After Kirk shooting, Utah governor calls social media a “cancer.” Will we treat it like one?
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
So what’s your thoughts of a certain state governor mocking Dear Leader by adopting his style?
Holding a mirror up to someone can be a powerful tool.
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There is a difference between mocking someone by acting out their foolish behaviors versus adopting their assholishnesses. One is funny and the other is just being another jerk.
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I've always thought that you don't anything but his actual name. "Musk" has vaguely unpleasant connotations for me.
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And how would you rate the likelihood of the above happening? Because I read your post and upvoted it but... You're basically stating there's no option left but violence, if we're being honest. Is that what you meant to say?
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I refuse to even accept this as understandable. Because what you're doing is giving cover to common people to deadname trans celebrities because they're rich and famous and have power and therefore deserve it. Is it cool to deadname Caitlyn Jenner? She's an author and celeb too.
"It's okay when I do it" is almost always a cop out.
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I think it's stupid. I don't think it's powerful, I think it's a PR move to try and rebuild Newsom's image after he trashed it with people on the left.
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IMO, if they deliberately use incorrect names for others in a denigrating/invalidating way, then it's perfectly okay to do the same thing back. You're just treating them as they choose to treat others.
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I can’t speak for Aurich, but as someone who has shared his disdain for Newsom,
"Stooping," is the word you seek.
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If you focus on everything you will get nothing. So prioritize first, get power, then help as many as you can. Anything else is a fantasy.
I would love for trans rights to be something that the USA cares enough about to push back on the right wing of the country. it's not. Focus on the rich taking power. Focus on health care. Focus on equality for all. If you chop everything up into every tiny thing you play right into their hands. You will not get in power long enough to do anything. The last 8 years proves it.
I don't like it. i think it sucks. Being correct and moral is what should matter but messaging and getting people on your side is not an option. It is everything.
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So how does that work? They're allowed to deadname trans people now because it's perfectly okay to do it back to you? We just go back and forth? Everything is fair game as long as we're all assholes?
It just feels like a third grade squabble on the schoolyard, trying to explain to the principal that "they started it".
For any of the parents here, did that actually work on you with your kids?
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Your willingness to cast aside the most vulnerable and victimized in hopes of being popular has been noted. We understand your stance of telling the persecuted and slandered that they have to continue to wait until their abusers stop abusing them before we can be allowed to stand with them. That you see it as necessary to sell out vilified minorities for electoral gain has been made clear. I think we are all in agreement on what your position is, thanks.
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Is that the royal 'we' you are using? I don't remember the vote appointing you as anyone's spokesman.
By all means keep being smug in your ideological purity, I think being effective is more important than feeling righteous.
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Prioritizing your message doesn't cast anyone aside. Throwing away elections so you feel better does.
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Of course not, but we're definitely talking about two different things. JK Rowling has not renounced her first name. Is it deadnaming to call her that? Surely it is just disrespectful or para-social behaviour
edit: I agree it's childish and stupid, but comparing it to trans deadnaming seems incorrect
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
I think anyone who would like to believe the GOP and its supporters can continue operating the way they have over the past 6 months in particular, let alone the past ~9 years, without a sharp increase in violence is fooling themselves. We're already seeing this happen.
That's very different from wishing for violence. But yes, if Trump continues the way he had, isn't stopped, and refuses to even really acknowledge he's actually responsible for governing more than a hateful minority, then yes, there absolutely will be violence.
Honestly, I suspect that's what Trump thinks he actually wants right now. You can't just keep pushing people on one side with violent rhetoric and on the other by systematically denying their rights and end up with any other result.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
Right. Systematically disenfranchising votes is part of that abuse the post you responded to was talking about.
Unless you're talking about the whole "stolen" 2020 election, in which case maybe Democrats want a word with you after what happened in Florida in 2000 — the only thing even remotely resembling a "stolen" election in any kind of recent history, and yet also something Democrats were pretty universally able to acknowledge was actually legally decided even if the result likely should have been different had the vote counting process been allowed to complete.
Because, see, the whole "not my president" thing in 2016 was protest over yet another president elect who wasn't even voted in by a plurality of actual voters. No one was trying to claim the result was legally wrong, because that would have been just as crazy and irresponsible in 2016 as it was when Republicans actually decided to do that in 2020. And here we are in the aftermath.
(Oh, unless you meant "throwing away" as in not voting for Harris because reasons. In which case, yes, anyone who did that was either an idiot or got exactly what they voted for.)
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
I think it's trying something that seems to actually be exciting people.
