Put down the tack board and red thread. Not everything is part of a conspiracy. Not everything is connected. Not everything is a distraction from the Epstein files. Not everything is part of some grand plan. The fascists are perfectly capable of doing multiple awful things at once, each for their own independently awful reason.

You have to post anything a fascist would hate. Fascists love undesirables killing themselves.

Honestly, at this point the government already is shut down. It’s been shut down for months. We’re just still in the denial stage. Trump’s claimed and a criminally corrupt SCOTUS has endorsed Trump just refusing to pay funds allocated by Congress. There is absolutely zero point in Democrats negotiating with Republicans on this, as Trump can just refuse to pay any Democratic priorities they fund.

A little off topic, but don’t we all just want a society that works for its members?

The problem is, for conservatives, only a small fraction of people count as people.

If they were quotes they would have quotation marks…

The problem isn’t focusing on one issue. The problem is that periodically, performative centrists will seek to prove their centrism by performatively sacrificing a minority group on the pyre.

Democrats are a coalition party. They can’t afford to sacrifice a chunk of their base in a vain attempt to appeal to suburban white Republicans. Democrats need to keep their coalition together, which is far more diverse than the Republican coalition that mostly caters to straight white Christians.

Democrats from time to time are tempted to pick one or two of the minority groups in their coalition to throw into a woodchipper. The thought process is that if they just sacrifice the one group the right is screaming the loudest about, that somehow they can get Republicans to vote Democrat. It never works, but it plays to the biases of the Democratic leadership, who themselves are largely straight white Christians.

2024 wasn’t about Palestinian activists demanding the entire campaign be made about them. What happened in 2024 was that Democrats decided that it was the Palestinian-Americans turn to be thrown onto the pyre, a ritual sacrifice to attempt to win straight white Christian votes. The leadership made the calculus that by sacrificing Palestinian Americans, they would gain more votes than they would lose. Muslim Americans would inevitably refuse to support Democrats for abandoning them, but Democrats would gain more Republican and Zionist voters in return. The DNC didn’t want Palestinians and their allies to vote for them; they wanted Republicans to vote for them.

That calculus didn’t work. The Palestinians had a lot more friends than the DNC gambled when they decided to sacrifice them. And it cost the Democrats the election.

Ultimately, what side would be best for Palestine is completely irrelevant. This was an active conscious choice on the part of DNC leadership. They actively chose to abandon Palestinians and their allies. They did so knowing full well it would cost them a ton of votes. They just gambled that they would win more bigot votes in return. That gamble failed, and then they turned around and blamed the loss on the people they fully expected to not vote for them, entirely due to their own conscious choices and actions.

Not even the DNC are stupid enough to expect the votes of people they deliberately choose to sacrifice. But, apparently that bar isn’t one you’re able to clear.

Message: Defund the police!

Your response: stop using that phrase. It’s not specific enough and too easily weaponized by the right.

Message: reallocate police funding to mental health response teams. Transfer duties from the police to medical professionals.

Your response: the left sucks at messaging. We need powerful slogans that capture the imagination, not wonkish policy positions.

Homebrew T is as illegal as growing marijuana is in a state where it’s not legal. It’s controlled, but it’s hardly fentanyl.

Always live one pay raise behind.

I get what you’re saying, and you can make your own decisions. This is a personal thing that people need to balance their own shitty options. But for me at least, I would rather be dead than spend years in a rape dungeon.

Well trans women don’t have the luxury of casually dismissing what comes after. Again, trans people do not actually have 2nd amendment rights. In practice it is not legal for us to use firearms in self defense.

Why not? Again, I repeat, trans Americans do not really have 2nd Amendment rights. They’re purely theoretical; they do not exist in practice. She defended herself, and look what happened. If you are a trans person and use lethal force to defend yourself, you WILL be made an example of just like she was. Prosecutors wanted to send the message that trans people shouldn’t get uppity and resist their abusers. They did that to CeCe, and they’ll do that to you.

There is a reason most all guides on LGBT self defense focus on things other than using weapons for self-defense. They focus on thing like traveling in groups and retreating. There is also a reason it’s an ongoing debate over whether police officers should be allowed at Pride. The first Pride was a riot against evil police.

