How is this so perfect?

environmint:

pastemeimyours:

environmint:

fuckyeahkinkydevil:

[Image Description: Background is several triangles in a circle like a pie alternating between black and blue with white dividing them. A Tasmanian Devil is appearing to be making an angry noise with its mouth widely agape. There is text on the image.

Top Text: “TELL PARTNER YOU WANT TO TRY SOME SERIOUS ROLEPLAYING”

Bottom Text: “THEY GIVE YOU D&D RULEBOOK”]

Oh you’re hilarious.

I would LOVE a partner who did that

Amateurs, serious roleplaying is WOD or Pathfinder

I would also LOVE a partner who gave me those.

Pathfinder rocks!

lebanesepoppyseed:

highlanderhufflepuffhugmachine:

lebanesepoppyseed:

I need feminism a reform in the feminist movement because I want to finally talk about how the oppressed are hurt, not the privileged. I don’t fucking care about why straight people, cis people, white people, and men need feminism. Don’t talk to me about the terror of boyfriends being worried about their girlfriend’s well-being or straight girls being so agonizingly confused for gay because of their butch presentation. That’s some fucking bigoted privileged-centered whiny bullshit and exactly what feminism should NEVER be about.

Just because some people are MORE oppressed does not make the struggles of the more privileged invalid. 

Do transwomen, women of color, LGBTQ+ women, disabled women and other women with a minority status suffer MORE from the patriarchy than white, middle class, straight ciswomen and the men who love them? Of course.

But women in far more impoverished areas of the world suffer more than ANY women in Western culture. Yes, even the wheelchair-bound black trans lesbian woman living on food stamps has it better than the 11 year old sex slave child soldier in war torn central Africa. Does that mean that the disabled black trans lesbian impoverished American woman needs to shut up and get out of the feminism movement until she is the single most oppressed person on Earth? No. 

The existence of GREATER suffering does not invalidate anyone else’s suffering. 

Look, I’m white, middle class, cis, and well educated. I’m better off than a lot of people in the world. Even despite my bisexuality and my atheism, I don’t suffer as much under the Patriarchy as many, many other people do in the world. But that doesn’t mean that my issues, and my voice, don’t matter.

Feminism SHOULD be about unity in our struggle for equality; not trying to shame the privilege or erase the voices of anyone in the movement for any reason. 

You’re disgusting for twisting the original post like this. Absolutely fucking disgusting. No one wants to hear your fucking privileged whine and NO ONE WANTS YOU SPEAKING FOR THEM. Go away.

Can you elaborate on how they twisted your post? It looks like they were just responding to the text of your statement…

squashedcomments:

I agree that a sensible definition of a battlefield can exist- why do you think the Obama administration is entirely uninterested in giving such a definition?

Who do you think ought to define battlefield? (Or, perhaps more reasonably, “war zone” or “zone without an effective rule of law.”) I would expect that to be a judicial determination—because executive determinations can change based on the administration.

And I don’t trust Congress to do anything useful now.

You said that one branch of the government cannot suspend due process, but you’ve ignored the myriad of times that the executive branch has done it- including Obama, through Holder, very recently.

I don’t think anybody is claiming to suspend due process—though they are claiming that some level of process isn’t due. The Bush Administration argued that habeas corpus was (at least a little bit) suspended by, I believe, the Military Commissions Act. But there are a lot of cases where the administrations have ignored due process. And there are a lot of cases where people disagree on how much and what sort of process is due. (Military commissions are a good example. We try our own soldiers with them. But can we try people accused of crimes? Is that a real kind of process? The Supreme Court actually reversed its decision not to hear a case when a bunch of JAG defense attorneys resigned under Bush and accused his military commissions of being grossly unfair. The Obama administration overhauled the process.)

There are a couple of the “indefinite detention of people we can’t try” cases. Those are really, really bad. But … I don’t envy the Obama administration on those. The Bush administration tortured some people. We can’t convict them in any court because all the evidence is tainted. But all signs suggest that they’re really, really dangerous. Do you just let them go? (I think the answer is that you just open the door and let them out in Cuba and do your best to keep track of them from there.) There are also the people who we grabbed but can’t let go for their own safety. We had some Chinese citizens who we thought China would disappear if we sent them back to China. We should just let them go in the U.S.. But Congress has thwarted that.

There is no actual question of what the process to punish people for crimes is, under our law.

I think there’s an important distinction between a “punishment” and other types of violence. We punish convicted criminals. But the drone strikes aren’t (at least, they better not be) about punishment. They’re more of a war thing. We detain people before trial sometimes—but not as a punishment. People get shot if they get in a shootout with police—but that’s not punishment either. The process for trying people in anticipation of a criminal conviction and the formal societal censure that comes with it is clear enough. The process for what we do when guns are blazing and everything is morally grey is not.

The ‘question’ you’ve brought up is an entirely artificial one, manufactured in order to give plausible deniability to the clear breach of rule of law- for instance, you asked “how we can be sufficiently confident that it’s being administered in a reasonably neutral manner” without even bringing up the fact that the document considered to be the supreme law of the USA clearly addresses how we approach due process, and it’s been entirely ignored by the Bush and Obama administrations.