The problem is, what the right is doing in terms of messaging is working. It's stupid, and that's not what politics should be about in a healthy country, but nevertheless it is. I think you can either choose to acknowledge that and try to play the game, but at least do it somewhat tastefully, or you can likely lose again.
I don't know if there's a way out of this at all for the US, but continuing to do what isn't working is certainly not it. New Zealand is looking kind of nice these days…
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Where that woman is concerned there’s a key difference though - her name is Joanne. Has she publicly stated that she wishes to be known as ‘Terrence’, or ‘Harry’, or ‘Susan’ or ‘J’? No?* Then Joanne is her name.
Look, I get it. I have a name that has a long form and a more casual short form. I much prefer the short form because I’m not a formal person, and I let people know that. But if they insist on using the long form I don’t get bent out of shape, and I certainly don’t consider myself as being ‘deadnamed’.
*if she actually has then consider my argument moot.
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I always think if the wizards in her books were real, someone would have given her a penis. Voldemort obviously. And Luna Lovegood most likely, she knows a thing or two about discrimination.
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For someone so much focused on messaging you might want to consider a different tactic.
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I stuck my oar in because you were trying to bully someone who disagreed with you into silence. I despise authoritarians whatever ideology they hide behind.Thanks for your permission. It means a lot.
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I'm sorry, but what are you talking about? You seem to be responding to a bunch of things I did not say and ignoring almost all of what I did say. All I ever said to you was effectively that Joanne Rowling's transphobia is not "lesser" in some way than (for example) Kirk's racism and to avoid implying as such. I haven't ventured any opinion on "focus" or made any relevant specific comment on Kirk himself outside of relating to the framing you used.
Asking someone to do better on characterising bigotry is not "perfectionist" or "eating your own." What a bizarrely vitriolic response. Why is your first instinct on hearing the slightest pushback on something to lash out like this? Doesn't that seem a little ironic to you vis a vis the "eating your own" remark?
I will again politely ask you to stop implying that transphobia is less significant than racism or sexism. All bigotry is bad. It is truly and completely bizarre to me that you think that is a controversial or confrontational stance. To give you some idea why: I am a trans person. Try to imagine how seeing people who claim to be "on my side" glibly insist that the horrendous abuse directed at myself and those like me - even at medical professionals who simply acknowledge our existence - by the likes of Kirk and Rowling is somehow not as important as the (in my view) equally disgusting attacks Kirk made on women and anyone who's not white.
I'll give you a hint: pretty fucking shitty.
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We had an exchange of opinions, and part of my opinion was spelling out exactly what their finger-wagging means in the real world. They told me I should lay off including Kirk's anti-trans bigotry because it's not popular with the voters, I told them I'm not going to because I find that instruction morally disgusting.
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I feel like that ignores common courtesy, though. I'm not on a first-name basis with Ms. Rowling, and I'm going to go out on a limb and assume jtwrenn is not, either. No, it's not the same thing, but it's doing a similar thing, for similar reasons.
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I'll be honest, I'm not big on common courtesy towards individuals who have dedicated their lives to making the lives of others as horrible as possible.
It's her name. If she feels strongly enough about it then she can change it legally and, if she does, I'll honour that name. Until then it's no worse than someone calling me by my long-form name even though they know I'd rather they didn't. And trust me, if I wanted to insult her I'd be calling her much worse things than her name.
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The whole fucking point is that referring to someone as the name they'd prefer is common courtesy, not some deadly imposition by Communist thought-police enforcing right-think on some plucky common-sense protagonist in a world gone made as transphobes portray it to be.
It flouts their hypocrisy by pointing a sign at it for everyone else to recognize. In Rowling's case regarding her use of nicknames and pseudonyms, entire essays have been written for several years about it but who's going to be aware of that unless someone does something provocative, prompting bystanders to ask "Why are they calling her Joanne?"
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Ahhh, yes, the "we have tried nothing and are all out of ideas so maybe the 2000th No Kings Protest will engender a different result then we can go back to the status quo of letting the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation and Fox News fuck with society unimpeded for another century"
Newsflash: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are gone. Not only are they not coming back but there is no conceiveable way any of their rhetoric could get through to the public as it is today nor could they govern in the face of bad faith behavior by the opposition (Obama and Biden tried and failed)
I think with this you've officially conceded the point and in bad faith accused me of not outlining the plan properly to 'get the elephant'
Calling my plan 'short-sighted' and 'fucking with conservatives' also demonstrates you have no vision, aren't paying attention and aren't thinking big picture enough.
