I caught some of the stream of this last night, sans audio. It’s crazy how plainly Vance and Johnson wear their evil on their faces. Vance has some pretty visible moments of shame, but you can see how well Johnson hides his from himself with that smug grin. They’re both dying inside, to be sure, but you can really see the psychological somersaults Johnson is doing on display.
I don’t know how people can look at them and not see it immediately before they even open their mouths.
So, what are you going to do about it? Just saying “this is bad” isn’t enough. Just saying “we’re fucked” isn’t enough. And saying “there’s nothing we can do” is literally counterproductive.
What is your suggestion?
It is illegal. If this is something you’re worried about happening in your local area, I’d recommend making a fuss about it. If you can find evidence of specific people doing this, collect it and make sure the law is enforced. If you know a local library is being targeted, get them to take steps to minimize the risk of it happening. Things like making sure any large trash bins are readily visible to librarians or developing policies about just glancing in the trash every now and then to see if books have been thrown away might be helpful.
You can also probably help by keeping an eye out for books that may be targeted. If there are books you think might be subject to these sorts of actions, you could make a list of them and drop by to check on them every now and then. See if they’re on the shelves. If they’re not on the shelves, ask if they’ve been checked out. If they’re missing from the shelves and also haven’t been checked out, consider looking around to see if you can find them hidden away somewhere or buying a replacement to donate.
It probably isn’t simple to enforce this and to protect books from being removed from the shelves sneakily, because somebody has to put the work in. But if you care enough to do so, there’s no reason that person can’t be you.
I don’t. I hope they get derailed and don’t have enough time to do nearly so much damage. I hope 10 years from now it’s an embarrassing mistake that comes as a wake-up call to people and prompts them to grow.
Why would you want to see shit get as bad as it possibly could? Just to dunk on some random people? To be right? The hell’s the point?
The instinct toward feeling superior being more important than having a decent world and a stable country is the reason we’re in this mess to begin with.
Another attack on trans women by people who almost certainly don’t know the names of even a half dozen non-olympian women who are professional athletes or a single trans athlete.
I literally am just trying to figure out how I’m going to keep making enough money to survive. I’ve been going through an insane level of instability over the past year. I’ve managed to get my mental state to a much less helpless place than it was a few months ago, but in terms of actual stability? I don’t even know what my life would be looking like in a few months if this wasn’t happening.
I have no fucking clue how I’m meant to be doing anything more than keeping my head above water. I’ve been sounding the alarm about this shit for years. I’ve been trying to get people aware and motivated, and I’ve had some success. But right now? I’m just trying to keep myself safe and I’m not sure how to do that.
I’ve been the person who resists the bystander effect so many times in my life. I’m the person who breaks up fights at parties. I’m the person who steps up and says something when they see something fucked up. I’m the person who’s stuck my neck out to stand up for the right thing even when it made me a pariah. But I don’t know how to do that now. And honestly, reading vague lists isn’t really giving me any further ideas.
The best I know how to do is not get completely overwhelmed by hearing the kind of rhetoric I’m hearing about myself and people like me from our government and from the people who’ve propped them up. Literally just figuring out how to do something as simple as get out of bed when I’ve got a neighbor who suddenly feels bold enough to throw transphobia right in my face in a world where I don’t even feel like I can safely apply for a passport.
I’m literally just trying to keep my finances straightened out and keep some kind of hope alive. I can’t be the person to fix this. I wish I could. Some days it feels like I have a target painted on my back just leaving the house, and I live in a pretty safe area of a pretty safe state. I worry about my friends who don’t. I worry that I don’t have the resources to do much of anything to help them other than talk to them and be there for them. I know that’s not nothing, but compared to all the shit going on it kind of feels like it is.
I don’t know who to point at and say “hey, I need help”, let alone who to point at and say “hey, this other person needs help”.
It is a massive eye roll.
Ooookay.
I’m not sure the US saying “okay, Putin gets whatever he wants” is going to be as effective as Trump would like to think.
… One could say the same of participation in the electoral process. Taking your ball and going home doesn’t work any better as a voter than as an official.
Posts like this make me question the wisdom of being on Lemmy. The more I look at the kind of messaging I see on this platform, the more I think maybe it isn’t great. It’s a lot of demotivating, depression-inducing, defeatist gloom and doom and far fewer calls to action than I remember seeing on other platforms in previous conservative administrations.
I’m starting to feel like having a particularly leftist environment where the most frequent message is “we’re fucked the there’s nothing we can do about it” mostly just works to prevent the people who might actually get together and do something from doing anything at all.
