RawrTigerlily

@rawrtigerlily

Progressive living in Georgia, but always Minnesota Nice until you push me. I have a husband & an adult son. ^We had a senior cat who passed away. Can we make this a better place? I'm trying.

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RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· 18d

The fervor of the conversation makes me think the oligarchs are actually worried. Ask yourself if they would be this worried if the DSA was politically unviable:

A screen grab of a substack comment written by me:

I have a similar disdain for the people on bluesky right now with their underwear in a twist over “DSA candidates” as if we don’t have fascists murdering people in the streets and a government willing to lie about public health/food safety for a measly $1 million.

It’s all a little too of the same exact pitch for me to take it as anything more than a paid influence campaign.
I hang out with a lot of dems in real life. Even “normie” dems, and none of them has ever clutched their pearls this hard over a DSA candidate.
Spare me if I’m not concerned that candidates organizing people power from the ground up might finally beat the candidates taking Super PAC money to protect the status quo.
My spidey sense says the ultra wealthy are worried their money will stop being able to buy electoral success. And to that I say, “good. And fuck you.”

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· 20d

Don’t let the consultant class tell you support for Israel is still the center Dem position, when most of us now understand Israel & AIPAC are anti-democratic forces.

Democratic voters are not, as it turns out, completely dense. As I discussed here, the party base has been increasingly skeptical of Israel and Zionism. In 2016, 43% of Democrats sympathized more with Israel compared to only 29% saying they sympathized more with Palestinians; in 2018, that number had slipped to 27% of Democrats who said they sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians vs. 25% who said they sympathized with the Palestinians. in 2026, after this most recent horrific stage of Israel’s genocidal policies, only`17% of Democratic voters sympathize with Israelis while 67% of Democrats sympathize with the Palestinians. Over a decade, supporting Israel went from a +14 issue for Democrats to -50.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jul 8

Essentially the message was "pander to toxic masculinity, machismo, to a white male fantasy of manhood." Why? This seemed to be an illogic in which somehow the white male vote counted for more than other votes. It was really about white men mattering more than others. In a way they do – they hold disproportionate power in this country, in terms of money and position, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to electoral politics.

But if the Democratic Party is committed to democracy, it has to be committed to equality regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and committed to universal human rights. Also white men already have a party devoted exclusively to their needs and fantasies.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jul 4

The OG TJ wrote similarly, as inscribed on the Southeast Portico of his monument:

A lightly edited except of Thomas Jefferson’s wring, inscribed on the Southeast Portico of the Jefferson Monument;

"I am  not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Jefferson to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval), July 12, 1816

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jul 1

(Credit Jesse Duquette)

A cartoon of the founding fathers around a table, and one of them says in a speech bubble,
“How about in 249 years we try having a king again only this time he’s really fucking dumb”

Credit Jesse Duquette

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jun 25

But if we shift the question to not be about the last 250 years but the next, then we have a choice. Will the next page in American history be written by those of us who love or hate other people?

We could really muck this up. Or, put more gracefully, we might struggle to climb this current social change mountain, because the status quo has all the money and power and if history is a guide, those forces will cling to current hierarchies with all their might. They’re going to be so nasty, you all. Nasty and cruel, in way that will require us to get far better at protecting each other. But they’ve chosen their path, which means we need to commit to our own.

As we speak, one movement is tilting towards care and the other is churlishly hurtling into a reactionary abyss. They control the institutions, but we have the momentum. And that may not be enough to dramatically change society in the short term, but it’s more than enough to build our ranks, especially thanks to unforced errors on the right.

Don’t believe me? Pretend that you had no preexisting ideological bent. Whose movement seems like a better time— the one with the potlucks and parties in the street, or the one that hates everybody and looks like J.D. Vance?

It’s time to push those vibes further. More care. More fun. Doors swung even wider. Bread and roses and art and music and everybody finding the place that makes them light up the most. Every invite helps. Every welcome mat begets another. Every celebration makes it a little easier to believe.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jun 22

And the message must be rooted in material reality. Hungary’s pro-democracy opposition didn’t win in 2025 by running on democracy as an abstraction. They won on corruption. On healthcare. On economic stagnation. On what sixteen years of authoritarian consolidation had been costing ordinary Hungarians in their daily lives. Seventy-nine percent of voters turned out despite a captured media, a gerrymandered electoral system, and the active intervention of foreign heads of state working to keep the authoritarian in power. And they turned out because the opposition made the material cost of authoritarianism visible and concrete. People do not mobilize to defend institutions. They mobilize when they can see, in concrete terms, what is being taken from them and their families.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jun 16

'Love Feels Like Blasphemy When You Worship Power' evanhurst.substack.com/p/love-feels...

