No Stupid Questions

I tell people all of the time

"I won't throw the first brick, but when the bricks start flying give me a call"

The thing that broke me wasn't data centers or hot weather, it was when I had to pay $7 for hot dog buns

The business men who put a $7 price tag on hot dog buns during the 4th of July are not nearly as afraid of the public as they should be.

It's fucking bread. Bread!

When stealing bread to feed your family is almost a felony... burn it down.

Problem is, if it happened, you would need to choose your targets wisely for it to be effective. Looting a Target isn't the answer. The point is not to get yourself a new TV; it's to advocate for real change. Don't burn down your own place of business, don't burn down your own neighborhood... burn theirs

Find the motherfuckers in the Epstein Files, sink yachts, tear down the walls surrounding billionaire neighborhoods, etc...

When death is no longer the worst alternative, there will be revolution.

• my favorite high school history teacher

Part of the issue is that everyone I know that wants to do something is terrified that it’s going to place targets on vulnerable members of their larger communities. A lot of trans people, queer people, black and brown people, disabled people, immigrants, and indigenous folks I know want to DO something. They’re just scared that if they do, then it’s going to only accelerate violence against their marginalized communities and the greater population isn’t going to fight for them.

Nothing is going to happen until we weaponize the cishet white dudes and get them on our side.

This shit has gone on for way too long.

Best way to start it off is with a symbolic figure. Some greedy CEO, board of directors member, police chief, or corrupt politician. Whatever is done has to involve being publicly displayed.

I find myself being pushed closer and closer everyday to jumpstarting it myself, but the reality is, it is highly unlikely that one person is going to accomplish it. Coordination with others is key.

...or so I've heard.

Its less about starting to riot and more about stopping to buy. Cancel your accounts, throw away your credit cards, stop paying taxes, start a fucking garden ( now is perfect btw) and build a network of friends and neighbours.

We all want to have a good life lets just live it.

This topic is well covered in The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFdwfNh5vs

The problem is that we still want to live through it.

In our imaginations it's everyone rising up against tyranny and oligarchy and demanding a better world. It's us seeing the change happen and getting to that better world. We want the world to be better because we want better. We want a fair chance to own a nice home and live a decent life without constant worry. We want to be able to afford basic health care. To not be forced to pay thousands of dollars for 'health insurance' and then still be hit with hundreds of thousands in bills if we actually have a serious medical issue. To be able to go to a hospital for one night to give birth to a child without ending up $10k in debt for doing it. We want to know that justice exists and the people in power aren't raping and murdering kids and then laughing when we demand justice. That they aren't throwing poor people who can't afford to defend themselves in for-profit prisons for crimes they didn't commit so they can be used for slave labor.

We want to live, and to have life be something we enjoy and love instead of endless struggle and stress. We want to see the change happen, to experience how amazing and different things can be.

We want to live through it.

Most of us aren't willing to die for it. To walk away from every thing you have, right now. Every belonging, every relationship. To stand up and walk away from all of it expecting to never see any of it again. Expecting to die. But willing to do that to make the world a better place for other people. For your children, or their children.

It's common to hear people saying they don't have or want kids because of the state of things we all hate so much. Making the world a better place for your children is one of the biggest reasons people are motivated to give up their own lives to force a rotten system to change.

We want deaths like Alex Pretti and Renee Good suffered to stop. We don't want to be the next people at the wrong end of the gun.

Revolutions aren't without cost. Usually very high cost. It takes a lot of people being willing to die, expecting to die, planning to die, and deciding that it's worth it just for the chance to make things better for the future.

No revolution ever fixes everything. There are still problems and injustices and wrongs after every one of them. There is no guarantee that you standing up and walking out of your entire life, to go fight the system and die, will change anything at all. It might not work. Enough other people might not stand up for it to make even a tiny difference. Even if enough people do, it might not end up in a very big difference in the end. There's a chance that it could cause big changes. That a lot of the worst parts of today would actually improve. But that's only a chance, while there's a complete guarantee that it would never lead to some idyllic utopia where everything is all batter.

You will almost definitely die. You won't even know if it makes any difference in the end. All you'll have is that hope that maybe it will, and maybe things will really be better for future generations.

Are you actually ready? Are you standing up, moncharleskey? It's easy to type. It's not easy to do. The answer to what you're waiting for it simple. You're waiting for you to decide that the mere chance, the hope, that in rising up and almost certainly dying for it you will manage to make a difference and make the world a better place is worth walking away from your entire life and expecting to die.

