I don’t like Biden either, but anyone with half a brain knows there are two choices in the 2020 election. If we had a sane voting system, voting third party might be worth it, but as it stands, no one but you knows your favorite candidate exists and unless you want to become their campaign manager that will still be true in...
There are folks preparing for armed insurrection. I would say there are probably enough of those folks already, I’m not saying they’re wrong, just that it’s easy to think of that as a default solution and miss the much more important foundation building work.
Collective disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from preparing the logistical side of a revolution. The art of was says that for every person on the field of battle, 7 are in support.
The idea of the revolutionary with a gun is attractive, especially for those of us socialized male. But there are a lot of critical roles that are revolutionary and are not that. In a lot of ways the glorification of the militant serves the state by making the resiatence easier to kill. Focus on the things that are harder to justify killing people over and harder for feds to figure out how to disrupt. The armed part of the Panthers were used to justify the attacks, but the breakfast program is why they were a real threat.
My favorite example from the past of a revolutionary project I worked on was our local GDC’s food security committee. We started with a shared pantry for members. This allowed some members to engage in riskier things like striking because they knew they’d have food covered. Other times it just supported people through hard times. We did some guerilla gardening on some abandoned plots. I learned to forage. Eventually it grew in to a few folks regularly bringing canned food to houseless camps and providing them material support.
Houseless camps are a threat to the stability of the state. They are necessarily a lawless space which threaten the legitimacy of the state.
The biggest lesson we need to take away from the Syrian civil war is that whoever can fulfil the needs of the people becomes the regional power. The state will control resource (like food) to control people. If you can disrupt their ability to control those resources or provide alternatives, then the state has less power to leverage. Simultaneously, fascist terrorists will attack the infrastructure in order to inflict suffering and control people. In both cases, providing things like food to comrade makes resistence possible and undermines the legitimacy of an authoritarian state.
A state that cannot fulfil the needs of its people loses legitimacy. But the other pillar, aside from fulfilling needs, is the legitimacy of the infrastructure of violence. My other favorite project was an independent journalism and public records activism collective. Lucy Parsons Labs OpenOversight is a plarform for police accountability. Since police ultimately will never be held accountable, pointing this out weakens the state’s ability to leverage them without losing legitimacy with the people.
So erode the narrative of the state and build it’s replacement. If you read Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare or any book like that, you’ll realize that the literal fighting part is probably the smallest and least import part of a revolution. The fate of the revolution is decided long before anyone picks up a gun.
So go talk to your neighbors, find out what they need. Organize with comrades. Join food not bombs. Push local disaster prep groups to support houseless camps, since it’s also indistinguishable from supporting people after a major natural disaster. If you do all the legal and easily justifiable things then if a fed infiltrates your group they just end up doing a lot of work without being able to disrupt anything.
Finally, go read as much as you can about the Rojava. Learn about Libertarian Communalism and think about how that translates to the US context.
To do any of this you need to organize. Start a book club or join one. Join FNB. Find other people. Talk to your neighbors. You would be amazed how many normal people actually want radical change. I’ve talked to liberals who are really radicals who haven’t figured out how to make it actually work. Don’t discount normal folks, because revolution is impossible without their involvement.
Edit: a note on foraging, one of the critical things for a revolutionary guerilla force is soap. Most US cities have abundant horse chestnuts (buckeyes or conkers). These are natural soap and can be used for laundry detergent, hand soap, or body soap. To anyone in an urban area, you’re welcome.
Liberalism is driving off a cliff and killing everyone because a third of people voted to do it.
There are 9 people on the bus. Five people vote to get shit burgers even though no one wants that, just because they think it will save them from the 3 people who vote to drive off the cliff. One person obstains. Two of the three people hijack the bus and drive off the cliff. Four of the five people blame the person who obstained as they drive off the cliff.
Fascists don’t care if they win or lose. Voting can’t save you once you’ve reached this point. You don’t have slightly high blood pressure that you can treat by eating right. You have cancer. You fight the cancer with everything you have or you die.
You will never get a chance to vote for what you want became America isn’t a democracy. It’s not a democracy if a club of rich people choose who you get to vote for. That’s literally how Chinese democracy works except it’s the party instead of the oligarchs.
Fascists want to win because it means there will be less resistence from liberals, not because they will abide by the law. That’s a pretty important distinction that I don’t think liberals can integrate right now.
A successful coup is indistinguishable from a legal election, which is why they create as much chaos as possible and sew distrust before elections.
I’m not saying voting is completely useless but I am saying that you are deluded if you think voting will save you. It might not even buy you more time. Organize now. Figure out how you’re going to eat while you’re fighting. Download army manuals and start reading them. Start talking to other people about what to do when Trump takes power (acknowledging that he will claim power reguarless if he wins or loses the election).
