So, ICE is getting $75 billion in funding in this spending bill.
There's a directive to build a ton of new private prisons which are effectively concentration camps. Actually let's remove the "effectively". They ARE concentration camps, under nearly any definition of that term.
So why do people keep getting swept up for nearly no reason whatsoever? It's about quotas. 🧵
When you have a system like this, what we are looking at is a well funded set of slots and quotas, a promise of numbers.
And you know what happens with this. You know what it's like for you or someone else to get pulled over for a bullshit speeding ticket at the end of the month. The cop has been given a quota to fill. They'll be in trouble if they don't fill it. They *have to find* people who are in trouble, or *they'll* be in trouble. 🧵
We are looking at maybe the most well funded goon squad / gestapo / secret police style system of all time. They've made the spaces for it, they have the directive to fill them.
Who's going in the prisons? Who is "breaking the rules", including under the new rules they're setting up?
Is it you?
Is it someone you love?
Is it someone you don't know directly, but someone you know indirectly?
This is where things are going. That's what's at stake.
I'm well aware of a host of nightmares ready to be loosed upon our dying world by the christian nationalist oil capitalists.
The question really is what are effective strategies to resist?
There's the easy stuff like contact congress or protest, but after those fail, what's next?
Flee the country?
Boycott big tech and the oil industry?
Switch to the untaxable underground economy?
Disappear into the wilderness or forgotten warrens of cities and go off grid?
Take over small towns and turn them into independent city/states?
Engage in direct economic or military sabotage?
If a countries economy breaks, the central government's ability to project power declines. Running armies and keeping the loyalty of secret police does require resources.
That IS very seriously the question.
yes, organised, militant, working class sabotage. that is the only way we have ever won against the capitalists. be sand and rocks in the gears of oppression. read labour history. listen to Woody Guthrie, and Utah Phillips, read Malcolm X, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
these problems have been ever-present in modern society, and plenty of people wrote about it, sang about it, and told stories about it. there is no need to re-invent the wheel.
@alienghic @cwebber historically, pretty much every protest had clear demands, and this is because they'd protest until they got them
relatedly, the protests where seattle protestors surround the ICE facility and don't let anyone out until they let out the people they illegally detain have been, eventually, effective at raising the issue:
(article buries the lede on this)
@alienghic @cwebber
We do seem to be at a point where law and legal means can, in fact, be said to have decisively failed.
IMO, that means this is a good time to break out the illegal nonviolent steps, like general strikes. After all, what's legal or not doesn't matter anymore at this point anyway.
Getting all of the community organizing necessary to make that happen will be very hard.
https://newrepublic.com/article/193370/general-strike-trump-musk-sara-nelson-labor-unions
How would you deliver food and water if the stores are closed?
@cwebber
Its me. And some I love.
Nevermind if we've been here over 10 generations. They want to tortue us, they will.
@quin @cwebber
"Read some history" doesn't answer my question, seeing as from what *I* remember from history, the Third Reich wasn't ended from within, but from losing WWII.
I'm not in denial of what's happening, I just think you're deluded about what the logistics of this are, and do not see a role I can effectively play in stopping things. You seem as though you're just putting a pretty face on "go get yourself killed because you deserve it, Amerikkkan".
@quin @cwebber
First, this "damned kid" is in her late 40s. Just because you don't agree with me doesn't mean the source of my demand for a realistic plan of action is naïveté.
Second, you're deliberately maliciously misinterpreting me. I'm not saying violence *by* leftist marchers would be necessary, but that violence *against* such marchers would be the result. Even Jan 6th was clearly pushing it, given for once MAGA was actually getting punished.
1/2
@quin @cwebber
Third, I don't believe you're actually an American or you'd *know* about the left vs. right double standards about protest. A leftist January 6th wouldn't play out like the original; we'd just be massacred, and the propaganda machine would demonize it all.
Fourth, also pointing to your foreignness: most foreigners don't grasp the physical size of the US, and thus make demands exactly like this. Agatha Christie is not a geographer.
@cwebber
Let me be absolutely clear: what I'm saying isn't "nonviolence is stupid, I wanna kill people!" like this person seems to think. It's "you *do* realize that this is exactly the sort of regime that will respond to a massive nonviolent protest in DC by arbitrarily declaring it violent and 'counterattacking' with banned weaponry, right?"
[Edited to remove the ping to the block-bait person.]
@cwebber @quin
Does this person even realize her pings are still showing up for me despite her blocking me?
In any case, just because I don't know what to do *instead of* standing in front of militarized police waving my arms and shouting "Gas-bomb me!" doesn't mean I'm ignoring fascism or intend to do *nothing* about it. I'm not some ostrich letting normalcy bias tell me that the unmarked neutrally-colored vans are just someone's small business vehicle.
@cwebber "But I'm not breaking the rules, and I'm a citizen"
A - Without due process, good luck proving you were born here
B - Trump is floating the idea of deporting Elon for criticizing the Big Bullshit Bill. If the richest man on Earth can't buy his way out of being disappeared, good fucking luck!
That's the other method. Depends on the kind of dictatorship. The one we enjoyed in Argentina was military-religious fascism. Bureaucratic nightmare.
Two of the "legs" of the system.
the "rule of law" isn't gone. the laws are being changed. capitalist law will always produce these conditions.
@burnitdown @heathen_cat @cwebber
You seem to be defining "law" differently from most people. Law is distinct from the random whims of a dictator in that, at least in theory, those in charge of a government are bound by the rules set out in them. If this is not the case, then what is happening is rule by fiat, not rule of law.
And I'm pretty sure what Trump is doing now is blatantly violating actual written laws, then *maybe* rewriting them after the fact.
is it really distinct? the laws of capitalists don't bind them if no one does the binding, and no one really does the binding. the law protects the ruling class, and does not bind them.
"you were put here to protect us
but who protects us from you?
every time you say 'that's illegal'
doesn't mean that that's true."
--Who Protects Us, by Boogie Down Productions
i didn't say the law is fake.
laws don't stop existing just because they're terrible laws and the person who made them is also terrible. white supremacist, fascist laws are still laws.
what "rule of law" would you have? who do you expect to enforce this intentionally vague "rule of law", and how will the people it protects but does not bind become bound to it?
it would help if "rule of law" had any meaningful definition in the first place. i keep asking "who enforces it?" and getting no answer. that's not a lack of concensus about a dinstinction between terms, but a refusal to say wtf the term means in the first place.
@pteryx oh, it's a "gotcha game with an anarchist" now!
go fuck yourself. eat shit, fucko. take your bad faith bullshit and walk into the sea with it.
@cwebber
It is also a self referential con.
"We need money to do our deeds!”
“Here, have some ill gotten gains to do deeds that are not needed.”
“Look how well we are doing with the money spent”
It is a fake business, smells like money laundering so no one can get the money back.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
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