I once had a friend and neighbour who was an aikido sensei. He was kind of an awkward dork, but magically calm and centered physically. One thing aikido is good at is endless fall training.

He once had a truck swerve toward him and his response had his motorcycle aiming at two older women on the sidewalk, so he cranked it hard into a hedge with a small wall behind it. He was going fast enough that it launched him off the bike and all the way across the yard to the front door of the house.

Naturally he executed a perfect roll and finished on his feet facing back at the old gals on the sidewalk before he knew what he was doing. He nodded politely and tried to keep his cool and a superhero aura for comedic effect despite being freaked out at flying around 30 feet or so, but it’s a good story about how training is bigger than you at times.

That’s great bud just take yer shoes off in the house

Holy shit, dude.

The wealth of the USA is much more from colonial extraction and market manipulation than the mythology of productivity would have you believe. The dark waters of American imperialism have flooded the globe for nearly a century.

So yeah, you, as in the polity, think about the rest of the world all the time, but more like buffet than neighborhood.

But more to the point, examine the defeatist viewpoint that is part of the democracy-suppressing ideology that is prominent in many countries, and results in low civic participation, the hero complex: “I’ll get right on that whole convincing 100 million Americans what to do and vote”.

No, just no. No-one asks that.

What we ask is just resistance in the form of what is possible. For those ground under the millstone, it may just be educating yourself with documentaries or a study buddy, so you can better see how to build the society you want, and represent that in speech and action. Every act of resistance counts, it really does.

But essentially, just help organize. Volunteer 4h a month at first. In a sea of 400 million people every drop counts, because you only have to sufficiently organize about 20 million for real change to kick in.

Don’t second guess too much what is effective, that requires massive data, and there are all kinds of unexpected wins and losses. I have had some successful activists tell me that I made a difference in their chosen directions years ago, and I had no idea. Sometimes it’s just a comment that leads to a lot of convincing.

Pretty sure the italics was the equivalent of /s.

Note how “terrorist” is often applied to those resistant to resource/land based occupation/exploitation.

Similar shit happened in Indonesia after the genocide. People had to go back to being neighbours with somewhat typical people who were former state sanctioned serial killers and enablers. Germany tried to deprogram the youth in the '50s, but yeah. Didn’t stick, for various reasons. Harsh reality.

Still, no society has recovered from fascist or similar regimes without at least some targeted pruning of the tree of life. Putin SHOULD obsess about what happened to Gaddafi and the like. Society has to remember or, well, here we are again.

Well, you have done a lot of of the things that you need to do, and that are the simplest basis of civic responsibility. Don’t let people troll you down.

It is sad that it is not immediately apparent to Americans that what they need to do is organize as much as possible and develop civil society because it has been gutted.

Simply finding ways to educate yourself and others about what has been stolen from you and how you can get it back is absolutely necessary if you are ever going to solve this problem. One form of light organizing is a study group, which can quickly lead to more effective substantive action, or simply joining a civic service organization like food not bombs or similar offers a toe hold on getting going.

Yes, the individualistic choice is always there, if you can afford it, and manage relationships. Especially if you’re an early target of fascism (in its end, though, everything is a target).

Happy medium: educate and organize, in preparation for the moment.

Economic power is the basis of all the megaviolence. General strikes recuperate the true source of the power: worker productivity. Do it now before automation makes it moot.

Or, you know, kick the bastards out, and close all the authoritarian loopholes. More democracy, stop subsidizing the fuck out of the rich, move that to education and research. Mandate empiricism in governance.

End US imperialism in favour of multilateral partnerships, especially around the 800 or so military bases in other countries, or else that shit returns home and gets used on Americans. The ship has sailed on being the one superpower. Adapt and evolve.

Myself, I favour smaller polities wherever possible, but given the current lack of an egalitarian basis to start from, breaking the states into countries will be a feast for the oligarchs.

Soldiers require 2 to 20 people each providing support. You can resist without picking up a gun. Stop assuming.

Back in the ‘90s, my grad student roommate was studying how tanzanian chimps use certain plants only for antiparasitic effect. Quite effective and too small in quantity to be food. Medicine.

The fuck is wrong with you?

Some people are not fighters. The species is full of variation because we are cultural and depend on specialization. I state the obvious.

Logistics. But the resistant insurgency will carry on for living memory, even after this shit is put down.

Sit the fuck down.

I think fraud laws should be extended outwards from economic law and cover mass manipulation. Make politicians legally honest. Provide robust investigative support to prove or disprove intent. Unintentional mass manipulation gets injunctions. Intentional gets fraud convictions.

OK, I am not surprised, but that’s not well known and kind of a taboo subject so not official, they were ‘guidelines’ and the policies were ‘encouragement’. Canada did similar nasty abusive sterilization in its colonial enterprise until the '70s, but hardly anyone knows.

I get the sense they are sticking it more to entitled guys and potential mothers-in-law than the government! Just going off one friend’s opinions there, though.

That was a PRC policy, don’t be ignorant. There were government recommendations to only have two kids, not a regulation, and it was over 60 years ago.

The problem in Taiwan stems mostly from women chafing against patriarchy in a modern world.