#longwinded post ftw

[godloveyell]

While I know Dianne Feinstein has finally shuffled off this mortal coil (or the Democrats have finally stopped propping up her corpse ala Weekend at Bernie’s), I still feel this clip of her meeting with these children is the perfect encapsulation of the modern Democratic Party: geriatric as fuck, condescending at best, outwardly hostile at worst to their base, and full of contempt for anyone under forty.

Because okay, even if Feinstein thought the Green New Deal was a bad idea for whatever reason, she should have been able to lay out why she thought it was a bad idea and explain what she felt should be done instead. If nothing else, she should be able to assure these kids that she cares about their concerns and wants to do right by them. This is Basic Politician 101 here, the kind of thing that someone who spent like 30 years in the US Senate should be able to do.

But Feinstein can’t even managed to do any of that, making it quite apparent to these kids that she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of their concerns with the underlying “I’ll be dead before any of this stuff actually affects me & if I’m not, well, decades of insider trading has made me rich as fuck, so I can buy my way out of this anyway” message barely hidden underneath.

Yeah, none of these kids voted for her, but they will be old enough to vote someday, and I doubt that these future voters are going to turn out for a party that’s made their contempt for them quite clear.

Plus, while they’re not voters, they are her fucking constituents, citizens of the state of California, aka the people she was put into power to represent.

Seriously, I hate the GOP, but you hold no illusions about them. They say what they’re going to do and guess what! They proceed to do it or at least, put forth a damn good effort to do so.

The Democrats, on the other hand, pretend to be on my side, while backstabbing and selling out their base at every turn.

David Sirota said that the key difference between the two major parties is that the GOP fears their base. Meanwhile the Democrats despise their base.

That may be the most accurate summation around.

Though at least in the past, the Democrats were able to put forward the effort to mask their contempt. The modern version can’t even do that.

[godloveyell]

Always remember what really galvanized the LGBT Movement and led to the rights they enjoy today, wasn’t just a case of a bunch of societal misfits coming together so they can hang out with each other: it was because their friends, family, and lovers were dropping like flies and literally no one besides them was giving a damn.

In fact when AIDS was killing mostly the “right people,” the Conservatives were outright gleeful, seeing it as God’s judgment.

Fuck Reagan, but keep in mind that while he deserves your hatred, don’t let yourself be fooled. As both AIDS and COVID demonstrate, the state can and will let you die for whatever reason if they find that giving a rat’s ass would cost them too dearly.

[godloveyell]

FYI, Utah also implemented the novel strategy of giving homeless people a goddamn house to great success. Before implementing their program, Utah spent, on average, 20K per homeless person per year. After, they were spending 10K per homeless person per year.

Unfortunately, I think Utah has since ended their program, but I thought its existence should be pointed out to silence any naysayers who might say that it wouldn’t be possible to implement such a program in America.

Another strategy that has been proven to work: giving poor people money. Not just dribbles and drabbles, crumpled dollar bills thrown their way by a few compassionate people, but actual meaningful sums of cash given away with few, if any, strings attached. Turns out when given enough money to do more than barely eke out an existence, poor people spend most of their money on :gasp: practical things like necessities (food, shelter, etc.) and stuff that enables them to pursue employment.

When I was first becoming politically aware as a teenager, I assumed that poverty and homelessness were complicated problems and any solutions to these problems would be complicated. Now, as an older and wiser adult, I know the truth: the solutions to our problems are actually very simple. We just persist in pretending they’re complicated, so we can weasel out of addressing them in any kind of meaningful way.

[godloveyell]

However rough things may be as this long post points out, all hope isn’t lost. We can’t completely undo the damage we’ve caused, but if we’re willing to put forth the effort, we can salvage a lot of it.

Doomerism, as tempting as it may be, only serves the Powers That Be. They want you to give up hope, except this world as the only way things can be, and stop fighting for something better.

Though this would have to be a global effort and given what things are like…

Sorry to be all gloom and doom, but when it comes to all the government shitfuckery involved with COVID, I can’t help but think about the Smallpox campaign in the 50s and 60s, how WHO and all the governments of the world were like, “Let’s do some good by wiping out an endangered species for a change.” And everybody corroborated and made it happen. Smallpox is effectively extinct, only existing as frozen cells in a Petri dish in a select handful of labs.

