this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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me_irl
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Country? That's a dumb limiting thing. Why stop there? Why bind yourself with borders that will never be a tool of virtue?
Sure, that's the goal, but honestly, even the country is far too big to start. Getting the ball rolling at a city or maybe even a small town level would probably be best, then build in people from surrounding towns to get it up to county size, then state, the country, then continent, then world. Trying to build the final stage as step 1 is just making a hard task harder. People like to join an existing movement rather than feel like they're starting from scratch, and getting a few people to work together to start is a lot easier than millions.
But the idea of working on their organizing units is insane unless you're trying to be them its not like I don't talk yo people around the world every day
That's why you start small. A country of people won't join a small-town movement, but they'll be a lot more likely to join an existing country-sized movement. It's a snowball effect. Not sure if you've ever lived somewhere cold enough to actually roll up a snowball, but it only grabs a small amount of snow compared to the size of the ball when you roll it.
A small ball won't pick up a lot of snow, but it will pick up enough to grow into a larger ball that picks up comparatively more snow to grow larger and pick up comparatively more snow, and so on. It doesn't take long until you're picking up clumps of snow several times larger than the initial ball like they're nothing.
If you tried to just pack all that snow into the ball from the start you'd be there all day, but starting small and diligently rolling will easily result in a huge ball so long as you stick with it. Obviously people aren't so easy to gather, but the principles are the same.
You're still thinking in their terms units of organization why tfshpuld I rsspe t their borders San Diego Tijuana are same city to me like Victoria Seattle it's not smart to do that 'country' is stupid
I mean, who gives a shit whether I say "A country's worth of people" or "100 million people?" If you're going to be that pedantic about it, we'll never be able to come together to rise up in the first place. I speak in terms of geographic locations because that's how revolutions start. One person in real life teams up with another person in real life, who together team up with other geographically nearby people on a local scale before moving up to larger and larger scales.
No matter how much a person in Seattle wants to help a movement that's currently confined to Tijuana, they won't be able to do anything tangible unless they physically go there and help. They could alternatively start up their own local movement in Seattle that eventually merges with the Tijuana one, or wait until the Tijuana one grows to reach Seattle, but neither of those helps the Tijuana one right now. Technically they could go online and spread awareness of the Tijuana movement, but the whole "thoughts and prayers" thing is less of a tangible helpful act and more of a way to pacify us by making us think we did something tangible, and rest on our laurels.
A country's worth Montenegro Switzerland India please specify you seem really attached to the form of countries geographic locations sure but alto California and Appalachia aren't the same not even close you can throw things from San Diego to Tijuana like with your hand england and the Balkans are closer culturally than California and appalachia and geographically not that we can't work together its geographically nearby sometimes but especially these days networks of comrades aren't always same continent I've written for zines first printed in Sydney and Dublin like opposite side of world and completely failed to put shit together with people on my block used tactics and strategies from hong Kong learned about what not to do when being cavalry charged from a friend who sent me a pic of her breasts with the great pyramid in the background later that day
Jeez, man. I was raised in a world separated into countries, sue me. I've made it clear that I don't care about borders, they're just a helpful way to get a vague understanding of a size of a group of people. Towns vary wildly in size and proximity to one another, too, but you don't seem to be harping on me about that.
My point is that you start with a small local group in the 10's of people, then move to the 100's, then 1,000's, then 10,000's, and so on. It doesn't matter if they come from the same country or not, so long as they can physically get together. It's just easier for most people - clearly not you - to picture how big "a country's worth" of people is, instead of a 1 with a bunch of 0's after it.
...Yes, you can purchase products from around the world and "support" people with words and thoughts and prayers and whatever makes you feel like you contributed. No, that doesn't provide a tangible benefit to people literally fighting their own local government, unless you plan to send them guns, which probably wouldn't work.
Someone geographically nearby, regardless of how different they are culturally, has a lot more they can do, and a lot more reason to do it, than someone on the other side of the world who thinks a zine is going to keep a resistance fighter alive.
You didn't read most of what I said
To be fair, it's difficult to follow your train of thought, but I assumed I understood it all. To summarize my understanding of your last comment:
Which of your points do you think was the crux of your argument that I failed to address?
I didn't touch on information transfer because if someone is already part of a movement, they would probably learn a lot more from someone local who's actually been fighting as part of that group than from someone who maybe did something kinda similar once on the other side of the world.
I also didn't touch on how some people don't get along, because that's obvious; not everyone in any given area will join the movement - only the ones who are motivated to do so will, but that number increases as the total size of the movement increases.
