adderaline

its not completely wrong. getting cosmetic veneers is a pretty common practice in hollywood. they don’t cause your teeth to decay or whatever, but lots of celebs have them.

link! i didn’t know Internet Archive had a merch store.

corporate governance structures are anti-democratic by nature. framing corporate capture of innovation, economic opportunity, scientific research, and our most critical services as a positive thing is grotesque. nobody should own lifesaving research. nobody should own our houses, our hospitals, our livelihoods and our parks, corporations shouldn’t be able to decide what causes are worthy, what challenges can be addressed. we should. the people who do the work, who make the products, who do the labor that serves others, not unaccountable boards of ultra-wealthy assholes who think they get to make our decisions for us, and are using that power to actively kill the fucking planet.

if you wanna lick the boot, have fun with that corpo.

no, its to achieve your goals. this is fundamental to the idea of direct action. you’re doing stuff. you aren’t trying to build support for helping homeless people, you’re going out there and feeding them. you aren’t waiting for people to legalize desegregation, you’re defying segregated public space. you aren’t begging public officials not to build an oil pipeline in your home, you’re chaining yourself to equipment.

if you confine protesting only to convincing bystanders to be on your side, you’re just saying the only way to win a just future is to be popular. what consolation is that to the marginalized? to those who have never enjoyed widespread public support, and can’t expect it to solve their problems?

if you think protests are only to alter public opinion? you don’t know very much about protesting. direct action has been part of protests since the beginning.

i’m not really seeing any claim that “any protest anywhere is just as valid”. they’re talking about educating people on the strategic value of civil disobedience and direct action. that is important for any social movement that wants to succeed.

Blocking random roads does nothing but turn people who just want to get to work against you.

this isn’t true. it can turn people against you, for sure. that isn’t the only thing it does though. it can delay the construction of an oil pipeline. it can disrupt the logistics of an industry. like, the activist’s dilemma is important, taking care to recognize the PR of what you do is important, but direct action is about doing the thing you want done, rather than waiting for public opinion to turn.

if you are an indigenous activist trying to keep an oil pipeline from poisoning your water, or the government from leasing your land to corporate agriculture, it doesn’t matter if people are “on your side” or not. you need to stop the fully legal process that is guaranteed to make your people suffer, knowing that nobody but you and your people are historically likely to defend your home. there are so many situations where just waiting for public opinion to turn isn’t gonna stop the thing you want to stop.

i’m sorry, but you really aren’t in a position to be saying anything about how effective these strategies are. direct action continues to be a huge part of basically every modern social movement up to and including the largest protests in history. if you aren’t open to learning those reasons, you have no grounds to contest their efficacy.

they’re kinda right though. the things this person is saying aren’t new. the principles of direct action were instrumental in the success of the Civil rights movement, and many other activist movements throughout modern history. i’m really not sure where you think this person is coming from, though, with the whole “spoon-fed hate” thing. they’re a leftist. a socialist or an anarchist, something of that flavor. the action they’re demanding is action against climate change, against bigotry, against capitalism. or at least, i don’t really see many people who aren’t somewhere around that headspace talking about “praxis” and “direct action”. they kinda come off like a smartass to me, but the point they’re getting to is something pretty fundamental to organizing effective movements, and they’re talking about it because tons of people aren’t aware of the theory and politics that has grown up around making changes in society.

like, just for history’s sake, in the SCLC, the org MLK lead during the civil rights movement, Selma, among many other things, was organized by James Luther Bevel, the SCLC’s Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education. he turned out to have sexually abused his daughters, so uhhh… not a great dude , but if you look at his wikipedia you can see how instrumental he was to the civil rights movement as it is known today, and how the idea of direct action was foundational to that movement and its success.

because not fighting means getting killed, being marginalized, getting the groundwater poisoned, losing rights, getting put into concentration camps, etc? its not complicated. lots of people don’t have the luxury to just not “bother”. they aren’t blocking roads cuz they like it, people who do direct action can get put in fucking prison. they’re doing it because they don’t have the choice to sit on the sidelines and whine about how annoying protests are.

like, for real, do you think the people who built the civil rights movement didn’t hold meetings on this exact thing? that they didn’t talk about blocking roads and airports? that they didn’t do sit-ins and other kinds of direct action? like, if you think this is stupid as fuck, you must think a great deal of the people who built and participated in the civil rights movement were pretty fucking stupid, because they were doing this shit, and it was against the law, and it was the law that broke first.

