#activism 101

[many-sparrows]

If you want to advocate but can't protest, are under voting age, want to do more, whatever, my roommates and I made a bunch of solidarity stickers. Palestinians are begging us to not look away, to force awareness-- we made these to easily and quickly stick up everywhere that people might see them. I'm talking Starbucks windows, light poles, crosswalks, electrical boxes, street signs, bus stops etc to keep this on people's minds. They also make easy post cards-- stick one on an index card and mail it to congress.

I bought 150 mailing labels from Staples for about $15, but you could also use scrap paper and clear packing tape. I also tried to use some different phrasing-- a lot of people shut down when they read "free Palestine" or "from the river to the sea" so I tried to bypass the "pOLiTiCaL" angle and appeal to the humanitarian one.

Also also, if you want to contribute and have some time, sending physical mail to representatives is a good thing to do. For this issue, it doesn't even have to be long or complicated letters, it can literally just be a note that says "cease fire now xoxox, your constituent, [name]" or whatever. It can be easy to ignore Twitter and brush off voicemails left with their staffers, it's time to get stuff in their desk.

[nappingpaperclip]

btw when organizing events it’s absolutely your duty to make sure all of your events and the attendees are safe & inclusive as possible.

Learning how to redirect and keep everyone safe is important, and so is encouraging positive change and inclusivity in your activism.

Don’t fall to defeatism and don’t allow racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, or any other kind of hate and intolerance in your space.

Luckily, most people you meet will be incredibly kind, but it’s important for organizers and even attendees to learn how to deal with so y’all will be prepared.

Look into de-escalation training and plan with safety and inclusivity in mind.

Also always wear a mask! Covid safety is community care. Immunocompromised people want to get involved too so make it a priority not to get them killed, ok?

[myimaginationplain]

It kind of fucks me up to see some people come out of watching RGU having absorbed absolutely nothing of what the show has to say about patriarchy, misogyny, & queerphobia, outside of "men bad, lesbian good." Which like.....sure, I guess? in the absolute barest sense, I suppose RGU is partially about that.

But if this show's thesis were really as simple as "lesbian good," then Juri & her role as an antagonist on the mini patriarchy that is the Student Council would simply not exist at all. Juri would've won all the duels, kicked Akio in the nuts, freed Anthy, & ridden away into the sunset with Shiori in her arms before Utena even showed up if that were the case. But she obviously didn't do any of that despite being a lesbian, so there must be something more complicated at work here.

A lot of RGU's narrative is dedicated to deconstructing binary social systems & the ways in which they harm those trying to and/or being forced to fit within one of two narrow boxes; man vs woman, adult vs child, princess vs witch, prince vs devil, special vs not special, romantic vs platonic, etc. So for someone to watch all of that beautiful complexity, only to filter it through yet another essentialist binary...sucks, to say the least.

[spookyradluka]

“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female.’”

—Erin McKean

[iwozlegit]

Excuse me, Sir-!

Sir-!

Fucking S I R !

[lonestarflight]

Space Shuttle Enterprise on top of the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, NASA 905, as they land at the Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California following the first captive-active flight of the Approach and Landing Tests (ALT-9).

Commemorative stamp from Rockwell International

Date: June 18, 1977

NASA ID: ECN 6828, C-1977-2303

source

[concerto-roblox]

this is all such fucking bullshit. this morning i got a letter from my mp bc i emailed them abt the ceasefire before the vote and it basically said "we said no to a ceasefire because hamas said they won't do it, but the civilian casualties in gaza cannot continue!!" you know what would stop them from continuing?? a fucking ceasefire you sacks of shit.

[morninkim]

In 1999, the speedster known as The Flash began fighting crime in Central City, Oregon, combining the inspiring presence and gentle demeanor of Superman with the facts-driven and logical mind of Batman.

Later that same year, Coast City, California would get its own hero in the Green Lantern, a cocky man who claimed to be an officer from an intergalactic peacekeeping force assigned to this sector of space.

