There are folks preparing for armed insurrection. I would say there are probably enough of those folks already, I’m not saying they’re wrong, just that it’s easy to think of that as a default solution and miss the much more important foundation building work.

Collective disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from preparing the logistical side of a revolution. The art of was says that for every person on the field of battle, 7 are in support.

The idea of the revolutionary with a gun is attractive, especially for those of us socialized male. But there are a lot of critical roles that are revolutionary and are not that. In a lot of ways the glorification of the militant serves the state by making the resiatence easier to kill. Focus on the things that are harder to justify killing people over and harder for feds to figure out how to disrupt. The armed part of the Panthers were used to justify the attacks, but the breakfast program is why they were a real threat.

My favorite example from the past of a revolutionary project I worked on was our local GDC’s food security committee. We started with a shared pantry for members. This allowed some members to engage in riskier things like striking because they knew they’d have food covered. Other times it just supported people through hard times. We did some guerilla gardening on some abandoned plots. I learned to forage. Eventually it grew in to a few folks regularly bringing canned food to houseless camps and providing them material support.

Houseless camps are a threat to the stability of the state. They are necessarily a lawless space which threaten the legitimacy of the state.

The biggest lesson we need to take away from the Syrian civil war is that whoever can fulfil the needs of the people becomes the regional power. The state will control resource (like food) to control people. If you can disrupt their ability to control those resources or provide alternatives, then the state has less power to leverage. Simultaneously, fascist terrorists will attack the infrastructure in order to inflict suffering and control people. In both cases, providing things like food to comrade makes resistence possible and undermines the legitimacy of an authoritarian state.

A state that cannot fulfil the needs of its people loses legitimacy. But the other pillar, aside from fulfilling needs, is the legitimacy of the infrastructure of violence. My other favorite project was an independent journalism and public records activism collective. Lucy Parsons Labs OpenOversight is a plarform for police accountability. Since police ultimately will never be held accountable, pointing this out weakens the state’s ability to leverage them without losing legitimacy with the people.

So erode the narrative of the state and build it’s replacement. If you read Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare or any book like that, you’ll realize that the literal fighting part is probably the smallest and least import part of a revolution. The fate of the revolution is decided long before anyone picks up a gun.

So go talk to your neighbors, find out what they need. Organize with comrades. Join food not bombs. Push local disaster prep groups to support houseless camps, since it’s also indistinguishable from supporting people after a major natural disaster. If you do all the legal and easily justifiable things then if a fed infiltrates your group they just end up doing a lot of work without being able to disrupt anything.

Finally, go read as much as you can about the Rojava. Learn about Libertarian Communalism and think about how that translates to the US context.

To do any of this you need to organize. Start a book club or join one. Join FNB. Find other people. Talk to your neighbors. You would be amazed how many normal people actually want radical change. I’ve talked to liberals who are really radicals who haven’t figured out how to make it actually work. Don’t discount normal folks, because revolution is impossible without their involvement.

Edit: a note on foraging, one of the critical things for a revolutionary guerilla force is soap. Most US cities have abundant horse chestnuts (buckeyes or conkers). These are natural soap and can be used for laundry detergent, hand soap, or body soap. To anyone in an urban area, you’re welcome.

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Liberals would rather blame leftists than actually fight fascism.

People in functional countries don’t love their country. Only dictatorships do that, like Russia, China, and the US. People in normal countries acknowledge the problems and work to solve them, because there are actually solutions. If it is impossible to solve things in your country, why would you not hate your government?

Saying that anyone who points out flaws is an enemy agent is something cults and dictatorships do. It’s how Xi and Putin maintain control, it’s how Trump maintains control of his people, and it’s how America has worked for generations. You are responding like someone who is in a cult.

The US is not a democracy, it’s an oligarchy. This is a fact. We talk about it constantly. The fact that oligarchs basically choose who can and can’t run for the two major parties, and that the two major parties control the debates, mirrors the way the Chinese Communist Party controls who can run in elections. In both cases they let the people choose between the options that are acceptable to those who are actually in charge. This is just an observation of reality.

The US was built by slave owning oligarchs who didn’t want to pay taxes for the genocide they’d been doing. They built a system od government around controlling the population. Only landed white men could vote. The facade of the system has changed over time but the system itself remains largely the same: a small group of landed white men get to control basically everything. This is just an observation of history.

