Yeah its tough… At least you can block ads when browsing and pirate digital media pretty easily 🤷‍♀️

We have no neighbors. Only an unruly 51st tundra state and a hoard of alien barbarians being held at bay by the Night’s Watch ICE

After a long enough period of striking it begins to have repercussions beyond the individual budget.

If the flow of money slowed to a crawl for an extended period, companies don’t have the funds to pay workers. Enough job loss leads to further reduced spending, thus impacting stock value, thus impacting employment, etc…

A month would have a noticeable impact, but a full fiscal quarter would be the first cliff where the big corporations would really sweat. But generally I agree, an economic strike with an end date is like an overnight hunger strike

My assumptions were built off your original comment, in which you said it was recent and driven by XHS:

The realization came with TikTok ban. Soon as I heard that TikTok could be banned, I started looking for alternatives […] I stumbled upon XHS […] about a month before everyone else. I was absolutely fucking blown away by China

I don’t know your life story and it didn’t seem like a leap to think “He uses TikTok” and “It doesn’t sound like he’s been to China from his reaction”. I could be wrong about those assumptions, but it wasn’t unreasonable. It’s pretty wild that you’re trying to walk it back even though it’s right there, verbatim.

Again, my intention wasn’t a personal attack, I’m just trying to provide a counterpoint to the sentiment I often see; that China is a bastion of progress and everything I’ve been told is western propaganda. My anecdotal explanation is to show this isn’t coming from what I read on CNN or second hand but my lived experiences in the country.

And if you want to think I’m a douche: go for it, more power to you. I just wanted to voice my thoughts on the matter.

Pretty weird that you were “blown away by China” then… No need to get mad 🤷‍♀️

My anecdotal experience is different than yours, but everything I’ve said is nothing but facts. China is a country of 1.4 billion people and 3.7 million sq mi, so obviously sentiment will vary. But I based my opinion on what I’ve personally seen and people I’ve talked to across half a dozen cities, so I feel pretty confident in my pessimism.

So you’ve been in the last few months since you learned these great things? Or was it before Covid, when people were physically caged into their apartments?

Was it only to the sterilized foreigner hotels on business trips? Or did you ever stay with locals who had to register your passport with the local police?

Were you able to spend physical currency or was everything already hooked up to official biometric identification (payments tied to socials tied to state id)?

I’m not asking to be confrontational, but the shiny foreigner facing China of yesteryear is nothing like the domestic atmosphere of China today. Their international digital presence is as carefully managed as their local platforms.

The locals I’ve met definitely have a positive view of the US, but things have gotten very dark very quickly under Xi. Think about why they could have started their emigration at any time but are choosing now.

Have you uh… actually been to China? Or talked to anyone from China (in real life)? I do both, quite often. Without fail, anyone with the means is actively trying to leave. And not in a “grass is greener” way. Those emigrating to America are fully aware of the political turmoil, they’d just rather be out before it’s not physically possible to leave.

It’s unlike we’ve been told in almost all respects…

Based on testimony from a demonstrably censored platform?

I’m not arguing for American superiority or that the vacuum won’t be easily filled by other countries. But that change isn’t automatically an upgrade.

Nobody answer, this guy might be a fed

I’d just like to step in here and remind the people at home that appeals to hypocrisy are a logical fallacy. Just because someone isn’t doing what they say should be done doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Thanks, I’ll hang up and listen.

Not a lawyer but I wonder how much teeth that law has. The GOP/Trump has put on a clinic on how to legally gum up the wheels of justice, it seems like unions could try the same. Delay, argue technicalities, appeal, rise, repeat…

For example: if you spend 2 months in court arguing about who organized what and what they’re technically striking for, damage could still be done even with the strike broken up. Multiply that by a few major unions and it adds up.

You can already see a similar plan coming together with UAWs 2028 contact expiration plan. Its not a general strike, there’s just coincidentally a lot of strikes at once.

Of course there’s a stricter set of laws and leeway when you’re not a corrupt oligarch so it wouldn’t work. But it’s fun to think about…

Oh huh, interesting… 📃✍️

Wouldn’t composting just release more greenhouse gasses? We need a more effective means of carbon capture, or maybe directly repurpose them as some sort of nutritional paste

Why not go out doing something exciting at least?

