#Inherent Right Policy

[wonder-worker]

"The division between the two families [the Woodvilles and the Nevilles] and their allies can be seen in the royal charters that they witnessed. Warwick, Rivers and Archbishop Neville of York, while serving as chancellor and afterwards, were fairly constant witnesses to royal charters and consequently often appeared together. This was not, however, the case for other family members and friends. From 1466 to 1469, if Scales or Woodville associates like Sir John Fogge, John Lord Audley or Humphrey Lord Stafford of Southwick witnessed royal charters, then members of the Neville group, such as John Neville, earl of Northumberland, or John Lord Wenlock would not, and vice versa. Discounting the ubiquitous Warwick, Rivers and Archbishop Neville, of the twenty-four charters issued between February 1466 and June 1469, twelve were witnessed by men associated with the Woodvilles, eight by men associated with the Nevilles and two were witnessed by no member of either group beyond the two earls at their heads and the archbishop; only two charters, both from 1466, featured associates of both families.

Such striking segregation of witnesses suggests that something more than simple convenience or availability was at play. [...] The evidence of these witness lists does show the extent of the split between the two groups from early in Edward's reign and of the need for political society to work with that cleavage in the heart of the Yorkist regime."

— Theron Westervelt, "Royal charter witness lists and the politics of the reign of Edward IV"

*This is specifically applicable for Edward IV's first reign; in contrast, the charters in his second reign displayed a great deal of aristocratic and domestic unity and cohesion.

[frogeyedape]

Ah ah ah, but that's not what they're saying! Notice they say "verifiable sources" not "true facts," they say "fact checkers use misinformation," they say "statistics and studies" [research, science, academics] are baselessly biased.

They're not saying that left writing ("propaganda") is based in fact and therefore based in truth. They're saying truth has been obscured.

Some of them really think/feel this way. Others are good at spinning the lies that make truth seem false, improbable, ludicrous. "Haha, they're admitting they're liars," no. Not to the other people who agree with them.

[ceilidhtransing]

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.

[dostoyevsky-official]

The existence of an immigration-enforcement agency isn’t inherently the problem. Most people accept that states have a right to control their borders and that there’s a legitimate role for authorities charged with enforcing immigration policy, especially when it comes to those who have committed serious crimes. ICE also investigates trafficking, smuggling and other transnational offenses that clearly require federal oversight. The core issue is less the agency’s mandate than its methods. Well-documented abuses — denials of due process, inhumane conditions and politically motivated enforcement — have undermined public trust and raised serious ethical concerns. The worry is not whether immigration law should be enforced but how, and at what human cost. The holding facilities ICE uses are part of this system: They house people awaiting deportation, court appearances or further investigation. What’s in dispute isn’t the need for such spaces; it’s the treatment of detainees within those spaces. Many facilities have drawn criticism for degrading or dangerous conditions. Still, as a beneficiary of a trust that rents a property to ICE, your leverage is minuscule. You can’t unilaterally break the lease. Even if you could, ICE would simply relocate its facility. And while moral complicity is a serious concern, receiving income from a legal tenant, however problematic, isn’t generally considered an ethical transgression on its own. We’re all entangled in systems we don’t control. As citizens, we’re already implicated in the actions of government agencies that act in our name and that we help fund. If those actions are shameful, they cast a shadow on all of us. But that shared entanglement also opens the door to shared responsibility — and response. [...] Here’s one constructive path: If this money feels tainted, redirect it. Use it to support organizations that advocate for the rights you believe ICE has violated — groups like the A.C.L.U., the American Immigration Council or local legal-aid nonprofits that provide support for detainees. Back candidates pushing for humane immigration reform.

jaw-dropping new york times column reassuring readers that receiving blood money from the gestapo is ok

[mantisgodsdomain]

Feudal-Industrial peasant?

Yeah we think it's pretty self-explanatory.

[fozmeadows]

You write thorough analyses of concepts and events, so I thought I would ask for your take on Senator Booker's speech today. Some people say it was disrespectful. What do you think? Thank you in advance for your opinion.

