sanaer.bsky.social
I ride vehicles that begin with a b (bikes, busses, very rarely boats)
you can also find me at [email protected]
880 posts
258 followers
95 following
Getting Started
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" becoming the first mass sit ins of the San Francisco Bay Area civil rights movement. Many of these people were students at Cal Berkeley or SF STate, protesting discriminatory hiring practices"
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but I think leads to an overreliance on "theory" and re-learning things from first principles
It has occurred to me that Black American leftists have been one group I've seen online talking about the historical effectiveness of boycotts
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Ok everyone, that's been fun and a little baffling, but I need to go to bed so I'm closing the comments section
This is probably going to break the thread but there's an entire thread you can practice your reading comprehension on in this comments
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I also think that as one piece of optimism, I think if things get worse enough, people in the US would respond the way people are in Canada.
The problem, aside from things getting worse, is they need to get worse for *everyone*
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it also sounds like there's a huge amount of social pressure to not buy American, and people are talking about it all the time in a way I've never heard of happening here (at least among boomers, who polls show are the most on board with this stuff)
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true in that particular case, but from what I've heard from my family a lot of the grocery store boycotts are fairly unplanned, and those plus other decisions like not planning any future travel to the US are probably more impactful than liquor stores
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Actually I'm legitimately curious. Why did you reply to me? Usually on here I talk to people I've gotten to know either online or IRL, and as a result we're able to have real conversations. I usually don't post in random people's mentions. I'm curious what the appeal of posting in this way is.
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bsky.app/profile/sana...
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I don't have that kind of self control
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I'll do it before going to bed, but I have this futile belief I can teach strangers about reading comprehension
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also I don't really know anyone in the US who isn't on the left, and I don't really have a strong interest to know what they're saying
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bsky.app/profile/sana...
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the problem with bluesky is I have a bunch of great conversations with my friends, however
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1
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I was looking into this at some point and Florida is in a unique situation where they make most of the orange juice (most oranges in California are not the juice ones)
There aren't good ones for most other states. Maybe whiskey
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Historically, there was a pretty successful orange juice boycott (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_B... in case you didn't know)
For the Trump/Elon administration as a whole, nothing immediately comes to mind. For the anti trans laws, we could bring back the orange juice boycott
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I have this theory that people are making up fake (and easily defeated) threats in order to avoid acknowledging and to somehow cope with the real ones, and that this accelerated around Covid
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Yeah
one thing that is difficult about the current situation is that the right wing seems to view their made up fake problems as existential threats, whereas it's hard to get people to care about actual dangers
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yeah, I would say so, I'm maybe being a little unfair to the American consumer because so far I'm pretty optimistic about that one
It probably helps that most people weren't going to buy a Tesla driver and that Tesla drivers were already disliked
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thinking about it more - going on kind of a tangent
actually effective unorganized boycotts came in response to a crisis
Crises seem likely in the future for all sorts of reasons (climate change even if everything else gets fixed tomorrow)
maybe we should think about crisis resiliency more
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what I was trying to get at in the thread is that there is an assumption that long-term, deep organizing is always necessary, but I think it's only necessary in the US because of a large degree of apathy and being happy with the status quo
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That was part of it but I started thinking about this a few days ago; mostly based on people being surprised and skeptical that in Canada a protracted boycott with no long-term deep organizing is happening, and realizing that I myself don't have any precedent for that sort of thing
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I'm kind of morbidly curious about who shows up next
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are people like searching for words in this thread and why
We need private posts on bluesky
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To clarify more to the random people who found their way here, I think people in the US are mostly correct to think any particular boycott won't work but that's less because boycotts inherently can't work and more because nobody wants to do them, including the people calling for a boycott
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I intended to write something more productive on the general topic but I wrote 1500 words of bullet points probably nobody wants to read
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Probably because we aren't following each other and don't seem to have overlapping followers so I guess you don't have any context on this conversation
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I think also the idea that workers in wealthy countries have no power as consumers is something people really want to believe, but I don't think it's true. A consumer wants a T shirt for $10 and across the ocean a child sews it for them. That's an incredible amount of power
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Yeah I have kind of a larger post I'm working on of what boycotts I think work and what don't
I don't use Amazon Prime but that's less because I think it will affect Amazon and more because of other positive effects
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You could have multiple parties forming coalitions, with the relative size of each reflecting people's actual preferences. This is to some degree pretty common in other political systems.
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But I don't think the problem of boycotts is that fundamentally different from the problem of unions. There are very few unions in the US, most of them were founded at a different time, and most unionization efforts fail. That is because the average American is comfortable with the status quo.
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Having like max 2% of the population put in most of the effort, which is often known as "organizing", can motivate a large number of people to put a small amount of effort towards making things slightly better for themselves. This is worthwhile because it's our only real option.
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What I've realized recently is that boycotts happen when enough people genuinely care and the situation negatively affects them in a concrete way. They wish things were better but they're ok with the status quo because compared to most people in the world the status quo is very good.
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Crown Royal doesn't have the best reputation either, but maybe I should actually try
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me but without cats
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I looked it up and the company is actually American
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How is it
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My solution for transportation in San Francisco
1. Assume a frictionless slope
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This would kind of work on the west side of SF for a very generous definition of "work"
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I have an even worse idea
Train goes the way the wind usually goes, but slightly uphill
To return you take down the sails and go downhill
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I learned all about this from the videogame valheim
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I was imagining the train only goes if the wind is going the right way
This would be really good for adding artificial time pressure in movies and so on but maybe not for any other purpose