#republican wankery

[qqueenofhades]

Hi! This question has been noodling in my head for a few weeks, and I’ve been really curious to hear your opinion. I’ve appreciated your very thoughtful commentary on the ways the online left in particular have hurt the real and concerted efforts that have been made to navigate through the Gaza war in support of Palestine. I’ve seen a lot of outrage online about Biden bypassing congress in order to make another emergency weapons sale to Israel, which does indeed read as counter to helping to the Palestinians facing endless and indiscriminate violence. I understand that you might not want to answer this ask, because the work that you already do in your life offline and the work that you do here on tumblr to respond to and explain these issues is exhausting enough. Thanks so much for your time and your thoughtful contributions! It’s always really helped me remember to slow down and think critically about the media I consume.

Because you have asked this thoughtfully and in good faith, I will return the favor and give you a careful and extensive answer to the best of my ability. However, obligatory top-of-post disclaimer that I will disable reblogs at the first hint of any wankery in the notes and I will not answer any follow-ups or secondary asks at this time (unless I decide to do so, but I engage with this topic sparingly, judiciously, and only in small doses, so don't count on it).

First, let me say that the moment, I disagree with substantial portions of how Biden is handling the two main foreign-policy crises (Ukraine and Gaza). In regard to Ukraine, I think he's backed off, taken his foot off the gas, and otherwise given Republicans ammunition to keep delaying or watering down a new aid bill, is refusing to disburse military aid packages from the $4 billion of funding remaining that was previously approved by Congress, hasn't sent long-range ATACMS and other critical military hardware that might bring the war to an end sooner, and is not (as of the moment, though recent reporting suggests this might change) pushing hard enough for frozen Russian assets to be transferred to Ukraine for military and/or humanitarian financial assistance. However, I am also aware (unlike, it seems, much of the left-leaning internet) that I am basing these judgments only on my personal impressions, on what is reported (or not reported) in the media (which has plenty of its own problems) and otherwise what is formed in my role as an ordinary American citizen without any kind of special, classified, high-level, or government access. I know nothing more than any of you, and I also know that a lot of what goes on behind closed doors does not appear on Political Twitter and/or the Washington Post or the Guardian or Daily Kos or whatever other aggregate sources of information I or any left-leaning person typically consumes. So it's highly possible (and this is my cautious academic instinct speaking) that I do not, in fact, have a full picture of events. There are also contributing factors that Biden cannot simply handwave aside, even if he did, say, dip back into the $4 billion pot in the meantime. Congress will need to pass a new funding bill for Ukraine aid and the MAGA Republicans have been enthusiastically blocking it to the point where Putin's cronies on Russian state TV praise them effusively for it. We all know about the Republicans and Russia's mutual love affair. So.

The same goes for Gaza, and even more because we have already had reporting about how the Biden administration is walking a behind-the-scenes tightrope in a number of seemingly impossible tasks: keeping the war from spreading to a larger theater, pressuring Netanyahu to dial down, y'know, the rampant genocide (when Netanyahu notoriously doesn't like Biden, was very close with Trump, and would be happy to keep the war going in order to boost Trump's chances of being re-elected and save Netanyahu himself from his own criminal prosecutions), and pursuing a complex policy toward the state of Israel that does not follow the antisemitic Western Online Left's fever dream of "Israel suddenly disappears overnight and falls into the ocean and all Jews die or disappear." We have had multiple credibly sourced reports about this. Blinken is back in the Middle East right now trying to keep the war from spreading. The US under Biden has criticized Israel's essentially empty policy document for post-war Gaza as not being remotely feasible (because it's so vague) and gone so far as to voice support for a two-state solution with Palestinian self-determination (which is itself quite radically different from previous administrations). However, they have also vetoed UN ceasefire resolutions and other essentially meaningless political theater (the UN as a whole has been ruthlessly exposed in the last few years for being completely useless) that are easy to gin up outrage about, and that's what the internet focuses on, rather than any of the other complicated actions taking place.

