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.

[this space intentionally left blank]

Liberals would rather blame leftists than actually fight fascism.

White people finally figuring out what names are for… https://youtube.com/watch?v=63ldknEhOMM

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

C-x C-f /sudo::/path/to/file

Yeah, in emacs you use tramp to open the file with /sudo::

Oh, you aren’t looking for an answer because you’re an idiot. Go on with your life then.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yep.

“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.

Fixed:

Ancap: *incoherent statement*

Tankie: *heavily cited mix of cherry picked accurate and utterly incoherent statements with a sprinkling of denying atrocities*

Ancap: *nonsensical response indirectly quoting literally Hitler*

Anarchist: *blocks lemmy.world*