#the republican party is a fucking clown show
Text
1K notes
·
View notes
Photo
(via Sue's News: A Round-Up of Screw Yous)
Fuck you to the aforementioned motherfuckers—Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and Doug Burgum—for making the 2024 race even more of a clown show that could once again hand the nomination to Donald Trump.
Fuck you to the Florida lawmakers who passed the Stand Your Ground laws for which delayed the arrest of a white woman who shot and killed her unarmed Black neighbor through her locked door.
Twin fuck yous to presidential candidate Nikki Haley (R) for saying in the same town hall that it’s a middle-ground position that people who have abortions shouldn’t be executed, and for making the disgusting false claim that transgender student athletes are to blame for teen girls’ suicidal ideation.
Another double fuck you to the Republican governors of Texas and Missouri for signing bills to ban gender-affirming care for minors. The Missouri bill also bans Medicaid coverage of the care for adults. (Louisiana’s Democratic governor said he’ll veto a healthcare ban sent to his desk, but the Republicans hold veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers.)
Fuck you to the five Mississippi members of Congress who demanded that the Department of Veterans Affairs remove a temporary Pride flag from a cemetery in Biloxi, MS, claiming it’s disrespectful.
Fuck you to North Carolina State Rep. Tricia Cotham (R)—the woman who was vocally pro-choice before switching parties and voting to ban abortion—for telling reporters that abortion “never been an issue that I was always out there for at all.” Ma’am, we printed your Planned Parenthood endorsement questionnaire where you pledged to oppose any bill that restricted abortion access.
Fuck you to Utah Republicans and activists for getting mad that a school district used a book-banning law to remove the Bible from classrooms due to its references to incest, rape, and sex work. Fuck around and find out, you clowns.
Fuck you to the New York state prison system for thinking it would be fine to further restrict the ability of incarcerated people to create art, write, and produce journalism and to prohibit them from getting paid for that work. (Thankfully, they reversed the directive after swift backlash.)
Fuck you to presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the only Black Republican Senator, for saying that the concept of systemic racism is a “dangerous, offensive, and disgusting message to send to our young people today.”
Fuck you to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for making the ludicrous claim that the $886 billion defense budget means the military “is radically underfunded related to the Chinese threat.”
Fuck you to whichever awful person tore down the temporary repairs at an Illinois abortion clinic under construction that a 73-year-old man plowed his car into weeks earlier. The clinic has a GoFundMe.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t conclude this post with a hearty rest in piss to televangelist Pat Robertson, a terrible person and raging homophobe who blamed 9/11 on gay people, who died this week. Fuck you forever, Pat.
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
Larry Correia's fans love it when he "fisks" articles, blog posts etc. ("Fisking" is Larry's term for picking apart a post and making fun of it). So, now that he's had his brain fully melted by grifters like Jack Posobiec and Dinesh D'Souza, maybe he deserves a taste of his own medicine.
There’s a red wave coming because normal voters are fed up with democrat bullshit. They suck at governing and they cater to their base, which is psychotic.
There's this weird notion that Republicans and centrist Democrats have that the Dems lose elections every time they're not basically Diet Republicans. That the party has gone too far to the left courting the lunatic fringe. This doesn't really hold up if the last election was any indication; centrist dems actually lost seats compared to more leftist candidates. What's actually happening here is that the Democrats over-promised and under-performed, as they've done for the last 40 years. They don't lose elections because they're not far enough to the right. They lose because they don't deliver.
But the GOP has a history of being lame, cowardly, corrupt squishes, so our government keeps sucking.
How do we fix it?
Right-wingers keep doing this thing where they vote for people who promise to bring the government down from the inside like Samson, are shocked to find that this only makes the government suck more, and conclude that the only reason we don't have a capitalist utopia is because these rich assholes don't have the balls to give themselves and their cronies even more money. Since they've repeated this cycle for the last 40 years, they just keep getting angrier and angrier that it hasn't paid off.
This is my opinion, based upon working as an accountant/contractor for the most efficient part of our stupid government, which was still a fucking clown show when compared to the corporate world (or at least the non-woke corporate world)
Larry likes to lean heavily on his experience as an accountant regardless of whether it has anything to do with the subject at hand. Y'know how there wasn't any actual evidence of election fraud? He made a bunch of posts talking about vague "red flags" in the election because... something something, he likes doing audits. Did you know he used to be an accountant?
A well known, yet denied, truth is that most government employees are entrenched and don’t do shit. They’re utterly useless. Depending on the department you could fire a ton of them and all it would do is free up parking spaces.
Now, there are some government employees who work their asses off. Good. There are some government functions which are necessary. Great.
A great many don’t work, or the work they do is utterly pointless.
Y'know, you say that, and yet every time an office or department downsizes, it tends to go to shit and they wind up having to pay contractors. See also: literally every military branch trying to save a few bucks by reducing their aircraft maintenance personnel.
As any honest gov employee. They will admit this to you in private. If they say no, everything we do is vital and everyone here is vital, they’re a liar protecting their budget, or one of the useless ones. Most places, if there are 5 employees, 2 do 90% of the work.
Source: No shit, there I was. Trust me, bro.
Pournell’s Iron Law says that as it grows over time any bureaucracy’s purpose will change from its original mission, to a new mission of protecting and growing the bureaucracy.
So now our Department of Labor by itself is bigger than LBJ’s entire federal government. This stuff never shrinks. It only grows. It’s an endless leviathan.
That is a weird comparison for a few reasons. First, it's plainly false unless you take the DoD out of the equation. The military was rapidly expanding during LBJ's administration to deal with that whole "Vietnam" thing. The Department of Labor currently has around 17,450 employees. Under LBJ, the USMC alone hit its peak of over 300,000. But if you throw out everything but "civilians employed by the executive branch" when you say "entire federal government," you can consider yourself technically correct, as 2,900 is quite a bit smaller than 17,450. That's some creative accounting, though.
Now I get that Larry is talking to an audience of knee-jerk "government getting bigger = government getting more badder" types that probably have Thin Blue Line punisher skull decals next to their Molon Labe ones, and they will absolutely eat this shit up without question, but still. Nice little truisms ignore the fact that bureaucracies can expand and contract over time depending on improvements in efficiency and the demands placed on it. Check out the Air Force since 1955.
Yeah yeah I know it's because the Democrats hate America and the GOP is too spineless to give us a strong military blah blah fuckin' blah. "Pournelle's Iron Law" still doesn't hold up. It's all a bunch of circular logic that nobody ever questions because It Is Known.
(And if you think military branches don't count as "bureaucracies" you have no business citing experience working with them.)
The leviathan needs to grow and protect itself against all threats, which is how you get super evil shit like the CIA and FBI meddling in US elections…
More circular logic with no basis in reality. The FBI is extremely conservative as an organization and treated both Clinton and Trump with kid gloves to avoid even the appearance of meddling in elections. The CIA waited until after Trump was President-elect to make up their minds whether the Russians were trying to help him or not. Before that it was "we know they're up to something, but we don't know what it is exactly."
Or constantly expanding its powers into new places, like the #MinistryOfTruth
If you're not familiar with Twitter, this is probably incomprehensible. There's a right-wing conspiracy theory that the Democrats are trying to take over social media under the guise of stopping misinformation. Right-wingers also have a complete victimhood mentality about their posts being moderated, believing that the people running those sites have it in for them. There is no evidence for this; every empirical study into Facebook and Twitter shows that right-wingers are typically allowed to post whatever the hell they like, with only the most egregious TOS violations resulting in suspensions, bans, etc. Anything that pisses off the old and middle-aged tends to drive up engagement and is thus good for the site's bottom line.
And that's when they're not just being cowards. Facebook deliberately lets Breitbart violate its policies just to keep people like you happy. But yeah, you're right, being given a time-out from shitposting is just like 1984.
This leviathan will find allies which help it expand in size and power. The more power/money you give it, the more it can bribe and co-opt other institutions. Academia, media, corporations, etc.
Funny you should mention that, Larry. Most of the people you like to cite are propped up by billionaires like the Koch brothers and Peter Thiel. It's almost like the "leviathan" you should be worried out isn't the bureaucracy so much as the extremely wealthy guys with their arms up the ass of those puppets you live to listen to.
As the leviathan grows in power, it will become more malicious, spiteful, and controlling. Dissent is crushed. Freedom dies.
@elonmusk is currently a speed bump in this, which is why the control freak contingent is super pissed at him.
