I have a better idea. Why don’t we just leave them the fuck alone?

Raised his national profile. If he keeps up political theater like this for the next 3 year’s he’ll have a good shot at the Democratic nomination.

It makes complete sense if you are looking at it from the perspective of an oligarch. They are just trying to tank the economy to hoover up even more assets. They’re banking on an eventual recovery, after which they’ll be even richer and more powerful than they are now.

As with most things in life, assuming some grander Machiavellian scheme is usually wrong. People don’t think and plan like that outside of movies and TV. Most people, especially the very rich and powerful, only plan for the short term.

There is no 3-4 steps down the road. They’re just trying to repeat exactly what they did during/after the COVID recession. And the Great Recession. And the '01 dot-com recession, etc, etc, etc.

Maybe dumb people who bought the Trump line on tariffs think that, but most people know it’s not true.

All the talk about bringing back manufacturing is just a smoke screen to cover the fact they’re intentionally tanking the economy so the oligarchs can buy the dip and get even richer when the economy recovers. That’s all it is.

It’s not that complex or Machiavellian.

Look at what rich people have done after every recession of the past 40 years and how what’s happened to their wealth after the recovery. The economy crashes forcing middle-class people to sell off what scant assets they own. Even people on the lower end of upper-class tend to sell off assets when the stock market crashes. Super rich people who have enough money to weather the economic downturn buy the dip, gobbling up all those assets people are selling. Then when the economy recovers the rich people make out like bandits (which they are).

That’s all that’s happening. He’s tanking the economy so Musk and his other rich friends can buy the dip and increase their wealth even more when the economy improves.

It makes me feel like they’re trying to minimize or discount my own feelings (of disappointment, anger, betrayal etc) to present themself as a victim. To me, an apology doesn’t really mean much. It’s just words. If you apologize, then continue to do the same thing that elicited the need for the apology in the first place, then you’re not really sorry. You’re just apologizing to get me to stop being upset/confrontational/etc.

Say ‘sorry’ once, but demonstrate you’re actually sorry by changing your behavior. Otherwise, you’re just repeating false platitudes in order to dismiss my own feelings.

WFH isn’t available to most people. To have a WFH opportunity, you have to have a job that’s almost entirely done on a computer with no need to be on-site almost ever. That’s just not a reality for most people. For some? Sure. But even most people with jobs that are largely WFH still have to go into their office once or twice a week.

I’m not debating the the Democratic Party has moved to the right over the past decade. However, (a) I wouldn’t call the Democrats Progressive, and they never really have been. There is a fringe of the party that is progressive, but they’ve never been the majority or leadership. And (b) both progressives and the Democratic Party are still to the left of George W Bush on most issues. He campaigned on a same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. He was a climate denier. He fabricated evidence of WMDs in Iraq in order to start his second of what would become decades-long wars. He opened Gitmo. He institutionalized a torture program as policy. None of that is anywhere close to what progressives are pushing for now.

I guess my main question to you is this: who are you defining as ‘progressives’?

All the President’s Men is my favorite political movie.

It was a gradual thing. I remember when my uncle got married in 2006 he told me that he had met his wife on Match.com, but it was a bit of a secret. My uncle didn’t mind if I and my siblings knew (I was 20 at the time), but didn’t want my dad or grandparents to learn because he felt there would be some stigma because they met online.

It was my generation (I was born in '86) that kicked off the apps/online dating thing. I started dating my (now) wife in 2010. We met at a party and neither of us ever did online dating or the dating apps. But so many of our friends did/do.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we were the fist generation to socialize on the internet on a large scale. We grew up in high school on AOL Instant Messenger and Myspace. We got on Facebook back in 2004/2005 when it launched. We were just very primed to be open to online socializing, which is just a step away from dating.

As soon as we became old enough to be in charge of our own finances and be a demographic group businesses were willing to market to, the online dating world opened up in a BIG way.

Friendliest country I’ve ever been to was Cuba. Everyone was incredibly nice and helpful with anything we could want. Malaysia was a close second.

Least friendliest was Belgium, but I went as part of a school exchange trip, so I was pretty much always in a large group of mostly teenage Americans with a few teachers. Understandable why people might not have been as friendly.

It’s democratic confederalism

Yes, it’s possible. Any system built by people can be destroyed by people.

Now, of course, there would be a reaction. What specifically that would be I can’t say. I’d like to think it would cause serious blowback, but I’m also pretty jaded and don’t really have that much faith in people all the time.

