[image: a quote tweet. @ DineshDSouza, quoted: Fake sexual assault victims. Fake refugees. Now fake mail bombs. We are all learning how the media left are masters of distortion, deflection, & deception @ Hbomberguy: Note that as Conservatives get what they want, their paranoia only increases – despite coming up two full years of government control, the ideas they support don’t seem to be making anything better. So these failures must be attributed to an ever-powerful ‘media left’ control.]
I’m always a little baffled when liberals will see leftists doing something and object out of the fear that the right will “use it as justification” to do xyz oppressive shit.
because like… literally 100% of the time they already are doing that exact oppressive thing, and there’s centuries of evidence that they will just make up justification when they don’t find anything concrete to blame it on anyway
organizing to combat voter suppression isn’t the cause of voter suppression. organizing to prevent fascist groups from terrorizing communities isn’t the cause of fascism. advocating for the end of boarders isn’t the cause of the United States government deporting people
I don’t understand how so many people have been convinced that any advocacy or organizing is the cause of oppression instead of the fight against it. How do you consistently mix up cause and effect this much?
So much of liberal rhetoric is focused not on stopping or combatting what is happening, but instead on trying to get the referee to notice that the other side isnt playing fair so they’ll step in and put things back *~*the way they should be*~* and so a lot of the time when they say that the right would “use _____ as justification” for something, what they really mean on some level is “_______ could be said to provoke that response, and as soon as we do anything to provoke, we no longer have the moral high ground”
and of course there is no referee — there’s nobody standing outside the system who is empowered to step in and throw a flag when somebody is “cheating.” But they just can’t get past the illusion that if they point out enough times that the right is breaking laws or acting badly, then somebody (with the appropriate authority) will step in and do something about it
This is also the very real impulse lurking behind all of those joking posts on fb from liberals going like “damn I wish the queen would just take the US back” because the idea that the British royal family, the last body that controlled America from the outside, could step in and stop everything bad is much more appealing than the thought that if they want change they’re going to have to do the hard work of making it themselves
Make no mistake. Trans people, especially trans women, are the canary in the coal mine. If the United States government manages to pass legislation making it essentially illegal to be trans again, mark my words it WILL continue on up to sending us right back into McCarthyism and the “kill or imprison anything you disagree with or dislike” policies of the 1950s (not that that hasn’t already been happening under the radar, but it’s going to be More).
There really are people out there who are acting like suggesting genetic testing to “confirm the identity” of a group of people isn’t a wildly dangerous thing for a government to start doing. This is not a door that should be opened.
we’re not the canary. People already died in this mine, it’s unsafe, but those in charge keep sending us in. This government has already illegally incarcerated innocent people, made false arrests and annulled citizenship based on ethnicity, stolen children from loving parents and given them to white, straight, cisgender christians. This government has enacted and encouraged policies around identification, citizenship, proof of being who you say you are and a citizen of where you live, that are only enforced when the people enforcing them decide they don’t like your skin tone, religion, politics. This government has made every effort possible to ensure that the physically and mentally disabled and chronically ill citizens will die faster while also forcing us to thicken the wallets of those who want us gone. This government is doing its damnedest to erode religious protections except for Good Old Fashioned American Christianity, which is being granted privileges and special rights to discriminate against people who don’t fit its narrow view of morality. This government is making the richest people richer, and convincing the poorest people that it’s good for them by turning them against their best allies.
trans people, especially trans women, are not the canary. We’re not a distraction, either, in spite of what some other people are saying. We are yet another in a long list of groups threatened by an administration that pushes fascist policy after fascist policy. And if we’re going to be a metaphor, we should be the last straw.
“the fbi isn’t a monolith” umm. are u sure. it’s an organisation. it can in fact be judged by it’s actions and their outcome
Republicans: Felons should NEVER regain the right to vote. Got a felony for pot possession when you were 21? Fuck off. If you can’t follow the law, you don’t get to vote on the law.
Also Republicans: I mean, even if Kavanaugh IS an attempted rapist who drank underage in high school, whatever. It’s not disqualifying even if its true. I still think he should serve a LIFETIME POSITION ON THE SUPREME COURT.
I’m really glad this anti-Confederate backlash has picked up steam, because we’ve allowed Confederate apologists to completely seize control of Civil War history. The fact that we even think of it in terms of “North vs. South” or “Union vs. Confederacy” is a sign of that influence. It should be “America’s Slaveowner Revolt.” We ask questions like “what if the South won the war”, as if that was remotely possible given their numbers and logistical failures. The Confederacy was barely a government. Within a year of forming there were riots from food shortages. The whole notion that this was between two equally formidable and legitimate sides is a fallacy of the so-called Lost Cause.
This isn’t griping from a history buff by the way, the Lost Cause has been one of America’s chief guardians of white supremacy for 150 years. The Big Lie about states rights affects politics to this day, and always in the context of letting states curtail civil rights that the federal government has guaranteed. Prior to the Civil War, when Northern states tried to push back against fugitive slave laws and make themselves sanctuaries for runaway slaves, the government cracked down hard on them. There was not a peep about states rights on that. We see it happening today. The states rights scolds have not said a word about Jeff Sessions threatening to destroy cities that refuse to hunt undocumented immigrants. Yet somehow the rights of states become sacrosanct when they want to keep gay couples from adopting kids. All of this is relevant to our current situation, and hopefully taking down some statues of (frankly overrated) treasonous generals is just the beginning.
is space force just an elaborate way to replace nasa with a space organisation that doesn’t investigate climate change
the use of the word “farmer” to mean not just people doing actual, important farmwork, but also include the parasitic capitalists who simply profit from those people’s labour.. incredibly insidious. so many policies marketed as “helping farmers” are really aimed at supporting people who exploit farmers, furthering their misery
As an Arctic researcher, I’m used to gaps in data. Just over 1% of US Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. In truth, some of the maps we use today haven’t been updated since the second world war. Navigating uncharted waters can prove difficult, but it comes with the territory of working in such a remote part of the world.
Over the past two months though, I’ve been navigating a different type of uncharted territory: the deleting of what little data we have by the Trump administration.
At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on 21 January. The US National Strategy for the Arctic, the Implementation Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress all gone within a matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links turned red, I frantically combed the internet for archived versions of our country’s most important polar policies.
I had no idea then that this disappearing act had just begun.
Since January, the surge has transformed into a slow, incessant march of deleting datasets, webpages and policies about the Arctic. I now come to expect a weekly email request to replace invalid citations, hoping that someone had the foresight to download statistics about Arctic permafrost thaw or renewable energy in advance of the purge.
You know how people always lament the burning of the library of Alexandria? All that lost knowledge? How much greater civilization could’ve been if such knowledge hadn’t been destroyed?
🍓🧀 (archive) 