PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

RIP to Mr. Ah Loo. This shouldn’t have fucking happened, and hopefully there will be accountability for this. Beyond that, I’m going to hold off on commenting until more details come out.

That’s fucking cursed. Try here: https://annas-archive.org/md5/adf8feb06a3e21357764640971b33f82

It doesn’t necessarily need to be a firefight.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/organizing-armed-defense-in-america#toc24

Are we though? Don’t drop any details if you’re aware of actual community defense preparations at the No Kings protests…but the organizers of these protests are libbed up as hell. No way they’re working with any armed community defense groups. It looks like the Salt Lake City protest organizers actually did work with a volunteer peacekeeping group, and the fatality was a bystander killed by a bullet meant to stop the gunman.

I don’t trust cops , or most people, with sleeves of tattoos.

FTFY. ACAB. Nothing wrong with tattoo sleeves.

You’ve described a period in history for every country, most of them today as well

Yes, I’m literally an anarchist. All states are at least classist, racist, capitalist, and enslavers to some degree. Any one of those would make states worthy of abolition IMO. Of course I oppose nationalism in all its forms. For a more nuanced (and less “giddy”) perspective, please see Section D.6 of the Anarchist FAQ.

You’re just giddy it’s the u. S this time.

I’m extremely cautiously optimistic that ordinary people are coming out to protests. And considering how after Trump 1.0, Democrats turned a blind eye to ICE, police violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Gaza genocide once a Democrat was elected to office, all after showing up to Black Lives Matter protests during Trump 1.0…I’m more cautious than optimistic.

I don’t think your in the best in headspace

Please read my post/comment history. Yeah, life’s been a bit shit lately so I’m more upset about it, but I’ve been an open anarchist for as long as I’ve been on Lemmy.

No thank you, the nationalists can keep their star-spangled rag. The “American ideal” always represented a settler-colonial project. Racism, classism, slavery, capitalism, conquest, and genocide are all built into the “American ideal” just as much as its nonideal implementations in the US government.

Whatever modes of living come after America needs to be a clean break from its horrific legacy. America in all its forms is holding us back.

Absolutely dogshit wrecker take

Yes. Imagine we meet at a train station or something and I say. “Hey, you look like a racist piece of shit, but we’re starting a campaign to end world hunger, would like to hear more about it?”.

Yeah but we’re not at a train station. Particularly, we are communicating through text, where you can skim the entire body of the text. Maybe the upcoming text justifies why the author sees me as a racist piece of shit. Maybe I have a blind spot! Or, maybe the author is just a jackass. But now I want to find out.

But like also I think you’re missing the forest for the trees? The point was not to say “you’re a liberal and you should feel bad about it”, it was to critique the point you started with. Namely, the “forest” is that the far right is not morally or materially equivalent to the far right, and to claim otherwise ignores history and the current reality. And I only used the “fellow liberal” framing because liberalism is the default ideology in the Western world, and because it is usually liberals who make points like this. Strike out any usages of the word “liberal” if you really can’t look past this point.

And we’re on Lemmy. I’m pretty sure " liberal" is a generally acknowledged insult here.

I mean we’re on Lemmy.world so I don’t know about that 😆. Lot of liberals around here.

People stop hearing the things that you actually want to say because the name calling bears more weight.

Yeah those people are never going to listen anyways. Really, namecalling bears more weight than the entirety of an argument, than the reality of the situation? If not namecalling, they’ll make up something, or just admit they never cared.

And while I think that “liberal” should be an insult in 2025, it unfortunately is not.

Did you actually stop reading at the word “liberal”? Because the actual argument I made was, with only a little bit of sass, that even from a liberal perspective, based on the values that liberals claim to uphold, the far right should be evaluated to be much worse than the far left. And then I remarked that this is not how liberals think because most liberals are two-faced (even if unintentionally so!).

And while there’s a small chance you’re not a liberal…well, you’re walking like a liberal, quacking like a liberal, posting and commenting like a liberal… and we’re on .world, so there’s gonna be lots of liberals here anyways.

Based, keep up the good work 👍

Ah yes fellow liberal, this is our classic dilemma: do I support people who want to destroy the planet, create an ethnostate, take away all my personal liberties, and kill me and all my friends and family and colleagues, or do I support people who are more zealous than I am about changing society in the direction of the values I loudly claim to hold? /s

(It’s not actually a dilemma because liberals always pick the far right.)

I am incapable of the kind of black and white thinking that would allow me to believe that literally ACAB

Well…ACAB is not just an assessment of all officers’ individual characters [1]. It’s an assessment of their role in society. Even a polite, protocol abiding, perfectly gentle cop is, on their best day, a member of the enforcement arm of the State, i.e. they are part of the organization that imposes the will of the capitalist class on the rest of the community every single day. Anything else that individual cops or individual police departments do is subordinate to the designated goal of enforcing the will of the capitalist class. In almost all cases where police departments attempt to do things beyond their primary function

I.e., literally all cops are the enemies of the community by design, regardless of the internal character of an individual officer or department. ACAB communicates this sentiment as well as you can do in 4 letters, i.e. something that can be graffitied in a pinch.

[1] To be clear, like 99.99% of all cops are still shitty people, even if the “cop” portion of their life is assumed to be separable and then ignored. And like you, I really don’t like black and white thinking, so the leftover 0.01% does not represent any cop I have ever personally met or read about; I’m only leaving open the theoretical possibility that there exists a person who would otherwise be a good person if they were not a cop. This observation is almost a corollary of the main point of ACAB, and then plug in the statistics about officers beating their partners and history of police brutality, violating their own protocols, enforcing heinous laws, etc…

Trump disrespected those troops by being there.

Yeah he gave them exactly what they deserved 🖕

A ringing endorsement for more protests

NOT Riots, peaceful protests

Absolutely should not matter if the event was peaceful or not. From Vicky Osterweil’s book In Defense of Looting:

"Rioters Hurt the Media Coverage, They Make Us/Our Concerns Look Bad”

…

No matter how peaceful and “well-behaved” a protest is, the dominant media will always push the police talking points and the white supremacist agenda. Although it can sometimes be leveraged strategically, the mass media is the enemy of liberation, and when we shape our actions to conform to its opinions or perspectives, we will always lose. If we riot, they will slander us. If we behave politely, peacefully, legally, they will simply return to ignoring us.

And in my view, this line in the sand that we see moderates draw for protests vs. riots is another example of capitulating to right-wing frameworks. Never ever give the right a single inch because they will always take a mile. The people who really are against the violence of capitalism will eventually understand that riots are the language of the oppressed. The rest will never be convinced no matter how hard you try until a better world becomes inescapable.

That sucks. Thank you for your time and running the instance. Gonna miss you all like hell while you’re gone. 😞

Unironically I would be literally thrilled to contribute to this brain drain. I’d drop everything and get on a plane right this very second for a chance to do a PhD in literally any other country.

If anyone is looking to fill a electrical engineering PhD position literally anywhere but America then I’m ya boy.