"Voting doesnt work because not enough people in my country will vote for MY version of communism. We need a violent overthrow of the government to MAKE this happen"

@captainjonnitkessler im stealing your tags because youre so fucking right

The best that I can tell, it’s primarily about remaining Pure.

Obviously, the people who think they’re too leftist to vote aren’t monolithic, so no one reason fits all of them. But there’s a clear trend among many of them that they see voting for someone who has done things they personally find to be sufficiently Impure—or, in some cases, voting at all within an Impure system—as being an act that will somehow harm them.

So they stand firm in their conviction that they mustn’t vote, and instead talk about how great it will be when we finally have a Pure system, with only Pure candidates…

And this mindset is one of the things that has consistently fucked serious socialist governments once they do gain power, is the thing. (Another of the things is the CIA but that's another conversation.)

Because if you are unwilling to try to build institutions that can fluctuate and evolve and potentially be used in ways that aren't true to your vision, you not only have to institute tyranny, you have to build your entire system around maintaining your tyranny forever.

And once all your other goals hinge upon retaining power forever, they become subordinate to it.

At which point there is no realistic future to the Tyranny Of The Proletariat other than the tyranny of you personally. Which means you are going to 1) liquidate your own peasants or whatever similar scenario arises in your context and later 2) be overthrown and leave no useful institutional legacy, because you founded it all on virtue-by-fiat.

The self-cannibalism of ideological purity is never pretty, but in the context of government it's particularly bad.

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I feel like I want to hand these people copies of "Interesting Times" by Terry Pratchett - one of the earliest books where he points out that the ultimate problem with a lot of People's Proletarian Revolutions is that ultimately the people in charge of them wind up realising they have the wrong proletariat. I mean, he also makes the same point in "Night Watch" as well, and I think it also gets raised in "Monstrous Regiment" too. But basically, it's a point Pterry made a number of times in a number of different books - the search for ultimate ideological purity and perfection is not going to change the world. The willingness to muck in and get your hands dirty, on the other hand, will.

Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.”

― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

...Our friend was So. Damn. Wise.

This is the second time in my voting history that I’ve participated in flipping a red seat in Alabama for Democrats (the previous time being my beloved Doug Jones) so it’s always funny to see people turn around and say voting doesn’t matter when I’ve seen it twice in the past ten years flip seats in what is supposed to be safe Republican country. Republicans are digging their own grave with their radicalization and it is making them lose (and with your help we can make them lose harder). Vote.

Vote. If yours didn't matter, they wouldn't be trying so hard to make sure you couldn't do it.

Democrats outnumber Republicans in the US.

Democrats outnumber Republicans in several "red" states - the Rs just work very hard to keep them from voting.

In "red" states, every Democratic vote matters, even if they don't win; it proves support, and it makes the Rs nervous about pushing their agenda. (And in states where there is also voting on laws, the public can block some of their agenda even without voting in a Democratic governor or majority in their legislature.)

In "blue" states, Democratic votes help remind everyone that we outnumber them, and help push the Overton window to the left.

If voting didn't matter, nobody would be wasting money trying to convince you not to.

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #16

April 26-May 3 2024

actually for fusies, let’s make it a poll

original post for context:

I’m sorry but there is no time limit on $100k/month?!? So it ends up being 14 hour days forever?? No thank you. $10k/month is more than enough

please make every effort to vote <3

Voter suppression is a real problem!! I know so many people in real life that are LGBTQ and or left leaning irl that seem to think theres no hope and dont bother to vote! Its insane!!

you ever have just like, a really bad idea

anyways if you like bad things here’s a postcard

I was trying to figure out why this post starting spiking recently and then I found out you animals had this queued for Mother’s Day

Cdrama: The Princess Is a Rabbit Fairy (2023)

Voting Blue matters.

Republicans WILL NEVER cancel medical debt.

Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power?    

One man is especially to blame for why corporate power is out of control. And I knew him! He was my professor, then my boss. His name… Robert Bork.

Robert Bork was a notorious conservative who believed the only legitimate purpose of antitrust — that is, anti-monopoly — law is to lower prices for consumers, no matter how big corporations get. His philosophy came to dominate the federal courts and conservative economics.

I met him in 1971, when I took his antitrust class at Yale Law School. He was a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl. He seemed impatient and bored with me and my classmates, who included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, as we challenged him repeatedly on his antitrust views.

We argued with Bork that ever-expanding corporations had too much power. Not only could they undercut rivals with lower prices and suppress wages, but they were using their spoils to influence our politics with campaign contributions. Wasn’t this cause for greater antitrust enforcement?

He had a retort for everything. Undercutting rival businesses with lower prices was a good thing because consumers like lower prices. Suppressing wages didn’t matter because employees are always free to find better jobs. He argued that courts could not possibly measure political power, so why should that matter?

Even in my mid-20s, I knew this was hogwash.

But Bork’s ideology began to spread. A few years after I took his class, he wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox summarizing his ideas. The book heavily influenced Ronald Reagan and later helped form a basic tenet of Reaganomics — the bogus theory that says government should get out of the way and allow corporations to do as they please, including growing as big and powerful as they want.

