfans—but not anyone who, say, went to a comedy club in the 1990s.

Of the many recent failures of the American left, one of the greatest is making entry-level battle-of-the-sexes humor seem avant-garde.

(Did you know that women often run relationship decisions past their female friends? Bitches be crazy! That sort of thing.)

As Rogan himself says after he emerges in stonewashed jeans, clutching a glass of something amber on ice:

“Fox News called this an anti-woke comedy club. That’s just a comedy club!”

To underline the point that these jokes can survive outside the safe space of the Mothership, much of the material I saw Rogan perform ended up in his latest Netflix special, which was released in August.

In Austin, the masturbation mimicry happens during a riff about concealing his porn consumption from his wife—“the best person I know,” he says, sweetly.

That routine captures the essence of the Joe Rogan brand:

He is bawdy around his fans, respectful of his wife, loyal to his friends, and indulgent with his golden retriever, who has 900,000 followers on Instagram.

He maintains a self-deprecating sense of humor that’s rare among men who could buy an island if they wanted one.

His politics defy easy categorization—he hates Democratic finger-wagging but supports gay marriage and abortion rights. (“I’m so far away from being a Republican,” he said on a podcast in 2022.)

He voted for a third-party candidate in 2020, and in early August expressed his admiration for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former guest on The Joe Rogan Experience.

He also wonders if President Biden might have been replaced by a body double. (Does he have any evidence? Sure, the guy looks taller now.)

He sees himself as an outsider, nontribal, just an average Joe.

The best way to think of him, one of my friends told me, is as if “Homer Simpson got swole.”

[artcalledmusica]

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But God forbid if !!!!!!

Another bullet hits your mind, the question was is He fit?

To replace you!

Nothing to do with ego!

Answer Trump!

We are U S in waiting!

Please Sir?

You piss oh golden and shite in

My Ex Former President (Convicted)

Numerous walls looking over the Fence!

You and He

Trump Vance

X I’ve tweeted or X-ed

How’s it called I’m adding to this one

Now only on Tumblr

T M V

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The so ones & on’s

We captured together (ahh the added)

[quindolyn]

plz write george smut thank you :)

Anytime || George Weasley

Word Count: 2,201

a/n: I’m so sorry this took me longer than I wanted it to finish. I’ve been pretty all over the place. I hope you like it! After this I’m getting out a Harry imagine I have requested in my inbox and then I’ll start writing whatever you guys vote for!

Warnings: daddy kink, quickie

Masterlist

It started out innocent. You swore it did, you never imagined that it would get this far, nor was that your intention.

It started off with you not noticing that the top couple buttons of your blouse had popped undone exposing a rather excessive amount of cleavage for the common room. Especially when it was flooded with a bunch of third and fourth years, many of whom were ogling you like they’d never seen a human woman before.

George was torn between giving you his coat to cover you from the less than respectful gazes targeted at you and using it to hide his erection.

Next it was crossing your legs in class when you sat next to him, revealing miles of your beautiful legs that he couldn’t help but drool over as your uniform skirt hiked up dangerously high on your thighs.

Then it was brushing your fingers across his bicep when you were talking to him in class, or sometimes across his chest.

You had no clue how much you had been riling up your boyfriend over the last week or so. Now, it was sort of hard to miss the affect you had on him as evidence of such in the form  of his hardening cock was pressed into your back.

“Georgie?” You craned your head to gaze up at him, blinking owlishly as he stared down at you, practically salivating at the mere sight of you.

You were shocked when he basically growled at you, in hindsight, what you were wearing may have been a little much for a party in the Ravenclaw common room but most of the other girls in attendance were just as dressed up. You all were all young and attractive, why not go all out for the last party of the year?

In a slinky, white slip dress, that could’ve easily passed as modest lingerie you had every eye in the room on you. Some envious, most not as respectful as they probably ought to be, and one pair completely eye fucking you as he was torn between falling to your feet and worshipping you like the goddess you were and pulling you into a broom closet where he would punish you for wearing such provocative clothing. It was too much, all of the teasing, whether or not it was intentional, and now this.

George was desperate, he needed you.

“George?” You called out his name again as he looped his arm along your waist, pulling you into his side as he guided you out of the crowded, smoky room and into the empty corridor directly outside of it.

You were tense, he’d barely said a word all night since you’d met him outside the Ravenclaw common room, and he wasn’t saying anything now either. Which led you to the question, what was wrong with him?

All you received in response was a grunt as he tried to pull you along with him, but your legs were no match for his much longer ones, getting frustrated with the miniscule progress the two of you were making he paused, accessing your figure before huffing and picking you up. It all happened so quickly that you barely had time to squeal as he threw you over his shoulder as though you weighed nothing before he strode off down the corridor.

Your attempts to track where you were going were futile as you lost track somewhere between the third left and second right.

What you didn’t miss, what you couldn’t have missed, was the straining erection pressing against the crotch of his pants.

His off putting silence continued as he sat you down on the ground, rather harshly if you may add, especially considering the sinfully tall stilettos strapped to your feet.

“God George, do you think you could be a little bit more careful? I-”

You were cut off as George took your face in his hand, pressing your cheeks together just enough to make your lips puff out in an exaggerated pout.

“You really wanna take that tone with me Darling? After this past week?”

“What are you talking about George? What did I do?” Your voice was muffled as you tried to speak with his hand, not lightening its grasp on your face.

He cocked his head to the side, his gaze dragging up and down your body before returning to your flushed face, “You really don’t know do you?” His voice was hoarse as he spoke, conveying the arousal thrumming through his veins.

You shook your head, indicating that you indeed had no clue as to what he was talking about.

“Oh poppet,” He cooed, brushing a piece of hair out of your face, tucking it delicately behind your ear, “You really are that innocent aren’t you? S’just everything about you, drives me insane, the way your skirt rides up your thighs, how you brush your fingers against my arm, fuck this dress you’re wearing.”

Your gaze followed his as it dropped to your body, ample amounts of heaving cleavage visible from the low cut of the dress, the hem riding up dangerously high, just as he had described your skirt doing.

“You’ve had me painfully hard for you (Y/N),” He buried his nose in the crook of your neck, inhaling your scent as if it was oxygen and he was stranded at the bottom of the ocean, “Need you, need you now.”

“Need you too George,” You moaned, tangling your fingers in his soft hair, pulling slightly to tip back his head and allow you to mesh your lips with his in a slow, sensual kiss. Nothing was rushed as his tongue slipped from his mouth into yours, exploring the cavity of your mouth.