A coup is less likely to be successful if you promise to revolt no matter how a fascist takes power. They rely on tricking enough people in to cooperating. If enough people will riot, some of the ghouls who back the fascist will back off and you lower their chances of success.
You don’t have time. Sure, vote anyway because it’s a low effort thing that might buy you time. It’s basically a free lottery ticket. You probably aren’t going to win, but it will be really great if you do and it’s super low effort. But you wouldn’t take out a loan assuming that ticket will pay off. Act like voting won’t actually buy you time, because it probably won’t.
At most it’s gonna pull some of the people from it before it drives of the cliff.
Vote for shit burgers or don’t. The time to build a movement was 4 years ago before liberals decided to go back to brunch. The thing is that fascism requires the complicity of liberals. A very small group of people could beat the driver to death, take the keys, and park the bus. Liberals will work with fascists to resist those people because they think they’ll get the keys back later and get ice cream. Liberals can’t accept that there is no ice cream and there never was.
The bus is heading for a cliff. Someone stands up and says, “this is stupid! We should change the way we make decisions so this can’t happen!” You hold that person down so they can’t stop the driver because you want to tell the driver to get ice cream after the bus drives off the cliff.
The US is not a democracy, it’s an oligarchy. This is a fact. We talk about it constantly. The fact that oligarchs basically choose who can and can’t run for the two major parties, and that the two major parties control the debates, mirrors the way the Chinese Communist Party controls who can run in elections. In both cases they let the people choose between the options that are acceptable to those who are actually in charge. This is just an observation of reality.
The US was built by slave owning oligarchs who didn’t want to pay taxes for the genocide they’d been doing. They built a system od government around controlling the population. Only landed white men could vote. The facade of the system has changed over time but the system itself remains largely the same: a small group of landed white men get to control basically everything. This is just an observation of history.
The idea that any colonizer state can possibly be democratic is just absurd. Any system bult on genocide and oppression won’t magically stop being built on genocide and oppression. The system must be completely replaced.
So the question to ask is if you advocate direct action to make sure this isn’t something that can ever happened again, or if you just advocate direct action so you can go back to brunch until next time?
People in functional countries don’t love their country. Only dictatorships do that, like Russia, China, and the US. People in normal countries acknowledge the problems and work to solve them, because there are actually solutions. If it is impossible to solve things in your country, why would you not hate your government?
Saying that anyone who points out flaws is an enemy agent is something cults and dictatorships do. It’s how Xi and Putin maintain control, it’s how Trump maintains control of his people, and it’s how America has worked for generations. You are responding like someone who is in a cult.
Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk....
See: MRAs failing to understand how this kind of “reverse sexism” is really just the same patriarchy that feminists describe, and that basically every “gotcha” example is really just an example of patriarchy hurting men… In exactly the way feminists have been describing for decades.
Under patriarchy, men are the only ones seen as having agency so they are assumed to always be the aggressor. The assumption is true, even when the reality is not. At the same time, men are socialized to ignore boundaries meaning that most of the time they will be the aggressor, reinforcing the assumption and justifying the application of laws that align with that assumption.
Men will always be the abusers and never the abused. Men will never be seen as the care givers, even when they are the actual care givers. Men will always be the rapist, never the victim. And, because society tells men these things, we often enact them against our own interests.
The fact that this logic doesn’t make sense is something feminists have been calling out for a long time as part of the larger system of patriarchy. While patriarchy usually gives more power to men, it doesn’t always. But even when it does seem to benefit men, it still harms men… Just like how every other system of oppression harms everyone involved, not just the oppressed.
The logic should apply both ways, but it can’t because patriarchy prevents it. Meanwhile, people who don’t have a critique of patriarchy can’t really explain why this is the case. They simply point to it and say, “this is unfair and it hurts men,” without having enough context to actually fix the underlying problem.
So… Trump has promised to carry out a coup if he doesn’t win. A good coup would be indistinguishable from him just winning… Yet, people keep saying “vote harder.” Like, yeah, this is all super important stuff and the more people vote the harder it will be for Trump to carry out the coup… But a lot of people have put in a lot of money to make this happen so he’s going to have another coup attempt. This time it won’t be a bunch of idiots, it will be Eric Prince and the Academi soliders who got deployed in Portland.
If you are in the US, you need to prepare to fight. If he wins, democracy is over. If he doesn’t win, democracy is probably over too since he’s already rigged the supreme court so he can steal the election and make it look legal. Police all over the country have already pledged allegiance to him. When you come out to protest they will run you over with SUVs and just open fire on you. They’ll shoot at reporters to make sure no one can see what’s happening, just like they did during the George Floyd rebellion. But this time they’ll just kill people and claim they were violent.
You all need to be ready for the absolute worst. You also need to vote to make it harder, but voting will absolutely not be enough. You need to prepare.