Despite our law school sparring, Bork later gave me a job in the Department of Justice when he was solicitor general for Gerald Ford. Even though we didn’t agree on much, I enjoyed his wry sense of humor. I respected his intellect. Hell, I even came to like him.

Once President Reagan appointed Bork as an appeals court judge, his rulings further dismantled antitrust. And while his later Supreme Court nomination failed, his influence over the courts continued to grow.  

Bork’s legacy is the enormous corporate power we see today, whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon, Google, and Meta taking over the tech world.

It’s not just these high-profile companies either: in most industries, a handful of companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.

This corporate concentration costs the typical American household an estimated extra $5,000 per year. Companies have been able to jack up prices without losing customers to competitors because there is often no meaningful competition.

And huge corporations also have the power to suppress wages because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.

And how can we forget the massive flow of money these corporate giants are funneling into politics, rigging our democracy in their favor?

But the tide is beginning to turn under the Biden Administration. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are fighting the monopolization of America in court, and proposing new merger guidelines to protect consumers, workers, and society.

It’s the implementation of the view that I and my law school classmates argued for back in the 1970s — one that sees corporate concentration as a problem that outweighs any theoretical benefits Bork claimed might exist.

Robert Bork would likely regard the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts with the same disdain he had for my arguments in his class all those years ago. But instead of a few outspoken law students, Bork’s philosophy is now being challenged by the full force of the federal government.

The public is waking up to the outsized power corporations wield over our economy and democracy. It’s about time.

So this dude really borked us, h uh?

check your voter registration, people, esp in red states (and esp if you're a poc). tRump's fascists will stop at nothing to see to it he wins.

Every time I advocate for voting people are like "no you shouldn't vote! Read this literature, it'll totally change the way you view voting!" And every single time it's the same fucking "you shouldn't vote because both parties are exactly the same so it won't make a difference who wins" bullshit wrapped up in some fancy language

"OP you need to read 'Voting is not Harm Reduction" OP has read Voting is not Harm Reduction. It opens with the acknowledgement that for the most vulnerable people, even a tiny degree of harm reduction can mean life or death and then continues to advocate for not participating in that harm reduction lest you "participate in your own oppression". Pardon me for not finding "vulnerable people should die for my ideology" very convincing.

This is the second time in my voting history that I’ve participated in flipping a red seat in Alabama for Democrats (the previous time being my beloved Doug Jones) so it’s always funny to see people turn around and say voting doesn’t matter when I’ve seen it twice in the past ten years flip seats in what is supposed to be safe Republican country. Republicans are digging their own grave with their radicalization and it is making them lose (and with your help we can make them lose harder). Vote.

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.

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.

Biden has made combating climate change a priority, including listening to environmental groups who criticized him for not doing enough in the beginning of his administration. The Inflation Reduction Act alone included $3 trillion worth of climate investments. His administration has also heavily prioritized environmental justice, including earmarking money to help low-income and marginalized communities build climate resiliency, tightening regulations on cancer-causing emissions to eliminate "Cancer Alley", and working with indigenous groups on projects such as the Klamath River dam removals and the management of national parks and monuments.

When his mass student loan forgiveness plan was shot down by the Supreme Court (a Supreme Court, by the way, which is ONLY right-wing dominated because Trump won in 2016), he kept working on it, and has so far approved $153 billion worth of debt forgiveness for 4.3 million people, all while the Republicans have been actively trying to sabotage student loan forgiveness.

He's pushing the FDA and DEA to re-evaluate the drug classification of marijuana, and he's issued mass pardons for people with drug-related federal convictions. He's acknowledged that the "drug war" disproportionately affects people of color. He has also directed the FDA to look at ways to expand birth control and abortion access. The FDA now allows abortion pills to be prescribed in telehealth appointments and sent via mail, something that I can't imagine would have happened under the Trump administration.The FDA also recently approved over-the-counter birth control, which does not require a doctor's visit or prescription to obtain.

Biden has also appointed more Native American judges than any other president in history. He's also been actively supportive of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Is Biden perfect? Absolutely not. I think his COVID response leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm appalled by his continued monetary support to Israel (although I just saw an article saying that the US has paused a weapons shipment to Israel because of Israel's assault on Raffah, so I think there's some hope there). But on so many fronts, he's not just the lesser of two evils-- he's actually doing a lot of good, and he's gone further left just since being in office.

As OP said, when right-wingers get elected, the Left doesn't think, "Oh, we weren't far left enough," they assume that they need to move further right to get elected (this isn't speculation-- this has been the pattern in politics for a long time). And both Trump and the Republican party have made it very clear that if they get in power, they will do whatever it takes to stay there.

If we allow a fascist, would-be dictator to get elected, we're going to get a fascist dictator. He's learned from last time, and his cronies have been working hard to dismantle the systems which kept him from stealing the presidency last time. If he wins this year, I doubt that we'll get a second chance to vote him, or his compatriots, out again.

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

here are my policy focuses:

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

'The Hills', one of the limited-edition prints available in my shop: www.tomgauld.com/shop

I am once again reminded of Das Rad 🪨

different Tifa for TifaWeek2024 🐬💕