#or just vote anyone that isn’t a genocidal maniac

[mikeyisbrooklyn]

I also wanted to add that I am unapologetically voting for Claudia and Karina no matter what and I will gladly shill for them here. Go to their site (https://votesocialist2024.com)! They’re the real deal. They’ve actually been organizing and are active members of their communities! It’s great to see people who actually care for once.

“But they’re third party!” Yep, that’s who (so far) has won my vote. If anyone else fucking wants they’re gonna have to earn it like they did. As candidates are wont to do.

AND I will be doing more than vote because that’s what it actually takes for change to happen. As already said, organizing, community outreach, protests. The whole nine.

I’m very over the defeatist attitude of (mostly) white liberals. They hardly ever actually try to make change or progress and then throw their hands in the air going “guess it wont happen, gotta vote moderate again!” Nonsense.

listen i am not american. i understand that even democrats fucking suck and its a genuinely shitty situation to be in. im so sorry. but hey, hey look at me. why are you guys bullying people for saying "you should still vote blue?" Like im curious about the alternatives youve got. voting red? firebombing walmart? tumblr user catboyssepticbutthole, i know you will not be firebombing walmart.

[qqueenofhades]

Could you expand a bit on the "death of expertise"? It's something I think about A LOT as an artist, because there are so many problems with people who think it isn't a real job, and the severe undercutting of prices that happens because people think hobbyists and professionals are the same. At the same time, I also really want people to feel free to be able to make art if they want, with no gatekeeping or elitism, and I usually spin myself in circles mentally thinking about it. So.

I have been secretly hoping someone would ask this question, nonny. Bless you. I have a lot (a LOT) of thoughts on this topic, which I will try to keep somewhat concise and presented in a semi-organized fashion, but yes.

I can mostly speak about this in regard to academia, especially the bad, bad, BAD takes in my field (history) that have dominated the news in recent weeks and which constitute most of the recent posts on my blog. (I know, I know, Old Man Yells At Cloud when attempting to educate the internet on actual history, but I gotta do SOMETHING.) But this isn’t a new phenemenon, and is linked to the avalanche of “fake news” that we’ve all heard about and experienced in the last few years, especially in the run-up and then after the election of You Know Who, who has made fake news his personal brand (if not in the way he thinks). It also has to do with the way Americans persistently misunderstand the concept of free speech as “I should be able to say whatever I want and nobody can correct or criticize me,” which ties into the poisonous extreme-libertarian ethos of “I can do what I want with no regard for others and nobody can correct me,” which has seeped its way into the American mainstream and is basically the center of the modern Republican party. (Basically: all for me, all the time, and caring about others is a weak liberal pussy thing to do.)

This, however, is not just an issue of partisan politics, because the left is just as guilty, even if its efforts take a different shape. One of the reason I got so utterly exasperated with strident online leftists, especially around primary season and the hardcore breed of Bernie Bros, is just that they don’t do anything except shout loud and incorrect information on the internet (and then transmogrify that into a twisted ideology of moral purity which makes a sin out of actually voting for a flawed candidate, even if the alternative is Donald Goddamn Trump). I can’t count how many people from both sides of the right/left divide get their political information from like-minded people on social media, and never bother to experience or verify or venture outside their comforting bubbles that will only provide them with “facts” that they already know. Social media has done a lot of good things, sure, but it’s also made it unprecedently easy to just say whatever insane bullshit you want, have it go viral, and then have you treated as an authority on the topic or someone whose voice “has to be included” out of some absurd principle of both-siderism. This is also a tenet of the mainstream corporate media: “both sides” have to be included, to create the illusion of “objectivity,” and to keep the largest number of paying subscribers happy. (Yes, of course this has deep, deep roots in the collapse of late-stage capitalism.) Even if one side is absolutely batshit crazy, the rules of this distorted social contract stipulate that their proposals and their flaws have to be treated as equal with the others, and if you point out that they are batshit crazy, you have to qualify with some criticism of the other side.

This is where you get white people posting “Neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are the same!!!1” on facebook. They are a) often racist, let’s be real, and b) have been force-fed a constant narrative where Both Sides Are Equally Bad. Even if one is a historical system of violent oppression that has made a good go at total racial and ethnic genocide and rests on hatred, and the other is the response to not just that but the centuries of systemic and small-scale racism that has been built up every day, the white people of the world insist on treating them as morally equivalent (related to a superior notion that Violence is Always Bad, which.... uh... have you even seen constant and overwhelming state-sponsored violence the West dishes out? But it’s only bad when the other side does it. Especially if those people can be at all labeled “fanatics.”)

