#coherence-based policy

[bsahely]

From Locke to Life: A Manifesto for Regenerative Governance | ChatGPT4o

[Download Full Document (PDF)] This document, titled From Locke to Life, presents a manifesto for regenerative governance, critiquing the philosophical foundations of modern political economy and proposing a new framework based on life-value. It traces the legacy of John Locke’s social contract and property theory, illustrating how these ideas have contributed to ecological degradation and social…

[hyperlexichypatia]

Neuroscience is real and important (while still beset by the same implicit and explicit bias problems as all human science and medicine), but pop culture understanding of neuroscience has absolutely made society worse, and I hate it. Every popular invocation of "dopamine," "serotonin" "trauma," "the prefrontal cortex," and "epigenetics" is used to justify some logically and/or ethically terrible conclusion. Recently I saw someone say that she lift weights to boost dopamine "Because my body doesn't make its own." My sibling in neurochemistry, that is your body making its own! A chemical your body produces when you exercise is still being produced by your body! Furthermore, why are we repeatedly told that exercise is good because it boosts dopamine, but video games and social media are bad, because they boost dopamine? Are dopamine-boosting recreational activities good or bad? The obvious answer, of course, is that it's just moralistic judgment -- exercise is Virtuous, games are not -- dressed up in neurochemical justifications. People even talk about being "addicted to dopamine" as if being "addicted" to a substance produced by one's own body can even be a meaningful or coherent concept. I'm not saying there aren't evidence-based things people can do to protect their neurological health (one that I strongly recommend is wearing a helmet). I'm saying that pop neuroscience is not a sound basis for logic, philosophy, ethics, morality, law, or public policy. If you're going to make an ethical or public policy argument using "the brain" or "brain chemistry" as a justification, consider, instead, not doing that. Instead, consider that other people know what's best for their own brains without your expounding on "dopamine" and "trauma."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conservatives are fringe outliers - and leftists could learn from them

The Republican Party, a coalition between Big Business farmers and turkeys who’ll vote for Christmas (Red Scare obsessed cowards, apocalyptic white nationalists, religious fanatics, etc) has fallen to its bizarre, violent, noisy radical wing, who are obsessed with policies that are completely irrelevant to the majority of Americans.

As Oliver Willis writes, the views of the radical right — which are also the policies of the GOP — are wildly out of step with the US political view:

https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/conservatives-arent-like-normal-americans

The press likes to frame American politics as “narrowly divided,” but the reality is that Republicans’ electoral victories are due to voter suppression and antimajoritarian institutions (the Senate and Electoral College, etc), not popularity. Democrats consistently outperform the GOP in national races. Dems won majorities in 1992/6, and beat the GOP in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. The only presidential race the GOP won on popular votes since 1988 was 2004, when GW Bush eked out a plurality (not a majority).

But, as Willis says, Dems “act like it is 1984 and that they are outliers in a nation of Reagan voters,” echoing a stilted media narrative. The GOP’s platform just isn’t popular. Take the groomer panic: 71% of Americans approve of same-sex marriage. The people losing their shit about queer people are a strange, tiny minority.

Every one of the GOP’s tentpole issues is wildly unpopular: expanding access to assault rifles, banning immigration, lowering taxes on the rich, cutting social programs, forcing pregnant people to bear unwanted children, etc. This is true all the way up to the GOP’s coalescing support for Trump as their 2024 candidate. Trump has lost every popular vote he’s ever stood for, and owes his term in the Oval Office to the antimajoritarian Electoral College system, gerrymandering, and massive voter suppression.

Willis correctly points out that Dem leaders are basically “normal” center-right politicians, not radicals. And, unlike their GOP counterparts, politicians like Clinton, Obama and Biden don’t hide their disdain for the radical wing of their party. Even never-Trumper Republicans are afraid of their base. Romney declared himself “severely conservative” and McCain “put scare quotes around ‘health of the mother’ provisions for abortion rights.”

The GOP fringe imposes incredible discipline on their leaders. Take all the nonsense about “woke capitalism”: on the one hand, it’s absurd to call union-busting, tax-dodging, worker-screwing companies “woke” (even if they sell Pride flags for a couple of weeks every year).

But on the other hand? The GOP leadership have actually declared war on the biggest corporations in America, to the point that the WSJ says that “Republicans and Big Business broke up”:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-corporations-donations-pacs-9b5b202b

But America is a two-party system and there are plenty of people who’ll pull the lever for any Republican. This means that when the GOP comes under the control of its swivel-eyed loon wing, the swivel-eyed loons wield power far beyond the number of people who agree with them.

There’s an important lesson there for Dems, whose establishment is volubly proud of its independence from its voters. The Biden administration is a weirdly perfect illustration of this “independence.” The Biden admin is a kind of referee, doling out policies and appointments to its competing wings, without any coherence or consistency.

That’s how you get incredible appointments like Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division and Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureat — the progressive wing of the party bargained for these key appointments and then played their cards very well, getting incredible, hard-charging, hyper-competent fighters in those roles.

Likewise, Jared Bernstein, finally confirmed as Council of Economic Advisers chair after an interminable wrangle:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-06-16-team-biden/

And Julie Su, acting labor secretary, who just delivered a six-year contract to west coast dockworkers with 8–10% raises in the first year, paid retroactively for the year they worked without a contract:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/14/statement-from-president-biden-on-labor-agreement-at-west-coast-ports/

But the Biden admin’s unwillingness to side with one wing of the party also produces catastrophic failures, like the martyrdom of Gigi Sohn, who was subjected to years of vicious personal attacks while awaiting confirmation to the FCC, undefended by the Biden admin, left to twist in the wind until she gave it up as a bad job:

https://doctorow.medium.com/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband-4ce1ffb16dc5

It’s how we get key roles filled by do-nothing seatwarmers like Pete Buttigieg, who has the same sweeping powers that Lina Khan is wielding so deftly at the FTC, but who lacks either the will or the skill to wield those same powers at the Department of Transport:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

By refusing to stand for anything except a fair division of powers among different Democratic Party blocs, the Biden admin ends up undercutting itself. Take right to repair, a centerpiece of the administration’s agenda, subject of a historic executive order and FTC regulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Right to Repair fights have been carried out at the state level for years, with the biggest victory coming in Massachusetts, where an automotive R2R ballot initiative won overwhelming support in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

But despite the massive support for automotive right to repair in the Bay State, Big Car has managed to delay the implementation of the new law for years, tying up the state in expensive, time-consuming litigation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

But eventually, even the most expensive delaying tactic fails. Car manufacturers were set to come under the state right to repair rule this month, but they got a last minute reprieve, from Biden’s own National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who sent urgent letters to every major car manufacturer, telling them to ignore the Massachusetts repair law:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bbkv/biden-administration-tells-car-companies-to-ignore-right-to-repair-law-people-overwhelmingly-voted-for

The NHTSA repeats the car lobby’s own scare stories about “cybersecurity” that they blitzed to Massachusetts voters in the runup to the ballot initiative:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

The idea that cybersecurity is best maintained by letting powerful corporations gouge you on service and parts is belied by independent experts, like SecuRepairs, who do important work countering the FUD thrown off by the industry (and parroted by Biden’s NHTSA):

https://securepairs.org/

Independent security experts are clear that letting owners of high-tech devices decide who fixes them, what software they run, etc, makes us safer:

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2022/01/letter-to-the-us-senate-judiciary-committee-on-app-stores.html

But here we are: the Biden admin is sabotaging the Biden admin, because the Biden admin isn’t an administration, it’s a system for ensuring proportional representation of different parts of the Democratic Party coalition.

