#like what reaction do those people have when the likes/retweets etc come rolling in?

[skitskatdacat63]

Reposting is so grrrrrr. I just saw some artist get informed their art was reposted, so I went to stalk on Twitter to go see. And it hurts me so much, bcs the op's twt of the drawing has ~20 likes/5 retweets, and the repost has ~2.3k likes/300+ retweets. Is that not fucking evil?

That's why I will always be so outraged at reposting, so often it ends up that the repost gets way more attention. And yeah they often "credit," (usually in a follow up tweet not on the main repost ofc 🙄) but that does literally no good imo as people will always just up retweeting/liking the repost instead of making the effort to go to the original. Not that people shouldn't credit, bcs its just even worse that way, but idk, it always seemed to me like a bandage on a gaping wound lol

[fapangel]

Since I first issued my dire predictions of civil violence in the not-so-distant future, I’ve been looking, exhaustively, for evidence I’m wrong. III Have you considered this angle: The traditional media's hyping that up? I mean, we know in the early/mid 60's the newspapers and cameras focused on the small number of violent protestors during anti-war protests and made them out to be the majority. If the media has no shred of integrity left, why are you looking at them for evidence of integrity?

That’s just the thing - I’m not. I’m looking at people. at the “man on the street” and in both my personal life (as in actual meatspace, not online) and in actual journalism (some people still do it, outside and inside the mainstream establishment,) I’m seeing a decidedly worrisome tone. 

We all remember “literally shaking” on Twitter the night of the election, but there were other words going around quite a bit - sick, disgusted, afraid, scared, etc. Twitter - as it’s used by the majority - gives a quick insight into the personal emotions of the people using it. (This is why PR uses that bank on the presumed intimacy - like Trump’s twitter - tend to be more successful, and more careful, sterile treatments, like the Clinton campaign that took 12 staffers and 10 drafts to compose a single tweet, typically lack traction.) Sure, us seal-clubbin neocons and tree-hugging liberals had a good giggle at the triggered snowflakes breathlessly predicting the Right Wing Gestapo emerging from the woodwork to bash the gays - but then a friend of mine told me it’d actually happened, post-election, to a friend of his, and that’s when my laughter stopped. 

As was explained to me, the LGBTQ folks feared that Trump’s election would be seen as “permission” by all the knuckledraggers, and it seems it was. So it’s time to ask yourself the question - how did the knuckledraggers get that impression to begin with? Maybe - just maybe - it had something to do with the media screaming, 24/7, for months, that Trump was literally Hitler and that he was going to oppress all the gays and Jews and Muslims and fluffy bunnies. “Of course he’s Our Guy,” the Illinois Nazis said with glee, “the entire news media keeps screaming about it!” 

Also consider that the media’s reinforcing the left wing’s narrative, which makes people on the left wing much more likely to believe it since it’s validating their own beliefs. Vox.com has an excellent article on the Russian conspiracy blitz and why it’s playing so well with Democrats, and the author is neither a Trump fan or apologist (as is abundantly clear from the article itself.) It’s worth reading entire, but this quote stands out: 

“Misinformation is much more likely to stick when it conforms with people’s preexisting beliefs, especially those connected to social groups that they’re a part of,” says Arceneaux. “In politics, that plays out (usually) through partisanship: Republicans are much more likely to believe false information that confirms their worldview, and Democrats are likely to do the opposite.”

The article accurately compares the current phenomena to the entire “birther” movement on the right - it’s the exact same psychological phenomena, so unsurprisingly you see it manifesting with human beings on both sides of the spectrum. A lot of politics falls into that category, and it’s where most of that “political common ground” I keep talking about can be found. The difference is that the Left controls the lion’s share of the communication media and in turn, our culture. Hollywood - a cultural engine if there ever was one - is extremely left wing and has been since before McCarthy’s day. The modern telecommunications and internet media, which lives and breathes in Sillicon Valley, is likewise invested in the left wing; Erich Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet (Google’s parent company,) founded a PAC to give Hillary’s campaign IT support during the election, and we all remember how the CEO of Mozilla was hurled out of office because he dared to cast a private, anti-revolutionary vote. The next time you hear leftists talking about how “de-platforming” is legitimate, remember that the leftists literally own the fucking platforms. Nobody’s gonna find your conservative site if Google de-lists it. This is the problem - both sides have their lunatics willing to swallow any shit they’re being shoveled, but only one side has a massive megaphone that’s actively colluding - complete with sticky-handed twitter high-fives - to push the same narrative across the board, and cross-validate it. 

