Goals

[silvervvings]

as a Canadian I don’t really feel it’s my place to way in on the American election however since I have to see MAGA hats when I go out I think I can have an opinion. America really doesn’t understand how much their election effects the geo political climate of other countries, America’s devolution into facism is going to have consequences for literally every other country in some way shape or form.

i’m already seeing people blame third party voters and as disappointing as it is Kamala has no one but herself to blame, she sees that a huge chunk of her voter base refuses to vote for her because of one big issue and she refused to make concessions which is her job as a politician. Centrism/moderate politics have no place in the current political climate and I think that’s what a lot of people don’t get especially liberals, they think they’re catering to a larger voting base but they’re just alienating potential supporters, maybe the dems with learn from this for next election but i doubt it.

[motioncityshakespeare]

Sorry for my ignorance, what's the "one big issue" that she refused to make concessions for?

[silvervvings]

it’s wasn’t just one thing but her stance on Palestine and the fact that she was often unwilling to address it in a genuine way was a huge factor in many being unwilling to vote for her. her stances on the military and the police turned off many potential voters from the left.

[motioncityshakespeare]

I am having trouble confirming that any of that is actually true. I know that there's been a lot of internet discourse about that and that some people were saying not to vote for her for those reasons, but I'm not actually sure there was any real impact on the votes she did or did not get because of that. Based on what little I found about that, even in the aftermath where everyone is picking apart the results and trying to find reasons that she lost, I don't think those issues were big enough to enough voters to actually impact the final results.

I originally replied to this post because I think it's a bad take and I think I stand by that. Yeah, we lost, and yeah things are going to get really really bad. I think this is the exact time that trying to make the democratic party out to be unyielding monsters is a really bad idea - the only thing gained at this moment by infighting is gained by the right. We win nothing over fighting against ourselves.

A Trump presidency is going to be worse for everyone than a Harris presidency would have been, especially given Congress and the courts. Not voting for her for really any reason would have been quite stupid - Palestinians are not going to be better off for her losing, the only people who feel better about that may be the ones who smugly chose not to vote for her out of a messed up sense of what political action means. But right now the best thing we can do is work together to fight the right as much as we can. If they split us into splinter groups of leftists and progressives and single issue groups focused solely on Palestine or abortion or trans issues at the expense of all other issues, so we're just left fighting each other as the right destroys the world economy, women and minority rights, black bags and deports people by the thousands, we are doing nothing to make the world better, we're only - at best - making ourselves feel better for taking a principled stand. But principles don't mean much in a gulag, survival does.

[celestial-blight]

There are no rules, no laws that exist that bind you. Trump could legally demand that every queer person walk off a cliff, and you wouldn't need to listen to him.

Trump could take away so much from us, but he can't take away our free will. We can do anything, and that's why they're afraid of us.

Take over your local government!

Build support systems!

He doesn't need to stay in power.

Create a local community that's safe for queer people!

And for me, the biggest thing we need to do, depose the Democratic party. They've proven they're miserable failures incapable of standing against fascism, and we need to replace them with something else. We NEED a progressive party, and we needed it 200 years ago.

[motioncityshakespeare]

The intensity that Tumblr folks feel their feelings is insane. Y'all, this is like so far away from how things actually work and what good ideas actually are.

Anyone see that post about unions and how they are a way to organize because they already have the machinery and organization to handle working with thousands and thousands of people and how difficult it is to build that from the ground up? Yeah, that's what "a new political party" would be, at an even grander scale.

I think people really don't understand the absolute insane about of time, money, people, organization, communication, etc that any kind of politics requires. Who's going to start that process for a new political party? Who's going to invest in that, in any capacity? You have to have a certain measure of inertia and momentum to get people to actually believe you have a chance of success (which is the whole point of this response) and it's going to be a long time before any brand new political party can get that. Especially if they are competing with the existing Democratic Party.

Maybe the time to try and start a new political party and put in all of that time and effort and social/political l/human capital is not when every day, month, and year counts. Maybe we could focus on avoiding a Gilead situation first.

