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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

$The white christian president is himself an adjudicated rapist. The evidence is clear and undeniable that his best friend was modern history’s most notorious child rapist, who ran a child-rape human trafficking ring for hundreds or thousands of our society’s social and professional luminaries. This campaign fund crime isn’t the worst crime the white christian president has committed, but it’s certainly the latest. Another few crimes will drift by today. A few crimes drift by every day. Ho-hum. He’s excused because he is him. And many among the opposing party—most—will still tell you that it’s not wise to prosecute or impeach or issue consequence, that if or when they regain power, they want to work with the other side, not against them; to look forward, not backward; and whenever desperately needed change is proposed, they scold that we can’t do anything radical, despite growing evidence that radical change is what is not only needed, but desperately desired. So it seems we won’t do anything about choking medical debt, choking educational debt, mass incarceration and mass surveillance, police brutality, ICE invasions, predatory lending, predatory rent, predatory venture capital, predatory tech, open and flagrant corruption, the destruction of the commons, or the rapidly expanding and existential series of ongoing disasters that is climate catastrophe. These aren’t the same infractions as rape but they seem to rise from the same kind of spirit. This is the way it is because the people with money and power want it this way, and nothing would be more dangerous than changing the way it is, nothing would be more radical than listening to the cries of everyone else, begging that those with money and power—people who don't ask, they just grab—stop brutalizing them. In America—and, therefore in the rest of the world—unless you are a special case, consent isn’t on the menu. In the American sociopolitical world, when there is revelation of abuse, of corruption, of crimes, th…$

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

@juliusgoat.bsky.social on how the Cornell Rape story is not an exception, it's the norm, in a society built to protect and reward predators, which deliberately chooses that some people deserve to be victims:

When someone is gang-raped, there appears to be something to defend, and it’s not bodily autonomy; there appears to be something to protect, and it’s not the victim.

The raped woman was not a perfect victim, you know. She did unwise things. She abused substances. She trusted people she shouldn’t have trusted. This makes her at fault for her brutalization in many minds—which suggests to me that, in many minds, bodily autonomy is only for certain types of people, and predation upon other people is something deemed permissible for certain types of people to do to certain other types of people who can open themselves to being permissibly predated upon, simply by not being the right kind of person, or by not making the right sorts of choices.

You know the narratives. They’re practically scripts. They’re practically lines of code. You could rattle them off like a stand-up’s tight five, a candidate’s stump speech. You could run them like an AI prompt. I didn’t know. I didn’t see it. I saw it but I didn’t know what it meant. I saw it but I didn’t take it seriously. Sure but what about all the wrong things that she did? She’s hysterical. She’s confused. She’s insane. We’re good guys. We don’t deserve this.

They’re the same lines that politicians use when they don’t want to have to address things they’d rather not have to address, like when the leader of their white christian fascist party has approvingly quoted Hitler again or threatened to murder 93.2 million Iranians or decided that the nation’s capital is now called Trump DC or whatever the fuck it is he’s done in the last few hours. The fascist white christian president does it; he doesn’t ask, he just does it. When you’re a star they let you, he said. And he was right—they do let him. Ask them, they’ll tell you: We didn’t know. We didn’t see it. We saw it but we don’t take it seriously. What about George Soros? You’re being hysterical. Trump derangement syndrome. We’re the good guys. We don’t deserve this.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Same as it ever was. A smarter country would stop falling for the same trick over and over again.

“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

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

AR Moxon, on this guy, John Gannon, whose fiancé got taken by ICE... How do we reframe the conversation to take this entitled white guy out of the "victim" seat and perhaps get them to understand the system they identified with, consumes all. There is no exceptionalism that protects you.

An improved John Gannon would have to be somebody who sees this story as something that has been done to other people, not to himself. Does he extend the sympathy he shows himself to his fiancée? He might. It’s not clear in the story that he does, but that might just be the story’s framing. Does he extend it to others? That seems less likely still.

This would be a good place to begin. We might do well to ask, as the news media did, “how did you feel?” but we’d do far better if we progressed to “how do you suppose Yasmin felt?” and best of all if we progressed to “how do you suppose the tens of thousands of other families this has happened to feel?”