2003 would see the appearance of the Green Arrow, a Robin Hood-like figure who would target and expose corrupt officials in Star City, Washington and surrounds.

Though not as notable as The Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, the three Heroes of the West Coast would be instrumental and important in the Silver Age of Superheroes.

[ivygorgon]

AN OPEN LETTER to THE U.S. SENATE

Women deserve equal pay! Pass S. 728, the Paycheck Fairness Act now!

393 so far! Help us get to 500 signers!

Women—especially women of color—are the backbone of our nation’s economy. But they are consistently underpaid and their work is undervalued. Action on equal pay is sorely needed to address these inequities, but Republican Senators have blocked vital legislation, S. 728, the Paycheck Fairness Act, that would achieve critical progress. The median annual earnings for women working full time, year-round in 2022 was $52,360, or just 84 cents for each dollar earned by men, with much wider gaps for most women of color compared with white, non-Hispanic men. All women—regardless of the number of hours worked during the year—typically made $41,320, or 78 cents for each dollar earned by all men. Discrimination is one of the factors contributing to this gap, leading to thousands of dollars in lost wages for women over the course of their careers. That’s why we need the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would strengthen existing equal pay protections, prohibit retaliation against workers who discuss their pay or challenge pay discrimination, limit employers’ reliance on salary history, and much more. These robust measures would bring us one step closer to equal pay. Women and families cannot afford to wait for equal pay. We need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act now.

▶ Created on April 3 by Jess Craven · 393 signers in the past 7 days

📱 Text SIGN PWBBDA to 50409

🤯 Liked it? Text FOLLOW JESSCRAVEN101 to 50409

[dysaniadisorder]

i hate how normalized military is in the us im gonna rip my hair out

[dipperdesperado]

i'm not sure about dialectical materialism...

I spend a lot of time talking about strategies and frameworks for IRL worldbuilding. This can be a bit problematic for a lot of reasons. I’ll start by looking at two: a “democratic centralist” ideological lineage that I disagree with, and a different, more insurrectionary response to that tendency. Now, that is something I have much more respect for, but don’t see it as being able to carry the torch the whole way.

I am someone who sees the importance and benefits of strategic thinking but also understands the negation-oriented spontaneity of uprisings, direct actions, and isolated confrontations. I don’t want (nor do I think it’s possible for) those things to stop, but I want them to be as effective as possible. This means that more people need to become collaborative and autonomous (in the self-directed, can-make-decisions-for-themselves sense). We have to organize around this, and we need a strategy so that we can both make it happen and iterate more successfully.

That’s all I’ll say about that section of things. Anti-organization/anti-strategic folks are dope, but they can’t get us all the way. The best case is that they widen the spaces for autonomy to flourish. The main thing I want to focus on is people who strategize and organize in a centralized way. I’m going to discuss dialectical materialism as it is conceived, and why I think that it blows.

Let’s talk about dialectics and materialism separately for a bit. Dialectics is a way to think about the world, a kind of mental model builder, that allows one to analyze tensions (or contradictions) in society and resolve them in a way more satisfactory than either choice. It is an undergirding idea that can animate further thoughts. Materialism, meanwhile is that the material world/reality itself is what promotes history and social development. Ideas aren’t what make history move, it’s the material conditions. So, the way that they are combined, becoming the philosophy of dialectical materialism is meant to be a framework to allows us to understand and critique society so that we can make it more liberatory.

Dialectical materialism is an idea that I’ll mostly attribute to Stalin that sees social change and history through understanding contradictions and material circumstances. It’s meant to understand the base of society, which is the economic mode of production, and the superstructure, which is everything that is birthed from that economic mode of production. So things like culture, art, ideology, etc. Base = economics, Superstructure = the rest of the pieces of society. Got it?

While this may sound great, dialectical materialism as a framework has some glaring blind spots. People don’t act purely from a place of rationality or determinism based on their conditions. Said otherwise, you cannot look solely at material conditions and understand why the world is why it is, or why people act the way that they do. We have to dialectically (ha) look at the tension between materialism and idealism, analyzing both of their places in the world. With this in mind, the way that dialectics are bundled with materialism (creating the philosophy of dialectical materialism) claims scientific rigor without proving it through a relationship of experimentation and iteration. There isn’t enough empirical evidence to support this conception of dialectical materialism.

