The no-compliance attitude is spot on regardless of what anyone thinks of any proposed actions. Which should be thought through.
We will almost certainly never reach the numbers (ie, solidarity) required to win. Just look around you. People barely talk about this.
But in a sense (ethically) it doesn’t matter if we win: don’t collaborate in the destruction of everything, including your children’s future. And that’s literally true, given the flooring of carbon by these omnicidal nihilists.
(A word on the distraction of “optimism” vs “pessimism.” Fact: 99% of “optimists” think everything will work out, so they don’t have to do anything. Fact: 99% of “pessimists” think everything is doomed, so they don’t have to do anything. Note the functional similarity.)
Stick your neck out. Make good trouble. Join organizations. Spend time, money, and effort. Try to get the apathetic and/or frightened to grow a spine. Make these murderers of your posterity *work* at their omni-destruction.
Trust me: if you literally do and risk nothing, you will hate yourself. You will try to rationalize it but you will fail. There are fates worse than audits and harassment—or whatever lengths this scum will go to, and I think we should prepare for the worst.
So? Fuck ‘em all. Dissipate the comforting fog of diffused responsibility. They are literally coming for your children. Literally.
What are you going to do about it? What are we all, the minimally sane and supposedly non-sociopathic, going to DO about it?
I ask myself this question every day as I don’t do nearly enough, so I’m hardly holding myself above anyone. I’m just “mean” enough to state it baldly.
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” - I. F. Stone
And you know what? People might join you. How many others are terrified and want to stop ICE but feel isolated. If I was American I'd be looking for another country to live in.
There are seeds of resistance everywhere. You have it in you. I have it in me. Hamilton has it. We're not that many, sure. And inevitably part of our task as a global left is to get our house in order, at least partially enough to fight this, differences on many things be damned.
Let's not anticipate failure. It's what they are counting on. Bad for morale. Let's be realistic and try the impossible.
Pessimists are far more likely to engage in resistance than optimists. I believe that there are even a few studies proving this. If you aren't a pessimist in this moment, you are out of your mind. Consult the doomsday clock if you need a reality check. The US public has been force fed optimistic bromides for so long that they are ready to believe that Trump is in trouble from the Epstein files or near death from swollen ankles. No and no! We need doomers and more doomers - people with the guts to realize that our backs are up against the wall.
Communities of affluence are very different from communities of strife in the nature of their human relations. Only in the latter do real emotional bonds exist. Americans are largely weaned away from that.
This piece introduces a tone of desperation under the guise of a practical proposal that is unlikely. After all we've seen, the Project 2025 coup, as embodied by Trump, is unpopular, but not that unpopular. Those of us here who enjoy commenting in order to feel enlightened in contrast to THEM, believe we will survive this because we're not in the targeted groups. If we were to seriously oppose the forces of the coup, we would risk becoming targeted ourselves. How is that choice going?
Mostly informally, Project 2025 has been in the works for about a century. So has the Zionist Israeli Colonial project, to where now Kushner, Blair, et al, are drawing up plans for a Trump Gaza (Riviera II). It's settled, isn't it? The extermination of the Palestinian people is a fait accompli. It's history might reveal the volume of content that story provided for the production of the "news" industry.
There is nothing now that the raw application of money cannot accomplish against all moral considerations, cannot accomplish toward the further consolidation of power by the corporate/government complex. It's been named: Corporate Colonialism. Why has the prerogatives of the American weapons industry largely been left out of the story of this genocide?
In the way that Katrina exposed so many heretofore latent deficiencies and injustices toward an unnecessary calamity, so does this coup render visible the depth of racial hatred here, especially now that a democracy would no longer operate in the favor of the ruling minority for whom "quality of life" has been systematically reduced to level of consuming. We've been lauding the term democracy without understanding how it's supposed to actually work, or what it's actually for. After all the rhetoric about healing our divide(s), we're being split into those who will accommodate to despotism and those who will be persecuted by it. The despot will define the threats and you and I will disagree at our peril.