I have complained many, many times, and will probably complain many times more, about how hard it is to deconstruct people’s absolutely ingrained ideas of history and the past. History is a very fragile thing; it’s really only equivalent to the length of a human lifespan, and sometimes not even that. It’s what people want to remember and what is convenient for them to remember, which is why we still have some living Holocaust survivors and yet a growing movement of Holocaust denial, among other extremist conspiracy theories (9/11, Sandy Hook, chemtrails, flat-earthing, etc etc). There is likewise no organized effort to teach honest history in Western public schools, not least since the West likes its self-appointed role as guardians of freedom and liberty and democracy in the world and doesn’t really want anyone digging into all that messy slavery and genocide and imperialism and colonialism business. As a result, you have deliberately under- or un-educated citizens, who have had a couple of courses on American/British/etc history in grade school focusing on the greatest-hit reel, and all from an overwhelmingly triumphalist white perspective. You have to like history, from what you get out of it in public school, to want to go on to study it as a career, while knowing that there are few jobs available, universities are cutting or shuttering humanities departments, and you’ll never make much money. There is... not a whole lot of outside incentive there.

I’ve written before about how the humanities are always the first targeted, and the first defunded, and the first to be labeled as “worthless degrees,” because a) they are less valuable to late-stage capitalism and its emphasis on Material Production, and b) they often focus on teaching students the critical thinking skills that critique and challenge that dominant system. There’s a reason that there is a stereotype of artists as social revolutionaries: they have often taken a look around, gone, “Hey, what the hell is this?” and tried to do something about it, because the creative and free-thinking impulse helps to cultivate the tools necessary to question what has become received and dominant wisdom. Of course, that can then be taken too far into the “I’ll create my own reality and reject absolutely everything that doesn’t fit that narrative,” and we end up at something like the current death of expertise.

This year is particularly fertile for these kinds of misinformation efforts: a plague without a vaccine or a known cure, an election year in a turbulently polarized country, race unrest in a deeply racist country spreading to other racist countries around the world and the challenging of a particularly important system (white supremacy), etc etc. People are scared and defensive and reactive, and in that case, they’re especially less motivated to challenge or want to encounter information that scares them. They need their pre-set beliefs to comfort them or provide steadiness in a rocky and uncertain world, and (thanks once again to social media) it’s easy to launch blistering ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you, who are categorized as a faceless evil mass and who you will never have to meet or negotiate with in real life. This is the environment in which all the world’s distinguished scientists, who have spent decades studying infectious diseases, have to fight for airtime and authority (and often lose) over random conspiracy theorists who make a YouTube video. The public has been trained to see them as “both the same” and then accept which side they like the best, regardless of actual factual or real-world qualifications. They just assume the maniac on YouTube is just as trustworthy as the scientists with PhDs from real universities.

Obviously, academia is racist, elitist, classist, sexist, on and on. Most human institutions are. But training people to see all academics as the enemy is not the answer. You’ve seen the Online Left (tm) also do this constantly, where they attack “the establishment” for never talking about anything, or academics for supposedly erasing and covering up all of non-white history, while apparently never bothering to open a book or familiarize themselves with a single piece of research that actual historians are working on. You may have noticed that historians have been leading the charge against the “don’t erase history!!!1″ defenders of racist monuments, and explaining in stinging detail exactly why this is neither preserving history or being truthful about it. Tumblr likes to confuse the mechanism that has created the history and the people who are studying and analyzing that history, and lump them together as one mass of Evil And Lying To You. Academics are here because we want to critically examine the world and tell you things about it that our nonsense system has required years and years of effort, thousands of dollars in tuition, and other gatekeeping barriers to learn. You can just ask one of us. We’re here, we usually love to talk, and we’re a lot cheaper. I think that’s pretty cool.

