Random Blue Collar guy living life in the Pacific NW. 49 years and counting.
330 posts
Praxis23 - Happy Geek - Tumblr Blog
Adding my own bit about what Dens do when they lose: they go more conservative and move to the right. After 12 years out of the White House, Clinton won it back by being more conservative than the rest of the democratic field. I won't say Obama did the same thing, but a lot of his policies were to the right of where Regan was in 1980.
If you, like myself, are sick of America sliding into a fascist police state, sitting home and staying out of politics is NOT the way to fight it.
do you really think voting for the dems is going to make a difference?? this is a genuine question.
Absolutely.
Because historically, that's how you get them to move left.
Now, and let me be clear, this is not the only part. Because once we elect them, we have to keep fighting them. It may seem counterintuitive, but in a two party system it is far more advantageous to have someone in power who you can fight and push on issues than to let them lose.
When Democrats lose, they don't go looking to resell the left on them -- they tend to move center, because folks in the center are still voting, and they think they can win those voters over. They don't think about the part of the pie that's missing, just what they can get out of what's remaining.
Now, long term, we need to think bigger. We need to be pushing progressive candidates on the state and local levels. This is because that's where the real battlegrounds are right now. All of our issues with trans rights in the last few years? Largely state based actions. Be active with your school boards and city councils. They have a lot more of an effect on your daily life than the folks in Washington.
This will also help build our "farm team" (to use a baseball metaphor). It's what Republicans spent the seventies doing, and it's part of how they ended up getting so much power.
The Presidency gets all the focus, but in truth we just need someone progressive enough to sign the legislation we want passed. Presidents fuck us over really easily, but rarely have the power to make our lives better. We have to keep that in mind.
We vote for Biden as a stop gap -- the finger in the dam. We then go and build the future on our own.
Trump won in 2016 by a super slim margin. Are you prepared to play a part in that happening again?
On a personal note, having voted third party in 1996 and 2000, I can assure you it did nothing to stop conservative nonsense. The best legal way to push them out of power is to crush them in the voting booth.
We have lived through this before.
People said Gore wasn't good enough, that he was Bland and uninteresting and middle of the road and something had to change. So they voted third party or they didn't vote at all. And the Democratic party didn't wake up, and we got George W Bush and all the absolute hot garbage that came with him.
And they said Hillary Clinton was the wrong candidate, that she was middle of the road at best and conservative for the Democrats at worst, that she was entitled and they were going to vote for a third party or they didn't vote at all or worse yet, they voted for the other candidate as a joke because it's not like those votes change things, you know? And the Democratic party didn't magically wake up, they didn't majorly change, and we are still dealing with the fallout from that.
And that's not only twice in my lifetime, but twice in my voting lifetime. One of the important things you learn in therapy is that you cannot change other people, and you cannot set your expectations based on how you think they ought to react to certain things.
If you are refusing to vote, or voting third-party because of what you think it's going to make someone else do, please reconsider.
If you want to make the liberals or the centrists or whatever you want to call them wake up, you're going to need to do something that hasn't already been done twice in the last 20 years.
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, 11x14
It helps vulnerable workers and might improve the internet. Worth signing.
While we're on the subject of swinging our fists at God
The ACLU is gonna take action against Mastercard for their anti-porn schtick! Y'know, one of the major reasons the internet turned to shit in the last ten years? It's literally like 95% of the way there, we just need a few more signatures and the petition Gets There. You have to be USAmerican to sign, but there's enough of us here to fill in the last few signatures needed several times over, so go on over and throw your name on there!!
I'm turning 50 in a few days.
Reblog if you’re 30 or older
This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!
People supposedly on our side regurgitated Republican propaganda about Hillary and Trump was elected. Many of those same people are now actively regurgitating Republican propaganda targeting Biden.
Some people are completely naive about how foreign policy and diplomacy work. Short of sending in troops Biden can’t force that little prick Netanyahu to stop this madness. At this point Netanyahu is actively trying to sway the election in Trump’s favor. Trump and the Republicans in power means the literal end of Palestine and its people.
Repeating Republican/Hamas/Iranian/ Russian propaganda will only make things worse for the Palestinians, Americans, and the whole world. Biden is a good man doing as much as he can while being hindered by a Republican House of Representatives and an illegitimate SCOTUS. Stop calling Biden the lesser of two evils, he is not. Trump is the only evil person (from an evil party) and he’s already proved it repeatedly.
