The New Society

hatman:

maverick-ornithography:

sitta-pusilla:

You have no options. Voting for a third party candidate is effectively throwing your vote away. It’s a BINARY CHOICE. 

You are going to get us all killed.
You are going to get us all killed.

You might not remember what happened last time, but I do. Leftists swore up and down an Al Gore Presidency would be “just as bad” as a Bush Presidency. That was the EXACT phrase they used.

“Al Gore is a corpratist,” they said.

“I want to vote for something instead of against something,” they said.

Now, over a decade later, the entire GLOBE is still trying to correct what was done during the Bush administration–global financial collapse, SCOTUS nominees, TWO endless wars, drone strikes, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, Isis, DICK CHEYNEY.

Open your eyes and see how the tide is turning. For the past 10 years, there’s been a steady rise of right-wing ideology and politics. There’s UKIP and the Brexit, France and their damn neo Nazi Marine Le Pen, whatever is happening in Brazil right now. Canada only just ousted a leader who muzzled scientists who spoke about climate change!

And now we have the possibility of Trump. Trump who, as of this moment, has a 38% chance of winning according to Five Thirty Eight. Not 38% of the vote. 38% chance of winning. Those aren’t terrible odds. They’re better odds than rolling a specific number on a die, 16.68%. 

Do you understand that we have a chance to flip the Supreme Court for the first time since the 60’s? 

Remember all that Civil Rights shit from the 60’s? Do you know what happened to it, why it didn’t usher in a new age of equality like MLK’s Dreamers hoped? The Burger Court happened to it. The Burger Court is the conservative-majority Supreme Court that came into power in the backlash following the 60′s. With that Court came a conservative jurisprudence that would last for generations. It was the Burger Court that stymied de-segregation efforts, and created ‘white flight’ by ruling that de-segregation orders couldn’t be extended past district lines. It was the Burger Court that laid the groundwork for Citizens United, when they ruled that corporations could spend money in politics. Everyone was so shocked when SCOTUS ruled corporations are people and money=speech. Well, thank the Burger Court!

Now, for the first time in SEVERAL DECADES there is an opportunity to flip the Supreme Court. We haven’t had a liberal jurisprudence since the 60′s. And look at what’s coming down the pipe–anti trans laws like HB2, Affirmative Action, housing rights, repealing Citizen United, immigration, abortion, gun control, police brutality, climate change, etc. 

I am begging you to vote Hillary. And tell others to vote Hillary. I won’t quibble over whether her policies are better than Trump’s (they objectively are) or whether or not she is a better person than Trump (that’s…more subjective). The SCOTUS nominations should be reason enough. PLEASE don’t make me live through a Trump administration. Please don’t do this again.

Latina trans woman chiming in to add that I am doing my damnedest to get all of my documents updated before the election, because if that two-chambers russian roulette chance pops up I want to at least have everything in order.

But even then, if Trump wins there’s a very good chance that I will die. Three trans women have been murdered within twenty-five miles of my house in the past NINE MONTHS, and I live in a fairly liberal state. If Federal law turns against me, I lose what little protections I have, and my risk of death by murder skyrockets.

And that’s not even looking at healthcare! Currently I am only able to obtain HRT because in my state Medicaid is required to cover transgender health services. With a Republican Supreme Court and Congress, not only does that go out the window but so does Obamacare and the Medicaid expansion which is how I have health insurance in the first place.

If you care even the slightest bit about my safety as a human being, you will 

GO OUT AND VOTE CLINTON AND DEMOCRATIC ALL THE WAY DOWN THE BALLOT 

This is absolutely about survival, and a Trump presidency will in no uncertain terms be anathema to my continued existence. Please, I beg of you: help me stay alive.

Fuck y’all and fuck this false dilemma bullshit.

The fact that so many people are apathetic about Trump and Clinton being the nominees for this election cycle means that third parties CAN ACTUALLY BE CONSIDERED MINOR PARTIES BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

Let me break it down for you:

The reason why third-parties are considered a “waste of a vote” is because they lack the resources to get on state ballots and run effective advertising campaigns. The fact that the Commission on Presidential Debates is specifically set up to keep third-party candidates from making it to the debate stage (thus gaining much-needed exposure) doesn’t help this at all. Hell, there are actually pending lawsuits against the CPD for potentially violating antitrust laws because of those shenanigans.

If a third-party receives just 5% of the popular vote, they become eligible for the Presidential Election Campaign Fund’s grant, by way of FEC rules. To put this into perspective: If the Libertarian party had gotten 5% of the vote in 2012, they would start the 2016 election with $10 million. That is literally four times the amount the party raised by donations in 2012.

“BUT ROSS PEROT MANAGED TO GET ON THE BALLOT IN EVERY STATE, AND HE GOT A HIGH POPULAR VOTE!” some of you might say. Yeah, well Ross Perot was also a fucking billionaire who could finance it himself.

