#incrementalist

[drnic1]

Sweet Dreams in a Clickbait World

Sweet Dreams Snooze or Lose The latest pick-up in the press with a clickable link from Axios is How to get more sleep (Americans need it), which frustratingly fails to include a proper reference to the actual source paper or data. The notation “Data: Apple Heart and Movement Study” suggests the data came from this study group out of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital with a web page here. But…

[callmearcturus]

I had a very long, emotional talk with a friend about the state of the world and the darkness hanging over us all, and how grim it all seems.

There is just one thing I wish I could give to everyone is the idea that part of the Struggle, of wanting a better world, is that you need to celebrate the victories and not just sink into despair.

I think this hit me a few years back, maybe 3 or 4, when I saw someone say "If all you reblog about trans people is how much you hate terfs, what are you even doing here? make sure you're elevating us and not just our haters"

which unlocked something in my brain. that I needed to love trans people more than I hated transphobes. hate can't be the point.

a diet of fear and anger will poison you, you need to have joy too. you can't lose sight of the joy and hope. we have to know that we can win, and we have to celebrate everyone around us. if all you can think about are the failures and you can't remember where we won, then what are you doing here? how do you see the future? will I see you there?

i hope so, and that's the guiding light.

[monopeptide]

im dealing with the election week bummer of learning that a very good friend and I are less aligned on our politics than I thought we were and I’m really holding myself back from cranky posting about it. just so you guys know

[taohun]

people on here complaining about “burn it all down” leftists as if their problem is that they’re incrementalists and not that they’re not leftists

[pissvortex]

Me and Greg talk about this in the newest episode of Red Connections but the reason nobody will ever “take one for the team” and do something that directly threatens capitalist hegemony is because the only thing that leftist organizing in America is doing is working on improving people’s quality of life and playing damage control. We all have too much to lose, union jobs to fight for, etc. — why would we throw that all away going to jail for sabotaging a weapons factory or something? I am by no means saying that purposefully making people’s lives worse on purpose so they have less to live for is a viable strategy either (that is where we’re headed regardless, though!). The left, the fucking DSA and PSL and SRA or whatever need to pool their resources together on SOME kind of a limited united front that provides legal defense and solidarity for everyone who takes actions that risks their careers by putting them at odds with capital. People need to be allowed to openly oppose the state and still have a LIFE to fall back on rather than just fucking dying alone in a blaze of glory. Housing, armed protection from fascists, shelter from the state, anything at all to give people an alternative way of having some semblance of a life after putting themselves at odds with the status quo. “Building power” and creating a parallel structure at odds with capitalist society is not this incrementalist getting socialists on the city council bullshit that we’ve already been trying to do for decades. Dual power means moving as a bloc capable of taking action and sheltering ourselves from retaliation by the state and capital - we can’t rely on the bravery of individuals who are willing to throw their lives away setting themselves on fire or assassinating a CEO, we need to provide people with a livable alternative to the system they put themselves in opposition to.

[crimsonphantasmagoria]

The thing about Mythal is, if they'd kept the whole thing from Trespasser about her having positive contact with Solas’s rebellion, and made that into her being an inside contact or bankrolling the rebellion, like Dorian or Maevaris for the Shadow Dragons, she would have been so much more sympathetic. But because of that one regret mural, it seems like this wasn't the case at all. Which means that the best I can say about Mythal is that she's an incrementalist who failed miserably and got her feelings hurt when her boytoy left to go make some actual changes to society, and the worst I can say is that she was a power hungry slave owner who was surprised when the leopards ate her face. Unfortunately, Veilguard leaves the whole thing very ambiguous, so both of these readings, and everything inbetween are equally as valid as one another. And that's without going into the ambiguity of her and Solas’s relationship, which changes tone wildly based on whether you know that Trespasser strongly implied Solas had her vallaslin. Or, you know, that vallaslin were slave markings. All in all, I think this ambiguity was a mistake. Possibly a mistake born of limited time and resources, but a mistake nonetheless. And that's without the fact that they decided to drop all her individual motivation and goals that we got hints of from Flemeth, and made her instead into a prop for Solas’s story. They literally retroactively fridged her.

Honestly, justice for Mythal, she deserved better from Bioware.

