You’re such a loser, dude.
Let’s consider a country like the Marshal Islands.
Their anthem in English:
My island lies o’er the ocean;
Like a wreath of flowers upon the sea;
With the light of the Maker from far above;
Shining with the brilliance of rays of life;
Our Father’s wondrous creation;
Bequeathed to us, our motherland;
I’ll never leave my dear home sweet home;
God of our forefathers protect and bless forever Marshall Islands.
Stirring and charming at least I’m stirred and charmed.
Times they nuked USA is zero, times USA has nuked them probably lots I’ve done no research.
Liberals: we’ve slightly shifted in policy! We’re heading back to the conditions that lead to the election of Trump. We’ve learnt no lessons.
You have the stain of being a large big strong country and elected Trump. That stain won’t wash away because a bored geriatric takes over.
In order to avoid being pulled under by the riptide of a white nationalist Christian theocracy, we couldn’t swim straight towards the shore of progressive idealism. If we had tried we would’ve lost and the results would’ve been devastating.
So we have to swim parallel to the shore for a while, but at least we dodged the bullet and escaped disaster and hopefully we can slowly turn towards the shoreline of the world we really want.
You can’t approach this like it’s a fight you can win. It’s not. It’s a fight you fight, and you’re going to be fighting it in 10 years, 25 years, 50 years. Every time you gain an inch of ground, your opponents are going to fight tooth and nail to claw it back.
Our enemies are formidable and sometimes the most you can hope for is to hold the ground you’ve gained.
And progressive values and policies have prevailed, slowly but steadily. I entered the job market at a time where an interviewer could say…”Damn, I’ve struggled with this. You’re the most qualified person I’ve interviewed, but the guys in the back just aren’t ready to work with a woman. I can’t go there yet, sorry.” That happened to me once. And it was perfectly legal.
At least that guy called me for the interview, I imagine other companies just tossed the resume. If you were gay your life could be destroyed by an undercover cop pretending to be interested in connection and intimacy. If you were a married woman, your husband had an absolute right to sex on his terms, whenever he wanted, your marriage vow was considered blanket consent. If you were black, you faced incredible obstacles in getting housing and employment.
We’ve come a long way, slowly. There were times when I didn’t even feel the motion, times when it felt as if we were slipping backwards, even. But when I look back over my lifetime I see the incredible distance we’ve traveled, the victories we’ve achieved. We can’t take the ground we’ve gained for granted, because there are people who fought against us every
step of the way and would love nothing more than to drag us back, kicking and screaming, to 1950.
I get it that you’re impatient and impassioned, grasshopper. The passion is a good thing, the impatience - not so much. Because sometimes, in the face of formidable obstacles, the quickest path to your goals is not a straight line. Patience is strategic.
Thanks for your lengthy and considered response but people actually act like they like these monsters so I believe that they do.
It’s fine to say fuck these people but we have to deal with them, reluctantly but you can’t celebrate this madness and not look the adherents of a fading cult.
We have a Black President?
Your account history is, seemingly, of an Australian. Did you move to the US?
Although we hold different views, this may be the best political-strategy analogy I’ve ever read. Swimming straight back against something is usually a recipe for failure, swimming sideways until you can eventually go back to shore works far better.
Oh, I’m sure a little of them goes a long way, but I won’t skip one of their songs if it shows up on my Spotify playlist. Plus, seeing as they’re possibly the last mainstream rock band ever, I feed an obligation to support them.
I’m glad you acknowledged the considered response, but I’m not sure you have read it with full comprehension.
Ann_Hedonia is absolutely saying we have to deal with them. Every day. We have to fight fight fight, and continue fighting to even hold the ground that we have won. I like the phrase “this is not a fight you win, this is a fight that you fight”
OF course we have to look at the adherents of the cult. I don’t believe anyone has said otherwise. They are the ones that want to drag us back to the 50’s. Because those are the times they held ALL the power. And we won’t let them.
The problem is that we have been swimming abreast of the shore for almost as long as I can remember. When I was younger, we could occasionally get a foot on the seabed, but the currents keep pulling us outward. It is almost like our course is being subtly charted toward deeper waters while we are being told that the shore is getting closer.
The situation really is quite dire. We may well have already passed the tipping point for the climate, meaning that the youngsters will seriously pay our debt in the worst of ways, and rejoining the IPCC is likely little more than lip service.
Our economic system is a travesty, punishing hardworking people for failing to be devious sociopaths while heaping rewards upon the latter. It is a recipe for a revolution, and those things always end badly, solving nothing. Meet the new boss, and all that.
Another year, even, of Individual-ONE would have been a horrifying prospect, but his insane, reckless policies might have made it clear how little of the shore is still visible. Yet, Biden is going to do nothing to address the massive problems in our economic system. He might put a bit of scotch tape on this or that crack, but it will continue to get worse, ruining thousands/millions of lives in the process. He is, after all, a corporatist, and that is one of our problems.
