Barx [none/use name]

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 20th, 2024

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  • OWS was not well-organized. Palestinian solidarity groups are doing better. The key difference is in being able to coherently make informed decisions as a group and then act on them as one.

    Every OWS encampment was basically 5-30 orgs all doing their own thing and then fighting about horizontalism and being naive about how the cops and City Hall would treat them. We need to be able to act like 1-3 orgs (even if there are more), politically educate so we can avoid mistakes, and create good structure as early as possible so that expectations are set and time isn’t wasted and bad decisions are avoided.

    The US left is basically slowly relearning the basics of organizing. Get involved and make it go faster!


  • Trump isn’t a fascist. In action he is actually a pretty standard reactionary liberal. You will notice that Biden has continued the salient policies that made liberals call him a fascist, such as extreme and horrible border policies (Dems actually outflanked the GOP on this from the right), anti-China policy, and extending militarism (like maximum pressure on Russia via Ukraine).

    He’s mostly just openly racist whereas the political class usually wraps itself in polite jargon bullshit before it fucks with a bunch of brown people.


  • The main ways you’re exposed to microplastics is through ingestion and breathing it in.

    To limit ingestion, yes the main thing to do is to avoid food and drink that comes in plastic containers. Reducing your consumption of processed foods will help with this. Eating mostly produce is a simpler way to approach this. Even though produce may often be transported in plastic, if you wash it before consumption you’ll have done pretty well. Ideally you would also have a reverse osmosis filter at home, as your water probably has microplastics as well (but less than bottled water!).

    To limit breathing it in, yes avoid frequent exposure to busy roads. They are often full of tire dust that is getting kicked up. This is cumulative, though. Walking by a busy street once is no big deal. Walking along one twice a day may add up.

    Overall, however, to address microplastics we will have to control the production of plastics and the use of plastics in the first place. For example, there would be a lot less tire dust if we used more rail to get around. And there would be less need for bottled water if water fountains were ubiquitous and so were standardized stainless steel water bottles. In addition, we could use biodegradable plastics for more packaging so that they don’t accumulate in bodies or the environment.

    But this last point, despite being the only real solution, will literally require the overthrow of capitalism. I’m for this and am happy to talk about it more, but it is a lot.