It leaves me to question whether or not a more holistic, systems & complexity-oriented method/philosophy can surpass dialectical materialism. Complexity theories, namely the ideas of self-organization, emergence, chaos, and entropy are exciting and interesting ways to see how social change works. Rather than a simple machine, societies are complex adaptive systems that are more than just resolving tensions between contradictions. A useful mental model builder is DSRP (Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives) structures. Distinctions are about looking at the elements/agents within a system, where identifying one element implies the existence of other elements. Systems are an understanding whole that necessitates parts. Relationships are the actions and reactions between the other structures (Distinctions, Systems, other Relationships, and Perspectives). Perspectives are specific positions/points, implying a view. Using DSRP, we can construct models of systems and understand them on a holistic level, rather than reducing the fidelity of our analysis to our detriment. DSRP, similarly to dialectical materialism, is a fractal tool, creating as little or as much fidelity as we would like in our models.

I think that the most damning thing for dialectical materialism is a lack of understanding of how power functions within both the base and the superstructure, influencing and steering social forces. Power is a relationship between both people and their positions within a society. By not questioning the form that power takes (power-over vs. power-to vs. power-with), it cannot actually resolve the contradictions within society meaningfully. It undermines the whole project. We need to unpack the multifaceted nature of inequality, relating to all of the vectors that identity exists (race, gender, ability, sexuality, etc.) and seeing their relation to the structure as both of and from that structure. How social discourses, institutions, and practices reinforce matrixes of domination is very important to understand.

But maybe this doesn’t mean that we fully discard dialectics and materialism. I see them as something that can complement complexity theory and a liberatory power analysis. Dialectics are a great way to look at shifting terrains and sites of struggle, based on our understanding of the complex adaptive system of society. We also need to understand the material world, which benefits from a holistic scientific framework like understanding complexity. Ecosystems (a descriptive, holistic science) are a much more useful touchstone for understanding society than physics (a prescriptive, reductionist science). Oppressive ideas come from material conditions and are shaped by power structures. We could critically employ dialectical materialism to get a fuller picture, but that comes from being in concert with other tools.

Instead of fully abandoning it, we can integrate some of the most useful insights from dialectics and materialism, blending them into more modern systems analysis and theories of power. This has to be done in concert with those marginalized by society. Fuddy-duddies are the ones who have bungled everything, so it’s time to pass the torch. If we can do this, if we can empower the folks on the furthest margin, they will be able to emancipate themselves with a theory that simultaneously facilitates a building of dual power, contesting oppressive power, and ushering in a new world.

[spookyradluka]

"Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity."

How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley

[aronarchy]

https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1343704323302178817

The Revolution Starts at Home, and So Does the Revolutionary.

How to Find Our Place in the Struggle for Liberation: A Thread

[image ID: a series of concentric circles. The centermost circle is labeled with the text “You.” The next circles around it are labeled, in order from innermost to outermost, “Your relationships,” “your workplace,” “Your neighborhood,” and “Your town/city.” /end image ID]

What I’ve pictured above is an example of how you might map your various spheres of influence. Many of us become awakened to join the struggle and want to leap headfirst into radically changing our entire city, but don’t know how to even start.

My suggestion: start with understanding and mapping out what is in your personal reach. What is in your greatest ability to change/influence? Begin there. By strengthening that sphere, you will build your power to influence and strengthen others.

You: you have the most power to change yourself. Attend to your own internal contradictions. Unlearn the toxicity taught to you by Empire. Learn the history of struggle. Figure out your values, discover how to act in integrity to those values.

You → Your relationships: When you strengthen your own sense of your values, when you build your understanding of history, when you learn how to speak to those values and to challenge Empire’s propaganda, you will better be able to bring that into your relationships.

