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Latest Posts by angrykeese - Page 6
Found my 53yo very-much-not-online father in the kitchen today meticulously arranging cutlery on the countertop and i was like 'what are you doing' and he looked up at me with the world's most shit-eating grin and said "Your mother told me this is how you rick-roll the Youth" and i looked over and it was fucking. Loss.jpg.
Everybody does the exact same stupid shit. That white nationalist anon I was getting a while ago would send me story after story of some random black guy or immigrant committing a violent crime against a white person. Well, yeah, people are violent, you're gonna find those if you go looking for them. And there's a lot of racial animosity in the world, so you'll even find racially charged ones if you go looking! No shit, Sherlock. We could play this game all day. You find me a news story of a black guy killing a white guy, I find you a news story of white guy killing a black guy. This does no one any good.
TERFs are identical. News story after news story of a trans woman raping somebody. Yeah, the world is an awful place and people rape each other. I can find you a news story of a cis woman raping a teenage boy and getting three months in jail. I can find you a news story of a cis mom killing her disabled kid cause they're too much work. But I don't want to. The world sucks shit, why gorge yourself on the tragedy?
Zionists come up with news story after news story of pro-Palestinian/BDS/whatever protestors being antisemitic. Yep. A lot of people out there hate Jews. And there has been a genuine rise in antisemitism since the Oct. 7th attack, and that's awful. There are no excuses for that. Do you know what else has happened since then? The Israeli military has slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinians, including huge numbers of innocent civilians—men, women and children.
People are often terrible to each other. Welcome to Earth. If you go looking for bad actors in a big enough group, you are guaranteed to find them. How about this. What about all the black people who didn't kill a white little girl? What about the black little girls? What about their hopes and dreams? What about their chance at life? What about all the trans women who didn't rape anybody in a bathroom? What if they just want to go about their lives, without constant public scrutiny of what genitals they have (as a cis woman, can you empathize with that? Constant public scrutiny of what you're doing with your genitals?). What about the 30,000 Palestinians who have been killed, and the 70,000 who have been displaced from their homes?
Fear has made you a monster. Fear has driven you to demand slaughter and oppression of innocent people because they look like guilty people you read about on the news, and since they look the same to you, you feel fearful—how can you tell whether these are the innocent ones or the guilty ones? Best to oppress and slaughter them preemptively just to be safe. I am here to tell you that this twisted logic of self-defense does not hold. I do not care if you feel safe—I do not care if you are safe—if the cost of your safety is innocent life. The world is a risky place. I am not going to deny that. Horrible things could happen to any of us. If we go around preemptively attacking other over it, we do not make it a bit better. And, needless to say, danger comes from everywhere, from every group of human beings, and oppressing the people who make you nervous will not, in fact, deliver you from danger. It just makes you a monster.
@comicaurora You seen this already?
green
I am begging everybody, fucking begging them, to slow the fuck down and fucking look things up. Right now, there are a lot of people who are making money off of creating headlines that are meant to make you mad, and it's going to get worse as we get closer to the election.
If someone tells you that there's a secret conspiracy to [do a thing you don't like] and that it's unique to Biden, you better fucking look that thing up, because chances are you're going to find that it's been happening under every administration for the last 50 years. Is that good? No! Should you want to change it? Probably! Is it a unique crime to Biden? Nope!
"Biden said [bad thing] [X] years ago." Well, this bad thing he said happens to be true, but it looks like it was 45 years ago, and he changed his stance 40 years ago. "Biden said [other bad thing] [Y] years ago." What's the source on that? So there's one person who says he said it? And nobody else who was there has corroborated that account? Who posted the story?
These are all random examples of things I've seen over the last couple of weeks, with the details slightly changed from the Tumblr posts and news articles I've seen, because the point isn't the details of the particular story, so I don't want to get bogged down in particulars that don't matter to the point I'm making.
The point of this post isn't the specific things I'm referencing but the fact that in each of these cases, the reality was not what was initially presented. Either the reality was wildly different, or this story can't be corroborated and was told by someone with a clear and very well-known agenda of their own, which means that at the very least, the story should be treated with extreme suspicion.
And on that note, please don't believe that because you're a leftist that you can't be radicalized in the same way that right-wingers are. You aren't immune to propaganda either. I'm not saying you have to like, or should like, any particular politician or political entity. I am saying, however, that you should view a lot of the news with a gimlet eye, and that goes double for anything that makes you real fucking mad.
You need - need - to stop and read the whole article and ask yourself if you can verify the claims and who benefits from this making you mad.
Please. For the sake of the people around you who have to patiently explain to you that you've gotten fucking bamboozled again by propaganda if for no other reason. We're all very tired of you thinking that leftists can't be propagandized.
Though the nominees are locked in, the stakes of the remaining 2024 presidential primary elections are still gigantic. In fact, the health and evolution of American democracy may hang in the balance.
That’s because of this year’s protest vote phenomenon, as primary voters increasingly use their ballots to demand a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.
In previous uncompetitive primaries where the front-runner was a shoo-in, protest votes ran around 7 percent. This year, as it became apparent that more than 1 in 10 primary voters were casting protest votes for a cease-fire, the Biden administration “freaked out” and changed course.
