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rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
RawrTigerlily
@rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
3.7K followers 4.2K following 6.6K posts
Progressive living in Georgia, but always Minnesota Nice until you push me.
I have a kid, a husband, and a cat.
Can we make this a better place?

I'm trying.
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rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
Blue Gray Gnatcatcher says, "Don't cross the picket line!"
A blue gray gnatcatcher clinging to a branch. This bird has a gray upper and white belly, but most prominently has a black marking over it's eyes that resembles angry eyebrows.
November 13, 2025 at 7:04 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
A Gallup polling chart that shows in 2025 67% of respondents prefer a focus on social problems to reduce crime, with only 29% preferring an increase or strengthening of law enforcement.
November 6, 2025 at 8:27 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
AR Moxon on “careless people” and shame.
“I'm all for paths of redemption and letting people walk those paths. Yet I do think it's not only appropriate but absolutely crucial to be ashamed of shameful things. And I don't think you solve problems without naming them, so I don't believe that naming equates to condemnation. I'm told that naming people Nazis because of their alignment with Nazi ideals and tactics condemns them as irredeemable, which leaves them isolated with no path for redemption. This would seem to suggest both that 1) it is the job of others to redeem people engaged in abuse and harm, and that 2) the only way to get careless people to care is to tell them they're already OK and nothing they're doing is wrong. That doesn't seem right;”
November 3, 2025 at 1:43 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
To be a Republican in 2025 represents a clear public confession that you either don't know the difference between good and evil and you're so morally empty that you can't be bothered to begin to try, or that you do know the difference, and you prefer evil enough to commit mass murder for it, or at least let others commit it on your behalf and to your benefit. It's been that way for a while. I'll let people with more time on their hands than me argue about when it started being that way. I don't know of a starker way to put it—which I can say authoritatively, since I am trying my best to find the starkest possible way. I think there's value to saying things plainly, particularly when there's so much bullshit, nonsense, and outright lies flooding the zone. Truth exposes lies, and the simpler and starker the truth, the better it exposes the lie. Texas has invaded Illinois with its military at the behest of the Trump dictatorship. In cities that have been identified as too compassionate toward undesirables like poor people and foreign people, masked unidentified goons are brutalizing and terrorizing and kidnapping and disappearing our friends and neighbors to enslavement gulags, and rounding up entire apartment buildings, and zip-tying children, and brutalizing people for the crime of questioning them. By waging war in our cities, the Republican regime has turned those cities quite literally into war zones, which is something Republicans insisted the cities already were, even though it is something those cities never have been before. And saying any of this is now potentially enough to get you labeled a terrorist and an enemy of the state, and receive any of the punishment and violence that comes with that. And I'm going to say it anyway, because fuck them.
October 12, 2025 at 6:14 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art
An excerpt from a comic by The Oatmeal. It's a long narrow frame that says, "But first, here's a fun observation." He has inserted a drawing of an interested face. "You're not gonna like this one." He has inserted an angry face. "But it's an anecdote, so chill out." He has inserted a chilling out face. "Here we go." Some circuitry looking lines connect to the observation, which is in white text on a black box. It reads: "In my experience the people who are excited about AI art also happen to be some of the most talentless fucking people I've ever met."
October 7, 2025 at 5:41 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
Due process for all, has to be everyone, or it’s not guaranteed for anyone.

www.everythingishorrible.net/p/if-immigra...
There are, however, a certain number of people who are not fully MAGA, but who think that they can gain a tactical advantage by throwing a some marginalized individuals—trans people, immigrants, women, leftists, Palestinians—under various wheeled vehicles. For those radical centrists and quisling motherfuckers, I think it’s worth reiterating that removing due process for some inevitably means removing due process for all. If one person has no right to due process to prove their innocence, then no one has the right to due process, since the only way you can show that you are a person who deserves due process is through…due process.
October 2, 2025 at 1:02 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
This is the energy. “Have you considered hosting a potluck?” Instead of just arguing that everyone else should adopt your perspective…