This isn’t just bad for policy, it’s bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/narrative-warfare/#giridharadas

The failure to deliver a coherent, muscular vision for a climate-ready, anti-Gilded Age America has left the Democrats vulnerable. Because while the radical proposals of the GOP fringe may not enjoy much support, there are large majorities of Americans who have lost faith in the status quo and are totally uninterested in the Pizzaburger Party.

Nowhere is this better explained than in Naomi Klein’s superb long-form article on RFK Jr’s presidential bid in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option

Don’t get me wrong, RFK Jr is a Very Bad Politician, for all the reasons that Klein lays out. He’s an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracist, and his support for ending American military aggression, defending human rights, and addressing the climate emergency is laughably thin.

But as Klein points out, RFK Jr is not peddling pizzaburgers. He is tapping into a legitimate rage:

a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world — inflamed on every level — that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.

RFK Jr is campaigning against “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power,” against drug monopolies setting our national health agenda, and polluters capturing environmental regulators.

As Klein says, despite RFK Jr’s willing to say the unsayable, and tap into the yearning among the majority of American voters for something different, he’s not running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth.” Rather, “public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers.”

We’ve been here before. Remember Trump campaigning against a “rigged system” and promising to “make America great again?” Remember Clinton’s rejoinder that “America was already great?” It’s hard to imagine a worse response to legitimate outrage — over corporate capture, declining wages and living conditions; and spiraling health, education and shelter costs.

Sure, it was obvious that Trump was a beneficiary of the rigged system, and that he would rig it further, but at least he admitted it was rigged, not “already great.”

The Democratic Party is not in thrall to labor unions, or racial equality activists, or people who care about gender justice or the climate emergency. Unlike the GOP, the Dem establishment has figured out how to keep a grip on power within their own party — at the expense of exercising power in America, even when they hold office.

But unlike culture war nonsense, shared prosperity, fairness, care, and sound environmental policies are very popular in America. Some people have been poisoned against politics altogether and sunk into nihilism, while others have been duped into thinking that America can’t afford to look after its people.

In this regard, winning the American electorate is a macrocosm for the way labor activists win union majorities in the workplaces they organize. In her memoir A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey describes how union organizers contend with everything that progressive politicians must overcome. A union drive takes place in the teeth of unfair laws, on a tilted playing field that allows bosses to gerrymander some workers’ votes and suppress others’ altogether. These bosses have far more resources than the workers, and they spend millions on disinformation campaigns, forcing workers to attend long propaganda sessions on pain of dismissal.

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

But despite all this, labor organizers win union elections and strike votes, and they do so with stupendous majorities — 95% or higher. This is how the most important labor victories of our day were won: the 2019 LA teachers’ strike won everything. Not just higher wages, but consellors in schools, mandatory greenspace for every school in LA, an end to ICE shakedowns of immigrant parents at the school-gate, and immigration law help for students and their families. What’s more, the teachers used their unity, their connection to the community, and their numbers to get out the vote in the next election, winning the marginal seats that delivered 2020’s Democratic Congressional majority.

As I wrote in my review of MacAlevey’s book:

For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job. First, we fix the corrupt union, firing its sellout leaders and replacing them with fighters. Then, we organize supermajorities, person-to-person, in a methodical, organized fashion. Then we win votes, using those supermajorities to overpower the dirty tricks that rig the elections against us. Then we stay activated, because winning the vote is just the start of the fight.

It’s a far cry from the Democratic Party consultant’s “data-driven” microtargeting strategy based on eking out tiny, fragile majorities with Facebook ads. That’s a strategy that fails in the face of even a small and disorganized voter-suppression campaign — it it’s doomed in today’s all-out assault on fair elections.

What’s more, the consultants’ microtargeting strategy treats people as if the only thing they have to contribute is casting a ballot every couple years. A sleeping electorate will never win the fights that matter — the fight to save our planet, and to abolish billionaires.

If only the Democratic Party was as scared of its base as the Republicans are of their own.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

[Image ID: The title page of Richard Hofstadter's 'Paranoid Style in American Politics' from the November, 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine. A John Birch Society pin reading 'This is REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY: let's keep it that way' sits atop the page, obscuring the introductory paragraph.]

[szhmidty]

I can never really get over how much of the resentment towards modern art is based purely on some group of art nerds liking art you hate and disliking/dismissing art you like, and being strident about it.

With architecture, I kinda get it. You are forced, in some sense, to engage with architecture. It's funny to me that there seems to be widespread ignorance about the fact that large bricks of steel, glass, and concrete keeping getting made for economic reasons rather than artistic ones, but the distaste and frustration for it makes sense.

You just don't have to go to an art gallery full of modern art, though. Duchamp's fountain is not hiding in your closet ready to jump you.

"But szhmidty, all these hoity-toity art critics say that bullshit, degenerate modern art is supremely important, some of them even insult your intelligence or proclaim you ignorant for not liking a painting with 3 stripes or a "sculpture" that's just a lamp with a barbie doll shoved in the bulb socket."

So? Why do you care? Why do you worry about their opinion? They don't matter! They don't determine the direction of commercial art, and their relevance outside their narrow field is negligible. They don't matter, or they wouldn't if you'd just get over your seething hatred.

Why do you care if this person called you a baby for your art taste? In what way does it affect you? Why does it make you so angry? I truly do not get it.

At a certain point, I need you to realize that you're trolling yourself.

==========

You know what art I "love"? Christian art. Well, the stuff that's well crafted and coherent enough to be somewhat entertaining on it's own merits.

I didn't bother watching God's Not Dead 2 though 46 or whatever, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching the first one. That movie evinces a level of contempt for me, me as a person, me as someone who thinks like I do, in a really pure, unadulterated way.

The studio, actors, and champions of God's Note Dead deeply hate me and everyone like me.

But for the life of me I cannot muster resentment towards that film that comes within an order of magnitude of the resentment towards modern art and it's defenders.

There is, I guess, the unpleasant fact that I share a world with millions of people like that, that such people ultimately decide national policies. I would prefer that not be the case.

But on a personal level I just don't value or care about their opinions enough to be insulted by them. It's like being insulted by a toddler. I would genuinely be more upset if a friend's kid called me a butt-face in anger. At least I want the kid to like me.

