Progressive Community Clusterfuck Breakdown, a la TFC

*deep breath*

#1: I have left almost all the online Green groups I have belonged to for the better part of a year.

I support the Green party platform. I do NOT support the rise of the "Green party twatform".

Take your party shaming, purity testing shit down the ramp. We can have these kinds of petty difference squabbles when we knock down a few immediate, looming, BIG FUCKING PROBLEMS we should probably be dealing with instead.

Get your noses out of joint, goddamnit. We have shit to do, all of us. I'm done listening to everything and everyone be maligned over some nonsensical tinfoil hat, chemtrail, hippie bullshit purity tests that literally any and everyone could fail. I'm done watching people IN the Green groups nitpicking each other and everyone else to death. It's counter-productive and I'm not going to be involving myself in it, listening to/reading it, or entertaining that bullshit. Keep it AWAY from me.

#2: We all know INTENTIONAL, institutional racism is wrong and shitty. It's literally killing people every day. We seem to be way too content with ignoring inadvertent personal racism, and that's the death of progress.

Inadvertent personal racism is also wrong and shitty, but its both common and a phenomena that (as we can see from the last week or two) gets caught in a web of cognitive dissonance and hurt feelings, then silkspun by a great big defensive spider to the point that we can't even see the elements to the problem anymore. Fuck, we could barely see it to begin with and that's why it occurred.

It's not terribly difficult to fix, in practice. We're just scared of the practice for a variety of reasons (upon which people can, have, and do write endless academic papers that I won't emulate here). The point being, we sometimes need to shut up and listen and not assume we're being maligned because someone wants us to stop what we were doing and CONSIDER doing something else. You're not being attacked for being asked to listen to an alternate viewpoint.

We're making assumptions that are defensive and insecure, and its literally suffocating any hope of a productive conversation. When you are confronted, the assumption is NOT (and should not necessarily be immediately perceived as such) that you are a BAD person because you did something that someone found offensive or that you were oblivious to something that elicited very strong, negative reactions in someone else. If that were the case, the person petitioning your ear wouldn't be bothering. The assumption instead is that you are a GOOD person with sense who might simply be unaware of aspects to certain situations that you haven't had the opportunity to experience the exact same way as someone else.

That's it, y'all. The assumption you can actually SAFELY make is that we all see the world through different lenses, crafted by our experiences, relationships, and society. The SAFE assumption from that is simply that your experience is quite probably not exactly the same as someone else's. From that assumption, you can drop the defensiveness and actually hear what someone else has to say when they question your statements or actions. Being asked to think is not a punishment.

Inadvertent racism helps to support intentional racism, which is why it must be carefully deconstructed. Now, sometimes unpacking this inadvertent racism can be tricky. Know that its not SUPPOSED to "feel good" all the time. Growth does not come from remaining perpetually in comfortable and familiar places. Sometimes that means you're going to have to call out that one relative you really like, like Auntie Clau--- er.. CINDY, and tell her she's got shit backwards. It's going to make you feel like crap because you know she was oblivious to what she did, but you also know that there are at least five truths you can count on here:

1: Right is right, and it applies to everyone.

2: ^ Same thing goes for "wrong".

3: It might be better that you be the one to take her aside and try to explain things, before everyone on the Internet hands her a silver platter with her own ass on it.

4: "Letting it go" as a friend/family member only reinforces more of that behavior/speech/action. If you're never "wrong" there's no incentive or reason to change.

5: Being a hypocrite is lame and you don't wanna.

and one more..

#3: Can everyone stop being so fucking reactionary for like FIFTEEN MINUTES?

With the amount of drive and heart within progressive people, we might actually make something out of that fifteen minutes if everyone could stop trying to find excuses to change their status to "Butthurt" at all times.

This goes for everyone. Not just the people getting the hurt feels. This goes for you assholes with the witty comments who KNOW you're rubbing salt in an already salty wound.

For fucks' sake, knock this shit off for a week. Everyone needs to either organize and get the fuck over shit, or take a brief vacation.

EITHER IS FINE.