The idea that any colonizer state can possibly be democratic is just absurd. Any system bult on genocide and oppression won’t magically stop being built on genocide and oppression. The system must be completely replaced.

So the question to ask is if you advocate direct action to make sure this isn’t something that can ever happened again, or if you just advocate direct action so you can go back to brunch until next time?

The bus is heading for a cliff. Someone stands up and says, “this is stupid! We should change the way we make decisions so this can’t happen!” You hold that person down so they can’t stop the driver because you want to tell the driver to get ice cream after the bus drives off the cliff.

Fascists want to win because it means there will be less resistence from liberals, not because they will abide by the law. That’s a pretty important distinction that I don’t think liberals can integrate right now.

A successful coup is indistinguishable from a legal election, which is why they create as much chaos as possible and sew distrust before elections.

I’m not saying voting is completely useless but I am saying that you are deluded if you think voting will save you. It might not even buy you more time. Organize now. Figure out how you’re going to eat while you’re fighting. Download army manuals and start reading them. Start talking to other people about what to do when Trump takes power (acknowledging that he will claim power reguarless if he wins or loses the election).

A coup is less likely to be successful if you promise to revolt no matter how a fascist takes power. They rely on tricking enough people in to cooperating. If enough people will riot, some of the ghouls who back the fascist will back off and you lower their chances of success.

You don’t have time. Sure, vote anyway because it’s a low effort thing that might buy you time. It’s basically a free lottery ticket. You probably aren’t going to win, but it will be really great if you do and it’s super low effort. But you wouldn’t take out a loan assuming that ticket will pay off. Act like voting won’t actually buy you time, because it probably won’t.

At most it’s gonna pull some of the people from it before it drives of the cliff.

Vote for shit burgers or don’t. The time to build a movement was 4 years ago before liberals decided to go back to brunch. The thing is that fascism requires the complicity of liberals. A very small group of people could beat the driver to death, take the keys, and park the bus. Liberals will work with fascists to resist those people because they think they’ll get the keys back later and get ice cream. Liberals can’t accept that there is no ice cream and there never was.

You will never get a chance to vote for what you want became America isn’t a democracy. It’s not a democracy if a club of rich people choose who you get to vote for. That’s literally how Chinese democracy works except it’s the party instead of the oligarchs.

Liberalism is driving off a cliff and killing everyone because a third of people voted to do it.

There are 9 people on the bus. Five people vote to get shit burgers even though no one wants that, just because they think it will save them from the 3 people who vote to drive off the cliff. One person obstains. Two of the three people hijack the bus and drive off the cliff. Four of the five people blame the person who obstained as they drive off the cliff.

Fascists don’t care if they win or lose. Voting can’t save you once you’ve reached this point. You don’t have slightly high blood pressure that you can treat by eating right. You have cancer. You fight the cancer with everything you have or you die.

C-x C-f /sudo::/path/to/file

Yeah, in emacs you use tramp to open the file with /sudo::

Parking is a problem only in cities. 20% of the population lives rural.

I was specifically talking about cities. I’m glad we can agree that 80% of people should not own cars. Let’s talk about the rest.

As someone who grew up in actually rural areas, I need to point out that there are two types of “rural.” There’s farm land and there’s suburbs. Suburbs are a parasite that kills cities. They drain city resources without having a high enough density to pay for those resources with their taxes. They fill cities with cars and they don’t produce anything of value. Suburbs must be destroyed.

Farmers actually do something useful. They, and the communities that support them, should be treated like full citizens instead of as a second class. This means they also deserve the same infrastructure, bike lanes and train stations, as cities. There are some trade offs to living in rural areas. Things do take longer and are harder to get to. You have to do a lot of things yourself.

When I was growing up we drove our trash to the dump because we didn’t have garbage service. Personal vehicles sometimes make sense here, but absolutely not giant trucks to haul some milk and eggs. Motorcycles and kei cars are more than enough in most cases. Even for kei cars you should have to justify it purchasing it by providing you live in a rural area and to have a truck should require a commercial license.

