The family group/tribe is built on mutual support, but the modern conservative version is transactional, based on membership and loyalty. Actions that look like kindness are in reality actions to reinforce tribal loyalty. I think this is why so many people in conservative communties, who are trapped in entirely conservative information spaces, have a hard time breaking free. They see examples of community support as affirmations of their community goodness, and this narrative is drummed into them constantly. Conservative leaders have the advantage of labeling any disruptive people or ideas as 'foreign' and a threat, even if from within the community, so that they never even have to engage with new ideas on merit.
Kindness isnt a relevant trait to their tribal functioning, because the ability to be unkind and cruel to people who arent toeing the tribal line is necessary to upholding 'family law'. Kindness in others undermines their attempts to police peoples behavior (this is why its so important that men are in charge). Therefore, not only is kindness devalued, it is actively persecuted as a threat to conservative values. And that is only treatment of your in-group. If you reject kindness internally, imagine how easy it is to subject an out-group to cruel inhumanity. You can literally justify anything. What is horrifying is the degree to which everyday members of conservative communities have become willfully blind to the terrible treatment of others in order to hang on to an image of community goodness. I have witnessed far too much of this in my life.
Its worth stating that the left has its own, different kind of tribalism. They embrace kindness but there is a lot of pressure to prove the right kind of worth. It has a distinctly multicultural, anti-authoritarian tribalism, where the rules of the tribe are under constant negotiation. This makes communicating a platform challenging. Its a lot simpler for conservative platforms whose rules come from demagogues and an old book.
The flaw of designing a system without compassion is that the cruelty eventually becomes impossible to hide from the tribe, and the cruelty comes for everyone. #uspol #politics #disability #sociology #anthropology #kindness #geopol
From #MEAction -
"ICE Makes Me Sick: Fund Healthcare, Not Violence"
https://www.meaction.net/post/ice-makes-me-sick-fund-healthcare-not-violence
"No more money to ICE. Restore funding for healthcare and independent living support for disabled people."
You can help!
Email your Congress rep using this tool:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/ice-makes-me-sick/
Read the Take Action Guide for more actions:
co-sponsored by Long Covid Justice
#USPol #ICEout #AbolishICE #MEcfs #LongCovid #ChronicIllness #Disability #Resist
Hey everyone,
With all the craziness going on, please check out and share:
http://www.dontcallthepolice.com
It’s an online directory of local resources available as alternatives to contacting law enforcement if you need help with DV, mental health, housing, LGBTQ+ support, protecting your vote, crisis management, addiction, etc.
#politics #uspol #ice #Police #mentalhealth #housing #lgbtq #votingrights #addiction
BREAKING: A bunch of U.S. Digital Service employees (including me) were fired tonight. It's still unclear exactly how many. There is no visibility whatsoever into what determined who was let go. Legacy USDS (i.e., pre-DOGE) leadership was not involved in the decision about whom to let go and was not notified in advance that people were going to be fired.
#politics #USPol #DOGE #coup #USDS
1/2
Report: Global march to Gaza
Thousands of human rights activists, doctors, students, artists, & unionists from across continents are mobilizing for the Global March to Gaza, determined to break Israel's siege & deliver aid.
"This is no longer about borders. This is about humanity. Either we act now or history will record our silence as complicity.”
~International Coalition Against Israeli Occupation
#USPol #UKPol #EuroPol #GlobalMarchToGaza #Palestine @palestine .
#USPol
I don't love Democrats; I hate Republicans.
I don't talk about the parties; I talk about policies. It's easy to see which party has better ones.
Free college. Nationalize health insurance. Ubi. Legalize it. Prosecute the rich and the privileged who violate the law, and make them pay taxes. Hold cops to a higher standard than citizens who aren't allowed to speed or shoot people. Trickle up. Go solar. Let folks come here to live and work. Christianity optional. Gender is a social construct.
I knew an Iraq War vet who told me the truth: soldiers are killers. That’s it. There are no “sheepdogs”, he said, just killers and the killed. Predators stalking prey. Oaths mean nothing next to the primal bloodlust which feeds every soldier of every nation. Give them an enemy, as Trump has, and they will play their script. They will kill.
News report from Philadelphia where a criminal is posing as ICE assaulted and robbed a woman.
Good luck visiting this lawless land for a holiday, where anybody with a mask and a tactical vest can abduct you off the street and everyone else is supposed to look the other way.
"Pres Trump just fired:
• 90 physicians
• 350 nurses
• at least 25 nurse practitioners
• nearly 20 dentists
• 85+ pharmacists
• 45 lab techs
Employed by the Indian Health Svc to provide HC. This is going to have dangerous consequences for our Indigenous brothers & sisters."
-Sen Luján
Snr officials: ~5,200 ppl on probat. employment -recent hires -across agencies incl. #NIH #CDC will be fired🚨Fri. CDC: ~1,300 WKRs...
