One of the most vile tricks ever pulled, is the way that even the mildest left-leaning ideals are made out to be a political imposition trying to force people to act or think a certain way, while even the hardest right-wing ideologies are construed as mere beliefs, matters of opinion that we must respect.
oppression isn’t generational and trying to frame politics as “the old people are wrong and the young people are right” erases the fact that there are old people who have been fighting the good fight for decades and the fact that there are young people who are literally nazis
Plus while there might be less old people fighting the good fight it’s usually because they were killed or were part of the minorities that have poor living conditions that kill you early
the NYT 2018 midterms morning-after narrative, with all the chin-stroking about mixed results and the bland end of the Dems driving the successes, seems really wrong to me and frankly kind of enraging. obviously there were disappointments but, net-net, this is not a morning for wailing and gnashing of teeth. I compulsively wasted hours and hours of my life following this shit last night, so I’m just going to lay out some of the story points supporting a more robust and optimistic narrative real quick
the objective was always to take the House; the Senate was always an almost hopeless moonshot
we did take the House, decisively
the things that follow from that are now going to be realized. it means not only more robust Trump oversight, the tax return subpoenas and protection for the Mueller investigation and so on, but also much needed brakes on the runaway GOP legislative agenda. the Republicans are not going to get to try to repeal ACA again, or kill Social Security, or defund Planned Parenthood, or have their way with the 2020 census or the budget. those things are all huge
the >9% popular-vote D advantage is comparable to or bigger than past midterm “wave” elections, including 1994’s Tea Party wave. that’s literally how we fucking took the House despite 1. the disastrous 2010 census gerrymandering and resulting structural 5- to 7-point GOP advantage and 2. the more recent horrifying surge of strongman fascism. excuse me but we 110% fucking deserve wave status
got a bunch of governorship wins that really fucking matter! Scott Walker, don’t let the door hit you on your way out of Wisconsin! welcome home, Michigan! fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Kris Kobach!
what’s not the matter with Kansas, multiple excellent results there with both Laura Kelly and Sharice Davids winning upsets. possibly they’ve finally put it together that austerity is terrible and are positioning themselves to start fixing the damage. good going, Kansas
this whole weird line that it was moderate Dems that drove all the key successes and dynamic progressives only ever have any chance in the very bluest coastalest elitest cityest races is bullshit. I can’t believe the NYT can say that with a straight face. Sharice Davids is NOT your bland straight white guy DINO, and Kansas is, um, not the Bronx? Pennsylvania is literally going to have a DSA caucus? Beto O’Rourke lost what was, come on, a moonshot race by a high-suspense hair, he clearly has cemented his rising-star status and generated real excitement and momentum
meanwhile DINO “moderate” poster children Heitkamp and Donnelly lost us two (2) Senate seats. wtf with this narrative?
several of the highest profile GOP wins were in states with especially flagrant and egregious voter suppression. we’re all looking at you, Georgia, North Dakota, TEXAS whose Senate race was still close as hell. this is one of the things a Democratic House is well positioned to make a goddamn fuss about.
also Michigan and uh I think another state passed anti-gerrymandering ballot initiatives and, may I goddamn repeat, official face of ‘voter suppression is actually good’ Kris Kobach is out on his ass. plus, granted Florida is a trainwreck by a hundred thousand or so people again, they’ve also just reenfranchised 1.4 million ex-felons, so that may be goddamn changing in future
Virginia is a blue state now btw
New York internal state shit here but the state senate has finally thrown off its shackles so maybe we can actually get some good goddamn legislation passed, seriously if you don’t live here you have no idea the bullshit that’s been going on in Albany thanks to so-called moderates
is everything in the garden lovely? hell to the fuck no, shit sucks in abundance out there, but we knew that! that’s not the surprising bit!
give hardworking blues the credit they deserve 2k18
On the progressive side, I would also note that Stacey Abrams (who hasn’t conceded yet but I’m not holding my breath on this) came the closest to flipping the Georgia’s governor’s mansion since the 90s when middle of the road democrats since 2002 have lost from between 5 to 20 percent. Good lefty Abrams got within 2 percent (and outperformed Clinton in total number of votes received in Georgia…IN A MIDTERM YEAR). The Southeast did tend to go less blue than might have been hoped, but the Midwest made up for that and the vote totals show the progressives can get out to vote.