All of this is to say that no, in fact, I don't blindly support everything the Biden administration is doing in regard to either Ukraine or Israel right now, but I actually have a sense of real-world perspective about it and understand that there are certain immutable realities that we are working with and which will not be erased by some absolute jackasses yelling at Biden in a historically black church at the commemoration of an anti-black terrorist attack. Likewise, as I've said it before and I'll say it again, and as plenty of other people have noticed and pointed out, the Western left is using this as an orgy of pseudo-revolutionary fervor that focuses on using Hamas as a proxy for their own fantasies of violent uprising against their own governments. Because while yes, anti-zionism and antisemitism are two distinct things and represent different aims and goals, it's become more or less irrelevant in allegedly pro-Palestine Western leftist spaces. It's just increasingly rabid, accelerationist, and nihilistic antisemitism all the time, or the obvious usage of "Zionist" to mean "Jew." It's not good. There is no concept of actual restorative justice for Palestinians or other people, such as Ukrainians, Syrians, Uyghurs, Taiwanese, etc, either undergoing genocide or facing the threat of it, because Western leftists have latched onto this cause solely as a stick to beat the Democratic Party with and have no actual moral interest or concern in stopping genocide elsewhere in the world or repudiating it as a method overall. They just want the state of Israel (which they characterize as a "proxy state for white western colonialism" despite the many, many things historically, religiously, and politically wrong with that statement, because it means it now Contains the Right Buzzwords to Oppose It) to be destroyed altogether in the name of "opposing colonialism," but it really seems to be all about opposing Jews. Hmm.

Simply put, Biden is not ever going to pursue a policy of "let's totally abandon Israel tomorrow, never sell it any weapons or allow it to defend its own civilians, and agree that Hamas is actually a good representation or advocate for the Palestinian people" in the way a number of Western Online Leftists seem to think he should do. There is still the fact that Israeli civilians do exist and that Hamas has continued to launch missiles at them daily, inconvenient as that fact might be for the Hamas fanboys (and fangirls) who now populate much of what passes for Western leftist discourse spaces. (Either that or they don't care, because in their view, Israeli civilians are fully acceptable collateral damage by virtue of simply living in Israel in the first place, which -- yikes. Fucking yikes. That is all.) The number of people professing to be lifelong leftists who are Just Shocked at all the antisemitism, or thinking that any and all antisemitism is just artificially introduced into leftist spaces by bad-faith right-wing/Nazi psyops either has not spent any actual time around leftists, or (more likely) simply does not listen to what they openly say. The antisemitism is virulent, constant, and only getting worse. On the most basic level, regardless of the other difficulties around the founding of Israel as a state in 1948 and the fact that doing so on some of the most bitterly religiously, politically, ethnically, and culturally contested territory in the world for over two thousand years was always going to be a massive clusterfuck, the fact of its immediate post-Holocaust creation simply cannot be ignored the way many Online Leftists do. Israel exists because of the worst antisemitic mass murder in recorded history (and that's a high bar). That fact must be incorporated into any actual discussions about its right either to exist or to protect its own civilians. But this gets turned into "Israel exists only as a puppet state of white western colonialists" which is just bad on so, so many levels.

The collective Western Online Leftist feeling seems to be that Hamas are innocent and wronged freedom fighters who are begging for a ceasefire and the cruel Israelis aren't granting them one. This is not true. Hamas has rejected multiple ceasefire opportunities, and continued to launch missiles and retaliatory attacks, because they are terrorists and they do not want or represent any serious opportunity to negotiate in the framework of western liberal democracy. They are treated as helpless woobified blorbos by much of the Western leftist-leaning internet. They are not. In that case, Biden bypassing Congress to sell Israel weapons (which was just something like 100 million of artillery shells, which is not nothing but still not a huge systematic thing like, say, Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal) is not great. I do not support anything Israel is doing to Gaza. It is abhorrent. However, there are reasons for Biden to provide some limited amount of weapons to Israel without congressional approval that do not automatically and mindlessly equate to BIDEN SUPPORTS TOTAL GENOCIDE IN GAZA!!!!!!1 Especially when as I've said, the Online Leftists only care about stopping genocide when it fits their political self-righteousness, and absolutely not at all the rest of the time.