[roycohn]

for a minute i definitely forgot that kanye west had changed his name to ye and was wondering why this accusatory headline was written in shakespearean language

[silvervvings]

as a Canadian I don’t really feel it’s my place to way in on the American election however since I have to see MAGA hats when I go out I think I can have an opinion. America really doesn’t understand how much their election effects the geo political climate of other countries, America’s devolution into facism is going to have consequences for literally every other country in some way shape or form.

i’m already seeing people blame third party voters and as disappointing as it is Kamala has no one but herself to blame, she sees that a huge chunk of her voter base refuses to vote for her because of one big issue and she refused to make concessions which is her job as a politician. Centrism/moderate politics have no place in the current political climate and I think that’s what a lot of people don’t get especially liberals, they think they’re catering to a larger voting base but they’re just alienating potential supporters, maybe the dems with learn from this for next election but i doubt it.

[motioncityshakespeare]

Sorry for my ignorance, what's the "one big issue" that she refused to make concessions for?

[thebreakfastgenie]

"how are the democrats so good at losing?" why don't you ask how the republicans are so good at winning?? stop acting like democrats are the only political party with agency. republicans do things on purpose.

[choppywaterswiftboats]

^^ It seems to me that I haven’t seen many people acknowledging that republicans are good at winning because they lie and because they have a multimillion dollar industry committing to getting them elected and backing up their lies.

I’ve seen statistics correlating misinformed views to voting choice, a study about how respondents preferred Kamala’s policies over Trump’s when they weren’t told who had which set of policies, people discussing ‘vibes-based politics’—but in my opinion all this analysis is incomplete without confronting how republicans have a veritable propaganda machine working for them. It’s pretty hard for democrats to fight that. We have to rely on average donations from normal people when corporations/rich individuals can invest millions into networks who will try to get people elected who will give them tax breaks.

[thebreakfastgenie]

#seriously I want more people to talk about the sheer amount of damage rupert murdoch has done to this country#fox news is the most viewed cable news network in the country.#i remember a few months back harris’ campaign had success bringing project 2025 to the public’s attention#but democrats still don’t have anything comparable @choppywaterswiftboats

Fun fact that I will tell literally everyone all the time!!! A former Nixon staffer said they would have survived Watergate if they had their own news network. And that staffer's name was Roger Ailes!

[harpyharpyharpy]

Books to read:

Dark Money: An examination of the Koch Empire, and its patronage and entanglement in Right wing media, politics, and lobbying.

Messengers of the Right: A history of the conservative media landscape, beginning with talk radio (Clarence Manion, before the era of Rush Limbaugh), through periodicals like the National Review, and notable books, like God and Man at Yale. I'm sorry, but you don't know half as much as you think you do about American political history if you don't know who William F Buckley is. All of this walked, so Fox News could run.

Let Them Eat Tweets: A political synthesis of history, economics, and communication scholarship that posits wedge-issue-identity-politics as the method by which contemporary conservative parties drive their white working class bases away from class-based solidarity toward a party that serves only economic elites. That, Hacker and Pierson argue, is how you explain the escalation of billionaire oligopoly, rising economic inequality, and fanatic racism/other bigotries.

If you can understand these patterns and these histories, you'll begin to see why the GOP has nosedived into overtly fascist rhetoric, while STILL successfully courting voters who vote against their material economic interests.

There are no surprises here.

[communistkenobi]

I don’t really want to wade into discourse too much today because I know everyone is extremely miserable online rn but I think if you want to give people genuine advice on what to do politically, “join a union/get involved in your current union/organise your workplace” or “join ACORN/a tenant union/etc” is much more actionable advice than like “build community.”

the problem with “community” is that it doesn’t have the same formal infrastructure / resources / political connections / organising capacity that allows your hard work to have reach far beyond your immediate circle (which is what a union has), and also because like, “community” is an extremely vague and abstract concept that can mean anything from a local restaurant run by your neighbour to a church to your dnd friend group. Reaching out and helping your neighbours is a good thing, lots of people are having a really tough time and helping people around you pay rent or take care of their family or etc is a good thing and you should feel good doing that, but in response to the complete institutional and political failure of electoral liberalism I think the next best option is to turn towards already existing national infrastructure that can mobilise people without requiring you to individually maintain dedicated personal relationships with everyone around you. In my experience + the experience of many long-time activists that I know, relying on interpersonal connections to organise and get things done leads to highly sectarian, disorganised, toxic, and unpleasant organising conditions. The cold impersonal bureaucracy of union membership is legitimately a good solution to this problem.

there are many little positions of power available in these organisation that become open to you for as low a cost as showing up to zoom meetings. I have personally been elected to positions in various unions/orgs literally because I was someone who showed up to meetings! Nobody goes to committee meetings! You get annual budgets! You get to pass votes, organise events, spend money on organising materials! You get to buy food for people! Organising is so much easier in these spaces.

