RawrTigerlily

@rawrtigerlily.bsky.social

4103 Followers 4589 Following

Progressive living in Georgia, but always Minnesota Nice until you push me. I have a husband & an adult son. ^We had a senior cat who passed away. Can we make this a better place? I'm trying.

The rich man is projecting. When he calls others parasites and vermin and other words meant to strip them of their humanity, he understands on some level that he is talking not about some hated poor black or brown person, but about himself. He knows somewhere within him – somewhere deep and dark and unexplored – that he's the one who has a deeply and undeniably parasitic relationship with American society, and the world more generally. It's his parasitic tendencies that have made him an historically important figure, something more than his casually-fashy Silicon Valley counterparts. The rich man sucks the world dry every hour of every day while poisoning minds with the fascist slop he elevates on his propaganda platform.
A screen grab of a substack comment written by me: I have a similar disdain for the people on bluesky right now with their underwear in a twist over “DSA candidates” as if we don’t have fascists murdering people in the streets and a government willing to lie about public health/food safety for a measly $1 million. It’s all a little too of the same exact pitch for me to take it as anything more than a paid influence campaign. I hang out with a lot of dems in real life. Even “normie” dems, and none of them has ever clutched their pearls this hard over a DSA candidate. Spare me if I’m not concerned that candidates organizing people power from the ground up might finally beat the candidates taking Super PAC money to protect the status quo. My spidey sense says the ultra wealthy are worried their money will stop being able to buy electoral success. And to that I say, “good. And fuck you.”
Democratic voters are not, as it turns out, completely dense. As I discussed here, the party base has been increasingly skeptical of Israel and Zionism. In 2016, 43% of Democrats sympathized more with Israel compared to only 29% saying they sympathized more with Palestinians; in 2018, that number had slipped to 27% of Democrats who said they sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians vs. 25% who said they sympathized with the Palestinians. in 2026, after this most recent horrific stage of Israel’s genocidal policies, only`17% of Democratic voters sympathize with Israelis while 67% of Democrats sympathize with the Palestinians. Over a decade, supporting Israel went from a +14 issue for Democrats to -50.
Essentially the message was "pander to toxic masculinity, machismo, to a white male fantasy of manhood." Why? This seemed to be an illogic in which somehow the white male vote counted for more than other votes. It was really about white men mattering more than others. In a way they do – they hold disproportionate power in this country, in terms of money and position, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to electoral politics. But if the Democratic Party is committed to democracy, it has to be committed to equality regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and committed to universal human rights. Also white men already have a party devoted exclusively to their needs and fantasies.
A lightly edited except of Thomas Jefferson’s wring, inscribed on the Southeast Portico of the Jefferson Monument; "I am  not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Jefferson to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval), July 12, 1816
A cartoon of the founding fathers around a table, and one of them says in a speech bubble, “How about in 249 years we try having a king again only this time he’s really fucking dumb” Credit Jesse Duquette
But if we shift the question to not be about the last 250 years but the next, then we have a choice. Will the next page in American history be written by those of us who love or hate other people? We could really muck this up. Or, put more gracefully, we might struggle to climb this current social change mountain, because the status quo has all the money and power and if history is a guide, those forces will cling to current hierarchies with all their might. They’re going to be so nasty, you all. Nasty and cruel, in way that will require us to get far better at protecting each other. But they’ve chosen their path, which means we need to commit to our own. As we speak, one movement is tilting towards care and the other is churlishly hurtling into a reactionary abyss. They control the institutions, but we have the momentum. And that may not be enough to dramatically change society in the short term, but it’s more than enough to build our ranks, especially thanks to unforced errors on the right. Don’t believe me? Pretend that you had no preexisting ideological bent. Whose movement seems like a better time— the one with the potlucks and parties in the street, or the one that hates everybody and looks like J.D. Vance? It’s time to push those vibes further. More care. More fun. Doors swung even wider. Bread and roses and art and music and everybody finding the place that makes them light up the most. Every invite helps. Every welcome mat begets another. Every celebration makes it a little easier to believe.