...Elon Musk tried to create his own "#ministryoftruth" called Pravduh, remember? You're talking about a guy who tried to get a kid's bot shut down for reporting on the movements of his private jet, which is publicly available information. He called a dude a pedophile for calling his stupid submarine idea stupid. He is not a free speech advocate. He's not remotely a "speed bump" for the censorious. He's just another stupid, rich asshole who wants to control the narrative.
The big question is, do the people own their government, or does the government own its people? If we are just assets of the gov, we can be spent freely, and bad assets get eliminated.
Look, either the government loves keeping useless people around, or it ruthlessly eliminates anyone not contributing to its goals. Make up your mind.
The leviathan is compelled to own EVERYTHING.
Again, I think you've misidentified your "leviathan."
Slowing the leviathan down isn’t enough. If you concentrate on stopping one part, others keep growing. Then when our bipolar country elects a new leader, those parts start growing again. Repeat forever. And it just keeps getting bigger.
So we’ve got to shrink the whole thing
If the GOP had a brain/spine (lol) they’d slash the shit out of everything. They’d starve the beast. They usually don’t, because they are total chickenshits. They’ll pay lip service to this, do nothing, or feed their favorite parts.
The DNC gleefully feeds the whole thing.
This is how you know you've given up describing anything besides a The Blob. You don't need to think about anything besides a malevolent Something that consumes everything, and then... then that'd be real bad. Also, the idea that the GOP hates spending is nonsense. They hate taxes. They LOVE spending. Especially if it's on the military. But only for tanks the Army doesn’t want, not cost-of-living raises for the troops.
Trump’s biggest weakness was he surrounded himself with people who loved government, and loved expanding government. Of course all of those fucked him at every opportunity.
HAH! He surrounded himself with nuts like Steve Bannon and oil barons like Rex Tillerson. And his own children. The only people standing in his way were trying to stop him from fucking up. It's why nobody lasted long: they either got caught doing crimes for him, or realized that being anything other than a yes-man was getting them frozen out.
We need somebody who actively HATES the government to run it.
We need a Lucy who's going to HOLD the football! Christ, how do you dipshits keep falling for this?
if I was President (ha!) I would only create a single new executive branch entity. The Department of Fuck Your Job Security.
The DoFYJS would consist of surly auditors, and their only job would be to go into other government agencies to figure out-
A. do you fuckers do anything worth a shit?
B. which of you fuckers actually get shit done?
Then fire everyone else.
Someone's got fantasies of being Steve Jobs. (Supposedly, he'd ask random employees what they did for him. If they couldn't answer immediately to his satisfaction, he'd fire them on the spot. This was completely ineffective because most of the people they reported to actually used them and would immediately re-hire them.) Trying to do this only gets you surrounded by yes-men who know how to tell you what you want to hear. See also: Joseph Stalin.
Right now it is pretty much impossible to fire government employees. The process is asinine. It is so bad that the worst government employees, who nobody else can stand, don’t get fired. They get PROMOTED. It’s easier, and then its somebody else’s problem.
If you think that's bad, you should really be a Defund the Police guy. Federal desk jockeys have nothing on cops when it comes to being impossible to fire. And they generally make a lot more money!
But the DoFYJS don’t care. If your job is making tax payers fill out mandatory paperwork and then filing it somewhere nobody will ever read it?
Fuck you. Gone. Clean out your desk.
That's not a government job so much as an Intuit and H&R Block job. It absolutely does not have to be this way and you don't need your fantasy Chekas to do it. All you have to do is reform how taxes work like a functional country. But that would go against the whole "taxes should hurt" concept, which conservatives love! Thanks, Reagan!
We need to get rid of entire agencies. Gone. WTF does the Department of Education improve? NOTHING.
Gone. Fire them all. Sell the assets.
Ah, we're going the "everything was already figured out in the 1860s" route, I see.
Any agency that survives this purge, move it out of DC to an area more appropriate to its mission. Do we need a Dept of Agriculture? Okay. Go to Kansas.
This will also cause all the DC/NOVA power monger set to resign so I don’t have to waste time firing them
Yeah, let's gerrymander federal agencies and make it harder for them to coordinate with the president, there's no way that could backfire. Besides, I'm not sure you could bore an Iowan like Tom Vilsack away from the job by sending him to Kansas. And that guy tried to bore himself away from the job.
Oh, and right wing pet causes, you’re not safe. I worked for the Air Force. We all know that we could fire 1/3 of the GS employees tomorrow and the only noticeable difference would be more parking available on base.
The only reason the military has so many GS employees is that some penny-pinching genius already eliminated the positions normally held by enlisted personnel, only to find out later it actually needed the guys they RIF'd and had to hire them back on as more expensive WG, GS or contractors because otherwise readiness would be destroyed. The attempts at slimming down and privatizing military services has been a slow-motion catastrophe for awhile now. Don't build base housing, that's expensive. Oh wait, now we have to increase housing allowances to keep up with soaring rent, burglaries are driving everyone insane, off-base incidents go up, and gate traffic is a Lovecraftian nightmare. Oops.
The responsible thing to do would be stop over-missioning the military and reorient our strategies around less intervention, but that'd mean no longer being the World Police, and might get you assassinated by LockMart.
Cut everything. We never do, because somebody might cry. Too bad. They’re called budget cuts because they’re supposed to hurt. Not budget tickles. Fuck you. Cut.
Cute. Utter nonsense, but cute. Pain is a sign something is wrong. If your cuts actually hurt, you fucked up and are going to spend even more money fixing the damage later.
And yeah, we're at "Megamind arguing with Metroman" levels of tortured analogy here but this whole thing was stupid from the start.
Shutting off the money faucet will also destroy the unholy alliance between gov/media/academia/tech.
It absolutely will not. Media's gonna do whatever gets ad revenue, as they've always done. Academia's gonna do its own thing. By "tech" I assume you mean social media sites, since reducing manning will in no way stop the government from blowing billions on new toys. Oh, but we gotta keep the A-10 around. Right. Better order 2000 more replacement wings for 'em.
Anyway, you're still gonna see all the people with money trying to control everyone under them. They can absolutely do it without the government.
Right now there is a revolving door, government job, university job, corporate board, think tank, the same crowd who goes to the same parties and went to the same schools and all that other incestuous shit just take turns in the different chairs.
Sell the fucking chairs.
See, that's the thing. Those people, the moment your auditors come after them, are either going to sue the shit out of your administration, or simply bring your auditors into the club. Hell, they probably wouldn't even be in a position to be one of those auditors if they weren't already in the club or club-adjacent. In any case, this is the part where your simpleminded strategy gets you so tied up in red tape and litigation that you look like the Michelin Man in a spider's web.
Every entity that gets tax money inevitably turns into a pig trough for these people. Cut it all off. All of these money faucets ALWAYS cause some kind of financial crisis later anyway.
Oh boy, you're really not gonna like how you could actually do that.
See the student loan crisis caused by the government, here is free money, oh college has become expensive and useless, so now we need more government to solve it. You dummies get to pay for it. Have some inflation.
Hey, you asked what the Department of Education is for? I mean, maybe you could use it to do something about that? Like, maybe end the giveaway to banks that the entire system is and fund higher education and trades through the government. But then, I dunno, that sounds kinda communist.
It’s all bullshit.
Quit pretending any of this makes sense.
Oh, believe me, I'm not.
The only way the leviathan shrinks is we elect people who actively hate the government to the government, and then only let them stay there long enough to fuck the government without getting corrupted by it.
People who actively hate the government don't participate in government. It's simple as that. As long as you keep telling yourself that this is possible, you're going to keep electing liars who put on a big show about how government isn't the answer, cuts things you don't like, but ultimately contributes to the actual problems and makes us all worse off. They'll be sure to keep jingling keys in front of you about migrant caravans, and Dr. Seuss, and Mr. Potatohead, and how the green M&M isn't fuckable anymore, and critical race theory in schools. So you won't notice until they get replaced and you'll be mad that you've once again been fooled by your "spineless" candidate.
The instant you see the small government crusader you sent to DC going “Oh, well maybe an unholy alliance between the state and OmniGlobalMegaCorp to develop a mind control ray is a good thing” FIRE HIM.
That won't happen, because it means letting a Democrat take his place. You can see the opposite thing happening now with the Democrats and Sinema. Democrats are furious with her for not doing what she was elected to do, but the centrist refrain is, "and what, let one of those REPUBLICANS win? Then we'll lose the Senate!"
So there you have it. That’s my platform if you elect me president. Fire fucking everybody. And only give me one term. Thank you.