And of course, you are going to face the same ideological resistance, apathy, ignorance, incompetence, and bigotry that you would at your local queer meet-up or community neighbourhood council, and I have no illusions about the institutional limits of unions (which can also be reactionary, bigoted, highly disorganised, incompetent, toxic, and so on), but if you want to avoid completely exhausting yourself and resenting everyone around you, you don’t need to build “community” from the ground up, there are already structures out there where you can do good work. For all the resistance there is to unions and union activity, you will face that same level of resistance with local organising but have none of the power, resources, or institutional legitimacy already secured by unions

[alexanderwales]

Here's a legal PSA:

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.

Know your rights. Don't let eccentric detectives put you away.

[motioncityshakespeare]

Well except, at least in the US, actually getting to court takes years of sitting in prison to accomplish. Hence why plea deals make up some insane percent of all people sentenced to prison, because it's shorter than waiting in prison until a trial and then possibly going back for even longer depending on the outcome.

[thebreakfastgenie]

If Harris' campaign was faultless is that you saying that you support genocide or like, that you didn't know about her pro-genocide stance?

You know I've kept quiet about this for various reasons but I think that was a mistake.

Referring to the Harris's position as a "pro-genocide stance" is a bad rhetorical trick. The left has done it before, calling people COVID-deniers and climate-deniers for not sharing your exact position. It's not helping your cause. Most people don't see "support for Israel in line with the mainstream status quo" as a "pro-genocide stance." I don't believe that deep down you really think Harris's position is identical to full-throated support for genocide. Only one candidate has said he wants Gaza turned into a parking lot. That candidate won, so come January you're probably going to find out what full-throated American support for genocide looks like. People who don't agree with your description of Harris's policies as pro-genocide think you sound absurd. They think you're a crank with fringe positions. Whether you're right or not always using the most extreme possible language is only alienating more people and making fewer people take you seriously. Having observed this for a while now, I don't believe most cases are people trying to make a sincere moral argument. Most cases I see, like your message, are bad faith shock value. I see this happen so much, you confuse radical politics with base edginess.

It's not doing anything to help Palestinians. Your screaming at people that they support genocide because they won't want Trump to be president hasn't worked. Now the guy with a settlement named after him is going to be in charge and he's already said he'll let Netanyahu do whatever he wants. If I turned around what you say to Democrats on you, and said you need to do a better job of persuading people and not alienating them, you'd probably say "but there's genocide on the line!" But... that's exactly it, isn't it? If making rhetorical concessions and saying things you found cringe, or you generally feeling kinda bad, was the price of stopping a genocide, wouldn't it be worth it? This kind of messaging comes from people who are more invested in the moral high ground of yelling at people about genocide than in doing anything about it. I don't respect that.

[motioncityshakespeare]

jfc, this this this. Read it and then read it again. Really think about it, especially that last paragraph.

[futchdoctor]

[teathattast]

[michaelmilkers]

in 2004 george w bush won the presidential election and promised in his acceptance speech to codify a federal ban on gay marriage. 30 states passed bans on gay marriage in the wake of his re-election. and then they fell. one by one by one. it has to get worse before it gets better.

queers. trans people especially. our attitude for the next decade has to be “we’re not fucking scared of you”. do you understand? this has always been at the core of who we are and what we do. we fucking move. we take up space or carve out our own with our bare hands. we take care of us.

do you know the other queers in your neighborhood? do you know who you can call at a bad time? do you know whose house you can crash at? do you know where you can go for a free meal? do you know where you can bring meals to the hungry? do you know the LGBT resources available in your area? do you know the informed consent clinics in your area?

do you know how DIY HRT works? do you know and have friends who don’t? do you know our history? have you read the works of james baldwin and leslie feinberg? are you equipped with knowledge about the forces that work against us? do you understand dialectical materialism? do you know what to say if stopped by the police? do you know what good opsec is? are your legal documents in order? do you know how to get them in order?

scream, cry, rot in your bed, do whatever you need to do to process this, then find something to do. do not fall into despair. in the face of extermination say “fuck you.”