You'll notice at no point have I mentioned cancel culture or banning conservatives on social media for posting the shit Charlie Kirk did even if old Twitter moderation would have done so. You can apply economic consequences for this to the conservative population that don't involve publically searchable doxxing databases of Democrats.
My plan also takes into account that uniparty Democratic rule is impossible and would naturally give way to something else in 10, 20 or 30 years but not to the century long Confederate-Fascist institutions of the GOP.
Face it, I've done the bare beginnings of what no Democrat has done to date: acknowledged an opponent that isn't on a level playing field, wants their whites and legal asians as a political punching bag and their minorities outright dead or deported, acknowledged any elections that happen from here on will be a rigged sham or cancelled at random, They then want to allow wealthy immigrants from other countries to buy their way in and indoctrinate them into Western fascism to export back to their home countries.
They've also successfully bred an entire generation of nihilists steeped in victimhood and hypocrisy, one of whom shot Kirk, and in so doing guaranteed that they can't hold power and when they realize that they'll lash out and hurt as many people as possible going down.
And you want to fucking protest and think voting and persuasion alone is enough, that things will swing back to a sane direction with no work beyond emotional pleas to peace.
The irony here is that because of people like you, to even begin to draw up and lay up rhetorical plans and disaster supplies (the liberal faction I am discussing here would have to attempt to replace FEMA on a volunteer basis to gin up public support) it would take exactly the civil disobedient protests you are suggesting on DEMOCRATIC candidates to get them with the fucking program and to concede the political middle has failed and can now be considered an extremist third pole in and of itself.
If you want a historical corollary to what we're facing here it is not Martin Luther King Jr., it is still World War 2. It took both corruption and internal collapse of the Nazis and a boot to their necks to engender a generational fear of returning to fascism and that is what is needed here on Christian Nationalism and the wealthy class. It takes a long time to plan that and fewer street protests getting fodder shot by GOP live ammunition. It won't all be kids dancing in front of rubber bullets to mock the military, which will be bifurcated and weakened with corruption regardless on top of being abhorrently expensive to deploy to merely suppress protests.
You can have enough protests that it's too expensive for the GOP and local law enforcement to react but that had better be backed by a plan to seize power and perform a Nuremburg on the GOP's voters.
Without knowing it you've wholly conceded the point here by abdicating responsibility for outlining a better plan, which is not something I could have said a year ago.
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"Musky Felon" is something people should have been using for a long time now. If it gets confused with Trump or points out he is directly and personally liable for crimes due to DOGE in ways where the statute of limitations are off the table, all the better.
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Self-censorship as a concept and word shouldn't be lost on you, both in the context of the forum moderation and in terms of coded language around the Right Wing and foreign spies.
I myself think there's years of subversive, legal, rhetorical and economic manipulative shit you can do to gin up the right flank against MAGA before that point without being caught in a lie or hypocrisy, without the goal being to win the next election AND because the Left is going to be accused of it anyway with no ability to sufficiently deny it, the groypers are is who is actually picking up guns to force MAGA's rhetoric further rightward against the pacing set by Project 2025 before having to go plot an insurrection yourself.
MAGA is racing to get enough of a permanent institutional advantage to mitigate Trump dying in office and that's going to occur before any actual violence could be planned and be effective anyway, so it's both foolish and not pragmatic to be violent because it would cement that institutional advantage. Encouraging Russian/Chinese style corruption and groypers vs. MAGA is far more useful. The nature of how MAGA coded language is controlled encourages corruption inherently in any government or corporate institution.
MAGA has a habit of ignoring its youngest conservatives on economic policymaking so making conservative Gen Z and Gen Alpha into fodder with incendiary rhetoric while they don't know you're liberal is not ethically great but entirely morally sound, you would still have to attempt to convert them and prop them back up economically with overpaid jobs after MAGA can no longer dictate economic policy and trade deals with foreign countries remain on much shorter and more frequently reviewed durations to ensure America is acting in good faith.
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I remain opposed to your call for world war 3. Thanks for the still vague manifesto.
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Not only that but the US military and law enforcement are both the most expensive on Earth.
We already have National Guardsmen shitting in humvees, if you want a military coup against MAGA that attempts to hand the country to an interim government and back to the center-left and far-left to hash things out while losing a few states (my bet is the entire American Southeast and maybe Texas, not sure there since it's stealth purple) to secession, governing the way the GOP plans to in Project 2025 is a wonderful way to end up there without an election depending on how competent, publically visible, and patient the opposition is.