Trump killed over a million Americans, killed more Middle Easterners than Netanyahu, and is responsible for the Russian aggression in Ukraine. Further it’s almost a certainty that Putin put his proxy Hamas launch the October 7th terrorist attack on Israel. Putin needed a distraction to take the world’s attention off his campaign in Ukraine and wanted to weaken Biden in the hopes of getting a more compliant Trump back. Putin funnels money and arms through his other proxy Iran to Hamas, which is also a proxy of Iran and has also attacked Israel.
Hamas are not champions of the Palestinians, they are an oppressive terrorist organization holding Palestinian as virtual hostages and using them as literal human shields. Palestinians want them gone as much as they want that little shit Netanyahu gone. Hamas leadership resides in luxury estates in Qatar that are paid for by Iran. Most Middle Eastern governments are oppressive autocracies and they only way they can keep their own people from rebelling is to provide them with a common enemy as a distraction and that scapegoat is Israel. Just as states like Iran need Israel as a foil, Netanyahu, and his conservative government, need the Hamas terrorists and hostile regimes like Iran to keep himself in power.
Protest Netanyahu and his supporters as much as you want as they deserve it and more. Donate to feeding and caring for the people of Gaza. I do both. But don’t repeatedly drag Biden through the mud and dissuade people from voting for him. Biden is trying to solve this nightmare while Republicans are giving speeches about how they are going to exterminate Palestinians and confiscate their land.
All these slogans you repeat came from a Republican think tank. Please consider doing something constructive for the Palestinians instead of working to get Trump back in the White House, because if he does we all lose.
See also: growing up in the American Midwest.
Too many ignorant progressives trying to tear Biden down because they're not happy about things Biden has no control over or he's not doing their bidding or acting fast enough to keep them happy.
Here is a list of everything anti-Biden progressives are helping to bring into reality by their support of Trump or by voting 3rd party which is the same as voting for TFG:
1) Abortion will be banned nationwide.
2) Contraception will be banned shortly thereafter.
3) The Supreme Court will be locked hard-right for the next 30+ years.
4) The climate crisis will significantly worsen, beyond our ability to mitigate it.
5) More tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, spiking the deficit.
6) Trump will not leave office.
7) There will be a recession (there's been a recession during every Republican presidency for the last 100 years -- Google it).
8 ) Prices will NOT return to 2019 levels.
9) 50,000 federal workers will be fired and replaced with Trump loyalists per Project 2025. The lack of checks on his power will make it more likely he will remain in office beyond his term.
10) Similarly, the Department of Justice will shift to being under the direct control of the White House, allowing Trump to arrest anyone who's been mean to him.
11) Russia will annex Ukraine then move to invade other eastern European nations, probably Poland first—with Trump's support.
12) America will leave NATO.
13) Trump will, as promised, close the pandemic preparedness office.
14) Millions of citizens will be swept up in Trump's deportation blitz.
15) Trump will use the military to arrest peaceful protesters and charge them under the Insurrection Act. Pro-Palestinian protesters will be deported as Hamas sympathizers.
I cannot imagine having so much privilege as to believe this is okay would not affect me.
The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.
The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)
The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.
Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.
Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.
The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.
The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.
The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.
I hate posts like this. What if some of us are allergic to cats? I have nothing against cats, I just hate how they make me feel. It's not that I "can't control them", it's that I can't control how my immune system reacts to them.
judging men by the way they are with cats
Push the party Left. Save democracy.
Gonna need yall to stop putting Biden is Just As Bad propaganda on my dash. Had to unfollow someone because I don’t want to a start a fight with them over it, but I’m about to bite the next person who puts that shit in front of me.
If you don’t like Biden, vote in your god damn local and mid term elections for third party or further left candidates so that we get better democratic candidates for future elections. But this one is already fucking decided, and I’m NOT ending up under a Trump led dictatorship because yall value protecting your personal sense of moral purity over the collective good. Whether it offends your personal morals to vote for Biden is IRRELEVANT in the face of the alternative.
This isn’t a lesser of two evils situation. One guy sucks. The other guy is LITERALLY PLANNING TO OVERTHROW OUR DEMOCRACY AND INSTALL HIMSELF AS A PUTIN STYLE DICTATOR.