As a historian, I have been trained in a certain skill set: finding, reading, analyzing, using, and criticizing primary sources, ditto for secondary sources, academic form and style, technical skills like languages, paleography, presentation, familiarity with the professional mechanisms for reviewing and sharing work (journals, conferences, peer review, etc), and how to assemble this all into an extended piece of work and to use it in conversation with other historians. That means my expertise in history outweighs some rando who rolls up with an unsourced or misleading Twitter thread. If a professor has been handed a carefully crafted essay and then a piece of paper scribbled with crayon, she is not obliged to treat them as essentially the same or having the same critical weight, even if the essay has flaws. One has made an effort to follow the rules of the game, and the other is... well, I did read a few like that when teaching undergraduates. They did not get the same grade.

This also means that my expertise is not universal. I might know something about adjacent subjects that I’ve also studied, like political science or English or whatever, but someone who is a career academic with a degree directly in that field will know more than me. I should listen to them, even if I should retain my independent ability and critical thinking skillset. And I definitely should not be listened to over people whose field of expertise is in a completely different realm. Take the recent rocket launch, for example. I’m guessing that nobody thought some bum who walked in off the street to Kennedy Space Center should be listened to in preference of the actual scientists with degrees and experience at NASA and knowledge of math and orbital mechanics and whatever else you need to get a rocket into orbit. I definitely can’t speak on that and I wouldn’t do it anyway, so it’s frustrating to see it happen with history. Everybody “knows” things about history that inevitably turn out to be wildly wrong, and seem to assume that they can do the same kind of job or state their conclusions with just as much authority. (Nobody seems to listen to the scientists on global warming or coronavirus either, because their information is actively inconvenient for our entrenched way of life and people don’t want to change.) Once again, my point here is not to be a snobbish elitist looking down at The Little People, but to remark that if there’s someone in a field who has, you know, actually studied that subject and is speaking from that place of authority, maybe we can do better than “well, I saw a YouTube video and liked it better, so there.” (Americans hate authority and don’t trust smart people, which  is a related problem and goes back far beyond Trump, but there you are.)

As for art: it’s funny how people devalue it constantly until they need it to survive. Ask anyone how they spent their time in lockdown. Did they listen to music? Did they watch movies or TV? Did they read a book? Did they look at photography or pictures? Did they try to learn a skill, like drawing or writing or painting, and realize it was hard? Did they have a preference for the art that was better, more professionally produced, had more awareness of the rules of its craft, and therefore was more enjoyable to consume? If anyone wants to tell anyone that art is worthless, I invite you to challenge them on the spot to go without all of the above items during the (inevitable, at this rate) second coronavirus lockdown. No music. No films. No books. Not even a video or a meme or anything else that has been made for fun, for creativity, or anything outside the basic demands of Compensated Economic Production. It’s then that you’ll discover that, just as with the underpaid essential workers who suffered the most, we know these jobs need to get done. We just still don’t want to pay anyone fairly for doing them, due to our twisted late-capitalist idea of “value.”

Anyway, since this has gotten long enough and I should probably wrap up: as you say, the difference between “professional” and “hobbyist” has been almost completely erased, so that people think the opinion of one is as good as the other, or in your case, that the hobbyist should present their work for free or refuse to be seen as a professional entitled to fair compensation for their skill. That has larger and more insidious effects in a global marketplace of ideas that has been almost entirely reduced to who can say their opinion the loudest to the largest group of people. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but at least I can try to point it out and to avoid being part of it, and to recognize where I need to speak and where I need to shut up. My job, and that of every single white person in America right now, is to shut up and let black people (and Native people, and Latinx people, and Muslim people, and etc...) tell me what it’s really like to live here with that identity. I have obviously done a ton of research on the subject and consider myself reasonably educated, but here’s the thing: my expertise still doesn’t outweigh theirs, no matter what degrees they have or don’t have. I then am required to boost their ideas, views, experiences, and needs, rather than writing them over or erasing them, and to try to explain to people how the roots of these ideas interlock and interact where I can. That is -- hopefully -- putting my history expertise to use in a good way to support what they’re saying, rather than silence it. I try, at any rate, and I am constantly conscious of learning to do better.

I hope that was helpful for you. Thanks for letting me talk about it.

[altheathewriter]

5/5 All in all, it sounds like you really need to examine both the plot you're writing and how you're writing it, because what you are thinking and how people are interpreting it are two divided entities.

Ok. Thanks I think.

It sounds like a lot of people don’t like this story which is what I wanted. I don’t want people to like Caelius and I don’t want people to like the story. But anyway.