This despite entireblue districts in GA getting allocated non-working voting machines and being no joke completely shafted for voting, BY THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE WHOSE LITERAL JOB WAS RUNNING GA STATE ELECTIONS. It’s not a disgrace, doing this well in the face of not only a legit mixed af Southeastern state constituency but also flagrant bald-faced cheating.
wait wait wait wait
How can running elections possibly be the job of somebody who has such an immediate and vested interest in the outcome?!
I think we would all know yet more on this point
Apparently both the Abrams election in Georgia and the Gillum one in Florida were called before most(maybe all? The stories I’ve read are unclear on this) of the absentee, provisional, and mail-in ballots were counted, and there’s a real possiblity those returns could push them into run-off territory, so:
Not only did leftier Dems, even the ones who lost, drastically out-perform centrist Dems
At least two of the lefties getting national recognition who did seem to lose(largely as a result of clear civil rights and election law violations) the night of, may not have actually lost.
So, as everyone above has been saying, all this stuff coming from status quo loving pundits about how Tuesday “proves” Dems should shrink away from ~extreme~ policy positions like “people should be able to afford to go to school”(when the US basically invented public universities), “people shouldn’t go bankrupt from seeing the doctor”(a problem no other post industrial country has), and “you should be able to leave your house without worrying you’ll be shot”(again, a problem unique to the US among post-industrial countries), are spewing hot-air.
As someone who’s reported alt-right harassment and rhetoric on various
social media sites and been told “there’s nothing here that violates our
TOS,” seeing what RPGnet is doing is a welcome breath of fresh air.
(Twitter thread from Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight. Transcribed below:
“Seems likely Democrats will eventually get up to about 60m total votes for the House once unprocessed ballots from CA are tallied. Maybe a bit more (~61M?) based on what’s left in other states. Those are similar numbers to what recent GOP *presidential* candidates have received.
Trump got 63m votes, Romney 61m, McCain 60m. Dem votes for the House this year should be very close to that range.
There’s not any precedent for an opposition party coming this close to matching the president’s vote total from 2 years earlier. The closest to an exception was when Democratic House candidates in 1970 got 92% of Nixon’s vote total from 1968.
Of course, this reflects 3 things we already knew: 1) Trump was elected despite losing the popular vote; 2) D’s won by a big margin this year and 3) Turnout was VERY high.
But Trump is a very unpopular president, and I don’t think that’s totally sunk in yet in how he’s covered.
About 60 million people turned out to vote for Democrats for the House this year. That is a **crazy** number. (Republicans got 45m votes in the 2010 wave.)
And this was sort of missed. Why so many stories about Trump voters in truck stops and not so many about “the resistance”?”
Listen there’s no argument of “rape/abuse fantasies, even if they’re exclusively fantasies, are disgusting and you are disgusting for having them” that doesn’t turn directly in radfem rhetoric.
The idea that it’s your responsibility as a feminist to police all your thoughts and private sexual expression (which I would strongly argue appropriately tagged and archived fiction/art is) in order to avoid harming feminism and Be A Good Woman is radfem. There is no way around it.
If your taste in fiction/fantasies necessarily correlates to your personal politics and morals, then it makes sense to ensure that yours and others fantasies line up with your politics and morals. It becomes a form of protecting yourself, a subset of activism in its own right. And all of a sudden we’ve looped straight back around to policing women’s sexual thoughts for The Good Of Society.
The moment you start shaming and forbidding fantasies on the basis of morality, you’re about ¾ of the way to radfem.
So radfem is respectability politics?
hmmm. Not especially ‘radical’.
tw: misgendering, transphobia.
When radfems use the word “radical” they are not using it in the general political sense of having an extremely different point of view, they are using it from the sense of believing that the root of all the world’s troubles is sexism/misogyny. (”radical” as derived from “radix”, meaning root) and that therefore if you eradicate all vestiges of sexism and misogyny (including from your own heart and mind) the world will therefore be Perfect and so will you. In this ideology (evolved among academic upper-class white women in the 70s and 80s, and largely unchanged since then) there is no room for intersectionalism, for the oppressions of racism, classism, ableism, or queerphobia (other than lesbophobia). (lesbianism, being by, for, and about women, is ideologically congruent with their beliefs, and hatred of lesbians can be boiled down to “people hating women and hating that they don’t depend on men,” but other forms of hatred of LGBTQ+ people can’t really be acknowledged because first you would have to acknowledge that isms other than sexism exist, and that it is possible for men to be oppressed.)
