I mean, we’ll never do it under capitalism, Gore. So you good with dismantling capitalism?

(Crickets, I’m sure.)

Nice. I gotta wonder why a flying schoolbus which lands in meadows needs a pop-out “kids loading/unloading; do not pass” stop sign on the side, though. LOL. 😉

I was going to make a funny or meaningful comment, but fuck: look at this shithole full of liberals. Place is getting worse than Beehaw, TBH. Might as well be back on Reddit.

Looks interesting. Local, resilient, community power stations are a great idea, even set apart from the dual use for fruit and veggie farming.

I worry that in this case, since the power isn’t being delivered directly:

Lightstar’s community solar project will generate clean, local energy that home and business accounts can subscribe to a pay for portion of the electricity generated. This generation is then used as a credit to offset utility bills.

the existing utility company may be given far, far too much leeway to fuck people over, like in California where PG&E plays like crazy with the rates given to people pushing power to the grid from their solar panels, uses obvious rate differences based on time of day, and charges people fees just to use the infrastructure (which is absolutely fucking backwards, since every Joule of energy produced locally is a Joule that doesn’t have to be transmitted over their infrastructure from distant power plants).

On top of creating local solutions, we need to start decoupling them from the centralized and capitalist-controlled ones, and/or regaining a great deal of political power so that we can start setting conditions of our own.

Excellent. Was going to recommend another, similar video, but it’s one of the ones Second Thought links to at the end. Nice.

Nice. Love to see people contributing both to this genre of source material and to FOSG. And doing it with a good set of players as you go is definitely the best way to do it. Keep on gamin’!

May take a look at the material later, though probably not going to participate in the game.

TBH my initial thought is that it would make more sense to produce source material for an existing genre-neutral system like the Hero System than to create a whole new system unto itself. Still, I guess if the system is going to be FOSG (Free and Open-Source Gaming 😉) then it would still make sense to do the extra work.

Restaurants run on hierarchy, or so I’ve always been told. There’s got to be someone in charge, someone giving orders, in order for the whole thing to run right… The last person I worked for, one of the most experienced and talented restaurant people I’ve ever met, always said it’s best to run a restaurant as a “benign dictatorship.”

I mean, liberals (and authorities like owners/executives/managers/politicians) will tell you this about literally everything, not just restaurants. So there’s no particular reason to believe them, and many millennia of history filled with reasons to not believe them. shrug

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”

—Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

I mean, even without revenue decreasing, profits are going to “decrease” because money that will go to increased pay and benefits to workers would otherwise go to greater profits. So even leaving out the fearmongering about lost revenue, the title and significant parts of the article (about profits and margins) is taking the liberal path of calling it a bad thing due to sympathy with capitalists instead of workers.

So yeah: how about a fuck you UPS, and a fuck you CNN. Nothing new, but always bears repeating.

Hmm. Yeah, that’s a possibility. I do other stuff that’s similar, like working on community gardens and helping comrades who are interested in learning technical skills I’m practiced in. But collective remote work situations…that’s an interesting think to ponder!

Serious question, would Jan 6 be allowed to happen anywhere else?

Yes, except on a level which actually has some non-laughable chance of succeeding—and which often even does succeed. Often facilitated by the U.S. itself. 2014 in Ukraine, for example, and all over Latin America, and…well, pay attention to West Africa right now, because most if not all of the coups taking place are being carried out by military forces that were trained by the U.S. If you think the clown show of Jan 6 was actually some kind of “threat to democracy” then you REALLY need to start paying attention to what the U.S. has been doing at home in smaller communities, and big-time abroad, for a very, very, very long time.

Biden has enacted FAR more fascist policy in his political career than Trump. Fascism embodies reactionary state violence used to consolidate the power of state and capital. From mass incarceration (which Biden is one of the chief architects of)—including literal concentration camps—to torture programs, mass surveillance, militarized policing, the violent repression of liberation movements, militarized borders, and support of fascists all over the place globally (including Saudi Arabia, India, Ukraine, Israel, and many others), to the ongoing American genocide, you’ve honestly been struck fucking blind by liberal propaganda if you don’t see the fascism Biden embodies. Heck, he’s been best buddies with outright segregationists for his entire political career, and was more or less of a closeted one himself (not wanting his “children [to] grow up in a [racial] jungle”).

I never claimed both sides are the same. It’s just that between the two brands of status quo U.S. politics, there’s literally only one side. You’re in a socialist community, for crying out loud. Time to start figuring that out. The other side is the left; the other side is labor; the other side exists only within social movements in the U.S., because hundreds of years of that fascism (of the kind Hitler explicitly recognized, admired, and modeled his pogroms on) have stripped that side from the electoral landscape.

Yes. My company decided to shut down the local office to save money (kept by the bosses rather than being distributed to us, of course). So some of us became remote indefinitely.

Generally, I love it. I can “commute” in my PJs, and avoid spewing a lot of carbon into the climate just to ship around my sack of flesh. I can take breaks throughout the day to tend my garden, and play music to help myself think. I don’t have to worry about packing a lunch, or wasting time and money and social energy eating out in the middle of the day. Hell, I can go take a nap when I don’t have any meetings scheduled and feel the need.