And the message must be rooted in material reality. Hungary’s pro-democracy opposition didn’t win in 2025 by running on democracy as an abstraction. They won on corruption. On healthcare. On economic stagnation. On what sixteen years of authoritarian consolidation had been costing ordinary Hungarians in their daily lives. Seventy-nine percent of voters turned out despite a captured media, a gerrymandered electoral system, and the active intervention of foreign heads of state working to keep the authoritarian in power. And they turned out because the opposition made the material cost of authoritarianism visible and concrete. People do not mobilize to defend institutions. They mobilize when they can see, in concrete terms, what is being taken from them and their families.
“A man takes responsibility, a man upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors, a man does what’s right, even when no one is watching. “And here’s what real men don’t do: They don’t lie and cheat their way through life. They don’t sell their soul to the highest bidder. They don’t steal from other people in order to enrich themselves. And so I’ve said before and I will keep saying that “Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves. And so I welcome this debate about what it means to be a man, and I don’t think Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz are in a position to tell anybody what a real man is.”
The long war against public purpose succeeded in changing policies over time. But it also changed the emotional meaning of public life. It taught people to distrust the very structures that might protect them. It taught them to experience dependency as shame, solidarity as weakness, expertise as domination In, and public investment as a racket being run against them. Fear makes people vulnerable to seeking authoritarian protection. Hate gives them a place to put their pain. Greed turns extraction into virtue. Corruption teaches them that the public world is fake anyway, so only power matters.
And that's exactly what's wasting my time: all these marketers, publicists, founders, and "creatives" beguiled by the promise of optimizing their own mid tasks (or by the idea that they could replace the marketers and publicists altogether). They're using it to write an email they don't want to write — and that email, in turn, becomes an email no one wants to read. A mid technology transforms reticence, laziness, or lack of skill into someone else's problem. Of course people find it alluring. In this way, mid-tech A.I. facilitates and expands a particularly American style of individualism: do what's right, faster, or seemingly more profitable for you, with little mind to the way those actions affect others. The tool itself is alienated not only from the reality of its production (the thousands and thousands and thousands of data centers eating small towns across the country) but the reality of its reception: how someone feels when they receive a pitch like the ones at the beginning of this essay, devote time to grading an essay written with the help of A.I., deal with a looping ChatBot attempting to provide Customer Service, or sift through hundreds of slop results after a simple Google Search. Whoever wrote that Mira prompt — the one accidentally included at the beginning of the pitch to me — has certainly been annoyed, at some point, by slop. But something convinced them that their A.I. use is not, could never be, mid. In the this case, the A.I. itself isn't hallucinating. But the person prompting it is delusional.
People want to send all the pitches to all the people. They want to have the "best" advice synthesized from all advice ever given. They want everything, absolutely everything, in the image — with no attention to style, space, perspective, or scale. They want to spend less time getting more, and in the process, they're making more work — more clutter, more slop, more crap — for everyone in their wake. An A.I.-booster will tell you that this waste is all just part of the A.I. learning curve: sometimes you've got to let the system learn, make mistakes, hallucinate, and/or slop around before it can achieve its transformative potential. But I'm not the one opting-in to this time suck; all these people clogging my inbox are. I'm also increasingly convinced that the vast majority of A.I. technology is destined to be what economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo call "so-so," or what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls "mid tech": flashy, ostensibly useful, and ultimately annoying. McMillan Cottom argues that yes, of course, A.I. can be transformative, even life-changing — when people with a lot of training (in both the field to which they're applying the A.I. technology and the A.I. technology itself) work diligently to ask the right questions. But most people are using the tech for "far more mundane purposes": "A.I. spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants. That's a mid revolution of mid tasks."
A statista graph showing the top 10% in aggregate holds nearly 70% of American wealth. Leaving only 30% for the bottom 90%.
