Is anyone else utterly mystified by the Vote Blue Rhetoric this election?
I really do feel like I'm taking crazy pills with libs this election. The last two they at least had a bloodless rationale to the "lesser of two evils" rhetoric.
But this is genocide, the canonical Worst Thing You Can DO! I know many just believe that it's not a genocide at all because Palestinian civilians are all Hamas and just subhuman or that the videos published by official IOF channels are all deepfaked by the hungry ghost of Nasrallah. But then just FUCKING SAY IT and then we can call you a genocide denier and we'll know where we stand!
What I can't get is that many do seem to agree it's a genocide and Kamala is complicit. But then they lesser evil by going "Well if we don't vote then Trump will do bad things to trans people here."
Like Fuck You! You scheming, gaslighting bloody handed monster!
Either this is just a disingenuous argument to get your team in power or to maintain liberal civility politics, in which case double Fuck You that you think people are abstract political tools.
Or, you actually believe this, and the freedom of an LGBT person here outweighs the lives of 2 million people, many LGBT, who happen to have had the extreme misfortune to be born 5 cm over the border and thus outside your ability to feel empathy.
In which case Triple Fuck You, because you are, somehow, more of a fascist than Trump. At least Trump is too incoherent to make a complete argument for fascist policy!
I'm going mad, I really am. How can people be streamed genocide live on CNN and just say "well, I guess we're ok with genocide now!" Is the US public even human?! Even the fucking Germans had the good sense to pretend to look guilty after they lost.
Nobody is really dealing with the fact that rhetoric and demographics != policy and action.
Republicans are pretty unpalatable unless you're a hog hooting for immigrant and queer death, and people are just kind of assuming that, of course, the other team won't do anything bad, and will do the good things, because they have the correct demographic support, and the rhetoric at times gestures vaguely to something nicer and less fascist, or at least tries to let a voter infer whatever they need to in order to deliver support, right?
People are pretty rightly scared, they should be, and they literally have no tools for understanding a world where a vote isn't a solution. Because Americans have limited understanding of non-electoral organizing, limited time because of work and survival, and I think we're reaching this point where solutions are so ugly, and so outside of anything anybody in living memory understands, that it might as well be like showing a Westworld host a picture of the outside world - It's just not going to seem like anything. There's an ontological break where voting has to work.
This is what's happening on the ground.
On the organizing level, the ghouls are just playing to the emotions, anxieties, and fears of their constituent demographics. Republicans are integrating with their extremists, and democrats are suppressing theirs. This creates a balance that will inevitably empower the far right, and the democrats are fine with this because their bosses are the same people.
The rhetoric is insane because the moment is insane.
Was officially diagnosed with Autism recently. I wonder if Autistic traits are common among the left? Like do I feel this way because my brain is literally wired differently than other people? Are neurotypical people more able to brush off mass death and all of the discrimination that leads to it?
Leftists (in the west at least) from my experience are overrepresented with neurodivergent folk, queer people, poc, and disabled people. Probably because of two things. Those demographics are less likely to resonate with the promises and dreams of western liberal society. Like the whole house in the suburbs with a spouse and 2.5 kids and office job. That whole dream sounds either impossible or unappealing, so it leads people like us away from buying into the liberal framework.
The other thing is those demographics are often more impoverished. Which leads back around to not buying into the liberal capitalist dream.
I have had a difficult time coming to grips with my recent ADHD diag and the exhausting path I'm still walkin' tryina find out what skittle flavor i am in my end of the autism rainbow. Been feeling bad, like i am broken, wrong, in my genes.
But then i see the kinda things, things like this, the absolute lack of empathy that supposedly NT people are capable of and am proud of my capacity to feel real pain in my heart for people i will never meet. It is automatic, immutable. It drives me, it's one of the few things i just know
Nah, this is facts. I have days all the goddamn time these days where I could rip out my emotional core, some self-kali-maaaa type shit because I'm sick of waking up furious that I still live in a system of genocidal white supremacy. I'm sick of waking up furious that I don't have enough savings to pay the exit tax to renounce because cost-of-living just keeps going up and it's eaten through my nest egg. I'm sick of waking up furious knowing that someone else infinitely more disadvantaged than me died screaming because cracker warhawks and their tapdancing minstrels decided they just HAD to give another billion dollars worth of materiel and ordnance to an illegitimate settler colony that everyone just acts like has the right to exist because of the scribblings of a bunch of ancient theologians who can't even prove the evidence of their divinity.
Like, if all it takes is a book, the Black nation could settle everything from Compton to Portland as our own, send all the crackers back to the eastern seaboard, and bombard anyone who disagrees with it, right? Right? What's stopping us, if that's all it takes?
I'm sick of waking up feeling like this-- and then I remember that there's really some yankee peckerwood sitting back in his computer chair with the smuggest look on his face, right now, and he feels fucking nothing. He is a homunculus, a ghoul, a wretch beyond even the most wretched of the earth still chained by the Great Satan.
And it settles in my gut: I want to be nothing like that fucking homunculus that would dare to consider himself and I as part of the same demonym.
I really am not looking forward to the change that comes on the back of this level of anger, frustration, and alienation, but while I can't fully relate to you, I'm with you in the spirit of, "there's basically nothing of this society that shouldn't be torn down and annihilated"
Whatever is coming will be really fucking ugly and deserved, I won't raise a hand to stop it even if i'm outside of it, unless it's on the backs of a bunch of white fascists, then i'll die fighting it I guess.
I'm sick of being desperate. I'm sick of watching loved and desperate people fall down to be crushed underfoot. Meanwhile I've got the dumbest people in the world telling me a ballot will fix this.
Right?!? I don't get it! Why care so much about what side of an imaginary line (border) someone lives on? Why do we have to divide ourselves into so many different groups?
We're all humans here but most humans don't see it that way. And I'm the outcast who's politically homeless
They call it "black and white thinking" and a "heightened sense of justice" and it's like my god they consider having basic moral convictions to be a symptom of illness!
Not only are Americans stuck on thinking voting has to work, many of them can’t understand voting third party or choosing not to vote. This is a discussion I’ve had with people I know IRL: it’s not that they’re angry I’m “throwing my vote away”, they literally can’t understand someone not voting D or R (at least someone who’s politically engaged like they know I am).
Yeah, agreed. In the reality they subjectively live in there are literally no possible alternatives to voting. They cannot imagine anything else. Like they all hate capitalism now but Stalin bad so they just sort of gripe about it but can't imagine any alternative.