#Progressive Grassroots

[thenewdemocratus]

Sommer 57: What the Ideal American Political Candidate Looks Like

. The Daily Journal The movie The Candidate from 1972 where Robert Redford plays a young idealistic Progressive Senate candidate, who gets the Democratic nomination for this California Senate seat, running up against a three-term incumbent Republican Senator, the Washington insider of Washington insiders, to me represents what Progressive grassroots politics looks like. The main character in the…

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

Gee idk person trending no. 2 under the Turkey/Syria tag right now, feel like maybe there's more to the story about why Syria is a fucking mess right now than the orcish Russians being chaotic evil badguys cause they just can't help it. I wonder why you think that way

Ah

[v-arbellanaris]

so fuckin late i just found out abt the matt healy nonsense and im fuckin disassociating bro x

[tomorrowusa]

The road to political power runs through the suburbs and exurbs. Not a HUGE surprise, but we were again reminded of this in the November elections.

Republicans insist on alienating people there with their hardline MAGA ideology and authoritarianism. Democrats have benefited by default, but to ensure victory in the burbs we need to be more proactive and do more grassroots organizing there.

The victories Democrats racked up on Tuesday night spanned safe blue states, Trump country, and one-time battlegrounds: A popular governor was re-elected in Kentucky; Virginia Democrats flipped control of the state house and kept their majority in the state senate; Democrats reversed GOP gains in New Jersey’s legislature; Pennsylvania voters delivered a Democratic romp in statewide contests; and the liberal positions won big in Ohio’s two ballot measures to enshrine the right to an abortion and to legalize marijuana. Post-election vote totals show that much of that success was due to a very specific kind of American: affluent, college-educated voters who are likely to live in the suburbs of metropolitan areas. In Kentucky, that means the areas in and around Louisville, where vote totals from the secretary of state’s office show that Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear improved his 2019 margins by nearly 10 percentage points; the counties in and around Lexington, where he improved by an average of 9 points; and in the three northern counties that sit across the state line from Cincinnati, Ohio, where vote totals show he improved by an average of 3 points. Ohio was a similar story: The “Yes” vote on Issue 1, which protects reproductive rights, saw its biggest support come from major urban centers and their suburbs, where it performed better than the Democratic Senate nominee in last year’s elections. Vote totals tallied by the New York Times show the “Yes” vote performing 6 points better in and around Cleveland, 11 points better in neighboring Lorain County, and 8 points better in nearby Summit County. It also won the vote outright in five other neighboring counties that Democrats lost last year. This picture also appeared in the suburbs of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, where vote totals reported by these states show a common theme: Suburbs, and places with higher concentrations of wealthier and better-educated voters, swung to the left. It’s a trend that’s been largely true since the dawn of the Trump era: Republicans have been consistently struggling to perform as well as they once did in the suburbs, giving Democrats an opening to persuade and turn out voters that are crucial to winning statewide races in battleground states.

Extremism and instability have increasingly become identified with Republicans. It's not just Trump's unhinged rantings but also the constant threats by the GOP to shut down government, politicize law enforcement, weaken national security, and cut programs that help the middle class in order to provide more tax breaks for the filthy rich.

This trend has held strong since 2016, when suburban and college-educated voters lurched away from Donald Trump for Hillary Clinton. They had been much more likely to side with Republicans as recently as 2014: In Northern Virginia, Virginia Beach, and the Richmond suburbs, Republicans had won or run nearly even with Democrats in the suburbs; the same was true in places like suburban Colorado, Georgia, and Wisconsin in 2012 and 2014. In the “blue wave” of the 2018 midterms, these more diverse and highly educated regions voted out Republican members of Congress. And the suburban shift contributed much of the margin of support that buoyed Joe Biden to victory in battleground states in 2020 and helped Democratic candidates win in close midterm elections last year. The common line? Ideological polarization around social issues and Trump’s brand of politics.

Progressive stability and rights is a message that works.

Some people on the fringe left might not appreciate such a strategy, but if you really want power in a democratic system the goal is to attract a broad majority – not to placate a rigidly ideological minority. And that's exactly what the GOP has become – a gradually shrinking elitist cult centered on MAGA ideology.

[felixwylde]

What's better to admire than money?