==========

I have a similar dynamic with "subs only" anime fans. You have specific cases where the dub is more of an adaptation of the original, where there are strong differences between the sub and the dub, and for those I'll grant that the sub is probably better.*

I'd originally written up a paragraph on subs vs dubs here, but actually it just doesn't matter. I basically never watch a sub unless the dub is genuinely horrible, or the story is wildly different because the dub got censored for american audiences or whatever, or if a dub literally doesn't exist.

There's a large contingent of anime fans who feel contempt for me as someone who defaults to watching dubs. They will openly mock and belittle dubs preferers.

And like. I just can't care. Outside of a personal enjoyment in having arguments and yelling about things I do and don't like, I simply feel nothing when I see contemptuous comments from subs preferers.

*The exception is Ghost Stories. Anyone who recommends the sub over the dub isn't merely a disciple of the holy art of subtitles, they're just delusional. Or they hate the very specific brand of humour that the Ghost Story dub is going for, but if I'm being honest I would not believe the average crunchy roll subscriber if they claimed to dislike it. I've seen what makes them cheer.

==========

There's something of an irony to writing 10 paragraphs dedicated to people who insult me only for me to end each section with "I don't care." Like why would I write so much if I didn't care?

Mostly I'm just trying to look for cases where I might be on the other side of this issue, the side of the insulted, belittled, and demeaned, to put myself in the hot seat, as it were.

You can believe me when I say "I don't care" or not, I don't care.

[tomorrowusa]

100 days of Trump. If you've read Project 2025 and listened to his semi-coherent rants, you shouldn't be surprised.

In three months Trump has shoved the world’s oldest continuous democracy towards authoritarianism at a pace that tyrants overseas would envy. He has used executive power to take aim at Congress, the law, the media, culture and public health. Still aggrieved by his 2020 election defeat and 2024 criminal conviction, his regime of retribution has targeted perceived enemies and proved that no grudge is too small. Historically such strongmen have offered the populace a grand bargain: if they will surrender some liberties, he will make the trains run on time. But Trump’s delusions of monarchy have been coupled with a fundamental ineptitude. His trade war injected chaos into the economy, undermining a campaign promise to lower prices and raising the spectre of recession; his ally Elon Musk wreaked havoc on the federal government, threatening health and welfare benefits for millions; his foreign policy turned the world upside down, making friends of adversaries and turning allies into foes. Having promised so much winning, Trump is losing. Just 39% of respondents approve of how he is handling his job as president, according to an opinion poll by ABC News, the Washington Post newspaper and Ipsos, while 55% disapprove. [ ... ] Trump and his allies had four years in political exile to plot and plan a disruptive agenda laid out in Project 2025, a set of proposals by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank in Washington. Yet its execution has been undermined by the president’s mercurial nature, cabinet infighting and leaks, especially at the Pentagon, reportedly now in disarray. [ ... ] Even long-term political observers are aghast at Trump’s acts of self-sabotage. Paul Begala, a former White House adviser and Democratic strategist, said: “I expected him to be stupid. I expected him to be chaotic. I expected his team to be a bunch of sycophants and nincompoops. I expected the tariffs and trade war. “Here’s what I didn’t expect. For me, the defining word of these 100 days has been betrayal. A good politician takes office and tries to expand beyond his base; an average politician tries to reward his base; Trump is the first politician who’s screwing his base, betraying his base. I honestly don’t understand it.”

Not only does Trump screw his base, but they respond: "Thank you sir, may I have another?"

Well, Jon Stewart has a gift for explaining things in an entertaining and occasionally absurdist way. His take on the last 100 days.

My favorite part of the Jon Stewart vid was when he called bullshit on Trump deal making. Trump claimed he made 200 trade deals with countries. Jon pointed out that there aren't that many countries.

[sspookyspoonss]

Hello I am a non-binary person from terf island. I’ve seen a few misconceptions about how the decision concerning the Equality Act came about. I think it’s important in the wake of this devastating decision to point our activism in a useful direction and make sure people are aware of the protections they still have. So I’ve written this.

How the decision came about:

The UK Supreme Court (UKSC) does not work like the Supreme Court of other nations like America. It cannot overrule a direct act of Parliament. Instead, it interprets the meaning of legislation to resolve legal issues. This is under the logic that judges arent elected, MP’s are, so are better placed to make policy decisions. They are also democratically accountable, unlike judges, so they can be voted out if they do something the public doesn’t like (this comes up later.)

To make a long story short, the decision is a result of this interpretive role. The Equality Act does not define sex or gender. Therefore the court had to decide a definition for what Parliament intended to be the outcome for cases like this using the legislation. They found (due to things like the use of ‘sex’ in the section granting protection on pregnancy status, makes more sense in the judgement) that the Equality Act could not be read as certified sex, instead it could only be read coherently by using biological sex.

Why does this matter? Well, it means that the decision is limited to the meaning of who is protected under ‘discrimination based on sex’ in the Equality Act for protection against things like sexism. Don’t get me wrong, still dire, but it is not removing the recognition of trans peoples genders entirely.

It is stated in the judgment that ‘gender reassignment’ is not limited to those with a gender recognition certificate. In this way, while still awful, the decision is not as bad as first seems. Trans people still have protection via the category of ‘sexual reassignment.’ This is important to reiterate. You are not completely without protection, if you face transphobic discrimination, you still have some legal protection. This needs to be said so people continue to bring action for transphobia they face and so transphobes don’t think they can get away with transphobia. Not knowing what protections remain helps bigots because they will go without consequence.*

*(Keep in mind that obviously bigoted people still get away with their actions when legal action is brought. However, the point of deterrence and the ability to bring a case under public scrutiny by bringing it, regardless of outcome, is important)

HOWEVER:

Process of the court:

First of all we cannot remove the court of all blame. Yes, they were interpreting legislation however the process of doing that was REALLY flawed. They refused to take evidence from trans people. This should have been considered because of the UKSC’s power to make a Declaration of Incompatibility. Basically, this says ‘Parliament this Act violates ECHR, fix it.’ Because of the impact this decision is going to have on trans people when it comes to things like sex segregated spaces (see below), I think making one should have been considered at the very least. Really, I think here one should have been made.

The Act itself

The court also stated that the Act recognised a conflict between the interests of different protected characteristics. This reveals that the Act is written in a manner that pits the interests of trans people and interests of cis people against each other. This is an issue. Trans people and cis people (particularly cis women because that’s what this case arose about) are not enemies. Blaming trans people is obviously scapegoating to protect other forces that harm both groups. Really, having sex and ‘gender reassignment’ as two categories rather than ‘identified gender’ in an Equality Act was bound to cause this conflict. We need a better Equality Act that doesn’t pit trans people and ‘women’s interests’ against each other.

This judgement just highlights how poor the Equality Act is in terms of protecting trans people. Although only being from 2010, the Equality Act has bases in the Sex Discrimination Act from 1975. This means there are far older perceptions of trans people at play here. These flaws have been revealed by this case.

There are provisions in it relating to sex segregated spaces with no consideration about how this would impact the ‘gender reassignment’ category, despite sex also being used in defining eligibility under that categories’ protection. We’ve been acting on an unstable presumption that trans people were included. This has collapsed in this case because of how rules of interpretation function. This shows we need a new Equality Act, one that doesn’t leave space for interpretation that trans people are any less of a man or a woman and thus don’t deserve equal protection.