“A man takes responsibility, a man upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors, a man does what’s right, even when no one is watching.

“And here’s what real men don’t do: They don’t lie and cheat their way through life. They don’t sell their soul to the highest bidder. They don’t steal from other people in order to enrich themselves. And so I’ve said before and I will keep saying that

“Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.

And so I welcome this debate about what it means to be a man, and I don’t think Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz are in a position to tell anybody what a real man is.”

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jun 8

Before I noticed who this account belong to and read the detail on the full image, I thought, “this reminds me of my octopus coasters.”

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jun 7

tcarrilioparadigmewalker.substack.com/p/the-long-w...

The long war against public purpose succeeded in changing policies over time. But it also changed the emotional meaning of public life. It taught people to distrust the very structures that might protect them. It taught them to experience dependency as shame, solidarity as weakness, expertise as domination
In, and public investment as a racket being run against them.

Fear makes people vulnerable to seeking authoritarian protection. Hate gives them a place to put their pain. Greed turns extraction into virtue. Corruption teaches them that the public world is fake anyway, so only power matters.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· May 24

And that's exactly what's wasting my time: all these marketers, publicists, founders, and "creatives" beguiled by the promise of optimizing their own mid tasks (or by the idea that they could replace the marketers and publicists altogether). They're using it to write an email they don't want to write — and that email, in turn, becomes an email no one wants to read. A mid technology transforms reticence, laziness, or lack of skill into someone else's problem. Of course people find it alluring.

In this way, mid-tech A.I. facilitates and expands a particularly American style of individualism: do what's right, faster, or seemingly more profitable for you, with little mind to the way those actions affect others. The tool itself is alienated not only from the reality of its production (the thousands and thousands and thousands of data centers eating small towns across the country) but the reality of its reception: how someone feels when they receive a pitch like the ones at the beginning of this essay, devote time to grading an essay written with the help of A.I., deal with a looping ChatBot attempting to provide Customer Service, or sift through hundreds of slop results after a simple Google Search.

Whoever wrote that Mira prompt — the one accidentally included at the beginning of the pitch to me — has certainly been annoyed, at some point, by slop. But something convinced them that their A.I. use is not, could never be, mid. In the this case, the A.I. itself isn't hallucinating. But the person prompting it is delusional.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· May 24

People want to send all the pitches to all the people. They want to have the "best" advice synthesized from all advice ever given. They want everything, absolutely everything, in the image — with no attention to style, space, perspective, or scale. They want to spend less time getting more, and in the process, they're making more work — more clutter, more slop, more crap — for everyone in their wake.

An A.I.-booster will tell you that this waste is all just part of the A.I. learning curve: sometimes you've got to let the system learn, make mistakes, hallucinate, and/or slop around before it can achieve its transformative potential. But I'm not the one opting-in to this time suck; all these people clogging my inbox are. I'm also increasingly convinced that the vast majority of A.I. technology is destined to be what economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo call "so-so," or what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls "mid tech": flashy, ostensibly useful, and ultimately annoying.

McMillan Cottom argues that yes, of course, A.I. can be transformative, even life-changing — when people with a lot of training (in both the field to which they're applying the A.I. technology and the A.I. technology itself) work diligently to ask the right questions. But most people are using the tech for "far more mundane purposes": "A.I. spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants. That's a mid revolution of mid tasks."

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Apr 26

I finally got tired of how relentless this chipmunk was in digging up this pot everyday. I transplanted an abundance of lemon coral into the bare spots and spritzed it with homemade chili water. And now he is BIG MAD, chuffing his frustration on the edge of the pot.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Apr 14

And you can see pretty much a direct correlation here that 90% of the population lost wealth equity over the last few decades to give even more to the top 10%.

A statista graph showing the top 10% in aggregate holds nearly 70% of American wealth. Leaving only 30% for the bottom 90%.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Apr 12

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Trump at some level knows he’s failing politically, cognitively and physically and wants to take it all down with him, the way that ancient rulers were buried with their slaughtered horses and servants. He’s also, as mortality breathes down his neck, trying to grab some immortality by sticking his name on buildings and park passes and currency.

But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.

