If you, the reader of this comment, are not currently in a union, please contact a union today by sending them an email about organizing your workplace. Doing so is literally essential to our last chance to avoid entering a bloody civil war.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to directly demand real changes (Ending the war in Iran and Gaza, and Abolishing ICE should be towards the top of the list).
The General Strike was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).
Learn First Aid! ⛑️
Violence is being used against those who resist and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.
Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.
But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.
Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.
Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.
These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.
This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.
Join a Union to help prepare for a General Strike! 💪
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to make a general strike possible.
Once you are in a union you and your coworkers will need to pressure your leadership to prepare for a general strike, as well as pressure them to organize with other unions to enact a general strike. This is especially true if you are in a more traditional union that isn’t the IWW. Your local shop may need to organize directly with other unions if your union leaders are too cowardly to do so.
Most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then will be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner.
You can contact the IWW with the link below:
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.
Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.
Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.
Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.
Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.
We’ll start it off with some General Advice:
- Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
- Be careful about who you meet online
- Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
- Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
- agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.
For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).
I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).
For the record, this is exactly how Democrats win leftist and (otherwise) abstaining votes. The ones who can’t be satisfied and will never vote D are the lying embarrassed centrists.
This autoplays for anyone else who doesn’t want to be jumpscared :/
I think that depends on you client, but yes it does autoplay for me, lol.
Massively, incredibly based
Content might be very good and interesting, but the subtitle format is a huge PITA (can’t have sound right now).
Sorry, I didn’t make it
But THAT would be Political! INSTEAD we should WAG our Fingers!
-Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries!
AND write a strongly worded letter! They’ll back down after THAT!
Both of those people will be out come November. They might be reelected to office, but they’re done as congressional leaders.
The chair of the DNC has shifted to someone who likes Mamdani, and is backing similar candidates.
Both of those people will be out come November
They might be reelected to office
but they’re done as congressional leaders.
I loathe the term influencer. I hate that the word implies 1) that’s their sole purpose, 2) they’re actually capable of it, and 3) it paints people who take in their content as sheep looking for influence.
That, and it sounds like none of those apply to her.
Kat is the real deal. And she’s married to the owner of The Onion so she’s definitely cool too
- they’re looking to be comped stuff because they’re “influencers”
Apologies for the snark. Misread your reply.
I wasn’t fast enough to read the snark, regardless I appreciate the re-evaluation.
People are collectively sheep, objectively.
But not you, right? You’re different. You don’t fall for the stuff those silly other people fall for, they’re the sheep, you’re a smart wolf above the mere proles?
Utter shite supremacist rhetoric.
I had an experience this weekend with someone quoting Bart Simpson and later purchasing a Butterfinger candy bar that same day…
No one is immune to propaganda.
deleted by creator
We need to gut the Dem party from within and make it leftist in order to get RCV.
Well, the DNC chair has passed to someone who is willing to actually back the left.
Sadly RCV is just a bad system.
It’s better than Plurality, but when you dig into the mathematic details of RCV, it’s just as broken as Plurality, just in new an horrible ways.
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorium says that all Ordinal voting systems are shit. They all have a spoiler effect. It’s just a question of when does it kick in.
All that said, there is a much better system. A Cardinal system called STAR.
A breakdown can be found at www.starvoting.org
The short of it is that instead of a meaningless ranking, you rate.each candidate on a scale of 0-5, and candidates may share ratings.
Those ratings are then counted independently of each other. The two highest rated candidates then go onto an automatic second step that incentivises the use.if the lower end of the scale for candidates you don’t like. You see which of the final two candidates are rated higher on each ballot.
If your bottom two candidates make it to the final step, and you rated one as a 2, and the other a 0, the 2 gets your final vote.
No thrown out ballots because of ballot exhaustion. They all get counted and even the losing side has a slight say in who is elected. Which would prevent another Trump completely.
this comparison table here actually shows STAR is a pretty terrible system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems
Some of those criterion are odd, and yeah, most don’t even apply to STAR, because it’s Cardinal and not Ordinal.
Bit it’s also important to know why and how the criterion are applied.
Like being cloneproof,
This wiki, (which is better for election specific stuff) says this;
STAR voting
STAR voting consists of an automatic runoff between the two candidates with the highest rated scores. Suppose we use the rated definition of cloning, where a candidate’s clones have scores nearly identical to the candidate who was cloned. If the winner in STAR voting differs from the Range voting winner, then cloning the latter will make him or her win. Therefore, STAR voting has a teaming incentive.
