The problem is that Sanders’s vision — and the vision of Perez and the DNC — as they laid it out this week, looked less like a radical transformation of the Democratic Party and more like a return to mistakes the party has made in the past. These mistakes have nothing to do with economic equality, and everything to do with a willingness to sacrifice the rights of much of the party’s base.

Sanders is wrong that reproductive rights (or gay rights, for that matter) are separate from economic issues. The ability to control reproduction is central to women’s social, professional, and economic stability, and the women most likely to require abortion services and to be negatively affected by restrictions on access to reproductive health care are poor and low-income women, disproportionately women of color.

But he and Perez were also wrong to view compromising on abortion as part of a pragmatic political path forward and to hold up an aggressively anti-abortion Democrat as some exemplar of progressivism’s future. Heaps of contemporary polling shows abortion is not the divisive issue it was long assumed to be. In 2015, polls showed that seven in ten voters, including independents — and even in Kansas — not only supported safe and accessible abortion but were willing to vote based on that support. A postelection Pew study found support for Roe to be at 69 percent, an all-time high. Omaha, the city where Heath Mello is running for mayor, was carried by Clinton — who made the most full-throated case for reproductive rights ever offered by a presidential candidate in her final debate against Donald Trump — by eight points. (For the record, Mello released a statement on Thursday claiming that, “While my faith guides my personal views, as Mayor I would never do anything to restrict access to reproductive health care,” which is a lovely sentiment, except for the fact that as state senator he literally did do lots to restrict access to reproductive health care.)

There is absolutely no need to abandon women’s rights in the name of advancing progressive politics. And yet the party has done it time and again, often after losing presidential elections.

A lot of so called slacktivists are actually just people living in poverty who really can only share an article or two between whatever combination of jobs, chronic illnesses, or the increasingly unrealistic demands of higher education are grinding their life away.

gaaraofsburbia:

electoralcollege:

aliencadaver:

not gonna say it again

Political compass

Rotate it 90 degrees clockwise and it’s perfect

roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

kmclaude:

queerpyracy:

queerpyracy:

baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat

you know what i’m in just enough of a bad mood that i’m ready to nail my grievances to the church door so let’s fucking go

black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is ~~a dirty sinner~~ Problematic and probably a predatory monster

everyone is ~~a sinner~~ Problematic but ~~true believers~~ people who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because I ~~found Jesus~~ am the most woke

casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong

aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]

YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing

historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)

lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis

the answer is no

I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about

~~Good Christians™~~ Nice Gays™

don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by ~~non-Christians~~ those terrible queers

all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children

it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old

literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that

people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking

I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon

Thank you for breaking it down like that because so many of us have been saying it but to see a play by play breakdown comparison is just…Thank you.

this parallel is incredibly apt.

i grew up a liberal protestant and watched my mom deprogram conservative women’s circles like some kind of jesus-freak natasha romanov, and i swear it looked a whole lot like roach and seebs dismantling sjw circlejerks today.

you don’t have to stop believing; you just have to start thinking too.

another place the parallel works is with people getting the most angry and doubling down on the worst instances of doublethink. the less defensible it is, the more they’ll cherish it, because it’s the gas vent of their death star. one shot there, if they let it in, will blow the whole edifice.

compare: conservative protestants furiously defending their love of war and violence, in direct contravention to everything jesus ever said; tumblr wowzers attacking women about sexuality, in direct contravention to everything real life social justice advocates stand for.

and i gotta say, being a quaker on christian forums really prepared me for dealing with these folks. y’all can’t rile me. i’ve turned the other cheek to southern baptists. i might get cranky sometimes when they tell nasty lies about people i love, but i’m not gonna lose hope or give up. i’m also not going to crack and show the seething evil beneath, or whatever they’re hoping will happen if they keep attacking long enough. this isn’t kayfabe. my faith and my activism both go all the way to the core, grown from seed over decades.

now that i think about it, i would be very interested in what the (raised)religious demographics are on this site. early programming matters a lot to how you approach problems (and problematics).

prokopetz:

Thesis: the narrow focus on public performance over substantive action in certain activist circles has less to do with cynical schemes to game the system for progressive brownie points, and more to do with the fact that many folks basically think social activism is a form of ritual magic. Popular histories give us images of Great Men making speeches and leading marches and circulating petitions, and completely erase all the ground-level infrastructure that made all that stuff work; the end result is that a lot of folks seem honestly to believe that bringing about social change is a matter of performing the appropriate symbolic actions and waiting for reality to reconfigure itself accordingly.

general politics, i’m suddenly like. WHAT THE FUCK. what are they thinking? don’t you all have multiple degrees? aren’t you all mostly career politicians?

broadlybrazen:

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I think Dems have one huge structural problem that isn’t even within their control: the biggest problem for Democrats, and indeed the country, is the destruction of the Republican party.