This is representative of the fact that Western Online Leftism has now completed its all-out descent into blind Noam Chomskyism. Chomsky has never met a "leftist" or "anti-Western" genocide he couldn't deny, excuse, or openly cheerlead (going all the way back to the 1970s and Pol Pot/the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and going up to the minute with Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine). Noam Chomsky is the leftist Henry Kissinger. His ethics and morals are equally abhorrent, he's just as willing to justify total genocide in the name of advancing his preferred political ideology, and while there were (justifiably) celebrations and gloating memes across Tumblr when Kissinger finally bit the dust, Chomsky's beliefs are replicated with slavish adoration in many other Tumblr spaces and spread in some form or another to the rest of the website, which now takes them as leftist gospel (and let's not even talk about Twitter). This represents my absolute frustration with the fact that Western Online Leftism has devolved to such a degraded, mindless, useless, and malevolent level that "cheerlead for any anti-western/Leftist TM terrorist group or state" is taken to be the be-all and end-all of their moral philosophy. Someone remarked that ISIS peaked too early; if they were still at the height of their powers today, they would have a legion of devoted white so-called progressive Twitter users shilling earnestly and angrily for them, and Christ, isn't that the fucking truth.

I know we live in a hard, frightening, complex, and difficult world, and it's hard to sort out what our moral responsibility and action should be at any given time, especially since the answer is always so frustratingly partial and incomplete. Nobody of basic good sense and decency wants to see Gaza leveled while the Israeli state continues to apply a number of violently cruel collective punishments even outside the actual daily bombing of civilians. But for the love of god, let's get rid of the idea that the continued mindless violence doesn't benefit Hamas (because it does; unsurprisingly, sympathy for their cause has soared in Gaza) as much as it does Israel, or that Hamas is some kind of benevolent peacemaker that is being thwarted by the cruel imperialist US/West. And going back to the incident that prompted you to send me this ask: white leftists have often and repeatedly demonstrated their withering disdain for black people, Democratic voters, "mainstream" Americans, and anyone else doesn't buy into the twisted tankie fantasy land where getting rid of Biden would somehow be a massive coup for social justice (by getting Trump, now openly announcing at every turn that he will be a dictator, back into office! Very praxis, much justice. Wow.)

In short: if you, a white person, stand up in Mother Emanuel AME -- one of the most sacred sites for Black churchgoers, who are indeed often heavily Democratic voters -- in the middle of a remembrance service for victims of white supremacist terrorism, after the Black pastor has asked you not to protest inside the church out of respect for the Black community coming together to relive its trauma -- just so you can heckle Biden and feel good about yourself, then Jesus Christ. You don't care about restorative justice for people of color, or literally any justice at all, much less "stopping genocide." You just want to use them as props for your Chomsky cosplay revolutionary fantasies and your sense of self-righteous superiority over literally everyone else, regardless of the real-world consequences. So I have no hesitation whatsoever in telling those people to get fucked. Often and repeatedly.

[centralkvetchmonolith]

The following post is in its entirety a transcription of the images from the post linked to by these words, which images are screenshots of a twitter monologue.

@gravislizard retweets @Avik (a verified account for someone named Avik Roy) saying "I'm very open to thoughtful critiques of the Senate bill from the left. "MILLIONS WILL DIE" is not it."

