Untitled

[thetourguidebarbie]

Supreme court came down with two earth-shattering decisions this morning:

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo allows courts to make decisions that used to be the job of federal agencies.

If the FDA says hormone treatments are safe, the court can now say "mmm, nah" and ban those treatments.

The court can ban mifepristone or miscarriage care contrary to medical experts.

The court can lower requirements by the EPA that regulates climate change.

The court can overrule trade rules by the FTC.

The court could require less safety regulation on airplanes.

And much much more!!

This is very very bad, and the way to solve this problem is by voting for Joe Biden so that he can replace Thomas and Alito when they die. If you care about marginalized communities, PLEASE vote.

City of Grant Pass v. Johnson says that criminalizing/fining people for sleeping outside (aka being homeless) isn't cruel and unusual punishment. It will punish people of color and disabled people disproportionately.

On my knees begging you to vote for Joe Biden. You cannot sit this one out. Activism is not tweeting or blogging. You are not helping by not exercising your right to vote, a right that can and will be taken from you if Joe Biden is not reelected.

Edit: they also dismissed some charges against January 6 defendants but quite frankly that is not as important, even though that's what everyone is freaking out about.

[animentality]

[nateconnolly]

[skullchicken]

If you have achieved something, please remember to observe a mandatory period of basking in the warm glow of your achievement like a lizard on a stone, lest you teach your brain that effort is futile, actually, because it didn't get to enjoy its happy chemicals, so, naturally, nothing good ever comes of trying. (And no, avoiding punishment is not a reward!)

I recommend, like, 5% of basking time in relation to whatever time you invested into achieving the thing minimum. And if you can't make your own bask, friend-brought is fine (= tell your friends!).

[mariacallous]

[hopefulmisanthrope]

I decided not to watch tonight because at this point I don't care if Sesame Street puppeteers are dragging Biden's embalmed hand across the bottom of the executive orders, decent stuff keeps coming out of this administration, and also I don't love the rapist autocrat with the cognitive impairment who wants to have Putin's babies. I've kept up with the news pretty steadily since 1998. I earned a night off.

[noodleincident]

ok i almost wish he spelled this incredibly obvious fact out bc people are being dumb about it and it’s annoying me. if (when 🙏🏾) he’s reelected he gets to nominate the next 4 years of scotus justices. that’s what changes.

[annacaffeina]

The biggest problem I have with the way people watched this debate and engage with the upcoming election overall is the time spent debating whether or not Joe Biden is a good president or a fit president. At length. Over and over. In detail.

As if the other option wasn't Donald fuckin trump. Noted worst person.

[mariacallous]

[afloweroutofstone]

Nothing like an uninterrupted Trump monologue about immigration to be reminded that, underneath all of his buffonish entertainment value, this is still a person who would commit an ethnic cleansing if he ever had a real chance at it

[mariacallous]

[pbs-r]

nothing solidifies generational bond more than remembering discontinued candies that you can’t even be sure were real

[pbs-r]

[animazed]

[azureandie]

[thickness-protection-program]

Creme savers were actually brought back!! It's just only the strawberry and orange ones and I've only been able to find them at hobby lobby of all places

[carsonjonesfiance]

One thing the analysts back in 2012 were right about is that they’d stop calling it “Obamacare” the second it started working and lo and behold anytime it was actually threatened under Trump it became The ACA and now Leftists who were in Kindergarten when the ACA was passed think Democrats have added nothing to this country.

[ifyouknowmeirlgoaway]

It's so fucking infuriating that people are like "Disabled kids will just be violent and teachers need to accept that" because imagine that in literally any other job. Imagine if he worked construction or farming or medicine and got injured--we'd all recognize that even if injury happens sometimes, the employer needs to do whatever they can to minimize the risk of it happening and minimize the damage that does occur. But with teachers we just expect them to accept the risks, whether it be violence from their students getting frustrated and punching them or bringing literal guns to school.

Like there could be smaller class sizes and more teachers, so if a kid is getting upset with one teacher another can take over or even take the kid to somewhere quiet to chill out. There should be a variety of snacks available to kids who are hungry. Parents should have to meet with an expert to come up with a strategy at home to help minimize violence. And the expert should be able to connect the parents with support, including financial support, to make sure they're able to spend time with their kid working on emotional regulation. The expert should also be there to help the teacher work with that one specific kid and their specific issues, because maybe their signs of frustration aren't as clear or the normal methods to calm kids down don't work for them. Even when you can't 100% remove the risks, there are things you can do! The problem is none of those things are getting done.

