Come, rest for a while

I’m starting to sound like a nutcase at work because upper management keeps trying to implement AI programs and AI assistants and Chat GPT and my middle-of-the-road, don’t-infodump, don’t-engage response has been “I don’t like AI”, “I prefer to remain in control of my own tasks”, “I’d rather make my own mistakes”, and “I don’t trust any machine smarter than a toaster”

My honest opinion: “Generative Artificial Intelligence” is a purposefully misleading liar’s name we gave to a labour-stealing company’s proprietary algorithm so they could market it to businesses who would rather see simple work done badly at the expense of the consumer than contribute to the community it is profiting off by offering even a single human being in that population the barest minimum honest wage to learn and do it properly, simultaneously robbing the working class while grifting both the client and the customer, and we’re buying into it because we’re a superstitious social species of codependent apes would could pack bond with a rock if we spent enough time around it existing in the most extreme state of social disconnection and parasocial reliance humanity has ever known, like a dying man in the ocean drinking saltwater

What I have to keep saying to avoid being classified as “the conspiracy theorist”: Haha yeah I guess I’m a bit of technophobe lol

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You joke, but there's value in teaching children how to search for new information. I can see this as a wholesome experience if it's done with that amount of supervision and attention often when a child asks a question

Like a response of "I don't know, let's find out!"

Elon Musk attacked democracy defender and superstar court lawyer Marc Elias as “undermining civilization,” taunting him by asking if he suffered “generational trauma.”

Elias’s response was brilliant and worth amplifying:

Mr. Musk,

You recently criticized me and another prominent lawyer fighting for the rule of law and democracy in the United States. I am used to being attacked for my work, particularly on the platform you own and dominate.

I used to be a regular on Twitter, where I amassed over 900,000 followers — all organic except for the right-wing bots who seemed to grow in number. Like many others, I stopped regularly posting on the site because, under your stewardship, it became a hellscape of hate and misinformation.

I also used to buy your cars — first a Model X and then a Model S — back when you spoke optimistically about solving the climate crisis. My family no longer owns any of your cars and never will.

But this is not the reason I am writing. You don’t know me. You have no idea whether I have suffered trauma and if I have, how it has manifested. And it’s none of your business.

However, I will address your last point about generational trauma. I am Jewish, though many on your site simply call me “a jew.” Honestly, it’s often worse than that, but I’m sure you get the point. There was a time when Twitter would remove antisemitic posts, but under your leadership, tolerating the world’s oldest hatred now seems to be a permissible part of your “free speech” agenda.

Like many Jewish families, mine came to America because of trauma. They were fleeing persecution in the Pale of Settlement — the only area in the Russian Empire where Jews were legally allowed to reside. Even there, life was difficult — often traumatic. My family, like others, lived in a shtetl and was poor. Worse, pogroms were common — violent riots in which Jews were beaten, killed and expelled from their villages.

By the time my family fled, life in the Pale had become all but impossible for Jews. Tsar Nicholas II’s government spread anti-Jewish propaganda that encouraged Russians to attack and steal from Jews in their communities. My great-grandfather was fortunate to leave when he did. Those who stayed faced even worse circumstances when Hitler’s army later invaded.

That is the generational trauma I carry. The trauma of being treated as “other” by countrymen you once thought were your friends. The trauma of being scapegoated by authoritarian leaders. The trauma of fleeing while millions of others were systematically murdered. The trauma of watching powerful men treat it all as a joke — or worse.

As an immigrant yourself, you can no doubt sympathize with what it means to leave behind your country, extended family, friends and neighbors to come to the United States. Of course, you probably had more than 86 rubles in your pocket. You probably didn’t ride for nine days in the bottom of a ship or have your surname changed by immigration officials. Here is the ship manifest showing that my family did. Aron, age three, was my grandfather.

[see image in comments]

As new immigrants, life wasn’t easy. My family lived in cramped housing without hot water. They worked menial jobs — the kind immigrants still perform today.

