I’m calling it now with reasonable certainty. Lots of people would vote if they could, but they can’t, so they can’t help. Meanwhile, the roaring heyday AmeriKKKan fascism is enjoying at the moment? Very empowering. Tons of the wrong people are going to vote – including people who hadn’t even bothered to vote their fuhrer in. Baby nazis who stayed home during the last election because they felt hopeless to affect it until the upset? Or who couldn’t vote then but can now because they’re 18? This beer with kavanaugh thing. This is their time, my people.
Look to Brasil. It’s always rough but it is diving straight into neofascist hell right now. They’re fucked even worse than we are – and we are pretty damn fucked. Anyhow, look to places like Brasil, like Spain under Franco. Capitalist democracy has handed some of the most populace countries in our hemisphere to pure evil, and the only progress we’re going to make is by fighting every bloody inch, breaking laws, risking our lives.
We might have a few democrats flip a few seats, but it’s not going to be what they hope for, what we need. I’m not saying don’t vote. Vote, knowing you’re going to lose. What I’m saying is be emotionally prepared to suffer and fight every day and still lose everything, because that is what being a good person in a fascist state looks like.
Long live the fighters.
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I really hope you’re wrong. I’m worried you might not be. There does seem to be a lot of people who are frighteningly okay with supporting fascism. I always knew they existed, but recent years have made it clear that there are far more of them than I’d thought.
I hope there’s a blue wave and that it’s enough to take control of congress. If not, I think that’s probably it for democracy in America, at least for a few decades. The GOP have already done a lot to disenfrachise voters and with their lock on the supreme court solidified, what’s to hold them back? Their sense of decency and respect for democracy?
I don’t understand why so many people are eager to live in a hellscape, but that seems to be the case. O tempora, o mores.
That’s the million dollar question. People have been making the same mistakes over and over again through history, not for a lack of knowledge or awareness, but because we can’t – in masses – control our animal behaviors. We’re beasts who should know better, but consistently are taken down by our worst impulses.
I want a plan that deals with the underlying psychology going on here. I don’t know if there’s anything for it, except time that we don’t have.
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Fuck blue wave. That just means putting the less-corrupt democrats in power. I’m ready for a general insurgency. Burn the swamp.
It’s got a lot of gas. I’m sure it’s flammable.
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https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/brian-kemp-voter-purges-governor
This is the thing. The US ruling party (whichever) has always manipulated the elections. The Republicans have never played fair and there is no reason to expect they are suddenly going to start.
Sad to say but I think the Black Panthers and Weather were right: the only thing they respect is violence. After all, it’s their preferred tool.
We need a black power party again, but the problem is that anyone who volunteers to make that happen is signing their own death warrant. But then again, the worse things get, the more that’s true of every stripe of progressive activist.
If my dream comes true and we get a black power party – particularly centered in the south – I’d like to see most of its staff be white people. Makes it a little less media-friendly to firebomb them.
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I don’t have a solution but the problem isn’t that complicated to understand.
To those who do not agree with him, Trump is a racist, mysoginist sexual predator and bully. He makes us all complicit in wholesale kidnapping and other abuses of immigrants. He lies so frequently he appears to completely lose track of it and contradicts himself within days on many issues. He’s a thief, a fraud, and his whole family is apparently guilty of massive, illegal tax evasion. He’s hilariously bad at faking religious piety. And he’s just the face of the rot, he couldn’t do all of these things (and more that I didn’t think of off the top of my head) without enablers and co-conspirators willingly and enthusiastically helping him do all of this. He’s nowhere near smart enough to plan most of this stuff on his own.
To the people who don’t appear to be sociopaths but would vote for Trump, he’s just another in a long line of politicians. He’s just holding up the conservative side of the normal national conversation. All the accusations against him are probably just the losers of that conversation making things up and that’s a really ugly mark against them, not him. He’s a little rough on immigrants maybe, but those people don’t have to come here, and they might be coming for my job anyway. Kidnapping? Of course not! It’s probably just a paperwork snarl. Red tape sucks for everyone, welcome to America. He’s not a sexual predator or mysoginist any more than the rest of the Republicans are (and they’re not either because it makes no sense for a political party to write off half of the nation). They don’t see Trump lie because they don’t care to pay enough attention to the usual meanderings of politics to notice who’s lying. They all lie anyway.
Basically it all gets down to a few concepts. Politicians always fight and lie, the media has joined in, and a blind belief in American values. That last bit is key and assumes that if Trump had done all the awful things he’s been accused of, his own party would not support him. If all the accusations are coming from Democrats, it must just be politics as usual. And whoever you are and whatever you think, Trump has said something somewhere at some time in support of your ideas. So he’s Your Guy.
Imagine the general freakage if someone started telling southern white people “don’t go to the polling place today because there are gonna be hispanics with guns.” Oh, the freakage there would be.
