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Now With Twice as Much Lemon!

@itsybitsylemonsqueezy / itsybitsylemonsqueezy.tumblr.com

WARNING: MAY CONTAIN OPINIONS! I am literally a bunch of opinions masquerading as a lemon. Mind the bursts of citric acid. Age: legal / Gender Identity: cis female / Preferred Name: Lemon / Occupation: gainfully employed/???/used to write some things...
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Anonymous asked:

https://www.tumblr.com/qqueenofhades/743255237060689920/the-thing-that-confuses-me-about-the-dont-vote

The “don’t vote” left’s point is basically that, if Biden gets a second term, it’ll basically signal that “They’ll vote for us as long as we’re not Republicans, why don’t we do some REAL fucked up shit, if we can get away with it?” It takes the power out of the people’s hands and places it firmly in the party’s.

I can’t completely disagree with that, my caveat is that there’s no real alternative system or party in place, because top-down change is ineffective; a third party president has to contend with a two party congress.

Except no. This whole "Biden just wants to do as much fucked up shit as possible while not being a Republican, and if you give him a second term he'll do more fucked up shit deliberately to spite you" mindset is only possible as an interpretation if you a) deliberately and comprehensively ignore everything he has done to date, and b) you approach the situation with the maximum bad faith possible. Not to mention, the ultimate outcome of this Big Important Teaching Biden A Lesson is that Trump gets back into power and makes everything orders of magnitude worse, because he does in fact want to deliberately do evil shit to everyone and says so at every opportunity. There is not some magical happy alternative that springs into existence by not voting. If you choose this as a year to Teach Biden A Lesson, you are enabling Trump. Trump will be much, much worse. If you don't care about that, I still do not care what your Great Ideology is. You are not helping anyone and you are directly and irreversibly hurting everyone.

I made a post a few days ago wherein I mentioned that I want to assess Biden fairly, taking into account both strengths and weaknesses, but the rampant bad-faith, lying, misreading, misrepresentation, and open sabotage of him (especially by the online left; the GOP sometimes only wishes they were as good at turning Biden's voter pool against him) makes it really difficult to do that. My frustration with those people makes me just want to go "BIDEN IS GREAT THE END." I know he is a flawed old man (though by literally every account of a career spent in public service, he really does care about making the world a better place and any remotely good faith reading of his accomplishments thus far can see that). It is also very likely that he goes MORE left in a second term because he won't have to face the electorate again, he has always gone more left when pushed before, and he's not actually the scheming genocidal mastermind that leftist social media paints him as. Shocking, I know.

I know there are things in the world we don't like and don't want and want to stop, and therefore we blame our own president for not making it stop. But I have zero, no, none, absolutely none whatsoever sympathy for this pseudo-populist "WE NEED TO TEACH BIDEN A LESSON BY ELECTING TRUMP AGAIN, I AM VERY MORAL MUCH ACTIVIST" mindset. There's this funny thing about America wherein it is still (for now) a democracy. If Biden wins a second term, he can't run again. I would take literally anything these people said more seriously if they focused on developing their dream progressive successor for 2028 (and also figured out how to get that person elected and in a place to make real change) rather than cynically sabotaging Biden in the most consequential election year, again, of our lifetimes. If you don't like him now, find a way to make his successor a better option. Throwing a toddler tantrum and handing the country back to a senile, deranged, fascist, revenge-riddled, theocratic Trump HELPS. NOBODY. I still don't know how many times I'm going to have to say that, but yeah.

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mrshamill

Throwing a toddler tantrum and handing the country back to a senile, deranged, fascist, revenge-riddled, theocratic Trump HELPS. NOBODY.

louder for the morons in the back who are still whining about both parties being the same

Not voting for the left because they're not Left Enough also does not make the party go more left. It makes them go more right. Because that's where the votes are.

Reblogging because for the love of Christ, I wish the “I’m not going to vote for Biden because he’s not pure/ far left/ whatever enough for me” crowd would remember what, EXACTLY, it would mean for there to be a second Trump presidency.

Assuming that any checks currently in place would stop someone who’s mindset is “I’m perfect and DESERVE to be president” from turning our country into the closest approximation of Russia he can get, is not only naive, it’s dangerously, determinedly ignorant.

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alarajrogers

I said this in 2016 and I said it in 2020 and I'll say it again:

If you don't like the fact that the leftmost candidate of the two major parties isn't left enough, the solution is neither to refuse to vote, nor to "send a message" by voting third party. Both result in an advantage to the rightmost candidate.

The solution is, vote for the guy that's not quite good enough, and then lean on him hard.

