• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 21st, 2023

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  • Lot of people here need to get informed and get a grip. Just because a bill is introduced doesn’t mean it will be passed. The overwhelming majority of bills that are introduced don’t pass. And this is in one state, not federal. And if the legislature passed it the governor may veto it, and it would certainly face legal challenge.

    I get that everything sucks right now and it feels like we’re getting attacked on every front. I get the administration is doing illegal stuff. We’re in for a rough time. Still: don’t give them power by acting like every idea they bring up is likely, or possible. This bill is just trolling, it’s so some nobody state level legislators will have a bullet point in their newsletter and a social media post.





  • Didn’t things look worse when Nazi Germany was at its height? Didn’t things look worse when slavery was at its height?

    The state of the world has been much worse before, and things still got better.

    We have to acknowledge that a lot of people died, and a lot more were hurt, before things got better. And it may come to that in our times as well. But barring nuclear disaster, things can improve. And one prerequisite is not agreeing to lay down and die.

    Like I said, I get it. Seems like anyone with any real power doesn’t recognize the severity of the situation. Seems like there’s no justice. Are you going to say “no point in trying”? I don’t think so because you wouldn’t be so mad about it if you didn’t care. I don’t have the answer. But believing change is possible is a crucial ingredient in change happening.



  • In the faq section it asks who the leadership is and they say they’re decentralized. It asks who they’re partnered with and says “if you’re interested in partnering reach out”. It asks what are your demands and essentially says “we’ll figure out specifics once we have more people onboard”.

    This website presents itself as a movement, but I would guess is the work of one person or a handful of people, who don’t have experience in this area.

    Which isn’t to say people have to have experience to get involved. And it isn’t to say we don’t have a bunch of valid reasons to be mad and ready to take action. Just that from a strategic standpoint, if you’re asking people to put their livelihoods at risk you need to be able to earn their trust, and you need a clear explanation of what benefit participants can expect to get.






  • I started to read the pdf but stopped. Just a little bit in and it struck me as complicated, and that’s as someone familiar with ranked choice voting, proportional voting, etc. Not that complexity is inherently bad, but when it comes to group decision making, elegant solutions will encourage many people to participate. Complicated solutions will favor people with lots of time or money.

    I also don’t think weighing systems so that certain people have more of a say than others is ideal. It’s true that experts know more than lay people. But there are challenges in identifying and labeling experts, deciding what being an expert in a given subject should mean in terms of more power/influence, and in doing so creating mechanisms for gaming the system.


  • I hear you that it’s tiring and intimidating dealing with fascists. That said I don’t think it’s factual to say they only need to win once, and believing so creates a strategic disadvantage.

    Factually, world war 2 is the classic example of fascists needing to win continually and being unable to do it. The Nazis had a good showing in an election, Hitler was made chancellor and then they used that foot in the door to take over the government and seize many countries. But they lost in the end, and that was a result of resistance, not just militarily but the sum of every individual act of opposition.

    There’s a concept of anticipatory obedience. Corporations and local governments sometimes fell over themselves to do what they thought the fascist government would ask before the actual ask. Even if Trump seized power, that wouldn’t be the end. They need us to cooperate. And by resisting in a concrete way (not just #resist posting of course) we will stop fascism.

    It’s never over. Fascism is destined to lose. It’s a question of how much suffering and injustice can we avoid by defeating it sooner.

    And believing like they want us to believe, that it’s all over, is a strategic disadvantage. If we believe we’re beaten or that victory is impossible we’ll act that way. Believe that we can win, and spread that belief, and we’ll act that way.