Lurker > legendary_zell

Here's what all of you can do:

http://go.workersfiremusk.com

It's go time baybeee. It's now or never.

A bunch of my coworkers got fired all at once today after being promised that they wouldn't be. It's a dark day, but it removed any illusions I had about keeping my job, and I believe it did for many others too. So I'm released from any fear or desire to keep quiet and ride it out.

This will cause unseen anger and aggressiveness from the federal workforce.

There's lots of things you all can do without risking getting shot even.

Organize, talk to your neighbors, show them what's actually happening, protest, practice direct action, picket, boycott, strike, call your legislators incessantly.

If everyone who said they couldn't do anything or waited for someone else to do something just took the actions available to them, we'd be in a fundamentally different situation.

Across basically all agencies, probationary employees (less than one or two years) are being fired without cause, without justification, without notice, sometimes with not even enough time to collect their belongings.

This could mean up to 200,000 federal employees lose their jobs all at once. Agencies will be permanently crippled. Lives ruined. Services broken.

Now is the time to get out there and support federal employees and workers in general. If you're not part of a union, start one, join one, get them ready to take action to protect democracy. Join community organizations, get involved in mutual aid. Speak out to the media. Call your REPUBLICAN and Democratic lawmakers at every level.

You're watching your society dismantled in real time. It is NOT too late to do something about it. We have the numbers and we can tell them to stop. You just have to do it. I am, I'm going to be risking my neck a lot more in the very near future.

Jen Psaki is not exactly a fresh new voice for change. She doesn't have any credibility to speak of here and it's weird that Stewart would have her on to present that vision.

A Democrat that suggested this and, especially in connection to China would be impeached and on the way to Gitmo by the end of the day.

The viruses, bacteria, and parasites are rejoicing at our collapse.

Heineken14 posted...

Cool story, bro.

This is the whole story. If you're dismissing this, you're dismissing any chance at winning. The Democrats are losing largely because they're being saddled with all the worst parts of the status quo and have become seen as THE status quo party. The whole world hates the status quo and incumbents are losing everywhere. People are angry most places. Selling more of the same when people hate what's going on is a one way ticket to defeat.

The non-right wing parties need to be the gathering place for righteous rather than reactionary anger, but we constantly try to defuse it rather than harnessing it or directing it. The parties that are winning are the parties that can offer a credible explanation of how they'll be different, this loss is an opportunity that must be taken to do that. To clear out the Clintonites, identify flaws in our ideology and outreach, and transform into a party that can defend and take back democracy.

This is a weird interpretation of an overwhelmingly anti-Trump article. That's one sentence out of context. That's saying he should have the right to do normal Republican stuff, maybe even the evil stuff he campaigned on, not this mask off internal coup shit he's actually doing.

Don't think I'm defending the NYT though because this article is not raising nearly enough alarm and is still telling us to have confidence in checks and balances while they're blowing through each and every one daily. And saying "much of civil society from the business community, to higher education, to parts of the corporate media has been disturbingly quiet, even acquiescent" like that isn't a perfect description of them is disgusting.

Of course, there should be a bone deep analysis of the trends that led to the loss and the decisions that the campaign made.

But I think it would've actually taken a basically perfect campaign to win, considering the headwinds. A conservative media landscape that is dominant in both traditional and non-traditional spaces. A worldwide anti-incumbent wave due to inflation, immigration, and Covid. Losses among key demographics that actually started years ago, shortly after 2020. Being tied at the hip to an extremely unpopular administration that most people feel gaslit them about the President's mental state for years. She would've needed to run an Obama 08 level campaign to win with these factors and the amount of time she had. She started off well but then fumbled around the time of the DNC.

He spoke the AFGE rally today like he really supports the grassroots, meanwhile he fucking hates them and wishes they'd leave him alone.

They want people to support them without question regardless of what they do, while they never have to take any risks themselves and are fine either way.

It's amazing that he actually came out and said it. They're happy to be dragged into camps without a fight as long as they get to be mad at people too left for them.

Voting is just one part of politics. Saying you give up entirely and don't plan to do anything as everything collapses proves you don't understand it at all or don't care nearly as much as you claim to.

Sandalorn posted...

It's because not one single person that I remember ever said that. But when you don't have an actual argument...you lie to make one.

Many of the immediate reactions to the election by pundits, consultants, people who worked on that campaign refused to identify anything she did wrong. We had topics about it on this very board. The only reaction was that Trump was worse so any errors the campaign made shouldn't have mattered.

LightSnake posted...

I confess part of me doesn't care what happens to th Teamsters now. Made their bed.

The leadership of the Teamsters and many of their members are reactionary, shortsighted idiots. We're still going to need them. We'll need everyone involved in critical infrastructure related industries, they're the ones who can cause the biggest disruptions and really make Trump/Musk capitulate.