Trump at some level knows he’s failing politically, cognitively and physically and wants to take it all down with him, the way that ancient rulers were buried with their slaughtered horses and servants. He’s also, as mortality breathes down his neck, trying to grab some immortality by sticking his name on buildings and park passes and currency. But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were. It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen
A photo of two huge clematis flowers. They are about 6 inches wide, with a star petal configuration. The petals are a pink with a hot pink strip down the center of each one. The center of the flower is a pale creamy color with abundant long pink eyelash like stamens.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” ― Lyndon B. Johnson
If we’re talking about counternarratives that can lead to positive change, one of the defining counternarratives of the last few years could fall under the umbrella of “the resistance.” I would like to hear your perspective on whether any of the strategies against President Trump and Trumpism have been counterproductive. That is, if calling him or the movement fascist, sexist, racist pushed people into their respective corners? That’s the least of our problems. They are racist, they are authoritarian, they are misogynist, they are homophobic, and tiptoeing around it protects them and not the targets of the hatred and discrimination. I get so tired of the idea that progressives have gone too far in asserting that every human being deserves human rights when people are being shot in the streets of Minneapolis. We are facing such horrific brutality. Politeness is not really the problem. I think we got into this situation in part by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was more important to be polite than to call things by their true names. There’s a wonderful historian and scholar of nonviolence named George Lakey who says polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong.
Was listening to the audiobook of "The Ministry for the Future" today and heard this nugget: "The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women... If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred." It goes on to expound about narcissistic rage, and that some people are afflicted with such disregard for every "other" that they cannot accept a world where they lose their privilege and status, and would rather the world end than to go on without them being in a position of influence, or even simply without their existence. So as much as many of us are wondering how much of this new war in the Middle East is driven by a need to "forget" the Epstein files, and how much of it is a favor to Trump's business partners in the region... how much of this could also just be about such a profoundly selfish, malignant narcissist facing the obviousness of his impending death having an acute impetus to make sure whatever is left behind is completely broken beyond repair?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
Yes, women don't want to be property, so they choose not to be with men who believe they are property. And patriarchal men holding such beliefs decry women who would withhold themselves over nothing more than political beliefs—beliefs these men think women should find completely unimportant, yet which men also hold as so fundamental to their identities that they seem unwilling to change them, no matter how isolating those beliefs are. Many of these men, rather than fixing their hearts, will lie about their beliefs, which makes women, who still would rather not have companionship at all at the cost of their personhood, increasingly wary of men. And I'm told that this makes men feel as if they are being treated like the bad guys, irredeemable, isolated, unlovable. This is a problem. What I am inviting you to contemplate is how frequently it is treated as a problem for men, caused by women, to be solved by everyone else. I'm inviting you to contemplate how seldom it's being treated as a problem caused by men who have never even started the work they need to do on themselves. All this makes women lonely, too, you know. It's just that, increasingly, women are finding that they would rather suffer loneliness than the far greater suffering that attends being owned by a man who sees them more as an acquisition than a person. They'd rather not be around somebody with a near-pathological need to dominate, and they'd rather not be dominated. Meanwhile men are finding out that they'd rather suffer loneliness than learn how to treat women as human beings instead of possessions, because treating a woman as a possession is domination, which means that it is seen as not just masculine, but core to masculinity. Treating a woman as a human being is gay, which is the least masculine thing of all.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." -Lyndon B. Johnson
People whose minds aren't captured by supremacist domination wonder why it is that people who have more wealth and power than they can ever use themselves nevertheless pursue even more, no matter how much other people suffer as a result. The conclusion I have arrived at is that this formulation, while understandable, has matters reversed: Wealthy people don't seem to think of money as money. It's certainly not lack for material needs or luxury that drives them. At a certain point of wealth, what is being pursued seems not to be wealth, but the ability to make other people suffer. What's being pursued is immunity from human decency; the ability and even the right to be depraved with impunity. Depravity is, to the mind consumed by the billionaire mentality, a flex. It's the prize. It seems the whole reason for the money in the first place. The more you can make other people suffer, the more the rules don't apply to you. The worse a crime you can commit, and the more blatantly you can do it, the more you can demonstrate your impunity to the most foundational laws of human decency. I think this is why child rape is so popular; it's not so much a proclivity for younger people, it's a crime universally agreed upon as so terrible as to be unforgivable. To the mind consumed by the billionaire mentality, to rape children with impunity is how you show beyond doubt that you are a person of influence. The emails sure stayed chummy, didn't they? Child rape is the sort of thing they hint at or even talk about openly in emails and birthday cards. One wonders what other taboos they commit that they don't put in writing.