We might do well to ask, as the news media has, if he regrets what he has done. But we’d do better to ask “what do you now intend to do?” We might do well to ask if his support for the authoritarian has changed. But we’d do far better to ask “How has this changed you?”

These are questions that do not seem to have occurred to our news media. They may well not have occurred to John Gannon, or the legion of Gannons out there.

Many of them will never ask that question of themselves, and will resist any suggestion they ought to. But some—some—might, especially if they are asked.

Asking might plant a seed in their mind.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

On this Labor Day, let’s acknowledge that worker power is the thing that must stand in opposition to the capital class’ drive to consume all.

The story of America is that increasingly powerful corporations are organizing all aspects of our world in order to maximize corporate power. Other things that happen are a result of, or a side effect of, or an obstacle to that.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

When you hollow out the middle, collapse happens on both ends...

Veblen’s leisure class wastes resources to prove it has more than it needs. The despairing class wastes itself to prove it has less than it requires.

The two phenomena are not coincidentally simultaneous. They are the same phenomenon viewed from opposite ends of the wealth distribution. A society in which both are flourishing is a society in which the productive middle has been hollowed out, and what remains at either end is the public performance of disengagement from production: gilded at the top, soiled at the bottom, structurally identical in the middle.

This, incidentally, is why every era of conspicuous luxury in human history has coincided with an era of conspicuous degradation at the bottom. Late Republican Rome had its Lucullan banquets and its bread doles, its Crassus and its Catiline. Late Qing China had its Summer Palace and its opium dens. The Belle Époque had its Faubourg Saint-Honoré and its absinthe. The Roaring Twenties had Gatsby and the Bowery. The eras rhyme because the dynamic rhymes. When a small class consolidates rents to a degree that excludes a large class from the productive economy, both classes stop producing, and both classes start performing.

We are in such an era. Everyone knows this. The disagreement is about who is performing what, and why.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

When you’re a company that has the opposite of standards: Several companies, including Elevance, Altria, Pfizer, John Deere, and TD Bank sent donations to Miller that were received after the publication of the Daily Mail article. substackcdn.com/image/fetch/...

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/paying-for...

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/us-wages-...

A graph showing the consumer price index increased 22.7%, while average hourly earnings only increased 21.8% from Jan 2021 to July 2025. Resulting in a .7% decrease in earning power.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

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.”

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

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

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

'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.”

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

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.”

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

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%.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

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

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

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?

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

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

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

They are still operating under that Lyndon Johnson quote:

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

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.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

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

Allowing law enforcement officers to act with excessive force, brutality, disrespect for the community and, most of all, impunity is a threat to democracy. It was a threat to democracy when permitted by local law enforcement in Baltimore, and New York, and North Charleston. And it is a threat to democracy when committed by federal law enforcement agents in Minneapolis.

That so many failed to see the policing crisis when Black men and women were the victims as a democracy issue during the most volatile years of policing reform efforts is key to understanding what often slows down progressive strategy and alliances.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

open.substack.com/pub/thewhite...

Highlighted text:

“There’s no guarantee a war will work either, but with a war, but you know for sure that a war will make more victims.”

My goal wasn’t to convince them to remain pacifists for the rest of their lives. Nor, it’s worth repeating, is it my goal to prescribe that path for anybody reading this reflection. I love so many people who share my dreams of a better world, but not my conviction as to how we get there. That’s fine. Good even, because I very well might be wrong."

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

doctorow.medium.com/a-perfect-di...

Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as “capital allocation” — that is, using investors’ money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business — that hasn’t been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of “lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services.”

The other 97% of finance is gambling.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Pretty willfully obtuse to consider themselves a “law and order” family while doing the increasingly lawless bidding of the Trump administration. Due process is the law too. The 4th Amendment is the law too. The 14th Amendment is the law too. The law shouldn’t bend where it meets white supremacy.

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RawrTigerlily @rawrtigerlily.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Can someone give Vanity Fair a nicely framed print of the Maya Angelou quote?

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
-Maya Angelou

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