Ungoliantschilde

Seems like every time I say something remotely political, I get notified that I need to change my password. I get a “cannot authorize” in my notifications.

I have been remarkably consistent in my infrequent political postings. I am a staunch moderate that has serious and provable problems with both major political parties. I have REPEATEDLY advocated for mutual conversation towards a positive goal, with an emphasis on listening and giving validity to each other’s view points.

I don’t think either side of the political extreme represents the majority of American’s political viewpoints. The Trumpers and the Wokes are both equally awful yet surprisingly prevalent online. And neither side represents the reality of daily life.

And yet, every time I say things to that effect on this site, I get hacked and I have to change my password.

It is Friday, June 17, 2023. I live in Missouri USA. The local time is 6:38 PM.

I wonder how long it will take for me to have to change my login information again.

The middle is an impossible place to be. There's no spectacle in it. It's just the place for Getting Things Done, thus impossible to romanticize.

We are Very Busy Apes who require entertainment, and it's enormously entertaining to stand at the far end of the enclosure and hurl turds toward the other–much more so than say, sitting in the middle and feeding oneself or grooming someone or making one's bed for the night. This business in the middle simply will not do. Very Busy Apes must play the game. There will be time for the middle once the turds have been counted and the winners decided. If one refuses to play, the apes at the edges will hurl turds at the middle until such time as the middle gets up and chooses a side.

Enclosures are very noisy places too. High curved walls bounce echoes around in such a manner that one often hears one's distant poo adversary shouting directly into one's ear. This is why it is imperative the middle of the enclosure be abandoned. One will miss all the meaningful exchange.

Why would one subject oneself to such tedium, such anonymity, such COMPROMISE as happens in the middle? One cannot WIN from the middle, and Very Busy Apes need to win.

One must summon every ounce of poo that one can muster and bring it to the far end of the enclosure immediately. This contest is for the very soul of the enclosure.

At the very least, if you're going to stay in the middle, you might offer to help count turds.

This made me chuckle. Well put. But I’m not ready to pick up my fecal abacus just yet.

Alito, in his draft majority opinion, says very clearly that he is seeking to overturn the Roe and Casey court decisions.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled," Alito writes, according to Politico. "The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision....”

“According to Alito, "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

No it hasn’t

The results of Roe v Wade have been 100% positive and a good thing for the nation

I am 100% pro Abortion

In fact when I look at the world around me, especially at the screeching dipshits who think (Using the term loosely) like Alito does the first thing that comes to my mind is “We really need for more people to have abortions”

Yep.

And the woke radical left that in no-way speaks for most of our country’s Democratic Party supporters has slowly dominated most forms of social media. And they are OUTRAGED when they find out that their exasperating crusades are doing nothing but driving everyone with sense and a life away in droves.

You’re right anon. Talking openly about sex, race, and religion in public forums like Tumblr has become a tricky business. If you and I don’t say the right words, and appease the right fringe groups of people, then we run the risk of being spammed by trolls, getting blocked and losing followers en masse. Not because the followers disagree with us, but because those followers are afraid of being associated with anyone that doesn’t toe the line of every popular young liberal talking point.

You know what happens when you step back and examine these political discussions without emotional investment? You notice the trends. The extremes of both the conservatives and the liberals are similar in exactly one regard: they don’t want free thought and expression, they want homogeny and power. They want all of their constituents to say and agree with all of the same things and elect the same people and support the same issues.

I have talked politics on this site on many occasions, and I have been criticized, blocked, and attacked exclusively by people ostensibly on the side of the radical left. I have been active on this site for 10 years or more. I have been exclusively liberal in my leanings and my political opinions. And yet I am frequently subject to criticism from extremists who accuse me of not being liberal enough.

The Doc is a solid dude, and a good artist. He’s also -in my estimation- far more vocally progressive than I am. And the Doc gets hate mail from Extreme Liberals more than anyone I know of. It is insane. It is farcical.