Flicking your tongue with his he slid his hands under the hem of your dress, letting his fingers slide up the backs of your thighs until they grazed against the swell of your bum. Your bare bum.

“No panties angel?” He practically moaned as he brought your skirt up around your waist, revealing your bare ass and cunt to the chilly air of the seemingly abandoned broom closet.

“Every pair I have you could see through my dress Daddy,” You whined, suppressing a shiver as your new level of exposure.

“So you decided to go without them,” George asked you, condescension dripping from his voice as he cocked his head to the side, gazing down at you as he towered over your frame, “Gonna be the death of me bunny.”

George pulled down the thin straps of your dress, revealing that you weren’t wearing a bra either, the silk ivory fabric bunching around your waist.

“Fuck,” He swore pinching your nipples with the rough pads of his fingers before bending down to capture one of your hard buds inbetween his teeth, rolling it gently before sucking, not hard enough to mark, but enough to have you gasping.

You threw your head back at the sensation, your mouth left gaping at the immense pleasure and before you knew it George had his hands underneath your thighs, supporting you as he pushed you against the door of the room.

His large hands guided your legs around his waist, there your ankles criss crossed, locking you against his body. Your small, nimble fingers quickly found their way to the zipper of his jeans, unzipping them so you could pull both them and his boxers down just enough to bring out his throbbing cock.

He’d been hard the instant he saw you, dealing with his throbbing member all night hadn’t exactly been easy and now that you were here, pressed up against a wall, basically naked, needy for him. George couldn’t deny himself any longer.

A pathetic whimper left your mouth as he brushed the head of his cock through your folds, once, then twice before he fully sheathed himself inside of you. Not taking the time to work in his impressive length inch by inch, he’d been more than patient, he deserved to get to make you feel good.

“Daddy!” You screamed as the tip of his prick brushed at a spot deep inside of you, making you feel deliciously full.

George clamped his hand over your mouth, his gaze boring into yours, “Gotta keep quiet for me bunny, can’t have anyone finding us like this, can’t have them knowing that I can’t go more than an hour without needing to be inside of you.”

You nodded your head, his hand still clasped around your mouth.

“Can you do that for me baby?” He asked, still not moving inside of you, giving you a moment to adjust to his size.

“Yes Daddy,” You answered as he pulled his hand from your mouth, instead using it to stabilize himself against the wall, “Please Daddy, move, need you to move.”

“Okay pretty girl,” He smiled as he began to pull out before harshly thrusting back into you, making you arch your back against the splintering wood of the door.

Your hands grappled for the hair at the nape of his neck to ground yourself to him as he thrusted into you, his strokes were deep and quick. There was an urgency in his motions no doubt fueled by the fact that someone could walk by you guys at any time and become curious as to what was making all of that noise.

Pushing your hips down, you tried to meet his thrusts as he pushed himself up into you, “Want it Daddy, making me feel so good,” You whimpered, clenching your eyes closed as the knot forming in your stomach tightened, slowly but surely as wave after wave of pleasure ripple through your body.

Readjusting his grasp on you George thrusted in particularly harshly, prodding at your g-spot over and over again as he observed how well you reacted to his movements.

Knowing that there was no way he was going to last long, not after the week of torture and night of constant temptation he brought one of his hands down to work your clit. Finding it instantly he began tracing figure eights against it, reveling in the way you writhed against him.

“You gonna cum bunny?” He smiled, speeding up the pace of fingers, “You gonna cum all over Daddy’s fingers? Make a mess for me?”

“Yes Daddy,” You whined, trying to match the volume of his voice, not wanting to be too loud, “Yes Daddy please can I cum?”

Deciding he was feeling benevolent he nodded down at you, pinching his fingers around your delicate bundle of nerves sending you careening over the edge of pleasure.

You didn’t know if you stayed quiet as you should’ve because the ecstasy that overtook you was all consuming, blotting out your vision, as your legs tightened around George’s waist. It was like you blacked out, all you could focus on, all you could feel was the knot in your stomach unraveling, leaving you a moaning, quivering mess.

If it weren’t for the throaty grunts he released as he came inside of you, rope after rope of cum painting the inside of your cunt, but his noises grounded you, bringing you back to the musty little closet.

Taking a minute to collect himself George brushed his chapped lips across your brow before slowly pulling out of you and tucking his softening member back into his pants.

Setting you don’t gingerly on the floor he pulled the skirt of your dress down so that it was once again covering your bum before he pulled the delicate straps of the dress back up your shoulders.

“There we go poppet,” He murmured, eyes raking over you, not in the ravenous manner they had earlier but with a distinctly George tenderness, making sure you were properly covered and okay, “Let’s get you up to my dorm, yeah?”

“But the party-” You began before he cut you off.

“Nope, don’t gotta worry about the party, need to get you cleaned up pretty girl.”

“Are you sure?” You asked, peering up at him, unable not to feel just a little guilty that you were the reason George wouldn’t get to go back and celebrate with his friends.

“Of course I am (Y/N),” His hand found its way under your jaw, tilting your face upwards so that his lips could meet yours, “Not even a question.”

Before you could protest any further he was lifting you into his arms, one supporting beneath your bum, the other under your back. You took the opportunity to nuzzle your face into the crook of his neck as he stepped out of the closet with you in his arms.

No matter how hard you tried to resist it, you were no match for the rhythm caused by his walking as he carried you up to his dorm, being lulled to sleep against your own will. Not wanting to fall asleep before you could say something to him you yawned, “Thank you Georgie, made me feel so good.”

Though you couldn’t see it, a gentle smile tugged at the man’s lips as he gazed down at you, clinging to him as you snuggled further into his arms. “Anytime, love. Anytime at all.”

tagging: @randomoutsiders @weasleyposts @kittykylax @amourtentiaa @superbturtlemakerathlete

[gladiates]

56 french-language film recs!

I wanted to find some movies I can watch to improve my French, so I looked for films available on Kanopy (which is rly cool--if you live in the US, you can stream some movies for free if your library or school subscribes to it!) All of the following films are on Kanopy, and I imagine you can also find many of them on p*racy sites (totally not endorsing that at all no sir!). I’ve listed each film’s title along with its year and score on IMDB. I only included movies with at least 1,000 IMDB ratings and an average of at least 7/10 so they’re all reasonably acclaimed! I also included a short summary of each from IMDB as well. List below the cut because it’s long!

Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962, 7.9 from ~17.0k votes): Cleo, a singer and hypochondriac, becomes increasingly worried that she might have cancer while awaiting test results from her doctor.