A majority of likely voters polled, including 76 percent of Democrats, have consistently called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, but their demands went unheeded by U.S. policymakers. In fact, on Feb. 20, the U.S. vetoed a widely supported United Nations resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza.
Being deaf to voters’ foreign policy preferences is nothing new; it’s business as usual. The Constitution has no provision for national referenda on policy issues, and no formal mechanism to register voter preferences on policy issues in national elections, other than by voting for candidates. As democracy scholars have long observed, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
But that pattern began to shift on Feb. 27, when more than 100,000 protest voters in the Michigan presidential primary checked “uncommitted” on their ballots, so delegates at the national convention would be free to call for a cease-fire. A week later, the Biden administration began calling for a six-week cease-fire. Then, as March primaries continued to rack up larger-than-expected numbers of protest votes, the U.S. dropped its opposition to a U.N. cease-fire resolution, allowing it to pass.
These are pyrrhic victories for Palestinians, as civilian casualties continue to mount in Gaza. On the other hand, protest voting may also be part of the reason why President Biden is disagreeing so publicly with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and why Israel’s planned ground assault on Rafah, with its massive refugee camp, hasn’t happened yet. It may also have played a part in developments adjacent to Gaza, including Israel scaling back its counterattack on Iran under pressure from the U.S. and other allies, and the U.S. considering sanctions on an Israeli military unit occupying the West Bank. Whereas former President Trump vows lockstop support of Israel, Biden seems to be signaling willingness to pressure Israel to moderate its attacks in hopes of winning back protest voters’ support.
These signals may or may not have saved lives in Gaza. But they’re important and could yet have far-reaching consequences because they demonstrate protest voters are accomplishing something exceedingly rare in modern American history: moving the needle on U.S. foreign policy.
The shift began with the New Hampshire primary in January, when a small group of grassroots organizers mounted the Vote Ceasefire (VCF) campaign, which proved the concept that primary ballots could be used creatively to register demand for a cease-fire. Since Biden wasn’t officially on the ballot there, voters had to write candidates in anyway. From there it was an achievable step to get voters to write in “cease-fire” instead of the candidate’s name. Starting just a week before the primary and operating on a shoestring budget, VCF convinced 1,500 voters to do just that, and got state election officials to count and report those ballots.
The idea that primary ballots could be used to convey demand for cease-fire struck a chord, and VCF got inquiries from groups across the country. Local groups in some states with write-in options on their ballots launched their own Vote Ceasefire campaigns. In other states, advocates found different techniques. The Listen to Michigan campaign got 13.2 percent of Democratic primary voters to mark “uncommitted” on their ballots. That stunning result spawned a national “uncommitted” campaign. Other variations emerged, like vote “uninstructed” in Wisconsin or “leave it blank” in New York.
What they all have in common is creative use of the primary ballot to demand a timely, permanent, meaningful cease-fire in Gaza. Taken together, they are converting the disaffection and sense of powerlessness many primary voters feel as their support at the polls is presumed while their demand for cease-fire is ignored to a sense of agency and power to make a difference. That represents a historic shift in U.S. politics, and perhaps in U.S. democracy.
More needs to be done to translate demand for a cease-fire into action. Protest vote campaigns in upcoming primaries in Maryland and Oregon will keep pressuring Biden to secure a cease-fire — not during the Democratic National Convention in August, not in November, by which time tens of thousands more Palestinians may die, but now.
While this poses some risks for the Biden campaign, it’s also an opportunity. Widespread protest voting is a sign of disaffection, but also of how voters hope to be heard. If Biden is responsive and effective in demanding cease-fire and preventing wider war, he’ll win the vast majority of them back.
Either way, the ongoing protest vote movement is reinvigorating the 2024 presidential primaries. In terms of the race for the nomination, these elections are mostly alienating, irrelevant formalities. But as laboratories for showing how voter preferences can affect policy, they are now vital exercises in building a stronger, more direct American democracy.
Growth capitalism is a deranged fantasy for lunatics.
Year 1, your business makes a million dollars in profit. Great start!
Year 2, you make another million. Oh no! Your business is failing because you didn't make more than last year!
Okay, say year 2 you make $2 mil. Now you're profitable!
Then year 3 you make $3 mil. Oh no! Your business is failing! But wait, you made more money than last year right? Sure, but you didn't make ENOUGH more than last year so actually your business is actively tanking! Time to sell off shares and dismantle it for parts! You should have made $4 mil in profit to be profitable, you fool!
If you're not making more money every year by an ever-increasing exponent, the business is failing!
Absolute degenerate LUNACY
a story about tumblr’s collective ability to fact check
Jesus christ, I wish to just one day be this pinnacle of wit, horniness, and sacrilege.
The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.
Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”
If you (like me) want 3rd party candidates to be an actual viable option in USA elections so you no longer have to vote for Democrats OR Republicans as your first and only choice, then what we need is Ranked Choice Voting. In order for that to happen, we as voters have to do two things:
Vote Democrat this fall, because Republicans fucking hate Ranked Choice Voting, and in several Republican-run states they have outlawed it. So if you want it, you have to keep Democrats in power in your state.
