As an American, fuck this cowardly shit. Enough people voted for this or didn’t vote at all to make it happen. Americans walked right into fascism through laziness or complicity. Democrats in Congress are doing next to nothing to fight back against this regime because they don’t want to upset their SuperPAC donors. They’re relying on a windfall during the midterms so that they can get into power and then still do nothing like they have been doing since Reagan. A government is a reflection of the people in a democracy. We made our bed and now we have to lie in it. We cannot expect others to clean up the messes we create or to excuse our bad behavior when it’s inconvenient for us. This “but I’m one of the good ones” take isn’t good enough. Resistance has to be more than op-eds and impassioned speeches. We bombed a school. We killed innocent children. I have not heard a single other person in my life try to cope with the guilt of that. Our discussions lasted as long as the news cycle and everyone just moved on. My tax dollars help pay for a bloated military budget that was used to end the lives of little kids on the other side of the planet who were just trying to go to school. We as a people need to sit with the reality of that and process the guilt instead of immediately finding reasons we should be excused. Maybe after some self reflection on actions and consequences, will we make better choices.

I love Robert Reich, but he should know better. The world needs to deal with the US skeptically from now until we clean up our house. Until we get rid of Citizens United and big money in politics. Until we shore up our gerrymandered districts. Until we deal with healthcare in our country in a real, meaningful way. Until we start taking care of those who own the least and stop catering to those who own the most, we should be handled with a ten-foot pole by the rest of the world. How can we say anything about the splinter in any other country’s eye while we have a log in ours?

Ask them what type of evidence would convince them and go from there. If what they say is reasonable, present it. If not, then there’s nothing that will convince them

Can IL be included with Canada too?

5. Get off 4chan

If you live in a place where food service workers are underpaid and you don’t tip, you’re an asshole. This is not a morally defensible stance unless there is a system to protect those workers already in place.

Evidence?

This has been my background for a bit. It’s from an artist whose work I’ve followed for a while. https://ko-fi.com/asmeesh/

My lock screen is the living universe animated wallpaper of the moon and its current phase.

I’m listening to the audiobook of Babel by RF Kuang. The narration is pretty great but I don’t know how I feel about the story as a whole yet.

I’m also reading Junot Diaz’s Drown on the recommendation of a work friend. Interesting how both books use the narrator’s native language to help color the stories.