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germiyahu · 4 months

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I also don't like the assertion that Jews are trying to conflate "criticism of Israel with antisemitism/the Israeli state with Jewishness as a whole" because you... YOU... did that first and you do it more easily than you breathe.

You interrogate every complaint of antisemitism, just to make sure it's not actually whining about someone being mean to Israel. You investigate the person's social media history to make sure they're not a Zionist. You turn around and act so enlightened and wise when you say "Right because Netanyahu wants Jewish people to think criticism of Israel is antisemitic, and he wants Jewish people to think that they have to have ties to Israel and that Israel is the only place they'll feel safe, that plays right into his hands," like you're doing this for Jewish people's benefit. Like you're not one of the people making Jews feel unsafe.

The fact of the matter is that Israel is intrinsically Jewish. By design yes. But also for the fact that it's just logically true? Most Israelis are Jewish. Most Diaspora Jews have friends and family in Israel. It's not a function of flags or national anthems. It's a function of people. Saying "Well conflating Israel with the idea of Jewishness is antisemitic," changes nothing about that. It's words with no value. It's empty air. Because what have you done to advocate for Diaspora Jewry and make them feel like they're not subordinate to Israel? What have you done to assure them that your disdain for a country that most of them have personal familial and cultural ties to is not motivated by bigotry? What have you done to include them and center their safety when advocating against Israel's policies?

Yes, the more people are antisemitic and weird about Israel to Diaspora Jews' faces, the more of them will gravitate closer to Israel. But that's not the point. The point is that if your criticisms of Israel were normal, we wouldn't have a problem. 99% of Diaspora Jews would join you. But you tell them they're not allowed to defend Israel in any context and they're not allowed to defend themselves when your "criticism" of Israel harms them. You don't want to admit that these can overlap. You just want them to silently add a rubber stamp of approval of whatever you say or they can leave.

It's clear you don't see Jews as a marginalized group. This is not how Leftists treat marginalized groups. This is how they treat the oppressor group, the dominant group. Diaspora Jews are at best an ally to Palestinian liberation. Because you don't see them as different from Israelis, you see them as the group that benefits from the oppression of Palestinians, not as a group that has nothing to do with Palestine and is historically and contemporarily marginalized by Western society, the society you live in.

And yet for all you conflate Diaspora and Israeli Jews you clearly want to keep Israel and the Diaspora divided, isolated from each other. They can't show solidarity with one another because that's (((ZIONIST COLLUSION))) and confirmation of a media controlled conspiracy or something. You want Diaspora Jews under your thumb and you want Israeli Jews dead. You're not as subtle as you think you are.

#antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #israel #palestine

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hyenagurl · 16 days

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youll know that feminism, actual feminism, is as deeply unpopular and thus as important as its ever been when you have people sniffing around Suspicious Women for thought crimes, the way hippie dudes in the 60s and 70s would badger and ostracize their fellow leftist women for being Frigid Prudes. real feminism is intrinsically anti-establishment and counter culture because the establishment and culture are misogynistic, if it were popular then its not doing its job. the fact that this liberal pro prostitution and post modern gender form of feminism is the most popular, and that any woman who speaks against it in the slightest is deplatformed, should clue even the biggest moron in on how this is all an antifeminist farce. what a waste of everyone’s fucking time!

#but they dont have a clue bc. theyre sexist morons

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drbased · 3 months

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This is how conservatives percieve transgenderism, and I hope it's immediately obvious here what makes this conservative rhetoric rather than leftist feminist rhetoric.

The whole tone of this is off; the focus here is on the corruption of the individual - there is no commentary on the moral consequences of the trans person's behaviour; it is simply assumed that the mere presence of mental illness is in itself a corruption of the natural order and that bad moral consequences inherently follow.

The first warning sign is explicitly the word 'deviants' but implicitly the words 'mentally ill'. The word deviant in and of itself signals to some corruption of the natural, and the natural is good, therefore deviancy is itself a bad thing. The badness doesn't come from the act of rape, or of deception, or of invasion of privacy, or of control of others, but rather the lack of conformity to social norms. And this combines with 'mentally ill' to plant inside the reader's mind the concept of mental illness as an explicit, conscious choice to be evil - to be a 'mentally ill deviant' is to be an aberration of the natural and good. The conservative mindset is that there are simply good people and bad people - the belief is that goodness and badness as inherent, intrinsic and ontological, instead of being a complex web of circumstance (privilege included). They want to have their cake and eat it too - they want to believe some people are 'just' bad, but also that their badness is entirely their choice. This allows for rapid, easy and guiltless dehumanisation, which is useful for a society with a prison-industrial complex. Thus 'mentally ill deviants' takes on a meaning of intrinsic and unpreventable but ultimately purposeful badness purely by association.