Your relationships: Family, friends, partners, co-workers, classmates, neighbors, etc. You have the most influence and impact with those closest to you. Challenge their oppressive understandings. Offer new possibilities. Practice healthy communication and accountability together.

Your relationships → Your workplace: When you strengthen your relationships and communally build up shared values and with them shared power, you can bring that power to bear on larger social spaces and collectively affect the conditions of those spaces.

Your workplace: shorthand for anyplace you engage with a larger community. Your work, your school, the place you volunteer, etc. A space that structurally holds power in your community, and thus takes significant collective power to change or disrupt. Use your relationships of shared values you’ve built to apply pressure within the range of those collective relationships. With coworkers, that might be unionizing or starting a co-op. With fellow organizers, that might mean changing the goals/standards/practices of an org. What you can do here is entirely dependent on the relationships you have. What does your collective power allow you to begin doing that you otherwise could not have done alone? Be creative, there are so many avenues where one might apply collective power in the struggle.

Your workplace → Your neighborhood: Building new ways to relate to one another in the work we do, as well as finding ways to work together under our shared values can free up all involved to reach further into the community and use collective resources to affect it.

Your neighborhood: shorthand for a sphere of influence beyond a single workplace. This can mean helping build larger networks of worker co-ops or unions. Or organizing actual neighborhoods to resist gentrification. Similar to the workplace, what you can do within your “neighborhood” is dependent upon the smaller organizations of people within them, which are dependent on the relationships within them, which are dependent on who the individual people are within them.

Your neighborhood → Your town or city: Building up large networks of communal power under shared values is what allows for change on a larger scale. This is what allows for autonomous zones to be built, or general strikes to be called, that can affect a much larger social space.

Your town or city: You can meaningfully and sustainably begin to change large swaths of the social landscape by building communal power and understanding the specific context of that landscape. Learn where power can be most effectively leveraged with the least cost. Use your collective knowledge to root out the spaces where the power of Empire is weakest, and also where your collectivity is the strongest. Build Dual Power—strategic direct action against Empire on one hand and new mutual aid based infrastructure on the other.

This is all an single example and should be treated as such. What I am suggesting here is not that everyone must follow this exact formula, but the opposite. What is within range varies person to person, community to community, and that’s a GOOD thing.

There is too much shame flying around about what is or isn’t “real” revolutionary work. Not every person/group needs to amass enough power to engage in city-scale direct action. What’s important is that everyone be engaging in the struggle within their range as best as they can.

Your range might only ever extend to yourself and your relationships, and that is still valuable work! For every person connected to the struggle, we have a whole other set of ranges and power to build upon, and that’s what revolutions are made of.

All that, imo, liberatory work asks of us is for us to be honest and accountable to what is in our range, do our best to strengthen it outward. That is inherently going to look different for everyone, and that can make us all collectively powerful.

Also, you need not make yourself the perfect revolutionary before you work on your relationships, nor do your relationships need to be perfect before you reach out into your workplace or neighborhood. We ALL are constantly working on building up everything within our range.

The point is that the more you build yourself up, the better you’ll be able to show up in your relationships. The more you build up the people in your life, the more you’ll be able to collectively act in your larger community. But this work can and does happen simultaneously.

As the saying goes, many hands make short work, and all that we need from each other is that we work within our power as best as we can. If we establish this as our communal expectation, revolution will be sure to follow.

Thanks for reading.

Love and Solidarity ✊💚

[lonestarflight]

"The Space Shuttle Enterprise is mounted atop a NASA 747 carrier aircraft on the runway of the Edwards Air Forces Base in southern California after the third captive-active flight (CA-3) of the Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests (ALT). CA-3 was a full dress rehearsal for the shuttle's first free flight the following month, and the pilots were Fred Haise and Charles Gordon Fullerton."

Note: the R4D and Mini-Sniffer in foreground.

Date: July 26, 1977

NASA ID: EC77-8143

1157145138

[starfishlikestoread]

national rail one day. one day you will pay for your sins.

[pinkeoni]

S** L******* is not a good director