Great example! These little turns of phrases and wordplay that reveal the incredible right-wing bias of our media are all over the place if you learn how to look for them.

Another great example you see all the time is “office involved shooting” whenever someone is shot by police. It’s always something like “John Smith died after an officer involved shooting” or “a gun was discharged in an officer involved shooting that resulted in the death of Jane Smith.” Where it should be “Officer Joe Blow murdered John and Jane Smith.”

Those of us who pay attention know.

However, the media ecosystem is INCREDIBLY conservative and pumps out the rah-rah jingoism whenever it can. Those of who just stick to the mainstream echochambers think the US is a bastion of freedom and peace.

This is a common myth that isn’t really backed up by the historical or archeological record. Most pirate crews were not proto-anarchists looking to live a life of absolute liberty. They were more comparable to modern street gangs. The captains tended to be a strongman type leader who imposed their will over the crew through fear and coercion. The pirates themselves tended to be outcasts from society who couldn’t turn to authorities to try to escape their situation for a variety of reasons, mostly because they were criminals who knew they’d be imprisoned or killed if they went to authorities.

Probably the only place where anything close to what you describe ever really existed was small communities in Madagascar which became the inspiration for the probably mythical Libertatia. The communities that definitely did exist weren’t some ideological project to try to craft a society absent hierarchical power structures. They were just small, impoverished communities of families where the patriarchs (the pirates) spent most of their time away (at sea doing pirating) so the communities largely ran themselves without a power structure. This isn’t because they had an ideological opposition to them, but because the authority was the pirate leader who spent 3/4 of their time away (and, therefore, couldn’t do the job of being in charge) and when they were home they spent their time partying.

No, the idea of authority is not necessarily contrary to anarchism. You need to first examine the source of that authority’s power, the structures which put them into power, and how that power is enforced.

If it’s coercive in any way, that is, if you are threatened with violence in some way if you do not comply, then it is indeed counter to anarchism. However, that’s not how anarchist brigades in 1930s Spain, the Makhnovshchina, the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria, the anarchist brigades during the Russian Civil War, etc worked. First, membership was pretty much always voluntary. If you didn’t want to follow an order, you didn’t have to and you wouldn’t be executed or tried as deserter or whatever like in most traditional armies. If you didn’t want to follow an order, it was generally accepted that it was your right to refuse.

Second, there weren’t set terms between elections like you might be thinking of within a modern representative democracy. If an elected officer was issuing commands the rest of the soldiers didn’t agree with or like, they could be voted out at any moment, including in the middle of battle. This tended to present problems in the Spanish Civil War where the Soviet Union tried to exert complete control over everyone on the anti-fascist side. They’d send in Soviet officers to lead anarchist battalions. As soon as the Soviet gave an order that the rest didn’t like, they’d vote him out. When the Soviets refused to give up authority, the entire battalion would disband, steal all their supplies, and reform a few miles away as a “new” battalion and elect their own leader.

They also weren’t usually structured like we tend to think of military units with a mass of enlisted and a few detached officers issuing orders. The officers tended to come from the enlisted ranks. The officer position was less of a leader and more of a coordinator. Plans were usually made collaboratively by the whole unit (or those who cared to take part). If the heat of battle when snap decisions needed to be made, the officer tended to be the one who made those decisions, but there was no expectation that anyone who disobeyed would be killed or court-marshalled. People obeyed because they knew the person making the decision, why they were making the decision they made, and that if it was a bad decision they could replace that person.

It was called the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno as part of the Makhnovschina movement.

There was also the anarchist CNT-FAI which had an army of decentralized militias, collectively organized by Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish Civil war of the 1930s.

During the Russian Revolution and early parts of the Russian Civil War, there were also a lot of anarchist militias and military units, most notably the Kronstadt sailors. The various groups never coalesced as a single army, and, therefore, were easily crushed by the Bolsheviks.

There was also the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria, which was an anarchist society of more than 2 million people in the late 20s/early 30s. They never had a whole army, but they did organize militias along anarchist principles.

The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, founded in 1994 and still active today, is organized along decentralized principles and is closely associated with anarchism.

More recently, the YPJ and PKK operating in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the militias fighting the ongoing revolution in Myanmar are not entirely anarchist, but have strong principles of direct democracy at their core.