This is how dogwhistles work; calling someone 'mentally ill' derogatarily isn't a particularly nice thing to say, but the context here means it signals to a core belief about what mental illness is - the 'illness' is being described not how we would describe it in a factual, neutral sense, but rather as a sickness of the soul, a corruption of the personhood. The crimes committed by the 'mentally ill deviant', then, are used as 'proof' as the inherent corrupted evilness of the person doing them - in essence, the actual harm they've caused and the person hurt by them are almost secondary to the real ideological point: that this person is a Bad, Corrupting, Evil force. The concept of why we have morality at all is ultimately irrelevant to 'the bigger picture'.

The second major warning sign of his use of '2 genders, male female'. Any radfem worth their salt doesn't care jack shit about gender; we address the material reality of biological sex. This man does not care about morality or about the oppression of women; this man only cares about conformity, about accepting the status quo. He is simply asserting the status quo because the conservative mind accepts the status quo as fact, purely on the evidence that it's the status quo, in a closed feedback loop. There are 2 genders because they are, some people are bad because they are bad. That's the underpinning ideology of conservativism: an unquestioning assumption of the self-evident nature of the goodness of things.

And then of course, the last line. The last line exists to sum up all this person has to really say on the subject. Not to be corny but the use of 'shrink' here really evokes an old-school mindset. This isn't about visiting a therapist to resolve trauma; this is about visiting a 'shrink' to fix you. I guess you can say that this is a kinder approach than simply categorising someone as 'bad' and 'evil' and locking them away, but that's all it is; the fundamental of the mindset is still there, only in this course the person is given grace by the belief that the corruption inside of them didn't come from their soul but rather from some metaphysical social evil (if you want to be explicitly christian about it, you'd call it the devil). Ultimately it betrays the same lack of curiosity about why people make choices - if you're mentally ill (indeterminate) you need to be 'fixed'. Right-wingers claim to be all about individual freedom but they show no interest in understanding people as individuals. You're either good or bad, and that's it.

A short quippy reply to a tumblr post doesn't really sum up someone's entire belief system, but I think the lack of empathy to anyone here really jumps out. Considering I saw this comment on a radfem post, I found it interesting how upon reading it I immediately thought 'oh that's a right-wing guy' and went to the blog and it's exactly the kind of alt-right conspiracy shit you expect. It's a fun and enlightening exercise to parse why I so quickly identified it as that.

#my takedowns #my writing

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is-the-fire-real · 2 months

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'Reminder that "punch a nazi uwu" leftists utilize Nazi rhetoric to justify punching Jews.

It was never about punching Nazis; it was about getting social permission to punch.'

It was this very mentality that drove me away from considering myself a liberal anymore (I AM VERY MUCH LEFT LEANING, I DIDN'T DECIDE TO BECOME CONSERVATIVE JUST TO BE CLEAR. I just don't feel like those spaces have any intrinsic safety any longer). It feels like so much of western leftism has become about "punching up". I don't think it's about compassion or concern anymore, it's about finding the "right" targets. And so often that was just used as a way to excuse bigotry. I'm a goy but I noticed this on a personal level plenty with people identifying as feminists, they'd be perfectly okay saying something unquestionably sexist, as long as "white women" was attached onto the front. It's very much the same with shaming people over physical features that others may have, as long as the individual person is "bad enough" it doesn't matter if wide foreheads or big noses or acne are features many people have and would feel hurt by seeing them used as an insult, because they're only "really" directing it at "one of the bad ones"

So, I'm going to link to this piece again because it's been embarrassingly useful, and explains why I say things like "pretending to believe" despite their clunkiness. For new material, I hope you don't mind that you have accidentally triggered a massive unskippable cutscene, but you tapped into a few things I have been pondering and I'd like to take advantage of your observances to add my own.

Part of what you're discussing here, which I agree with, is that toxic slacktivists pretend to believe that they are Good People Doing Good Work. They are Bad People and their work is Bad Work, but if they all get in a group and pretend together that it's Good, then that's almost the same as being Good, right?