The impact

This has been ceased upon by transphobes to be a ‘victory for women’ and authorising same sex spaces. People can explain far better than me why the former isn’t true. However, sadly, the latter is true. We can only wonder what the UKSC will decide when a case gets brought concerning the ‘gender reassignment’ categories and these spaces. I can only hope a declaration would have to be made then, or ECtHR would rule against the UK. However, these future events do not impact the harrowing impact this is going to have before any case like that is brought. This court case, despite the above, is still undeniably tragic.

Why does this matter?

There is a point to make that the process doesn’t matter, the outcome is still the same. However, it is important to remember that democratic accountability element. My fear is that the way this has been reported is allowing politicians to hide behind the court for their own failures. Failing to not consider how trans people are protected by the Equality Act. Failing to pass further trans rights legislation like self recognition. Increasing restrictions on gender affirming care. They can point their fingers at the courts and say ‘look they‘ve okayed this!’ In reality, all the court has done is highlighted Parliaments sloppy work in protecting trans people because of the way they had to interpret the legislation.

It is important to point out the flaws are within the Equality Act. Minority groups rely on this legislation, including trans people. This case has highlighted it does not represent trans people or suit our needs. We need an Equality Act that is capable of protecting us. Not one as flawed as the current one so we are able of relying on it, without the semantics of ‘oh what does sex mean.’

Obviously, the court is not blameless. I’ve mentioned why. However, we cannot do anything about who’s on the court. We CAN do things about what legislation Parliament makes. We cannot let them hide behind the UKSC. Doing so means they avoid the democratic accountability that is the whole reason why the court has to follow the meaning of Parliament.

We need to channel our anger to places where we can make an impact. Write to your MP demanding a better, comprehensive Equality Act that protects trans people. Legislation that doesn’t view a persons biological sex as determining whether they are a man or woman. Legislation that doesn’t pit cis women and trans people against each other.

Sign petitions. Look up and attend local protests. When the time comes, even at council elections, vote for trans friendly candidates. Call out transphobia. Donate to charities which have platforms to give better resources so they can try and petition legislators.

This situation is dire. Trans people need a hell of a lot of comfort after this. But we need to know what protection we still have so we can use them. We also need to know where the problem lies so we can work for change as effectively as we can.

Know that you are valid. And that you can fight.

[psychotrenny]

While I don't think much of the overall USamerican population cares about the genocide in Gaza, the scale of the recent protests show that it's a pretty important issue for the more progressive and politically active segment*. A segment which assumes a disproportionate electoral importance in a nation like the USA with non-compulsory voting and generally low voter turnouts. Like your "average" Yank might not give a shit about Palestine, but said average Yank wasn't gonna vote anyway. And the people who actively support the Genocide are mostly gonna vote for Trump no matter what; Harris's stance on Gaza did a pretty good job of driving off people who might have voted for her without attracting new support.

It's not as though Trump is very popular; he just managed to maintain some sizeable base of supporters by doing the bare minimum job of a politician and "promising them things they want". Like Trump managed to win this election with fewer total votes than he had in his 2020 loss; you could say that he's "more popular" than Harris but that's really not a high bar. The electorate less voted for Trump and more didn't vote for Harris because why the hell would they? She had nothing worthwhile to offer so Trump more or less won by default. While Gaza wasn't necessarily decisive in this, it certainly fucking hurt especially among the demographics (i.e. Ethnic Minorities, Young People) that Harris was trying hardest to reach. At the very least, a more popular Gaza policy could have made her loss a lot less humiliating.

But the US DP doesn't seem that interested in victory anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter. They get paid for putting on a show, creating a nice distracting spectacle; actually winning seems secondary at best. I doubt they'll learn any lessons beyond "We need to get more Racist". And considering the recent surge in posts to the effect of "I can't wait for White Supremacists to brutalise you as punishment for not Voting Blue", it's a lesson their online supporters are already putting into practice with enthusiasm

*I must emphasise that I'm defining this "segment" very broadly; It's not as though you need an especially principled or coherent ideology to conclude "Explicit Genocide is bad and we should at least dissociate ourselves from it"

[batboyblog]

2016 is often considered the point when leftism managed to get itself into the mainstream and became more popular, but I honestly can't help but wonder, given the sheer descent into conspiracy theory and selfish cruelty of the current state, whether in hindsight it was actually leftism's step into decline.

I've been thinking about this a lot, sadly I'm getting the start of a Migraine, so the edges of my thoughts are all fuzzy so idk if I'll be able to do what I think justice, but lets try.

The human mind doesn't really like complexity, it'd a pattern recognition machine built to find food and stuff that thinks you're food in the African brush. So we like to find patterns and lump stuff together, its hardwired in.

so "Leftism" I do understand what you mean, but I think it covers a really wide area.

and I think in politics we like to assign ideological and policy logic to things to political movements, it has to be about a coherent and rational ideology and world view we think. But... I think, often times it's emotional as much as anything. Did people vote for JFK or Reagan so much for policy as they, personally in their person, seemed to be the antidote to what was wrong in the moment? JFK seemed young and energetic when compared to an elderly and ill President Eisenhower, Reagan had the claiming aging leading man energy to make everyone feel like it'd be okay, a movie cowboy to lead us against bad guys we didn't understand while nice guy Jimmy Carter seemed stuck.

So back to 2016, I think there was so real ideology to start. The Left of the Democratic Party felt empowered after 2006, the left of the party had been against the Iraq War from the jump and that turned into the organizing issue that pushed Republicans out of power in 2006. A San Fran liberal, founding member of the House Progressive Cause was the first woman Speaker (and in favor of gay marriage too). In 2008 the Left of the party for largely emotional reasons sided with Obama over Clinton, even though they largely overlapped on policy and where there were (minor) differences she was to his left.

so riding high from two back to back wins, having gotten a lot of progressives elected to the House and Senate (like Bernie Sanders) progressive Dems were pretty let down by the real results, the ACA got bogged down and their dearest wish list item, the public option, which Pelosi fought for so hard, failed to make it into the final bill, and then 2010, a blood bath. And understandably there's been some frustration with Obama for not living up to the hype and also failing to really focus on state level races, Democrats got tarred hard

BUT! there's also an emotional side, Occupy Wall Street. I remember at the time being interested in it, I was young and more radical, but soon I got really frustrated because they had no demands, I watched every night MSNBC which was very sympathetic, but no one could articulate what it is they wanted, past a vague idea of "punish" the guilty.

I think there's a lot of restless frustration, some of it grounded and based in reality some of it not, in this country and its only grown over time as well as a contempt for and a break down of any kind of respect for experts and norms any anything established.