But people who just want to use rural areas to defend their use of cars in cities often don’t realize how many people in rural areas can’t drive. They don’t know the absolute hell of being completely isolated and reliant on a parent to do anything. They don’t know how hard it can be to take care of someone who’s disabled or elderly, who relies on a caretaker to get to every appointment or activity. Functional infrastructure would significantly improve the lives of a lot of rural people, and cars often get in the way of that. You will grow old and you will be part of that group. Do you want to be trapped? With functional infrastructure, elderly people can use mobility scooters or microcars safely in bike lanes.

Rural areas don’t have to be car centric. There’s nothing innate about rural areas the forces people to rely on cars for everything. They’re designed that way. They can be designed differently.

Excellent? Sort of inconvenient, people have to walk to the nearest station. Especially with groceries. And impractical for the elderly, disabled and small children.

The elderly are often not safe to drive, so your solution is not more convenient. It’s to trap them at home or have them risk killing someone. A functional city that’s not designed around cars makes it easy to get groceries by other means, more convenient means that don’t involve the potential of accidentally murdering someone. There aren’t really any places in Amsterdam, for example, where you’re more than a few minutes bike ride from one or a half-dozen grocery stores.

It can be inconvenient to walk to a station, but it’s far more inconvenient to not be able to walk or bike anywhere because your whole city is just roads and parking lots. Cars kill cities by decreasing density below the point where commerce is sustainable. Go look at a picture of Huston if you want to see what happens when you let cars win.

If everything is so efficient, why on earth needs a tram 15 kWh per passenger per 100 km?

As opposed to 20 for EVs? Even cherry picked numbers beat cars. Oh and why are those numbers even that bad? Cars. Cars decrease demand for transit. The London metro is 4.4.

And that 20 kWh per 100p-km doesn’t take in to account manufacturing, shipping, and disposal or any consumables like…uh… tires, which are a petroleum product. Well tuned vehicles operate more efficiently, which is why personal vehicles can never be as efficient as well used mass transit.

There’s a fundamental limit on the efficiency of large scale transit and it’s realized by mass transit. Any possible improvemnt that could be made for individual transit could just as easily be applied back to mass transit for a higher efficiency.

Your ride sharing example highlights the same thing again. That’s actually pretty similar to the last mile soliton for Sound Transit in Seattle. They send a van to pick people up and drop them off at transit stops, which reduces the justification for personal cars even more.

Abusers are often victims first. You can’t really look at Musk, or any billionaire, and think, “yeah, this person is totally fine.” He’s not. None of them are.

Patriarchy and capitalism reward the unhealthy coping mechanism he uses to protect his ego. Patriarchy specifically asserts that those coping mechanisms are not only normal but optimal.

He’s absolutely a victim of this system and in a functional one he would be given help instead of power, which is literally the opposite of what he needs to be able to recognize his problems and heal.

He is who he is because the only way he can see himself as valuable at all is if he’s basically the savior of the world. Anything less than that is unacceptable garbage. Anyone who believes differently must be manipulated or destroyed.

There’s no way he can ever be happy. He needs help. It’s tragic that we live in a society where he can’t even see how much he needs help.

None of that takes away from the behaviors he expresses. The fact that his manipulation of others comes from his insecurity doesn’t take away from the manipulation, the feeling of unreality, that comes from experimenting that manipulation. Both of these things can and do exist at the same time.

100% of car involved crashes involve cars. That’s just tautology. Even in acknowledging the fact that you completely misrepresented or just outright lied with your data, you’re can’t seem to help continuing to blame the victim.

I haven’t accepted trains are more efficient than cars because they aren’t. I refuted you elsewhere. It’s kind of self-apparent when you’re not paid to believe something else.

In optimal cases, measuring only movement and not taking in to account wasted movement, some EVs can match the efficiency of some trains while moving point to point (assuming none of that movement is wasted). But we know there are some inefficiencies and externalities that decrease that efficiency. Let’s see if we can fix them.

Parking is the biggest problem with everyone having a car. Looking for parking is necessarily wasted.

