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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • “Getting organized with your community” could mean things like volunteering to help register voters, giving people rides to polling sites, resisting voter suppression, etc. It could also mean things like setting up group panel discussions to help regular people articulate their needs to elected representatives, or organizing fundraisers for political candidates.

    In my opinion these types of activist work have potential to be more helpful than just encouraging to people to vote in an abstract sense.

    You can even sometimes organize groups of people to solve problems directly on their own. In a town I used to live in, people got sick of waiting on the government to provide better clinics, so they started a free clinic with donated money and labor. Later, they were easily able to secure government grants once it was operating. No voting, signs, or yelling required (I believe they did have a few benefit concerts). It was a win for the community, who got a free clinic, and a win for the local government, who got a longstanding problem off their plate with essentially no effort on their part, just a little ongoing funding.

    Doing the work of calling people up & coordinating getting them to come to events (like, say, polling sites, or city council meetings, or benefit concerts) is basically 90% of what “political organizing” is.



  • Police kill more Americans than active shooters do and should be disestablished for that reason alone. 1/3rd of all homicides are by police. Homicide by police is the largest single category of homicide. Yet, police have only 2% of all the firearms in this country. To me, those statistics are staggering. We have actually, by several objective metrics, reached the point where police commit more crimes than the “criminals” do. American society is just experiencing whiplash catching up to the numbers because many of us don’t want them to be true. Which is understandable, we have put a huge amount of collective trust in these institutions and it sucks to be betrayed.

    Defunding the police isn’t about idyllic utopias, it’s about stopping the ongoing racialized mass-murder that doesn’t actually protect anyone’s community. Where I live, the police are a bigger social problem than any gang or mafia.

    Defund, disarm, disband.











  • It’s not so much that they’re bored, although that’s probably how they frame it to themselves.

    For some people, it’s that to be that rich you have to ignore a lot of suffering and inequality. I think that takes a toll on your mental health if you don’t constantly distract yourself, hence all the thrill-seeking/chaotic behavior and drug use.

    For other people, it’s that after having a lifetime of no one ever denying them anything, or facing any consequences, they genuinely start to think they can truly do [whatever] they want.