Agreed. I’m down for vandalism as a pastime as long as we recognize it’s pretty much the least one can do and changes nothing, compared to other efforts. It’s basically irl memeing, good for a laugh, good for pissing off the MAGAs, but at then end of the day the dude putting his name on the money still has more than us and will just print more if all we do is deface it.
You can’t even be troubled to get off your keyboard and meet like minded people in real life, so I question your commitment to organize a general strike much less take any direct action against your enemies. How do you think the masses survive a general strike? It would take weeks and weeks to put a dent in the pockets of the oligarchs. We survive the hit to ourselves, which is far more devastating, by the support of our neighbors and the people in our community, the people we met at protests and rallies, the people you think are beneath you. You’re the leftist equivalent of a Facebook MAGA, loudly blasting your opinion and invoking the names/histories of those who did something in their time like you’re the second coming but hoping others will get the ball rolling. But you sit at home while others actually “do” and are contemplating bugging out. We could use your help, but if you’re just here to get famous, get your own, or duck out when it gets too serious, go fuck yourself.
From the looks of the comment history, they plan on writing “pedo” next to his signature on the cash and bugging out of the country. So, performative bullshit followed by running away when it gets too tough.
That’s cool as long as you make sure you’ve cleared the building of any non-human persons prior. Start lighting up pets or livestock willy-nilly and I’ll give you a taste of your own medicine, personally. ✊🐾
This is one of the biggest problems with a general strike these days. The wealth inequality between them and us is such that even a year long strike will only ruin most of us, meanwhile they’ll get a government bailout even though they never missed a payment on their yacht. You might be able to destroy a MAGA supporting small business, but you’ll wreck yourself and your like-minded neighborhood small businesses along the way. I don’t have a solid solution, just throwing this out as food for thought.
Because society has decided parental rights override teenage autonomy. Runaway and they’ll call the cops, who will return you to them, or if they want to be asses, throw you in juvie. So you maliciously comply while expressing your utter disdain for them until you attain the age of majority, then you abandon them and move on with your life. At that point you become a wage slave, have to live somewhere, and much like Dark Helmet, realize you’re surrounded by assholes.
“This shit probably what they did when it happened in Nazi Germany.”
If you’re unaware of fate of opposition groups in Nazi Germany, what they did or didn’t do, you could always read up on history. It’s out there, right at your fingertips. Everything from their mistakes to their successes. It’s one of the great things about history, it already happened so you can learn from it.
It’ll be volunteer checkers, we have no shortage of them here. They’ll use it to harass anyone who doesn’t meet their expectations, which also means that cisgender women who aren’t conventionally “attractive” and effeminate but cis gay men can be hounded as well. It’s all their favorite victims in one and they can avoid consequences for false reporting by pretending like they did so in good faith. Interestingly, the Idaho police lobbies spoke out against this legislation because even they could see that it’s so aggressive and so difficult to gather evidence they didn’t want to deal with it. Shocking, I know.
Historically whether to have all gender restrooms or specific ones has been at the discretion of the business, and Boise has a lot of all gender ones. However, other legislation has been pushing to force out the right of business owners to choose what they want to do in their own businesses, probably because they planned on this legislation all along. Because, you know, party of small government.
Truly, shit for brains.
I’m in a strange boat. My bio mom was young when she got pregnant so I was put up for adoption. My adoptive mother was a cold, cruel woman who was emotionally and physically abusive; adoptive dad just ignored it and told me to not upset her. She did things like withhold medical attention to extract confessions about things I’d done she didn’t know about, destroyed personal objects like toys/clothes/cds, told me she didn’t love me but was legally obligated to take care of me, left me on the side of the road when I was 6 so the coyotes would eat me, stoked fears of a werewolf under my bed so I wouldn’t get out of it after she put me in it (needless to say, I pissed the bed well into elementary school because of that, which I got beaten for).
I had a lot of rage as a youth, though almost exclusively self-harm. Found punk in my teens and channeled the rage for my mother into rage at authority in general, and eventually found productive means of achieving that rather than mindless violence at whatever I think oppresses me. Still, 30yrs later, I love to thrash and be thrashed in a pit and the measure of a good night is “am I bruised and bleeding”.
But, I found my calling in dog rescue and training, a career where cruelty, heavy-handedness, and force are ill-serving. It’s a field a lot of men struggle in (unless they just beat a dog into submission) because the mannerisms and bravado the define how western society tells men they should act will make a scared, under-socialized, untrusting dog reject them. The terrified, the deaf, blind, wheelchair bound dogs are my specialty because I have an inner gentleness the, by social standards, would be called effeminate. I’ve helped hundreds over the years and it is one of the proudest achievements of my life.
I found my birth mother well into adulthood. She’s a hospice nurse and cat rescuer whom I share an uncanny amount of personal quirks with despite zero association aside from genetics. We’ve become wonderful friends and I have integrated into my bio-family after 20yrs of no contact with my adoptive one. I did get one boon in my childhood though. One set of grandparents were the kindest, gentlest, most loving grandparents anyone could hope for and quite likely the reason I didn’t end up a total sociopath or suicide.