Four years of President Lawsuit. Or at least until you get so sick of spinning your wheels, you get filmed smashing watermelons on the white house lawn with a tetsubo and your ticket-balancing veep invokes section 4 of the 25th amendment.
Oh wait… why did I just get these hot insider stock trading tips in my inbox from Blackrock? I guess a second term is cool.
See, that's the thing. You wouldn't even be a serious contender if you weren't already playing that game. Money is Speech, after all.
Seriously though, something has to break. We can’t afford the loss of money or more importantly, freedom. The government either has to start cutting off parasites and control freaks, or stuff is going to get way way worse.
I dunno man. Try burning down a police precinct or something.
13 notes
·
View notes
Text
test image m31 galaxy. star test. a couple minutes of exposuer,-testing my collimation and new tracking, much improved stars, tight focused, stars... the core of m31 galaxy. andromeida, galaxy,, and couple of other smaller galaxies, in image........
we are seeing a mass extinction, event being played out, here on planet earth,, we are witnessing, the great next extinction, of many species and life on this planet..
and the american people, are just carrying on, with the possible re election of that monster to humanity, donald trump,, and their other insane backward ignorant republican party,.. i can not belive any of it,, shame on america,,,, build those walls, and blame immigrants and people of color for your issuies,,,,,, never mind the gun insanity gun violence, and the out of controll climate change, never mind, the mass extinction that is about to happen.. or is happing.... i am very sorry for my fellow citizens, and those awfull back ward republicans, setting us back to 1950 jim crow south.,.
i can not belive any of it......... i wonder, what is more important, the human speices, or the planet earth= gaia,?.. maybee the human species has to leave, and be gone, to save the planet earth...
maybee its for the best the end of humanity, but save the planet..
. the only planet in this star system capable of hosting life as we know it, maybee the aliens, will eliminate the human threat,to the planet. to save the planet.........
we would have to stop every thing, right now!. and thats not going to happen,
its incredible, it really is happing,right now! we are seeing the mass extinction, of the species of life on this planet, and we humans could have done somthing,we desatroyed the planet, for other species of life, and our selves...
it is too late, i think. i dont think that we can stop it now.
we have reached a junction point,or passed a point of no return.
i never thought that we would see this in our life times, these great upheavles of climate change. incredible to become awear of it, and we people, in america, just chose our polticals, telling us it was junk science,, and fake media and false news,, and doing nothing, as our elected leader, tore up the french accord, to climate change,, and america did very little, to even educated its people. we chose to help the politicals surpress the reality,....
well maybee now, your great donald trump will save you,,, and your greaT GEORGE BUSH,, CALLING IT JUNK SCIENCE,
america has no-body. to blame, but themselves, for many years of ignorant choices,,,. it really is happing, and america really did do more then other nations to cause the problem, and we did little to fix it, we elected donald trump, a moron clown, criminal, insane criminal. and the war of geroge bush, who called it junk science, but you folks cant remember that, too much gun violent television programing, your all in some type of sleeping trance, inslaved.
blame the people of color, blame the immigrants, build that fucking wall, and make divisions and be hatfull ignorant monsters, like your trump... every hell, needs a satin... thats why you elected him and those republicans that keep you inslaved, and backwards, in 1950,, jim crow south..........
yea those are the issuies to be concerned with,. never mind your insane gun violence, and being fed the violence by holly wood, and your elected leaders,.. never mind the mass shootings.. and the out of controll climate change, and extinction.... just build that fucking wall, and send money to trump, he will fix it.,......... and that awfull ex president bush, telling you all it was junk science, his genuis wife, said that,, junk science,,, its all kind of funny!. now,.. hi hi hi,.,, i cant blive that it really is happing like wow!... very weird, how calm people are about it.......... maybee the aliens will show up and save the planet, by eleiminating the human species,, it really might be the only solution, to the problem....... to save the planet,?--. working on my next sci fi, novel,, this is all imagination, creative writing and looking at the facts of our time...... rather scary?.. i am sorry for the american people making very poor choices, for anumber of years, and choosing to be ignorant,.......
. wow!..................
1 note
·
View note
Text
Republicans have no standards or morals, they react based on uncomplex emotional nones.
"Guns don't kill people"
We had 39 mass shootings in under 25 days. Every day there has been a mass shooting in 2023. Everyday.
"We need more guns!"
Yet the problem is still guns being Point and Click Kill Tools anyone can get regardless of their history or mental health and soon even age. What scientific Median is the "right" amount of guns? Or are we just gonna make the problem impossible to fix and the country uninhabitable first?
"My body my choice"
They screamed at the top of their decaying covid filled lungs Right Up Until Roe vs Wade got undone. No cohesion, complete clown world, no principles, no morality, not an ounce of thought or reasonability.
"Pedophiles!"
Churches have Child Molestor Insurance but go off.
The republican politicians you suck the toes of are likely convicted sex offenders, that's page 41 btw.
0 drag shows have had any pedophilia. Especially the ones republicans banned at a fucking bar. A Bar.
"Political correctness!"
Tan suit
Dijon mustard
Zelenksy's tan shirt
Republicans voted to make it illegal for women to wear pants in congress.
Republicans boycott a beer company because it had a rainbow on it. They were unsuccessful.
Republicans banned books, a book about a seahorse because it was "woke" when it was biologically factual how it reproduced.
Republicans cried when Rage Against the Machine, turned out to be Raging Against the Machine (republicans)
Republicans steal music all the time. Never pay people either. Have to walk back terroristic claims like pussies.
Republicans so far near solely have been getting arrested over and over for severe levels of corruption Trump Allowed.
There's no real reason to act like political correctness is one sided when one side fails sometimes to recognize actual "isms" while the other side Banned Gays from being mentioned at all in schools.
And banned Trans medical works because of fearmongering with still to this day 0 proof of any claims made.
And banned women's medical procedures because abortion is too hard of a concept to accept as the lesser evil and had to lie doctors have ever aborted a baby instead of always a fetus.
Thinking is against political correctness, both sides are dumb, but only one side is ever successful in causing harm via political correctness.
PC for republicans means solely being white and not mentioning problems that aren't about black people or the libz.
PC for democrats is don't be racist even accidentally or I swear to god I'll make going online not fun for a whooooole month! But only sometimes. Not remotely always. Usually mislead, usually backtracks and apologizes. Usually some degree learn from their mistakes and move on.
Never republicans. They do, forget, move on.
Point is, republicans have no platform other than blind hatred. Killing black people isn't fixing the economy or roads. Killing trans people isn't solving poverty. Killing immigrants isn't helping anyone get a job.
But that's republicans for ya. Is it even terrorism if you make terrorism your party platform that 30% of the country, 50% of voters, accept? Obviously yes, but ask a republican in various ways and the answer becomes a proud, ignorant, hateful: "No"
1 note
·
View note
Text
So nice that Biden is caving on work requirements for food assistance, giving in to the sociopathic scum in the Republican party
What a clown show
Lots of people on SNAP can't work and aren't eligible for disability
Great Democrat, fucking over the poor so rich evil bastards can steal everything under the sun
I hope the actual democrats tell him to fuck off with that bullshit
0 notes
Text
Poorly describing my versions of the Gotham rogues:
Joker: “yolo” in its most dangerous form, def is writing a slow burn enemies to loves fic about him and Batman. Gay and homophobic 💯 The other rogues don’t invite him to pride celebrations anymore cause he’ll keep calling people slurs “as a joke”. Him and Edward have longterm beef, like schoolgirl levels of petty drama.
Harley Quinn: would describe herself as a “girlboss” unironically while committing heinous crimes. tweeted “clowns aren’t funny” after breaking up with Joker (ended up causing a huge scandal). The OG “I can fix him” girl. Is sort of the rogues free underground therapist (god knows they need it) cause they can’t get professional help without being sent to Arkham.
Poison Ivy: Breaking News: Cottagecore lesbian commits mass murder cause her plant wilted. She’s what republicans think environmentalists are. Would get in a fist fight with that vegan teacher cause “plants have feelings too”. Has beef with most of the male rogues, supports ‘kill all men’ without realizing it’s a joke (she prefers ‘kill all humans’ but figured she had to downgrade because the Gotham city sirens are humans technically).