I keep wondering what if we had put forth a similar effort when it came to COVID. Maybe we couldn’t have made COVID go extinct like we did with Smallpox (because they are different organisms after all), but how many strains could we have kept from emerging, how many people could have been saved if we embarked on a global effort to get vaccines, equipment, and medicine to where they needed to be?

Combatting Climate Change is going to require far more effort and coordination than tackling Smallpox or COVID. If we’re going to tackle it, we’ll have to radically change our way of life and think of ourselves as a global community rather than as a citizen of X Nation.

[godloveyell]

To add a few more things to this fabulous post, never forget the principle known as Foucault’s Boomerang: tactics/weapons used to suppress uprisings abroad, will eventually be used against the citizens at home. It’s why we shouldn’t give an inch regarding the actions of US Empire or its proxy countries (in this case, Israel) and human rights, even if these actions are carried out against brown people overseas, as if the fact they’re people isn’t enough of a reason.

And the authorities will always be more brutal when it comes to leftwing protests/groups while going relatively easy on rightwing ones no matter how many people are killed or endangered by their actions, for much of the same reasons talked about in the previous post.

Rightwing protests tend to reinforce traditional systems/cultural beliefs related to power and control, their violence concentrated within the lower levels of the societal pyramid. They are more of a nuisance than a threat to those higher up on the pyramid.

Whereas leftwing protests and actions explicitly call out these traditional systems of power and control, directly challenging traditional systems of power and control, and are aimed directly towards those at the top of the societal pyramid. Hence why the tanks and tear gas, militarized cops and COINTELPRO variants come out to play very quick.

a lot of the coverage of the Palestinian genocide is focusing on the US student protests and the narrative is constantly in danger of shifting away from what the protests are actually about and a lot of the language is now speaking in terms of police brutality, silencing of free speech, etc. It's not a radical thing to say that this isn't exactly helpful to the Palestinian cause if the actual reasons for the protests aren't constantly front and center. A lot of people have already made this point. I do not think the genie can necessarily be put back in the bottle with how the protests and the police reaction to them are entering the public consciousness of the USian people. A lot of people are or will become aware of these protests through the lense of these simply being instances of police brutality, and police brutality is a critical issue that many USamericans are very passionate about thus making it difficult to reframe the context of these images of police slamming white professors into pavement towards awareness of Israels decades long illegal occupation and systematic and indiscriminate displacement and murder of Palestinians. What I feel needs to be done is try to reframe these images flooding the internet not *away* from issues of police brutality and homesoil fascism, but in the wider context of imperialist governments taking the lessons they learn oppressing "foreign peoples" and turning them inwards. That police brutality is not disconnected from imperialist mass murder. That the one thing connecting the assaulted USian protester and the trans israeli denied gender affirming care for refusing to serve in the fascist Israeli military and the Palestinian child buried alive for the crime of being Palestinian... the one thing connecting them is that, sooner or later, they are all victims of power. Our rights are granted to us inequitably, unevenly, and are just as quickly stripped away when we do not serve the interests of fascist power. We are either a tool of the state or an enemy of the state. The Palestinian, not the innocent or the guilty but the human being Palestinian, is murdered because she can not be useful to the state while she is still breathing. She can never have the "privilege" of being a tool. I'll say it again: We outside of Palestine who can go to protests, who have families, who are able bodied, who can work, who can keep their head down or speak without immediate retaliation have the "honor" of choosing to be a tool of the state or an enemy of the state. The Palestinian has no choice.

There will always be an armed cop ready to arrest you and kill your brother as long as there is a bomb ready to drop on the heads of Palestinian children. Fascism trickles up and inward.

[godloveyell]

Bless her for trying to do something. However small this action may seem, again, by making this part of the record, it provides further documentation of what’s going on. As said before, Israel is going to do its damndest to try to bury the truth about what happened, so we need to do what we can to refuse to let that happen. Do not let any of what happened disappear down the memory hole.

Tlaib also serves as further proof that all the Democrats seeming ineffectiveness is bullshit. Look how quickly they were able to mobilize to censure her. So every time they claim to be absolutely helpless because of Sinema or Manchin…again, it’s BS.

The DNC chooses what they want to fight for and if a cause is important to them, they’ll find a way to either work around any party members refusing to play ball or use their muscle to force them into behaving. Student loan forgiveness along with so many other leftist causes isn’t important to them, so they don’t fight for them. It’s as simple as that.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib submits to the Congressional Record the entire South African genocide case against Israel and makes an impassioned call to Congress to stop funding the ongoing atrocities in Gaza.