thinking that farmers should do work with nothing in return as a method of ending food insecurity is ignorant to the work being done to address food insecurity. nobody is proposing farmers should work for free. food stamps, subsidized farming, community owned farmland, urban gardening, universal basic income, food banks, all of these things and more are how we eradicate starvation, and how many other developed nations have successfully reduced food insecurity.

systems which allow people to starve are indefensible in a world where we can make enough food for people, and we absolutely can do that.

people should not starve. we have the resources to ensure nobody starves. it isn’t a naive statement, its a moral imperative.

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to be honest i’m not sure i agree with that. but that doesn’t seem like the position drdiemz is defending. they seem to want less ideology in schools, or none at all, which is… both impossible and undesirable.

pedagogy is ideological. the way we teach children, the things we teach them, the things we don’t, all that requires a specific ideological framework. free access to knowledge, freedom to choose what to believe, teaching diverse perspectives, those are ideological imperatives not shared by all ideologies. i think we should impress upon our children the value of free access to knowledge, of liberation, of the social forces which have led to them having access to schooling and literacy when before only the wealthy did. and to be honest, from the behavior of a large quantity of the ideological right wing, they seem to think that’s an active threat.

the fact is that ideologies which prioritize the well being of other human beings, their liberties as individuals and as communities, are better, and their ability to learn about any ideology unrestricted is facilitated by the implementation of socially progressive values in their schooling environment. its why i’m always wary of people who seek to minimize politics in the classroom. everything is political. the way in which students are taught is political, the organization of classrooms is political, the certification of teachers is political, the funding for schools is political. every single part of every person’s life is shaped by politics, and if you aren’t engaging students with politics, you are withholding information from them that they should be given.

it was exactly like they were having an actual drag show. maybe not the modern cultural understanding of one, but they were dressing up as women to play feminine roles in the context of a performance, which fits under the definition of a drag show. it was a common practice in both the British and US militaries.

what is too far? what places? i hear this point alot, but do you have examples? real schools that are really going “too far” in some specific sense? where are they? what are they teaching?

bullshit jobs are a compelling concept, but not one i really find convincing. we can say paper pushing isn’t a real job or whatever, but large organizations do require staff to manage the complexity of their infrastructure. if those papers don’t get pushed, nobody gets paid and nobody doing the non-bullshit jobs know where to go or what to do. not to say that advertising isn’t on its own of dubious social value, but profit-seeking corporations wouldn’t invest in paying those folks if they didn’t make them money or otherwise facilitate the making of money.

i mean i get the impulse, but if we were to blindly trust any sort of knowledge system, science is the one to trust, right? like, any downsides of trusting scientific consensus are necessarily larger when trusting information sources that aren’t scientific, and if you follow through with trusting science blindly, you might ignorantly begin to believe that empirical testing and intellectual honesty is necessary for determining the truth of your beliefs!

one thing i think needs to be recognized here is that this isn’t some moral failing of individuals, its an explicit goal of capitalism. the atomization of communities, the capturing of markets, the exertion of power to maintain the status quo. these are all things that should be expected under capitalism, and are not symptoms of moral decay of some sort. that we have to fight these impulses is not a sign that we’re doomed, its exactly the thing we are tasked to fight against.

conceiving of the reddit protests as an unambiguous failure is also, i think, not reasonable. this got a lot of coverage in a lot of places, it forced reddit to act pretty publicly to break a strike, and drew attention to projects like lemmy and kbin. it also isn’t over. maybe we’ll be able to clearly see what effects this event had in the history of social media sometime in the future, but we ain’t done with it yet, and i think assessments of its efficacy are only going to be clearheaded some time after the dust settles.

i do kinda think you’re overthinking it. you can’t control how other people behave most of the time. societies inner workings are beyond our control. we can only act according to our own values, and hope that others do the same. for me personally, worrying about how successful a movement is going to be is kinda secondary to participating. if this fails, then it fails. lots of things fail. most things, even. this is not a fight we’re going to win every time, but if we don’t try, we cannot succeed.

I don’t think we need to consider optics like that. If all we talk about is what we want to, the people who want to talk about that will stick around, and the people who don’t won’t. I doubt it’ll stick around for too long though.