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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneWait no rule
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    5 hours ago

    I’ve been a bad, bad little boy. I haven’t achieved any of the goals on my five-year plan. My gym membership has lapsed and I don’t think I’ve done any laundry in over three weeks.

    What are you going to do about it? French maid’s outfit? Very kinky. And… degreaser? A sponge? Okay, what are we planning here? These are not the sexiest rubber gloves. Why are you pointing me towards the oven like that?



  • There are a million non-violent ways to oppose authoritarianism such as boycotts, labour strikes, voting blocs, etc. but since they involve at least some amount of effort and inconvenience no one (in the USA, at least) wants to do them.

    These economic levers typically need a critical mass of participation. And one way to get that participation is via buy-in from the government (regulation) or capital (BSD). Random people refusing to shop at Starbucks doesn’t mean much. But when a location is shut down for violating ordinances or because the landlord kicks them out, that’s a material hit to their pocketbook the owners can’t ignore.

    Rallying that critical mass of support is difficult and frustrating. I’ve heard more than one organizer describe it as “herding cats”. This isn’t a trivial issue of inconvenience or effort. It requires an industrial scale of activism.

    However, by wanking about a revolution that you know will never come you can claim to be on the right side of history while still taking the path of least resistance in every way that matters.

    “The Revolution” is a critical mass of critical mass events. Its something you can only really talk about in hindsight, because it requires a bunch of constantly moving social parts to kinda line up at the right moment and move in the right direction together.

    Revolutions aren’t uncommon. Large institutional shifts in composition, function, and ideology happen regularly. But they’re a lot easier when the people executing them already have a bunch of institutional controls to operate. “Wanking” often feels like the only thing you can do, because you’re so cut out of the so-called democratic process.


  • I mean, I volunteer with Food Not Bombs, and their politics is well to the left of the DSA. But if you ask them what their accomplishments are, its a pretty straightforward “We feed the homeless people that the police would rather see starved to death”. That’s it. Every week, getting out and distributing food, even if people get arrested for it.

    Now, there’s definitely other people who just spend all their days shitposting and doing nothing else of consequence. But they’re not typically the people I meet in person when I’m out trying to make my neighborhood a better place.








  • Delivering swift and terrible justice to the gaggle of sociopaths and bigots that have channeled our collective wealth into institutionalized misery is cool and good.

    But the wealth building doesn’t come from taking a few bourgeois fucks out back to the wood chipper. Real wealth means building real infrastructure and bureaucracy that can sustain and improve the lives of your neighbors. I see a lot of progressive-ish folks who cheer guys like Luigi and whatisface the Charlie Kirk guy, then frown at the state bureaucrats in the AES states of Cuba and Venezuela and Sankara-era Burkino Faso. They lose track of the fact that the folks running the literacy programs and maintaining the train lines and working their way through the medical schools are doing 1000x more for their comrades than some vigilante in a western hellhole who got his lick in.