How much traffic stems from cruising for parking? Table 1 summarizes the results of 22 studies of cruising in 15 cities on four continents, dating back to 1927. According to these findings, cruising for parking accounted for between 8 and 74 percent of traffic in the areas studied, and the average time to find a curb space ranged between 3.5 and 15.4 minutes. On average, 34 percent of cars were cruising, and the average time it took to find a space was eight minutes.

https://transfersmagazine.org/magazine-article/issue-4/how-much-traffic-is-cruising-for-parking/

Holy fuck! That’s a HUGE amount of waste in a good scenario. Crazy, like 95% of the time cars are parked anyway. This is just insanely poor design. Let’s fix that. OK, so the first thing we need to do is find some way to share those vehicles. This would also fix the problem where people keep buying larger and more inefficient EV trucks. How can we do that? Maybe we could have some kind of car share program or something, like lyft and Uber. Oh yeah, those are super inefficient actually and really abusive to their employees. We really need some kind of automated system, like some kind of robotaxi to avoid that car parking problem. OK, so let’s make a fleet of autonomous taxis that drive around the city based on some kind of optimized pattern. Great, now we’ve eliminated (or at least limited) the parking problem.

But you know, it would be easier to share these taxis if we didn’t go door to door. Like, maybe we could have well defined routes for these autonomous taxis. Autonomous driving technology is actually really awful and gets confused really easily. It’s much easier to travel specific routes anyway. Great, now we have a bunch of cars that travel specific routes so people can share the cars. We drop some inefficacy by not having every car go door to door as well. Excellent.

OK, but now every taxi has a computer on board. They all have to keep track of each other’s movements. We’re definitely losing some efficiency here. Let’s combine some of them. We could cut a few of them up and weld the passenger compartments together to make long taxis. Then we could physically connect a few of the long taxis together so they can have centralized control. Great.

There’s still a lot of starting and stopping though to pick everyone up. What if we shared the getting on and getting off time. What if we made some kind of shared taxi stop and then everyone who wanted to get on or off could just wait at the stop and get on and off at the same time. Can’t really argue that that wouldn’t be better.

You know, if we have these shared routes and shared stops I bet we could get rid of even more of the complexity by just putting the whole thing on a track and getting rid of the whole steering controls. That would take less computers, so it would be more efficient. Oh wow, if we have a track we could also get rid of those heavy metal microplastic spewing tires. OK, so now we’ve got big metal taxis that are linked together and travel on a track with metal wheels.

I wonder if we could take better advantage of that shared entry and exit stations by running on some kind of schedule. Then a bunch of people could gather together and all get on our off at the same time instead of having to individually call for taxis when it’s convenient for them.

Oh, wait, every single one is still carrying it’s own battery. It’s way more efficient to move electricity itself than moving batteries. Since we’re already running on a track, we can take the batteries out and have some kind of central power delivery via maybe overhead cables or something.

OK, so we’ve made EVs more efficient by making them shared, getting rid of wasted space, eliminating some of the excess from trips, running them on a schedule and a track, making specific stops, and taking out all the extra battery weight. Let’s take a look…

Huh. Interesting.

I wonder if we could like… put it in some kind of underground tube and maybe electrify the rails for power delivery instead. You know, to get rid of the problem of it getting stuck in traffic…

Huh. Cool. I guess I accidentally did an Adam Something.

You go back and tell me which of these proposed efficiency improvements actually reduces efficiency and we’ll talk.

If bikes would drive the same annual passenger-kilometers, they would.

This is insanely deceptive.

This could only possibly be true if cars continued to be used at the same rate. The vast majority of deaths involving cycling are from cyclists being killed by cars. If people traveled as many miles by bike as by car today, cycling deaths would be practically eliminated because there would be no cars to murder them.

Are you able to cite something that’s not locked behind a pay wall?

He’s a malignant narcissist. It takes a long time to escape that kind of programing. Being in a relationship like that is basically like being in a cult.

Related fun fact: most of the noise cars produce at highway speeds is from tire noise, not from engines.

Biking is as common in the Netherlands as high winds and rain. I ride in the rain all the time. You wear a jacket. Same with cold, except you wear a bigger jacket. Biking in the snow is common in Finland. I’ve biked in freezing rain. It’s not always super pleasant, but is a small amount of discomfort really worth destroying our cities and our planet to prevent?

I don’t have a great answer for heat since it’s not something we deal with here (as much). Cycling requires less energy than walking, so if you’re not biking hard you can keep as cool or cooler than walking. Where mass transit exists, use that if you really need to get around… And, honestly, you should generally stay inside during dangerous heat anyway.

Kids, pets, and elderly folks regularly die in cars during normal summers. Things are only going to get hotter and we’re going to need to adapt our culture around that.