The Rules of the Game (1939, 8.0 from ~26.6k votes): A bourgeois life in France at the onset of World War II, as the rich and their poor servants meet up at a French chateau.

Breathless (1960. 7.8 from ~73.1k votes): A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he reunites with a hip American journalism student and attempts to persuade her to run away with him to Italy.

The 400 Blows (1959, 8.1 from 105.1k votes): A young boy, left without attention, delves into a life of petty crime.

Purple Noon (1960, 7.8 from 14.2k votes): Tom Ripley is a talented mimic, moocher, forger and all-around criminal improviser; but there's more to Tom Ripley than even he can guess.

The Return of Martin Guerre (1982, 7.4 from ~4.0k votes): In medieval France, some villagers challenge a man's claim of identity when he (as he says) returns home from some time in the army.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961, 7.8 from ~20.3 votes): In a strange and isolated chateau, a man becomes acquainted with a woman and insists that they have met before.

The Wages of Fear (1953, 8.1 from ~54.5k votes): In a decrepit South American village, four men are hired to transport an urgent nitroglycerine shipment without the equipment that would make it safe.

Tell No One (2006, 7.5 from ~50.7k votes): An accidental discovery near a doctor's estate stirs up some painful memories eight years after his wife's hideous murder, and now, things are bound to take a turn for the unexpected. Does the good doctor know more than he's letting on?

Queen Margot (1994, 7.4 from 16.3k votes): Young Queen Margot finds herself trapped in an arranged marriage amidst a religious war between Catholics and Protestants. She hopes to escape with a new lover, but finds herself imprisoned by her powerful and ruthless family.

Un Flic (1972, 7.1 from ~8.2k votes): After a shaky first heist, a group of thieves plan an even more elaborate and risky second heist.

Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953, 7.5 from ~16.8k votes): Monsieur Hulot comes to a beachside hotel for a vacation and accidentally, but good-naturedly, causes havoc.

La Haine (1995, 8.1 from ~150.0k votes): 24 hours in the lives of three young men in the French suburbs the day after a violent riot.

Alphaville (1965, 7.1 from 22.9k votes): A U.S. secret agent is sent to the distant space city of Alphaville where he must find a missing person and free the city from its tyrannical ruler.

Tomboy (2011, 7.4 from 18.4k votes): A family moves into a new neighborhood, and a 10-year-old named Laure deliberately presents as a boy named Mikhael to the neighborhood children.

Full Moon in Paris (1984, 7.4 from 3.8k votes): Louise, a young woman, who recently finished her studies in arts, is working as a interior decorator trainee. Playing the game of seduction, her life becomes more and more complicated.

Bob the Gambler (1956, 7.7k from 10.8k votes): After losing big, an aging gambler decides to assemble a team to rob a casino.

La Chinoise (1967, 7.1 from ~6.2k votes): A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.

The Innocents (2016, 7.3 from ~9.6k votes): 1945. Mathilde is a French Red Cross doctor working on a mission to help the French survivors of the German camps. While she works in Poland, she is asked for help by a nun. In her convent, several nuns are pregnant.

Germinal (1993, 7.1 from ~4.7k votes): In mid-nineteenth-century northern France, a coal mining town's workers are exploited by the mine's owner. One day, they decide to go on strike, and the authorities repress them.

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017, 7.4 from ~13.4k votes): Members of the advocacy group ACT UP Paris demand action by the government and pharmaceutical companies to combat the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s.

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954, 7.8 from ~6.7k votes): An aging, world-weary gangster is double-crossed and forced out of retirement when his best friend is kidnapped and their stash of eight stolen gold bars demanded as ransom.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975, 7.8 from ~7.4k votes): A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. However, something happens that changes her safe routine.

Port of Shadows (1938, 7.8 from ~8.2k votes): A military deserter finds love and trouble (and a small dog) in a smoky French port city.

Lumumba (2000, 7.2 from ~1.8k votes): The true story of controversial leader of independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

Three Colors: Blue (1993, 7.9 from ~89.6k votes): A woman struggles to find a way to live her life after the death of her husband and child.

The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, 7.7 from ~8.4k votes): Two sisters leave their small seaside town of Rochefort in search of romance. Hired as carnival singers, one falls for an American musician, while the other must search for her ideal partner.

The Brand New Testament (2015, 7.1 from ~29.8k votes): Did you know that God is alive and lives in Brussels with his daughter?

La Rafle (2010, 7.1 from ~8.2k votes): A faithful retelling of the 1942 "Vel' d'Hiv Roundup" and the events surrounding it.

Diabolique (1955, 8.0 from ~61.4k votes): The wife and mistress of a loathed school principal plan to murder him with what they believe is the perfect alibi.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006, 7.1 from ~18.5k votes): Secret agent OSS 117 foils Nazis, beds local beauties, and brings peace to the Middle East.

Mon Oncle (1958, 7.8 from ~18.8k votes): Monsieur Hulot visits the technology-driven world of his sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, but he can't quite fit into the surroundings.

A Man Escaped (1956, 8.3 from ~19.1k votes): A captured French Resistance fighter during WWII engineers a daunting escape from a Nazi prison in France.

The Well-Digger's Daughter (2011, 7.0 from ~3.6k votes): In 1930s southern France, a father is torn between his sense of honor and his deep love for his daughter when she gets in trouble with the wealthy son of a shopkeeper.

Weekend (1967, 7.2 from ~13k votes): A surreal tale of a married couple going on a road trip to visit the wife's parents with the intention of killing them for the inheritance.

Claire's Knee (1970, 7.6 from ~9.0k votes): On lakeside summer holiday, a conflicted older man is dared to have a flirt with two beautiful teenage stepsisters despite his betrothal to a diplomat's daughter and the fact that the girls have boyfriends.

Shoot the Piano Player (1960, 7.5 from ~17.5k votes): Charlie is approached by his crook brother Chico, who is chased by two gangsters. Charlie helps him to escape, but he upsets the criminals, so when his brother Fido is kidnapped, Charlie has to take an attitude with tragic consequences.

My Night at Maud's (1969, 7.9 from ~10.8k votes): The rigid principles of a devout Catholic man are challenged during a one-night stay with Maud, a divorced woman with an outsize personality.

Eyes Without a Face (1960, 7.7 from ~27.5k votes): A surgeon causes an accident which leaves his daughter disfigured, and goes to extremes to give her a new face.

Three Colors: Red (1994, 8.1 from ~90.4k votes): A model discovers a retired judge is keen on invading people's privacy.

The Grocer's Son (2007, 7.0 from ~2.3k votes): Antoine moves home to help his mom drive the mobile grocery, when his dad's hospitalized. He brings Claire along, hoping she'll become more than a friend. He drives around Provence's countryside, selling mainly to old people.

