Knight by JohnnyD
right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters.
Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.
You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.
I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:
- Biden/The Former Guy
- Biden/DeSantis
- Biden/Republican Fascist to be Named Later
No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.
No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).
Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.
If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).
Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.
As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.
There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.
Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.
Speaking as a Michigan resident: Look at the laws being passed in Michigan. Now look at the laws being passed in Florida. Spot the difference? That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party. That’s the difference. They’re different parties. It is not the same.
You want what we’ve got? Vote for it.
(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled? Keep fucking voting.)
D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy
look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill.
But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting
Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.
Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.
Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.
Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:
close gender pay gaps
raise federal minimum wage
make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants
protect civil/public water sources from pollution
cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change
increase gun regulation
lower and control prescription drug prices
improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions
protect net neutrality
protect gay marriage rights
these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years.
Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights.
when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources
So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.
Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.
I live in Pennsylvania.
Neither of my children is cisgender.
The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?
That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.
And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.
You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.
Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.
I will never forget back in the day when I used to participate in local elections (before the plague anxiety and burnout got the better of me), when a group of women supporting Bernie were talking about how angry they would be if Hillary got the candidacy and that if she did then they simply wouldn’t vote.
When I spoke up and told them that actually they should vote even if they don’t get the candidate they wanted (because of the very real threat of Trump being elected instead) they responded with their WHOLE CHEST “if Hillary is chosen as the Democratic candidate then America deserve what happens when Trump is elected president.”
And yeah boy did we get that. I think about those women every so often and I wonder if they’re happy about how things turned out.
This isn’t a fucking sports game, this isn’t your side winning against another side, this is actual fascists being emboldened and empowered by actual fascists being elected into office.
right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters.
Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.
You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.
I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:
- Biden/The Former Guy
- Biden/DeSantis
- Biden/Republican Fascist to be Named Later
No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.
No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).
Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.
If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).
Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.
As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.
There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.
Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.
Speaking as a Michigan resident: Look at the laws being passed in Michigan. Now look at the laws being passed in Florida. Spot the difference? That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party. That’s the difference. They’re different parties. It is not the same.
You want what we’ve got? Vote for it.
(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled? Keep fucking voting.)
D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy
look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill.
But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting
Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.
Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.
Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.
Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:
close gender pay gaps
raise federal minimum wage
make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants
protect civil/public water sources from pollution
cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change
increase gun regulation
lower and control prescription drug prices
improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions
protect net neutrality
protect gay marriage rights
these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years.
Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights.
when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources
So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.
Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.
I live in Pennsylvania.
Neither of my children is cisgender.
The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?
That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.
And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.
You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.
Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.
I will never forget back in the day when I used to participate in local elections (before the plague anxiety and burnout got the better of me), when a group of women supporting Bernie were talking about how angry they would be if Hillary got the candidacy and that if she did then they simply wouldn’t vote.
When I spoke up and told them that actually they should vote even if they don’t get the candidate they wanted (because of the very real threat of Trump being elected instead) they responded with their WHOLE CHEST “if Hillary is chosen as the Democratic candidate then America deserve what happens when Trump is elected president.”
And yeah boy did we get that. I think about those women every so often and I wonder if they’re happy about how things turned out.
This isn’t a fucking sports game, this isn’t your side winning against another side, this is actual fascists being emboldened and empowered by actual fascists being elected into office.
listen I ended up regretting saying anything about this on my old blog because people will interpret literally any and every statement maliciously on this hellsite but I want to start like. a helpline for people who are like “hey I pretty much only read YA but I’m like 22 now and don’t relate to teenagers as much, it’s such a shame that there are no fun books written for adults :(” because boy HOWDY are there some fun books for adults
maybe I’ll start a big google doc or something one day but for now *deep breath*
- The Beautiful Ones (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) - absolutely BUCKWILD romance with a dash of telekinesis; nonstop high society drama and misunderstanding from start to finish, happy ending guaranteed. STRONGLY recommend if you, like me, are a basic bitch who enjoys a bit of Pride and Prejudice.
- Binti (Nnedi Okorafor) - a math prodigy runs away from Earth to become the first of her people to attend a prestigious university in space, but shit gets real when a crew of hostile jellyfish aliens attack her ship.
- Chilling Effect (Valerie Valdes) - a spaceship captain and her crew take on a series of convoluted missions in order to rescue the captain’s sister, who’s been frozen and held for ransom.
- The City of Brass (S.A. Chakraborty) - an 18th century conwoman and a mysterious djinn team up to go looking for a legendary hidden city.
