#strawman nominations

[critical-skeptic]

Distract. Divide. Desensitize.

For those just finding out about the destruction of the Georgia Guidestones in 2022: this is exactly how they keep you blind. The monument—designed to endure and provoke thought about humanity’s future—was quietly erased, just like countless other significant events that vanish beneath layers of noise. Why? Because you're meant to miss the real moves while they orchestrate chaos to keep you fixated on distractions.

Take the recent CEO assassination—a so-called act of “vigilantism” being spun to desensitize the public to oligarchs calling anyone who isn’t with them an enemy. Or Trump’s absurd strawman nomination of Matt Gaetz for AG, a spectacle that was never serious but designed to feed the outrage machine. These aren’t random—they’re calculated distractions, conditioning the masses to accept heightened division, alarmist rhetoric, and creeping authoritarian control.

The destruction of the Guidestones wasn’t just about wiping out a controversial monument; it’s part of the playbook. They erase history while feeding the public "heroes" and manufactured conflicts to keep you too distracted to notice the chessboard being reconfigured. So while everyone’s eyes are glued to the spectacle, the powerful move in silence, building the structures they’ll use to lock you out of the game entirely.

Wake up. If you’re only now learning about the Guidestones, ask yourself what you missed today while being fed your latest dose of chaos. This is how they operate: distraction, division, and silence over what truly matters. By the time the dust settles, it’ll be too late to stop what’s been quietly built around you.

[charlesoberonn]

I think The Big Bang Theory is both overrated and underrated.

It's definitely overrated by general audiences, not worthy of 10 Emmys and 55 nominations.

But its critics I think are often unfair towards it, misrepresenting the show to criticize a strawman version of it rather than the real thing.

For example, the whole "if you remove the laugh track from it, the show has a lot of awkward pauses".

The show is acted and edited around the laugh track so obviously if you remove the sound and don't replace it with anything you're gonna end up with awkward silence. You can criticize the decision to make the show that way without literally editing the show into something it's not.

Another thing I see often is people taking jokes out of context to make them seem like they're just references.

The show would usually incorporate the pop culture references into something about the characters in one scene, and in a later scene would make another reference to the same pop culture property to comment on what happened previously. If you only watch the second scene in isolation it would seem like the joke is just a reference, but that's because you're watching a punchline without a setup.

There's plenty to criticize in The Big Bang Theory as well as subjective reasons to dislike it. But it bugs me when people are dishonest or unfair just to hate on it.

[underestimated-heroine]

One of the few things that actually seems to shake pro-Trump folks I've talked to is bringing up how, back before he was nominated, he mocked McCain for having been a POW.

I thought the reason this reached them was because of the veteran angle, but give that two layers of thought and you realize it doesn't make sense; bring up the revelations of him calling soldiers and veterans "losers" and "suckers" throughout his presidency and they shrug it off or declare he's the one "who actually supports the military" or "Biden's the one who disrespects the military." (They always try to bring up Biden, and argue against a rabidly pro-Biden strawman, which is honestly part of the point I'm making).

It's that particular reference which shakes them, and I think I've twigged part of the reason why:

When I bring it up, they don't question that he said it or defend his actual actions. What they argue with me about is the timeline. Many of them point-blank refuse to believe he said it before he was nominated for the 2016 election.

We could argue that they don't want to admit to nominating someone whose actions went against their values, but by now I think that trying to convince yourself they give a shit about their own hypocrisy or Trump's is an exercise in self-delusion.

No, what they don't like is being confronted with that question--implicit or explicit--of what the hell was going through their heads when they nominated him. Revisiting that version of themselves who wasn't that familiar with Trump, who was maybe ankle deep in the bullshit instead of drowning in it, or was even critical of him, is jarring especially when they're looking one of "the Libs" in the eye.

That they flinch when reminded of how and when they started to support him, to me, seems incredibly telling.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I understand that it is reductive to think of geopolitics in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys," but it honestly feels like the good guys are losing everywhere on Earth. There doesn't seem to be a single country where common sense and compassion are baked into the fabric of their society deeply enough to prevent the rise of the worst human beings you could possibly imagine. Every single time I read about a supposedly progressive country, it turns out they're run by fucking sociopaths who consistently lose elections to Nazis. Are there any places that are not backsliding right now? Anywhere at all? If a country sounds good on paper, there's always some horrible catch! Every month I hear news like "this country has the best healthcare on Earth, but the ruling Social Labour Worker's Party (center to center-left) just passed bipartisan legislation with support from the National Purity Alliance (far-right) to allow secret police to abduct and sterilize anyone they suspect to be disabled."

The nominally left-wing party is led by some incompetent right-of-center choad who is razor-narrowly elected against the worst caricature of a cartoon strawman supervillain you could possibly imagine, and the choad's party spends the entire term spitting in the face of every single person who voted for them by passing horrendous legislation with single-digit approval ratings, only to be swept out of office by the supervillain and their handpicked toadies. You could set your fucking watch to it, it's so regular.