[no815]

[your-dewey-decimal-number-is]

709.051

modern art in the 21st century

[mini-wrants]

I'm immediately unfollowing anyone who says "democrats didn't try to win and they pondered to the middle".

Democrats bullied their candidate, a sitting president, off the fucking ticket after one bad debate, that's how badly democrats wanted to win.

Democrats have amassed huge petition drives across the entire fucking nation for abortion rights, that's how bad Democrats wanted to win.

I'm sorry you decided that your single issue was more important than other people's single issue, so important you threw away your vote for it.

You announced last November that you wouldn't be voting, and you were listened to and treated accordingly. If you weren't served, it's because you removed yourself from the table.

[mini-wrants]

I was called a bootlicker a year ago for bringing to light all the good shit democrats have been accomplishing.

You never gave a fuck, and you'll continue to not give a fuck, because it doesn't affect you.

Meanwhile my dad's probably losing his health insurance, his food stamps, and his SSI despite being fully disabled in the next few months if Trump pulls this off.

[mini-wrants]

Remember when the leftist from a different country said I needed to act more like the leftists in Michigan who had gone to college campuses to register voters and collect petition signatures for abortion accesss, even though that's literally how I had spent an entire summer and fall in 2022?

That's what you fucking sound like!

You do not know how hard people worked just for smug assholes to throw it in our faces that we didn't do enough to earn *your* vote.

Sorry it's not legal to pull a gun on someone and force them to vote!

[mini-wrants]

"Even though Kamala said she'd keep funding genocide I still wanted her to win" yeah is that what she said? Did she say that?

She said "I like genocide let's keep funding it" is that what she said? She didn't say Israel was a strategic ally but that we needed to crack down on inhumane treatment and human rights abuses being committed and recommit to a 2 state solution?

Cause Trump said that Democrats were jew-haters for not letting Israel go farther, and Trump said he'd been negotiating personally with Netenyahu (I guess not on a ceasefire), and then 5 years ago he assassinated an Iranian general, and before that Israel named a settlement in the Golan Heights after him because he "gave" them the land, so I want to be real fucking clear on what she said about funding genocide right now.

[mini-wrants]

Trump promised a Muslim Ban and then he delivered a Muslim ban and he said he would appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe and then he did that too, so let's hope the republican comments about turning Gaza into a parking lot weren't meant literally.

[bicokun]

I mean, there are a lot of Democrats saying they hope Gaza gets turned into a parking lot right now too, so

Scratch a liberal…

[mini-wrants]

Damn that's totally the same thing as a Presidential candidate saying she wanted to fund genocide. Those random Twitter users are Democratic politicians elected to serve on the US government, wow I had no idea.

Do the people on the left who leave messages in the comments and notes of my posts telling me to kill myself for voting for abortion rights all serve on Jill Stein and Cornell West's campaigns, or do you think they're just random angry people.

[mini-wrants]

Damn, you know who else would have welcomed you with open arms and called you brother outside of the Alt-Right?

A bowling league. A hiking club. A native plant association. A birding group on facebook. A role play group.

[mini-wrants]

You were searching for a community and instead of, idk, looking up a LOTR fan group on reddit or something, you found Neo Nazis. And then you....pretended to be one?? For the companionship?

I'm a member of 3 different Sims Fan groups on Facebook my guy.

[mini-wrants]

Anyway I'm very sorry you feel bad about being male, texts are going out to black people about being slaves, girls are hearing "your body my choice" in the cafeteria, and women are dying on gurneys because their fetus still has a heartbeat.

Hearing my body was worth nothing more than the womb within it for decades did not turn me into a TradWife or a Nazi, so like. Skill issue I guess.

[mini-wrants]

If my lily-white ass can resist the alt right then so can yours. Put up a poster of John Brown and Pete Seegar in your house and sign up for a drop in softball league.

[mini-wrants]

We literally made a Hollywood comedy that explained step by step how to make friends as a man like....