People don’t realize that the system is rigged to ensure that the two-party system survives, and part of that is mental manipulation like this shit here. The two-party system fails when you get to points like these, where you have a madman and a warhawk running. This is why I’m voting third-party, because even though I know I’m not voting for a winning candidate, I’m voting to try and change the fucking system so we won’t have these sorts of shit elections again.

Also, y’all really need to start a movement for getting rid of the electoral college because literally, the only votes that matter as far as the EC is concerned are the ones in battleground states.

First, how dare you try to override marginalized voices to tell them that they are somehow ignorant for putting their personal safety ahead of your selfish third-party pipe dreams. How fucking dare you.

Second, what happens if your precious Gary Johnson wins a couple of states? The election is then decided by the House of Representatives, which is currently controlled by the Republican Party. Which means, President Donald Trump.

Third, there is a moral imperative for voting for Clinton. Trump absolutely must be stopped for the security of not only the United States, but for the world. His radical ideas of “bombing the hell out of [ISIL]” can, in all likelihood, spark World War III. Knowing how much of a loose cannon he is, he can get angry at a country not kissing his feet at the UN and seek military action against them. That puts literally every person in the world at risk. I know, because you’re a cishet white man, you won’t be able to properly empathize with the marginalized people’s pleas for their personal safety. But maybe if you understand that a Trump presidency has the potential to start a nuclear war, you’ll make the correct choice and vote for the immediate future over the hypothetical one.

frontier-heart:

“Don’t fight hate with hate” is an example of subtle gaslighting, where our legitimate hurt & anger at the injustices we suffer is being equated to the bigotry & abuse of our oppressors.

Being angry doesn’t mean you are being hateful, it means you love yourself enough to get upset at your own mistreatment.

Hatred is passionate, and can be used for good.

Hatred of evil is what destroys evil.

thememepirestrikesback:

ntnewsociety:

“Free speech” is nothing but a shield used to protect ideas that actively harm the oppressed.

Exactly, that’s the point. Free speech is a shield used to protect ideas. Whether they “harm” the oppressed (ideas don’t harm, actions do), or the oppressor, or nobody. Whether it offends somebody or even insults the queen, free speech is shield that seeks to protect all speech from those that seek to silence others.

Free speech is even a shield to fucked up backwards ideas like yours that deny free speech itself.

What drives actions but ideas? What is the root cause of hate crimes but hatred? Bigotry is an idea, a learned concept. Take away the ability to communicate that idea to people, and the idea dies out.

zamzamafterzina:

“Two weeks ago a man in France was arrested for raping his daughter. She’d gone to her school counselor and then the police, but they needed “hard evidence.” So, she videotaped her next assault. Her father was eventually arrested. His attorney explained, “There was a period when he was unemployed and in the middle of a divorce. He insists that these acts did not stretch back further than three or four months. His daughter says longer. But everyone should be very careful in what they say.” Because, really, even despite her seeking help, her testimony, her bravery in setting up a webcam to film her father raping her, you really can’t believe what the girl says, can you?

Everyone “knows” this. Even children.

Three years ago, in fly-on-the-wall fashion of parent drivers everywhere, I listened while a 14-year-old girl in the back seat of my car described how angry she was that her parents had stopped allowing her to walk home alone just because a girl in her neighborhood “claimed she was raped.” When I asked her if there was any reason to think the girl’s story was not true, she said, “Girls lie about rape all the time.” She didn’t know the person, she just assumed she was lying…

No one says, “You can’t trust women,” but distrust them we do. College students surveyed revealed that they think up to 50% of their female peers lie when they accuse someone of rape, despite wide-scale evidence and multi-country studies that show the incident of false rape reports to be in the 2%-8% range, pretty much the same as false claims for other crimes. As late as 2003, people jokingly (wink, wink) referred to Philadelphia’s sex crimes unit as “the lying bitch unit.” If an 11-year-old girl told an adult that her father took out a Craigslist ad to find someone to beat and rape her while he watched, as recently actually occurred, what do you think the response would be? Would she need to provide a videotape after the fact?

It goes way beyond sexual assault as well. That’s just the most likely and obvious demonstration of “women are born to lie” myths. Women’s credibility is questioned in the workplace, in courts, by law enforcement, in doctors’ offices, and in our political system. People don’t trust women to be bosses, or pilots, or employees. Pakistan’s controversial Hudood Ordinance still requires a female rape victim to procure four male witnesses to her rape or risk prosecution for adultery. In August, a survey of managers in the United States revealed that they overwhelmingly distrust women who request flextime. It’s notable, of course, that women are trusted to be mothers—the largest pool of undervalued, unpaid, economically crucial labor.”

