#like what happened to democracy to human rights

[maykop1010]

Oh, you’re still on this? Talk about obsessed. Alright, let’s go.

First off, you’re doing a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid one simple truth: what’s happening in Gaza is genocide. You can spin it however you like, but redefining terms or adding caveats doesn’t change what’s right in front of us, an apartheid state systematically destroying an entire people. That’s not “urban warfare.” That’s ethnic cleansing.

And your little rant about me “obsessing” over the word genocide when Jews are involved? Spare me your weak ass attempt at deflection. Criticizing a government’s actions, like Israel’s, is not antisemitism. But calling out apartheid, war crimes, and genocide specifically when they’re excused or ignored? Yeah, that’s going to get attention, because people like you keep justifying it.

Now, your obsession with “spaceship”? Seriously get a fucking grip. You keep bringing up this imaginary person like a boogeyman you can’t get over. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there’s more than one person who sees through your bullshit. Maybe your talking points are just that bad.

Let me spell it out for you: I don’t give a fuck who’s committing genocide. Be it Israel, China, Russia, or anyone else, I’ll call it out. But the difference is that Israel silences any criticism by crying antisemitism. That’s the unique part. That’s why people are speaking up. Which honestly abhorrent, given that real antisemitism is disgusting.

Your problem isn’t with the use of the word genocide. Your problem is people calling out Israel’s government. And that says a hell of a lot more about you than it does about me.

So keep screeching at me about “spaceship” and I’m a Nazi cunt (my all time fav screeched at me by genocidal supporters like you), antisemitic, if it makes you feel better. All you’re doing is proving my point: you’ll twist any narrative to defend war crimes and genocide as long as Israel’s government is the one committing them.

Oh, by the way, let me know what you’re doing for the people of Gaza, the ones starving, the ones whose babies are freezing to death because, you know, the “beacon of democracy” won’t allow blankets or food in. Let me know what you’re doing to help Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem currently living under apartheid. And please, do tell me what you’re doing to support Palestinian children as young as 11 who are held in military prisons without due process, subjected to torture, abuse, and rape.

Are you part of any solidarity or advocacy campaigns for the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples being persecuted in China? Have you raised your voice for the Rohingya refugees, or taken part in any boycotts against the UAE for its brutal funding of the civil war in Sudan?

What about the children in the DRC, forced to dig cobalt with their bare hands? Did you by chance raise the alarm or boycott Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, whose operations have been documented to violate human rights, including child labor and exploitation?

Have you done anything to support the peoples of the Caucasus who continue to suffer torture, disappearances, sexual violence, and discrimination at the hands of Russia?

Were you part of any of the thousands of protests against Assad’s regime for its barbaric acts, or did you happen to help provide food, shelter, and clothing for the Syrian families fleeing that nightmare?

Say, have you spoken up for Israeli women? Israel consistently ranks the highest in West Asia for documented cases of rape and sexual assault. In 2023 alone, 55,044 reports were filed with crisis centers, 17,484 of them new complaints. Over 80% of these cases were closed without indictments, “indicating issues with the legal process” while one in five women in Israel report being raped in their lifetime. In fact, the APCCI said “that the rate of violent sexual offenses in Israel was 10 percent higher than the average for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, labeling it as an "epidemic."

Have you by chance advocated on behalf of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, many of whom endure conditions akin to modern slavery? Or supported Saudi women fighting for equal rights?

But please, keep screeching at me with the same tired talking points. Keep dodging Israel’s human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Your deflections only confirm what I already know.

The right hates Jews because the right are bigots. The left hates Jews because Jews are bigots!!!

Seriously Jews, it’s you. It’s not us it’s you!! Y’all treat all us “goyim” like trash and then act surprised when we don’t want to be around you. Then you commit a genocide against the Palestinians and act like the victims when people protest it!!

JEWS!!! IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO UNPACK YOUR BIGOTRIES!!!

[winter-came]

okay, anyone has any tips what to wear or say at the funeral of your own country? because what Robert Fico just did is an execution streaming live. we're back in the old days and my god, i am sick to my stomach.

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

97 Poets of Revachol pics!

HERE THEY ARE, courtesy of the event's official photographer, Zuzana Šubrtová. The Elysium-based LARP took place in two runs in Terezín, Czech Republic, in the latter half of September. These are from the second run!

I can't possibly describe what it was like to inhabit the rundown tenement of La Cage with more than a hundred other players, bringing to life a whole slice of society: immigrants, barflies, petanque players, sewer people, Union gang members, Wild Pines mercs, disco people, sewer people, looters, street artists, an inevitable mass of fascists, anarchists, communards (or so I'm told), communards (proper), communards (it's complicated), councilmembers, hustlers, taxidermy enthusiasts, the also-inevitable mass of pale-fried strugglers, journalists, Moralintern creeps, RCM chucklefucks, and so on and so forth. The old military hospital burst to life with small human moments and grand revelations happening in every corner at all time, as the gears of history moved toward our inevitable trial run of Le Retour.

We really had it all. Politics, drugs, creeping mold, more drugs, unseen voices steering us toward our best and worst natures, a metaphysical rave, entroponetic anomalies, precognition (scripted), precognition (just kind of happened?? Several times over?), suzerainist coffin deliveries, sweatshop politics, old reckonings, radiant sacrifices (accidental-ish), three-way divorces (one-upping one HDB), strikes and strike-breakers, political dance-offs and political orgies, and did I mention the drugs, under the greatness of history and the pale.

Thanks to the organizers for the colossal effort they pulled off like it was nbd, and to all my fellow dwellers of La Cage.

A few favourites:

First off, this was basically the entirety of my game:

...with a central heartrending tension between that abandon, that 'something beautiful is going to happen', and my character's earthly loves, the family she loved so much. It was really really fascinating and emotionally moving to get to play out that central conundrum in full (and go die on the barricades for an independent Revachol following the push of History) (and also of Franconegro pulling my strings like a marionette in a chilling scene) (but mostly History)

Case in point: me in the back, the Unseen voice/spirit/skill "Doomsayer" to the left, dear husband Tai in the middle. Sorry Tai!

Moralintern mission

Sweatshop workers strike

Both sides of the barricades, right as the game ended (this is not a spoiler, it said up front on the website that that's where the story would end): independentists (feat. His Fuckery Franconegro with the black wings in the background, but also the Unseen of if it sucks hit da bricks, the street martyr and idk who else) and globalists (Dolores Dei, Doomsayer et al)

speaking of those two - here's them in full rave regalia. I love that two of the collective skills of this place are flat-out "Dolores Dei" and "Franconegro", it's so fitting. Can't have current society without them, so here they are, as a molecular part of it.

RCM peeps predictably being serious, professional individuals

Designer drug guy talking to Corrosion who's kind of the local version of Electrochemistry. I'm sure this was a completely hinged conversation that reached sensible conclusions

Wild Pines mercs +1

Disco downtime. The set design for The Bearded Vulture club and The Second Club was out of this world. I hope my own pics can convey some of it.

sweatshop power dynamics (there were accidents, Union leverage, strikes, corruption... you'd think there would be barely time for anything else to go on AND YET)

possibly my fave pic of the whole thing (go Doomsayer!!!). we had specific graffitable areas on the wall and made VERY good use of them. Well, everyone else. My character wasn't much of a graffiti artist, her greatest contribution was turning "Revachol for revacholians" into "Revachol for mold"...

LARP^2

fascist campaigning at the Democracy Picnic

Petanque club...

...actually playing petanque? I never saw them ingame, I was starting to wonder if it wasn't a front for something else

Pictured - no scheming, plotting or quadruple-crossing here as you can clearly see by "Kras Knezhinisky"'s super normal demeanour and unassuming name, which I can totally believe was on his legit birth certificate)

I mention Kras because here's the theatrical taxidermy show with him in the middle narrating the adventures of his antifascist ferret Kommissar Kunixet. Nice pic, I take the shot. Five seconds later, superstar Frittte clerk Jamie Delaney joins in, and what can I do, NOT have Jamie in a shot? Absolutely not, so I take the same exact shot with Jamie in it as well.