Now is not the time for half-measures. Now is not the time to accept phony pseudo-conciliatory gestures from the regime, or from the party that claims to oppose fascism. ICE is killing people both in the open and out of sight. Their terror continues unabated. They continue to defy the law, invade our homes, and attack those who dare to question them. Ground yourself in this difficult reality — refuse the allure of false hope in the face of a real, deadly fascist onslaught. Now more than ever we need a clear head, and honesty with ourselves about this crisis. False solutions, like telling ICE to not kidnap U.S. citizens (something they’re already not supposed to be doing in the first place) is not enough. The rug needs to be pulled out from under them, their funding must be stripped, and those who claim to lead us cannot be allowed to settle for anything less.
They are lying murderers, not because I don't like them, or because I disagree with their politics, but because their leaders are sending paramilitary death squads into our cities to commit premeditated acts of state terror and murder against our civilian populations and then telling lies about it, and their rank and file are lending their spiritual and financial and political support to the effort. One can't deal with a problem properly unless one deals with the reality of the problem, and one can't deal with a reality unless it can be spoken. So I speak the grim reality, not because I would live in a world of abusive violence where might makes right, but because I do live in such a world, and I think it is a problem, and I would like to change that. Speaking the truth about an abuser—what they are doing, what they are saying, what their false words and violent actions mean about how we ought to understand them and deal with them—is taken as abuse itself, is taken as violent intent or even violence itself against the abusers, is taken as a blasphemous sin against the abuser's indestructible presumed innocence, is taken to mean that you are preventing the abuser from ever attaining redemption, is taken as all this and more. This is how I can tell that it is a cult of abuse we are dealing with, and a culture of abuse that we are living in.
Wow, tens of thousands. It’s been growing exponentially. As of this morning, there are 12,000 people across Minneapolis on the multi-neighborhood rapid responses. That’s 3.46 percent of the adult population of Minneapolis, and that’s people who can tolerate these giant Signal group chats with a thousand people—most can’t. I would say there’s at least three times that many people in their individual neighborhood groups, block groups, and school patrol groups doing rapid response and ICE watch. And then I would double that number again for the folks who are giving rides, bringing food to people’s homes, going grocery shopping for targeted communities, doing fundraising for rent and other material support. At this point, I don’t know a single person in Minneapolis who isn’t involved in this work.
rawrtigerlily rawrtigerlily 14m Edited This the thing that all the normie white people who still think immigration enforcement at any cost is still in their interests don’t seem to understand. Once you throw out due process and the 1st, 4th, & 5th amendments “for those people” you have effectively given them the freedom to throw it out for everyone. The burden of proof is supposed to be on the government before they infringe on your privacy & freedom. Not an afterthought once they already broke your car window or busted in your door. Random dickheads in camo are not supposed to be allowed to demand to see your papers. Women in particular should be WAY more skeptical that random thugs should get to see your identifying documents, with information on where you live. They are setting us all up to be subject to constant police state harassment, abuse, & violence. Do not accept that this is how we should live.
Allowing law enforcement officers to act with excessive force, brutality, disrespect for the community and, most of all, impunity is a threat to democracy. It was a threat to democracy when permitted by local law enforcement in Baltimore, and New York, and North Charleston. And it is a threat to democracy when committed by federal law enforcement agents in Minneapolis. That so many failed to see the policing crisis when Black men and women were the victims as a democracy issue during the most volatile years of policing reform efforts is key to understanding what often slows down progressive strategy and alliances.