SO! I think that emotion latched onto Bernie and the left of the Democratic Party. As someone who worked that election I can tell you, at first knocking doors in New Hampshire, I got the taste of the very start of the campaign. And people would say "oh I'm voting for Bernie now, but I'll vote for Hillary in the general" but soon it went from friendly, from "we're pushing her to the left" to something bitter and angry. I had Bernie supporters tell me 1990s Fox News conspiracy theories around the Clintons, I had a Bernie supporter (in the general election) follow two college girl volunteers for blocks back to our office to SCREAM at us all.

Bernie won the New Hampshire Primary pretty commandingly that year, and partly because he had a strong volunteer network. But in the general despite many efforts we could barely get any of his regular volunteers to come work with us against Trump. I remember one lady who showed up just once and looked RIP SHIT! to be there, I think she said that all the positive stuff we said about Clinton, at a canvass launch for Clinton, made her "sick" and "don't expect me to say anything nice about her!" and she was one of only a tiny number of Bernie people who showed up in the general so she was better than some.

I remember the only Bernie Volunteer we got to become a regular. He'd knocked doors for months in New Hampshire for Bernie, organized his own phone bank into Nevada for their primary, drove down to South Carolina and spent the week before their primary knocking. Clearly a true believer, and when he decided to volunteer with us they kicked him out of the Facebook group he started and stopped speaking to him. I'll always remember what he said, that around the Bernie office they used to say that "a Trump voter was just a Bernie voter who hasn't been educated yet"

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, there were real motivations of the progressives and the left of the party, real policy based frustrations, particularly around how health care worked out, and I think Bernie Sanders himself was running because of that and to express that. But it tapped into something else, something not really political and much more emotional, rage and bitterness and a need to punish, the same energizes Trump taps into. It made a permission to be nasty to people you don't like, particularly women, I won't repeat the things people said on the phones, horrible.

now in 2024, almost 10 years later, there's a lot more depression mixed in, Trump talks about America as a 3rd world country all the time, there's just a vibe of having given up, hopelessness. There's a genocide and everything is horrible and hopeless and give up and die.

I don't believe in giving up, I don't believe in bitterness, I'm not a sunny person in real life, but I believe the point of politics, the politics I'm a part of, is lifting people up. It might be corny and uncool, but I believe in America, not that we're prefect, no, we're not, but together we've done great things, we fought a world war and went to the moon, and we can do great things together still always if we believe in each other, build each other up, stop being so afraid and weak and sad. I want to be beat fascism again, I want to go to the moon again, I want to beat climate change, and finally finally make the promise that all men are created equal REAL, and I don't believe in hiding behind walls, and crying that we can't do it any more, fuck that shit.

[whetstonefires]

You know what else gets neglected? Wen Xu made Lan Wangji set the library on fire.

Like. Realistically he knew it was going to burn whatever he did, so making a point of defiance that would just get more people killed would have been stupid. (I assume a major reason cql swapped this out for the Headband Cave, besides building up Su She's craven villainy, was that this would have been very expensive to film.) Giving way on this point after getting his leg broken, with his Sect overcome around him and his father mortally wounded, was perfectly reasonable.

But it's also something that was guaranteed to be very traumatic for him. Putting the flame to that building with his own hands.

And then, not knowing the fates of his family and with a broken leg, he got dumped into the Wen indoctrination and wound up in the turtle cave alone with Wei Wuxian, and definitely took his trauma out on him a little bit, though all things considered he handles himself with great restraint.

And then there's the war, and he takes time out of the campaign to try to find a presumed-dead guy whom he almost definitely regrets only being kind to when he wasn't really coherent, and then even though that guy is no longer trying to befriend him gets himself assigned to his theater of war to watch his back.

Lan Xichen is shown in that one tent flashback in the Nie Mingjue empathy section to know full well his brother is in Jiangling because Wei Wuxian is in Jiangling.

During the unclear-but-plural number of years the war went on, Lan Wangji was away from Cloud Recesses more or less all the time. Repairs were, we may assume, made in his absence. The collection was rebuilt as much as was possible, and housed in a replacement building, that may or may not have been complete by the time he went home to stay.

(Presumably one of the irreplaceable texts Xichen smuggled away was a list or index of the more replaceable ones, that got burnt, so they can go around to their contacts in an organized way asking to make copies. They seem to have done so very well at replacing such a large library so quickly that I can only assume they had had a very generous copying policy, and reaped the reward of this after the war.)

So after the war, when Lan Wangji is spending most of his time closed up in his room working on music, his being fixated on saving Wei Wuxian from the spiral of his own cultivation method is the least worrying explanation.

Because the alternate reasons Lan Xichen has to hand for this behavior are 1) Lan Wangji's ptsd is totally crippling and he's potentially going to become a shut-in for life or 2) the trauma he suffered at the start of the war, in the Cloud Recesses, being made to act against the Cloud Recesses, against his own safe place, means that he no longer feels secure or comfortable there, and is shut away obsessively cultivating to avoid their family and home.

And ngl I tend to suspect based on the timing of some beats that Lan Wangji did wind up funneling a lot of the energy from his war trauma into his romantic attachment. Because during that crucial window from 'Wei Wuxian has gone missing' to 'Wei Wuxian is dead' he believed that Wei Wuxian was someone he could help, if he could just figure out how.

And a huge predictor of PTSD, much larger than how 'objectively bad' something was, is how helpless you felt in the face of harm to yourself or others. So channeling his intensity and control issues into the contained and should-still-be-possible issue of Wei Wuxian's well-being would have been....

Not actually the worst coping mechanism, although it sure would have been a better one if Wei Wuxian had in fact been possible to help in some more substantive way than 'watching his back in battle' lmao.

[bsahely]

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[hms-no-fun]

in your view of things right now, with the political climate so hot coming into the election, and companies doing worse than ever in terms of amassing greed and power and fucking us all over... what do you think has to change to find a way out?

oh boy, what a question. i've got a BA in film studies. i pay my bills by making youtube videos and writing homestuck fanfiction. i am not an authority, i only kind of vaguely know what i'm talking about in any given conversation. but i do think about this question a lot, and i've been wanting an excuse to arrange some of my thoughts on the matter. so, you know, don't take my words here as gospel, or as a coherent platform, or whatever. i'm just a goat with some opinions who hasn't read enough theory but means well.

alright. as a communist my answer is always gonna be "proletarian revolution," but that's an endgoal we're currently nowhere near achieving. the path to getting there is impossible to truly know, because of course revolutions are historically contingent on an organized vanguard being prepared to take control in a moment of national crisis. we don't have a leftist vanguard in this country, haven't done since the FBI and state governments went to war with the Black Panthers. my ideal vision of an effective communist party is one unlike any that currently exists on a large scale in the USA, built by organizing communities to coordinate neighborhood needs, as part of city/county organizations coordinating local needs, as part of state organizations that etc. right now political parties are exclusively focused on electoralism. i want a party that can organize eviction blockades, free community daycare, reading groups, high-capacity cafeterias, and all manner of mutual aid. i want a party that can operate with solidarity, as the Panthers did by supporting the 28 day 504 sit-in that resulted in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. an effective vanguard party interfaces directly with the working class and builds its policy platforms based on their needs with no apology, rather than the acceptable liberal half-measures we've grown so accustomed to.