They react to it with the following 38(?) tweets, which have been formatted into paragraphs for, hopefully, ease of reading: over the last century our shitty politicians fucked up politics so much that people forgot that decisions can have serious consequences. the american people got completely inured to the idea that politics is about tariff disputes and inconveniences. (white, straight, etc.) americans came to believe they have no real problems, that society is a solved problem if only politics would stop. politics!!! BIG eyeroll for THAT shit, folks. a waste of time, ugh! we have to listen to these BUREAUCRATS just talk and talk and talk

meanwhile, we didn't have any civil wars. and we continued to not have any civil wars.

americans don't actually think that mass death is real. this is a fact. they have abstracted life itself. they have abstracted disaster, in fact. because, by and large, we don't die in floods. our children aren't killed by epidemics. the idea that people can die on a large scale is not real to most people. so any form of panic is 'hysteria'.

the most relevant onion article in existence portrayed it thusly:

[screenshot of the Counterpoint half of a Point/Counterpoint article from The Onion, where fictional white man in a suit Bob Sheffer says "No it won't. It just won't. None of that will happen. You're getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine, okay? You're really overreacting. 'This war will not put an end to anti-Americanism; it will fan the flames even higher'? It won't. 'It will harden the resolve of Arab states to drive out all Western (i.e. U.S.) influence'? Not really."]

The problem with the healthcare shit is in fact that millions will die. They were slated to, and then we fixed it. We took a ton of peoples heads off the chopping block and now the GOP is trying to put them back on. There is no nuanced argument and /that is a huge fucking problem/ for us. The problems that we are facing as a society /do not seem realistic/ to the right. They think these things can't happen.

[Note: the following three lines are sarcastic imitations of conservative reactions] Millions dead of preventable disease? Oh come on. Are you even listening to yourself? Look nobody's going to kill you for going into the women's bathroom if you have facial hair. That just doesn't happen. Are you kidding me? We're going to heat up the *entire planet* and cook ourselves? What is this, a comic book?

I...maybe I'm being naive here but I feel like these arguments would have been MUCH easier back when people died en masse constantly. "You remember when the entire city of East York died? 4,300 people all killed by a plague? they say this will be ten times this bad" (no i do not think this is a realistic number for any single mass tragedy but anyway)

Anyway the point is what we're up against is a lot of people who have never faced adversity worse than double billing by the power company. There are a ton of people in this nation who *literally* have never suffered any worse than "I had to argue with a clerk". how do you convince that person "no, no, you don't get it, there are people being shot right now. RIGHT now". how do you convince them that random acts of violence are real? that people are born with horrible illnesses and have *no* solutions?

The entirety of reality has been abstracted in their eyes, reduced to a lot of squabbling and he said she said and who wins or loses. But life ALWAYS goes on. Politics just means the gas prices might go up and your tax return might be smaller.

Politics never means watching your sister die in a hospital bed while the drugs that will save her are locked up in a cabinet 10ft away. Politics never means a person watching their lover bleed out on the pavement while the cops huddle and get their stories straight Politics never means entire cities being swallowed by the ocean.

It took us less than a century to forget, culturally, that bad things are real and that we have to work to prevent them. That's WHY Americans are so quick to blame black people for their own deaths, addicts for their suffering, queer people for persecution. Because they ALWAYS see it as "everything's fine for me and everyone I know, i've never seen any of this. YOU must be doing SOMETHING"

It's not where these prejudices started but it's why they're so easy to keep alive. Keep all this in mind before you tell somebody "but if we don't fix this then people will DIE." they literally don't believe that's possible. death isn't real to americans. Death is something that happens to other people, or happens when you're old.

I don't have a solution. I'm sorry. But you should at least understand the scope of the problem, why we keep failing to sway people. This applies to so many problems - the "i don't see it so it can't be THAT common" phenomenon. I've still never seen a catcall but every woman I've talked to swears to me they're regular occurances. It was so hard to accept this. A lot of gay people who live in gay-friendly cities don't think homophobic violence is real.

It's just so easy to become convinced that this shit only happens in movies and to other people in other places

[centralkvetchmonolith]

In other news, Bloomberg News is the worst. The two experiences I've had are 1) old white dudes weeping about how minimum wage increases are going to happen and how that's going to hurt stock, and 2) pre-law frat bros crying about how anti-rape education made them lose their boner in what seemed like totally consensual situations

[centralkvetchmonolith]

Is this real life

[Image description: a truck with a mural of a bald eagle, a 13-colonies American flag, and the words "vote for FREEDOM or government". The mural is on the back flap of the truck bed.]