The extreme left has hurt the party I love and support more than anything the Republicans have ever managed to accomplish. Fuck you guys. Sit down, shut up, and help us fix the problems. Stop attacking anyone that doesn’t agree with you on every inane opinion you have.

Agreed.

It doesn’t bother me.  I’m all for people being passionate over their liberal, progressive ideals.  Sometimes it can come across as sanctimonious or even oppressive but that’s sort of part and parcel with online discourse.  

See? He’s solid dude. Seeing as how he’s a member of the tribe, I suppose I should call him a Mensch.

I know it doesn’t bother YOU, dude.

My point is that it hurts the overall cause, and it actively irritates me when issues I care about and support get mishandled and then marginalized because of the non-stop blather perpetuated by a minute percentage of the actual constituency.

It’s like a baseball player that only gets one at-bat a game, yet every time he gets to the plate, the fucking mascot delays the game for 40 minutes, and then that player winds up being associated with the mascot instead of his batting percentages.

That free state of CHAD shit was a perfect example. The idiots on the far left got exactly what they wanted, and it went to shit almost immediately. And that received National coverage.

If you live in a big city, you don’t realize how damaging that was. The democratic base is not college-educated 20somethings that are starting their careers. The democratic base is basically anyone that is making minimum wage or slightly better. Anyone that rides the bus. Or knows that the library is actually pretty awesome. That public schools are a blessing.

When the radicalism of my own party is the cause of a debacle resulting in multiple murders and the most liberal city in the country being forced to suppress violent protests... it hurts all of the people I just mentioned as being our base.

Because another trend I have noticed? The extreme left is predominantly white and from affluent backgrounds. It’s a bunch of bored, rich honky ass motherfuckers with sociology degrees competing to see who can be the most woke. And those collective dipshits are the reason people turn away from the Democratic Party.

Being a person of color, being LGBTQA+, being ANYTHING but a cis-gendered white person does not make you right and make me an asshole. It does not. You have perspectives I do not have, and I listen as intently as I can when I hear those perspectives, but claiming victimhood whenever the core logic of an argument is flawed doesn't somehow validate the argument.

People that don't look like me, or identify as I do, or fuck the way I do can be oppressive, rude assholes just as much as anyone else. Having had shitty things happen to you directly, or the group you associate with directly, or historically does not automatically make your point of view more valid.

The "believe all women" thing got me. That is, in my experience, a shockingly naive, narrowminded, and sexist assumption. If you have spent anytime interacting with women, you'll realize something: they are just much human beings as everyone else you interact with. Women are just as capable of guile and manipulation and deception. Psychologically, young women are socially conditioned to use mind games and manipulation to achieve their goals. Boys beat each other up. Girls bully other girls differently. Girls lie and manipulate and insinuate about other girls. So, the blanket statement of "Believe all Women" implies that all women are inherently virtuous. It's sexist.

I have a degree in psych. If someone tells me they were abused, I believe them. I also ask more questions and follow up. Perception is a powerful thing. So, I guess I should clarify to state that I believe people who tell me they have been victimized, but I refuse to believe that victimhood and virtue are synonymous. Because they are not.

And being "offended" falls under the same category. It's not a valid argument.

Phew.

OK, to the Doc's point. Gerrymandering, Voter Suppression, the specter of Fascism, and the Trumpian policies of the last few years never went anywhere. Trump did not create those problems, because Trump was not the disease. He was the logical endpoint for that political movement. A fiery outlier that got elected by playing to the fears of white, blue collar Americans and those of extreme wealth. He was an opportunist, not a brilliant politician. That means the ground was already fertile enough to for his ideas to take root. And the infighting of the liberal party is pretty much the defining weakness of the Democrats. Young liberals spend more time focusing on who is and is not virtuous, instead of on achieving goals that help the most amount of people. This trend of being "woke" will end up creating more and more Trumps that can seize on the collective exasperation of everyone who isn't woke enough and is too busy with their lives to keep trying. That's what will happen. People will just stop listening to the beneficial arguments of Liberals, and we will wind up even more divided.