And by sheer twist of technology (and of course the pale, and of course vile censorship in defiance of the Romangorod convention)... Kras Knezhinsky of all people gets kommissar-no-kommissar'd. "Kras, the pale is erasing you from our memories, from images," I warn him, showing him the two pictures. One hour later, he gets taken behind the waste disposal facility and shot.

Hm.

(LARP's haunted. These things KEPT HAPPENING. In the first run, that version of my character went "YOU MURDERER" at the specific merc who'd turn out to be connected with her background, a couple of hours before getting that reveal in-game. What's Elysium without some good old-fashioned precognition after all!)

Poor Flowerseller (red dress here) was kind of my Empathy - many valiant attemps were made, however. Uphill struggle.

HARDCORE anodic club leader Konrad Nilsen doing something not so hardcore here, idk what was going on exactly but then again I never even noticed we had a morgue and I had a plot right next room, so what do I know. I know that the end is near. That much for sure. And that the resolution of history's contradictions goes through the pale. But corpses? Nah.

||||||| 😎

[a-student-out-of-time]

An Important Reminder In Trying Times

Hey everyone, Mod Bubbles here.

I know that I've said over and over that I don't like talking about politics on here, but I really feel the need to say this:

This Is Not The End.

I understand things probably seem really bleak right now. A lot of people are going to be hurt by this, and the sheer amount of fearmongering and worst case scenarios are inescapable. But the country and the world are not going to change overnight. To be honest, it may not change very much at all in the next four years. I'm not a political scientist, so I can't tell you that for sure. There's a lot to be concerned about.

What I can tell you, as a student of history, is this: not only have we survived this once, we have survived this every time.

Think about it this way: every single tyrant, every single right-wing representative, every single emperor and colonial power, every corporate scumbag and power-hungry lunatic. No matter how many of them have ever come to power, held onto power, and tried to make themselves seem invincible, not a single one has ever held back humanity's progress and not a single one has proven to be invincible.

There were countries throughout history, especially in the 20th century, that fell under brutal dictatorships and saw countless lives lost. Did the people just give up and accept it? Fuck no they didn't. They fought back. Many of them lived to see democracy restored to their lands in their lifetimes, or fought to see it restored in their children's.

From Europe to Latin America, while many countries still have their issues, they endured and their people have survived. Their governments were not invincible, just as none ever have been.

Regardless of the outcome of this election, the world will go on. People will not just roll over and accept whatever horrible things happen, the fight will continue and we will do everything in our power to carry on as we always have. We'll carry on to achieve bigger and better things.

Let me also be clear: if you feel the need to cry, please cry. If you're afraid, don't pretend you're not. If you're angry, allow yourself to feel that anger. But if you're seriously contemplating giving up or hurting yourself, please don't.

You may hear all this news and ask yourself, "Bubbles, what's the point? What can I do about all this?" I've felt that way too, I have for a long time. I understand completely. It's scary and overwhelming, but I'll tell you exactly what you can do to fight against that: you can be kind.

Do you want to know where the most tangible change in the world begins? It's never at the top. It begins with people like us on a communal level, where we reach out to help others. Whether that means we help our neighbors, our friends, or any strangers we can.

Going out of your way to start fights, looking for someone to blame based on the flimsiest justifications, and just being cruel because you're angry, those aren't how you change anything. Those just add to the problem.

Here's just some ideas on what you can do instead:

Get away from the news, stop doomscrolling, mute doomers, and turn the TV and news apps off. This will get you out of a negative feedback loop that'll make you feel worse and more powerless, which is what they're designed to do in order to maximize traffic.

Remember to eat, sleep, brush your teeth, take a shower, take your meds, and do everything else you need to do to stay healthy.

If you or someone else really feel like leaving the country for your own safety is best, you can still work do so. But please don't convince yourself that if you can't, it's over.

Give back to people as much as you can. Show the people in your life who support you that you care, and that all that they do for you matters.

Donate to good causes you believe in.

Stand up to bullshit whenever you see it.

Do not give up on your dreams and ambitions. One bad leader does not mean your future automatically ends. Stop worrying about any potential apocalypse in the future, because you can do that even on the best days, and instead work toward a future that you CAN achieve.

There's this pervasive and very inaccurate idea that it's only the president who gets to enforce policies on the country. This ignores governors, the House of Representatives, Congress, mayors, and the countless other leaders involved. And it ignores you.

You do not have to spend the next 3 years and 364 days doing nothing but feeling miserable. In fact, that's the last thing you should do. Fear and despair are the weapons they wield, and they only have as much power as you allow them to have over you.

If your view of politics is that you just have to vote for the "right one" and then everything will be utopian, or that if people vote for the wrong one" then we're headed for a terrible dystopian nightmare, I have to tell you that that is incredibly reductionist and also very dumb. I can also tell you from personal experience that it's not them who make the real changes where it's needed.

A friend sent me a video that really opened my eyes on this situation: Adam Conover, the guy behind Adam Ruins Everything, said he's not worried about all this. Why? Because he and some friends were able, through their own power, to make real positive changes in their community. They were able to bring homelessness down in their district by over 38% through their own efforts.

And he's right that, as a silver lining to all this, it made more Americans than ever take a stand against all the horrible shit they were seeing and get involved with solutions.

Speaking from my own experiences as well, when Hurricane Helene devastated my area, it wasn't the politicians who came and repaired roads and power lines, it wasn't them who brought in food and supplies to everyone, and it wasn't them who worked tirelessly to save people still in need. It was everyone in our local communities.

The people at the top have never really cared about anything more than your money and your vote, but the people around you care more than you may believe they would. Hell, even strangers on the internet care more than you'd believe.

Now, even if you've made it this far, you may be wondering "What about when he starts outlawing and banning things?" To that, I say look at Prohibition and see how well that went. Politicians have only ever operated under the idea that banning something will make it go away, and it always does the exact opposite. And if you're still worried, you can get involved with organizations that fight to support these things being available and regulated.

But by now, you may also be wondering "What if I can't get involved? What if I'm too young or I don't have the money, or my parents won't let me?"

Then just be kind.

Stop looking for enemies to blame. Don't martyr yourself for some nebulous cause or the idea that your suffering increasing means the rest of the suffering in the world will go down. Don't torture yourself by telling yourself that you didn't do enough.

Show compassion, show support, show love and genuine care toward people who need it, including yourself.

"But there's so many shitty people in this country and the world, why should I-" Stop thinking that way. This isn't about them, this is about you and how you can make a difference. There will probably always be shitheads and power-hungry morons, but that does not negate the fact that you can choose to be different. You can choose to be kind.

Kindness is a sword that you have to learn how to wield. Wield it responsibly and use it to help others. No matter how small or insignificant it may be, YOU DO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

I say all this as a 29-year-old who spent most of his life feeling scared and miserable about so many current events, convincing myself I'm useless and selfish because I was worried about so much and I hated myself for all of it. And I've decide I'm not going to do that anymore.

During the last right-wing era, I managed to help build a whole community out of my love for Danganronpa. I created friendships, relationships, and there are people alive right now because I chose to do so. Because I chose to use that community for kindness. I want to keep building from there by going into streaming and reaching out to more people.

I won't lie to you and say that I'm not scared, because I am. But I'm also not going to let fear change who I am. I want us all to be better to ourselves and others, because that is how you defeat hate. It starts with you.

And if you're still concerned, let me share with you a quote from The Great Dictator, a movie made in 1940, when World War II wasn't even at its height yet:

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Please take care of yourselves out there, everyone. We'll get through this, just as we always have.

[devildomwriter]

Obey Me as Disenchantment Quotes #1

Lucifer & Satan: *Laughing maniacally*

Simeon: “While I question their evil motives, it is nice to see them happy.”

Barbatos: “Now announcing the triumphant return of our heroes from their quest that we all privately thought would fail.”

Mammon & Leviathan: “…”

Lucifer: “How do we even know it worked.”

Solomon: “Oh but it must have worked. Now to test it, we need a volunteer to kill you.”

Belphegor: “Dibs.”

Barbatos: “How can you keep messing up a recipe with two ingredients?”

Solomon: “If you ever run into trouble give them this note.”

MC: “Kill me?”

Solomon: “Thirteen gave it to me, now I give it to you.”

