#political posts

[cetaceanhandiwork]

okay so one of the big arguments you hear against moving away from prisons as a society is that there’s always going to be some % of folks who have no interest in improving their behavior & would always be a danger if ever allowed to walk the streets again. and like, yeah, that % is probably low after you factor in all the other ideas ppl have for solving the root causes of crime (and the number of ppl right now who are imprisoned for incoherent ass reasons to begin with), but it’s never gonna be zero

but today I thought of a very stupid but also very funny solution to that problem: if the # really is as low as has been claimed/estimated, then even if there’s no prisons you can still put those people under house arrest

totalitarian regimes that are facing international pressure for political imprisonments do it all the time. sure, the number of political prisoners they have to treat that way is usually pretty low; it’s not a scalable solution. but you don’t need a scalable solution. we’ve already established that we’re dealing with the exceptional case, here! and in exchange, by using a non-scalable solution, you avoid all the costs of building something scalable. you never build  infrastructure of incarceration. this has several benefits:

nobody’s phoney baloney job relies on there still being a certain number of people imprisoned. you can scale down, even to zero if you get lucky, without that being a political football.

people under house arrest will be able to use normal ass things to live, instead of using special “for prisoners” stuff that’s secretly designed to be off-the-books torture. no special concrete buildings. no special phone companies that turn every phone conversation into a roll of the dice as to whether your recipient can figure out how to get quarters into its collect call wallet. no need for the state to suddenly being responsible for wiping a guy’s butt just because he’s in custody. and for the state, this is cheaper than the alternative! even the savings from cruelly bargain basement economies of scale can’t beat the savings from “that isn’t my problem in the first place”.

scaling it up is costly. yes, I mean it when I say that’s a benefit. consider this: it means that anyone who comes after you & wants to do mass incarceration is going to be bad at it. they’ll have to start from scratch. they’ll have to put in the startup costs and build the infrastructure. the thing you’re building will be harder to use for evil than it is to use for good. that’s the kind of legacy you want in politics.

[superbeans89]

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

I feel stuck in my head and I need to ask someone: what's gonna happen to us when biden's reelected? What can we do to stop the genocide? What can we do to get roe v wade back? How to we make things okay?

Answering the last question first — how do we make things okay? We get informed, and we get involved.

If you want to change how things work, first you have to understand why they work the way they do. I’m not saying you have to become an overnight expert, but you gotta know the basics. You have to know who *really* makes the decisions about the stuff you care about. And I’m not being snarky here, but there’s a very very very good chance that that person is not Biden.

(long-ish more in depth USA-specific thoughts under the cut)

Let’s look at the two specifics that you mention. Yes, the president may be commander in chief of the armed forces but that “just” (air quotes bc obviously that is hugely consequential power, but it’s not the only power at play) means he’s the guy who says yes or no, stay or go. A more effective tool to address the United State’s relationship to Israel? Money. You know who controls the federal money? Congress. You know which political body has elections twice as frequently as the president? Congress. Look into who your Senators and Representatives are, look into their voting records, look into their hiring choices, look into their public statements and appearances, look into the company the keep.

If you like what you find, let them know, and if you have the resources, donate money and/or volunteer your time to make sure they win reelection. If you do not like what you find, and you think they might be responsive to public pressure, let them know you didn’t like what you found. If you found it abhorrent or do not trust that they will adjust to their constituents expectations, figure out if they have a competitor, and if they don’t, make sure that someone steps up to the plate. That someone doesn’t have to be you, but while we live in an ostensible democracy, these people can lose their jobs if and when we vote them out.

Regarding Roe v Wade, this might be upsetting to hear but you need to get used to the idea that it’s not coming back, and if anything, things might get worse. If voting and the legal system is your jam, I can recommend researching the circuit and district judges that preside over your region. If organizing and direct action are more your thing, there’s probably a Nurse’s Union in your area that can point you in the right direction. If your school district has an elected body where you can run for a seat to make sure that kids in your area are getting appropriately scientific sexual health education, do that. If you feel brave enough to start actively having conversations about sexual health and reproductive rights among your daily/weekly social groups, and maybe even start a book club style study group to learn about the legal and medical aspects most relevant where you live, do that. Even on the most individual scale, if you can make it clearly known that you are a safe person for people to talk to about this stuff, that’s a great step in the right direction.

To wrap this up, I think I’ll just say that I think big picture, if Biden wins a second term, things will be fine. If anything, maybe his administration will be able to bolster the environmental wins in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) but at a basic level he will probably maintain the status quo and then after the four years are up, he’ll leave office.

Let’s please not pretend the same can be said about Trump.

