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  2. Fuck.

    Just fuck.

    I’m so sorry y’all, I was too tied to join the Zoom, by the time I got home last night (voting went quickly, and as I’m sure y’all were, it was Blue, Yes on 1, Yes for Kids, and Incumbents *all* the way).

    I’m frickin’ heartbroken and *terrified* for everyone, because The Oligarchy seems to have won, *and* i keep going back to Alito on Precedent in Dobbs–and especially Thomas’s concurrence, and what that’s going yo mean for the rights of *everyone* who is not a wealthy, land-owning, white man, in the coming years.

    So few people realize that ALL of Special Education Law, and honestly even most of Disability Law rest on the backbone/Cornerstone of Brown v. Board, Loving, and the like–but *mostly* Brown.

    Between Project 2025, the likelihood of Thiel & Vance pulling a 25th Amendment at the first possible opportunity, *and* the fact that the R’s are incredibly likely to come gunning for Brown and take away the rights of *everyone* but those white male landowners?

    I’m just totally heartsick right now.💔

  3. Also, he’s going to come gunning *hard* for MN & CA, probably NY and DC, too.

    I feel as betrayed as I did, in 1984, 2016, and the summer of 2020 and just as heartbroken.

  4. 1. Still having a hard time logging in evertime I want to reply, so, due to my extreme laziness, I don’t participate as much as I would, I’ve tried things, I’m not asking for anyone to do anything, just explaining why I’m not as active.

     

     

    2. This feels like a death, like, I can’t process it, just feel numb, fuck.

  6. I could not have been more wrong.

    We basically just woke up in Nazi Germany.

    All of the checks and balances have failed. I’m not even going to hope for the House of Representatives.

    They will round up people and put them in camps, and it’s not just going to be minorities. I’m already seeing people starting to scrub their social media. People dashed outside last night to pull down their Harris signs and rip off bumper stickers. News outlets will all become Fox or cease to exist.

    We’re going to lose medicine, public education, any type of public funding, anything that exists for the greater good. Say hello to measles, polio, and tooth decay. Natural disasters are going to spike and he’ll use them as weapons against states that defied him.

    Gaza and Ukraine will be obliterated. Europe is going to need to figure out what to do about NATO without the US because that’s over.

    Prices are going to spike because there’s nobody left to stop gouging, and corporations will go nuts on pricing necessary goods, like food. Any oversight will be gutted, so you’re going to see lots more listeria outbreaks because they will gut the agencies responsible.

    And I’m pretty certain we just witnessed our last free election. He’s not leaving office again, and when he does, a hand-picked successor will take over. And we’re not going to get any say in that.

    This is so much worse than I ever thought it could be. So much worse.

    • Yep, he now has the house, senate, and the supreme court, plus no pandemic to stop him and his VP has no morals (I’m no pence fan but at least pence has a shred of a belief system). There is literally nothing stopping him from doing whatever he wants. Well, there’s something but I won’t spell it out bc I don’t want suits knocking on my door.

      • Yeah my takeaway this morning is basically why try to change anything, this is just how it’s going to go anyways because of how people just are.

        And yes I know that’s the wrong attitude in general, but in this case it feels like the correct headspace to be in.

    • Feels like a goddam gut-punch!

      I am *still* in a state of simply spluttering “HOW  in the FUCK?!?!????”

      I honestly don’t get it anymore, i just DON’T.

      I really didn’t think that people were THIS incredibly stupid & self-sabotaging… I mean you have experts like Ruth Ben-Ghiat *explicitly* saying “this is what will happen if….”

      And the dumbfucks CHOSE that anyway

      Just *WTAF*?!?!???

      The assholes LITERALLY published their playbook, and people CHOSE to believe they “won’t use that–it’s all made up!”

      Fucking DUMBASSES!

    • What constitution?

      We apparently just elected a Kakistocrisy/Oligarchy/Monarchy triune godhead🫠

      The Constitution just went out the window, unless you’re meaning that 3/5ths, Only White, wealthy, landowning Gentry have any say version of the Constitution (because they *will* keep *that* one!)

       

    • I don’t think they will need a plan.  They can just keep fucking with the laws and infrastructure enough to provide a veneer of credibility while still being able to make sure that only “certain” people are allowed to cast votes.