Some may look down on those immigrants — the ones without fancy degrees — but my family was proud to work and grateful that the United States took them in. They found support within their Jewish community and a political home in the Democratic Party.

I became a lawyer to give back to the country that gave my family a chance. I specialize in representing Democratic campaigns because I believe in the party. I litigate voting rights cases because the right to vote is the bedrock of our democracy. I speak out about free and fair elections because they are under threat.

Now let me address the real crux of your post.

You are very rich and very powerful. You have thrown in with Donald Trump. Whether it is because you think you can control him or because you share his authoritarian vision, I do not know. I do not care.

Together, you and he are dismantling our government, undermining the rule of law and harming the most vulnerable in our society. I am just a lawyer. I do not have your wealth or your platform. I do not control the vast power of the federal government, nor do I have millions of adherents at my disposal to harass and intimidate my opponents. I may even carry generational trauma.

But you need to know this about me. I am the great-grandson of a man who led his family out of the shtetl to a strange land in search of a better life. I am the grandson of the three-year-old boy on that journey. As you know, my English name is Marc, but my Hebrew name is Elhanan (אֶלְחָנָן) — after the great warrior in David’s army who slew a powerful giant.

I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.

I will not back down. I will not bow or scrape. I will never obey.

Defiantly,

Marc Elias

The pettiness is just 👌😂

Sound on! Sound on!

He has since begun getting past the defensiveness and actually talking to people on the left to learn their perspective, and is openly admitting that no, if this hadn't happened to him, he wouldn't have considered our side of things, and that's wrong.

Love me some schadenfreude as much as the next guy, but we actually WANT these people to finally blink and go "oh shit wait, maybe I should move LEFT".

Bc the more we have on our side (esp ppl who can say they left MAGA and finally understand how culty it was, how bigotry is wrong, etc), the more resources we have with which to apply pressure and intimidation to these fucking fascists.

to quote the sacred texts, don't punish the behaviour you want to see

Agree on "don't punish the behavior you want to see", but unless we want to go down this path a second (third? Fourth?) time, there has to be some acknowledgement of

"we were shouting from the rooftops that this was going to happen until we were blue in the face, and you told us to stop being so dramatic and voted for him anyway"

Actual growth requires taking responsibility for your actions.

In regards of the Trump government scraping all trans inclusion in its queer information portion of its websites I have made this thing. Spread the word. Don't let them pretend we never existed.

P.S: Don't like! Reblog! <3

having parents that were really angry and petty and abusive when you were young is weird, because it makes part of you grow up to want to be kind, to generate good things, to be a source of peace and wellbeing for others; but it makes another part of you grow up to be quick, and sharp, and spiteful, and that’s always the part that shows itself first in a hard situation, so it’s a struggle between your hateful gut reactions and your wish to not add any more misery to the world. it’s a hard balance, and the people who really, really know me - i know they see that anger flash in my eyes before i quiet it, if i quiet it…i want to overcome years of conditioning, and with gentle, constant force, i know i’ll mellow it. it just takes time.

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

Thanks to whoever tried, but I knew they'd never allow it.

Let's do it the old fashioned way. Spread it far and wide.

The news today and the media responses to it really put into contrast how differently white collar murder and blue collar murder are treated. On principle, the only time I would be okay with vigilante justice is when justice is otherwise impossible. This was one such time

Brian Thompson was a white collar mass murderer and should be remembered as such. I wouldn't pull the trigger myself but I sure wouldn't get in the way of anyone who would.

Hopefully either his surviving colleagues realize they might be held to account and might be a bit less gung-ho about profiteering off of the death and suffering of other people, or this becomes a trend until that happens

A 22 yr old in my org got drunk tuesday night and kinda shit on the fact that I'm running a community cleanup for our chapter. Said something along the lines of "i didn't join up to pick trash." Which really bothers me and it took me a while to figure out why. The whole point of the community cleanup is that we're returning to the neighborhoods where we knocked doors for A4 to help clean up their streets and provide material improvement for free in an effort to build inroads with those neighbors.