Pickpocket (1959, ~7.7 from 19.6k votes): Michel is released from jail after serving a sentence for thievery. His mother dies and he resorts to pickpocketing as a means of surviva

La Collectionneuse (1967, 7.5 from ~6.6k votes): A womanizing art dealer and a painter find the serenity of their Riviera vacation disturbed by a third guest, a vivacious bohemian woman known for her long list of male conquests.

Code Unknown (2000, 7.2 from ~11.9k votes): A young man harasses a homeless woman, another man protests, the police arrest both and the woman has to leave the country. What were their various story-lines leading up to this event?

Children of Paradise (1945, 8.4 from ~18.2k votes): The theatrical life of a beautiful courtesan and the four men who love her.

The Last Metro (1980, 7.4 from ~12.5k votes): In occupied Paris, an actress married to a Jewish theater owner must keep him hidden from the Nazis while doing both of their jobs.

Danton (1983, 7.5 from ~6.4k votes): In 1793, as the Terror begins in France, Georges Danton, a champion-of-the-people, returns to clash against Maximilien Robespierre and his extremist party.

Orpheus (1950, 8.0 from ~10.5k votes): A poet in love with Death follows his unhappy wife into the underworld.

Lacombe, Lucien (1974, 7.7 from ~6.5k votes): In 1944, an 18-year old boy from small-town France, collaborates with the Nazi-regime and subsequently falls in love with a Jewish gir

L'Atalante (1934, 7.8 from ~14.4k votes): Newly married couple Juliette and a ship captain Jean struggle through marriage as they travel on the L'atalante along with the captain's first mate Le père Jules and a cabin boy.

Le Million (1931, 7.4 from ~3.1k votes): An impoverished painter and his rival engage in a race across Paris to recover a jacket concealing a winning lottery ticket.

La bête humaine (1938, 7.6 from ~6.8k votes): In this classic adaptation of Emile Zola's novel, a tortured train engineer falls in love with a troubled married woman who has helped her husband commit a murder.

Black Girl (1966, 7.4 from ~3.5k votes): A black girl from Senegal becomes a servant in France.

Out 1 (1971, 7.8 from ~1.1k votes): Following the May 1968 civil unrest in France, a deaf-mute and a con artist simultaneously stumble upon the remnants of a secret society.

Les Misérables, Part 1 (1934, 8.2 from ~1.5k votes): The lives of numerous people over the course of 20 years in 19th century France, weaved together by the story of an ex-convict named Jean Valjean on the run from an obsessive police inspector, who pursues him for only a minor offense.

Beau Travail (1999, 7.4 from ~8.5k votes): This film focuses on an ex-Foreign Legion officer as he recalls his once glorious life, leading troops in Djibouti.

[laulink]

A.N. : Alright, so since the graduation party is now done in the anime as well and it’s not a spoiler anymore for anyone who’s up to date with at least one of the three medias, I decided to do Maria justice and give her what all her friends decided she wasn’t allowed to have : time to explain her words to Katarina (and time for Katarina to digest them and react upon them). @the-woundupbird and @i-hate-liking-batman, as promised !

    The sun was slowly descending toward the horizon, colouring the sky in shades of pink, violet and blue, while Katarina Claes and her friend, Maria Campbell, walked around the school grounds, looking for familiar faces and enjoying the food. The graduation party had been beautiful, as expected of an event organised by the Student Council, and Nicol had been delighted by his vegetable bouquet, as Katarina had predicted… or at least she assumed he had been delighted. His expressions were still quite hard to read. Still, she felt proud of herself : she really had a great idea with that one !

    Her train of thoughts was interrupted by Maria asking her a question :

 “How did you like the party, Lady Katarina ?

- It was wonderful ! So many tasty sweets~ Oh, and the flower bouquets on the tables were really pretty too !

- You should tell Lady Mary then,” giggled Maria, “she was the one who provided the flowers and made the bouquets. I am sure she would be delighted to hear your praise !

- I’ll make sure to tell her then !”

    The two girls kept walking as they chatted about the ceremony, Nicol and Giordo’s speeches, the food, the presents Nicol received… After a while, Katarina noticed that the sky was turning dark as the sun disappeared behind the mountains on the horizon and that they had drifted away from the party to a rather secluded part of the school grounds. Remembering why she had spent the entire day glued to Maria’s side, Katarina started to panic.

 “Wait a minute, that’s not good ! By that time, Maria should have been approached by one of the capture targets who would confess his undying love to her ! What’s going on ? Why is no one here beside the two of us ?”

    Before the panic could really sink in, Katarina took a deep breath and decided to ask Maria directly who’s route she had pursued over the course of the year… but maybe not in those terms.

    Turning toward her friend, Katarina grabbed her hands, the sudden movement prompting Maria to look up at her in surprise.

 “Maria, I meant to ask… Is there anyone you like right now ?

- Huh ? … Well, I adore you, Lady Katarina !”

    As usual, huh… But this time, Katarina wouldn’t stop there ! She needed an actual answer, now !

 “While I’m happy to hear that, that’s not what I meant… Do you have someone you’re interested in ? A boy that you’d want to go out with ?

- Someone I’m interested in and want to go out with ? A boy… ? No, there isn’t one !” Maria answered with a cheerful smile.

    Meanwhile, Katarina was lost for words.

“Huh ? No one ? What does that mean ?”

 “I’m not interested in any boy. For me, there’s only one person I’m interested in and admire from the bottom of my heart. The person who’s side I never want to leave… It’s you, Lady Katarina. So…”

    Maria moved her hands around Katarina’s to hold them between her own, then lifted her gaze up to meet Katarina’s, trying to convey all her love for the girl through her eyes as well as her words.

 “Please let me stay by your side forever, Lady Katarina.”

    Katarina was speechless. She hadn’t anticipated Maria to tell her such passionate words and didn’t know how to react. At the same time, something about this declaration felt familiar…

 “Oh, that’s right ! This is the line the heroine is supposed to say to her chosen capture target at the end of the game ! But why is she saying it to me ?! What’s going on ?!”

    Thinking she might have just misunderstood, Katarina tentatively asked :

 “Uh, Maria… What do you mean by that, exactly ?”

    Maria blushed. Her pink lips parted as her gaze somehow turned even more tender. Katarina suddenly found it hard to breathe.

 “I mean that I’m in love with you, Lady Katarina.”

