US Politics, February 2020. They want to kill your cows.

And here is much better than somewhere like Alabama as far as having fellow liberals around. Sedona and Flagstaff are pretty liberal, and Navajo and Hopi too.

ha this is all the reason i post FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT on twitter and i think here at least once. i do mean it. i even use "patriots" in reference to my 5 people in tweets, though i long disliked its use. more than disliked.

fuck them. this is our place too. you gonna march in dc with guns and masks? fuck you, you fuckboy fucks.

this said, talk is cheap. pixels is cheaper. VOTE VOTE VOTE. don't walk away, people need us. stand in, stand.

has any other incumbent president travelled around to the various primaries and given campaign speeches the way Trump has been doing? he's spending a lot of time declaring "victory" in Iowa & NH even though nobody's really running against him. its bizarre.

Meanwhile is this approach working for Warren:

In the week between Iowa and New Hampshire, there have been no messaging shakeups or public shifts in strategy. Warren, as usual, has refused to attack her rivals and stayed positive. She's made slight tweaks to her stump speech, but her message of uniting the party to beat Donald Trump, taking on corruption and offering the broadest menu of policies is the same as it's been for months.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/11/elizabeth-warren-sticks-to-plan-new-hampshire-113718

Not going to lie, my wife and I have discussed emigrating if there's a Trump win in November, and I'm not really interested in who does and doesn't approve. As a trans woman in a queer relationship, the continuation of Trumpism will result in an even bigger, more permanent target on my back and I am not especially interested in being anyone's martyr. "Voting is your most powerful tool?" Great. I'll vote absentee. But don't lecture me on some obligation to stay here and suffer.

Makes me think a bit about the question of roots. My family had much deeper roots in Eastern Europe and Italy than I have in the US, but they realized that the smart thing to do was to come over here, and they had the foresight to do it well before things got really bad over there. It sometimes pays to go before the bad stuff happens. All my relatives who were unable to leave Eastern Europe were eventually murdered. I have no plans to leave the US, but it's hard not to think about that.

True of my dad's side of the family as well. The ones who fled Austria-Hungary and Russia during the pogroms of the late 19th century all came here and thrived. Most of the ones who didn't perished in the Holocaust. My mom's side has early 18th-century roots here. My wife is a 3rd-generation American so her roots are not particularly deep.

Not going to lie, my wife and I have discussed emigrating if there's a Trump win in November, and I'm not really interested in who does and doesn't approve.

^^^

^^^^^^

completely disagree with the prevalent opinion that it's weak and cowardly to want to leave. esp with the references to "minor psychological trauma" or whatever that bullshit post was above. jfc

No one's life should be in danger in their country.

Yesterday I (lightly for me) railed against pre-election performative despair.

If it's ok to get the hell out of Alabama, it's ok to get the hell out of the other 49, right?

sorry, i misspoke. it was "some psychic distress"

LOFL

no WmC, it is your duty as a patriot to fight for alabama. if you leave alabama, it will make it worse for other good alabamans. and if you aren't in alabama, why aren't you? that's where you should be to make the biggest impact. now go rip your shirt off, grab some kitchen knives, and run straight into the woods there to fight racists

i dont put a lot faith in the “i am my ancestors” stuff. my “people” historically moved early and at adversity and toward oppty. where theyve got entrenched theyve been no more perfect than other whites. but the shit right now, while unimaginably bad, i hope it is the equiv of a death rattle as we all move forward together.

if we let them win now, they will unbuild all they can. they have no plan outside oligarchic neo feudalism. there is plenty reason that is immoral, and plenty reasons it needn't happen. i know a fed judge and i worked with former usas who know recognize and abhor this bullshit. when leas prosecutors quit and line attys withdraw, dont give up on them. ppl who cheered “yay someone quit, standards!”, i’m like, “NO THOSE PPL YOU WANT TO STAY, IT’S CABINET PPL YOU WANT QUITTING, GAH.”

i accept and know that the fears of minorities and superminorities are for real, but we need you to stand in, too. we need you.

i got a rando call from warren dude last night who’s asked me to canvas for warren in prep for super tue. if she’s staying in, i am going to do it. it is like actually the least i can do, besides voting. the only dem i’d eyeroll at this point is butti, and i’m scared sanders does not have the skillset to do what he wants, but maybe i’ll canvas for them i general if warren is out.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Lots of great otm responses here, but I struggle with the "if we let them win" part because it's not like we are just rolling over and giving up, it's because they are cheating and gaming the system at every single turn. I just don't feel like it's "letting" them win when we aren't even playing the same game at this point.

