@SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net I found that when posting this, it’s seemingly not possible to select this community from the community suggestion drop down when creating a post from the main page (instead of clicking create post from within this community, which auto-fills it). Seems there are too many other communities around the threadiverse with the name art in it, which seem to take priority over this one.

I think if the name of the community was changed to Solarpunk Art, it would then pop up with the other Solarpunk X communities we have, and become searchable again.

Like the logo! I think it’s quite fitting ^^

Also like the frog banner, though I might be a bit biased 😄 Interested to see what others might suggest.

I just can’t understand how it got so bad, so quickly. Relatively speaking.

It’s not too different from other fascist takeovers. Hitler and Mussolini went from being jokes to seizing dictatorial control in a relatively short time. Their rise was spurred by the failures of liberal style governments to adequately tamp down the excesses of the capital owners, along with other economic factors.

To a historian, the rise of Fascism in the US probably wouldn’t be too surprising. We had a popular Nazi movement here in the 30’s that was clamoring for power. That collapsed due to their leader embezzling funds, and it’s successors being imprisoned under the espionage act during WWII.

But as for why it’s happening again, it starts with FDR finally implementing major economic reforms that provided desperately worker and union protections, high taxes on the wealthy, and social security. Those actions were directly responsible for ending the gilded age as well as finally giving the working class a sense of hope and that life could actually get better (at least… If you weren’t a minority, life still sucked for them, hence the civil rights movement a few decades later).

However, starting in the 70’s, conservative and liberal leaders have consistently and slowly whittled away all of those working class gains from the 30’s to the 60’s.

• 70’s: Regulations on businesses and corporate tax rates are relaxed, and wages start to fall behind inflation despite higher productivity.
• 80’s: Unions are once again being busted in the under Reagan, and right-to-work laws in conservative states allow businesses to skirt unions. Union membership declines.
• 90’s: Liberal leaders do little to fix anything in the when they were in power, Neo-liberalism is really taking effect now, manufacturing jobs are drastically being outsourced aboard to take advantage of slave wages. Unions continue to bleed members, wages stagnate further.
• 2000’s: Obamacare (affordable care act) passes. It ensures people with pre-existing conditions are able to purchase health insurance (they could be denied before, so if you had cancer and didn’t already have health insurance, you and your family would go bankrupt). Overall it’s a shitty band-aid when universal healthcare is desperately needed so workers can actually attempt to unionize without having to fear losing their health insurance if they get fired for doing so. Wages remain stagnant.
• 2010: Citizens united passes in 2010, allowing corporate donors to go on unlimited spending sprees on political campaigns (they were harshly limited before). They pump pro-corporate candidates and senators full of money or non-monetary ‘gifts’
• The 2020’s: The liberal government does nothing to stop insane housing costs as corporate landlords purchase insane amounts of housing as an investment vehicle, and begin to collude with each other to keep rents unbearably high. Cost of living increases in all areas, with Covid often being an excuse by corporations even after supply chains are restored. The majority of Americans have less than $200 in savings, and would become homeless if they lose their job. Insurance premiums rise to extreme levels in some areas. Most people can barely afford to live, more and more fall into poverty. Less than 10% of US workers are unionized.

Throughout the 90’s to the present, we also had hard-right propaganda being allowed to be aired on TV (Fox News is one example), which fermented conspiracy theories for decades to an unfortunately uneducated populace.

All of that set up the perfect environment for a fascist to come in and perform their classic tactics of: blame minorities, promise a bright future, and convince their base that the left is literally evil and that they must be eliminated.

That’s glossing over a whole lot, but that’s kinda the ultra short version as to how we got here, and why it seemed to rise so quickly.

I understand why you’d be so incredibly pessimistic against humanity, considering that most of what we see is humanity being awful. However, all of this awfulness is very likely a strange turn from what Humans could normally be.

In The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, they present compelling archeological evidence that humans used to live in relatively egalitarian societies, even after the discovery of agriculture, and that was the norm for hundreds of thousands of years.

The evidence suggests our current way of oppressive hierarchical societies primed for exploitation is an aberration from the norm, and we have evidence that it’s possible for humans to reject this new, unnatural way of being; It was demonstrated in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Humans there succeeded in building a truly egalitarian society that valued the freedom of all.

What that shows us is that the goal of Anarchists the world over is finding the right time, place, and method to successfully rebel against these unnatural conditions everywhere, forever, and return society to an egalitarian society of cooperation. Once that genie is out of the bottle, and the majority of the world adopted it, there would be no going back, and we could finally begin to build a world we all would like to live in.

and what about general strikes and so on.

A general strike is desperately needed, but it genuinely isn’t as easy as just calling for one and hoping everyone jumps onboard. Unions need to coordinate together to organize a proper one that won’t fizzle out, which I will admit has been an agonizingly slow process, but it does appear to be happening.

The best thing we can do in the meantime is to unionize our workplaces if it isn’t already, help a friend unionize theirs, speak up at union meetings about the importance of preparing and organizing a general strike (set up strike funds, contact other unions and mutual aid orgs to plan a date and resources, etc), and joining a local mutual aid group that will help us weather the strike.

I’ve been spreading this guide showing how to prepare for resistance as far and wide as I can. If you’d like to chip in and spread that as well, you have my full permission to copy and paste it wherever you think it’d get the most eyeballs (that goes for anyone else reading this too, your help would be much appreciated. Just try to make sure you post it where it won’t be totally off topic and unwelcome).

You can access the markdown version of that guide by clicking the little page icon with the folded edge beneath it (on lemmy through the browser), so you don’t have to manually copy the links or the formatting.

