Oh so it sounds like we will be in good shape with some patches.

Sure. Here’s pair of examples as mentioned. Sorry if this bums you out, it bums me out.

Elon Musk article

RFK Transcript

STONE: It’s certainly a strange, almost dizzying moment for the public health field. Kennedy is well known for questioning the scientific consensus, pushing inaccurate information about vaccines. He’s founded an antivaccine advocacy group and is generally antagonistic toward mainstream medicine. As NPR has covered, he’s promoted unproven treatments for COVID and made other basless claims related to health.

At the same time, there’s no denying that on chronic disease prevention, there is some real overlap between what he talks about as his priorities and what you hear from scientists who work in this field. One of them is Barry Popkin, a professor at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. He says, he would welcome meaningful action on nutrition and the food supply.

BARRY POPKIN: If it comes, I’ll support it, and I’ll be super surprised, and academia will be behind them and so on. But I do not see that. I fear the worst.

More RFK Credulity

AUBREY: RFK Jr. puts food- and diet-related policy changes at the top of his agenda, getting rid of a host of food additives and dyes and reforming the SNAP food assistance program, formerly known as food stamps. Kennedy says beneficiaries of the program should not be allowed to use their benefits to buy soda or processed foods, and points to the need for change. Dr. Mozaffarian agrees there’s plenty of room for innovation in this program.

MOZAFFARIAN: SNAP is one of the biggest handouts to the food industry, including for lots of junk food and unhealthy food. I think it’s absolutely critical that states are allowed to innovate and try new approaches and test them.

Sad that it has happened to Vice but I am more upset about NPR. They have Nazified so quickly it makes my head spin. They have posted fawning articles about RFK Jr and Elon Musk recently that are so credulous and anti-social it hurts to read.

Imagine trying to call up Chappell Roan for a tiny desk after you’ve become a propaganda outlet for a nazi government.

Because the United States was founded as a loosely confederated colonial slave empire, and it benefits the caste of people who founded the empire and still control it to continue this form of government, I don’t think “shifting to state’s rights” is going to bring us any closer to freedom. Fascist slave empires shouldn’t exist. You shouldn’t contribute to them. Individually, if you are trapped in a fascist slave empire, you should seek to distance yourself from it in whatever ways you can. You should slow and stop spending money where possible. You should leave the country if you can, and remove yourself from the direct power of petty lords if not by moving out of their jurisdictions. If you are adamant about staying where you are at, you can build and contribute to a local mutual aid network, but understand that makes you ‘the local mutual aid network within a Fascist captured zone.’

Governments are not immortal. Fascist governments have risen and died before. Unfortunately fascists steal their people’s futures. I liked my future a lot better before I heard about Trump but he isn’t the first and he won’t be the last American Fascist.

😭 its the funniest joke they have ever made

What if suddenly living in Denver versus Austin or Charlotte versus Tampa start to come with very different sets of rights as an individual in terms of your family’s access to basic health care, what books your child gets to read in school, whether you can walk the streets without carrying your “papers,” whether your kid’s school requires basic vaccines, or even whether the public water supply is considered safe?

This is already the case in the Rust Belt. Default is you don’t have basic healthcare, your kid goes to some fake voucher school or an extremely underfunded school (books comment is weird, Texas decides most of the books already), you can’t get vaxed or operate in the economy without your “papers”, public water supplies are not safe by modern standards. This crumbling ramped up during Trump 1 and became the default in the pandemic and the region didn’t really recover.

Anyway the Fed isn’t my friend and the decline of that faction isn’t the part of this mess that has me worried. Has the Fed been really helpful or a positive influence where you are located? Mostly to me they are ICE and FBI offices and I don’t think those folks do good work.

The hard nationalist name is a great giveaway

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Oh okay I think we just disagree then.

I can see why you might read my post that way because what other context do you have. I don’t belong to the “us” group you mentioned. I spent 2015-2022ish doing direct service activism and it cost me a great deal. Part of the reason I sound disillusioned is because the fascists directly attacked and destroyed much of my work as I was performing it (especially in 2018 2019 when they were a little better organized). I did literacy and library access work for the incarcerated, primarily. My work was primarily volunteer so it seriously hurt my family’s economy, in addition to being undone in real time as paper bans and mail bans were put in place. People at the universities I “worked” for would provide verbal support, but that was all it ever amounted to.

Part of the reason I like Doctorow is because he gave a pretty accurate description of how literacy access within the prison system works in The Bezzle except for the part where he was using it to distribute LSD. That sounds cool but its largely based on a myth made up to protect prison employees who trade drugs inside.

You don’t even have to do anything and there are thousands of people out there trying to protect you from getting more fucked[…]

Don’t go around telling them they don’t have to “do anything” plz 😅

Not trying to call you out otherwise, how are you supposed to know

Since all my local newspaper websites went pay-to-read, I walk two blocks to my local library and read the hard copies maybe once a week. There’s only about one or three articles per week that aren’t just USA Today internet drivel, so it’s not like I’m sitting there for hours pouring through papers like a maniac, and how dare you picture me that way.

If you are a traveler, it is a good trick to pick up as many library cards as you can get your hands on. So many libraries are traveler friendly from old COVID policies and if you aren’t working touristy towns, even pretty flimsy community connections can get you a card. “Oh I work for this practice in the community, can I-” and when your contract in that community ends, what, are you going to go turn in your library card? And let your community’s ebook DRM go to waste? No 😜

Doctorow can write a great detective novel but he lives in absolute La La land. I’m glad he’s open about the fact he’s just distracting himself with this post, but the idea that these webs of laws or these models of “how things should work” mean anything tho the people with power are complete nonsense.

He has some understanding of that, I think? But like, buddy, your country just went full Nazi. You’ve been living in a total fantasy. You’re not going to rethink the concept of fixers, get a grip.

The people who tell you to be civil aren’t going to help you on the line, generally. Unless its one of those fake protests like The March for Science.

Don’t let people who aren’t going to help you tell you how to behave.

in about 201X I was having a terrible time trying to get through the thesis period of a master’s program

picked up some bundle of the OG 2DS (black & blue variant) and Pokemon X and loved it

a world where I could pick my friends, people were pleasant, my next career moves were obvious, and my work was rewarded? To this day, this is my escapist fantasy.