The problem with using lethal force to defend yourself is that doing so inevitably requires interfacing with the justice system. And that justice system is just as likely to abuse a trans person as the bigot that assaulted them.

As a trans person, if you use lethal force to defend yourself, you are signing yourself up for years of daily sexual assault. That is the cold hard reality.

You only want to focus on the defense part, in the abstract, but you’re completely ignoring what that actually looks like in the real world.

As a trans woman myself, this is one of the reasons I don’t carry a firearm. In almost any situation trying to retreat is much better option than trying to stand my ground. And even if there is no where to retreat, again, there are fates in this world that are worse than death.

One of the hard truths that members of majority groups struggle to internalize is that for many minority groups, the 2nd Amendment really doesn’t exist.

See the case of CeCe McDonald. She was being attacked and assaulted by a group of bigots. Her life was in danger. She defended herself and killed her attacker. The prosecutor didn’t accept her right to self defense and threw the book at her. Facing the prospect of murder charges, she pled down to second degree manslaughter. She was then forced to spend 3.5 years in a male prison. One of her surviving attackers was charged with second-degree assault and got out on time served.

Or consider the case of Jaia Cruz under very similar circumstances. The DA through the book at her and she was vilified in the media.

If you are a trans woman and you use lethal force to defend yourself, you can be sure of a few things:

1. The local prosecutor will take a very dim view of the member of such a maligned minority group daring to defend themselves. Prosecutors and most law enforcement are not friends to trans people. They view trans people as innately lower on the social totem pole, and that they need to know their place. A trans person using lethal force to defend themselves? That’s like a black man in the Jim Crow South using lethal force to defend themselves against white violence. To most prosecutors, trans people are only good for prostitution, porn, and mockery. One using lethal force is an affront to everything they believe in.

2. Your self defense claim will not be accepted. The book will be thrown at you. You will be charged with murder.

3. The press will demonize you, especially once the right wing tabloids learn of the story. Seriously. Look with your own eyes at how trans women who dare to defend themselves are treated by the media. Your act of desperate self-preservation will be portrayed as you stabbing someone because they didn’t respect your pronouns.

4. If you go to trial, the jury will not be sympathetic to you. Trans people are unpopular, and there’s nothing more unpopular than a villainized minority group member daring to leave their place and kill one of their “betters,” even in self-defense.

5. You will likely have to plea out. If you’re trans, you probably don’t have the money for a good lawyer. And even if you do, you will face an uphill battle. The prosecution will portray you as a radical transgender nihilist who murdered someone because they didn’t respect your pronouns, when you were actually just trying to save your own life.

6. Before and during trial, you will be held in pre-trial detention. You will likely be denied bail. You will be housed in a prison with men. There you likely be v-coded. The jail staff will place you in a cell as a reward to another prisoner. Someone who helps the guards out in one way or another will be rewarded by having a woman placed in their cell, you. You will be repeatedly raped by this person. If you resist, the prison guards will punish you for it. You will be beaten by the guards and then placed in solitary confinement. If you kill your rapist, you will be charged with a second count of murder. You will be regularly raped your entire stay in prison. These conditions will continue if you are convicted and must serve a long sentence.

7. No Second Amendment groups will come to your aid and help fund your defense or raise awareness for your act of self defense. They only do that sort of thing for straight white men.

In practice, if you are a trans woman, the 2nd Amendment doesn’t actually exist as a tool of self defense. Gun rights folks love to say “better judged by twelve than carried by six.” But what they forget is that there are fates in this world that are worse than death.

It’s not about the information itself. All of human knowledge is at your fingertips. Unfortunately, that knowledge is buried under an ocean of bullshit. And if you haven’t studied in a field, you likely cannot tell the difference between quality sources and bullshit.

You bemoan a course that consists of studying a textbook, but how do you even know what textbook to read? If you do not know the field, how do you know that it’s an accurate work of reliable history and not some right-wing slop like PragerU? And it’s not just reading the book. It’s knowing what parts to read, preparing writings, participating in discussions, and a thousand other activities that are designed to advance the learning objectives of a course. Hell, just having a course with a fixed schedule to it can be immensely beneficial to most learners. Studying is hard. It’s time consuming. And it doesn’t generate any immediate returns in your life. Most people who try to teach themselves a subject end up learning less in five years than they could in a single semester of enrolling in one or two college courses. When you’re teaching yourself something, it’s far too easy to just put off the hard dull work til tomorrow or avoid it all together.