PLEASE look up Project 2025 and stop acting like abstaining is some kind of personal ethical decision!
Who is helped in this scenario?
More to the point: how will your one issue improve under Trump?
This is all sorts of awesome.
I feel like disappointment in Biden is baffling to me because he was always a disappointment. He was the asshole who got to ride to power on the coattails of a better man. He told bizarre and repeated lies (despite getting caught at it and his team telling him not to) about having a Welsh coal miner dad when he did not and he stole that story from actual Welsh people. I read a profile of him years back that pointed this out and told the story of the time he straight up ignored good advice from an expert not to plant a certain kind of tree too close together and flew a bunch of them out to plant, at night because he was just too fucking excited about it, and they all died. He’s not a smart man! He’s charismatic ish and lacks principles and as far as I can tell doesn’t really care about abortion rights or a lot of things we’d consider pretty critical to preserving freedom. I sincerely thought he couldn’t become President because there were so many obviously better candidates in the pool. I underestimated the sexism and antisemitism in American politics, and when he became the candidate in 2020 I gritted my teeth and voted for him because the alternative was a man who is not only an idiot but also profoundly dangerous. Trump is not ha-ha crazy, he’s Mussolini crazy. He is not dangerous because he’s stupid, although that doesn’t help; he’s dangerous because he does not care about anyone except himself under any circumstances and if that means he lets the far right push us straight into forced birth for white women and sterilization for women of color he’s going to do that. If that means conversion therapy for queers and death penalty for homosexual acts he’s going to do that. He has literally no limits. If he gets back into power, a whole lot of people are going to die, again. It’s not a hypothetical because it happened the first time and he’s only going to get worse.
I am not, never have been, and never will be a fan of Biden. To pretend that he and Trump are in any way equivalent is wrong at best and another goddamn Russian psy-op at worst. To pretend that a third party candidacy is viable in the US is to completely ignore every election of your lifetime and your parents’ lifetimes, and to further ignore the lesson of Ross Perot.
You cannot save Palestinians by not voting for Biden in November; the best you can do is chip away at his margin, and the worst you can do is see Trump elected so he can decide to do the worst possible thing in ever circumstance. Biden has Palestinian blood on his hands and watching this when we could have had Bernie or Elizabeth Warren instead is maddening. (I would have preferred Hillary to Trump, but I don’t think she’d be any different than Biden here. They’re both old-school politicians.)
I hate everything about this, and I hate that saying “maybe don’t put the man who literally said he would kill his political enemies in power” is seen as supporting genocide. It’s acknowledging reality. Joe Biden as a person can eat rocks for all I care. I was kind of hoping he’d die sooner in his term so we’d have time to get used to and then vote for President Harris. (Remember when the line was “she’s a cop, don’t vote for her”? Funny how there’s always a reason not to vote for a woman or a person of color or someone you just “don’t like” and can’t put a finger on why except she “seems angry.” Oh does she. How would she not? When Michelle fucking Obama, the picture of grace , STILL got called angry for having the nerve to be a Black woman with an opinion? When Hillary Clinton lost to a man with no political experience to her decades and who openly discussed sexually assaulting women? Would you have voted for President Harris? Or would you let Trump win again because you don’t LIKE her personally and she’s made decisions and statements you disagree with?)
Biden has both less power than his critics give him credit for and more power than his fans give him credit for. He needs to do more to pressure Israel and although it’s a delicate diplomatic situation I’d rather see us fuck up our diplomatic relationship with Israel than watch more Palestinians get murdered for things like “wanting to eat” and “existing.” The line has been crossed, and he doesn’t see it. Because he wasn’t the best person for the job. Because they didn’t get elected, because of sexism/antisemitism/racism. Hell, I have no idea what bootlicker Pete Buttegieg would have done here, but I’d have given him a try. But no. We got Biden and we’re stuck with this reality where you can be as leftist as you want and still have to look at the situation and decide whether you’re comfortable contributing to a Trump victory through inaction. I want socialism—I want every single person on Earth to have clean drinking water, enough safe food, shelter, medical care, and education—and I’m going to vote for Biden, pissy as it makes me, because the only actual alternative is so, so much worse, for me personally as both a woman and a queer, and for everyone in America and the rest of the world who Trump would find reasons to hurt. What do you think the man who openly and repeatedly praises dictators is going to do when those dictators massacre their own people? Yes, we need to care about this genocide now. We also need to care about all of the other people who are at real risk, both at home and abroad. Would a Trump government agree to fund military intervention in Haiti without insisting on it being a colonial exercise in power? Would a Trump government roll back the restrictions on discriminating against transgender patients in healthcare? How would Trump respond if Orban started dragging people into the streets and shooting them en masse? How would Trump respond if China finally went for it and invaded Taiwan? There are more lives at stake here than mine or yours or even those of the Palestinians, who have deserved better for literally decades and are being mass killed in ways that should result in immediate sanctions, a war crimes trial, and the execution of Netanyahu.