yeah good discussion, all I have to add is that the rising tide of fascism is a global problem and not confined to the US.

other people I know who want to move are doing it purely for health care reasons, which seems legit to me as our system is broken.

i'm not opposed to dipping but i'll absolutely cop to it being a consequence of privilege (for now). my gf has brazilian and italian citizenship, and i'm not sure how viable either those options are in the face of creeping fascism. and by that i mean i'm literally ignorant, particularly wrt italy.

anyway, she's not going anywhere until her two young kids (u.s. & itlalian citizenship) are out of the house.

my original gripe was all the immediate pivots to "well we're fucked, yay Emperor Trump", not just because they're defeatist, but incredibly triggering to those of us with major anxiety issues, esp when it's pointless speculation nine months out.

i can't tell anybody whether it's right for them to move or not if he wins again. I don't think any of us can. none of us know anybody's situation. people are just afraid that if he wins again, all of the people that would fight him and the Republican government will leave, leaving only those who need people to fight on their behalf. it's an understandable fear, but it's a collective fear as opposed to an individual one. i wouldn't think less of someone who decided they couldn't live here anymore if he won again.

think of it this way, if the worst thing that happens is you move to Canada, or Europe, or somewhere else and feel peace but there's someone mad at you on the internet, I think you did well.

things are always the way they are, until they aren't

this is what makes me homicidal about the endless "McGovern 1972" chorus

xpost Speaking as someone with major anxiety issues, respect, but also trafficking in gallows humor is sometimes the only way I can process bad shit without having an embolism. That said, because I realize that can be triggering for people who process differently, I do make an effort from going as far into the black as I might otherwise tend to.

re the history of europe and migrations and labor and roles and general shit.

atop the jungfraujoch in bernese alps in che is a memorial to the people who died and struggled while completing the tunnelling there (at 3000m+!) at the end of the 19th cent.

To my maybe-not-discerning eye, the vast vast majority of those digger’s names appeared very italian. the engineers referenced had v germanic names, but i cannot identify what regionalisms were in those.

someday i’ll learn more about that melting pot, and i sorta understand that tunnelling is gonna come outta mining demos. but still— what is the reasonable conclusion there about who was doing the hard dangerous work, and who was drafting plans and directing? About maybe this history of movements of peoples?

The struggle is always real. I suspect there, too. Stand in.

Chris Hayes had a good monologue in NH about this - the idea that Trump is undefeatable, that he's gonna rig the election or cheat or has this unstoppable army of rural voters guaranteeing him an EC victory is...exactly what they want you to think. not saying parts of that aren't true, he's absolutely going to commit more crime to his own political ends, but at the end of the day the hopeless "Emperor Trump" stuff is good for the GOP and they all know it. Trump is still one of the most hated politicians in the history of this country and practically all his policy goals are deeply unpopular. his one thing is that the economy is strong.

also worth noting that in spite of Trumps all time high approval ratings the current polling still shows him losing handily to every single Dem candidate, with Sanders and Bloomps beating him by nearly double digits.

Chris Hayes had a good monologue in NH about this - the idea that Trump is undefeatable, that he's gonna rig the election or cheat or has this unstoppable army of rural voters guaranteeing him an EC victory is...exactly what they want you to think. not saying parts of that aren't true, he's absolutely going to commit more crime to his own political ends, but at the end of the day the hopeless "Emperor Trump" stuff is good for the GOP and they all know it. Trump is still one of the most hated politicians in the history of this country and practically all his policy goals are deeply unpopular. his one thing is that the economy is strong.

― frogbs, Wednesday, February 12, 2020

otm

Also, the Gallup poll that freaked us out last week was an outlier.

the economy is not strong for a significant minority of the population

my gf has brazilian and italian citizenship, and i'm not sure how viable either those options are in the face of creeping fascism. and by that i mean i'm literally ignorant, particularly wrt italy.

well, I would suggest that Brazil might not be the *best* choice wrt to avoiding fascism

xp hey I agree but for some reason this country decided that the key economic barometer is a system driven entirely by speculation and made up numbers that values Tesla as being 4 times more valuable than Ford despite selling 1% as many cars instead of, say, whether or not the average person can afford to buy groceries

Part of me wonders if there will come a point where Trump starts to see the writing on the wall and, as the realization dawns upon him that he might finally have to pay for his rampant venality once he's no longer in office, begins to transition from his trademark assholism towards a more hat-in-hand, foot-shuffling approach in deference to the likely president-elect. 'Aw, chee willikers, I...I was just foolin' around, fellers!'