The Feminine Context

Divide to Conquer: Progressive Parties For All

Okay fellow and beloved progressive people. We need to have a civil, polite, respectful conversation about party affiliation. We need to pick parties. We need to accept not only that we're not all going to pick the same parties, but that it might be in our best interest to NOT all pick the same party. Even better, supporting each other toward taking needed, differing directions might be the most empowering thing we could do to forward progressive change in our country.

I've seen people suggesting that we join the Republican party to forward progressive candidates THERE because the Democratic party is far too corrupt to trust again. Some of us want to go Green/Independent/(Insert Alternate Party Here), and some of us want to go rip roots out of the current Democratic party and start there. As you continue to read, when I refer to the Green party, please assume I am referring to them and any other 3rd party that is trying to create its own power base.

The true answer is that all of these approaches can and will work, provided everyone can stop being assholes about it. We can actually divide and conquer, moving all of these directions simultaneously. I think that might be the best way to go, if purely for the sake of MOVEMENT. Right now, we're not moving anywhere and doing anything. Currently, we're all too damn busy beating one another about the head for so much as considering a party affiliation that seems to oppose our own party of choice.

A progressive infiltration of any party, and even all parties at once, very much COULD work. Ripping one another to shreds is going to make this multi-pronged attack a lot more difficult, though.

Personally, I'm heading back into the fray of the Dem party SPECIFICALLY to go in there and cause nothing but hell for the people currently in power. My aim is to help elect NEW people and to maintain my ability to vote where it counts, object where it counts, and I don't have any notions of uniting with corporatist Dems. I will not be donating money directly to the Dem party to do what it wants to do - if I were to donate time or money, it will be toward SPECIFIC candidates trying to move into that party who reflect my progressive values.

I don't know how successful the idea of moving into the Republican party will actually be, but the mere act of moving forward and attempting to work on common ground principles within the GOP could only result in one of two things: either progress toward building better Republicans, or a massive "brick wall" opposition of exisiting Republicans, which should be enough to get progressives to eventually abandon the idea and find a party affliation they CAN work with. I can see a lot of good work being done by progressives should they enter the Republican party, if just because that party (like the Dems) requires a bit of agitation in its ranks and a re-evaluation of what's important to American voters.

I do NOT believe we will encounter the same sorts of resistance in the Democrat party because progressive voters and Democratic voters do share a lot of the same ideals and values. The disagreement between the two left-leaning groups focuses mainly on whether the DNC is trustworthy or properly conducting its business. While Dems and Progressives DO agree, Progressives would like to take their fight farther left and the main argument with current Democrats is simply that they don't think its entirely possible. This is not exactly a disagreement so much as a lack of faith in a system that BOTH groups can agree is slow, ineffective, and unwilling to take bold steps.

As the Trump administration carries on, I see a huge potential for the Dem party to sweep in a massive number of members for the sole purpose of ridding our country of Trump. The republican party is currently doing itself no favors by backing him in all of his obscenely awful executive orders, and its becoming abundantly clear that Trump has no idea what he's doing from day to day. There is every reason to believe that as the public grows weary of Trump, they're going to lean to whichever direction appears to be the strongest opposition to him. The majority of American voters lean toward one of the two major ruling parties, and since Republicans chose Trump as their man, there's only one clear direction to go to oppose him.

I think we're foolish to assume that the Democractic party will do anything but strengthen as Trump's admininstration continues to agitate the American public. As such, our standing on our "principles" by avoiding them entirely isn't going to hurt Team Blue a goddamn bit. The Democratic party doesn't need US to get the majority numbers they will need to rise in power. Trump's going to do all that work for them, and they can sit back and reap the rewards of it in due time. Leaving the DNC to its own devices, staying OUT of it and not demanding any change from them is going to allow corporatist Democrats to run wild with power in 2018 and 2020.

We've seen this before. While there are a handful of us (comparitively speaking) who will do our research and will ask the hard questions, most voters are fairly apathetic. A large number of people who intend to vote, somehow don't make it out. Lots of people will flat out tell you they don't vote because they see no point in it. The general unwillingness to vote is a clear indicator of how habituated Americans are to corruption, and it results in a certain kind of listless apathy which makes voters easier to manipulate.