[godloveyell]

I don’t mind hand-washing dishes. Let me wear my headphones, listen to whatever I want, and give me something that’ll keep my hands from turning to sandpaper, and I’ll be happy. Heck, at the last job I worked where there was dishwashing involved, my coworkers liked having me wash dishes because I was the fastest at it and made it so they could go home earlier.

And frequently when dishwashing time rolled around, I was worn down from being around people and dealing with customers, so being shut away in a fairly quiet room with nobody to deal with except me, myself, and I? I jumped at the chance. And it was good, meditative exercise: dipping my hands into warm, soapy water, doing the simple, basic motions over and over, in a quiet space. My only objection was that it turned my hands to sandpaper afterwards.

I actually don't mind dull, repetitive labor if I'm capable of the task, allowed to be mostly left alone while I do it, and if I know what's expected of me. The trouble is, there's no way in hell to make a living doing any of this.

Sigh.

[godloveyell]

In any case, even if we felt that the intentions of the creators mattered, if a so-called system constantly produced outcomes contrary to the stated intentions, well, at some point, you need to either reform the system or scrap it entirely. Because there comes a point where continuing to carry on as before without so much as trying to throw something into the gears, becomes a dereliction of duty, and you become complicit in what the system does, like it or not.

Basically if you know a person is drowning and don’t throw them a life preserver or do literally anything to get them help, and that person drowns, then you are responsible for their death.

And that scenario is being generous in that it assumes that the person who left the poor schmoe to drown, played no part in the drowning victim winding up in that situation in the first place, like didn’t shove them into the water with weights strapped to them or something.

this is so on the nose

[godloveyell]

We found the EV equivalent of Spiders Georg. 😂

In all seriousness, while I am not opposed to EVs entirely, I don’t think they will be the Green Tech™️ that will save us all. They are a tool, but they shouldn’t be the only tool we use to fight climate change because the mining of the materials needed to create the batteries is almost as destructive as the drilling needed to harvest fossil fuels.

We need EVs, but we also need cheap and easily accessible mass transit. We need cities built around people, not cars. And the concept of planned obsolescence, along with whoever came up with it, needs to be taken out back and shot.

Biodiesel is also worth pursuing though like with EV, we shouldn’t put all our eggs in that basket.

Climate Change is the result of many problems all coming together to form a giant Voltron that will fuck us all over and will require many different people utilizing many different methods to stop it.

Sorry for the Voltron metaphor. Was trying to liven up the discussion with a pop culture reference. I was told the internet likes those things.

Tesla is tanking so hard it is dragging the entire EV segment's sales down into the negative. When you omit Tesla from the equation, EV sales are up 13% across the board.

Don't let anyone tell you EV sales are in a slump.

[godloveyell]

As I’ve already said, while it’s unlikely that an ICJ ruling would do a lot to change the situation on the ground, South Africa still deserves credit for standing up and trying to do something, anything in the wake of the madness. The mere act of conducting this hearing and having these words on record will make it a lot harder for Israel to deny what has happened.

Ideal world: the killings stop, the apartheid state of Israel is dissolved, and Netanyahu and co. are tried in The Hague for what they’ve done.

Still, if we can’t get any of that, the world needs to do its damndest to not let any of what happened, disappear down the memory hole, because that’s what they’re going to try to do.

The Powers That Be will do its best to make all this disappear, clear out the rubble, scour the public records, and flood the discourse with rewrites of what happened and rationales for what happened.

We have to plant our feet and say, “NO!”

From the court today. Israel IS committing a genocide.

[godloveyell]

The sad part is the numbers have been crunched, and it turns out that between feast days and holidays, your average medieval peasant enjoyed more leisure than your modern-day office worker.

Also, day-to-day work for the medieval peasant often involved frequent breaks especially during the heat of the day and really their work life was more “you’ll have some months of intense labor followed by some months of rest” unlike the current one where you’re expected to constantly work and produce at the same intensity year-round.

And the nobles didn’t really bother themselves with the day-to-day minutiae of the peasants’ labor. So long as at the end of the year the rent was paid, the nobles didn’t care so much about how the work was done, meaning that said peasants had more control over their day-to-day work than most modern-day workers.

Am I saying that life back then was a paradise with no suffering whatsoever for those on the lower levels of society whatsoever? By no means! I’m just pointing out that we’re getting Feudalism 2: Electric Boogaloo with none of the benefits that came with the previous version of it.