I think what Booker did was extraordinary on several levels. First, the sheer physical endurance it takes to speak for that long, almost uninterrupted, while remaining cogent, is absolutely incredible. Second, the actual content of what he said, based on what I've seen, was fantastic; he was impassioned, engaging and incisive, and the extent to which he kept on topic over that many hours is staggering. Third, the fact that he broke the record for the longest speech on the Senate floor, which is not only an achievement in its own right, but doubly meaningful given his status as a Black man when the previous record was set by a segregationist, Strom Thurmond, protesting the Civil Rights Act in 1957. And last but not least, the moral clarity inherent in rebuking, loudly and at length, the myriad abuses of a historically corrupt, fascist government while working to delay their business.

All that being so, I think there are only three plausible reasons for someone finding Booker's speech disrespectful. The first is predicated on agreeing so completely with the Trump administration's policies that disrupting their operation via a lawful, established form of political protest is cast as inherently bad - which would be very much in keeping with the logic of those who, to take just one example, see nothing illegal or indeed remarkable about Trump's insistence that the executive branch should be able to unilaterally overrule both the Senate and the judiciary. The second is predicated on being such a spineless appeasenik milquetoast that some nebulous concept of "civility" is considered more important, and thus more urgent, than doing literally anything to protest an administration so nakedly corrupt that the president is publicly shilling for crypto and Tesla in order to line his own pockets. And the third is, simply, racism, whether subconscious or overt, which here translates to the reflexive assumption that a Black man being loud and disruptive must of course be inherently bad, and certainly a worse offense than whatever he might be protesting.

So, in conclusion, no, I do not think Booker's speech was disrespectful - but even if it could be fairly labelled as such, as I don't believe this current administration is remotely deserving of anyone's respect, I'd still be cheering him on.

[srldesigns6277]

Executive Order on Education Part. 2: Changes to History Education from "Anti-American" to Patriotic Education.

Sec. 3.  Ending Indoctrination Strategy.  (a)  Within 90 days of the date of this order, to advise the President in formulating future policy, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide an Ending Indoctrination Strategy to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, containing recommendations and a plan for: (i)   eliminating Federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology; and (ii)  protecting parental rights, pursuant to FERPA, 20 U.S.C. 1232g, and the PPRA, 20 U.S.C. 1232h, with respect to any K-12 policies or conduct implicated by the purpose and policy of this order.

This order calls to fundamentally change History Education to explicitly make discussions of Racism and anything 'Anti-American' like discussions of the Civil War and its causes or Segregation and Civil Rights inherently wrong as it discusses the wrongs of America. It also calls for changes to promote more 'Patriotic Education' to showcase 'American Exceptionalism'

THIS IS CENSORSHIP IN ACTION; DO NOT FORGET THE HISTORY OF HOW THE GOVERNMENT TREATED VARIOUS PEOPLES THROUGHOUT THE PAST 250 YEARS!!!

[consultingfujoshi]

some thoughts wrt the two established "romances" in severance so far (burt/irving and helly/mark) inspired by @figmentof who pointed out how irving had to find out mark and helly kissed from the corporate video in s2 e1 and how he must have felt seeing his co-workers' love affair like portrayed like that, and how it ties into the queer narrative at play here which uses workplace dynamics and policies as very clear analogues for real-life prejudice against queer couples. I mean, just look at this:

it's not just documented, but celebrated. used as propaganda for how the conditions on the severance floor have improved. proof that the severed workers are happy. and how even though he is unaware of the sociopolitical meaning of all this, lumon is very not-subtly telling him that what he had with burt is inherently lower and less valuable than this.

irving doesn't even know homophobia exists and yet he is still affected by it, it still seeps into every corner of the way his and burt's romance progresses. burt is positioned as an unacceptable love interest from the jump. irv is actively discouraged at every turn from pursuing it. their friendship is viewed with disgust and apprehension from their coworkers. burt working in a different department that's hated by MDR. dylan himself not being homophobic in the sense he opposes their relationship because they're both men but his attempts to keep them apart still has a parallel sort of prejudice behind it and still ultimately has the same effect as if it WERE driven by homophobia. irving is made to feel perverse for wanting contact with burt. he's told this is for his own good.

and then, just as they manage to overcome that immediate resistance from their peers and escape to a place where they can explore this blossoming romance on their own terms, burt retires. for all it matters to irv, he's dead. and then irving is given the option to live the rest of his life with grief that will never heal, or kill himself too, because there is no reality where they get to be together. that's just the way things are. of course they wouldn't get to be together. he was unreasonable and childish for ever hoping that could happen. this is just the way it goes for innies. he's told to get ahold of himself and not make a scene.