Deliberate, apathetic, myopically optimistic that this can be voted out and things go back to how they were; all of the above? Even among the non-MAGA there’s still a lot of folks who aren’t the direct targets of the regime and unless they speak out against it could live quietly under it’s boot because of their skin color, gender, or sexuality. They’re some of the hardest people to convince to do something because there’s a fear that doing something will draw undue attention or put them at risk when they’d rather resent it but not risk it. And protesting is risky. Trigger happy cops, mass surveillance, opposition members who show up to shoot crowds or drive into them. But to not do anything is to let their scare tactics win. It is true, a million people holding signs doesn’t mean shit to this regime, but making new connections with people in your community, real connections face to face and not just anonymous internet chit chat, that is what makes these worth something.
Trial and error. The lentils always cook faster than the beans and my recipe is 1c lentils and 4c of mixed beans. In my cooker running about 8min longer than the recommended time will leave my beans tender and intact but reduce the lentils to a filler consistency like ground beef. The same method works well for making vegan chili.
Once a month I fill the pressure cooker with a variety of beans, brown and/or red lentils, peppers, onions, jalapeños, garlic, and sometimes kale, mushrooms, whatever is around. I overcook just slightly so the lentils break up and become my “meat”. Then I freeze most and slowly work through it over the month using it at work for lunch burritos, nachos, in ramen, over rice, etc. Cheap and handy and is the staple of my diet.
Having tried to save snowballs in the freezer for a mid-summer snowball fight, I can assure you that that’s just going to be ice and result in head trauma.
Trying to get popular brands to give him free swag with his personal logo and Punisher skulls on it? I’m sure a K$H themed Monster is coming soon.
I’m not entirely convinced Luigi didn’t not want to get caught, I’m curious to see how the trial plays out because I question if he wanted a stage to make a statement or is banking on jury nullification. The botched investigation of Kirk’s death is more telling. It took family ratting him out to put them on the trail. ICE agents are ill trained loose canons that rely on numbers, intimidation, and the confidence no one will fight back. They started a war that now they don’t know what to do with. Meanwhile the FBI Director is making Punisher skull collectible tokens and designing his own custom Nikes and the Secretary of War is adding randoms to their group chat. Mass surveillance is only as efficient as the people operating it, and the people operating it are ego driven cronies who’s qualifications are loyalty.
Local cops are the bigger threat. They’ve been at it longer and are better trained than the deputized rabble of Proud Boys and insurrectionists they call ICE. They also know their cities. Even then, criminal organizations like gangs, bikers, drug traffickers, human traffickers, and others operate across the nation every day. Some of it is allowed because they know and want to build bigger cases, some is missed.
Technology always changes war and fighting with yesteryear’s methods is a sure way to lose. If they started loosing military grade hardware like drones on us we’re epically more fucked. But also, Ukraine has shown you don’t need elite soldiers to fight back, just gamer geeks with good hand eye coordination and access to a 3D printer. Fighting back might not be daily shootouts with the authorities, but more infrastructure and supply chain disruptions.
Minnesota showed how quickly locals will improvise and respond, and how many will join up. They chose to keep it non-violent on their end. The response might be different when presented with the knowledge that there’s no peaceful solution left. It’s all conjecture because this would be the first civil war in a digital surveillance state, a heavily armed surveillance state in an era where drones can kill remotely no matter how many guns you have.
Locals do have the benefit of being local. They know their cities, they know their neighbors, they know the blind spots, they know the infrastructure. What works in LA might not work in Chicago, might be different than a fight in Texas. It will need city and state leadership to be willing to, if not fight, at least run interference with the Feds. If the US goes mask off, full on dictatorship that will not give up power willingly, no one else in the world is going to come save it from itself. At that point you accept it or start testing how to resist while knowing it’s a risk and that you will likely end up in a prison or dead.
There’s no way out of that scenario that doesn’t involve that (and they’re already killing and imprisoning people for far less), and there’s no perfect roadmap for how to pull it off because nobody has tried. It’ll be figure it out as you go. I’ll add that the volume of mass shooters that have spent weeks spewing their hate and posting manifestos on social media before their crimes but failed to get red flagged makes me question how great their mass surveillance and threat detection is. People aren’t even trying to not be caught but fly under the radar.
I doubt it will be nationally coordinated. If it really got rolling it would probably look more like The Troubles but scattered across cities, some more violent than others. The biggest hurdle is that it’s not just civilians vs ICE, it’s ICE, cops, and all the Rittenhouse wannabes that assume they’ll get a pass.
But really, what’s going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Blatant election interference? Losing control of Congress but just ignoring it? Running for a third term, or simply refusing to leave office even if impeached or when the term expires?Democracy only works if everyone agrees to play by the rules and let go of power when the voters decide or the time comes. We’ve never had a situation where we might have to forcibly remove someone with that much power and influence that says “fuck your democracy”.
It’ll be a lot of John Browns until city/state leaders start siding with the people in their districts and at that point we’re on the brink of secession and civil war.
“ICE Out!” varies state to state. Minnesota and Portland are targeted with an increased presence because the regime wants to control the kickback. In my state there’s no mass presence even though the arrests are still occurring. They’re less visible, harder to track, don’t build castles that can be sieged, and the vast majority of the work is being done by local/state police officers because state leadership are boot-lickers. ICE creates bonfires for attention but a lot of the work is being carried out dimly and discretely. It’s a lot harder to take action, organize counter-protests, make local chats, and follow them with whistles when it’s one or two unmarked cops trolling vs a squad of them going door to door.