収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

I thought about calling this one “Hold the line, you maggots!” like in The Lord of the Rings but I decided against it. You can tell me if that’s the right call.

Catherynne Valente has a post up today saying basically the first half of what I said back on July 6th, which is to stop fucking surrendering and get back into the goddamn fight. It’s spicy and you should enjoy it.

Yeah, the media love Trump. Yeah, Facebook is going all-in on censoring Project 2025 commentary as “(partially) false” and in one case I got today as “physical harm” for talking about marriage rights, overtime law, and social security and veterans benefits cuts, apparently:

So yeah, they’re all in for Trump, just like Elon Musk with his $45 million a month and anti-democracy billionaire Peter Thiel is, particularly now that his fascist protégé JD Vance is on the ticket.

But we still outnumber them. They out money us, but we outnumber them, and we outnumber them by more every single day. It doesn’t look like it, because they’re riding high on an assassination attempt (yikes but true), and that’s emboldened every secret Trumper to trip their shirt off and shriek FUCK YEAH FASCISM! But it’s true.

That’s why they’re doing all this. To make it look like it’s over, with months to go to the election. To make us surrender, now.

Thing is:

We. Win. This. If. We. Fight.

….though maybe not if we fight each other.

Even if we have to fight Twitter (as I’ve been saying we will for over a year), we win. Even if we have to fight Facebook, we win. Even if we have to fight the media, we win, because what they want to do – and what they absolutely will do – is monstrously evil.

But we have to make sure everybody knows it and actually accepts that it’s true. Everyone.

The television media won’t do it, they’re drunk on the drama again, and half of them are owned by billionaires anyway. A lot of social media – outside of Mastodon and BlueSky, anyway – will try to stop you from doing it. But we have to do it, and we can.

I know, I know, so many of us have been fighting a mostly-defensive fight for so long. We’ve been holding the line to keep having actual elections – remember Republican calls in 2003 for Bush to bring his “victorious army” back from Iraq and replace Congress? We’ve been fighting to keep having an actual republic, for decades. We’ve had some surprise wins, particularly on LGBTQ rights, and not just there – but mostly, it’s been just trying to keep having a republic so that when anybody gets big enough to take on the Boomer right-wing hegemony, there’d still be a mechanism to do it.

We are so fucking close. This is the last election under this oh-christ-so-old system, this trench warfare, this barricade and this line we’ve held for so long. They’re a minority of the voters this year. After this year, they lose critical mass completely, which is why they are working so very very hard to stop that from mattering.

We just have to hold one more time, and then, if we do, elections change again, and for decades to come.

The cavalry is in fact already here.

Not all of it, but a lot of it. It’s not just us anymore.

We just have to charge together and in the right direction.

And then we win, and then…

…but only then…

…we can start working on getting what we – and the cavalry – actually want, instead of just trying to hold this line, to just keep the Republic a republic, for so very, very, very long.

There are so many reasons it’s critical to win this election. Some of us, he’s promised in Agenda 47, won’t be legal under a new Trump regime. Millions of people, Trump has promised, will be swept up into concentration camps and deported. Women will be legally second-class citizens or worse. Biden’s huge but oh-so-boring-so-nobody-pays-attention achievements in decarbonisation and renewable energy will be undone and replaced with Drill Baby Drill part XXXVIII with all the disastrous results that entails. The reasons go on and on and on.

But for a lot of people, the biggest one is that it would end the rightist Boomer hegemony.

No more existential elections, not ones that are close anyway. No more oil company subservience. No more years and years of being hammered relentlessly towards authoritarianism as the Baby Boomer ruling class gets older and older and older. New rules. New rules for everybody.

But not quite yet. We have one more election to win under the old rules. Under their rules.

We have to hold the line one more goddamn time after an entire political lifetime of doing nothing but that – but this time, some of the cavalry are already here, and more are coming, and things are gonna goddamn fucking change.

If we hold.

Which we will.

If we work, and work together.

111 days remain.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.