It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Apr 3

Hard to get a good picture, but that’s a barred owl (I think) chilling in my suburban box elder tree. He’s 30 feet from the front door, maybe 35 feet off the ground.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Apr 3

I’ve named my clematis Dr. Mavis Ruppel. You can’t convince me this flower is named Gomez…

A photo of two huge clematis flowers. They are about 6 inches wide, with a star petal configuration. The petals are a pink with a hot pink strip down the center of each one. The center of the flower is a pale creamy color with abundant long pink eyelash like stamens.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Mar 28

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Mar 11

Rebecca Solnit to replace Ezra Klein at NYT (Unless she doesn't want to). K. pls. thx.

If we’re talking about counternarratives that can lead to positive change, one of the defining counternarratives of the last few years could fall under the umbrella of “the resistance.” I would like to hear your perspective on whether any of the strategies against President Trump and Trumpism have been counterproductive. That is, if calling him or the movement fascist, sexist, racist pushed people into their respective corners? That’s the least of our problems. They are racist, they are authoritarian, they are misogynist, they are homophobic, and tiptoeing around it protects them and not the targets of the hatred and discrimination. I get so tired of the idea that progressives have gone too far in asserting that every human being deserves human rights when people are being shot in the streets of Minneapolis. We are facing such horrific brutality. Politeness is not really the problem. I think we got into this situation in part by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was more important to be polite than to call things by their true names. There’s a wonderful historian and scholar of nonviolence named George Lakey who says polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Mar 3

So many shitty made up reasons for us to go to war with Iran, & then the sim gave me another one to chew on today. ;)

Was listening to the audiobook of "The Ministry for the Future" today and heard this nugget:

"The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women... If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred."

It goes on to expound about narcissistic rage, and that some people are afflicted with such disregard for every "other" that they cannot accept a world where they lose their privilege and status, and would rather the world end than to go on without them being in a position of influence, or even simply without their existence.

So as much as many of us are wondering how much of this new war in the Middle East is driven by a need to "forget" the Epstein files, and how much of it is a favor to Trump's business partners in the region... how much of this could also just be about such a profoundly selfish, malignant narcissist facing the obviousness of his impending death having an acute impetus to make sure whatever is left behind is completely broken beyond repair?

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Feb 27

Even better I think is Upton Sinclair 😉:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Feb 22

Exactly this. Why is everyone else supposed to take on the burden of solving men's problems, as if many of these issues aren't *everyone's problem* and the solutions need to be ones that deal fairly with all of our humanity.

Yes, women don't want to be property, so they choose not to be with men who believe they are property. And patriarchal men holding such beliefs decry women who would withhold themselves over nothing more than political beliefs—beliefs these men think women should find completely unimportant, yet which men also hold as so fundamental to their identities that they seem unwilling to change them, no matter how isolating those beliefs are. Many of these men, rather than fixing their hearts, will lie about their beliefs, which makes women, who still would rather not have companionship at all at the cost of their personhood, increasingly wary of men. And I'm told that this makes men feel as if they are being treated like the bad guys, irredeemable, isolated, unlovable.

This is a problem. What I am inviting you to contemplate is how frequently it is treated as a problem for men, caused by women, to be solved by everyone else. I'm inviting you to contemplate how seldom it's being treated as a problem caused by men who have never even started the work they need to do on themselves.

All this makes women lonely, too, you know. It's just that, increasingly, women are finding that they would rather suffer loneliness than the far greater suffering that attends being owned by a man who sees them more as an acquisition than a person. They'd rather not be around somebody with a near-pathological need to dominate, and they'd rather not be dominated. Meanwhile men are finding out that they'd rather suffer loneliness than learn how to treat women as human beings instead of possessions, because treating a woman as a possession is domination, which means that it is seen as not just masculine, but core to masculinity. Treating a woman as a human being is gay, which is the least masculine thing of all.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Feb 2

They are still operating under that Lyndon Johnson quote:

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Feb 1

When money stops being money and starts being the power to make other people suffer...

People whose minds aren't captured by supremacist domination wonder why it is that people who have more wealth and power than they can ever use themselves nevertheless pursue even more, no matter how much other people suffer as a result. The conclusion I have arrived at is that this formulation, while understandable, has matters reversed: Wealthy people don't seem to think of money as money. It's certainly not lack for material needs or luxury that drives them. At a certain point of wealth, what is being pursued seems not to be wealth, but the ability to make other people suffer. What's being pursued is immunity from human decency; the ability and even the right to be depraved with impunity.

