I am less shocked and more resigned. Been tracking the progress of the Republican party over a decade now and watching them throw out euphemism after euphemism as they just aren’t needed anymore. What the reaction of shock got us back then was “alarmist” since the Conservative playbook was so layered up in dogwhistles the average person thought it was tinfoil hat fodder.

The base was being groomed to accept this as an outcome and so they were slow boiled. It was that way for the Nazis too. Each terrible move wasn’t quick it was the next horrible logical conclusion of their worldview of removing the “useless” aspects of humanity. They started first in government services and then with eugenics in mental health care while dismantling queer infrastructure in cities under the same eugenics line citing them as non-reproductive genetic dead ends. Then it turned to homelessness. Then as their policies created more “useless” classes of people in the form of minorities who could not legally work because of the laws they passed they turned to liquidation of those groups. Each step was followed by a pause to make the rhetoric more callus to build off the basic premise that as an able-bodied, regularly employed, sane, cishet, white, Christian / atheist that your resources were personally being stolen from you to feed the “undeserving”.

How far back can you remember Republicans on their soap box about people being undeserving of assistance or support? About people being a waste of resources or campaigning to make those people easier to stigmatize? It shouldn’t be surprising after over a decade that they’ve been dropping the mask.

These jabs are only vaguely in your direction. I have been aiming past you to people who are not shut down. You have decided to stay sidelined which I have said at multiple points, is fine. You do you. But what you keep doing is to try, quite transparently, to discredit the seriousness with which I am taking the situation by signaling to the people around me that inaction is noble. That what I am doing is shameful… That is my only problem with how you comport yourself because otherwise even those who are useless are fairly neutral.

But you aren’t useless, you are taking this personally. You are throwing up your hands and crowing victim which is another silencing tactic well worn in circles that aim to keep the conversation going so the solve never comes. That isn’t useless behavior , it is undermining tactics. This isn’t about you. Get over yourself.

At this point this convo is so buried that the point has essentially passed so I will not continue. Goodbye.

Get used to there being a front line because as this gets worse these mediums of communication are going to get more action driven. You think it’s overkill now but the more you get used to hearing other people calling for ACTUAL action the more you will see what it actually looks like and will know what you could be participating in. This is likely lost on you because at this point you are simply reacting to being checked.

Yesterday the US failed diplomatically at a fundemental level with allies who are key to policing the international waters and air between the USA and Russia. Don’t be fooled. It is not just a trade war, it is a softening of US defenses as well. Priorities will be changing and depending they could change faster than you expect. If this follows the patterns of other historical conflicts we will all only learn how critical our time was at this stage in hindsight.

No APATHY is calling a call for further action moreso than the feather touch of resistance “being an edgelord” it’s an attempt to shame someone into less vocal rhetoric so that people take what is happening less seriously. It’s an attempt to shame people out of mobilizing.

You want to stay out of the frontline? Fine. Move to the rear and stay out of the way of the people who are showing up People who are taking classes in collective action or medic training, showing up to protests and getting arrested or helping their neighbours with minor acts of institutional sabotage. You don’t get to shame on people taking this more seriously than you are.

We are so far beyond caring about toothless boycotts.

Well quite frankly nobody asked for this but we have it and we’re not the first fucking generation to have to put aome skin on the line to make the place we live habitable after everything goes to shit. If you think all you can do is wait to cash your ballot or wave a sign then I am speaking to you. It’s time to organize better and move because it is only going to get worse from here.

You are free to ignore this. You are free to go quietly. However keep your destructive apathy to yourself. More of us have to look apathy and personal disenfranchisement from the system in the eye and see it as the weight that stops any of this from ever getting better.

Your government design and allocation of power made it so one person could do this. Trump is simply the first to flaunt the social contract this brazenly. There was no lock on the door, only a verbal agreement not to go through it.

Once this is done, once Trump is deposed the fight will not be over. Measures must be enacted to make the systems safe so that another Trump can’t do this ever again. The system is just as liable for this happening as the man himself. We need to stop thinking in terms of singular bad actors and recognize faults in system design because otherwise it is just a waiting game for the next bad actor to do just as bad or worse.

It is your government. This is your head of state and the head of the US government weilding power that once belonged to Congress but ceeded to the executive branch about a hundred years ago. This man represents you.

I understand it is uncomfortable. That you wish it wasn’t so I get it… But Do not diminish this fact because these are the stakes. He is your, I repeat Your, Government. Do not wash your hands of him acting as he does because in your silence and denial he still acts on your behalf and you need so much more than silence and denial.

As a Set Dresser/On set dresser - any set build before a director sees it/ wideshot films it.

How it generally works is we get a bunch of stuff and… Something. This something can be as exact as a blueprint (techpack) that clearly marks where furniture is supposed to go or as vague as a one sentence long description of what the set is supposed to be. We are usually given a bunch of options for virtually everything that is used. Then we make up the set.

Then the waveform goes nuts. The Heirachy goes Set Decorator, Production Designer, and then Producer. They will randomly visit or call in sometimes separately and whatever plans that existed immediately cease to matter. The set may completely change a random number of times back and forth as anyone above us in the hierarchy demands unless it countermands a specific demand made by someone above the demander in the hierarchy.

That is until shoot day. Once the Director has the floor all of that prep goes immediately out the window and the director may change whatever they please about the set and while there’s usually too much time constraints to change everything it could mean getting rid of anything. The waveform only collapses to depict a singular reality once the wideshot is in the bag which means there is now a continuity that must (okay “must” is a strong word) be obeyed.

I theorize this is because she’s had to adapt to code switch to speak a rhetoric specific for wider media coverage. Since the attention span of the general reader is fairly narrow and so many readers demonstrate confusion at perfectly correct terms (or the right wing coverage co-opts things in a very specific pattern) there’s a certain way of looking at language utilized in short, quotable format as a unique tool. In those instances it’s more useful to approach language from the aspect of what is the specific choices being made doing rather than saying. It’s not always correct to believe the person saying it believes what they are saying is strictly literally true. The reasons for an intentional error are many, it could be phrased that way for a personal political reason, to attempt (though not always successfully) to make the quote more legible to someone with only a passing understanding or to achieve some kind of specific desired result in the reception of the audience.

Those who know better usually find it frustrating to interface with but if you are speaking to a large group you are actually speaking to multiple audiences and usually your target is to capture those at the bottom of the engagement curve. As an informed audience member target wise you are far more likely to understand what is being implied and are thus not the ideal target for the potential language tools being employed. In many ways as an audience type you can be safely ignored in favor of outreach to people who are generally not so literate or aware.