Highlighted text: “There’s no guarantee a war will work either, but with a war, but you know for sure that a war will make more victims.” My goal wasn’t to convince them to remain pacifists for the rest of their lives. Nor, it’s worth repeating, is it my goal to prescribe that path for anybody reading this reflection. I love so many people who share my dreams of a better world, but not my conviction as to how we get there. That’s fine. Good even, because I very well might be wrong."
“We are told so many stories about what is going to happen. In 2025, we were told that there was no point in resisting Trump, or AI, or a world where the only voices that mattered were roughly a dozen men with podcasts and creatine dependencies. Maybe some of those stories are still true. Lord knows there are powerful forces fighting like hell to make them appear true. But I hope you discovered, this past year, how much more joy there is in a life where we act as if none of this is pre-ordained. We don’t have to give our money to corporations who hate us. We don’t have to accept the authority of a state that disappears our neighbors. We don't have to cast anybody to the curb just because a pundit told us that nobody cares about strangers anymore.”
Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as “capital allocation” — that is, using investors’ money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business — that hasn’t been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of “lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services.” The other 97% of finance is gambling.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." -Maya Angelou
It’s not enough to go after the individuals in Epstein’s circle. We should do that, but we shouldn’t stop there. We should, and if we want a decent future we must, go after this warped system that rewards sociopathy and depravity. Capitalism creates an incentive structure where the worst among us are rewarded for their ruthlessness, their lack of empathy, their willingness to ruin lives. When guardrails get in the way of the ruling class exploiting and harming us, they organize and pour money into bulldozing those obstacles to their endless accumulation of wealth. It’s not enough to gently check their greed, we have to take away the system that enables and rewards them and gives them vast power.
Wilhoit: 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.
A blue gray gnatcatcher clinging to a branch. This bird has a gray upper and white belly, but most prominently has a black marking over it's eyes that resembles angry eyebrows.
A Gallup polling chart that shows in 2025 67% of respondents prefer a focus on social problems to reduce crime, with only 29% preferring an increase or strengthening of law enforcement.
“I'm all for paths of redemption and letting people walk those paths. Yet I do think it's not only appropriate but absolutely crucial to be ashamed of shameful things. And I don't think you solve problems without naming them, so I don't believe that naming equates to condemnation. I'm told that naming people Nazis because of their alignment with Nazi ideals and tactics condemns them as irredeemable, which leaves them isolated with no path for redemption. This would seem to suggest both that 1) it is the job of others to redeem people engaged in abuse and harm, and that 2) the only way to get careless people to care is to tell them they're already OK and nothing they're doing is wrong. That doesn't seem right;”
To be a Republican in 2025 represents a clear public confession that you either don't know the difference between good and evil and you're so morally empty that you can't be bothered to begin to try, or that you do know the difference, and you prefer evil enough to commit mass murder for it, or at least let others commit it on your behalf and to your benefit. It's been that way for a while. I'll let people with more time on their hands than me argue about when it started being that way. I don't know of a starker way to put it—which I can say authoritatively, since I am trying my best to find the starkest possible way. I think there's value to saying things plainly, particularly when there's so much bullshit, nonsense, and outright lies flooding the zone. Truth exposes lies, and the simpler and starker the truth, the better it exposes the lie. Texas has invaded Illinois with its military at the behest of the Trump dictatorship. In cities that have been identified as too compassionate toward undesirables like poor people and foreign people, masked unidentified goons are brutalizing and terrorizing and kidnapping and disappearing our friends and neighbors to enslavement gulags, and rounding up entire apartment buildings, and zip-tying children, and brutalizing people for the crime of questioning them. By waging war in our cities, the Republican regime has turned those cities quite literally into war zones, which is something Republicans insisted the cities already were, even though it is something those cities never have been before. And saying any of this is now potentially enough to get you labeled a terrorist and an enemy of the state, and receive any of the punishment and violence that comes with that. And I'm going to say it anyway, because fuck them.