Depravity is, to the mind consumed by the billionaire mentality, a flex. It's the prize. It seems the whole reason for the money in the first place. The more you can make other people suffer, the more the rules don't apply to you. The worse a crime you can commit, and the more blatantly you can do it, the more you can demonstrate your impunity to the most foundational laws of human decency. I think this is why child rape is so popular; it's not so much a proclivity for younger people, it's a crime universally agreed upon as so terrible as to be unforgivable. To the mind consumed by the billionaire mentality, to rape children with impunity is how you show beyond doubt that you are a person of influence. The emails sure stayed chummy, didn't they?

Child rape is the sort of thing they hint at or even talk about openly in emails and birthday cards. One wonders what other taboos they commit that they don't put in writing.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Feb 1

Reject appeasement.

Now is not the time for half-measures. Now is not the time to accept phony pseudo-conciliatory gestures from the regime, or from the party that claims to oppose fascism. ICE is killing people both in the open and out of sight. Their terror continues unabated. They continue to defy the law, invade our homes, and attack those who dare to question them. Ground yourself in this difficult reality — refuse the allure of false hope in the face of a real, deadly fascist onslaught.

Now more than ever we need a clear head, and honesty with ourselves about this crisis. False solutions, like telling ICE to not kidnap U.S. citizens (something they’re already not supposed to be doing in the first place) is not enough. The rug needs to be pulled out from under them, their funding must be stripped, and those who claim to lead us cannot be allowed to settle for anything less.

The establishment position that no harmful government agency should ever be abolished is the extreme, unreasonable position. Eliminating those aspects of our government that hurt us, that enable fascism, that make society worse is the reasonable, necessary stance.

So don’t settle for less. Don’t settle for policies that put lipstick on a fascist pig and call it a day. The abolition of ICE is a clear stance that we can and must organize around, and that we must force anyone with a scintilla of power to embrace and push for. Reject the idea that fascism can be appeased, reject the idea fascism can be reformed, reject the idea that you should placate yourself and limit the horizons of your resistance in the face of fascists laying siege to communities around the country.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jan 25

www.the-reframe.com/the-shovel-n...

They are lying murderers, not because I don't like them, or because I disagree with their politics, but because their leaders are sending paramilitary death squads into our cities to commit premeditated acts of state terror and murder against our civilian populations and then telling lies about it, and their rank and file are lending their spiritual and financial and political support to the effort. One can't deal with a problem properly unless one deals with the reality of the problem, and one can't deal with a reality unless it can be spoken. So I speak the grim reality, not because I would live in a world of abusive violence where might makes right, but because I do live in such a world, and I think it is a problem, and I would like to change that.

Speaking the truth about an abuser—what they are doing, what they are saying, what their false words and violent actions mean about how we ought to understand them and deal with them—is taken as abuse itself, is taken as violent intent or even violence itself against the abusers, is taken as a blasphemous sin against the abuser's indestructible presumed innocence, is taken to mean that you are preventing the abuser from ever attaining redemption, is taken as all this and more.

This is how I can tell that it is a cult of abuse we are dealing with, and a culture of abuse that we are living in.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jan 22

FUCK YEAH, Minneapolis!

Wow, tens of thousands.

It’s been growing exponentially. As of this morning, there are 12,000 people across Minneapolis on the multi-neighborhood rapid responses. That’s 3.46 percent of the adult population of Minneapolis, and that’s people who can tolerate these giant Signal group chats with a thousand people—most can’t.

I would say there’s at least three times that many people in their individual neighborhood groups, block groups, and school patrol groups doing rapid response and ICE watch. And then I would double that number again for the folks who are giving rides, bringing food to people’s homes, going grocery shopping for targeted communities, doing fundraising for rent and other material support. At this point, I don’t know a single person in Minneapolis who isn’t involved in this work.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jan 17

These are people who believe that both the constitution and the bible contain an asterisk that means only people like them get the benefits & protections, and everyone else are the only people who get the punitive parts.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jan 16

rawrtigerlily
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This the thing that all the normie white people who still think immigration enforcement at any cost is still in their interests don’t seem to understand.

Once you throw out due process and the 1st, 4th, & 5th amendments “for those people” you have effectively given them the freedom to throw it out for everyone.

The burden of proof is supposed to be on the government before they infringe on your privacy & freedom. Not an afterthought once they already broke your car window or busted in your door. Random dickheads in camo are not supposed to be allowed to demand to see your papers. Women in particular should be WAY more skeptical that random thugs should get to see your identifying documents, with information on where you live.

They are setting us all up to be subject to constant police state harassment, abuse, & violence.

Do not accept that this is how we should live.

RawrTigerlily@rawrtigerlily· Jan 10

sherrilyn.substack.com/p/whether-it...