[transhuman-priestess]

"stop talking about how its economics and start talking about how its racism" bruh i don't know how to explain to you that the racism follows from the economics

nobody wants to hear that shit actually does suck for everyone and its really really easy to get the most powerful of the rabble to blame the least powerful

If the Biden/Harris admin had actually done literally anything to ameliorate high rent, low wages, high food costs, etc in the past 4 years they wouldn't have been blindsided by their literal predecessor coming in and blaming the same people he blamed last time for his problems that they manifestly failed to fix.

[motioncityshakespeare]

I don't know how to handle reading these posts that say "if they had just fixed things we wouldn't be here!!!" when the very people who just took back power made it nigh impossible for those who just lost power to actually accomplish anything. Almost like they knew that if they hamstrung the administration then they'd have an easier chance getting back into power.

Plus, like, the fucking administration did do shit. The chips act? The IRA? These were sweeping pieces of legislation that managed to pass and will (until they are scrapped) make some things better in some arenas. Which is more than you can say for any republican administration in, what, a century?

Did I get back on Tumblr just to watch it fall to the Russian propaganda mill or do people actually believe it's this simple and that the democratic party is the problem here??

[transhuman-priestess]

Which one of my Terfy ex’s friends are you again

Anyway, more to the point, you can't point at graphs and say "see things are great" when groceries cost 3x as much as they did 4 years ago, when you force everyone back to work, when you go back on your promises to put out stimulus checks, etc.

Do you want to win on your terms or do you want to win for real

[motioncityshakespeare]

I'm... trans. I don't know if that is mutually exclusive with being a terf but I can say that this is the first time I've ever been accused of that particular transgression.

This is pretty on key for Tumblr though, from what I remember

[ms-demeanor]

Trump 2016 was nothing compared to what's coming and you know it.

No I don't, and you don't either.

One of the problems that I have with electoralism is that every election is the most important election of our lives. Every election is the last one to save democracy. Every election is the only way that we can protect the marginalized otherwise so you have to vote blue no matter who or you're going to be killed in the streets by the red team.

This is propaganda to get people to vote, but what it also does is reinforce the idea that the only people who can save you are the ones on the ballot.

There are people all over the world living under fascist regimes, living in war zones, living in dictatorships, who are supporting one another. There are trans communities under Modi and queers in Russia and people who provide underground reproductive healthcare in Iran and people who provide medical care to their neighbors in tents in Gaza.

What you are doing is American exceptionalism in a liberal hat. This is NOT the end of the fucking world. This is NOT the worst disaster you will ever face. This is NOT a reason to give up or to stop caring or to stop working or to lay down and die.

Is this a good thing that has happened? No. But bad things happen all the time and we keep going.

If you must wallow, then wallow, but I've got shit to do just like I did last week.

[motioncityshakespeare]

... None of what you said actually supports the argument that you don't know that it's about to get worse, and that this is going to be worse than the 2016-2020 era. In fact, your angry response kind of makes it sound like you expect it to get pretty fuckin bad, given your examples.

[transhuman-priestess]

"stop talking about how its economics and start talking about how its racism" bruh i don't know how to explain to you that the racism follows from the economics

nobody wants to hear that shit actually does suck for everyone and its really really easy to get the most powerful of the rabble to blame the least powerful

If the Biden/Harris admin had actually done literally anything to ameliorate high rent, low wages, high food costs, etc in the past 4 years they wouldn't have been blindsided by their literal predecessor coming in and blaming the same people he blamed last time for his problems that they manifestly failed to fix.

[motioncityshakespeare]

I don't know how to handle reading these posts that say "if they had just fixed things we wouldn't be here!!!" when the very people who just took back power made it nigh impossible for those who just lost power to actually accomplish anything. Almost like they knew that if they hamstrung the administration then they'd have an easier chance getting back into power.

Plus, like, the fucking administration did do shit. The chips act? The IRA? These were sweeping pieces of legislation that managed to pass and will (until they are scrapped) make some things better in some arenas. Which is more than you can say for any republican administration in, what, a century?

Did I get back on Tumblr just to watch it fall to the Russian propaganda mill or do people actually believe it's this simple and that the democratic party is the problem here??