In all instances, the overall organization of the militaries were not entirely dissimilar to a traditional military. There were enlisted soldiers led by officers who gave orders that were expected to be followed. There was a higher level command structure which organized the army to distribute resources and coordinate strategy and tactics. The big difference, however, was that the leaders (officers) tended to all be elected democratically by the people they led and could be replaced/voted out democratically whenever the people who they led decided they needed to go…

There’s a common myth that anarchists are opposed to organization. Quite the opposite is true, in fact. Anarchists are all about organization. The thing we oppose is hierarchical power structures. Systems that place someone, anyone, above anyone else and say, “you must do what your superior tells you on threat of punishment” are inherently evil. But free associations are not. Rather than thinking of an officer in an anarchist militia/army as a leader whose commands must be followed or you’ll face steep punishment, think of them as a central coordinator. Their directives aren’t followed because you’ll be court marshalled or otherwise punished if you don’t obey. They’re followed because people at every level are included in the process and allowed to have their voices heard. Everyone has a degree of ownership and influence over the process. People follow directives because they understand where they’re coming from and why the decisions were made. Yet, if at any time someone decides they no longer want to take part, they have the option to just leave.

At the Tesla protests, yes. it’s mostly standing there with signs and chanting. At the one I attend, the dealership is on a major road with a TON of traffic. People line the street on either side stretching for about 1/2 a mile. The first protest had a bunch of people at the front door of the dealership, but police came and arrested one person. Since then, there has always been a police presence right at the front door. The cops tend to leave us alone if don’t go up to the door of the dealership. A couple of times every hour a group will organize to try to block the road. They’ll usually hold the space for about 5 minutes before the police come and force everyone back to the sidewalks. The point here is to challenge authority.

On a broader scale (I attend a LOT of protests), it depends on the protest. At those that are planned and coordinated by a larger organization (think the Women’s March, March for Science, etc) there’s usually a stage with a series of speakers “preaching to the choir” to energize the crowd. There’s lost of people chanting in unison various slogans/chants. Usually there’s a single rallying point where the speeches happen, then there will often be a march from that point to somewhere else. Along the route the crowd shuts down the streets, chants, carry signs, etc. The point here to make connections with like-minded people and demonstrate that there is popular support for whatever issue/concern there is.

At less coordinated protests without a central organizing committee (think the 2017 airport protests, the 2020 uprising) there’s not as much of set “schedule of events”. It’s more of a way for a community to express their collective anger/fear/outrage/etc. The specific goal will depend more on the specific event. For example, the 2017 airport protests were against the first version of Trump’s Muslim Ban. People entering the US from the countries he had tried to ban people from were being held in holding rooms at airports. A large number of activists showed up at airports where those people were being held and the sheer numbers and anger we were expressing got the people working at the airports to let the people go. There were also immigration lawyers who showed up to those protests. When the people in holding were released, they had legal representation right there waiting to support them. The 2020 uprising events were about showing that people weren’t afraid of the police and wouldn’t be silenced by police violence.

At every protest I’ve ever been at, there are always people from various organizations walking through the crowd trying to get people to sign up. Sometimes it’s just collecting names/emails/phone numbers for a fundraising list. Sometimes it’s staffers for politicians raising signatures to get on a ballot, or to get a referendum on a ballot. Sometimes it’s activist organizations trying to get people who might be willing to take further actions.

As virtually every protest winds down, there’s usually a group of people, almost always not affiliated with the “official event” who organize to continue taking action, typically less sanctioned, and dubiously legal actions.

Most protests don’t achieve their immediate goal. That’s how it’s always been. The way we tend to talk about it, any given movement or event has 3 sets of goals: short-term/immediate goals, mid-terms goals, and long-term goals. We usually fail at the short-term goals (although not always). But we’re almost always successful at the medium- and long-term goals. These Tesla protests, for example. The short-term/immediate goal is to shut down the specific dealership we’re protesting at. That has only happened where police presence has been light and where protesters are willing to take illegal action and get arrested (which is always a minority of protesters). This goal has largely been unsuccessful. The medium-term goal is to destroy the Tesla brand so much that the stock price plummets. This is already happening. After the election, Tesla stock prices skyrocketed. Since the protests started, the stock price has already dropped back to where it was before the election, wiping out all that value added since the election. Keep this up, and we’ll hopefully force it even farther down. If we’re lucky, they’ll have to start closing dealerships. The long-term goal is to remove Musk and Trump from power. Obviously, that hasn’t happened yet, but that’s why it’s a long-term goal.

If you say yes, your 17 year old son will be fucking his girlfriend in your house with your implied consent.

If you’re fine with that, go ahead and say yes.

If it helps mollify you any, I think it’s pretty likely they’ve already fucked.