#radical party

[hadesoftheladies]

being unwilling to accept degradation on any level as a woman makes people so mad at you lmao. no i will not exist and walk around like i am here to be performative art and not a human being fuck you

[feral-radfem]

It's warming up so let me give y'all your yearly summer reminder: if you see a "ladies get in free or reduced drink prices" at bars this is not a rare form of "female privilege" it is because you are the product that is on sale.

The bars are advertising to men that there will be a lot of women there who will be drunk. No (osa) man wants to go to a bar that's a sausage fest, so bars know that letting y'all get intoxicated for free (making you vulnerable and providing incentive for you to come) makes male paying customers come in. [This is also why they are allowing teenagers in with shitty fake IDs. They know you are underage girls, they just don't care about your safety. If they could advertise they have underage drunk girls there, they would. Stay Home.]

These spaces typically have an air of male entitlement that's stronger than other bars because they feel like they are already paying for your time and that you owe them for getting the free drinks. That your sexual availability to them is "part of the deal" for them having to pay to get in or to drink and you not having to. All the men are already walking around with the "I bought you would drink so you owe me" mentality in bars like this. So, while we get into the fun seasons of the year, remember to avoid places that purposely set themselves up as a lion's den. If they are advertising that a lot of women will be there, they are not doing it for women. They are doing it to use you as bait to catch more paying customers who will feel sexually entitled to you.

Be selective where you show up and allow yourself to be vulnerable. Have fun, but mitigate some of the risks you're going to be exposed to if you can.

[sketchnskribbles]

🔥THE FLAVOR HAS BEEN UNLEASHED🔥

[elfyprincess]

This is the first presidential election I am able to vote in & I get to vote for a woman. 🥲 I’ve been dreaming of having a female president since I was a little girl. If she wins (she will), I am going to cry.

[aesukhia]

looking at current results of the european parliament elections and i can’t believe how many seats the far right has gotten

[ameicalovesisrael]

I can no longer support the left .

They have treated Israel horrible and showed the worst kind of Anti semitism .

When Oct 7th happened we saw their true colors and what they really thought about Jewish people.

I will support the party that supports Israel and that is not Kamala Harris!

First time voting red .

How did it come to this 😔

[lilithism1848]

[dadvans]

7x08 spec

i can imagine eddie losing buck’s trust and buck being hurt, but i don’t think it would be a lasting anger. how i imagine it happening is buck finds out because buck asks marisol how their date went the other night and marisol asks buck how their boys night went the other night and then they both realize that eddie lied to them. and i can see buck being more pissed that eddie set him up to be the one to watch marisol’s heart break, and being upset that eddie would lie, and would be disappointed in eddie’s character.

if eddie doubled down on My Ghost Wife Is Real And She Loves Me, i can see buck cooling off on their personal friendship and being a little bitchy at work, but leaving the door open if eddie gets his shit together. obviously i don’t think eddie will see it this way because he’s subconsciously self-sabotaging out of a shame he can’t let go of (that’s his emotional support shame!), and thinks he deserves to lose everyone important to him, so where buck sees an open door, eddie will see a burned bridge. i can see this lasting the first half of next season and then the second half being about them being friends again and 🤞🤞🤞

[sher-ee]

Hmmm. That’s weird. 🧐

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 19, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 20, 2024

Yesterday morning, NPR reported that U.S. public health data are showing a dramatic drop in deaths from drug overdoses for the first time in decades. Between April 2023 and April 2024, deaths from street drugs are down 10.6%, with some researchers saying that when federal surveys are updated, the decline will be even more pronounced. Such a decline would translate to 20,000 deaths averted.

With more than 70,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2020 and numbers rising, the Biden-Harris administration prioritized disrupting the supply of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. They worked to seize the drugs at ports of entry, sanctioned more than 300 foreign people and agencies engaged in the global trade in illicit drugs, and arrested and prosecuted dozens of high-level Mexican drug traffickers and money launderers. 

In March 2023 the Biden-Harris administration made naloxone, a medicine that can prevent fatal opioid overdoses, available over the counter. The administration invested more than $82 billion in treatment, and the Department of Health and Human Services worked to get the treatment into the hands of first responders and family members. 

Addressing the crisis of opioid deaths meant careful, coordinated policies.

Also today, markets all over the world climbed after the Fed yesterday cut interest rates for the first time in four years. In the U.S., the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, the Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an older index that tracks 30 prominent companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, all hit new records. The rate cut indicated to traders that the U.S. has, in fact, managed to pull off the soft landing President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen worked to achieve. They have kept job growth steady, normalized economic growth and inflation, and avoided a recession. 

As they have done so, the major U.S. stock indices have had what The Guardian's Callum Jones calls “an extraordinary year.” Jones notes that the S&P 500 is up more than 20% since the beginning of 2024, the Nasdaq Composite has risen 22%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone up 11%.

Bringing the U.S. economy out of the pandemic more successfully than any other major economically developed country meant clear goals and principles, and careful, informed adjustments.

And yet the big story today is that Republican North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson frequented porn sites, where between 2008 and 2012 he wrote that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography; referred to himself as a “black NAZI!”; called for reinstating human enslavement and wrote, “I would certainly buy a few”; called the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “f*cking commie bastard”; wrote that he preferred Adolf Hitler to former president Barack Obama; referred to Black, Jewish, Muslim, and gay people with slurs; said he doesn’t care about abortions (“I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” he wrote); and recounted that he had secretly watched women in the showers in a public gym as a 14-year-old. Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck of CNN, who broke the story, noted that “CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.”

