#vote for decency

[qrfit]

And different type of Monday hype song today…

This one is timeless. It applies today, tomorrow, forever. Just like Quincy was; it’s always in style. My family given nickname (Q) was always cooler to me because it was the same as Quincy’s. ☺️ If I could possess just an ounce of his swag and versatility, I could live up to his level of cool.

If you were to look into the genre of music he embodied, almost every genre would be listed! Pop, R&B, Jazz, Rock & Roll…Quincy did it all. He worked with everyone; Sinatra, Count Basie, Michael Jackson, Leslie Gore…no one was off limits or out of bounds. It was all Quincy. All music was his style.

So, it’s fitting today to play this song. The day before the election that will decide the fate of our great nation and the day Quincy left the world he put to music. It’s finally his time to rest. And it’s time for us to choose between order and chaos. Here’s hoping we choose to show this world we got more we could be. 🙏🏽🫶🏽✌🏽

[heart2heartroses2u]

The truth finally comes out.. now you know who to really blame for our border crisis… gotta love it 🥰

[lemonbombsfjl]

Something has got to give. We are being crushed by the rich.

Vote blue for economic justice!

http://Iwillvote.com

http://vote411.org

[eugenedebs1920]

As of Monday afternoon the wildfires in California had consumed over 36,000 acres leaving a death toll of 24. When asked in an interview regarding funding for disaster relief, Alabama senator Tommy Tubervill said this “We shouldn’t be [funding California]. They got 30 million people in that state they vote in these imbeciles in to office” former collage football coach and by far the dumbest senator continued, “you go in to California you run in to a lot of Republicans, a lot of good people and I hate it for them. But they are just overwhelmed by these inner city woke policies with people who vote for them. Those people don’t deserve anything unless they show that they’re going to make some changes”.

Notwithstanding the not so subtle racism of ‘inner city woke’ comment, exactly what is the senator from the state ranked 44th out of 50 for living standards, health, education, opportunity, natural environment, ect, saying?

Alabama’s GDP grosses $300 billion, with a population of a little over 5.1 million people, they are the 14th highest recipient of federal welfare assistance, they are 45th in education and 44th in overall health. Over 360,000 residents receive rental assistance and nutritional assistance.

Yes. California ranks number one for dollar amount federal assistance. Although upon further analysis the percentages are far less unbalanced as the numbers would suggest.

California is the WORLDS 5th largest economy, grossing $3,862 billion annually, with a population of nearly 40 million. That is over 10 times the annual revenue Alabama takes in, with almost 10 times the population as well.

Does California have its share of difficult circumstances it deals with, with some questionable solutions to do so? Yes. Yet seeing as it’s the top contributor to federal tax revenue they obviously are functioning beyond the norm.

Overall the states that fund this nation the most are, California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida. States such as the Dakotas, Wyoming, Mississippi, Kentucky, and yes, Alabama, contribute a dismal amount in contrast.

Let’s look back to late summer of last year. When two hurricanes devastated the the lower southeastern states, Helene causing monumental destruction and incredible loss of life. Did the Biden administration use these disasters as a political tool? Did he suggest that they shouldn’t get funding until they remedy their bigoted, unconstitutional voter suppression and gerrymandering? No. He said that the United States government is here for you. While right wing politicians and media plastered the victims with false statements and misinformation, confusing and misleading the afflicted Americans, FEMA and the Biden administration begged the survivors to reach out for help. The politically motivated lies even spurred FEMA to create a specific website combating the false claims and offering assistance.

There’s the old saying, Rome wasn’t made in a day, the recovery from these massive events unfortunately takes time also. Yet NEVER did Democrats or Biden lead folks astray, exploit their vulnerability, or abandon them. I know, I reside in a county that was declared a disaster area after Helene. The federal response was quick, and thorough.

What did the right do? Lie. Mislead. Frighten. Contrive a self serving narrative. Enrage those impacted and scrambling to piece their lives back together.

The void of compassion, the insufficiency of truth, the lack of maturity from much of the right is astounding. When did we begin using the suffering of Americans as a tool to advance your political agenda? When did it become the status quo to segregate assistance to only those who align with your political views? What was the moment when helping your fellow American out in a time of need was tethered to conditions?

In my just over 40 years on this earth I’ve seen the GOP go from being a party of fiscal responsibility, “Christian family values”, the party of law and order, and the party of high moral standards, to now where over a quarter of the current deficit was created in one Republican presidential term, a party of nominating, elected and confirming sexual assailants and predators (not just Trump), a party that not only backs and supports a felonious insurrectionist, but tiptoes, if not flat out violates the Constitution and rule of law, and a party that has no self awareness of its own misgivings.

Personally. I want leaders who are far more intelligent and far more qualified than me to be in charge. I want leaders who harbor self restraint and possess an extraordinary sense of moral fortitude. I want leaders with grace and maturity running the various aspects of this country. I want leaders who care and hold reverence to their values and to the oath of office they swear to.

Can we go back to a time where those who represent us were adults? Can we go back to a time where government was beholden to you as an American citizen regardless if you reside in a blue state or red state? Can we go back to a time where leadership wasn’t a popularity, tribalist, culture war crusade?