Another worthwhile aspect of what you're discussing is something I became aware of in the aftermath of the collapse of Occupy Wall Street. One commenter on a liberal blog I still follow lamented that mass protest never seems to accomplish anything, and how the millions of people who turned out for OWS protests should have affected more political change. Considering most of them could also vote, write to representatives, etc., something other than littering and arrests could've been done.

Another commenter pointed out that he had personally been at most of the anti-Iraq War protests, including the largest worldwide protest on 15 February 2003 (6-10 million estimated participants). But most of those protesters did not agree with each other. There were at least four major coalitions of antiwar protesters showing up then and thereafter. The ones he listed were:

"Just war" advocates who believed the Iraq War was unjust.

Total pacifists who believed all armed conflicts are unjust, and therefore the Iraq War is as well.

Right-wing bigots who believed a war might potentially benefit those they thought of as religiously or ethnically inferior and subhuman.

Xenophobes, both left- and right-wing, who believed "the US can't be the police of the world" and that any action taken outside USian borders was immoral.

Imagine four people with these beliefs in a room talking about the Iraq War... then bring up the war in Ukraine to them and see how fast the coalition falls apart.

"Well, the war for Ukrainian liberation is a just war," says the just-war advocate. The pacifist starts to scream "HOW COULD YOU DEFEND ANY ACTION THAT MIGHT LEAD TO CHILDREN DYING, YOU MONSTER!". The right-wing bigot says they support the war, too--on the side of the ethnically and religiously superior Russians. And then a left-wing xenophobe says we're wasting money that should be supporting American workers and uplifting Americans out of poverty instead of buying new bombs for Ukraine.

And your "antiwar" coalition collapses, with the pacifist wandering off to agree with the xenophobe while the just-war liberal and the right-wing bigot scream at each other pointlessly and without resolution.

This is one of the wisest breakdowns of human behavior I have ever discovered:

Any coalition of people is made up of many sub-coalitions who only temporarily agree on a single aspect of a single issue. Making sure the group does not collapse prematurely is the true, unsung labor of movement maintenance.

To be real, it's much easier to let one's coalition collapse and scream about how The Menz, or The CIA, or Greedy Capitalists, or The Jews artificially forced your group's collapse than it is to admit that one might just suck a big one at coalition building. This is especially true among leftists, who are sometimes anti-hierarchy and frequently fall for populist, anti-expert nonsense. Having a leader means you're suggesting someone should have authority, and a lot of leftists are allergic to that suggestion.

Moreover, though, a lot of "leftists" are "leftists" but only agree with one or two aspects of leftism.

To use your feminism example: I have absolutely seen feminists who think they can be misogynists so long as they say "white" before they say "woman". I mean, who can even argue? I have also seen feminists who think they can be gender bioessentialists so long as they're doing it towards "men" (a category which includes a lot of people who neither look like men, nor live as men, nor benefit from male privilege). I have seen feminists who think they can call themselves "trans allies" while consistently ignoring, degrading, and dismissing the concerns of anyone who isn't a binary trans woman. Etc.

The thing is, they are all feminists. What makes someone a feminist, at bottom, is the acceptance of and opposition to patriarchy. That's it. It's similar to how what makes a person a Protestant Christian is the acceptance of Jesus as their Lord and Savior--you might need to do one or two things to be considered a part of a specific branch of Christianity, but all you need is that one specific belief about that one specific idea. There's a lot of bunk about how "you can't be a REAL Christian unless you do X" just like there's bunk about how "you can't be a REAL feminist unless you do Y", and it's all bunk.

There are people who might be really bad feminists or Christians, but that's not the same as not being feminists or Christians.

So, the coalition of leftism has several sub-coalitions who actually despise each other. Here is my proposal for the sub-coalitions. (Please keep in mind that I am not defining groups by how they define themselves, but by the far more useful metric of their actions.)

Liberals who agree with leftist economic thought, but strongly disagree with leftist conclusions regarding violent revolution. Liberals do not have time for online arguments and superficial action. They are generally participating in protests, running for office, writing postcards to advocate for candidates, informing voters, and working within the system for positive change that alleviates suffering. They are pro-expert but opposed to a vanguard party due to its inherent authoritarianism.

Tankies, whose primary interest in leftism is authoritarian. They oppose capitalism and support violent revolution because they imagine themselves as the vanguard party who gets to control everything when the revolution comes.

Anarchists, whose primary interest is opposing hierarchy. They want to burn down the system because it is a system, and frequently become angry and defensive if you try to ask them any questions about what would be built out of the ashes.