It’s easy to make statements like that before desperation sets in. Starving is an awful way to die, death after nuclear fallout is excruciating and slow, you won’t enjoy any sunsets when the smoke from burning cities fills up the sky.

50 years from now when you’re freezing in a cold muddy ditch, you’ll be wishing you died a martyr taking the 1/1e10000 chance to fix it.

Edit: I’m legally required to clarify that martyrdom can result from non-violent acts 🙂

Burnie Burns? Weird choice but I admit it’d be an upgrade

Putting aside whether or not that’s anathema to the cause, I’m not sure how you’d “other” them in a meaningful way. The reason it works for the right is that they target groups who’s members are publicly visible and can’t voluntarily leave (LGBT+, minorities, foreign religions, etc…)

If you target a group of people for their beliefs (something not overtly visible), they can either relabel their group or plausibly claim their beliefs differ in some way. We already do this for fascists and nazis, but very few people are going to outwardly admit to these ideals. Now they’ll just say they’re “extra-constitutional”, “alt right”, “Christian patriot”, or any other hat a bigot wants to swap out for far right authoritarian.

You can’t “other” them where they already proudly claim a majority (white + Christian) so what are you left with?

There might not be an easy alternative right now.

People tend not to internalize a problem until they can personally see it, and a lot of these problems (deportations, cutting education, handcuffing the CDC, etc…) might not affect them until things get truly bleak. Unless of course they do something reckless like directly cutting funds that goes directly to their wallets (Medicare or Social Security).

Spreading awareness has always been a huge problem. Activists in Tsarist Russia had the same problem of trying to reach out to uneducated rural peasants and their efforts didn’t go smoothly. And of course this was before everyone had hand held disinformation machines in their pockets.

I don’t have a magic bullet but we do have some things going for us. It’s not yet illegal to spread radical ideas, our targets are generally literate, and we still share a fair number of cultural references.

The following is my best guess at advice, I’m just as open to ideas as giving them:

The tricky part is that mainstream social platforms are a non starter. You’d never outweigh the echo chamber. In my opinion digital organization is secondary at best because anything can be suppressed at the whim of server owner, ISP, or government.

So as dumb as it sounds, go forth and talk to people in real life. Be sure you’re educated on what you want to talk about (read your history and theory, know what political buzzwords actually mean). Try to avoid activities that insulate you in your own comfort zone, and gravitate towards ones with wide appeal and low barriers to entry.

Start a woodworking club with some like minded friends or join a book club and offer suggestions. Running group, bodybuilding, birdwatching, whatever… If you want to do some good for your community, join a mutual aid network.

Try to know the narrative these people are living in, even if it’s a fantasy. Avoid trigger words they’re primed to react to, keep it simple and let them draw their own conclusions. Not everyone will be receptive, some people are just assholes.

It’s not sexy but it’s also not that hard to point out glaring injustices in the world. Most people can at least see that far and agree that something needs to change, starting that conversation is first step.

Being reactionary to a nazi salute at a presidential inauguration is warranted, reasonable, and useful.

Being reactionary to my 70 year old neighbor who ate too many paint chips as a child because he had a Trump sign in his lawn for 2 weeks before the election is less useful.

Being reactionary against an anonymous stranger in your own digital echo chamber is pointless (assuming their bad argument isn’t also in bad faith).

It’s not necessarily a lack of education, I know a really smart surgeon, generally very reasonable, who fell for this stuff.

If you’ve never seen the echo chamber this guy lives in you don’t understand how bizarre it can be.

On the surface there’s a lot of influencers that can say truly regressive lies, and make them sound innocuous. They say it with such confidence and mixed in with truths and half truths. It can be hard to see the fallacies and misinfo even if you know what to look for.

There’s a constant drip of cherry picked stats and talking points designed to reinforce what he’s feeling. In the back of his mind he knows those support his case but he doesn’t really have an original source to reference. He tries to say them with the same confidence that he heard them with, but they’re not based in reality and look pretty ugly without the professional window dressing.

There’s videos where people do deep dives on this stuff (I can try to find one if you want). You could probably also experiment with it yourself if you have a VPN and a fresh/virtual device to make an account on.

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