“1/5 I think everyone who is sending asks lately, anon or otherwise, understands that caelius is in fact the bad guy. That has been evident from the get-go, really. But I think the nature of recent asks comes from... a few things. 1) The Adryeans ... super parallel Nazis, coming just short of packaging up the Nishiians and boxing them in concentration camps. You've established in past posts that the Adryean stereotype is blue eyes and blond hair.“

Ok it probably does have a lot of Nazi related things. I did not intend to relate directly to the Nazis, the holocaust, or jewish persecution in the form of entertainment. I started writing this because of real life issues I am having with MAGA and the treatment of hispanic people, as I am a hispanic person trying to deal with internalized racism in my own family, history of the treatment of my race in America, and the current treatment of them. Also the treatment of minority races in America since day one, especially with genocides and all that most people ignore or don’t know about. I mean, people here celebrate Columbus and ignore the things he did. Also, to put all the narcissistic bigoted scumbags I know IRL into one character.

“2/5 The way their laws and behaviors functions is eerily similar to how Nazis discriminated against the Jews [and others]. And I mean. If you took away the D and the E, Adryean becomes Aryan. By that token, the comparisons are not that big of a stretch. 2) Another problem people seem to be having - and a problem I share - is that.... there's some tonal inconsistency. Take the whipping/torture scene you posted, for example. “

Yeah I’m going to change the name. I actually got it from one of those fantasy name generators with intentions to change it. But again, I began writing as a response to the racism in America. I guess that says something about America. The whipping scene was a drabble. It comes way in the future and will probably change a bit. The only part of the story you have is 1.5 chapters. So far, all you really have is Caelius hates being at home and wants to get laid.

“3/5 You have Caelius torture a man, blackmail him for his heritage, and then ask him at the end what Max likes. That... Those two don't... go together?? 3) You've thus far deflected all criticism with some version of "But Caelius is the bad guy" which... while that is in fact true, the fact that people have these criticisms in the first place means that your writing is saying something vastly different than you are. And that isn't good. You shouldn't have to reiterate that he is a bad person.”

Yeah, dude, Max is an object in Caelius’s eyes and Caelius thinks he owns him, and he’s going to do what he can to keep that possession. A few things happen between chapters 1.5 and this scene that causes him to do this. Besides, Devron is Max’s bf and is part of this resistance. This is part of their plan.

“4/5 He is a fantasy Hitler lol but. The narrative itself doesn't easily lend us to the fact that. Yaknow. He's a racist, genocidal maniac. 4) To add to points 1 and 3, while the narrative continuously hammers into us that "Nishiians are oppressed and killed" etc.... I mean. You have scenes like Max asking for wine despite being a) unwanted b) a servant/prostitute/whatever Caelius uses him as c) part of a racial minority that is actively slaughtered.”

Yeah probably fantasy hitler. Or maybe his dad was. 

Max is there to get info. Did yall forget he was a spy?

Also, if you ask a racist if they’re racist these days, they aren’t going to say they’re racist. They’re going to say they’re not. And then they’re going to say something like but stereotypes exist for a reason, or something like, well if people didn’t want to be treated this way, they’d do this or that, or their actions would follow in that they vote for racist laws or support racist rhetoric, watch Fox, vote for Trump, and see no problem with hispanic people being held in warehouses with cold floors, separated from their mothers, with chain links surrounding them. 

Caelius isn’t going to state that he’s racist. But he is.

Like I get what you guys are saying. Its disturbing. But I feel like disturbing things need to be written. 

Anyway. Sorry to offend if this offends anyone. I’m probably going to shelve this piece for now. This story disturbs even me, and that is why the writing has been such slow going. I keep wanting to write cinnamon roll Isiere and his religious prosecution story but I’m sure that will offend someone too.

[conservativemalarkey]

Okay, now I'm curious about what you saw of the Tea Party. (Not a new follower, if that matters?)

Hey, it’s fine! I’m mostly just trying to get some Content (TM) here, so... any questions are welcome. Caveat here: I was a teenager for the brunt of this, and I was a young teenager at the beginning of this. (I was only a sophomore in high school when it really kicked off and I started following it.) In my head, some things are mixed up- I did a little bit of fact-checking to make sure I got the dates right, and it turns out I didn’t at all. Also, I was never involved on the ground level, because I was a young teenager in a rural area and didn’t have the opportunity to do things like ‘go to protests’; most of my involvement was liking things on facebook. 

