Brian Ward

  • If you’re looking to support or join some good organizations, I’d suggest:

    🌹 IWW

    ⚖️ ACLU

    🔐 EFF

    🪐 The Planetary Society

    🌐 Wikipedia

    🏛️ Internet Archive

    🕵️ ProPublica

    Each is part of the puzzle in the fight for truth, justice, freedom, and the future. ✊

  • I’ve only gotten bluer over time, but then I got so blue that I got pissed off and turned red. But not THEIR red. Our red. ✊🌹

  • Watching tonight: The Wobblies youtu.be/t0ruK6IQL… 🎬

  • “Do not ask for your rights; take ‘em. There is something the matter with the right that is handed to you.” — Mr. Dooley

  • Currently reading: Revolution in Seattle by Harvey O’Connor 📚

  • Finished reading: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North 📚

  • When Republicans Say America Is Not a Democracy, They're Right – It's a Corporatocracy

    America, we need to talk. This just isn’t working, and something has to change. I’ll come right out and say it: This country is broken. Completely fucked. We have elections, but power belongs to the billionaires. This isn’t some big secret. Through media manipulation and consolidation, it isn’t necessary to rig elections in the traditionally understood sense of the word: The owners of this country – the oligarchs – can simply predetermine all of our choices before we’ve ever had a chance to consider the options.

    Take politics. We have two political parties: The Democrats and the Republicans. There’s of course a handful of inconsequential parties that exist, but what’s important to realize is that here we have a legalized duopoly where these two parties get special treatment on just about every ballot in the country, and onerous restrictions make it next to impossible for those other candidates and third-parties to ever even make it onto a ballot.

    So why is this acceptable in a nation that believes ostensibly in freedom of thought, priding itself on the god of free markets and the hallowed marketplace of ideas? Why aren’t political parties able to compete freely in this country without being locked into a limited ideological spectrum? If there’s a radical right in America, then why isn’t there a radical left? If you think the Democrats are radical, think again: Liberalism is by definition a centrist political philosophy. We only tend to think of it as the “left” because it’s more liberal only in relative comparison to the Republicans. But liberalism is not the left. In any other country, this is evidently the case, and when we look at the policies of the Democratic Party, we can see that this is so.

    The Republicans would have us believe that the Democrats are raging communists, who are ready to replace their confederate statues with Chairman Mao or Stalin. And you know, in the People’s Republic of Seattle, we do actually have a Lenin statue, but guess what: We also have Amazon here. We pioneered the $15 minimum wage in this country, but to get that accomplishment it required the election of a socialist city councilwoman, which tangentially was not the city’s first brush with leftism. The right loves to talk about protecting history and heritage. Funny how they never talk about the history of labor movements, of working-class rebellion, of people rising up against the elite.

    What’s being missed here is that the Republicans are just performing their role, which is to constrain the debate and to rein in the Democratic Party from becoming a truly leftist party. The Democratic mayor here only announced that minimum wage increase when it was clear that our socialist candidate was going to win. Democrats run scared shitless at any hint of a notion that they might be a scary socialist, but when there’s an actual socialist on the ballot, all of a sudden real changes start to happen that they can take credit for. Interesting. 🤔

    This isn’t the first time this has happened before. FDR, notwithstanding his obvious flaws, has long been one of my personal idols because of the New Deal, but a hard truth we on the left are going to need to come to grips with was that he didn’t champion these policies purely out of altruism, he sold it to the monied interests that already controlled this country on the basis of preventing an all-out socialist revolution here. This was partially about self-preservation, although the results were undeniably transcendent in their improvement to the conditions of the average American. The 1950s middle class that we think of with such deep nostalgia was made possible by these policies: They literally made America great.

    So here we are today, where just a few short years ago, in 2016, we had Bernie Sanders running for president. We know how that went. He was wildly popular and cut across political boundaries, but was thwarted despite his deep popularity. DNC official Donna Brazille admitted that they straight-up, actually-for-real, rigged that primary to prevent Bernie Sanders from becoming president.

    Now does this sound like a political party that is actually fighting for you? Every time the Democrats have power, they fall all over themselves to figure out how to fuck it up. But every time the Republicans have power, they don’t waste any time dismantling core features of our political system. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. We must actually be insane.

    Not for me. I’m done. I’m no longer a Democrat, and I’m tossing the liberal label aside. I believe in social democracy as a goal for good governance. I believe in social justice and I believe in equity for people. Furthermore, I believe that we need to start having truly honest debate about the world in which we want to create and live. Politics cannot simply be soundbytes and an ever-escalating war of gotchas. We are driving our ship of state right off of a cliff and we’re taking the entire world with us given the enormous problems of climate change.

    All of this is the fault of the wealthy. The richest three people in America own half of all the wealth in this country, and since money is a direct representation of relative power, it’s clear that corporations have all of it. They bought our government long before Trump got here. They own it, they run it, and they’ve broken it. Trump is merely a counter coup. What Republican voters don’t appreciate about him is that he’s not here to fix the system; he’s here to hijack a broken system and use it to benefit himself.

    In failing to meet the desperate needs of the people, the Democrats – fully enveloped by the corporations – have enabled all of this. And that’s why America is not a Democracy.

    Voting harder will not solve our problems, and our representatives will not save us. Schumer’s CR vote made that abundantly clear. The courts are the very last thread that keep the Constitution barely alive, but that’s dwindling fast in light of Speaker Johnson’s threat to dissolve courts who rule against the Trump regime.

