astroboy's posterior

Today, democracy teeters as our capacity for collective action seems to have withered away.

Structural change is rooted in people, human beings, and the power we can create with each other when we find values we share, and our capacity to turn those values into sources of power.

Power does not exist out there, in some bank or something.

the general was called stratigos, and then the soldiers were called tacticas.

Structure is the commitments we make to one another about how we’re going to work together.

The benefit of rock bottom is that it delegitimizes what’s gone before.

Organizing is about enabling people to speak for themselves. It’s not a charity project. It’s a justice project.

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/marshall-ganz-interview-building-power#

TeleMessage’s server – hosted on the public AWS cloud, run by an Israeli company that’s led by a former IDF spook – has plaintext access to the Signal chat logs they’re archiving.

The modified Signal app is almost entirely identical to the authentic version of Signal, except it also archives copies of every message.

The communication between the TM SGNL app and the final archive destination is not end-to-end encrypted.

https://micahflee.com/despite-misleading-marketing-israeli-company-telemessage-used-by-trump-officials-can-access-plaintext-chat-logs/

The more we share, the more we have.

Through workshops, locals have learned the basics of power tools, electrical work, plumbing, machine sewing, hand sewing, wood working, little free library building, sign making and more. With these new skills, people are better equipped to repair their belongings when they break, saving them money and keeping things out of landfills.

You don’t have to be a consumer. You can be a repairer.

https://truthout.org/articles/no-tariffs-on-sharing-tool-libraries-offer-resilience-amid-federal-chaos/

authoritarian followers share three tendencies:

they obey authority figures from their in-group (called authoritarian submission); they punish rule breakers (authoritarian aggression); and they rigidly endorse long-held traditions (conventionalism).

When we think that the world is unstable and unsafe, we search for ways to regain control. Unfortunately for our democratic institutions, placing trust in a dictator and becoming an authoritarian follower is one way to reestablish a sense of control.

Multicultural neighborhoods likely provide people with the chance to form close friendships with others from diverse backgrounds. In turn these experiences dispel worries that immigrants threaten deeply held cultural values or will take their jobs.

Democracy rarely falls at the hands of a single individual. Rather it dies through the complacency and obedience of otherwise well-intentioned authoritarian followers.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-some-people-follow-authoritarian-leaders-and-the-key-to-stopping-it/

This is being circulated at #NASA regarding new performance evaluations to be done 4x a year. Note: “Faithful Support of Administration of the Law and the President’s Policies” are Number 1 criteria for both SES & SL/ST NASA personnel.

This is being circulated at #NASA regarding new performance evaluations to be done 4x a year. Note: "Faithful Support of Administration of the Law and the President's Policies" are Number 1 criteria for both SES & SL/ST NASA personnel.

— NASAWATCH (@nasawatch.bsky.social) 2025-05-01T16:09:47.061Z

It wont end because these people have no personality. No identity of their own. So they latch onto political parties and conspiracies and anything else to give them a feeling of purpose and moral high ground.

‘Founders are allowed to manage people older than them because they’re the founders. If you’re not the founder, people just don’t want to be managed by somebody younger than them who’s maybe a virtuoso, a wunderkind, but they’re a little immature. The companies don’t want to take that risk, so they bias towards senior, grown-up, functional experts. But typically that function is not the product, and I think that’s a problem.

It’s not that founders are magic. It’s that youth is magic.’

young people, women, and poorer groups — indicate that it’s the people with less power in a society who are more likely to see ideological news.

If you’re a wealthy middle-aged white man, a huge part of the “impartial” media is aimed squarely at you — no need to seek an alternative.

Does “impartial” news represent a purity of audience service? Or some triangulation of all the various power sources and elite stakeholders that interact with it?

U.S. conservatives ranked No. 2 in how much extra support they gave to ideologically aligned media. (Only Spain’s conservatives gave more support to ideologically aligned media.)

For some of these audiences, expressing a preference for news that shares their points of view might be another way of saying they prefer news that portrays people like themselves more fairly.

https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/23816

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/04/which-types-of-people-arent-big-fans-of-impartial-news-people-who-dont-have-power/

Under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.

One party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.

inequality exerts a massive influence on social, economic, environmental and political outcomes, regardless of people’s absolute positions.

austerity increases support for the radical right in economically vulnerable regions. Austerity, they found, is the key variable: without it, less-educated people are no more likely to vote for rightwing demagogues than highly educated people are.

the gap between the rich and the poor is rougly the same after taxes are levied, suggesting that taxation has no further significant effect on income distribution.

The one thing that can stop the rise of the far right is the one thing mainstream parties are currently not prepared to deliver: greater equality. The rich should be taxed more, and the revenue used to improve the lives of the poor.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/trump-populists-human-nature-economic-growth

Late-stage capitalism is fun to say until you realize it’s the same thing, mostly, as late-stage cancer. A disease that has progressed so far you can’t stop it now, you can just ride it out and find peace before *fart noise*

Hope persists, though. Hope maybe isn’t the thing with wings but hope is the stubborn green thing, its stem-and-leaf pushing up through what seems to be limitless concrete. It finds a breach and it pushes.

What It Feels Like, Right Now