Ashley

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

Because "defund" connotes the elimination of funding, not the strategic reduction of funding. That's why you like it: it has a radical, transgressive edge to it.

If you just wanted to convey a shift in funding priorities, you’d use boring language that evokes that concept.

[Briahna Joy Gray @briebriejoy]

What is this mass psychosis where people accurately describe defunding something and then say the word defund is confusing? Defunding the police to support social services is literally what it is. That’s the thing. You’ve just described it. It’s the word used in English to describe that phenomenon.

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

It was just a little over a year ago that you voted to blow up the debt by trillions of dollars and throw millions of people off healthcare so the Epstein class could pay lower taxes, you fraud.

[Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @FmrRepMTG]

The two parties give us the same result no matter who is in charge.
More debt.
More foreign wars.
More unaffordable living no matter how hard you work.
The two parties are total failures.

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

Mitt Romney can say “black lives matter.” Bernie Sanders can say “genocide.” The one thing they can’t do is speak the truth, clearly and consistently, without leaving any room for doubt about where they stand.

We have the luxury of being able to do that. We should use it.

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

Any phrase can be co-opted, diluted, misused, etc. That's why it's important to avoid being a language fetishist and instead be a truth fetishist.

[Briahna Joy Gray @briebriejoy]

If you listened to Bad Faith, you’d know that I’ve been saying this *exact phrase* would get co-opted for years.

This is why it’s important for left electeds to heighten the contradictions and be adversarial to the party. Instead, DSA is telling members to vote for Tom Steyer for governor, and Zohran is bragging about reforming the Democraric party.

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

My conspiracy theory (I’m not *asserting* this, it’s just an idea rattling around in my head) is that people like @CraigMurrayOrg are directly or indirectly on the payroll of U.S. enemy states, and now that Venezuela is under the U.S.’s thumb, his talking points on Venezuela reflect the new, U.S.-approved position of the Venezuelan government (which basically amounts to “nothing to see here folks, those yanks gave it their best shot, but we’re still in control!”).

He’s pushing a narrative that serves to whitewash/normalize U.S. dominion over Venezuela because that’s become the official state narrative in Venezuela, and his job is to push the official state narrative in Venezuela, whatever it may be.

(I don’t know if any of that made sense. And, like I said, I’m not claiming it to be true. I have no idea. It’s just a thought.)

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

If I weren’t so inclined to assume good faith, I might interpret this post as some kind of weird, controlled-oppositiony attempt to legitimize what’s happening in Venezuela (all of which the U.S. appears to be quite happy with).

Who cares whether there was a “split” between Maduro and Rodriguez? The fact is that Maduro is currently sitting in prison and Rodriguez is currently giving every indication that she’s cooperating with the people who put him there (which is understandable given that her only other option, presumably, is to get murdered).

Maduro’s son can say whatever he wants. The country’s rightful president has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers (it sure seems, anyway) are calling the shots. Not good!

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

If this doesn't convince you the Maduro/Rodriguez split is a CIA psyop, nothing will

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

Being a “literal traitor” to the U.S. would be a good thing. This country is by far the most evil state actor in the world and anyone who’s genuinely trying to subvert its agenda is a hero.

The people who supported Tulsi on anti-war grounds (including, once upon a time, me) were wrong precisely because she *isn’t* doing that, and never was.

[Lincoln Michel @TheLincoln]

It is really insane how there was a group of very dumb and gullible morons who promoted this vile Islamophobic warmonger (and perhaps literal traitor) as some kind of "peace" candidate or leftist option. https://t.co/s1Cr2NlTqN

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

Fuck ICE obviously, but yeah, you don’t have a right to storm into a house of worship and disrupt an actual worship service (as opposed to a fucking stolen land auction). You’d think that would be a super boring and uncontroversial point, but no one in our diseased political culture has an incentive to make it, so it doesn’t get made.

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

“Protesters interrupted the church service with chants of ‘ICE out’ and ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’”

“Videos posted on social media show the protest bringing the service to a halt and congregants moving to leave…” (https://t.co/379PjrGEzQ)

This is basically everything the demonstrations outside synagogues have been falsely portrayed as. The gap between how those were covered and how this was covered is kind of mind-blowing!

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

She’s a wealthy person of European descent. If she honestly feels that she’s occupying Stolen Land — land whose theft is a live, ongoing fact about the world that should inform our behavior — she can immigrate to Europe. That’s within her power. She isn’t doing it because she’s a virtue signaling fraud who doesn’t believe what she’s saying.