The world deserves better from you than complicity in a Trump victory.
The new posts have now made it to Useless Asshole circles. “But the electoral college—“ oh ok! So the system is fucked? Is the system going to be LESS fucked if you refuse to participate in it?
art by Seth Tobochman
Kenny from South Park might as well have been an X-Man.
X-Men fans: Oh no! They killed this character! They were my favorite! X-Men fans who've been reading the comics since the 1980s: Oh? They put that character on the bench for a while? I wonder what stories are coming up that the writers felt that guy needed to be gone? I wonder what big reveal will have them return, or will that be a problem for the next creative team?
Not long now. Time to cast!
It's gonna be such a funny mess when Donald Trump dies of a stroke on April 1st, 2024.
Naturally everybody will think it's fake because of the date only to lose their minds (both positively and negatively based on their opinion of trump) when realizing it's real
There will be massive celebrations in the streets and on social media and lots of predictable "don't speak ill of the dead" discourse about those celebrations
Weird evangelicals will pull some weird number trick talking about how Jesus was conceived on April 1st and that makes Trump a sort of messiah and people will make fun of that
The Republicans (after they're done with the faux-sadness and faux-outrage) will stomp over each other to be his successor but none of them will succeed. They'll tear each other apart and have no single nominee for the November elections.
There will be discourse about if Biden and the living former presidents should go to his funeral (they won't, he was a traitor insurrectionist)
The Ukraine-Russia War immediately goes in favor of Ukraine as morale in the Kremlin is reduced. China similarly backs off from its threats on Taiwan.
Ten thousand new memes are made, some sticking around for years to come.
Not a month later a bunch of unofficial biographies of Trump hit the bookshelves, many with new details about just how awful he was.
Signal boosting to show where I stand on these issues. While I enjoy conspiracy theories, and a lot of the New Age stuff, it's mostly because I think they are bullshit and fiction.
Friendly reminder that:
The concept of starseeds promotes ableism by minimizing or denying ADHD and autism.
The ancient astronaut hypothesis promotes spiritual colonialism and destruction of other cultures by twisting other people's mythologies and sacred texts to fit their narratives.
The reptilian alien mythology is based on conspiracy theories historically used to justify oppressing and murdering real people. Loosh/blood/adrenochrome harvesting is just repackaged blood libel.
New Age mythology is chock full of repackaged right wing conspiracy theories, the same kind pushed by QAnon.
It's also full of repackaged racist pseudoscience about genetic superiority/inferiority and the function of evolution.
Ascension to 5D was supposed to have happened back in 2012, and the prediction failed.
New Agers are recycling their predictions over and over to catch new waves of people who don't know the movement's history.
Belief in Atlantis is strongly motivated by white supremacy.
For more info, see:
Looks like it's time to talk about starseeds and the New Age movement again.
How the mythology of starseeds, indigo children, crystal children, rainbow children, etc. harms kids
New Age YouTube channel caught recycling claims of imminent "first contact" for three years
Is the spiritual person a conspiracy theorist? A list of red flags
What is spiritual eugenics?
New Age beliefs that derive from racist pseudoscience
I think I agree. I've seen far too many on the left bitch and whine about Biden with no real grasp of policy or how much destruction Republicans want to cause.
Reminds me of fickle incels who reject potential partners because they are "only" a 90% match.
She articulates what I feel on this issue. Anyone who thinks a vote for Biden in November is a vote for genocide is either a child, or doesn't understand the monsters backing Trump.
I'm just going to leave this here, because this woman said what I've been trying to articulate for ages much more effectively and succinctly than I've been able to