Biden has moved farther to the left than any president since Roosevelt. Yes. He's gotten more of our agenda done than Clinton or Obama. And there's many things he's tried to do that the right wingers in Congress or in the Supreme Court have stopped him from doing. He's also moved farther to the left than any president I know of when you look at his whole career; at one point he was Liberal Lite, "moderate", pro-corporation, etc... and it seems he learned from it. He changed. So we're dealing with a guy who is capable of moving left, has done so, and could be asked to go farther.

The other candidate literally wants to become a dictator, eliminate freedom of the press, and spend our tax dollars persecuting his "enemies."

Do I like the fact that Biden is supporting Israel militarily when they have caused such an enormous and horrible death toll in Gaza? No. But we have treaties with Israel and we can't easily break them. Meanwhile we have actually seen him call Netanyahu out. Including saying basically "You keep this up and no one will be your friend", implying that he is threatening to withdraw support. Trump, meanwhile, is cheerfully Islamophobic and would happily murder every single Palestinian. You care about Palestine, there is only one legitimate choice. I'm sorry, I know you want to believe there are multiple moral options you can take, but there is really only one. In the US's winner-take-all first-past-the-post no ranked choice system, the guy who gets 51% of the vote and the guy who gets 90% of the vote are exactly the same.

Look, we can win this. The right's abortion bans are wildly unpopular; many people will be voting to try to restore the right to control our own bodies. Republican support skews older, but in four years millennials didn't magically reach a point of comfortable status quo where they're likely to start voting Republican; instead Republicans have doubled down on the crazy. Anti-maskers and ant-vaxxers, who are likely Republicans, are much more likely to have died of COVID than the reality-based community on the left, since Biden won by 7 million votes 4 years ago.

But Trump will do everything in his power to cheat. We can't just win by 51%. We have to trounce him and as many Republicans at the ballot box as we can, because they have lost the plot. Even the best ones refuse to do anything to stop the spread of this evil-for-its-own-sake movement that wants queers, Jews, and Muslims dead, POC subservient, and women of all races securely under the thumb of men. We have to stop this movement by sending a message to politicians, "these are not winning ideologies. Embrace these ideologies because of the fanatic fringe, and you will lose." Most of them aren't true believers; they're pandering. The only way to stop the Republicans being pointlessly destructive is to make so many of them lose, the rest realize, shit, the grownups are back, we better start acting like politicians and not demagogues again.

And one of the best ways to do that is to make sure Biden wins by such a large margin even Trump can't cheat his way to victory. Because he's ready. He's promised, there will be violence if he loses. (There will also be violence if he wins, but it will be state violence against us. If he loses, there will be rioting white thugs in red states, but the federal government will still have both the power and the will to try to stop that.) He's going to pull every dirty trick in the book to win. The only way to stop him is to win overwhelmingly. Then we get four more years of relative safety, where if Clarence Thomas dies or gets arrested we get a young liberal judge in his place, and in that time, we can push the Democratic party farther to the left, because they'll know why they won. They'll know who voted for them, and why, and they'll move in that direction because they want to keep winning.

You cannot save Gaza by making sure Biden loses. That is actually the worst possible thing that could happen, in terms of anything any American could do. Netanyahu wants Trump to win because Trump will back him up no matter what he does to the Palestinians.

Voting is not about proving how moral you are and selecting the perfect candidate. Voting is about getting the best possible candidate out of what is usually a lackluster selection. But this time, the choice is, an old guy who's not as charismatic and shiny as we'd like and hasn't done as much as we want, vs, literally, a wanna be dictator with an agenda that's pure evil.

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porterdavis
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lynati

29 BILLION?!?!

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edenfalling

The IRS is not your enemy!

We all have to chip in what we can -- that's how society works. And if the IRS gets proper funding they can:

A) Audit more companies for tax evasion B) Process help requests faster C) Send your refund out faster D) Make filing taxes simpler and easier for the average American

And so on and so forth. Denying funds to the IRS just makes the whole system gum up, which lets rich assholes get away with all kinds of shit while average people get ground up in the gears because nobody can afford to lend a hand.

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Genuine question cause I've been seeing posts of this nature on my dash. Why is this the focus? When we have a clear perpetrator and clear victims, why do we need to focus on how to heal the perpetrators (Zionist Israelis) as they are still harming people (Palestinians) and not actively removing the club from their hand

This is a history blog written by an American Jewish Holocaust historian who is concerned with memory and attitudes within her own community, and this is what I choose to write about in relation to my observations of the discourse surrounding recent events.