I mean, why money? Money’s just a symbol of power; it’s not the power itself. We kinda rely on it, but we’re still around even when we’re broke.The weird thing about money worship is that it’s not really about what you can buy; it’s treated like some sort of deity.If money were a god, what would it offer? Would it give us fame, fortune, happiness, or just some peace of mind?Are rich folks…

[jewish-sideblog]

I think people forget that the Nazis never said they were the bad guys. If someone says, hey, I’m evil! You don’t let them take over your country. They presented themselves as scientific, not hateful. By their own account, they were progressives, and the superiority of White Europe over the other races was a proven and immutable fact. They had scientists and archaeologists and historians to prove it. They didn’t tell people they wanted to kill the Jews because they were hateful. They manufactured evidence to frame us for very real tragedies, and they had methodological research to prove that we were genetically predisposed to misconduct. Wouldn’t you believe that?

Hollywood has spent the last 80 years portraying the Nazis as an obvious and intimidating evil. That’s a good thing in some ways, because we want general audiences to recognize that they were evil. But we also want them to be able to recognize how and why they came to power. Not by self-describing themselves as an evil empire, but by convincing people that they were the good guys and the saviors. They hosted the Olympics. Several European countries capitulated and volunteered themselves to the Empire. There were American and British Fascist Parties. They had broad public support. Hollywood never shows that part, so general audiences never learn to recognize the actual signs of antisemitism.

People today think they can’t possibly be antisemitic, because they’re leftist! They abhor bigotry! They could never comprehend Nazi ideology coming from the mouth of a bisexual college student wearing a graphic tee and jeans. How could they? The only depiction of antisemites they’ve ever seen have been gaunt, pale, middle-aged men in black leather trench coats with skulls on their caps.

If the Nazis time-travelled from the 1930s and wanted to take power now, they’d change their original tactics, but not by much. They would target countries suffering from an identity crisis and an economic collapse. They would portray themselves as the pinnacle of what that society considers progressive. Back then, it was race science. These days it’s performative wokeness. Once they’d garnered enough respect and reputation, they’d begin manufacturing propaganda and lies to manipulate people’s anger and fears at a single target— Jews.

If the Nazis made an actual return, they wouldn’t look like neo-Nazis. They wouldn’t be nearly as obvious about their hatred. Their evil wouldn’t give them yellow eyes, and no suspenseful music would play when they walked in the room. They’d be friendly. They’d look like you. They would learn what things your community fears and what things you already hate. They would lie and fabricate evidence to connect the rich elites and the imperialists you revile to a single source of unequivocal Jewish evil. It wouldn’t be hard— they already have two-thousand years of institutional antisemitism they can rely on to paint their picture.

If you’re curious why antisemitism today is coming from grassroots organizations, young, liberal college campuses, suburban neighborhoods with pride flags and All Are Welcome Here signs? That’s why. It’s because, as a global society, we’ve forgotten that the world didn’t used to see the Nazis as bad guys. And what is forgotten about history is doomed to be repeated.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Working class Dems who campaign on economics beat Trumpists in elections

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me FRIDAY NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The Democratic Party Pizzaburger Theory of Electioneering is: half the electorate wants a pizza, the other half wants a burger, so we'll give them all a pizzaburger and make them all equally dissatisfied, thus winning the election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

But no one wants a pizzaburger. The Biden administration's approach of letting the Warren/Sanders wing pick the antitrust enforcers while keeping judicial appointments in the Manchin-Synematic universe is a catastrophe in which progressive Dem regulators (who serve one term) are thwarted by corporatist Dem judges (who serve for life):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

The Democrats – like all parties in two-party systems – are a coalition; in this case, a "progressive" liberal-left coalition with liberals serving as senior partners, steering the party and setting its policies. These corporate dems like to color themselves as "neutral" technocrats with "realistic, apolitical" policies that represent what's best for the country:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

This sets up the left wing of the party as the starry-eyed, unrealistic radicals whose policies are unpopular and will lose elections. But for a decade, grassroots-funded primary challenges have made it possible to test this theory, by putting leftist politicians on the ballot in front of voters, especially in tight races with far-right Republicans (that is, exactly the kinds of races that the corporate wing of the party says we can't afford to take chances on).

The 2022 midterms included enough races to start testing these theories – and, unlike traditional midterms, these races enjoyed high voter turnout, thanks to the unpopularity of GOP positions like abortion bans, book bans and anti-trans laws. Jacobin teamed up with the Center for Working-Class Politics, Yougov and the Center for Work and Democracy at ASU and analyzed those races:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/11134429/CWCP-Report-2024.pdf

Their conclusion: candidates from working-class backgrounds who campaigned on economic policies like high-quality jobs, higher minimum wages, a jobs guarantee, ending offshoring and outsourcing, building infrastructure and bringing manufacturing back to the US won with a 50% share of the vote in rural and working-class districts. Dems who didn't lost with a 35% share of the vote:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-03-18-how-actually-existing-democrats-run-for-office/

In other words, in the kinds of districts where Trumpist politicians are beating Democrats, running on "left populist" policies beats Trumpist politicians.