but the thing is, the standards are not the same for all. a heterosexual romance gets upheld as the shining example of success and fulfilment for the severed employees, whilst a homosexual romance is ridiculed and invalidated, and written off as something that was simply never meant to be. and even more importantly to irving, a heterosexual romance is APPROVED OF by lumon, and by extension, by kier. irv held back from allowing himself to even call his and burt's relationship a romance, because his god had told him it was wrong, he followed the handbook, thinking this was what kier wanted, and then finding out after suffering the worst heartbreak imaginable because of it, that this WASN'T EVEN TRUE. it's simply just that someone like HIM doesn't get to have something like this. his love is not the kind of love god wants. he does not approve of irv's love. cynical and manipulative though that approval may be (even within the context of the corporate video, the helly/mark romance is only being celebrated to further the narrative that lumon care for their workers, but the point still remains that it was THEIR romance specifically used to suit this end), when your entire life has been in pursuit of that approval, it must be devastating to learn it was never on the cards for you.

he and burt even used the fact kier met and fell in love with his wife in the same circumstances as them to justify this to each other - and they were RIGHT, god does approve of falling in love with your coworkers - this simply just doesn't apply to them specifically. and if irving needed any more proof that he no longer has a place at lumon, that he's better off not existing at all than existing with this pain that cannot be remedied, pain that won't even be acknowledged for what it is, a symptom of a sickness which plagues the entire severance system, pain that he is simply expected to choke down and get over - this is that proof.

and that's the POINT. they're TELLING us that this is unjust, and there's a double standard. they're using the ways the innies experience romance and the difference in lumon's reaction (lumon being the collective of all the management we've seen, lumon as a singular entity) to burt/irving vs helly/mark to comment on how queer people are not afforded the same level of respect or validation IN REAL LIFE, for their attachments, their love, their pain, their suffering. it is NOT just incidental that irving's romance is with a man. it would not WORK if his love interest was a woman. the POINT is that they are both men and how that puts them at a disadvantage, even if they aren't aware of the prejudices of the outside world, even if they don't TECHNICALLY apply on the severance floor, there are very clear analogues which still end up oppressing them in equivalent ways that they would be suffering if this were a normal workplace in the outside world.

it genuinely sickens me to my stomach that even in a world so divorced from reality and the sensibilities of regular society, a queer couple is still made to suffer and feel inferior in a way that perfectly mirrors their real-life counterparts. how they will never, EVER be allowed to exist in a world where their love could thrive freely and uninhibited - they never get to taste the joy our world has to offer people like them, but they are still somehow subjected to all the pain it has to offer them regardless. it's such horrifically devastating writing. it makes my skin crawl. I can't stop thinking about it

[txttletale]

i try not to be petty, unless it would be cute or funny, but one of the few things to happen on the computer that i am genuinely still mad about was all the uk libs (sometimes not even uk!) telling me i had to shut the fuck up and vote for labour because they would Be Better (not able to point to any actual policy positions, of course, just inherently on the basis of their tie colour presumably) only for me to be proven more and more right every single day since the election

[balioc]

Let's imagine that you're trying to fix American politics by making a George Washington gambit, or perhaps a Dwight Eisenhower gambit.

Your goal here is to transcend our dysfunctionally-polarized moment by taking the two big political parties and smashing their heads together until they stop moving. You are trying to unite a supermajority of Americans behind a sane, stable, viable-consensus Middle Way - maybe through third-party shenanigans, maybe by hijacking and parasitizing the Republicans or the Democrats, whatever can be made to work.

Let's further assume - arguendo - that you have some good reason to think that you might be able to achieve this, given the right setup and the right resources. We don't need to have the argument over whether it's just a stupid idea from the get-go, that's not the point. (We also don't need to argue over what the sane stable viable-consensus Middle Way would actually be, in terms of policy prescriptions, branding, etc. Fill in your own favorite answer.)

You'll need a figurehead. A presidential candidate. Someone who can, in his person, stand in for the idea of "we're better than all this and we're actually going to set things to rights." Someone who won't immediately be treated as just another shill for the existing left/right.

A real American hero, ideally. Someone who seems like a good, trustworthy leader to as many voters as possible?

...any nominees?

Seriously. I mean it. Anyone at all? I'm coming up pretty short, and that fact scares me.