They did real damage this last election, but they did it because of wider trends. Democrats lost everywhere, among everyone, especially among the demographics that dominate the Teamsters. Because of those trends, they would've struggled to rangle people to support Harris. It's illogical, it's harmful, but it's true. The central question in politics today is how to get those people back. I don't think it's going to be politics as usual. I don't think it'll be leftism as we know it. I don't think it'll be centrism.

Yes, we'll see serious attacks on unions, we're already seeing them trying to dismantle the NLRB. But unions have been in much worse positions than now or even what Project 2025 envisions. Robber barons used to hire thugs or even the government to shoot people in the streets for trying to organize.

And an important thing that many don't realize is that part of the reason for the decline of unions over the last several decades is the very legal structures and procedures that we have now. Turning union fights into legal proceedings rather than physical and community struggles over dignity and control has done a lot of damage.

If the legal procedures to unionize are blocked and dismantled, the only way left will be the old way. I'd prefer it doesn't go to that, but unions are not as easy to kill as some imagine, especially when stripped back to their core elements.

The unions are suing already. Note that with all their problems, they're one of the only institutions gumming up the works right now. Take note. Organizations of ordinary people are the only ones we can rely on, ultimately.

I'm not really sure what the response to this is, maybe a lawsuit challenging their ability to refuse to enforce the law? Or challenging his ability to do something drastic like this as an acting secretary? Maybe this is considered and end run around employment protections and union contracts?

We also just need massive disruption throughout society so they're too scared to even pull shit like this. It can't all be on the courts. They're essentially repealing laws through monetary warfare.

This is a total systems collapse. The Republicans as a party should not exist. Modern conservatism should not exist, but it had the funding and lizard brain appeal to take over people's brains. We all lionized wealth too much and let people with it have what is now kingly power. Fascists bear the primary responsibility for fascism.

Democrats failed to offer the only other message and vision that could counter that, populist, working class politics. When you have capture of the religious, the rural, the white, the non-college education, the disconnected, the only coalition bigger than that and that cuts across those is people who work for a living vs owners. They didn't even go to the mattresses to defend the institutions they claimed to care about and didn't understand that it was the wealth corroding them, that working institutions and Elon Musk/the Koch brothers/Zuck cannot coexist.

Leftists lacked the funds, reach, and credibility to spread their message, and very often focused on the wrong messages in the first place. They actively alienated potential allies, sealed themselves in bubbles, offered people little room for growth or grace, had almost zero base among the workers they claimed to represent, and were too happy with radical visuals with very little in terms of radical results.

We all failed, it'll be on all of us to get out of this.

"Yo, lemme cop those Red XIIIs"

Lucky devils. Wish we could get some of that right now.

You guys are beyond parody. I was thinking of making fun of you by saying you engage in "eat your veggies" condescending politics and then seconds later, you decide to do it unironically yourselves.

You talk so much about politics and have such strong negative opinions on people who don't think like you do, and yet you don't seem to understand how you come off to others and don't seem interested in actual political analysis or understanding people's thoughts.

I urge you to read that article Antifar posted, that's a much better use of your time than posting screeds about how voters don't eat their veggies on Gamefaqs.gamespot.com.

They've always been against federal oversight. States are easier to capture completely. There's less attention paid by media, politicians, and activists and more control when you accomplish it. By capturing state education systems, you can basically lock down states in terms of ideology for decades to come. You can privatize the whole thing and put it in your pocket. You can get rid of the types of education that produce the woke lawyers that sue you, the college kids that protest you, etc.

You can resegregate and impoverish. You can indoctrinate. You can shape society with impunity. You can remove any type of baseline standards or shared understanding of reality. You can make it so that an Alabama education produces white Republicans and black domestic servants/low wage workers and nothing else.

Harris/Biden lost ground in every single area of the US. That's an astonishing fact that should have the Democrats falling all over themselves to self reflect and figure out what went wrong. Instead, a subset are spending all their times punching left and figuring out how this is all the fault of Palestinian voters. We are unsure what effect not wanting to vote for an administration currently facilitating a genocide had, but I doubt it caused her to lose ground among everyone everywhere.

I think the reason we're seeing such vehemence and anger towards pro-Palestine voters is because people aren't willing or able to do the work of assessing what actually went wrong. It's much easier and emotionally satisfying to simply attack the hypocritical lefties.

Instead of self-reflection, we're seeing anger at the very concept that they should have to engage in it, that there ever should have been any criticism of the campaign, a tendency to completely write off voters. We're several months after the election, the midterms are approaching and the only shift in the Democratic Party has been to support an unconstitutional anti-immigration bill.

