Dark times. I hope the fumble this one just like they did some two decades ago with Chavez but I don't have high hopes.

Good luck, Maduro. Venceremos.

The strategic blunders from the Democrats on all levels is incredible. They're throwing the progressive anti-war libs to the left, they're giving well-meaning libs an experiential crash course in how Hasbara propaganda works.

The way they have been peeling people off of liberalism recently is just remarkable.

1. The DNC learned nothing from 2016. It is the definition of irrationality to do the same thing twice and expect different outcomes.

2. Bernie could garner huge crowds and massive support by campaigning on the basis of policy that has mass appeal, such as universal healthcare. Kamala chose not to do this because she prioritised business as usual over stopping Trump.

3. You say "things will get worse under Trump". That's true. But things got worse under Biden/Harris after Trump's first term as president - environmental policy, the border camps, reproductive rights, trans rights, cop city, the genocide of Palestinians etc. So when you say "we must vote for Kamala or things will get worse" that line of reasoning is at best unconvincing and at worst it betrays the 4-year state of amnesia you have lived in because you are so politically detached from the consequences of your voting.

4. Telling people to protect democracy—the system where you vote for the candidate who best represents your political values—by voting for a person who in no way represents your political values in order to save democracy is tortured logic.

5. No, I'm not an accelerationist. Me advocating for people not to vote for Kamala Harris is not an accelerationist position because we should not be giving a mandate for a genocide, climate change, and civil rights-eroding accelerationist by voting for them.

6. How many delegates did Harris win in the last primaries? How many did she win in the primaries to get her to run for president this time? Is this what you claim as your democracy?

7. When I list a number of legitimate grievances with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's regime and issues with Kamala's election platform, none of which have a single thing to do with her race or gender, and you respond by calling me racist or misogynistic it drives home how little you are willing to listen to my political concerns and how intransigent your favoured party is. When you act this way and then tell me that people have to vote for Kamala in order to push her left while you yourself are unwilling to even acknowledge the fact that Kamala's platform has serious issues, it signals to me that there will be no shifting left on anything. I already knew this fact but you have done an exceptional job of inadvertently teaching other people this lesson.

8. When entering into negotiations with someone, it's a uniquely terrible tactic to hand over your one state-sanctioned bargaining chip before making even one single demand.

9. You are chasing the DNC to the right and one day you will wake up and wonder to yourself "How did I end up all the way over here?" I'm not following you into that marsh but you're welcome to go into it yourself, just don't get upset at me when I point out what you're heading into and don't get angry when I refuse to blindly follow you.

10. Kamala Harris is the only thing that can stop fascism. Kamala Harris cannot do anything to protect reproductive rights, trans rights, Palestinian lives, the lives of Marcellus Williams and Robert Robertson etc. because she is powerless to do anything about it 🫠

11. Kamala Harris said she would "follow the law" regarding trans people. She was angling to become the primary lawmaker in the US. Not only does this show a lack of whatever libs care about like "leadership" but it shows how cowardly and detestable she is because she understands the law and she is willing to follow it but not when it comes to things like international law, only when it's laws that she can use to hide behind while trans people are subjected to further oppression through legislation that strips them of rights.

12. Historically, fascism has never been stopped at the ballot box. You being convinced that this is possible does not sway my opinion on any matter aside from my estimation of your political awareness and your ability to achieve change.

13. You had four years (eight+ if you count Trump's regime and the lead-up to it in this calculation) to "stop fascism". What did you do in this period of time? Did you push Biden and Kamala to adopt policies which have mass support? Did you do anything except go to back to brunch?

14. When you accuse me of not organising irl, when you say that I'm not doing anything:

• I'm not about to dox myself

• I'm not going to make a laundry list of the things that I have done w/organising and activism just to impress (?) you, especially not when you've already told me that I haven't done anything

• It's a huge self-report and it's obvious that you're projecting

• You alienate others by telling them "I do not recognise your efforts and everything that you have done is unimportant in my estimation"

15. You aren't entitled to others' votes. Stop pretending that you are.

16. We aren't splitting the so-called left, Kamala Harris did that all by herself.

17. You have no red lines. There is nothing that could make you not support Kamala Harris and we know it. Telling people to drop their standards and ignore their conscience to vote for Kamala is a fatal strategy and you killed her campaign by deploying it.

18. Selective invoking of people of colour to advocate for Kamala was ridiculous and disgustingly tokenistic. Yes, Angela Davis is smarter than I am. Telling me that I'm stupider than her and so I should take my political cues from her with regards to electoralism is a losing argument and it's low-key ableist became you're arguing that the person who lacks intelligence also has a commensurate lack of political virtue. Historically speaking, very intelligent people have had absolutely atrocious politics. Also people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are almost certainly a lot smarter than I am. It would be wrong of me not to defer to their superior intellect and their politics, isn't that right?