Really this is more The Gilded Age 2 only with electricity and better plumbing, at least in First World nations. Third World ones don’t even get that.

[godloveyell]

It’s something I remember clearly from my own teenage years: the absolute contempt with which adults treat teenagers. The way they mostly abandon raising them and leave them to their own devices, then come down on them like a ton of bricks as soon as they screw up. Burying them under a workload that most adults can’t handle. Constantly heaping scorn on anything they actually care about. Refusing to let them participate in the wider culture then getting mad when they break away and form their own subcultures to try to take care of each other with.

Adults pick on teenagers for being disrespectful, but respect is a two-way street. It’s pretty fucking sick to demand respect from someone you refuse to grant any in return. Teenagers aren’t stupid; they can tell how for all the effort society puts into fetishizing and marketing to them that it really hates them.

Of course it’s worse for teenage girls who not only get a double heaping of contempt, but also have to deal with being sexualized almost as soon as they start developing breasts. You talk to most women online about catcalling, and the majority will tell you that they were catcalled more when they were 10-15 years old than they ever were as mature adults.

Laurie Halse Anderson: I grew up as a teenager with parents who were disconnected from me for their own reasons, so I remember so clearly that confusion and that sorrow. I could go on for days about our disrespect and disregard for adolescence in American culture. Americans are all about loving kids when they’re small and portable, but for some reason … boy, do we abandon our teens. We abandon them in families, we abandon them as a culture, we don’t do a great job in most high schools of educating them properly. We disrespect them, and at the time when they are in most need of good, fun, loving, trustworthy relationships with good adults, we step away. And that’s really stupid and awful. So I try to write stories that tell the truth about hard things because kids need to know it; the world is hard and it will kick your ass if you’re not careful.

Unpopular opinion but the reason being a teenager sucks is less to do with hormones and social cliques and more to do with the fact adults fucking hate teenagers. The fact that adults expect teenagers to be able to take on adult responsibilities yet don't deserve rights of an adult. They don't see teenagers as human beings and they aren't prepared to see kids with their own formed identities and humanity. Teenagers are so sexualized and seen as needing to take on more and more adult responsibilities. Yet when they want rights and humanity they are denied. The years your brain spends wanting nothing more than to form an identity are being taken away from you. Teenagers are essentially being kicked out of social spaces unless they have an extra 40 dollars lying around anytime they want to go out. Teenagers being kicked out of the mall just for existing or groomed into the school to prison pipeline. And now creating legislation to keep them off the Internet. Our society hates teenagers. And does everything we can to hurt them. The fact that anyone makes it out of their teenage years without trauma is a fucking miracle frankly.

[godloveyell]

When trying to sell people on our vision for a new world, rather than trying to reassure them that they’ll still have their gadgets and various geegaws under this system, try focusing on the stuff they’d gain.

I think most of us would be willing to give up fast fashion and getting new models of smartphones every year, if it means that the clothes and gadgets we own, are of higher quality, last longer, and can be easily repaired or modified. Consumers aren’t buying crap merchandise designed to fall apart immediately no matter how well they are cared for because they like it; they buy them because it’s literally all that’s being sold.

When everything is in the hands of very few people who can pretty much decide everything regarding their products and they operate under a system (Capitalism), which worships profit above everything else, then they’re going to do what maximizes profits, and customers can’t really do anything about it because voting with your dollar doesn’t accomplish jack when there’s literally nowhere else they can go.

But okay, even minus consumer goods, there are still ways of selling our vision. If I had a choice between never having to worry about getting old, sick, hungry, or homeless, having a lifestyle that isn’t destroying the planet, if I could enjoy having walkable cities, plenty of third spaces, more leisure time, and the security that comes with knowing that I have a community that will take care of me no matter how dire life becomes (because they know I’d do the same for them) and consumer goods, I’d take the first one. I like chocolate and ebooks as much as the next person, but if I had to give up them or any consumer good for the world I envisioned, I would.

Idiots will frequently justify this dystopian hellscape by saying that we live better than a medieval king, because we have such luxuries as spices and electricity, but they are wrong. Maybe a medieval monarch didn’t have a smartphone, but they didn’t have to worry about being homeless or not having access to medical care.

Capitalism has so poisoned our minds that we’ve long forgotten that wealth isn’t found in pretty pieces of paper and consumer goods. Wealth is ultimately found in security that comes with having all your needs met, knowing that you’ll never have to worry about ever having your needs met, and knowing that the same is true of your fellow humans.