Cat Woman: “OH NO! It appears I’ve gotten stuck backwards in the bank vault step-Bat 😏😏😏😏😏😏, looks like I’m not stealing any more diamonds today 😰😩”. Mad respect for Selina, she just wants diamonds and bat dick, no tragic backstory or complex motivations needed. I personally like to headcanon her as wearing a straight up cat costume (ears and a tail like a true furry) cause it’s way funnier to imagine a sophisticated rich woman dressing up as a cat to steal shit than whatever bullshit DCs up to these days. Trans catgirl supremacy 💎👍
Scarecrow: That one guy who gets angry at people because “Halloween costumes are meant to be scary 🤬😡😑😒”. Doesn’t even attempt to express emotions, is the human embodiement of this emoji: 😐. His presence is more jarring than threatening, his intimidation levels are somehow underwhelming and overwhelming at the same time. The other rogues have collectively decided that he’s asexual under no assumption other than that they don’t want to imagine Jonathan having sex. Overtime Jonathan has become basically fearless (he smokes his own fear gas like vape just to feel something). Jonathan and Harley became good friends when they both worked in Arkham, their dynamic is surprisingly wholesome.
The Riddler: Didn’t get hugged enough as a child and is now making it everyone’s problem. Would hold a bank hostage to show Batman his third grade spelling bee medal. Is the only autistic rogue that gets accommodations in Arkham because he won’t stop bugging the guards. FTM trans ofc (his names Edward Nygma for Christ's sake). He ran away from home at seventeen and faked his own death (his deadname is legally dead lmao). Uses the terms “alpha, beta, and omega male” unironically.
Two Face: “Yeah, I mean, I didn’t wanna blow up the orphanage either, but Y’know the coin said-” The other rogues talk to Harvey as if he’s constantly at his breaking point, which is half true. Harv is a stone cold mf, he’s the rock that’s holding Two Face together tbh. Edward calls Harvey and Harv Jekyll and Hyde cause he’s that original. All the rogues have at least a sneaking suspicion that Bruce Wayne is batman and use Harvey as their little primary source (being ex besties and everything), until they find out Selina and Bruce are a thing of course. No matter how much evidence he’s faced with Harvey will never accept Bruce Wayne is batmam, he’s not ready to consider that one of the only positive people in his life has been duking it out with him this whole time.
Penguin: He’s the rest of the rogues chill gay gangster uncle I don’t make the rules. The iceberg lounge is like the Batman villain equivalent of The Central Perk from friends (aka: its their default place to hangout). Oswald always makes a fuss about them not making reservations ahead of them but at this point it’s just performative. Everyone’s 99% sure Oswald and Edward fucked at some point (Edward always makes a show of flustering Oswald when he needs a loan). Ossie always takes care of the others belongings when they’re in Arkham (he has a special place in his heart for Jonathan‘s crows).
The Mad Hatter: I love Jervis lmao he just really likes Alice in Wonderland and that’s a valid ass villain motivation 👍. One of the smartest rogues but doesn’t get enough credit because of how childish he is. He dresses in kids clothes, not just because he wants to but because he’s small af and can’t fit in shit. In public while the rogues are undercover Jervis usually wears a beanie or a baseball cap (he’d get spotted instantly if he wore his usual, but on bad days Jervis can’t bear to be without a hat). Jonathan and Jervis play chess a lot together in Arkham, and frequently engage in intellectual discussion, Edward tends to be a piss baby when Jon encourages him to do the same, he’s not ready to accept the reality that Jervis can match his intelligence.
Killer Croc: Waylon has a surprising amount in common with Jonathan, they share southern solidarity. He doesn’t travel out of the sewer often so the rogues will occasionally come to visit Waylon there (Edward always makes sure to complain loudly about the smell). Will show immense affection and loyalty to anyone who treats him as human (poor guy just needs a friend ☹️).
Mr Freeze: Literally just dead inside, someone give this poor bastard a hug. Victor stands as the most awkward rogue, he‘s sorta like the odd one out. The other rogues don’t interact with him that often because he’s sort of a party pooper. He’s the straight friend on thin ice, haha get it. Mr Freeze is my sisters favorite Batman villain because she thought the ice puns were funny in Batman in Robin, little does she know I’m embarrassing myself on tumblr in her glory.
Music Meister: So many of the Gotham rogues have horrible childhood trauma and Music Meister is just like “people bullied me for being a theater kid 😩😭💔😔”. In all honesty he’s iconic, in my au universe thingy I have him join the dork squad latter on and he sticks out like a sore thumb for a bit. I feel like him and Jervis would really hit it off though (mind control buddies, ha), although Jervis would always get him to sing Alice in Wonderland songs. In Arkham they have him wear a dog collar thingy and zap him when he sings, he gets bullied for that lol.
anyways I’m sure I could make more of these, but it’s 2:20 am and my mind went blank. If y’all liked this I could always put more au headcanons out (I have A LOT)
#gotham rogues#batman rogues#batman villains#rogues gallery#dc rogues#batman rogues gallery#two face#harvey dent#scarecrow batman#jonathan crane#the riddler#edward nygma#headcannons#mr freeze#victor fries#music meister#killer croc#waylon jones#mad hatter#oswald cobblepot#jervis tetch#selina kyle#cat woman#harley quinn#pamala isley#harleen quinzel#poison ivy#joker
421 notes
·
View notes
Text
Also, not sure if anyone has posted it here yet, but this unsettlingly prescient essay from November is a worthwhile read. Doesn’t offer much in the way of “what do we do now,” but a necessary wake-up call for anyone who might entertain the idea that Congress going back to business and confirming the election results right after the riot means anything anymore.
Indi Samarajiva: I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now
Some noteworthy excerpts, bold emphasis added by me:
Americans are so caught up with the idea that this can’t be happening to them that they’re missing the very obvious fact that it is.
-
Two years ago, I lived through a coup in Sri Lanka. It was stupid. The minority party threw chili powder at everyone in Parliament and took over by farce. Math, however, requires a majority and the courts kicked them out. They gave in. We’d been protesting for weeks and yay, we won.
No.
I didn’t know it at the time, but we had already lost. No one knew — but oh my God, what we lost. The legitimate government came back but it was divided and weak. We were divided and weak. We were vulnerable.
-
It’s absurd, because the whole thing seems like a clown show. Coups are supposed to be orderly, authoritarian, not this dumb shit. It honestly seems like a grift to bilk supporters out of more money. You can just roll it back, right? Right?
[...]
This is the point. You have taken an orderly system balancing a whole lot of chaos and fucked with it. I don’t know how it’s going to explode, but I can promise you this. It’s going to explode.
This is precisely why we have elections, and why both sides accept the results. To keep the chaos at bay. The whole point is that you have a regular, ritual fight rather than fighting all the time. Once one side breaks ritual then you’re on the way to civil war. Once you break the rules then chaos ensues. What exactly happens? I don’t know. It’s chaos.
-
This is a major problem, and it won’t just go away on a technicality. I’m telling you, as someone that’s been there, you’ve already lost. It doesn’t matter if you get Trump out. He and the Republican Party are destroying trust in elections in general. This is catastrophic. You have no idea.
233 notes
·
View notes
Link
Today in the false reality of the Republican Party
To Matt Masterson, the review of 2020 ballots from Maricopa County, Ariz., that's underway is "performance art" or "a clown show," and definitely "a waste of taxpayer money."
But it's not an audit.
"It's an audit in name only," says Masterson, a former Department of Homeland Security official who helped lead the federal government's election security preparations leading up to November's election. "It's a threat to the overall confidence of democracy, all in pursuit of continuing a narrative that we know to be a lie."
By lie, he means the assertion from former President Donald Trump and some of his allies that election fraud cost him a second term in the White House.
And, Masterson says, the strategy chosen by the Arizona's Republican state Senate leaders is working as intended to undermine confidence in the outcome of last year's vote.
The process is a simple exercise in how disinformation spreads and takes hold in 2021. And experts fear it presents a blueprint for other states and lawmakers to follow, one that is already showing signs of being emulated across the country.
"Now we have a playbook out there," said Masterson, who is currently a policy fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory, "where if you don't like the results — by the way in an election that wasn't particularly close ... you just claim you didn't lose and in fact the process itself was rigged against you."
(continue reading)
A few quick words to get us up to speed: The 2020 Maricopa County (AZ) election results have already been audited multiple times. Every one of these audits were instigated by the Arizona GOP, and every time the results came back squeaky clean. No irregularities. No
Each of the previous audits were done by-the-book by respected firms, so obviously they couldn’t do that again. For the current ongoing Republican attempt to delegitimize the American system, they hired a firm with no expertise in the field led by a “stop the steal” conspiracy theorist. An on-air host from the ultra-right wing media outlet One America News not only fundraised for the latest “audit”, but organized trips for out-of-state legislators to give this exercise in fraud a veneer of respectability that it absolutely didn’t earn.