- The City We Became (N.K. Jemisin) - a scrappy bunch of Chosen Ones have to band together to defend New York City (which is very much alive) from a huge ass monster.
- The Empress of Forever (Max Gladstone) - a lady supervillain gets blasted into space and meets an even bigger, planet-destroying evil space empress. literally WHAT is not to like?
- The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - high fantasy royal drama about a woman making her way to power in the wake of a political marriage that left without friends or allies.
- Escaping Exodus (Nicky Drayden) - a space-faring clan are creating their latest spaceship from the insides of a giant monster when absolutely everything goes to shit (as things are wont to do in science fiction stories).
- Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (Kai Cheng Thom) - a trans girl runs away to the big city, where she uses her martial arts skills to team up with other trans woman and form a vigilante gang to defend their own when police look the other way. a fascinating blend of poetry and prose and magical realism.
- Finna (Nino Cipri) - two exes working at an IKEA have to team up to save a customer who disappeared through one of those interdimensional portals that all IKEAs have laying around. you know how it is.
- Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) - come on, you’ve heard about this one. it’s the one with the lesbian space necromancers? yeah, that’s the one. you got it.
- In the Vanishers’ Palace (Aliette de Bodard) - a Beauty and the Beast retelling based in science fiction and Vietnamese fantasy, featuring a young woman falling in love with a “beast” who’s actually a motherly dragon after becoming a tutor to the dragon’s two powerful children.
- Jade City (Fonda Lee) - urban fantasy gang wars, pitting one magically enhanced family against rivals and a new drug that lets anyone mimic their abilities.
- The Library of the Unwritten (A.J. Hackwith) - hell’s librarian gets sent on a quest to find a runaway soul.
- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Becky Chambers) - aka one of my favorite books ever, essentially slice of life science fiction following an interspecies crew of deep space truckers making the longest and most complicated delivery of their lives. very warm and fuzzy.
- Mort (Terry Pratchett) - one of many MANY Discworld books, but a very good one to start with, following the adventures of a boy named Mort after he’s taken on as Death’s apprentice. you know, like the Grim Reaper? that Death.
- River of Teeth (Sarah Gailey) - historical AU in which the United States imported and domesticated hippos in the Mississippi River; follows a crew of hippo-riding crooks and hooligans as they plan one heck of a caper.
- Space Opera (Catherynne Valente) - a washed up rock star and his old bandmate get roped into performing in an intergalactic singing competition that will determine the fate of the entire planet Earth. full of aliens, attempted assassination, art, and emotional turmoil.
- This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) - time-travelling assassins from rival factions fall in love in a poetic and breathless story that spans centuries and reality.
- Under the Pendulum Sun (Jeannette Ng) - fairyland is real, and Victorian England is sending missionaries. a woman and her brother attempt to bring the good word to the fair folk, but start to suspect the queen might just be screwing with their heads. PEAK gothic horror with a creepy fairy twist.
- Witchmark (C.L. Polk) - a doctor and former soldier with magical powers of healing is trying to live a quiet life and avoid his controlling, aristocratic family’s plans for him, only to get tangled up in a massive political conspiracy when one of his patients mysterious dies. accompanying him in his investigation is a mysterious and gorgeous faerie man. romance ensues.
- The First Sister by Linden A Lewis. Three protagonists and all of them queer, a fun space opera. It’s not out yet, but I can tell you it’s really, really good. I highly recommend
- Gods of Jade and Shadow another Silvia Moreno-Garcia book. It takes place in 1920s Mexico and has Mayan gods. A fun breezy book.
- Kill the Queen by Jennifer Estep. If you like YA fantasy but want a little more swearing, violence and sex then this novel is for you.
- The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle Jensen. This one I really enjoyed. If you like the winner’s curse then you’ll like this book.
Books I haven’t read but I’ve heard good things about
- Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson. This one isn’t out it but I believe it’s got a black protagonist.
- Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri. An Indian inspired fantasy novel. I haven’t read this one but I’ve heard good things about it.
- Rage of Dragons by Evan Winters. A black fantasy novel.
- The Unspoken Name by AK Larkwood. I haven’t read it but I know it’s got a lesbian protagonist.
- Song of Blood and Stone by L. Penelope. Just started this book but I believe it’s for adults.
- Tiger’s Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera. Lesbian protagonists and it’s still on my tbr.
Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.
Word for today: wisdom of repugnance
The logical fallacy that because something disgusts you it must be bad
ALTthis is probably the funniest example of a tumblr user simply not reading the post theyre reblogging at all
collage of female characters that people have used to “prove” that there are too many masc women in media
Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.