An excerpt from a comic by The Oatmeal. It's a long narrow frame that says, "But first, here's a fun observation." He has inserted a drawing of an interested face. "You're not gonna like this one." He has inserted an angry face. "But it's an anecdote, so chill out." He has inserted a chilling out face. "Here we go." Some circuitry looking lines connect to the observation, which is in white text on a black box. It reads: "In my experience the people who are excited about AI art also happen to be some of the most talentless fucking people I've ever met."
There are, however, a certain number of people who are not fully MAGA, but who think that they can gain a tactical advantage by throwing a some marginalized individuals—trans people, immigrants, women, leftists, Palestinians—under various wheeled vehicles. For those radical centrists and quisling motherfuckers, I think it’s worth reiterating that removing due process for some inevitably means removing due process for all. If one person has no right to due process to prove their innocence, then no one has the right to due process, since the only way you can show that you are a person who deserves due process is through…due process.
There have, as you know, been specific moments when political movements that share my values (about how the innate value and dignity of every human being matters more than systems of domination and greed) have won great victories for humanity. They came, more often than not, because our forebears both opened the doors beyond the usual suspects but, crucially, didn’t water down their core values or message for the sake of growth. What they did instead was build. They built caring, humane infrastructure, specifically with an eye towards protecting the most vulnerable. Their movements grew because they were, to paraphrase Toni Cade Bambara, both spiritually and materially irriesistible.
The path forward requires maintaining the distinction between legitimate political disagreement and the dehumanization of our fellow citizens. Not because we’re purists, but because failing to maintain this distinction is precisely how authoritarians win. They exhaust us into accepting false equivalence, into treating hate as just another viewpoint, into believing that defending human dignity is as divisive as attacking it.
The disgusting, undemocratic use of the justice system to further Trump’s petty feuds is ugly and terrifying. It’s also, in James Comey’s case, a lesson that other elites would do well to study. Bending over backwards to help Trump for any reason — to protect yourself, to demonstrate your bipartisan apolitical bona fides, to secure a government deal — absolutely never ends well. Trump will come for you eventually. You might as well take a stand and fight when it matters.
Wilhoit: 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.
2. The Psychology of Justification If Section 1 exposed the disguises, Section 2 reveals why those disguises work. MAGA supporters are not reasoning from facts but from psychological needs: the need for safety, for belonging, for identity, for power. Authoritarian psychology has long documented this pattern. Right-Wing Authoritarianism feeds on fear of chaos and the yearning for a strong hand. Social Dominance Orientation justifies hierarchy and exclusion. Collective narcissism treats every criticism as an insult to the nation itself. And motivated reasoning ensures that any contradiction, however blatant, is swallowed whole in the name of loyalty.
Sorry the alt text exceeds the line limit. You can read the except here: https://www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-trolley-problem/?ref=the-reframe-newsletter#:~:text=In%20all%20such,and%20length.
What I've noticed is that when justice and order come into conflict, most human beings tend to prefer order. When an interested and unabused third party reconciles with an abuser while that abuser's victim still lives under threat of abuse, it betrays the victim, leaves her stranded, friendless, vulnerable. It’s inappropriate. It’s complicity. And it is very, very, very tempting—tempting, because it does restore order, and only the abused party has to pay ... at least at first. It’s worth noting that order isn’t a bad thing, taken by itself. But order, like so many other good things, becomes corrupt when it is elevated inappropriately above its station. And, as any corrupt order will eventually collapse, justice must be considered a higher priority. Sometimes, restoring order is inappropriate. Sometimes, maintaining order is abusive. Sometimes, your sister is bleeding and frightened for her life. Sometimes, the only appropriate thing is to change the locks—whatever that might look like. What might that look like, especially in a time like now, when abusive bullies have full run of the national house?
When we talk about loneliness, what we’re really talking about is a lack of connection. And you don’t cure disconnection through pandering, or even through proximity. True connection comes through interdependence, through bonds that emerge when people trust that you actually care about them, rather than viewing them as means to an end.