Meanwhile, the “process”, such as it is, seems designed with the specific intent of cooking the books. One of the on-the-floor observers shared her horror story with the Washington Post.
I was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed things up.
Speed doesn’t necessarily pose a problem if the audit has a process for catching and correcting mistakes. But it didn’t. Each table had three volunteers tallying the ballots, and their tally sheets were considered “done” as long as two of the three tallies matched, and the third was off by no more than two ballots. The volunteers recounted only if their tally sheets had three or more errors — a threshold they stuck to, no matter how many ballots a stack contained, whether 50 or 100. This allowed for a shocking amount of error. Some table managers told the counters to recount when there were too many errors; other table managers just instructed the counters to fix their “math mistakes.” At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling.
(full article here)
It’s almost like manufacturing errors is the point of this fiasco, delegitimizing and destabilizing the American system. It’s almost like the Republican party was presented with a stark choice by the very crazy, very violent people who make up the most motivated part of its base: Either your career goes or the electoral process does. Pick one. And united as a body, in lock step all the way down the line, the Republican Party chose the path of personal power and international humiliation over dignity, morality, and democracy. Welcome to the New Cult Of The Lost Cause, just as stupid, hate-filled and built on lies as the old one.
And for those who are brain-broken enough to genuinely believe there’s still a legal route to reinstall Donald Trump, a man whose name will forever be marked as the sorest loser in the history of American politics, Lawrence Norden, director of the Election Reform Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, has an answer for them (via ABC News), one that sadly they’ve willfully ignored over and over again, and will continue to do so.
"We already had the court battles. And in the case of the presidential election, when the totals are certified in Congress it is over. And there is no constitutional route to reverse that."
To which I add:
It’s over. For the love of God, grow up and move the fuck on.
67 notes
·
View notes
Text
Erroneous Gratitude
A Homeless Veteran Speaks
Stephen Jay Morris
10/30/2021
©Scientific Morality
He sleeps in a tent with an American flag draped over it, like the coffin of a dead soldier. His tent is situated in front of a Veterans’ hospital, somewhere in West Los Angeles, California. At his age, this an advantageous location in the off chance he should suffer a stroke or heart attack. He is in his late 70’s; he served in Vietnam. His sweat-soaked face is smeared with dust and there are bacciferous patches on his cheeks. He looks like a soldier in the midst of battle. And he is: A battle for survival.
The only unsoiled part of his body are his lucid blues eyes. They are like beams of light. He tells his interviewer: “I am roughing it in my own civilized country. The only time they care about me is when they have me put on my dress uniform and stand next to a Republican who’s running for office, so he can show off his patriotic cred. Back in the old days, these rich clowns got their golden child out of the draft with some high-priced lawyer. Me? I couldn’t even afford a pair of shoes, so I volunteered for the Vietnam war so I could have a place to sleep and food to eat. All these clowns use me for a patriotic prop. Fuck them to hell!”
He is an old man, but he doesn’t walk around with baubles of medals on his chest, suffering from false valor. He is hurting from American neglect. The greatest country in the world has turned its back on him.
Suddenly, a car passes by, its horn honking. A female shouts from the of passenger side window, “Thank you for your service!”
The homeless vet yells back, “Fuck you! I should have had joined the Viet Cong!!” He looks at the interviewer with an angry expression on his face. “All these right wing shit heads with their fake patriotism! I would love to shoot them with a Chinese AK-47! When I was in Nam, I fought with a comrade who almost got killed. After he left the Army, he joined ‘Vietnam Veterans Against The War.’ After that, he joined the Communist Workers Party. In 1976, he went to Hanoi to apologize to the Vietnamese people. I got his Decoration of Forgiveness from the government of Vietnam.” He took it out of his pocket. It was inscribed in Vietnamese. He continued, “In ‘79, he went to protest against racism and a carload of Klansmen shot him dead. I miss him so much!”
When I finished watching the interview, I questioned his words. Was this man suffering from mental illness? Was he just confabulating? That would be the job of a medical professional to determine. I sat on my couch and started to think about Ron Kovic, the famous war hero who came to my high school in 1970 and gave a moving speech about his experience in Vietnam. After that, I never thought of war in glorious terms again. I’ve since watched all sorts of YouTube videos on the subject, but this interview with the Vietnam vet really got to me.
Now, these Right wing yahoos want a civil war. Okay, you testosterone fueled rednecks! You think that war is the panacea for stopping tyranny? That illusion will stop when the enemy shoots off your balls and you walk around sounding like a seven-year-old girl. The biggest enemy of the USA is not Communism or Islamic terrorism. It is fake “patriots” living in an 18th Century fantasy while wearing Tricomb hats and shooting Muskets.
Stop it! This is reality!
4 notes
·
View notes
Link
I’m not sure if I liked Republicans better when they were secretly racist or if it’s better now that they’ve decided to wear their racism on their sleeves. Seriously, the way Tucker Carlson is going lately, I expect him to show up on the air in a Waffen SS uniform any day now. (I assume he’s already wearing the vintage Eva Braun Underoos.)
So here’s my advice to my fellow white people. Before you speak on anything related to race, or race relations, or the history of racial oppression in the U.S., or—good God in heaven—slavery, think about what you’re saying before you say it. Then, just to be safe, don’t fucking say it. Maybe listen for once.
So in episode No. 10,342 of Republicans Behaving Badly, we encounter Colorado state Rep. Ron Hanks, a white man (natch) who doesn’t think the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise is what we can all clearly see it was: an attempt to categorize Black people as something less than a full a person.
HuffPost:
The newly elected lawmaker, who was part of the insurrectionist mob that marched on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, was mistakenly introduced as Rep. Lynch during debate on a bipartisan bill to strengthen civics education in Colorado public schools. (There is a Colorado lawmaker named Mike Lynch).
“Being called Mr. Lynch might be a good thing for what I’m about to say. No, just kidding,” Hanks began.
Clearly, Hanks knew he was about to say something awful … but he did it anyway.
https://twitter.com/Marshall9News/status/1382771720675811331
Okay, really fucking terrible start. I mean, really terrible. As bad as it gets. Surely he’s reached his nadir. Everyone mark April 15, 2021, on their calendars as the day Rep. Ron Hanks bottomed out, because it can’t possibly get any wor …
Oh, shit.
“Going back to the founding, and going back to the three-fifths, and I heard the comments and I appreciate them, and I respect them. But the Three-Fifths Compromise, of course, was an effort by non-slave states to try to reduce the amount of representation that the slave states had,” he said. “It was not impugning anybody’s humanity.”
Hearing dissent in the chamber, Hanks asked, “Is this really racist to be talking about what the Three-Fifths Compromise was?”
Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut the FUCK up!
Yeah, it’s so hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that counting Black people as three-fifths of a person during slavery might just possibly be a tad dehumanizing. What’s wrong with all these woke snowflake liberals?
Needless to say, there was blowback.
“The fact that Representative Hanks thought it would be appropriate to make a ‘joke’ about lynching―especially at a time when we’re seeing a rise of racially motivated assaults on people of color across our country―is utterly despicable,” said Halisi Vinson, executive director of the Colorado Democratic Party. Vinson also noted that Hanks was attempting to “whitesplain the historical experience of Black people in our country.”
Meanwhile, Shenika Carter, chair of the African Diaspora Initiative of the Colorado Democratic Party, also issued a statement: “To call the comments made by Mr. Hanks today disgusting and ignorant would be a gross understatement. For him to downplay the indisputable, historical fact that enslaved Black people were treated less a person’s worth both in law and in practice is offensive and beneath the dignity of our state legislature. Mr. Hanks needs to apologize immediately, and he needs to educate himself before he makes ignorant comments with such recklessness in the future.”
Say, didn’t Kevin McCarthy just say, in response to the Hitler Boof Caucus that Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are starting, that the GOP is “not the party of nativist dog whistles?” He’s right. It’s the party of nativist train whistles. And we all live next to the tracks. And the train comes through every 15 minutes or so. It’s kind of hard to miss, frankly.
Again, to some degree it might be a good thing that people are getting their racism out in the open. On the other hand, the inevitable backlash doesn’t appear to teach them anything.
Maybe they should just keep their mouths shut, now and forever. We’d all sleep better.
”This guy is a natural. Sometimes I laugh so hard I cry." — Bette Midler on author Aldous J. Pennyfarthing via Twitter. Need a thorough Trump cleanse? Thanks to Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, Dear F*cking Lunatic, Dear Pr*sident A**clown and Dear F*cking Moron, you can purge the Trump years from your soul sans the existential dread. Only laughs from here on out. Click those links, yo!