    History isn’t written yet, so what will you do? If real change only happens when they fear losing control, then our job is simple: Make them afraid. The media isn’t your friend in this regard. They will bury your protests. I watched them bury Bernie by simply ignoring him. And somehow, somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the fact that protesting isn’t just about lobbying representatives or to get media attention, but it’s to lobby your neighbors and open their eyes to what’s happening. And if no one stands with you, stand anyway. Alone, you are impossible to erase.

    “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

    u up?

  • I don’t think we in Seattle appreciate the richness of our local history as much as we ought to. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat…

  • I watched a lot of Noam Chomsky interviews last night. He was right about everything. He warned us for decades. Decades.

  • It cannot be credible in the face of so much insanity that the political force ostensibly charged with stopping a blindingly clear right-wing coup is only ONE POINT ahead in the polls! Lack of clarity in polling results leads to confusion about moral certainty: Are we mounting an honest opposition?

  • Translate your outrage into action. Make a sign. Stand somewhere.

  • Not my cat meowing at me this morning for food like she was gonna SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION from me. 🐾

  • Protest before you can't

    Had a full-on existential crisis today. I was panicking this morning. I’ve been feeling helpless and terrified about what’s going on right now. So I worked through some of that and tried to channel it into something productive.

    That resulted in me protesting solo outside today for 3 hours this evening. I was initially hesitant to do this, but I have to tell you that protesting by yourself can be incredibly energizing and liberating. My thesis is that we often think of protests as just a way of lobbying our representatives, but at this point we need to be lobbying our neighbors to raise awareness of what’s going on! So many people came up to engage with me and I found it a very positive experience. We are not alone, and other people feel just as terrified as you and I.

    Don’t wait for permission to protest. Don’t wait for someone else to organize you. Don’t wait for the next big mass action. Just do yourself a favor and make a sign, pick a spot, and stand there. Right now. Talk to people. Clue them into this madness. The media isn’t going to do it for us. Our leaders aren’t going to save us. We have to do this work ourselves.

  • Diversify Your Information Gathering

    With Donald Trump’s direct attacks on US media sources like CNN or MSNBC, we should anticipate that we won’t necessarily be able to rely on them all the time. Consider that we may be cut off from them entirely, or that they will self-censor themselves for preservation purposes. Potentially they will be turned into right-wing propaganda outlets for the regime. This might not be immediately evident if it occurs, so I’m not sure it’s wise to trust any US-based mainstream corporate-owned news outlets at this stage. I’m currently maintaining deep skepticism of everything I see right now.

    We should also disabuse ourselves of the notion that we can trust algorithmically sorted news gathering via social media networks like Facebook, Bluesky, and Threads. Of these, I tend to trust Mastodon the most since it’s a decentralized open source federated network, which makes it resistant to manipulation. Sites like Reddit can be good as a means of gathering information, but due to their centralized nature are potentially easy to be compromised by bad actors.

    I’ve made a list of news outlets I think are reasonably reputable and have gotten myself a nice RSS reader in order to obtain direct feeds of their content on an ongoing basis. You should consider getting one as well if you don’t already have one. You can subscribe to lots of feeds on there and export an OPML list of your subscriptions to clients on other platforms. I’ve included a download link at the end of the article to help you get started.

    Here are some of the news sources I’m choosing to prioritize: Al Jazeera English, BBC News, CBC News, Democracy Now, DW News English, Jacobin, Le Monde English, NPR, ProPublica, RFI, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, The Stranger (it’s a Seattle institution), WBUR, WGBH.

    I’ve also got a VPN provider called Nord VPN, so I can use the British version of the BBC News website, which is somewhat different than the US version.

    Consider getting yourself a shortwave radio. While I don’t use these as news sources, with a simple handheld unit (I have a Tecsun R9700DX), I’ve been able to pick up Radio Nikkei based in Japan, Radio New Zealand, Radio Havana Cuba, and various other broadcasters as far as the Philippines, China, Russia, Central America, and even Canada. There’s a long history of using shortwave radio to send information across borders to suppressed populations. That’s what we were doing with Voice of America and others until Trump shut them down this past day. It is possible this form of information dissemination will become necessary again in our time for our own use to gather news from abroad.

    With regard to long distance radio, by the way, here’s a fun fact: You can also pick AM radio stations located across the country over long distances at night. From Seattle, when I’m DXing, I can often pick up AM broadcasters located in San Francisco, Reno, and Colorado.

    Get yourself a ham radio. I have a handheld Baofeng UV-5R. You’ll find that there are local repeater groups regularly broadcasting that you can tune into and hear from people all over your region and indeed the world. It’s fun to listen to them, and hear people talk about things happening on the ground in your locality. Get a ham radio operator license. I haven’t yet done this, but I would like to eventually. Even if you don’t have a license, you can still listen, and in a life and death emergency situation, it is also permissible to use them unlicensed under specific conditions (see exceptions 97.403 and 97.405).

    Above all else. Keep an open mind. Be skeptical of what you see and hear. Think before you share. Consider the source and keep in mind any biases the sharer might have had.

    Good night, and good luck.

    –

    My OPML file: While I tend to follow lots of tech news sites and bloggers as well, I’ve extracted just the information sources I’ve put together that are relevant to me for the purposes of this post. Maybe you can use it as a starting point for yourself: Download

  • Downtown Seattle viewed from Jose Rizal Park late afternoon today.

  • Bellevue this evening as seen from Leschi.

  • Leschi

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Leschi

  • Dad and Topper

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Dad & Top

  • Mom and Dad

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Mom & Dad

  • Cake

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Cake

  • Mike

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Mike

  • Jason

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Jason

  • Team Runic

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Team Runic

  • Reyes

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Reyes

  • Happy Birthday!

    brian-ward posted a photo:

    Happy Birthday!

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