WARNING: Long post is long, and I don’t want to put this under a cut in case I have to change my URL. If you don’t want to read this, you can press the ‘J’ key to skip down (or just... swipe, I guess. Sorry, mobile users.) 

...So. Around the time President Obama got elected, a lot of conservative types were angry in the same way we are about Trump, and for nearly the same reasons (though, of course, they were wrong). They thought, thanks to right-wing media/propaganda, that Obama was an illegitimate president who was hiding all kinds of things from the American people and that he should never have gotten into office at all and that he was going to send the country to hell. And that was the people who weren’t flagrantly racist. 

 This was right after the 2008 financial crisis and no one was happy with how the government was handling the situation on either side of the political fence. Everyone wanted to see the banks punished for screwing people over, and under both Bush and Obama, that ... wasn’t what happened. The government in general let the banks off easy and gave them what they asked for so that the economy didn’t crash even harder. People were pissed off. 

A number of grassroots protests happened. Most of them were not very successful, but the one that caught people’s attention was an anti-tax, anti-bank-bailout, anti-government-meddling-in-the-economy libertarian deal. It was technically ‘bipartisan’ - in that libertarians on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide were involved. I don’t remember too much about this one in specific- I was honestly more interested in the ‘juicy’ culture war stuff- but everyone on both sides of the fence talked about it for months. 

The movement that sprung up around it was called the Tea Party-- after the Boston Tea Party, but TEA also stood for ‘Taxed Enough Already’. People started using Revolutionary-War imagery, hanging tea bags off their hats, that kind of thing. I think this is also when libertarians started using the Don’t Tread On Me flag, though that could have been just ‘I was a wee babby and this was the first time I was seeing it’. 

 ...And at the time? I was really hopeful. It was really obvious that things were wrong, and anyone that had eyes to see could see it, even if we blamed different things for it. I thought this would be a thing that would get liberal and conservative people to come together to fight the Real Evil of taxes and bad government regulation. I thought that maybe it really would be bipartisan and people would do the ‘right’ thing and make a change in the world.

...of course, that isn’t what happened at all. 

What happened was, conservative news media picked up on it and started touting it as an example of how much people hated Obama. People who hated Obama for other, much more dubious reasons glommed onto the Tea Party as a way of expressing their displeasure. Conservatives who hated Bush for ‘compassionate conservativism’ also glommed onto the Tea Party-  they wanted the government to get out of the business of even pretending to help people. Then conservative media started going ‘see? see how p o p u l a r  this Totally Bipartisan movement is? clearly everyone hates Obama as much as we do.’ 

A lot of Very Serious Moderate-Conservative people started freaking out about the Tea Party and trying to discredit them- as far as I remember, some of this may have been true. There were all kinds of rumours that the Koch brothers were funding them or that they were taking money from kooky right-wing candidates everyone hated or- in general, that there was some evil mastermind behind all this, that people weren’t rising up on their own because they were pissed off, that’s not a thing that HAPPENS, right? But happen it did. 

So what happened was... a libertarian, vaguely-populist movement quickly spiralled out of control. Egged on by conservative media-- and by the general disdain they got from more ‘liberal’ media outlets-- it turned into a ‘I’m More Conservative Than Thou’ heckfest.  

If the American right has learnt anything from the American left, it’s purity politics. This is when you started seeing the term RINO sprout up. RINO stands for ‘Republican In Name Only’ - in plain English, an actual conservative rather than a right-wing radical. The Tea Party popularized the term ‘RINO’ as meaning ‘anyone who doesn’t support the Tea Party or doesn’t support the increasingly radical direction it’s going’.

The Tea Party, at its various levels, started funding state and local elections- going against moderate Republican incumbents, and putting more right-wing candidates in their place. At the time, I thought this was great too- it was Putting Strong Good People who Believed All The Right Things In Places Where They Could Change The World. 

...the thing was? The Tea Party is directly responsible for how crazy the Republican party is right now. And I’m horrified at even the little bit I did to cheer it on, but no one thought things would wind up like this. At least, not in 2008. 