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
democracy was on the ballot and it won
I am a slow-boring-of-hard-boards realist about politics. I am delightedly surprised when I get what I want AT ALL. Months and months ago, I said that my number one issue in this election was the desperate need to put the brakes on democratic backsliding in the United States. I’m not sure how to process the fact that I’ve started to get what I wanted even before the transition.
There is a real path forward for democracy reform in this country. EVEN WITH an aspiring autocrat doing everything he could to rig this election, EVEN WITH a pandemic raging, EVEN WITH malicious foreign actors still trying cause problems, EVEN THOUGH we still have not restored the Voting Rights Act, EVEN WITH all the structural imbalances built into our creaky eighteenth-century constitutional system:
Voter participation went way up! People voted over the course of several weeks from the comfort of their own homes, or on weekends, or on Election Day. And because people took responsibility and spread out their votes like that, it was safer to go to polling places. That was a huge collective choice to prevent a lot of suffering and even some deaths.
A big part of why they could do that is the enormous number of citizens who rallied to work at the polls so that the retirees who usually do the job could sit this year out.
Cities and states around the country took the time they need to count carefully.
Media gatekeepers, for the most part, had the discipline and the patience to be helpful to users about what we knew and what we didn’t. If anything, they’re erring on the side of being too cautious. This is after weeks of most media gatekeepers having the discipline to debunk a disinformation campaign by Trump’s allies and Russian backers, instead of aggressively participating in it.
Social media companies took the most aggressive countermeasures yet against election misinformation.
The person who got the most votes is also the person who won the election, which is pretty cool!
That is a huge improvement from EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Just in terms of how well the election itself was administered, my only major criticism is that we still did not do something called risk-limiting audits. In the case of an election, audits are basically a carefully calibrated statistical smell test. They’re not a recount. They are a reliable and cost-effective way of figuring out if a recount or some other type of scrutiny should be done for the sake of public confidence in the results – and that makes them a cost-effective deterrence against any bad actors who are considering sabotage. Audits are important whether an election goes your way or not, just like smoke detectors are important whether your building catches fire or not.
But that absolutely should not take away from the fact that we overcame all the new problems that were introduced this year and took some big steps toward solving a lot of old ones – despite the best efforts of Trump and all his enablers. Imagine what we could do under an administration that is helping democracy revitalization instead of aggressively hindering it.
The easiest way for us to make the most comprehensive change would be to win the Senate, which would allow a Biden administration to pass a revitalized Voting Rights Act and restore legitimacy to the federal courts. If you have any time or money to spare in the next few weeks, consider sharing it with the two excellent Democratic candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs.
We should be realistic about the situation: we’re probably not going to get to do it the easy way, at least, not until after the midterms. But we’re not going to be doing it the hard way any more. The hard way is what we’re doing now. We’re about to get a Department of Justice that opposes civil rights violations and enforces what’s left of the current Voting Rights Act. The intelligence and military cybersecurity units are going to be able to work with the administration instead of around it. And we aren’t going to have to deal with a 24/7 fusillade of lies and voter intimidation coming from the Oval Office. To spin out the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” metaphor: we’ve been running a marathon uphill carrying forty-pound backpacks. We’ve reached the top where the path levels out, and someone just took our bags and gave us protein bars.
And while we have our protein bars, let’s look around, because the view is as clear and as beautiful as it’s going to get. Donald Trump had every intention of wrecking American democracy, and the entire Republican party had every intention of supporting his aspiring dictatorship. And, while Trump himself is and always has been a clown, the person occupying the Oval Office is the most powerful person on the planet. Actually, that’s an understatement. Since Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our technology has grown stronger and our government has concentrated more and more power in the executive branch, which means that every holder of that office has arguably been the most powerful person in the history of the world. Every other holder of that office has at least wanted to think of himself as using that power for the advancement of democracy and humanity. Donald Trump affirmatively tried to use all that power to entrench himself there permanently.
We stopped him. We stopped him peacefully. We stopped him without further harming the many vulnerable people he holds hostage in a hundred different ways. We stopped him not by elevating an equal-but-opposite charismatic demagogue for a two-men-enter-one-man-leaves smackdown, but by building a vibrant, heterogenous coalition and finding competent, experienced, principled leaders who respect that coalition in all its raucous power. We stopped him, in short, by choosing to do democracy.
That feels good today and it’s enormously consequential. It is also proof of concept. It is something that can happen, because it has happened.
Something that political scientists and democracy advocates have been saying for the past few years is that Trump has been a propaganda gold mine for dictators. They use him as a cautionary tale against liberal democracy or even against hoping that things can ever get better: see, even the Americans are no better than we are! Dictators can artificially insulate themselves from accountability in the short term, which makes them ill-equipped to think about backfire. Train your people’s eyes on the aspiring American autocrat, and they can all see his humiliating fall.
To our sisters and brothers around the world, from Idlib to Hong Kong, from São Paolo to Moscow, and along every wide country road in between: this is the only true thing your oppressors have ever told you. We are no better than you are. We are no more suited for or entitled to liberation. Look what we have done. Imagine what you can do.
There’s kind of a false dichotomy going on where people swung from “Trump is going to successfully rig the election for himself” pessimism to “oh, Biden only ousted an incumbent by a freakishly large margin, it wasn’t an immediate electoral college landslide, why did Trump get so close.” This take has set in before deep blue California and New York have come close to completing their mail-in ballot counts, which tells you that it isn’t serious, but it’s also beside the point. Trump succeeded in making the election unfair. If he hadn’t illegitimately put a whole lot of thumbs on the scale in his favor, if we’d actually had the free and fair election we deserved, I think he probably would have lost in a landslide. We did the work and showed up in numbers that were ultimately too big to rig. That led to victory, although not a victory you can quantifiably measure against the dozen or so American elections that were more or less free and fair. That doesn’t mean the rigging didn’t happen or have any impact. It means we beat the spread. As the world’s most prominent train enthusiast once said, that is a big fucking deal.
A government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. One day soon, it may even exist. That is our charge. That is our choice.
So take a moment to recharge. Enjoy the view. Breathe. We got work to do.
18 notes
·
View notes
Text
Republicans are Red
Democrats are Blue
Neither one of them
Give a fuck about you
or you or you or you
Just in case you side with one party or the other.
Total shit show, you retarded ass clowns.
7 notes
·
View notes
Text
What “The Dark Knight” says about our bad politics
Waaay back in the summer of 2008, me and my dad drove up to Northern California to attend San Jose State University’s freshman orientation.
It was a long drawn out process where first-year students basically were told and shown a bunch of things they would forget and relearn by their first day anyways and culminated with all of us spending one night in the campus dorms so we could all get a taste of the “campus life” experience.
I wanted it to end badly for a couple reasons. Being an introvert, I was not comfortable sharing a room with anyone, let alone a stranger, for a night but more importantly, I was being kept from the biggest movie premiere of the year that day: “The Dark Knight.”
As soon as I woke up the next morning, I rushed my dad to find the nearest theater and purchased tickets immediately for a late-night screening. I was already a huge fan of “Batman Begins” but every trailer to Christopher Nolan’s epic follow-up indicated we were in for an even bigger blockbuster than before and I was beyond pumped.
(Me getting the fuck off campus to watch “The Dark Knight” that day.)
Two and a half hours later I left the theater blown away by the experience. “The Dark Knight” was everything, at the time, I was hoping for in a comic book movie; angsty, dark, edgy (all things I thought I was as a teen), cinematically sharp, thrilling, a fantastic score once again by the legendary Hans Zimmer, and fulfilled just about every fanboy wet dream I had at the time for a perfect Batman movie.
To this day it remains the most satisfying theatrical experience I’ve ever had seeing a movie, not that it’s my favorite movie of all-time anymore, mind you, but that I have never gone into a movie with such high expectations and had them blown away quite like that since.
(Conversely, this^ was my most disappointing experience...)
I’m a different person now, of course. If you were to wipe my memory of the film and had to watch it again today I doubt I would have the same fanboygasm I had then as the cynical 30-year-old I am now but I’ll argue that “The Dark knight” still remains a high mark, if not the standard, for comic book movies today.
That said, parts of this film have definitely not aged well. Visually the film still holds up, the action is still exciting, the performances are all stellar (though Bale’s Batman voice is still bad) but what hasn’t aged well, for me, are the movie’s politics.
