#vote for the folks that aren't doing this

[sirfrogsworth]

I was hoping this election would be a wake up call to the Left. I thought maybe people would start to realize we need to stop eating each other and organize and build power.

But I feel like it made things worse. Hopefully that is just a trauma response and we'll get our shit together eventually, but I am disheartened by the current infighting.

I'm also seeing people recommending guns. The reason the NRA didn't want the CDC to study gun violence is because they know guns aren't actually that great for self defense. And you are more likely to be the victim of your own gun than to stop any violence from harming you. One study showed a gun is about as effective as literally doing nothing.

Then I see people talking about "revolutionary organizing" and my first thought was that leftists would all end up just shooting each other.

We have the best ideas. I believe that very much. When you present lefty ideas to regular folks in their simplest form—without mentioning Marx or using stigmatized buzzwords—people are like, "wow, that sounds great!" Even Missouri voted for abortion and raising the minimum wage despite re-electing Josh Fucking Hawley.

Our ideas are our power. We need to stop fighting each other and start talking to people about how these ideas can help them. We need local representatives. We need to start running for city council, school boards, and state government.

All we have left is the long game. It's time to stop demanding performative action that has no tangible benefits and start playing that long game.

[victusinveritas]

[graysongoal]

Not to cause discourse on this site, but I am a

transgender

queer

disabled

neurodivergent

sex educator

DEI professional

with Palestinian friends, who studied Palestine in college

And I don't want to fucking vote for Biden, cecause he's committing gen0c!de and I have a strong sense of justice.

It is NOT fair to act like I'm holding privilege and then sit there and say that I don't care what happens to my communities.

I absolutely do.

I draw a big fucking line at gen0c!de - and at being told every fucking election that I have to vote for the lesser evil, when other options do exist.

I'm not saying I don't understand OP's viewpoint. But, I'm fed up with

this fucking system

being told the lesser of two evils is the asshole literally doing a gen0c!de (and who uses his links to various oppressed communities to get y'all to think he's progressive when he's center-right at best)

having my own identities & communities thrown back into my face by people who act like I'm not a part of them

I specifically have a strong sense of justice because I'm a part of these communities. Stop acting like we don't exist and aren't fucking struggling with our presented choices between raging orange diarrhea, gen0c!dal constipation, or ???.

Look.

I have made you a chart. A very simple chart.

People say "You have to draw the line somewhere, and Biden has crossed it-" and my response is "Trump has crossed way more lines than Biden".

These categories are based off of actual policy enacted by both of these men while they were in office.

If the ONLY LINE YOU CARE ABOUT is line 12, you have an incredible amount of privilege, AND YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT PALESTINIANS. You obviously have nothing to fear from a Trump presidency, and you do not give a fuck if a ceasefire actually occurs. You are obviously fine if your queer, disabled, and marginalized loved ones are hurt. You clearly don't care about the status of American democracy, which Trump has openly stated he plans to destroy on day 1 he is in office.

[jaythelay]

Hot damn the whole "biden drop out" shit becomes more obvious as time goes on.

It's clearly republicans pressuring donors into fuckin dems over.

For some reason BPT wants to think it's an avoidance of a Black Female VP (Ya'll I have actively never heard anything good about her and she shut the fuck up barely a year in for actually everyone's own good, don't pretend race has any part in her actions and words dipshits)

And to add on further, Absolutely Everyone Fucking Hates Khamala Harris. Bar None. She was AWFUL PR for Biden damn near everytime I heard her speak, being one of the ones to call a Ceasefire Deplorable and claim to be too busy with covid to legalize weed and soon after started banning vape sales online, of which, clearly, they weren't busy with Covid to do.

My god it's hilarious and embarrassing how inneffective, uninformed, absolutely idiotic leftists are. My god. What happened??????? Seriously the fuck happened?????? Ya'll wanted to raise min wage! Now you're dumb enough to let R's shove Dear Leader out for Absolutely Worse???

You went from Definite Win to Definite Loss. How... How??? THE POLLS??? YOU STILL LOOK AT THE THING ONLY R'S FUCKING ANSWER AS THE POLLERS THEMSELVES TOLD US????

THE POLLS...? Really. Truly? Seriously. Wow.

my god man.

Insanity. All of it. Insanity. Dems are inneffective purposefully or genuinely? Not capable of thinking further than an emotional none.

Vote Third Party holy shit what a shitshow. Dreadful work Literally Everyone, I'll remember to laugh when I'm on my deathbed at your own orchestrated failures. Seriously. Be embarrassed. It's honestly sad how little effort any one of you put into something you supposedly believe in. There's not enough words, there's only strong feelings of contempt, dissapointment, fruatration, and most of all? Boredom.