you cannot be functional in a two-party system where one party is for governance and the other one literally wants to set the planet on fire. you have this absolute nightmare wherein political conversation within the party is divided between dealing with legitimate inner conflicts, criticisms, re-alignments, strategies, etc, and the certain knowledge that if the party doesn’t win then *everything fucking dies*.

you cannot be functional or cohesive when you are in the dangerously idiotic position of being the ONLY institutional power saying things like “don’t poison the water and land and air.” you cannot be functional when you are in the mindboggling position of being the ONLY people at the table saying things like, “science is real.”

quoting from twitter: democracy isn’t designed to handle when you’re unable to define a spectrum of compromise…democracy isn’t designed to handle one party having to go balls-to-the wall on every single issue, every single time. I mean…Dems have no other choice right now, but the reason it looks completely dysfunctional is because this IS completely fucking dysfunctional.

it is normal & healthy for a political party to wrestle with itself; in other circumstances, I wouldn’t worry overmuch because in healthy environments, such conflict helps the organization grow, help keeps it dynamic and flexible.

But it is NOT normal & healthy for a party to be stuck as the “come with me if you want to live” option. it is NOT normal & healthy for a party to be stuck as the “come with me if you want even 0.01% chance of dealing with manmade climate change before we destroy all of humanity’s future.”

like, every single administration in the US has a maximum shelf-life of 8 years. you can’t have that kind of turnover & remain functional if you don’t have a certain amount of continuity and functionality that remains at all times – and we DON’T, because the Republican party fundamentally does not give a single shit about governance and they’ve been getting steadily worse for a few decades. Trump is the most extreme and frightening result of this shit.

[cut for longwinded example]

Keep reading

tami-taylors-hair:

That shit is wild to me though. ‘This doesn’t benefit me personally, so why should I pay taxes for it?’
The VA doesn’t benefit me, so fuck those 25 year olds with traumatic brain injuries. Medicare doesn’t help me out, so grandpa can get bent. I don’t watch Sesame Street, so PBS? Fuck em.

Like, listen you putrid chuckleheads, we’re trying to have a fucking society here, and part of that is taking care of your fellow fucking human beings. Paying taxes for things you might not use is part of that. And if you view that as theft, you’re a dumb shit who can go live on your own in the tundra and see how well you do.

roachpatrol:

gayasscommie:

softtrade:

I think the issue w a lot of people invested in like “SJ” sorts of things is that they conceptualize ethics as *only* being abt these structural oppressions, so as long as you are acting in accordance w those precepts you literally cannot do anything unethical.

But like, you can be completely Right Politically in a situation and still be acting in a cruel, greedy, careless, vicious, or harmful way. And that doesn’t give that complete absolution.

We need to like, not mistake structural analysis w ethical formation, tho they are obviously connected

I think that’s a part of what’s been so like, volatile about SJ spaces for the last couple of years: people think that if you sublimate your individual ethics into some kinda framework that you’re good and that you can act like an incredibly petty asshole

yeah it’s like people were told ‘you can’t be reverse racist because that is not how the social structure of oppression works’ and heard ‘anything you do to someone who’s more privileged than you is righteous’ which is… not great

jumpingjacktrash:

greyhairedgeekgirl:

ernmark:

During a conversation with my manager this morning, she mentioned that her manager– the district manager– had told her that “We want people who are passionate about our products. We don’t want people working here if they’re doing it for the money.”

To which the manager (internally, because she doesn’t want to be fired), went “you’ve got to be fucking shitting me.”

Here’s the thing: it is totally possible to do a job for the passion and not be obsessively thinking about the money every minute of every day. In fact, there have been economic studies regarding that very thing.

You know when it starts?

When the employee in question is making $50-75k per year.*

That’s the starting point of financial security. That’s the point when you’re fairly secure that you’re going to have rent, food, and basic living expenses covered.

I’ve worked a lot of jobs over the years. A lot.

I saw the same working as a freelancer– when I charged lower rates, my clients treated me like shit and acted like they were doing me a favor; when I charged more, they respected me as a professional. A newspaper that started out paying me above market wage also treated me very kindly, because they started with the assumption that I was a human being who needs to eat.

In my experience, the employers that insist that your job be your “passion” are also the ones that pay you nothing and treat you like garbage. It’s exactly like abusive people, who tell you that you would put up with their abuse if you “loved them enough”. It’s a way of convincing the victim that they’re responsible for their own mistreatment, which is absolutely fucked up.

Here’s my advice to you:

It is absolutely okay to take a job that doesn’t pay you what you deserve– you’ve got to eat, after all. But don’t think for a second that you have a responsibility to that job. If you see something available that pays better and treats you better, take it and don’t look back. Don’t waste an ounce of sympathy for employers who try to convince you that passion is an acceptable substitute for survival.

If they want you to be passionate about your work with them, they should be treating you wtih the respect they give to people who ARE passionate about their products.

Also: your employer doesn’t own your soul, and can’t ask for it.

what they want, whether they know it or not, is people who can convincingly lie about being passionate.

no one is passionate about a product.