(I’m not a conservative, btw. I want to abolish ICE and I think undocumented immigrants are largely innocent victims of the U.S. government who deserve to be treated with compassion. Also, obviously, America’s origin story is drenched in blood, and no one can defend what was done to the indigenous peoples.

But I’m not going to pretend that I’m a “settler” who doesn’t really, truly belong here when I don’t believe that. I do belong here. So does every other American, including every Native American. The U.S. isn’t going to be dissolved, and there’s no moral obligation for it to be dissolved. It’s here, it exists, and that’s fine. What’s not fine is promoting death and misery around the planet with our murderous foreign policy, and treating our own people like garbage. That’s what has to change, and if Billie wasn’t full of shit, that’s what she’d be emphasizing.)

[Kylie Cheung @kylietcheung]

conservatives are never able to argue with the substance of someone's arguments so they just start saying stuff like "um. you're rich and you uh live in a society"

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

In a world of [literally every single person other than Norm Finkelstein]'s, be a Norm Finkelstein.

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

Harvard professor Robert Trivers tried to get Jeffrey Epstein in touch with Norman Finkelstein. Instead of accepting, Norman sent a reply calling Alan Dershowitz a pedophile rapist and saying Trivers should be ashamed for defending them, and both should be strangled instead

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

“Dump the Dems until they make themselves worth voting for.”

No, don’t even vote for them then. Dump them permanently. When they finally nominate Ro Khanna or whoever, it won’t be a real transformation. It will be fake. He’ll get in power and the death and destruction will continue, because it always does.

(You don’t need to believe that on faith, either. The red flags will be there from the beginning for anyone willing to see them.)

[Dr. Émile P. Torres (they/them) @xriskology]

I used to argue that leftists should vote for Dem candidates, but now I'd encourage them not to. They aren't an opposition party to fascism. They just aren't. They're worthless, useless, spineless enablers of fascism. Dump the Dems until they make themselves worth voting for.

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

I think every high-ranking public official knows that if they ever *really* got out of line, there’s no limit to the consequences they might face, regardless of how spotless their personal history might be.

(In the case of Biden, it wouldn’t have taken much to push him out of office, given the fact that he was a walking corpse. That alone was probably enough to keep him obedient.)

[g. @GeauxGabrielle]

I HAD to laugh reading that Biden wasnt in the Epstein files, wasnt being blackmailed by anyone in any way, nor were his family being threatened.

He just TRULY believed in supporting Israel. Like buddy was committing a genocide for the love of the game. It’s INSANE

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

“One of the tools, which was built by Paragon, an Israeli technology company, lets people take control of phones or remotely hack into them to read messages or track locations. The others were built by Penlink, a Nebraska-based software company. They use social media data scraped from the web and information from data brokers to help build dossiers of anyone with a social media account.”

Cool.

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

“The agent then walked over to Ms. Cleland’s car and surprised her by addressing her as Nicole.

‘He said he had facial recognition and that his body camera was on,’ said Ms. Cleland, 56, who had not met the agent before.”

We live in hell 🫠

https://t.co/LD8IuHoyoO

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

“ICE has vastly expanded its tech tools over the last year after an influx of cash. In July, President Trump signed a bill increasing ICE’s annual budget to roughly $28 billion from $8 billion, making it the most richly funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.”

Much thanks to @FmrRepMTG, America First populist extraordinaire, for voting yes on that shit. I’m sure it’ll be paying more and more dividends as time goes on (for the police state that Donald Trump is currently giving birth to, not for us).

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

I watched this movie in my hotel room after a very unpleasant medical procedure a few years back. It made me laugh so hard that I forgot about my troubles. RIP!

[wyatt dunkin @WyattDuncan]

this is just one of the best physical comedy bits of all time

[Ashley @iwl2ke95]

The main one I obsess over is people not being fully over the duopoly. Like they’re 99% of the way there (at least on paper), but when push comes to shove, they still end up rooting for one team or the other.

Also the fetishization of BRICS/“multipolarity” is concerning, imo. I don’t necessarily buy into the David Icke view that everyone on the world stage is secretly playing for the same team, but I think that might be closer to the truth than we imagine, and regardless I don’t think it’s ever healthy to be loyal to this government or that government.

A few others: taking rational positions to irrational extremes (e.g., critics of the mRNA shot who act like everyone who’s died in the past five years was killed by the vax), adopting pseudo-radical narratives that actually bolster the establishment narrative and then dogmatically insisting that everyone agree with you (e.g., Free Palestine leftists who lose their shit if you talk about Israel propping up Hamas), basically anything that sows division and/or dilutes the truth in some way.