no, my dear; softly, knowing it was only the truth

30, bi, fiend/layabout/absent tomato plant parent AO3

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

i have a false tooth filled with a placebo in case i'm ever captured and need to be a control subject

[roomwithavoid]

[unadulteratedhideouttrash]

[bixbythemartian]

the funny story about the cat with a Hispanic-sounding name being summoned for jury duty because the cat was mysteriously registered to vote (even though the owner has never registered to vote, which is the 'punchline' of the story) is asking you to swallow some basic (racist, incorrect, and conservative) assumptions about the way voter registration works in the United States of America in the guise of a funny story about 'bureaucracy'.

[sunshinetheinspiration]

Link to the story in question

@bixbythemartian would you be willing to expand on this? I definitely didn’t read it that way and had questions about some details of the story myself but took it to be essentially “cat somehow gets on jury duty list, no one knows how or why but US gov bureaucracy is so ridiculous that the cat has to show up in person to be excused”

[bixbythemartian]

'us gov bureaucracy is so ridiculous that a cat has to show up in person to be excused from jury duty' is also expressing an inherently conservative viewpoint*, it's just a much more commonly accepted one.

but, to your point, the cat didn't 'somehow' get on the jury duty list, it was on the jury duty list very specifically because the cat was registered to vote. the unspoken assumption is that it's so easy to register to vote that even a cat can do it! the cat is even jokingly accused of voter fraud. of which, of course, the cat is innocent.

it is left to the reader's imagination how that happened, and who else could potentially register to vote.

this post is not in any way intending to blame anybody who read that and thought 'huh, what a funny story' and thought nothing more about it. this post is intending to demonstrate the ideology underlying the story going around, that one might have missed on a first reading.

*this is why they gutted a bunch of government services at the beginning of the current president's term, and continue to try to do so, in the name of cutting through red tape and inefficiency and useless spending. the number of people who have died to these cuts is currently unclear (the departments responsible for measuring such things also were massively cut and downsized), but estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, at the moment, and projected to go into the millions.

[clearlyafandomblog]

also it appears that the story is a retelling ripoff of a real story that happened all the way back in 2010. here's an article from 2011 bemoaning the circulation of the viral story as if it was breaking news when it was (at the time) already a year old:

Jury Duty Cat: Why a Viral Story Is a Media Fail

When One Website Reported a Year-Old Story as New, Dozens of Big Outlets Followed; Welcome to the Web Rewrite Echo Chamber

i admit, i also uncritically reblogged that story, in no small part because i knew a cat had in fact been summoned for jury duty before! the voter registration stuff pinged as odd, but the humor of the situation overrode my inner critic. in the original, real story, the cat had been listed as a pet in the census, which is how he somehow ended up on the jury roll. the other details - right on down to the first exemptions being denied and a vet being asked to write testimony that the potential juror was in fact, a cat - were lifted directly from this sixteen-year-old news story.

knowing all this now, it's almost impossible not to see the doctoring of the story as what it is - a pernicious and intentional production of conservative dogwhistling horseshit. knowing that the SAVE act is in senate yet again, it is difficult to imagine this registered voter cat story as anything but malicious propaganda designed to sow doubt around our voting systems.

[beardedmrbean]

[rosieandthemoon]

[muppetshow2026]

i genuinely feel like im being edged

[abigailspinach]

[clownboybebop]

*street shot of zohran mamdani clad in nasty lil suit and hard hat* five months ago i was elected mayor of new york city. in that time, we have managed to COMPLETELY defeat the Staten Island Minotaur at no additional cost to the new york taxpayer

[miasanmuller]

the most important thing to take from this all is how football unites us. all of us, across different continents, speaking different languages, with different beliefs, all of us, in this brief moments, united around what really matters: our hatred towards argentina

[pangur-and-grim]

I hope my spider fucking book will hold universal appeal

[pangur-and-grim]

[depsidase]

[baddywronglegs]

I want to work in a treehouse where at most once a month someone has a question about something I'm obsessed with or allowed to lie to them about

[hustlerose]

dj multiple orgasms wants to keep the vibe going

[furby-yeehaw]

*going to a festival that celebrates what has for a long time been considered sexual degeneracy by society* Oh boy I sure hope I don’t encounter anything that society views as sexually degenerate!

[bleekay]

you might think shane at 18-19 would have been too anxious about being seen buying sex toys to go into a shop about it and would have ordered his one dildo online, but i argue he would have been more anxious to put his real name and address and card info on any website attached to the purchase of a sex toy, so he would in fact go into a shop with cash in his wallet, sunglasses and ballcap on, and when checking out would announce completely unprompted to the person at the counter, who does not care, that he is buying this for a Girl, his Girlfriend, in fact. yeah i just travel a lot for work, you know, so it's a gift for her, like for when i'm gone. it's for her birthday actually which is next week, yeah. do you offer gift wrapping actually. oh great, yeah just a gift bag is fine, and i'll get a card too while i'm at it. thanks.

[fleur-aesthetic]

instagram | scarlettandjoy

[leahgardner-art]

apéritifs