The Decline and Fall

Tracking what's to come. US politics, and the consequences of our mistakes. Reblogs and quotes do not indicate agreement.

[becauseweknewthem]

Adam Kinzinger just reminded me of this, and this is the blog where most people used to find me for this fight.

Where the fuck are all the second amendment, don’t tread on me, small government militia, I have my guns to defend against tyranny, guys?

You’ve been telling everyone for years that this is why we had to be on your side. That we were supposed to revere you for demanding infinite weapons without restriction. Because you’d defend all of us when shit went down. When the government attacked the people. That you were my only security against a government out of control, and you were willing and eager to do it.

Where the fuck are y’all now. And don’t give me that shit about how it’s only immigrants and criminals.

WH said it outright today. They wanna go after “home grown” ones. That’s citizens. No process no trial no jury. They’re gonna vanish citizens for disagreeing with them, exactly what they’re doing now to legal residents and green card holders and anyone with the wrong accent or any ink. They get grabbed. Into camps and across borders. You think it’s only criminals? They’re bullying lawyers and journalists and students. Next step is to label anyone that opposes them a criminal.

I can see the parallels with ruby ridge, can you? Except this time it’s not a single location with a person being watched for years. It’s everywhere. It’s broad daylight. It’s so rapid they’re grabbing random people on accident and keeping them because they have honest to fuck quotas for meet.

If you ever meant any of your posturing, where are you now?

Strange times and bedfellows, but if you meant it, that it’s about defending all of us, if you’re also calling your reps and demanding that they defend the constitution, you’ll have a hell if a lot more allies.

[bakerstreet-and-beyond]

There seems to be a general malaise on most of Tumblr about TikTok getting banned in the United States.

I understand the problems, "brain rot", whatever but- A government banning a social media app that opened the world for many people is legitimately scary and upsetting. Say what you want but, there are MANY global and local issues that would not have gotten the same traction, recognition, and outreach without TikTok.

And then add to this that Meta/Facebook was one the largest lobbyists working to get TikTok banned... Like- I think folks should be more concerned about the implications of what this means, especially since the ban goes into effect the day before inauguration.

[vaspider]

A lot of small businesses are just staring at a cliff coming right for them and they genuinely don't know what to do. It's hard to explain how good TikTok has been for a lot of little businesses. It's been accessible for people in a way that, like, Facebook hasn't been.

I never got really into it but I know a lot of small business owners who are really, really freaked out.

[foolishmortal]

I am no fan of TikTok, but this ban is not addressing the issues people have with that app. Misinformation and deliberately addicting, damaging content algorithms are valid concerns. What we need here is more regulation, something that the Republicans are notoriously allergic to. This sort of regulation would also set a precedent to go after other US-based companies that do the same thing (see Facebook's recent removal of their fact checking policies), which Big Tech and silicon valley will attempt to avoid at all costs by throwing a competitor under the bus and blaming it for all the sins in the world.

Tying these concerns to a specific actor, instead of to the system at large, will do absolutely nothing, unless the case against TikTok can be levied against other companies perpetuating the same bad behavior.

I'm an engineer not a corporate lawyer so I would love to hear from someone who is in that space, who may be able to look at the case in question against TikTok to see if using that as a precedent against other big Tech companies, is even possible. I personally doubt it, otherwise the rest of Big Tech would have lawyered up and protested against this.

[micdotcom]

Watch: President Jimmy Carter tells Oprah America is no longer a democracy, it’s an oligarchy — and he’s not wrong.

[blondebrainpowered]

Rest In Peace

[la-laborista-republiko]

[antifainternational]

Pro tips from original antifa.

[luckyfirerabbit]

Reblogging for reasons

[townlad-blog]

Wowsers. Is everything cool?

[becauseweknewthem]

bringing this back around

[liminalweirdo]

Stop Mask Bans

Take action to stop mask bans.

mask bans are fascist

[breelandwalker]

And just to be clear -

Mask bans have nothing whatever to do with personal autonomy or public health and everything to do with the fact that they interfere with facial identification software in surveillance equipment.