[viking369]

Goodbye salvrun. They and I were having a debate on Original Intent (OI) and Strict Construction (SC). Then the following happened. I let this rattle around in my noggin for over a day, and then I decided to take steps. 1) Salvrun wrote, "Constitutional Originalism/Strict Constitutionalism is neutral on/irrelevant to adding or changing the constitution." I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Both OI and SC were created by lawyers and jurists for the rentier class with the express intent of blocking the use of federal power for the benefit of common citizens, and they have been used almost uniformly for that purpose. To characterize them as "neutral" in any way is either centrist, both-sidesing toolism or rentier class trolling. I ran out of time for both in college, and that was a very long time ago. 2) Salvrun then wrote, "There are provisions for revision in it, after all." Yes, there is an amendment procedure in the Constitution. It was created for emergency situations, and it is next door to impossible. 13, 14, and 15 almost didn't pass, and that was immediately after putting down an insurrection that necessitated them. Then it took another 70 years just to give women the vote. And they still don't have full constitutional rights because the ERA failed (Courtesy religio-fascists like Phyllis Schlafly. And since you're all too young to remember, I'll note she was one of the Reich Wingers who secured the nomination for Goldwater in 1964.), and the only reason they have the rights they have is because the Warren Court decided 14th Amendment due process should count for more than a pinch of pig shit. 3) THEN salvrun wrote, "What it is against is revision of the document outside the process of those provisions. You can’t just one day say that a line in the constitution means or covers something it was never considered to before, let alone by the drafters of the given section." That is Strawman City. NO ONE is saying you can simply flip things over like that. Oh wait, that IS what Grand Inquisitor Alito did in Dobbs and what Don Scalia did in Heller, which just shows OI/SC proponents don't really give a flying, foaming fuck what the Constitution says or what the Founders intended. And salvrun ignores this. 4) Salvrun closed with, "The thing in itself, the idea of the document, is the intent of the law. The written lines themselves is the wood in this metaphor." Oh sweet zombie Jesus on a pogo stick. First, as noted above, OI/SC proponents care not a whit about either the text or the intent. Don Scalia's opinion in Heller is a classic, reading the introductory clause out of the Second Amendment (Think I'm exaggerating? Until the NRA started its gun campaign in the early 70s, no one, and I do mean NO ONE, thought local jurisdictions couldn't regulate open and concealed carry. Want some evidence? Do you know what the proximate cause of the Gunfight at the OK Corral (which wasn't at the OK Corral, but let's put that aside for the moment) was? Tombstone had an ordinance requiring all firearms be checked at the marshal's office. The Cowboys had not done so (quelle surprise), and the Earps and Doc went down to enforce the ordinance. In the roughly three million and twelve pages of comments on that event, no one has alleged the Cowboys' Second Amendment rights were being violated. Because we FUCKING KNEW BETTER!).

Second, and this is important, so pay attention, the flexibility of the Constitution was a big selling point from the start. Let's start with the Federalist Papers (Because everyone starts with the Federalist Papers, although that is just a crock of shit. The Federalist Papers were advocacy, one half of a newspaper op-ed debate. But we never look at the other side. Nor do we ever look at the debates in the state legislatures that actually turned the Constitution into law through ratification. But then OI/SC advocates are not really interested in either OI or SC. Hmm, are you keeping up, salvrun?). Even though Hamilton and Madison ended up despising each other with extreme prejudice, they agreed that one of the big selling points for the Constitution was it could be interpreted flexibly. Not so flexibly as the UK Constitution (Since we had sovereign states, we couldn't have Congress simply dictating what the Constitution was.), but flexible enough that we could make things work. That's why there is judicial review. Hells, without it wouldn't have (have had) Roe. We wouldn't have Griswold. We wouldn't have Loving. We wouldn't have Heart of Atlanta. We wouldn't have Brown. Hells, we wouldn't have judicial review.

So all I can say to salvrun is, "Guess what, you're part of the problem," and

[caffeineandsociety]

There is no such thing as a person who is truly "TME".

Yes, people who are not visibly, factually MTF trans women will not experience ALL facets of transmisogyny...but neither will any specific individual trans woman. Yes, because they are the primary, nominal target, trans women will be hit HARDER by transmisogyny than people who are not trans women...on average-

But consider a butch cis woman in sports in a conservative region with gender challenge rules, vs. a well-passing conventionally attractive trans woman office worker in the queerest neighborhood of San Francisco. The former may very well experience more transmisogynistic abuse than the latter! It doesn't mean the latter is unaffected by transmisogyny; it doesn't even mean that, nominally, she's less of a primary target - she IS the person being strawmanned to make the rules used against the athlete, after all - but she isn't the one being hit by the fallout directly in the moment the former is sexually assaulted with no recourse to avoid getting her team fined, now is she?

Consider the differences between the experiences of a middle class, skinny, 6'2" Black trans woman, and a poor, midsized, muscular, 5'6" white trans woman. Both are gonna have an experience with transmisogyny, but they're going to look EXTREMELY different. Both will have things leveraged against them that the other doesn't!

There are experiences of transmisogyny that you won't have if you don't have "male" primary or secondary sex characteristics...but intersex cis women and feminine-leaning people, as well as transmasc drag queens who have had enough done to typically be taken for AMAB, very much exist. There are experiences of transmisogyny that you won't have as a non-op trans woman - society's simultaneous obsession with, and hatred of, vaginas...isn't going to hit you nearly as hard if you don't want to get a vagina. The obsession will hit, in its own unique way, but the hatred will look very, very different to that experienced by someone who wants or obtains one. It may be the reason you decided against it, which is a different experience to if you just truly like having a penis, which is a different experience than having your vagina scrutinized and called a fake, just a fuckhole, which is a different but frequently overlapping experience to having surgical complications ignored until they nearly kill you because whatever, ALL vaginas are nasty stinking festering wounds anyway, right? There isn't a SINGLE experience of transmisogyny that isn't racialized - even aspects where the broad strokes are the same will have different details depending on race, ethnicity, nationality, location, and how all those factors intersect.

