A list of links to resources that have been recommended to people concerned about recent events in Minneapolis, MN. I don’t know enough about any of these resources to comment on them – just making a list here because they are being suggested by reputable sources.
ATF Launches ICE’s Corporate Collaborators: Exposed Campaign – Americans For Tax Fairness
Noncooperation Library – Freedom Trainers
Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee
There’s always the need for more context with Sophia, for the big picture. But I’ve learned over the years that rationality with her, as with many, is just a matter of rationalization. She wants a picture just big enough to justify what her government does. She needs to understand just enough to be able to reason that what America wants is also what anyone rational in the world wants.
Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
This latest VR experience, a short little clip in the life of an unnamed Murtuen refugee, however, felt different.
But for an accident of birth, that little girl could have been me. Her mother even had my mother’s eyes.
For the first time in years, after her youthful idealism had been ground down by the indifference of the world after college, she felt compelled to do something.
Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
The last of her ear modules gave out a few years back. Expected. Sad. It was different from how she felt after the social dark, the great failure of the apps and networks that kept people together. She had no idea if it was server collapses or companies shutting down or national firewalls, or simply a problem with the internet in Gargano, which had always been spotty. But after a few days, she began to feel like a drifting vessel pinging into the deep.
The hearing loss instead was a wave of truth descending upon her. The curtain had closed on her beloved spectacle of sound, and now, like a theater-goer, she had to return home. To reality, which was no spectacle, but quiet. Paolo held her, kissed her eyes.
The Soma Earth, by Ciro Faienza; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
Most of the time, though, that sense of frontier won out over grief. There was simply too much to know and do. Tiche downloaded volumes on volumes on off-the-grid methodologies, everything from herbal pharmacology to stick fighting for self-defense. One day she asked Paolo in still broken Italian, if they’d become crazy libertarians by accident.
He thought for a moment and said, “A man of the right means a man who is afraid and nothing else. We are not afraid.”
The Soma Earth, by Ciro Faienza; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
To be clear, I made the decision to add the social media portion of this strike just for myself – it’s not an official general strike request.
Resources:
Indivisible
ThePeoplesSickDay.com
What to know about National Shutdown on Jan. 30 in Wisconsin
The General Strike
https://www.advocate.com/politics/general-strike-nationwide-anti-ice#rebelltitem1
The problem of female labor as a “competitive menace” came to Milwaukee in the spring of 1852. At that time, Madame Mathilde Franziska Anneke founded the first woman suffrage paper of the state, Die Frauen Zeitung. Madam Anneke had been offered the use of Moritz Schoeffler’s printshop where the first German daily of the state, the Wisconsin Banner, was published. However, the printers at Schoeffler’s establishment refused to set the type, perhaps because of their opposition to a woman-suffrage paper, but more likely because of Madame Anneke’s advocacy of female compositors.
Early Unions in Milwaukee 1840-1884, by Thomas W. Gavett, Workers and Unions in Wisconsin, A Labor History Anthology, edited by Darryl Holter
Some of our friends in college thought of Jianwen as a Chinese nationalist, but that’s not quite right. She dislikes all empires because to her, they are the ultimate institutions, with deadly concentration of power. She doesn’t think the American empire is any more worthy of support that the Russian one or the Chinese one. As she put it “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.”
She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of flawed institutions that could be perfected.
Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.
The first successful strike in Milwaukee was called in September, 1848, by a Ship Carpenters and Caulkers Association at the shipbuilding company of George Barber. The skilled workers demanded improvements in hours and wages, and a restriction on the number of unskilled workers — “barndoor joiners” as the strikers dubbed them — employed…When the agreement was broken, the union members, for the first time in Milwaukee, decided to start a cooperative store and warehouse with $1,200.
Early Unions in Milwaukee 1840-1884, by Thomas W. Gavett, Workers and Unions in Wisconsin, A Labor History Anthology, edited by Darryl Holter
Jianwen despised elitism in all its forms — she was keenly aware of the irony of this, coming from an Ivy-educated financial services technologist with a roomful of top-end VR gear like her. It was one group of elites who decided that democracy wasn’t “right” for her country, and another group of elites who decided that they knew best who deserved sympathy and who didn’t. The elites distrusted feelings, distrusted what made people human.
Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.