He’s a malignant narcissist. It takes a long time to escape that kind of programing. Being in a relationship like that is basically like being in a cult.
Abusers are often victims first. You can’t really look at Musk, or any billionaire, and think, “yeah, this person is totally fine.” He’s not. None of them are.
Patriarchy and capitalism reward the unhealthy coping mechanism he uses to protect his ego. Patriarchy specifically asserts that those coping mechanisms are not only normal but optimal.
He’s absolutely a victim of this system and in a functional one he would be given help instead of power, which is literally the opposite of what he needs to be able to recognize his problems and heal.
He is who he is because the only way he can see himself as valuable at all is if he’s basically the savior of the world. Anything less than that is unacceptable garbage. Anyone who believes differently must be manipulated or destroyed.
There’s no way he can ever be happy. He needs help. It’s tragic that we live in a society where he can’t even see how much he needs help.
None of that takes away from the behaviors he expresses. The fact that his manipulation of others comes from his insecurity doesn’t take away from the manipulation, the feeling of unreality, that comes from experimenting that manipulation. Both of these things can and do exist at the same time.
“Boy” is only the opposite of “girl” if you’re working within the framework of gender binary. One could equally argue that “non-binary” is the opposite of both “boy” and “girl.”
Similarly, “Right Libertarian/AnCap” and “Tankie” are opposite ways to justify authoritarianism and atrocities (dictatorship of the “market” vs dictatorship of the proletariat). “Anarchist/Left Libertarian” is the opposite of both because both assert that non-consentual hierarchies are normal and excuse the atrocities that come with them while anarchism rejects the validity of non-consentual hierarchy.
Last Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., former Army officer and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asking why and how the Pentagon could tolerate an airman like Bushnell in its ranks. Calling his death “an act of horrific violence” that was “in support of a...
As a reminder, the FBI was built to kill anarchists and they’ve been doing unconditional shit to hunt anarchists since before they were the FBI.
The FBI will do anything to avoid fighting actual terrorism like the Klan and all the Nazi groups that have infiltrated the police and military. Nazis infiltrating the military literally tried to build s dirty bomb and the FBI is still more interesting in people protesting against police brutality.
I mean, this is kind of like the meditation on death from the book of the five rings. Like, once you accept death as inevitable you can see that on a long enough time scale things will be fine.
Yeah… As soon as you realize that slavery is a type of civil war because it’s a war on people living in the country, you start to realize that there’s never really been a time that the US wasn’t in a civil war. And when you look at the Red Summer, you see that genocide that’s being scheduled now is just part of the regular cycles of America… Like… Maybe a country built on genocide and slavery is a bad idea that can’t ever be fixed.
When the Romans and later Christians colonized Europe, they systematically exterminated almost all of the indigenous cultures there over the course of hundreds of years. During this process they brought the ideas of states, genocide, and colonization itself. When the Roman state collapsed, these colonized people rebuilt states that ultimately replicated the horrors they experienced across the globe.
Mabye the answer this time isn’t “let’s rebuild the same atrocity machine.” Land Back is an option, and there’s even a model we can look to in Norther Syria. I’m just skeptical of any attempt to replace an old state with a new one because it always seems to fail in exactly the same oligarchy/authoritarianism decline in to suffering…and the last few centuries have seen states start to speed run this. Like, AfD is on the rise in Germany and there are literally still WWII vets alive today. Perhaps you’re right, but I just don’t see how states could be the right option here.
He could be sent straight to the Hague right now to stand trial for crimes against humanity if the US would just recognize the authority of the court. Separating parents from their children is an act of genocide, and last time I checked the penalty for genocide was death. He clearly did that shit. It’s funny how recognizing the legitimacy of the world court would just instantly remove one of the world’s biggest problems.
Exactly, also, anyone taking the gun and the bullets has obviously never used a handgun. Your chances of doing any damage is pretty low without a ton of range time, which takes bullets. Hand guns aren’t accurate at any kind of range so you’d make some loud noises and that’s about it. If you did manage to actually hit anyone, an Archer would kill you from way beyond your effective range and just take the gun and any remaining bullets.
The gun is the absolutely least useful thing on that list after the bullets.
It’s necessary to hold two truths: liberalism always leads to fascism and accelerationism does not prevent fascism. So one should both delay the inevitability of fascism by participating in liberal democracy and do everything possible to make liberal democracy unnecessary as quickly as possible before the collapse.
The thing that can be especially hard for some people to understand is that not everyone experiences fascism at the same time. It’s not a switch. It’s a decline. Some people have been expecting fascism for decades or generations now. So people will be at different places in terms of interacting with the system. We are all trying to survive. We need as much time as possible to build a resistence movement, but, at the same time, no matter what compromises we get via electoralism those can be destroyed instantly if we only rely on the state to protect them.