That's the good news: if Dems recruit leftist, working class politicians and put them up for office on policies that address the material reality of voters' lives, they can beat fascist GOP candidates.

Now for the bad news: the Democratic establishment has no interest in getting these candidates onto the ballot. Working-class candidates, by definition, lack the networks of deep-pocketed cronies who can fund their primary campaigns. Only 2.3% of Dem candidates come from blue-collar backgrounds (if you include "pink-collar" professions like nursing and teaching, the number goes up to 5.9%):

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/left-populists-working-class-voters

All of this confirms the findings of Trump's Kryoptonite, an earlier Jacobin/CWCP research project that polled working-class voters on preferences for hypothetical candidates, finding that working-class candidates with economically progressive policies handily beat out Republicans, including MAGA Republicans:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/08125102/TrumpsKryptonite_Final_June2023.pdf

Since the Clinton-Blair years, "progressives" have abandoned economic populism ("It's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money" -T. Blair) and pursued a "third way" that seeks to replace half the world's of supply white, male oligarchs with diverse oligarchs from a variety of backgrounds and genders. We were told that this was done in the name of winning elections with "modern" policies that replaced old-fashioned ideas about decent pay, decent jobs, and worker power.

These policies have delivered a genocide-riven world on the brink of several kinds of existential catastrophe. They're a failure. The pizzaburger party didn't deliver safety, nor prosperity – and it also can't deliver elections.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/20/actual-material-conditions/#bread-and-butter

[hellyeahscarleteen]

It’s our 25th birthday! We’ve been doing all we do for a quarter century, for somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 million people in total.

You heard us right: 25 years of actually groundbreaking, original, smart, brave, pleasure-forward, caring, inclusive, shame-free, body-loving, learner-led, holistic, progressive, feminist, wholly independent and for-real and FOR FREE comprehensive queer sex ed for around 90,000,000 people around the world and counting under our belt now. That's a helluva thing for a scrappy grassroots sex education resource that started completely from scratch.

Our work is as essential now as ever. We’ve been experiencing a growing wave of legislation designed to cut young people off from vital and wanted information, support and community, especially young queer and trans people. In the last several years, we’ve also seen many sources of independent, feminist and queer, media shutter or give up their independence, some at the cost of their ingenuity or integrity. Scarleteen is and has always been fully independent, feminist, queer media. We don’t de-fang our content in order to appeal to advertisers or other sponsors. We offer unapologetically queer, pro-abortion, feminist, justice-minded and pleasure-forward sex education, and we have since we were a 🦄 in all that.

To help sustain Scarleteen through 2024 and the coming years, we need about 750 new people to sign up as recurring donors (you can see our progress towards that goal in the second graphic on this post). If we were there for you when you were younger; if you use us in your class, your curriculum, your counseling or healthcare office; if you refer young people to us; if you share our content on your social media, pass it to friends, or as a resource for your own research or writing; if our work has helped or does helps you in any way? We hope that if you're able, you'll consider becoming a recurring donor today, and will let others know about both the value of our resource, and our need for some help to keep on doing everything we do. 💗 🎉

Check out a 25 year timeline of our work and learn how to help with a donation or by hosting an online fundraiser

[bigdorks]

closer | hobie brown

A/N: Idk what this is tbh. It's like a mix between a series of hcs and a lil bit of smut. There's like 3 lines of dialogue in the whole fic opps. Warning: smut towards the end so 18+, afab reader, this is kinda cheesy, pls read the tags for more info WC: 1k+

At first, you didn't know what to make of Hobie Brown. He was a tall, formidable presence, so steadfast in his beliefs in a way that wasn't really shared among many of his peers.

Cliche as it is, you'd never met anyone quite like him, despite the many variants of Spidermen that existed across the multiverse that you had come across.

Like the rest, he fought valiantly against the evil within his own Earth, battling fascists and collapsing oppressive corridors of power with his 'Spiderband.' But he did it in his own unique way, true to his punk lifestyle. You remember how hard you'd laughed when he told you about the time he had once rushed a stage at a fashion show in protest.

He never faltered in abiding by what he felt was right. You saw the way he supported those who desperately needed it, even when it diverged from the majority. That Hobie had stood by Miles even when the entire multiverse was against him.