We are all humans. We all feel pain. We all feel joy. We all bleed red. Most importantly we are all citizens of the United States of America, key word united.

This shouldn’t be this hard. It shouldn’t be this controversial or complicated. We are one nation, we all want to see it flourish. We all do better when we are all doing better.

So please! Let’s return to decency. To compassion. To respect. To some mild form of social adhesion.

[that-willowtree]

y’all I’m watching the presidential debate rn. This is actually so funny. American pls don’t make me lose hope in you. Make the right choice.

[mercurysnitch]

I’m sorry to be so political today, but personally I find the “I disagree with this candidate on one thing so I’m not voting/protest voting” stance infuriating. Admittedly I live in a country with compulsory voting so maybe I’m just more used to picking whoever’s the best fit and putting up with anything you don’t agree with. Sometimes there are no perfect options or even great options so you go with the least worst.

I keep wanting to say at least there’s term limits if Trump does get back in but I can’t shake the feeling he’d try to get rid of them. I would have thought that would be difficult but I don’t know enough about what would have to happen to be confident in that,

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.

[onebillionsocks]

“what radicalized you” idk man whenever i was upset with someone when i was younger i was told to put myself in their shoes and it kinda just stuck with me

[steelbluehome]

They have already tried to pull this "she slept her way to the top" bullshit on Kamala Harris. And it will only become worse and more prevalent.

Please remember, when someone says that about a woman, what they deeply believe, and have absolutely no problems with, is that men in power withheld promotions from women unless they were given sexual favors.

But they may not think that is what they believe. What they think they believe is that the woman they are insulting is some kind of sexual predator, who could use the act of intercourse as a magical way to enslave men. So that these poor men, even though they are grown ass adults, just become slobbering fools at the suggestion of sex. They cannot be blamed for anything because obviously they are just perpetual bags of hormones in heat, but without the morals. So a woman could ask for anything, blank checks, blank contracts, any position they want in an organization, and the man would have no choice but to give it to her, because SEX! The man can't be held responsible for taking advantage of a power dynamic, or betraying a possible spouse and children, because what else could they possibly do when they are offered sex?

Understand that when someone uses the insult of "she slept her way to the top" they believe one of the above to be absolutely true, and absolutely normal. That is the kind of person you are dealing with.

[yakumtsaki]

voting's closed, thank u all for voting! heir to be announced in a bit once i do the photoshoot huhu

[qrfit]

Yes, she can. Yes, we can.

[heart2heartroses2u]

Bullseye 🎯 “Put his ass in jail”. I couldn’t agree more.. should have from the start.

[lemonbombsfjl]

💙🌊*Share far and wide to nip this nonsense in the bud.*

They picked on Biden’s stutter! Never again! Enough of this mean-spirited petty bullshit!

WE ALL DO IT. Remember your mom’s ‘phone voice?’ You own speaking voice when you talk to a supervisor or teacher? Not the same voice as when you order a coffee, or talk to a child, or chat with friends.

•psychologytoday.com/us/blog/achieving-health-equity/202012/what-is-code-switching

•en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

[fox-stuck]

kind of sickening watching Americans and their supporters reblog stuff that moralizes one of the presidential candidates: “scared I’ll see good news or the end of the world from a meme”… like hey, full stop…. what good news? you can claim all you want that Kamala will be better for you and your loved ones (she won’t <3) but literally this minute she’s still arming Israel. She’s going to continue to arm Israel. For over a century western imperialism has funded & armed Israel. There’s no good news coming out of this election re: presidency. Like I need Western voters to unpack this.

Vote, sure, but do not pat yourself on the back or act joyous when our countries are destroying countless others. It’s so sickening. For some of y’all this attention to imperialism and colonialism will end as soon as a president elect is chosen and I think that’s so shameful.

[palatinewolfsblog]

Untitled (for my dear Friend @rubenesque-dollyd-93 ).

[eugenedebs1920]

How bad does the Biden administrations Gaza policy look now? Trump just ended the hold of 2,000 pound bombs that Biden had halted the sale of. Trump is now floating the idea to just relocate all Gaza residents to Egypt and other countries in the middle east, creating a refugee crisis the likes we’ve never seen.

The world is not black and white. Foreign policy is complex, complicated and aggravating. Being reactionary and accusing Biden of genocide despite the fact that Hamas attacked Israel, despite the fact we had no military involvement only arming our ally that would get these weapons of war somewhere else if not us.

All the protests against Democratic candidates. All the slander and ill informed rhetoric poisoning the narrative. All the antisemitism uneducated actions of demonstrators demonizing the Dems and Biden for combat operations they had no say over. The shred of hope for a fair resolution for Palestine through the decency only found in the left, now fluttered away…

I’ve said it before, hopefully won’t have to say it too many more times. The lesser of two evils is still less evil. A protest vote is a vote for the worst possible outcome. Life isn’t simple, and it sure ain’t fair.

[alyceinwonderland777]

For all the Trump supporters who say shit like "YoU cAn'T cUt PeOpLe OFF oVeR PoLiTiCs!1!1!1!1", actually yes, we can.

Cry mad about it, prick. ❤️