https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1327393476003160064

  • OhWell [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Conservatives have been pushing this "big government" narrative since Reagan.

    What they really mean by "big government" is institutions, safety nets and entitlement programs that go to poor people. They want all that gone and replaced with a military and police budget through the roof. That's where we're at after 40 years of neoliberalism.

    • cum_drinker69 [any]
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      4 years ago

      Small government with 2800 new age fighter jets and 15 aircraft carriers. Small government that hands military technology to civilian police forces.

      Big government is when you give out health advisories for the disease the government was too passive and inept and underfunded to handle properly.

  • ValliumOverdose [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Is anyone trying to "cancel Thanksgiving"? I'm pretty sure they're just asking you not to have large gatherings.

  • My_name_is_christ [any]
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    4 years ago

    Thanksgiving is based off a lie that colonizers tell themselves to make them feel innocent.

    • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Yes, but I think that the holiday itself is worth celebrating, or at least the idea. I like the idea of families getting together, celebrating peace, and being thankful.

    • REallyN [she/her,they/them]
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      4 years ago

      What part is the lie specifically? From my understanding there was an alliance and there was a feast/celebration. Obviously it wasn't this kumbaya thing where all the Europeans and Natives were friends as the alliance was one against another tribe and I believe the Dutch. So there is an aspect of conflict behind the scenes that the story doesn't really tell, but idk if that is what you mean? Is there something I am ignorant of or missing?

          • abc [he/him, comrade/them]
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            4 years ago

            When I was a child, Thanksgiving was simple. It was about turkey and dressing, love and laughter, a time for the family to gather around a feast and be thankful for the year that had passed and be hopeful for the year to come.

            In school, the story we learned was simple, too: Pilgrims and Native Americans came together to give thanks.

            We made pictures of the gathering, everyone smiling. We colored turkeys or made them out of construction paper. We sometimes had a mini-feast in class.

            I thought it was such a beautiful story: People reaching across race and culture to share with one another, to commune with one another. But that is not the full story of Thanksgiving. Like so much of American history, the story has had its least attractive features winnow away — white people have been centered in the narrative and all atrocity has been politely papered over.

            So, let us correct that.

            What is widely viewed as the first Thanksgiving was a three-day feast to which the Pilgrims had invited the local Wampanoag people as a celebration of the harvest.

            About 90 came, almost twice the number of Pilgrims. This is the first myth: that the first Thanksgiving was dominated by the Pilgrim and not the Native American. The Native Americans even provided the bulk of the food, according to the Manataka American Indian Council.

            This is counter to the Pilgrim-centric view so often presented. Indeed, two of the most famous paintings depicting the first Thanksgiving — one by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe and the other by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris — feature the natives in a subservient position, outnumbered and crouching on the ground on the edge of the frame.

            The Pilgrims had been desperate and sick and dying but had finally had some luck with crops.

            The second myth is that the Wampanoag were feasting with friends. That does not appear to be true.

            As Peter C. Mancall, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote for CNN on Wednesday, Gov. William Bradford would say in his book “Of Plymouth Plantation,” which he began to write in 1630, that the Puritans had arrived in “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”

            Mancall further explained that after the visits to the New World by Samuel de Champlain and Capt. John Smith in the early 1600s, “a terrible illness spread through the region” among the Native Americans. He continued: “Modern scholars have argued that indigenous communities were devastated by leptospirosis, a disease caused by Old World bacteria that had likely reached New England through the feces of rats that arrived on European ships.”

            This weakening of the native population by disease from the new arrivals’ ships created an opening for the Pilgrims.

            King James’s patent called this spread of disease “a wonderfull Plague” that might help to devastate and depopulate the region. Some friends.

            But many of those native people not killed by disease would be killed by direct deed.

            As Grace Donnelly wrote in a 2017 piece for Fortune:

            The celebration in 1621 did not mark a friendly turning point and did not become an annual event. Relations between the Wampanoag and the settlers deteriorated, leading to the Pequot War. In 1637, in retaliation for the murder of a man the settlers believed the Wampanoags killed, they burned a nearby village, killing as many as 500 men, women, and children. Following the massacre, William Bradford, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for “the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.”

