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In 2024 I felt that I was safe being a transwoman in America, that the GOP could rage all they wanted but it was impotent bluster, as dumb as the American people were even they realized that transpeople were no threat and that this was just "Gay Panic V2"
I was wrong
I'm sorry to hear that. Which is so often said vapidly, but I mean it. I also thought we were past this bullshit, but people love a strongman who can point ANYWHERE else to blame their problems on other people in their class or below instead of their keepers.
None of those ever existed to protect you.
Oops, the system was actually set up to profit off you all along! Funny thing: it turns out that centralized, authoritarian monopolies are the most profitable things in the business world, and now in the political world too!
The establishment has failed us and I think that is why we are were we are now. "Everyone Who Was Supposed to Protect You From This Failed Miserably" so sure they failed but we failed as well. Democracy is supposed to be driven from the bottom up, but instead we the people collectively do not pay attention and take responsibility for our our system.
Part of the problem is the will of the people has been superseded by decades of corporate and politicial interests (e.g. Citizens United, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Bush v Gore, etc etc).
Perhaps we should have been fighting back, but this is decades in the making.
Some of us never even had a chance to fight back. This battle was lost before I was born. Bush v Gore was more than 24 years ago, I was barely a child. I wasn't even alive for Reagan. What can I do now, 40 years too late?
I was running my college newsroom for the 2000 election. I called up an editorial cartoonist at 2 a.m., having already blown deadline by two hours (it would be four by the time we got the flats to the printer), to provide the main art for A1. It remains the only time I have run an editorial cartoon out front.
As these things go, the art I requested was of Gore holding up a paper with a hed of "Bush Wins" (because we were upstyle back in the Dewey/Truman days). Then went with a dek of "Florida holds the Keys" ... we finally put the paper to bed at 4 a.m., went out to a 24-hour diner, as was customary, and when we got back to the U-District, the major papers were out.
USA Today (McNews) went with "Florida holds the key," completely missing how to use that reference. That was the morning I decided to drop out of college and fix this shit. Oh, the irony that I'd later work in automation for Gannett against their wishes (you can't tell my team that they suddenly need to produce 33% more pages per hour and expect me to not start coding).
Now that I've vomited irrelevant verbal diarrhea, the answer is we never had a chance. The system doesn't like people enjoying their lives, it's just rent-seeking.
Limbaugh gave my dad permanent brain damage. to this day I can't really tell if he's still in there.
Saying that's part of the problem is akin to saying the asteroid was part of the problem for dinosaurs. All you're really missing is the gutting of critical thinking in public education under Reagan.
The system was designed from the ground up to make sure only the right kind of people had an actual say in it. The people at the top make damn sure that the people at the bottom have as little freedom to act on their right to vote as possible.
That is always tradition.
The people at the top will never have your best interests at heart. It’s just not how it works. There is no system where the people in government make sure to include you, and make sure everything is set up fairly, and you can just chill, secure with your voice being un-kept out of it and your inclusion assured. You can either stay engaged and take an active part in forcing the government to be a decent government, or else you can mostly ignore it as we have been doing, and you will get the unfolding horror we are about to experience.
My point is that for many people in this country, that's practically an impossible task. You can either choose to vote in your gerrymandered district and get fired for taking a day off from work under right to work laws, or you can put food on the table. You can take the time off of work to get a license you may or may not ever use beyond proof under voter ID laws, again at risk of losing your job.
The people who can and don't because their rights aren't up for debate every 4 years are one thing. But many of us are already political by necessity, and it means nothing in the end.
Voting harder isn't going to fix things.
What on earth made you think I I was talking about voting? I definitely think it’s necessary as one part of the equation, but just voting for one of the provided candidates and calling it good was exactly what I was describing as deadly inaction.
Because usually when people talk like that, they're leading up to blaming the Democrats losing on x group (usually either Millennials or a minority) not voting hard enough.
Also because voting is supposed to be the easiest action you can take, but for so many, even that is a risk to the roof over their head and the food in their bellies. The system has been rigged to the point where even the most basic of rights aren't guaranteed, and we need to provide that for people if they're ever going to be able to act.
I see. So I said one thing, you decided I meant something totally different and explained back to me, more or less, exactly the same thing I was saying, while pretending I was saying the opposite. Also, you brought "Democrats" into it as far as I can tell for no reason at all, thinking that I was "leading up to" saying something about them when I definitely wasn't. Well, glad we got that sorted out.
Friendly reminder that part of the ethos of Beehaw is assuming good faith. I don't see in that response what you're accusing them of. These are tough times, but giving up our humanity and ability to connect with each other only worsens the problem.
They specifically said they were responding to what I was "leading up to" saying, and skipped ahead to responding to that, the opposite of what I explained multiple times I was actually saying. They also, as of this writing, were still insisting that "the establishment has failed us" needs to be interpreted as "if you people had just voted for the Democrats" when literally no one said that, and indeed we all seem to be agreeing on more or less the exact opposite of that.