[becauseweknewthem]

I am so used to seeing the inverse - screeching that mask requirements are fascist - that I got angry faster than my brain could finish actually reading the words.

And yes, masks mess with facial recognition. Filters to make you look like XYZ train the recognition models. 'which celebrity do you look like' trains the model.

Cosplay the winter soldier if you need to avoid surveillance.

[saywhat-politics]

BREAKING: Matt Gaetz is threatening that if his sexual misconduct gets revealed, he’ll call out all the other pervert Republicans in Congress.

[becauseweknewthem]

Do ya promise?

[becauseweknewthem]

I have not had time to read fully or dig into details, but, gut reaction to Alvin Bragg charging Mangione with Murder as an act of Terrorism is that it will make it much much easier for authorities to broaden what they count as supporting him. Remember post 9/11 when all you had to do was call them french fries, not freedom fries, and some folks took that as proof that you were on the side of terrorism?

That's the cultural legacy this is happening under.

I don't have a coherent and expansive essay, just a deep certainty that using that word is going to make this a lot messier. Especially for a case in NYC

[creature-wizard]

So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?

I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.

[fierceawakening]

Yeah. I keep thinking about what it is people hate about “woke” and I honestly don’t think it’s the “we should be nice to more people even if they are weird” part, so much as it’s the “if you don’t know what our lingo means it’s because you are already evil” part.

There’s a lot of emphasis in leftist circles on like, “don’t be sad if your kid is gay or trans or autistic,” and… I honestly think it’s kind of wrongheaded?

Like don’t get it twisted! I I absolutely don’t think you should SAY TO your kid “you should be normal” because that will just upset them for no gain.

But if you had a vision of what the good life is supposed to be and it became clear your life isn’t that, including your life “as a parent” which EVERYONE HAS A MENTAL IMAGEABOUT grief is… predictable! Maybe even understandable.

We need to get better at saying “that grief is temporary. It’s not evil. It’s normal for someone who has been told a good life looks very narrow! The evil happens when instead of learning to adapt to a messy life that doesn’t fit that image, you get so scared you try to force it instead of slowly learning how to get used to something else instead.”

[fierceawakening]

My mom once told me someone had come to her for advice on how to accept their kid who’d just come out as gay.

They knew they SHOULD accept their kid and had no interest in harming their kid by rejecting them, but they’d always thought that was Wrong. They weren’t sure what to do with those feelings but couldn’t seem to just will them away.

They had to be helped to see things differently, which started with acknowledging “these are the feelings I currently have, which exist in spite of me wishing they didn’t.”

There’s a LOT in leftism, especially online leftism, where people who’ve rejected their bad views or feelings brag about it rather than acknowledge “I felt this way, and my reasons were crappy but understandable.”

Said it before will say it again but I thought for several years that accepting asexual people as queer would fundamentally alter gay culture in ways that would disconnect us from our history.

I was wrong, I’m glad I was wrong, and I feel very stupid for ever thinking it.

But fears of cultural shift, of losing traditions and associated spaces, are common, not rare. And they’re not always wrongheaded. It depends on things like what the traditions are and how the new people feel about helping preserve them.

I was human, not irredeemable.

[becauseweknewthem]

Saw a thing being all whiny, tumblr moral high ground about the CEO getting shot and I'm being the better person.

Yes, if you're cheering or encouraging - sincerely - for people to be killed through widespread vigilante violence, that is bad. That way lies chaos because you don't get to choose all of the deaths, so the people you love also get targeted. That is bad. Don't hope for that, because if there is a widespread use of it, you're headed towards the purge. Purge = Bad. Pretty sure we're agreed there.

However.

That doesn't mean you need to have any sympathy for the individual. Or the individual's family. You don't have pray for them. And that's not even a rule only for 'bad people' You can feel no real sympathy about a death of an innocent or a coworker. You can not give a damn. You can snort and be pleased that a person is gone. Your take can just be 'that sucks' and then go on with your day.