Hilariously, the Vox author (Kevin Drum) doesn’t see it, making the article a self-demonstrating one: 

Luckily for the Democratic Party, there isn’t really a pre-built media ecosystem for amplifying this like there was for Republicans. In the absence of left-wing Limbaughs and Breitbarts, media outlets totally unconcerned with factual rigor, it’s much harder for this stuff to become mainstream.

… except he does see it, because he goes on to name some examples (and some tweets) of people chugging the kool-aid… but all of them Democratic politicians or DNC staffers who should know better, not the media itself. He’s clearly intelligent and well-balanced, he’s standing in the middle of a bullshit cyclone he knows is bullshit, but he’s only just now starting to smell the rot and he hasn’t even noticed objective journalism’s decaying corpse yet, despite standing in its ribcage. If someone like him can be so stymied, how do you think That Guy - you know, [the bitter old man |the aging hippie creep] who always [ sits on his porch yelling at birds | shuffles around Trader Joe’s in grungy sandals comparing kale prices] and blames everything on [ dat gal-dern Mooslim Obongo | the military-industrial-jew-lizardman-complex] is going to react?

Some people do actually believe this shit and they are mostly Democrats - hell, here’s a Gallup poll with the numbers if you doubt my analysis. And to re-iterate, they’re inflaming extremists on both sides of the spectrum, because the more violence antifa commits, the more the Illinois Nazis will croon “see, we were right all along!” 

The traditional mass media engaging in this shit is much, much worse than the right-wing “alternative news ecosystem,” the blogs, the talk radio hosts, infogiggles, etc. They’re all personality-based and those personalities differ and disagree (if they didn’t, how would they offer content distinct from what the others offer?) This is natural, because conservatives argue. They argue a lot. It might surprise some of you given how often the media portrays the NRA as triple Satan, but there’s gun rights groups that exist specifically because some conservatives think the NRA is too wussy. You’ve got social conservatives, business/free market conservatives, REEE TAXES conservatives, etc., and they rarely see eye to eye. Ann Coulter - the Screeching Enchantress herself - once wrote that “Republicans can’t put together a two-car funeral without writing six books denouncing each other.” 

You don’t see this on the left - not in the media, at any rate. There’s more to this than just the obvious mainstream media collusion; the back-slapping and twitterwank, although their deliberate and conscious effort plays a huge part. There’s also how the left wing thinks. 

If you’re old enough to remember the Bush years, you’ll remember how often the left would attack Rush Limbaugh - even though an entire ecosystem of conservative, national talk-radio had sprung up by then, so he was no longer The One And Only Conservative Voice In Mass Media. Liberals treated - and attacked - him as the de facto leader of the right wing, and this puzzled conservatives no end, because a pundit, however clever, is not a goddamn politician or leader. 

The left wing, however, thinks differently. Unlike classical liberalism, which is mostly concerned with balancing the inherent rights of individuals with the rights of every other individual in a social contract, the leftists (communism/socialism/etc.) focus on the  collective as the central, essential point, and move from there. This is why “virtue signalling” exists; leftists care very much about what others think of them. Emmet Rensin’s essay on smugness in liberalism, which I’ve mentioned many times, showcases it well; while describing his subject, he also illustrated the mechanisms by which it manifests - left-wing culture. Everything he described - the virtue-signalling to others that you know the correct facts, the knowing, even the “Eye roll, crying emoji, forward to John Oliver for sick burns,“ exemplifies it. This Mother Jones writer’s reaction to his piece has a telling line: 

“I’ve long since gotten tired of the endless reposting of John Oliver’s "amazing,” “perfect,” “mic drop” destruction of whatever topic he takes on this week.”

They key here is John Oliver. When leftists look at Rush Limbaugh, they see a conservative John Oliver - in short, a demagogue. Demagogues and cults of personality have always been of prime importance with the left wing - remember how Obama was lionized by the left during his first campaign? To say nothing of the Kennedy’s being immortalized as “Camelot.” Yes, conservatives liked Reagan a whole lot, but we don’t vote in entire fucking royal dynasties, which is why Low-Energy Jeb is cooling his heels right now. And these demagogues, you’ll note, are all on the same page when it comes to ripping into conservatives… and their epic, wicked put-downs then become The Big Joke that the left wing retweets and reblogs and parrots to each other ad nauseum. Remember Tina Fey’s mockery of the only working mother leftists have ever despised? I’ve seen people on facebook quote “I can see Russia from my house” fully believing that Sarah Palin herself said it - the Tina Fey skit is the reality, for them. Truth is lost around the twentieth re-tweet, or so. 