The full irony here, if only in a secondary sense, lies in the fact that the 2nd Amendment, every docuher conservative ball bag’s favorite amendment, was drafted to prevent this very thing:
For over 200 years, it was viewed as a single, inseparable anti-Federalist clause that granted the states the right to raise and arm their own militias to prevent federal overreach.
The current interpretation recasting the 2nd Amendment as an individual civil Liberty entitling an individual to possess a gun is the product of conservative dickbags fevered imagination hoping to pump their stock values in fire arms companies, AstroTurfed in the ‘70s and enacted by regressive activist judge Scalia in DC v. Heller in quite possibly the worst-written judicial decision in the history of the Supreme Court.
A state national guard of course fulfills this constitutional requirement for an armed militia. Too bad it’s been pressed into the service of tyranny due to a legal loophole.
Interesting to see how the military, including the Guard, chooses to view their oath to protect and serve the Constitution from enemies domestic and domestic.
I've pitched this story to a few magazines! Where the hell are the 2A fanboys, who insisted that it was them (and them alone) protecting all of our constitutional freedoms?
Oh, and where were they when SCOTUS took away women's constitutional right to an abortion?
I guess all these high school dropouts are constitutional law scholars now, telling us all what are "real" rights.
I don’t think there is any question as to how the military, including the Guard, will choose to view their oath to protect and serve the Constitution from enemies domestic.
They will just follow orders, just as they did and are doing in L.A. and D.C.
From France: Sept 10th is the day that we have been called out by the Socialists/Unions and other parties to just not work. No trains. No shops open and protests. This has been openly handled on many sites. We will see.
My point is that it accomplished nothing in the past and 10 September will be a waste of effort. The French establishment from LFI to RN is completely moribund and only threatened by actual violence. See eg les Gilets Jaunes.
I feel like this shit is legitimately EVERYONE's problem.
It's not only that american fascism is absolutely devastating politically and on a human level and that there are growing concerns that it's a matter of time until there might be military action abroad. (After all, so far there is no limit to The Crazy (as Paul Krugman calls it) at all.
It's also that economical effects and all other sorts of ideological fallout is hitting Europe as well.
What I am saying is:
I think there is a legitimate case to make to try and also get international unions to chime in on this. It's in our well-understood self-interest that we support workers in each of these cities as they are quite literally fighting on the frontline for all of us.
Completely agree with the post but with the addition of what I believe to be the longer-term strategy. As an election judge in the City of Chicago, I fully expect to see weapon-carrying National Guard at all polling places and even inside the polling places in 2025 starting with the primary election in March and then in the general election in November. The purpose will merely be to discourage people from showing up to vote.
I think the garbage strike idea is really smart. Trump is trying to manufacture ‘order’ as a way to justify extraordinary means…just look at troops picking up trash in DC. Creating disorder then becomes a source of collective power. What better way to show disorder than a garbage strike? I actually put the main ideas together into slide format and shared it on Reddit just now to my Baltimore community. I am curious what people will think. Thanks!
we just had a municipal strike (not exclusively garbage, but including sanitation) here in philadelphia. it was not a success but provided a lot of lessons - others have written more thoughtful and extensively than i can do here, but it was a disappointment that a trash strike did not move the needle more.
Every strike is different obviously-- the virtue of a garbage strike in the situation I describe is mainly that it's the fastest possible way to get every single person in a city screaming at the government.
agreed that “what is to be done to stop this now?” is the most important question, but I can’t help but thinking about how there isn’t a single dem president in my lifetime who would t have enjoyed these exact same powers at their disposal. perhaps it’s indulgent to kick the dems for their fecklessness, but their role in this is real and building real opposition is the call to action
I need to see Dem governors mustering their states’ national guard to repel fed goon squads, including other state guards, and ordering them to refuse any instructions from the feds.