We host an XMPP and Movim front-end that’s accessible to all Slrpnk members using their lemmy login (it queries the same database), if you’d like to try it out before recommending it to your group. It’s mentioned in our sidebar and in the monthly Meta posts (I guess that shows we might not be doing a terribly good job advertising it if you’re not familiar with it 😅)

I tried a lot, I think it has the most feature parity.

Have you tried Movim? It has most of the essential features, like group video calls, screen sharing, and a better E2EE method than matrix (IMO, anyway). It’s also much easier to set up and host since it uses XMPP.

Unfortunately we’ve allowed ourselves to use proprietary venture capital built apps, which inevitably will bring with it enshittification that makes continuing to use it against our own interests, but by then the network effect makes it like being caught in a sticky web that’s hard to escape.

We can only avoid this from happening again and again by using open-source libre software that allows for self-hosting and federation, just like Lemmy and Piefed, which makes them virtually immune from enshittification.

In this case, we need to migrate our friends and family one last time to something that will let us relax almost permanently for once.

Right now, our best option for a Discord alternative is Movim, which uses XMPP as its back end, an old, open, and proven framework. It has the essentials like group video calls and screensharing (without audio, yet), and is currently working on implementing discord-like channels with rooms.

The Dev has been working on it since 2010, and only receives $41 a month from their patreon. If you’d like to support the development of a truly federated, E2EE discord alternative, I’d highly recommend anyone reading this to consider helping out with a donation, if you can’t contribute with coding help.

Could put [AI Subject] in the title.

Love to see it. Wish them luck :)

Depends on what you and your friends need.

If you often use text, group video calls and screen share, Movim is probably the best option currently (though there is no application audio when screen sharing yet). It supports encryption too!

If you use mostly text, and just send video or voice files to the group to be played in-app, Deltachat is really slick and encrypted (but it doesn’t do voice calls).

I played Choas Theory’s spy vs merc multiplayer before the servers were shut down (though there are fan efforts that got it working again).

I had an absolute blast with it, and as you mention it was extremely unique, I have yet to experience anything like it.

If it helps, the developers all hated Tom Clancy’s books and the conservative politics they pushed. They basically made the first splinter cell as a parody of the tropes in them. (The first game actually casts the US in a pretty bad light, showing that it’s propping up dictators who are friendly to US capital).

It’s also a running joke in the series that Sam Fisher hates Ronald Reagan with a passion.

We’re also late on implementing good public transport, having universal healthcare, 30 days off from work per year, and more! :D

It sucks.

Hm, I get the district feeling you’re talking past me at this point since none of that seems to engage with or acknowledge my previous message.

Open source options not mentioned in article:

Movim: uses XMPP, supports E2EE, can do group chats, group video calls and screen sharing. Dev is currently developing discord-like channels with rooms.

Fluxer: Newly released GPLv3 discord clone coded from scratch. Still rough with some features like screen sharing not working reliably. Doesn’t currently support E2EE or federation (is planned), but can be self-hosted.

Two outta three!

https://fluxer.app/

Still needs some work, but its AGPLv3, and the Dev seems chill.

We also have Movim implementing Discord-like rooms soon, as more established and encrypted option based on XMPP.

That looks interesting, and since it’s licensed under GPL I do genuinely hope it’s successful,

It’ll have to prove that it can eventually scale at least as well as the battle proven XMPP protocol (apparently the main Fluxer server is already experiencing lag from the sudden growth its gotten after the discord announcement). And it’ll be competing with the Movim XMPP client (which may reach feature parity with Fluxer soon). But I do wish the dev luck. They seem pretty chill, and with more contributors, I could see it taking on Discord.

waiting just makes it worse, and your choices are fighting or full submission.

I don’t believe it’s a simple binary. During Nazi Germany’s rise, Hitler was extremely popular with the average citizen. I will agree that in that period, a militant option might’ve been their only real move, as the Unions, despite being far stronger than they are in the US today, didn’t seem to take the threat seriously enough to call for a general strike (or at least, I can’t easily find an example of them doing so) before he took power, or after Hitler began attacking the unions.

In contrast, the US unions (besides the teamsters) seem to be aware of the threat, and are actively making inroads to a general strike.

They’re not going to wait for an excuse, or they’ll make one. You’re dealing with a false choice here.

I agree that they will eventually pull a Reichstag fire, but it’s not clear to me that accelerating a confrontation is wise. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend checking out the article I linked in my previous response.

which is about exactly the use of non-violence in the US Civil Rights movement

I’m not sure that’s applicable, or perhaps we’re using the word violence differently. I’m not at all against property destruction or riots, but you didn’t see Black Panthers actively going on the offensive and gunning down cops. Had they done so, it would’ve brought the whole military down on them and they’d likely be wiped out without mercy, which the government was itching to justify as evidenced by the Desire group being shot at with 30 thousand rounds without provocation.

I think the Civil rights movement used property destruction and the very real threat of violence quite effectively, but I’m unsure how things would’ve gone had Malcolm X openly called for the movement to open fire, as he almost did after the murders of Nation of Islam members. Maybe that would’ve kicked off a successful revolution, another civil war, or the quick extinguishing of those radical members by the military. It’s hard to say.

As to the quote in the photo you left: I agree that a peaceful protest will change nothing without a credible threat to back it up. A general strike is one threat, and a very effective one if enacted (as evidenced by how the government of Chile reacted to one). Property damage is another, as are riots. The last option is the cartridge box, it should not be the first option unless you know you can win, and have a pretty good idea that it will save more lives than not using it.

No prob! I’m excited for it too ^^