Hope you beat this thing as quickly and smoothly as possible, so I can be annoyed at your modding style again! Jokes aside, take care, all the best wishes for a successful recovery that is very boring and predictable.

Well, take care. In the meantime, listen to the 20 lessons on tyranny.

And maybe binge watch this guy, I think he’s onto something.

I’m not denying fear, violence, or victimhood. And I’m not equating oppressors with the oppressed. I should push back on the idea that naming cultural patterns equals blaming victims, or that only people inside the worst possible historical analogy are allowed to analyze trajectories.

I’m talking about how societies slide, not about who deserves what. Those are different conversations. I’ve been on the receiving end of state violence. I’ve marched, been gassed, watched movements radicalize too fast and burn themselves out. That’s exactly why I’m saying this: jumping straight to existential framing and armed horizons doesn’t protect anyone it only narrows the future until only catastrophe is left.

You don’t need to already be in a Holocaust to talk about escalation dynamics. In fact, if you wait until everything is unspeakable, analysis is already useless. Yes, fear is justified and preparation is understandable and necessary. But when fear becomes immune to critique, it stops being a warning signal and starts being a steering wheel.

My point hasn’t changed: there is still space, Real Political Space, for non-violent (not peaceful!) resistance, that can be powerfully disruptive. Once that space collapses, it doesn’t reopen because people were right about how bad things felt. I’m arguing against that collapse, not minimizing what’s at stake.

The reasons you outlined are why you are in trouble. As in, if they weren’t the case you would be in trouble. It’s a bit of a circular tautology. But they are not things that doom you. They are the shape of the whole you’re in. And it’s on you guys to find a way out. There’s no way around that. And no, the world is not coming to save you: there is no cavalry.

I don’t think you guys are doomed. I think the opposite, that the American people are a sleeping giant that can shake the world. And no, I don’t think you need to jump straight to shooting reach other.

You missed my point.

On the one hand yes you are behind on some kinds of labour organizing.

On the other hand, it’s not that simple.

a) you have a very long history of minority organizing. Black Americans, Chicanos, indigenous people, and other minorities have survived for generations. It sounds like a leftie cliché, but you guys should really take leadership from them.

b) you don’t have the baggage that comes with entrenched left wing politics. There is a thing like too much left wing politicking. In Greece for example, land of spectacular antifa riots, the left is absolutely paralyzed and completely fragmented. Too much history, too many reasons to blame this or that left faction for what they did 10,20,30, sometimes 60 or more years ago. You have a chance to build on a green field.

c) one thing you Americans actually have going for you is that you guys actually believe in democracy. You’re true believers. It’s a thing we in the rest of the world have always kind of being weirded out by you that you want to be electing judges and sherrifs and school boards etc. And you actually have this libertarian steak in you that’s kind of interesting when it comes to resistance. You have so much democratic institutional hardware just lying around.

d) you actually are close to some of the powerful economic structures, institutions, and pop culture centres in the planet. Anything you do will and already does reverberate globally in ways that others don’t.

So, while you do have very big challenges you also have very big opportunities. And friends man, you have friends. I know we give you guys shit all the time, but trust me, when Americans rise up and stand up we all feel a bit taller. I’m telling you this as someone who listened to RATM on the way to weekly marches getting gassed by the police, thinking we were trying to be as cool as the WTO protests in Seattle.

Not American, so feel free to stop reading.

It’s ridiculous to me how you yanks go from zero to a hundred like this. Either normality or civil war. Like there is no in between? You have an authoritarianism problem. So resist authoritarianism. What makes you think that the only way to resist is shooting people? Resistance is a spectrum, and you have barely started using democratic means to fight back (you just started electing democratic socialists), much less active procedural and institutional warfare (is Bernie demanding a vote for every procedural point requiring a vote? Are the Dems actually using any rat fucking tactic to make the state ungovernable? Are your local and state governments really resisting beyond making angry noises?). You have barely tried non violent resistance (not the same as peaceful!) but you’re such a violent culture that you jump straight to military solutions. Wtf. Those come at the very end, if everything else has failed. Has it? Nowhere near. So this talk about civil war, is that really useful?

You’re wrong saying that it’s a non-story. If you’d asked the question ten years ago, it wouldn’t be a third. The news is that this possibility has been born. That’s big news.

Nah that was British boomers being stupid.

Some people seem to have replaced Great Man historiography with Great Manipulator historiography.

C’mon Jews, speak up!

Have you been around the last couple of years? From Naomi Klein and Mahsa Gessen to Omer Bartov and Gabor Maté, Jewish intellectuals have been major voices against the genocide. And organizations like JVP and IJV in different countries, have been doing immense legwork and organizing. Not to mention the Refuseniks in Israel, and organizations like Standing Together.

If you haven’t heard Jews speaking up, you haven’t been paying attention.

In my experience that’s not the case. But your mileage may vary. And make sure you have your adjectives right. Jew and Israeli are not the same thing. In any case crushing antisemitism outside of Israel is a huge step to defeating Zionism.

This is how we defeat the Jewish Agency for Israel. Make it antizionist praxis to genuinely welcome migrating Israelis and to encourage diaspora Jews to not do Aliyah (Why move to an apartheid hellhole? Here in [insert your country] is a lovely and safe place to flourish as a Jew!). It’s a double win: you get a good friend and neighbour, and the palestinians get one less colonizer to worry about!

EDIT: Added benefit: you piss the fuck out of far right asshats in your country.

So then what you need to do is build …what… ? Take your thought to it’s logical conclusion.

Look, dear American people, there is no cavalry coming to save you. You have to do this. It’s your country. Build the infrastructure, build the organization.

Start small, build up: https://youtu.be/vvaquOcNEKI

General strike.

I mean, you Americans love to compare yourselves with Rome, learn something from the Secessio Plebis.

Or better, take a hint from your own previous social movements.

Orcas ahoy!

In fact, “computers” were women whose job was to do calculations in the era before electronic computers.

A heads up that, in 2026, a 70 year old grandmother could just as well have had a 30-40-50 year career in computing. Don’t use grandmothers as the go to trope for tech illiterate users :)

The idea that a language ends up a lingua franca because of its qualities is simply ridiculous. It’s not linguistics, it’s empire. It’s always empire.

John Kerry warned that Israel can be Jewish, large, democratic, pick two. They picked Jewish and large. Now leopards are coming for faces.