Frederick Douglass said, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them." But, in this case, according to what I just saw at the AP news site, a whole lot of people SUPPORT what Trump is doing and are completely happy with it. They are not aware of submitting to anything. People who live in the middle of nowhere feel that Trump is "protecting" them from crime. How this makes any sense I am not sure, other than the usual delusions of a population fed constant bullshit and propaganda 24 hours a day for their entire lifetimes. Turning that around quickly now is unlikely. Mass arrests and stuffing people into burgeoning, quickly assembled detention centers may change some minds, but many will say "the enemies and criminals are being safely locked away, the country is all the better for it." They have been successfully led to believe that the way things are now is entirely unacceptable, and the solution is force, and they LIKE it.
the democrat party are useless little lying bitches who will do nothing for anyone but their own billionaires. It's up to the people to resist and the best way to do that is to turn the organized armed forces into a people's army, one soldier at a time. Make sure to always say something to law enforcement and the military about their role to uphold the rights of the working class, since they are part of it, and do as much as you can to subvert every corporate action against the working class.
Message from a citizen to any and all National Guard or federal troops: If you follow Trumpstein's orders to occupy American cities and abuse fellow citizens you are violating your oath of service. You are a traitor to the people and the nation and no amount of strutting around city parks and playgrounds in your GI Joe military combat kit can hide that reality. Time to man up boys and defend the Constitution and the people you took an oath to do, or just be a little Nazi gear. Your choice, but know, we see you for what you are.
Before the election I was telling everyone that I could that it was the most important one of our lifetimes because we couldn't let Trump have control of the military. Before the election I was screaming that the right-wing propaganda machine was cancelling reality and that this was super duper bad because autocrats turn into authoritarians when they get to dictate what is real (like crime being out of control in DC and Chicago being a "killing field").
Communities of affluence are very different from communities of strife in the nature of their human relations. Only in the latter do real emotional bonds exist. Americans are largely weaned away from that.
This piece introduces a tone of desperation under the guise of a practical proposal that is unlikely. After all we've seen, the Project 2025 coup, as embodied by Trump, is unpopular, but not that unpopular. Those of us here who enjoy commenting in order to feel enlightened in contrast to THEM, believe we will survive this because we're not in the targeted groups. If we were to seriously oppose the forces of the coup, we would risk becoming targeted ourselves. How is that choice going?
Mostly informally, Project 2025 has been in the works for about a century. So has the Zionist Israeli Colonial project, to where now Kushner, Blair, et al, are drawing up plans for a Trump Gaza (Riviera II). It's settled, isn't it? The extermination of the Palestinian people is a fait accompli. It's history might reveal the volume of content that story provided for the production of the "news" industry.
There is nothing now that the raw application of money cannot accomplish against all moral considerations, cannot accomplish toward the further consolidation of power by the corporate/government complex. It's been named: Corporate Colonialism. Why has the prerogatives of the American weapons industry largely been left out of the story of this genocide?
In the way that Katrina exposed so many heretofore latent deficiencies and injustices toward an unnecessary calamity, so does this coup render visible the depth of racial hatred here, especially now that a democracy would no longer operate in the favor of the ruling minority for whom "quality of life" has been systematically reduced to level of consuming. We've been lauding the term democracy without understanding how it's supposed to actually work, or what it's actually for. After all the rhetoric about healing our divide(s), we're being split into those who will accommodate to despotism and those who will be persecuted by it. The despot will define the threats and you and I will disagree at our peril.
100%.
The no-compliance attitude is spot on regardless of what anyone thinks of any proposed actions. Which should be thought through.
We will almost certainly never reach the numbers (ie, solidarity) required to win. Just look around you. People barely talk about this.
But in a sense (ethically) it doesn’t matter if we win: don’t collaborate in the destruction of everything, including your children’s future. And that’s literally true, given the flooring of carbon by these omnicidal nihilists.
(A word on the distraction of “optimism” vs “pessimism.” Fact: 99% of “optimists” think everything will work out, so they don’t have to do anything. Fact: 99% of “pessimists” think everything is doomed, so they don’t have to do anything. Note the functional similarity.)
