wesley crusher enthusiast

the alt-right pipeline is a real and dangerous thing that i think needs more awareness. here’s some videos that can help you learn about it

陶芸作家 悦 -etsu-さんのツイート: “ハニワ焼けました。 #埴輪 #はにわ #ハニワ https://t.co/tT9FOqHfEP”

たくさん買って並べたい♪

i'm so sorry i lost a bet

Italian Elon Musk is having a field day today

(from the FAQ)

CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW DIFFERENT THIS IS??? because as someone who works in digital marketing, my jaw literally dropped.

When I put out an ad for a client on Facebook, I can target like... new moms in their 30s who are looking for furniture within a 10-mile radius. Or people who have an anniversary coming up. People who have just moved. People who are in a new relationship. People who have elementary school kids and tend to vote Republican. People who have liked certain Pages. It's absolutely unnerving.

the utter chaos of this, though.

it's just... incredible.

(via OwbiAgw.jpg (2160×3840))

Too many folks don’t know that Musk is not an engineer. He is not an inventor. He is not a creator. He is a person whose fortune began with enslaved human beings pulling emeralds out of a mine. He is a person who has literally bought everything, including his titles and status in every company all these dummies believe he founded.

He is NOT a good person. He is a rich person, and way too many people think they are the same thing.

If he had ANY seriousness about making a single thing better in this world for the uncountable number of human beings who are suffering right now, and not just getting attention or cosplaying as Tony Stark, he would have done it by now.

Way too many people admire the myth, while they ignore the truth of the shitty billionaire who smeared a literal hero who saved children’s lives as a “pedo”, because Musk’s ego got bent out of shape when he couldn’t make something the world cared about all about himself. He has numerous children, who he has just abandoned. His factories are consistently reported as being toxic, racist, environments. And all these folks are like, “yeah but rockets.” Do you even hear yourselves?

He’s awful. All these things y'all claim he’s “making” are coming from actual geniuses who do actual work. He could fund all their work, and really change the world in meaningful, tangible, immediate ways with his fortune, without being the poster child for fragile male egos. But he doesn’t. And way too many people are totally cool with that.

— The GOP is no longer a party. It’s a movement to impose White Christian nationalism.

The Republicans have, indeed, ceased to be a political party. A political party has a legislative agenda by which it achieves its goals… which also means it also, y'know, has goals. In a two-party system, those goals are often shared goals (at least on the surface) and it’s only the approach that’s up for debate. One party might be hawkish, believing in global stability via dominance and threat. The other might believe in peace through diplomacy and cooperation. But they both believe in this vague concept of “world peace.” Similarly, one party might favor applying financial benefits to the most needy, while the other believes in top-down economics, but both have the shared goal (again, perhaps only superficially) of strengthening the middle class. That’s why it was easier in past times to “reach across the aisle,” to say, “I can work with this Senator, I can work with this President,” to have the fabled beer together at the end of the day. There was compromise to be found. Even saying “we’ll try it your way” was possible because your opponent’s goal is roughly in the same ballpark as yours. Heck, sometimes it was enough rope for your opponent to hang themselves with.

The current GOP only has one agenda: stop the Democratic Party, from whatever it tries to achieve. Do not give it a single win. Do not concede a single inch of ground. Do not allow them an accomplishment to brag about. Socially. Economically. Geopolitically. if the Democrats advocate for the virtues of inhaling, every member of the GOP should performatively hold its breath. Admit no fault. Acknowledge no flaw. Anything other than a shutout is a loss: do not allow a single blue point on the board.

Bonus points for cruelty.

That’s it. That’s the entire current Republican agenda.

That is not a political party. That is a counter-party.

There is one group trying to achieve its goals, and one group trying to stop them. The United States currently has one political party, and one counter-party.

How did we get here?

I believe part of the problem is that there are three political philosophies in the United States, and only two viable political parties in the United States to contain them. And two of those philosophies switched places over the last ten years.

Progressives believe in change, as quickly as possible. They bear the weight of all of those in society who are suffering due to systemic injustice, today, and cannot wait another moment. Lives are miserable, lives are lost, cycles remain unbroken, and all for reasons completely outside the moral compasses of the oppressed. It is the party of empathy, of treating others the way you’d want to be treated had luck and privilege gone the other way. I count myself as a progressive, by the way. The Democratic Party is the home of most progressives.

Conservatives believe in change, but as slowly as possible. They are the politics of tradition, of history. They do believe in innovation — much of their economic policy is, in fact, based on innovation completely unchecked by regulation — but carefully, minimizing the impact to the status quo, making sure that the future America is moving towards is still somewhat recognizable, at least to them (after all, there’s nothing scarier than being lost), even if many of the things that are “recognizable” about “America” culturally and economically marginalize a great many people; but then, empathy is an anecdotal factor to be discarded, to conservatives. Eventually, they come around socially, boiled frogs, as more are more build concrete empathy via exposure, rather than the abstract empathy progressives already possess (you see this all the time: a conservative will believe marriage between homosexuals to be an affront to society, until it’s their daughter who wants to marry another woman, and then that one conservative suddenly embraces the concept. I do believe abstract empathy, caring for a kind of person you’ve never met and possibly never will, is the biggest difference between progressives and conservatives). The Republican Party used to be the home of most conservatives.