[karlachian]

i genuinely believe duke consort astarion's #1 agenda in life (after ->enjoy decadent safety and ->love wyll) at least in the beginning is to drive ulder to suicide. this is fine though because ULDER'S #1 agenda in life is to annoy astarion so much that he goes and lives in a separate house (not even divorce ulder doesn't like having lofty goals he's an incrementalist). it's also even more fine that astarion wants his father in law to kill himself because ulder is the type of man who refers to suicide as "pussy shit".

[probablyasocialecologist]

Those of us on the left who call for radical change are sometimes accused of having “pie-in-the-sky” ideas by milquetoast liberals. Well, if it’s pie-in-the-sky to want everyone to have their basic human needs met, then so be it. Anyone who is unhoused cannot thrive. Being unhoused significantly raises one’s risk of mortality and lowers one’s life expectancy. We have to care enough about unhoused people to demand they get what often seems unthinkable: housing! Incrementalist change is often rotten. It’s the natural outcome of a politics that refuses to see people’s human rights as nonnegotiable and that lacks a fundamental willingness to challenge structural causes of injustice. We need to have a pie-in-the-sky dedication to creating a society with zero homelessness and zero hunger, to ending poverty and unmet healthcare needs once and for all. Our society needs to center human needs, not private profit. We need to be a society that truly allows people to thrive—not one that, as Malcolm X said, merely pulls the knife in people’s backs out by a few inches.

[max1461]

Would you consider yourself an incrementalist or an excrementalist?

endocremationist

[gynii]

i’m catching up on the qsmp debate and frankly, baghera bbh and gegg are really the stars here. baghera and bbh, while having different plans for the new governmental system, are at least campaigning to restructure and reject the system set up by the federation. gegg supplies the passion and ideology to reject the federation, and i think the three of them combined would be a very respectable force to be reckoned with.

that being said, i think it’s really funny how most of the candidates lump bbh and baghera together despite them having near opposite governmental structures in my mind. While bbh is promoting an informal and unstructured system based off of mutual aid and bond of word style honor, baghera is promoting a very structured council system with voting and community lead aid systems. yet the ‘true’ presidency candidates are lumping them together as the same ideology because they are both trying to challenge the system immediately, and thus cannot identify the nuances in their proposals.

gegg is nearly completely dismissed because of his more radical and comedic deliveries, but is essentially the distilled essence of resistance. he supports both baghera and bbh BECAUSE they refuse to comply with the greater systems, and wants to push them and the voters to think more radically. gegg is not a candidate in the traditional sense, but a pushing force to challenge as many candidates and voters intellectually as possible. the only flaw is how effectively he’s dismissed.

the presidency candidates will twist his words to support their agendas, the audience will scream ‘based’ and ‘spitting facts’ without truly incorporating his ideals into the worldviews. they understand ‘federation bad’ and gegg’s platform is the most clearly anti-federation, yet people dismiss his more radically inclined phrases as absurd and hyperbole. yet it’s his extreme stance that is necessary to invoke true change.

tldr: really fucked up the gay cat boy is turning out to be an incrementalist boot licker /LH /J /RP

[autolabrum]

Watched Conclave

Very different at home than in theaters. Significantly less imposing, and I was significantly more aware of the highs (framing, mise-en-scene) and lows (movement and stillness) of the cinematography. Performances and character work is really impressive here. Still think it comes off as annoyingly liberal and incrementalist, but my friends here (who adored it) convinced me that it's more impressive than I thought (although the identities still feel pretty arbitrary and tokenized). Despite my complicated feelings, it is extremely fun to watch in a group, would recommend.

[unsoundedcomic]

So Shadwe is a genuinely good guy then? I was honestly half-expecting that he’d turn out to be monstrously corrupt, maybe even involved in Duane’s assassination somehow. Even at best I figured he’d be a grody in that he’d representative of Alderodes more repressive and traditional side. But giving rights to women, treating other castes well, and supporting third options? Man sounds like he’s way ahead of his time.

He's a thoroughly decent human being, in the context of his time and place. I always thought that was really apparent right from the start considering where we see that Duane is when we first meet him in Alderode. Duane's from a low place in the world but he's been elevated to this pretty prestigious position, with an even more prestigious calling ahead of him. None of that would be possible if he wasn't serving a man willing to overlook his low birth and caste. Grandvin even smoothed over the Bodie incident (though it was by letting Bodie kick Duane's ass, of course).

So yeah, a very fair-minded man, but an incrementalist, as so many Jet and Copper tend to be.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Dion J. Pierre

She continued, “The fight for a free Palestine is an intersectional movement that encompasses fights for environmental justice, racial justice, health care and reproductive justice, and the liberation of oppressed peoples worldwide.”

