acetone_kitten

saw this weird and quintessentially Seattle event flyer on a random Telegram channel and feel that someone i know would find this interesting

@CharlotteEowyn@chaosfem.tw i'm over 50 and didn't really transition until my late 40s. i was fortunate enough to do it in Seattle, which, although it has a lot of downsides, i recognize is an epicenter of American transness. i run a dance party here and i'm constantly meeting trans people who moved here from somewhere else in the country. am i recapturing the things i missed? i think yes, although i have to say i've also been very, very lucky >

@kate@shrike.club every last crow delights me

@mxchara@seattle.pink @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social tl;dr, maybe: we gave some people some fun stuff to think about, but also attracted a lot of problems that we were quite incapable of meaningfully addressing

@Ratttz@mastodon.social i'm still throwing dance parties! i gotta figure out how to do one near y'all. also how did i, like, lose track of you on fedi!

@kate@shrike.club it's so disappointing. she needed to bring people in with her who would both have her back and keep her on message against the snakes in the council and the media, and either she didn't have them or she didn't bring them, and it sucks. she learned nothing from Sawant's example, and we know damn well she had every opportunity

@tulips@shrike.club i have a job that's slightly under 0.5 FTE and it manages to feel like 0.8 FTE. i think this is partly because almost all of it requires thought, i can't do it while i'm checked out or thinking about smth else, i can't even listen to music with lyrics while i do it, but also this is the nature of jobs

@raphaelmorgan@disabled.social _we can do so much more mutual aid_. actual mutual aid, not red charity (which is still _noble_). but i think we also need to fight - to wrest more resources out of the ruling class. there just isn't enough to go around down here where most of us live - emphatically not because there isn't enough period, but because most of the resources are being funneled upwards. we need to build enough power to force them to share.

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop that's all fair, let me try to expand a little.

1. we don't have the bodies partly because we haven't made our work relevant to most people's daily lives, especially workers' lives.

2. we are in a crisis of social reproduction & need to recognize that the ppl whose help & numbers we need have very little spare capacity. we are asking them to make sacrifices (time etc). perhaps we should try building up their capacity first? i'm v much grappling w the Q of how to do that

@davidgerard@circumstances.run ppl talk about "insults to life" and they're often right. now let's be real that we will be forced to accept this insult to life, just as we were forced, duped or seduced into accepting all the other insults to life that served a certain class. let's assume we're going to have to live with all these insults to life, rather than successfully resisting them somehow, because for the foreseeable future, that is what we will be doing. i don't see a lot of successful resistance.

@raphaelmorgan@disabled.social @MichaelTBacon@social.coop you need at least 5 million. we _can_ get there, but my feeling is that we need to understand why we're not there now before we start to build upward. see my other reply to Michael for some thoughts there. also, you seem cool, sincerely wish you luck with the move. and if you're still respirator shopping, the FloMask is $$$ but has done good by me and my friends

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop yeah, we don't have enough bodies for that, we haven't for at least the last 40 years.

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop by "workers" i meant "working class people" which i understand may not have been clear. tenant organizing, civil disobedience, mutual aid (preferably actually _mutual_ aid) etc are also important. labor organizing may well not be the main arena. also, we need to correctly assess the impact of our efforts. i see the non-organizing work people are doing to support each other (i'm trying to do it myself) and it is powerful but insufficient. this is a strategic not a moral judgment