adavidjohnson.bsky.social
A David Johnson, one of many. Anarcho-Satanist, one of few.
I believe in a world without rulers or ruled, even tho I may not live to see it. I believe injustice must be fought even if you lose.
The work is the work, and more hands make it lighter.
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"We have to stop what's going on by any means necessary" is not just a euphemism because "by any means necessary" really does mean a lot of things working in concert, and they need to be working reliably for it to have any shot of working.
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People who need an abortion need someone to drive them.
People going to protests need someone who can do child care.
Labor unions need lawyers.
Clubs need people who can cook meals for dozens of people.
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Therefore it's important to being doing things that actually matter right now and preparing yourself to be able to do more later, too.
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Finally, I don't want to be pessimistic, but based on what I saw five years ago and see now from Democratic elites, a dramatic mass uprising or general strike that can be called via Internet announcement is not really in the cards because people haven't gotten ready for what that actually requires.
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I don't want to keep going because I don't want to get too cute, but the core of "I am reliable for this thing" is not a small thing at all, and it provides for a lot of other work to build off of and interconnect with it.
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Sometimes a sewing circle is good for meeting other people interested in your hiking club that meets outside of town separately and with a slightly different group of people, and the people in that club have fun giving each other nicknames they always use for one another.
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Or sometimes a sewing circle is also a place for book recommendations or writing political prisoners together.
Sometimes it's "just" gossip about who isn't safe to be around or it's coordinating mutual aid like child care while someone else goes to a potentially dangerous protest.
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A sewing circle is hard to surveil and infiltrate by the state because they usually require people in them to have a certain set of skills already, and it's a huge investiture of time because sometimes a sewing circle really *is* just a sewing circle.
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This includes things such as who needs a reliable driver for abortion access funds, or where abortifacients are still available (in bulk or on demand) in states where it might be illegal on the books to discuss or facilitate that — and where creating a digital record would therefore be inadvisable.
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A sewing circle is a place to meet regularly and talk in person about all sorts of things, including networking for other things and planning them.
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However, a sewing circle is immediately useful to all kinds of people, especially people who are of limited means and for whom patched or repaired clothes would mean something.
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(And also, for people who were out in 2020, the tens of millions of everyday liberals who were necessary for a sustained mass movement like that to work got scared and drifted away when things came down to more than just marching. "I support protests against police violence, but...")
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We've seen how going out in the streets and protesting tends not to have a great answer to the, "And now what?" question. It is a lot of noise and motion, but to what end?
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"We need people in the streets and a general strike and a revolution, not half-measures!"
It's not a half-measure to say, "I am going to commit to being a stable foundation for decades for this project," and that includes things that at first glance seem boring or ineffectual like a sewing circle.
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There is work to do, and you have to do it, and you have to be someone other people can rely on to be able to do their own necessary work. If you are the single point of failure for a dozen different projects, you will fail and your projects with you, and everything that relied on those projects.
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But this is not an emergency that is dealt with in weeks. This is a catastrophe that has been set in motion for decades and has decades yet to come.
You cannot do nothing from information paralysis or denial and you cannot exhaust yourself until you are incapable of doing anything more.
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So pick your thing. Pick the level of involvement you can commit to, including the risk and suffering you actually are prepared to endure. Work on increasing your capacities.
“You are what you do repeatedly. You become more of what you practice at.”
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Being fully alarmed by all crises does not necessarily result in anything being done about any of them and trying to do things about all of them simultaneously will either result in sloppy, shallow work; quick burnout; or both.
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Think about your priorities.
Pick your thing.
Do that thing consistently.
Lend a hand occasionally when you have it to spare.
Accept that this will require much more time than you’d prefer but understand it has to be done anyway.
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When you’re stressed and terrified, think about what you can actually do about it, and if the answer is nothing, put it out if your head.
Not because it’s not important but because the things you can impact are too important to let slip away by radiating your limited energy in useless worry.
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Literally, three things is the most most people can manage, and that’s a lot because it includes your low points, too, not just your best moments when everything else is going well.
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Whatever else you add on to or join in on, you keep up this one commitment, and you don’t take on so many more regular commitments that doing all of them wears you down.
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I don’t know what your thing is, and literally, it could be feeding four or five other people regularly for an activity.
But it’s something in particular, and you do it.
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Connect with other people doing that thing and become reliable for just that one thing. Help others become reliable, too, as best you can, but this is your one thing you definitely show up for and others rely on you for.
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Ask yourself: “What do I care deeply about?” You probably can think of a few things, but don’t think of more than a few things because you probably can only commit to doing one of them.
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It is to tell you that things like hope and despondency, resignation and terror are not useful. They’re just experiences you have, and if they prevent you from taking action, they are not useful to anyone.
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That’s not to tell you to “calm down” or avoid treating seriously what’s happening and how it’s making you feel.
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there's a single mom whose child is at the size where going to the package room for heavy/cumbersome boxes is very difficult for her but relatively easy for me
so she texts me when she needs help with that. sometimes she has extra food she brings me.
this is community, as i understand it
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One of the reasons so much money is put into law enforcement budgets is to be prepared for when these insurgencies & uprisings occur.
While they tear the funding from our Department of Education & healthcare programs to fund it, at the end of the day, there is still a number to it.
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makes sense tbh
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The equivalent would be if 170 million lived around D.C., instead of the 50 million in BosWash as-is.
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According to Wikipedia, half the population of South Korea lives in the Seoul metro area (26 million in a country of 51 million), or a fifth just in Seoul proper (10 million).
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I think the active efforts to remove bodily autonomy and make it illegal to be publicly queer is supposed to take care of that.
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My two pieces of feedback would be to
1) Make a semi-expensive craftable path that you could link several of together to serve as a canal to extend irrigated tiles
2) Either make a rice a two-season crop or come up with a third paddy crop so you could do an irrigation game throughout the year
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Is the idea that the more untenable the rest of the world becomes for the Jewish Diaspora, the better for Israel (and therefore real Jews™)?
Or is it that Israel has more in common with authoritarians than liberal democracies and pluralistic societies?
(Or are both misunderstanding your meaning?)