Stick your neck out. Make good trouble. Join organizations. Spend time, money, and effort. Try to get the apathetic and/or frightened to grow a spine. Make these murderers of your posterity *work* at their omni-destruction.
Trust me: if you literally do and risk nothing, you will hate yourself. You will try to rationalize it but you will fail. There are fates worse than audits and harassment—or whatever lengths this scum will go to, and I think we should prepare for the worst.
So? Fuck ‘em all. Dissipate the comforting fog of diffused responsibility. They are literally coming for your children. Literally.
What are you going to do about it? What are we all, the minimally sane and supposedly non-sociopathic, going to DO about it?
I ask myself this question every day as I don’t do nearly enough, so I’m hardly holding myself above anyone. I’m just “mean” enough to state it baldly.
If failure is all that’s left, fail properly.
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” - I. F. Stone
Exactly!
And you know what? People might join you. How many others are terrified and want to stop ICE but feel isolated. If I was American I'd be looking for another country to live in.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
But also... failure is not all that's left.
There are seeds of resistance everywhere. You have it in you. I have it in me. Hamilton has it. We're not that many, sure. And inevitably part of our task as a global left is to get our house in order, at least partially enough to fight this, differences on many things be damned.
Let's not anticipate failure. It's what they are counting on. Bad for morale. Let's be realistic and try the impossible.
Pessimists are far more likely to engage in resistance than optimists. I believe that there are even a few studies proving this. If you aren't a pessimist in this moment, you are out of your mind. Consult the doomsday clock if you need a reality check. The US public has been force fed optimistic bromides for so long that they are ready to believe that Trump is in trouble from the Epstein files or near death from swollen ankles. No and no! We need doomers and more doomers - people with the guts to realize that our backs are up against the wall.
Communities of affluence are very different from communities of strife in the nature of their human relations. Only in the latter do real emotional bonds exist. Americans are largely weaned away from that.
This piece introduces a tone of desperation under the guise of a practical proposal that is unlikely. After all we've seen, the Project 2025 coup, as embodied by Trump, is unpopular, but not that unpopular. Those of us here who enjoy commenting in order to feel enlightened in contrast to THEM, believe we will survive this because we're not in the targeted groups. If we were to seriously oppose the forces of the coup, we would risk becoming targeted ourselves. How is that choice going?
Mostly informally, Project 2025 has been in the works for about a century. So has the Zionist Israeli Colonial project, to where now Kushner, Blair, et al, are drawing up plans for a Trump Gaza (Riviera II). It's settled, isn't it? The extermination of the Palestinian people is a fait accompli. It's history might reveal the volume of content that story provided for the production of the "news" industry.
There is nothing now that the raw application of money cannot accomplish against all moral considerations, cannot accomplish toward the further consolidation of power by the corporate/government complex. It's been named: Corporate Colonialism. Why has the prerogatives of the American weapons industry largely been left out of the story of this genocide?
In the way that Katrina exposed so many heretofore latent deficiencies and injustices toward an unnecessary calamity, so does this coup render visible the depth of racial hatred here, especially now that a democracy would no longer operate in the favor of the ruling minority for whom "quality of life" has been systematically reduced to level of consuming. We've been lauding the term democracy without understanding how it's supposed to actually work, or what it's actually for. After all the rhetoric about healing our divide(s), we're being split into those who will accommodate to despotism and those who will be persecuted by it. The despot will define the threats and you and I will disagree at our peril.
Well said. Repeat wherever you can!
The full irony here, if only in a secondary sense, lies in the fact that the 2nd Amendment, every docuher conservative ball bag’s favorite amendment, was drafted to prevent this very thing:
For over 200 years, it was viewed as a single, inseparable anti-Federalist clause that granted the states the right to raise and arm their own militias to prevent federal overreach.