For the love of god, without looking it up, do you even know how to pronounce the word pedagogy?

If you had taken even a single course in education or course design, you would know there is so much more to designing a course than simply reading a textbook. I’ve taught and designed numerous college courses. If you think it’s just a matter of reading from a textbook, you are standing atop a mountain of ignorance.

We hanged people like Charlie Kirk at Nuremberg. Literally. That is not an exaggeration. Charlie Kirk used the exact same journalist techniques, the race-baiting, the “honest debates” about the existence of minority groups, the breathless reporting of every crime committed by members of minority groups, as Julius Streicher. Streicher was a leading Nazi propagandist and agitator. At Nuremberg, it was recognized that even though his crimes were primarily committed through acts of speech, he was still guilty. His trial consisted mostly of presentations of his own works and speeches. He was charged and convicted of incitement to genocide and crimes against humanity. For all the innocent lives he helped end, he was hanged from the neck until dead.

And Charlie Kirk did the exact same thing. He even shared some of the same targets as the Nazis. His diatribes against trans people could have been taken right out of one of Streicher’s publications. Charlie Kirk openly called for the elimination of trans people entirely. The man was guilty of incitement to genocide. In a just world, he would have been tried, convicted, and hanged for his crimes.

The tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s death was that it was an act of vigilante justice. No one deserves to take a life, not Charlie Kirk, and not his assassin. It is a tragedy that he never faced his day in court. But one should never make the mistake of thinking he was a hero or martyr. The world is objectively a better place with him six feet under ground. He dedicated his whole life to hurting other people and taking innocent lives. His whole project was an attempt to incite genocide against vulnerable minority groups. He was guilty of crimes against humanity and incitement to genocide. It’s a tragedy that he never faced a jury, but there is nothing tragic about the fact the man himself is dead. Him being dead is worthy of celebration. Him being killed is not.

Yeah, you end up “doing your own research” and just falling into right-wing grifts and bullshit because if you lack background in a field, it’s pretty damn hard to do actual meaningful research.

College isn’t absolutely necessary to learn, but for most people, it really is. Or even if people don’t fall into right wing fever swamps, they often cannot distinguish between appropriate sources. You try to teach yourself engineering, and all you end up doing is watching a bunch of infotainment engineering youtube channels.

You’re just classist when it comes to your views on violence. You don’t actually care about human death and suffering; you only care about optics. You’re perfectly happy with someone murdering tens of thousands of people as long as they wear a suit and use a pen as their murder weapon. Sorry, but if you concoct an insurance system that is deliberately designed to remove people from the life-saving care that they are legally entitled to receive as part of their insurance plan? If you deliberately design a Kafkaesque nightmare literally designed to make people die of their conditions before they’re able to navigate through all the hurdles you place in their path? If you do all of this just to drive your stock price higher? You are every bit as much a murderer as any psychopath that carves people apart with a knife.

And no, this scarcity mentality is bullshit. Yes, there are always some novel, experimental, and ridiculously expensive treatments that need to be denied for cost reasons. But no system, private or public, covers those, so there’s no point considering them for this discussion. But bog-standard well-established treatment do not need to be rationed. No one is going on chemotherapy just for fun. You absolutely can have a system where no one dies from lack of affording standard well-established medical treatments. The US is the outlier here. The rest of the developed world doesn’t have this problem; only us. Yet you’re here, having gouged your own eyes out to willfully blind yourself, saying that you simply cannot see a way how this can be done!

Let me know when they’re also forcing students to watch a video put out by Hamas’s press wing.

You’re trying to present this as some enlightened attempt to force students to see all sides of an issue, but they’re only showing ONE FUCKING SIDE.

There is a difference between studying propanda and forcing students to watch propaganda without critique or study.

Tailgaters like that are the worst, especially if they have a clear path to pass you but just don’t for some strange reason.

To deal with folks like that, I like to do what I call the reverse pass. I’ll go into the left lane, slow down, and then drop back behind the tailgater. Then I’ll happily let them be the pace car, letting them be the radar shield, matching whatever speed they choose to gun it to.