I have read some firsthand stuff from French resistance folks and artists in more similar situations to my own from this time period. I find their accounts easy to commiserate with and it is a very frustrating time to be alive. Foresight and historical knowledge have been so unhelpful to me.

Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

Hey, wow. Been there.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked[…]

If you were seriously activated at a recent-ish point in America, ‘Occupy’ era until today, you’ve experienced situations where you field at a critical protest point only to find:

• most people actually don’t support anything progressive
• most people who claim to support you are committed to inaction under even very dire circumstances, they will always draw a new line in the sand
• representatives like politicians and nonprofits for causes are mostly there to diffuse energy and frustrate efforts, and at the very least tie action to money
• there actually are many people who are openly against things like feeding kids, racial equality, preventing climate change and they have more money than you
• there are serious, life altering costs to real activism

I guess a more positive way to look at it would be “wow, so stuff also sucked for this dude…” like hey another time comrade

PS: Most people don’t get which historical point in time we’re at because the camps started at the borders and most people don’t look there

What if suddenly living in Denver versus Austin or Charlotte versus Tampa start to come with very different sets of rights as an individual in terms of your family’s access to basic health care, what books your child gets to read in school, whether you can walk the streets without carrying your “papers,” whether your kid’s school requires basic vaccines, or even whether the public water supply is considered safe?

This is already the case in the Rust Belt. Default is you don’t have basic healthcare, your kid goes to some fake voucher school or an extremely underfunded school (books comment is weird, Texas decides most of the books already), you can’t get vaxed or operate in the economy without your “papers”, public water supplies are not safe by modern standards. This crumbling ramped up during Trump 1 and became the default in the pandemic and the region didn’t really recover.

Anyway the Fed isn’t my friend and the decline of that faction isn’t the part of this mess that has me worried. Has the Fed been really helpful or a positive influence where you are located? Mostly to me they are ICE and FBI offices and I don’t think those folks do good work.

deleted by creator

Oh okay I think we just disagree then.

I can see why you might read my post that way because what other context do you have. I don’t belong to the “us” group you mentioned. I spent 2015-2022ish doing direct service activism and it cost me a great deal. Part of the reason I sound disillusioned is because the fascists directly attacked and destroyed much of my work as I was performing it (especially in 2018 2019 when they were a little better organized). I did literacy and library access work for the incarcerated, primarily. My work was primarily volunteer so it seriously hurt my family’s economy, in addition to being undone in real time as paper bans and mail bans were put in place. People at the universities I “worked” for would provide verbal support, but that was all it ever amounted to.

Part of the reason I like Doctorow is because he gave a pretty accurate description of how literacy access within the prison system works in The Bezzle except for the part where he was using it to distribute LSD. That sounds cool but its largely based on a myth made up to protect prison employees who trade drugs inside.

You don’t even have to do anything and there are thousands of people out there trying to protect you from getting more fucked[…]

Don’t go around telling them they don’t have to “do anything” plz 😅

Not trying to call you out otherwise, how are you supposed to know

Heyyyy you’re right

fantastic post, I wouldn’t have considered that fan setting issue on Bazz…

wonder if one of the linux fans speed apps can replace that functionality to some extent

You know I think he actually uses the music producer example in his 2nd novel (The Bezzle).

Doctorow can write a great detective novel but he lives in absolute La La land. I’m glad he’s open about the fact he’s just distracting himself with this post, but the idea that these webs of laws or these models of “how things should work” mean anything tho the people with power are complete nonsense.

He has some understanding of that, I think? But like, buddy, your country just went full Nazi. You’ve been living in a total fantasy. You’re not going to rethink the concept of fixers, get a grip.

Seeing as the US is a transcontinental slave empire, it does make sense that they wouldn’t emphasize literacy among their populace.

lmao, the article is about the UK

if you would like to criticize American teachers anyway, perhaps we could find a nice article about that subject together

*edit: here you are

in about 201X I was having a terrible time trying to get through the thesis period of a master’s program

picked up some bundle of the OG 2DS (black & blue variant) and Pokemon X and loved it

a world where I could pick my friends, people were pleasant, my next career moves were obvious, and my work was rewarded? To this day, this is my escapist fantasy.