Meanwhile, there are people who are not trans women who will be scrutinized for looking too much like men to present as femininely as they do - mostly but not exclusively BIPOC. There are cis women being sexually assaulted to Prove They're Really Women. There are intersex babies being forcibly made into "girls", and more fortunate intersex adults undergoing consensual vaginoplasty, who will often face the very same medical neglect and social judgment as trans women undergoing the same procedure (or, frequently, their own flavor thereof, for that matter (realize again that it's easier to have it done on a baby who cannot consent than on yourself as an adult!)). There are femme trans men and nonbinary transmascs and people on the butch-transmasc cusp and more, years into transition and passing for AMAB, as well as AMAB nonbinary people all over the not-a-woman spectrum and cis femboys and drag queens, being asked to make the same choice between authenticity and safety from other people's potentially violent judgment that many non-passing transfems are. There are intersex cis women, butch cis women, BIPOC cis women, even just tall cis women with broad shoulders, being ejected from bathrooms for looking too much like men, getting beaten for being too Manly to REALLY be women, having their anatomy speculated on by strangers. There are cis people of both recognized binary genders being threatened to coerce them to continue to perpetuate the worst of patriarchy, or be "accused" of being a closeted trans woman with all the hate that entails - "what, you're not going to bully the weird tomboy with us? You don't recoil in terror when your 5-year old daughter wants to paint your nails? Ooooh, I bet you like those things...because you're secretly Like That, aren't you!?" All of this, too, is transmisogyny!

You can't disentangle transmisogyny from "regular" misogyny, from patriarchy, from binarism, from white supremacy. These are systems of control that impact EVERYONE. They are authoritarian - they perpetuate themselves by force and by threat. Some people are impacted harder than others, but NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY, is truly exempt.

[dhaaruni]

i know you’re on twitter, so what’s the origin of this “fucking twitter libs and their hand wringing about protests outside of the houses of the conservative supreme court justices” discourse that i’m seeing which feels like a strawman situation?

It is lol.

Leftists are claiming that liberals are against people protesting against conservative Supreme Court justice’s houses when the reality is that Brett Kavanaugh’s own NEIGHBORS in his wealthy DC neighborhood, who are largely liberals and not leftists who want to eat the rich, organized the protest. Liberals, particularly liberal women of all ages (aka the Karens), are furious at this ruling and leftists legit want to play purity politics over an issue they yelled at Hillary Clinton for “fearmongering” over when she told them Trump would nominate justices to overturn Roe. They can’t pretend to care about the Supreme Court now when they openly claimed Hillary was bullying them over it like all the articles are still up lol.

The people who are doing the most pearl-clutching about respectability and not bullying conservatives are neocon never-Trumpers like Bill Kristol or flat out Republicans. Everybody else, even if they point out that protesting in front of the justices’ homes may not help the cause since it could easily alienate squishy moderates who love their norms, is like, “They deserve it for stripping bodily autonomy away from half the American population.”

That being said, the Senate passing a bill to protect the families of justices by unanimous consent isn’t a bad thing given that Ketanji Brown Jackson for one would benefit from it even if the optics are bad at this time. I don’t trust loony conservatives to not go for her or any of the other liberal justices!! Also, my DC taxes would go up if the DC police were called to protect justices and their families so it's a win-win for me anyways.

[centrally-unplanned]

Okay here I do think you are strawmanning the case, though fair enough if you have seen only frivolous takes on it:

1: Poll after poll after poll unanimously shows Biden's age is a big concern of voters. They do not want an 81 year old being president, they double+ do not want an 86 year old being president, and they do not want that because they are correct, it sucks! And that is a problem in particular because Biden was already unpopular, more unpopular than other democrats: He is underperforming democratic congressional candidates in every single swing state. At this point the concern is that not only is Biden going to lose the presidential election, but that, because voters - correctly - treat the election as a unitary referendum, he may drag down these candidates as well.

The problem being solved is that Biden is a bad candidate, who additionally is too old to fix that problem via aggressive campaigning. The albatrosses around his neck - the stink of inflation and the fact that he is mentally & physically declining old man - are not amenable to fixes. I think most all democrats are on this page.

Now to be clear, what I am not saying is that replacing him is some slam dunk come on you morons thing. Obviously they don't have a super popular alt option and it is late in the game, voters are fickle and maybe, even though they do care about age, they don't actually care enough and won't swing their vote over fixing it. That is totally fine to believe.

But you can't just default to the status quo on this, the uncertainty swings both ways. The case for replacing him is very, extremely clear. Is it strong enough to fight the case against it is I agree not so clear, but it is also never going to be. There is not "more information needed" or anything, this is what life is.

2: is essentially covered in 1, I don't see this take really or it is just a way of saying "we need to win the election", someone said it I am sure but it isn't what Senator Murrary or Rep Quigley are saying.

3: I think the default path is very clear and most agree on it. Biden should willingly step down and nominate a successor, same way it works the other dozens of times this has happened. Who is its own thing, but this is the obvious path - all this "contested quick primary" stuff is blogger fodder. The problem is Biden isn't going to do that. So sure, right now they don't have a path, but that is because they are hoping to convince Biden to do the obvious path and that has failed. That is just how things go, you try X and then it fails so you think about Y or whatever.

Haven't stepped much into the "it would be too logistically hard to drop Biden" debate because, yeah, as above - it is silly, once you *need* to do something you can do it. I agree the democratic party may not be able to do the same, but that is not because of logistics; it is instead due to a lack of unity & strategic leadership. You have zoom calls, you can make a decision if you are actually cared to in a few days.