And with that, you couldn't help but to admire Hobie, wanted to be more like him. Be a little more unapologetic and devoted in ways you had not learned of yet.

When Miles got his powers, you resigned yourself to a mere supportive role in the background. But you had always wanted to do so much more. To be more helpful than a quick phone call to the authorities as the computer nerd in the chair. A part of you wanted to prove to yourself that you didn't need superpowers to be a driving, albeit small, force of change. So, you set out to do just that.

Beyond supporting Miles's operations as Spiderman, you found grassroots organizations to involve yourself with. You volunteered at schools as a mentor, supported mutual aid funds in any way you could, and advocated against the local forces that threatened to destroy all of the progress Miles had made as Spiderman.

And maybe you inspired Hobie, too, in your own smaller efforts. Perhaps it was not as great or impactful as the collective heroic actions of the Spider-people, but it was enough to create a small ripple of change within your own community.

There was one time when Hobie had smiled, so proud and excited when you'd told him how you'd teamed up with Miles to raise enough funds to save the local struggling performing arts center.

You could still recall how giddy you felt when his arms pulled you to his chest and held you there, maybe for a beat too long, while his pierced mouth rained you in praise.

As you grew closer to him, talking to him about anything and everything became so easy. Relaxed banter flowed in your conversations with the complement of his dry humor to your sarcastic remarks. You'd become so consumed in each other during your talks that hours would pass by without notice.

Among the lingering touches and steady chatter, the frequent looks of longing that you and Hobie gave to each other were enough to clue the others in on the tangible tension between you. They were gleeful in their sly matchmaking attempts, especially Pavitr, who didn't even try to hide his play at Cupid.

Nonetheless, it wasn't long before you and Hobie fell into a relationship. A relationship that existed beyond labels and social titles. You both just went together. And it was as simple as that. As natural as breathing.

That is not to say it wasn't hard sometimes.

Problems arose from the cosmic distance between you two. Conflicts born out of Hobie's obligations as Spiderman and yours to Miles. And yet it wasn't anything you both couldn't work out. It took a lot of self-humbling and vulnerable communication you hadn't thought yourself capable of, but it was all worth it in the end.

So even though you and Hobie lived on two entirely different Earths, in different planes of reality, you still managed to find a way to be together.

You'd go to his universe and support him when he played packed shows in some underground pub, decked out in a patch-filled leather jacket and spikey accessories you had made with him. You’d drank with his mates and proudly screamed the lyrics of every song until your throat felt raw.

Some days, he'd stop by your apartment, and you'd introduce him to everything that had yet to be made in his own universe, particularly the music.

You watched as he combed through your vinyl collection and picked a new album to listen to, how his wicks moved around when he bobbed his head along to the melodic shouts of Mommy Long Legs, the versatile flows of Bad Brains or even the soothing tones of Sweetback.

And there were days like this when conversations lulled, and desire took over. Days when the history between the two of you felt as ancient as the cosmos, vast and full of eons of memory. Like you'd known Hobie longer than you really had. Every touch was well-practiced and well-placed, brewing ecstasy wherever they landed, as though you both had done this same dance a million times before.

Clothes litter the small space of your living room floor. He lays with you astride his hips and his back to the old cushions of your secondhand couch, which creaks noisily underneath your heavy movements. Kisses are stolen in between pants. Your breaths are shared in the small space that exists before your bodies.

Hobie's hands slide up and down the curves of your body, brushing your thin braids from your face, groping at your chest, guiding your hips to keep a steady pace with him. Your combined moans and the wet sounds from your repeated joining create a heady atmosphere that clouds the expanse of your mind.

You sit up and throw your head back when the pleasure becomes too much. Your braids follow the harsh motion like a whip, but you don't register any pain when they slap against your back, too focused on feeding your ravenous need for release.

Your hands press against his abdomen for leverage, your thighs aching when you bounce on him even faster. As his hard cock continues to bully your insides, your walls start to clench tighter around him, a sign that you're close to crossing the line that separates you from complete delirium.

"You feel so good." His voice strangled in his throat, his hips humping upwards toward yours. "Look at how well you're takin' all of me, love. You're soakin' it."

You look down to see the heat in his gaze as he watches the two of you join again and again. The sticky mess of your fluids wet his dick, spreading further and further across his lower half with each smack of your thighs. It makes you grind down harder, your blood pulse even faster, and your breathing grow heavier as your body reaches a plateau.

But what really pushes you over the edge is when his thumb finds your engorged clit, rubbing a series of smooth circles against the tacky skin. It's exactly enough stimulation to help you fall right into the throes of euphoria.