Also, yes, this low key sounds like psychopathy, but only in the overly-online sense. Humans don't have the capacity to be emotionally invested in every single other human. You cannot hold equal sympathy for our friend as we do for a CEO you've never met, who may have directly caused you harm.

[moved-to-korrigantsionnach-deac]

I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I'mma put him out of his misery.

[femonologue]

The king’s son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjects’ grievances, and a general’s like “how will you defeat the prophesied evil now? You’re old and weak.” Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdom’s public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.

No evil lives in this kingdom, says the teenager. It starved to death before I was born.

[femonologue]

Every once in a while, when I’m feeling down, I go and look at the notes on this post and they make me feel a lot better. This is the energy I want to carry into 2018.

[thestarfishdancer]

For those who need to carry it into 2019.

[noctumsolis]

And on to 2022

[durnesque-esque]

And into 2025

[libraford]

I am becoming aware of the effect a lack of trust in the media has had on people, paired with a dearth of research skills.

[libraford]

I'm thinking about the argument I got caught in yesterday- the subject of it doesn't matter.

Often, pseudoscience and misinformation comes packaged with a lot of very important sounding words, and the jargon gets to the point where it seems like a lot of work to fact check it. Which makes the 'I encourage you to do your own research' statements real obnoxious. If it's phrased in a way that's impossible to navigate, good luck.

It sucks, but you gotta.

If you don't want to fact check individual words, that's fine. That's a lot to ask of someone that's just trying to figure out whether something is true.

This is where we get into something called 'lateral research.' Instead of trying to draw a map to a sentence, you check the credibility of their source material.

This is your Snopes, your Fact Check/Media Bias, your Follow The Money.

Knowing more context about what someone is saying will save you a lot of time and energy.

If you're not sure about something, question it.

[zetabrarian]

I feel like I've been throwing this around a LOT lately, but:

Practice SIFT! SIFT is based on lateral research and can be very helpful for these situations.

DON'T just share information without doing your due diligence.

[elizeshiro]

whyyy the fuck does this not have more notes please rb this more often qwq

[libraford]

Well, I mean... probably because I posted it like an hour ago.

[weaselle]

STOP

i have found this post and infographic and i want to share it

INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE

zetabrarian's blog says they are a socially progressive librarian monsterfucker, which a quick scroll through their blog seems to support. This makes them pretty cool but not necessarily the perfect source -- anyone can say they are a librarian, and surely not every librarian is correct about processing information

FIND BETTER COVERAGE

if i go to a search engine (in this case google via firefox) i see that several universities, libraries from large municipalities (like Los Angeles) as well as the BBC all agree that this is a real method experts in information fields recommend. I wouldn't necessarily take any single one of these sources as 100% credible, but they are individually reasonably reliable, and taken together indicate a high probability of factual information

TRACE TO ORIGINAL CONTEXT

A brief search reveals that the SIFT method was created by Mike Caulfield, who is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. This is an extremely good source of information for how to process information on the internet. As the creator of the SIFT method, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops.

I could not find a post or page about SIFT written by Mike Caulfield himself, so i went to the University of Washington's website for this page about it, since that is the university that employs him.

It corroborates the above information, though there are a few notable differences. For example, under the "trace to original context" section in the Washington U. source (again, as close to the original as i could find) this step contains advice to check the date. This seems very good to include, as in the fast moving world of internet information, things become outdated or get updated very quickly, and yet first takes and outdated articles hang around and get shared for a long time.

EXTRA CREDIT

I personally find that it is important to outright search for the opposite information. For example, I put in a few searches like "Mike Caulfield discredited" "Mike Caulfield wrong" "SIFT method bad" etc. I found nothing showing me any indications this method has any problems. Interestingly, somehow this did turn up an article about news literacy on Medium, which was actually written by Mike Caulfield in April of 2017

[beemovieerotica]

dropping this here

[wokeuphighbyvanessacarlton]

Worth pointing out that in her capacity as VP Kamala Harris cast a tie breaking vote in the senate to save union pensions.