Leviathan: “I’ve been meaning to…but the thing is, I…so you see…well, I’m glad we had this talk. How bout you talk now?”

MC: “But you haven’t said anything yet.”

Belphegor: “Well I was waiting to tell you until after I was dead so I wouldn’t have to tell you.”

Mammon: “Now just keep holding on, okay. Just keep holding on.”

MC: “It’s okay, it’s okay Mammon, I always wanted to go out while I’m still young and hot.”

Leviathan: “I didn’t want to tell you because I’m terrified of female emotions.”

Satan: “No, no, no, I was mostly raised by Lucifer. And a bunch of friendly drunks down at the pub. They taught me the fine art of stabbing.”

Barbatos: “It’s just too painful seeing the truth all the time.”

Solomon: “Ah, that’s why humans tend to avoid it.”

Belphegor: “The profession left without me.”

Diavolo: “Oh, that’s too bad.”

Belphegor: “I blame myself, cause I didn’t even notice.”

Solomon & Barbatos: *fighting*

Asmodeus: “Guys, guys come on. I’m much more embarrassed than I am aroused.”

Asmodeus: “MC, you poor baby. What a horrific day you’ve had. Let’s have too much wine and forget about it all.”

Beelzebub: “How’d you become a weird talking cat.”

Satan: “You keep shoving waffles in your mouth while I think of an answer.”

Thirteen: “I’ll use my skills as a hunter and Raphael will use his diplomacy to stab them with a broom handle.”

Solomon: “I used to spend many nights up here. Watching the sky, the moon, the neighbors.”

Lucifer: “This is your home. You’re free to explore.”

MC: “Wow, what’s behind that door?”

Lucifer: “None of your business nosy.”

Mammon: “Maybe you were overcome by chimney fumes. It happens quite frequently in a place like this with no chimnies.”

Satan: “What family curse? You mean insanity?”

Leviathan: “No, don’t be crazy. But yes I mean insanity.”

Asmodeus: “You guys are heavy. Do I really need both of you?”

Solomon & Satan: “Yes!”

Asmodeus: “Damn, I hate democracy.”

Mammon: “I knew you could count on me!”

Simeon: “What’s this called again?”

Mammon: “A a massage. It’s like a light well intentioned beating.”

Diavolo: “You’re clearly upset.”

Lucifer: “I’m not upset!”

Diavolo: “You said that like you were upset!”

MC: “Come on Belphegor be reasonable!”

Belphegor: “Never!”

Satan: “We’re gonna have to wing this in a dangerously half assed manner.”

Mammon: “That’s the Morningstar way.”

Asmodeus: “There’s plenty of fish in the sea, Sol.”

Solomon: “Like hell am I marrying another fish woman.”

Lucifer: “Disappointment’s a form of caring.”

Diavolo: “Tell me, where are you from.”

Solomon: “A country setting, it’s kind of like a farm but more stabbing.”

Simeon: “This whole thing feels like a weird dream.”

Mammon: “Or scurvy. When does scurvy kick in?”

Lucifer: “Believe it or not I know what it feels like to be burned alive by a mob of idiots.”

Beelzebub: “Oh, sweet butter, you’re the only thing right with the world.”

Solomon: “Morning, Belphegor! Care to try my new cure all? It wards off the deadly plague.”

Belphegor: “I’m actually hoping for death. Thanks though.”

Mammon: “For the first time in my life I feel completely calm and—“

Mammon: *Gets attacked by hawk*

Satan: “I’ve loved you since the moment you killed my brother.”

Mammon: “You don’t scare me! I was born scared.”

[qqueenofhades]

I'm watching the results come in for the French legislatives first round, and I have been following American presidential race and supreme court from afar. I am depressed. Please say something wise that will give me hope. I never thought to live through times like this.

Anonymous asked: Hey I know you said you’re avoiding posting about politics so absolutely feel free not to reply, but any tips about not getting hopeless? Especially when the fellow young people in your life are all clamoring to talk about how both parties are the same, they won’t vote, etc, etc (😑)?

Welp. It seems that what the people want to hear at this point is some Wise Words From Internet Grandmother Hilary, so... I will do my best to see what I can come up with. It bears repeating, as I have said many times before and will do so again, that I still have heard no better advice for living through The Horrors than the Gandalf: "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." Because, yeah. That, in its simplest essence, is it. We cannot control The Horrors. Individual people have never been able to control The Horrors, and five thousand-odd years after the invention of documented human history, here we still are, making the same stupid fucking mistakes. That is pretty maddening to deal with, and if you try to think of it like that, it is impossible to wrap your head around and it will only drive you crazy. So, then. What?

I will freely admit that I am scared too. Despite my best efforts, the post-debate furor wigged me out, I had to log off all social media and news sites for most of the weekend, not look at anything aside from one site I trust for two minutes, and try to get myself back in an okay headspace. So yes, rule number one: STOP DOOMSCROLLING. Please get a muzzle on that little voice in your head that says you HAVE to look, you HAVE to read everything, you have to KNOW JUST IN CASE HOW BAD IT COULD POSSIBLY BE. Then you look at stuff that makes you upset, and that leads to other stuff that makes you more upset, and then there you are in a stew of anxiety and anger and everything else that doesn't help. Do not look at the Bird Site Formerly Known as Twitter or news sites or anything else that is liable to have stuff that upsets you, especially in Panic!!! moments like this. It is designed to make you feel worse and it obscures the fact that nobody actually knows. Like, I devoutly hope that the anonymous "adviser to a prominent Democrat" and the NYT editorial board and everyone else screaming about how Biden should drop out right now step on ten Legos a day for the rest of their lives, but they also DO NOT KNOW (and given the NYT nakedly admitting to a personal vendetta against Biden for not giving them an interview, everyone can see exactly what this crass and unbelievably stupid sabotage attempt is, but yeah). Even if they get quoted in prominent publications, they do not know what is going to happen. They are not prophets. The NYT has, as noted, showed its ass 800 times before and keeps coming up with polls that are so ludicrously pro-Trump that it's becoming a cottage industry to debunk them. They are crass and cynical and trash and all that, they have vested interests, they have a platform, but repeat after me: WE DO NOT KNOW "FOR A FACT" THAT EVERYTHING IS DOOMED AND WILL NEVER BE OKAY AGAIN IF WE DO NOT LISTEN TO THE ALMIGHTY NEW YORK TIMES. In fact, the NYT has been so fucking wrong so fucking many times that at this point, I would bet on it being the other way around.

As part of my Bad Headspace Night on Friday night, I did picture the worst-case scenario of Trump winning, American democracy being overthrown, fascists around the world being emboldened, etc. It was a nasty mental picture and I didn't like anything that would come about if it did, but I had to remind myself that even if it did happen, well, the world would still be here, and good people who care about its future would have to do something to make that future happen. It would be ten times harder and it would be the result of another unimaginably evil and cynical fascist sabotage campaign, but... those are not exactly unprecedented in human history. (See: making all those mistakes over and over again.) People in the past were faced with those same exact moments where everything seemed monumentally hopeless and doomed for a generation, and they fought back, and they won. That's the thing. Fascists are evil and awful and terribly unnecessarily destructive, but they are not unbeatable, and they never have been. If we make the choice to resist them, then, well, they can be resisted. It will not happen by posting vaporous screeds on social media, or sitting on your ass and waiting for some miraculous savior/revolution/whatever to swoop in and save you, but it can happen, and it can work. That's what is very hard to remember in the current Horrors, but it's the way it's been for as long as there has been evil. It is not the be-all and end-all of the human experience and never will be.

Likewise: if a la the second anon you're being surrounded with people who are saying stupid things and making you feel worse: just don't be around them any more. It's that simple and you should do it. You can unfollow people who are posting defeatist rubbish, or you can avoid spending time with people railing about how everything is already doomed and voting is useless, etc. You may feel guilty because these people are your friends or you don't want to cut off contact, but you need to do what is best for your mental health, and if all you hear is BS, then, yeah. Pull the plug, cut the cord, do whatever you want. You do not owe anyone else your headspace, your attention, your mental health, or anything else, especially if it is demonstrably idiotic and incorrect. Find ways to do something. Go out and volunteer. Put down the phone (again, this cannot be overemphasized) and stop looking at doomerists on Twitter who get their engagement fix from making you upset and angry. Read a book, watch a TV show, visit a friend in real life, take a walk outside (if you don't live in a furnace, which unfortunately a lot of us do right now). Just sit and close your eyes and meditate. Stretch or move your body. Drink water. Super basic ordinary things that get you away from the increasingly frantic death spiral mindset and put you back in the reminder that things are never over and there is still a lot of time for everything.