Authoritarianism is extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, ask Syria. Climate change will ultimately being about the collapse of all authoritarianism because there simply won’t be enough excess to support hierarchy. The question is if we will be smart enough to being about that change before material conditions force it to happen.
Israel is not representative of modern Judiasm. It’s representative of modern settler colonialism. There are a lot of Jews who have opposed the existence of Israel since the idea of Zionism came up. Don’t conflate Judiasm with colonialism in it’s name.
The far-right simultaneously aligns with Israel and uses it to fuel their antisemitism. They don’t care about facts or the truth because their only focus is power. That’s why it’s so critical to always call out the fact that Israel does not represent Jews.
It is critical to call out the contradictions of Israel so that people who do care about facts are not as easily fooled by the far-right.
Ffs, there are a ton of interviews with rabbis calling for a cease fire or even an end to Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace has been consistently vocal in their opposition to Israeli apartheid.
Read Abdullah Öcalan and Murray Bookchin are definitely worth reading here. Öcalan points out that states are fundamentally genocidal because it’s easier to control one identity than several. Rajava is a really interesting example of libertarian socialism that doesn’t attempt to confront the state, but basically just ignores it unless it’s a threat. Rojava isn’t a country, it’s just an autonomous zone within the state or Syria (that isn’t governed by Syria).
I think that model offers a lot. It could even offer a path beyond Israel and the US. Öcalan’s Democratic Confederalism is like 100 pages and worth the read IMHO.
Becoming “native” isn’t as simple as not having a culture. It’s having a culture specific to the region. Settlers never develop this because they believe that not having ties to a region and exterminating those who do is sufficient.
Becoming native historically has generally meant adopting the language and customs that evolved in the region, or staying in a region long enough to evolve customs and culture. That takes several thousand years.
But there are also both nomadic and diasporic people. The existence of nomadic people is directly threatened by the existence of borders, making borders, in and of themselves, a tool of genocide. Diasporic people are not native but also not colonizers. Antisemitism is one example of persecution of diasporic people, while ant-black racism is another.
We have been migrating for thousands of years, which kind of invalidates the legitimacy of borders and by extension countries. If the existence of a county requires a border, by definition, and borders are genocidal, by definition, then countries are genocidal by definition. If we accept that genocide is a bad thing (perhaps the worst thing) then how could we accept the right of any nation to exist? At the very least we should demand the abolition of all nations that exist within the same space as nomadic people.
Potatoes are also really easy to grow. If you ever forget about your potatoes and they sprout or you leave them in the sun and they get green, you can put them in a pot and grow fresh potatoes.
Potatoes grow well in shade. Fava beans can grow in containers just fine, but may need a balcony. I would also get a short variety. A lot of things can grow in a window sill.
There’s also guerilla gardening, where you plant on an abandoned plot. Potatoes are great for this because they’ll basically grow on their own as long as they aren’t overtaken by blackberries.
Please, for the love of God, VOTE! (pawb.social)
I don’t like Biden either, but anyone with half a brain knows there are two choices in the 2020 election. If we had a sane voting system, voting third party might be worth it, but as it stands, no one but you knows your favorite candidate exists and unless you want to become their campaign manager that will still be true in...
Okay, but Mötley is a pretty awesome name. (lemmy.world)
rule (lemmy.cafe)
FAQ...
Kyle Rittenhouse storms off stage after being confronted by students (www.newsweek.com)
Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk....
Misinformation? (lemmy.world)
Lol
Democracy is at stake. | An address from Bernie Sanders (www.youtube.com)
Romeo and Juliet got nothing on this (feddit.de)
Lemmy.world be like (lemmy.world)
Will Aaron Bushnell’s Death Trigger Anarchism Witch Hunt? (theintercept.com)
Last Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., former Army officer and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asking why and how the Pentagon could tolerate an airman like Bushnell in its ranks. Calling his death “an act of horrific violence” that was “in support of a...
The choice of a new generation (lemmy.world)
Taste the one that’s forever young. Forever.
Election rule (lemmy.world)
2024 is going great, and I can’t wait for things to get even better in October!
Trump Claims He Will Debate Biden 'ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYPLACE' (www.rollingstone.com)
Hmmm 🤔 (jlai.lu)
Choose your items (lemmy.zip)
Accelerationist [RULE] (files.catbox.moe)
went to my first protest today :33 (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
The Anti-Semetism is just incredible (lemmy.world)
Rightio.
Serious rule (i.ibb.co)
Edit: Blocked the author’s name, because it’s not my tumblr. I didn’t expect so many people to misinterpret it and respond in this way....
Me no speak good (lemmy.world)
Let them eat cereal rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
SHOTS FIRED! (slrpnk.net)