[becauseweknewthem]

I did, do, and will for a long time, want to strangle Joe Biden for many things, but he has never wavered on his love of unions and the working class of America.

[knottahooker]

Satire publication The Onion buys Alex Jones' Infowars at auction with help from Sandy Hook families

Families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims say the satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’ Infow

The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax. “The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement provided by his lawyers. The Onion acquired the conspiracy theory platform’s website; social media accounts; studio in Austin, Texas; trademarks; and video archive. The sale price was not immediately disclosed. The Onion said its “exclusive launch advertiser” will be the gun violence prevention organization Everytown for Gun Safety. “Everytown will continue to raise awareness on InfoWars’ channels about gun violence prevention and present actual solutions to our nation’s gun violence crisis, including bipartisan, common-sense measures and public safety initiatives backed by Everytown,” The Onion said in a statement Thursday. Jones confirmed The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars in a social media video Thursday and said he planned to file legal challenges to stop it.

There's more information in the article, but just posting this to say AHAHAHA GET FUCKED ALEX

[becauseweknewthem]

So someone burned Nick Fuentes house down, after he decided to fuck around, huh? How terrible. Truly tragic. I’m so upset. Shocking that he had to find out.

In all ways but literal, fuck that guy.

[becauseweknewthem]

Damn. The internet lied to me. But let’s go ahead and put that energy out there.

[becauseweknewthem]

So someone burned Nick Fuentes house down, after he decided to fuck around, huh? How terrible. Truly tragic. I’m so upset. Shocking that he had to find out.

In all ways but literal, fuck that guy.

[segamascott]

trump dies of congestive heart failure before being sworn in charge to like cast to reblog

[becauseweknewthem]

Nope.

The man is an idiot who surrounds himself with smarter people. As long as he's alive, he can continue to say insane shit that slows down the smarter people who would otherwise be able to easily enact their evils. Trump will say sixteen contradicting things about a policy from project 2025 that have to be untangled.

Also: President Vance is not an improvement.

Leave them shackled to the feeble old man so they have to try to spin all of grandpa's crazy talk

[becauseweknewthem]

Oh wow I can finally say this with confidence.

Approximately 5 years ago I made a post about types of guns, where I intentionally, massively simplified down some descriptions, somewhat facetiously, got a couple small details wrong in doing so, and that post went crazy. Like. Prompted the second highest number of threatening messages I received.

(And I got a lot of death threats on this account.) (I’m curious how long before I start getting them again.)

But anyway, that post. At first I responded to people in fairly respectful ways. I had made a mistake, which happens, so I reblogged with the correction. It barely got seen, but such is the way of this website.

Then I started to think things were weird. It just kept getting messages. And so did everything else I’d ever said about their precious pew-pews. To an alarming level. And it wasn’t reblogs with comments, which would make sense as a thing prompting more reactions. It was replies, almost always from accounts that rarely or never posted anything. Just blank accounts replying to posts with whiny bitching because they’re 2A zealots, so they’re react like the worst kind of comic book fan showing up to go “well ackshully” because you cited the wrong model iron man suit for him fighting a villain.

Eventually I froze this blog for separate reasons. I reactivated recently, and that post was in my head. Not as a “oh gosh, oh no it’ll start again!” Because; whatever, I can just keep blocking folks from that corner of the website. But because I knew that kind of thing would happen again, except now I expect it to be maga flavored that causes me the most trouble.

Y’all. This got reactivated less than a week ago. I have posted nothing about guns. I got a reply on that post a few minutes again. So I can now say, with high confidence, that the wackadoos really do scroll through tags, looking to complain, trying to start a fight.

They are that desperate to score a point. They’re also too scared to reblog or make it a real conversation. It’s the drive by shooting of anti-behavior.

Here we go again, and bring it the fuck on.