As I said: I am doing this myself right now. It is not easy. I know it is not. I wish that we lived in a kinder timeline where this was not necessary, but as Gandalf says, nobody ever wishes for this and yet it happens nonetheless. But we can still control how we react to it and identify the things that are doing their best to make us feel terrible and doomed and hopeless, and make a choice to move away from them. We do not know what's going to happen, no. But we also do not know that everything is doomed, and you know what, it usually ends up not being that way. So that's what I can offer for now. Courage.

[zingay]

Do not conflate Jewish people with Israel and do not conflate Palestinians with Hamas. Criticising the Israeli government + military and Hamas is completely fair, but you must criticise both for their actions. Don't pin everything that's happening on Hamas alone like I'm seeing people do because everything Hamas does is immediately linked to the Israeli government.

Israel's cruelty created Hamas, and Netanyahu funded and uplifted them to power to get rid of other "more acceptable" Palestinian groups like the PLO to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. This serves the purpose of turning the world against Palestine and to separate Gaza and the West Bank. They then forced Gaza into an open-air prison, and no election has been held since 2006 to allow the Palestinian people of Gaza to choose their representatives.

X (paid article) X

Palestinian people have attempted peaceful negotiations and protests in the past, the most notable being the 2018 protest, The Great March of Return. Protests that took place on Fridays to fight for the right to return to their stolen homes and to end the illegal blockade of Gaza (which remains to this day). Israel responded with violence, using snipers to kill and injure protestors. Many women and children were killed or disabled as a result.

X X

Many Jewish people in and out of the state of Israel are antizionist and do not support the occupation of Palestine. This has been the cause of many raids by the Israeli police. Jewish people around the world have spoken up and protested against the Israeli government, calling zionism itself antisemitism.

X X X (highly recommend going through this account)

No matter what the Israeli government cosplays as, it will never be a democracy or a safe place for Jewish people if people are not allowed to protest or criticise the government. Netanyahu's approval continues to drop after months of protest against the proposal to reduce the power of the Supreme Court, giving more power to the government. This has been destroying the illusion of Israel as a democratic state.

X

X

This part is purely based on my snd others' suspicions as it is based on much more recent events and information, but also past actions of the Israeli government. But considering the warning that Israel has received from Egypt days before the October 7th attacks (X), and the sudden change in location of the Universo Paralello Festival 2 days before the event (X), you might question if this was on purpose to both distract from the Israeli's protests and police raids against them and get rid of the Palestinians.

Standing with Palestine is standing against zionism and genocide. Standing with Israel is standing with violence and antisemetism.

We will get nowhere if we continue allowing people to believe all Palestinians are terrorists and that all Jewish people are zionists. We can deal with groups like Hamas later. We can deal with violent zionists later. As we've seen, none of this can be done humanely before Palestine is freed.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Tulsi Gabbard’s history with Russia is even more concerning than you think

“What happened in Syria is what allowed the Russians to feel that they could do the very same in Ukraine,” he said.

“And what she is doing with Ukraine shows that it goes beyond her maybe misunderstanding one conflict. She is, hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet.”

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.

Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior began in Syria. The devastating conflict was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in 2011, which were brutally crushed by the Assad regime. It descended into a complex web of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the world and global powers into the fray.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group with a network of sources on the ground, documented the deaths of 503,064 people by March 2023. It said at least 162,390 civilians had died in that same time, with the Syrian government and its allies responsible for 139,609 of those deaths.

But Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War, viewed it all as a “regime-change war” fueled by the West and aimed at removing the dictator from power. She saw Assad – and Russia, when it entered the conflict – as legitimate defenders of the state against an extremist uprising.

In 2015, when Russia entered the Syrian war on the side of the dictator Assad, Gabbard expressed support for the move, even as the civilian toll from Moscow’s devastating airstrikes grew into the thousands.

“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911,” she wrote on Twitter.

It was precisely because of her support for Assad and Russia’s war that Moustafa was keen for her to attend the congressional delegation to southern Turkey to meet the victims of the conflict.

“From experience, everyone that we bring over to the border, and they see the victims, they always come back with a realistic view of what’s happening and who is behind the mass displacement and killing and atrocities and so on, and so that was the objective,” he said. “What was shocking was her lack of empathy. She’ll sacrifice the facts, even when it came to little girls in front of her telling her they got bombed by a plane – it didn’t matter.”

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who testified twice on Syria to the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Gabbard was a member, spent years debunking her various conspiracy theories about the war.

“Her consistent denial of the Syrian regime’s crimes is so wildly fringe that her potential appointment as DNI is genuinely alarming,” he told The Independent.

Lister said her views “appear to be driven by a strange fusion of America First isolationism and a belief in the value of autocratic and secular leaders in confronting extremism.”

They included a suggestion that Syrian rebels staged a false-flag chemical weapons attack against their supporters to provoke Western intervention against Assad — something the US intelligence agencies she will soon lead had concluded was false. She declined to call Assad a war criminal when pressed, despite masses of evidence, and used a video of Syrian government bombings to criticize US involvement in the war.

“Her descriptions of the crisis in Syria read like they were composed in Assad’s personal office, or in Tehran or Moscow – not Washington,” Lister added.

Gabbard was not swayed by meeting the victims of Assad’s airstrikes in 2015. In fact, two years later, she went to Damascus to meet the Syrian president in person and came away even more convinced of her opinions.

The congresswoman said her visit to meet Assad – the first by a sitting US lawmaker since the conflict began – was aimed at bringing an end to the war.

“I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace,” she told CNN at the time.

Fire rises following a Syrian government airstrike in Aleppo in 2016 (AP)

Gabbard was forced to defend her embrace of Assad and other dictators during her 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. During the Democratic primary debate, she clashed with Kamala Harris, who accused her of being “an apologist for an individual – Assad – who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”

“She has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I’m prepared to move on,” added Harris, who would subsequently drop out of the race and later be selected as Joe Biden’s running mate.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard again defended Russian aggression.

“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/Nato had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns,” she posted on Twitter in 2022.

Gabbard appeared to fall for various conspiracy theories about the conflict that were promoted by Russia, as she had done in Syria. One of those conspiracy theories was a Russian claim about the existence of dozens of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine that were supposedly producing deadly pathogens.

She later walked back on those remarks, suggesting that there might have been some “miscommunication and misunderstanding.”

Gabbard’s frequent echoing of Kremlin talking points has earned her praise in Russian state media. Indeed, an article published on 15 November in the Russian-state controlled outlet RIA Novosti went so far as to call Gabbard a “superwoman.”

The possibility that Trump would tap someone with Gabbard’s history to be America’s top intelligence official shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who followed the president-elect’s first four years in the White House.

During his 2018 summit with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the then-president was asked if he believed the US intelligence community’s assessment, which stated that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf.

That assessment was based on analysis of what was determined to have been state-sponsored campaigns of fake social media posts and ersatz news sites to spread false stories about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as cyberattacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and prominent operatives associated with the Clinton campaign.

But Trump, who’d just spent several hours in a closed-door meeting with Putin, stunned the assembled press and the entire world by declaring that he trusted the Russian leader’s word over that of his own advisers.

​​"President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be," he replied.

Trump would go on to repeatedly clash with his own intelligence appointees during the remainder of his term. He sacked his first DNI, former Indiana senator Dan Coats, after Coats repeatedly declined to back away from the government’s assessment of what Russia had done during the 2016 presidential race.

Larry Pfeiffer, the director of George Mason University’s Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, said Gabbard’s apparent susceptibility to foreign disinformation and her affinity for strongmen will give pause to American allies with whom the US routinely shares intelligence on common threats.

Intelligence services, he explained, are notoriously territorial and tight-lipped on sources and methods – particularly when it comes to so-called human intelligence, or Humint, which refers to information collected by and from spies and sources within hostile governments.

