HELLO Hello hello...

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

Echo

[Gendo]

Sorry this response took so long; hard to keep up with the flood of activity around here!

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

Lol

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

It does seem quiet.

How are we all coping with the various lockdowns at the moment? Successfully managing to avoid the coronavirus? Are you being allowed to WFH?

[Gendo]

I've been working from home for the past 3 years; so very little has changed for me!

[Cassius Clay]

I'm stuck abroad lol

[Derived Absurdity]

My personal life has remained pretty unchanged tbh.

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

It does seem quiet.

How are we all coping with the various lockdowns at the moment? Successfully managing to avoid the coronavirus? Are you being allowed to WFH?

Working from home

Worst thing about this for me so far is I lost a lot of weight and the gym being inaccessible isn't helping me maintain it XD

[Anakin McFly]

My personal life has remained pretty unchanged tbh.

Same, though I miss going out for breakfast on my own on weekends.

Some big events I was looking forward to this year were cancelled. My brother was supposed to be getting married in end June, and they may still be going ahead but doing it on Zoom, which just isn't the same.

Meanwhile I've been slightly overwhelmed handling various crises in the local trans community, because teenagers being stuck at home with unaccepting parents hasn't been great.

[Gendo]

My personal life has remained pretty unchanged tbh.

Same, though I miss going out for breakfast on my own on weekends.

Some big events I was looking forward to this year were cancelled. My brother was supposed to be getting married in end June, and they may still be going ahead but doing it on Zoom, which just isn't the same.

Meanwhile I've been slightly overwhelmed handling various crises in the local trans community, because teenagers being stuck at home with unaccepting parents hasn't been great.

Good to hear from you! Sometimes you don't notice how long someone has been away until they post and the you see they hadn't posted for almost a hear. Glad you're well.

[Faustus5]

Have the riots had an effect on any of you folks?

My first apartment upon moving to Minneapolis was right in the area where the shit started going down. I shopped at that Target and I worked in the mall attached to it. So there's that.

Yesterday I went to the Dinkytown neighborhood near the U of Mn to take care of some errands, including cashing my government COVID check, and every business I had planned on shopping at was boarded up, including the damn bank.

Then this morning on the walk to the grocery store where I shop, someone in charge here decided the store would close for an indeterminate amount of time (before I left the website only said they were changing hours). Same with the liquor store I go to. Luckily I have a pantry that is well stocked and just went shopping because I wanted to try out a new lunch recipe. Well, scratch that idea.

Meanwhile, my best friend just posted on Slack that up until 3 AM in his neck of the woods, he could hear shots, explosions, and military helicopters. He took a walk this morning and ash and the smell of smoke was everywhere.

Oh, and all the folks arrested for causing damage were from out of state, according to a press conference that finished last hour.

2020 is sure looking to be a unique year in my life, I'll say.

[Derived Absurdity]

It turns out that press conference was incorrect. I'm wary of claims of "outside agitators", it's a classic attempt at delegitimizing protest. It goes all the way back to the civil rights movement.

I'm not sure if I'll join in. I don't protest in general, especially during a pandemic, but I want to see if this has any staying power or if it fizzles out.

[Raxivace]

Have the riots had an effect on any of you folks?

Not yet, though the Raleigh protests are just a few miles out from where I live. I've been trying to follow them on the news and through Twitter posts.

From what I can tell the protesters are mostly peaceful here, with really only a few people actually breaking windows and looting and such. The police seem to be the ones really trying to escalate shit too- even local news people are getting teargas thrown at them for god's sake!

[Gendo]

I went to college near Minneapolis, so I have several friends who live in the city. As far as I know they're all ok.

[Anakin McFly]

I've dropped by occasionally, but saw no new posts haha

Kind of overwhelmed with all that's happening in the world right now, in the US and my country and elsewhere. I'm also bothered that coverage of the US has as usual taken centre stage and pushed aside injustices happening in other parts of the world, but there's no good way to say that when people are grieving without coming off as a terrible person. I'm hoping at least that this is a tipping point where things actually change for good.

[Derived Absurdity]

Some scattered thoughts on the protests.

a) I'm not optimistic in general, especially about political or social stuff, but this seems to have staying power, and it looks like it could actually signal a tipping point. Millions of people have joined in, and it has the support of the majority of the public, at least for now. Everyone has seen the video of the cop murdering George Floyd in cold blood in broad daylight. Anecdotally, I've heard a large number of people say people they know who were previously apathetic have become enthusiastic and supportive of the protesters. This is almost unprecedented. I never thought I would ever see anything like this in this country.

b) This is an honest-to-god spontaneous, organic, people-powered uprising against the government, and the police state. It sprang up all over the country overnight. I never thought something like this could actually happen. And the police are going full terrorist in response, martial law is on the road to being instituted, and the president is outright telling the military to kill citizens. This is the actual hypothetical "tyranny" that right-wingers are always saying the Second Amendment is there to protect us from. It's here. It's happening right now. This is exactly it. And they're on the side of the tyrants. On the flipside, this is also the large-scale, spontaneous, multiracial, working-class, anti-police uprising that left-wingers have been feverishly fantasizing about. This is it. It's here, and it's pretty revealing how many of them are responding to it.

c) This is still not really going to come to anything if things don't get more organized and disciplined very quickly and some people don't step up to make concrete demands.

d) The disparity between the unending videos of unprovoked police brutality that are going viral on social media and the relentless images of looting and rioting everyone getting their info from corporate news are being subject to is extremely stark. You would think there's no police brutality from watching or reading the news, even though the police are literally attacking journalists and reporters. I'm not sure if the manufacturing of consent has ever been so vivid or obvious.

e) Someone tweeted something like: I always wondered what it would be like to live through the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and the 1968 riots all at once while under a Nixon presidency. I thought it was a funny tweet.

