this is in fact the opposite of what i’m saying

Alas it’s getting increasingly hard to find paper maps a lot of places. They’re just not sold anymore. If you find yourself in or near one of these places, I recommend CoMaps

most farmer’s markets where i am have a heavy emphasis on community building and resiliency as well as income stabilization for vulnerable people with the bank’s sword of Domacles hanging over them. of the three i mentioned, they are the weakest form of resistance but they still have a role to play, which is why Granges put so much work into making sure they are available to non members of the grange

Farmer’s markets, co-ops, and mutual aid all exist as forms of resistance to capitalism purely by making sure your dollars go to people within your community rather than get captured by the modern company store through Wal-Mart or Target. At the same time though, they are also not everything. It’s a whole thing. Nothing anywhere is or can be perfect. The best we can do is the best we can do. I know that sounds like a thought terminating cliche but sometimes it’s important to set aside the things you can’t control and to focus on the things you can and have faith that the more people that do that the easier it will become to resist the horrors that surround us all

“there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” has to me always been a clear call to reduce your consumption within a capitalist system. yes, it is these shit heads who shackle us. but when we reduce our dependence on them we begin the breaking of our bonds to a system that kills thousands every year

A lot of what you’re arguing is tangential to what I was trying to say, but I’ll still go through it.

1. We were glad in NoVA that Spanberger won in an extremely conservative district in Northern Virgina in 2018. It was a relief compared to what was there before. The follow up in 2020 was also nice.
2. I’m not trying to say that she didn’t win by enough. I don’t really care about vote margins in electoral politics, I care about what politicians do in office to shift how people perceive the political process. Spanberger has been a consistent corporate vote. Better than the overt fascists. Still complicit in the erosion of our environmental and labor protections. She’s part of the false binary we find ourselves in in this country between overt hyperfascism and slow neoliberal fascism. We won’t know until we try it if a populist left wing candidate like a Zohran Mamdani or a Bernie Sanders could win in a general. Virginia hasn’t had an opportunity to do such a thing in my lifetime.
3. I also don’t think that the NYC populace is the same as Virginia. I think our left wing populism would look different from their left wing populism. I know this because I’ve experienced it first hand. The center of left wing life in SWVA is the Grange, the Mutual Aid Hub, and the Water Defender. In the urban centers the focus is much more on economic unions and labor unions for the factory and office worker. I’ve lived both lives, and have seen that organization efforts need to fall along different lines and put different focuses on confronting poverty. In the countryside you need to empower people to support eachother through their access to clean drinking water and growable food. In the urban centers you need to empower people to organize their people power to demonstrate to their bosses the ability to say “No.”
4. I missed my CWA chapter endorsing her. I didn’t know that the CWA endorsed her. That’s my mistake. Most unionists did tend to vote for her anyway because Winsome Earle-Sears was an overt fascist. You will receive no argument from me. But this was the first time in my life that the unions refused to endorse either candidate. That’s HUGE

5. If she ran unopposed in the primary, why didn’t Progressives put up a challenger? Is it HER fault she ran unopposed? That’s EXACTLY the organization failure I was trying to point out. Democracy is not a single event that occurs at the ballot box in November. Even the bourgious electoral form of democracy practiced in the United states requires participation 2-3 times a year to get the best possible outcome, but moreover, it requires dedicating time to go door to door to talk to people about candidates. You get more enthusiasm to do that when people are enthusiastic about the candidates. I haven’t seen that in Virginia in a decade. No one trusts any of our politicians and people dedicated to the value of democratic values have been much more focused on community organization with their neighbors. It’s been a monumental shift, and one I’ve very much seen accelerate in the past 4 years since the western regions of the state were devestated by hurricane helene along with our North Carolinian and West Virginian brethren, with many people slowly viewing themselves less as residents of any of our states or border states, and more as being parts of the cultural communities we exist in. The people of Bluefield, Tazewell, and Boone have more in common that their political representation reflects. So why do we even pay attention to the state borders when our real connections are through our food and our water? More and more people want representation that reflects this, and if Democrats don’t run a socialist who reflects this, they risk losing to a national-socialism who does Definition of fascism by Seth Tobocman. If we are to resist fascism, we must acknowledge how it takes hold. The “Virginia wants corporate dems” narrative undermines our ability to assess and resist our standing when increasingly there is a boot on our nets.