I realize that this is a complete fantasy which assumes Donald Trump possesses any of the qualities commonly associated with a functioning human being, but still. It could happen.

trump is the dumbest guy to ever hold the office but he's definitely got a child or really pet-like understanding that he gets the most treats from indulging in his worst behavior

imagine how much him and his ppl will bitch and moan about any attempts to hold him accountable, and how they'll say Angry Dems are the ones violating norms and are we living in a banana republic now where you can jail your predecessor once you grab the reins of power?? Then for the rest of eternity they will try to prosecute any Dem prez as soon as they're out of office on some er trumped up charges.

One of the more baffling things about him is that, given that he seems to be driven almost in toto by self-interest, his self-preservational instincts are for absolute shit (see: the eight million problems he's personally brought on himself). At the moment, that's offset to a great extent by a GOP willing to bend over backwards to cover his ass, but he may be surprised to discover how many of his republican friends drift away if he loses the election (and, possibly, more importantly, if a number of his friends are likewise voted out of office thanks to the Trump Taint).

May the Trump taint infect them all

i accept and know that the fears of minorities and superminorities are for real, but we need you to stand in, too. we need you.

The pure fucking balls of this. You wouldn't say this to a German Jew in 1938, so don't fucking say it to me now.

as a threatened minority, I feel the opposite and am not going anywhere.

I would've told German Jews in 1938 to stop cooperating with Nazi authorities and giving them lists of people to murder and deport

also tbrr I think Nazi analogies are way off and I'm sick of them

do you. i’ll fight with you, i cant fight for you.

I'll hop right on murdering and deporting people.

There are currently 12 states trying to make it illegal for medical professionals to provide affirming care to trans teens, and even more states fighting to keep LGBT people unprotected by anti-discrimination law, and a Supreme Court that is in all likelihood about to rule that gender identity and sexual orientation are explicitly not protected by Title VII. And no conceivable Congress for the foreseeable future is going to do anything about that. So I'll keep my own counsel about what analogies are and aren't apt.

And, not for nothing, but despite being Jewish you are a cishet white man and can be completely invisible.

and there is a point in any fight where flight is the only safe manner to survive. i have no issue with that.

I think it's easy to assert but difficult to know with certainty how one will/won't/might respond if shit were to get truly dire. I would guess, knowing both my cellular loathing of injustice and general haplessness wrt doing anything real about it, I would almost certainly be the bullet-riddled corpse they're talking about when they ask 'okay, anyone else wanna be a hero?'. But who really knows.

xxp I didn't ask you to! I don't know what morally superior mantle you're trying to claim, but go nuts. It has nothing to do with me.

my gf has brazilian and italian citizenship, and i'm not sure how viable either those options are in the face of creeping fascism. and by that i mean i'm literally ignorant, particularly wrt italy.

At least Italian citizenship gives you access to the rest of the EU.

^ah yes very true. and even though she grew up in Brazil and all her family is there, she’d def go to Italy were she inclined to leave the US.

though hey maybe it won’t be up to her if GOP has it’s way

as a non-student of trans rights and a supporter of a group supporting migrating trans persons, i want morally improved conditions of lots of shit, that’s the best claim to morality i’ll venture.

my tendency is to believe that coordinated allies for moral battles are better than uncoordinated flight, though that is sometimes the only answer.

but despite being Jewish you are a cishet white man and can be completely invisible.

if you mean "not go to synagogue where I routinely wonder what I would do if someone burst in to murder us all" ok sure. that invisibility is predicated on essentially erasing a part of myself, which I refuse to do.

but we shouldn't fight, I get you feel threatened and that's totally legit and I want to support you and do what I can to make you and others feel safe, we are in this together.

xps

she’d def go to Italy were she inclined to leave the US.

no fascists racist homo/transphobes in Italy lol

i’m am with you both, peace. privilege does (mis)inform me as it does many.

(FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT)