I’m sorry for coming so hard at you specifically, I like you a lot friend owl. You are funny and cheerful and I appreciate that, but I radicalized a lot younger than most people I know of and this is just the reality I have been experiencing for my whole life.

I am always looking for some light at the end of this tunnel, a hopeful answer to give, but I think what’s most likely to happen to empire now would be like what happened to Rome: the population dwindles — due to endless war & mass death, fleeing — until there is nothing left to churn through and things cease to function. Even that is optimistic. I do not put it above this country to blow the world up before that can happen, and regardless of anything else further pandemics are guaranteed as the global population’s immune systems get cumulatively destroyed by endless COVID and other unknown pathogens emerging due to increasing climate disasters altering the environment. Tuberculosis was thought to be, essentially, gone; it is now surging around the country in numbers not seen for something close to the last century. In all cases, the prognosis is still extremely dire to me. I don’t know how one can see what’s happening around them and deny it. We can and should build ad-hoc collectives and communities and extend that influence where we can, but I do not think that power extends beyond this small footprint until the complete and total collapse of empire, and I know that’s not a good answer, but until I find a better one (and I haven’t yet; I really, really am trying) then that is how I predict things playing out. This is the most optimistic thing I can say.

That doesn’t mean do nothing. Like I said, I still fight because I do not know how else to live. But god damn it am I sick of hearing this sentiment from “leftists” whose first taste of anything was Bernard fucking Sanders eight years ago. “Just organize”, “touch grass doomer”, “get involved with your community, lib” ad nauseum.

I mean, you can wear a mask and organise.

Let me tell you how well that’s going, because I actually have done this!

They call me a wrecker. They call me a fed. They tell me COVID is over, it’s just a cold, and I am overreacting. Only sometimes do they say they will accommodate, and then they still don’t. I show up to demonstrations & events I was promised would be “fully masked”, “masking enforced”, and there are no masks on any faces; there is no enforcement of anything. At best, single digit numbers among 40, 50 people, on average for the kinds of things I try to attend. Anything larger? Hell the fuck no they won’t. And this is in one of the most “progressive” cities in the country!

This is a thought-terminating cliche at this point.

Listen. I’ve been organizing, agitating, doing anything at all that I can for nearly two decades in this shitheap of a country. Do you know what I have to show for it? Piles of corpses and social murder galore. I got a world that is happy to tell me to get bent every time I have the displeasure of committing such a radical act as walking to the fucking grocery store. It’s not going to get better. @Diuretic_Materialism@hexbear.net is basically correct. After witnessing the general population’s COVID response, their response to ongoing genocide, the absolute bipartisan (universal!) public health collapse, and living in this atomized, individualistic hell for nearly four decades now, I have complete confidence in saying this. We should take advantage of this specific moment? Not a global fucking pandemic? Not an ongoing genocide? Not centuries of racism, slavery, poisoning of native lands, the earth we all share? None of this has been what makes us failures, apparently, but a Trump victory that everyone is replaying 2016 for is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, what really makes us dumbasses for failing to capitalize? We fail to capitalize because this population does not want it. Tell my immunocompromised, disabled ass to self-crit over this, whatever. I’ve done plenty. I’ll fight til there’s nothing left because I don’t know anything else, but you cannot make me have hope. I hate all of these people too.

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Thank you. It really is a matter of approach and hardening my information it seems, then, and maybe even accepting that reaching everybody might not be possible, which is something I am still learning to manage and probably always will be.

But that’s what I mean — is it really not doing harm if me, a white person, tells a Black person who says something like “this is all the fault of you people who didn’t vote for the Black woman” they’re wrong, actually? Because this is a real life thing I’ve encountered, and something my partner did too, and I feel like I just don’t know how to tactfully handle this. I know the correct stance, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are frustrated POC who are not looking for two white girls to tell them they’re wrong even if they are. I feel like this is not my fight, but at the same time, if there’s no one else to do it…I dunno. I gotta say something, right? But do I actually?