Instead we've got a teacher who got hit (and again, no evidence that the kid was young or disabled, just some assumptions, but teachers are absolutely getting assaulted by older non-disabled kids) and the parents' solution is a banana, and a bunch of people expecting him to just accept it. What happens when the kid gets frustrated in the afternoon, what is the one calming banana he eats in the morning gonna do then? What happens when the source of frustration isn't hunger?

Like we literally just watched a teacher almost get killed by a very young student while the parents and administration stood by and did nothing, and then tried to blame the teacher.

The teacher's original tweet is about how teachers are leaving the profession, especially teachers who support high needs kids, so everyone's reaction of "Guy just needs a different job" is so ignorant and will only mean that disabled kids end up even more neglected than they already are. Every teacher in America right now is asking themselves if they need a different job! Our education system is on the verge of collapse because people don't want to deal with the fact that teachers are workers and they deserve rights and support the same as every other worker.

[possiblyscrewed]

Championing workers’ rights didn’t become popular because people understand the importance or care about material conditions. It’s popular because now it’s possible to get social capital by going “fuck my boss, I’m gonna harm him on purpose (strike, slack off, steal from work, etc).” AND it creates a huge bad ruling class that it’s socially acceptable to hate without nuance.

You have a double whammy here because a. everyone has had a teacher before, therefore teacher = ruling class who has had or does have power over the poor oppressed working class. And b. in pop culture social justice you can’t have a victim without a bad guy, and you can’t have a bad guy who isn’t evil, and a child can’t be that evil bad guy. Ergo, the teacher can’t be harmed by the child and should just deal with it.

As a healthcare worker (who has also been assaulted at work, as many of us have) for a long time I thought that if only people realized what our day to day is like and that we are workers just like them they would be nicer about the shit we have to deal with. Eventually I realized that leftist culture is more invested in ensuring that healthcare workers are always people that it is socially and morally correct to abuse. So they will always refuse solidarity with us as a group. I’m less familiar with the teaching side since I’m not a teacher, but I’ve seen enough posts about how all education and teachers are awful and evil to assume it’s the same situation.

Oh and the healthcare system (or, the side of it that poor people can access and afford) is also on the verge of collapse. Because why would people stay in a profession where you take physical and emotional damage on a daily basis and the only response is “if you didn’t want to deal with that you shouldn’t have picked that career”

[unbotheredmuse]

[ot3]

If you don't know this already, please try and internalize it: the idea that people join the US military primarily because they are young people at a disadvantage in life coerced into believing it is the most accessible path to upward mobility is not true.

if you're parroting this talking point, you are doing propaganda for the US military and you just need to stop saying it. here's an article from the Military Times that breaks the finding of various studies like this one from 2020 and this one from 2018 that analyze motivations for joining the military and popular conceptions of motivations for joining the military. Here's a pretty important excerpt:

Further, they hypothesized that some of this possible misconception about poorer Americans joining the military was a geographical issue. While the Defense Department tracks the zip codes of recruits ― and historically, many of them come from more rural areas in the southeast ― it doesn’t track their incomes or their parents’ incomes, which leads to assumptions that the poorer their communities, the poorer the recruits. [...] Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 1997 to 2008, they found that the services have recruited primarily from the middle class, America’s largest socio-economic demographic. “We show that recent recruits tend to have higher than average socioeconomic background: they disproportionally come from the middle of the family income, family wealth, and cognitive skill distributions, with both tails under-represented,” they found.

Here's from the army times:

Surveyed troops said these were the top five reasons for staying in the Army. The percentages indicate how many troops felt the factors were “extremely important” to them:

- Opportunity to serve my country — 53.5% - How well my retirement pay or benefits will meet my future needs — 45.1% - Opportunities to lead or train soldiers — 43.5% - My sense of purpose — 38.1% -How well my pay or benefits meet my present needs — 37%

Also mentioned in other sources but here from the NY times in 2020 as well, army enlistment is becoming increasingly skewed towards being the children of people who have previously served.

The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor.

'Joining the army to lift yourself out of poverty' is not the reality for military service, it is the narrative used by the military in it's marketing and recruitment. if you go around repeating it i hope for your sake you're at least on their payroll! if you're going to bootlick don't do it for free!

[prof-grace-aspen]

If you (like me) want 3rd party candidates to be an actual viable option in USA elections so you no longer have to vote for Democrats OR Republicans as your first and only choice, then what we need is Ranked Choice Voting. In order for that to happen, we as voters have to do two things:

Vote Democrat this fall, because Republicans fucking hate Ranked Choice Voting, and in several Republican-run states they have outlawed it. So if you want it, you have to keep Democrats in power in your state.

Lobby for and then vote for Ranked-choice voting in your state!Many American states have already adopted Ranked Choice voting and several more are set to do so in 2024. The ball is literally already rolling on this, we just need YOU to help it along.