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Katarina’s brain was a mess, almost all of the small versions of her running around screaming while an alarm was blaring. The chairwoman lifted her hammer high over her head and slammed it down on the table, once, making the others stop running, twice, cutting off their screaming, then a third time as the alarm quieted down, plunging the mental space in an eerie, uncomfortable silence.

 “Everyone,” said the chairwoman with a calm voice, “losing ourselves to panic will not help us make sense of this situation. We need to stay calm and examine the evidence laid before us to understand what has led us to this development.”

    Studious Katarina nodded and went back to her seat.

 “You are right, Chairwoman. We need to consider this situation carefully. Maria confessing to Katarina is not something that could have happened in the game, not only because they were enemies but also because Katarina had been killed or exiled already at this point.

- But Katarina isn’t a villainess this time.” Fearless Katarina reminded them. “We aren’t even a rival since we made sure to stay out of Maria’s way to Giordo’s heart. So if we’re neither a villainess nor a rival, did that make us automatically become a capture target ?

- It seems that is how Maria views us at least, or she wouldn’t have fallen in love and confessed.

- I can’t believe Maria has fallen in love with us.” Spineless Katarina murmured, cheeks blazing red. “She’s so amazing, and cute, and kind, and hardworking, and honest, and sweet, and funny… She’s just the perfect girl !”

    All the Katarinas nodded, blushing a little as they remembered everything good about Maria.

 “It is true that Maria is quite the amazing and alluring girl,” agreed the Chairwoman, “no one can say otherwise. Being the target of her affections is certainly not a bad thing.

- Thinking back on all the time we spent with Maria… It makes me want to ask her to be our wife !” exclaimed Fearless Katarina, rising from her seat in her excitement.

- Thinking back on all this time, huh…” Studious Katarina took a moment to gather her thoughts. “Now that I think about it, we did steal a couple of romance events from Giordo and Keith, didn’t we ? The first big ones on top of that. And we are clearly the one who spent the most time with Maria compared to the other capture targets. According to the game’s rules, it was obvious, in retrospect, that she would fall in love with us. But what about us ? Are we in love with Maria ?”

    All the Katarinas paused what they were doing and took a moment to consider the question.

 “It’s a hard question.” said the Chairwoman, a frown on her face. “Maria is certainly an amazing girl, but since we have only ever viewed her as a friend, suddenly trying to change our point of view is a bit difficult.

- Still, I think we are in love with her.” Happy Katarina said, looking unusually solemn. “When I try to think about life without Maria, it hurts in my chest and the resulting life feels hollow.

- You’re right,” Fearless Katarina nodded, “I remember when Maria was kidnapped by Raphael… Those three days where we didn’t know what happened to her, if she were still alive… It was awful. The idea of seeing her get hurt now…”

    All Katarinas shivered at the thought.

 “But is that romantic love ?” asked Studious Katarina. “No one wants to see their friends get hurt after all. We cried when we dreamed of our friends being killed by Raphael. Are our feelings for Maria really that different from the ones we harbour for our other friends ?

- I… think they are.” This time it was Spineless Katarina who voiced her thoughts. “I don’t want any of our friends to get hurt, but it’s only when I think of Maria that I feel the need to hold her tight and never let anything happen to her.

- I have a similar feeling.” said the Chairwoman. “And I have a proposition to make, to really ascertain our feelings for Maria. I think you all know what I am talking about ?”

    All the Katarinas nodded solemnly.

 “Then, all in favour of confirming our feelings for Maria through this mean ?”

    Everyone voted “yes”.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Katarina blinked, coming back to her senses. Maria was still in front of her, holding her hands, but now looked worried.

 “Lady Katarina ? Do you hear me ?

- Maria… Yes, I hear you. Sorry, I was lost in thought.”

    Maria sighed in relief, then offered Katarina a little smile.

 “I am relieved. I was starting to get worried, since your trances don’t usually last this long.”

    Katarina scratched her cheek and let out a nervous giggle.

 “Yes, well… It’s not every day I am confessed to. I really didn’t see it coming.”

    Maria chuckles.

 “I thought as much. So it’s ok if you don’t want to give me your answer right away. I’ll wait as long as you need.”

    Maria’s sweet smile made Katarina’s heart clench. She wanted to take her in her arms. To hold her close and never let go. She wouldn’t feel that way if she only saw Maria as a friend, right ? But to be sure…

 “Actually, Maria… I think I know the answer I want to give you, but I want to confirm my own feelings first. So please, forgive me for being selfish.

- Selfish ? What do-”

    Before Maria could finish her sentence, Katarina snuck an arm around her waist to bring her closer, the fingers of her free hand tangling in blonde locks as she brought her lips to Maria’s in a chaste and a bit sloppy kiss.

    And it clicked.

    Suddenly all felt right in the world and Katarina felt as though her heart just got bigger, fuller, ready to envelop Maria in her embrace and never let her go. She tightened her hold on Maria and deepened the kiss, desperate to feel the other girl as close to her as she could be.

    After a second of confusion, Maria cupped Katarina’s face in her hands and kissed her back, a low hum of contentment escaping her as Katarina deepened the kiss. Soon after, her hands moved, one to Katarina’s shoulder, holding onto it as though she needed it to stay upright, the other to the back of Katarina’s head, caressing a sensitive spot at the base of her neck that made her moan in Maria’s mouth. Their kiss only grew hotter and more desperate, the two girls holding each other as though their lives depended on it. They only separated when the lack of air made them feel lightheaded, but even then they didn’t break their embrace, instead resting their foreheads against each other’s, gazing lovingly into the other’s eyes. After a couple of seconds, Maria had regained enough of her breath to ask :

 “So… I take it that’s a “I love you too” ?”

    Katarina couldn’t help but laugh breathlessly at that, love and happiness too large to contain. She buried her face in Maria’s neck, too overwhelmed to use her voice yet, but unable to resist the urge to lay feather-light kisses on the soft skin beneath her lips… then, hearing Maria let out a sigh of pleasure, laid a few more to draw out another which soon turned into a moan when Katarina found a more sensitive spot. Something in Katarina awoke at that, something she didn’t even know existed, and she started sucking and nibling on the soft flesh, then soothing it with gentle kisses and licks before starting all over again. She could feel Maria tremble against her, hear her moans, her breath coming out shorter and shorter… Then it was her name that Maria was moaning in her ear and Katarina almost lost herself in the sudden wave of desire that engulfed her in that moment. She was saved by Maria’s gentle hands bringing her face back in front of her own and away from her neck. A chaste kiss on her lips anchored her back into reality and she smiled sheepishly under Maria’s tender, amused gaze.

 “Sorry, I got carried away.