A bit later is says this;
Notes
Clone-negative methods can be argued to be better than clone-positive methods, because in a clone-negative methods, the clones may be more likely to drop out of the election, giving voters more of a say on the remaining candidates, whereas with clone-positive methods, the election result can come down primarily to which candidates run more clones of themselves. Such behavior has been observed with the Borda count.[6]
It’s a weakness, and it’s important to know about, but it’s not election breaking, it just renders the automatic runoff meaningless. Except it doesn’t because people still care about the who, even if the platforms are identical.
An election breaking criterion to fail would be Monotonicity. STAR satisfies it.
What she says about organising to help poor folx…
Here in this country in the middle east, where things are in full-swing Ramadan, people gather to prepare tables and bring food to feed EVERYONE, every single day. This is not organised by the government, but by every day people. The only thing that brings them together is a belief that it’s important. Some do it with no regard for others, but simply because they think that’s what god wants them to do, and so on. And I don’t subscribe any religion, or wanna fan Islam. But I think it shows what power we have.
This is really encouraging to read.
Here in America there are some people doing something like that. Food Not Bombs is the classic example for good reason, but we really need more people to know that groups exist to join, and frameworks exist to create groups if none do exist.
If you’re hungry or want to feed the hungry, and you’re in the US look into fnb. They don’t ask questions, they don’t care if you can afford food (though they ask that those who can comfortably afford food aim for the back of the line to ensure that if there isn’t enough the needier are prioritized), they don’t care if you think the beliefs the organization is founded on are stupid. It’s just food for the community.
Ymmv, but FNB can cook too. What I’ve had from them is varied, healthy and tasty.
I can’t confirm as the one I have experience with mostly just gave groceries, but that was crucial during the pandemic. They helped ease our financial stress at the time.
And one big thing you can do is if your city is having lots of protesting, being involved with fnb (even just someone they know can help when all hands are on deck) you can push for increasing meal frequency so that protesters (or strikers, or whomever else) can get a hot meal every night.
And if feeding people isn’t the sort of activism that speaks to you they can probably help you find other forms of direct action whether it’s protest groups, books to prisoners programs, or even groups that help fix up and sell cheap bicycles to the community. These are all ways you can help people and form community bonds.
Happy secular Ramadan!
One thing to consider about the United States is that organizing to feed needy people (or anyone) in specific ways can be illegal, you can be arrested or harassed by police for feeding people in the wrong ways or the wrong times or for attracting the wrong people. It’s something that might not possible from an individual person which is why it’s so cool that Kat is using her campaign to also give back to her community. She and her team are just great in a difficult time in the US
Polling looks not bad but not great. Biss is a solid handful of points in the lead, but with Fine in the mix, they are clearly splitting the NPR liberal demographic.
The polling was also a telephone poll and Abugazala does best with the 18-35 and 35-45 groups. She does have a commanding lead in the 18-35:s at 90%+.
If she wins the primary it’s going to look like an upset, but it will be for the work theyve done on the ground building a basis of suport
I’m most surprised that they found more than ten 18 - 35 year olds to pick up the phone (from an unknown number, at that).
If Kat has been focusing on growing voters into the coalition, they’ll do great.
“Campaign office doubling as a mutual aid hub” is pretty neat.
She’s pretty pro-war with China which is an unfortunate inconsistency.
Everytime a candidate expressing support for progressive policy comes forward it’s like our system injects a dose of Kissinger’s blood directly into their brain.
Pretty big leap from “Taiwan deserves self-determination and we should assist them how we can” to “pro war-with-China” you made there.
I envision a two-part credible deterrence plan that turns Taiwan into a “porcupine” too costly for the PRC to invade, by providing them with weapons to defend themselves and committing to actually defending the island if they do invade.
It’s more the military armament implementation as a pre-emptive and deterrant policy. So perhaps ‘pro-MIC including war with China’ might’ve been more technically correct? Or a less globalized M.A.D. policy? Localized?
Nonetheless she’s probably going to be no worse and probably better than the retiring incumbent at any rate, so I can even just chalk it up as an electoral strategy.
If a defense strategy doesn’t include “we will use weapons to stop you from doing this” it isn’t actually a defense plan, it’s a strongly worded letter.