Progressives, whose primary interest is opposing liberals. They also oppose capitalism; they are, like tankies, positioning themselves as the vanguard party because they are already in political power. What makes them Not Tankies is that they care more about sticking it to "the Dems" than they do about actually being the vanguard, opposing capitalism, or achieving anything of worth or meaning politically.

"Red fash", who used to be called "beefsteak Nazis". They say all the right things regarding violent revolution and economics/capitalism, but they only believe what they believe for the sake of their specific ethnic group and nation (frequently, white and USian, but this is extremely popular in Europe too). IOW a red fash wants the vanguard party to only have whites of a specific ethnicity in control of the revolution; they only want universal health care for "their" people, that sort of thing. Some red fash are actual Nazis cosplaying as leftists, but some are just really, really, REALLY bigoted leftists.

Whether we like it or note, the acceptance of armed, violent revolution as a Good Thing means that leftism has always regarded punching up and violence as a necessary component of leftist thought. This is not a perversion of Real Leftism. This is leftism. If you think revolution is good and necessary instead of a terrifying possibility, then you also think punching up is okay; it's just a matter of who is Up and who gets to punch.

Of the five sub-coalitions I described, only one has rejected violent revolution--and it's the one all the other leftists accuse of being right-wing. And interestingly enough, only liberals are habitually accused of secretly colluding with the right... when red fash are natural allies to the right, and when all other forms of leftists openly ally with right-wingers so long as they say the right things about economics. (See under: "After Hitler, us" leftists, left-wing Trumpistas who think they'll rule the ashes after Trump burns down the current system.)

And if you believe in violent revolution, then (let me be facetious for a second) what's the problem with making fun of your political enemies for being ugly? If we believe Steve Bannon is a Nazi, aren't we obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and doesn't that include mocking him for his alcoholism? Isn't mocking someone for their appearance and intrinsic characteristics mild compared to, say, threatening them with exploding cars covered with hammers? Or retweeting pictures of pitchforks and guillotines?

If we believe Ben Shapiro is an opponent to the revolution we accept is necessary and vital to the movement, then what's a little antisemitism in the name of the people? Don't we have to be bigots to oppose bigots? And--

--oh. There's that horseshoe bending round to the right again.

#leftist antisemitism #horseshoe theory #coalition failure #political analysis #from someone who never attended college but who is old and has seen and read a lot. to be fair #the people most likely to die in your violent revolution are the people most likely to die under capitalism #the people who advocate the hardest for violent revolution are those most convinced they will live through it #as for me. well. i already live under threat of constant violence and kind of don't look forward to it #so a political philosophy that fetishizes violence was never going to fit me very well

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ancestralsurvival · 4 months

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Leftists who gauge whether someone is entitled to sympathy based on the color of their skin are as dangerous as their right-wing counterparts who apply an equal and opposite measure to determine a person’s intrinsic worthiness.

Of course I’m aware of systemic racism, colorism, etc. That doesn’t excuse judging people by skin color and using that information to calculate whether or not the person can receive your basic human connection of respect.

If you judge individual humanity using any level of skin color metric, congratulations — you’re racist.

#this is obvious right?#racism #leftist antisemitism

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hidingoutbackstage · 22 days

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Many horror movies over the years have used voodoo as a catch-all scary thing to use as the villainy in their movie without acknowledging where it actually comes from and that it’s a genuine religion that people follow and shouldn’t be treated as intrinsically creepy. Night of the Living Dead was credited with creating the modern zombie, but the modern zombie comes from Haitian folklore and the fears of slavery. “The black guy dies first” isn’t the most accurate overall but it was common enough that black characters, sparse as they were, wouldn’t live to the end of horror movies, thus creating the trope. Plenty of horror movies have native savages as generic threats to the white protagonists. Majority of the people credited with “creating” the horror genre were white.

Women were so oversexualized and brutalized in subgenres like slashers and splatters that the entire genre was dismissed by many people as being outright misogynistic (and it’s still being done today, just look at the Terrifier movies). Majority of the well-known horror filmmakers, past and present, are men. The final girl trope was a very specific trope that came about because of the era of slashers, and it has been flanderized to have no meaning at all in modern circles when it was specifically about the objectification of women in slasher movies. The majority of female protagonists that are seen as icons are still white women.

One of the earliest slashers, earliest horror movies, was about a man dressing up as a woman to kill people. One of the most infamous horror “twist endings” is about a girl character being revealed to have been born male. A horror musical that people act like is the only horror musical ever has a main character that’s a man who dresses feminine and commits assault on unsuspecting male and female characters, and was written by a transmisogynist.

