Shinga

if your weird enough with the homies you can break all boundaries of platonic/romantic love and make a third, more evil thing

a podcast...

yes. and because of the rampant misinformation online and russia giving money to tucker carlson and other rightwing media (x) and because the DOJ refused to punish trump for his crimes and because russia literally called in bomb threats at key polling locations (x)

the misinfo played such a critical role. @ other countries. this could be you. put in rules and regulations to stop the spread of misinformation and to stop russia funding extremists to spread it. and keep young kids off social media till they're old enough to recognize radicalizing content spread by trolls for what it is. don't let what happened in the US happen to you.

Ugh. I hate the current political climate. Trump is trash. I miss when we had REAL, GOOD presidents like *opens up a history book* umm... *keeps flipping* uhh... *frantically searches* oh Jesus oh god

this is him, this is my baldur's gate husband

A trump-appointed judge just struck down a policy put in place by Biden to protect undocumented immigrants married to US Citizens which is crazy because the rhetoric online for the past 4 years has been that Democratic politicians are just as cruel to immigrants as Republican politicians are...it's almost like not being allowed to celebrate any legislative accomplishments by democratic politicians can create apathy in a huge portion of the voting block and then everyone is shocked when helpful policies they didn't even know existed are stripped and suddenly 500,000 people are at risk if deportation because of one judge and one president who appointed them.

A helpful Biden policy being struck down or ended by some judge or Trump is going to become a very familiar headline. The irony is that this might be how people start to recognize Biden actually did something as a president.

How are disabled and interracial illegal???

Interracial marriage was outlawed for the longest time, and disabled people lose government benefits when they get married so they cannot have reassurance that they will continue to LIVE if they get married.

Story time: my mom is white, dad is black. They’ve been together twenty four years, married for twenty three. When my parents were dating they did it on the low TO KEEP MY DAD SAFE.

My mom’s parents said “We don’t care who you love.” At that point she’d only ever brought home white guys. She brought my dad home-her mother called her a nigger lover and damned the relationship as much as possible. Her father grew around his prejudices after I was born but never apologized, just wasn’t a blatant fuck.

The day she introduced my father to her family was the last time she spoke to her mother for over twenty years. When I was getting sick and she called and asked her mother and grandmother if anyone in the family had anything strange happen similar what I was going through they told her “it’s because you married a black man. You made your bed, you lie in it.”

Cops pulled them over all the time and asked my mom IF SHE WAS OKAY AND IF SHE NEEDED HELP BECAUSE MY FATHER-A BLACK MAN-WAS DRIVING A 100 POUND WHITE WOMAN AROUND. HE WAS HARRASSED AND THREATED WITH ARREST.

My father ended up getting into a fight in self defence because some entitled hick decided he didn’t like seeing a black man and white woman in the bar together. Thankfully other patrons helped my father but he still couldn’t go to the er for his injuries. My mom patched him up and they were terrified the cops would take him away.

THEIR BEST FRIEND GOT LICENSED TO MARRY THEM SO THEY COULD ACTUALLY TIE THE KNOT BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE WOULD AND CITED JIM CROW ERA LAW AS TO WHY.

When shopping with just me my father wouldn’t hold my hand if there was a group around. Why? I’m far lighter than him and people had stopped and asked him “whose child is that?” Or “little girl where’s your parents?” and were stunned when I grinned and pointed at my dad and proudly proclaimed “my daddy’s right here.” You know where else mixed kids couldn’t hold their parents hands? Apartheid South Africa. We live in fucking FLORIDA.

So yeah. Some history for you.

This post was made in October 2018. The above poster’s parents met in 1994. We were a generation removed from the Civil Rights movement and this was happening.

obsessed with this costume

Explain yourself.

some people might not have seen all of them yet

woke up this morning, rolled over, and very confidently tried to blow out my alarm clock like a candle. absolutely no precedent for that.

