Hey New York - you’re beautiful!

#NoKings

#notyrants #nokings #malaga #spain

#NoTyrantsMalaga #NoKings Does this ass make my country look small

I’m off to the #NoTyrantsMalaga rally - the EU version of the #NoKings protest in support of Democracy in the US and around the world.

I had a moment of hesitation. A moment of doubting whether my presence would make any difference. I am not sure what this hesitation means, but I know for sure that it needs to be packed down into the flakey part of me, and ignored.

We’ve got to do this everywhere. LOT of vulnerable people in the world depend on everyone standing up.

So let's go… see you!!!

So, I cannot find my TRUMP IS A CUNT t-shirt, (which I made in 2018) and I have a sneaking suspicion I might have donated it to charity, under the ridiculous misapprehension that the US would not shoot itself in the head twice.

The advantage to both the White House and the GOP congress spouting streams of nonsense about who the #NoKings crowd will be is that it is no longer incumbent upon you to be a model neutral protester.

They’re going to devolve to accusing us all of being spawns of the devil in any case. So, come naked. Come as a frog. Come with your flags and scarves and offensive T-Shirts. (I’m still trying to find my Trump Is A Cunt t-shirt, damn it).

You don’t have to be anything but non-violent

Regarding the #NoKings protests:

Come carrying whatever baggage or aspirations you have. Wearing whatever you want to wear, waving whatever flag you want.

Because the turn out is going to be huge, and the Trump administration doesn’t require excuses to blatantly lie about who that crowd consists of or what motivates them. The GOP already called everyone paid activists. They’ll make up any shit. Which is liberating in a way.

Come, as you are. As a friend...

https://www.rawstory.com/no-kings-trump-spies-walsh/?ref=ActivityPub

So, if you read and appreciated my morning’s thread, I want to tempt you to put it into practice.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t like who is organizing the #NoKings event. It doesn’t matter that you will be in a group with people who call themselves all sorts of things you disapprove of.

What matters is that you turn up with your BODY. The single most important goal is to say, loudly, that you won’t tolerate what is happening to your country and the world.

https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/115386847198953011

So yes, I sound like a socialist.

But in reality, what I am is a person who gets joy from living in a community with other people and would prefer less misery and more joy.

I want less grand narrative and more practical contentment.

Individuals with enormous personal wealth are fundamentally anti-social forces. The power their wealth affords them skews or defeats every collective aim of a social order.

It doesn’t even matter what happens with the money we relieve them of. As long as it is sufficiently dispersed.

We are not going to achieve the aim of having joy and contentment in our lives, as individuals or as a group, without this.

10/

But sometimes they do. And that is the key.

Sometimes currency is practical. Sometimes people do get justice. Sometimes elected officials actually DO serve our interests.

Our overall aim, I think, should be to better the odds. And to try and avoid the trap that all ideologies promise - some shortcut to absolute perfection.

So it is not out of any ideological orientation that I say… we need to get rid of these billionaires. Because they lessen the odds of success by any societal measure. 9/

We agree to participate in the delusion that a disc of metal (a coin) has a value beyond the metal it’s made of - and that that value is not quite fixed.

We agree to participate in the delusion that the legal system (even the fairest and most humane one) gives us the satisfaction of justice. When in fact quite often it doesn’t.

We agree to participate in elections to confer immense power onto individuals who will represent our interests. When in fact they often don’t.

8/

Strangely enough, it was in interacting with my brother, who is experiencing psychosis, that I really came to a better understanding of how I really felt about the world and society.

We all hallucinate. We all have delusions. Non-psychotics simply have a faculty for sharing their delusions. That is what a society is.

So this insistence that any one of us knows what is REAL is simply moot. We agree to participate in this or that delusion. This isn’t a bad thing. This is who we are as humans. 7/

We created social organising structures specifically to cushion ourselves against the cruelty of nature - both internally (our wired drives to satisfy ourselves) and externally (to create artificial environments that protect us from the dramatic swings of paucity and plenty).

So we have created systems of customs, norms and laws in an effort to protect ourselves. And yet those systems all, to one extent or another, can evolve to impose the same cruelty that raw nature has. 6/

The nasty reality is that humans are animals. We all die. We can die sooner or later. We can live experiencing joy and contentment or misery and anger.

People say they would rather live shorter but happier lives. But the reality is that when confronted by death, like every other living creature, most would rather scratch out a few more days or weeks of being alive, even if it is in abject misery.

And nature is no model. It’s pitiless. Nature doesn’t care how much you hurt. 5/

What I grew to understand is that whenever people put ideology before basic humanity, whether on the left of the right, things got ugly.

Moreover, that as humans we have two really destructive tendencies that I don’t think are ‘fixable’ in the near future: humans are motivated by competition and we crave absolutes.

We’re drawn to narrative coherence - the competition that creates the heroic narrative - and our yearning for absolute answers - that provide emotionally satisfying ‘endings’ 4/

None of that takes away from the fundamental reality that, 200 years later, Marx was still right.

Wealth accumulation is not just a driver of economic disparity. It always inevitably leads to power disparity. Because wealth is power. Period. Sometimes obviously, sometimes quietly.

Our willingness to embrace the collective delusion that a minted coin, a printed bill of currency has some intrinsic, concrete value has been both a method of organising exchange, and a misery to humankind. 3/

I am neither blind nor naive. The vast majority of political systems that used Marxism as their ‘model' did not end up treating their populations any better than the alternative. In many cases, it was worse. The manufactured famines, the repression, the deaths…in the millions.

People in capitalist systems seem to die in quieter, less spectacular single events but I always wonder, if it were possible to keep count, how it would compare.)

2/

When I was very young, I had not read Marx. I was a socialist because ‘feelings’. It ‘felt’ fairer to aim to create and maintain a society that had humanitarian and egalitarian aspirations - something beyond simply perpetuating the law of the capitalist jungle.

I, like I suspect many others, thought that the right and left were arguing about moral and economic structures of societal organisation.

Then I actually read Marx.
1/

To Tahoe or not to Tahoe

That is the question.

*sigh*