"S-shit, Hobie!"

Your limbs tense and shake as you groan, a mixture of his name and incoherent praises and begs falling from tender lips. You barely notice Hobie finding his release beneath you, his grunts joining your symphony of noises as his hips stutter to a stop, a warmth blossoming from where he's hilted inside of you.

You take a moment to catch your breath and steady the harsh palpitations of your heart. When Hobie gently pulls out of you, you can feel the slow drip of his cum further wet the damp skin of your thighs and his pelvis.

Like always, he's a master of aftercare, cleaning you both up and then helping you dress in fresh clothes. He carries you to your bed despite you insisting you can walk.

And when he lies down beside you and pulls you to lay on his bare chest, you're content as you think of how deeply he's become a part of your life, a part of you.

"I really love you, y'know." You whisper to him, slowly drifting off to sleep.

He presses smiling lips to your forehead in a kiss and somehow pulls you even closer. "I really love you, too."

[dilf-in-peril]

I keep repeating myself but I think when people get mad about the Ric Flair or Ronda Rousey hiring a common comeback is "but what about WWE?" The thing is no one expects better from WWE. WWE is a right wing capitalist venture, which is slow to adapt and unwilling to do so if it doesn't mean making more money (or at least not less). We know this. We're just glad they don't make women do bra and panties matches anymore.

But people expect better from AEW because AEW has intentionally harbored this fresh, young, better image. From Tony Khan going off on Vince for being a sex pest on twitter to the whole grassroots founding ethos, which moves people to such extremes as writing essays that call Punk a "gentrifier" for not getting along with the young wrestlers.

We've been told that AEW is progressive — except they won't book the trans wrestlers on TV, have the worst ratio of women's to men's matches of any company and on top of the reactionaries that already hide in plain sight they now also hired yet another sex pest and a transphobe.

I suppose in a way it's just easier to watch WWE and be surprised when they surpass your low expectations than watch AEW and get disappointed over and over again.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Palestinian liberation is a feminist issue. While this truism should need no elaboration, it has, as with so much that relates to Palestine, necessitated discussions, clarifications, analysis and documentation, again and again. Palestine rights activists have long been familiar with the all too common phenomenon known as PEP: Progressive Except for Palestine. Less known, but no less common in feminist circles is FEP, the Feminist Except for Palestine phenomenon. Books such as Evelyn Shakir’s 1997 Bint Arab recount incidents of FEP going back to the ’60s, with many Arab feminists being shunned by their American friends over their support for Palestinian liberation. FEP had one of its early expressions on a global stage at the 1985 United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya, when Betty Friedan, an icon of second‑wave western feminism, with its slogan ‘the personal is political’, tried to censor the late Egyptian feminist Nawal el‑Saadawi as she was about to walk up to the stage to deliver her address. ‘Please do not bring up Palestine in your speech,’ Friedan told el‑Saadawi. ‘This is a women’s conference, not a political conference.’ Sadly, little has changed in global north feminism’s rejection of the very humanity of the Palestinian people, as evidenced in their continued exclusion from national and global discussions of women’s issues. White feminism has continued to align itself with orientalist imperialist militarism; Ms Magazine cheered the Bush Administration’s US war on Afghanistan in 2001, calling it a ‘coalition of hope’, and suggesting that invasion and occupation could, indeed would, liberate Afghan women. The white feminists in the Feminist Majority Foundation, which bought Ms Magazine in December 2001, never consulted with Afghan feminist organisations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who denounced both religious fundamentalism and western intervention in Afghanistan, and who opposed the US attacks on their country. More recently, hegemonic feminism’s desire to exempt Israel from criticism led to the fragmentation of the Women’s March, the coalition of women’s and feminist groups that came together to denounce the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the US. The co‑chair of the 2017 Women’s March was Brooklyn‑born Palestinian American Linda Sarsour, a grassroots organiser who had long championed Palestinian rights. When journalist Emily Shire asked in the New York Times ‘Does Feminism Have Room for Zionists?’, Sarsour responded with a resounding ‘No’. Many felt threatened by her outspokenness and visibility. Another Palestinian feminist, Mariam Barghouti, also asserted in a 2017 article that ‘No, You Can’t Be a Feminist and a Zionist’, and explained that: ‘When I hear anyone championing Zionism while also identifying as a feminist, my mind turns to images of night raids, to the torture of children and to the bulldozing of homes.’ In the wake of Israel’s latest war on Gaza, white feminists are denouncing the unsubstantiated accusations of sexual violence against Israeli women, without addressing the Israeli state’s amply documented gendered violence against Palestinian women, children, and men. ‘Feminism cannot be selective. Its framework comes from true and absolute liberation not just of women, but of all peoples,’ Barghouti continues, building on bell hooks’ analysis of feminism as a complete liberatory movement. ‘A feminist who is not also anti‑colonial, anti‑racist and in opposition to the various forms of injustice is selectively and oppressively serving the interests of a single segment of the global community.’ Simply, ‘feminism’ that aligns with regimes that engage in racial and ethnic oppression is gendered supremacy; no ideology that hinges on supremacy and discrimination is reconcilable with feminism.

