Awesome! Glad to hear it ^^
Just to clarify, I did not post this as an allegory for the election loss, we don't need any myths to soothe our conscience. It just popped up in my subscriptions and thought it was interesting enough to post.
If anything, I think its conclusion about feelings and beliefs ultimately trumping objective truth is quite applicable to MAGA.
Maybe I misinterpreted what Feral was getting at, but at least from my reading of it, he's saying the myth was 'half-true' in the sense that that propaganda was effectively sold to the lowly enlisted/conscripted men to give them self-justification to fight. Whereas the truth was indeed that the whole thing was just for slavery. The myth then became even more useful after defeat to help them accept it 'honorably'. His conclusion about what people believe and feel ultimately having a larger impact than the actual truth seems to confirm that reading, but I could be wrong.
I'm in favor of your idea, both for the reasons you stated, and for an additional one.
Due to some instances defederating from each other, the choice of instance for a community becomes more important if its to become a one stop shop for everyone. As an example, Beehaw, which is quite an active community, cannot access any .world communities, making .world a poor choice just on grounds of overall reach alone.
!electricvehicles@slrpnk.net as the core community is a good choice, as it is only defederated from a small handful of extreme instances, so its reach should be pretty decent.
I have been considering moving mealtimevideos and documentaries away from .world for similar reasons, as it sucks that all of the content I post there isn't available to beehaw users.
A deeply unfortunate choice of sponsor.
Search your local area + the word 'mutual aid' and see if there are any groups near you. Also a good chance of meeting some at a local food not bombs event, or other volunteer work.
There's an offshoot of libertarian socialists in the DSA, but those seem pretty spread out, not sure if you'll find any locally. If you have few other options, you could try checking out a regular DSA meeting, but from what I've seen, a lot of those groups just do quarterly meetings and aren't really that active in anything meaningful, and they tend to gather more social democrats than anything. Still, better than nothing, and you may be able to make some friends there that you can invite to local direct action things that you find other people participating in.
If you can't find anything in your area, start your own! :)
In a really morbid way that would've been funny to see, if only to witness the confusion of conservatives.
There are thankfully now stand alone devices that can use meshtastic, and they support hosting on RPI as well.
I personally always enjoy Meta update posts on other instances to see what they're up to, how they handled a particular problem, or offer help if they need it, and welcome the same on the meta posts on my own community from non-members.
But that's just me.
First and foremost: at this juncture, I would implore everyone to keep OPSEC firmly in mind, and to take preemptive precautions.
Use a phone with Graphene OS, and use encrypted communication (preferably XMPP, but Signal at the very least. No technology is best)
with that said,
Mutual aid will be more important than ever, join and build up your local groups if you're able, it will pay off in dividends in the coming years.
- Search your local area + 'mutual aid'.
- Help your local food not bombs.
- Create a worker owned cooperative with your friends if possible, or join an existing one.
- Help spread the meshtastic network to build up communication resilience in your community.
- Plant trees in your community to help reduce the heat island effect for the coming heatwaves.
- Create or join a community garden near you to bolster food availability and foster connections with those around you.
- engage in guerrilla urbanism, make your community safer to walk or bike
- encourage your coworkers to unionize under the IWW, contact them for help on how to unionize your workplace.
- vote in your local elections to try and have a state or city government that is less hostile to the above actions, but continue to build decentralized power independently of them regardless. Do not make the mistake of handing off the responsibility to make things better to them, it's up to YOU, and your community, and hopefully other nearby communities doing the same, but that is all.
- consider having the means to defend yourself and the skills needed to do so effectively. But do not neglect medical equipment or its use either.
We have tremendous collective power if we just use it, and hopefully this outcome will result in us coming together and building that world in the shell of the old. Collective solidarity is our only solution left.
Good stuff my friend, your preparations are essential and appreciated.
Smoothbore musket was the standard issue firearm during that period, with a smattering of rifled muzzleloaders as well.