That being said, I really and truly support Green candidates across the board, as the Green party doesn't accept or promote corporatism. When possible in general/midterm elections, I'm happy to vote for Greens if no one progressive enough for my liking is running under the Blue banner or if said Green candidate is a better choice. If I feel this way about Greens, why am I not JOINING the Greens?

Greens are simply weak, if not utterly ineffective in the face of the two predominant ruling parties. On the state level, Greens can start working to gain a lot of power in their regions and should do so. Purely on state and regional levels, Greens COULD, in fact, make a lot happen. On a national level, the two ruling parties are going to need to have their foundations rocked and their monolithic presence chiseled down a bit to afford the Greens ANY potential as a national force to be reckoned with.

It's going to take a weakening of the two national parties' dominance and opposition to a third party uprising, and some major grassroots effort on the part of the Green in order for this to happen. There is literally no way around the fact that a lot of changes will HAVE to be made to allow for third parties to get a foothold, and that we desperately need more than two parties if we're ever to have proper representation of the needs and will of the people.

Take note of this in that I am not writing off the Green party entirely. Our problem is that we need to pursue realistic long-term goals, and its going to take some time to develop the Green party appropriately to present a national threat to the current duopoly. Those of us in states where there's not a snowball's chance in hell at developing a strong Green base can actually HELP along the Green party by aligning ourselves with one of the two major national parties and raising what hell we can toward the pursuit of placing progressive-minded candidates in whatever party positions we can. It's more realistic to consider 3rd parties an eventual goal that currently needs participants within all parties to ensure their national viability in the future.

I think we're shooting ourselves in the damn foot with all this division, silencing, purity testing, and nonsense. It's going to take all of us, but we're not going to be afforded the luxury of moving in one specific direction (as we did behind Bernie) for the greatest amount of change to occur. Some states have a GREAT number of progressive citizens and common ideals, and Greens have an excellent starting point to build a hell of a party within those specific regional areas. On the national level, however, the two party system currently reigns supreme and I cannot fathom any way to break that stranglehold unless the Republican and Democratic parties are either weakened or modified from the inside, with a strong emphasis on changing how they typically do business and why.

So, in essence, JOIN the party that you want to pursue change within. It's fine. Join the one you see avenues and angles you could work. Either way any of us go, its going to be a hell of a fight. We have to cease the infighting, though, lest it just be used against us and our goals. I think we're better off with representatives everywhere, pushing forward, than we are sitting in our frustrated herds and nitpicking one another to death.

Why couldn't we do this, instead? Why couldn't we not only join the parties we feel we could exert changes and progressive empowerment within, and STILL be united. We could share strategies and campaigns between us, crossing party lines and developing non-partisan solutions, pushing forward a progressive agenda from all angles.

For the love of fuck, join SOMETHING. We're all stagnating while we argue about it, and at the end of the day, we all want the same things. Going multiple directions isn't necessarily going to result in failure, and might be the unique, forward-thinking, PROGRESSIVE approach needed to shake this broken, failing, damnable system.

Bonus Reading: A basic guide to elections from VoteForBernie.com 

The Feminine Context

The Political Bitchslap Everyone Needs - All Parties Included

You know who's at fault for the state of the country? We are.

What the hell are we allowing to pass for "acceptable" out of our representatives and WHY? Are you THAT sad and pathetic that you're going to be content in sighing, shrugging your shoulders, down-talking others who are suffering in a crippled economy JUST LIKE YOU ARE, and assuming there's nothing to do about it?

Stop believing this horseshit that business-like decorum and understatement to the point of silence is good for us, helpful, or a mark of success. People who are representing us in government BETTER be fucking angry and ready to call out bullshit as it comes up, or they are literally nothing but well-dressed mouthpieces for those who want to profit off OUR suffering and need. Those people will NEVER help the rest of us get what we need, because they make far too much money on keeping it from us and giving us empty statements to lead us along. They will throw you a crumb from the big fat cookie that a corporation paid them, and then tell you that its the people suffering NEXT to you who ate the cookie you didn't get. Too many of us are willing to be complicit little assholes and blame that person suffering beside us, while that suited mouthpiece mumbles some more bullshit through his or her cookie-filled mouth.