6. Not being Winsome Earle-Sears is not clear policy value. Virginians like some of her policy positions, but some of her policy positions are WILDLY unpopular, and as a result she has become increasingly unpopular. We do need to acknowledge that there is an element of misogyny driving her unpopularity. I renounce anyone who roots their criticisms of the 67th governor in her gender. Fuck that and fuck off if that’s you (not you who I’m replying to, obviously, but I know there’s a chance someone’s reading this hating her for her gender). I’ll state my stance that our last good governor was Francis Harrison Pierpont. Spanberger is a better governor than Youngkin, McDonnel, or Warner up to this point, but we do have to acknowledge what the specific issues with her governorship have been
7. You think I don’t know the short sessions and long sessions are completely insane!? THEY’RE COMPLETELY INSANE!! “Oh it’s to avoid a permanent professional class of politicians from running the state” bull fucking shit, the result is representatives that spend somewhere between 1 and 3 months a year doing anything, and the rest of the year schmoozing. I fuckin’ hate it. I’ll have to take your word for it on that it was the centrist dems mainly saying she scuttled collective bargaining and environmental protections we’d been hopeful on. That was the feedback we got from our union endorsed representative and from multiple environmental groups in our valley who spend a lot of time talking to representatives, senators, and anyone else who will listen to that we’re tired of the arsenic in the New River, so it was the understanding I had taken away from this past session.

Abigail Spanberger won a tight race against an overt fascist without endorsements from any of the most powerful political blocs in virginia, like the UMWA, USW, UAW, or CWA. she also ran virtually unopposed in the democratic primary. she is not an example of someone who won because of the value of centrist politics. she’s currently wildly unpopular for vetoing populist left wing bills from the long session (60 days) without providing input during the session about what she wanted. the next, and final session of this legislature is a short session (30 days) and none of the legislaters knew what she wants or needs to pass environmental protections, labor protections, or affordability measures as Virginia experiences a housing crisis.

so.

no.

this is not a good counter example to Mamdani, but instead a good example of exactly why no one trusts corporate dems or ex-CIA agents

it’s just down the road from me. it’s a convergence point between a bunch of mining towns so it’s a bit of a significant labor organization point in central Appalachia. it’s also where Mother Jones founded the UMWA. also prior to European colonization it access between the Allegheny highlands and the great valley made it an ideal trading hub thanks to the New River, so it holds significance to indigenous rights organizers in Appalachia as well. the fact that the median income is $19k/yr is very much a policy choice of enforcing poverty

Beckley deserves so much more than to be a tourist trap where people get told lies about the union

neat!

the 47th president says a lot of stuff

french folk, you best be out protesting this as hard as you can because once it passes, your police become like the american police i grew up with

also by even scheduling a debate between say… Bill Nigh and a creationist, the illusion is created that these are equal things, equally deserving of our attention and time. before you ever get into the moderator bias creating an impression that the truth lies in the middle of these two people when in reality only one of them is speaking in good faith.

is it pre-emptive in a war that’s been going for 12 years and a full scale invasion that’s been going on for 4 if there’s credible intelligence that Russia is using these facilities for war?

you believe that no country should ever attempt to arrest people that are illegally spreading misinformation directly to sow racial division, arming malcontent separatists, and funneling money towards extremists specifically so they commit terror acts and specifically so they can sow racial discontent and separatist movements?