- I can’t say I disliked it. But we should probably avoid that while we are in the school’s gardens.”

    Katarina blushed as she realised they were still out in the open.

 “Right, anyone could have seen that… Mother would kill me if she heard rumours of me passionately making out with one of my classmates.”

    Maria gently extracted herself from Katarina’s embrace before taking one of her hands and leading her back toward the school’s building.

 “The party must almost be over by now, so we should get back inside anyway.”

    Katarina nodded absentmindedly, thoughts still filled by what she just experienced. But she had the feeling she was forgetting something… Thinking back on what happened, she realised what it was and stopped Maria in her tracks.

 “Huh ?” Maria turned toward her, surprised. “Lady Katarina, is something wrong ?

- I got so carried away I ended up forgetting maybe the most important thing.”

    Maria stared, confused, as Katarina stepped closer and hugged her around the waist, bringing the two girls chest to chest again. Then, with a sweet smile and gentle voice, Katarina finally gave her answer :

 “I love you too, Maria.”

A.N. : taking the opportunity to say that I’ll post everything I’ve written so far as a compilation of short stories on AO3. My pseudo there is also Laulink in case you want to check it out and follow the collection to be alerted next time I post something.

If I write short stories in the form of series of dialogues, like the “Like Mother like Daughter” one, I’ll post it on tumblr, but the more novel-like stories, like this one, will be put only on AO3 and I’ll just post a link here on tumblr.

Also I might write a couple more short stories for this series and Beware of the Villainess, but once that’s done, I’ll start working on a multi-chapters AU that’s basically a mix of Hamefura and I favour the Villainess, where Maria is the one who has memories of her past life in our world instead of Katarina and she decides to save the villainess from her doom. I don’t know when I’ll post it yet, but stay tuned !

[romansrace]

Season 13 Sassy Reviews - E1: The Pork Chop

Salutations! Here we are with a quick run of episode 1 - which we can all charitably say was a hot mess, right?

The queens gathered, split into pairs - and one three (would it be Drag Race without one ill-thought-out extra large or extra small team?) to lipsync for their lives in Episode 1 with... no eliminations, because the fandom loves a no-win no-elim premiere, amirite? ...

And of course with this format where they could go all out with gaggery, the producers of course chose... to protect their favorite queens at all costs and clearly signpost to the audience from the first minute exactly who they want us to care about and root for.

Is this the moment the show jumped the shark? Full lipsync review after the jump.

First lipsync is between obvious Vanjie/Shangie-esque life and soul of the party Kandy Muse who blasts into the werkroom with energy at 11, and self-described ‘filler queen’ Joey Jay who boasted in her Meet the Queens of never wearing a wig yet showed up looking like 2001 Christina Aguilera in her entrance look and a notably more subdued 2021 Pink in her confessional.

They lipsync to Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. Joey gives us all the right showgirl tricks and follows the song hitting every beat and word, while Kandy plays up a schtick and comedy with a few dance moves thrown in for good measure. All in all, it was a pretty equal start in my view from two queens neither of whom are likely lipsync assassins. However, the producers had a different idea, and Kandy is given the first shantay while Joey sashays away.

The second lipsync features ice skater (did you know she skates? It was only hammered home about 8 times in the 3 minutes of screentime she got) Denali vs dancer and seeded-not-the-best-look-queen LaLa Ri, who is very high energy in the confessionals compared to Denali’s slightly more subdued and cautious remarks. Want to guess who wins without even watching it?

Yes, once again, despite Denali pulling an amazing performance out of the bag to the PussyCat Dolls’ When I Grow Up in full-on ice skates on a normal floor including  a Naomi-Smalls-esque full body back bend and a cartwheel, you’ve guessed it, the louder confessional queen wins the second lipsync too, and Denali is sent out back to the loser queens’ holding room.

The third lipsync is between young look queen Symone wearing a dress made of photographs of herself (choices) and cancer-surviving well-established queen mother Tamisha Iman. They’ll perform to Janet Jackson’s The Pleasure Principle. To reiterate, a young, confident, beautiful looks queen - who is friends with Gigi Goode, from the last season - versus an older queen who has been doing drag for 30 years and has tried to get on many years previously. Gosh, wonder who the producers will favor.

If you guessed Symone... you’d be right. Despite Tamisha giving us a near-perfect rendition of Janet-esque choreography with handography the house down boots in a Janet-esque colored suit with shoulderpads, the shantay goes to Symone for...I guess waving her hands in the air a bit and strutting. In truth, Symone did not do badly in the lipsync, but did she win it? Not in my book.

Our resident two kooky queens are up next; Gottmik who is inspired by clowns, and Utica Queen who is inspired by colors and patterns mixed up and blended together. Gottmik is also the franchise’s first trans man competitor.

The two queens give it all they’ve got to Rumors - by Lindsay Lohan. This one’s pretty even, but of course, there was no way they were going to let RuPaul eliminate a trans contestant on the first episode after her past controversies - although, given the number of contestants, a double shantay would be perfectly doable AND would probably build early rapport between the pair - so it’s instead a shantay for Gottmik only and a sashay for Utica.

Fifth lipsync with only one to go gives the floor to Rosé, the drag sister of Jan, from season 12, and Olivia Lux, a young queen who admires and has always looked up to Rosé. Does anyone smell a storyline here?

Rosé is asked by the judges before the lipsync - to Elle King’s Ex’s & Oh’s - starts if she expects to do better than Jan did. Ru has a nasty twinkle in her eye that suggests that no matter how Rosé answers, she’ll make sure it doesn’t come true. Once again, Olivia and Rosé perform quite evenly matched. Olivia arguably gets a bit more into the song, but equally, she breaks into some non-drag-esque air guitar moments that previously saw contestants like Yuhua Hamasaki eliminated. In any case, once again, the typical happens, and it’s bye bye to Rosé while Olivia is given the win.

And finally, we have a three-way lipsync, and the first time I was personally even a little gooped because this resulted in only one queen winning rather than only one sashaying away, meaning that as of the end of episode 1, Season 13 has eliminated over half of its cast. Choices. (Although as if they won’t be back in some way...)

The final three queens into the werkroom are the slightly wallflower-esque yet shady Kahmora Hall, confident-but-perhaps-deluded Elliott with Two T’s, and the big girl winner stereotype the show has clearly been trying to capture for four seasons now, hostess, actress, and comedy queen Tina Burner, a mainstay of the New York drag scene.