Own up to it, for fucks sake, or we're all fucking doomed. Own up to how much time you've spent asleep.

Spare me your liberal or conservative sense of moral superiority to others. Shut the fuck up with your constant excuse making that those who are less well-off than you are living like shit because they're not up to your personal ethical standards. Your "moral superiority" doesn't mean jack shit to poverty-stricken children, and if you truly believe it's fine to shrug that off, YOU are probably the strongest arm of the of the many forces that are pushing those children away from good lives. YOU are a willing accomplice to suffering and further deterioration of the American quality of life. YOU are the voter who doesn't want to fucking bother. YOUR apathy is affording the rape and pillage of our nation's culture and well-being and you should be ashamed of yourself.

If your state representatives are sidestepping the point in endless, useless niceties and word salad, vote the them fuck out. Vote them the fuck out at the local, regional, state, and national level. What we thought were good, balanced, savvy politicians have FUCKED us for personal gain and cushy careers in well-paid jobs they barely show up for, while reaping work-offered healthcare, retirement, and sick pay benefits we are also paying for and will never see anything remotely as good offered to us as citizens. What's worse, is that we all truly understand that political figures are, as a rule, full of shit. It's a standard at this point.

Why do we keep voting for them?

If you were too damn cozy in being an uppity ass Democrat to see that it wasn't going to save you, shame on you.

Democrats have been dicking off, totally high on a sense of their own intellectual superiority, to the point that they don't even investigate who's paying their party members and how that could fuck people over. Your supreme Democratic intellect is used against you just as easily as religion is used as a tool to incite conservatives, and you can't sit here and pretend you give a singular rat's ass about the suffering of others if you can't even listen to them speak because they don't meet your personal standards. Poor, uneducated people that aren't as "worldly" as you deserve a living wage and health care as much as your comfortably numb, blue-voting ass does. To think otherwise is to be a bigot. If you think this way, accept that you are a bigot and if you truly believe that bigotry is bad, sort your fucking life out, mate.

If you let your religious preference be pandered to and thought that was just great, shame on you, too.

Republicans have been far too content to put blame their neighbors and in allowing the vanity of having their "personal relationship" with Jesus stroked as hard as any Democratic ego, to the point that no one's acting in any sort of "Christian" manner. Religion, which should be sacred, personal, and a means of self-improvement as a human being, has been made into a freaking circus side-show via which you're sold shoddy garbage, snake oil, and a ringside seat to your own destruction. Guess what? Your Republican representatives don't give a fuck about you or Jesus. Your preoccupation with Jesus just makes you a great big fucking propaganda target and you're letting it happen because you're a chicken shit who wants to be pandered to. Jesus would want the sick healed and for children to eat, from all I've read about the guy. If your representatives aren't putting that first, how the hell are you going to keep allowing them to align themselves with your savior? How are you not OUTRAGED by such blasphemy? You, as well as uppity Democrats who don't care about starving kids from out of work miners in West Virginia (cause fuck those red state people), should be entirely ashamed of yourselves. For people who want to work in the image of their savior to promote family values, you're awfully goddamn okay with little children and new mothers living in abject poverty and suffering. Just because a guy says "I'm all about Jesus" while he pulls the rug out from under families, doesn't mean he's your friend. Wake the fuck UP.

Oh, and independents? Fuck you, too. You're not helping.

You're leaning either right or left in most cases, fanning the flames of anger, and not doing jack shit to help put out the fire. You're decrying the moral decay of politics as you contribute to it on the citizen level, perfectly content to naysay and complain while everyone (including you) is suffering. What party do you belong to? I FORGOT. YOU'RE AN INDEPENDENT SO FUCK EVERYONE AND THEIR PARTY. You're too GOOD for working within the shit-stained political system, even toward the ends of changing and cleaning it up. What mass are you gathering to effect change? OH THAT'S RIGHT. YOU'RE NOT. You're sharing memes about how fucked up everyone else's party is, while you sit cozily in your little bubble, morally superior to us all because you don't see any reason you should have to pick either, corrupt side. The most ambitious among you are still doing nothing but forming utterly doomed little parties with no might behind them, cause most of you have nothing but disdain for every other party (major or minor) that isn't YOUR specific little horseshit party.