No, I do not believe this. But moreover, I do not think this is what this law does, in function. The bigger issue here, to me, is that China is declaring that they have the right to enforce Chinese law outside of China. While States (capital S intentional) and borders are intrinsically bullshit, the idea of one State enforcing compliance on people living outside of that State is a nightmare scenario. I think there are more effective ways to counter misinformation than what is being proposed here. One of the biggest things they could do is address structural issues within the China that have established a hegemonic racial hierarchy in which some people receive preferential treatment from the state and others have to fight to maintain their cultural identity and language. In particular Blang, Nu, Gelao, Yi, Achang, Daur, Fuyu Kyrgyz, and Ili Turkic people face total cultural erasure. These cultural traditions need not be erased for a Marxist eutopia to be achieved. In fact, these people demand our solidarity with them in order for any of us to be able to achieve a positive pro-social outcome for any of our societies. When Marx wrote about international solidarity, this was the sort of thing he meant. We cannot claim to have class consciousness if we erase some people’s cultural identifiers in service of some hypothetical positive outcome.

I’ve been talking to some of my Cambodian friends recently, and something struck me. I tend to think of colonization as being predominantly a process by which one population erases another in order to steal their resources. They all talk about colonization in terms of one population stealing another’s resources with the predominant aim of erasing their culture through homogenization. It’s still something I’m processing and working through, but I think it’s something we should all take into consideration as we combat colonization.

I know anarchists are a bit on the naive side

You “know” this and yet I perceive things like what you’re saying to be naive. This is something we’ll have simply disagree with because I think our perspectives are completely irreconcilable. We are looking at the same set of problems and seeing a different set of root causes and actions to take based on that.

and historically haven’t exactly been victims

This though I’ll need to push back on. In my country identifying as an anarchist is considered reason to have your citizenship revoked if you hold dual citizenship or are naturalized. Anarchists in Israel do not receive due process, the act of identifying as an anarchist is considered to be an act of terrorism that is met with being shot on sight. Mikhail Bakunin spent 2 years in solitary confinement after being sentenced to death before being imprisoned for another 3 years before being exiled to Siberia for 5 years (which he escaped, not released). Ukrainian and Russian anarchists who supported the reds against the whites were ultimately crushed and largely put to death after the Russian civil war. Spanish anarchists in the 1930s faced persecution from both forces supported by Italian and German fascists in Franco and Soviet forces supported by Stalin. Rojava was destroyed by forces supported by both Turkey and Russia just earlier this year. The US national guard and police forces have bombed multiple anarchist workers’ movements throughout Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest.

Yet still we organize under these principals. For me, it’s because I’ve known the pain of being hungry. I’ve known the anxiety of being homeless. Many of my friends and allies are the same. We know what it means to experience poverty, and we know the value of community supporting each other. So we spend our time building a coalition of allies that can resist and defy the state because for us this is a matter of life and death. I think your analysis of anarchists is at least a little reductive, however my read on this is that it’s not coming from a place of malice. I just ask that you meet and talk to some anarchists, and consider adding some anarchist theory to your reading. Whether you add any of that to your praxis is of course up to you (since the ultimate Anarchist philosophy is that no one is more equipped to determine what is best for someone’s self determination than them).

one would think you’d pay some attention to how your enemy actually operates and why your movement will always fail if you do not have plans in place against these tactics.

I do. Which is why I’m skeptical about this situation and its positive benefit for the people. I’ll be thrilled if it turns out I’m wrong, but if my country was passing a law like this I’d be fucking horrified.

bunch of white supremecist states and turkey, a fascist dictatorship. doesn’t make this acceptable

“that’s good”

so we’re clear i’m really not into an anti-intellectualism. what i’m into is knowledge sharing without barriers based on class hierarchies

too many people have the attitude of “why contribute to something when X corporate service works fine”

but more and more, with these companies giving less and less of a fuck and relying on stale and outdated knowlege calcified in training data that itself didn’t represent the real world as well as they think, the information we share with eachother for the love of sharing will become more valuable

We need both more citizen science and citizen journalism