[centralkvetchmonolith]

More news from America: the recent flag shortage caused by an uprising of zombie Ronald Reagans has led to the near-extinction of American flags, as helpfully demonstrated by this topical tire cover

[centralkvetchmonolith]

For anyone wondering why a Bundy is in the news recently, some douchebag in Nevada claims the federal government of the United States does not exist and has threatened said government with about a hundred other douchebags with guns

[centralkvetchmonolith]

I was listening to a speech on the radio today that I realized, with growing horror, was George W Bush...

He was actually saying some pretty agreeable stuff about education and racism but when it actually came to policy it was like

George George bb The way to close achievement gaps is to literally throw money at schools and require that they use it to support minority students I can't tell if your "soft bigotry of low expectations" shit is just unintentionally doing the opposite of what you want, or if you intentionally harmed a decade of public education by couching the destruction in language that's palatable to liberals George George no

[centralkvetchmonolith]

yamelcakes replied to your photo “Mmm I love the smell of Tea Party in the city”

ewwwwwwww

kellyinacan replied to your photo “Mmm I love the smell of Tea Party in the city”

Where'd you find that gem? I wanna go throw eggs at it.

Northwest corner of Hennepin and Franklin! I salute your intentions, friend.

anoteinpink replied to your photo “Mmm I love the smell of Tea Party in the city”

i really enjoy the i-94W "obamacare: THE ODDS ARE NEVER IN YOUR FAVOR" or something. pop culture references make you hip, right??????

#Teens

[centralkvetchmonolith]

Mmm I love the smell of Tea Party in the city

[centralkvetchmonolith]

New emails suggest a senior aide to Christie—a 2016 presidential contender—ordered a nasty traffic jam in Fort Lee as political payback.

Heads up that Gov Christie (R-NJ)'s team is a bunch of petty scumbags who strand kids on buses because their parents are "Buono voters".

[centralkvetchmonolith]

Man laughing alone with money - billionaire, sportsball owner, and alleged inside trader Mark Cuban blows several million dollars in legal fees to tell the Securities and Exchange Commission to fuck off.

Image source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/10/16/National-Economy/Images/114994282.jpg

[centralkvetchmonolith]

galacsin asks: Hello, I just wanted to ask about this shut down thing you Americans are going through right now. What is it? How can a government shut down? I am just asking because for my foreign eyes it seems incomprehensible and scary. What is happening with you and why, guys! : (.

Hey Bernadett! Nonessential government functions like NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency are shutting down, because they can’t pay workers. The postal service, active-duty military, certain essential functions of nonessential agencies, all three branches of government…all of that stays open.

The shutdown only affects federal agencies. Institutions funded at the state level are largely unaffected.

While this isn’t the end of the world, many people, including several of my followers, are affected. Anyone who had a nonessential job with the federal government is now technically unemployed. One follower’s husband was about to get a job, but now can’t be hired. One follower’s dad was just now “formally dismissed” from the Pentagon, which coordinates American military operations. Unemployment benefits and welfare are slashed. Overall, 800000 people (about 0.3% of the US population) is now not getting paid for the jobs they had last night.

This is perfect for Republicans! With the exception of the Postal Service staying open, this is exactly what they wanted to happen to federal government. They will probably keep dithering about what provisions they want in order to raise the debt ceiling (the amount of debt the United States may incur - this is why we shut down, because our debts are greater than that ceiling) for another couple weeks, until our credit rating is irreparably damaged, tens of thousands more people are homeless, and the momentum that a lot of progressive federal programs had is taken out. Then, either they’ll finally give up and probably lose 2 million potential Republican voters in the next election, or Obama will do what he always does and capitulate in search of “middle ground”, strongly hinting that his fellow Democrats should sign the ridiculous extortion.

[centralkvetchmonolith]

House Majority Whip: System unavailable for the American public...why am I not surprised?

Sean: ...because you orchestrated that?