Republicans are obsessed with controlling and disrespecting women. Misogyny is at the root of most of their rhetoric.

Republicans are amoral

Radical Republicans are as rare as Radical Liberals, and neither side represents the main stream.

The Republican Congress has two options: Support Trump or Lose their Jobs. The Democrats have two options: Oppose everything Trump or Lose their Jobs. Trump just sits around stirring the pot and staying in power.

The point I am making is simple: Trump is not a Republican. Trump is a narcissist that is wildly misinformed because he relies entirely upon Fox News for his information. He is an ignorant, narcissistic, racist old buffoon. But he is not a republican.

And condemning half the population of our country for having a different political view point is not helpful to us as a nation. Fight the real fight. Don’t blame the clothing of the enemy. Blame the enemy.

Republicans are my enemy. As a gender non-conforming, pansexual, Latinx I am everything they seek to destroy and hurt and demolish. When I exist their reaction is to make laws that ban me from existing safely, protecting my country if I so desired, adopting children with a same sex partner in the future, and on top of all of that they want to rip me away from my family as well as make laws that make it easier to put me in prison than any white person. And the vice president literally is a republican, who thinks I should be torn away from my home, strapped into isolation, self hatred, and torture because he doesn’t understand I can love a person with the same genitalia as me. Republicans are my enemy. They made that decision. And I have to fight that decision because if I don’t then I will be tortured, harmed, persecuted (more so than now), and I will lose all of my family and be stripped of everything that makes me who I am. And I will not be the only one. They want to make me not exist, or exist in a fashion that they control and are above me. So you’re god damn right that Republicans are my fucking enemy.  

I hate this aspect of tumblr, and I’m gonna be using Instagram a lot more going forward, but OK, here we go.

Right off the bat, I am gonna go ahead and guess that you are either in College or in your Early 20s. I am guessing that because your entire identity is based around your sexuality and your gender identity, as well as your race.

You started your rebuttal by identifying as “gender non-conforming, pansexual, and Latinx”. Those things are not political view points. They are not political talking points. Those are aspects of who you are. And who are you is a beautiful human being. I am not attacking any of your identifying descriptors in any way.

The crux of what you said is that your existence is everything the Republican Party seeks to destroy. OK, let’s talk about that. How many Republicans do you know? How many of your friends work blue collar/hard hat jobs, belong to Unions, and vote Republican? How many?

I am 35, I live in Missouri, and I am a life-long Democrat. I vote Democrat across board. Missouri is about as Republican as it gets. Every farmer out here flies Trump flags on their tractors. Because they believe his bullshit. They believe him because he makes them believe he cares about them.

Trump lied to Middle America. Trump probably committed treason. Trump should probably be impeached and imprisoned. But he won more Counties than Hillary. And he did it by doing EXACTLY what you are doing in your post. He demonized his opponent and whipped up public fervor against his opponent. He ignored facts. He ignored rational political discourse and went the populist route. And it worked.

So, if you take nothing else from my response, take this: People will only listen to you if they think you are saying something of value to them. People will only think your point of view is valid if it is a part of their existing views.

You will NEVER convince anyone except people who already agree with you unless you are willing to listen to their views as well.

So your fiery rhetoric about how Republicans are the enemy is great. But you’re only appealing to people who already agree with you. And Trump already won the election. We flipped the House, which was a great start. If you want to flip the Senate, you’re gonna have to do better than appealing to people who already listen to you.

My neighbors out here all live far away from me. They live in trailers and small brick houses. They have old tractors, old fences, and new cattle every spring. They’re Republicans. And they are good people. I spent Christmas Day bringing firewood and Deer Meat to my Neighbors. And every one of them gave me a huge hug.

If you want to appeal to Republicans, you should probably start by not calling them evil or your enemy. Last I heard, Democratic Party and the Liberal Movement in general is about acceptance for everyone.