I don't know, maybe me saying "pretending" and general sarcasm was un called for. I'm just trying to be direct. I've lost a lot of patience with the people who imagine to themselves what you are saying, and then disagree, instead of reading and then responding. And that's what happened. That's not any assumption about their faith level, that's just what's written in the comments. If that means I'm not welcome here, so be it.
I'm not saying you're unwelcome at all, and I see where you're coming from. You just danced at the edge of an ad hominem instead of taking them at face value. I'm a sarcastic fuck but tone it down here because A) I'm a mod and B) I fled here to escape the sort of shit on other platforms that feel like this petty quibble.
The only rule on this instance is to Bee Nice. You were not doing so, and I wanted to provide a gentle nudge. Just be a bit more thoughtful that you're talking to another human; some are not native English speakers, which can cause misunderstandings. I'm not sure if that's the case here, but I'd like you to consider that possibility in any interaction.
Hanlon was right.
Yeah, I do hear you. I have a habit of being mean or sarcastic out of the bounds of what's really needed, sometimes, and it's not good. Point taken and I appreciate it.
I thought you were OP, so add their line about democracy being driven from the bottom up to your post and tell me if you can see the "If you people had just voted for the Democrats harder" in there.
OP posted:
Donald Trump will now be the president again. A colossal failure by every Republican, Democratic, legal, corporate, and media institution got us here.
Then coffeetest, who I assume you were thinking is OP maybe?, posted:
The establishment has failed us and I think that is why we are were we are now.
Democracy is supposed to be driven from the bottom up, but instead we the people collectively do not pay attention and take responsibility for our our system.
Democrats are absolutely a part of "the establishment," and yes, I would fully agree that they failed us. I would also strongly agree with that second "bottom up" statement. Like I say, anyone who's part of the establishment will always "fail us" unless forced not to, Democrats included, for reasons I already touched on.
It really feels like you're trying to shoehorn a "counterpoint" about the Democrats being bad into a conversation that was already specifically about how they are bad (along with the rest of the establishment, and also along with the low level of citizen involvement) and what to do about it. Why are you singling out the Democrats so hard right now?
Rolling Stone is pissed today.
I like it. We need more of that.
They really are. I chose this one because the writing was sharp, and I didn't really want to spam y'all on what was already a rough day.
But for anyone who doesn't regularly read Rolling Stone (I didn't until the Post shat the bed), the political coverage is incisive and pushing the left edge of the Overton window, which is precisely where you want your journalism.
This fucking paywall is part of what failed me. Money grubbing capitalist horse shit.
Journalism costs money. Unless we enjoy being fed propaganda by billionaires who can afford to dump money into news organisations we should get used to paying for journalism.
You say that, but I remember the internet before all this shit. Print media once used to actually produce a product, which it sold in an actual physical store and through subscription services. Meanwhile, some outlets had internet editions, but the vast majority of what was posted online was being posted by people. You'd see a lot of excerpts, a lot of people's takes on things that were informed by articles they'd read, and a lot of websites and forums dedicated to particular subjects.
Then print media moved in and started begging us for their views, paying for them with ad revenue. They wanted our eyeballs. Then social media blew up and they got the visibility they wanted while contributing to the birth of the current terrible environment that is the internet today. Eventually, once they had the attention they'd sought from us, attention that we used to give each other, they started walling everything off.
Paywalls are part of enshittification. They're part of the degradation of the internet. And, surprise surprise, look where the degradation of the internet has led us.
This is absolutely part of what's failed us. It's the commodification of information. They literally started this subscription model clickbait bullshit.
I remember that time of the internet too, and agree that that was a better time for independent creators. But people on random blogs weren't breaking stories like the Panama papers, or the LAPD Rampart scandal, or anything that takes months or even years of investigation and interviews with sources. At the time, that was being paid for by the people buying newspapers, which people don't do any more.
And I disagree that paywalls are part of enshittification. For me, enshittification is when a news outlet tries to stay "free", covering their sites on ads and sponsored content, and puking out articles which are just lists of tweets, while having their articles written by unpaid interns or AI. See: the Independent, Evening Standard (both now owned by Evgeny Lebedev), and every single other paper that doesn't implement a paywall. I know lots of people who have been driven out of the journalism profession because you just can't make a living on it. Sure they can start a blog, but that won't put food on the table, and it won't allow them to spend huge amounts of time, and in many cases money, to actually get to the bottom of something that powerful people don't want you to know about.
Enshittification doesn't just mean charging for your services. It refers to when VC-backed startups use their vast funding to offer something for free, then make it worse and worse by trying to monetise it more and more. People deserve to be paid for their work. If you value their work, you should be paying them.
Sorry for the rant, I just really think that the reason journalism has taken such a massive nosedive in recent years is because hardly anybody is willing to pay for it. Similar to music: as a listener it sucked having to pay £12 for an album. But now on Spotify the artists are getting a pittance for something they've worked their whole lives to create.
"The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free."
Use the Bypass Paywall Clean plug-in if you're using Firefox.