#Racism #Trump #PublicHealth #USPol #HHS
https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/14/federal-employee-layoffs-at-hhs-cdc-on-first-day-robert-kennedy-health-secretary/
"..Donald Trump received 750,000 more votes than Republican Senate candidates in those same districts. That’s not just voter preference. That’s a statistical impossibility."
#TheGremlinZoo #USPol #Citizenship
From CNN.com: Trump can’t end birthright citizenship, appeals court says, setting up Supreme Court showdown
Sorry, but Los Angeles is close to my heart. I am boosting #USPol, whether the posts have CWs or not. I can and will CW my own. But this is timely in occurrence.
If you have to, mute boosts from me. Getting info to loved ones out there from afar, and we're three days from a major turn or a huge whiff. Not sure yet.
Tonight, on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, #Mastodon and #PixelFed got a call out for not falling in line with Trump and as an alternative to Meta products.
#USPol #JohnMastodon
…a film of about 80 minutes, published in January 2025, and worth every minute of your time, which explains the left-right political divide in the Jewish population of the US. This film makes very clear what motivates Jewish pro-Palestinian people in the US to protest since even before genocidal war restarted on 2023-Oct-7, and their reasons are really the most simple, relatable form of peaceful humanitarianism that you will ever see anywhere. I felt moved by how their Jewish faith makes their conviction in peace and humanitarianism so powerful. It seems in light of this most recent genocide, the views of this new generation of Jewish pro-Palestinian rights activists are slowly becoming more mainstream. Of course this invites the reactionaries to fight back against them, and we hear some of their voices in this film as well.
#USPol #Gaza #genocide #Israel #Palestine #FreePalestine #Judaism #SimoneZimmerman #IfNotNow #Documentary
Welcome to the March/April 2025 issue of Texas Observer magazine! Editor-in-Chief Gus Bova introduces our latest by examining the "biannual dread” invoked by the Texas legislature and what we can do about it. https://www.texasobserver.org/editors-letter-introducing-our-march-april-2025-issue/
The United States currently has an elected president and an unelected billionaire who are flagrantly breaking its laws. As members of Congress wrongly insist they have no leverage to do anything about this, we who care about democracy are pleading for others to help. Is it consistent with democracy to direct these pleas to the federal judiciary—a branch of government staffed by unelected judges?
Yes, of course. With reservations.
A third downside to relying on the judicial menu is that federal courts helped get us into this mess—and they can make things much worse by ratifying the lawbreaking. Few federal judges believe it is actually their democratic responsibility to enforce the laws passed by Congress; most of them believe they can disregard any law whose constitutionality they disagree with.
I REALLLYY like the Send the President a Postcard movement, because:
a) I love postcards
b) I like imagining all the giggles every postal worker, etc will get seeing it
c) Everyone can do it
Please tell me you'll join in and send a postcard, or 2?
I created this graphic tonight to share - it's the idea from @BrianJopek
When Biden left the White House, the economy was growing at 3.9%.
Now that Trump is in the White House he’s turned it into a NEGATIVE 2.5% growth rate IN SIX WEEKS.
Republican Presidents destroy the economy.
#Economy #StockMarket #GDP #ArrestTrump #ArrestMusk #DonaldKrasnov #RepublicansOwnThis #GOPKakistocracy #GOPWeirdos #NoRepublicansEverAgain #USPol
🚨 Want to resist ICE agents?
EDIT: This is a general training session about organizing resistance to the Trump agenda, not just against ICE
There's a virtual training session on Wed, March 19, 8 PM Eastern/ 5 PM Pacific
"Do Not Comply: a training to organize resistance in your community"
https://www.mobilize.us/surj/event/759508/
Note: "Can’t make the call? Register and we’ll send you a recording in a few days."
How Musk likes to see himself: the Master of Master Blaster. He would do well to remember how this character met his end.
Musk has indicated on X that he thinks he's ready for a post-apocalyptic world, showing a picture of Max next to his car in Mad Max 2. This is much closer to how he would survive. Riding on the back of useful idiots while living in a world of darkness and shit.
Edit: Sorry, I wasn't happy with the helmet's shadow on Trump's face - or rather, the lack of one. #Nitpick
Edit2: Sorry again, there was no shadow on Musk's face, either. It looked too flat. A bit better now. Last edit, I promise. 😁
Dammit people, do you not see the crossroads we are at? We are in Nazi Germany, at the twilight of civility before fascism firmly takes root and can no longer be stopped. You can't just stand there aghast and scandalized and talk about how it's illegal or shocking or vile. If we don't take *action*, the chance for action will pass.
We are witnessing the active consolidation of power by a fascist government as politicians and judges are arrested and harrassed, people are rounded up and sent to camps, the armed forces are mobilized against our citizens, rule of law is discarded, and war is looming.
What else do you need to see to convince you that we are OUT OF FUCKING TIME? Act now, in defense of your neighbors and your representatives and your nation, or expect it all to be yanked from your hands for the duration of the long, dark night. It is a countdown to war and death camps. This isn't a game. This isn't a hypothetical. IT IS FUCKING HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!