And these “comedians” - in truth, pundits and opinion columnists - base their jokes on whatever quote-unquote “revelations” aired in the mainstream media’s news broadcasts that morning. 

If you’ve ever noticed how quickly a new catchphrase or word gets onto every leftist’s lips - like “fake news” - this is how it’s done. It’s not just the mass media moving in lockstep co-ordination to get the message out; it’s how the phrases become the newest “in-thing” with the entire leftist culture, that then get bandied about in the social sphere, on and off-line. After the cruise missile strike on Syria, I watched, on /pol/ alone, about thirty different varying interpretations, everything from “Assad and Putin are unironically heroes shove omfg I love facism Trump why u blow them up” to “I HOPE HE DROPS A MOAB ON RUSSIA NEXT FUCK THE REDS NUCLEAR WAR NOW” to a bunch of “he’s really playing 64 dimensional chess check this shit just you wait” that covered everything in-between. And that’s just on /pol/, which is so full of bullshit and jokes they literally made a fucking containment board for the containment board - called /bantz/. You don’t see this in the leftist blogosphere - the opinions all align the same way and vary only in magnitude of gibbering lunacy. And the John Oliver quotes don’t just define the conversation, they define the fucking language - for instance, “Drumpf.” 

Do not, for one second, think that the media doesn’t know how all this shit works. They may be delusional, but they don’t control and run vast media empires because they’re stupid. And a lot of them have been at this for a long, long time. 

[turninyouup]

I wake up Black every morning...

I started thinking through this on Twitter, and then was going to post a status of FB, but the more I thought about it the longer it got and I didn’t really have anywhere to put this so I’m putting it here. 

So I’ve done the whole imagining and visioning practices that are designed to help people think about what a world without racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. would look like. However, despite stretching my imagination as far as it could go, I have never been able to really think about what that world would feel like, look like, taste like, smell like. 

What is it like to not wonder if I wasn’t hired because I wasn’t qualified or because my name is hard to pronounce and that makes people uncomfortable? What is it like to walk around ULTA and not have a sales rep follow me to every section of the store asking if I need help? What is it like to sit in a classroom and not wonder if I am going to have to turn a group project into an individual project because I can’t find a group that would work with me? 

Those are the more mundane things that are simply at the top of my mind because they happened to me yesterday. But they don’t even scratch the surface the direct threats of very real violence that my body encounters on a daily basis. And the way my privilege package is set up, I’ve got it pretty good. I have lighter skin than many of black siblings, I am able-bodied, college-educated (it’ll be official once June rolls around), I’m not skinny by any means but I’m also not significantly overweight, I identify as straight for the time being, I come from a college-educated family, I have a home and financial support, I’ve never been addicted to any substance or diagnosed with a mental illness, I have been able to travel the world, and on and on and on. So I can’t even begin to imagine what people who truly live at the margins of our society experience every day; or what it would mean for them not have to constantly think about the direct threats to their humanity.

And yet, I am reminded every morning when I look into the mirror, that I am Black and my skin carries a certain history with it that elicits a reaction (either negative or positive) out of other people that I have to prepare for if I am to make it to the next day as whole as possible.

My ramblings remind me of what Claudia Rankine writes about in her book Citizen: An American Lyric. One piece that hit me dead in the center of my body, right where my diaphragm is, is when she says: “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.” 

I can’t let go of institutionalized racism because it is in my skin. I wake up Black every morning and that means something. It requires attention and care and action. My skin screams ‘protect me’ every time I look in the mirror because I know no one else will; no one else can.  

The way I do my hair and the outfit I wear is like armor and my makeup is like warpaint, consciously chosen for specific purposes because I know how they will or won’t be received. Some days I am more brave than others. But I always have to think about it; my decision-making process is incredibly conscious. 

And it’s exhausting. Because I am always aware of how I move through the world, there’s little space in my mind to think about what it would feel like to experience the world in a different way, without that awareness. My experience is to intimately related and intertwined with struggle and fight and resistance that I literally cannot imagine what it would mean to be Black without it. 

I know Black is not synonymous with struggle, and all this isn’t to say that I do not live a happy and satisfying life. But when we see black and brown girls missing in DC and retweets the hashtags that hold the names of black bodies gunned down by police, what is it that we always say? “That could have been me/my sister/my brother/my father/my aunt/my (fill in the blank).” We always know in the back of our minds that there is something about being recognizably Black that puts a target on our backs and at any moment we could become the next hashtag. 

I just want to know what it would be like to not have to live with that dull fear. What is it like to know that you are in complete and total control of your life?