[sebastianshaw]

I know everyone here is SICK of my Duggan hate but-- It strikes me, he really just CAN’T write complex characters? I’ve noted many times over how he’s dedicatedly stripped Shaw of anything likeable or human not only the present, but actively retconned events to make him a 2D sack of evil (and frankly, inept evil) in the past as well. But he also goes out of his way to do the reverse for Emma, retconning that she’s ACTUALLY been a good person All Along even when she was at her most evil (so. . . what about her neverending journey to be a better person then, if she always was?) and actually Always Helped Other Women (which is like. . .pretty laughable to anyone who has read her past issues) to fit his ‘feminist’ theme. And there’s also, as many others have noted, how the secondary cast is just. .  .bereft of character, or likewise one-not. Bobby, Pyro, Shinobi, and Bishop can go for ISSUES without speaking, and when they do, it’s like. . .one line. They show the bare minimum of personality most of the time, and while sometimes Duggan can hit a home run (Shinobi’s remark about how he and his dad have done well in not trying to kill each other so far) a lot of it is just. . . why are they there? No, really. They don’t really do anything, and the “plots” he gives them are typically underwhelming and resolved in one issue.  Pyro, as @sammysdewysensitiveeyes has noted, hasn’t been demonized into a total strawman like Shaw, but he’s also really not at all recognizable as Pyro either. His character is entirely a one-note buffoon who is there for stupid comic relief, and there’s zero discussion about his past prior to coming back---his time with the Brotherhood, his battle with the Legacy Virus, the changes he underwent as a person when he was at death’s door, or even the stuff before that as a wartime journalist in Southeast Asia. None of that is there, there’s just this chaotic frat boy joke that Duggan pretty much entirely made up; he only even acknowledges Pyro is a Gothic Romance novelist after 20 issues, and even then it’s to make him look like a joke some more. Like Shaw, he’s just got one dimension now. Duggan seems to WANT to talk about abuse, specifically at the hands of men, which both Christian and Shinobi have experienced, as both were abused by their fathers. But he never, ever brings that up. Instead, he retroactively invents that Shaw abused Lourdes, and tacks on an abusive backstory to a female villain. I don’t think he thinks men can be abused? Or just. . .doesn’t care. His male characters are the ones who suffer most from flatness and having to be inept, evil, or both while the Cool Women Do Things, and I guess he, like lots of men, thinks that’s what Feminism (TM) is, just he’s not whining about it and is performing it instead. Speaking of that female villain, Wilhemina is a nasty evil sadistic little girl who not only happily kills/hurts people, she also kills and tortures animals, especially kittens. And you know what? I bet in the hands of a skilled writer, she very much COULD be made sympathetic and understandable. But what Duggan does is he just takes her and literally in ONE SCENE is like “oh she understands it was wrong now and is SUPER SORRY see she’s CRYING and also she did it because she was SEXUALLY ABUSED” and bam, we’re supposed to feel for her. There’s no buildup, no exploration, just a sudden explanation and remorse and that’s. . . .it?  Compare MANON AND MAXIME whom I’ve written about before. They’re two children who were traumatized, abused, exploited, and made to hurt others by their abuser, which they seemed to enjoy doing. Now that they’re free and living on Krakoa, they do still exhibit unacceptable behavior at times, sometimes out of vengeance, sometimes in self-defense gone too far, and sometimes out of a desire to help and please others but lacking the tools to understand boundaries and appropriateness and respect for other’s autonomy. They’re a very unsettling blend of being sweet, childlike children, too eager to please adults, and little gremlins who seem to take joy in messing with people’s minds---or who just don’t understand when it’s wrong even when they mean well. Unsettling, and realistic. Psychic powers aside, I find the twins to be much closer to real-world victims of abuse, especially children, in that they’re NOT “good victims” or “bad victims”. They’re not the “abuse makes you evil” trope, but they still have fucked-up behavior so they’re not the “little abused angel who just sobs beautifully but whose symptoms are all sympathetic uwu” either, which is just as rare and as damaging a stereotype in its own way because it holds that up as how survivors of abuse “should” be. And, as said, that’s rarely it. Most survivors come out of abuse with behaviors that AREN’T sympathetic but DID help them survive, and they ARE NOT BAD PEOPLE FOR IT. This shit is complicated. Then there’s Wilhemina, who starts out as just a monster (even though, realistically, if a child is hurting animals, they probably DO need help) and then the moment her tragic backstory is revealed, she also recognizes and regrets all her wrongdoings. She jumps from one extreme to the other in the space of a few panels, but remains totally one-dimensional either way. And of course, Lourdes. We didn’t see to much of her personality BEFORE Duggan got ahold of her, but in her two issues pre-retcon, she showed a surprising amount of depth and moral ambiguity. She was a member of the Hellfire Club and high enough in its ranks to try to prevent Shaw from being nominated as Black Bishop, claiming she’d seen how it changed people. She clearly had seen some shit and despises it, yet she remained within it. She also seemed content with the idea of Shaw and Buckman experimenting on mutants as guinea pigs, her concern was more doing it on the X-Men specifically and that Buckman would betray Shaw. And she had far more agency when she chose to give her life to save Shaw’s, than Duggan’s version that needed Emma to tell her what to do. Duggan’s Lourdes is a brainless doll who talks like a little girl and needs Emma to handle everything for her, despite it largely not making sense that she would, given her own resources. She’s more morally pure, perhaps, but also one-dimensional. Only room for ONE Woman With Agency here, honey! TL;DR Duggan really can’t write characters that are more than one or two notes, and it shows. 