19. You say that democracy is going to be strangled in its crib and that fascism has come to town. You are maybe posting about this online in your echo chamber and that's it. You do not take politics seriously, not even your own, yet you demand that I take your politics more seriously than you yourself do. There are things that I am doing right now to avert this trend in politics. There are things that I would do if fascism proper had seized power, none of which I would post about online. We are not the same. Enjoy your brunch though.

20. Almost all of your arguments for voting for Kamala Harris (aside from the "it will stop Trump" argument which, in retrospect, appears to be a dismal failure) also apply to reasons for voting for Trump. "You can push them left", "By voting we will get a seat at the table", "Voting third party or not voting at all is a wasted vote", "We have to vote this way to protect the country", "Politics is about comprise - you cannot expect them to be your perfect political candidate", and whatever hold-your-nose-and-vote arguments you trot out. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why it is that you do not find these arguments for voting Trump to be convincing?

21. Last time Trump got elected you were brutally vindictive. You took glee in the thought of people in red states and marginalised groups suffering due to policy and things like natural disasters, regardless of their politics or how they chose to vote. You were excited to tell these people that they were going to get deported and put into concentration camps. You will do it again this time too because you have learned nothing. November came and these people you targeted with your vicious schadenfreude remembered. They aren't going to forget how effortlessly you abandoned them and how you wished the worst suffering and ill-fate upon them.

22. You said that a non-vote or a 3rd party vote is a vote for Trump. We have been shouting from the rooftops that Kamala Harris is fundamentally unwilling and incapable of stopping Trump. History vindicates this position; Trump managed to win the popular vote while Harris underperformed by millions of votes, even compared to Joe Biden. Thus your support for Kamala Harris was therefore support for Donald Trump's presidency. Congratulations on getting the candidate which you campaigned so hard to get elected.

23. I don't care about the US. America must die and if Trump is to be its undertaker then I am relieved to hear it. What you have done is to accelerate the destruction of the US. If I were cynical about achieving my political objectives, wouldn't have said any of the above. If I was an accelerationist I would have been pushing for all of the things that you've been pushing for instead of pushing back against them. I would have even gone so far as to furnish your side with more poisoned chalice arguments (I do this with the far right, I exactly know how to do it). Instead I've been defending your political project against your own excesses and self-defeating narrow mindedness. You are right in the fact that I am your enemy but you are wrong to oppose me because you are a far greater enemy to yourself than I could ever have the stomach to be. You won't listen to a word of what I've said because you refuse to learn and to reflect.

24. A cynical person might argue that my strategy is to oppose you in the knowledge that this will make you react by becoming more deeply entrenched in your position, encouraging a sort of siege mentality in you, so that you see any criticism or difference of opinion as being an existential political threat that must be eradicated as a means to create more disaffected people to radicalise out of bourgeois democracy. This is not my intent. If things improve for the proles and the marginalised because of what I argue for then that's a win for my political objectives. However I can't control your actions and if you choose to respond by taking a hatchet to your precious liberal democracy then, likewise, that's a win for my political objectives. Which way, western man?

There was a guy who responded to this.

His mom was attacked by a bear and wrote a book about it. He said that she felt safer around men than around bears in response to this trend.

Thing is though, she did an AMA on Reddit a few years back and someone trawled through the answers and found a question where she was basically asked her this exact thing. She said that she feels safer around bears than men and that she carries a gun when she goes hiking but not because of the risk of running into a bear again.

There have been some really good responses from women defending choosing a bear. Here's a few that stuck out to me that I remember:

[CW: assault/SA]

"At least a bear sees me as human"

"Nobody would ask me what I was wearing if I got attacked by a bear"

"The worst that a bear can do is kill me"

"If I got attacked by a bear people would believe me"

"When I got attacked by a bear I screamed at it and it ran away, when I got attacked by a man he smiled, covered my mouth, and said that he was just going to enjoy it more"

"A bear would only take 5 minutes"

"A bear wouldn't kill me for pleasure"

A lot of "defensive" men have been missing the point (shocker, I know) and they seem to think that it's a question about whether women would prefer to be attacked by one or the other, or that they are saying they'd rather be alone with a bear than any man including ones they know and trust.

The question is very specifically worded to ask women if they would rather be alone in the woods with a bear or with a man.

I saw one really good response from a man who clearly wasn't quite over the line with regards to women's liberation and feminist values - think a middle of the road kinda guy - and his partner asked him if his daughter was in the woods alone would he rather there be a bear or a woman in the woods. He immediately said "With a woman" almost reflexively.