Until you hit that point inside, until you're willing to stand up on the spot and give away your own life, you will keep sitting.

Part of the problem is that there's a thing called "Co-opting the Revolution" that's been figured out, that you can neatly repackage dissent as a product to sell.

Like how you get Che Gueverra as merch now.

And it's done an incredible job at making people feel like they're doing something, whilst actually doing nothing.

I've done my part! I wear a ACAB pin that I purchased from Hot Topic

Or

I've done my part! I participated in the Reddit Blackout, and then bought the memorabilia

And the sad thing is, IT FUCKING WORKS

Psychologically, for many people, it silences the parts of the brain that are like "FIX THIS! DO SOMETHING!" for quite a lot of people

climate change can be stopped with solar energy, and the amount of installed solar power has grown exponentially in the last few years. so that's something positive.

https://youtu.be/0YFdwfNh5vs

The issue is that the powers that be did learn their lesson and they learned it well. If you keep the masses JUST sufficient enough that they still have something "to lose" they'll be to busy chasing that to be able to mount any kind of resistance to their exploitation. It's the splash and dash mentality. It's also why they are so against abortion. they frame it as a moral issue, but it's really about ensuring a good crop of fresh people to exploit when the current crop wears out. It's a common fascist tactic: Concentration Camps were usually billed as "work" camps where people would be set to menial or meaningless tasks, so they would waste away on purpose, and the deaths could be logged as "by natural causes" and not murder. (only what the regime defined as "undesirables" were sent to be euthanized.)

Competing Lords owned the land and extracted labor from the peasants, and this was feudalism. Then peasants overthrew the lords so they could seek ownership of those lands, but that only benefited those who already had the means to fill the vacuum left by the lords. Capitalism only shuffles the deck of Feudalism. it doesn't solve the underlying flaw in the game, namely that there will always be someone with more means than you extracting value from people whose only asset to sell is their labor and time. Eventually a group of gentrified individuals will emerge that fill the rolls that the old lords did, and given that nepotism is rampant in industry, it's not even really that different at all from feudalism. The idea that a CEO should be president of a democracy is such a perversion of the idea of public rule that it is anathema to it. Extreme wealth should be disenfranchising in of itself, as if you are that wealthy, you no longer need the protections of a popular government, but rather, you are what that kind of governance is supposed to be protecting against.

When the internet goes down.

The second paragraph answers the first. We wait until we're coordinated.

If you want to speed up the process, get out there and coordinate. You might be ready, the people here might be ready, but a few thousand geographically isolated people on a left-leaning niche forum aren't gonna do it. Getting out into the community and getting active, that could actually shift sentiment.

Find a local organization with at least a hundred members. Even if you don't align 100% with the DSA, join and go to meetings. That's where you're going to find people to coordinate with. Network with people, find out who has which skills, and volunteer your own. Participate in mutual aid. Canvas for leftist politicians. Even if you only care about revolution, going to these events and interacting with these causes will bring you in contact with the people who will coordinate with you.

No one REALLY feels the threat posed by the polycrisis. It's all complex, intellectual worries about things that FEEL like they're still just a little ways out, not quite here. People are mostly focused on the here and now and the very near future. The riots happen when people literally can't feed their kids in the here and now. As long as it's just difficult, and not impossible, people will struggle on with their nose to the grindstone. Watch for rises in unemployment. CoViD showed what can happen when millions if people find themselves with mountains of free time to use on political action. When enough people are hungry and have no job to distract them, the fires will come.

We couldn't organize enough people to go stand in a line for 20 minutes and scribble in a few little pencil bubbles to prevent the hell upon earth that is currently happening.

Unfortunately there will be no revolution or uprising or meaningful riots until things are far, far, far worse than where they are now.

Our citizens couldn't sacrifice 20 minutes out of their lives to prevent what appears to be the beginning of the end of the USA; they're certainly not going to give up their homes and livelihoods and freedom anytime soon.

Rioting won't help anymore. The time for action was 40 years ago. We could maybe save humanity by killing almost everyone and subsisting the few remaining on a clean energy, no-fossil fuel burning, aggressive carbon recapture society. Beyond that, we are fucked.

Treat your continued existence like terminal cancer and try to live with purpose.