- I’m going to do less punching across and more punching up. That doesn’t mean that I agree with everything my fellow leftists are doing—after all, I’m still the Woke Contrarian—but I don’t think it’s a good use of my time anymore. I’m probably going to edit or private some of my older posts. Not because I’m complying in advance, but because I don’t think they reflect my current views.
- I am unspeakably angry at Trump for refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m still a critical supporter of Ukraine, but I’m still a supporter. Russia was wrong to invade. There’s no way around it, no matter what Trump says.
- We are going through an administrative coup led by Elon Musk. Democratic legislators, governors, and other politicians need to take it seriously and stop treating Trump, Musk, and their administration as though it were a normal Republican administration. The same goes for the legacy media.
Social media is rife with those whom we’ve come to call “doomers”: those who have given up in the face of oppressive leaders and situations. This is distinct from preparing for the worst. When you prepare, you still believe in your future. Doomers, meanwhile, do not. They are ready to throw in the towel, ready to cast aside any chance of achieving even small wins.
Yes, the horrors of the looming Trump presidency are part of a long-lasting pattern of racial and gendered oppression. He is of a piece with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and countless other American social ills born of systemic inequality. But his being part of a pattern does not mean that we cannot resist him. He has compromised our institutions, but he has not yet destroyed them. The Republicans are a fractious lot, incapable of maintaining discipline even when they have control over the House of Representatives. There are still openings in which we can place roadblocks in front of Trump.
But if you heard doomers, you’d think that this country will turn into Hitler’s Germany the moment he takes the oath of office.
Trump is an authoritarian demagogue and a harbinger of worse things to come if his movement is permitted to survive after his demise, whether political or material. But he is not omnipotent. Do not obey in advance. The reason why totalitarian leaders were able to take control in the first place was that people obeyed in advance, and advance obedience includes dooming.
The common supposition is that democratic government depends on “free trade in ideas”; that parties, which are the bulwark of the government, are formed around clusters of ideas called programs or platforms. The educated voter is expected to study issues, so that he may choose programs rather than men. And it is clear that if he continues to develop his political ideas he is but a step away from intellectualizing politics.
Where in all this is the menace? It lies in the possibility that, for him and others, ideas will come to seem more important than public service and social peace.
—Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, p. 146, emphasis mine
…of Trumpers, tankies, TERFs, Tories, theocrats, and terrorists.
Did you seriously think that a standard-issue Democrat who happens to be a Black South Asian woman had a chance of winning against a white male cult leader whose entire political career is based on celebrity and pandering? Some Redditors were idiotically predicting a fucking landslide for Harris, which I always thought absurd. If Biden didn’t win in a landslide against Trump, why would Harris?
I hate Trump as much as the next guy. And I also hate being right when I’m pessimistic.
But I was never confident that the Democratic candidate, whether that was Biden, Harris, or someone else, had what it took to forestall a Trump victory. I have been pessimistic about this election since the beginning of this year, when Trump easily won the Republican primaries.
I do not fault the Democratic Party for deciding on Harris. She is the sitting vice president and had the best chance of getting campaign funds. The fault here was Biden’s, since he failed to step down and stupidly decided to run for reelection instead, despite his advanced age. But even then, any Democrat would have faced an uphill climb against Trump, given the state of the economy as perceived by the average voter.
Much of this is attributable to Trump’s personality cult and this country’s deep political polarisation. Even if you set aside Harris’s race and gender, Trump is the kind of candidate who gets irregular voters to come out for him every time he is on the ballot, even though they don’t care about any other candidate but him. There are a lot of people who aren’t even Republicans, but they love Trump so much that they register GOP just so they can vote for their “God-Emperor” in the primaries. He has managed to have people marching in his name and starting riots. People see him as a Jesus substitute. This is not a candidate who loses handily, even against someone vastly more intelligent and competent than he is (and that’s most of the people he’s run against, though I wouldn’t call Biden particularly intelligent). His loss to Biden was in a squeaker. And Trump can also rely on just enough voters who will pull the lever for anyone with an (R) after his name, even when it’s a raping, lying, cheating, grifting fraudster. No matter what, they’ll reliably vote Republican. Trump can pool together the reliable Republicans and the “nonpartisan” MAGA cultists and win, and that seems to be what he’s done. I’m not a pollster, of course, so my perceptions could be off base. But judging by what I’ve seen of Trump and his supporters for the past nine years, I believe it is plausible.
On the one hand, there’s the entirety of Paul Cooijmans’s oeuvre. On the other hand, there’s Kaninchen Zero’s “Ableist Word Profile: Intelligence.” Both are supremely stupid.
Cooijmans’s concept of intelligence can be reduced to testing. Not intelligent behaviour, not developmental history, just testing. But the tests are supposed to reflect the ways that people recognise patterns, process information, and generate new knowledge. He can’t see the forest for the trees. (He’s also the kind of scum who links to white-nationalist sites like American Renaissance.)
In some ways, Kaninchen Zero’s post is even worse, mostly because we’re supposed to be on the same side. At least you know what you’re getting with Cooijmans—racist, sexist, ableist bullshit. Kaninchen, on the other hand, cannot separate individual differences in cognitive ability (which obviously exist, or we wouldn’t have a diagnosis called “intellectual disability” that necessitated accommodations) from the misuses of intelligence testing. It is a poorly argued mess.
