Notices by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ (richpuchalsky@mastodon.social)

@cwebber

JFC both religion and marital status are not immutable and they are recognized discrimination categories in the US

@MediaActivist

I've read a good deal of the "neither optimism nor pessimism" literature and I think it's just as bad as the previous "if only we could find the right words to communicate" literature. It's policing people's emotions rather than addressing the actual facts of what's going on, which are that voters and consumers have no power as voters and consumers and have to become something else.

@MediaActivist

What's wrong with exacerbating doom-and-gloom thinking? Kids should learn what's actually going on without delusive "resources for support", until they overthrow the entire edifice that their elders built.

@cwebber

I will never play CDDA because the tutorial showed how I needed a recipe in order to put peanut butter in between two saltines

Periodic self-repetition: for global problems, individual volunteer actions do not help. All they do is convince people who might have otherwise done something useful that something is being done. Even all of the communal lowered demand of the Covid era did not really change anything, since the same industries kept going afterwards.

Now we are in something that may really help! A supply shock which causes worldwide conversion to solar / batteries.

#climate
#IranWar

@PhoenixSerenity

We wanted large sheets of cardboard to kill weeds and the best source of them is bike shops, who always have a lot of huge empty boxes in a dumpster. The one near us has a locked dumpster but they were happy to have us carry away the cardboard and they let us borrow the key.

@abolisyonista

back then people generally understood what you had to do to make progress on anything

@violetmadder

"I'm not sure what's going on" isn't theory, though, it's part of being a responsible adult. Theory is supposed to serve practice and lead to changes in our situation.

@abolisyonista

@bruces

I'm sure that he could crash-land something on the Moon, hail it as the physical start of a new city, and extend the grift for another few years.

@abolisyonista

This does bring up the question of why critical theory really needs to exist. Is revealing and describing ambiguity really at all valuable or useful? It seems like ambiguity is always fairly plentiful and descriptions of it are themselves ambiguous.

#Texas is becoming a world center for the largest polluters and for concentration camps where children are imprisoned and die.

But don't criticize the people of Texas! It's not their fault that they live under a democracy and can elect the leaders that presumably represent their values. They are victims.

https://www.texasobserver.org/developer-gw-ranch-pecos-county-largest-power-project-us/

@abolisyonista

"Can people actually do it or not" is far down the chain of questions about why this might not be good. Another one is "do factories even matter in this society, are they actually more than a marginal source of power for the ruling class".

@abolisyonista

Every contemporary protest in my society interrupts circulation / commerce, not production. Is everyone wrong? Possible but not that likely.

@revoluciana

It's so annoying that a large % of journalists and academics moved there. I still have to read it for climate stuff.

A video of uncertain provenance showing an elderly Hmong man being arrested by ICE in sub-zero weather, wearing very little.

The Hmong in Minnesota are there because they were US allies in Vietnam. People should remember: never be a US ally. The US will not remember.

@abolisyonista

Social democrats are still trying, with projects like Norway's oil fields. Since these projects take something that everyone agrees is evil when capital does it and claims that it's not when "the people" do it, I think that they are not good in themselves. The left is supposed to provide an alternative to capitalism not a justification for it.

@inthehands

"violence is instigated by cops and/or provocateurs" is not a good idea. When the police station burned down that was not a bad thing.

@adamr

I have a Masters (in astrophysics), have been tangentially involved in academia throughout a working life, and I am here to tell kids that what they are being taught has no value to adults other than to keep them in line and is forced on them by the system.

@futurebird

@futurebird

i think that there should be a social expectation that young people should learn, and that adults should not be able to prevent children from learning. But as an anarchist of course I think that the state should end, as well as a state mandated system of education.

@adamr

@futurebird

Quite possible! (Anarchists are not really big on the church either.) But communities can build schools and staff them without a church organization, or young people can learn through one-on-one teaching from adults.

When looking at bad possible alternatives we have to compare them with what actually exists, not the ideal of what is supposed to exist.