I bored. You bore me. Leftists are boring. They believe in nothing enough to understand it and fight for it. All they know to do is make bad memes and pretend to care about online drama. That's it. No political bones in their bodies. Notta one.

[prokopetz]

I'm not gonna claim that most Tumblr polls are anything like rigorously structured, but I've seen a lot of folks rather smugly asserting that having a "not applicable" option that ends up dominating all other responses is evidence that the person who created the poll is incompetent, and y'all: under the specific circumstances in which these polls are constructed and distributed, that outcome is evidence of good poll design, not bad poll design. Yes, even when the "not applicable" responses outnumber all other responses ten to one. There are several reasons for that:

At the time of this posting, Tumblr polls have no "see response" button. The only ways to see a poll's distribution of responses are to wait for the poll to conclude, or to respond yourself – and not only are people on social media typically curious and impatient, many of them also know that there's no way they'll remember to check back later once the poll has concluded, so in practice, their opportunity to see the results is now or never. Adding a little note to the poll insisting that people who aren't part of the targeted demographic should refrain from voting isn't necessarily going to restrain that impulse. Indeed, it may end up encouraging folks who otherwise wouldn't have picked a random result-revealing response to do so, because fuck you, don't tell me what to do.

Many respondents genuinely won't realise they're not part of the targeted demographic until after they've voted. It doesn't matter how much text you add to contextualise the poll, because they'll read the poll first, and if they read the accompanying text at all, it's only after they've responded. Heck, a lot of folks don't even bother to read the question before responding to a poll; they just start going down the options and reflexively click the first one that seems like it might apply to them, then go back and read what was actually being asked (and complain in the notes if it turns out that they misunderstood). Even a well-meaning person can only comply with instructions they've actually read; for those folks, clicking the "not applicable" option is what compliance looks like.

Even folks who do fit your poll's targeted demographic can fall prey to the imp of the perverse. Giving the most accurate response rather than the most entertaining one can be a real struggle for a lot of folks; in scientific analysis of polling data, this is known as the "mischievous responder bias". In an informal setting like Tumblr, it's reasonable to suppose that the mischievous responder effect might be exaggerated compared to polls conducted in more formal contexts, and a well-designed poll is going to take that into account. A humorous "not applicable" option provides an escape by affording folks the freedom to screw around with the knowledge that they're not polluting useful data by doing so; in practice, the "I am a toaster" option is a mischievous response filter.

What this adds up to is that a poll where 90% of the responses hit the "not applicable" button is more likely to have yielded useful data than a poll with a narrow target audience where some unknown percentage of the responses represent folks not reading the instructions, clicking random options to see the results, and/or taking the piss.

[clandestinegardenias]

Okay fine. I teach an ethics course and I just keep seeing all of this discourse on whether or not to vote in the upcoming US presidential election and I just wanted to lay a few things out here.

People who are saying they will abstain from voting because they see voting for anyone as supporting/endorsing genocide are operating from a Rights Theory perspective.

Basically, Rights Theory posits that you should never take any action that could violate someone else’s rights. EVER. The balance of benefits and harms does not matter. There is NOTHING that can justify taking away the right to, for example, life.

And I think that’s where these anti-voting folks are predominantly coming from. They see voting as endorsing/enabling genocide, full stop, and therefore it is morally indefensible EVEN IF IT WILL RESULT IN LESS OVERALL HARM.

People who are arguing that you SHOULD vote, and vote for Biden specifically, are operating from a Utilitarian Theory perspective.

Utilitarianism is all about balancing benefits and harms, and essentially prioritizing overall harm reduction. They recognize the harm the system is creating, but are willing to participate in the system because through doing so they can ensure that various harms are minimized--certainly not eliminated, but reduced, and, importantly, made easier to eliminate eventually.

Through utilitarianism, we can actually make people's fundamental rights EASIER to defend! But a lot of people are so caught up in the idea of moral purity, and Rights Theory, that they're willing to let their inaction erode people's rights because at least they aren't actively participating in the system. (they are still passively participating, however, and we can argue about inaction being a form of action, but I digress)

Point being, VOTE. Because of Utilitarianism, but also because, if you believe in the inalienability of people's fundamental rights? Voting will make it much easier to protect those in the long term, and that's frankly more important than you getting to feel exempt from an exploitative system you are nonetheless inherently a part of and complicit in.

[melancholia-ennui]

Gentle reminder to UK folks that if you don't like Labour there is no better election than this one to vote for a third party or independent who actually stands for what you believe in.