Go right ahead and criticise biased IQ tests. But to pretend that intelligence doesn’t exist is to pretend that humanity doesn’t exist.
The US and NATO should continue to support Kiev militarily, though they should push the Ukrainian government to stop pushing nationalist bullshit. Last year, I thought that it was futile to send weapons to Ukraine, but I’ve given it more thought since then.
(Sorry I haven’t written many Ukraine/Russia or Israel/Gaza posts lately; I’ve been preoccupied with an avalanche of personal issues, including rape flashbacks and existential crises.)
A second Trump presidency, which seems likelier by the minute, will be a disaster not just for the United States, but the world generally. He is a mendacious, corrupt, vile, felonious excuse for a human being who should never have been near the Oval Office in the first place. Any Republican presidency would be dangerous for marginalised people (do you think that the chillingly fascistic Project 2025 is just for Trump?), but Trump is his own brand of awful because of his cult following. (And this time around, there will be fewer safeguards, since he no longer has to face the voters as he did in 2020, and the Supreme Court has declared him immune from prosecution if they believe that he has performed “official acts.”)
And Joe Biden is going to hand Trump the election on a silver platter if he continues to stay in the race. States like New Jersey—yes, New Fucking Jersey—are in play. The swing states all seem to be going to Trump.
If Biden stays in the race, I will never forgive him. No matter what he did during his presidency, he will sully his legacy by letting his ego get in the way of preserving democracy.
Drop out, Joe! Only then can we dump Trump for good.
(CW: rape, murder, child abuse)
I was ambivalent before, mostly because of violent crimes like murder and rape. (Also, a lot of abolitionist writing is heavy-heavy-heavy on the jargon, which makes me grit my teeth even as I cheer the writers on.) But I’ve done more reading into what prison abolition actually means—it doesn’t just mean letting violent criminals walk around killing and assaulting people. It means providing the resources people need so that they never commit crimes in the first place. It’s a gradual process, not an immediate “let’s get rid of all the prisons” demand. It’s not incrementalist in the sense that it upholds current systems with piecemeal tweaks here and there; it’s a ground-up rethinking of how we prevent harm and move toward a better, safer society.
Abolition calls for accountability without using the prison system to punish and isolate, or simply “cancelling” or shunning the harm-doer. This isn’t to say that everyone needs to become BFFs with Bob the Axe Murderer (and especially not his victims’ relatives or friends). It means that you need a way to prevent Bob from becoming an axe murderer, or figuring out what he needs to put down the axe and become a functioning member of society again. And incarceration isn’t going to stop the violence; instead, it will just perpetuate the cycle.
I have read restorative- and transformative-justice stories about incestuous child molesters being rehabilitated. Hands-on parent–child sexual abuse is probably the most horrific thing I can think of—and I should know. I would be open to reconciling with my parents if they actually took responsibility for what they did. (I’ve never confronted them about the sexual abuse; I hadn’t contextualised the abuse when I was still in contact with them. But I knew about their emotional and physical abuse.) The problem is that they refuse to be accountable for their actions. Other survivors may not agree with me about reconciliation, and it’s not their job to. There’s a hotline, A Call for Change, designed to reach people either before or after they’ve abused their partners. ReSpec, operated by a former staff member at Feminist Frequency, is a monthly support and accountability group for people who have caused harm, whether that’s harassment, sexual assault, or something else. Circles of Support and Accountability surround recently released sex offenders and provide them with a community that makes them less likely to offend.There are organisations like Stop It Now! that provide confidential support to get people to stop using child sexual abuse material. These groups let people know what they’re doing is wrong before matters get worse, and there needs to be more of them.
People who cause harm may do so for complex reasons. Yes, even murderers, domestic abusers, and rapists. That doesn’t excuse their actions in the slightest; it just means that there are ways these crimes could have been intercepted without the involvement of police and prisons. We put a stop to rape when we teach people not to objectify each other and dispel the notion that people owe each other sex. We stop child abuse when we remind adults that kids are somebody and not something. We stop murder when we learn that we cannot take others’ lives to settle scores or remove obstacles. Prisons don’t teach any of those lessons, since policing and prisons themselves are violent. They lock people up, sometimes for life, instead of teaching them values.
I can understand the need for restorative justice in my own life. I’ve fucked up. I’ve never assaulted or murdered anyone. But I have said horrific, despicable, wildly out-of-character things I regret and can never take back because of untreated bipolar disorder (which can result in poor impulse control, grandiosity, and straight-up delusions and psychosis). These things haunt me to this very day, even though I don’t say anything destructive when I’m taking medication for my mood episodes. But even though I wasn’t in my right mind, the things I said still caused harm. They still ruptured relationships, either temporarily or permanently. They distorted the truth. They were cruel, distorted, vile. You could be possessed and swing around an axe without intending to hurt anyone, but an axe is still an axe. The blade still cuts.
Prison abolition teaches that “we are more than the worst things we’ve done.” And that’s why I’m an abolitionist.