Radfems did some wonderful theoretical work in the 70s and 80s. They really did provide the theoretical foundation for a lot of our understandings of sex, gender, and oppression. However, they proved more interested in putting themselves at the top of the hierarchy than in dismantling it, because they chose not to acknowledge other oppressions than the one they themselves faced, and so did not listen to their sisters of color and of lower class, or who were in any way different than themselves, and so they didn’t and do not accept responsibility for the ways in which they contribute to the oppression of others. And they are willing to join with ultra-conservative Evangelical groups to enact and enforce laws that fit their ideology. Radfems believe that they are the ultimate arbiters of feminism, and that therefore any woman who does not agree with them is either deluded about the patriarchy or consciously participating in her own oppression. Therefore, they have the right and the duty to tell other women what they can and should think and do.
For example: they did some really EXCELLENT theoretical work on the exploitation of women inherent in the sex industry, both pornography and prostitution. About the ways in which our culture devalues women’s bodies and uses them as articles of consumption for men. Well and good. But when women who work in the sex industry, both porn stars and prostitutes, point out their limited economic choices and why they and women like them don’t always have better options, radfems do not listen. To a radfem, a woman in the sex industry is either a blameless victim, or an oppressor who betrays your own people. Because of this, not only have radfems endorsed laws created by the Religious Right (blech), they have doxxed sex workers and former sex workers who publicly disagree with them. Including at least one case where a radfem sent a woman’s current location to her former pimp. This is why radfems are sometimes called SWERFs, Sex-Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists.
Also, radfems got the ball rolling in the 70s and 80s talking about gender and how we should abolish gender roles. But they also believe that men/males are the root of all evil. Therefore, any transman is betraying their sisters by joining the oppressive patriarchy, and any transwoman is a “man” who is trying to infiltrate women’s spaces. Thus radfems have doxxed transpeople, signed on to bathroom bills, consistently deadname and misgender them, and done a variety of other transphobic things. This is why radfems are sometimes called TERFs, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.
But yes, a whole heaping helping of respectability politics, just with THEM as the ultimate arbiters of what “respectable” (or rather, “a good feminist”) looks like.
This is a great summary of radical feminism and how it turns into anti-kink, SWERFs, TERFs, and exclusionism in general.
1. That income tax cuts are good for poor, working and middle class people. (Compared to property tax and sales tax cuts, income tax cuts affect poor, working and middle class very little.)
2. That “they” – racial and ethnic minorities – benefit from social programs like welfare, housing subsidies, public transportation, and higher education, but “we” – white people – don’t. (Since there are LOTS more white people in America, even now, than “not white” people, simple math suggests most beneficiaries of social programs are white. And they are.)
3. That the “free market” can lead to the least expensive, highest quality solution to social and political problems. (Many social and political problems, after all, involve situations where no one has any money, so the “free market” has no reason to touch them.)
4. That the “free market” means that government must not intervene in the market, and must allow whatever the market determines to actually take place.(The “free market” requires government to pass laws, create courts, and run a stable banking system to make the market work smoothly.)
These four ideas have convinced millions of Americans to smile and wave as rich people rob them blind.
SIGNAL BOOST THE HELL OUT OF THIS.
Just say “Ronald Reagan” – don’t soften it with “last 40 years.” Some of us were present when that horrible old man began his horrible work that has led directly to this day. We protested at the time – women, gays, POC. Don’t let racist old white men lie to you that we All Loved the Gipper.
Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.
One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”
I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”
“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”
Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.
And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”
The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.
“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”
The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”
“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”
So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.
But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé – well.
Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.
What the whole world would look like.
Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time – more than nine times out of ten – CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.
If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.
(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)
Looping back to politics.
You stand up and yell and fight back and mock and ridicule and insult because to do anything less is to be complicit.
You do CPR with a 4% chance because most of humanity can’t see someone in need and not help.
You protest and resist because you can’t see a nation in need and not help.
The odds are terrible. But at the end of the day, I would rather know that I at least attempted CPR.
i'll apple your turnover 