Every major poll is predicting a Labour landslide and a total collapse of the Tory party. The only reason to tactically vote Labour to "keep the Tories out" is if in exactly your seat the Tories (or worse Reform) are projected to be first or second place and no one else is close - but in a lot of seats the predicted second is not the Tories, it's Lib Dems or SNP or in some places even Greens, and that gives you the freedom to vote for what you believe in because the Tories aren't gonna get that seat anyway.

Remember: UK is not the US, and despite all that Labour and the Tories try to do this is not a two-party state. Vote pragmatically, yes, and mindful of harm reduction, but be rational and informed as well.

[tododeku-or-bust]

My serious response to this election:

Like it was so interesting at work on Wednesday. The people most distraught were the white folks. Literally everyone Black I knew (mostly women) had pretty much steeled up and took the blow, ready to survive once more. Ye olde resilience kicked in.

And I hate that it has to be that way. I hate that so much, it fills me with resentment. That even on a day where white people had the least to be worried about, that the numbers showed that a white supremacist resurgence is real and alive once again, that WE had to be the ones to control our tempers and emotions. We STILL had to center white feelings.

As predicted, white women showed up in the largest numbers. And still voted Trump. The second- no, the THIRD time this has happened. And this was the group that Kamala was so determined to convince and change the minds of, instead of speaking to her own loyal votership. Btw, once again don't ever talk to or about Black women on this app being the problem ever again, period.

So yeah, from now on, if y'all aren't confronting the racists you know- and yes, you DO know them, the odds that you don't are full of shit given the numbers- instead of punching down, I don't wanna hear it.

[deadpresidents]

I just hope these next 4 years go by fast

This election isn't just about the next four years. With Trump in the White House and a Republican Senate at his side, the MAGA movement can pick up where they left off when it comes to packing the federal judiciary with right-wing judges who will control the Supreme Court and appellate courts throughout the country potentially for the rest of the lives of everyone reading this right now. It's the perfect recipe for them to continue stripping reproductive rights away from women nationwide and gives them the opportunity to turn their attention to the other issues that they have been dying to attack, from voting rights to gay marriage and every other extension of personal freedom that has been won by minorities and marginalized people in hard-fought battles over the past 60 years. This is the nightmare scenario that people have been warning folks about for the past few elections. It's here. And there isn't going to be a way to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The consequences of this election will have a direct, negative impact on your life -- possibly on the entire remainder of your life. This country just re-elected a President with authoritarian tendencies who is the willing puppet of a dangerous Christian nationalist movement that figured out exactly how to manipulate him (through flattery) for their aims. They have created the perfect vehicle for a genuine cult of personality that they can use to achieve the goals they have been very clear about striving for over the past few years. And you can't blame anybody other than the American voters because they not only elected Trump, but they gave him a fucking mandate, with a Republican Senate and potentially a Republican House. They already have a right-wing dominated Supreme Court for the next few decades, and now they are going to ensure that the entire federal judiciary is in their control for years to come. And don't forget the fact that a few months ago, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that gave Presidents sweeping immunity for a broad (and conveniently undefined) range of "official" acts, so Trump is going to go into this second term knowing that not only does he not have to deal with the "guardrails" of responsible adults he had around him in his first term (Mattis, Tillerson, Kelly, General Milley, etc), but he knows he can get away with virtually anything and everything that he wants to do this time around. If you thought that Trump's first term was bad, just understand that they are prepared this time and now he's surrounded himself with people who will do his bidding -- people who are perfectly willing to let Trump be Donald Trump.

I wish there was a reason to cry foul, lodge protests, and challenge the election's results. But this wasn't a rigged election. There isn't any confusion about what the voters really wanted. The American people did this. People you know and care about and who say they care about you are the people who did this. We need to recognize that these elections aren't outliers anymore. Trump's supporters aren't simply chaos agents who got lucky on a bad day for the Democrats. That's the country we live in now and we have to find a way to resist it that actually makes a difference because now they have the keys to all the doors and all of the alarm codes. This country has normalized the conspiracy theories and nativism and racism that has powered the MAGA movement since the moment Trump came down the elevator at Trump Tower in 2015. He's given those people permission to be open with their hatred towards people who aren't like them, and it's actually become surprising to see how many Americans have been eager to take advantage of that. I didn't think I had any misconceptions about this country before Donald Trump because I recognized this nation's history, but I clearly had some misconceptions about people I thought I knew until I saw them wearing a red MAGA hat or noticed they had a gigantic flag with Trump's name hanging where their U.S. flag used to hang. Once that happened, it was like a switch went off with them and they started saying things in ways that I'd never heard them speak. I feel like that's happened to the entire country. It breaks my heart and it pisses me off.

