...oh. oh sweet jesus. This is the Democratic Socialists of America? The people I thought I might feel at home with and was planning to finally hook up with soon?
...I hate everything right now.
Voter registration for your local Democratic Party will yield better results in better company. It's a grind, but it's something to do besides wait for things to get worse.
yeah. I was attracted because it seemed like the local branch was doing actual canvassing and phone banking for local Dem candidates at least. last I looked, anyway.
but if they're fucking spoilers. NOW.
and racist tankies, awesome!
Individual DSA chapters are better or worse, but there's nothing useful to be done through it that you can't do better either on your own or directly supporting a Democrat, IMO.
fair. Just some sort of community that had any sort of utility at all against, you know, Right Now. but I don't need to be dicking around with the Popular Peoples' Front of Judea.
I hear you - and FWIW, there's no reason not to go to a meeting or two, see for yourself what kind of people it has in it, but bring up a couple of what you consider to be bedrock issues (IE, we have to beat Trump no matter what, which means supporting the Democratic nominee) and see how they react.
there's always the friendly full on socialist I forget which frigging branch group upstairs from the progressive church I go to sometimes. they take Marxism Leninism as a science and are tankies and interrogate you for your fitness before joining.
I can straddle a line regarding Israel because Palestine is so obviously the David here. At the same time, Jewish, and also just can people please know what you're doing.
the other group had a tankie line about Ukraine and I was like yep nope gone.
It's a line I straddle too, though for different reasons.
My point is more; in dangerous times you have to be pickier about who you associate with, because if the worst happens, you _really_ do not want the Beef Escalation Brotherhood to have an actual Gestapo to drag into things.
Um. I am unaware of fascistic murder squad fantasies coming from Democratic officeholders.
Do what you want but if you think we're gonna fight a civil war on the other side as the whole armed forces, that's nuts.
no no no. I meant, if Trump gets in, he could well decide to declare war on all his enemies meaning the entire opposition. I mean he's certainly been making those noises and his spocs are worse.
Yes. Which is why you do not want to be part of a small, poorly-disciplined org where people turn on each other over nothing. You will get turned into the death squads by someone sitting next to you at one of these meetings.
Bad logic to have to think through, but fairly clear, IMO.
Then you know the most dangerous cults are the ones where things are shaky, and the leadership are trying to firm up support!
It's bad headspace, but the good news is that right now we still have a chance to avert the worst outcomes, so I'm taking that route and trying to handle my nerves.
yeah. I hear you. I go back and forth. Writing some of this shit down helped. Therapy. Friends. Ordering postcards. Getting mom to sign up for postcards.
I've been thinking a lot about the doubly traumatic ways this impacts folks who've escaped this shit on a smaller scale. Like cults. Abusers.
I'm actually laughing about it, a lot. "Oh no, the thing that was completely foreseeable in 2016 has happened" - yeah, I had the feelings then, pretty well resolved to do what needs doing from there.
I'm also trying to keep too busy to ruminate myself into a hole.
it was great going into a spiral and being told by all the experts i was trying to get help from that this was just "my thing," like worrying that everyone's judging my table manners.
"I don't pay attention to politics. But Trump's not so bad. He's a New York sophisticate!"
That's when you question your choice of experts.
Timothy Snyder did not say anything like that, for example. So there's someone you can swap out a dipshit for in your intake.
oh, believe me, I didn't think of that guy as any kind of expert for long. it was. well. it was a time that was.
yeah I need to read all of On Tyranny finally. and some of the other stuff.
A good rule of thumb; read people who saw this coming, and look at what they see as the _next_ big thing.
Don't worry about catching up to what you already missed; worry about missing the next thing.
On the flip side, prune out of your reading people who were disastrously wrong about the last thing for stupid reasons.
Anybody who thought talking about the Supreme Court in 2016 was 'blackmail' should be unpersoned. They are no longer worth your time.
thankfully wasn't around for those conversations.
mostly gibbering quietly to myself and then asking for reassurance from completely inappropriate quarters. that kind of thing.
I drank through the second half of the election, but I recall _vividly_ all the leftist dipshits declaring that we HAD to vote against Hitlery Klintoon, those people are mostly fascists now in deed if not word - but they're still wrong about a bunch of stuff, too.
Personally I would crack open a solid one-volume history of the Civil War (say, _Battle Cry of Freedom_), and read the runup to the war (chapters 1-8).
Feels bad, but try to put yourself in the mindset of someone in 1860 imagining the shape of the future - with no idea what's coming.
The United States is not Weimar Germany, though. It is the United States.
I get why so many people have a hard/wet on for the WWII analogy, but it's wrong.
Okay... but you see how this is the _exact_ type of thinking that led you to be shocked by events before, right?
What great war did we lose that recently toppled our monarchy? In what way is the legitimacy of the newborn American state compromised by the loss of the monarchy? Etc.
dude, it's almost midnight here and i'm coalescing thoughts and feels to a stranger on a limited character social media platform. I promise you I understand it's not a 1:1 parallel.
By comparison it barely applies at all.
You don't think studying the actual history of the last time this country had a civil spasm along similar ideological lines might not yield some _more applicable_ lessons?
If you want a more recent conflict, try the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I didn't say I'm not interested in the Civil War. Just chatting, here.
My best friend grew up on the border of Northern Ireland caught between The Troubles and theocratic Catholic repression. He's seen some shit. He still really doesn't wanna do this again. But he's bracing.
I'm not interested in dick-measuring conflict connections. My grandmother lived through the Blitz and it fucked her permanently up, my question to you is: do you want to react to events or try to get ahead of them?
In times of crisis, people who can think through their panic tend to live longer.