Anyone still got a case of the red-ass from 2016? I know I do. We tried all of the above bullshit for this past election, and we're sitting here with a failed Democratic candidate who didn't give enough fucks about her supporters to so much as pretend to care about the issues that most strongly affect them, nor support them when her opponent won. As a result, we are left with a volatile, moody, uninformed jackass for a Republican president, who's as ready to throw everyone under the bus as he is to throw a temper tantrum. The Democrats are too busy feeling sorry for themselves to even acknowledge the obvious progressive route they need to adopt to succeed, and the Republicans are working around the clock to hasten our demise.

We're all fucked and EVERYONE has allowed the worsening quality of American life to happen, to some degree or another. I don't blame anyone for voting any way they voted in 2016, because we were fucked either way. If you're not pissed off at how the primaries played out on EITHER side of the aisle, you haven't learned jack shit and you should review and reflect so that this shit doesn't happen again. Give yourself two or three smacks to your own, smug, stupid, self-satisfied face while you're at it.

You smug fucking Democrats didn't see anything wrong with superdelegates being allowed to choose the winner of the primary in advance of running one, and you should be slapped soundly for thinking that was anything other than corruption, cronyism, and an OBSCENE waste of money to even run a primary in that case. For fucks' sake, just the waste of MONEY alone should make us all furious that the Democrats tilted their primary in one direction, let alone the utter disrespect for all ethics in pretending that the people who support their party had any say in the outcome.

Republicans - since when the fuck was it a "family value" to encourage and cheer on an egomanical bully and praise him for being one? How is the concept of blaming others for your own problems (immigrants, etc) a "pulling oneself up by ones' own bootstraps" mindset?

Independents? You guys suck, too. If you wanted Bernie or Hillary or who the fuck ever, you should have gotten off your uppity asses and made yourself part of the process.

Kudos to all of you who DID try, and tried your fucking hearts out. I know that's why you're so battle-worn and bitter now. I don't blame you. I am just as hurt and angry as you are. You're going to have to drop it, though. We need to keep swimming or we're all going to drown in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Take all that you learned about election laws and rules in your state, dust yourself the fuck off, and get your pissed off asses to work well in advance of 2020, while we have a chance to do something about it.

TRUTH BOMB: sitting around in echo chambers, indulging in "Anti-Trump" OR "Anti-Clinton" circle jerks with each other all day isn't making you guys a movement. It's making your "movement" into a sad pile of angry little bitches who are only going to be angrier when this shit happens again and again. You ARE entirely complicit in the repetition of the 2016 political disaster if all you can do is conduct constant purity tests among one another and repeat things you already know, over and over again.

BONUS TRUTH BOMB: Everyone's getting fucking sick of your bellyaching, including those among you. We all know its getting us nowhere. It's time to shut the fuck up and move.
The sad fact of the matter is that we shouldn't have been so short-sighted, lazy, and apathetic as to allow the kind of choices we were left with at the end. Maybe we're used to it - all the corruption and game-playing to make a few people some cozy lives at the expense of making ours more miserable. Maybe it crept up on us, incrementally. Whatever the case, if we don't pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and DO something radically different from this point, we're even more fucked in the future than we are now.

.. and we're pretty fucked right now, y'all.

Don't sit on your fat, lazy, closed-minded, uneducated voter ass AGAIN and let the damn parties tell you who you're voting for. Get your shit together. Slap yourself in the face and say "I will not be made a bitch of, AGAIN."

Learn when primary dates are. PICK the goddamn delegates, reps, assemblymen, mayors, governors, state house reps, whatever, this time instead of letting the same fat fucks keep the same damn jobs, unopposed, that they've been sitting comfortably in for years. They don't worry about THEIR kids making it through school, and they're damn sure not sending them to school with YOUR kids. They're not worried about dying from a treatable illness. They don't have to. You're paying with your taxes to place them in positions of power and privilege, and you're also paying for your own family to wither away while these representatives you're supporting live fabulous lives on your dime.