[weepingwitch]

honestly wild that the democratic party acts as an all-consuming black hole for vaguely progressive organizing efforts and energy and funds and bright-eyed young activists,, but the best grassroots campaign message they can find up with is "you are morally obligated to vote for 98% Hitler over 100% Hitler"

[accord-vn]

Major Players in the War Against the Firmament

The Republic of Stauros

The Republic of Stauros is a global superpower that controls the Americas and much of eastern and southern Africa, its imperialist agenda funded by the exploitation of abundant natural resources. This influx of resources means that they have been able to rapidly advance technology, particularly in bio-science, engineering, and materials science fields, and their advanced technology in turn makes for political capital with which they can bully nations into being subsumed by the Republic.

Stauros is a meritocratic oligarchy with republican structures, and presents itself as being a place where the best can rise to the top. It is centrally governed in its capital of Etorios, by a council of (what were originally) six departments that oversee facets of government such as treasury, military, agriculture, etc. These department heads are chosen from among a democratically elected parliament that makes up the upper levels of each department by the previous council. In short, the system rejects change very stubbornly as those who are eligible to lead have been entrenched in the system for a very long time. This entrenchment means that the Republic, while founded on progressive ideals, has now fully embraced the authoritarian streak that has haunted it since its inception.

Most prominent in Stauros's war against the Firmament is the ExoCorps, the executive arm of the Department of the Exterior. The Dept of the Exterior was created in order to protect Stauros's offplanet interests, however in the decades since they have come to rival the power of the Dept of Military, even surpassing it in many instances. The most notable example of this power imbalance is in the ExoCorps' development of Synaptic Transfer technology and the resulting Janissary program.

The Sophic Church

The Sophic Church originated as part of the Third Awakening, a reactionary revival in religiosity coupled with anti-Christian sentiment and strong undercurrents of paranoia brought about by a sharp rise in conspiratorial thought. What were several grassroots Gnostic revival movements came together to form a single ecclesiastical society, united in their desire to dismantle current institutions and build something new. These movements, originally different sects, syncretized their beliefs, though after several decades of transformation, their doctrine has evolved into a largely ahistorical conflation of Valentinianism and Sethianism alongside some entirely new ideas.

The Sophic Church played a key role in the formation of the Republic and rose alongside it, shaping it in the process, and as a result, within Stauros there is a strong presumption that most residents of the Republic are a part of the church.

Naturally, due to this relationship the Church has amassed a large amount of wealth and influence, and has invested this wealth into a number of corporate assets. The most prominent among these is Ascension, a corporation with child companies for mining, manufacturing, logistics, pharmaceuticals, and many other industries.

As a result, the Sophic Church has control over a substantial amount of the economy not just of Stauros, but the rest of the world as well.

The Stereomatos

In 2068, Olympia, Stauros's first permanent Martian research base, collapsed due to mismanagement. Due to the nature of the Stauros Dept of Research's control over the research base, while researchers lived permanent lives on base and even raised families there, leadership was not only appointed from a bureaucracy located on Earth, but also frequently rotated. As a result, most Directors of Operations viewed the position only as a temporary station, and ultimately failed to carry out their duties.

This culminated in 2067, when a failure in the water system caused dozens of people to become ill and 14 deaths. Civil unrest had already started to stir, but now was in full swing.

A nearby ExoCorps detachment was then stationed inside the colony to dissuade uprising, but the additional strain on resources that they caused served only to exacerbate discontentment. Before any violence broke out, the base was declared no longer fit for human habitation and disbanded, its residents either returned to earth or stationed in other colonies. The base was leveled shortly thereafter.

A mere two years later, Synesia was founded on Olympia's ruins. Synesia was intended to serve as a colony and an experiment in autonomous government, as well as a center for Stauros' civic operations offplanet. This quickly expanded into a semi-autonomous satellite state, granted nominal independence by Stauros in return for serving as the governing body for bases and offplanet stations too large and too distant from Earth in order to be effectively managed by a planetary bureaucracy.