The fact that there have been progressive horror filmmakers in the past, present and future does not negate the fact that there was also extreme bigotry in the past, present and future of horror. Stop being ignorant. Stop claiming that horror is intrinsically leftist and punk and meant to be anti-conservative. The fucking Conjuring movies are 1000% conservative and they’re a multimillion dollar franchise. If you try to claim that real horror is always going to be leftist and that conservative horror isn’t “real” horror I’m just going to think you’re being intentionally obtuse for the sake of winning your own argument

#sid rants #sid bitches #sorry i’m just REALLY pissed off at this guy lmao

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snow-lavender · 2 months

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and what if i said "Where is the Justice?" is a commentary on people whose leftist ideas come from a place of hate instead of compassion who are then pushed to the right by fascist ideas of retribution and intrinsic morality. what then.

#death note the musical #death note

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agro-carnist · 1 year

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You've mentioned the history of guro before, but I was wondering if you had any resources?

So, guro is a super niche thing outside of Japan so it's hard to research its history in any one particular place. If you want to learn more about ero guro as a genre in English you pretty much just have to go down separate rabbit holes piecing together what you can and looking at the art and literature of creatives of the genre like Shintaro Kago, Suehiro Maruo, Waita Uziga and Edogawa Ranpo. Most resources are going to be in Japanese. A lot of early ero guro was also destroyed so there are holes in its history.

I can offer a general summary of ero guro, but also mind you that I might not have everything exactly correct for the reasons stated above. Most of what I gather is just from being a fan of the genre and talking to other fans. Also apologies if this is kind of all over the place, I'm not going through and editing this, I'm just going to be a little autistic about this.

Ero guro has its roots in another art genre from the 19th century, muzan-e, which were woodblock prints that depicted violent acts in Japanese history. You also had the appearance of I-novels, semi-autobiographical works that described usually dark events in the author's life. Later ero guro gained popularity in the 1920s with the ero guro nansensu subculture. Ero guro nansensu focused on exploring violent and sexual themes that would have been considered shameful. There's the misconception in the west that guro means "gore," but it's instead a wasei-ego (borrowed English compound or abbreviated words) term for "grotesque." Ero guro and ero guro nansensu were not just blood and guts, and being bloody or violent doesn't make something guro. The art style focused on pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, and featured horror-like themes, body horror, and body fluids. It's meant to explore what is deviant, taboo, or just outlandish or ridiculous. The contrast of eroticism and grotesque is the appeal.

Especially jut before and during WWII, the Japanese government heavily censored published media, and people were rebelling against that. A lot of ero guro works of this time were also tied to leftist publications. Kaizo magazine featured works from communists, anarchists, and other leftists, and as such, faced heavy censorship and was eventually completely banned. A lot of leftist literature at the time was anti-militarism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-war while also embraced naturalism, humanism, and radical social and political views. Kaizo inspired other magazines and underground sale of media, which included ero guro. There was even more scrutiny for ero guro after a real event where a couple was practicing erotic asphyxiation and the woman ended up killing the man and castrating him. The Japanese blamed ero-guro books for the incident and decided to ban them. Unfortunately that means a lot of books and magazines were destroyed, and those that weren't were often printed on poor quality pulp paper, so little of it survives today. After the war and during American occupation, Kasutori became another magazine that inspired ero guro by publishing controversial sexual art and writing that also integrated horror themes. This was also a very traumatizing time in people's lives, so they were expressing this through horror. Both during and after the war, Japanese people were pushing for sexual liberation and freedom of expression, which is why I find ero guro so interesting. This was a time when even kissing was seen as a disgusting immoral act outside the bedrooms of married couples, and people were telling the government they couldn't be controlled. If anything they did was going to be judged they were going to hold no bars with what they could create. There are no confines to human expression. I was a fan of ero guro even before I became a leftist but it as an expression of progressive ideals and being intrinsically anti-fascist makes me love it even more. Taboo art has inseparable ties to leftism.

Another later influence of ero guro was Garo magazine, which was also started to promote Marxist artists and the gekiga art style, which differed from early manga art styles like Osamu Tezuka's that were more cartoony and whimsical. Gekiga focused on being more detailed and having more mature themes. Garo published several different bizarre themes during its publication. Ero guro also ended up influencing the rise of pink films (Japanese erotic movies) and exploitation films (movies that exploit the shocking or transgressive). Tentacle hentai also stems from ero guro media.