[bitegore]

Also, like, for the record every time i say "liberals" i mean a very particular strawman. If you're a liberal but I've allowed you on my blog you're probably not one of the empty-words "love is love! btw i think unemployment benefits need to be cut" tackle-problems-at-their-surface-and-make-no-meaningful-change, "the party i like has said something is now their platform so i'm going to pretend that's what i've always wanted" types.

IRL I run (or at least ran, before 2020) into quite a lot of people who genuinely have no backbone, no ideals, and no hopes for the future. They clearly do not think about politics terribly hard, and let their emotions and nothing but their emotions guide them. The same kind of people who are nominally anti-racism and anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia but oppose almost every policy put in place to materially combat the results of those biases (healthcare, wage, housing, and education gaps, largely) in place of empty pushes and hollow words to the same tune of "stop bullying" campaigns in the early 2000s. The kind of people who think that "love won" with marriage equality and now homophobia is dead, who think that the only kind of transphobia that exists is violent hate crimes, and who don't see racism because they're "colorblind" or who only see racism when black folks hold their hand and walk them through it every single time. Generally they're part and parcel to every kind of -ism on the planet, but especially ableism; and even more generally, they consider themselves advocates for people of color and The Gay Community while refusing to ever acknowledge that they have perpetuated racism and homophobia while attempting to be this advocate for poc and the lgbtq community. (Usually they're like "yeah i was homophobic but i got better!" when it's pointed out that they're unintentionally making shit comments in the present).

At the end of the day, the only defining factor about these particular self-proclaimed liberals is that they stump for the Democratic party and will always support anything it's doing, including drone strikes and foreign meddling, even when it comes into conflict with what they claim to believe. Materially they do nothing but support tax cuts and go "yasss!!! real change!" when a senator notices that black people exist.

This is my strawman. Like I said, if you consider yourself to be a liberal, but you're here, I probably am not talking about you. If this all feels like it's hitting kind of close to home, though... uh...

well, I want to say "stop" but really the correct answer is probably "try harder" actually. Sit down and figure out your values. And then figure out which of your values have gotten tangled up in racism and sexism and homophobia and ableism and so on and so forth and decide if that is in line with your values. and then once you've sorted your shit out act in accordance with those values. and suddenly you will no longer be anything like my strawman.

cool? cool

[limonadecandy]

NGL yes the reality of climate change is dire but spreading misinformation and not using the right words to describe events is extremely harmful and discredits our cause as a whole.

like today I opened my work's Facebook page just to see a political page (with an anonymous author, who absolutely never posts about meteorological events) posting about a "heat dome" over France that would cause temperature to "locally" hit 37 degrees, beating every heat records for the month of May, and that "no one speaks about it" using strawman arguments of "muh people nowadays are shallow and only care about celebrities and sports and they are responsible of every shitty things that happens to us"

then you visit Météo France's homepage where they tell you it's an heat wave (different from a heat dome), that the highest temperature would be 34 degrees in Toulouse (the country's fifth biggest city that has the same climate as Atlanta, and we know that big cities are always 2-3 hotter than nearby rural places due to insular heat trapping), and that the records from the May 2011 heatwave won't be broken in most places. No one is talking about it because a new prime minister has been nominated last night, because there's a genocide going on in Ukraine, because the rise of life wages is getting higher and higher everyday, because we're still trying to overcome the trauma of the COVID crisis that killed our elders and loved ones the past two years. People aren't shallow, they are simply done with these preachers of the apocalypse and the media telling them 24/7 that everything is fucked and we are all gonna die in terrible suffering. And no amount of twisted facts, elitism, moral superiority, and guilt tripping can make up for that. We won't overcome climate change by alienating the masses.

[mamthew]

Why you should vote for Sanders in the Democratic Primary

I know this took me too long to write, and the Super Tuesday polls are closing soon, but to anyone who somehow hasn't voted yet, here's my...pitch, I guess, for Sanders over Warren, or Biden (or Bloomberg? God I hope I don't have anyone I interact with who's dumb enough to support Bloomberg). Or at least, here's my thoughts on where we are now and where we can go from here. The argument people tend to use when defending a vote for Biden is that the only issue that matters this year is that we must defeat Trump, and Biden - by being essentially a Republican - can do it by attracting moderate and Republican voters to his candidacy. Biden himself even floated the idea of choosing a Republican running mate for this very purpose.

Obviously, I agree that we have to stop Trump; he may be a mostly inept dumbass but he's still clearly and definitionally a fascist, and the policies that have managed to hold his attention long enough for him to pass are essentially just...unimaginable cruelty for the sake of inflicting unimaginable cruelty. We must, however, also stop Trumpism, the larger fascist movement that has grown out of Trump's rise. It's not enough to replace a Fascist figurehead with a Neoliberal figurehead, because there will still be the issue of millions of alienated people whose lives have been destroyed by the status quo and who have been distracted from the real cause of their situation by a man who will by then be painted as a martyr. The Democrats and Republicans have batted this voting bracket between parties over the decades, doing something small for them, then rolling it back, cyclically breeding cynicism and discontent. So here's something I've said so many times elsewhere that it might be a little divorced from meaning for folks who know me: Left-wing populism is the only way to beat Fascism.

Fascism is the use of aesthetics in politics to keep working people from getting too mad at those in power. These aesthetics (or illusions, or falsehoods, if you prefer) vary wildly from country to country and movement to movement, but they always ALWAYS include the framing of one or more minority groups and "the Left" as being enemies of the people. Obviously, "the Left" means different things in different places, but America's overton window has been pulled so far to the right that here it means Liberalism, a center-right ideology. Thanks to the wild success of Fascist propaganda in the '50s, it's considered the baseline that Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists are considered enemies of the people, which means America has always been this close to outright Fascism. Trump wasn't a bug, he was simply what we've been building towards kinda since the country's inception.