In practice, the Stereomatos is a puppet state. Most of its leadership is either beholden or sympathetic to Stauros, and lives under constant threat of dismantlement. Stauros maintains exclusive trading rights with the Stereomatos, and uses the leverage of their monopoly on space infrastructure as means of controlling the nation.

The Firmament

The Firmament is a revolutionary movement across the Stereomatos with the ultimate goal of eliminating Stauros control over space.

The movement is comprised of several cells across both inner sphere and outer sphere colonies and stations, which frequently work together to improve the living conditions of Stereomatos citizens, smuggle goods and resources across planetary boundaries, and wage asymmetric warfare against Stauros.

The Firmament's immediate strategy is to hold Stauros at resource-point through piracy and targeted attacks on military installations so that they'll agree to several key conditions:

The right to self-govern independent of Stauros control, including reforming the government from a parliamentary republic into a syndical state.

Better access to tertiary industry, including the means to utilize synaptic transfer tech

Access to Stauros trade networks in order to carry out trade with other nations with minimal interference

The Stereomatos as a whole may be generally divided in their opinion on the Firmament's methods, however it is an unspoken rule to side with them whenever possible, because the Firmament represents hope for a freer future and an end to overcrowding and military police actions. Even those ideologically opposed tend to avoid speaking out, because the members of the Firmament are ultimately members of their community. A number of Stereomatos politicians have direct connections to Firmament leadership, and work to achieve the movement's aims through diplomatic means.

On Earth, however, the opinion is generally much more divided. Typically the details of their actions are largely reduced to the effect that they've had on Stauros, and are branded terrorists due to civilian casualties from their attacks. Within Stauros, media is sufficiently skewed that those who are aware of them despise them. Outside of Stauros, the Stereomatos is shown more sympathy, and even those who skew more conservative are open to the idea of free trade with the Stereomatos.

Federated Oceania

As climate change ravaged the global south, Aotearoa (formerly New Zealand) successfully pushed back the encroaching ocean with a sea wall, reclaiming additional land in the process. Having secured their new position as a safe haven for climate refugees, they pushed Australia into adopting a similar strategy. As a means of allowing displaced people to retain their sovereignty as well as protect against the threat of a subjugation-hungry Stauros on the horizon, the bloc of Federated Oceania was formed.

With a vested interest in environmental sciences and sustainable energy, Oceania rose to prominence by implementing the first viable fusion reactor and selling off excess energy from successive plants. This paved the way to further successes until it became the non-Stauros leader in technology on a global stage, and served as the first country to challenge Stauros's self-proclaimed "monopoly on space".

As a staunch rival of Stauros, Oceania is one of the few terrestrial nations to openly provide support the Firmament.

The Archon Program

The disappearance of the Caesarea is a mainstay of conspiracy circles system-wide. From independent blogs hosted on the clearnet to chatrooms on planetside LITEs to forums and message boards maintained on Firmnet servers in the belt, no hushed whisper passes through the internet's lips without mentioning its name, and the Caesarea is rarely mentioned without the words "Archon program" in its wake.

However, there is little consensus on what those words mean.  

They say that Archon Program is run by the Dept of the Exterior— no, by the Sophic Church— no, it's the secret Dept of Suppression— as a psyop— actually, it's in order to crush unions (the IPU has NEVER been able to touch Ascension)— no, to serve as a counter to the Firmament's dark matter bomb— and eventually, to dominate the world— utilizing heinous machines that are larger than any Cataphract, that bleed, that drive their enemies and pilots to madness.

When asked for proof, however, the stories converge. A would-be whistleblower from Ascension Aerospace, killed when lightning struck her complex as she was uploading the leak, severing the connection and her life at once. All that was uploaded was the first gigabyte of a single file, titled Archon Program, completely blank except for the image of an A with an ouroboros divided into seven pieces.

Nothing more is known by the public.

