#the centrism

[thewardenisonthecase]

I honestly truly wish that I could enjoy inquisition as much as other people did, because every time i see a post about people praising inquisition all I can think is how much i hate that game.

[politijohn]

Source

[odinsblog]

👉🏿 https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/15/elon-musk-trump-super-pac

[aroacegundamalex]

I mostly think this poll is hilarious (and some people are taking it way, way too seriously) but it’s starting to get really weird how often people on the opposite side are dismissing Gundam — a giant of science fiction that remade a genre in its image — and quite literally lying about Suletta and Miorine. I’ve seen people claim they were canonically married to men, people claim the show’s ending was rewritten by interns, claim they never hugged, and other claims regarding them not being canon.

While Bandai and Kadokawa did censor one interview, and Bandai released an “open to interpretation” statement, these no longer hold true. Official material has henceforth referred to them as married. One instance of censorship and a statement they’ve clearly walked back on does not erase the fact that the show itself heavily emphasizes their wedding rings, refers to Miorine as Eri’s sister-in-law, and makes it abundantly clear that they are married.

“I knew I was going to make an epilogue, but it was a while before I decided upon the exact number of years that should pass in-between. The ending itself follows “The Tempest,” and depicts Suletta and Miorine getting married and becoming partners.”

- Hiroshi Kobayashi

They are completely and unambiguously canon, and arguably were never decanonized to begin with given the literal text of the show.

An addendum to this: I’ve also seen a strange dismissal of the history that G-Witch pulls from.

The original Gundam inspired Revolutionary Girl Utena, with Lalah Sune in particular (the creator of an iconic Gundam archetype) serving as the inspiration for Anthy Himemiya. Gundam has had a queer fanbase for decades, and has had gay characters (with Yoshiyuki Tomino himself confirming this) since the 1990s.

G-Witch draws from Gundam’s extensive, genre-shaking history, classics like Utena and Rose of Versailles, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It brings Gundam and Utena’s connection full circle, and is in conversation with every Gundam series that came before it.

It’s unfair to dismiss it as just some random show, or — as I’ve seen some do — credit its open queerness to the influence of completely unrelated American media, as if Japan is utterly devoid of gay people.

[parasiticstars]

nooooo little chronically online leftist don’t fall for the media’s pervasive purity testing and villainizing that’s specifically made to divide us and keep us fighting amongst ourselves when we should be focusing on getting the boot off our throats

[imsobadatnicknames2]

The Adventure Time TTRPG that was being developed by Cryptozoic Entertainment using their custom Yes And system is officially being switched to D&D 5e due to fan pressure. War and hatred on planet Earth.

[vexwerewolf]

[r0entgen]

I accidentally lost the post that contained this article - but please read if you're outside of Venezuela and want to engage with us in good faith.

[areawest]

god it’s equal parts funny/depressing when yanks get defensive about geography and they hit you with the old “well can YOU name all fifty US states?” like mate we were talking about countries here calm the fuck down

[kropotkindersurprise]

David Graeber explains exactly what went wrong with this US presidential election (democrats going all in on liberal-centrism) even though he has been dead for the past four years. [video]

[aropride]

hi i made a survey on masking (the covid kind) please take it i'm nosy and i love statistics and tumblr polls weren't cutting it anymore

sorry if i missed anything obvious making this it's above my paygrade (my paygrade is $0 i am not getting paid)

[politijohn]

Source

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

[that-satireguy]

I feel like the erasure of trans men, who come from violently misogynistic cultures and countries needs to be studied. Like trans discourse is always white and us-centric, but this is a particular phenomenon i've noticed.

I think its because it doesn't fit in with the current theorisation of trans men's 'male privilege'. Because its really hard to claim that misogyny is not a force directed at trans men, that we are not part of the intended targets when looking at laws that allow- and even encourage- the treatment of us as property.

Trans men experience FGM.

Trans men can be child brides.

Trans men are beaten for showing skin.

Hijab is enforced on trans men.

Trans men do not have access to abortion.

Trans men do not have access to education.

Trans men are lower in priority in being given clean water and food.

Trans men are legally defined as the property of their fathers.

A trans man's word is equal to half of the word of a male (because of our inferior female brains.)

Do not look away.

Do not brush experiences like mine under the rug.

ANY form of trans or queer discourse that ignores us is misogynistic, dismissive and (usually) racist.

[chaberkowepole]

I still can't get over the fact that some people have a qualm with a Swiss person using "it" pronouns when that is a very common thing to do for non binary people here

Every time I'm in a queer meeting there is somebody who introduces itself with "es", we don't have native they/them pronouns, different languages and queer cultures exist like,,,,

And even if it wasn't common you people need to chill

[snovyda]

US centrism is incredible. You write something about the history of your country that faced some oppression from its neighbours and you get (sometimes seemingly well meaning) USamericans all yelling "me!me!me! What about the oppression WE did? The most important oppression ever, we are THE worst, that is what must be talked about!" And it's literally silencing the voices and experiences of those whose history was NOT related to those very specific US policies. It's still a form of imperialism, too, by the way, stealing voices and agency from others for the sake of your own main character syndrome.