The reason, then, that left-wing Populism is the most effective way to stop Fascism is that it does not use aesthetics when identifying the issues hurting working people. There is no distraction from the machinations of those in power. You're not suffering because of "Liberals" or immigrants, or trans folks, you're suffering because for centuries backroom deals within corporations, within the government, and between corporations and the government have eroded away any semblance of human dignity for working-class people. You're a bargaining chip in a larger political game, but it's not your fault and it's also not the fault of the person next to you at whom Trump has been wildly gesticulating, who is also a bargaining chip in the same game.

Now, left-wing Populist movements don't often crop up in electoral politics, because of both the nature of electoral politics and the nature of the Left. These movements usually happen on the micro level, when communities work together to help each other, or groups of individuals try to lift up others. When they're larger, they're usually activist movements, or painted as terrorists, like with Occupy, Black Lives Matter, or the Black Panthers and Rainbow Coalition. Electoral left-wing Populist movements usually get kneecapped by corporate or government interests before they can do much (imagine if Eugene Debs wasn't in prison). But American culture has married politics to electoralism for so long that it's hard to get a large political movement going that isn't directly tied to an elected official or an electoral campaign. There are lots of left Populist movements right now that have been fighting the results of Trump's Fascism and the the results of the larger American Fascist experiment on grassroots levels, without involving themselves in electoralism in any way, but they haven't gained the same traction as Bernie Sanders, and they haven't stopped Trump, because those aren't their purposes.

Sanders' base is the most diverse, by far. It skews the youngest, and it polls best in working-class demographics. In 2016, Sanders won literally every single district in West Virginia. He won all but nine districts in Michigan. He absolutely cleans up with Hispanic voters - one of the minority groups that Trumpism frames as enemies of the people. Obviously, y'all know I care about Appalachia the most, and he speaks to Appalachia, both literally and figuratively. Counties that were painted as "Trump Country" in dishonest thinkpieces by journalists putting down six figures had more people vote for Sanders in the primary than voted at all in the general, and it's because what he said about the establishment rang true in a way that Trump's words didn't. If you want to attract a voter base who usually doesn't vote, you have to tell them the truth or spin them a convincing enough lie, and Clinton's lies, in the end, weren't as convincing as Trump's, just as Trump’s aren’t as convincing as the truth.

If the Democratic party is going to survive (and I'm not sure it even deserves to, at this point), it needs to stop engaging in aesthetics to protect those at the top, flirting with fascist strategies. We need to stop letting party elites hem and haw about what "moderates" might or might not want while selling our rights to the highest bidder and letting folks die because insulin cost them more than a month's income. I put "moderate" in quotes, because the "moderate voter" is mostly an invention; we all have things we care about and things we care less about, and very few people are actually that enlightened centrist strawman who believes there's a good midpoint between helping people and hurting them, corporations and working folks, concentration camps and no camps, etc.

Everything Joe Biden says about actually improving material conditions falls apart when you look at his record, because he's consistently voted for cutting social programs to benefit elites, he supported segregation, hell, he was on tape last year saying he has no empathy for young people struggling financially. His facade breaks easily, and he no longer has the mental acuity to even formulate a convincing enough lie to convince most Liberals, let alone nonvoters or former Trump voters. Sanders tells the truth about the reasons for living conditions in America, has the record to back up his convictions, and has the grassroots support to further back him up at the grassroots level, because (as much as every publication tries to make it a scare word) that's how Populism works.

If Sanders gets the nomination, it'll still be a hard fight against Trump. I'm not 100% believing those maps placing him at 474 electoral votes, especially because Trump's aesthetics have the backing of every corporate interest and centuries of disenfranchisement behind them. But Biden's fight just won't win, and if somehow we end up in the 1% of timelines where he somehow convinced enough people to show up at the ballot box for him, we still would have no defense against Trumpism. A burgeoning Fascist movement who still believe the same lies distracting them from the ruling classes and now with a martyr as a political figurehead will have no path to recuperation because primary voters believed it when the news said the word "socialism" was too scary.

Anyway, that's my piece, and it's where my mind has been for...honestly a few years, now. I'll see you on the other side of Super Tuesday.

[nekodracones]

Examining the ‘Truth’ Pt. 1

Cat takes a look at the front page of a self-professed truth bringing website.  Part 1 because it’s long and my attention span is short.

So you say!

Sure, hard evidence always goes a long way to convincing people of your cause.  Let’s not forget that how you present them also matters, though.

Let’s find out!

Fair enough.  What’s the point being made here, though?  Diamond and upper tier sapphire teams are actually able to help each other in actionable ways; ideally, this would be how alliances in War Dragons should work, no?

Right, the ultimatum bits were a bit dramatic.  Personally, I can’t recall a moment when people actually summoned up enough energy to care about my platinum/sapphire team at any given moment in time to give us ultimatums.  Maybe other people can share their experiences, though!  Absolutes are very easily disproven. :P

Favouritism: It’s definitely a thing.  There can be no debating this.  Did your team earn every single castle they own?  Can you say that interpersonal relationships play no part in the benefits that each team/player enjoys in Atlas, be it extra castles, or allies?   In such a social game as this one, it’s impossible to avoid favouritism; it’s easier to simply label it as an effect of the social aspect of the game.  Everyone playing this game enjoys a certain degree of favouritism.  It’s certainly not ideal, but PG will have to be the one to discourage people from using social factors to make decisions in the game, because in the absence of discouraging factors, people will always make decisions based on social factors.  There’s no benefit or particular enjoyment for most in giving a castle to someone you’ve never talked to in your life, as compared to a closer friend. For now, favour and be favoured!

