Agreed! My org had folks go out and poll people about what they're most concerned about, which was a great icebreaker for moving to what they're doing about it.

I also found that having a scripted opener was helpful in making the approach less awkward (something like "Hi! I'm trying to get a sense of the main concerns folks have. What brings you out here today?"). It also helped my nerves to frame it as just collecting data, so each interaction wasn't make-or-break.

Control through guilt.

Nobody wants an event to be ruined, and the narcissist knows this and uses it as a weapon to get what they want.

HEY!! Don't be mean to my comrade

We are each molded by our environment to a larger degree than we like to think.

The mark of a good person is NOT "did their environment happen to mold them into a good person."

The mark of a good person is deciding what they value, and then striving to align themselves with those values.

A necessary (but often painful) step is taking inventory of where they're at today and seeing where they don't align with their values. Each person will find themselves in varying degrees of misalignment with their values. Nobody starts out perfect, but nobody is irredeemable, either.

I'm proud of you for taking that step, and I'd be willing to bet that the parts of you that you don't like are the direct results of your environment. I encourage you to look into the Internal Family Systems Model - it was extremely helpful framing for me.

One of the greatest injustices in life is that we each have to try to deal with the ways our environment fucked us up. I've heard folks say "it's not your fault... but it is your responsibility."

I say all that because I don't want you to be too hard on yourself. It's awesome that you want to be better! You're not gonna just flip a switch and fix everything, and you'll have setbacks, and that's ok too!

If you're taking intentional steps towards being better, you already are a good person.

I want you to extend to yourself the same compassion that you extend to sharks, pencils, and Ben Affleck

There are plenty of people that things that each of those things are morally wrong, and some who would say that they're much worse than a bomb threat.

Those people are writing the laws.

Legality and morality are two completely different things. It's a comfortable lie to think they're the same.

Having an email provider that will not comply with law enforcement is important because any of us could be next on the target list.

I'm not saying "yay, it's morally good to send bomb threats."

Folks who care about privacy don't want their email provider engaging with local authorities.

when tyranny becomes law rebellion becomes duty

"Illegal" is NOT immoral, and when laws are increasingly being passed by right-wing nutjobs, folks doing the right thing will be doing illegal things.

• women getting access to an abortion
• undocumented folks avoiding being sent to El Salvador
• trans folks getting healthcare

Any platform has three options:

1. Always comply with law enforcement, and give up vulnerable populations that are targeted by the government
2. Never comply with law enforcement, and make law enforcement track down bomb threats some other way
3. Sometimes comply with law enforcement, based on... what criteria? where's the line?

3 is obviously the thing we'd like, but no company is going to open itself up to legal threats by doing it.

This article shows that Proton Mail is falling into category 2. I think that category should exist to protect vulnerable populations.

I could see it being a "softer" way of a community enforcing good behavior, especially for things that don't rise to the level of mod action.

I'm not on an instance with (visible?) downvotes though, and I do think that makes me more comfortable voicing opinions.

The hexbear mods/admins will probably have gotten community feedback and done a poll, so might be worth checking with them?

I've been thinking about this a lot, especially when we're seeing these huge protests and rallies. These are people who agree that what's happening is bad, and (importantly) are actually doing something about it. How do we reach those people, and start getting them involved in effective resistance?

My hypothesis is that it will take many small ideological steps, and that it will not happen in one conversation. It's why I'm optimistic about Bernie's rallies and think that we need to start small, by addressing people's immediate needs.

I don't think we build a mass movement by expecting people to hop from their current beliefs directly to ours. I think we need to get people taking small actions in the right (left?) direction to start developing and exercising collective power. That might start as small as a community garden, but that group of people is organizing and working together for their collective good, and I think that's the muscle that the left needs to build.

Being embedded in those communities also allows you to provide answers to the questions that they're having, and to steer them towards useful solutions.

Jesus Christ this is fucked.

The MAXIMUM estimates at the number of folks in the US illegally is below 20 million. So this bill is proposing that we spend over $4,000 per person and only to cover the next 4 years.

I'm curious about section 287(g) is of the immigration and nationalities act is - the fact that it's not named is a bit concerning.

$20 million to "check minors for gang tattoos" is fucking gross... oh, wait it's actually $40 million bc we have two departments doing it.

its employees had received emails containing obscene and vulgar content sent via Proton Mail.

the email service reportedly refused to share details about the sender of the allegedly offensive emails, despite a police complaint.

Last year, the police department of the southern state of Tamil Nadu had sought to block Proton Mail after the email service was found to have been used for sending hoax bomb threats to local schools.

Honestly, pretty glowing review of Proton Mail

Definitely agree. Ideally you'd find people with your exact political opinions, but those folks will be few and far between.

We need a mass movement, and most folks don't have correct politics. That means we need to work with people who don't currently have correct politics, and educate them.

At this stage, that IS the work.

There is no revolution without mass organization, and building mass organization means bringing people on that don't already agree with you.

Trump getting elected for the second time absolutely wrecked me, because (for me) it was the death of any last shreds of hope in the superstructure. It was my crossing of the Rubicon.

As one person, taking on the entire superstructure is not possible. The goal (for me) is to build a different superstructure, one dedicated to leftist values. I'm trying to devote energy almost exclusively to things that I can make a meaningful difference in, and that has meant finding and organizing like-minded people at a very small scale.

In that vein, I've been getting more plugged in to the DSA branch around here, and it has actually been super helpful for my misanthropy! There's some stuff that I don't necessarily think is a good use of time (e.g. electoralism, but tbf they focus on local stuff), but it is SO NICE to be around people who want to help and are doing something about it.