There’s a slang term in politics- ‘red meat’ - that means ‘the stuff your political base, your True Believers, rabidly care about that no one else really gives a damn about’. For instance, most people would not care about a proposal to tear down a statue of Columbus in the middle of town and replace it with.. IDK, a Little Free Library. For liberals/leftists, that might be a piece of red meat- replacing a statue of a genocidal maniac with a library? How wonderful! On the flip side, for conservatives, this might be a piece of red meat- how DARE you replace a statue of a NATIONAL HERO with some Weird Liberal Thing that will COST TAX MONEY!!!1!! But no one else really gives a damn, or has mixed opinions. 

The Tea Party was all about giving conservatives red meat. And very little else, to be frank, because it was a populist movement. The conservative base had never really chosen candidates on how effective they’d be, they were always more focused on what their candidates believed than what they actually Did- but the Tea Party made them go nuts. They didn’t have to care about the candidates their party chose (based partly on how effective they’d be)? They could pick whoever they wanted? Well, that guy believes aliens built the pyramids, but he also says he’ll outlaw abortion and gay marriage, so why the hell not? 

Tea Party candidates got crazier and crazier until you wound up with people like Sarah Palin seriously being considered for high office- candidates who would never wind up on the national stage before. Moderate Republicans were terrified. People thought the Tea Party was gonna become its own third party and be a real threat to the Republicans-- moderate ‘pubs either quietly became Democrats or started making the same kind of promises the Tea Party candidates were making.

I’m not sure if the Tea Party is still extant- I stopped hearing much about them in 2011, but that’s also the year that I stopped obsessively reading conservative news media, so they could still be around. As far as I know, the movement as a movement has basically quieted down. Maybe it was that people realized they looked silly wearing tricorne hats with tea bags hanging off them; maybe it’s that they were sick of getting called ‘teabaggers’; maybe it’s that the conservative media/mainstream media just stopped reporting on them once they stopped being new and shiny. Maybe they just switched to wearing MAGA hats.

...but the thing is, whether or not they won enough battles to stick around? They won the war.

Trump is the ultimate Tea Party candidate. He is all red meat and no vegetables or vitamins. He promises people the universe and then gives them a load of hot air for their trouble- and he puts on a great show. He gives them all the right words; all the best words. He hates taxes and government regulation-- he must, because he’s a successful businessman, right?  

Ugh. That got depressing quick. Let’s just get to...

THE TAKEAWAY, for anyone who’s read this far.   

The Tea Party is 99% of what radicalized the mainstream Republican party. I don’t think the alt-right would even be relevant if the Tea Party hadn’t paved the way for them. The Republicans started moving farther right by degrees long before the Tea Party, but the Tea Party accelerated the crazy- conservative pundits today say things that would be unthinkable even during the Bush administration.   

Voting can and does have measurable effects; it’s just that voting for President and Congress once every four years does not. You have to be willing to vote for local and state candidates, to primary candidates you hate, to be picky about who you support, but also to vote for candidates within one of the major parties. 

The Democratic Party does not give their base enough red meat. The Republican Party gives their base way too much red meat. This is why both parties are FUBAR- not giving your base enough red meat results in a shirty, disloyal, angry base that will betray you; giving your base too much red meat makes them stupid, petulant children. 

As a voter- watch out for red meat. Try to think critically about what politicians are telling you and whether they’re playing on things that you care about to get your support. If a politician is promising you lots of things that you care about that most people have no reason to care about, are they trying to manipulate you? Odds are good the answer is ‘yes’. 

[nahare-shin]

Acting like biden’s only issue is being old and stuttering is craaaaaazy.

Like yeah Trump is ultimately worse, but Biden has invented propaganda to legitimize the genocide in Palestine and still fully endorses and funds it despite his hollow warnings and finger waggings about how Israel better stop bombing Rafah or he’s gonna put them in time out.

Biden was also extremely anti-integration and actively protested the end to whites only spaces. You don’t go through a magical dance number and just stop being the type of person who would spit at black children going to a “white only” elementary school just because arbitrary amount of time has passed and he’s publicly worked with black politicians in the last couple of decades.

Idk man, I’m all for telling people not to vote for trump, but can we not be dishonest about Biden just to pretend he’s a smol bean poor old man with a speech impediment and not a genocidal maniac who has promised to send us to war with Iran if they retaliate any further against Israel bombing our embassies?

