The Republic Is Ours To Save: Not over. As someone alive before Chevron precedent, before legal abortion, before many things being flipped back in time existed, I can say you can fight this war&win it. Again. &this time, people have sunk costs&reaped benefits where before it was theoretical. They will feel&resent the loss.

Not over. As someone alive before Chevron precedent, before legal abortion, before many things being flipped back in time existed, I can say you can fight this war&win it. Again. &this time, people have sunk costs&reaped benefits where before it was theoretical. They will feel&resent the loss.

The war is over. The bad guys won.

The immediate retreat to doomerism is not a good look and we need to push back against those impulses at all costs.

It's not doomerism, it's reality, and you pretending it's not is actually part of the problem. When half the population refuses to accept what is happening is even happening, how do you expect it to get fixed, genius? What's there to fix if everything is fine?

They will feel it in reality bc they have been living with the benefits on several fronts&will feel the pain of their loss. No one is pretending anything here.

I hope this is true but I wonder with journalism under fire and our shared collective reality eroded will people actually place the blame for dismantled regulatory oversight where it belongs once the support pillars start to crumble

This is a good point and I do not know but you know what would be great? A plan that foresees these issues and addresses them

this would be nice

I understand & sympathize with this, and it hurts me to see people naively, or knowingly-and-maliciously, misrepresenting times I lived through. But a "shared collective reality" has never existed in the USA. The appearance of one is a product of institutional power (which is a different discussion)

yes, U.S. delusion and misinformation is nothing new, but journalism and academia are against the ropes, supplanted by a 24/7 bombardment of automated engagement chasing gibberish and propaganda at unprecedented scale in human history

Yeah people will feel the pain and loss as the fascists line us all up against the wall, sounds great, let's all stop being negative about it.

"The people in charge clearly don't care about the citizenry, the supposed opposition party is opening every door for and putting up no fight against the literal fascists, but the problem is people saying this is bad." You sound like a clown.

How did it get fixed (ish) the first time?

How did what get fixed? You mean like, the French revolution?

Lolol no I mean like we how did we get these small protections in the first place. We got them against the same intransigent bigotry that exists now. We can do it again. Though this time around, I think there will perhaps need to be some different tactics. What we didn't do was maintain them.

President Biden just gave a great speech in North Carolina. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYgh...

WATCH LIVE: Biden attends campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina after first presidential debatewww.youtube.com YouTube video by PBS NewsHour

I wonder why the crowd wasn't given the message that we're supposed to lay down and give up?

Stuart Stevens posted this last night. He’s exactly right.

maybe Looks dont fucken matter

A good “look”? Ok late middle aged white dude.

Being Mexican decent and hearing Trump saying hes going to deport 15 million illegals. While there is est of 11 illegals. Makes me worried. Not just that too the stochastic terrorism towards Hispanics is going to put targets on our backs. Thats why El Paso Walmart shooting happen.

Yep! When I was born, there were rivers on fire in the US, women couldn't even open their own bank accounts, let alone have access to abortion, it was illegal to be gay in most states, etc. It is horrifying to see progress erased, but that does not mean we can't fight back and reclaim it.

Same. Even Loving vs Virginia had just been decided. No ADA. No EPA. No protections against being fired for pregnancy. No no-fault divorce.

A friend (same age as me) who grew up in LA told me they used to have "smog days" instead of "snow days." The air was too awful to go outside, so school would be canceled. You couldn't see the nearby mountains because of the smog. The work to clean it up was rough, but it was successful.

I remember seeing pictures of those on the news and thinking what a disaster LA sounded like. And then there’s the ozone and CFCs!

I love to teach about the reaction mechanism of ozone depletion in my chem classes. I always tell the students, "I know it doesn't feel like this in your world today, but humans DO have the capacity to solve crises, and in fact we have done so many times throughout history."

That was my childhood in the San Gabriel Valley, in Richard Nixon's hometown. We'd usually have school for a few hours in the morning and then be sent home early in the afternoon. My mother used to tell me stories about how bad the San Francisco Bay smelled when she was a girl. Things got better.

I remember the smog days. Yes, that was real.

We had school geography lessons about Californian smog, in the UK. It was about the only mention of North American physical geography on the syllabus.

I was born in 1940, I am a woman who couldn’t buy a car or even rent an apartment by myself.