Labourdette went on to describe a paranoid worldview in which Zionism is linked to “mass surveillance” which “gives our government and institutions the capability to identify members of our movement through their usual clothing or facial recognition trained on ID databases” and implored protesters who attend the event to conceal their identifies by “wearing masks and sunglasses or nondescript clothing.” At past anti-Israel protests, such instructions have facilitated hate crime assaults, property destruction, and the illegal occupation of campus buildings.

As part of the demonstration, the students will issue a slew of demands calling for policies which fulfill the requirements of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. They include terminating foreign aid to Israel, severing Wesleyan University’s relationship with the aerospace company Pratt & Whitney, and ending “all university partnerships and programs with Israeli academic institutions due to their direct contribution to the Zionist state’s goals of colonization.” According to Labourdette, these demands, and others, were authored by the group known as the February Action Committee, a splinter group of National Students for Justice for Palestine (NSJP) by way of its affiliation with Connecticut Students for Palestine.

NSJP, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its grand strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.

“Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” it said in Sept. 2024 in a now-deleted tweet. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”

[comparativelysuperlative]

What was the book? With the Definitely Real Banishment

Spoilers (obviously) but it's the Lightbringer series. That villain was pretty good! The word-by-word writing is fine! The plot is, for several books' worth, aimed at being Very Generic Fantasy (for reasons that will make sense later). Incoming long post about its philosophy, with even more spoilers.

It's not often that I read a book and immediately go "I can tell you what kind of middle school this author went to." In this case, it was drawing on the author's experience of exactly the theology I grew up with, which was almost eerie.

(I read book one years and years ago, and didn't retain much other than "cool magic system." Probably everything in this post is true about book one as well, but I wouldn't know.)

Google will tell you that the series gets gradually very Christian, to the point where the climax of the last book contains a sermon. But it's more specific than that. These books scream "Protestant, American, classically educated, does not travel internationally very often, male, straight, probably white, the kind of person who would vote straight-ticket Republican until that meant Trump at which point all bets are off." I did not bother confirming most of those. They're just obvious.

The loudest part--to me at least--was the "classically educated." (If you're not familiar, it's this thing.) The series would mention quotes from fantasy medieval Catholics or fantasy ancient Greeks or whatever, and I'd recognize the quotes or the names because they'd be real people I ran across in school. Sure enough, author went to Hillsdale.

Lightbringer is interesting for having an actual vision of a conservative society, not just about hating the right/wrong people. Not being on that team anymore I don't actually like this vision very much, but compared to current conservatives, credit for having one at all.

Differences between people obviously don't affect your value as a person, they just might make it easier or harder or mean you have to specialize differently to accomplish as much For The Group.

(That opinion makes perfect sense for characters in an elite military unit/training for that unit. But that context is mostly specific to book two, and the philosophy really isn't.)

This applies to everything. Physical condition, including strength/weight/gender. Color-blindness. Superpowers. Being straight. (I'm genuinely not sure if that part was intentional. Characters kept getting distracted at terrible times, and the narration outside their head sounded exactly the same as when someone can't run a mile without Trying Very Hard.)

It does not matter whether your mental illness turns out to be literally demons in your head. Either way you've still got to either work through it or specialize around it.

Tradition matters, even when we don't understand the reason behind it.

If you happen to be in a fantasy book and have access to magic, consorting with demons is evil but fancy physics is fine. You can just BET this author got into fights with other Christians about whether Harry Potter was anti-Jesus.

"Irredeemably bad" isn't really a thing. "Not in fact going to be redeemed" is, but it's worth trying to show mercy if you have the chance. If you don't have the chance, kill 'em. Don't enjoy it, though.

Forgiving people for actually-bad things is hard, can't just go "idk, they're good guys now," but it's also important. (I do think this is underrepresented in secular fiction, where it's either depicted as "how could you work with THEM" or "come on, get over it already and team up against the whatever.")

One of the big reveals at the end is "the Christian God is real." The answer to the problem of evil is indeed the popular answer in the denominations I grew up with. Human choices something something mumble free will.

Very incrementalist. You do as much good as you can as fast as you can, but obviously without overthrowing the entire order or anything. Only evil opportunists would want to do that. Yes, even if the existing order is corrupt all the way through.

Speaking of which, you know that organization/political entity claiming to represent God? Corrupt all the way through. God is more personal than that. Protestantism!