The issue isn't to say that polarization can't be destructive. The issue is that polarization is something that happens when two sides are equally and mutually diverging from each other, and it's usually employed to indicate that the thing they are diverging from is a matter that is trivial next to the benefits of unity. Thus, the word polarization slyly insinuates a state of affairs is simply not true. What's happening today is not two sides equally and mutually diverging from one another over matters that are immaterial next to the goal of unity. What's happening is that a group of people privileged by supremacy is asserting that privilege through oppressive and violent domination of all others in order to strangle human unity to death. What's happening is the institutional kidnapping, terrorizing, robbing, and murdering of our family members and our friends and neighbors. What's happening is violent and oppressive and systemic, and it is being done by just one side among an infinite array within the great diversity of human art, one single side that defines itself by its unearned privilege, then uses the power that privilege affords to frame its own murderous violence as order and justice, and frame any struggle in response to its violence, no matter how peaceful, as violence deserving escalating violence in return. So we can see that opposing fascism will require a solidary with hundreds of different sides against the sole murderous one. Perhaps that one murderous side will experience this solidarity as "polarization," but we don't need to agree with them about that, or "agree to disagree" about it. In fact, it is our moral imperative to disagree with them about that. The price for disagreeing will be very steep for some of those of us who pay it—it may well include oppressive violence—but for all of us, it will cost the supremacist privilege of respectability.
Wilhoit: 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.
If you question these people of evil, they'll tell you that they are just making the hard-nosed pragmatic decisions that are necessary to ensure our safety. This is clearly pure bosh. If these decisions were pragmatic and necessary, they wouldn't rely exclusively on lies and self-contradictory nonsense and hypocrisy for their rationales, and if they were meant to ensure safety, they wouldn't create so much death and destruction and pain and suffering. I'm also told that one should never ascribe to malice that which can also be explained by ignorance. This is meant to be a morally sophisticated position, but I don't know. It seems to me that ignorance is a core property of malice, and letting malice off the hook simply because it also happens to be ignorant is not so much a sign of moral sophistication but rather falling for a game that is pretty obviously designed to swindle rubes. Anyway, it's hard to credit the conservative movement with ignorance. If they were ignorant they'd sometimes accidentally choose less evil over more evil, but no. No matter where you set them, no matter how many times you spin them around, their moral compasses point with unerring certainty toward maximum atrocity and cruelty, and their gleeful celebration of it suggests that this isn't about hard-nosed pragmatism, but rather a genuine desire for evil things to happen. How to live among people who have decided to hate and fear kindness and knowledge and creativity and diversity, and to love cruelty and malice and ignorance and theft and bullying and domination? How to live among people so committed to supremacy that they'd rather have it than life? And how to live a human life during such dark days?
We don't need a party that validates someone's choice to support the mass deportation of their friend, or a party that validates the popular belief that the failure of conservative white people to do the right thing is actually the fault of everyone else for not flattering them well enough. What would actually expand the tent to include these Missouri ladies is to offer them not the same thing, but something different—to actually embody unshakeable ideals of universal human rights that are not up for debate, and make that the center pole of our tent—a pole, not a poll. This would give an actual option to people who have become newly concerned about and newly aware of the destruction of human rights, in a way that a party that offers to swap one atrocity for another doesn't. It would do it without pushing other people out of the tent. It would grow the tent by expanding the margins on all sides, which is where there is space to expand. And it would truly win the center, not by engaging in a pandering chase after the least awful of an awful coalition, but by defining and defending a true moral center—a fixed spot around which people can gather, if they want to accept the invitation for something better. I don't think cowardice in the name of pragmatism builds a broad coalition. You know what I think builds a broad coalition? Principles and resolve. That's what I recommend if what we actually want is a big tent, and just not to avoid being impolite about atrocities to people who some of us identify with more closely than those to whom the atrocities are being done. That's what I recommend, if we actually want to choose to prioritize a political test that expands the number of those who can join, expands the number of people we mean when we say "us," and expands the parameters of the uncomfortable truths we can tell one another.
A comic by Paul North of sheep looking at a billboard of a wolf politician that says, "I AM GOING TO EAT YOU." One sheep comments, "He tells it like it is."