“The Dark Knight” is, of course, a post 9/11 movie, in fact, it’s arguably the definitive one as its pop-cultural footprint dwarfs pretty much all within its sub-genre. This Nolan sequel deals heavily in themes of terrorism with its iconic villain The Joker, played maniacally by the late great Heath ledger, wreaking havoc across Gotham with various explosive devices. Though the Clown Prince is more an anarchist than someone with an ideology, like those in Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the results of his beliefs/non-beliefs are more or less the same; cause pandemonium and fear in the masses. Batman, representing the power of justice and order, does battle with this in a war to save Gotham’s soul and again this is still a damn entertaining and thrilling story.
(Seriously, it’s still a rock solid entry in the comic book movie genre.)
But where the film’s 9/11 politics become problematic is toward the end of the film when the Joker begins his final act to plunge Gotham into unstoppable chaos. Batman becomes desperate; The Joker has eluded him at every turn, always two steps ahead of him, escaping justice no matter what Bruce Wayne does so he concocts a plan to finally to locate and stop the Joker for good.
He creates an elaborate sonar system using every cell phone in Gotham, effectively creating a massive surveillance state to spy on its citizens in order to locate the Joker.
(And it’s the only time we have ever got the real Batman eyes on screen, damn it!)
Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman, appropriately calls this out telling him he’s wrong and that he cannot support this but Batman insists that it’s the only way. Fox reluctantly agrees and tells him he’ll resign once this is over as he can’t morally support such a system. The sonar, of course, works and Batman is able to stop the Clown Prince once and for all and upon Fox entering his name into the sonar computer the program dissolves and is deleted presumably for good.
This is of course to wash Batman’s hands of this deed to the audience. Our protagonist knows this is wrong, the audience is told it is wrong but by ending the surveillance he shows he would never abuse such a program, that sometimes good men have to do terrible things to defeat evil and that makes it ok.
For years, as a bleeding heart liberal (at the time) who grew up in the Bush years but loved the hell out of this movie, I tried to reconcile with this part of the story because Batman was the hero. I thought maybe this kind of action is ok because if the “good guy” is in charge bad stuff is fine because he/she won’t abuse such power. That’s real justice, right?
The problem is in the real world, at the top, there really aren’t any good guys and they are counting on you to believe that they are when they get a hold of such power because that’s how we are programmed.
The Patriot Act, which was the signature Bush-era reform post 9/11, created our current surveillance state. In the interest of national security and ensuring those “dern turrists don’t go killing lil’ Timmy riding his tricycle out in Des Moines, Iowa” our elected leaders, both republican and democratic (make no mistake), effectively signed away our constitutional rights to “ensure our safety” by spying on us basically without warrants. The proponents proudly claimed its necessity in fighting the “War on Terrorism” and those naysayers either shouldn’t worry “if you have nothing to hide” or worse were un-American Taliban sympathizers.
For progressives, of course, this was an evil violation of our civil liberties but for many conservatives, this wasn’t a big deal. They are just trying to keep us safe after all.
But conveniently ignored by many on the left still today is the complicity they had in bringing about this era in warrantless surveillance. Yes, this policy started under Bush, of course, but it continued to be re-upped through the Obama administration and the Trump administration, not to mention revolving majorities in the House and Senate, showing no matter who was in charge they all liked the idea of keeping an eye on all of us with or without reason.
Considering the Patriot Act was made to win the “War on Terrorism” our leaders were never going to relinquish this power anyways because you can’t win a war on terrorism. Terrorism is not a country or a people, it’s an ideology behind many different ideologies. The US, no matter how you see it, be it as liberators or oppressors, will always have enemies and that’s all the reason they need to keep this power it seems.
Having the data on our lives mined like oil can easily be used against us in a variety of ways regardless of if any of us have terroristic or even criminal intentions. But for many in this country, it was only a problem if the wrong guy wielded that power. As soon as their “good guy” got in though, suddenly it was no big deal. I wonder why...
“The Dark Knight” puts forth a problematic view on who can and should wield supreme power, that even terrible choices can be made as long as the “right” person is the one making them.
Liberals are notorious for justifying them when it’s one of them who does it.
It’s a lie. A lie that both parties use to their advantage because they want you believe everything they do can be justified because you happen to be a part of their party; the “good guys” once again. But there is something extra cynical about the way liberals wield it as they parade themselves around as paragons and moral pillars against the Jokers of the Republican party.
For all the platitudes liberals give, that would make some superhero speeches seem benign, they wear masks about as well as the vigilantes do but not for the same reasons. When confronted by this blatant hypocrisy, liberal voters justify all kinds of horrible things as long as the other “bad guy” isn’t the one doing it. For all the shit Bush gets, and rightfully so, for plunging us into a military, financial, and humanitarian quagmire in the Middle East, Obama gets almost zero real pushback by liberals for effectively drone bombing the hell out of the same people. During these past three years Trump has more or less allowed ICE to run rampant on immigrant communities sure and liberals have been critical, again as they should, but who made the cages they were thrown into and who deported more of them during his first three years in office than Trump did?
(And once again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, Andrew Cuomo is NOT your fucking friend...)
Liberals often like to present themselves as the moral purveyors of good in the face of conservative opposition and they use it to their advantage to more or less do many of the same foul things those with R’s next to their name do. Sure, not all their actions are equally as evil but even then, we rarely truly hold either of our leaders feet to the fire because we believe their actions are somehow better because they have a “D” next to their name.
These horrific policies and actions will never see justice as long as we keep justifying them because the “right” person is behind them.
No, this is not an all sides are equally bad take. That discussion requires more nuance and for a different time, but I will say both sides are varying degrees of bad that should be taken seriously instead of not at all and can’t be pushed aside again and again and again because “the other guys are worse.”
We are running into the same situation today as our presidential election features a credibly accused rapist, sexual predator, who supports Bush-era tax cuts, who takes money from major corporate lobbyists, who is against Medicare for All, has open disdain for millenials, and not only supports but openly bragged about the aforementioned The Patriot Act.
Hmmm, sounds an awful lot like someone we know, huh?
You could argue that one of these two men mitigates, or even vastly mitigates, harm if in office and I’m not here to necessarily scold you for making what you feel is morally the least awful choice but the point still remains; we are justifying evil again because our “good guy” is in charge.
Being liberal, just on its own, does not vastly minimize the problematic nature of a bad person.
Regardless of how you feel about this election and what choice you plan to make this November (and again, I’m not here to tell you what to do), bad things and bad policies will be continued to be enacted by bad people because that’s what choices we’ve been given. There isn’t a good one and the most vulnerable will be hurt the most by it regardless of who wins. There is a reason so many are disillusioned with voting and it’s not just voter suppression laws.
I can already hear some of you screaming “OH MER GERD pURiTy TeStS,” but this is far more cynical a standard we have than simply choosing a less than perfect candidate. Many are already making rather tone-deaf comments about people being “privileged” for choosing not to compromise their morals anymore. What’s “privileged” is voting for the guy who will do less harm for you but ultimately still disproportionately harm more people of color no matter who is in office.
(The country and the world can really begin to truly heal when a Democrat is in charge of one of these Freedom Machines once again!)
Yes, I might agree that one is probably a net positive for the world at this point but to act like someone choosing to not participate anymore in what is effectively a never-ending cycle I can’t say I blame them either. At some point, our society has to draw a real line in the sand on these things with our leaders and force a more moral standard for our government instead of the status quo.
We can’t go on this endless “pragmatic” path picking “the lesser of two evils” until we gradually just become evil. You can make the argument that maybe the time isn’t now, and you might be right but when? These folks at the top are COUNTING on us accepting circumstances and justifying terrible beliefs and actions over and over again because of the state of our politics.
“The Dark Knight” believes that sometimes bad things must be done to defeat evil but the real world can be so much less cynical if we stopped compromising on our beliefs. It’s not entirely too late for us to do the right thing. We can’t go on forever letting bad behavior go because the “good guy” will be the one doing it instead of the other one.
Taking money from corrupt billionaires is wrong. Extra-judicially drone bombing the Middle East endlessly is wrong. Throwing migrants in cages like fucking animals is wrong. Rape and sexual assault are wrong. Mass warrantless surveillance is wrong. Doesn’t matter if its Batman or fucking Superman doing any of these things; immoral behavior cannot and should not be ever justified.
Otherwise, we really will live long enough to see ourselves become the villain...
Looking forward to the comments on this one...
