In Person Activism

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"Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them." -Tim Snyder

A community for sharing information about ways to get involved with real world activism to make the world a better place.

Spend less time arguing about politics on the internet. The world is in trouble. Get out there and try to help.

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Don’t Doom Scroll, Organize: How to Get Active in the Current Terrain (itsgoingdown.org)

submitted 1 week ago by punkisundead@slrpnk.net to c/inperson@slrpnk.net

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14921136

While the future, no matter who wins the upcoming election, doesn’t look rosy, at the same time there is still a lot of people who are looking for an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian alternative to the established political order and are searching for concrete ways to get involved in real life action.

In past installments of this column, we’ve fleshed out ideas about how to to go about forming a group and promoting events, but this time around, we wanted to talk about concrete ideas on starting more long-term projects in your community. While this list isn’t exhaustive, we do hope this presents you with some real ideas about how you might start to begin.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 1 week ago

(I've been accused recently of debatebroing for the Democrats when I wasn't doing that, so I figured, if I'm going to get the accusation anyway, I might as well do it sometimes, too. What follows is absolute unapologetic debatebro.)

both candidates are deeply unpopular with vast amounts of the population.

This is a little misleading. When politics are as partisan as they are right now, favorability measurements get misleading.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/

Both candidates are favorable with about 44% of the people. I'm comfortable saying that people who consider Donald Trump favorable are completely out of their minds, meaning Kamala Harris is favorable with 44 / 56 = 78% of the people who aren't completely our of their minds.

This is the first little alarm bell that I saw that this whole paragraph is trying to spin things to make it look like Kamala Harris and Trump are as similar as possible.

Republican Donald Trump pushes far-Right conspiracy theories, calls for mass deportations, and for the military to shoot protesters.

True.

Democrat Kamala Harris continues to support the ongoing war and genocide in Gaza.

Not really.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/kamala-harris-middle-east-foreign-policy

It's not completely clear. Her expressed opinions are a lot better than Biden's. What she'll actually do isn't clear, although it also might well be the status quo. That whole article is worth reading, to give a good overview of what she thinks and what she's said. It's not simple.

Neither candidate offers any real solution to growing anger around the rising cost of living, skyrocketing rents, endless wars, militarization of the police, and the unfolding climate crisis which this summer fueled massive wildfires and catastrophic hurricanes.

Biden raised wages enormously, pulled out of Afghanistan, did some modest police reform (https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/the-biden-administrations-executive-order-on-policing-is-a-foundation-to-build-upon), and took the biggest action on climate change of any US president by about an order of magnitude.

He didn't do anything about rent that I know of.

I'm not sure if any of that has anything to do with Kamala Harris, but if we're going to blame Harris for Biden's support for genocide, it seems reasonable to give her credit for his action on all this other stuff.

For all I know, the whole rest of this article is great stuff. Nothing the Democrats are doing goes far enough. But pretending that the candidates are in any way similar, or that defeating Trump isn't the most effort-efficient opportunity to make in-person progress that will be available to anyone this year or maybe next year, is silly.

Getting involved in on-the-ground organizing sounds really good. Getting out of, or discouraged about, politics right now is planetary suicide. You can look at this quote from Greta Thunberg, to get the version of this that doesn't include pretending for no reason that US politics are unimportant right now:

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/b13a35e5-201b-40a0-83e1-d8382ec0abf8.png