But in the spirit of ending on a more hopeful note, if you do not want Kamala Harris to be the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party in 2028 (and/or if you want a third party other than the Democrats and the Republicans to stand a snowball’s chance in hell) the time to start organizing is now. We deserve better than the status quo, we can do this, let’s fuckin go 💪

mod dyr

[wolfspaw]

[cetaceanhandiwork]

it’s. it’s not a photoshop????

have to admit I would not have pegged linus “tech tips” sebastien & co as the type to go full Ignorance and Want with their “weird special request PC build” pranks

wild

So Linus Tech Tips built a PC for the YouTuber The Spiffing Brit, liquid cooled it with tea, lots of Union Jack flag decals and stuff right

And then they hid this on the inside

[motherofplatypus]

This is how many bullets they shot on a fucking kid.

This post has been compiled in Record of Genocide.

[oldtvandcomics]

HEY GUYS!!

GUYS!!!

FRANCE HAS REACHED THE REQUIRED NUMBER OF SIGNATURES ON THE CITIZEN'S INITIATIVE AGAINST CONVERSION THERAPY IN THE EU!!

ONE COUNTRY DOWN, SIX TO GO!!

We also need still quite a few signatures in order to reach the one million required.

As to date, the six other countries with the most signatures are:

Spain - 38.72%

Finland - 30.31%

Ireland - 24.86%

Netherlands - 24.15%

Germany - 23.54%

Belgium - 23.09%

So yeah, still a long way to go, but we ARE slowly getting closer. Don't stop now! Don't let this stay within the community, either, if you have any friends or family who are open to queer rights, get them to sign, too!

[politijohn]

Source

Source

[troythecatfish]

[fixing-bad-posts]

please fucking vote

[kensatou]

MONKEY MAN (2024)

[cetaceanhandiwork]

the thing you gotta understand is that every time a sufficiently foreign government does something unpopular enough for average joe on the trolly to have an opinion about it, the result is increased hate crimes against the ethnicity that average joe thinks of as "living there"

remember how, in 2020, when COVID broke containment and spread worldwide, anti-asian violence more than doubled? remember sikh dudes getting jumped over 9/11?

or, for a milder and sillier couple examples: remember how, after the invasion of Ukraine, people were posting on here about giving up Russian cuisine for no good reason? remember freedom fries?

this shit happens every time. people start lashing out against their neighbors b/c something in their brain breaks and makes it so they can't distinguish between "the Russians" (i.e. the government of Russia) and "the Russians" (i.e. some random ethnically Russian guy). and yes this is partly the fault of how governments sort of deliberately name themselves as if the plot of land & the main culture that lives there & the organization that rules it are all one thing - it's harder to keep the three separated in your head when metonymy is built into the terms we use. but I think it's more fundamental than that; after all, it's not like "al qaeda" is any specific country, or as if anyone is "of talibani descent", but 2002's anti-brown and anti-muslim sentiment didn't seem to have been weakened by that.

and so... bringing this around to current events? yeah, actual hate crimes against jews are on the rise, and that's worth talking about & fighting back against. and since we understand that "jewish ppl =/= gov't of israel", we need to be especially responsive to warnings of antisemitism, and not just write them off as being "about" the war, because until you hear the rest of the sentence you don't know whether it's about criticism of the war or not. and accidentally writing off fears about unprecedented levels of antisemitic hate crime (which is happening) as being IDF apologism just makes it sound to the person you're talking with like you think all jews are responsible for the IDF's crimes, which is an awful thing to hear from someone who's supposed to be an ally.

(bonus fact: in case you didn't guess already? wonder of wonders, the other possible version of this situation is happening as well, simultaneously: islamophobic attacks on the rise b/c people see "Hamas" and think "any random palestinian/arab near me". this shit cuts every possible direction. because, again, it doesn't result from a logical thought process. it's people mixing up "ethnic group" with "goverment of country where many of that ethnic group reside", and then taking out their anger at the latter on the former, and the whole political spectrum is vulnerable to that kind of thinking. it happens EVERY time.)

[angel-fruitcake]

[cetaceanhandiwork]

every time a term is invented to express "outside the cishet paradigm", like clockwork, someone argument against it seems to catch on - some parallel construction of "oh, of course I don't oppose such a word existing in principle, but that particular word is wrong".

remember the mid 2010s when people on this site were toying with "MOGAI"? and then it fell from popularity, not for being a "slur", but for being supposedly the exclusive domain of confused and self-deluding cishet teens?

remember all the stupid arguments over LGBTQ+ and where to end the acronym? how too many letters is derided as "alphabet soup", but too few is argued as excluding anything that wasn't deliberately mentioned (a convenient property for folks who would prefer to end the word at "LGB")?

the justification, then, is different every time. and yet somehow, every time, such an argument gains traction. one might start to wonder if this is the point - if, somehow, the arguments are arising because someone desires, and is putting in effort to ensure, that there remain no easy way to refer to the broad umbrella of everyone for whom the cishet paradigm is insufficient, nor to succinctly position oneself under that umbrella.

that's a clue.

pride poll

[punkitt-is-here]

btw functionally for the US election today you are not picking your "hero" or whatever you are picking your opponent for the next four years because all presidents are bastards and they oppose the working class. you are simply selecting the one you can get the most ground on. this really helped reframe some stuff for me, hope this helps