You’ll only be scared before you go to the protest. Once you’re there you’ll be fine. The vibe on the ground at every protest I’ve been to is great and there’s a real feeling of camaraderie and support from your community. There is some risk, yes. It’s probably still safer than crossing the street.

It’s also accounted for almost 100% by mosquitos, specifically the diseases they carry…so not really the mosquitos at all. Quick searching shows snakes following mosquitos with 100,000 deaths caused per year. In any case, the scale is prodigiously unbalanced. Human animals kill trillions of non-human animals, almost entirely for their own pleasure. Non-human animals kill a few hundred thousand human animals (or a bit over a million if you count mosquito-borne disease) in self defense or by accident.

Hills are why bikes have gears and there are plenty of chilly hilly places with strong bike infrastructure and culture. Not Just Bikes goes off on this subject frequently. Check them out on nebula or youtube for a laugh and some good information.

This is bringing hope to millions of people and setting the precedent of democrats actually resisting. It’s changing what is normal and energizing others to do their own good work, to get into their own ‘good trouble’. It’s doing a lot of fucking good. What the fuck are you doing?

A good criminal justice system ought to have comprehensive mental health services as part of the goal of rehabilitation. Therefore, for his own good, he should be in prison and we should reform the prison system.

today I learned that I am a tgirl. I didn’t expect to find out this way but I’ll accept it.

We don’t need back, we need forward, and a lot of us aren’t interested in giving into doomerism. It is still the time for peaceful resistance and that might still work. It might not, and if it doesn’t the time for widespread destruction of property and civil disobedience will come and that might work, and then soon after the time for armed resistance will come and that might work. If it all fails we can at least make them hurt and show the world that we don’t take fascism lying down. It’s dark times but we don’t get out of them by giving up.

Hell, there’s a chance we come out of this better than we were before, and not just because the bar is so fucking low. We (americans) might find our passion for liberty and justice again and we might find our courage and we might express our decades of resentment against the creeping in of inequality by swinging to the left with new and more inclusive rights and protections for working class people. That’d be nice but even if we can’t have a good ending it’s still the right thing to do to fight fascism with everything we have.

and call police what they are, nothing more than enforcers for the owner class. Not your friends, not there for ‘justice’, not there to save you. They exist to exert control and dominance over the exploited.

This seems like a remarkably good idea but I still wouldn’t gender it. Say it’s “hands on therapy for physically oriented people” or something. I’m sure there are plenty of non-male humans who would benefit.

Hell, it might even work for my girlfriend who will go to insane lengths to avoid sitting down and having a conversation about anything personal. If it works, I owe you an upvote or something.

That’s how they get you, with a nugget of truth that in your context is reasonable and in theirs is explicitly unreasonable. The idea that one can’t choose peace if they have no choice is an old one and philosophers have been thinking about it for ages. There’s nothing wrong with the idea. What’s wrong is that in the context of the alt right they imagine themselves as John Rambo and use nonsense like this as wank material when they’re advocating for (or doing) violence. It’s a story they tell to infantilize and invalidate the left. If we’re all babies who couldn’t even choose violence if we wanted then they should make decisions for us, right? Including the decision to kill us.

Funny thing is that the left got most of the rights and protections that people of every stripe benefit from through outright violence. Strikes and protests and all that are the compromise, remember.

Do you understand the difference between capitalism and commerce? Using money for trade isn’t what makes capitalism what it is. Capitalism is, from wikipedia, “An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market” Capitalism means that I can own something I have nothing to do with and you have to pay me for the privilege of using it. When that thing is housing or food or medicine then I own you unless you want to die.

Capitalism means taking from the worker and giving to the ‘owner’. The problem is that work is real and ownership is a made up concept.

The more you learn about it the more you’ll understand how evil it is, I promise.