#Boston Uprising

[mercyofficial]

oh it’s so over

[cr0cutacr0cuta]

Hey I'm not too big into Overwatch League anymore but there is one thing I keep up with...

There's a player named Striker who has been in the league since it's inaugural season in 2018(?) and he's had 6 different contracts.

The thing about it is...he keeps going between the same 2 teams.

It's so funny. They're literally playing hot potato with a person.

[teamahwol]

2023 Boston uprising supporter (derogatory)

[artillatron]

Fingers crossed Boston put in the work to pick good coaches, it would suck to spend more this year and not be good enough because of coaching.

[overwatch-1eague]

2018 (Inaugural Season)

Stage 1, Week 5, Day 4

Match 2 - Houston Outlaws vs Boston Uprising

[angeltannis]

Still cracks me up that the guy who owns the Patriots also owns an Overwatch League team

[zmyaro]

I got this shout-out from Bike Lane Uprising 😊

If you see vehicles blocking bike lanes, submit them to BLU to help them build their map so cities can see which areas need better bike infrastructure! (And if you live in the greater Boston area, send them to Boston Bike Blockers too!)

[losangelesvalorant]

To be fair to pre jidset is about the funniest piece he could add to this team apart from Ryder or kyky.

[eltristanexplicitcontent]

Stretch Debuts in Europe at Otto Group

Hyundai and Softbank robot to bust the UPS package handler and Amazon warehouse worker unions. (They own Boston Dynamics)

[thecuddlymuffintop]

Tonight, at 7 pm CDT, I will be streaming @graycatcafe 's Charity Wheel Spin Pick, Bioshock, over on Twitch.

You're always welcome to either watch here or join me with the above link.

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

soooo niche but in the inaurugal season of the overwatch league in stage 3 week 3 theyre all passing around the hand sanitiser and it becomes a meme and hex is like "when the superbug hits..." well let me fucking tell you it "hits" differently watching it back in 2023. 2018 was just a much simpler time

[romanceyourdemons]

the imperial chinese examinations are a godsend for enjoyers of pathetic historical men such as myself. they gave rise to so many types of guy, such as: guy who failed the examinations like forty times and despondently wrote one of the great works of chinese literature between failures; guy who failed like ten times and decided “you know what? this is bullshit. this all has to go” and started a brutal peasant uprising; guy who just barely passed and was suddenly thrown into a very high military position, which he has ABSOLUTELY no training for; and guy who failed several times, faked a degree, got hired by harvard to teach chinese, had his fake degree discovered after he got to boston, begged harvard to let him teach because otherwise it would be really embarrassing for them all, taught like seven students, and died of pneumonia

[one-divides-into-two]

"If we treat the Stonewall Uprising as initiating the modern gay mass movement in 1969, the left-adventurist line was initially dominant, and fell by the wayside in the late 70s. Those who led the first wave of the LGBT movement of the 60s understood themselves (however incompletely) as participating in a revolutionary movement and process: In broad strokes, the early “left” line groups of gay liberation located the center of gay oppression in the family form itself and were explicitly in solidarity with the women’s movement as in many ways the same as their own (ideologically if not always practically). The British Gay Liberation Front’s Manifesto reads

The oppression of gay people starts in the most basic unit of society, the family...At some point nearly all gay people have found it difficult to cope with having the restricting images of man or woman pushed on them by their parents...we are expected to prove ourselves socially to our parents as members of the right sex (to bring home a boy/girl friend) and to start being a 'real' (oppressive) young man or a 'real' (oppressed) young woman

The Boston Gay Men’s Liberation group argued in their manifesto for the collectivization of childcare and housework, saying

Rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. Any legal rights parents have over ‘their’ children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny. Free twenty-four hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing

Others explicitly aligned themselves with the national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles of the time –Third World Gay Revolution went so far as to explicitly call for armed struggle towards establishing socialism. The gay struggle, to these organizations, was necessarily part of the struggle for the end of capitalism and the liberation of all oppressed and exploited peoples.

Nevertheless, these groups primarily took the left-adventurist line, and the failure of these organizations to place politics in command and take up Marxism fully (despite its influence within the movement), and the failure of the leading Marxist organizations of the time to cast aside their chauvinism, place politics in command, and embrace the LGBT movement (most notably RU/RCP, which maintained that homosexuality was “perpetuated and fostered by the decay of capitalism” and to be eliminated under socialism until 2001 and engaged in conversion therapy-style practices on their gay cadre), allowed the bourgeoisie to co-opt the movement and suppress its revolutionary strains. By the end of the 1970s the main left-adventurist groups that emerged from the movement's popular initiation via the Stonewall Uprising (GLF, STAR, TWGR, etc) had collapsed, and were replaced by the newly dominant right-opportunist trend, represented in groups like Lambda Legal (founded 1971), GLAD (1978), and the Human Rights Campaign (1980). Occasional left-adventurist ruptures emerged over the succeeding years, with ACT UP's break (rooted in part in gay and lesbian anti-imperialist solidarity work in the preceding years) from Gay Men's Health Crisis representing the most significant of these, but over the next three decades the bourgeois "marriage equality" became the central demand of the movement, with the implication that once these various reforms proposed by the right-opportunist trend were enacted, the gay movement would cease to be necessary.

