whetstone

@whetstone.bsky.social

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I live in Colorado, have mad fits of creativity followed by periods of somnolence, and am charmed by snakes. She/her, or whatever.

Signal: whetstone.20

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whetstone

Reply to

Sean Kelly

I do know that if there's any ambiguity at all from a legal standpoint it'll end up in front of SCOTUS. Which, you know. Ask Al Gore how that goes.

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whetstone

All the Joe Biden ads should be "folks, if you vote for me by this Thanksgiving you'll never have to think or hear about Donald Trump ever again" > 300 electoral votes

@bskyttrpg.bsky.social stats

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whetstone

To begin with, every supposed "centrist" who's yammering for this at the NYT and everywhere else will immediately sandbag any D who might succeed Biden while leaving Trump alone and unscathed.

lemme be clear here if the dem nominee is a ham sandwich, i'm getting ham sandwich stickers and writing gotv postcards and helping cure ballots for ham sandwich 2024. but anyone who thinks biden dropping off the ticket will not be met with weird gop ratfucking chaos just fell off a turnip truck.

seems to me that you’d want to facilitate a very well-rested, well-exercised, well-fed president at all times because most of the time there are highly competent staff to do what’s needed & if you hit a crisis that needs long hours, you wouldn’t want the president to be starting from a deficit

The discourse around biden needing more sleep is fully insane. Does no one remember "Executive Time," the thing Trump spent the majority(!) of his schedule on where he would just watch TV and tweet? Dude was categorically unable to fulfill any of the demands of the office and the press barely cared

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whetstone

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whetstone

He has arrived.

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whetstone

Reply to

Claire Willett

excommunicating the fuckers who won’t respect your duly elected authority because you want to use it on behalf of people they hate, and who have forfeited their right to power because they’re using it to undermine progress, is the energy I wish Democrats would take into the White House JUST ONCE

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whetstone

donorbox.org/support-the-...

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whetstone

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.“ - Rebecca Solnit (1/)

There's another key attribute of hope that doesn't get mentioned much. Hope fights. Even when victory seems unlikely—especially then—hope fights. We should be hopeful people. Full essay: www.the-reframe.com/a-fools-hope/

A Fool's Hopewww.the-reframe.com How to be hopeful people in this age of deliberate ignorance, empty optimism, lazy cynicism, and manufactured despair. A more useful definition of hope than these false ones we're offered.

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whetstone

The fact they're simultaneously running don't vote campaigns and trying to undermine the dem candidate is proof that the moneybags who own these publications are united in realizing their robber baron days are drawing to a close under a guy who is the most pro labour president of the 21st century

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whetstone

This will be one about hope, though maybe not "hope" as it is usually meant. Hope is a defiant act taken against those who would sabotage any act of reparation—and sabotaging repair is exactly what fascism does. For this reason, hope is what is needed right now. www.the-reframe.com/a-fools-hope/

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whetstone

sometimes the most annoying people in politics can be right. the orange man is indeed bad. if you vote, you shouldn’t vote for republicans under any circumstances, which typically leaves one option

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whetstone

We have learned so much about how viruses transmit over the past four years & yet none of the passive yet effective measures (better ventilation, HEPA filtration) have been adopted as new standards. An opportunity to future proof our buildings & workplaces let slip away. www.rte.ie/news/2024/07...

Covid rates were a third higher in deprived areas - ESRIwww.rte.ie A new report has found that Covid-19 infection rates were more than a third higher in the most deprived areas of Ireland, relative to more affluent areas.

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whetstone

Happy No-More-Kings Day tomorrow! And remember: Patriotism is helping the country you love do less wrong. Nationalism is pretending that it's *never* wrong. 🇺🇸 "Nationalism is Patriotism for Assholes." – Jon Lovett

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whetstone

There have been so many of these but they still find ways to shock me

Change in Headline

i mean even if you buy every single scaremongering story about biden’s mental capacities, he’s hired people who are working to do shit like green infrastructure and antitrust enforcement and forgiving student debt his opponent’s staff’s priorities will be very different

It also makes me feel insane that the rat fuck around Biden’s age and mental capacity is being uncritically spread around by Democrats when Trump is *incredibly obviously* grotesquely mentally incapacitated, in a way that is genuinely terrifying.

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whetstone

It's not going to come down to a president or red states or blue states. It's going to come down to electing mayors and city council members that are brave enough to say "you're going to need to send in the National Guard if you want that shit enforced here." This is why we vote.

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whetstone

I'm old enough to remember when everyone agreed it would be unprofessional and unethical to diagnose Trump as a sociopath

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whetstone

they have these gatherings of annoying people called city council meetings and if you bring a couple other annoying people regularly you can actually accomplish a lot

Being annoying as praxis is only the first step. The second step is to gather likeminded neighbors and friends and ask each other how you can maximize your joint annoyingness. Congrats: this is called organizing, you’re building a base of your common man united on a common cause.

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whetstone

I don’t know what you expect the presidential election to accomplish exactly but it’s not a miracle drug to fix all problems. It’s just oxygen to keep breathing while the real work happens on the ground. That work is a heck of a lot harder to do without air.

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whetstone

Reply to

Gabe

Yes, you have three choices. 1. Vote for Trump & fascism; 2. Vote for the one person with a chance to defeat Trump and decrease the likelihood of fascism; 3. Vote for someone else, who has no chance of blocking Trump & fascism. There is no dilemma here. This IS our system. We live in it.

american ideas about emigration seem to have been set during the vietnam war and never updated you can’t just walk over to canada and hang around there being a hippie anymore

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whetstone

It's important to note that Trump tried to order this at least twice we know of during his regime.

right. the president could order troops to suppress protesters using live fire and the supreme court would extend that absolute immunity

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whetstone

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whetstone

And remember, the Christian Right only took up abortion as a topic after they lost school segregation for good when the IRS went after Bob Jones’ U status, & needed a new issue to rally the troops. 1/x all our issues are intertwined. 🧵

The United States has always been a democracy for some and a brutal authoritarian regime for others, and the effort to expand it to democracy for all has led to a 70+ year backlash culminating in SCOTUS claiming that kings are totes cool and also judges are the ones to coronate them

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whetstone

Again, Black people are an exception here, as basically anyone who stayed in the Jim Crow South has a living memory of living under what amounted to fascism, including the “always walking on eggshells/lack of social trust/long periods of boring endurance/randomized terrifying violence”

Pretty much. What it mostly boils down to is that most Americans really don’t have the faintest idea what living under modern authoritarian regimes actually looks like, and how it’s often at the same time way more boring and way more scary than they’d imagined.

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whetstone

Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself

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whetstone

Reply to

Winifred Burton Updates

These yt people are giving up after something small like the Supreme Court saying the criminal president can do whatever he wants; imagine what they’d do if the Court ruled that they weren’t citizens! Twice!

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whetstone

Some of the nihilism I'm seeing on the skyline is why Black people say y'all wouldn't last an hour as us, btw.