Yeah its tough… At least you can block ads when browsing and pirate digital media pretty easily 🤷‍♀️

We have no neighbors. Only an unruly 51st tundra state and a hoard of alien barbarians being held at bay by the Night’s Watch ICE

OH THANK GOD they finally stopped exploiting me. Let me just catch my breath here and oh GOD OH FU–

Total collapse might not be required for real, tangible change. Collective action is a unifying force, and it would remind everyone top to bottom that the house of cards is in fact collapsible and not an inevitable behemoth under its own inertia.

You could argue that even with reforms the underpinning economic system remains as problematic as ever. But building that collective support, reminding poor voters that they’re not temporarily embarrassed billionaires, adds more opposition to it than support.

After a long enough period of striking it begins to have repercussions beyond the individual budget.

If the flow of money slowed to a crawl for an extended period, companies don’t have the funds to pay workers. Enough job loss leads to further reduced spending, thus impacting stock value, thus impacting employment, etc…

A month would have a noticeable impact, but a full fiscal quarter would be the first cliff where the big corporations would really sweat. But generally I agree, an economic strike with an end date is like an overnight hunger strike

Don’t disagree that civilization is a parasite, but a lot of parasites evolve to not kill their host 🙂

Well, the alternative is very foreseeable consequences for aquatic life. I’m sure they’d be on board

Oh huh, interesting… 📃✍️

Wouldn’t composting just release more greenhouse gasses? We need a more effective means of carbon capture, or maybe directly repurpose them as some sort of nutritional paste

If anything the current political context makes what needs to be done pretty clear. There’s a difference between downplaying the problem and realizing that if laying down and dieing isn’t an option.

God forbid someone tries to think past the next quarter.

If the future can’t be livable and people just wants a quiet suicide for the human race I’ve got good news. There’s a very easy solution for avoiding that discomfort that also happens to be the #1 way to reduce your carbon footprint.

But if you want to keep living and not just surviving, suck it up…

Why not go out doing something exciting at least?

It’s easy to make statements like that before desperation sets in. Starving is an awful way to die, death after nuclear fallout is excruciating and slow, you won’t enjoy any sunsets when the smoke from burning cities fills up the sky.

50 years from now when you’re freezing in a cold muddy ditch, you’ll be wishing you died a martyr taking the 1/1e10000 chance to fix it.

Edit: I’m legally required to clarify that martyrdom can result from non-violent acts 🙂

Putting aside whether or not that’s anathema to the cause, I’m not sure how you’d “other” them in a meaningful way. The reason it works for the right is that they target groups who’s members are publicly visible and can’t voluntarily leave (LGBT+, minorities, foreign religions, etc…)

If you target a group of people for their beliefs (something not overtly visible), they can either relabel their group or plausibly claim their beliefs differ in some way. We already do this for fascists and nazis, but very few people are going to outwardly admit to these ideals. Now they’ll just say they’re “extra-constitutional”, “alt right”, “Christian patriot”, or any other hat a bigot wants to swap out for far right authoritarian.

You can’t “other” them where they already proudly claim a majority (white + Christian) so what are you left with?

There might not be an easy alternative right now.

People tend not to internalize a problem until they can personally see it, and a lot of these problems (deportations, cutting education, handcuffing the CDC, etc…) might not affect them until things get truly bleak. Unless of course they do something reckless like directly cutting funds that goes directly to their wallets (Medicare or Social Security).

Spreading awareness has always been a huge problem. Activists in Tsarist Russia had the same problem of trying to reach out to uneducated rural peasants and their efforts didn’t go smoothly. And of course this was before everyone had hand held disinformation machines in their pockets.

I don’t have a magic bullet but we do have some things going for us. It’s not yet illegal to spread radical ideas, our targets are generally literate, and we still share a fair number of cultural references.

The following is my best guess at advice, I’m just as open to ideas as giving them:

The tricky part is that mainstream social platforms are a non starter. You’d never outweigh the echo chamber. In my opinion digital organization is secondary at best because anything can be suppressed at the whim of server owner, ISP, or government.

So as dumb as it sounds, go forth and talk to people in real life. Be sure you’re educated on what you want to talk about (read your history and theory, know what political buzzwords actually mean). Try to avoid activities that insulate you in your own comfort zone, and gravitate towards ones with wide appeal and low barriers to entry.

Start a woodworking club with some like minded friends or join a book club and offer suggestions. Running group, bodybuilding, birdwatching, whatever… If you want to do some good for your community, join a mutual aid network.

Try to know the narrative these people are living in, even if it’s a fantasy. Avoid trigger words they’re primed to react to, keep it simple and let them draw their own conclusions. Not everyone will be receptive, some people are just assholes.

It’s not sexy but it’s also not that hard to point out glaring injustices in the world. Most people can at least see that far and agree that something needs to change, starting that conversation is first step.

Being reactionary to a nazi salute at a presidential inauguration is warranted, reasonable, and useful.

Being reactionary to my 70 year old neighbor who ate too many paint chips as a child because he had a Trump sign in his lawn for 2 weeks before the election is less useful.

Being reactionary against an anonymous stranger in your own digital echo chamber is pointless (assuming their bad argument isn’t also in bad faith).

It’s not necessarily a lack of education, I know a really smart surgeon, generally very reasonable, who fell for this stuff.

If you’ve never seen the echo chamber this guy lives in you don’t understand how bizarre it can be.

On the surface there’s a lot of influencers that can say truly regressive lies, and make them sound innocuous. They say it with such confidence and mixed in with truths and half truths. It can be hard to see the fallacies and misinfo even if you know what to look for.

There’s a constant drip of cherry picked stats and talking points designed to reinforce what he’s feeling. In the back of his mind he knows those support his case but he doesn’t really have an original source to reference. He tries to say them with the same confidence that he heard them with, but they’re not based in reality and look pretty ugly without the professional window dressing.

There’s videos where people do deep dives on this stuff (I can try to find one if you want). You could probably also experiment with it yourself if you have a VPN and a fresh/virtual device to make an account on.

Wecome to Disney’s North Korea+ (brought to you by Tesla)

I’d agree that your reasoning makes sense but is reductionist when talking about America’s two party system.

I grew up in a conservative town and I personally knew lots of people that were truly, deeply compassionate people. Christian in the truly radical, hippy sense of the word. Except they had one issue, abortion made them sad.

It wasn’t any ignorance of the issue or believing in satanic baby eating, but a philosophy arbitrarily picked by their community. They didn’t hate anyone getting an abortion, they just had some utopian vision of a world where they didn’t happen.

Since abortions were framed as murder and one party promised to ban abortions and the other party expand access, they were told there was only one ethical choice.

So their one line of thought trapped them. I could argue up and down the ballot on issues they agreed with, how the economy should be handled, prison reform, etc… but that one stupid idea held them back.

They’re still good people, and voted 3rd party a few times when the mood struck them. But I don’t think wanting one bad policy (with the best intentions) makes them bad people.

So I’d say yes. In that instance, with those people, it’s generalizing to say they were on board with any of the hateful policies. They were held hostage by their single issue, and the right’s rhetoric made damn sure they could never wriggle out.

What if the system is designed to keep you ignorant?

If you want to come to that conclusion in a political postmortem 20 years from now I’d fully encourage it.

The problem is that right now the house is burning down and shaming people for playing with matches won’t save us.