#change things

[hale-my-nathan]

Trump Weird News - "Back To The Future" To The Rescue [LOL]

[sweetdesserts]

[dipperdesperado]

I'm writing a plan for a solarpunk social revolution

I think at this point we all have an understanding that things in the world aren't good. That's useful information, but that's also only step one.

Next, is broadly to figure out, "what the heck do we do?"

I've been doing a lot of listening and reading about that, and I'm trying to formulate my thoughts, to create a guide of sorts. I'm gonna sketch out my framing for it, with the areas of focus and basic tenants. This is going to be an iterative process, so let me know what you think about this! If u have the stuff to add or change, I'm cool with that!

Basic Needs (Pillars for Life)

These are the things that people deserve to be provided in order to live a comfortable life. The brave new world should be able to provide these things.

Shelter: A safe and secure place to live is essential for a comfortable life. This could be a house, apartment, or another type of dwelling.

Food and water: Adequate nutrition and hydration are essential for maintaining good health and well-being.

Clothing and personal items: Clothing and personal items such as toiletries help people feel clean and presentable, and can also provide protection from the elements.

Health care: Access to quality health care is important for maintaining physical and mental well-being

Transportation: Having access to reliable transportation can make it easier to get to work, run errands, and participate in activities.

Communication: Being able to communicate with others, whether through phone, email, or other means, can help people stay connected and feel less isolated.

Education: Access to education can help people gain knowledge, skills, and opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Technology, electricity, and internet access: Access to technology and the internet can facilitate communication, education, and access to information and resources.

Art, Media, Entertainment, and Play: People often need activities or hobbies that provide enjoyment and help them relax and de-stress.

Social connections: Strong social connections and a sense of community can provide support, companionship, and a sense of belonging.

Financial stability: Having access to sufficient financial resources can help people meet their basic needs and feel more secure.

Personal safety and Defense: Feeling safe and secure in one's environment is essential for a comfortable life.

Levels/Spheres of Liberation

These are the levels at which liberation needs to occur. There's an interplay between each level: for example, you have to a reach certain standard of self-love before you can make meaningful connections with others. The more connected with yourself you are, the more connected with others you can be.

Internalized Liberation: Internalized Liberation is a state of radical self-love.

Interpersonal Liberation: Interpersonal Liberation is a state in which love is fully and freely given to all others. 

Institutional Liberation: Institutional Liberation is a state of radical inclusion, where all organizations see equity as their responsibility and use an equitable process framework in perpetuity.

Systemic Liberation: Systemic Liberation is a state in which we have reconfigured societal relationships to resources to allow for ingenuity and social protections to coexist, creating the interconnected circumstances under which all people have the resources, access, and opportunity to thrive.

Environmental Liberation: Environmental Liberation is a state of harmony with the environment. Reconnecting with nature and understanding our place in it.

Ideological Liberation: Ideological Liberation is a state in which we have fully transcended and have no need for social constructs such as race; a reality where we are unbound by identity defined in contrast to others; individuals are unconflicted and feel a full and authentic sense of belonging in all spaces.

Guiding Principles

These guiding principles are the values which underpin the revolution; these are the unarguable, foundational ideas that make up the basic requirements for the movement.

Grassroots/Direct democracy: people should manage their own affairs. If something only affects you, then you do what you want. Things that affect others should involve them in the process. The goal is to find the balance between individual and collective autonomy, where the combination of each is greater than the sum of its parts.

Social Ecology: Our foundational understanding of nature is based on hegemonic values that separate us from it. This thinking coincided with the domination of people by other people around the beginning of civilization. By trying to reconnect with nature and see ourselves as part of it, while also upholding the values of liberty, solidarity, and equality, we can work towards mending our environmental and social relations.

Decentralization: civilization is an extremely complex system, and the most successful complex systems balance order and chaos thru decentralized forms. Highly centralized systems like the prevailing ones simplify things and standardize things to make them easier to manage. Having unique communities that federate based on need and shared projects leads to more resilient, creative, and emergent societies.

Anti-hierarchy, domination, and coercion: revolutions have to be led by the people, for the people. Forcing a mode of operation onto others is a non-starter. Freedom with subjugation is no freedom at all.

Liberty: people should be free to live how they want, so long as those desires don’t harm others. Matters should be decided with a maximal preference for that balance.

Free Association: all relations should be voluntary. No one should have the power to force a relationship, whether it’s for work, play, or community.