Pfeiffer said foreign allies are likely already concerned about how a second Trump administration will handle intelligence, given the president-elect’s record. He also predicted that Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI would cause even more problems among skittish partners.

“I think they wouldn’t feel like they’ve got an American confidant that they can deal with on a mature level,” he said. “I can guarantee you that the foreign intelligence services of Europe, including the Brits, are all having little side conversations right now about … what is this going to mean, and how are we going to operate, and what are we going to do now.”

Gabbard has taken the side of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as well as the Russian president (AP)

The former US intelligence veteran also said Gabbard’s record of spreading foreign talking points calls into question whether she will be able to carry out the DNI’s important responsibility of briefing the president on threats to the nation.

He told The Independent: “Somebody like Tulsi Gabbard, you look at her long history of statements that seem to come out of the Kremlin’s notebook, her propensity to be influenced by their viewpoint – [it] raises questions as to whether she has the ability to present the intel community’s perspective as it is, or is she going to be one who’s going to want to discount it, influence it, color and change it, or ignore it and just present her own view?

“I think it also raises questions of judgement. You know, here’s an individual who seems very prone to misinformation, prone to conspiracy theory. That should worry anybody who’s worried about America’s national security,” he added.

Trump’s selection of the former Hawaii congresswoman could be a problem for the senators tasked with confirming her, on several different levels. For one, the position is unique among cabinet agencies in that there are strict requirements for who can serve in the director’s role.

The text of the 2004 law which established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington and the intelligence community’s failures leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, specifically states that any person who serves in the DNI job “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

The first person to serve as DNI, John Negroponte, was a widely respected foreign service veteran who had served as US ambassador to Iraq, Mexico, Honduras and the Philippines, as the country’s ambassador to the United Nations, and as a deputy national security adviser during the Reagan administration. The next three people to hold the office were flag-rank military officers with significant intelligence experience.

Pfeiffer, a US intelligence veteran of three decades’ standing who once ran the White House Situation Room and served as chief of staff to then-CIA director General Michael Hayden, told The Independent that Gabbard’s experience in the House and her military service, while admirable, do not match the standards envisioned by the authors of the 2004 law which established the office.

“That’s national security experience … but she was a freaking military cop … operating at a largely tactical level, not that strategic, long-term national security perspective that one would expect,” he said.

Gabbard may have left the Syrian conflict behind, but Moustafa still works with its victims every day. And he believes the connection between her views on Syria and Ukraine is clear.

“What happened in Syria is what allowed the Russians to feel that they could do the very same in Ukraine,” he said.

“And what she is doing with Ukraine shows that it goes beyond her maybe misunderstanding one conflict. She is, hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet.”

[willknightauthor]

What happens in the Dolorian church in Martinaise is a profound bit of worldbuilding. At first Elysium seems like a normal, secular world, and if anything it's surprising how absent religion is from it. Liberalism has become the religion. The only real reminder that Moralism was once a fully functioning world religion is the abandoned and broken church west of the lock.

But learning about the pale point, the history of the churches, it makes sense now. The pale is directly interacting with human thought and society because they are both manifestations of information in the universe, in an evolving dialectic. Dolores Dei pulled information from the future and literally expanded the world by inspiring others with her dream. She was, by the standards of our world, a prophet. The churches, built around nascent points of pale particles, are a social attempt to control the pale through the collective act of ritual dreaming. By dreaming the divine, humanity pushes back the death of the world, for a moment.

By the time the game takes place, that side of Moralism is long dead. The churches have been abandoned and their function forgotten. Moralism has degenerated into liberalism. The Revolution was a moment of mass dreaming, of the future manifesting itself. It was the best hope to push back the Pale, but the MoralIntern crushed it, and restored global stagnancy. Growing entropy is accelerating the consumption of the world by the Pale, and no-one knows what to do because there is no future, only past.

Harry though, depending on how you play him, has the potential to start the reversal of this process, if just in Martinaise. The man who has effectively dedicated himself to a kind of monastic worship of the Pale (unknowingly) is the first one to start the process. (Never give anyone too much credit, even Harry.) But if Harry helps the homeless ravers start a club in the Church, he is effectively helping to start a new ritual community with the same properties as the old Moralist Church, right under the pale point.

If you get Noid to warm up to you, you learn he's a kind of organic existential philosopher. He even discourses with Tiago. He and the others don't just party as a hedonistic act, they maintain partying as a kind of ritual act of life affirmation and contemplation, an attempt to transcend themselves and realize something new and powerful. In short, they are reaching into the future to create something new. It's ridiculous 90s Euro club music, but the way they do it it's as ritually powerful as any church service.

This ties into the more general theme of Disco Elysium, that the human power to dream of a new future and then collectively act to bring it about is a powerful act of creation that pushes back the boundaries of the universe, and is necessary for our species to even survive. To crush the revolution, to crush democracy, is to crush the future. Elysium has killed God, but they haven't gotten to the next stage of becoming gods.

Dolorian humanism ironically does not end up elevating human beings. Only the communards had a chance at elevating humanity to a level of creative consciousness that would allow them to tame the Pale the same way they used to with religion. And the revolutionaries, even though the Moralists never recognized them as such, were likely pulling from the future as much as Dolores Dei. Kras Mazov will never be recognized as an Innocent, but in terms of prophesying and inspiring people with a dream which could push back the Pale, he effectively was.

Now with the revolution at a low point, the world is in a kind of existentialist limbo, lacking the conviction of faith in either the divine or the future. The old is dead, but the new cannot be born. What happens in Martinaise is the beginning of the return of that faith.

[sgiandubh]

Really?

And then, this came in, first thing in the morning:

Unhinged people like you are exactly the reason why I never encouraged politics on my page.

Yes, my side more than probably lost. Yes, I still stand for my own principles and values - I will always do, unwaveringly, because this is also who I am. Those principles and values have everything to do with my own past and my own corner of the world. I have seen women suffer and die at home, under a brutal natalist dictatorship that took away their right to decide for themselves. I am also very sensitive to my country's geographical proximity to a war theatre - all things you probably have no idea about.

That being said, human beings have always been more important to me than politics. To the victor the spoils? Absolutely: this is the beauty, the spirit and the purpose of democracy and of the rule of law. I, however, never selected my own friends based on what they vote. All are welcome in my heart and all crossed my path for a reason. To bring joy. To teach. To heal. To show me it is possible to extend trust across what divides us. Or just to feel good, together.

And I have to tell you I consider myself tremendously rich because of this instinctive, non negotiable choice. What about you, Immature Anon?

If this is how you saw fit to react today, then I pity you. You acted like a twelve-year old bore. In doing so, you showed me you couldn't care less about tolerance. All you cared about was to hit a nerve and make me look bad. Your problem, not mine.

And no, what happened tonight in the US has not a damn thing to do with SC, or this fandom's fault lines. If you think it does, then you are, pardon my French, a cretin.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Op-Ed from the New York Times:

At first glance, Xi Jinping seems to have lost the plot.

China’s president appears to be smothering the entrepreneurial dynamism that allowed his country to crawl out of poverty and become the factory of the world. He has brushed aside Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious” in favor of centralized planning and Communist-sounding slogans like “ecological civilization” and “new, quality productive forces,” which have prompted predictions of the end of China’s economic miracle.

But Mr. Xi is, in fact, making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.

It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that.

This raises an important question for the United States and all of humanity: Is Mr. Xi right? Is a state-directed system like China’s better positioned to solve a generational crisis like climate change, or is a decentralized market approach — i.e., the American way — the answer?

How this plays out could have serious implications for American power and influence.

Look at what happened in the early 20th century, when fascism posed a global threat. America entered the fight late, but with its industrial power — the arsenal of democracy — it emerged on top. Whoever unlocks the door inherits the kingdom, and the United States set about building a new architecture of trade and international relations. The era of American dominance began.

Climate change is, similarly, a global problem, one that threatens our species and the world’s biodiversity. Where do Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia and other large developing nations that are already grappling with the effects of climate change find their solutions? It will be in technologies that offer an affordable path to decarbonization, and so far, it’s China that is providing most of the solar panels, electric cars and more. China’s exports, increasingly led by green technology, are booming, and much of the growth involves exports to developing countries.