For the past few years, I've been warning everybody about how elections have consequences. I imagine that there are hundreds of posts on this blog with that phrase in all caps listed with the tags. Now the elections have happened, and we have to live with real fucking consequences. And we're going to pass these consequences on to other generations because this is the one that you can't get a do-over on. When you give a movement like this the power and the mandate that this country just gave them, there is no easily rolling back the things that they end up doing. They are going to fundamentally change the lives of people in this nation and especially change the way the younger generations of Americans live and love and learn for years to come. And you have people in your life who made that happen. It's another disgusting day in America -- a prelude to another reprehensible four years (at the very least) -- and I'm ashamed of tens of millions of my fellow Americans because this one is on them. They know exactly who the man is that they voted for, and now we know exactly who they are, too.

[darcylindbergh]

I want all you vote blue no matter who folks to suffer just as much as all the disabled ppl you left on the wayside as soon as biden said the pandemic was over. All of you talk about solidarity but as someone disabled by covid its all so shallow. You are all so happy to stop masking and let covid keep killing. You cant even pretend its not true. 95% of dems stopped giving a fuck as soon as their guy said it was fine to. And every time i bring this up i get told i just gotta vote biden or other people will be in danger. Like me and those like me havent already been sacraficed by all of you. You all will have to live with that because i wont be alive much longer. Vote Blue! Vote Blue! Close your ears and vote blue because now YOU are afraid.

sure, we can deconstruct this one too.

this one's cleverer than ms terf because frankly a lot of disabled people DO feel abandoned vis a vis the pandemic and masking, and that's definitely something that needs to be addressed. but this anon is not addressing THAT - they want to address how i shouldn't vote blue.

here's a couple things we can pick out:

i've recently responded to posts about gaza and terfs, so this anon has simply picked a topic i haven't addressed yet like they're playing whack a mole

blames biden specifically for their topic of choice

pitches a you versus them division while explicitly attacking the idea that the left can express sufficient solidarity (implying it doesn't matter whether you vote)

specifically disparages voting for biden while scoffing at the idea that failing to do so will place other people in danger

make it personal while using inflammatory language: "i've already been sacrificed" "i wont be alive much longer"

mocks voting blue out of fear or out of the idea that failing to vote or failing to vote blue will result in a negative outcome

of course, not voting blue (either by splitting the vote, as in 2016, or not voting at all) will certainly not result in an improved outcome for disabled people. anon doesn't even pretend like there's a viable alternative that will improve life for disabled folks in the us.

failing to vote blue will just result in republicans in power - who are as a national platform anti-masking, anti-vaccinations, anti-obamacare, and anti-healthcare reform. so what we have here is someone who is using the disabled community as a cudgel to divide the left and discourage voting - because don't you know you specifically are a bad person for being against disabled people?

anyway here's a short list of things the biden administration has done over the last 4 years to improve the situation of millions of disabled folks in the us:

Biden's first 100 days re: disability reform

Biden admin recognizes long covid as disabling

Biden admin directs $200 million to programs supporting aging Americans and their caregivers (5 days ago)

HHS strengthened rule banning discrimination based on disability (May 1, 2024)

Dept of Education cancels student loan debt for over 300,000 disabled borrowers who cannot work (Aug 2021)

Biden admin seeks to end subminimum wage for disabled (and tipped) workers (2021) - Biden's DOL has been actively working on new regulations regarding disabled worker protections, although the recent decision ending Chevron deference by SCOTUS's conservative bloc will make it much more difficult.

there's definitely still more work to do - passing the marriage equality for disabled adults act, for example, and seeing through the end of subminimum wages - but republicans aren't gonna do it. these bills died in the republican-controlled house. voting blue down-ticket is the only way folks are gonna see any progress.

[whetstonefires]

there's this song in the stage musical version of Annie--of which i only remember the hook and not the verses which aren't very good--which is the residents of a Hooverville singing @ Herbert Hoover

"We'd like to thank you Herbert Hoover..." about how much they hate him, right. because they're homeless.

Which ofc is reminiscent of the 'thanks Obama' meme to me, but also ofc means I'm thinking about Herbert Hoover, cuz the refrain to this mediocre song is looping in my head.

And the thing is, Herbert Hoover did not cause the Great Depression. Right? Inasmuch as it was a result of misgovernance, it was the fruit of decisions made before he was in office.

He did, however, mishandle the crisis fairly badly. Not, like, Trump-during-Covid levels of fail, but not helping, either.

But I happen to know that the rage at him had, in context, an additional element that isn't important enough to make it into history courses. Which is that Herbert Hoover made his national reputation as the point man on getting aid to parts of Europe devastated in World War I.