Also, he’s a rich white man in a powerful position. You wanna look me in the eye and tell me you honestly believe Biden has never sexually assaulted anyone? Again, yeah, less than trump probably, but get real dude come on.

This isn’t hard for people because Biden is cringe or just incompetent, he’s actively dangerous. The reason people catch criticism for supporting Biden is that it comes off as saying it doesn’t matter how many genocides and human rights violations Biden takes part in, as long as he’s not trump he’s a saint. That is such a dangerous and ignorant way of voting and half of why we got stuck with Biden to begin with.

He isn’t your friend just because he acts like he is.

And I’m tired of people acting like “oh well both Biden and trump support the genocide so it doesn’t matter who cares I’m still voting for someone openly committing genocide because maybe they won’t eat MY face” because EXCUSE ME⁉️

I’m not sayin you shouldn’t vote Biden, because I’m sure as hell never gonna say you should vote for trump, but if you really wanna sway people to vote for him instead of throwing their vote away by abstaining or voting a third party, being dishonest in portraying him as less dangerous than he is maybe uh isn’t the best way to go about it? Dude is heavily on the side of riot police brutalizing unarmed peaceful protestors and you’re gonna pretend the only issues with Biden is him being Old and Stuttering? Really??

Look, Biden isn't my first choice, either. But it's going to be one of these two guys, and I'm not voting for the rapist.

[opheliapurple]

If two candidates hold the same views on issues 1 and that issue is genocide

And they are both genocidal psychopaths

I’m not voting for them.

I don’t empathize whatsoever with this “well it’s a trolley problem and yeah it sucks but you can’t let the genocidal maniac with the red tie win amiright” coping and I don’t think I ever will.

If 24 HOUR LIVE COVERAGE OF GENOCIDE WITH THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE BEGGING AND PLEADING FOR HELP IN 4K EVERY DAY FOR MONTHS isn’t enough for you to say “there is no looking past this issue. This is something I can’t compromise on.” I truly don’t understand you and I don’t understand how you can donate and advocate and protest and then VOTE FOR THE GUY ACTIVELY DOING IT.

You can’t trolley problem genocide, you can’t divvy it up into a million small sins and sort through them until you find the least offensive pile and sigh over how monstrous the choices are.

I find it viscerally terrifying than genocide isn’t the red line for so many people, that burning people alive in refugee camps isn’t enough for people to decide the person responsible isn’t fit to lead under any circumstances. That people can see what’s going on and power through as though genocide is a single solitary point and not a cascading culmination.

You’re not saving democracy or keeping America from becoming a dictatorship, if you’re voting for two genocidal maniacs who are both trying to criminalize protestors ITS GONE BABY. KISS IT GOODBYE.

Biden is trying to give more funding to police than ANY OTHER PRESIDENT BEFORE HIM. He is NOT the safer less extreme option, he just wears a blue tie.

Vote, for the love of all that is holy, vote. Vote locally, vote for your president.

But I want to make two things abundantly clear.

One, voting third party or for literally anyone who isn’t currently funding and protecting ethnic cleansing on a scale beyond imagining isn’t fucking sabotage.

It’s not stealing a vote for the blue tie psychopath. He didn’t earn it, he’s not even trying to. He hasn’t promised or campaigned or done literally anything to win votes because he’s relying on threats. On everyone being too scared of the psychopath in the red tie.

It’s not the voters responsibility to convince themselves to vote for a candidate, and I genuinely pity how many people have let democrats twist that responsibility until they threaten voters FOR them.

Two, if you vote for Biden, you aren’t pro Palestine.

You might wish they get out okay, hope it gets better, feel positively toward their liberation. But not enough to do more than black squares did for the blm protests.

Did that piss you off? Am I wrong? Am I condescending af and being a hypocrite?

Go ask a Palestinian then.

Go on.

I find it so strange and funny that these conversations happen again and again, but weirdly no one ever lets Palestinians weigh in on the trolley problem.

Go on, explain it to them. That you’re going to pull the lever for their peoples’ track, but it’s not because you don’t care. You care so much!! You’re helping actually, just imagine what Trump would do instead.

Really, there are Palestinian Americans, they should get it.

You donated, you boost videos, you advocate, they’ll understand. So tell them who you’re voting for.

Prove me wrong.

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

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