From the American neoliberal economic viewpoint, a state-led push like this might seem illegitimate or even unfair. The state, with its subsidies and political directives, is making decisions that are better left to the markets, the thinking goes.

But China’s leaders have their own calculations, which prioritize stability decades from now over shareholder returns today. Chinese history is littered with dynasties that fell because of famines, floods or failures to adapt to new realities. The Chinese Communist Party’s centrally planned system values constant struggle for its own sake, and today’s struggle is against climate change. China received a frightening reminder of this in 2022, when vast areas of the country baked for weeks under a record heat wave that dried up rivers, withered crops and was blamed for several heatstroke deaths.

[tanadrin]

RE "revolutionary leftists are revolutionary because they know they can't win electorally."

It astounds me a little that there are leftists who think that a communist revolution is more likely to work than, like, fifty years of community-building and electoral politics. Sewer socialism, union activism, and other boring activities have brought much more success in the U.S. than agitation for a revolution.

What I mean is, setting aside the moral concerns (violence is bad, even when it's necessary, and if there are practical alternatives then we should pursue them), I am not a revolutionary leftist because I think we would lose a revolution. For one thing, there is a considerable right-wing element in the country that is much better prepared for this kind of thing, and I think that the majority of the institutions in the U.S. would pick fascism over communism if they had to choose, but also, prolonged violent action is ripe for breeding authoritarianism.

Goatse is concerned that "the party" might "abandon or neglect its primary ends," but what is leftism if it is not, at bottom, an attempt to improve the living conditions of all people, et cetera et cetera? To the extent that social democratic parties successfully pursue this end to some degree, they're better than than an ostensible communist party that talks the talk but commits human rights abuses. And, more than the fact that U.S. leftism has some pretty fierce opposition that would probably fare better if The Revolution happened tomorrow, I think that, even in winning, we would lose, because what came out the other end would look a lot more like Stalinism.

I think one thing the hardcore revolutionaries in OECD countries don't realize is that the reason they can't marshal support for their revolutions is that the socialists won most of the issues that were salient in the early 20th century--workers got more rights, better pay, unions were legalized, etc., etc. But it didn't take restructuring the whole political economy to do it, which is immensely frustrating if you believe that any society without your ideal political economy is inherently immoral and impure, so in order to justify an explicitly communist platform you have to rhetorically isolate it from the filthy libs and feckless demsocs who it turns out have been pretty effective within the arena of electoral politics in which supposedly nothing can ever get done, and treat them as of a piece with the out-and-out fascists and royalist autocrats of the 1920s and 30s.

Which, you know. Is not persuasive to most people! Most people understand intuitively the vast gulf between the SPD and the Nazis; they see that, milquetoast and compromising though they may be, the center-left can deliver substantive policy improvements without the upheaval of a civil war or political purges, and this is attractive to people who are not of a millenarian or left-authoritarian personality.

Which isn't to say that communists don't often make important points! It sucks having to fight a constant rearguard action against the interests of capital rolling back the social improvements of the 20th century, and it sucks that liberal governments in Europe and North America have historically been quite happy to bankroll and logistically support fascists and tyrants in the third world against communist movements (which invariably only exist as communist movements because these same fascists and tyrants have crushed more compromising movements and only the most militant organizations have managed to survive).

But I agree with you: communists also talk a big game about how liberalism is the real fascism (what's that line from Disco Elysium I see quoted everywhere about how everybody is secretly a fascist except the other communists, who are liberals?), while also being awful at democracy. Suppressing dissent because your small clique of political elites is the only legitimate expression of the people's will (which you know, because you have declared it to be so) really is some rank bullshit. A system with competitive elections is still, well, a system with competitive elections, even if those elections are structurally biased in certain ways; all the bloviating that attempts to justify communist authoritarianism cannot really obscure the fact that authoritarian systems are cruel and brittle, regardless of the ideology being served.

[tpquill]

America, what have you done!

I am tonight sitting here (Australia) speechless from what has transpired these last 12 hours or so, what the hell happened?

Why on earth did he get voted back in?

What in the world went wrong?

8 years ago he was elected whether you choose to believe it or not, through nefarious means (Russia influence) at the time people fell for his charisma & charm, but soon realised just like women realise when they fall for the charm and the boyish behaviour, there’s a darker side they don’t reveal until it’s too late. Congratulations America, he revealed it pretty early on once he got his claws into the Resolution Table in the Oval Office.

We (the world) watched in horror as he separated families and deported illegals. He overspent on his billionaire friends and made middle and working class suffer. Had no health care plan, no infrastructure or employment plan. No commerce or education - nothing, zilch. He employed sycophants who bowed and grovelled to do his biding (half of them his own family - nepotism much?) he ran America like one of his bankrupt businesses and almost brought America to the ground. He was responsible for not taking responsibility when a pandemic hit the world and over 1 million died under his watch.

America impeached him twice, investigated him multiple times. Decided then they’d had enough and voted him out. You had four years of peace, of prosperity, of employment health care, higher wages and lowering costs. Your country opened up again and healthcare was restored, you started bouncing back, you’re coming has never been better. Meanwhile he ranted and raged the election was stolen, even though every court hearing and document was thrown out. America had turned a page in history for four years.

What the hell happened?

Joe Biden stood for another term but that wasn’t good enough, the America media had an axe to grind and so did it seemed those who were influential in the media circus and he stood aside for a women he picked as his vice. A woman with an incredible record in prosecution and protection of law. A woman who had fought against cartels and won. A woman of scruples and integrity. Who was willing to stand up to him and hold him accountable. A man who has current,y 34 felony convictions including falsifying business records and inflating assets to hide tax fraud. A man with 6 bankruptcies and multiple accusations of predator and rapist behaviour AND YOU HAVE VOTED HIM BACK IN?

Why?

Was it because you like someone with a need for vengeance? Someone who had made it very clear he intends to run America like Russia? A man who stole your nations top secrets and in some cases sold them off? A man for whatever bizzare reason is allowed to do whatever the hell he likes with no repercussions, because he’s Donald Trump?

This is not the America I remember as a child. This is not the president I saw growing up, who took care of his people, who cared for his country, supported their military and stood up to foreign enemies.

I sit here tonight devastated for all the brave and wonderful women and men, who voted to protect theirs and their daughters basic human, reproductive and civil rights. To the persons of all colours and religions, to the victims of domestic and sexual violence. To the wonderful trans community, to the gay marriages built on love. To all those who have fought both home and abroad in service. To the dreamers who see America as a shiny beacon of light & hope. To those who have crossed many roads in search of protection, in a country who had always welcomed you. I feel all of your sadness and anger at what has transpired.

None of this makes sense, none of this adds up.

Kamala Harris was a future light of hope and peace, of working with both sides for democracy to move America forward - now it seems she will be pulled back into the darkest part of her history. Back to when women had no right to vote, no opinion that was listened to, no voice protecting her own body.

She will be silenced once again.

Immigrants will no longer be welcome.

The church will control what happens in marriages and government decisions.

You will no longer be accepted as a trans or LGBTQ+

If you suffer a medical emergency during pregnancy, you will be forced to endure the consequences of either the child dying inside you, or be forced to give birth at “God’s will” Rape is just a word - a pregnancy from it will be unfortunate but a necessary as your right to choose will not matter anymore.

None of this adds up.

I will not accept that a man who got almost the exact same amount of votes as he did in 2020 can be declared the winner and Kamala only got 60 million, where did the other 20 million go? The votes came in too quickly the declaration called too soon. I’m by no means a conspiracy theorist but the math doesn’t add up?

Bomb threats - is America the Middle East? Interference through social media via Elon Musk and China. Giving away money to people who would vote for Trump. It stinks like rotten fish on a warm summers day here in Oz.

My final take.

If I devoted my entire like in government, in prosecution, in upholding the constitution - I would have questions, I would want answers as to how this happened with no increase in Trumps collective votes from 2020, he didn’t increase, he stayed the same.

President Joe Biden in his last few months of power, should launch an investigation because it’s not a case of well America decided to perform a lobotomy on itself and completely wiped the years between 2016-2020 from her memory and only remember the last 102 days, or something or someone played a hand in some very nefarious and illegal vote tampering.