I remember my mother being so excited to order checks that had both my dad’s name and her name on them. They had been married since 1951, and she signed “Mrs. Herbert N. Smith” on every check from 1951 until the mid 1970s.

Yup. My youngest brother was born in the early 1960s. There were problems and my mother had to get a hysterectomy. She had borne 5 children. I was old enough to remember the hell that the parish priest gave my mother. Another reason why I left the church asap.

The scary thing is that progress involved building & using new legal and political tools, and this court attacks the legal foundations of those tools. Their decisions are cruel, factually dishonest and procedurally nonsensical, but what mechanism exists to tear them up without more decades fighting?

Right. We assume the passage of time means progress. But change comes from people's interactions (including disengagement). The idea that a few marches or a politician who seems like a messiah will magically make permanent change is untethered from reality. It's lazy, not independent, thinking.

I wish an FDR type would come back. Biden nor Hillary are it.

People need to pull on their grown up boots and fight, not whinge and cry about it.

I mean, why not both? Just mostly fight, take a few whinge and cry breaks as needed. It is fucking demoralizing to see Good Things be taken away. Cry and whinge and mourn and then claw those mother fuckers back.

Because they enjoy seeing you like this. Pull yourself together ffs. Cry in private if you must, but all this pathetic shit is doing is feeding their sadism. They're probably jacking off to this right now.

Oh, you really nailed this one, my friend. Seriously. #StopCryingAndVoteBlue #StopCryingAndUniteBlue #StopCryingAndDefendDemocracy

It is. But the thread being reposted here is someone who didn't fight and fell apart when a big setback was dropped.

I think the people reason feel helpless is that "fight" in this context translates into "give money to fundraising campaigns indistinguishable from spam" then watch as it's cycled into endless ads and other arcane shit as things just keep getting worse. Or volunteering to face abuse by fascists.

Sexually Suggestive

Labeled by Bluesky Moderation Service

This. It’s a hell of a setback. But both of those were moves in the correct direction and will always be so.

I don’t disagree. What eats at me is how the tools originally used to win those gains are being systematically weakened - stable precedent, voting rights and access, a relative belief in common reality, etc. - to create an immovable status quo in favor of one side.

Yes, it’s not going to be the work of a moment. But that’s why I mention sunk costs/reaped benefits. People have experienced these effects now, are invested. It’s not theoretical. So there may be a source of will of the people that has been overlooked that will emerge as the reality of losses hits.

I just don’t underestimate the amount of self interest that has built up around some of these issues among even the most die-hard conservative electorate&how motivating that can be once they feel the pain themselves. It is tragic that anyone has to feel the pain, esp those who didn’t bring this on

The erosion of stable precedent cuts both ways, though. We're hitting the point where lower courts are starting to just say, "Fuck it, SCOTUS clearly doesn't care about precedent anyway." If the sane Circuits start just ignoring them, there's no way they can hear and overturn all those cases.

Dr. Erica Chenoweth’s studies are relevant here. youtu.be/YJSehRlU34w?...

The success of nonviolent civil resistance: Erica Chenoweth at TEDxBoulderyoutu.be Between 1900-2006, campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance were twice as successful as violent campaigns. Erica will talk about her research on the impressive historical record of civil resistance in the 20th century and discuss the promise of unarmed struggle in the 21st century. She will focus on the so-called "3.5% rule"—the notion that no government can withstand a challenge of 3.5% of its population without either accommodating the movement or (in extreme cases) disintegrating. In addition to explaining why nonviolent resistance has been so effective, she will also share some lessons learned about why it sometimes fails. Videography credits Jenn Calaway, Enhancer Michael Hering, Lodo Cinema Sarah Megyesy, Side Pocket Images Satya Peram, Flatirons Films Sean Williams, RMO Films Anthony Lopez, Cross Beyond David Oakley

📌

THANK YOU. We *really* needed this perspective.

My mother is a dyed in the wool hippie, always has been. Shes been protesting various causes since the mid 70s, chaining herself to buildings, bulldozers etc She describes it as a sisyphean task, you have to keep pushing and never ever stop Shit isnt just now getting bad It has been bad

💪 for your Mom

true, a lot of the environmental stuff I'm already mourning became law during my lifetime; I was a baby the last time the Cuyahoga burned. I guess this is like some of the anti-public-health weirdness; people forget how bad it was before.

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