We tell jokes about God-Empress Taylor Swift (RIP @kontextmaschine), but of course that would actually be a bad idea for our project. She's popular, she might conceivably have the charisma and the intellect and the cultural-manipulation chops, but it doesn't matter; there's no escaping the fact that she's a pop star rather than anything else, and too many people would see her as inescapably frivolous. If she won, it wouldn't do the thing. Same goes for anyone else in the "celebrity performer" category.

War heroes are often good for this kind of role. Do we have any generally-accepted war heroes these days?

A scientist or high-culture artist might do. Are there any who are famous enough, and also not closely tied to an existing political faction?

I'd suggest "civil rights hero / activist leader" except that there are obviously none of those who aren't closely tied to existing political factions.

The best I can come up with on short notice is, like, Chelsey Sullenberger. Which is not super great.

(Admittedly I don't know enough about sports to say whether there's a sufficiently beloved-and-respectable athlete floating around. That would also be sort of an inherently weak choice, not much better than a celebrity performer and maybe even worse, but I can imagine really good spin doctors making it viable.)

[psychoticallytrans]

There's this idea, fairly common in society, that mental illness is for teens and up. Children are happy little creatures, generally, right? Sometimes they're abused and the trauma can make them mentally ill, but that's not common.

There are two fundamental problems with this attitude. One, it's incorrect to assume that trauma is the only reason a young kid can be mentally ill. Two, trauma is more common than people think. I'll be covering the first problem in this post through the lens of my particular experience.

Where I live, you can be diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 18 years old. You cannot be diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a minor. This poses a problem because my age of onset was in first grade, roughly six years old. Because of the fact that I was very young and new to the world, this was also the age of my first suicide attempt. Thinking I wouldn't be able to pass a spelling test genuinely felt like something worth trying to die over. So, I ate some hemlock, since I'd read about Socrates being killed with it. Luckily, I ate western hemlock, an unrelated species, and just felt kind of sick.

I'm not recounting that for fun or pity. I'm recounting it because children with mental illness are in genuine danger because they have little to no experience with managing their emotions, have little to no concept of the idea that their life can change and improve, and are dismissed by adults. I told a teacher that the test made me want to die, though not that I'd attempted to, and it was brushed off as little kid hyperbole. If I had used a method that was effective rather than one I thought would be, I would have been dead at six years old.

I would not receive medication that worked even a bit for another two years. I would not receive treatment for bipolar disorder specifically for ten years, and that required my PCP fudging the reason for the medication because she was afraid I would die if she didn't, and diagnosis was still two years off at minimum. I received a formal diagnosis at age 19, thirteen years after onset.

But surely that's uncommon, right? This story is a huge edge case, right? I actually have no idea, because age of onset and age of diagnosis are massively conflated for most disabilities. Policies like the one in my area that restricted bipolar diagnoses by age can artificially raise the age of "onset", in my case by thirteen years. The general idea that children are somehow immune to mental illness can also delay diagnosis by several years, perpetuating the idea that young children can't be mentally ill. The data on when people start experiencing mental illness is inherently skewed upwards, and I frankly don't have a good estimate on how bad that skew is. If anyone does have that data, please chime in.

Listen to children. If they're saying they're sad all the time, that they don't care about anything, that they don't see a future for themselves, those are signs of depressive symptoms. If they say that tests make them feel sick, that they can't do anything because they're scared, that they can't breathe and freeze up, those are signs of anxious symptoms. Many children talk about imaginary things, and that's just fine, but slip in a question or two about them to make sure that the kid is just playing, and not experiencing psychosis.

Children are new to the world and vulnerable, and they don't know what's normal and what isn't. They need people who are more experienced watching out for problems they might be having, and listening when they talk about having problems. If you can, try to be the person who perceives them, and tells them that things can be better.

[booasaur]

I think there are some takeaways here, if we want to learn from this.

First: third-party voters were irrelevant. In no swing state did left-leaning third-party voters add up to enough to push Harris over.

Second: many progressive policies and politicians outperformed Harris.

Third: appealing to Republicans did not work.

It has never worked, in the US or in Europe, we've seen time and again that giving ground to right wing policies only legitimizes them and voters then prefer the original. For example, if you worry about immigration, and both sides are saying it's a problem, who do you trust more to handle it?

Fourth: polls were pretty accurate. There were months, years, really, of debate about polling being broken, which demographics were underrepresented, which were overrepresented, herding, hopes that they were overcorrecting for the last two misses on Trump, but they ended up closer than anybody wanted. Which also means that Biden would have lost by even worse.