You may not have a problem with the due process free assassination of US citizens that have never been proven guilty of anything, or the purposeful targeting of civilian rescue workers, but please at least acknowledge that our government was created from the ground up by people who vehemently and viscerally disagree with the idea that one man (any man) should have the authority to decide who is guilty and who is innocent without the accused having a chance to defend themselves in a court of law.

Clearly I’m going to object to the purposeful targeting of civilian rescue workers. I don’t think that we need to treat U.S. Citizens particularly differently than other people. Being a citizen doesn’t make your life more or less sacred than anybody else’s.

If it’s practical to apprehend somebody and put them through a judicial process, do it. But it’s not always practical. What are the options then. One is a drone strike. A second is to ignore them. A third is to send in ground forces and destroy a few villages. If you got a guy who is actively plotting mass murder, is ignoring that guy the morally superior stance? I would hope that we can at least acknowledge that this is a hazy area.

As for your lament that “Congress isn’t offering” solutions, I can only point to the fact that Congress offered a limitation to the war in Libya that Obama illegally ignored, and that Obama used “state secrets” privileges to counteract other judicial and legislative oversight.

Did Congress actually pass anything on Libya? I missed that. As I recall, McCain and his cronies started talking about how they wanted a bigger war. The Republicans wanted to get more involved.

And let’s look at specific instances where “state secrets” was invoked. Because we have some legitimate state secrets. The Bush administration invoked that to say that its entire brief on why something was supposedly constitutional was classified. Has the Obama administration done anything like that?

Pretending that the executive is out of control because of congress is just Team Blue cheer-leading: clearly, the executive branch has purposefully and regularly bypassed checks and balances to obtain these powers that you claim to be uncomfortable with.

Congress is like the guy at the frat hazing shouting “hit him harder.” Checks and balances requires that somebody actually uses a check. Congress hasn’t done it. The courts have. The Obama administration has respected court decisions. The Bush administration did too, to a lesser extent.

Two things to note;

1) you left out a fourth option, which is to try Awlaki in Absentia- this would require the government to provide actual evidence he was involved in terrorism, which they so far have proven incapable of doing.

2) Congress specifically rejected intervention in Libya, and Obama kept troops longer than the legally specified 60 days, saying that Libya was not a “military action”.

squashedcomments:

trufaxandgoodadvice:

trufaxandgoodadvice:

Squashed: For some reason, Chris Hedges keeps writing things

squashedcomments:

The issues you list undercut your argument. They’re so different, they had the same policy on healthcare (until very recently). They’re so different, they both want to continue…

So, just to be clear- can you point to a single actual executive policy that is different between Romney and Obama?

Yes. Let’s start with CAFE standards.

Okay, so the difference there is a significant one, is it? The type of difference that makes Chris Hedges statement incorrect? Let me rephrase: can you a single actual executive policy that is different between Romney and Obama and also relevant to this conversation, where you’ve claimed the differences are a matter of life and death?

trufaxandgoodadvice:

Squashed: For some reason, Chris Hedges keeps writing things

squashedcomments:

The issues you list undercut your argument. They’re so different, they had the same policy on healthcare (until very recently). They’re so different, they both want to continue…

So, just to be clear- can you point to a single actual executive policy that is different between Romney and Obama?

squashedcomments:

The issues you list undercut your argument. They’re so different, they had the same policy on healthcare (until very recently). They’re so different, they both want to continue indefinite detention (only in Obama’s case, he wanted it on continental US soil instead of Guantanamo). They’re so different, they’re both pushing for austerity measures. They’re so different, they’re both behind the Keystone pipeline.

• They’re so different they’ve been elected to political office.
• They’re so different they’ve both been criticized by Hedges.
• They’re so different they’re both vaguely within the political mainstream.
• They’re so different they both have two eyes.

If you paint these things this flatly, of course things look similar. And if you’re willing to fudge the facts to say that Obama is “for” things he’s generally opposed, you can make them look a lot more similar. Obama hasn’t exactly been a champion of austerity and the Keystone Pipeline.

Look, Hedges isn’t saying that you can’t find discernible differences between Obama’s policies and Romney’s, he’s saying that they’re not substantively different, and he’s right. The differences are of degree and the degree isn’t even that extreme. Obama’s stances on healthcare, war, and austerity are are marginally better, but are all terrible for the exact same reason that Romney’s policies are terrible- they’re just slightly less extreme.

This is one we can put metrics on. We can actually come up with numbers and compare the proposals. We can look at the number of people who will die prematurely under Romney’s lax regulatory scheme. Or the number of people who died annually from lack of medical care who will be insured under the ACA. Or the number of detainees released compared to the number of people Romney would apparently round up to help him double Guantanamo. We’re talking about actual people’s lives.

I understand that we’re all angry and disaffected. But do we actually care about the people these policies would affect? This stuff is significant.

We actually can’t do those things, because not only are those facts impossible to determine (the people who would die from lax regulation, the people who would die from lack of insurance), but even if we could, they’re executives and not legislators. Additionally, you’re ignoring the fact that Obama’s lax regulations and poor health care legislation also leave people dead- just slightly fewer people. 

In the areas that they have executive control, there is no significant difference. I might be convinced that their legislative agendas have significant differences (in that one is significantly better), but there is nothing you can criticize Romney for that wouldn’t also apply to Obama, just less in a less extreme way. Healthcare, austerity, the climate- their policy differences are marginal at best.