When he got posed the same question except with a bear or a man you could see him really wrestling with the question as he considered the implications and the risks. I think he settled on the bear but the point wasn't about getting him to agree with women, it was getting him to understand some of the risks that women, trans people, and femme people weigh up on a near constant basis due to the risk that men pose.

In a similar vein, on a wild tangent, because I'm amab/masc presenting when the opportunity is right (either when there aren't women around or when a guy has escalated a discussion) I will often drop the question on them and ask what their rape plan is. Generally they squirm and have to, for the first time, think through what they would do to mitigate their risk of being raped and what they would do if they were in that situation.

Often the answers are really poorly thought through, such as "I'd fight back" or "I wouldn't get myself into that situation" 🙄

Sometimes it cuts through though and you can get a man to reflect on how pretty much any woman/trans person/femme person is going to have a very well developed rape plan with all sorts of strategies for mitigating the risk and how they carry these plans with them and enact them all of the time.

Which leads into my next tangent. An autistic femme presenting person talked about their experience trying to mask to fit in due to growing up undiagnosed and how it's a response to a constant pattern of being ostracised, judged, and harassed for not fitting in but the moment that you drop the mask, people tend to respond really poorly to that so it's a real double-bind where you either compromise your needs (and often your health) to get treated badly fairly often or you don't make that compromise and you get treated badly for it.

I jumped in the comments and said "Y'know there's a parallel here - women often report a similar double-bind where when a guy hits on them they either have to very gently and politely try to decline without coming off as being coy or they can be blunt and straight-up refuse but a blunt rejection very often gets an abusive response whereas a polite rejection gets ignored and compromises her own needs."

That wasn't anything widly political to say. I was just trying to invite allistic women to be like "Hey yeah! I understand that kind of experience where you are confronted with the choice of being treated like shit for just expressing yourself directly or you have to placate someone else's needs and expend all of this energy just trying to get them to not treat you badly (and often they end up treating you badly after all that effort anyway). That sucks. I didn't realise that's what it was like for autistic people for most of their social interactions."

But of course some ex-military jerkwad guy who was late self-identifying as autistic had to charge headlong into the replies to turn it into being all about men, all about him, and all about his own experience (and ableist perception) of autism to the exclusion of others. It was a perfect example of male fragility and it was yet-another example of guys doing that thing where they think they're defending men by arguing that they aren't capable of determining whether someone consents and that they cannot help but sexually harass women. Imagine how monstrous I am to argue that men are very much capable of knowing better and they can do things like "controlling their impulses like a mature human" being rather than being like wild animals that need to be physically restrained in order to protect the people around them. These dorks think the absolute worst of men and my hunch is that this kind of reply is mostly a self-report.

Dudes rock /s

"Navalny was actually just a really cool, xenophobic, ultra-nationalist guy. Nothing like that despicable, xenophobic, ultra-nationalist Trump 😇"

You can smell the "I'm apolitical/actually very progressive" and the "No, I haven't considered/didn't opt for conscientious objection to IOF mandatory service" through the screen

Hindenburg appointed Nazi party leaders to essentially all the levers of power within the Weimar Republic. This is something that gets overlooked in lib history because of great man theory brainworms but Hindenburg basically created a turnkey coup government for the party that, famously, was not led by a person who had already attempted a coup of the Weimar government years before.

Caffe Aronne owner Aaron Dahan said he was left short-staffed at his Upper East Side location after he tried to talk to two of the baristas about their Free Palestine pins.

But instead of hearing him out and understanding him, they walked off the job — becoming the latest staffers to leave over the cafe’s pro-Israel support.

Top-tier journalism, right there.

Zionist coffee shop owner tells staff "You aren't allowed to express your political beliefs while on shift, only I get to do that. You don't like it? You can walk."

*staff walk*

*shocked pikachu face*

"Why weren't they interested in hearing me out and understanding me? I'm the victim here!"

Sacha Baron-Cohen of all people did this?

You mean the celebrated comedian whose most famous schticks are the generic Muslim Middle Eastern dictator who is terrible in every way and the Central Asian anti-Semite who is sexually deranged and borderline uncivilized?

Why, it's almost as if this was inverted and a Muslim man from the Middle East played a grossly stereotyped depiction of an Israeli Jew for cheap laughs that there would be an immense outcry against what clearly amounts to open bigotry and racist caricature...

Whoops, sorry! Yep I did.

This quote is according to Molotov's recollection. From Сто сорок бесед с Молотовым (140 Conversations with Molotov) by Felix Chuev:

Stalin himself, I remember, said during the war: “I know that after my death, my grave will be piled with rubbish. But the winds of history will ruthlessly dispel it!

Say it with me now:

You can't invade your own country

Hitler had one great idea.

On April 30th 1945, in the Führerbunker, in what one might call the greatest brainstorming in all of history.