-
Bernie Sanders is the only honest politician we have: youtu.be/7EirWe1z3…
-
Something we should get wise to is that the republicans’ function here is to pander to their base and to terrorize the center-left. The Signal scandal is a distraction from their threats and actions today to dismantle the courts and limit your voting rights. Monitor good news sources like a hawk.
-
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…
-
Disenfranchisement. He is trying to take away your right to vote by making it significantly harder to prove your existence and easier to disqualify ballots: www.pbs.org/newshour/…
-
Now Congress threatens to dismantle courts that rule against the regime: www.usatoday.com/story/new…
-
I’ve heard people wonder what happened to news anchors like Walter Cronkite. They still exist: Her name is Amy Goodman.
-
She has lived in the US legally since she was 7 and they want to deport her because she protested. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2…
Lawless intimidation to stifle dissent. I see it and I won’t be silent about it.
-
I watched a lot of Noam Chomsky interviews last night. He was right about everything. He warned us for decades. Decades.
-
Go Protest Now! A free tiling protest sign maker.
I can’t stand by and do nothing while our republic is replaced with a fascist dictatorship. As I wrote earlier this week, it hit me rather traumatically that I need to stop waiting to do something about the helplessness I feel right now, and I need to start DOING SOMETHING about it.
That first came in the form of doing lone protesting earlier this week, which is a thing that was incredibly uncomfortable for me to psyche myself up to do, but as I mentioned, I’ve come to understand that it’s actually our most potent personal political power, possibly more than voting. When you stand somewhere alone on a public sidewalk, quietly holding a sign, you command the attention of your neighbors. Your message is unambiguous and it is impossible to justify its suppression without drawing immediate attention.
As I went through the process of making my sign, it occurred to me that sign-making probably ought to be easier to accomplish in general. Sure I could have used markers to write something out, but I have terrible handwriting. We live in the computer age anyway. Except I didn’t have access to a giant sign printer. Unless I wanted to go find one at maybe like an office supply store? Frankly, I didn’t want to go down that path.
So I decided to use my own home printer. This would require me to create a bunch of tiles out of 8.5"x11" paper and cut and assemble them together on the 22"x28" poster board I had already picked up a week earlier. Designing the sign and tiling it was doable with software I already had, but it wasn’t exactly super dead simple to figure out how to do either. I can figure out how to use these programs. Not everybody can.
You shouldn’t need to use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Acrobat to make a large tiled sign. Maybe such things can be done in applications like Microsoft Word? But again, that’s just yet another program others might not have easy access to and need to figure out. There should be a dead simple and free process for digitally making signs like this that doesn’t even require access to a computer or downloading apps. Many younger folks use phones only for everything, and tend to eschew desktop computing altogether.
In a republic, the barrier to entry for exercising the right to protest should be zero. That’s why I made Go Protest Now! It’s entirely free to use, works on desktop and mobile in any web browser, and there is no monetization strategy here and no data mining I’m doing. DreamHost (my site hosting provider) does track site hits, but I’m certainly not doing anything on my own.
Hopefully, you’ll find this to be a useful tool. You can get a sense of what its workflow is like in this other post I wrote up about it. The most important thing isn’t what kind of sign you have, but that you get out there and let your neighbors know what’s going on. Whether it’s through protesting, or talking to friends, neighbors, and strangers. People need to know about the current situation so that they can join in and help us to stop it.
There is an urgent need to take action now. Good luck to all of us! ✊
-
The people who react with a 😆 in response to every post that criticizes Trump ought to LOOK IN A MIRROR when wondering how something like the holocaust could have happened. What’s happening right now is deadly serious and you’re enabling it.
-
My new tiling protest sign creator now sorta works on mobile. It’s brand new and a little bit buggy though. Give it a try and lemme know how it works for you. Video included to show workflow. You can get to it at go-protest.us
-
First pass of a WIP tiling protest sign creator, called Go Protest Now!
It does NOT work on mobile yet: www.brianward.us/go-protes…
-
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?
-
R’s and D’s are right about immigration, but both are missing the point: Right-wing racism is exploited to trigger justified left-wing backlash. Rep. voters aren’t wrong to be mad about job loss, but THE REAL ENEMY ISN’T IMMIGRANTS—it’s wage stagnation. We don’t need cheap labor; we need FAIR WAGES!
-
Since we are into finding scams, how about this one: The rise of credit cards in the 1980s was a direct response to WAGE STAGNATION.
The corporatocracy didn’t just steal our wages; it made us borrow back the money we should have been paid in the first place. That’s the ultimate scam.
-
WIP making a thing tonight…
Protest sign creation should require NO SPECIAL SOFTWARE, and should let people TILE regular 8.5x11 printed pages into giant posters with ease. I see people holding little tiny printed out pages in some of these protest photos.
This SHOULD be easier for people to do.
-
Translate your outrage into action. Make a sign. Stand somewhere.
-
Read this with an open mind
The Democratic Party needs to come to terms with the fact that liberalism does not equate to leftism. Liberalism – and I called myself one for 20 years until Schumer’s CR vote – is ONLY liberal relative to right-wing conservatives. Look at a political compass: It’s all still in the authoritarian right. We’ve been kneecapping ourselves by not mounting an HONEST opposition in this country to the corporate political establishment. The path forward is Social Democracy, and the New Deal. Deeper inclusiveness and most importantly ENDING CORPORATE CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT. In my view Bernie has been the biggest champion of this message.
-
I should clarify, however, that we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good: Trump serves his own interests of corporate dominance and totalitarianism while the old guard tends to use soft power to maintain control. Both of these are bad, but one is actively more urgent to stop!
-
The message of the next political uprising isn’t just about stopping Trump and the oligarchy he intends to cement with his coup within a coup; it is to END CORPORATE CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT.
-
When you protest alone, it signals to other people: 1) That there is something important others should know; 2) That it’s okay to let others know what you think, and they might be inspired to join in. This is its true power.
Single protest is a catalyst for exponential awareness.
-
Lone protest is your most powerful political tool because you own it and you decide how and when to use it. We perceive lack of numbers as a sign of weakness, but it is the opposite because it is impossible for people to ignore and is difficult to repress.
-
We have the power to remove this man from office – today. The world is flabbergasted that we aren’t tearing this country apart in protest. We are sitting idly by while democracy is stolen from us. America calls itself the land of freedom – use it or lose it.
-
Not my cat meowing at me this morning for food like she was gonna SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION from me. 🐾
-
If you have MESSAGES ON YOUR PHONE indicating that you don’t like Trump, you will be DENIED ENTRY to the United States of America. This guy doesn’t just want Nazi Germany; he wants America to be North Korea! newrepublic.com/post/1929…
subscribe via RSS