The refusal to collect data that might push them in a direction they've already decided not to go, the refusal to consider that simply being better than Trump wasn't enough in 2016 or 2024, to consider that they might have done something wrong and that it's not all on the voters, that something fundamental might need to change in how they do politics, all of it is connected. That's the reason for the loss imo and until that changes, we'll be stuck here.

The atrocities are the product. They're the business model. There's a substantial number of parents out there who think atrocities are the only thing that can "fix" their child and believe the right to subject your child to atrocities is a God given, inalienable right. People are paying money to keep that perception alive.

America has been cruisin for a bruisin for a looong time. Since Nixon at least. Well now we've finally gone and done it. There's no easy way out of this.

I was just watching a finisher compilation that came up in my feed yesterday and saw Cedric Alexander and thought "I really thought he would've gotten further by now, he'll probably be released" and now here we are. I hope I didn't think it into being somehow.

Genuinely should be arrested. Even if he's a government employee, there's no way he has clearance to view some of this stuff, particularly at this agency.

I don't think we get out of this year without a long-term transformation, for better or for worse. Worse looks like it's winning, but I'll do my part to give better a fighting chance. If we all did that instead of checking out, it would definitely work.

It basically can't survive capitalism, intentionally or unintentionally, the concentration of wealth and thus power under capitalism erodes democracy.

You can't have authoritarian work places where people spend 8-14 hours a day, five days a week, have 100 people control the economic fates of millions/billions, have those same 100 people sponsor entire political parties, media empires, and think tank farms, have those people kneecap education systems, and have people be grateful for all of this and think you're going to have a functioning democracy.

Strider102 posted...

While you're not wrong, you have to have people willing to not only listen, but also participate.

Why too many people are fine with just sitting back and doing nothing.

All true. That's why you focus on who you can reach. Try to find the people with reach and help them. That's what I'm doing IRL as we speak. There are ways to break through the media noise, they involve in person community building and making sure that you communicate that you see them as a full human being so they can see you the same way.

That's why the number one thing that terrifies me is the impulse to disengage or to cut people off. We're doomed if that's the response.

It's hard to see how thoroughly you're being manipulated when you're thoroughly manipulated. The people on this board see the world and politics within a very narrow band that's not shared by most people. It's more accurate than most in many ways and off base in others.

The reality is that people didn't think he would do half the things he's doing. You can say that they should have, but tens of millions didn't. Then there's the tens of millions who have had media and culture telling them that terrible things are actually good and necessary from the day they were born. It's very hard to get out of that when you start there. Very few people do, the rest of us were mostly lucky not to start there in the first place.

Any Democrat should've been considered better than any Trump style Republican. But we've seen twice and damn near three times now that that's not the case. To Republicans. To independents. To Democrats who stayed home. Simply yelling at them is not a winning strategy. We have to defuse the Republican brainworm machine AND present Dems people have less trouble believing in. That's the only way out.

Protests are not enough. Organize to strike.

Lawsuits are doing their job so far, they're giving you time to do that. You have to cause disruption to the gears of society ultimately. Business as usual is the number one thing on their side. Ordinary people thinking they can't do anything and have to wait for lawmakers, courts, or the military is the number one thing on their side.

People working at Space X, Tesla, Boring etc could impoverish Musk and send him back to California tomorrow. You should be doing what you can to make that happen instead of posting here that all is lost and everything is already shut down.

The people who say this don't account for the demotivating factor of do nothing politicians and broken promises. Someone voting for someone and not experiencing any positive change or actively seeing things decline is not a neutral thing. It makes things 1000x harder to get them to believe or pull a lever ever again. That's the effect that a bad "Democrat" can have. That's what spurs the thought that politics doesn't matter. It's essential to avoid that as much as possible.

thronedfire2 posted...

he's not stopping

they're getting blocked by one court and appealed to others. Eventually the supreme court will be deciding what he can do, we already know what they're going to say

I'm directly affected by most of these EOs. I'm getting the emails where he's explicitly stating he's changing policy in compliance with court orders.

Continuing to appeal a case is not the same thing as ignoring a TRO or injunction. That's what we're talking about here.

Whenever you have the money to warp the local/regional economy, influence the media, break unions, buy legislators, etc. So probably 100 mil at the upper end.

People who are not actually paying close attention to the facts on the ground or who aren't familiar with legal analysis are just throwing out the "he's ignoring the courts" thing.

He's mostly not. He didn't last time. The evil stuff he's doing is stuff that courts are allowing him to do overwhelmingly. When he gets an injunction or TRO, he stops.

That might not stick for something he really cares about that he feels he can win on. And the Supreme Court will surely end up rubberstamping a few catastrophic policies. But let's be clear about what's actually happening at least so far.