Solidarity Economies: programs, organizations, and projects that prioritize the well-being of the community over other concerns.

Diversity as Power: intersectional understanding of different identities people hold and how that informs their experiences being alive. Along with this, a recognition that the diversity of experiences heightens the chance for emergent solutions to problems.

Levels of Organization

Organizing at different scales.

Affinity Groups: a small group that’s tightly knit and focused on very specific alignment. Similar thoughts on issues, and similar interests in projects and actions.

Communes/Neighborhood Pods: connecting with people in your geographical vicinity, uniting on shared issues to be solved, moreso than shared ideology.

Organizations (platform orgs, ideological orgs, social orgs): Groups trying to change the world for the better. There would be platform orgs that contribute to ideological orgs and social orgs to provide cohesion between different projects and strengthen community resilience through federation within the community and its disparate projects.

Prisons: writing letters to prisoners and creating specific programs to abolish the modern-day slave complex that is the prison system.

Schools and Educational Bodies: creating revolutionary unions for students, staff, and faculty, and making efforts to gain direct democratic control of education.

Workplaces (Unions and Cooperatives): starting revolutionary syndicates for traditional workplaces, and starting directly democratic, horizontally run businesses.

Cities/Counties: tying all of the above things together through assemblies to have citizens directly decide on things that affect the whole city/county geographical area.

Regions: tying multiple cities/counties together, making decisions on projects that affect the region (big infrastructure and the like). This will still be directly democratic. The people who are affected by the decision will be the ones to come to the decision.

"Nations": tying multiple regions together to make very large decisions that affect the whole landmass.

Those're pretty much the areas that I'm thinking about. Am I missing anything?

[w-armansky-blog]

SOPHIE MOUSEL, BREAKER OF BOARDS

source: https://boldmagazine.lu/sophie-mousel-briseuse-de-planches-et-decrans/

[bitchthefuck1]

Shitty performative corporate feminism used to really bother me on an almost existential level—"if people think this is what feminism is they'll never take us seriously!"— but the older I get the more I think that if buzzfeed calling manspreading a war crime is enough to make you decide that the mistreatment of women is okay or not a big deal or not really happening despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, then you were probably never going to give a shit about women anyway.

There's a kind of naive hope to this idea, like if you could just explain what your suffering is like and show men your humanity, you could get them to set their patriarchal thinking aside. Because how could they keep acting the way they do if they knew it was hurting you? It's easier to believe that they just haven't had it explained to them properly than to accept that they know, they've heard it, and they just don't care.

[thefloralmenace]

Okay, I went on my rant last night about how I'm tired of the two kinds of modern young people activism being "angsty complaining online + only 'protesting' to people who agree with you" and "straight up advocacy of violence and terror."

Now I'm ready to talk about what I think people should do to make a real difference in the world

1) Be aware of world issues, but understand that the effect you are likely to have on them, especially pre-career and pre-stable income will likely be minimal. There are some brilliant and/or wealthy people out there who can make waves in world issues (thinking of Boyan Slat being enough of a genius to potentially clean up the ocean), but if you're not in that position, don't beat yourself up. The best things you can really do for a big issue you care about is turn out for marches/protests (in areas/locations where they would actually be effective), raise money for a related nonprofit that you've researched, share information, etc. Ex: The summer of BLM, my car broke down, and I was too sick to make it to protests. Instead, I made BLM fundraiser T-shirts from my living room and donated ALL profits to NAACP and Color of Change.

2) Analyze every rule and policy you encounter, and if it's stupidly punitive for no reason, seek a nonviolent way to subvert it. Ex: My college had a policy that if you forget to wear long pants to lab and you can't go change and get back in 15 minutes, you get a zero for the lab for that day. Analysis: Why does this policy exist? We need people to wear appropriate clothing to lab so that they aren't harmed by chemical spills. Would anyone ever violate this rule on purpose? No. There is no incentive to wear shorts to lab on purpose. It's not like cheating where that has to be de-incentivized because doing it could provide an actual benefit, so the only people this policy affects are people who genuinely forgot to wear the right clothes when they left the house. Can you de-incentivize people forgetting things? No. So this rule is stressing people out for just being human beings, and the only real aim is to make sure people are safe in the lab. What did I decide to do about this? I spent about $30 total on pants in a range of sizes from Goodwill, stamped with them with "Emergency Lab Pants" and left them in a box with a sign saying what they were for in the department common area. You forget your pants? Go get another pair. It's still worth it to try to remember to dress appropriately because you can never be 100% sure your size will be there (someone else might forget at the same time), but there is a safety net. And you know what? Someone spilled an entire jar of sulfuric acid on their pants in lab that semester. Our lab manager didn't know what to do because they couldn't just send the guy home in his underwear, but another student knew about the emergency pants and got him a pair. As soon as the department knew the emergency lab pants were there, unexpectedly, every professor in the department endorsed them, and they even ordered more to keep on hand in the lab office. Turns out, no one had ever analyzed that rule before, so it was just an overly vindictive hold over that no one ever challenged. I never changed the policy, but I declawed it. No more panicked messages in the college group chats of people begging someone to bring them pants. :)