Fifth: on the one hand, people should hopefully see this graphic and realize there's no minority to scapegoat:

On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of people take it as a sign the country has simply shifted to the right in a huge, undeniable way that's depressing and ominous and feels hopeless. After all, Trump will win the popular vote by a lot, the first time a Republican has in decades.

However, this should be taken in conjunction with these numbers:

Now THIS is something that's open to further analysis and that can be worked with.

Why did so many Democrat voters not show up?

Here are some potential reasons for this, the truth most likely being a combination of at least several of them:

She's a Black-Indian woman. There's no denying the racism and misogyny among the US electorate, but given earlier polls where she was leading, I don't think this was the main or certainly only reason.

She was seen as too progressive/leftist. Again, by virtue of our racist, misogynistic electorate and our billionaire-owned media, Harris was seen as too extreme left by a lot of people, not just because of policies, but because inherently, her identity itself is extreme left to them. I personally don't think this was a crucial factor because, again, she had been leading when she was going stronger on the progressive messaging, other progressive policies and politicians outperformed her, and a lot of the people who think she's too extreme are Republicans who'd never vote for her. I just don't think it's a good enough reason for the millions of Democrats who didn't show.

Palestine. There's a coalition of pro-Palestine people, not just Muslims and Arab Americans but leftists and other POC too, but numerically, their vote for third parties made no difference. Did enough shift to Trump or not show up at all? Certainly in Michigan they swung to the right, but would that have made a difference? Did they matter in other less tangible ways, e.g., a lot of the same active progressives who'd have been out campaigning simply voted quietly for Harris and left it at that? How much of a distraction was this for Dems, having to constantly address Gaza as opposed to putting forth their own policies, and did it contribute to the overall perception of them being incompetent and weak and bringing chaos when people were tired of it? I think Palestine did have an effect, but enough to swing it overall...?

Not being progressive enough. A lot of people will point to Palestine and immigration, the decision to campaign with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban and court Republican moderates, stifling Walz, and various other shifts that abandoned the left for the center and then the left didn't show up while the center went for Republicans as they always do, but the left isn't that large. I think, if this one point is a factor, it's more that it was simply difficult for normal voters to show up when they didn't really know what the candidate stood for, aside from "more of the same" and "not Trump".

Biden. When you have a ton of people unhappy with where the country is going, including their biggest priority, the economy, being tied to an unpopular incumbent was going to be tough, especially when, as a Black-Indian woman, she would be judged as disloyal if she broke too much from him. Nevertheless... People were unhappy with him and his administration.

Ultimately, I think there's a lot to learn and I hope Dems will.

I think we're in for a tough time and we're going to need community and solidarity, not fighting among ourselves.

[arf2004]

i forgot to add that we are actively being killed by our government every day through gross negligence and even murdered intentionally constantly. disabled people are not safe in this country. people of colour are not safe in this country. queer people are not safe in this country. the citizens of the country that you are placing the blame on are having pur votes suppressed. we are living in a country where a man running for president has a plan to become a full blown dictator with power of every part of our lives. and he is running for president with that AS HIS PLATFORM. and the vocal minority of people that is supporting this kind of shit is all in power in our government fueled by voter suppression and voter tampering. russia is involved in our elections to an extent i previously only considered a joke and its just becoming a reality before my eyes. we are being killed from the inside. i am not saying that you cant be annoyed by americans but i dont know what good it really does to try and treat the individuals who live here as a Monolith That Hurts You when so many of us are dying and barely surviving.

i understand why this is the case which is why ill never say anythijg about it to people because i believe they have the right to feel this way even if i dont necessarily think it needs verbalized on tumblr lol... but id be a hypocrite since im writing this right now. that being said, occasionally ill see a post talking about the ways in which americans are to blame for [blank] and i truly dont know what to say to it much of the time because americans are being shot and drowning and dying on the street at a higher rate than most of the countries i see people complaining from 😭 like obviously this shouldnt happen to ANYONE. and you are also allowed to complain about the ways in which the american populous contributes to the things that you atruggle with. but this just goes hand in hand to me with comparing ANY group of people to their governement. especially because there is so much hatred and prejudice towards the usamerican south, both in and out of the country, that is pure classism, ableism, and racism. its all it is. and there is so little in a rich or middle class persons brain that makes them want to understand the plight of the poor and impoverished that they simply dont even make the attempt. i dont find value in fighting about when people are more or less oppressed than me generally, i understand i live in a position of relative privledge when you take the rest of the world into account. but i find that often big posts on tumblr that i see mutuals reblogging in good faith will just kind of assumes that whichever american is reading their post is well off because they have a phone or access to the internet like girl i was scrolling tumblr on the library computers to stay sane some days when i was homeless JJFJFJC you find anything u can sometimes. this is more of a personal ramble and this doesnt mean anything about any moral implications of any actions described, just kind of some food for thought for anyone who happens to stumble accross this i suppose on top of just being me yelling into the void lol