Soraya Chemaly, How We Teach Our Kids That Women Are Liars

Remember: Women are three times less likely to lie than men. The stigma has no factual basis, and is rooted in misogyny.

skeleton-lad:

ntnewsociety:

spaztastic1991:

ntnewsociety:

“Free speech” is nothing but a shield used to protect ideas that actively harm the oppressed.

“We don’t let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas” ~ Joseph Stalin

Ideas can be more dangerous and when you want to silence one the correct response is to silence you. We become robots in the oppressed world that you idiots want.

Wrong. By preventing dangerous ideas from being spread, through the use of censorship, fewer people learn about them, and the ideas ultimately die out.

Bigotry is learned, it is not inherent in anyone. If we are to eliminate it, we have to employ tools such as censorship. Why would anyone disagree, unless they find some redeeming quality in hateful, violent rhetoric?

I agree that censorship will work. Prohibition certainly worked. Crime went down and people most certainly DID NOT smuggle alcohol. We should just censor things we don’t like because then people won’t talk about them. We should protect everyone’s feelings because that’s more important than having a dialogue.

This isn’t about protecting feelings, this is about protecting livelihoods.

Think about it. Why has racial violence against black people decreased since the 1960s? Because racism became stigmatized. The n-word was semi-censored in public (not counting it being reclaimed, of course), and look what an effect it had. We had the dialogue, and we said that racism was intolerable. And our society is quick to say that we abhor sexism, and now homophobia, but we don’t take the extra step to prove it. We still allow the ideas to fester, and then they result in events like Elliot Rodger’s massacre, for example.

If we destroy the speech, we destroy the idea. Then we won’t have to worry about it being censored, because the idea will no longer exist.

spaztastic1991:

ntnewsociety:

“Free speech” is nothing but a shield used to protect ideas that actively harm the oppressed.

“We don’t let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas” ~ Joseph Stalin

Ideas can be more dangerous and when you want to silence one the correct response is to silence you. We become robots in the oppressed world that you idiots want.

Wrong. By preventing dangerous ideas from being spread, through the use of censorship, fewer people learn about them, and the ideas ultimately die out.

Bigotry is learned, it is not inherent in anyone. If we are to eliminate it, we have to employ tools such as censorship. Why would anyone disagree, unless they find some redeeming quality in hateful, violent rhetoric?

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

nidoranduran:

I love the phrase “I’m all for equality but isn’t this going a bit too far?” because like. It acknowledges that the issue is a matter of equality and tries to soften the ideological blow of what’s about to be said with the waiver that in most situations equality is totally cool by them, but on this occasion, there is an excess of equality here. Too much equality. This makes people too equal and they cannot in good conscience stand by it. Slow down this equality at once before we get too carried away on people being equal.

“I’m all for everyone being equal but shouldn’t some people be MORE EQUAL than others?”

Honestly, fuck equality. Equality is about sameness, but sameness doesn’t make up for thousands of years of oppression. And it gives rise to these mindsets, these “I’m for equality, which means I’m against affirmative action” sort of statements. The people who say they’re for equality are trying to turn a blind eye to discrimination and injustice, while trying to feel good about how they “don’t see color” or “treat everyone the same.”

Equity needs to be the center of these discussions. Equity means fairness, justice, acknowledging the differences between the privileged and the oppressed, and putting them on level ground by raising them up or lowering them down appropriately. Plus, it’s harder for someone to say “I believe in equity, but I don’t believe in affirmative action,” as it becomes a contradictory statement.

We find out who our true allies are when we shift the conversation from equality to equity.

p-ositive-vibez:

artisticgamzee:

YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW THAT YOU’RE TRANS IN YOUR CHILDHOOD TO BE TRANS

YOU CAN BE 5 AND REALISE IT
YOU CAN BE 16 AND REALIZE IT
YOU CAN BE 27 AND REALIZE IT
HELL, YOU CAN BE 68 AND REALIZE IT
YOU CAN BE ANY AGE AND REALIZE THAT YOU’RE TRANS

This is for the people who don’t think they’re “trans enough” just because they didn’t know they were trans as a child.

You ARE trans enough.

<3

gaylor-moon:

Honestly if your feminism isn’t intersectional of brown, black and all women of color, disabled women, hairy women, bi and pan women, ace women, butch women, women that don’t have sex, women that have a ton of sex, women that do sex work, bigger women, women that deal with substance and drug abuse, lesbians, women that enjoy sterotypically “masculine hobbies”, women of different religions or sects, or trans women it’s B U L L S H I T. If your feminism involves excluding and belittling/constantly harassing other women your feminism is fucking shit and belongs in the toilet just like you.

disabilityhealth:

It’s an act of violence to tell a mentally or chronically ill person that they’re faking.