#been saying for years#rainbow capitalism isn't a movement but it sure is a fucking canary (via @runawaymarbles)

This goes hand in hand with pushing for only queer people to play queer roles. Which in theory sounds like a good thing to push for authentic representation when so much of the past stuff was bad.

Except the actual real world outcome has become queer leftists abusively dog piling any actor they deem "inauthentic" leading to actors being forcefully outed against their will before they were ready in an attempt to make the abuse stop. Including children. People have been justifying psychologically tormenting literal children for not publicly disclosing (and being firm and set in) their gender and sexuality in order to work.

In many wants it's set back queer media and made people just as afraid of queer roles ruining their careers and their lives as they were when bigots were doing it. Which is not an improvement to the situation! It's really only giving cover to people who want none of this to exist.

We could have just praised the process we wanted to see. Personally I love seeing Jim Parsons take that big normative sitcom money and fucking off to make emotionally powerful queer films with it casting queer actors whenever he can. But praising that will always be more constructive than bullying Kit Connor. If Daniel Craig wants to spend the rest of his career making charming gay detective movies about helping marginalized woman get revenge on abusive rich assholes, then I don't care what his sexuality is because it's still pushing queer media far forward.

We could have positively addressed rainbow capitalism by supporting queer-owed business. We could have accepted that mainstreaming queer iconography at Target (much of it designed by queer people who got to pay their bills making it) would make space for people buying that small batch t-shirt at Pride. It's not like people only ever buy one t-shirt in their life.

A closeted-for-safety trans boy buying his first binder at Target could have created an opening for the next one to be from Shapeshifters. Instead he may never get the chance to know what it would feel feel like to take the first step because the wrong packaging could endanger him and the (fair) price mightbe unaffordable.

We can't built perils into doing better. We can't keep calling nigh-impossible next steps"the bare minimum" and tearing into them for every imperfection if we want people to do them at all. At minimum that's a burnout machine. At worst it gives bigots leverage to maker sure we have nothing. Kindness and enthuses support of what we want to see happen makes way more progress.

Unfortunately many leftists are still so stuck in the purity-sin-redemption mentality, even when they surface-level reject Christianity, that instead of growth and change everything keeps getting treated as blasphemy unless it's perfect. Even though perfection is impossible. So the whole well is primed to be poisoned by the people who genuinely hate us.

This.

This is the problem that's plagued Bernie Sanders through two Presidential elections. The Dems don't really care about the concerns of college-age and younger Americans, because the conventional wisdom is that young people don't vote.

Conventional political wisdom says that younger people are mad as hell about the state of the country and will express their anger by refusing to vote. Older people are mad as hell about the state of the country and will express their anger by voting in droves. So if you want to win an election, why would you ever listen to young people?

Bernie defied the conventional wisdom. He ran a campaign that reached out to young people across America and fought for economic policies that would be attractive for those demographics. And the consequence of this was that he failed out of two consecutive presidential primaries.

Bernie Sanders is extremely popular with people who don't vote. And that's why he's still just a Senator.

When you turn out and vote in every election, you are considered a reliable voting bloc. Those are the voices that the Democrats are interested in hearing from. They aren't going to listen to people who they don't believe will turn out anyways.

There are no answers outside of the Democratic party. Voting Third-Party will not put a Progressive in the White House. Refusing to vote will not put a Third-Party in the White House. Protest-voting for a Republican will not put a Progressive in the White House.

The only way to put a Progressive in the White House is to flood the primary ballot boxes with votes for Progressives and then consistently turn out on election day until Progressive ideology seizes control and becomes the de-facto policy position of the Democratic party. The Left needs to take over the Democrats. There are no other paths forward.

And the most fundamental part of that, and I cannot stress this enough, is that Leftists have to vote.

I mostly agree but one note I have on this is that in the 2016 primaries, Trump came out as a front runner because he was different from the rest of the Republican candidates in a way that people were engaging with, and the Rs made some noise about it but ultimately found a way to exploit it. In 2020, Sanders was winning primaries handily for the same spoiler effect reasons, but the Dems' response was to make a lot of private deals to get all the other moderates to drop out the weekend before Super Tuesday so that the Safest Moderate could take away his mandate.

Bernie Sanders would have gotten his clock cleaned in any general election. He did NOT have support from Black Democrats, and if you do not have support from Black Democrats, the Republicans will win every time

saying "look the Republicans did something insane, we should too" is not how I want to operate.

Also Bernie had two people in his 2016 campaign - Tad Devine, Tulsi Gabbard - who are known Russian assets. Look at Bernie's legislative record. His crowning achievement in decades in politics is dividing the American left.

AOC is different, imo, she's not 100 years old and she listens instead of screaming at people. Sanders was NEVER winning the 2020 primaries "handily," he was always going to get his ass kicked in southern states where Black people vote. And then his campaigned targeted Elizabeth Warren with sexist threats when she didn't bow down for him. Bernie is a cult of personality, that's all. Name one piece of significant legislation that he authored. I'll wait.

In order to be president, you have to be someone people can work with. All of Bernie's colleagues in the Senate, Republican and Democrat, say he's notoriously difficult to work with. In many ways, Obama had the same problem. He's a brainy introvert who didn't know how to network, and so much Presidenting is networking. Which is why Biden accomplished more with a dead-even Congress in four years than Obama did with a supermajority.

Begging y'all to stop beating the Bernie dead horse, and to bring it out for the 2020 election is especially rich because Biden won it by several million votes.

Speaking of Black Democrats, while this is strictly anecdotal I've noticed several instances of leftist non-voters in the US accusing Black Democrats of being slaves, and when you consider that the same non-voters also tend to downplay or ignore the danger posed by the white supremacists in the Trump administration... yeah, it doesn't feel like a stretch to say that a lot of leftist non-voters are racist

(Also, from what I understand, Black people are one of the two demographics in the US that most consistently votes Democrat, and the other one is Jews - and leftist non-voters tend to be very antisemitic)

Hamas has now killed at least six of the protesters from last week.

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