Here, themovementisalie.com asserts that Dread doesn’t meddle in how smaller teams play the game.  Sure!  That sounds like a lot of work; delegation is a good thing to learn when you’re learning to manage a largeish corporation.

I certainly remember Dread instructing Dreadside teams to not take competitive EQ players who were looking for spots on Dread teams, back when EQ was ousted from Sine Nomine, though.

Also, isn’t the act of saying ‘Our enemies are your enemies’ an instruction, too? Micromanagement certainly isn’t feasible, but management still exists.

You’ll notice that the screenshot in question shows how an officer on D1 (at time of typing) team DigitalChaos sent a reasonably polite message to a ‘Cyn’ on a S2 team asking them to remove Dreadnought from passage as they were being attacked via passage. This actually seems like a pretty reasonable request- certainly one wouldn’t abide by a neighbour giving an enemy access to hit them, right?  Sure, an intimidation tactic was used by implying that there would be trouble if said S2 team didn’t remove Dread from passage, but aside from this...I actually don’t see anything wrong with this mail.  DC guy expressed a desire to stay peaceful in the area and made his request clear, it’s up to you to deny him and then reap the consequences of what  It’s like what they say about free speech: say whatever you want until it hurts someone else.  Play however you want until that hurts someone else, too, and then after that you’ll just reap the consequences of your choices.  Perhaps that aligns with how someone else wants you to play the game, but realise that that’s already a thing.

If your neighbour was giving access to a larger enemy that you had no time or interest in defending against, would you not ask them to remove them from passage?  If you’ve never had to do this, I’m glad for you, but for a lot of people it’s an everyday occurrence.  There’s nothing odd about messaging your neighbour to ask them to remove an enemy team from passage, that’s just how passage works right now, regardless of what league you happen to be in compared to your neighbour.  Instead of blaming your neighbour, blame PG! In the meantime, asking for passage removal isn’t dictating how you play the game.  That’s a stretch and a misrepresentation of the actual intent of the original post.  Atlas is a social game, and hence there will be social interaction.  If you’re going to frame every single time someone asks you to do something as an impingement on your personal Atlas freedom...well.   Tl;dr- D1 team is not controlling you.  You have choices and are blowing things out of proportion just because they’re a big bad D1 team.  Setting up a strawman scenario just reflects badly on your website.

- To Be Continued -

Part 2 here

[underestimated-heroine]

The story [by Isabel Fall] was a response to the transphobic meme of the same name, but whether it was a reclamation or further mockery was up for debate: the author was an unknown, and there was no definitive proof how she identified. The story was nominated for a Hugo award, but despite the critical acclaim it received, it was also dragged through the mud on Twitter by readers who assumed the worst intentions. [...] When she wrote the story, Isabel Fall was putting one foot out of the closet as a trans woman, not yet ready to be completely out in her life. Since the backlash, she has stopped using that name and withdrawn her stories on similar themes that had been in progress. She saw publishing this story as an “important test for myself, sort of a peer review of my own womanness. I think I tried to open a door and it was closed from the other side because I did not look the right shape to pass through it.”

It’s tempting to be dismissive and angry at these paranoid readings: “They’re looking for things to be angry about!” But that sentiment seems remarkably similar to right-wing complaints about leftist “cancel culture”: that queer and trans people, people of colour, disabled people are creating problems where there are none. It’s a strawman feminist stereotype. What’s missing, too, from this dismissal, is where this impulse is coming from. There is a very good reason that trans readers are approaching stories from a skeptical perspective, and that’s because historically, the vast majority of trans representation has been malicious. Trans or gender-nonconforming characters have been the villains or the butt of the joke, whether in centuries old plays or modern TV. [...] At the same time, this impulse becomes weaponized against other trans creators. It’s also limiting: paranoid reading is deletive. It can only take away. It can easily lead to restrictive standards that only allow a certain kind of art to be acceptable, one that checks a series of prescribed boxes and doesn’t include any messiness, grey areas, or uncomfortable complexities. An example Sedgwick uses is camp, which is can be a source of queer joy and creativity, but is misrecognized by paranoid reading. Reclamation, drag, and many other forms of queer expression can be misread or limited by a paranoid reading being applied.

To slip into cliche, it’s also worth reiterating that paranoia is a natural response to a hostile environment: It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. Ira explains that, “as a transsexual living under neoliberal homonationalism, I need my paranoid reading skills at hand when I encounter cops, doctors, and other types of imperial myrmidon.” There are many situations where a paranoid lens is more useful than a reparative one, especially when your immediate safety is at stake. Ira continues, “No, it is as Sedgwick said: we must keep all of our tools to hand, both the paranoid and the reparative.”

When you find yourself joining a Twitter pile-on against someone, consider extending a reparative lens, at least to try it. But also keep in mind that dismissing paranoid reading out of hand is also unproductive. We need a balance of approaches, and room for conversations to include both playing off of each other. Otherwise, we risk missing valid critique as well as chasing creators off the internet for exploring nuance.

idek it's so hard to pick "the best" excerpts from this one. the whole thing's good. you just have to read it.

have shared before but this is a damn good read. I'd go so far as to say everyone on this website could stand to read it.

[theculturedmarxist]

Flight attendants played a crucial role in forcing an end to the government shutdown. Now the survival of their unions is being quietly threatened by Trump appointees on the National Mediation Board (NMB), an independent agency that was established in 1934 to resolve labor-management disputes in the airline and railroad industries.

