Thank you.

As an American, we take great pride in freaking the fuck out of our Allies and have for many years.

We’ve recently added our Elections to the Freak Out menu as market research has shown that spicy is very in demand right now.

We realize that no one with a functioning digestive system needs this much spice, but as Americans, we embrace Oscar Wilde, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess”.

We’re considering putting that on our money!

Anyway, sorry for any inconvenience.

Also, when you return, please try our new Reactor HOT Jabanero Policing. Milk’s not remotely enough to remove the burning tears…

UPDATE: We’ve been retooling our foreign policy dishes as our current Chef in Residence isn’t schooled on foreign fare, but shortly, we should have some foreign policy so spicy, it’ll blow a hole in your chest!!!

Bon Apetit!!!

Zooey wrote:

I use Facebook for my news feed. I follow a bunch of leftist groups there (and Libs), and mark them “Show First,” or whatever it is.

Twitter…my fear is following so many people that the feed becomes Niagara Falls. I’m only following around 30 people, and it’s like watching NASCAR. Too many cars, and I’m not sure how many of them I’ve already seen.

But Mack is there. And he posts gold, like the Pumpkin Spice Bleach tweet. And zn is there to chip in on Rams related stuff. He is there to point out stuff like the Rams need an Offensive Line in order to keep the enemy off of Goff. And Nittany is there to say, “Akshually…if you blend bionanphosate with xyoletholine, you will never achieve homeostanthesis. Under the conditions prescribed, you would have to….”

So that’s all good.

I am there to get retweeted by John Cleese…which Mack, zn, and Nittany never have.

You sure about that?

Aw crap. Just checked and he retweeted something I responded to… alright…you win this one…but I’ll be back!!!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Mackeyser.

Yeah… the problem with that is that it ignores a few things.

1) the DNC is ideologically, structurally and financially incapable of embracing left policies. They dismantled their ground game in the 90s in favor of corporations and donors.

2) The DNC is on record with thought, word and deed that they would rather embrace very hard right neofascism rather than do anything more than pay lip service to even center left ideas.

3) the DNC has been complicit in disenfranchising (to the point of election fraud) voters by a number of means including, but not limited to voter roll purging, gerrymandering, and undercutting progressive candidates with a chance of defeating Republican candidates with Center-Right candidates with NO chance of winning… (see: DNC running Amy McGrath, a self-styled Trump Democrat over Charles Booker, a progressive with grassroots support)

4) #2 needs to be repeated. There has been no fight about Trump’s court appointments. There was no fight to get Obama’s court appointments through.

So… to all of the Cusack’s out there…

I don’t begrudge your take, but it’s fantasy.

If Trump wins, the DNC wins because they can fund-raise the shit out of Roe falling and continue to make millions with hysterical emails.

If Biden wins, the DNC wins as they can say that their center-right neoliberal schtick has a “mandate” and this proves that America want’s what their selling.

I can’t with all that bullshit.

Both parties ensure that there are only two different brands of shit soup on the shelves and they really want to argue over which tastes better based on sales while ignoring their mafia-esque grip on what the store is ALLOWED to sell.

Honestly, American democracy is more and more a sarcastic joke or an oxymoron than a thing.

If you look at where the “whitelash” is strongest, you get three states…two of which will almost certainly go Trump: Ohio and Florida.

And that’s ballgame.

I really don’t care what the polls say as the media (not the Dems or Reps, but the media)
REFUSE to do exit polling after their exit polling showed widespread election fraud in the Democratic Primaries in 2016. The only way for them to avoid a court case into the election fraud was to full stop discontinue them and never mention them again.

Which, remarkably, they did. All of them. Even Fox…

Now… WHY would ALL the major news networks and outlets… ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NYT, WaPo, LAT, Reuters, AP, etc… ALL discontinue exit polling at the same time?

I don’t think it’s conspiracy thinking to assert that for that many entities with outright conflicting interests speaks to something greater.

Trump is gonna win because the billionaire class are fine with pushing us closer to Central American levels of income and wealth disparities and feeling confident that the police will focus on protecting capital over defending the Constitution… and so far… right on schedule.

Yeah, I think it’s gonna get bad and be bad for awhile… but the evil billionaires will eventually die out (calling them crazy removes their agency and they’re devoting their fortunes on this with purpose, expeditiously so). As well, they are growing an ever more activist seed this time.

This isn’t the 60s where young idealists are gonna sell out for their kids and bigger houses. Millennials and Zoomers are being radicalized on an even deeper and more existential level and when it’s their turn… the rubber banding is just gonna be staggering to watch.