[mariacallous]

My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can has cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.

It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous way station for the internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world—a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.

It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X to Facebook to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist.

"The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United States," the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED. “Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man.”

My first experience with the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOLcat all-nighter, when I was in college. I was a big Tumblr user—all my friends were on there—and for about a year or so, our corner of the platform felt like an extension of the house parties we would throw. That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxed the summer going into my senior year. Someone made a “hate blog” for me—one of the first times I felt the dark presence of an anonymous stranger’s digital ire, and posted my phone number on 4chan.

They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads. I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game.

Many of the 4chan users that called me mid-Battletoad attack left messages. I listened to all of them. A pattern quickly emerged: young men, clearly nervous to even leave a message, trying to harass a stranger for, seemingly, the hell of it. Those voicemails have never left me in the 15 years I've spent covering 4chan as a journalist.

I had a front-row seat to the way those timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the internet. The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s, tracing 4chan’s impact on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil as 4chan's users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying. And, in a way, they did. But the ubiquity of 4chan culture ended up being an oddly Pyrrhic victory for the site itself.

Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan's rise in the 2010s from internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there was really no point to 4chan anymore. Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name and even pays you for it?

4chan’s “user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy," Collins says. "Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official."

But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked. Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site's political influence, but I'd argue they were equally, if not more, important.

4chan was founded by Christopher “Moot” Poole when he was 15. A regular user on slightly less anarchic comedy site Something Awful, Poole created a spinoff site for a message board there called “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse.” Poole was a fan of the Japanese message board 2chan, or Futaba Channel, and wanted to give Western anime fans their own version, so he poorly translated the site's code and promoted his new site, 4chan, to Something Awful's anime community. Several core features were ported over in the process.

4chan users were anonymous, threads weren't permanent and would time out or "404" after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to. That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web. The dark end point of the techno-utopianism that built the internet. On 4chan you were no one, and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether.

"The iconic memes that came out of 4chan are because people took the time to save it, you know? And the fact that nobody predicted, nobody could predict or control what was saved or what wasn't saved, I think, is really, really fascinating," Cates Holderness, Tumblr's former head of editorial, tells WIRED.

Still, 4chan was more complicated than it looked from the outside. The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography. Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan's cooking board. (Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.)

"When I switched to sourdough, I got really good pointers," she says.

Holderness calls 4chan the internet's “Wild West” and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now.

Our feeds deliver us content; we don't have to hunt for it. We don't have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out whether we're getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto. The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back. And we'll eventually find out if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

"The snippets that we have of what 4chan was—it's all skewed,” Holderness says. “There is no record. There's no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was."

[centrally-unplanned]

Guess I should throw out some Gaza Ceasefire Thoughts - from a political history perspective it certainly is interesting:

-- As for the deal itself, it is pretty much "the best one could realistically hope for", though funnily enough the details aren't that surprising. Israel for some time has had very little strategy in Gaza (beyond "release the hostages or we keep blowing up random blocks"), and so them agreeing to these terms is the expected outcome. Hamas also lacked any real strategic options, but in the summer you could at least argue "the status quo of radicalizing the population and shredding Israeli reputation is beneficial", so you can see why both sides really weren't committing to anything before in the summer. Things have changed since then, though.

-- The straight-up-humiliating defeat of Hezbollah in the fall was a complete game-changer for the strategic situation. As much as Hamas had a strategy it was "wait for Hezbollah/Iran to carry the weight of the fight", and that was going not-awfully through the summer. Then Israel absolutely shattered Hezbollah to the point where their ability to control Lebanese politics is up-for-grabs, and any real threat to Israel is temporarily gone. Meanwhile Iran stacked that defeat with the revolution in Syria and their own military capacity losses, and while there is real tension in Iran between realist & radicalist factions, the current winds are blowing towards retreat. Combine that with the death of Sinwar, and the new Hamas leadership had no cards left to play. By the same token, Israel has few fights left to win.