But, usually, when I hear southern republicans say they want to close a few polling places, I know it’s a) going to be polling places in black neighborhoods and b) allowing them to increase the density of police coverage around the polling places in the white areas. It’s win/win voter suppression.
People with guns need to tell the cops “stay home.”
I’m not one for clichés, at least I hope I’m not, but if voting changed anything then it’d be illegal.
I am a proud abstentee.
Lately, I’ve been looking for safe spaces on the net to vent my frustrations without judgement. I have no intentions of it, but I stumbled upon “The Suicide Project” where people could express themselves about their struggles with depression and other mental illnesses.
It’s been about as well as you’d expect.
There’s this idiot who keeps telling me that people are “allowed” to respond to my self-advocacy. Well, to tell you the truth, I may have expressed such things as wanting to hurt my own mother for hurting me because she chose Trump over her own autistic asexual son. I also expressed that Trump turned my own people against each other as well as me through divide and conquer tactics. I told this idiot to leave me alone, but it was the same old “everyone’s entitled to their opinion” horsecrap.
No sympathy whatsoever just like the Social Anxiety Support forum. Over there, I expressed that you must be willing to be violent if you want to keep yourself safe from fascism. I outright stated out of frustration that I love violence and I needed it because it was a natural human emotion. Everyone called me an “edgy fifteen-year-old SJW.” The moment I defended myself from everyone’s insults, albeit by calling socially inept pond scum, I was immediately labeled a bully.
Is it any wonder that I enjoy stomping all over people now?
wontbe @ 9 – please refrain from using synonyms for stupid and insane in your comments here. if it happens enough, i’ll ban you for ableism. there’s more we could talk about if i had the time, but that’s the only deal-breaker in your comment that jumps out at me.
lanir & marcus – thinking about solutions, or at least trying to understand the problem enough to get closer to that goal – i like to see stuff like that. as i said, no time to engage at the moment, but i appreciate it.
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CRAP!
I’m so sorry!
I appreciate that, thank you.
Anyway, that’s my story.
I REALLY should’ve worded that better.
It may be worth noting that the Angry Cheeto was not installed in the White House by the popular vote, but, rather, by the Electoral College. Despite all the GOP’s decades-long program of voter suppression and gerrymandering, Clinton recieved roughly three million more popular votes than did the Cheeto.
How many other elected offices are “blessed” with an organization whose explicit stated purpose is to overrule the popular vote?
Things may not be as completely devoid of hope as you seem to believe. The results of the next election will be very interesting…
wont @13 – check my response to you on the next post. take it easy, kid!
cubist @14 – The problem is that all the decades of gerrymandering and voter suppression are still in place, so how can we make this happen? I’m not devoid of hope, but my hope for the species as a whole is razor thin, and a blue wave of corporate dems isn’t going to do *much* to assuage it, even if it does happen.
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“The problem is that all the decades of gerrymandering and voter suppression are still in place, so how can we make this happen?”
The same way Clinton got more votes than the Cheeto, despite all the GOP bullshit?
I absolutely agree that we can’t be complacent; the GOP voter-suppression machinery has become decidedly more active of late. But so, too, has the resistance to said machinery. I just think the message should be more we’ve got to work for it, and if we do, we might just win it, rather than we’re irreparably fucked, so we might as well just do the right thing while accepting that we’re inevitably gonna lose.
“I just think the message should be more we’ve got to work for it, and if we do, we might just win it, rather than we’re irreparably fucked, so we might as well just do the right thing while accepting that we’re inevitably gonna lose.”
That could be the wisdom there. I want there to be a voice for the absurdist heroes tho. I can’t read some shit like “the coral reefs are already dead, no matter what we do” and think this is going to work out even passably well. I’m here for people like myself who can’t muster more than a sliver of hope and could use a stronger reason for doing things.
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I need to come out and say something now that the midterms are here.
Before I discovered my asexuality, I was heavily involved in the gay marriage “debate.” The reason I use quotations is because now I realized how much I had been played. I found out that the whole debate was an excuse to legitimize control over another individual’s mind and body.
I wish I had the courage to say that nobody is ever allowed to have an opinion about what a human or two humans can do with their own individual bodies. Chuck Norris has no right to say that a sexual nonconformist cannot be a boy scout leader. Dan Cathy has no right to say that two sexual nonconformists cannot marry and raise children because it’s wrong. Had I discovered that I was a homosexual, I would’ve told these people to shut up and go die somewhere because they do not control who I am.
Voting and democracy both blow.
Word up. I have no idea what the alternative to democracy is, but clearly that shit does not work as described. You see the same pattern repeated through history wherever the will of the masses is involved – Some creep figures out he can appeal to people’s worst instincts to tease them into giving them power, people fall in line like animals, systemic oppression, human rights abuses, genocide, environmental devastation.
Sometimes I feel like the imminence of the end of humanity is a relief, because we won’t have to reiterate this shitty discussion anymore. The sponges and bacterium that inherit the earth can sort it out.
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