but it's a loooooooong road to get even that far. and you might say such an organization would be offputting, but like. the Panthers won over a lot of moderates over time because they weren't just out on the streets posturing. they took care of people. we only have free school lunch programs at all because of them. this is the thing that drives me nuts about so many leftists today-- you don't win over a moderate or conservative by debating the merit of their ideas. you help improve the material conditions of their day to day life, thanklessly, as you'd do with everyone in that community, because you cannot adopt means testing by another name without selling off an essential part of yourself. slowly, over time, some of those people will be won over. it'll never be everyone, but it doesn't have to be everyone. it doesn't even have to be a majority. you can get a hell of a lot done with even just 30% of people, especially if those people are even mildly-disciplined members of a well-organized party apparatus.

so, okay, that's my sense of the broad strokes. i want a proletarian revolution by way of a militant vanguard party. not saying this is the ONLY way forward, just the one i think would be most likely to succeed under the right circumstances. but again, we're a million miles away from having a communist vanguard in this country. quite frankly, such a thing feels an impossible pipe dream at this exact historic moment. so the question for me then becomes, how do we create the conditions that would allow for such an organization to emerge, claim power, hold it long enough to build a substantial base, then act on it towards a revolutionary goal?

first you've gotta ask why it's so hard to imagine this fanciful 20th century ass operation today. obvious answers: it's fucking impossible for a third party to gain a foothold in the system as it stands, so let's fix that. ranked choice voting would be a good place to start. i'm no electoralist, but if we're presuming that the revolution isn't happening tomorrow then some element of its foundation must be in making our democracy an actual democracy that can reflect people's needs. repeal citizens united. put HUGE limits on campaign donations and make it harder to conceal donations through super PACs. redistricting is another essential piece of the puzzle-- there is precisely one map of every major usamerican city and it's the map of redlined districts where people of color were not allowed to buy property. look at wealth distribution in communities and it'll map 1 to 1 to historic redlining, guaranteed. we gotta fix gerrymandering, loosen restrictions on poll access (such as the ad hoc poll tax that is government ID requirements), and if we're really feeling frisky push for a mandatory federal voting holiday so that no one has to work on election day (which elections count for "election day" is a whole other quagmire of course). less obvious answers: the cops and the FBI are still imprisoning and murdering black, poc, native, and queer activists in broad daylight. the national prison population is an IMMENSE locus of potential revolutionary energy. some goals on that front: abolish prisons, massively defund the cops, and curtail the surveillance state. restore the convicted felon's right to vote, and otherwise remove the many bureaucratic roadblocks that artificially create the cycle of recidivism. put money into nationwide job training programs (NO PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS) not just for ex convicts but for everyone, for reasons we'll get to momentarily.

i focus on electoral reform at the start here because i think it's an illustrative example of just how sprawling the task before us is. my goal isn't to overwhelm you or make you feel doomed because "holy shit that's already a lot of stuff that feels totally impossible and you haven't even mentioned healthcare yet," but to hammer home that the class war is being fought on a million fronts. you will go completely numb if you expect any one person or organization to address all of these issues simultaneously and as soon as possible. in an ideal world, there are many many affinity groups working towards these ends all over the place, either as part of or in solidarity with our imagined vanguard. i'm trying to look at ways to materially improve the lives of people in our political economy as it currently exists, rather than just saying "we need revolution" and leaving it there.

alright then, so what about capitalism? another major factor in the systematic disenfranchisement of the working class is the role corporate employers play in maintaining the class war. nobody has time to participate in local political actions because everyone has to work crushing hours, and when they do have days to themselves they still have to personally drive to wherever things are happening and find parking, instead of grocery shopping, taking care of kids, just fucking relaxing, whatever. obvious answers: medicare for all. right now, healthcare access is tied to employment status unless you are COMICALLY poor (i just got kicked off of medicaid a couple months ago because i now make marginally more than the cutoff, which now means i'm paying $200+ more a month on healthcare and am now way more worried about money than when i was on welfare. what a great and functional system!). if you're afraid of losing your health insurance for any reason, then you are disincentivized from expressing any opinions you might have about the conduct of your employer by, say, quitting. just passing universal healthcare alone would cause some major turmoil in the US economy. invest in mass public transit with rigorous local neighborhood access, and now a hell of a lot more people are empowered to participate in civic duty. less obvious answers: get rid of at-will employment! make it much much harder for employers to fire people, and regulate the ability of corporations to do mass layoffs. this would go a long way towards throwing some wrenches into the methods corps use to invent economic prosperity through the creative application of spreadsheets. on top of that, let's nuke the absolute fuck out of means-testing for programs like food stamps, medicaid, social housing, or literally any other form of "charity" that made Reagan shit his pants.

speaking of means testing, let's talk about bullshit jobs. there are a TON of pointless, degrading, wasteful jobs in this country. corps playing middlemen to middlemen. endless state and business bureaucracy using hundreds of systems that rarely if ever communicate with one another, putting a huge administrative burden on working people while the rich beneficiaries of this exploitation get to launder their guilt through the public-facing punching bags of customer service representatives. too many people work at the office factory. there are a lot of industries that need to be massively curtailed if not outright destroyed, a fact that intersects with the threat of climate change when you include coal and oil jobs. it's not enough to get rid of these positions, you also have to have a plan for those displaced workers-- hence the job training program i mentioned before. if we actually want to see a transition into a more egalitarian society that doesn't run exclusively on fossil fuels, then there needs to be a pipeline that gives purpose to the people whose lives will inevitably be radically altered by the kinds of changes we're talking about. there's an important thing, actually-- we all need to be prepared for this line of questioning and have a good answer in the back pocket. there is no shift from pure capitalism to even lite democratic socialism that won't hurt some cohort of people that doesn't deserve it. unless you want them to fall in with the fascists, you're gonna want to have a plan for how to integrate them into the world you're trying to build.

here's a wildcard for you. a lot of folks are on that "break up the monopolies" grind these days, and i appreciate the sentiment. i also think we would be vastly better served in the long run by simply nationalizing the monopolies. obviously there are plenty of worthwhile concerns to be had about any usamerican government gaining that kind of control over anything at this precise moment, but we cannot let that impede the horizons of our imaginary. i don't want market reform, i want the abolition of markets. the internet should be a public utility and ISPs should be government institutions. tech needs UNENDING regulation as we are all aware. social media should be public and interoperable. there needs to be a rolling back of internet surveillance. i've been toying with the idea of a Federal Department of Digital Moderation as an intervention on the current fascist radicalization pipeline that is social media, but that raises so many other concerns that i don't have an answer for. mostly i just think that the profit motive needs to be excised from as many sectors of public life as possible, and nationalization is a pretty good way to get there.