Personal morality matters. Your leaders absolutely must be good people, or at least trying to be, or you're screwed.

Personal morality matters. It is safe to assume you'll end up as exactly what your peers expect of you, so pick good peers.

A man should be faithful to one (1) wife. Viewpoint characters speedrun figuring out the philosophy behind this.

(IMO monogamy was a legitimate human rights win by early Christianity, relative to what came before, and I think something similar applies in this setting. But since the real-life alternatives today are so much better than women being property, giving this a lot of screen time sounded like the book is fishing very hard for things historical Christianity did right.)

Also, once you are married you Are Married. It's not that changing that would be unthinkable, just that if you do treat it as an option you're obviously doing it wrong.

Gay people don't exist. Any variety of non-straight, really. Nobody says that it should be that way. It just doesn't come up. Characters are written in enough detail that I can tell you how they'd react if you asked them, and it's mostly the "not my business" + "prefer not to think about it" kind of low-grade homophobia. A few would be explicitly okay with it. But it does not come up. If there were a gay relationship depicted, I'd expect it to be "coincidentally" problematic in some other way.

(I guess there's that one slaver-antagonist whose sexuality is just "sadist." Yeah, one might call that problematic.)

Practically dripping with Great Man Theory of History. There's a scene where the protagonist has a self-affirming/emotional moment about not relying on his family name and meritoriously earning his first kingdom. This is played completely straight.

Don't worry, he uses it for good. At least as much good as he can without overthrowing the existing order etc.

If there are end times prophecies, they might well be true but you can't trust any specific interpretation so it's wiser to just do your best without reference to the prophecy. (This is an interesting take! And not heresy but also not common! I bet the author's reacting against some interesting strains of fundamentalism there.)

A cool idea where angels and demons can be anywhere in any world at any time in history, but are very reluctant to actually do that because they can't pick the same time twice. You can just tell it's the author's Christianity headcanon.

You win by doing your best and having faith in God. The villains are very much a sideshow.

(I think if everyone followed this book's philosophy more it would be a mostly bad thing. Let's not do that.)

(But wow, I wish modern conservatives were only this bad.)

It probably sounds like I didn't like this series. But I did read five doorstoppers' worth. This post is just about the opinions, and the opinions sucked.

Anyway. This has to be on purpose, right, and 10 or 15 years ago I was pretty much the target audience for this. Guess I'm old.

I used to explicitly think "I'm Christian, but atheist fiction is more interesting," and this book is the kind of thing that...tries...to counter that. Fails, because resolving major conflicts with divine intervention is tricky to make interesting. But you'll see why it's going for Every Other Book, But Christian. (Also, the amount of sex in these books is much higher than you might think, given everything. I wish I knew less about what body types the author is attracted to.)

Anyway, I can't really say I would recommend it. But if you're interested in what would happen if Card or Sanderson tried to be Evangelical Lewis for adults, Lightbringer isn't bad.

[tiny-space-whale]

Fellow USAmericans,

I hate subscription-based business models as much as the next person — and probably more. But our good public media (you know, one of the actually helpful things our taxes go to) is probably losing its federal funding.

If you have a few bucks to spare:

Open the website for your local PBS station and sign up for monthly donations. It can be as little as five dollars. As a bonus, you'll also get full access to their streaming platform.

Do you listen to any NPR podcasts? If yes, and if you can, subscribe to the ad-free Plus versions. It's fast and easy, and some of them come with bonus content too!

Are either of these services perfect? No. Well okay, PBS is actually pretty close to perfect. NPR is full of neolib incrementalist only-slightly-right-of-center type shit, but it's kinda the best we have in terms of far-reaching national news media. (You should also support independent journalists if you're not already, but that's for another post.)

Links:

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Colleen Hamilton for Them (12.04.2024):

Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that could have wide-ranging implications for the right to make decisions about one’s own body and restrict access to lifesaving healthcare for millions of vulnerable people. If that sounds like a form of nightmarish déjà vu, that’s because we’ve been here before. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion with their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Now, employing a similar strategy, right-wing organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation have systematically undermined access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, resulting in another high-stakes case at the court.