Lobby for and then vote for Ranked-choice voting in your state!Many American states have already adopted Ranked Choice voting and several more are set to do so in 2024. The ball is literally already rolling on this, we just need YOU to help it along.
When we talk about men’s issues, it feels like it’s always the same handful of things (high suicide rate, drafting, divorce court, etc.) and even then it always feels like a token gesture. This is something that I always felt like us leftists need to talk more about, precisely because it’s something the movement actively needs to fix within itself. As a cishet man, it can be very strange to see how, no matter how much I value consent and the happiness of my partner, and no matter how deeply I understand that, as good as sex feels, a fulfilling emotional connection is more important, my sexuality is still seen as evil by a pretty big chunk of the movement. And of course, I understand why this is. Men have a long history of rapey behavior and right now it’s sorta getting better and worse at the same time, with lots of guys learning to confront and unlearn their misogyny and lots of other guys looking to people like Andrew Tate for solutions to their loneliness. I don’t think activism should be reactionary though. I mean what good do we accomplish if our “activism” is just reacting to societal issues that make us upset in whatever way feels right to our monkey brains? We should have an ideal that we’re striving towards, a specific vision of a better world that we have a plan for achieving. I know that to me, that ideal is a world where no one is ashamed of their sexuality while also still knowing where it is appropriate vs inappropriate to display it, and that we trust each other and that trust is earned because we’re all tuned in to each other’s wants and desires. That ideal doesn’t change depending on how mad or happy with men and/or women I am.
I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.
Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.
But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.
It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.
But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.
The AI tech bubble finally bursting is going to be both catastrophic and very funny.
There was no beauty in what we did to each other. And now there is no beauty in me.
Small artists you need to understand that when you see an artist who you think has 'made it' tells you not to worry about the numbers and to not fret about getting more likes than reblogs they are not telling you it because they think you are stupid for caring or because they dont need to network to survive they are very likely telling you that because they have witnessed first hand the way the numbers game tears people to shreds in terms of mental health and motivation
Can we talk about how a seriously concerning number of people are drawn to social justice not out of the goodness of their hearts but because there are prevalent circles within the social justice community that actively reward and encourage behavior that is nearly indiscernible from bullying and harassment with reassurance that it's the 'right and just' kind?
Like it or not this is what peak femininity looks like. This is the ideal woman.
Tech bros who think digital is forever and that uploading your consciousness to a computer is immortality crack me up. Like bro, you'd be "immortal" on the computer for like a year until your own company sends out some software update that makes you incompatible and whoops, there goes TechBro.soul into the great Recycling Bin in the sky
hey, hey. I don't know who needs to hear this, but--if you are a webcomic creator working with a publisher that tells you things like "your series is under preforming" as a reason why they can't meet certain, very basic requests you make, and leverages this vague statement against you as a way to position and request more from you--know that it is probably, definately, part of a script they use for every. single. creator. they work with.
If you are working hard, producing good work, meeting those deadlines, and communicating as well as you are able with the publisher, etc, you are a rockstar. Your series performance isn't YOUR job. It's their job to promote it and get those sales and numbers for you.
Don't let these companies get under your skin. They know you're working on something you are passionate about. They are banking on the assumption that you are trying to prove your own worth to yourself. They will say some extremely devaluing shit to you in their effort to squeeze as much out of you as possible.
When push comes to shove, if they can not provide what you need, then what you need is to walk away. You've got incredible skill and an incredible work ethic. If you didn't, they'd have never approached you in the first place. Know when a publisher is trying to tear you down for their own gain and leave 'em in the dirt. A publisher shouldn't be using language to make you feel like a disappointment. Nothing you've done for them is disappointing. They're not paying you enough.
my favorite calvin and hobbes comic is the one where his dad just rolls up and casually destroys his entire night by pointing out some neat trivia about record players
What makes this even funnier is if you’re a rich guy and do this the actual poker players will shower you with praise and stroke your ego (especially when you win hands through sheer variance) and say you’re great and to keep doing what you’re doing because they’re just siphoning money from you and want you to keep it up. Like, that’s the original definition of a “whale” in the gambling sense
We should be fine as long as we do not reblog bread.
people think they have to come swinging out of the gate with blockbuster AAA work to "matter" when all you really need to be able to do is successfully convey an idea to the audience. some ideas benefit from a lack of polish or professional touches. those tiny projects with small audience are the source of big waves
Some of you don't have firm principles that transcend ideology, and it shows.
this reddit thread of living your silliest life is so so good
Okay, you need to make sure you play this game at some point. Maybe not today or anything, because you’ll need about thirty minutes and a serious willingness to understand how it works, but - it’s so worth it. It’s basically an answer to our occasional frustration - why do assholes always come out on top? - and the beautiful thing about it is that not only does it explain how that happens, but also how we can change it.
“In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it’s us players who define the game.”
Here's a WIP on another animation thingy I'm working on.
Daily reminder to please PLEASE don’t just read headlines, even if you think the headline tells you everything you need to know, there’s always more to learn about a situation then what can be conveyed in a single catchy sentence.