After the first story broke, Natalie Allison of Politico broke another: that Robinson was registered on the Ashley Madison website, which caters to married people seeking affairs. 

Robinson is running for governor of North Carolina. He has attacked transgender rights, called for a six-week abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest, mocked survivors of school shootings, and—after identifying a wide range of those he saw as enemies to America and to “conservatives”—told a church audience that “some folks need killing.”

That this scandal dropped on the last possible day Robinson could drop out of the race suggests it was pushed by Republicans themselves because they recognize that Robinson is dragging Trump and other Republican candidates down in North Carolina. But here’s the thing: Republican voters knew who Robinson was, and they chose him anyway. 

Indeed, his behavior is not all that different from that of a number of the Republican candidates in this cycle, including former president Trump, the Republican nominee for president. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) embraced Robinson’s candidacy, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) welcomed “NC’s outstanding Lt. Governor” to a Republican-led House Judiciary Committee meeting “on the importance of election integrity.” “He brought the truth with clarity and conviction—and everyone should hear what he had to say!” Johnson posted to social media. Robinson spoke at the Republican National Convention.

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s. 

Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out that parties tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.

And they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.

But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject. 

In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.

And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.

In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system. Social media poster scary lawyerguy noted that the story about Robinson will divert attention from the lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which diverted attention from Trump’s abysmal debate performance, which diverted attention from Trump’s filming a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery. 

When a political party has so thoroughly walled itself off from the majority, there are two options. One is to become full-on authoritarian and suppress the majority, often with violence. Such a plan is in Project 2025, which calls for a strong executive to take control of the military and the judicial system and to use that power to impose his will.    

The other option is that enough people in the majority reject the extremists to create a backlash that not only replaces them, but also establishes a level playing field.  

The Republican Party is facing the reality that it has become so extreme it is hemorrhaging former supporters and mobilizing a range of critics. Today the Catholic Conference of Ohio rebuked those who spread lies about Haitian immigrants—Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance were the leading culprits—and Teamsters councils have rejected the decision of the union’s board not to make an endorsement this year and have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Some white evangelicals are also distancing themselves from Trump. 

And then, tonight, Trump told a Jewish group that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jewish Americans. "I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger."

Mark Robinson has said he will not step aside.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[hadesoftheladies]

How dare feminists center women’s struggles and define male oppression from the root lol. Feminists too smol brained to understand dialectical materialism. Feminism is a device of division that should be stopped. Feminism is . . . uh . . . racist. Feminists don’t understand women’s liberation or class struggle. Even the Marxist feminists are just uh . . . revisionists because Marx and Engels were already pure and perfect feminists with pure and perfect analysis

Women whining about their oppression is dividing the proletariat. Women don’t deserve their own political party that centers them lmao? There’s uh, working class struggles we all have to fix first! Then women will be free! If we were all just commies and marxists and people just understood that capitalism and imperialism (male-created) were abolished, men would be nicer and normal to women and women’s issues would evaporate! Because that’s worked so well before! Obvi!

feminists women are so stupid and don’t understand anything

feminism has done nothing for actual people men

[traumatizedbymay2016]

If I could Thanos snap a single time, I think I might use it to teach all the "But she supports Israel! :(" crowd what the Overton Window is and how we shift it left.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

“We are neither artists or anti-artists. We are creative men—revolutionaries. As creative men we are dedicated to building a new society, but we must also destroy the existing travesty. What art will replace the burning bodies and dead minds this society is creating?” stated Ben Morea in Black Mask #3, 1967

Founded in New York City in the mid-1960s by self-educated ghetto kid and painter Ben Morea, Black Mask melded the ideas and inspiration of Dada and the Surrealists, with the anarchism of the Durruti Column. With a theory and practice that had much in common with their contemporaries the Diggers, Dutch Provos, and the French Situationists—the group intervened spectacularly in the art, politics and culture of their times. From shutting down the Museum of Modern Art to protesting Wall Street’s bankrolling of war, from battling with Maoists at SDS conferences to defending the Valerie Solanas shooting of Andy Warhol, Black Mask successfully straddled the counterculture and politics of the 60s, and remained the Joker in the pack of both sides of "The Movement."

By 1968 Black Mask dissolved into "The Family" (popularly known as Up Against The Wall Motherfucker—the name to which they signed their first leaflet), which combined the confrontational theater and tactics of Black Mask with a much more aggressively "street" approach in dealing with the police, and authorities. Dubbed a "street gang with analysis" they were reputedly the only white grouping taken seriously by the Black Panther Party, and influenced everyone from the Weathermen to the "hippy" communal movements.

[cormancatacombs]

MAGA chuds are gonna try claiming the Trump shooter wasn’t a True Republican TM because he donated to this or that liberal/progressive cause years ago…

Bitch the woman who once showed me Paris Is Burning years ago is now a transphobic antivaxxer.

People can & do go down conspiracy/radicalization pipelines quickly & deeply.

[birdsareblooming]

almost good point ruined by treating people for being dumb based on being religious. bro you were so close but you decided to degrade those who practice religion.