[rotzaprachim]

I’m deeply disturbed and horrified by the bds decision on standing together as you can see - no I don’t think they’re a flawless organization, no one is, but I think they’re doing excellent work and I had the privilege of meeting alon lee-green and sally Abed in person years ago. We talked in a small group about some issues they were working to bring people to the table on. One thing I think that’s critical to talk about with standing together but just with radical politics in general is that I think there’s an increasingly large issue with internet leftists who have not had experience with community grassroots work reading the practical praxis and strategies of community grassroots work - no matter how radical - as centrism or aquiescence. But that’s just not how it works. If you want to change peoples’ minds on an issue they have strong feelings about, you can’t label your cause WITH THAT ISSUE. In standing together’s case, the three big issues we talked about were rent hikes, violence against women, and police brutality, all of which they were at that time working to try to being people from different SECTORS of Arab and Jewish society to the table on. The reality is that a lot of the people those damn awful things happening too???? Conservative. Many of the Ethiopian Jewish families whose sons might have issues with the police who they wanted to get to talk to Palestinian families? Voted for Likud. Many of the people experiencing rent hike issues? Ultra orthodox. Many of the women experiencing abuse and even femicide came down a range of conservative relifious backgrounds. It didn’t matter what politics the standing together organizers held- and they are mostly very left wing- what mattered was how they could actively work to meet people where they were at, right now, to get change happening.

Because that’s how community grassroots stuff happens - you recognize that terrible shit happens on scale to people whose politics you might not agree with, and you work to help them anyway. I mention this all because I think the bds decision on standing together was beyond idiotic, but I think the discourse around it actually illuminates a lot of failure to understand grassroots politics in a way that’s really concerning for future serious progressive activism. Because online and IRL I see a lot of throwing around of terms like “mutual aid” and “community activism” and then IRL I’ve noticed leftists who are only interested in community with tiny groups of other leftists who say the same “enlightened” things and have the right anticolonial water bottle stickers or shaved haircuts. The wider community is sheeple and a town hall meeting is only worth going to for one specific issue- agriculture???? Omg that’s useless! And I live in a REALLY politically progressive area, quite a left wing area, it just /looks/ different than us American leftists can understand, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test for blah blah blah. Because I think this attitude is widespread and demotivating, and ultimately it’s a terrible route to imagining change, because all it does is encourage leftist tribalism and make people feel they’ve “found Allies” and “enacted change” without changing anything practical, even at the grassroots level. Because your revolution should come from the love of the people, but the first thing is, you have to love people, as a whole, and that starts with real people, in your life, who might have problems. Because if it isn’t for them who is it for?

[odinsblog]

The Black Lives Matter movement hits a milestone on Thursday, marking 10 years since its 2013 founding in response to the acquittal of the man who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Gunned down in a Florida gated community where his father lived in 2012, Martin was one of the earliest symbols of a movement that now wields influence in politics, law enforcement and broader conversations about racial progress in and outside the U.S.

BLM activists and organizations plan to mark a decade of the movement with in-person and virtual events. Calls to action include a renewed push to defund police departments and reinvest in Black communities that have suffered disproportionately from police brutality, unequal treatment in criminal justice systems and mass incarceration.

In the wake of Supreme Court decisions that stymied relief from student loan debt held disproportionately by Black borrowers and banned affirmative action in higher education, the need for BLM’s existence couldn’t be more clear, said prominent movement activist Melina Abdullah.

“What this movement moment means is that we have to absolutely redouble our efforts and redouble our commitment to making Black lives matter,” said Abdullah, who is a director of BLM Grassroots Inc, a collective of organizers across the country.

“Ten years in, we’re getting a glimpse at what would happen if there were no Black Lives Matter,” she said. “We’re not just going to fight when it’s popular, but we’re going to fight because we need to fight.”

(continue reading)

[sirfrogsworth]

I don't think I've ever been this mad watching a YouTube video.

We keep joking about how everything is going to turn into The Handmaid's Tale but we are pretty much fucking there in Texas.

We need to stop arguing about a presidential race we don't actually have a way of changing. We are wasting so much energy right now.

Biden sucks.

Vote for Biden.

Now that we settled that...

We need to focus our energy on local politics. These are elections we can actually influence and win. All of the horrific anti-trans laws are local. All of the horrific anti-abortion laws are local. We need state reps and mayors and governors. We need to grassroots the shit out of local elections and fundraise for progressive candidates.

If we had local congresses filled with progressive majorities, we'd have to worry much less about a Trump presidency. Yes, he can still do a lot of damage, but almost all of the draconian shit is on a state level right now.

People were giving Biden shit about mask laws. But all of the mask mandates were done at a state level. It's the governors who did that shit.

Focusing solely one one political position is screwing so many marginalized people. If we can elect local reps and school board members and get them some political experience, they can then move on to higher positions. They can build their political cache and go from state to federal. And eventually maybe one of them can even run for and win the presidency.

We are attacking this from the wrong vector. People want instant results and I get that. But the long game is the better strategy. Not to mention the long game allows for long term results. If we build a progressive infrastructure from the ground up, it cannot be toppled by one crazy dipshit.

So, let's think local and get this done, eh?