Like... if your socialism doesn't include picking uo trash, I'm guessing it also doesn't include doing the dishes, babysitting, or anything else that is important but not prestigious. Idk man, fuck off with that shit. You'll pick up trash and you'll like it until you understand why picking up trash isn't anyone's job but your own. I hate that attitude. If helping and doing activism was always fun and visible and impressive, everyone you know would already be doing it.

The first thing the new york chapter of The Young Lords (Puerto Rican American communist civil rights group(Worked alongside the black panthers))did upon forming their group was reach out to their community in east harlem, they asked their community what problems needed to be addressed and consistently the number 1 problem brought up was the trash.

In their chairman Felipe Luciano's words, “So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you think you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?’" Luciano says. "And they said, ‘Muchacho, déjate de todo eso—LA BASURA!” [Listen kid, fuggedaboutit! It’s THE GARBAGE!] And I thought, my God, all this romance, all this ideology, to pick up the garbage?”

And so the young lords responded to their communities needs and they picked up the trash. This was at a time (1969) when there were literal tons of garbage lining the streets, trash collectors would pick up some garbage every now and then but would leave most of it behind, they also refused to sweep the streets, and only allotted 6 big dumpsters in that entire 40 block area. This was due to racist/classist stances held by the almost exclusively italian american trash collector union.

The young lords stepped up in this situation, they go and ask for brooms and bags from the trash collectors union and get refused and insulted. They go back later and steal the brooms and bags, and get started cleaning their neighborhoods. This is a band aid and it doesn't fix things but it does show their community these people care, these people will listen and put in the work, these people are our people, it was the basis of community organizing, building trust and responding to people's actual needs.

While this did help and build trust the problem persisted and so the young lords came up with a program they called the garbage offensive (or maybe the trash offensive i forgot). They started sweeping all of the trash onto the side of the street and waited for the trash collectors to come by, when they refused to pick it up, the young lord would pile that all into trucks and haul it off to 3rd avenue in Manhattan(a much richer whiter area that gets high traffic). They dumped the trash into the middle of the street (not just bags of trash, we are also talking furniture, broken sinks, etc.) and then hauled off and they did this almost daily. They forced people to pay attention. The whole community started to get involved in this, kids, young men and women, and older community members too. They all started to join in on dumping the trash in the richer parts of the city to make people care and pay attention.

These protests got larger and bolder, they would sometimes pile up the trash high and then light it on fire, over turn cars and make a party out of it sometimes too. Police were called and showed up and attacked as they do but the protests persisted.

The Young lords published their demands and sent them out in a press release and their demands were listened too. In that years mayoral race every single candidate had to address the trash problem and promise solutions.

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This is an important lesson that direct action often pushes reforms, if we want reforms the best way to get them is to act and make the state react to us and catch up with our demands.

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Their demands included increased sanitation workers, hiring black and puerto rican sanitation workers, increased dumpsters, increase in pay to sanitation workers, end having to pay off your sanitation workers to ensure your trash gets picked up etc. Many of these demands were met and in the coming years the trash does end up getting picked up regularly and the problem does get dealt with.

The Young Lords end up going on to do so much more. They occupy hospitals, steal supplies from the government, and try to build towards a revolution in america. But it starts here, it starts with the trash it starts with all the small menial hardships. We can talk about revolution all we want but if our neighborhoods are unsanitary, our neighbors hungry, our needs uncared for nothing will come of it. The revolution you want to build however radical you are must start rooted in your community, their wants and needs. And part of that is picking up the trash, starting a community run daycare, and all the little unglamorous day to day struggles that weigh people down.

Thank you for this addition! I'm going to read it to the volunteers who come out to trash pick with us today 🤘

I never thought of picking up trash under the highway as hot-blooded, but if it's what the kids are into.....

but unironically