Lady Marmalade is the lipsync song this time. Kahmora is a little outclassed by the other two, Elliott especially, who pulls out a number of tricks, flips, and a full side split - even in not the best outfit for the showgirl classic in her half-tank and cargo pants. Tina Burner holds her own with a comedy lipsync playing on her height and age, but it’s quite obvious that she would have been given this win almost no matter how she did. And she does - shantay you stay Tina Burner, and you other two, get off my stage! - was the vibe.

And so we go into episode 2 with six of the 13 queens clearly marked out as The Winners. Do we need any clearer demarcation of who the producers’ favorites will be this season? Is that guaranteed the top 6 - or maybe, at least, most of the places within the top 7 or 8?

I’d love to be gagged by changes as the season goes along, but this premiere had an almost-but-not-quite self-aware vibe to it that left me feeling uneasy in a way I haven’t since season 11. The eliminated queens looked - perhaps unsurprisingly, given the stressful nature of 2020, when this was filmed - genuinely devastated to be put into the losers group on their first episode, only to be told that they can only save themselves by Survivor-esque voting off themselves one of their number - a trick that works better on All Stars because we know by then all the queens competing are wealthy and already well-established, and have just come back for the game, rather than to make or break their livelihood.

I’m very cautious as to how this season will go now, and, to be honest, it’s not quite a death knell, but this did feel like the first steps into a new - and not necessarily better - era for the franchise.

But on the plus side, after this episode, I have a new and unexpected fan favorite queen - Justice for Tamisha Iman!

[alarajrogers]

To amplify this:

There can only ever be two significant national parties in the US at a time. This is because we have a winner-take-all system, where the guy who gets 51% of the vote is treated the same as the guy who gets 89% of the vote. Smarter people than me have mathematically proven that a system like that will always turn into 2 parties. Other countries with multiple viable parties have things like ranked choice voting, where you pick your first choice, your second choice, and so on. Then if your first choice doesn't get enough votes, your second choice gets counted, so your vote for, for example, Ralph Nader of the Green Party would not have ended up drawing votes away from Al Gore the Democrat and resulted in George W. Bush the Republican being elected.

It's not likely that the US will adopt ranked choice voting anytime soon, since it's in the interest of the existing political parties not to do it. And as long as we don't have it, there are two parties, and voting for a Green candidate in a national election is throwing away your vote. Which, it's your vote, you have the right to throw it away, but right now one party is flawed but believes in democracy, and the other one is going full on fascist. We are literally fighting to keep Nazis out of power.

I didn't sign up with a political party when I was your age because I wanted to maintain the mental fiction that I was independent. In fact, because I have always favored minority rights, in my lifetime I could only ever be a Democrat, and I have no time machines to go back and vote for Abe Lincoln. My life began with an incredibly shitty and corrupt Republican president in power, and they have only gotten worse over time.

The only thing that joining a party does is to give you some right to pick that party's candidate. That's it. In majority red states, many people who vote for Democrats sign up as Republicans so they can try to get less terrible local Republican candidates because in their state, the Republican will win. Same thing in majority blue states, the other way around. So there is some degree of calculation in deciding what party to sign with, but you definitely should sign with one or the other so you have some say over what candidate ends up on the ballot. Even if you then choose to vote Green, you've still had your say about who became the candidate for the national-level big party, because one of the two national level big parties is going to win. (And because Republicans are currently dominated by a fascist faction, and non-fascist Republicans are being forced out of office, please don't vote for Greens at a national level. They won't win, you're sending the wrong message to the Democrats -- basically when you say "you're not far left enough for me" they hear "I'll never be good enough for you so I should pander to the people in the middle" -- and, for the immediate future at least, you're not helping the fight against fascism.)

When you vote for a Democrat and you're a leftist, you can pressure them to move further to the left. "I voted for you and I am very disappointed in your decision to authorize drone strikes" kind of thing. You cannot pressure Republicans to move left. You can barely stop them from skidding all the way to the right.

If you dislike this, work toward getting ranked-choice voting implemented in your state. If all of them have it, then we can have legit national third parties. But until then, all voting Green does is tell Democrats that they can never capture the votes of the far left, so they should move to the middle instead. Don't tell them that! Tell them that if you see them making reasonable efforts to become more progressive, you see that progress and you reward them with votes, then keep up the pressure.

i registered to vote for the first time ( i feel old) now that im an adult but my state has closed primary elections which i was wondering if you have an opinion about. my initial thought was that its bad because i had to register democrat (rather than my states green party which represents my beliefs more) just so i could vote between democrat candidates, which feels like being pressured into supporting the weird pseudo two party system we have. but then i looked it up and apparently a reason for this is so that people from opposing parties wont purposefully mess up the votes just so that their preferred candidates have an easier time winning, and i think that makes sense too. but is that actually the reason theyve closed it or is it just to force us dem/republican?? cause it feels strange

Okay, look. I respect the fact that you're a young person, and I appreciate that you have not only registered to vote, but plan to vote in the primaries, so I don't want to lecture you too much. That said: I am taking you out for coffee, I am sitting you down, I am looking into your eyes, and I am urgently telling you the following:

The Green Party is a scam. It is a scam. It has existed for decades in American politics as an empty shell corporation weaponizing the good intentions of young people like yourself, because all it theoretically stands for "it's good to save the planet maybe." Which is not something that any non-insane person seriously disagrees with, but there is no world in which that cause is actually furthered by registering/voting Green (you mentioned that you did vote for Democrats, which -- good, but listen to me here, youngun, okay?) It ran Jill Stein in 2016 to siphon more votes from HRC, and this election it plans to run Cornel West, a pro-Russian tankie who positively equated Bernie and Trump, as another spoiler candidate. It does not stand for "protecting the planet" or America in any real way. It has never elected a single senator or congressman, let alone a president. It stands for empty performance/grievance political theater by those people who feel too morally superior to vote for/affiliate with Democrats, often because the internet has told them that it's not Cool or Hip or Progressive enough.

If your main priority is climate/the environment, you're doing the right thing by registering as a Democrat and voting for Democrats. (Also: the adjectival form is Democratic. It is the Democratic party and Democratic candidates, otherwise you sound like the Fox News host who wrote a book literally entitled "The Democrat Party Hates America.") They are the only major party who has in fact passed major climate legislation and have made environmental justice a central tenet of their platform. As opposed to the Republicans, whose Project 2025, along with the rest of its nightmare fascist prescriptions, openly pledges to completely wreck existing climate protections and forbid any new ones, just because we weren't all dying fast enough under their death-cult rule already. That's the main logical fallacy I don't get among both the Online Leftists and the American electorate in general: "the Democrats aren't doing quite enough as I'd like, so I'll enable the active wrecking ball insane lunatics to get in power and ruin even the progress we HAVE managed to make!" Like. How does that even make sense?