-- This is why negotiations resumed in earnest in October/November, and right now you are seeing some pretty heavy exaggeration of the role of the Trump administration in this deal. It has been being hashed out for months, you can easily point to articles about progress throughout both of those months (example) and the Biden administration was heavily involved in the Doha talks. These things just take time, and both sides had a dramatic incentive shift recently. That is carrying the most weight here - talks were "90% complete" before any Trump reps arrived on the scene.

-- But the election certainly did play a role here, primarily because it was inducing uncertainty and changing incentives in the US. While it was going on you can see how both sides could "hope" that new administrations might let them gain an advantage, and understood that commitments from the Biden administration in August just weren't very meaningful. Additionally, while not very important the war was "an issue" in the election, and so the "action space" of politicians was shaped by that. Why not just...wait, and see how things go, right? Now there is no more reason to wait, you know what you got.

--I don't want to take all credit away from Trump on this, though. A theme I will continue to harp on, the "Imperial Presidency" has advantages. Biden was a perpetual faction appeaser, and you could credibly call his bluff on any decision around the war by going "you won't take the heat from your own party on this" from the left or the right. Trump can much more credibly claim "I don't give a fuck what I 'said on the campaign trail', I say what goes, make a deal or I will absolutely spite you". This is not a great strategy in a lot of contexts, but in foreign policy you need this sometimes. Dems really do need to take notes here, more unity in either direction and more strong brinksmanship from Biden would have been better.

--Now let's walk that back a bit - it is way easier for the Trump administration to play hardball. Elections make hard decisions much more difficult to pull off, as political factions can punish you more easily. The Dems have an asymmetric disadvantage here - they are inherently the "dove" party facing a topic where the median American voter is generally hawkish, and they are the party that contains a notable split within itself on the issue. Meanwhile Republicans all agree. No longer facing electoral pressure, it is much easier for Republicans to play a "Nixon goes to China" card and credibly browbeat Israel. No one will really think the Republicans are anti-Israel even if they do that, and Dems can't accuse them effectively of foul play because the party itself is split on the topic. This is "unfair" in a certain sense, for sure, but such is politics.

--I would be assigning way less credulity to the complaints amoung the Israeli far-right about Trump or Netanyahu "betraying" them. The far-right in Israeli is a powerful force, for sure, but by no means do they command the majority. They want to annex the West Bank and all that, but most Israelis disagree, the military isn't on board, it would jeopardize US/Arab ties, etc. Never say never but that was not really in the cards - if it was they would have done it already. Slow-roll settlement expansion is the plan, that will continue, but meanwhile there is nothing left to do in Gaza. Netanyahu is of course going to say publicly "oh boo hoo my hands were tied by the Americans I'm so sorry" while he gets almost all of his realistic goals. This is politics 101 stuff - though if the approval vote on Thursday goes sour then I am wrong on this, part of why I am posting it today. (Also another reason to not assign too much credit to the Trump admin - easy to "bully" someone who wants to be bullied)

Okay done - hopefully the ceasefire sticks, obviously this has been a disastrous war for almost all involved, never look the imperfect status quo horse in the mouth. It isn't the world one would want but it is better than the one we have right now.

[notaplaceofhonour]

the problem with the slogan “nobody is illegal on stolen land” is that it leaves the door wide open for all the same dehumanizing rhetoric & violence to continue to be used against migrants & refugees as long as you believe the land is yours by right

this is not theoretical. it is exactly the logic used within the Pro-Palestine movement to paint Jewish refugees who fled pogroms & the Holocaust to Mandatory Palestine as invaders & colonizers because they entered the land “illegally”, to justify the Arab Revolt & other acts of anti-Jewish violence by Palestinians, to demand Jews leave the land, & paint any attempt by Israel to secure its border as inherently racist, all under the banner of “nobody is illegal on stolen land”

indigineity is a non-factor in the morality & legality of mistreating migrants & refugees. the wrongness of violence against foreigners, draconic border policies, and mass deportations stands on its own; it is not dependent on whether the land is stolen or not.

if you’re trying to say “nobody should be illegal” you can just say that. it’s less wordy & harder for blood-and-soil nationalists to co-opt.