Those are people that are lost in the sauce of a right wing framing or who wanted minorities thrown overboard generally.

The best case I've heard is when people are referring to something like Defund the Police, which I don't think ever had majority support even in 2020, even among the left. And it's one of the many cases I've seen where people support X outcome, but not some crucial thing it would take to get there. Can't have socialism if the biggest part of your local budget is devoted to policing the poors and prisons for countless reasons.

Hinakuluiau posted...

This is what was expected. Trump, Musk, and the rest of the GOP will do whatever they can rapidly to hurt our freedoms and we basically have to hope that they're unable to do lasting damage before the courts tell them to stop.
He had something like a 30% success rate with his EO's the first time around, contrast with Biden's 80%. Fights are happening against him all over, it's not going to be easy and we'll definitely lose some, but to think all is hopeless is not reality.

This. Don't be complacent or overly reliant on the courts, but also don't despair. Fight out in the streets and your workplace, and also challenge every single thing in court. This is a five alarm fire, it's time to use every tool that's at our disposal, even if only to delay.

I feel like there's been an understandable but unhelpful descent into reflexive cynicism. This is a good thing that should be celebrated, we shouldn't immediately be trying to preemptively discount it or imagine how it won't matter actually. That type of thinking is demobilizing and could stop us from stopping what can be stopped or at least slowing down what can be slowed.

This is a recognition that what they've been doing up til now is illegal. And it can potentially set everyone up to see that we've truly entered a lawless period if they ignore the court, and we can all act accordingly.

bigblu89 posted...

The sad thing is, youd think that thought process would motivate people to participate in more local elections, where their vote can actually make a difference, yet local and primary election numbers dwarf those of Presidential elections

Our political conversations and media are increasingly nationalized, people are trained to only have political opinions on national subjects or even view national things as political. Meanwhile, their local government could be a den of corruption or or could have things that could be readily improved, and they have no idea. (This definitely applies to me, as interested as I am in politics, I have no idea what's going on where I actually live).

Instead of people getting in where they could actually have some effect, it's only the true believers and the most corrupt at the local level. One of the many consequences of a decline in local media and local community not oriented around shopping.

RchHomieQuanChi posted...

The problem is that the American people have been trained and conditioned to believe that government is just a bloated bureaucracy that doesn't get anything meaningful done and if it does, it's because both sides wanted to do it.

Americans legitimately believe that elections have no real consequences and that everything that's happening would happen regardless.

This, this the dominant opinion among normies and people who keep up with politics have an incredibly hard time grappling with that reality. People don't have the time, the training, or motivation to keep up with politics. It's an exhausting thing to do and for the most part, it doesn't improve your life, it just gives you anxiety. And people are incredibly unlikely to do so if they think the cake is already baked, the decisions have already been made, and few things really trickle down and affect their lives either way.

Even if they do trickle down, they genuinely don't believe they have control over what happens. They either sincerely believe that or believe it's safer/more esteemed to be seen believing that. Rather than being a political loony that doesn't affect anything or an ineffectual radical. They genuinely believe those are the other possibilities.

These people are completely checked out or extremely cynical. It was always a huge risk, more for Harris than Trump.

refmon posted...

Why couldn't this be on a sunday? Most people cant afford to skip a day of work

Because the Super Bowl is this Sunday. And this is an urgent situation.

Very recent history got us into this situation. Trump's explicit argument is that Gaza is already a smoking ruin, and that's why people can't return there. Who funded that state of affairs? Provided cover for it? Blocked any attempts to stop it? Biden did. There's no universe where that's not relevant.

But you're right, let's talk about Trump. Trump is now trying to escalate to outright ethnic cleansing and another large scale forced deportation, the likes of which haven't been seen since 1948. That's approaching the deepest depths of evil and must be stopped by any means necessary, whether that's putting pressure on Republicans to stop this, Democrats to exercise whatever oversight powers they have in the minority, or ordinary people to gum up the works through strikes and other actions

Biden genocided. Trump is currently planning to genocide even worse, there's only gaslighting if you don't accept one of those two realities for some reason.

I agree that some of the major outlets are dropping the ball right now as they frequently do though. Didn't see anything at the NYT, ABC, CNN, NPR, PBS. But it's ongoing, we'll see if there's coverage later.

It's the main trending topic on Twitter right now. I think it's getting covered and the coverage will increase.

WingsOfGood posted...

You a Fed?

Yep. In a civil rights office too. Luckily, not an environmental justice one.

I've been ordered to return to the office and most of my work has been paused. There's also a high likelihood that I lose several coworkers. My job may also be at risk eventually.

Assassination attempts and random acts of terrorism. Absolutely would've been worth it and fully justified on January 21st, 2021.