#The Dark Knight#Batman#The Joker#joker#Christopher Nolan#DC comics#comics#comic books#super heroes#9/11#Terrorism#politics#Biden#Joe Biden#Democrats#Republicans#liberals#conservatives#leftist#bernie sanders#socialism#medicare for all#drone strikes#iraq#afghanistan#war#political#neoliberalism#neo liberal#centrist
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
Poets Diary
I haven’t read President Obama’s new book, but ive seen excerpts and it discussed within Left media on YouTube,
and I have to say,
the man, has no style to himself whatsoever, and he’s mastered this weird form of articulation that in essence removes his balls, he talks in the faux politeness of the middle classes, of which he curiously enough mentions he and his wife derive from,
look at his imaging, what black guy, do you know, has absolutely no style to him, from his basic haircut, to his basic absolutely basic manner of dress, I find him in that to be completely annoying and an embarrassment,
he is Man as a Negation of self, he negated his African American culture, via his basic haircut and basic clothing style, he negated the leftist thinkers he admittedly only studied to get laid, which to me, shows that mans character, I juxtapose that with myself, when ive read feminist books, leftist books, and so on, I was reading that shit, because im in pain, and I want to change this world, im not reading that shit to fuck women, what a fucking clown he is, for admitting to that, what dare I say, a white man he is, for saying some shit like that, because a real black man, comes to those works, in order to liberate his people, and himself, to understand the imposed insanity, of the hood, and his family,
I despise him, truthfully, and his wife, who mostly you see with her hair flat ironed, again look at these peoples imaging !
back to how he speaks, the man is the other side of the coin, in regards to Trump, he performs his liberal centrism which is in essence he never says anything substantive by saying many things superficially, again this reveals his character, as a man without BALLS, he’s essentially a eunuch, a spiritual asexual, of the highest order, in fact I'd put 1,000 dollars that he and his wife don’t have sex, and that in fact, he's sexually neutral, again, he’s Man as a negation of life, which is what liberal centrism is,
he’s also a coward, an aggressive coward, which I believe is tied to his Sexual-Psychology, he as a liberal centrist, make into a virtue being weak, and self effacing, how he of all people as a black man, expected republicans to play along with him is ridiculous, he talks about inviting them over for super bowl parties, and so on, his insistence on “bi partisanship” is insane, its a denial of the material reality of the political sphere, one in which, the republicans became a far right, aggressive political block, determined by race and maintaining the class structure of this conservative republic,
his lack of understanding of his role as a liberal amidst a republic system, with small democratic elements, with capitalism, is astonishing to me, in that it reveals how uneducated he is, that the liberals of his generation, have no historical understanding of their role, and are simply careerists, and just want to make money, and perhaps achieve celebrity and fame,
that in itself isn’t a surprise to me, because ive encountered people like this, in college, they’re all universally asexual btw, which seems to be the psychology behind liberal centrism and Neo liberalism, to be this way, one has to essentially negate and deny the material world, in pursuit of the superficial,
1 note
·
View note
Text
Trump isn’t the Problem; ergo Impeachment is no solution
Got an email from Common Cause this morning. It was one of those fund-raising emails disguised as a “poll”. This one started off like this:
“Tara, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done to get us this far.
Back in July, when Common Cause first called for an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, the conventional wisdom was against us. House leadership didn’t want to conduct an impeachment inquiry, because they feared it would impact their 2020 election prospects.
But you didn’t give up -- and your consistent, powerful advocacy paid off this week as public hearings into Trump’s impeachment began. This couldn’t have happened without you.
Now, millions of Americans are watching as multiple distinguished public servants bravely come forward to describe a dangerous pattern of wrongdoing -- bribery, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice -- by President Trump.
Tara, how the American people respond to this will determine what kind of democracy we leave for our children’s future.
All week, I’ve been hearing from Common Cause members like you who want to know what Common Cause plans to do next. And as one of our most active members, I wanted to get your input -- because we’ll be counting on your engagement and dedication to see it through.
Based on what you know, do you think President Trump should be removed from office? Click here to instantly record your vote, and if you’d like, tell us why once you've voted:
YES
NO
Needless to say, I voted “No”, and replied with the following:
“First of all, I am NOT one of your most active members, let’s get that lie out of the way. I’ve done NOTHING towards getting Trump impeached, because I think it’s a fool’s errand.
I wouldn’t waste time and taxpayer money impeaching Trump in the House when we all know it will go nowhere in the Senate. It is a futile act, which will be nothing more than a distraction.
Lawmakers are paid to create and improve laws, not to throw hissy-fit sore loser tantrums because you put up such an unlikable and arrogant candidate in 2016 that she couldn’t even beat a colossal clown of an idiot like Trump.
It’s not Trump’s fault that HRC didn’t visit certain states. Nor is it Trump’ fault that 46% of registered voters were not inspired to vote.
Get over your whining. We all know Hillary is STILL trying to save face, and your organization is controlled by her and her minions.
I’m not saying Trump is blameless - I despise the man. What I’m saying is that trying to impeach Trump is a fruitless effort that will not bring the desired results. He will not be removed from office. All that will be accomplished is that a lot of time and money will be wasted, the public will be led away from being concerned about political developments that should be concerning them during that time period, and the effort won’t even help defeat Trump in 2020.
Then there’s the other elephant in the room. If Trump gets removed from office (which is completely unlikely), why in hell would you want to replace him with a bigger warmonger?
Pence is a homophobic, racist Bible stomper who wants to replace the Constitution with the Bible! Not only that, but he is more bellicose than Trump, and would never make any peaceful overtures to foreign leaders, like Trump has done from time to time.
I’m an ex-Democrat, a “peacenik” if you will. I find the new breed of Democratic policies of approving and orchestrating bloodthirsty attacks on sovereign nations that pose no threat to the safety of our people to be abhorrent and completely goes against my beliefs about what policies should matter to all politicians, be they “Democrats” OR “Republicans”.
I didn’t leave the Democratic Party - the party left me. Impeaching Trump is a massive waste of time and money, and it’s only purpose should be to protect and serve the American people, but we all know that that’s not what’s happening here.
There’s a great sticker I saw once. It shows two different identical piles of dog poo. The caption is,
‘Democrats? Republicans? Same shit, different piles.’
That’s how I see the duopoly. No matter who is in power, the United States will continue to illegally invade other countries. It will not stop if Trump is impeached.
We are a rogue nation, supplying the world with arms in order to help them kill innocents. Our terroristic foreign policy will not stop if Trump is impeached. The world will not suddenly right itself if Trump is removed from office. Laws will still be created that benefit only the 1% and screw the 99%.
Things didn’t go wrong starting with Trump. Obama dropped a bomb every 26 minutes of his entire Presidency. Trump now drops one every 12 minutes. Both are heinous acts that make me ashamed to be an American.
It was Obama, not Trump who took away our right of Habeas Corpus.
It was Obama who deported more immigrants than all previous Presidents combined.
It was Obama who tortured Chelsea Manning, and made a fool of himself downing a plane with a foreign President on board, in an effort to capture Edward Snowden, a whistleblower hero who revealed twisted truths about our government.
It was Obama who sat silent during Standing Rock while American citizens were tortured by American “officers of the peace” paid by our taxes to do the bidding of a foreign oil company, to oversee the completion of a project that does not serve or benefit the American people one iota.
It was Obama who opened up the Arctic for drilling TWICE.
It was Obama who signed over 1000 new leases for underwater drilling in the Gulf.
It was Obama who signed contracts to build 30 new nuclear plants.
It was Obama who said not a word while HRC sold 20% of our Uranium stores to Russia.
It was Obama who didn’t say peep as the Opioid crisis rose to massive proportions.
It was Obama who never admonished cops for killing unarmed black Americans.
It was Obama who signed the Monsanto act.
It was Obama who took Hillary’s advice and destroyed Libya.
It was Obama who bailed out the banks and let millions of Americans lose their homes.
It was Obama who never filed charges against the banksters who destroyed our economy.
It was Obama who orchestrated taking down all Occupy camps simultaneously.
It was Obama who refused to bring charges against the previous administration for war crimes they committed.
And it was Obama who tried to start a war in the Ukraine on his FUCKING FINAL DAY IN OFFICE!!
Trump is an extension of the problem, not the cause. Our politicians are ALL bought by big money, and that will not change if Trump is impeached.
So what’s the damn point?
#Trump#impeachment#politics#nancy pelosi#democrats#2020#election#Bernie Sanders#tulsi2020#elizabeth warren
4 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
greenleaves69
Untitled
prosze-pokochaj-mnie
alone
themadron
Untitled
jollyelf
Possibly Rebranding
kayjayeyeoh
4 the Untitled