Since November 2017, the three-member panel that oversees the NMB has been controlled by Republicans, as the Senate confirmed both of Trump’s nominees, Gerald W. Fauth III and Kyle Fortson. Trump was also required to nominate one Democrat by law and he chose Linda Puchala, an Obama appointee who has served on the NMB since 2009.

The board is currently targeting the Railway Labor Act (RLA). That’s a federal law that was established in 1926 to govern labor disputes in the railroad industry and give workers the right to engage in collective bargaining. Although originally created specifically for railroad workers, it was extended to cover the airline industry in 1936. According to the RLA, any employee who wants to decertify their union must first get signatures from half of the workforce. After the signatures have been obtained, a “straw man” is established to run against the union. Workers then get to vote either for the union, for the straw man, or for no representation at all. The rule is designed to give workers the option to vote for new representation if they have an issue with the direction of the union, as opposed to getting rid of the union altogether.

In a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) issued on January 31, Fauth and Fortson made it clear that they’re seeking to create a “straightforward election process” and get rid of the strawman rule. Under the new criteria, workers would only be able to vote for the union, vote for no union or write in a vote. This would effectively make it much easier for a worker to decertify their union. Under the new rule, the workforce couldn’t be unionized again for two years, which is an increase to the current one-year ban that comes after decertification.

A Shameless Attack on a Strongly Unionized Sector

The NMB’s move fits into the Trump administration’s consistent pro-employer agenda, but the appointees’ January 31 offensive against the rail and air unions could easily come across as a form of retaliation, whether that was the conscious intention or not.

Flight attendant Sara Nelson — the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union — publicly called for a general strike on January 20 to end President Trump’s government shutdown. Less than a week later, Trump agreed to endorse a stopgap bill to temporarily open the government back up so that lawmakers could negotiate an appropriations bill to end the shutdown. Nelson’s declaration coincided with a number of airport workers calling in sick because they weren’t being paid. The labor movement had effectively forced the president to act.

Eleven days after Nelson’s momentous declaration, Trump appointees proposed a potential major blow for the airline and railroad industries, introducing a new rule that would make it easier for the union in these industries to be decertified.

Beyond the Trump administration’s view of the flight attendants’ union, there is also a more general reason why anti-labor forces are eager to target these industries: their unionization percentages are higher than other sectors. Eighty-two percent of Class 1 railroad workers belong to a union in the U.S., and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of overall railroad workers belong to a union. Not only is the majority of the airline industry unionized, their power has led to real victories for their employees: wages and benefits have increased by 46 percent since 2010.

“There is no legal authority for this NMB proposal to create a more ‘direct’ decertification process and no groundswell of support among airline employees for a new decertification procedure,” Sara Nelson told Truthout. “Airline employees understand the critical importance of having a contract. There is absolutely no interest expressed by workers to decertify and give up their union contract.”

Nelson also attributed the move to Wall Street pressure on airlines to cut costs and weaken union power in the industry. “The proposal is coming from ideologues who fantasize about weakening labor in the most unionized industry in America,” said Nelson. “This is an absurd waste of time and resources across the board.”

Right-to-Work for the Skies?

The proposed rule came just a couple of months after Trump’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) threw out a unionization vote by baggage handlers at a Portland airport, a vote which had been approved by Obama’s NLRB. Republicans on the current board ruled that the votes of contract workers at ABM Onsite Services-West were invalid because the company was connected to air transport and thus their unionization effort shouldn’t have been decided by the NLRB, but the NMB. This also means that baggage handlers and other airport workers fall under the jurisdiction of the RLA, which makes organizing employees a much trickier endeavor. Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which covers the majority of private sector companies, workers can organize smaller “micro units” while attempting to unionize. Under the RLA, bargaining takes place over a system-wide basis, as opposed to a facility by facility one, and every employee for a given job type gets to vote, even if they work in a different state.

Airport workers have been on the forefront of the Fight for $15 movement and groups like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have helped them win notable victories in recent years. Last fall, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey voted to raise the wages of airport employees to $19 an hour by 2023. Héctor Figueroa is the president of 32BJ SEIU, which launched the organizing campaign back in 2011.

“The 175,000 property service workers with 32BJ SEIU stand with all our brothers and sisters in labor against President Trump’s relentless attacks on working families,” Figueroa told Truthout in a statement. “Washington seems determined to chip away at good union jobs for regular people while rigging the system to benefit the wealthy few. Our elected leaders should be making it easier, not harder, for workers to join unions and win better benefits, as this would boost our economy and ultimately benefit all of us. We will not let Washington deter us from working to achieve a just and fair society.”

At the same time the NMB looks to make the decertification process in these industries easier, a right-wing Michigan-based think tank is pushing a lawsuit that would essentially make the railroad and airline industries “right to work” and enable employees to refrain from paying any union dues at all.

The plaintiffs in the case of Rizzo-Rupon are Lin Rizzo-Rupon, Noemieo Oliveira and Susan Marshall, all customer service employees for United Airlines. However, their lawsuit was filed by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank and member of the infamous American Legislative Exchange Council. Since the Supreme Court ruled that that nonunion workers can’t be forced to pay union fees last June in Janus v. AFSCME, conservative groups have spearheaded dozens of similar lawsuits to further erode the power of unions. In many ways Rizzo-Rupon is a retread of Serna v. TWU, a 2016 lawsuit that was funded and pushed by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. The Supreme Court wouldn’t hear the case, but that was before the Janus decision and before Brett Kavanaugh became a justice.

Public comments on the NMB move are being sought through April 1.