queermunist she/her

Biden’s base is “at least he’s not Trump” so I’m not sure.

If the Court decides that the President has unbound authority then why shouldn’t Joe Biden shoot Donald Trump with a gun? It’s not illegal when the President does it!

Remember when people said they liked Trump because being rich made him impossible to buy?

Bush became president after losing the popular vote and then started a war that killed over a million people.

What fucking democracy?

More “bad things are actually good things!” from the NYT 🙄

A comforting lie.

The IMF loots countries that take loans and in contrast China forgives loans. The reason Africa is aligning more with China is because they’re getting a better deal. If they really were just the same as the West then China wouldn’t be winning the continent.

We exploit Africa. China has begun to take up Western marketshare in Africa because they’re less exploitative and offer a better deal.

I think they’re old enough that they want to delay the inevitable until they’re dead and gone. They don’t really care about the rest of us, just themselves.

That would probably collapse the US

I fully support it, but Democrats want to keep this shithole from falling apart.

Just exactly what are you saying? Because you’ve been trying to guilt trip me about leaving this den of shit bags for the entire thread… Saying I’m “leaving people behind to die” which is incredibly dramatic seeing as I’m still here at present.

Then let me say this unequivocally so there’s no way to get it twisted. I was objecting, specifically, to when you said “nothing in the bible belt is worth saving”. That’s an incredibly fucked up thing to say and we shouldn’t abandon the innocent people who can’t escape. We should do what we can to save the people worth saving. We should try to find Christian allies that can be aligned against the Christian Nationalists. That doesn’t mean I expect you to personally live in the South, that’d be stupid, I live in Iowa and I’d be a huge hypocrite to demand that of you.

Not you. Us.

But when you say “nothing in the Bible belt is worth saving” you are ignoring the fact that there are people down there that need our help and it’s in our own best interests to help them, because they will be crucial allies against Christian Nationalism. Nothing means no one. Fuck that. There are people in the South worth saving from the South. They’re not all monsters and we need all the help we can get, and they need us too because with the way politics in this country are going the mass lynch mobs and race riots are going to be starting up again very soon.

I understand hating Christians. I did too for many years (I was born in Kentucky) but they’re not all monsters. Christians are literally the majority in the US. You have to grapple with this if you want to win when this cold culture war goes hot. I have not, at all, been guilt tripping you about leaving. Get the hell out of there. I am only angry that you’re saying we should give up on the South entirely.

At the very least, we’re going to need allies for when we reinvade them and force them to go through a new Reconstruction period.

Again, when did I ask you to fight Y’all Qaeda alone? In fact I literally said you’re free to leave and it isn’t your job to stay in the South to fight them in the first place! You keep building up strawmen to attack and I don’t know why.

As to the legitimate point that “If I walk into a restaurant and see a guy at a table with 9 Nazis, I see a table with 10 Nazis.” I think it’s worth pointing out they aren’t at the same table. They don’t go to the same churches, they aren’t in the same social groups, they’re literally different.

I’m comfortable saying all the Evangelicals are enemies but not literally all Christians when some denominations literally have queer pastors and do same sex weddings and the like. There’s clearly different factions and we need to drive deeper wedges between them instead of lumping them together.

Don’t go around making more enemies - we have enough of them.

And, to be very clear, the South is 99% Christian nationalists, particularly in the Bible belt. Zero percent of them are worth saving. None.

This is why I’m talking to you. This is just made a percentage you made up. The politics are so much more complicated and you’re writing off innocent people out of your - justified - personal grievances. Hating your enemies is good (they hate us after all!) but you need to make sure you’re correctly identifying your enemies.

The religious affiliations of adult people in Alabama are as follows: Christian – 86%, Non-Christian Faiths – 1%, Other faiths – 1%, Unaffiliated (religious “nones”) – 12%

Yikes, right? However, we can subdivide this further. Of those Christians, Evangelicals (the ones chiefly associated with the Christian Nationalist political movement) represent 49% of all Christians. Yikes again! They’re almost a majority of all Christians, and Christians are the extremely dominant majority of all people in Alabama. Those are our enemies.

Instead of just giving up on the South we need to unite all the disparate groups against Christian Nationalism and crush them like the cockroaches they are. We can defeat them and we can’t just give up and let them win the South.

We need a new Reconstruction.

The core belief system of the United States of America has always been to have fair and impartial judges. It’s not a conspiracy theory from either side.

The bipartisan consensus is right-wing because America is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

I literally never told you to stay. You’ve been arguing against a strawman of your own creation this entire time.

I don’t want to defend “the South”, it’s a rotten culture that grew out of the Confederacy and there should have been a cultural revolution during Reconstruction. I want to defend the people in the South who are going to get lynched. People like you! You’re literally one of the people that you’re saying are the shittiest people on the planet. How many millions are just like you?

This broad “they” you keep using is a lot of people and you’re just condemning millions of people to death because a lot of them are Christian nationalist crackers.

Vibe check

Do you think I’m telling you to stay in the south? I never said that. I just specifically am pissed off by you saying “Nothing in the Bible belt is worth saving.” That’s it. You’re free to leave, it isn’t your job to sacrifice your life for voting lol

This isn’t a fun topic. You’re basically saying “everyone who gets lynched deserves it”.

Not everyone can escape. Do they deserve to suffer and die?

And maybe we won’t just blow up the bridge. Maybe we build a wall! Why not? You’re all evil, we don’t need that blight on our society. In fact, why not declare war? Why not kill literally everyone! D o n t y o u a l l d e s e r v e i t? 🙄

Not everyone can afford to leave. Should we leave them to die?

You, yourself, haven’t left yet. What if we abandoned the south before you had time to move? Oh, maybe you’re the Last Good Person in the south, and once you’re gone we can leave the rest to suffer! It’s their fault for being born in the wrong states, after all. Especially the ones that are going to be born because their mothers were forced to give birth. They deserve it.

Okay so if you reject politics you literally can’t get judges appointed. 👀

With that out of the way-

“Rights”, as a concept, are inherently political. A right is literally a political carve-out that enshrines a mandate and creates a political obligation to uphold it. Idealism can be employed to support certain rights, but rights themselves can only exist through politics.

Imagine a gay woman living in Alabama. There’s certainly a lot of them, we’re everywhere after all. Do you think she’s going to say what she really thinks while around strangers? Or is she going to keep her head down and try to avoid getting hate crimed?

You are in the bible belt. Should we abandon you too?