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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • You aren’t listening to me if you think I am saying I haven’t been in an environment that was actively being racist towards black people, I am saying I can’t easily point to a single place and say “look there! Racism against black people! Catch it!” because I am fortunate to live in a fairly progressive place.

    The racism is still VERY much there, but it is structural often, harder to point to, that is my point.


  • Structural Racism look it up

    I can barely give you an example off the top of my head of a white person acting racist towards a black person in front of me, but that doesn’t mean the landscape around me wasn’t shaped by a racism towards black people…? It just means I have been fortunate? enough to be shielded from seeing it most of the time when it actually rears its ugly head…


  • It is celebrated in southern new england, I don’t think I have ever seen anyone insult someone seriously because they were irish or use slurs or anything (other than the incredibly prevalent joke that Irish people are all alcoholics? Like kind of yes but so is every other demographic basically…? At a bare minimum the Irish certainly aren’t alone there yet…) but I am not talking about big boisterous celebrations here, I am talking about structures of society and those can go entirely unreflected upon even as symbols of equality are flourished all over the sky, I ask myself with respect to Irish-Americans have those structures changed? I am not so sure and even if they have they left their mark on Irish-American culture, at least the parts I have experienced.

    I don’t mean to claim I am an expert, I am not significantly of Irish descent and I am not Catholic, I hope I am wrong and I am seeing more into things than I have any right to but it just makes sense to me based on my lived life experience and what I know intellectually.


  • I honestly think it is as simple as the elite white class of easterners wanted desperately in some way to be like mindfuckingly rich european elites and so why the hell would they go west when their parents already in their minds went farther west then they the children wanted to and were now having to commit genocide and other attrocities to drag a fabrication of that fantasy into reality here in the US?

    You have to look at the cowboy trope and interpret it quite literally as the US collective psyche, racism, stereotypes of westerns and all because it really does explain the behavior of the US right now.

    The west was not built by blonde hair blue eyed european descent cowboys taming the savage wilds, it was built despite them trying to kill the very soul of the landscape and despite the fact that retroactively cowboy imagery was violently whitewashed and plastered over a vibrant if brutal tapestry of history in order to simplify problematic questions about the “american project” into easy answers.


  • I am not the first person to point this out and I won’t be the last… but this is really the only way the system can work. If people aren’t turned against each other in this multi-dimensional shit show of empathy strangling twists of stereotypes and lived experiences than it will inveitably collapse into a giant “Why the fuck are we doing this?” and people will stand up together and put a stop to it.

    It is NECESSARY for the middle-class white family to leave abruptly without telling their poor neighbors in order to rationalize the hate the middle-class white person has for poor whites (I wouldn’t do this awful of a thing unless I was right because I AM a good person) and vice versa to rationalize the hate the poor white person has for middle-class white people or black people or whatever… all that matters is an unaddressed trauma is created and then denied any resolution for the victims. Rinse Repeat.

    Personally I think a better alternative would be free quality healthcare for everybody but what the hell do I know shrugs



  • I mean, the thing with Irish Americans is that they have been shit on for most of their experience in the US but then in the last 40 years or so ceremonially brought into the “white” club, but this club has no real rules other than it only temporarily brings minorities in, however the club wants to define minorities.

    You won’t see structural discrimination against Irish Americans as easily perhaps as other more obvious examples of US racism but it is there, mostly in terms of classism. Irish Americans are the stupid hardworking drunks you do all the manual labor and leave the WASPs to run everything.

    Things are changing, but I think to begin a conversation about why Irish Americans can have such disappointing politics compared to Irish people proper you have to understand the way the white elite in the U.S. has been playing poor-person-in-the-middle with groups like the Irish for decades.


  • Newsom’s motivations are crystal clear, play the ““Leftwing”” villain Trump can beat so someone like AOC doesn’t dominate and utterly reshape US politics for the better. Trump is giving Newsom air time the best way he knows how and it is working on neoliberals and centrists like the most condescending charm ever.

    I am sure the DNC and powerful players in the party actually legitimately support this strategy no matter the consequences (gotta rip the bandaid off or else the wound will heal as Chuck Shumer always says).


  • Yeah but as someone from southern new england I can assure you the irish immigrants still aren’t accepted there totally either. Day to day interactions no one targets you for being Irish descent but structurally being Irish American is considered to be barely white, more like poor white which is barely white among elite circles (ughh Boston is full of the descendents of the original immigrant european religious fanatics and it shows sometimes).

    Doesn’t make any of this right but notice the way oppression must metabolize and neutralize solidarity in a fractal process of targetting vulnerable groups along whatever axis they are exploitable along. Irish Americans must be both the oppressed and the oppressor for the system to work, and it is the same thing just more dogpiled the further you go down the ladder of real privilege.

    There was no damn potato famine, there was just England prototyping modern colonialism and capitalism on Ireland.











  • The purpose of his show, from what I can gather, is to show how you can find common ground with people you disagree with. And you cannot do this by invalidating somebody’s opinions. So he invites people on that suck, ie Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich, lets them say all the things they want to say with minimal fact checking, then where he can, he will point out the ways their opinions align with democrats. Then forces them to admit the commonality between the two.

    Yes I know this is what brainwormed centrists see when they watch it, the rest of us see someone who is platforming Charlie Kirk, Steven Bannon, and New Gingrich like they are reasonable people to have a conversation with who espouse reasonable positions that don’t threaten violence and bigotry towards vulnerable groups because these people are intellectually braindead and can’t come up with any interesting arguments to hold their audience’s attention so they stoke xenophobia in all its horrifying diversity of forms.

    No, you treat these people like Sam Seder or Hasan Piker does, you dismantle them mercilessly with your rhetoric and show how little they have thought through their beliefs and yet how much conviction they stick to their vile hatred with even when that is pointed out. The world needs to see that and a politician like Gavin Newsom is specifically well situated to obscure that by appearing to have a pleasant conversation with someone who wants to hurt your kids and family and is completely serious about it