I'm trying not to block people. But there's only so many times I can go 'give people the benefit of the doubt' and then click their blog and what's literally the third or fourth post on their blogs? They talk about middle eastern people like savages who can't control their violent urges. And of course, more than half of them are Americans. After posing for 20 years, the masks that temporarily went up when anti-war activists criticised the American war in the Middle East are slipping, some of you never really believed brown people to be your equals did you? Get the fuck off my blog.

Poll adventure (paventure? lol) Day 8: !!NOTE: this is different from the past polls - rather than choosing a story action, you're picking supplies to craft a little makeshift boat (EX: wood will be the main platform, so there should likely be the most of it, however, if there were 100% votes for branches and 0% votes for rope, then it'd just be a pile of wood held together by nothing - keep them balanced reasonably, etc.))

(✦ see past poll results + further information HERE (link) ✦)

The winning option of yesterday's poll was that the adventurer should get around the barrier by crafting a little boat to take a river detour….

~

Finally crawling out of his hiding spot in the brambles, he meticulously brushes the leaves from his clothes and composes himself, now fully focused on his generic traveler's map of the area... After checking it about 500 times just to make sure he isn't confused, he determines that going down the nearby river would likely still get him where he's trying to go, and hopefully be much less treacherous than wandering through haunted forests or confronting the stern gaze of the barrier guards..

It only takes about 10 minutes of following a narrower rocky path off the main road to reach a nice shaded spot of land next to a small river. He kneels in the grass, eagerly rummaging through his backpack for supplies, in addition to whatever he can scavenge from the edge of the woods. The rush of excitement slowly dissipates however, once he realizes that he.. actually.. might not know how to make a raft as well as he thought... Surely it's quite straightforward, no? Just.. make it look like it does in picture books?? There are no rules, as long as it floats, it works! Probably anyone could build one on intuition alone! ... maybe...???

.. Once again sinking into a cloud of anxiety, he slumps over, staring at the pile of materials with teary eyes, doubtful what to even do next.... How should he build the raft? Help him by using the poll to choose the appropriate amounts of materials (determined by final % of votes in that category)!

If you do not realize that Biden is a much better choice than Trump, you're fucking delusional. Is he the best in-a-vacuum choice? No. But our two party system means we are getting one or the other.

It really is incredible that even with as much of an admittedly libby take on this as I have, with me reblogging more "voting is important" posts than "Biden sucks" posts, I'm still getting asks like this. get a hobby

Y’all understand that the purpose of voting uncommitted in the primary is another form of protest to get Biden to choose between a second term and ending military funding for the IDF right?

I keep seeing posts that are frustrated about this because they assume the people who are voting uncommitted are doing it because they hate Biden (and if that’s the case I get it tbh), but I need everyone to understand that there is an inherent strategy in this tactic. The Democratic Party is putting all of its money behind Biden and not putting any other candidates in the Primary, leaving Democratic voters with only one option - the same person who refuses to call for a Ceasefire and is continuing to fund a whole fucking genocide while we tirelessly protest, write/call in to our representatives, and post online to spread awareness. They’re not giving voters a choice electorally. So by voting “uncommitted” instead of simply voting for Biden (in HUGE numbers btw) they’re sending a clear message about where their priorities really lie.

The whole point of voting is to use your voice to tell your leaders what you want! Voters are the only thing standing between politicians and any power they wish to wield. By not voting for Biden in the Primary voters are able to hold him accountable and say “you’re not holding true to the duty of your office, the office we put you in and pay for, to represent us faithfully, so now you don’t get to keep that office.” It’s essentially telling Biden to wise the fuck up, because the ultimatum is genocide or no more power. He will lose the privilege of getting to lead if he doesn’t listen to the people he represents.