However, it does take its toll. Not having a direct, face-to-face, human connection with folks throughout the day harms the associations that build solidarity. And finding ways to do one-on-ones and continue organizing the workplace is proving next to impossible. So I’m honestly not sure it is worth it at this stage of labor struggle. In a more ideal world—once we’ve won a few crucial victories over capital (and perhaps state)—I see no reason why many of us couldn’t work from home, and even move those jobs that require more direct, physical labor closer to those homes.

It’s good…so long as we follow the advice of that last section: “Prosecute Them All”. If it’s used instead to distract from the ongoing crimes of other parties and other politicians—such as the fascist currently at the helm—then I couldn’t care less, and I think we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be distracted by it while there are much more important things to focus on.

The worst of Trump’s crimes—the ones that did serious, material harm to working-class people—aren’t being touched by this, just as they weren’t touched by the farcical impeachments the Democrats facilitated. And that’s because they, themselves, are happily engaged in the same crimes, as they have been all along.

Sure, bring out your popcorn or whatever when you’re relaxing at home and have nothing better to worry about. But during the day, put all the energy you can into what we MUST do to turn things around: put an end to state warfare, ongoing climate destruction, and the state violence and repression that keeps us from making progress on everything else.

Also:

And that brings us to the real double standard here. Trying to overturn an American election is the kind of crime the Justice Department takes seriously. Extrajudicially slaughtering scary Muslims in a foreign country, even ones with US citizenship, is not.

Attacks carried out on marginalized communities—carried out just like the Jan 6 Washington DC attack was, but in cities and towns everywhere else on a monthly basis at least—also are not taken seriously. Jan 6 was one of MANY, but only when the halls of power see a tiny inkling of a (pretty pathetic) threat does it matter to politicians and their liberal fans. Not okay.

EDIT: sigh. Blockquotes broken by some Lemmy update.

That’s funny, because it literally does work in many places. You might want to refine your idea of how everything works, since you are simply wrong. 🤷

“One man’s wild dream.” Bleh. Flowery words for yet another bunk propertarian sea-steading project. I mean, he was literally planning to mine the shit out of the ocean floor and sell away more of the ecosystem to the capitalist market in order to create his Utopia. At least there was some acknowledgment of that at the very end.

Very glad the opportunistic scientific exploration happened along with it, though.

Very true. And this doesn’t even mention rape and other sexual abuse/violence. If all we focus on is them murdering people, we’re already ignoring forms of violence and harm that are heavily weighted toward non-cis-male demographics, are commonly ignored and erased, and cause enormous amounts of pain and suffering.

While murder is obviously the worst of acute instances of violence in that it is the act which can never be healed from or undone, police do orders of magnitude more violent harm every day if you take a broader look, and we must resist attempts to ignore that.

I do take exception to this being said by someone in the exchange:

And I think that loss is exacerbated by the fact that these are women who are killed by the same institutions that are designed to protect them.

These institutions—especially the police, but the legal system more generally as well—were absolutely never designed to protect women. Or any other people other than capitalists and politicians, for that matter. Any other nominal protection they do is incidental, and should also be scrutinized carefully with a skeptical eye as likely mythological. We really, really, really need to stop saying shit like this. Yesterday. In having a conversation about improving matters, do not propagate the very propaganda that serves directly to make it worse. And push back on it every time you do hear/see it.

Somewhere between anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism, with a strong dose of social ecology. Small communities—however sparsely (rural) or closely (urban) packed—governed horizontally through consensus models, and federating with one another for larger projects and to form responsive and resilient decentralized networks of distribution. (I’m not limiting “community” here to the strictly geographical interpretation of a communal neighborhood, though that’s certainly one form; others would be worker-owned-and-self-managed cooperative enterprises, recreational clubs of various kinds, etc.)

Find ways to build successful but non-growth/non-profit-centered industries with modern technology but without the expectations of rampant consumerism, and with governance models strongly influenced by more horizontal and matrilineal societies, past and present. If we can’t do it and keep smart phones, then sorry: ditch the smart phones. If we can’t do it and keep modern medicine, then prioritize refining the model so we can.

I have a hard time understanding what they are “crusading” about. I believe they don’t know either

Pretty sure it’s just enhancing and absolutely securing their own power over others. Seems pretty simple, really: whatever vector you can use to legally, extra-legally, or even illegally crush those who don’t want to be ruled by you, foment hate and fear against them, take away their resources, and just altogether put them at your absolute mercy, you take.

Oh. I’m also talking about the right in general (liberals), not just the nominally conservative ones. Haven’t met a liberal yet with any power who’s not threatened by even the chance that leftist ideas will be realized. Those that aren’t conservatives just don’t seem to feel like it’s quite as inevitable (why would it be when they co-opt leftist ideas and movements and funnel them into liberalism, making sure avenues like the Democratic Party are as radical as people can get), so they’re more content to use legal and general economic methods to subvert, control, and starve us…at least most of the time (but then, there’s always shit like election fraud like they pull against the Green Party, though).