[godloveyell]

If you ever start believing that the Democrats are merely weak and ineffectual, look at how quickly the party mobilized to stop Bernie and censure Rashida, putting forth far more effort than they ever did against Trump.

They choose to be this way. When it came to Israel, Biden and co. have no difficulty getting weapons to the genocidal fucks, despite the fact that the majority of the population (which includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents) is in favor of a ceasefire.

Yet when it comes to student loans forgiveness, throw up any obstacle and the Dems are like, “Well, what’cha going to do?”

It should be abundantly clear why. Student Loan Forgiveness doesn’t matter to the party, otherwise they’d make it a priority and do everything in their power to overcome whatever obstacles thrown in their path. Yet Israel does matter to them, which is why the gates are wide open.

This is also true when it comes to the selected Democratic scapegoats, the party members who stubbornly refuse to let the party pass any kind of meaningful legislation, your Manchins and Sinemas. If the issue really mattered to the Democrats, then they wouldn’t be completely helpless at the hands of intransigent party members. They would either find a way around these party members, or they would use whatever muscle they have at their means to force said members in line.

THEY CHOOSE TO BE THIS WAY!

after roe v wade got overturned under biden (a constitutional right we had for FIFTY years) i don’t believe any of the goofy “biden is better for domestic issues” rhetoric . you are lying to me and you are lying to yourself

[godloveyell]

I don’t want anyone to pin this on humanity as a whole. The native Hawaiians managed to live quite happily and sustainably on the islands for many centuries.

Then Europeans poisoned by Capitalism and Colonialism show up and within the span of a couple of centuries, the islands are overrun with invasive species and the whole damn place is being destroyed by various “natural disasters.”

It’s Capitalism that’s killing us with its constant need to devour and expand, convert everything into commodities to be sold, consequences be damned.

The paradoxical truth is that the reason everything’s falling apart and going to shit is because Capitalism triumphed like its proponents hoped it would, but that wound up sealing its fate.

Capitalism managed to stay in the game as long as it did because until recently, there were always new lands to expand to with new resources to exploit. Use up Europe? Then go to the New World and burn your way through that continent.

The trouble is that it won. Capitalism has effectively taken over the world; there are no more new places for it to expand to. Hence why things are falling apart because the Powers That Be deluded themselves into thinking that infinite growth on a finite planet was possible, no matter how obviously wrong it seemed. Just like if you constantly consume chocolate cake, you’ll eventually run out of chocolate cake, if you constantly use resources, you’ll eventually run out of resources.

Right now, Capitalism is trying desperately to stay in the game by basically cannibalizing itself, but there’s an even more obvious flaw to that strategy and at some point, we either dismantle Capitalism voluntarily and have something to salvage or the whole thing collapses in on itself by default and we wind up with nothing.

No amount of wishful thinking will change this.

The last po’ouli died in an unusual nest. Too weak to perch, the brownish-greyish songbird rested in a small towel twisted into a ring. He was the last of his species, the last in fact of an entire group of finches, and occurred nowhere on Earth outside his native Hawaii. For weeks, as scientists tried to find him a mate, he had been getting sicker. The only remaining po’ouli had just one eye. Alone in the towel, alone in all the world, he closed it.

Extinction Obituary for the quiet and beautiful Hawaiian po’ouli

[godloveyell]

Jesus Fucking Chris! Are homeless people supposed to just hover a few inches off the ground when they need to sleep?!

Nothing like homeless people to turn even the most compassionate people into devout eugenicists. I’m waiting for some politician to pass a law forcing homeless people to compete in Hunger Games or Squid Games-style shows for the entertainment of the public. Lord knows there will be pundits and others willing to defend this sort of thing, because see previous remarks about eugenics.

Ideally, we’d just give homeless people a goddamn house. It’s literally been proven to be cheaper and more effective than any of our labyrinthine bureaucracies or letting them die in the streets.

But if we’re not going to do anything to address the problem of homelessness, is it so much to ask that we not at least make matters worse for them? They’re just trying to live.

Apparently it is too much to ask.

And who enforces this? Is it just a few bad apples, or is it all cops?

How hard is it for them to find cops willing to enforce this? Do they have to sift through hundreds of heroic cops who refuse until they find the one cop who's monstrous enough to enforce this, or do they easily find cops willing to enforce this because monstrous cops are everywhere and being a monster is part of the job?

"All cops are bad" is not a stereotype. It's literally a requirement for the job that every single one knew about.