3) Seek to reduce misery in your immediate environment. Got a professor who belittles people for asking questions with "You should know that by now."? Send them an email asking them why they do that. What's the point of making people feel ashamed for asking questions? If they really think people should know ____ thing by now, shouldn't their immediate response be to explain so that they will? Is it really better not to answer and leave them still not knowing? Additionally, is the physical environment depressing? When I arrived at my department of study, the walls were blank, the main colors were gray, white, and black, and the study areas were nearly empty. I'm leaving it with potted plants, crocheted blankets, art on the walls, and study areas full. Place was depressing, I had to spend a lot of time there, so I decided to bring in potted plants and blankets labeled as officially property of the department, and I convinced our department chair to let me run an art contest to get student art on the walls.

4) Determine whether the problem you see is the result of active malice, apathy, or a mix of both. Ex: I identified an issue with professors in my department responding coldly or cruelly to students who reached out about struggling. I determined that in some cases, this was because the professors were just mean people, and in some cases it was just because they didn't have instinct for human empathy or how what they say sounds to someone having a panic attack. So I drafted up a flier with examples of dos and don'ts for responding to panicking students. Ex: Let them know that changing degree programs is an option, but don't make it the first thing you say in response. This comes off as "If you can't hack it, you should just quit" when that is your first suggestion.

5) In situations where you may end up in conflict with someone/something:

Powerful or which has some power over you

Big enough to easily brush you off

Get creative and make sure you have some cards to play. Ex: When I launched an investigation into my university's mental health services treating people inexcusably, I got permission from all my anonymous respondents to share their stories with news outlets, so when I submitted the report to the school mental health department, they knew I could take all the information I gave to them public as well. Ex part II: I reported one of my professors for a genuine episode of discrimination against students with disabilities. This protected me with an anti-retaliation policy that gave me more freedom to engage with him about his negative dogmatic attitudes towards education because had he taken anything out on me, there was no way to prove it wasn't part of bitterness about the discrimination report.

6) Get involved in the issues that are close to you because you can have the biggest effect on local problems you know well. That's why I fight for kindness in education - there's nothing I'm closer to and more familiar with than cruelty in academia. Additionally, be public with the issues you're fighting. That's how you inspire other people. I post my battles in college on social media to let my friends know that you CAN report a professor without being kicked out of the class, you can challenge departmental policy without being kicked out of the university or hindered in your degree, etc.

7) Be confident enough to publish your ideas. I wrote a pamphlet about how the work culture that gets pushed off on people in high school sets up high achieving students to be miserable in college. (you can find it here as a cheap download on my Etsy if you want to read it: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1089558834/over-achieving-not-working-any-more?click_key=ea53b13a4da266e0bc97e89924732abbe184328d%3A1089558834&click_sum=213d0412&ref=shop_home_feat_3&clickFromShopCard=1I) got the pamphlet printed myself, and left it around college study spaces, in bathrooms, etc. I also gave it out to the students I TA. People acted like it was crazy of me to do that, and some people responded like it was even narcissistic for me to publish my own ideas. Too bad. If you want to change things, you have to be confident in your principles. Also, leaving pamphlets in the area that your audience goes is easier and less awkward than trying to hand out pamphlets, so I highly recommend that approach.

Note: These are all principles of activism that you can pursue 100% by yourself. As much as I'd like to work with a team of people on certain issues, I can't find anybody with the same drive as me, so this is how I make waves without a lot of additional help.

[secretceex]

I wish I could change some things from the past. Looking back on it makes me uncomfortable but if it never happened I wouldn’t be who I am today..