Five
In run-up to the 1964 election, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. were given an audience with incumbent president Lyndon Johnson, where he asked them to scale down their protest activity until after the election so he could be confident he could win. They understood correctly that by continuing to protest, they had political leverage.
Imagine an alternative reality where LBJ had not signed the Civil Rights Act, and instead Barry Goldwater had won and increased the segregation and discrimination facing African-americans. Would you blame them for using the only electoral political leverage they had available, and laugh at their misfortune?
The only check the worst excesses of the Trump presidency has is the potential for widespread civil unrest. The Democrats aren't capable of that. Grassroots Palestinian-american organizations are. In building that base of resistance, we shouldn't make the same mistakes that caused the Democrats to lose the election. In the words of Nate Silver:
Democrats...often get angry with you when you only halfway agree with them. And I really think this difference in personality profiles tells you a little something about why Trump won: Trump was happy to take on all comers, whereas with Democrats, disagreement on any hot-button topic (say, COVID school closures or Biden’s age) will have you cast out as a heretic. That’s not a good way to build a majority, and now Democrats no longer have one.
Abbas Alawieh is concerned for the lives of his family and friends under another Trump regime. We all are. He is one of us.
Congratulations!
We contacted all of the instances where we knew he had bans before granting him membership. In the future I'll keep you updated on similar controversial choices so you can better protect your community. Greenlighting him may have been a mistake, but we didn't have sufficient information to gauge the seriousness of his antics. He's definitely not a bot or a spammer, and wasn't trying to conceal his identity so we're giving him the benefit of doubt.
The second half of Luthen’s conversation with Saw is him trying to convince Saw to lend air support to another faction so that they can make a combined hit on an Imperial power station. In rage, Saw tells off Luthen for calling his adherence to his own ideology as “petty differences” and says that he’s not risking his people for someone else. Saw has a reputation for being an extremist, and Luthen knows that his operation is well-funded and successful. Saw, however, is right to refuse the tactical alliance.
I'd like to add that the doomed faction Luthen was trying to get Saw to support were remnants of the separatist forces from the Clone Wars. The Separatists were often coded in fiction as the Confederate side of the US Civil War by emphasizing their role as the aggressor and their colonial / race-supremacist / pro-slavery politics. Names in Star Wars often are linguistic and historical references, with Gerrera being both similar to Guerrera (warrior in Castilian) and the character is directly inspired by Che Guevara, for example. The name Anto Kreegyr conjures the German word 'Krieger' which also means warrior. This is perhaps intentional to draw a comparison between Saw and Anto, both warriors and rebels, but with very different implied motivations. Anto is linguistically similar to Anton, a common Slavic name. The German language is unfortunately closely associated with the Kaiser during WWI and Nazis during WWII to English audiences, and Russian is similarly associated with the authoritarian Soviet Union.
The implied subtext is that the opportunist Luthen wants the anarchists to work with fascists and authoritarians in the name of defeating a greater fascist threat. Saw's outrage at the suggestion is much more reasonable given this interpretation, as well as his eventual decision to permit their sacrifice to increase the chances of ultimate victory.
This kind of behavior was rampant in Reddit city subreddits. People would frequently post a crime story featuring a racial minority, and then others would come out of the woodwork to engage in creative writing exercises about the kind of punishment the suspect deserved. More often then not, they would use racially charged language to describe the suspect. The mods would typically downplay the seriousness of what they were doing, administer wrist-slap bans when pressed, and then eventually permaban the lefties calling racists out.
I'm happy to say that's not a problem with local comms like the ones in Midwest.social that I've seen.
Threads.net federation status on major Lemmy instances based on blocklist info:
- Awful.systems - Blocked
- Beehaw.org - Blocked
- Blahaj.zone - Blocked
- DBZer0 - Blocked
- Dubvee.org - Blocked
- Eco.br - Blocked
- Feddit.org - Blocked
- Feddit.nl - Blocked
- Feddit.uk - Blocked
- Hexbear.net - Blocked
- JLai.lu - Blocked
- Leminal.space - Blocked
- Lemmy.best - Blocked
- Lemmy.ca - Blocked
- Lemm.ee - Blocked
- Lemmings.world - Blocked
- Lemmyf.uk - Blocked
- Lemmygrad.ml - Blocked
- Lemy.lol - Blocked
- Lemmy.ml - Blocked
- LemmyNSFW.com - Blocked
- Lemmy.one - Blocked
- Lemmy.zip - Blocked
- Literature.cafe - Blocked
- Mander.xyz - Blocked N
- Midwest.social - Blocked
- Pawb.social - Blocked
- Quokk.au - Blocked
- Reddthat - Blocked
- Sh.Itjust.works - Blocked
- SLRPNK.net - Blocked
- Szmer.info - Blocked
- Tchncs.de - Blocked
- Aggregatet.org - Not Found
- Aussie.zone - Not Found
- Feddit.cl - Not Found
- Feddit.it - Not Found
- Futurology.today - Not Found
- Infosec.pub - Not Found
- Lemmy.one - Not Found
- Lemmy.pt - Not Found
- Monyet.cc - Not Found
- SDF.org - Not Found
- Lemmy.world - Linked
- Sopuli.xyz - Linked
Also, in memoriam:
Your comment in another thread made me think you still wanted engagement on this comment. I value good faith discussion, and while we may disagree on what that means, I think you're engaging here in good faith. I value a diversity of thought, and while the conflict in YBTP is clearly a counter-example, we haven't been banning and don't typically ban people from the community who want to discuss anarchist politics with us.
The way I think about elections is foreign to a lot of people, and actually may not be that common among anarchists. I'd like to work on a metaphor to better explain it to people. Would you consider helping me by sharing a dialogue about it?
This is a valid reading of the subtext. It puts the amoral and implacable collector bot in a more appropriate context as well.
It still has the solarpunk message that the modern world is headed for disaster and we will be forced to change whether we are prepared for it or not, and it doesn't celebrate the authoritarian aspects of the human society that serves as the underlying antagonist.
The process of going "mainstream" is typically when the political ambitions of the movement are stripped away while the aesthetics become defanged and made 'appropriate' for popular consumption. This isn't a victory for a counter culture movement, it's capitalism wearing a corpse of another ideology as a fashion statement.
For example, wearing an Indian warrior costume to a dress-up party doesn't get first nations any closer to getting their land back.
I just saw the title and assumed it was talking about The Wild Robot and was confused, the movie did really well.
The plot point that listening to animal sounds will decode a generative grammar is obviously fantastical, and it's a relatively basic fish out of water/found family story. But the world hinted at taking place in the background is absolutely fascinating. Extreme weather events on a disrupted planet, large-scale rewilding, advanced robotics in the service of agriculture, and geodesic biospheres drop into the story without exposition or explanation. Perhaps it gets away with its radical messaging because it remains in the subtext.
Great find.