The worst thing he will do is inspire complacency. At least under Individual-ONE, we would be getting a better look at how bad it is getting. Joe the President speaks softly and gives us a chance to relax, at a time when we should be rolling up our sleeves and working toward some real solutions.
The disturbing thing is that, if a center-right person like Joe is president when our socioeconomic problems reach critical instability, the “left” (which he is being tarred as) will be perceived to be the wrong approach, giving the reactionary party the momentum to come in with a mandate to truly fuck the country over, under and sideways.
I am not saying we needed more of Individual-ONE. He was driving my stress through the roof. But if Joe the President cannot swim against the Rs to do actual good, we are getting not a reprieve but a furlough.
The fuck? No they don’t. South Korea, India, East Germany? The motherfucking UNITED FUCKING STATES? All places that currently are doing better due to (mostly nonviolent, except for the US) revolutions.
Or maybe the US revolution in fact was a mistake since Americans are such insufferable arrogant pricks being all “world police” (defund the police! 
) and “fweedumb”! while enabling stuff like Palestinian apartheid but that can’t possibly be true since that would be unAmerican to even suggest and we all know anything unAmerican is from the devil.
This guy gets it:
What a True Patriot™. *sniff*
That is basically the case. You look at British culture, and for all its flaws, one cannot help but think that the US might have become a better place if Britain had not been so rudely booted out of the equation. Just cast a glance at the country to the north to see how not having a violent revolution has impacted their culture.
There are some positives that happened from the Cuban thing, but that may depend on from whom you hear about it. And look at Russia: are they truly, inarguably better off than they were thirty years ago? I have my doubts about that. And, well, perhaps we could consider Yugoslavia.
Massive change that happens all at once tends to be so narrowly focused and chaotic that primarily superficial matters (the most visible) get addressed first, leaving some deep-core problems only lightly touched, or grossly mishandled.
Just consider what would result from a New American Revolution (civil war). Americans overall are lazy, arrogant and stupid. The likelihood that good leaders (not facile populists) could arise/survive to craft a better nation after such an event is rather long odds.
I mean deal with liberals who can’t or won’t actually do anything. And I mean deal with careerist politicians like Buttigieg or new DNC chair Harrison, just absolute husks of human beings.
I think most liberals have done a terrible job at advancing progressive causes because they don’t actually have that much at stake and the ones with no empathy and the ability to play the game and say what donors want keep getting promoted.
Then there’s the shitty tactics of civility and pointing out hypocracy and playing the political system like it’s fucking hackysack and you have to follow procedures and be polite and work together.
It hasn’t worked. Liberals haven’t just failed because reactionaries and facists are just too effective, they’ve failed because they don’t actually want to win and don’t really try.
It’s not an issue of too much too soon.
Thanks eschereal.
Also I realise that shitting on people for being happy about something seems like a cunt move, but unlike shitting on someone’s musical preferences (a total cunt move I sometimes lapse into), politics is different, there’s consequences and anyway I was feeling very alienated by the, to me, creepy fawning that seemed to indicate brains having being melted by Trump’s SciFi cartoon existance.
Surprisingly, D’Anconia has found a genuinely stupid liberal idea (in the San Fran thread):
As the link shows, even Democrats think this is a dumb one. There are lots of reasons to hate acronyms. There are lots of reasons to avoid acronyms. One of those reasons may well be (in the appropriate circumstances) that they make comprehension more difficult for non-native English speakers.
But a “symptom of white supremacy culture”? Just because “KKK” is a TLA doesn’t mean all acronyms are designed by the Man to oppress everyone else. Mostly they’re designed by the Management to appear clever; the oppression is just an added bonus.
You forgot the dumbest part of the idea. They’re replacing the dreaded racist acronym with “SFUSD Arts Department”
Can anyone in the class tell me what is wrong with this answer? Anyone? Bueller?
A far more useful change, if you’re actually concerned about ESL students having a more difficult time navigating communications is to require (at the district level) all acronyms to follow the Rachael Ray method. That’s where you follow the acronym with the full name “then add a bit of EVOO, that’s what I call Extra Virgin Olive Oil”.
Unlike Rachael, you don’t need to do this EVERY DAMN TIME, but only spell it out the first time you use an acronym.
Which is how I was taught to do letters when writing to foreign governments (I worked Foreign Military Sales for the Dept. of Defense (DoD). First time you spell it out and add the acronym, and then use could use it farther down the letter without attribution. No a hard thing to do. So yeah, stupid.
That’s a good idea in pretty much any context.
I see people complain about undeclared acronyms all the time on this board, and I have no reason to believe that those who do the complaining are not native or at least fluent English speakers.
TIL what “TLA” means.
Oh wait, no I didn’t.
I still might, though, if somebody wants to do the honors.
TIA