    • Probably their old buddy “Marshall Law” and calling in the military.

      Or using the USSC to allow all the red states to repealed any & all voting rights for everyone but the White, Male, Landed Gentry.

  14. Say you and your siblings sit down for a game of Monopoly.  Implicit in this is an agreement to play by the rules written on the inside of the cover.  Except, when the first sibling passes Go, the sibling who is banker gives them $100 and keeps $100 for himself.  Maybe there’s a brief spat, maybe you let it slide.  In any case, you continue the game.  But then the sibling who’s the banker passes Go and gives himself $400.  Everyone at the table is incensed, and goes to the ultimate authority, Dad.  Now suppose that the sibling who’s the banker is Dad’s favorite.  For whatever reason, he’s not going to intervene.  You and your other siblings, being kids, aren’t really free to just leave and go live with Grandma or your best friend’s family.  So there you sit stewing in your sense of injustice.

    See, the Constitution is nothing more than the rules of Monopoly writ large.  They’re only good so long as everyone who counts agrees to play by them.  It’s all a giant game of make believe, and Dad isn’t going to bail you out.  This is where we’re at.

  16. it’s one thing to vote for a dictatorship you were gaslit to believe you were fighting against (because you’re fucking stupid)…i get that. i accepted that when i was a child…

    MYOPIC?

    how about “correctprophet”?

    …and another to vote against your own interests…

    BUT to vote against your mother…your sister…your DAUGHTER?

    FUCK YOU, AMERICA!

    • I honestly just *don’t* get it, Myo!

       

      My own damn cousin voted Trump.

      The cousin whose wife went into premature labor with ther twins at 24/25 weeks.

      They lost their Daughter, but their son *has* survived. And then he survived his Liver Transplant, and so far, he’s surviving the cancer that he ended up with, due to the immunosupressants he’s going to need for the rest of his life.

      When they implement Project 2025 & repeal Obamacare?

      I have *no* fucking Clue how he thinks he and his wife are gonna keep their firstborn *alive*, once he caps out, according to the insurance companies, and he and his wife are just *expected* to cover the costs themselves.

      The twerp (who i *love*, but I a SO goddamn ANGRY at right now!), has no fucking CLUE the costs he may very well end up paying, and it makes me literally sick to my stomach right now, because *I* fucking know this shit–because I’m as bad as you & Rip at keeping up with the stupid policy weeds, in the areas I care about.

      It’s not even “The Leopards Eating My Face Party”–he is shoving the son he ADORES into the goddamned Leopard’s maw *himself*💔

       

  18. Hey, I don’t know if it even matters by now, but I’m sorry for just walking out of the Zoom without saying good night or anything. I was starting to feel numb as the doubt was setting in, and that was tuning me out of what everyone (i.e., brightersider and RIP) was saying. Or maybe I just probably didn’t wanna be there, but I really didn’t wanna be anywhere, either.

    I still don’t — at least not in this country anyway.

     

  20. Jamelle Bougie wrote this on Bluesky and I think it’s great as usual.

    i think that the people interested in recriminations and score settling right now aren’t seriously grappling with the magnitude of what happened and the implications for the rest of our lives. most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election.

    I’ve got ideas but they need to wait until I’ve had time to reflect. Take care of the people and things that matter.

    • They have no idea the cruelty that’s about to be unleashed, and won’t until it touches people they care about.  The question will be, will they wake up, or continue to rationalize and make excuses?

      • They will experience it first hand. Once elections are suspended, they’ll abolish Obamacare, Medicare and Social Security. MeeMaw and PawPaw will be paying $50 for a can of cat food with no source of income.

      • Yep.

        We broke the fucking timeline, and managed to Zoom ourselves back to 1930’s Germany.