You're seeing posts of this nature because people like you are going around leaving comments implying that all Jews are right wing Israelis complicit in murdering babies in Gaza, and it's traumatizing us. Because that is rhetoric which has been violently deployed against us for centuries. You're seeing posts of this nature because people like you are going around policing the conversations Jewish creators choose to have in relation to their lived experiences since Oct 7. We would love not to be having these conversations, but we have to, because of users like you.

I am presently choosing to use my knowledge as a historian to call in parts of my community, and help explain some of our communal responses to things to outsiders. If you would like to see me screaming about how much I h8 Israel and what a Good, Righteous, anti-Zionist Left Wing Jew I am, there are plenty of posts like that. And if you don't like what I write about on my history blog as an American Jewish Holocaust historian, then don't follow me.

Finally, I don't believe that this WAS a genuine question. It's so cartoonishly stepped in hostile, anti-Semitic, fifth-columnist, global JudeoZionist hivemind undertones and assumptions that it's difficult to believe it wasn't intentional. Also your blog only has one post. But, in case you are being genuine, please understand that people just like you are the reason why Jews like me and so many of the Jews who follow this blog feel deeply unsafe participating in non-Jewish pro-Palestinian activist spaces.

Reblogging mostly because I’m very petty and still pissed, but also because, if this was a genuine question, it serves as a good object lesson.

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x0401x

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.

Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.

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raptorific

Sometimes I see posts on here and feel like a lot of you have internalized the idea that the qualifying prerequisites for being LGBT are being cool and interesting and subversive, and that the fact that everyone in the community happens to be attracted to their own gender or else stepping outside of the gender assigned to them is just a happy coincidence, and not like, "not only a qualifying prerequisite, but the SOLE qualifying prerequisite." Being gay IS cool, but THAT'S the happy coincidence. Like I'm sorry to break it to everybody but even boring gay people are gay and even cool straight people are straight, because being gay is not about being cool, it's about being gay.

Replace gender with sex :3

It's a sexual orientation not a gender orientation.

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Here’s the whole video. It’s called “Don’t Be A Sucker” and it’s 17 minutes long.

don’t just scroll past this actually watch it, it’s only 2 minutes long. If you re-recorded this today word for word with modern actors and places, it wouldn’t even look out of place as a PSA

300,000 notes and i can’t find a transcript

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sky-squido

Transcript: (sorry for the language!)

Speaker: “I see negroes holding jobs that belong to me! And you! I’ll ask you, if we allow this thing to go on, what’s gonna become of us real Americans!”

Hungarian man with clear foreign accent: “I’ve heard this kind of talk before, but I never expected to hear it in America.”

Young man: “This man seems to know what he’s talking about.“

Speaker: “What are us real Americans gonna do about it? You’ll find it right here in this little pamphlet—the truth about negroes and foreigners! The truth about the Catholic Church! You’ll find…” [audio grows quieter as camera shifts to the onlookers]

Hungarian man: “You believe in that kind of talk?“

Young man: “I dunno, it makes pretty good sense to me.“

Speaker: “And I tell you, friends, we’ll never be able to call this country our own until it’s a country without… without what?“

Other man: “Yeah? Without what?“

Speaker: “Without negroes, without alien foreigners,”—the young man is nodding, following along—“without Catholics, without Freemasons! You know these…“

Young man: “What’s wrong with the Masons, I’m a Mason.” Looks to European man worriedly, “hey, that fellow’s talking about me!“

Huungarian man: “And that makes a difference, doesn’t it.“

Speaker: “These are your enemies! These are the people who are trying to take over our country! Now you know them, you know what they stand for. And it’s up to you and me to fight them!” A bunch of the onlookers in the vicinity wave him off like he’s crazy and turn away, “fight them and destroy them before they destroy us!”

Speaker: “Thank you.“

One man in the now somewhat awkward crowd: “claps“

Young man: *is visibly uncomfortable*

Hungarian man: “Before he said Mason, you were ready to agree with him.”

Young man: “Well yes but, he was talking about… what about those other people?“ *the pair sit down on a park bench*

Hungarian man: “In this country, we have no ‘other people.’ We are American people, of course.“

Young man: “What about you? You aren’t American, are you?“

Hungarian man: “I was born in Hungary. But now, I am an American citizen. And I have seen what this kind of talk can do. I saw it in Berlin.”

Young man: “What were you doing there?“

Hungarian man: “I was a professor at the university. I heard the same words we have heard today. But I was a fool, then. I thought Nazis were crazy people, stupid fanatics. But unfortunately it was not so. You see, they knew that they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation.”

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