"But I don't like the Democratic party" "Fuck the Dems, they're too corrupt" "Fuck the two party system!" "WE NEED A THIRD PARTY! I'll INVENT ONE AND YOU SHOULD ALL JOIN IT"

Well guess what, kids? The two-party system has all of us by the short and curlies and there isn't a goddamn thing any of your whining, foot-stamping, or going home with your panties in a fucking wad is going to do about it unless you're willing to get your hands (and soul) a little dirty and start getting in the right place to be plucking the con-artists out of these parties. That means you're going to have to be able to belong to them in order to have a vote.

If you think you lean more left - well guess what that means, sweetheart? I think you know the answer to that. Same goes for if you lean right. I don't care what you join. I don't care if you go Green or independent, but if you do, please stop bellyaching to the rest of us about your moral superiority when your effort inevitably fails because of a lack of numbers, electoral access, and the zombie-like mass of party loyalist voters who will always vote for whoever Team Blue or Red picks for them.

We can't fix stupid. We can't fix lazy. We can't make people want to think or grow a spine and enforce change. They'll just suffer on and whine and cry and do the same goddamn thing they always do - vote in larger elections where all the movers and shakers have already been picked for them, and then actually feel like they fucking did something by merely showing the fuck up and voting. We can't fix everyone and snap them out of the political apathy that is prevalent in our depressed society. Making fun of them isn't fixing shit, either.

Sad as it is, there will always likely be more of the party loyalists than independent thinkers. It is the responsibility of the independent thinking, hard-working, cunning progressives to get our candidates lined up in whatever party we can, to ensure that the average mindless voter mass is of some actual use to progressive causes. We can't make them NOT vote blue or red. We CAN make sure that whoever falls under the blue or red banner isn't another fucking jackass in a suit, ready to make money on the average citizen's suffering.

If you genuinely want to effect change, stop being a fucking crybaby and get in there and demand it. Get your equally woke buddies to do the same. GO TO WAR with the two parties who have the power and run for offices held by corporatist salesman who DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE PEOPLE THEY REPRESENT. If they don't give a fuck about us, we need to actively mount a hostile takeover and throw them the hell out of those seats.

Stop with this pointless repetition of cursing out the parties, or pretending that the two parties are evil incarnate by their very names. That's pathetically superstitious and ignorant. The parties are the structures that have the power. There is every reason for them to strangle out independents and third parties, and no reason whatsoever for them to give up a single inch of the power they possess. Teams Red AND Blue will maintain this stranglehold if we don't get very hostile, very direct, and take that power for ourselves.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK BERNIE SANDERS DIDN'T WASTE HIS AND HIS FOLLOWERS PRECIOUS TIME BY GOING OUT TO FAIL MARVELOUSLY AS A HOPELESS INDEPENDENT?

He put himself in a position to KEEP swinging. He's not sitting on Facebook, sucking up the adoration of his many followers, bellowing endlessly about how he was cheated. He WAS cheated.

If anyone has a reason to bitch, it's Bernie Sanders.

Is Bernie being a little bitch?

Fuck no, he isn't. He's out there working himself sick trying to represent you.

If you're not supporting that effort, then YOU are being a little bitch. Not Bernie.

Stop being a little bitch. Start being a fucking warrior.

These two parties are not going to be overtaken by a bunch of protesting, angry goddamn hippies and weeping millenials (not that we all don't have a lot of shit to rightfully, angrily weep and protest over). They are two, ready-to-use power structures. NOTHING MORE. The people IN those power structures are abusing them for their own ends.

I think the solution to that is pretty obvious.

Get rid of those people.

Stop being a pussy and stand up to them. Put them out. Put new people in. Take that house over for the people. Don't sit here and wave your typing-fist at me and do nothing but complain. You're as much a part of the problem as the blind party loyalists you rail on endlessly about.

"But what of experience and time served in politics? Won't putting new people in with less experience hurt us?"

I don't know. What are "experienced" politicians doing for any of us right now?

I'll wait.

The Feminine Context