[Raxivace]

c) This is still not really going to come to anything if things don't get more organized and disciplined very quickly and some people don't step up to make concrete demands.

This is my biggest concern- so far I think these protests have avoided a lot of the pitfalls of something like the Occupy movement but this is the biggest and hardest one to get right.

We've had some specific demands at a local level in Raleigh at least (Such as calling for our local police chief to resign), so that gives me some hope for the future.

e) Someone tweeted something like: I always wondered what it would be like to live through the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and the 1968 riots all at once while under a Nixon presidency. I thought it was a funny tweet.

My favorite tweet is the video of that asshole that brought out a bow and fuckin' arrow and started shouting "ALL LIVES MATTER!!!" before getting owned hard by a swarm of good people. Like on one level its awful and that dude is a horrible person for trying that, but its almost like something out of surreal sketch comedy too.

[Faustus5]

d) The disparity between the unending videos of unprovoked police brutality that are going viral on social media and the relentless images of looting and rioting everyone getting their info from corporate news are being subject to is extremely stark. You would think there's no police brutality from watching or reading the news, even though the police are literally attacking journalists and reporters. I'm not sure if the manufacturing of consent has ever been so vivid or obvious.

This is the part that I find most disheartening. My Twitter feed has literally dozens of video's showing police attacking completely peaceful protestors and journalists, preventing protestors from leaving the scene so they can comply with curfew laws, and even putting their own weapons in the hands of protestors to create the illusion of probable cause. And the media concentrates on looters.

[Derived Absurdity]

Millennials/Gen Z and everyone else live in two entirely separate universes at this point. The former get their info from decentralized and democratized sources on social media and can see what's really going on, while the latter still get all their info from the oligarch-mediated and manufactured narratives on corporate news. Entirely different worlds. That's one reason why millennials/Gen Z are so much more politically "radical" than their parents.

I think building up a genuinely decentralized and oligarch-independent source of news that could compete with the corporate media is a necessary step for progressives/socialists to build any power in this country. It's not an easy thing to do, but I don't see how things will progress if that doesn't happen.

[Gendo]

We've had some specific demands at a local level in Raleigh at least (Such as calling for our local police chief to resign), so that gives me some hope for the future.

I somehow missed this. What are the complaints against our police chief?

[Raxivace]

We've had some specific demands at a local level in Raleigh at least (Such as calling for our local police chief to resign), so that gives me some hope for the future.

I somehow missed this. What are the complaints against our police chief?

That she's overpolicing black and brown communities, turning a blind eye to the abuses of police officers etc.

[Derived Absurdity]

Honestly I think it's really unbelievable that literally nothing has changed from all this. Lol. Like literally nothing. COVID and the biggest protests ever and it's like they never happened. Everything remains exactly the same. Even the polling numbers are back to where they were before.

I mean, a once-in-a-century pandemic that upended everything and nothing materially changed. We got no universal healthcare, no UBI, no raising of wages or expansion of worker rights/protections, just... nothing. There wasn't even any general society-wide change in perspective or values. Unprecedented protests that had massive public backing and... nothing. A police accountability bill that wouldn't have done anything and didn't even pass. No reduction in police budgets, no structural change to policing on any level. Nothing. It's like they never happened.

I mean, if about a year ago in the middle of all of it, you had told me that after a year literally nothing would have changed except there'd be some inane and vapid partisan culture war bullshit about defunding the police and lab leak theories and critical race theory, I wouldn't have believed you. I wasn't that cynical, that nihilistic. Well, now I am.

[Gendo]

Makes me think that all this “great reset” stuff was actually just a bunch of conservative conspiracy theory fear mongering tactics or something.

[Raxivace]

Hey my wages went up because of covid!!!!...Granted it took a year for that to happen, and my hazard pay is likely going to end soon. Still at least I got a couple of thousand out of this lol.

Honestly though it is a little crazy to me that I made more extra money under Trump through all this than I have under Biden.

[Cassius Clay]

Millennials/Gen Z and everyone else live in two entirely separate universes at this point. The former get their info from decentralized and democratized sources on social media and can see what's really going on, while the latter still get all their info from the oligarch-mediated and manufactured narratives on corporate news.

The divide is even worse than this because when some of these older generations try to use social media as a news source, they do so in such a bizarro-ass, braindead way that they get caught up in some pretty wild right-wing conspiracy theories.

[Derived Absurdity]

Yeah I saw a thing a few days ago where the top ten most shared political posts on Facebook or whatever was mostly Ben Shapiro stuff, mixed with some Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson or whatever. Disturbing.

Youtube seems to have gotten a lot better in the past few years, though. A lot of the alt-right/anti-feminist videos seem to have tapered off, progressive and socialist channels are rising.