But yeah… I think the Super Bowl and the election are about the same level of fixed. There are too many indications of that.

WE can unfix them by electing Actual Progressives and leftists (not those fucking faux progressives who think symbolic gestures mean a fucking thing…) to local offices and build up a candidate base for state and then national offices.

And unlike prior to 2016, we KNOW now that we can lift a left or left-leaning candidate to heights no one can deny as happened with Bernie. Once that infrastructure is in place… be it with the People’s Party or DSA or whatever… we’ll see a change.

But yeah, as for the topic: Trump will win, either by Reps winning states like FL and OH or by fraud, but yeah. Those paperless voting machines gotta start giving the billionaires a return on their investment sometime now…

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Mackeyser.

Ocean Conservation Namibia is where I go after Twitter to bring me back.

Watching baby seals be saved is life affirming.

I still think Trump wins, but I think the turnout will be higher than in 2016 thanks to the cult of Trump creating demand on both sides.

Also why, when I quoted WV did the emoji become gigantic???

Also, none of it means anything, but can.

It’s amazing how vulnerable people can be online and Twitter amps that up because it’s so immediate.

I’ve cultivated a nice little group of lefties on Twitter and honestly, it helps.

Plus, I’m not a statie or a tankie and didn’t even know what those meant, but I was able to ask. There are plenty of people of all sorts of stripe of lefty to converse with as well which is nice, although it can get a bit dismissive with some folks… I mean, they may be leftists, but it IS the internet…

Also…not twitter, but something I found on twitter…

leftvalues.github.io

This is kinda like that political compass test, but for focus on WHICH kind of lefty are you

This is me. I thought I was a socdem (much maligned in the dark corners of left twitter), but apparently, I’m an Eco-Marxist…

Ha! found it! pic.twitter.com/V2ia3lC6bw

— Màxkhuwe🌹 (@Mackeyser) October 7, 2020

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Liberals ARE condescending. Leftists, too. Maybe Leftists even more so. And so the masses hate universities and experts and everybody whom they feel look down their noses at them.
.

================

Well, i dunno, but I know that I find myself being condescending all the time. I also find myself fighting my own habit of being condescending all the time.
I do it. But i try not to do it. And the pattern repeats.

Why do i do it? Because I am dealing with people who choose some weird Bible phrase over Science. Religion over Science.
Or, they choose some comforting political-myth over actual History.

So when I as a leftist am trying to communicate with a right-winger it is a huge challenge. How does one communicate with someone who believes in Myths/Religions and rejects History/Facts/Science?

It often either devolves into me being condescending, Or, I just find a way to change the subject to Football.

But….I do NOT find rightwingers being condescending to ME. Mainly they just pray for me, or shake their heads.

So, my personal experience has been that lefties are condescending and righties are not.

w
v

Well, that last part is just BS. Not your personal experience, of course, but the overall conclusion.

As a reformed conservative, there is TONS of condescension among righties, but it manifests differently.

The left condescends about facts, reality, policies and the actual record.

Liberals condescend about identity, association and convenient intersectionality. Facts will be condescended about ONLY if it brings up hypocrisy on the right or furthers the needs of their corporate/donor masters.

The right condescends about conservative dogma…which has changed radically over the past 40 years… well except for that Liberals are weak and the Left is dangerous. Are you churchy enough? Are you 2A enough? Do you wanna kill brown people enough? That can look a lot of different ways from jingoism to racism and all sorts of dark combinations.

The right condescends plenty. If you’ve never had someone go further than “bless your heart”, then God bless, cuz they out there. I guess living in FL, we have a more concentrated sample to draw from.

Maybe it’s because I used to be a conservative and I still speak the language or because I considered going to seminary and have been an elder at several churches or because I served in the military, but I’m usually able to have a conversation with conservatives.

I mean… I like guns. I do. I’m a devout Christian and know my Bible. I guess I get what’s important to them.

There is a method and it’s basically the same as how I became a lefty… ask them straight questions and let them come to their own conclusions.

Like…

Cons: I’ll never have a gay son. I’ll have a dead son, but not a gay one.

Me: Wait. You love your son so little that you’d kill him over that?

Cons: You bet. No. Wait. I love my son.

Me: So you’re saying you’re better than Dick Cheney? He shoulda killed his daughter?

Cons: What? No! But the Bible says…

Me: Now wait a minute. It says in Revelation that anyone that changes one word of the book is doomed for all eternity. Right? Okay, well, then how come the story of Lot in the Bible was rewritten after a US businessman in the late 1800s went to Germany to commission a Bible that changed that story?