        But *worse*, thanks to everyone having tracking devices *everywhere*, less folks with vital skills to keep folks alive, less folks with access to good soil or clean water, and an Oligarchy class who *has* the understanding of “what went wrong last time”💔

  21. Here’s what I don’t get:  how the fuck was this so decisive, so soon?  I’m not talking conspiracy theory voter fraud bullshit.  I just mean how did this happen logistically?  How the FUCK did he win the popular vote? Yes, yes, racism and sexism, I get it, but those things are priced into the Republican Party.  I’m talking about shit like voter suppression, or maybe Democrats thought Kamala was going to run away with it and turnout wasn’t as good for her.  Or maybe all of the sanewashing and other bullshit to convince people that we’ve actually been in an economic hole since Biden took office.  Or who knows what the fuck.  I just can’t fathom how that many people could look at this insane piece of shit, knowing exactly what his first term was like and say to themselves, “yes, more of that please.”

    I just want to eat everything.

    • I think the basic ability to get valid information to people and filter bad information has collapsed.

      Even among educated people, it’s like pushing a rope uphill through a garden hose running the other way.

      I don’t know how to fix that, but I think acknowledging it is the first step.

      • One of my former coworkers has been neck deep in the coverage and said that 20 million people who voted for Biden in 2020, just didn’t show up for Harris.  Trump’s vote count was more or less the same as it was before.  WHAT THE FUCK. So, yeah, I guess it is racism and sexism as the primary cause.  This fucking place.

        • …this has been fucking with me all day

          …that enough people stayed home to let him make nearly no headway…basically just get enough new voters in the young-dumb-men demographic to cover the losses in the others…& still sweep the “swing” states because people wouldn’t turn out for her

          …how much of that margin is down to the full-spectrum vote suppression seems impossible to know but also like it probably isn’t sufficient to cover the spread…so…people didn’t show up for her more than they did for him

          …say – since it’s a genuine flaw in what she seemed to offer – those were people who needed more from her about israel & palestine…that they’re not going to get from him

          …probably it’ll be like hillary & by the time the post-mortems are done there’ll be loads of different ways to slice the results to say this or that could have made the difference…but if that one winds up looking like it could be a big enough block of un-cast votes in the right places…I don’t know if that’s so much a function of a failure to get people to access decent information as it is a complete failure to engage in anything resembling joined-up thinking

          …& that’s consistent with him getting votes in inverse proportion to the voters’ level of education at least in so far as both lead to a high incidence of people who are “hard of thinking* & emotionally overinvested in asserting the world matches what they want it to being the same as being right about something

          …but it doesn’t leave my thinking a lot of outs from being on a train that only goes places I’m pretty sure nobody should want to visit…& I don’t think it’s terribly helpful to anybody including me if I doom loop myself into the cognitive equivalent of microsoft’s blue screen of death?

          …it staggers me that it looks like that guy…that fucking guy…could win the popular vote

          …I knew there was a chance she could lose the white house…but the popular vote?

          …are you shitting me, reality?

          …this…is it…there isn’t a trick…they didn’t in fact steal an election…because they could just buy out the pot on a bluff?

          …you’re killing me, here

          …could you at least give me some scrap of a reason to believe it doesn’t boil down to “at the end of the day most people just fundamentally don’t care – maybe the world ends, maybe they die first – they already checked out so they DGAF…”

          …because…it starts to make it seem like we deserve to have civilisation collapse…&…there’s definitely still hundreds of millions of people who don’t deserve to have society crumble…so…I’d rather not be stuck thinking that way…it’s not exactly constructive?

          • Yeah, the Palestine thing, sure we knew that Harris would continue to enable Israel just the same way Biden has been.  But Trump?  I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he sends a shitload of our troops there to level the place.  Anyone who thinks they were doing the Palestinians a favor by not voting for Harris needs to be fucking sent there right goddamned now.

            • A Facebook friend is currently in a fight with several of his family who are very excited Trump won because they have sons and they were worried about them going to war.

              And we’re like, what fucking war did you expect Harris to send them off to??? Which of those two seem more likely to put boots on the ground?

               

        • Every “person” online I saw who wasn’t voting for her (but who would ordinarily lean left) blamed Palestine. Person is in quotes because who knows if it was a bot or not, but that’s the line. Did they sit out? Vote 3rd party? Idk, but lots of idiots seemed to think it was a good reason to hand the election to trump.

  22. My wife spent most of the night looking at property in Ireland.  First thing she said to me this morning is “we can rent this house for …. and I found this in Dingle…”  I’m still in too much shock and leave for Hawaii tomorrow.  I don’t know how I am going to face our Ukrainian housekeeper today, they are going to lose their country.  This is so fucked!  Cascadia NOW!