Sure, but:
without touching the political One China Policy outlined in the Shanghai Communiqué
Coupling that with increasing armaments is what spurred the Kissinger reference. It kinda constrains the trajectory to escalating towards war.
Which, well, as we are seeing unfold with Iran now and have with the American boondoggles of the 21st century, may not serve Taiwan or the US in the long run.
Lip service must be given to the OCP lest Mainland China decide playing the long game isn’t worth it. Speaking against the policy is a signal that the only legitimate claim to Taiwan is through force, while also jeopardizing trade with the entire West Pacific.
Is providing Ukraine aid and arms pro-war?
Ukraine is an active warzone, so that switch is already flipped.
As a policy of deterrent though, arming a proxy nation to the teeth I do find to be pro-war.
But, if they are in an active war. Wouldn’t sending them aid and arms prolong the war? Wouldn’t that be pro-war according to how I understand your argument? Perhaps it might even lead to more deaths then if Russia would just conquer it without the ability for Ukraine to resist invasion.
Pro-war doesn’t mean just preparing for war right? It means a desire for war.
(For the record, I think we should be sending aid and arms to Ukraine. I’m just trying to follow your logic.)
But, if they are in an active war. Wouldn’t sending them aid and arms prolong the war? Wouldn’t that be pro-war according to how I understand your argument?
Sending an active war aid and arms is pro-war by using that logic, yes. But that’s not the point I was making, which was to armaments as a deterrent strategy. I simply don’t think it prevents war, like a deterrent would or should.
To me the pro-war aspect is not the scale of destruction or costs as it is whether pathways to peace or diplomacy are being closed off, or otherwise escalating military tensions and provocations. The destructive costs are double edged, which is the basis of my view, and why I don’t support the more death and destruction rationale to deterrence.
(For the record, I think we should be sending aid and arms to Ukraine. I’m just trying to follow your logic.)
And I don’t fault that, really. There are different goals in play than preventing war once war starts.
So like Kat’s saying do with Taiwan what wasn’t done with Ukraine by committing to a defense of Taiwan maximizing armament and commiting direct intervention. To me that’s a pro-war position, albeit one agnostic to whether it pays off or not. (I generally think it doesn’t work out long-term.) But not touching the One China Policy, however is where the Kissinger red flags started flying for me.
(And for the record I think she’s going to win and I don’t have a problem with that. She’ll likely/hopefully be better than who she is replacing. My current rep is a Zionist so if anything I’d take a China hawk like Kat if I could hotswap.)
Ukraine giving up it’s nukes was one of the reasons it was invaded. Also, the US promised to defend Ukraine incase it was attacked as part of the negotiations for them giving up their nukes, but that promise was broken.
For more info in the topic, see Ukraine and weapons of mass destruction
Ukraine inherited about 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each, 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads apiece, as well as 33 heavy bombers, totaling approximately 1,700 nuclear warheads that remained on Ukrainian territory.[2] Thus Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world (possessing 300 more nuclear warheads than Kazakhstan, 6.5 times less than the United States, and ten times less than Russia)[3] and held about one third of the former Soviet nuclear weapons, delivery system, and significant knowledge of its design and production.[4]
…
In 1994, Ukraine agreed to transfer these weapons to Russia for dismantlement and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders.[6][7] Almost twenty years later, Russia, one of the parties to the agreement, invaded Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently also from 2022 onwards.
Ah: somebody who actually understands that the country is in the process of being highjacked…
Too little, too late, I’m afraid, but glad somebody got it!
_ /\ _
The majority of the country gets it actually
Awesome, let’s get on it! Do y’all have mutual aid in your town? We have the Burrito Brigade (https://burritobrigade.org/), feeding people since 2014.
She’s thinking “parliamentary tactics” is what’s going to save the country.
Ma’am: Republicans have shown multiple times they are willing to kill to have their way. How will “breaking quorum” stop them?
She’s talking strikes and mutual aid too. A multipronged approach that includes every means we have from political power, to people power, to revolutionary power (mutual aid being fundamentally revolutionary) is the only way through this.
We don’t win if we keep nitpicking and attacking eachother.
As opposed to doing absolutely nothing.
LOL
Go vote for Schumer some more.
Sometimes breaking quorum requires a big, heavy stick.
Who is Quorum and why is he the only one we’re breaking?
