Biome name ideas:

• Arroyo
• Chaparral
• Garrigue
• Maquis (pronounced mah-KEE)
• Tundra
• Taiga
• Veldt
• Oued (pronounced “Wade”) / Wadi
• Xeric is a pretty cool name

Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Yes, the Bandcamp page is endorsed by the Russian ABC. I’ve also linked the album here.

A reasonable criticism. Be the change you want to see in the world.

Yes, they are musicians from the band m6th. I’m not sure what the shirt refers to, but I think it means ‘helmsman’ and Lyubov’s version includes a chaos star in the form of a nautical wheel, which is fucking perfect.

Great find.

The Onion article is absolutely incredible.

Are you saying it is hypocritical for him to campaign for the people in Gaza under Biden, and then continue to campaign for the people in Gaza under Trump? That’s the opposite of hypocrisy.

It is ironic that he condemned Biden because of a genocide and they both lost, and now you are condemning him because of a genocide.

In run-up to the 1964 election, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. were given an audience with incumbent president Lyndon Johnson, where he asked them to scale down their protest activity until after the election so he could be confident he could win. They understood correctly that by continuing to protest, they had political leverage.

Imagine an alternative reality where LBJ had not signed the Civil Rights Act, and instead Barry Goldwater had won and increased the segregation and discrimination facing African-americans. Would you blame them for using the only electoral political leverage they had available, and laugh at their misfortune?

The only check the worst excesses of the Trump presidency has is the potential for widespread civil unrest. The Democrats aren’t capable of that. Grassroots Palestinian-american organizations are. In building that base of resistance, we shouldn’t make the same mistakes that caused the Democrats to lose the election. In the words of Nate Silver:

Democrats…often get angry with you when you only halfway agree with them. And I really think this difference in personality profiles tells you a little something about why Trump won: Trump was happy to take on all comers, whereas with Democrats, disagreement on any hot-button topic (say, COVID school closures or Biden’s age) will have you cast out as a heretic. That’s not a good way to build a majority, and now Democrats no longer have one.

Abbas Alawieh is concerned for the lives of his family and friends under another Trump regime. We all are. He is one of us.

I enjoy her writing too. Her piece on the threat of Facebook entering the Fediverse does a great job of making the case.

I appreciate your transparency. It sounds like this was an honest mistake and not intentional ban evasion. It is true that we hold solarpunks to higher standards of discourse than you may be used to on other platforms. The members may be right to be concerned. I understand many of the people you’ve sparred with in the past have not engaged in good internet etiquette either. But you could really help us out as admins by making a commitment to good-faith debate, at least while using this account.

I don’t consider your participation in this thread ban evasion. This is not the kind of discussion that should be moved to direct messages. If @auk wants to ban you, we can move this discussion to !meta.

Congratulations!

We contacted all of the instances where we knew he had bans before granting him membership. In the future I’ll keep you updated on similar controversial choices so you can better protect your community. Greenlighting him may have been a mistake, but we didn’t have sufficient information to gauge the seriousness of his antics. He’s definitely not a bot or a spammer, and wasn’t trying to conceal his identity so we’re giving him the benefit of doubt.

Most of the darker skinned ones were already run over further back on the track.

The second half of Luthen’s conversation with Saw is him trying to convince Saw to lend air support to another faction so that they can make a combined hit on an Imperial power station. In rage, Saw tells off Luthen for calling his adherence to his own ideology as “petty differences” and says that he’s not risking his people for someone else. Saw has a reputation for being an extremist, and Luthen knows that his operation is well-funded and successful. Saw, however, is right to refuse the tactical alliance.

I’d like to add that the doomed faction Luthen was trying to get Saw to support were remnants of the separatist forces from the Clone Wars. The Separatists were often coded in fiction as the Confederate side of the US Civil War by emphasizing their role as the aggressor and their colonial / race-supremacist / pro-slavery politics. Names in Star Wars often are linguistic and historical references, with Gerrera being both similar to Guerrera (warrior in Castilian) and the character is directly inspired by Che Guevara, for example. The name Anto Kreegyr conjures the German word ‘Krieger’ which also means warrior. This is perhaps intentional to draw a comparison between Saw and Anto, both warriors and rebels, but with very different implied motivations. Anto is linguistically similar to Anton, a common Slavic name. The German language is unfortunately closely associated with the Kaiser during WWI and Nazis during WWII to English audiences, and Russian is similarly associated with the authoritarian Soviet Union.

The implied subtext is that the opportunist Luthen wants the anarchists to work with fascists and authoritarians in the name of defeating a greater fascist threat. Saw’s outrage at the suggestion is much more reasonable given this interpretation, as well as his eventual decision to permit their sacrifice to increase the chances of ultimate victory.

No, it invigorated it.

Bloody Sunday in Selma was one of the most successful protests in history, where police disproportionately responded to nonviolent disobedience by beating marchers with batons. It was successful not in spite of police violence, but because of it. The hundreds of demonstrators grew to thousands as people came from all across the country in solidarity.

A new Trump era means a renaissance of civil disruption. The methods competent police have developed to blunt the effect of protest don’t project the strong-man image fascists crave. Protest will become much more dangerous again, but will also become much more effective.

They don’t want to give up their share of rich donors and insider trading privileges.

New details about a program from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) are getting attention after the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) published a trove of internal documents about ICE’s ‘Citizens Academy’ programs.

If you live in the SF area, the OP is looking for help to get the inside too.

This kind of behavior was rampant in Reddit city subreddits. People would frequently post a crime story featuring a racial minority, and then others would come out of the woodwork to engage in creative writing exercises about the kind of punishment the suspect deserved. More often then not, they would use racially charged language to describe the suspect. The mods would typically downplay the seriousness of what they were doing, administer wrist-slap bans when pressed, and then eventually permaban the lefties calling racists out.

I’m happy to say that’s not a problem with local comms like the ones in Midwest.social that I’ve seen.