Part two of part two was that borders can include places really really far apart both culturally and geographically like I'd count on comrades in Canada and mexico before Appalachia because yeah culture but also I'm in California look at a map
I see. Yeah, a movement that starts in California would obviously spread to geographically nearby regions like Mexico and Oregon before it spreads to South Carolina. I wasn't trying to say that a movement needed to stay confined to one country before going somewhere else, just that it will almost certainly spread from one area to another physically easily-reachable area, and won't be recruiting hundreds of thousands of people at a time until its already comprised of hundreds of thousands of people.
Not really sure why you'd count on people in Canada - or think about Appalachia at all - if you're in California, though. How are they going to help you when you're staring down a cop about to cave your skull in during a violent protest? You need the guy standing right next to you so that you both can tackle the cop before he gets the chance. In this scenario the movement is still on the scale of 10's to 100's of people - you'd need to be looking for allies in your neighborhood before you worry about completely different geographical areas. We can worry about how we'll get people on board in Florida when the movement has gotten big enough to spread that far.
People in Mexico are close enough to hopefully help, but even if they're close, they'd still need to cross the border if your battles are taking place in California itself, which would be difficult regardless of the fact that the border is unjust. Or you could cross the border and start in Tijuana - it doesn't really matter where the movement starts, it just matters that people are able to get there and either help fight or help tend to the wounded.
That's kind of my point if something happens and San Diego explodes or Los Angeles burns down people in Tijuana can grosdtopically be there with a truck of supplies drop it off eat lunch and have a second one off by dinner doctors and experts from BC can be there by close of business if there's still a working airport but Appalachia is fucking far I'd say it might as well be China but fast rail inland and boats means its easier to get things from China than Appalachia its also culturally closer a lot of the same cultural forces operate on the west coast of the continent even if there are distinct regions and that's just not how the governments carved things up even linguistically we speak English with bits of romance languages we can kludge along with or Spanish with secondary English to whatever degree if we aren't fully bilingual yes the person right next to me matters extra the people within a few hours trip of me matter extra but the people in the same country well I don't understand the practical difference between new york London and hong kong from where I'm sitting hong Kong might have more to say their climate is more like ours than those other two country doesn't matter for shit and its a bad word for a bad thing linked to ideas of toxic nationalism when we need solidarity with all peoples who are willing to be in solidarity with us its unhelpful you might say city metro region county province those might all be useful if varying degrees of problematic and actually real things but country is a toxic fiction made of bad and nope with no utility and the people most likely to hurt my friends if I had friends obviously are from and employed by the country I'm in so I'm not very happy about countries in general which also q lot of times stop and make it harder to do the helping because that can kind of refer to governments which are not friends especially when bad things happen
Ah, I think I understand. We're in agreement on most points it seems. It just sounds like when I used the word "country" to refer to a large group of innocent people, you thought I was instead referring to a country's guilty government. That makes sense, since in my initial comment I used the word "country" when I was talking about forcing it to do what we want. In that instance I was referring to the governments - objectively evil people who deserve to be removed by any means necessary if uncompliant with the needs of the people. After that I shifted to referring to countries as a general group of people residing in any given country who would join a movement against their government. Sorry for the confusion.
I certainly never meant to infer that I thought any country was defined by their own corrupt government - it was always my goal to affirm that the people of all countries more alike to one another than they are different, and they are all under the thumb of their respective governments, corralled into borders to keep them segregated from one another. It sounds like you thought I was trying to say people should stay segregated by country when fighting, but I was just trying to say that people from the same country are often, not always, closer together and more easily able to help one another during an uprising than people in another country who are often, but not always, farther away.
There are, of course, scenarios where people are closer to others from another country than people from their own, and in those cases they should obviously join with those who they are close to. Whoever it is that you can group up with is who you should group up with, but obviously the harder it is for you to physically meet up, the less help you will be able to give one another. The important thing is that they're close, so that they can offer physical assistance at a moment's notice in the event of a raid or something.
If someone can make the trip from another area, that's great, but the primary source of support must be local for a movement to succeed. I certainly don't have anything against people from London, they just can't do much to help a movement currently located in California. If we're going to fight something as powerful and well-armed as a government, we won't be able to cherry-pick our support. I might get along better with Canadians than my own neighbors, but I can't rely on Canadians for a fight in my home town - I need the support of my neighbors who are here to fight right now. We need every able-bodied person we can get who can physically be there for us. If people from another geographic area want to come over to help, that's awesome, but we'll need the local people to join in too if we want to have the numbers necessary to put up a good fight.