Notices by wet forest moon folklorist (seachanger@alaskan.social), page 2

i've read many takes and written a few myself this week. today i think we need to get aggressive about hijacking the democratic party itself. in many places, it's a nothing burger so empty you can walk right in and make it your own. i wish RCV had had a big night last week but it got routed. we may have even LOST our new RCV here in Alaska. so the path to stop Trump is still locked up within the Dems. we just have to also be organizing in fierce coalitions outside of the Dems too

look at how Trump took power. he is completely hostile to the GOP establishment but he did not start his own party. the Tea Party was a movement but not a 3rd party. they used the GOP as a trojan horse. they blew a path through and took the reins. they understood the system, they used it in their favor, and they remade the institution, bringing generational energy and a national political realignment with them.

if they tried to do that via 3rd party they would be handing elections to the Dems

feeling nihilistic is a normal response to the reality of trump taking control of the US, but its not an endpoint (no feelings are). remaining politically nihilist going forward takes intellectual effort, you have to actively convince yourself and others that - in the face of much evidence to the contrary - there is no point in trying to change anything for the better. and at that point you may as well put that exact same amount of effort into literally anything else

i read a short Holocaust memoir in which the survivor remembered how they always thought they'd reached rock bottom, but then it would get worse. that false sense of nowhere left to fall leaves you unprepared for what's next.

so for those of you dooming out & saying we lost, its hopeless, i mean, be careful what you wish for. very possible we could look back at this moment 8-10 years from now and realize how much freedom we actually had to change things

"In politics you can’t fight something with nothing.

The Democratic Party needs to determine which side it is on in the great economic struggle of our times, and it needs to provide a clear vision as to what it stands for.

Either you stand with the powerful oligarchy of our country, or you stand with the working class.

You can’t represent both."

https://archive.ph/cUjeJ#selection-2027.0-2039.179

yes I hope bluesky replaces twitter, I’m also aware that bluesky is in its VC-funded phase of trying to replace its entire perceived market and especially any ideological competitors. the pattern is well understood if not well known: domination over cooperation, hype over honesty, vagueness that serves capital, well paid worker/boosters who are very high on their own supply

mastodon is dorky. the fediverse is full of failed experiments and interesting research. we are always talking about what sucks and how to change it. small groups get together and make recommendations or shift patterns or create models others can use. we fight the same -isms here as in the society at large. progress moves slowly, we’re always wondering if it’s even possible. this is all very *human*

I’ve become interested in social change that gets to the root of patterns of power and capital. change that is fundamentally creative, not at the scale of VC, but at the scale of human relationships.

trumps win has only amplified this impulse in me: start very small and slowly build up from there, centering values of love and compassion. to scale, network with other folks doing the same thing in different ways

we have hulu for a month so apparently i'm watching all of abbott elementary. what else should i not miss on there

my stepsister and I joked about tattooing the 2016 primary polling match ups against trump on our foreheads. Maybe this was in deference to a photo I was sharing of a disheveled white guy holding a piece of corrugated cardboard at a caucus on which he’d scribbled, in failing old dude handwriting, the same numbers. he was walking around a caucus trying to get people to see:

sanders beats trump, hillary doesn’t. this was known in early 2016. many of us were not surprised at all in November 2016

our parents, having parasocial relationships with msnbc stars, could not hear us. my stepsister, older and wiser, chose to avoid discussing it. but I had ugly arguments with them. I couldn’t believe that my single mom had raised me barely above the poverty level, working as she did in social services as Clinton attacked the poor, took me to a rural jesse jackson rally as a child, but then fell under hillary clinton’s spell so deeply that we couldn’t even discuss the polls realistically

it was at the very start of sanders campaign, in 2015, when I first noticed that msnbc had shown the wrong number on a match up graphic. I’d gone and looked up the poll and the cross tabs and compared with my screenshot and there it was, they were literally lying to their audience! sanders was on fire but the cnn/msnbc set was being propagandized with a different version of reality

we live in a country with a brutal history currently being brutalized by billionaires. contemporary liberalism, aligned with the ever aggrandizing forces of late stage capitalism, sells people the idea that they can check out of our history, out of this abject mess of a country, and let the experts handle it. buy a bigger tv and a nicer car on credit, your political participation is only needed for 5 min every 4 years and shame on you if you don’t show up or if you don’t vote blue no matter who

why did people start going to bernie sanders rallies en masse to hear him repeat the same shit over and over? because someone, anyone, in the national electoral arena was finally cutting the bullshit and calling our situation as he saw it, which was very similar to how we were living it.

a movement of self-organizing groups of people united by a simple story and our lived experience came together and it wasn’t work to organize for that campaign, it was sheer pleasure

@MrEdgarBass except those motherfuckers are not resigning — they’re going on tv to blame the base lol

@MrEdgarBass Pelosi etc are working very hard to hand the baton to young sycophants - change will *never* come from the top of the Dem party down

there is a path for local people to hijack it from the bottom up

@MisuseCase @MrEdgarBass it means they used an undemocratic process to determine a winner - Obama and Clyburn made moves, moves counter to the direction the base was headed and voting - Sanders first, Buttigieg second at the time of the power play

Fuck around and find out

@mekkaokereke there IS effectively an infinite supply, I always think of them as droid soldiers coming over a hill. you could totally exasperate yourself defeating each one only to succumb to another wave of fresh reply guys seconds later

at this point i feel like i can pretty accurately predict someone's politics based on their media diet (including youtube and socials). its an indictment on how little we talk politics irl with people outside our own worldviews, and how deeply we absorb political frames from our intimate, personal relationship with screens

its easier for the right to coalesce around a common narrative because capitalism is so compatible with fascism. we're fractured and don't share fundamental narratives on the left, because would-be coalition members get invisible pro-capital political frames from MSNBC and legacy media. these invisible frames, i think, are one of the primary reasons the Dems have been able to lead us off a cliff.