            Just 16 years after the Wampanoag shared that meal, they were massacred.

            This was just one of the earliest episodes in which settlers and colonists did something horrible to the natives. There would be other massacres and many wars.

            According to History.com, “From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier — the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world — became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people.”

            And this says nothing of all the treaties brokered and then broken or all the grabbing of land removing populations, including the most famous removal of natives: the Trail of Tears. Beginning in 1831, tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced to relocate from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. Many died along the way.

            I spent most of my life believing a gauzy, kindergarten version of Thanksgiving, thinking only of feasts and family, turkey and dressing.

            I was blind, willfully ignorant, I suppose, to the bloodier side of the Thanksgiving story, to the more honest side of it.

            But I’ve come to believe that is how America would have it if it had its druthers: We would be blissfully blind, living in a soft world bleached of hard truth. I can no longer abide that.

  • GVAGUY3 [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    I truly hate Ted Cruz. He is the worst of the right in a blob.

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Motherfucker "Thanksgiving" is a government holiday it's their prerogative to cancel it or not.

    We should cancel it anyway though COVID or not. Make November American Indians month or something.

    • cuckfucker93 [none/use name]
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      4 years ago

      or just give the Indians another holiday. We got like 6 holidays in this country and I like turkey

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        I like turkey too but I'm trying to go vegetarian now so what are ya gonna do.

        • cuckfucker93 [none/use name]
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          4 years ago

          You can go vegetarian most of the time and still eat meat every once in a while like your medieval ancestors did

          Unless you are descended from nobility I guess

          • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]
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            4 years ago

            fucking hell I have enough bastard ancestors I don't need to figure out who my bastard ancestors were BEFORE they got to this continent

            • cuckfucker93 [none/use name]
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              4 years ago

              There is a vanishingly small chance they were anything besides dirt farmers or maybe small artisans

              • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]
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                4 years ago

                While true, knowing how aggressively white I am I wouldn't be surprised if I was a direct descendant of Lord Aethelfred the Peasant Stabber, devourer of many kittens or some other very obvious bastard

  • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]
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    4 years ago

    It's my god given right as an American to check notes infect Mimi and Pawpaw with an extremely lethal virus and KILL THEM DEAD.

  • threshold [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Absolutely love being against big government in the middle of a pandemic.

    Absolute Galaxy Brain

  • Mike_Penis [any]
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    4 years ago

    the government should start telling these people not to shoot themselves in the face so they do it out of spite.

    • GravenImage [none/use name]
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      4 years ago

      traditional thanksgiving food is bad, especially turkey. love eating bland, dry

      Sounds like you should learn to cook. try spatchcocking it

    • The_word_of_dog [he/him]
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      4 years ago
      1. Brine it for like 48 hours

      Optional 2. Inject that shit full of butter and preferred spices before cooking.

      It's good lol

    • WetAssPossum [they/them,ey/em]
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      4 years ago

      Fuck I wish my family drank. All they do is eat cold casseroles and talk about how queer people are going to Hell. At least warm the fucking ham up Ruth! You took it out of the oven 5 hours ago and left it uncovered, it's colder than the lumpy as fuck mashed potatoes.

      Last couple times I spent time with family I snuck a flask, except for christmas when I had to drive my grandparents. I'm kinda glad covid has given me an excuse to not see my shitty family without making my grandparents, who are mostly alright, upset.

    • goldsound [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      I listen to a football podcast for the Minnesota Vikings and one of the hosts (who also is actually a real leftist), is famous for his hatred of turkey as a Thanksgiving staple and as a meat in general and that's all that this comment makes me think of.

    • buh [she/her]
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      4 years ago

      Consume turkey and be excited for next turkey

  • keki_ya [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    Please sir I need to eat lumpy potatoes with my nephews and punch my 17 year-old cousin in the face because he doesn’t believe in Qanon. Thanksgiving is essential to the american way of life sir