I get being scared about this. Protesting can be scary sometimes. Trump is a huge fucking threat to everything and everyone I love. He is a literal fascist who can’t be trusted to run a lawnmower let alone an entire country. But Biden and the Democratic Party are banking all their money on that fear being the sole motivator this November, so that they can continue with business as usual and not do their fucking jobs. They don’t want to listen to voters about calling for a Ceasefire because they want to continue taking money from AIPAC and other zionists, and because they don’t want further conflict between the US and anyone else. By voting uncommitted voters are sending the message that Biden is not doing his job (democratically representing the American people) and they are prepared to fire him for it.

sometimes I truly genuinely forget nuance is dead on the internet and then I have to read people who should be on the same side argue about politics on the internet and I start wanting to bash my head into a wall.

so. did not expect gabler sweep. Cassidy should have gotten more votes than she did and same for Owen. Gabler’s edit was, as everyone is saying, trash (so was cassidys I feel like we never saw her until post merge). It should have showed more of the relationship building bc that was his absolute biggest strength (and he clearly WAS good at it! Sorry!). This season was also pretty anti-women but I don’t think that was like. Any individual players fault like. When they voted off 4 women the first 4 votes we all knew there would simply be fewer women and thus a more sexist game. You can’t be mad that like noelle didn’t have female allies she was the only woman on her tribe for 70% of it. I also don’t think any of the jurors were overly bitter in their voting BUT if they were? Girl. It’s survivor am I supposed to pretend that’s something new? Final tribal councils used to just be jurors insulting finalists and saying they didn’t care their dads died and shit like that! part of playing a SOCIAL and strategic game is not having anyone despise you at the end!! I wasn’t rooting for gabler and I was expecting a Cassidy win (rip) but he made BY FAR the best tribal arguments for himself and clearly had some very deep and serious personal connections with the people he played with. That’s the game.

Hello, long time follower, I wanted to ask you what is your personal response/answer to what happens if democrats lose the house senate and presidency due to apathetic and dejected voters, (which is very justified at this point) and blatant corruption from republicans resulting in republicans taking control of it all? They have gerrymandered to the point of ridiculousness and put in state legislatures loyal to trump wherever they can, (amongst many other things) ensuring that our votes will matter even less, so voting will become even more pointless, since you talk a lot about politics I’m curious to what you think the answer to all this corrupt and fucked up stuff that is happening? And how would you go about motivating and organising it? I do see a lot of justified venting from leftists here - what are the solutions that would work with 1. the many people who are politically ignorant and 2. the barely functioning system we currently have for now. won’t we need the help of both of these to help to over throw the evil that primarily republicans but also many democrats have enabled? I love tumblr and I’ve learnt a lot from leftists here but we just don’t seem to be able to organise nearly as well as right wing communities, basically what the fuck do we do at this point that will actually enact actual change?! What are you doing outside of tumblr that is doing this - how can we join in?

Join a communist party or mass org, talk to your neighbors and community members, participate in a mutual aid network, organize. I know you've probably heard this all before but it's true.

sussy fanfare

*manifests election exhaustion through chart dissections even though I swore I wasn't going to keep picking at the election like an open wound*

RIP our voter turnout...

drives me up a wall living in a very very red district, like “no democrat is ever going to win any local election, let alone a real leftist” district, like “our school board members ran on who was the most anti-mask” red, like “I pass white supremacist signs on the way to buy weed” red

and being in the local leftist community and the guy who runs the anarchist book club and the lady who helps keep the warming shelters open and the people who marched on city hall when a local business was getting death threats for having a drag show are all members of a discord and we get on this discord and have frank discussions about how best to vote

the people who do the protests and the mutual aid and all the real work

going “okay, they’re both fascists, but this one lacks ambition and seems happy to just glide in the position” or “they both suck, but this one can be reasoned with if you frame it patriotically enough” like we don’t even have a democrat to vote for. we know what a vote is. we know what we hope accomplish with it. we know what it can do, and we know what it can’t.

and going from those discussions to here where people think that your vote is some kind of fucking??? enabling maneuver??? as if someone isn’t going to end up in that seat regardless of what you do???

