RedWizard [he/him]

One thing I know I’m going to be doing is reading “Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)” by Dean Spade. From the first two paragraphs of the first chapter:

Mutual aid projects expose the reality that people do not have what they need and propose that we can address this injustice together. The most famous example in the United States is the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, which ran throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including a free breakfast program, free ambulance program, free medical clinics, a service offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and a school aimed at providing a rigorous liberation curriculum to children. The Black Panther programs welcomed people into the liberation struggle by creating spaces where they could meet basic needs and build a shared analysis about the conditions they were facing. Instead of feeling ashamed about not being able to feed their kids in a culture that blames poor people, especially poor Black people, for their poverty, people attending the Panthers’ free breakfast program got food and a chance to build shared analysis about Black poverty. It broke stigma and isolation, met material needs, and got people fired up to work together for change.

Recognizing the program’s success, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover famously wrote in a 1969 memo sent to all field offices that “the BCP [Breakfast for Children Program] represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP [Black Panther Party] and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” The night before the Chicago program was supposed to open, police broke into the church that was hosting it and urinated on all of the food. The government’s attacks on the Black Panther Party are evidence of mutual aid’s power, as is the government’s co-optation of the program: in the early 1970s the US Department of Agriculture expanded its federal free breakfast program—built on a charity, not a liberation, model—that still feeds millions of children today. The Black Panthers provided a striking vision of liberation, asserting that Black people had to defend themselves against a violent and racist government, and that they could organize to give each other what a racist society withheld.

People in your community already need help. You and your friends can start building a mutual aid network today, one that can help queer people, black people, and women in need. You can decide what kind of aid you can provide. Maybe you’re offering rides to airports to women who need to travel out of state for medical care. Perhaps you’re providing safe places and spaces for the Trans population in your area. Whatever it is, you’ll feel more connected and more in control of your community, and put out a positive influence within it.

Along the way, you should also try and educate yourself so that you can educate others.

If you give me your vote unconditionally, then I have what I wanted and give up nothing in return. Even if you stand outside and shout at me after you gave me your vote, it still doesn’t matter because you gave me what I wanted willingly with zero conditions. Clearly, my position on any topic is of no interest to you either, otherwise you would have tried to make a deal with me, but you didn’t.

So how about this: You give me your vote, and I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.

As opposed to?

Actual leftism. Liberalism is a Conservative movement.

So what is your plan exactly? You want to vote for a genocider, giving them the one thing you have in exchange, your one bargaining chip? And then what, write a strongly worded letter? Or are you one of those libs that intends to go back to brunch having “Done your part” in voting for “The lesser evil” who will still genocide the Palestinians? Could you be one of those people who want to “be done with politics” so that it’s “no longer in your face anymore”? You don’t strike me as the “organize my workforce towards collective action centered around Gaza” type.

When you are making demands, you need leverage. The baseline leverage you have, is your vote. You’ve not leveraged a single thing.

Well, that does make some sense. I swear some of the channels who have these sponsorships are the same channels that had them last time around too.

I had that same reaction. It actually happened around 2018 (where does the time go?)

https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/4/17932862/betterhelp-app-youtube-sponsorship-controversy-explained

We’ve definitely been here before. One of the interesting things about this article is that a lot of the videos they embedded are gone now.

Am I just old, even by internet standards? Because we’ve been here before. Better Help was blasted on the internet several years ago for their shady business practices. Several major YouTubers published “make good” videos about it, because of how bad the service was. Better Help was giving YouTubers and podcasters a shitload of money to promote their product, and in their terms they explicitly stated that they did not verify the credentials of their “therapists” and that it was on you to do that.

No its only for the instance. Lemmy.ee is still federated with lemmygrad.

This dudes account is 2 weeks old.

The mod log is public and federated, so you can go look up what they were seeing… Also, no one says anything like that on lemmygrad, but OK.

Because different instances have different rules. And communities have their own rules. wait till you learn that you only see coversations from the people your instance federates with. You could be seeing half the comments of a thread if the federation overlap between your instance and the host instance are not exactly the same.