I have come across a somewhat uncomfortable scenario more than once this past week that I need some advice on from non-white folks here as a white woman in real-world organizing/activist spaces that do not necessarily lean very far left. I do not know how to approach BIPOC folks in these spaces (or even just in the general public I’ve encountered) espousing the virtues of voting Kamala Harris. I feel like @Angel@hexbear.net’s response to this in here is absolutely the correct perspective, but…is that even my place to say? I do not want to tell any non-white person how to express their frustrations and especially not as a white person, but…voting for Kamala was not it. It was never going to be it. I heard the same things back in the Obama days, too, and we have the benefit of hindsight now to tell us how poorly that goes. But I feel like I can’t be the one to say it. Is that the correct way to handle stuff like this? I feel very stuck.

This website is going to suck so much ass for the next few weeks

I have a t480 with the added battery and the thunderbolt dock for my desk and it’s great. Whatever you put on it these were the last computers built like this and it shows.

https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/01.wnl.0001051276.37012.c2

Findings indicate an association between acute COVID-19 rates and increased car crashes with an OR of 1.5 (1.23-1.26 95%CI). The analysis did not find a protective effect of vaccination against increased crash risks, contrary to previous assumptions. The OR of car crashes associated with COVID-19 was comparable to driving under the influence of alcohol at legal limits or driving with a seizure disorder.

pretty easy to explain imo

If I could afford a couple I’d wear a bunch of ushankas around and I don’t care if it’s cringe they’re cool hats!

tysm for this comrade floppa

the very concept of solidarity becomes untenable as an organizing principle

This is where I’m at, yeah. How can you sit here and tell me this population has any solidarity with me, any revolutionary potential at all when they excuse genocide? When they don’t wear masks because “their guy” said so? Say climate change is all right because “I didn’t like snow anyway”? The social fabric is pretty rapidly being undone and it’s all I can do to just cope with it; there is no fixing this without massive, sweeping cultural change and we can’t (won’t) even do the bare minimum.

to be honest I’ve kind of given up. I’ve spent nearly every day of the last 5 years constantly agitating in every social group I’ve been a part of in hopes of getting them to care any little bit at all about COVID — to speak nothing of all the rest of the very valid crises you mention — and none of them listen. None. They laugh at me. They spit (intentionally coughing) on me. They don’t say it, but their actions tell me to disappear, mortally or otherwise. I have two friends remaining of a previously not-insignificant social circle because all the rest abandoned me to catching COVID from them on repeat. There has to be a point when you realize you’ve lost and I think I’ve hit it. The reaction has won. I can’t do it anymore. I’m devoted to surviving and that’s it. I gave almost 20 years of my life mired in poverty, disability, and immense hardship to activism, learning, being involved where I’m able in trying to help these people and not a damn bit of it mattered, because in the end they all think they’re God and they won’t take no for an answer. All I have left to say is you won’t catch me crying when the chickens come home to roost.

Fair enough; I am not a parent nor a teacher, so I’m willing to say this is not my wheelhouse. To my knowledge the idea of a prolonged summer break like that is not such a popular concept in other countries than the US so I believe when you say there is a concern, I just wish everyone was consistent instead of this mealy-mouthed crap where we ignore the massive elephant in the room for, I don’t know, a tapir or something, and then it’s not even all the tapirs in the room!

Kids lose progress just from not receiving instruction over spring break.

We don’t see articles hand-wringing about this for years after the fact, though. There is no one saying that the whole three months (!!!) every year that kids are out of school for summer is harming their development.

the real beauty of living in late-stage capitalism is that sooner or later it’s all a dead end!

The industry is very, very bad right now. I have done software dev for close to 15 years and I’ll be two years unemployed in January. I don’t know how much of this can be attributed to my very specific medical needs but I can say for a fact that I have had these needs longer than I have been of working age and I have never had this much trouble finding a job before even just cold calling and never, ever as someone with my current level of experience. I genuinely don’t know what to tell people looking to break in. Keep at it as long as you can, and if you can’t, I don’t blame you.

Unsurprisingly this one seems absent from your curriculum.

Last year I went to a small themed party as this pokemon. I used a white dress, green petticoat & green gloves, a masquerade mask, white N95 and a green wig styled to a bob. It came out beautifully and for very cheap. I got so many compliments. Masks are already part of so many costumes, there is no reason they can’t work for lots of ideas.