we didn’t build this system, we just live in it. we’re just trying to survive. a vote isn’t a statement of your values, it’s not an endorsement, it’s not a marriage contract, it’s a strategic play you make to keep alive.

the biggest mistake I see leftists making is overestimating their own popularity. “well but everyone would be leftist if they just-“ no, stop, 1) you can’t possibly know that 2) everyone will not just

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

Getting a bit tired of all the “just go vote” posts floating around my dash. I will vote and everything, but I don’t live in the US anymore so I’m not allowed to vote for anything but federal stuff. So hooray I get to throw a vote at Maria Cantwell and Rick Larsen (probably, depending on primaries but they’re the incumbents) which is wild in and of itself cuz I lived in that area so briefly but that’s forever where I’m registered to vote now I guess.

And of course presidential election. Which wow so cool so exciting. Wonder who will get all those electoral college votes from Washington state, really on the edge of my seat over here, my vote sure is gonna make a difference.

Try to avoid talking politics cause it's a fucking cesspool, but god I fucking hate mike johnson, he's such a lying piece of shit

"Oh I've always supported Ukraine", bitch, you refuse to ever bring an up or down vote for aid to Ukraine to the floor, you refuse to even do the basics of your job and see if the house is willing to vote yes for aid to Ukraine. Quick being the biggest fucking liar around, at least fucking be honest

Wouldn't like you, but as it stands it would be hard fro my respect to get any lower when you straight up have been blocking aid to Ukraine since you got this position by simply refusing to even bring a vote to the floor

I'd be annoyed if it got voted down, but the fact he won't even just bring a simple yes no vote to the floor, that's why out of all the scum in American politics, right now I probably like him about the least

There’s some common threads I see in the anti-voting posts going around, and I feel like I need to discuss some of them. Let’s start with the biggest one:

Voting to punish evil. I see lots of variations of this. Biden is supporting Israel, therefore we can’t vote for him. Is there any viable candidate who would stop the genocide? I don’t think the anti voting crowd actually cares. They are appealing to moral feelings rather than political strategy, because strategically, you have to realize that voting is not going to change foreign policy, and that change has to be pushed by other means. It’ll probably be something in the long haul.

Democrats should run someone else. First of all, this is a shit strategy. You don’t primary your president in the second term unless your party is falling apart. This may come from people from countries where replacing the head of government is easier, but the POTUS is the de facto party head. Also, going to the lack of thought to the goal — do you know someone willing to primary Biden and able to win who would do the things you want?

Biden hasn’t done anything anyway. This is just a way to bat away pro arguments. There’s plenty of lists of progress on lots of things. Student loans, insulin price caps, regulations, anti-trust.

Putting the entire Palestinian genocide on Biden. I’m not saying there’s not culpability there, but understand that the entire US government is in support of Israel, on both sides. It was a miracle we got a handful of Senators to call for investigations. We should cut off aid, absolutely. Who’s running to do that? And keep in mind that Israel chose to engage. US officials would have liked a more limited response, not out of care for Palestinians, but because they know from experience that it will come back to bite Israel in the form of newly radicalized Hamas recruits.

Liberals just have no hope for change. This is a new one. Just some idea that people are stuck in a rut and that’s the reason the two party system exists. The two party system is a mathematical consequence of the way we vote. There is reason to hope for change. The change, though, whatever means you choose, will take decades. Keep working at it. The hope is not that this election will fundamentally change things. The hope is that many small political actions over the years will push things forward.

Funnily enough, I haven’t seen a whole lot of third party promotion, just lots of this rhetoric aiming to punish. When voting, ask yourself:

Is this problem I have with this candidate something that the other candidate would be better on?

Are there other political actions I can take that will help?

What things can change with a different President or Congress, and what needs to be pursued by other means?

Withholding your vote as a punishment isn’t really going to help. Biden doesn’t know who you are or why you are not voting for him, and there is no one with a chance of winning that will do everything you want. But you have other means. Protest, organize, donate, build up alternatives, advocate for a different system.