thewhitepages.net/p/ezra-klein...
There have, as you know, been specific moments when political movements that share my values (about how the innate value and dignity of every human being matters more than systems of domination and greed) have won great victories for humanity. They came, more often than not, because our forebears both opened the doors beyond the usual suspects but, crucially, didn’t water down their core values or message for the sake of growth. What they did instead was build. They built caring, humane infrastructure, specifically with an eye towards protecting the most vulnerable. Their movements grew because they were, to paraphrase Toni Cade Bambara, both spiritually and materially irriesistible.
September 30, 2025 at 3:13 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
The path forward requires maintaining the distinction between legitimate political disagreement and the dehumanization of our fellow citizens. Not because we’re purists, but because failing to maintain this distinction is precisely how authoritarians win. They exhaust us into accepting false equivalence, into treating hate as just another viewpoint, into believing that defending human dignity is as divisive as attacking it.
September 29, 2025 at 12:58 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
www.publicnotice.co/p/comey-indi...
The disgusting, undemocratic use of the justice system to further Trump’s petty feuds is ugly and terrifying. It’s also, in James Comey’s case, a lesson that other elites would do well to study. Bending over backwards to help Trump for any reason — to protect yourself, to demonstrate your bipartisan apolitical bona fides, to secure a government deal — absolutely never ends well. Trump will come for you eventually. You might as well take a stand and fight when it matters.
September 29, 2025 at 12:20 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
The guardrails and laws were only to keep other people in check, now that they have their trifecta of power none of that shit they used to pretend to care about matters.
Wilhoit: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
September 26, 2025 at 10:29 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
therationalleague.substack.com/p/maga-the-c...
2. The Psychology of Justification If Section 1 exposed the disguises, Section 2 reveals why those disguises work. MAGA supporters are not reasoning from facts but from psychological needs: the need for safety, for belonging, for identity, for power. Authoritarian psychology has long documented this pattern. Right-Wing Authoritarianism feeds on fear of chaos and the yearning for a strong hand. Social Dominance Orientation justifies hierarchy and exclusion. Collective narcissism treats every criticism as an insult to the nation itself. And motivated reasoning ensures that any contradiction, however blatant, is swallowed whole in the name of loyalty.
August 30, 2025 at 3:22 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
@juliusgoat.bsky.social on the fascist affinity for creating real life trolley problems, and our responsibility to reject the premise that anyone needs to be tied to the tracks for the betterment of society.
Sorry the alt text exceeds the line limit. You can read the except here: https://www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-trolley-problem/?ref=the-reframe-newsletter#:~:text=In%20all%20such,and%20length.
August 25, 2025 at 3:02 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
What I've noticed is that when justice and order come into conflict, most human beings tend to prefer order. When an interested and unabused third party reconciles with an abuser while that abuser's victim still lives under threat of abuse, it betrays the victim, leaves her stranded, friendless, vulnerable. It’s inappropriate. It’s complicity. And it is very, very, very tempting—tempting, because it does restore order, and only the abused party has to pay ... at least at first. It’s worth noting that order isn’t a bad thing, taken by itself. But order, like so many other good things, becomes corrupt when it is elevated inappropriately above its station. And, as any corrupt order will eventually collapse, justice must be considered a higher priority. Sometimes, restoring order is inappropriate. Sometimes, maintaining order is abusive. Sometimes, your sister is bleeding and frightened for her life. Sometimes, the only appropriate thing is to change the locks—whatever that might look like. What might that look like, especially in a time like now, when abusive bullies have full run of the national house?
August 16, 2025 at 4:08 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
When we talk about loneliness, what we’re really talking about is a lack of connection. And you don’t cure disconnection through pandering, or even through proximity. True connection comes through interdependence, through bonds that emerge when people trust that you actually care about them, rather than viewing them as means to an end.
August 12, 2025 at 4:10 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
futurism.com/collapse-hum...
August 5, 2025 at 4:21 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
The issue isn't to say that polarization can't be destructive. The issue is that polarization is something that happens when two sides are equally and mutually diverging from each other, and it's usually employed to indicate that the thing they are diverging from is a matter that is trivial next to the benefits of unity. Thus, the word polarization slyly insinuates a state of affairs is simply not true. What's happening today is not two sides equally and mutually diverging from one another over matters that are immaterial next to the goal of unity. What's happening is that a group of people privileged by supremacy is asserting that privilege through oppressive and violent domination of all others in order to strangle human unity to death. What's happening is the institutional kidnapping, terrorizing, robbing, and murdering of our family members and our friends and neighbors. What's happening is violent and oppressive and systemic, and it is being done by just one side among an infinite array within the great diversity of human art, one single side that defines itself by its unearned privilege, then uses the power that privilege affords to frame its own murderous violence as order and justice, and frame any struggle in response to its violence, no matter how peaceful, as violence deserving escalating violence in return. So we can see that opposing fascism will require a solidary with hundreds of different sides against the sole murderous one. Perhaps that one murderous side will experience this solidarity as "polarization," but we don't need to agree with them about that, or "agree to disagree" about it. In fact, it is our moral imperative to disagree with them about that. The price for disagreeing will be very steep for some of those of us who pay it—it may well include oppressive violence—but for all of us, it will cost the supremacist privilege of respectability.
July 13, 2025 at 5:52 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
For conservatives it’s always been partisan.
Wilhoit: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
July 13, 2025 at 2:18 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
If you question these people of evil, they'll tell you that they are just making the hard-nosed pragmatic decisions that are necessary to ensure our safety. This is clearly pure bosh. If these decisions were pragmatic and necessary, they wouldn't rely exclusively on lies and self-contradictory nonsense and hypocrisy for their rationales, and if they were meant to ensure safety, they wouldn't create so much death and destruction and pain and suffering. I'm also told that one should never ascribe to malice that which can also be explained by ignorance. This is meant to be a morally sophisticated position, but I don't know. It seems to me that ignorance is a core property of malice, and letting malice off the hook simply because it also happens to be ignorant is not so much a sign of moral sophistication but rather falling for a game that is pretty obviously designed to swindle rubes. Anyway, it's hard to credit the conservative movement with ignorance. If they were ignorant they'd sometimes accidentally choose less evil over more evil, but no. No matter where you set them, no matter how many times you spin them around, their moral compasses point with unerring certainty toward maximum atrocity and cruelty, and their gleeful celebration of it suggests that this isn't about hard-nosed pragmatism, but rather a genuine desire for evil things to happen. How to live among people who have decided to hate and fear kindness and knowledge and creativity and diversity, and to love cruelty and malice and ignorance and theft and bullying and domination? How to live among people so committed to supremacy that they'd rather have it than life? And how to live a human life during such dark days?
July 7, 2025 at 4:32 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
“BIG BROTHER”