The message for MAGA also is yes that's the way to get the highest amount of wealthy casualties even if they have property and international travel elsewhere or even private security, going on like they are now.
The message for everyone else is a military coup is probably the worst possible way to form economic trade deals and rehabilitate globalization out of necessity to get inflation under control afterward. No country on Earth can fully trust a USA formed by a military coup, even a left wing one busily purging its century-old right wing campaign and policy institutions. It might be necessary and the only way left but requires patience to fix an economy after all that, patience the remaining electorate won't have judging from the inevitable secessions to keep a MAGA core culture.
You need an election, even one American Libertarian factions know they will lose, but not necessarily one where the GOP is allowed to participate or even exists, and not necessarily a world where the Murdochs or Sinclair Broadcasting still exist, and likely one where Fox News reports the news much more like the AP, MSNBC and CNN by the time such an election rolls around.
(Conservatives own 80% of traditional mass media in the USA and this still matters more than social media, those people would be on notice to drop their political ideology or self-deport from the country along with payment processor CEOs by this stage, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Spez and Bezos for sure lest something happens a military coup can't or won't control)
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We are desperate for someone, anyone, to look like they're standing up to Trump.
I'm not a fool, I'll take what I can get. Even if it's Gavin Newsom, who's response to the election was to find common ground with Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk and focus test throwing trans people under the bus.
But, I was asked specifically what I thought of the tactic, and I said what I thought, that it's stupid. I don't think it's "working".
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At this point your proposition is far more likely to lead to WW3 than mine, haha.
That is, and has been, the whole crux and irony of your proposal.
We're also on a discussion forum and not a campaign trail, 'if you're explaining you're losing' doesn't apply here, quite the opposite, so even if you refuse to outline a comparable plan more detailed than 'vote again and rationality will prevail' (it will not, not by itself) you're still expected to be more mature about your objections than you have been to date.
"Vote harder and hope for the best" is part of the plan, it is not and cannot be THE plan. At some point a Nuremburg is coming up for 77 million people, we're just debating how much of it is a firing squad when that happens for sentencing, and whether it's the liberal citizenry or a foreign country. My method actually is LESS violent than yours in the end.
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They are of course not literally the same thing.
But on the other hand they kind of are actually related.
Do I care that people don't respect JK Rowling? No, I definitely do not. But what we say to people is it costs you nothing to just use people's names that they ask to be called by. Respect their pronouns.
We don't say "ah, but only do it if they've finished legal paperwork", or "but only if you like them".
It's like when conservatives would say Barack Hussein Obama. And then they'd say "that's his legal name!" when you know they're just being assholes about it.
I think we lose some of our high ground and footing when we play these kinds of games. When we do the "they started it". But, more to the point in our discussions, it's actually just personally irritating to me honestly. Because I know who JK Rowling is. I don't know who "Joanne" is. When you get all cutesy with your posts it just hurts my ability to even read.
It actually fucked with my head recently when the Elmo From Sesame Street social media account was hacked. Too many people calling Elon Musk Elmo.
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Just a reminder, we don't want to be host to comments calling for violence. There's a dedicated thread explaining why.
This conversation is steering too close to that in the back and forth, it's time to let it go.
This conversation is steering too close to that in the back and forth, it's time to let it go.
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No, that's not what I meant (but its a very fair question, given my post).
For me personally, and I regularly say this to anyone who asks.. I remind myself that everyday life goes on, and living a fulfilling life with decency, kindness, and human connections is its own act of resistance. Just like people live good lives all over the world in other repressive regimes, so too should we. It does not mean we should tone down our critiques - I'll always remember my principles and not dilute or forget them just because I choose to get on with my life. It does not mean abandoning protest, or the vote, or efforts to right the ship, especially because there are people for whom the above statement does not hold true (there are in fact lives being torn apart by this regime, especially some immigrants, LGBTQ people, women impacted by Roe etc., and some wrongs can never be undone -- i.e. they cannot simply "get on with their lives"). So we move forward accepting the loss, mourning it even, and coming together as people, helping each other out, and being kind to each other, while never ever softening our critique of the current regime and those who favor it. They are racists. They are fascists. And they are utterly corrupt.
The above is my preferred option. My point was that there's simply no way everyone will be satisfied to follow that path. There will be people who resort to violence, and it should not come as a surprise, if the state, the president, and the ruling party are so violent themselves, and they make the non-violent pathways so hard to follow that you need to adopt the persona of friggin' Buddha himself, to follow them.
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They were found with the rifle. It had a nearly full magazine, even though he only fired one.
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