Ebeneezer in 1742 wakes with a start as for some reason he has put out his guttering candle by slapping atop it ith the palm of his hand. His hand is burned and his nightgown and cap are spattered with hot wax.

i meant to empty my contact lens case of cleaner and instead launched my allergy pills down the drain. wasn't even holding the lens case

once confidently pointed my car keys at the door out of my house and pressed the unlock button

when I used to drive I once walked to the front and bend down as if to start the crank. like. an a fuckin olde timey car. I never did it before or again but I will never forget how second nature it felt nor the cold breeze of 'what the fuck' that instantly followed

i once got home and tried to eat my dog's squeaky ball like an orange. thank god i didn't try to eat it like an apple, because after trying and failing to peel a small tennis ball for a couple seconds to get at the fruit, the rest of my brain kicked in.

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

There's a disconnect happening here because the primary function of social media for most casual users is to form a circle of friends around the usual things that friendships are built on: shared interests and lifestyles and ideas of what is important and what is unacceptable. When people are mainly doing leftism on social media, this encourages thinking of leftism as centered around establishing high-minded social clubs.

For anyone who still isn't getting it from someone who helps people IRL: There's a difference between whom you're helping to feed at the mealshare and whom you're choosing to hang out with for fun after the mealshare. You don't have to invite a hungry person with opinions you don't like to play board games with you, but you do have to help keep them from starving if you're serious about leftist organizing.

"how are the democrats so good at losing?" why don't you ask how the republicans are so good at winning?? stop acting like democrats are the only political party with agency. republicans do things on purpose.

^^ It seems to me that I haven’t seen many people acknowledging that republicans are good at winning because they lie and because they have a multimillion dollar industry committing to getting them elected and backing up their lies.

I’ve seen statistics correlating misinformed views to voting choice, a study about how respondents preferred Kamala’s policies over Trump’s when they weren’t told who had which set of policies, people discussing ‘vibes-based politics’—but in my opinion all this analysis is incomplete without confronting how republicans have a veritable propaganda machine working for them. It’s pretty hard for democrats to fight that. We have to rely on average donations from normal people when corporations/rich individuals can invest millions into networks who will try to get people elected who will give them tax breaks.

#seriously I want more people to talk about the sheer amount of damage rupert murdoch has done to this country#fox news is the most viewed cable news network in the country.#i remember a few months back harris’ campaign had success bringing project 2025 to the public’s attention#but democrats still don’t have anything comparable @choppywaterswiftboats

Fun fact that I will tell literally everyone all the time!!! A former Nixon staffer said they would have survived Watergate if they had their own news network. And that staffer's name was Roger Ailes!

Books to read:

Dark Money: An examination of the Koch Empire, and its patronage and entanglement in Right wing media, politics, and lobbying.

Messengers of the Right: A history of the conservative media landscape, beginning with talk radio (Clarence Manion, before the era of Rush Limbaugh), through periodicals like the National Review, and notable books, like God and Man at Yale. I'm sorry, but you don't know half as much as you think you do about American political history if you don't know who William F Buckley is. All of this walked, so Fox News could run.

Let Them Eat Tweets: A political synthesis of history, economics, and communication scholarship that posits wedge-issue-identity-politics as the method by which contemporary conservative parties drive their white working class bases away from class-based solidarity toward a party that serves only economic elites. That, Hacker and Pierson argue, is how you explain the escalation of billionaire oligopoly, rising economic inequality, and fanatic racism/other bigotries.

If you can understand these patterns and these histories, you'll begin to see why the GOP has nosedived into overtly fascist rhetoric, while STILL successfully courting voters who vote against their material economic interests.

There are no surprises here.

You can even see the ripples of that abroad. My parents watch the Canadian equivalent to the conservative channel and this summer were telling me about how “both parties are the same and Biden is sooooooo old”. They are people who would usually consider themselves aligned a bit left of the center (CANADIAN center). And yet they knew nothing of what Trump actually said or did at any point in this campaign or during his last term.

Two weeks ago, a firmly leftist friend, a queer person of colour, told me “but the democrats are financed by all the big evil corporations”. And then he named checked all the corporations that Biden and the DOJ have been raking over the coals because of their monopolies. And I was just like “you think AMAZON wants the dems to win??? You think FACEBOOK wants them to win??? GOOGLE??”

The propaganda is real and it’s everywhere.