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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Goodness no, I hate the Russian and Chinese government. They can all go take a long walk off a short pier.

    And the fact that we can address these things, and occasionally change them (unlike China and Russia), is I suppose a bit encouraging.

    But that’s small encouragement next to the mass slavery, targeted attacks, and disenfranchisement throughout our history, and so much of it by regular everyday citizens cheerfully doing terrible things to other regular everyday citizens, no (or very little) government involvement required.

    And it’s still going today. The majority of people in this country refused to vote, or voted for a felon who ran on a program of destroying the constitution, over a PoC woman. Because they liked Trump’s message more, or, even more damning, figured that since they probably wouldn’t be impacted, it didn’t matter.



  • What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

    To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

    There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

    -Frederick Douglas

    We’ve never really been great, unless you were White and Male. But we have been good at selling the grift.

    Good on you for seeing past the lie.











  • Exactly. To these people, being ‘bad’ isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. (You may thank certain types of Christianity for this nonsense.)

    So the thinking goes something like: ‘I’m a Good Person. And as a Good Person, I do Good Things and have Good Family, because I am Good.’ They feel (and it is always feel, not think) that Bad People are what cause the true downfall of society—mostly because they’re told that by their Good Authority Figures (you can tell the Authority Figures are Good because they lead/belong to a Church, and Churches are Good—as long as it’s the right church, of course).

    This all means, of course, that since they’re Good, they can’t do Bad Things; they just make occasional mistakes.

    (This is also where you get ‘The people I voted for are Good, because only a Bad Person would vote for Bad People, and I’m not Bad, I’m Good. So Trump isn’t Bad, he’s just misunderstood!’ nonsense.)

    And, I hate to break it to you, but this behavior is very human. This is a version of Tribalism; my In Group is Good and everyone in the Out Group is Bad.

    Edit: I think Sir Terry Pratchett said it best:

    It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.


  • Two reasons. The first is that Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

    And they make sure they are in the first group by shoving other people into the second.

    The second reason is that they have the sort of mind that believes in Absolute Order. Everything has a Place, a very rigid set of rules that define what it is, how it can act, and what it can do. If something/someone is Out Of Place, then the very fabric of society will weaken and eventually crumble.

    LGBTQ people don’t fit in the boxes labeled ‘proper woman’ and ‘proper man’, so they must be destroyed lest they cause society itself to collapse.