So kind of like with Dr. Fauci--he was the face of something people on average felt good about the government doing, and it was believed he'd done a decent job.

Before he got into government he'd been a high-level coordinator with the Red Cross, which I learned about in passing in this book about the history of criminalization, because he organized aid after massive flooding of the Mississippi forced large-scale evacuations.

(And there are folk songs from that period about why you don't go down to that Red Cross store for a bag of flour, because the Red Cross was collaborating with law enforcement, which was being really intense about escaped slaves black people who had Voluntarily Signed ludicrously exploitative labor contracts using the disruption to Get Away. Anyway.)

So the thing is, people had voted for Herbert Hoover understanding him as a person who provided aid to the dispossessed. This was his image. Even the people who didn't like him thought he was that kind of guy! So when he absolutely did not mobilize the federal government to save his own people during a crisis, the deep sense of betrayal was personal. Not merely the institutions but the individual had let the people fall.

And that's why he got blamed harder than most presidents who have shit fall apart on their watch.

This has been American History With Earworms.

[theminecraftbee]

alright, so, one more thing i've been thinking about during all of this, and apologies, because i normally try to keep my blog fairly discourse-free in the grand scheme of things. but.

there are hermitcraft fans who act irritatingly morally superior about this fandom. i think it's out of some impulse to try to distance yourselves from any other mcyt fandom. it needs to stop.

the worst behavior during the polls was from the hermitcraft fans.

period.

there were so many instances of hermitcraft fans accusing the other side of cheating, of hermitcraft fans making attacks on the character of their guy's opponents, i have heard what i HOPE are isolated reports of racism in the grian/quackity fight (it was genuinely impossible to keep up with the blog's notes that round without both going into a death spiral thanks to the horrible behavior of scar fans during techno/scar and also without losing track instantly of where we were due to the frankly insurmountable volume of notes, so i did not see it, but unfortunately i fully believe it). i have seen people receiving awful asks - saw people being accused of 'betraying' the hermitcraft side due to voting for quackity or techno, for example.

and for a fandom that likes to act like it's better than the other guys, well. the dsmp fans were generally very well behaved in comparison. (shoutout, for example, to quackblr - i saw maybe one or two possible instances of bad behavior, but for as intense as you all were, you all were normally mostly just retaliatory towards whatever energy was thrown at you.) it wasn't supposed "outsiders coming in" that was doing this bad behavior, either.

folks, you can't blame the dsmp when the problem is inside the house. you can't blame twitter users when you're doing it here. you can't blame the reddit when you're the ones throwing the first death threats.

get off your high horses. we're all mcyt fans. we're all having the same fun. get off your high horses. you can hardly claim we're entirely all "unproblematic" when keralis accepted a sponsorship from the wizard game and xisuma periodically gets another round of getting shouted down over something he said on xisumasays. get off your high horses. you can't claim we're the accepting, good behavior fandom, unlike those other guys, when you're the ones causing the problems.

now, as always, i'm sure this is a law of large numbers thing to some extent. as technoblade, wise as he is, said: sometimes when you get a large enough group, you're going to have a few serial killers. but for the amount that hermitblr likes to act better than Those Other Minecraft Fandoms, and those Other Fandom Websites, it wasn't those guys that made me cry.

to be clear, the majority of you have been well-behaved. but there's a persistent tendency in this fandom to act strangely morally superior to other fandoms. and, y'all? you aren't.

you just aren't.

and the sooner you acknowledge that, the less likely this is to happen again, because once you admit that yeah, we can be toxic too? that's when you can start actually looking at yourself and trying not to be.

anyway, sorry again to make this post. i don't want to be a downer, hence why, outside of the official mod statements of "chill the fuck out", i didn't make this until now. (it also helps that i wanted to wait until i was no longer furious, upset, and death spiraling.) i have seen a lot of the best of this fandom over the past two weeks! i've just also, unfortunately, seen some of the worst, and feel the need to make this statement because it's just... been eating at me.

i don't want this to continue to be a trend. i think we can do better. do so.

[sillygoofyqueer]

Even more thoughts, for you to post if you so choose!

I do love the idea of Shen Yuan having a fancy hair piece with a pin that doubles as a weapon! Just because demon crows don’t have access to spiritual swords doesn’t mean he can’t stab the hell out of you.

For his main weapon, I’m thinking crow demons that can take human form tend to use bows, with the feathers shed by their clan as fletching. (Perhaps demon feathers also grant abilities of some sort to the arrows?)

Looking at the iridescence of crow feathers reminds me of the Chinese tradition of making jewelry with kingfisher feathers. Now I think it would be lovely if the crow demons also had a tradition of fashioning similar jewelry with their own feathers, perhaps treated with solutions and lacquered in a way that brings out even more of their color.

Speaking of colors, while crows aren’t among those birds able to see significant ultraviolet, they are tetrachromats, and thus are able to distinguish colors to a far greater extent than humans. I’m sure his sudden ability to see way more colors than he could in his last life is very perplexing to poor Shen Yuan!

The regular crows acting as an alarm system by cursing and saying spooky nonsense at all unknown visitors is an absolute delight!

I vote that Shen Yuan intentionally never gives them whatever signal that would mark Airplane as a friend, just so they continue to harass the guy every time he comes to visit. 😂

(I’m thinking poor Airplane is trying to set up trade routes for demons, and struggling with the general hostility different types of demons have for one another. Killing interlopers and/or raiding other demons for their stuff is not conductive to trade! It’s no wonder demons lack the arts. Nobody shares anything with anyone, except when giving demon nobles tribute. 😭)

You know, with all the feathers and bird-folks about, the transmigrators probably figure out quill pens. Not sure how big of an improvement they’d be compared to brushes, but they’re at least more like what the transmigrators are used to.

It’d also be funny if all the demon crows and villagers were learning to write simplified Chinese from Shen Yuan, instead of traditional, leading visitors to wonder what the hell is up with this one location’s weird writing system, where half the characters are inexplicably different.

(He probably teaches them traditional too, if only for the sake of reading imported books and things, but simplified is probably faster for personal notes and bookkeeping or the like).

I've always loved when people have weapons in discreet places, so it seemed necessary to dump that onto Shen Yuan because he's the most iconic character ever. Especially CrowYuan as well, it seems like something he'd do just to be safe when it comes to these things - after everything he's read, it's hard not to always be prepared. (Also, a more cheeky reason if I may, imagine Shen Yuan in a sticky situation and he pulls the hair pin out of his hair, now holding a weapon and looking AWESOME as he does it) Also, main weapon as a bow IS MAKING ME LOOOSE MY MIND. Ever since I was little, I've been obsessed with people who use bows (Legolas, Robin Hood, Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, various book characters) and the idea of giving Shen Yuan a bow?? I am dropping to my knees and shaking my fists at the sky. HUZZAAAHH!!! Feathers as fletching is a great idea, almost like a calling card of sorts, as well as a warning. Demon feathers giving certain abilities to arrows is a brilliant idea, such as resilience, poison, increased speeds (useful for high pressure situations where someone has to die before they can be alerted). I'd find it interesting if different demon feathers grant different abilities, and it's almost a norm for these demons to trade feathers! The jewellery idea is absolutely gorgeous and adorable! I was thinking that it could mainly be a crow demon thing, and to have one made for you if you aren't a crow demon is a sign of great trust within the community, a decision that has to be agreed to by at least half of the community! Also, itty bitty angst idea, this jewellery could also be highly sought out because it's gorgeous and its making is entirely a clan secret that is only taught to those within it - so, it's often seen as a spoil of war, a way to brag about a crow demon's death is to wear the jewellery "won" from "battle". Shen Yuan would most definitely be thrown off guard by this wider arrange of colours, often found in the wildest areas of the forest and just staring at everything. At first, he wonders if it's because he's a demon now, but more research (aka, bullying a demon chicken Airplane for answers) shows that it is fact not because he's a demon, but instead because he's a crow. He is both excited that he can see all these colours and fiercely delighted that Airplane can't, because he's a spiteful little shit and I love him. If Airplane comes to visit, he's grown adept to immediately submitting to the harassment of the crows because they soon grow bored of him if they don't get any reaction other than pitiful screaming. (He would highly suffer from trying to set up trade routes as well, lmaooo) OH MY GOD, if Mobei Jun ever comes to visit Bing-ge, he would also be immediately attacked by crows and that is funnier than anything else right now in my mind. His stern face immediately becomes one of absolute outrage, but it quickly becomes confusion when Bing-ge says he can't attack them back because "Shen Yuan would never forgive me" On the idea of feathers as quill pens, that would end up being incredibly useful for them! Perhaps the use of certain demon feathers would be better than others if we go by different demon feathers holding different abilities - for instance, let's say crow feathers hold increased speed, that would be helpful for writing because one would merely need to guide the quill and let it do the rest. However, a demon feather that created a poison effect, let's say chicken feathers, would not be the best for writing, which makes certain feathers more valuable than others for different things! Shen Yuan would be a great teacher, because he knows the traditional Chinese - which is useful for things you previously mentioned - but then he would be able to introduce a whole new writing system that makes it easier to write. This would be especially useful for those who may struggle with the traditional Chinese, because then they would still be able to access writing!! {part seven! part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six!}

[kanagenwrites]

So. Tuesday sucked.

We've all had a chance to come down from the "what the fuck" of it all, and we're starting to see the usual circular firing squad. Lots of lib centrists are doing everything they can to throw trans people, minorities, and basically anyone who isn't a finance bro under the bus, as is (very tiresome) tradition after both victories and defeats in the Democratic Party. I will be 42 years old in a few months, so this is far from the first time I've seen it, and sadly, I'm sure it won't be the last. To the lib centrists and those carrying water for them: This never works. Please stop trying it. Trans issues were not a major motivator; I'll get into that below. Sit down, kids, it's time for Auntie Kana's Fireside Dialectics.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of my followers are significantly younger than me. (Imagine that, an audience that skews young on Tumblr.) A lot of you folks probably haven't been following politics for very long, and you've been able to participate in them for even less time than that. For some of you this is probably your first election as an adult, and it kinda feels like everything blew up in your face, doesn't it? I was about your age for 2000, when the election was nakedly stolen by George W. Bush, and not much older for 2004, when despite his disastrous presidency Bush the Younger rode a wave of 9/11-brained racism to the last popular vote victory the GOP had prior to (likely) this year. So I get it. I really do.

If you're living in the USA you have probably had a subpar education in politics and civics. This is largely by design - education is horrendously underfunded and there is a sustained attack on the ability of teachers to even discuss things like the Civil Rights Movement, the legacy of slavery in the United States, the genocide this country was founded on, and so on and so forth. Economic education isn't much better; you very likely got a short lecture on basic supply and demand and an argument-from-authority that "socialism doesn't work." All this combines to leave a lot of folks totally baffled as to how something like this election happens.

But it's pretty simple. It's just material conditions. That's it. What the media isn't telling you (because there's no profit in it, and the media is nothing but a clickbait engine when they aren't open propagandists) is that there has been a massive anti-incumbent wave of elections across the world. How massive? Japan's LDP, which has held power almost uninterrupted since the establishment of Japan's postwar democracy, managed to lose their recent election.

And why are material conditions so shitty? That's a complicated question, but a lot of it is the fact that we had a lengthy period of low inflation followed by a period of extremely high inflation due to the absolutely botched response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A bag of Doritos used to be 2.50, and now it's like 6 bucks. That's worse than all the inflation (and naked price-gouging, because there's a lot of that going on too) I experienced in my life prior to 2020, squeezed into the space of a year or two. This smacks everyone in the face every time they buy groceries, and while the government and the Federal Reserve were doing everything they could to manage inflation (and understand what a big deal it is for me, the anarcho-communist, to say that the US actually did an extremely fucking good job of doing it, because every other country on Earth had it worse than we did), they did fuck all to actually improve the material conditions people were experiencing. Wages were not keeping up with the cost of living, and price-gouging wasn't being dealt with.

Remember the 600 bucks Joe Biden still owes you? The American electorate sure the fuck does. Invisible backrooms liberal wonkery does not connect, regardless of whether it works or not, but going back on a promise? People remember that shit.

It's a rare incumbent that could win in an environment like this, especially when tied to a track record of doing exactly fucking nothing to actually help people from the perspective of the vast majority of the population. Kamala Harris was not that incumbent. She was a singularly uninspiring candidate who failed to connect with voters so thoroughly that she was on track to lose her home state in the 2020 Democratic primary. Nobody liked her (except a few very eager and very loud fans in the K-Hive), and speaking as someone who lives in California, I am not surprised she ate shit. She was a terrible choice for VP and a terrible choice of successor for Biden, but because Biden('s handlers) insisted on pretending he wasn't obviously declining before our very eyes, Harris, a singularly uninspiring candidate, had three months to build and run a campaign.

And it was still weirdly close.

Now, there's two possibilities: Either she actually ran an amazing campaign and it's incredible that it was even this close, or Trump is just so loathsome that even in a massively anti-incumbent environment he didn't bring anyone new to the table. Given that Trump is on-track to receive less votes this time than he did in 2020, and how many of those votes seem to have been cast for Trump and no one else down-ballot, I think it's more of the latter than the former. Trump brought the usual suspects, while Kamala successfully drove away voters that even Joe fucking Biden and Hillary fucking Clinton were able to bring home. Not on the left, not in minority demographics, but across the board. After all, if things are horrible and you're being promised that "nothing will fundamentally change," (literally an early-presidency quote from Joe Biden, whose agenda Kamala Harris 100% aligned herself with) and keeping in mind that the average American voter is not nearly so plugged into the minutiae and the day to day of politics (as evinced by the sudden peak in google searched for "Did Joe Biden drop out?" on Tuesday), why the fuck would you bother to vote?

Hopefully you have a better idea how we got here now. The question, of course, is where do we go from here? I will probably continue posting about this from time to time, especially if there's interest, but my advice is this:

We are still here. We will be here tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and so on. Plan accordingly.

Things will get fucked up. Things will always get fucked up. That is the nature of things no matter who is running the government. Plan accordingly.

Organize. Develop parallel structures of power and assistance, because the government is likely going to be even more useless to directly assist you than it already was. Our greatest strength is each other, and our ability to care for and help one another.

I have been here before. You will be here again. It always feels like it's the worst thing ever to happen. That never really goes away, but your ability to deal with it, to plan around it, to endure it, and to rise up again on the other side of it and say "No, fuck you" is entirely under your control and within your capabilities. And you will get better at it as you do it. And you are not doing it alone. None of us are.

Do not give up. Do not surrender. This isn't the end, or the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning: it just is.

Now go watch a video of a cat doing something cute, or read some smut, or whatever gives you joy. You can't take care of others unless you take care of yourself. That's General Order #1: Take care of yourself.

Solidarity, y'all.

[maxknightley]

i just don't understand how usa trans folks in my circles aren't afraid for their lives re: the election. i get it. biden has been shit, he's been the main contributor to a genocide. harris will likely be no different. i'm in no way thrilled with them or our establishment as a whole. but trump clearly spells a much, much worse reality for trans people in this country. not only does his supporters' platform outline the criminalization of transness, but they'll have full immunity to do it due to the supreme court decision. this isn't a worst case scenario to get people to vote blue, this is the reality of what trump actively wants to do. am i missing something? because i'd love to believe i'm the crazy one in this case

most of what you're describing has been happening on a state-by-state level. the biden administration has done next to nothing to meaningfully push back against it. even if you're going hard in the paint on voting, you would be better off focusing your efforts on state and municipal elections, where something good could at least conceivably happen

"supreme court justice" is a lifetime position. as such, the supreme court is still going to have a republican majority regardless of who gets elected come november. you could make the argument "oh but what if one of the justices dies within the next four years," except that the democratic establishment has repeatedly demonstrated that they have zero interest in actually securing a progressive majority in the judiciary, so I'm not especially convinced it would make a difference. mind you, the whole fucking institution is flagrantly antidemocratic regardless.

kamala harris is actively campaigning on Bipartisanship and Cooperation with the christofascists she's running against. oh sorry I mean the Moderate Anti-Trump Republicans, like dick cheney, who definitely wasn't part of multiple infamously reactionary presidential administrations within living memory. why should I believe for an instant that she'll fight for me?

I might be biased due to living in a blue state, but the fact of the matter is: after four years of Trump, my life was not materially worse. after four years of Biden, my life was not materially better. under such circumstances, how am I supposed to feel anything but nihilism and apathy about the presidential election?

This is definitely a factor of living in a blue state, but it would be a statistical miracle if my vote for president mattered even the slightest bit beyond "maybe the green party will get some government funding and that will have some kind of positive ripple effect"

as someone who remembers the Bush administration I speak from experience when I say the republicans are constantly proposing hideous, inane social policies that end up dying in committee. that's not to say we should let down our guard, only that "if trump is re-elected he will immediately institute a dictatorship and all trans people will be hanged on the spot" is not actually a sure thing by any means.

I am a petty, angry person, and when people try to browbeat me into doing something - especially something that strikes me as pointless - it makes me less likely to do it.

tl;dr it's going to be bad either way; meanwhile, voting for a cheerleader of genocide would disgust me enough on a personal level that I'm willing to get uncharacteristically Kantian about the whole affair.

call me when they return to the obama playbook of "at least pretending they will try to make things better"

[msaprildaniels]

I'm almost 40 and my whole life I've been hearing folks on the left accuse the Democrats of being no different than Republicans, and it's never been true.

Democrats have always fallen short of what I wanted, but Republicans have always been an outright disaster. Imperfect is better than malevolent!

Not to mention the fact that the Dems really have moved left to a significant degree in the last ten years!

Remember the DSA? They won a string of victories after the 2016 election galvanized the left. Then all their best people became Democrats. The Dems are former DSA in lots of places.

Joe Biden has been the most liberal President of my lifetime, and Kamala Harris had a Senate voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders. The Dems aren't perfect but they're getting better and if you pretend that's not true, it'll stop happening.

In a democracy people who don't vote, don't count. If you abandon Democrats because they're not yet perfect enough for you, then all the Dems who tried to cater to you will get wiped out, and the survivors will see going left as a death sentence, and they'll stop doing it. They'll turn right again.