I’m also not really sure where else to go for content aside from YouTube and Ground News though, at this point. Maybe we would benefit from considering the impact of the kind of things we’re signalling to the rest of the left, though. Because I’m not sure this is helping at all, and it may be actively making the situation worse.
We have ample reason to be discouraged, but I’m not sure targeting the only block of voters and potential activists who might actually both give a shit and be educated enough to get something to budge in order to inflict depression is a good strategy.
It’s good to see this. This is vital. Atomizing the coalitions that can build the numbers to oppose entrenched corpo-fascist power is a substantial part of the strategy for rendering us toothless. Coming together in spite of our differences is absolutely necessary to combating that strategy.
Looks like it’s just a picture of something sitting in relatively still water that’s just been flipped upside down.
Even a stopped clock shits itself during press conferences. Wait… that’s not right…
Where the hell is the military to protect the constitution?
Yeah, but communication was so different at that time and the awareness of like, as stupid as it sounds, just the concept that racism is bad was so abysmal. Like, looking at the way people talked about race at the time it doesn’t seem like there was much awareness at all of how unreasonable and harmful racism is to society as a whole. Obviously we’ve still got a long way to go on that, and Trump’s election can be seen as an indicator that we’re not as far as some might have guessed (probably mostly white people), but people do seem to be at least more aware than they were. We also have the knowledge of that history of both the Japanese internment camps in the US and Germany’s concentration camps.
There definitely are substantial dehumanization efforts acting to counter this knowledge. But even there, you hear these stories of people being shocked that people they knew and cared about were among the people being deported during these crackdowns. They were sold on the idea of ‘bad people’ being deported, but the actuality is that it’s their neighbors who they actually like or even rely on who fall victim to these policies. A lot of people think of this stuff in terms of ‘exceptions’, where they might have a principle that they’re against undocumented immigration, but they don’t realize that the person at the counter of the local restaurant who they have a positive impression of is undocumented.
I see this myself every time I go to the grocery store. I can tell there are people who voted for Trump and are largely on board with the transphobic rhetoric in theory, but when they interact with me in the simplest of ways you can see this guilt in their face as they realize I’m actually just another human being and part of their community. They may not like the bogeyman of trans people, but when they meet an actual human being who’s kind to them? Even who just smiles at them and says hello? It conflicts with that propaganda that they’ve acted on in their politics and they literally do feel bad. Not all of them, to be sure, but some of them. That’s a good sign.
It means that there’s some capacity for learning. That we may be susceptible to propaganda and ignorance, but we’re also capable of learning from our mistakes. The question is how long it takes that capacity for learning to be triggered and override our capacity for ignorance, and how bad things get in the mean time.
Hopefully seeing those camps is one of the things that triggers that learning. That it rhymes enough with the history we’re aware of that people in the right positions start to realize how dangerously close we’re getting to something really bad before we actually get all the way there.
Like I can understand wanting to maximize exposure, but they could literally just set up cross-posting and journalists could start screencapping their mastodon instead of their twitter. But people can’t even be bothered with that level of ease. It’s easier to just do what they’ve been doing, so that’s what they do.
Honestly, it makes me wonder if this crisis mode shit that Trump is sparking will end up finally lighting a fire under people’s asses on a few things and getting them to move the ball where they would have just sat around talking about moving the ball otherwise.
I hope this level of stupidity acts as a sort of social vaccine before it does too much damage.
Not to undercut the story itself, but I find it absolutely wild that people are still using Twitter to talk about this. Like… what? If you can’t even get off Twitter how are you going to do anything actually substantive?
The controversial columnist is exiting the New York Times “Opinion” section this spring as part of a wave of job cuts. In 2022, after a decade of editing the Book Review, Paul joined “Opinion,” where she quickly gained a reputation as a liberal contrarian determined to court the rage of the online left. Over three short years, Paul has breezily claimed that free speech is under assault by woke activists, that gender medicine is mutilating a generation of children, and that America has become a dark, dystopian place where freethinkers get canceled and nobody reads books anymore. Through all of this, she has proudly donned the mantle of a beleaguered liberal, rejecting any suggestion that she has collaborated with the victorious right. “If people on the fringe are accusing me of ‘making straw-man arguments’ or ‘both-siderism,’” Paul said in 2023, “then I know that I’ve done something right.”
Wow what an absolute hero. 🙄
I’m pretty sure people thought Trump would be good at economics literally just because of the Apprentice. Manny more people in the US watch reality TV than have any real understanding of politics. Look at all the Trump voters who literally seemed to have no idea he would do any of the things he very loudly said he was going to do. They just remember him being the boss guy who was supposedly good at business from that one show they watched about business.