United States v. Skrmetti will decide whether bans on gender-affirming care for minors violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Dobbs also hinged on this question, with the court ultimately writing that rights not “deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions” are not protected.) The outcome of Skrmetti could decide if young people, in consultation with their doctors, can access care that has been safely available for decades and is supported by every major medical association and many global health authorities, as evidenced by several amicus briefs filed in this case. Beyond that, Skrmetti could pave the way for a broader rollback of trans rights, including bills that could restrict access to gender-affirming care for adults, prohibit insurance providers from covering gender-affirming care, and impose waiting periods before accessing treatment. With both Dobbs and Skrmetti, the conservative goal is as obvious as it is disturbing: to entrench rigid gender hierarchies and make it exceedingly difficult for people to make life-affirming choices about their own bodies.

Yet, while right-wing groups have united in their efforts to ban abortion and restrict trans rights, too many Democrats and cis women have failed — or lacked the courage — to acknowledge the connection. Instead, after running an unsuccessful Presidential campaign that promised to restore the already inadequate protections of Roe, they are trapped in a cycle of blame while abortion funds dry up and trans young people stare into a potentially terrifying future without care. This tension has become increasingly evident since Donald Trump’s re-election. Democrats have argued that the party has focused too much on “cultural issues” like queer and trans rights and not enough on "kitchen-table" policies like the economy. However, this analysis fails to understand that access to healthcare is an economic issue, for trans people and cis people alike. By failing to draw these connections and offer a dynamic vision of bodily autonomy for all, they cede ground to a unified conservative assault on human rights and quietly capitulate to the newest conservative talking point: your body, my choice.

The Democratic Party’s failure is particularly maddening given that right-wing groups have consistently recognized and weaponized the connection between movements for bodily autonomy. The parallels between their attacks on reproductive rights and gender-affirming care are striking and deliberate. Since Roe was decided in 1973, groups like the National Right to Life have taken a twofold approach: pass incrementalist state laws while reshaping the judiciary. Conservative groups have spent decades identifying and promoting judges with originalist interpretations of the Constitution, developing legal precedents (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), and exploiting judicial vacancies — most notably through Mitch McConnell’s block of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland’s appointment to the Supreme Court and subsequent judicial-appointment blitz during Trump’s presidency. These efforts culminated in a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, bolstered by a flood of restrictive state-level bills ready and waiting to land on their desks.

United States v. Skrmetti is not distinct from these fights over reproductive rights — it’s their next phase. Before 2020, there was not a single law that banned access to gender-affirming care for trans people. Since then, nearly 36 states have attempted to restrict trans rights. This is not a coincidence. Recognizing the conservative turn of the courts, the Alliance Defending Freedom has drafted and promoted bills that restrict access to gender-affirming care. These model bills have been introduced in various state legislatures, contributing to a coordinated and successful strategy to limit transgender healthcare. These laws “are the result of an openly political effort to wage war on a marginalized group and our most fundamental freedoms,” writes Chase Strangio, Co-Director of the ACLU's LGBT & HIV Project.

The same networks, legal precedents, and ideological tools used to overturn Roe are now being leveraged to erode trans rights. As Jules Gill-Peterson, a Professor at Johns Hopkins, writes, “Anti-abortion and anti-trans legislation are products of the same political coalition, using the same scripts and tactics.” The goal isn’t only to deny care to trans youth, though that is one potentially inevitable and devastating outcome. It is to reinforce a rigid gender ideology. As demonstrated by the millions spent on anti-trans political ads during the Presidential election, the goal is “to re-entrench old notions of what is the proper role of men and women in society,” says Strangio. This has sweeping implications for both trans and cis people alike who dream of a world where we all have the freedom to decide what happens to our own bodies.

[...] Public support exists, but we need to practice deeper forms of political courage and solidarity. Rather than capitulating to the right and abandoning the most vulnerable among us, we can demand a comprehensive vision of the world that protects everyone. Universal healthcare, for example, is widely popular and would materially improve millions of lives while ensuring access to gender-affirming care and abortion. According to a Pew study, 63% of Americans believe the federal government has a responsibility to provide healthcare for all. A robust defense of bodily autonomy isn’t just morally right. It’s politically savvy. Indeed, universal healthcare would also protect Americans with pre-existing conditions, who could see premiums spike if the incoming Trump administration repeals the Affordable Care Act. This is not just about trans youth or people seeking abortions—these fights shape a broader vision of a world where anyone, regardless of their gender or circumstances, can make decisions about their own lives. Restricting one group’s rights ultimately sets the stage for restricting everyone’s. Defending one group’s right to make decisions about their own bodies defends us all.

Colleen Hamilton wrote for LGBTQ+ publication them, detailing the reasons why attacks on trans rights should be viewed the same way as attacks on abortion: they are both violations of bodily autonomy.