On a federal level, the Greens have contributed nothing whatsoever of tangible value to American or international climate policy/legislation, environmental justice, or anything else, because as noted, they don't have any elected candidates and mostly focus on drawing voters away from Democrats. There might be plenty of good candidates on the local or city level, which -- great! Vote away for Greens if they're available, or the only other option is a Republican! But on the federal/primary level, please understand: once again, they are a scam. There is no point in affiliating yourself with them. You're welcome to register Green and vote Democratic, if that makes you feel better or if you prefer having another label next to your name, but once again, I'm telling you in my position as a salty Tumblr elder that they have done nothing but harm to the causes they claim to care about, because "environment" is such a nebulous priority and has demonstrably been hijacked to stop the American government entity, i.e. the Democrats, that is actually working to improve on it.

As for your question: nobody is "forcing" or "pressuring" you to vote in primaries. By your own admission, you made a conscious choice to register as a Democrat in order to vote for Democratic candidates. If you were just a regular registered voter of whatever party affiliation, you would vote in the general election for whatever candidate the primary process produced. But if you are sufficiently vested and committed to that process that you would like to have a say in who is running under that party label, it is not unreasonable that you would register as a member of that party. Nobody has twisted your arm behind your back and made you do so; you are taking a considerable level of initiative on your own. Likewise, open primaries can be both a good and bad thing. This falls under the "the political system we have is flawed, but we can't magically pretend it doesn't exist and act according to our own fantasyland versions of reality" thing that I keep saying over and over. So yes, if you want a role in shaping the Democratic candidates who emerge from a Democratic primary process, you will usually register as a Democrat, and nobody has forced you to do that. It's that simple.

Likewise as a general programming note: I'm trying to cut back on politics a bit right now, because I don't have the spoons/bandwidth/mental health to deal with it. I apologize. So if you've sent me a politics-related ask recently and haven't received a response, I'm not deliberately or maliciously ignoring you; I just am not able to handle it as much as usual and will have to put it on pause. However, I feel as if this is important enough to be worth saying, so, yeah.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

FIVE MORE DAYS

There are three things you need to do in the next few days.

I. If you haven’t voted yet, you need to do that.

If you still have your absentee ballot lying around somewhere, you need to bring it to a drop box or your local elections offices. If you try to mail it in, the regime’s capture of the Supreme Court and sabotage of the postal service may succeed in stealing your vote. Don’t let them.

If you didn’t request an absentee ballot, that’s totally fine, but you need to make your plan to vote now. If your state has early voting, you need to go TODAY.

Absolutely no bullshit games about “oh I’m in a safe state, I can not vote/vote third party/write in my dog.” Do not let anyone get away with saying that shit in your presence. First of all, no state is safe until it’s certified. Second of all, the margin of the popular vote is REALLY IMPORTANT. Any crap these mobsters might be tempted to pull is going to be more difficult and less appealing if there’s a five point Biden win than a one point win, harder and less worth their while still if there’s a nine or ten point blowout. That’s true in any particular state and it’s true nationally. If they think they’re going to contest or throw out votes, AND THEY DO, then we need to have more votes in the bank than they have time to steal.

II. You need to keep your head.

Their plan is to overwhelm everyone with their bullshit. It probably would’ve been smarter not to spend four years teaching us how to tune them out; lucky for us, they’re brainless jackasses.

Their big confusion play seems to be scaremongering if we don’t have a winner called, like, during prime time on Tuesday night. Ignore them. If it takes a few days, it takes a few days. That’s part of making sure the votes get counted. Even recounts and lawsuits in the days and weeks afterward are part of a sensible process. Don’t let these goobers overwhelm you with their shitty Trump fanfiction.

III. You need to prepare yourself for Wednesday, November 4.

I don’t mean emotionally. I mean that you should expect you will need to take some kind of direct action the day after all the votes are cast. Keep an eye on Protect the Results for events near you. If it’s available in your state, download the ACLU mobile justice app and get familiar with it now; if not, at least get the number of your state or local ACLU into your phone. Pack a little knapsack now:

hand sanitizer and a spare mask;

a tiny bottle of whatever OTC pain medication you use, plus a dose or two of any prescriptions you need;

a bottle of water and some snacks you can eat while you’re out;

an extra flannel or sweatshirt;

a photo ID and some bail money might not be the worst idea in the world.

In my opinion – AND THIS IS JUST MY READ ON THE SITUATION, WHICH CAN CHANGE ANY MINUTE – I still think the most likely scenario for next week is pretty similar to the midterms, where Trump goes to bed that night thinking the margins are close enough that he can wriggle his way out of a real loss, but the magnitude of a Democratic landslide gets clear pretty quickly. He doesn’t have the guts for a real fight, and he doesn’t have the psychological ability to absorb a narcissistic injury fast enough to take action. He’s spent years alienating the top brass of the military. He’s spent weeks trying to give his Secret Service detail the ‘rona. (Seriously, what successful coup has included “try but fail to kill a bunch of your armed bodyguards”? I’m genuinely curious.) But that’s the most likely scenario out of a lot of scenarios. It’s not over until it’s over.

People are anxious. They’re disoriented after 2016, when everyone knew Democrats would win a free and fair election but too few people realized that wasn’t what we were having. And they’re discombobulated now, because most Americans don’t have practice waiting for an election that they already know will be unfair. Chances are pretty good that at least a few of these people are in your social media feeds. So you might see a lot of doomporn loser talk about how it’s all rigged and he’s never going to leave anyway and blah blah blah.

Those aren’t misplaced concerns. But there’s a way to talk about them in a way that’s a lot more constructive, and it’s this:

Trump cannot win legitimately. That’s not me reading tea leaves or interpreting polls or whatever. He cut himself off from that possibility with his solicitation of foreign interference, his extortion of foreign leaders and American governors for his own political benefit, his willful destruction of the infrastructure we need in order to have an election, and his incitement of terrorism against journalists, opponents, and voters. He did not want to win an election with any democratic legitimacy and so he won’t.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll win. But I like our chances. Even knowing about so much of his cheating, and being aware that there’s almost certainly more cheating we don’t know about yet, I like our chances.

So let’s do it. Get that ballot in. Use whatever platform you have to remind other people to do the same. Make calls if you can. It’s not too late to chip in to your state party or the DSCC – they’re probably done buying ads, but we should assume they’re going to need money for recounts and lawsuits.

This is it. Crunch time. We can do this. Let’s go.