[transfaguette]

i kind of wish the anti voting people wouldn’t dance around the idea of what happens after the election. Like okay, the democrats lose, you taught them a lesson (and fwiw, I do think its a legitimate message to send- the people are not happy with the actions and status quo of the DNC). Now What. Trump, the multiply indicted crime president who incited a violent mob upon the capitol, is now President. He has all the qualities you hate about Biden, AND more, except he and his administration have even less reason to be sensitive to the wishes of their democratic constituents. He is a puppet for the far right and white supremacists and christian nationalists. I really shouldn’t even have to go over this- we LIVED it already. Genuinely asking, is this what you want? Because frankly I do not think 4 more years of Trump is worth it over Biden. Your hands are not clean, this is the future you want to choose. I just don’t understand why.

[hyperlexichypatia]

"The revolution" is not an acceptable answer.

[naamahdarling]

"the revolution" will outright kill people, the very ones doomers and accelerationists claim to be most concerned about. I shouldn't even have to qualify statements with "I don't like Biden". It isn't about liking it not liking him. It's about the fucking nightmare things will become under Trump. It's about surviving and working relentlessly and thanklessly for incremental change until larger change can be made, and a great many people invested in doing that work will either not survive or will be too burdened scrabbling to that they become unable to do that work. People need to fix their shit about this. In four years the fucking shitstain could be DEAD. Let's buy ourselves those four years for Christ's sake.

[jungwildeandfree]

like i am sorry you are uncomfortable with the possibility of being complicit in the atrocities perpetrated by the global north. but guess what, you already are. it's the privilege of being a citizen in The imperial center that allows you to pretend that your uwu good person pilatepilled abstention of civic duty is morally neutral. citizenship in a power is complicity in its policy, and the only way to ease our complicity as citizens is to act with every means available to us. that includes voting.

[fremedon]

People in the replies talking about all of the work they are doing in their communities "instead" of voting-- the restorative justice and the mutual aid and the land back and all of the other good, useful, and necessary work--

Why is this an instead? Why can you not do these things AND take a couple hours out of one day of your life to vote? Do you think any of this organization is going to be easier under Trump?

"I am doing these other kinds of activism instead of canvassing / phone banking / get out the vote" -- that makes sense! You have a finite amount of time and energy! No one can do all of the work!

"I am doing these other kinds of activism instead of voting" -- Uh-huh. And are these other kinds of activism in the room with us now? Or is your "activism" actually just "yelling on tumblr?"

If you were doing anything tangible in the world, it would be affected by the laws and policies you live under--the ones that will determine whether and what your kids eat at school; and what they learn there; and how your communities and protests are policed; and the conditions in the jails; and how likely you are to see the inside of one for sheltering undocumented people or providing abortion pills or DIY HRT.

If you were doing that work, you would know real people for whom a second Trump administration would mean deportation or forcible detransition or quitting college or going hungry, and you would need to be able to look them in the eye.

If you were doing that work, you would know that working with other people to achieve a goal sometimes requires compromising, even on issues that are important to you, but that getting things done, even incrementally, is worth that compromise.

If you were doing that work, you would have the experience of making things happen in the real world--gardens planted, children fed, houses built--and you would know that getting your hands dirty working is so, so much more satisfying than sitting alone and keeping them clean.

"I'm doing ~real important activism~ instead of voting--" Bullshit.

[beatrice-otter]

Like okay, the democrats lose, you taught them a lesson (and fwiw, I do think its a legitimate message to send- the people are not happy with the actions and status quo of the DNC)

That's.

That's not the lessons the Democrats would take away from Biden losing.

See, the thing is, they know from the last several decades that the further to the left you are politically, the less likely you are to vote, and the more fickle you are about it. Politicians who run after the vote of leftists may get elected once, if they're inspiring enough. But by the time it comes to re-elect them, the chances are very good that a lot of the leftists who voted for them the first time will have found some reason to dislike them, and so they will be a one-term politician.

On the other hand, if you want to have a long career in politics where you have a chance at actually getting shit done, you have to get re-elected many times. And centrists are much more reliable voters than leftists! If you go after the centrist vote, you'll lose the leftists ... but let's be real, the vast majority of them wouldn't vote anyway, so who cares. They might as well not exist.

Biden is by far the furthest-left President we've had in a century. You have to go back to FDR to get someone as consistently left-leaning in the policies he has championed and enacted. He is so far left that he has scared some centrists who voted for him in 2020 into saying they'll vote for Trump. If he loses after a single term, the Democrats will conclude that the reason he lost was because he was too far left, and leftists are still as fickle and unreliable as they have ever been, and so trying to court their votes is political suicide. Therefore, the lesson of a second Trump victory will be that the Democrats need to move rightward.