  23. I cycled through all of the grief stages really quickly last night so now I’m in problem-solving survival mode. I’ve been out of work for almost 2 years at this point because of various strikes and the fact that a lot of the film industry work has left the country. The good news is that I actually start on a new show on Monday – so I’m looking at farm property in a few blue states. I know that the whole states rights thing is probably going to be thrown out the window in a few months – but right now I feel like those are the best options. My point is – if I can get some acreage somewhere with no restrictions – the plan is for anyone that needs somewhere to go – you have a place with me and my three other unmarried sisters and our other friends. So, start watching Tiny home videos – because that will work the best for housing and farming videos because we’re going to need to grow our own food. Of course, I may just be in a manic panic spiral too – so there’s that.

    • I just finished “The Brainwashing of My Dad” (the book, but there is also a documentary). It basically says the same thing. The propaganda machine on the right is so much bigger and louder than on the left. MSNBC, NPR, and Under the Desk News don’t make a dent. Plus, lefty content doesn’t ping the brain chemicals that the stuff on the right does. They LIKE to be riled up and angry. They WANT to see boogeymen around every corner. They don’t want to fix problems, they just want to be told the problems are someone else’s fault.

      • The other piece of it is that the low information people – the kinds who voted D except for Trump, or the ones who just stayed home – have seen utter collapse of information systems.

        I bang on about the press, and I think that’s a piece of it, but the reality is that media in general is a mess, information you get from corporations is a disaster, churches have turned shallow, Twitter is a wasteland, Facebook is too, Google’s search results keep getting worse, and on and on. Institutional rot is all over, and both messages are corrupted and the means for reaching people are too.

        People who have worked out all of the vetting issues and are capable of digging through the dreck simply don’t get how bad information systems are for everyday people. We’ll see if anything new arises to take their place. I don’t know.

        • Yeah I am seeing this with the youths as much as the Boomers. We were comforted with all the -isms & -phobias dying off with our grandparents, but the zoomers and gen alphas are just as fucking stupid. They fall for shrimp jesus as much as meemaw. Schools need to start teaching media literacy, but considering they won’t tell people how to do their taxes, I am not holding my breath.

      • And that’s always pretty much been the problem with creating hard left media.  This has been a problem ever since Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine.  Right wing radio exploded.  Lefties saw what was happening a few years too late and tried to compensate, but never got the listeners to compete.  Because we don’t operate in a world where issues can be squashed down to a single atom and shoot that motherfucker out to create a chain reaction. We like to talk about consequences, and other points of view and who should–and should not–be included.  We have discussions with substance and thought–things that will never work in that kind of media environment.

        They tried it with radio, then TV, now with alt media, but the fact is we will never be able to compete because we’re not psychopaths.

        • The right has no empathy. This is why you can occasionally get one to go “oh, now that I have a daughter, I get it.” Because that daughter is just an extension of HIM. But otherwise, they literally cannot see other people as people, so why would they care about their problems?

  25. To DeadSplinteries: you are good people; you keep me from losing total faith in my fellow man/woman/persons.

    To those on last evening’s Zoom: It was a joy to see you! Luxardo Cherries.

    As for me, I am brokenhearted but resilient (I hope).

      • is okay…well…its not…but you know..not like im blaming anyone here

        seems i seriously underestimated americans willingness to vote against their own interests tho….or at least not be bothered enough to vote for them

        gonna be interesting to see the knock on effects over here….probably not good interesting

        suspect probably not good interesting will happen a lot quicker for yous over there… so you know… im sorry too

  27. The worst part?  Biden has carte blanche to do whatever he damned well pleases, thanks to right wing SCOTUS.  But he won’t do a goddamned thing because he still thinks that there are rules here.  Those six fuckers on the court knew when they ruled that Biden would never step up.

    • I thought the same. Biden could end this right now by arresting the fucker for his crimes but he absolutely will not. And honestly? We’re getting what we deserve. It’s gonna take a little longer for MAGAs to realize they have fouled water and dirty air and no health insurance and unaffordable food that’s contaminated. But they will find out. And they’ll try and blame it on everyone but themselves.

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