In the first two decades of the 21st century these reforms were realized, and the idealist fantasies of the leading bourgeois gay organizations were not. These reforms were granted because they reaffirmed the bourgeois family form, successfully assimilating the leading upper strata of LGBT people as a method of defusing the movement as a whole. While in some ways the broad social acceptability of homosexuality, transness and gender nonconformity have increased, the reaction to these reforms has produced a vicious effort to oppress the lower strata, typically trans people.

Indeed, all empirical evidence points to the continuing existence of anti-gay and anti-trans oppression. In our younger years, parents, teachers, and other authority figures will attempt to suppress any expression of homosexuality, transness, or gender non-conformity. The passive and active social enforcement of your sex/gender role is a universal experience, but is felt particularly acutely by those most directly in contradiction with those roles. When this fails, authority figures sometimes resort to violence and sexual abuse – gay and trans children suffer higher rates of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse across the board as compared to their cis and straight peers. LGBT people as a whole make 10% less than the average worker. This is felt more acutely among trans people, particularly trans women (in line with their cis counterparts), who make just 60% of the average. What bourgeois sociological evidence does exist points to significant discrimination in housing, jobs, medical care, etc. Accessing medical care is a struggle of its own for trans people – getting the treatment needed for basic day-to-day existence is often humiliating and expensive.

For younger LGBT people, particularly trans people, this political sequence has produced significant "whiplash." We grew up in a period of a real increase in broad social "acceptance," and being told that these reforms would guarantee an end to our oppression. But the utter abdication of leadership by the rightists following the reforms (after all, "we won") and the reactionary backlash has left the movement with a vacuum of political and organizational leadership at a crucial conjuncture. In the absence of this leadership, small groups have begun to emerge, largely taking up the left-adventurist anarchist line, sometimes explicitly. In some ways, this is a positive situation for communists. The broad masses of LGBT people are crying out for leadership in their struggle against the reactionary offensive, and the failure of the bourgeois rightist line to provide its promised victory has revealed to many gay and trans people, particularly those of the lower strata, the bankruptcy of reformism.

The current assault on our self-determination by the reactionary wing of first-world politics presents us with an opportunity to smash that trend, to effect a final rupture. Gay and trans people, particularly trans people, are increasingly forced into direct confrontation with the bourgeois state (through its repressive laws) and its extra-legal shock troops (with trans events becoming one of the primary targets for street fascist attacks). Not since the AIDS crisis have we seen such direct confrontation – and with it, openness to revolutionary communist political projects.

The task before communists in the gay movement is therefore to rectify the line of the movement through theoretical and practical struggle, to offer leadership to the gay and trans masses, and transform this movement into a detachment of the world proletarian struggle for communism."

Half the Sky: Preliminary Materials for a Proletarian Feminist Politics

[artillatron]

BOSTON UPRISING BIRDRING

[overwatch-1eague]

2018 (Inaugural Season)

Stage 1, Week 5, Day 2

Match 1 - Philadelphia Fusion vs Boston Uprising

[racefortheironthrone]

What are your thoughts on Police Unions and calls to have them thrown out of the AFL CIO?

The last time that police unions actually acted like unions was the Boston police strike of 1919 (that unfortunately catapulted Cal Coolidge into national political prominence). After that, the basic labor relations between the state and police unions began to change in ways that are not recognizable as standard trade unionism.

The shift really began in the 1930s, when the rise of industrial unionism and attendant strike activity scared the shit out of the employers and their allies in government, because the usual Pinkertons and American Legion thugs were not enough to keep a lid on the situation. Hence the need to keep the police unions on the side of the employers rather than allow any possibility of siding with the strikers - thus you start to see police unions getting easily recognized, wage increases getting thrown around like candy, anything to keep the strikebreakers sweet.

However, it particularly morphed during the Second Great Migration (1940s through 1970), when the sudden emergence or at least rapid expansion of black populations in Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western cities scared the shit out of the municipal establishment in similar, yet distinct ways than the earlier union uprising had. In this period, an informal understanding was reached that the elected officials would block, slow-walk, or otherwise frustrate attempts by activists to impose accountability on police through civilian complaint review boards and other mechanisms, in exchange for police making upholding the racial hierarchy one of their enforcement priorities.

The expansion of grievance and arbitration procedures to include shootings and other acts of police brutality, written reprimands and other punishments from management, civilian complaints of abuse of power, officers' misconduct records and the extent to which they could be made public or even shared with future employers - the whole intricate mechanism by which police union contracts were turned into a bulwark against accountability - was part of this quid-pro-quo alliance between the state and police in the face of the emergent civil rights movement.

That's part of what slightly gives me pause about the left critique of police union contracts, because I think this alliance would have been constructed, maintained, and expanded over the decades whether or not police were unionized. The means would have been different, probably exercised through city charters, local ordinances, judicial precedents (even more so), but the ends would be the same. And if activists actually managed to eliminate a police union contract today, I'm absolutely confident that municipal government would rebuild it the next day, because they're absolutely scared of police slowdowns.

As to chucking them out of the AFL-CIO, it's not a bad thing per se, but I do want people to understand that it would be purely symbolic. The AFL-CIO is a union federation, it doesn't really have much in the way of direct authority over member unions, or exclusive access to resources that outpace what the member unions have. To give a historical example, the AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters back in the 50s for being mobbed-up and it didn't change the Teamsters one bit - they kept on being mobbed-up until the Teamsters for a Democratic Union challenged the Hoffaites in the 70s and the Justice Department went after them with RICO charges in the 80s.