Madam Vice President - do not concede.

[koheletgirl]

Would love to hear about how you became an anti Zionist!

before i get into this, i'd like to direct you to some of @jewishvitya's posts: [x] [x] [x]. i think their perspective is more relevant to the current situation than mine, and they address issues that i won't get into here because they had no personal relevance to me and you asked about me.

so my family is considered left-wing in israel. my parents voted for ha'avoda (israeli labor) in most elections i can remember, my mom even went "as far" as voting for meretz (as far as jewish parties go, they're the furthest to the left. still zionist though. didnt get enough votes to get into the knesset in the last elections). i grew up mourning rabin, hating bibi before i even knew who he was, believing that the settlements are the source of all israeli wrongdoings. in 2005 people would put ribbons on their cars – green if you support dismantling the settlements in gaza, orange if you're against it. we had a green ribbon. my family talks about the two states solution, about going back to the '67 borders. my grandmother jokingly calls herself a "leftist traitor", because that's how the right labels them.

i grew up with these values. i was taught to value human life, i was taught that all people were equal, i was taught that nationalism and imperialism were wrong. we weren't afraid of talking about the occupation. we weren't afraid of calling israeli fascism what it was. you might have heard about the democracy protests that have been happening in israel in the past year; my parents went every week.

i think this is why it took me so long to break out of my zionist worldview. people talk about zionism as if it's explicitly genocidal and built on racial supremacy, and i understand why (and agree with this to an extent), but you have to understand how absurd this idea sounds to people like my parents. they don't think zionism is the issue, they think the israeli right is. they acknowledge the evils of the settlers in the west bank, but they would never consider themselves settlers. it's very easy to see the wrongness of a person going to someone's house and violently kicking a family out of there because they believe it should belong to them (not a hypothetical, this is happening in the west bank as we speak); it's a lot harder to think that maybe everything you were taught to believe about your own right to be here was a lie from the beginning.

and that's the problem, that it is a lie. we are literally taught there was nothing here. swamps and malaria and sand and sand. the zionists built a civilization out of nothing. that's the story, that's the myth.

another aspect of this that's essential to acknowledge is the dehumanization of palestinians in israel, which is still prevalent in leftist circles, despite taking a different form. the israeli left Loves to make the distinction between palestinians and "israeli arabs" - a term that some people that i have met have used for themselves, and i am not the right person to speak on (i'm sure there's nuance here i'm unaware of). these people don't think of themselves as racists. they don't mind arabs in general, they only mind "the arabs who want to harm us". and it's so easy for them to pat themselves on the back because they have plenty of arab friends and they actively oppose the goverment's racism; but they all draw the line when it comes to palestinians. to them, once a person calls themselves a palestinian, it means they believe jews have no right to exist here. it means their existence is at odds with their own. they don't see palestinians as people, they see them as an agenda.

i was going to add a bit about how the israeli left's aversion to religion (which stems from the influence orthodox jews currently have on israeli law) plays into this, but this is getting really long.

anyway. for me, it wasn't a revelation as much as it was a willingness to open my eyes to the fact that everything i had been taught was a lie. it was always there, this doubt, this uneasiness. i knew that there were a lot of people over the world whose opinions i generally agreed with – except when it came to israel. it just took me a really long time to be able to doubt Everything.

because that required tearing down everything my worldview was based on, everything i had believed in, and it was scary. it's a very, very difficult thing to do. not knowing what to believe is horrifying. realizing you have believed in lies your whole life is horrifying.

but at some point i had to ask myself: how can i hate everything this country stands for, and not doubt what it's taught me? how can i know what i know about the idf, and still believe it's acting humanely? and the thing is, i still don't know what to believe a lot of the time. i still doubt everything, all the time. i'm critical of all of my beliefs, and i think it's good to be. but i listen, and i look, and i feel, and above all i try to be compassionate. and there's only one stance you can take here if you value human life above all else.

here are some israel-based organizations that influenced my political views and i recommend checking out (even though i have my disagreements with them): b'tselem, standing together, breaking the silence, mesarvot

[hussyknee]

International news outlets are predictably parroting whatever they see the government-run news media propagandizing, so the foreign commentators who have never met a Sri Lankan even by accident are announcing that we have elected a Marxist leader. We have not. It's a coalition of mild social democrats lmao. Even the main JVP entity hasn't really been Marxist in decades. It's all neoliberal hysteria.

Here's some necessary context for what's going on, and by far the best summation of the situation as it stands. I've highlighted the parts that the leftists of other countries will probably find salient and deeply relatable lmao.

It was always going to come to this. The first Sri Lankan election in generations where even a remotely leftist party stood a chance of winning was always going to end with an almighty Red Scare. So it is that the presidential campaign of National People’s Power (NPP) candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) is inspiring lurid visions of an impending violent, dystopian regime, splayed across news and social media. This is the prophecy of the Sri Lankan elite establishment, a select cross section of the country’s businesspeople, policymakers, professionals, journalists and academics who have been proximate to state power, especially in the last two years. Scrutiny of them and their crescendoing hysteria reveals much about how power and privilege work in Sri Lanka, and what happens when their wielders are threatened. Mythmaking

The pre-election Red Scare is the culmination of a two-year-long project by the elite establishment to sustain the regime of Ranil Wickremesinghe. This project is founded on a number of myths which rewrite recent history, chief among them the idea that the Aragalaya suddenly turned violent due to its ‘infiltration’ by the NPP’s lynchpin party the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and other leftists. This myth, just like the one that Wickremesinghe stepped in to become Prime Minister then President “when no one else would”, only serves the elite establishment’s attempts to justify and sanitise Wickremesinghe’s power-hungry scheming.

Wickremesinghe was the only person shameless enough to accept Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s offer to become Prime Minister without any conditions. Likewise, the question of violence only became a problem after Wickremesinghe used the Aragalaya to manoeuvre himself to the Presidency. As always for elites, the spectre of left-wing violence is more serious than actual right-wing violence. Thus, NPP politicians standing on the banks of the Diyawanna is apparently far more alarming than the security forces ruthlessly dismantling GotaGoGama and brutalising its inhabitants on the very same day Wickremesinghe was selected as President by Parliament.

In the mythologisation of Wickremesinghe, we are further meant to forget that he has presided over a striking series of rights violations and undemocratic measures. Recounted partially and briefly: arbitrarily detaining multiple Aragalaya activists; violently repressing numerous protests by student and trade unions; passing the Bureau of Rehabilitation Act and Online Safety Act; deliberately preventing scheduled local authorities elections; continuing to obstruct memorialisation events by Tamils; and the ongoing Sinhala colonisation of the north and east.

As Wickremesinghe completed his transformation from supposed champion of liberal democracy to illiberal autocrat, establishment elites, especially the self-styled liberals among them, found themselves tongue tied about these issues for more than two years. If Ranil Wickremesinghe violates a human right, does a Sri Lankan liberal make a sound? ‘Stability’ and ‘Recovery’

It is not that these establishment elites merely promote Wickremesinghe’s government; it’s that they have been deeply and intimately involved in crafting and enforcing its policies, whilst often passing themselves off as impartial commentators. This particularly pertains to the Government’s economic agenda, and the idea that it has created ‘stability’ and rescued the country from the abyss to lead it to ‘recovery’. From the start, ‘stability’ and ‘recovery’ have been built on the backs of working class and poor Sri Lankans, who have literally paid for it with increased taxes, deteriorating public services and severely slashed welfare under the extravaganza of austerity mandated by the IMF.

The elite establishment’s espousal of this ‘stability’ and ‘recovery’ turns on a rabid, evangelical belief in neoliberal economic ideology. This tethers the unconditional acceptance of the IMF and its dictates, with any deviation from them held as ruinous. Similarly, neoliberalism manifests as identity through a strict belief that all wealth and success within a capitalist economy is gained through personal virtue (discounting inheritance, aid or luck), and inversely, anyone who is unsuccessful must be lazy and stupid. Such thinking is an apt glaze for the naturally patrician worldview of most establishment elites’ social class.