Cons: Wait…what?

Me: And even if you don’t want to go that deep, talking about the Council of Nicea and how the Bible we read in English… one of MANY translations…has been changed from the original Aramaic and Greek… Didn’t Jesus tell us to love one another as he loved us?

Cons: Well, now I don’t think he meant all that. My Pastor says…

Me: So, it was okay for him to break bread with prostitutes and tax collectors who in the ancient world were literally the lowest of the low, but in a world with Greek traditions and a Hebrew Orthodoxy that recognized SIX genders at that time, Jesus wanted us to love everyone but the gays?

Cons: Six what?

Me: yeah…six.

Cons: How does that even work?

Me: Well… that’s another conversation, but suffice it to say that Jesus wanted us to love everyone…even our enemies. And if he wanted us to love our enemies, then how could he not want us to love our own children?

And… it goes on from there.

Now… this can’t work on anyone stuck in dogma and that goes for anyone of any stripe. I’ve had convos where folks had all the barriers torn down and they just said, “nope, not changing my mind because I don’t want to even as you’re pointing out why I’m wrong using my own reference materials” Not much you can do there.

If a conversation can be made, then I usually have good success talking about things.

But yeah, one way to sort of judo pivot away from condescension is to frame new information as being part of the group that’s “in the know”

We all had to learn sometime, right?

I dunno… I descended into riffing like half way into this post…

Zooey wrote:

Wouldn’t shutting down FOX be a kind of mercy killing?

Why in every meme does she look like she just gave her hubby his birthday BJ and wants him to be happy, but absolutely, positively won’t swallow…

So she’s just stuck there…with her mouth full and this weird awkward smile…thing…on her face.

I dunno. It’s weird.

In the most cynical way, this makes perfect sense.

The Dems are signaling to the donor base that they won’t harm any parasitic industries like private prisons, insurance or healthcare companies, by, ya know… being fucking human.

The Dems have devolved from “the lesser of two evils” to straight out “pick your poison”.

If I’m gonna be poisoned, anyway, I’d rather just focus on a legit left party.

Fuck that was hard to read… honestly I had to skim some.

Being mixed is a different animal, especially being white passing… I’m that now as opposed to when I was younger and in SoCal was often mistaken for Hispanic.

It’s weird. I’m white passing enough that most folks wouldn’t know, but ironically, the ones that always seem to know are the most openly racist…. like that time at 16 in Santa Monica when a stranger came up to me on the bus and just asked to my face, “you got some nigger in ya, ain’t ya?”

I was so stunned, I didn’t know how to respond. I kept wondering if it was real. Surely, I’d imagined it. But no… he sat down and pulled what we now call a Cliven Bundy, sharing his “wisdom” and was only too glad to do so.

My wife’s father disowned her because he saw that I was mixed and didn’t want her bringing home any “nigger babies”. That one still stings.

I’m not white, but not black, have experiences that match both, but I’m neither. I’m Lenape as well and looking into rejoining that community.

All that to say that I really hope we’re going to in the end excise much if not all of the cancer that is racism. We’re doing it without anesthetic, but that seems to be how we decided to do it.

It’s tiring, hurtful and traumatic not just to have this history, but to add so many traumatic moments to our history.

I remember holding my great-grandfather Will’s hand. That’s the hand who when he was my age, held HIS grandfather’s hand and that hand was that of a slave. That still shakes me. I’m connected to slavery by someone I’ve met. If you said I was 7 generations removed, I’d think that was distant. It didn’t feel very distant when I realized that my great grandfather was a direct, single bridge that connected me to them.

I dunno.

I guess what I’m getting is that we just cannot have any more distraction, even when it’s healthy. From now on, it seems we’re gonna have all this until we truly and fully deal with it… and it’ll suck the entire time.

I just hope we get it right this time.

Yeah… this is a weird time where I dunno what’s worse.

Normally, we can see shit and think, yeah, I can’t afford shoes, but I’m gonna go with the Shinola. I can’t use it, but it ain’t shit.

Now… everywhere I turn, I’m being asked to choose which BRAND of shit… and it’s not even fertilizer… it’s like “you remember that shit you had after a night of drinking and binging on Del Taco??? Well, it’s that shit or the shit you had a few years ago when you lost your damn mind and ate that gas station sushi…

The survivalist in me wants to just get Trump out of office and then fight for better policies.

The leftist in me sees that and just thinks, “this shit…again? yeah, not interested.”

But yeah. Once again, Chuck Schumer would rather have McConnell in there than Charles Booker.