The current interpretation recasting the 2nd Amendment as an individual civil Liberty entitling an individual to possess a gun is the product of conservative dickbags fevered imagination hoping to pump their stock values in fire arms companies, AstroTurfed in the ‘70s and enacted by regressive activist judge Scalia in DC v. Heller in quite possibly the worst-written judicial decision in the history of the Supreme Court.
A state national guard of course fulfills this constitutional requirement for an armed militia. Too bad it’s been pressed into the service of tyranny due to a legal loophole.
Interesting to see how the military, including the Guard, chooses to view their oath to protect and serve the Constitution from enemies domestic and domestic.
I've pitched this story to a few magazines! Where the hell are the 2A fanboys, who insisted that it was them (and them alone) protecting all of our constitutional freedoms?
Oh, and where were they when SCOTUS took away women's constitutional right to an abortion?
I guess all these high school dropouts are constitutional law scholars now, telling us all what are "real" rights.
I don’t think there is any question as to how the military, including the Guard, will choose to view their oath to protect and serve the Constitution from enemies domestic.
They will just follow orders, just as they did and are doing in L.A. and D.C.
Thank you. It's driving me nuts to watch people declare "That's unconsitutional!" like it's an incantation.
Everything the regime does comes with an unspoken question: What are you gonna do about it?
From France: Sept 10th is the day that we have been called out by the Socialists/Unions and other parties to just not work. No trains. No shops open and protests. This has been openly handled on many sites. We will see.
Bayrou will fall. Another Macron gov't après. Rinse and repeat.
OF course. This is NOT my point.
It is a suggestion for Americans how to protest.
My point is that it accomplished nothing in the past and 10 September will be a waste of effort. The French establishment from LFI to RN is completely moribund and only threatened by actual violence. See eg les Gilets Jaunes.
We will see............even if this gets the PM our Bayreu, it's a start.
Your post today has spurned me to subscribe. Thank you for laying the situation out so starkly.
✊️
I feel like this shit is legitimately EVERYONE's problem.
It's not only that american fascism is absolutely devastating politically and on a human level and that there are growing concerns that it's a matter of time until there might be military action abroad. (After all, so far there is no limit to The Crazy (as Paul Krugman calls it) at all.
It's also that economical effects and all other sorts of ideological fallout is hitting Europe as well.
What I am saying is:
I think there is a legitimate case to make to try and also get international unions to chime in on this. It's in our well-understood self-interest that we support workers in each of these cities as they are quite literally fighting on the frontline for all of us.
I wish I could help more. But in any case:
Hammers up. We're going to beat this.
Completely agree with the post but with the addition of what I believe to be the longer-term strategy. As an election judge in the City of Chicago, I fully expect to see weapon-carrying National Guard at all polling places and even inside the polling places in 2025 starting with the primary election in March and then in the general election in November. The purpose will merely be to discourage people from showing up to vote.
I think the garbage strike idea is really smart. Trump is trying to manufacture ‘order’ as a way to justify extraordinary means…just look at troops picking up trash in DC. Creating disorder then becomes a source of collective power. What better way to show disorder than a garbage strike? I actually put the main ideas together into slide format and shared it on Reddit just now to my Baltimore community. I am curious what people will think. Thanks!
we just had a municipal strike (not exclusively garbage, but including sanitation) here in philadelphia. it was not a success but provided a lot of lessons - others have written more thoughtful and extensively than i can do here, but it was a disappointment that a trash strike did not move the needle more.
Every strike is different obviously-- the virtue of a garbage strike in the situation I describe is mainly that it's the fastest possible way to get every single person in a city screaming at the government.
agreed that “what is to be done to stop this now?” is the most important question, but I can’t help but thinking about how there isn’t a single dem president in my lifetime who would t have enjoyed these exact same powers at their disposal. perhaps it’s indulgent to kick the dems for their fecklessness, but their role in this is real and building real opposition is the call to action
I need to see Dem governors mustering their states’ national guard to repel fed goon squads, including other state guards, and ordering them to refuse any instructions from the feds.
That'd actually be a better step forwards.