Vote to give yourself space and get a little bit. Do other things to keep things moving.

Fundamentally, if the democrats lose the presidency in 2024, it will not be because of "voter apathy" or "the idealistic left" or Cornell West or whatever third party candidate the liberals end up blaming. It will be because the democrats have failed to meet the lowest standards of many Americans.

You can talk about strategic voting until you're blue in the face, but fundamentally, people need reasons to vote for a candidate. There are people in this country watching as their family members get slaughtered by American arms, sent to Israel by Joe Biden. The people watching their families get murdered in Palestine have no reason to support Joe Biden. How can you ask them to?

"Sorry your family got bombed, but I need you to vote for the man who is directly responsible, or *real* people are going to suffer too."

It was at this point While I was drafting this post that I heard he just started bombing Yemen. It's like he's doing everything in his power to sink his own fucking campaign, are you shitting me? This isn't a matter of "stupid commies not being realistic enough", he's not just working for the status quo; just about every action he has taken since October 7th has been an escalation of conflict in the Middle East and made it worse for everyone living there. This is exactly what I'm talking about.

You can scold people for voting wrong as much as you want, but fundamentally the way that democrats can win elections is by pursuing good policy. If the only argument you can come up with in favor of Joe Biden is that he won't do 1 or 2 of the terrible things that Trump wants to do, then that will simply not appeal to the people who are most intensely affected by Biden's failures (not to mention people who have moral objections to genocide, even when it doesn't affect them). You can scream and cry all you want, people are not going to just overlook his role in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza just because he is the Less Bad Genocider.

If a republican wins the presidency in November, you can blame the hundreds of thousands of voters/nonvoters who should've agreed with you and put aside every moral concern they ever had about the Biden administration... or you can blame the one fucking guy whose massive foreign policy failures are going to tank his re-election campaign.

Frustrates me to no end seeing people say “what’s your alternative to voting blue? Stage a revolution right now? This second? Get real, you’re posting on your computer instead of firebombing walmarts.” I don’t think that you understand what people are actually doing. I know for myself, I’ve been reading more history and theory than I ever have before. I’ve been marching. I’ve been getting involved with labor activism. I’ve been doing strategic research. I’ve tried to archive and share resources. I’ve watched other people do WAY more than I ever have or probably could. I’ve seen people occupy arms manufacturing sites and hold wildcat strikes and disrupt daily life as much as possible. We’ve all seen this happening at unprecedented levels for months now. And most of all, I’ve seen Palestinians telling us, rightfully full of anger, do not ever go back to how things were before. Do not turn away from what’s happening and your own complicity in it.

This is not something that we can vote our way out of. Our state is built on the same violence being inflicted on the people of Palestine. We helped to build Israel. We are still arming it and funding the “war” right now. Even the most half hearted measures from international bodies like the UN to take the bare minimum of a stance against genocide are quashed by the US. As they always have been, our power and resources are used to reinforce imperial and colonial hegemony. That remains the same no matter who is sitting in the Oval Office. And so does our own struggle for liberation. Meaningful change is never, ever going to come from within. We force the change to happen, as we always have.

If you can understand intersectionality, then surely you can understand this: we are not going to free ourselves by sacrificing colonized people. You may vote blue, and for you it could be a matter of life and death. Believe me, as a poor disabled person in a red state who almost killed myself over medical debt, I know the stakes. But I think you have to own the fact that you are empowering perpetrators of genocide and breaking solidarity with colonized people, not even to liberate yourself, but just to bargain with the oppressor for your life. That Palestinians and everyone else who we have harmed are going to be angry and they are more than within their rights. Instead of deflecting by just assuming that no one else is capable of putting their money where their mouth is and actually trying to lay groundwork for change, just do whatever you feel you have to do and sit with the reality of the situation.

Palestine will be free, we will be free, the whole world will someday be free. But for now, this is where we are, and we won’t free ourselves by operating like crabs in a bucket. Get organized, take care of each other, commit to solidarity. Empower yourself and each other rather than the state.