affordable housing! lower rents means fewer hours at work to make ends meet means more time to spend with family & community means more chances for more people to participate in civic action. abolish student debt and make college free! and make it illegal for colleges to invest in shit like fucking israel! a more accessible system of higher education means a more educated proletariat. this wouldn't by any stretch automatically lead to a more leftist proletariat, but conservatives have worked very hard to curtail access to higher education and that alone is more than enough reason to push for it. i've really buried the lede here, honestly. to my mind, medicare for all, mass public transit, free education, and national rent control are THE milestones we ought to be aiming for in terms of domestic policy. it is simply impossible to estimate how seismically and immediately these four policies (if applied equitably and without means-testing) could transform civic life in the USA. any systemic social ill you can name has some connection to one of these four ideas. i personally hold prison abolition & police defunding as equally essential, but these are unfortunately a MUCH harder sell for a lot of folks and will require some solidaristic frog-boiling from the likeable progressives/socialists of the world to naturalize the idea. but then, on that front i'm speaking very much outside my lane, and would defer to the wisdom of actual abolition activists in a scenario where we were talking concrete policy.

then there's foreign policy. this post has gone on a long time and i'm not the person to talk about this at length, but: the united states military needs to be defunded, and its outposts across the world removed. to curtail global climate change, the american imperial project must end. our meddling in foreign affairs is directly responsible for the domination of capital, and so long as this and other western states exist as they do, no communist outpost is safe. then there comes the question of reparations. all those billionaires didn't invent their money, they stole it. in quite a lot of cases they stole it from US citizens, but they've stolen far more from the rest of the world. tax the rich at 99% and distribute billions no-strings-attached to african and pacific island nations? other countries deserve a right to self determination without the threat of foreign interference. our nation's wealth doesn't just need to be taxed and redistributed to working class usamericans (particularly black communities), it ought to be redistributed internationally to all the countries we've fucked with over the last century and a half. but that's a pretty late stage pipe dream.

i guess the last thing that i've been thinking a lot about is more esoteric, and certainly difficult to implement. i believe we need to seriously interrogate "progress" as a concept. right now our society is defined by technological advancements as encouraged by a capitalist economy. if you fuck around with old analog tech at all, you've probably said to yourself more than once "they really don't make em like this anymore." i think about that fucking Hot Ones interview with matt damon about how streaming has stabbed the established profit model in the heart, where he says something like "we had a pretty good thing going before they showed up." i think about small museums closing down in the pandemic because they couldn't turn a profit, small local shops closing down for the same reason. constant newness paired with engineered obsolescence. disruption of the equilibrium in order to steal profit. it's easy to argue that socialized healthcare is good because it's actually more cost efficient than private healthcare. but those are the terms set by capitalists. i believe that healthcare and profit-seeking should be mutually exclusive. i believe that some things are a public good, however small --museums, quirky shops, parks, art spaces, open lots, movies, music, theater, whatever-- and that these things should be protected from the market at all costs. the alternative is corporate consolidation of everything, as every piece of local color cannot compete with economies of scale and asphyxiates to death. i refuse to accept the idea that "progress" means throwing away anyone who specialized in the thing being progressed beyond. i refuse to accept the idea that "progress" is linear and exists beyond the purview of morals, values, and ideology, nor indeed that it is inevitable and in any event an unalloyed good.

i believe that it doesn't matter if making higher-quality clothes at greater cost in unionized factories is "less efficient" than fast fashion. all "efficiency" means is spread everything as thin as possible, just enough just on time regardless of context. it's a mask for robber baron bullshit. it's an attempt by the bourgeoisie to naturalize the laws of economics as if they were on the same level as the laws of gravity, and we just can't accept that anymore. there's that meme, "i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i’m not kidding." i think we ought to apply that sentiment far more broadly. if we truly believe in the dignity of a self-determined life, then we must agree that some things are above profit, above efficiency, and are worth doing right. i haven't quite nailed down yet how exactly to verbalize this idea in a way that can be easily & quickly understood. but i feel it intensely, and only moreso as time goes on. as we push for these seemingly-impossible policy changes, it's of equal importance that we not lose ourselves to the limitations of the system as it exists under capitalism. to transform the world we must transform ourselves. to save the world we must save ourselves. if we hold a value to be true, then it must be constant and uncompromising. we must agree that our lives are better off when certain things exist even if they aren't efficient or fail to turn a profit, and thus decimate whatever part of us has been raised to believe that efficiency and profit ought ever to enter the equation. of course, in any revolution costs quickly become a huge going concern. there will always be painful compromises in policy along the path, always disappointments and mistakes. no revolution can be perfect. but through all these material challenges, the world that must be needs a place at the table with us. impractical, impossible, unfeasible... necessary.

you will probably not live to see that world, anon, and neither will i. we are all in the long game now, and it can never stop with one good policy, one good politician, one needed win. it's everything or it's nothing. socialism or barbarism. it is this belief which guides me, that no one ought to suffer the indignities i've suffered in my years working for shit wages, struggling to find housing, watching family die from economic abandonment. that there is simply no reason for society to be the way that it is, and that "the world isn't fair" is no excuse when we are the engineers of that "world" in every way that matters.

anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the subject. i hope i haven't made a complete fool of myself here.

[theculturedmarxist]

Half formed thought, but I suspect the "if you don't vote you're helping Trump/complicit in evil/whatever" locution is so important to the Democrats because its essential for disciplining both their party members and their base.

Because of the "Big Tent" nature of the Democratic Party it does contain members of the putative American "Left," with their varying degrees of support for policies that the party leadership oppose, like universal healthcare for example.

It would throw the party into chaos were the "Progressives" to form a coherent voting bloc and actually withhold their votes in order to achieve their goals. That's also why they're so terrified of voters doing the same, and why they hammer the "if you don't vote blue you're voting for hitler" slogans so often.

[ralfmaximus]

I really hate to say this, since I don’t want it to be true, but it looks like yesterday is the day Trump won the election by a landslide. The optics now are: a candidate who cannot maintain a coherent thought and a heroic one who survived an assassination attempt. Despite the facts, that is the contrast that voters will see. Those images are hard to shake from the subconscious mind.

I imagine his next term will be similar to George W. Bush’s first four years, where dissent was suppressed and harmful policies were steamrolled through. You guys remember the greatest hits, like “Free Speech Zones”, the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance program? Except Trump’s administration will be focused on fighting the enemy within, winning the “culture wars”. Any progressive advances made in the last few years are going be eliminated. Brace yourselves everybody, there are dark days ahead.

I respectfully disagree.

There will be no Trump landslide. Quite the opposite. He lost in 2020 with more momentum & money than he has now. His base of voters since then has shrunken. In order to win he has to attract Independents & Undecideds, who just saw an event that -- while exciting -- doesn't change any of the wacky shit he's been saying. Nor does that nullify any of the Project 2025 Gilead fascism he's pushing.

Despite what you hear, "most Democrats" are not abandoning Joe Biden. Even the ones who say they wish he'd step aside say they'll vote for him anyway. George Clooney says he's holding back millions of dollars in donations until the DNC ousts Biden, but they don't need that money. The Biden/Harris war chest is currently at $240 million bucks and growing.

There exists no serious demographic of voter who changed their minds about Trump after his attempted assassination. Sure, his MAGA base is going to vote even harder for him. So what? Everyone else knows he's the same obnoxious asshole as before. But now with extra blood and an ear injury.