Hope this makes some sense to you and inspires you to look more into ero guro. The genre is so interesting and the random little paths you can find it taking you are very cool.

#guro

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neotrances · 1 year

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i’m not even apart of punk subcultures but the disconnect or rather the difference between white punks and black ones is so blatant like yes punk is typically a leftist ideology but a lot of black punk politics is based in “black radicalism” and the recognition of race in regards to action, so then you’ll have characters like hobie that outright say they lead protest and fight fascist and feed the poor in their communities and ull have white punks or just white ppl in general either water down what he means / does or erase his blackness having an impact on his character, a easy facet to like discuss is him having freeform wicks, while obv not all ppl who get them r black radicals doing freeform with 4c hair is a pretty large part of pro black movements centered around celebrating black ppl, choosing to be freeform is actively choosing a to love and celebrate black beauty and not conform to white expectations, it’s saying “my hair is done and good” when ur called unprofessional or dirty for just keeping ur hair how it grows out of ur scalp and im already seeing nonblack artist make his hair looser or just straight entirely 😭 like his blackness (just like miles) is intrinsic to his character him being a BLACK punk is important, yall r forgetting the black part

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cuntess-carmilla · 2 years

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At this point it shocks me when leftists don't at least mention ableism when they're naming the structures that the right-wing and capitalist system are most strongly invested in maintaining/dependant on to survive.

Your class and anti-capitalist analysis are complete bullshit if you can't see the role that disability and ableism play in this capitalist system. You're also awful at this sort of analysis if you can't see how intrinsic ableism is to the patriarchy and white supremacy, and how intertwined they all are.

How can you look at the condition of disabled people under capitalism and completely ignore our plight? Think it's somehow less systemic than the other forms of marginalization you do recognize?

The poverty and homelessness rates we face? How even if we're not destitute we're prisoners of capital in ways abled people aren't because we literally have to pay 28% more in order to MAYBE experience the same quality of life as abled people, despite statistically being poorer, all while also getting mistreated and neglected with the services and products we pay EXTRA for TO SURVIVE? How we're prisoners to the medical establishment in a way abled people aren't? How we're shunned and erased from society and public spaces? The violence we're subjected to not despite how pitied we are but BECAUSE of how pitied we are? How disability rates are higher in marginalized communities BECAUSE white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, capitalism and the patriarchy INTENTIONALLY disable their targets?

Why do you all keep ignoring us when we're the biggest minority everywhere and the only minority that everyone will sooner or later join unless you all die before you can become one of us?

Your leftist analysis is pathetic and worthless if you "forget" to take disabled people into account.

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qqueenofhades · 1 year

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I really like coming to your blog to get realistic but moderately hopeful takes on politics. I mean, i get the burn-it-all-down passion the younger leftists (still) have, but it's also nice to have someone who will say "hey, this will help some people suffer less, thats a good thing". And i agree that biden is a good president (as much as any politician can be "good")

Like I said: I get it. I do. I have had multiple "humanity is intrinsically evil and we are all doomed" moments in the last few days alone. But I still try to push back on that and remind myself that hopeless paralysis and/or self-righteous inaction only helps the assholes, and I shake myself a few times and try to get on with it. So yeah.

It's just that so much of what passes for political analysis, especially in liberal circles, is often this exact categorical doomism where Everything Is Very Terrible And Nothing Can Be Done. And yes. Things are a giant rancid shitburger and nobody is disputing that. But how long, for how many times, have we heard that Trump was going to win and get away with everything and there would be a Red Wave in 2022 or so on and so on? And then none of that actually happened? Things are not great, but they are also FAR from the worst they could possibly be, and after the absolute nadir of 2016-21, there's finally a sense that things are slowly getting a little better. I don't know if that's what makes people shout even more about being Doomed, because they finally see a little light and are afraid to trust it, but still.

As I have said before: this has happened before, it will happen again, and the essence of humanity is learning how to sing in the dark times, and about the dark times. So yeah, just repeating over and over that only the worst outcome can possibly happen is just as unrealistic as thinking that everything is awesome, and it is demonstrably NOT what has happened. It's slow and it's fucked up and it's not as much or as fast as we would want, but yet again, as I quote all the time, "you do not have to finish the work, but nor are you free to abandon it." So. How about we actually do that, instead of insisting that we can't for whatever reason or another, and see what happens.

#post-it-free #ask #politics for ts

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