substackcdn.com/image/fetch/...
June 28, 2025 at 1:59 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
PREACH.
We don't need a party that validates someone's choice to support the mass deportation of their friend, or a party that validates the popular belief that the failure of conservative white people to do the right thing is actually the fault of everyone else for not flattering them well enough. What would actually expand the tent to include these Missouri ladies is to offer them not the same thing, but something different—to actually embody unshakeable ideals of universal human rights that are not up for debate, and make that the center pole of our tent—a pole, not a poll. This would give an actual option to people who have become newly concerned about and newly aware of the destruction of human rights, in a way that a party that offers to swap one atrocity for another doesn't. It would do it without pushing other people out of the tent. It would grow the tent by expanding the margins on all sides, which is where there is space to expand. And it would truly win the center, not by engaging in a pandering chase after the least awful of an awful coalition, but by defining and defending a true moral center—a fixed spot around which people can gather, if they want to accept the invitation for something better. I don't think cowardice in the name of pragmatism builds a broad coalition. You know what I think builds a broad coalition? Principles and resolve. That's what I recommend if what we actually want is a big tent, and just not to avoid being impolite about atrocities to people who some of us identify with more closely than those to whom the atrocities are being done. That's what I recommend, if we actually want to choose to prioritize a political test that expands the number of those who can join, expands the number of people we mean when we say "us," and expands the parameters of the uncomfortable truths we can tell one another.
June 8, 2025 at 8:14 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
A comic by Paul North of sheep looking at a billboard of a wolf politician that says, "I AM GOING TO EAT YOU." One sheep comments, "He tells it like it is."
June 4, 2025 at 6:01 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
www.everythingishorrible.net/p/they-did-v...
There are various reasons for that. One is that Johnson has figured out that he can hold onto his leadership position by always fucking over the moderates, who always cave, while always himself caving to the wackiest reactionaries (among whom we would have to include one Mike Johnson.) Another dynamic, I think, is that the GOP is increasingly, escalatingly, a fascist party—and fascism has a particularly contemptuous relationship to truth. You see this especially in fascism’s obsession with conspiracy theories. These theories are easily debunked, and fascism’s adherents often more or less recognize that they are easily debunked. They embrace them to own the libs with their dull establishment commitment to “facts” and “truth”—as per Sartre: Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. Conspiracies are, again, one way in which fascists demonstrate their utter freedom from the constraints of honesty. But I think you can see a similar cavalier attitude in governing, where the GOP often deliberately refuses to know what it’s doing. Party leaders, rank and file reps, and to some extent even voters themselves just refuse to pay attention to expertise, to evidence, or even to basic logic in their decision making. Garish expressions of hate and subservient expressions of loyalty overwhelm all other considerations.
June 4, 2025 at 5:42 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
Cory Doctorow on the "Meritocracy to Eugenics pipeline."

I was just commenting this morning that the "privileged white guy to asshole" pipeline is starting to feel like a vacuum tube system. :P

doctorow.medium.com/https-plural...
It’s kinda weird how, the more oligarchic our society gets, the more racist it gets. Why is the rise of billionaires attended by a revival of discredited eugenic ideas, dressed up in modern euphemisms like “race realism” and “human diversity”? I think the answer lies in JK Galbraith’s observation that “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
May 21, 2025 at 5:50 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
Oh and this highlight of the continued wealth redistribution from everyone else to the ultra wealthy:

(source: popular.info/p/the-ugly-t... )
A chart illustrating that under the Republican budget proposal, including Trump's proposed tax agenda... "In 2026, for example, the bottom quintile of earners ($17,000 or less) will see their after-tax income go down by $1,035. Meanwhile, the top 0.1% ($4.3 million or more) will see their after-tax income go up by $389,280."
May 19, 2025 at 6:36 PM
rawrtigerlily.bsky.social
Also look at this shit. So much for fiscal responsibility:
A chart showing Republican's budget plan, resulting in an increase to the federal deficit of $4 TRILLION over the next decade, mostly driven by a $2.2 Trillion cost for Trump's tax cuts for those making more than $4 million a year.
May 19, 2025 at 6:31 PM