Predictions are dumb. We're going to know in a few months who will be president. So get out there and vote against Trump unless you want your fears to come true.

[darkmaga-returns]

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced a new policy of one standard in combat units for both women and men. This is a vital step in creating and sustaining the most lethal military fighting force our country has ever known. It will ensure that the most qualified people are in the right jobs based solely on merit.

So-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and its array of predecessors allowed people to serve in units and positions they were not qualified to fill. It was disruptive and detrimental to unit cohesion and mission success. Using sex or any other diversity reason for inclusion is no longer acceptable.

I was an Army paratrooper and always thought there should be only one standard: pass or fail. When I jumped from a military aircraft, gravity didn’t care about my sex, and neither did the ground. There was no lighter rucksack or “women’s” parachute. Only those who could pull their weight belonged there, and that applied equally to women and men. 

Restructuring the current physical standards will be a massive but necessary undertaking; the military must have a coherent way to ensure the right people are in the right positions. The current general physical fitness standards vary based on sex and continually lower with age. They are not relevant to a service member’s ability to perform the duties required to ensure mission achievement. The best way to ensure lethality is to determine mission-based physical and intellectual requirements and generate an evaluation system accordingly.

[gayelderstourney]

OLD MAN YAOI BRACKET ROUND 1

Propaganda:

Sir Alistair Hammerlock/Wainwright Jakobs:

THEY ARE CANONICALLY MARRIED!!!!! THEY ARE FORCE/FINESSE SUN/MOON SALT/SUGAR. THEY ARE SILLY GENTLEMEN WHO ARE IN LOVE. HAMMERLOCK IS A VICTORIAN BIG GAME HUNTER LIFTED STRAIGHT FROM A STEAMPUNK NOVEL WHO IS ALL ABOUT ADVENTURE AND WAINWRIGHT IS A SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN HEIR TO A GUN MANUFACTURING MEGACORPORATION WHO HAS SMALL AMBITIONS. OPPOSITES ATTRACT ULTIMATE INCARNATION. THE THEMES AND MOTIFS AND PARALLELS BETWEEN THEM ARE IMPECCABLE. THEY SUPPORT EACHOTHER UNCONDITIONALLY AND WHOLEHEARTEDLY. HAMMERLOCK THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO DIE AND HE RECORDED WHAT HE THOUGHT WERE GOING TO BE HIS LAST WORDS AND HE SAYS, I QUOTE: "but I long not for death seeking adventures, but instead for one… last… peaceful… moment… with you. I love you, Wainwright. Farewell." DID I MENTION HAMMERLOCK HAS A NICKNAME FOR WAINWRIGHT. HE CALLS HIM Winny AND IT MELTS MY HEART EVERY TIME. GOD THEY GET MARRIED IN THE CORPSE OF AN ELDRITCH GOD AND THEIR WEDDING IS AN ENTIRE DLC. IT ALSO COVERS THEIR RESPECTIVE DOUBTS THAT MAYBE THEY AREN'T THE RIGHT MAN FOR EACHOTHER BUT IN THE END THEY REALIZE THAT IT'S NOT TRUE AND THE OTHER LOVES HIM SO SO SO MUCH JUST LIKE HE IS. I AM SO SO AUTISTIC ABT THEM THEY ARE PEAK OLD MAN YAOI BUT THEY ARE VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN IN THE OLD MAN YAOI COMMUNITY. PLEASE.

They have an entire DLC about their wedding. Their base game story arc starts with Wainwright calling you to ask you to go on a rescue mission to save Hammerlock and calling him the love of his life.

There is a whole game DLC dedicated to their canonical marriage, they constantly call each other by pet names, every single time they talk about one another there is passion in their voices, they express how much they love and care for each other.

Irving Bailiff/Burt Goodman:

they are TRAPPED in capitalist dystopian hell and yet gay love persists. literally they are fighting for their got damn lives to be gay. they've been subjected to evil fucked up brain surgery to make them forget who they are outside of the workplace and yet. AND YET. they fall in love INSIDE the workplace and gain the desire to fight their oppressors so they can do old man yaoi activities. i forgot to take my adderall today sorry im not forming coherent thoughts but they made christopher walken yaoi real

They have only ever experienced being at work and are desperately trying to find meaning with no memory of the outside world. Fraternization is against the rules as well. The yearning is so much.

they are 2 sad old men who are in forbidden love. they bond over a mutal love of corporate art & company tote bags. their love inspired Irving to rebel against his employers for the first time ever. Burt is even Christopher Walken.

They’re so quietly sweet and heart-wrenching… fell in love on the ‘inside’ (they both work a job that ‘severs’ their work memories from their out-of-work memories; inside the job, they have no idea who they are on the outside or what the world is like, but they found each other and found a little bit of love and meaning and happiness inside the nightmare corporate world that is their job)

canonically in love with each other! in the show people sever their consciousness so they aren't aware when they're working. this creates a separate person that only exists while they're at the office, who doesn't share any memories with the person they are on the outside. these two old men bond and find comfort in each other despite the dystopian hell situation they're in

Old men having a forbidden romance while stuck in a hellish workplace dystopia

These two old men know nothing outside of their company propaganda, which says romance is forbidden, and they still choose each other. They bond over paintings, discuss company policy in each other's arms like they're debating scripture on whether their love is allowed. They're sooo gay and it's so sweet to see true, canonical old man yaoi

Weird old man office romance except they only exist inside the bounds of the world’s worst office building and they go on a little date to a room full of plastic plants

[warsofasoiaf]

Hello slal! How are you? I was wondering what your opinion is of J D Vance’s foreign policy? Have a nice day!

He is overwhelmingly pro-Israel, to the point where his foreign policy has been characterized as "America First with an Israeli exception," and would likely support an escalation in Gaza and be unlikely to call for humanitarian pauses or expansion of humanitarian aid. I actually don't believe he'd have any real influence on the course of Gaza though - Netanyahu is driven primarily by domestic concerns, not foreign ones.

Vance sells himself as part of the Ukro-skeptic foreign policy community that wants to pivot to China, as emphasized by figures like Eldridge Colby (who is likely to be on the Trump natsec team should he win in 2024). He believes that there's no credible end-state to the War in Ukraine and that limited defense resources should be focused on China.

But of course, this is scuppered by the fact that Vance regularly repeats Russian talking points, unwilling to actually invest in expanding defense production, which has some of the highest ROI and would be a wise choice for anyone who claims to desire economic prosperity and a desire to revitalize American manufacturing. Whether Vance blames Ukraine for Trump's first impeachment and wants to punish them (as is likely the case with Trump) or he believes in the Russo-Ukrainian War as the next arena for the culture war, I do not know.

So in that sense, Vance has no real coherent foreign policy outlook and rather uses foreign policy as a means to pander to his base, which makes sense as he was picked largely because of his overwhelming Trump sycophancy (and his position as a swing state Senator) as opposed to any specific policy choices.

Thanks for the question, Fang.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King