As a result, establishment elites are indignant that working and poor Sri Lankans are not grateful enough for the ‘recovery’. In truth, the only real inconveniences they suffered were the fuel shortages and power cuts of 2022. So, they cannot and do not genuinely contend with suffering of many over the past two years—including the still unbearable cost of living, rising child malnutrition, falling school attendance and millions still disconnected from electricity to name but a few ongoing calamities. Consequently, working and poor Sri Lankans must be too stupid to understand the ‘recovery’, the necessity of the IMF’s ‘bitter medicine’ forced upon them and to even vote. In the same breath, of course, these elites ignore and obscure the fact that corporates and the wealthy—which is often to say they themselves—are spared any similar medicine, and get to freely evade taxes, enjoy generous state subsidies and concessions and hoard their wealth offshore.

Contours of a Scare

All this exposes such deep contempt by establishment elites for working and poor people. This is what fuels their wholesale disgust at anyone voting against Wickremesinghe, or not even settling for the Samagi Jana Balawegaya’s Sajith Premadasa (to the great dismay of many elites, the two could not set aside their blood feud and combine forces). Buried within this is a deep fear of a political reality they do not know and cannot control. Thus, the maniacal scaremongering about how democracy would be subverted by an AKD regime due to the internal intricacies of communist parties—as if the JVP and particularly the NPP qualified as such. (And as if Premadasa and the SJB, and especially the unelected, election-cancelling Wickremesinghe, were paragons of democracy.)

The Red Scare is also founded on bringing up the JVP’s violence during the two insurrections it led, particularly the second. Certainly, there needs to be a complete accounting for the horrendous violence the JVP instigated, which the JVP has failed to do itself. But it cannot be done in any honest sense by the elites who ignore or deny that the UNP government and its death squads (under Premadasa’s father) killed and disappeared far greater numbers of people than the JVP (by estimates of three to up to ten times as many), or that Wickremesinghe oversaw an actual torture camp.

In addition to these many hypocrisies, the Red Scare is also founded on the elite establishment’s striking political illiteracy. Words like ‘Marxism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ are thrown about with wild abandon without any serious evaluation of them against the NPP. Elites regularly conflate the JVP and Frontline Socialist Party, despite them actually being mortal enemies; and believe all trade unions are controlled in hivemind-fashion by the JVP, despite the wide range of trade union political allegiances. Acknowledging spiralling social deprivation in the country is “cosplaying poverty” and any critique of the government’s economic agenda and neoliberal dogma in general inspires a virulent derision for “commies”, in dizzying, barely-coherent invective and memes imported straight from the US and the gutters of far right social media. These ignorant, imbecilic displays would be amusing if they weren’t being bandied about by actual adult journalists, lecturers and professionals, speaking to the country’s depressing level of intellectual discourse. The Endgame

The real irony here is that the NPP does not warrant any of the elite establishment’s hysteria. Certainly, it stakes out an actual difference with the existing political hegemony by physically embodying change. AKD, just like his government in waiting, promise a halt to the endless game of musical chairs that characterises government-making in Sri Lanka. This contrasts with Premadasa and Wickremesinghe’s politics which evince more of the same, in the latter’s case even more nakedly and shamelessly with the most corrupt and criminal figures on offer. (This, too, is another inconvenient fact shrugged off by establishment elites as necessary realpolitik.)

Of course, many of those prospectively voting for the NPP to “give them a chance” reveal the Sri Lankan predilection to go with the ‘rella’ or wave. But embedded in there, too, is the idea that this chance is being given in desperation, against a political system which has brought them nothing but economic ruin. That system could not be characterised more effectively than by Wickremesinghe himself, who makes little attempt to hide his disdain for ordinary people.

Yet it’s easy to overstate such change. In substance, even a cursory glance at the NPP’s manifesto reveals not a plan to usher in full-throated communism but a milquetoast, deliberately vague social democratic program. Most tellingly, it promises to maintain the country’s economic settings, including the current IMF program, as well as its deeply majoritarian state structure. The establishment should in fact be thrilled that the supposed biggest threat to its existence accepts the very core tenets of its modus operandi.

What this also means is that if and when any substantive change fails to materialise for many people—particularly in living conditions, as will certainly be the case under continued adherence to the IMF program—any NPP government risks spectacular collapse. That will leave ample space for any new, reactionary force to step in, including Wickremesinghe who will be waiting, cockroach-like, or another dispiriting shuffling of the current deck. In such a scenario, the elite establishment could find multiple avenues to attach their hooks to, for they are nothing if not the most talented grifters.

This election is unlikely to spell a definitive end to the political establishment or the deranged elites who uphold it. But for anyone sickened by the elite establishment’s hypocrisy and degeneracy, one night of them losing their collective minds over the Red Scare they have convinced themselves can only be a fleeting, pleasurable treat.

[thebibliosphere]

Joy! I've officially jumped on the Phangs bandwagon, so I can finally send coherent questions about it—how did you come up with the political landscape? I imagine it's at least partially inspired by true events, but how do you keep straight the political compasses of each character?

Eeey! Welcome aboard!

And yeah, a lot of it's based on history, but also a lot of current events if you squint. (Or maybe you don't need to squint.)

As for how I keep the characters straight (ha!) I had definite ideas about them while forming their personalities and history.

Nathan is the youngest and only starting to question the political landscape around him. He's not politically unaware but perhaps a little naive and unwilling to see how corrupt everything is.

He's been conditioned from a young age not to question authority. Military indoctrination will do that to you. Only when he finds himself on the frontline of an unjust and hopeless war does he realize things aren't what they seem. He still toes the line... until he gets injured, and the true depths of how little the military or government cares for people like him gives him a nasty jolt. Even in the first book, he's still somewhat in denial because part of him doesn't want to admit that he's been complacent. You can see what in the conversation with his brother Miles. His realization that he's spent his whole life following orders doesn't sit well with him, and that's a theme that will continue for his character in all future books.

It's only when he meets Vlad that he genuinely starts to question things, and that's because Vlad is the walking embodiment of a homemade Molotov cocktail wrapped up in a silk suit and a fierce, unshakeable sense of justice.

Vlad was created as a challenge to the bored, misanthropic vampire stereotype who doesn't give a shit about humanity because they've been around for hundreds of years and lost all faith in humanity. If anything, the longer Vlad is around humanity, the more fiercely he loves it and wants to do everything he can to help them. He grew up under the bloody iron fist of his grandfather's regime and saw firsthand what happens in a world devoid of democracy, and he's been running from it ever since.

He can only do a little under his father's thumb. But what he can do, Vlad does with all of his being. He's found ways to enable free schooling and medical care on the island, and if you give him a few more decades, he'll find a way to make housing accessible, too. (It's a numbers game, and he's very good with numbers. And honestly, his father doesn't pay too much attention to what he's doing. Not if he's careful about it...) He's also a staunch believer in the power of worker's unions, and despite technically being the person the unions would fight against, he is trying to help the workers of his island unionize because he believes it is the just and right thing to do.

Ultimately, Vlad is my firebrand catalyst for change, and I am really looking forward to exploring his arcs in future books.

Ursula is... tricky. She's in a precarious situation where she can't afford to draw attention to herself and, at times, has been forced to side with people she'd otherwise cheerfully drown because they could offer her the best protection. It's exhausting and soul-destroying, and it leaves her feeling powerless. Which is laughable when considering who she is. What she is.

She hates it. She wants it to be different. She doesn't like feeling so hopeless. Defeated. But she's tried to change things in the past, and it almost destroyed everything. So now she just keeps her head down and works from the shadows. It's safest that way. Not to mention quicker. After all, what's one more human war to an immortal [REDACTED]? If she ignores it, it'll go away. Eventually. Right? Right? (This may or may not be the denial talking.) (It is absolutely the denial talking.)

The fact that human politics are about to severely and unavoidably affect her will not go down well. Ursula is, in fact, going to be bloody livid about it. Not to mention guilt-riddled for burying her head in the sand and letting the humans go unchecked for so long.

Fortunately, she's got some new allies in her corner. A fiercely protective werewolf with a newfound sense of political rage and a vampire who's been spoiling for a fight of this magnitude for over four hundred years. Maybe, just maybe, this time, things will be different...