Frederick Douglass said, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them." But, in this case, according to what I just saw at the AP news site, a whole lot of people SUPPORT what Trump is doing and are completely happy with it. They are not aware of submitting to anything. People who live in the middle of nowhere feel that Trump is "protecting" them from crime. How this makes any sense I am not sure, other than the usual delusions of a population fed constant bullshit and propaganda 24 hours a day for their entire lifetimes. Turning that around quickly now is unlikely. Mass arrests and stuffing people into burgeoning, quickly assembled detention centers may change some minds, but many will say "the enemies and criminals are being safely locked away, the country is all the better for it." They have been successfully led to believe that the way things are now is entirely unacceptable, and the solution is force, and they LIKE it.
the democrat party are useless little lying bitches who will do nothing for anyone but their own billionaires. It's up to the people to resist and the best way to do that is to turn the organized armed forces into a people's army, one soldier at a time. Make sure to always say something to law enforcement and the military about their role to uphold the rights of the working class, since they are part of it, and do as much as you can to subvert every corporate action against the working class.
Message from a citizen to any and all National Guard or federal troops: If you follow Trumpstein's orders to occupy American cities and abuse fellow citizens you are violating your oath of service. You are a traitor to the people and the nation and no amount of strutting around city parks and playgrounds in your GI Joe military combat kit can hide that reality. Time to man up boys and defend the Constitution and the people you took an oath to do, or just be a little Nazi gear. Your choice, but know, we see you for what you are.
"True Patriotism Is To Be Found In The Smoke Of A Burning Flag" ... https://mark192.substack.com/p/cartoon-true-patriotism-can-be-found
Before the election I was telling everyone that I could that it was the most important one of our lifetimes because we couldn't let Trump have control of the military. Before the election I was screaming that the right-wing propaganda machine was cancelling reality and that this was super duper bad because autocrats turn into authoritarians when they get to dictate what is real (like crime being out of control in DC and Chicago being a "killing field").
Here we are.
The best answers are in the past now.
I picked a terrible year to get sober.
You are doing great if you manage to stay sober in this environment. Stay strong. :)
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
Great work. I know how hard this is and wish you all the best.
Pfft. I didn't say it was working.
Very understandable ;) Good luck with it then still. You're really playing this on hard mode.
Communities of affluence are very different from communities of strife in the nature of their human relations. Only in the latter do real emotional bonds exist. Americans are largely weaned away from that.
This piece introduces a tone of desperation under the guise of a practical proposal that is unlikely. After all we've seen, the Project 2025 coup, as embodied by Trump, is unpopular, but not that unpopular. Those of us here who enjoy commenting in order to feel enlightened in contrast to THEM, believe we will survive this because we're not in the targeted groups. If we were to seriously oppose the forces of the coup, we would risk becoming targeted ourselves. How is that choice going?
Mostly informally, Project 2025 has been in the works for about a century. So has the Zionist Israeli Colonial project, to where now Kushner, Blair, et al, are drawing up plans for a Trump Gaza (Riviera II). It's settled, isn't it? The extermination of the Palestinian people is a fait accompli. It's history might reveal the volume of content that story provided for the production of the "news" industry.
There is nothing now that the raw application of money cannot accomplish against all moral considerations, cannot accomplish toward the further consolidation of power by the corporate/government complex. It's been named: Corporate Colonialism. Why has the prerogatives of the American weapons industry largely been left out of the story of this genocide?
In the way that Katrina exposed so many heretofore latent deficiencies and injustices toward an unnecessary calamity, so does this coup render visible the depth of racial hatred here, especially now that a democracy would no longer operate in the favor of the ruling minority for whom "quality of life" has been systematically reduced to level of consuming. We've been lauding the term democracy without understanding how it's supposed to actually work, or what it's actually for. After all the rhetoric about healing our divide(s), we're being split into those who will accommodate to despotism and those who will be persecuted by it. The despot will define the threats and you and I will disagree at our peril.