Unrelated to misanthropy, but regarding groups with mid politics:

There's a spot in F.D. Signifier's video on "hoteps" where he and a guest talk about their reluctance to condemn the movement as a whole, even though it has some bad politics, since they're allies in organizing for black liberation. She says something like "if you don't like their politics, just out-organize them!" And I think that's the best attitude we can have on the left in general: don't spend time talking bad about other orgs; work together where we can, set boundaries of acceptable behavior, and out-organize groups that have bad politics.

Honestly, having a combination of competency and indifference is perfect for a wage labor job.

If you're competent, software engineering is the best wage labor in terms of dollars per amount of effort (though I'm very biased).

Most folks come in with a ton of passion, then burn out in a few years because they overwork themselves.

Something I've noticed is that it takes a bit of time to get your feet under you at a new job, but if you're able to make a good impression and develop trust, you'll generally be given a lot of liberty in your day to day.

Ideally, you'll find an aspect of the work that you enjoy, and can devote your time to it. e.g. I'm a big fan of good data and monitoring, but needed to try a bunch of stuff to learn that.

Also hard agree with woodenghost's reply - I think the market is starting to shift for SWEs to one where unions will be beneficial, and if you're able to engage with that I'd recommend it.

And from experience... there's a lot to be said for not making your passion into your job. All jobs will be tedious and frustrating at times, and they can suck the enjoyment out of something you enjoy.

This essay has stuck in my head regarding types of folks at a company (and looking at it now it maps pretty well onto Marxist class theory). If you're working at any job at any company, you should have an idea of which camp you want to be in, and then play that role.

I did a bit of a dive into race and wealth in the other reply here. Yeah, white people as a whole are extremely well off. The surprising take aways for me is that 1. there's so, so many white people and 2. that most of the poorest folks are white.

And re ignorance: kinda yeah - I think most people just kinda believe what they're told, right? Humans are social more than rational.

My parents were Republican and Christian, so I was Republican and Christian. As I got older, I believed what my friends believed. It wasn't until I had a partner specifically, persistently ask me what I believed that I started to develop my own independent value system.

Everyone should decide what they believe for themselves, but I think tons of people live their whole lives just based on the vibe of their social circle. That goes double for white folks, who the system works great for and who would rather not even think about race (see: "I'm not racist, I don't see color!").

I also think our perceptions of the world are shaped by the media we consume. Capitalists own the majority of that media, and they have a vested interest in people not coming to the conclusion that they are suffering under capitalism.

Imo, ignorance is much more likely than malice for white folks, and so yeah I think that requires education and explanation (like the quote says).

Oh, but it should def be white folks teaching white folks. I don't mean to put that on other groups.

Oh sorry I just reread your post and I missed the second "not" in you first sentence, which really changes the meaning haha

I definitely had a different view: that white folks were also exploited under capitalism, just to a lesser degree. I looked up a few stats and I still think that generally, but the gap is way bigger than I thought.

63% of America is white, 12% black, 11% multiracial, 6% Asian

59% of Americans in 2025 don't have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 emergency expense

It's not a perfect measure, but I'm comfortable saying "most Americans are living on the edge." Even if we round down to 50% and assume every single non-white person is below that line, that would still leave 13% of America white folks living on the edge.

Which is more than the entire population of black Americans (12%), which tbh I did not expect. (Note: I'm kinda suspect of the 'multiracial' bucket as it applies to how folks experience systemic racism, since iiuc that tends to be more like the family guy skin color ok/not ok meme. i.e. I assume that there are a decent number of folks in the 11% 'multiracial' bucket that experience anti-black racism)

I really like this article, too, specifically median wealth by race and the households by "teirs" of wealth.

Because holy shit there are so many well-off white folks and yeah, as a whole they're rolling in it.

"Households with no wealth or in debt" (poorest 11% of the overall population) shows 9% of white households have zero or negative wealth, compared to 24% of black households. Applied to the overall population, that's 6% and 3%, respectively. Which... challenges my intuition. I would not expect white folks to make up the majority of the poorest group of Americans.

Honestly, I think the biggest takeaway for me is that there's an absolute shitload of white people. As a group they're incredibly well off, but there's also a huge number of struggling white folks.

What I'd really like to see is the racial makeup of each wealth percentile, something like this graph, but scaled by the absolute number of folks in each category, not by the percentage of a given race that falls in each bucket. Looks like the underlying data is published by the government, so I might try to do it myself sometime.

Exactly!! People are exploited and they know it, they're just often ignorant of the cause.

America is deeply racist, and fascists stoke those flames to explain why people are exploited.

I think the quote is still relevant because a ton of our work is explaining to people "no, treats aren't more expensive because woke, it's because capitalism."

What distinguishes neoliberal capitalism from fascist capitalism? Not trying to make a "they're the same picture" joke, just trying to understand.

In my head, they're the same economic system (where markets tend to centralize), just with different techniques and messaging to the masses.

Neoliberalism: feel-good concessions, "you too can get rich if you work hard," and directing discontent towards electoralism

Fascism: violence, "look what they took from us," and directing discontent at demonization of out-groups

I don't think Trump gets elected if the white dipshits are content with their material conditions, though?

I think there's real discontent in America in 2025, even with how privileged Americans are globally. I think that discontent is ultimately a result of getting squeezed by capitalism, and that most folks aren't aware of that. Trump won by acknowledging that "the system" is broken, which most people know- he just pointed them to bigotry instead to protect capitalism.

That's not to say that American's material struggles are comparable to Burkina Faso's - I think white folks in America are soft as shit - but I don't think people feel like they're doing well, and that's ultimately what drives their actions.

Yeah I only made it through the first few paragraphs before it became clear this was antivax propaganda.

"I asked why she regressed, doctor says it's common"

"RFK Jr says..."

"I got her vaccinated"

Just right in a row.

So gross.

I think they meant "fetishizing"