(Not to be condescending, but often, oddly, ironically, conservatives could be empathized with by a progressive, if one thinks of their lack of empathy as a kind of learning disability that needs to be accommodated just like any other. “Slow in the heart,” if you will. Taken by the hand, like children, and guided to a more equitable future. Actually, now that I type it out… yes, that’s condescending. But you can see how bridges could be built if you try hard enough.)

The third group are the regressives. Regressives do not believe in change at all. In fact, they believe that too much change has already happened, and we need to undo a large amount of progress that’s already been made. They see an America that is getting browner, getting spicier, getting louder, getting prouder, and they are definitely not getting used to it. They believe that any progress that is being made, is being made at their expense… often, literal financial expense (when people talk about the “economic anxiety” behind regressives, the concrete emotion is “I’m afraid my little boy will not be able to achieve his dream of becoming a firefighter someday, even if his scores are the best.”) They believe others’ progress is their oppression… and they believe that this “oppression” is due to forces that have nothing to do with the moral choices they’ve personally made, like any other marginalized group that progressives care for.

Regressives didn’t really have a political party as a home. The Republican Party in the USA prior to the mid-2010s was really three political parties welded together: The Business Party, The Christian Party, and the Regressives, joined by a tiny sprinkling of Libertarians who don’t like losing. The Business Party has no opinion on abortion rights. The Christian Party has no opinion on banking regulations (it may be worth nothing here that prior to Roe v. Wade, the Catholic Church was considered one of the most liberal organizations in the country, and it was a big issue when Kennedy was elected). And neither of those parties have any opinion on the Second Amendment, unlike Regressives, who want to go back to the Old West approach to firearms. They’ve been in an alliance purely for numbers, each in opposition to the Democratic Party but no particular interest in the goals of each other. Regressives were tolerated for the warm voting bodies, but relegated to the fringe, given a tiny bit of lip service but little else.

This changed with the Tea Party movement. Regressives suddenly became organized. And in the middle of the last decade, they found their leader: Tea became T, for Trump. The Regressives had found their perfect candidate, someone who will say anything. You have to understand the appeal, even if you’re a progressive. You yourself may have fantasized, “if I ever met George W. Bush in person, I don’t care: I’d just go right up to him and call him a war criminal to his face, decorum be damned.” There were so many Regressives, and even Conservatives, who talked in a similar way amongst themselves: “I wish a candidate would stop being so cautious about their political career and just flat-out call Hillary Clinton a crook on the stage like she deserves. Just do it.” Well, Trump did it. In a little over a year, the Regressives took complete control of the Republican Party out from under the Business and Christian parties, away from the Conservatives. They’re still stunned. Before, they just had to fake it a little bit about caring about the agendas of the other. But to watch the Business Party have to rave about the business acumen of Donald J. Trump of all people, and to watch the Christian Party tie itself into knots praising the holy sanctity of Donald J. Trump of all people… it’s really breathtaking.

This cannot be overstated: the Republican Party’s candidate for the Presidency of the United States was Mitt Romney, only ten years ago. Mitt Romney! The Republican’s Joe Manchin! Their most fringe centrist! When he was chosen as their candidate, “The Dark Knight Rises” was in theaters! This is not ancient history! The regressive conquest of the Republican Party and its transformation into a counter-party happened, in political terms, overnight, and we’re still waking up from it.

As to how the Regressives got so radicalized into a counter-party so opposed to the Tip O'Neil “beer after work” type of cooperation, it probably has to do with turning the anger dial up to 11 around Y2K. In the 1990’s, you certainly had folks like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh whipping up emotions, but it was really Karl Rove during the Bush II campaign who decided to apply sports-team loyalty to politics, to turn these opponents into rivals, and then rivals into enemies, and then enemies into anathema. Republican/Democrat became Yankees/Red Sox, and not even a brief reconciliation during 9/11 could turn the knob back down again.

All of which is to say: there is no middle ground between party and counter-party. It’s a binary. The one party will succeed, or be thwarted. That’s all there is. There can be no bipartisanship because bipartisanship requires two parties. There is only one party, existing alongside the legislators sent to stop it and only that.

Uggghhh I forgot to download my killing and murder this morning. Can I have some of yours?

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peter & kate

My lowkey headcanon is that they cast Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis to be Space Peter and Kate on Star Trek: TNG.

That’s not Captain Picard, just an uncharacteristically mustache-less Tony Levin

in fact the growing consensus is that ‘Patrick Stewart’ is just Tony Levin’s Actors Equity alias because

@wilwheaton​ can you verify?

popeye_sailor10349213802: im sad

popeye_sailor10349213802: im not doing good

BLuTo-2005: I'm sorry man. Whats wrong.

popeye_sailor10349213802: spinach doesnt work on me any more

olive.oyl1337: ok

popeye_sailor10349213802: spinach stopped working on me even if i eat a mountain height pile of cans if spinach

olive.oyl1337: ok

Do NOT let random motherfuckers add you on Discord