The last couple of months have seen a lot of intra-left argument about the ACLU. And the last couple of years have seen a lot of argument, all over the place, about “free speech” – what should be included under that banner, what exceptions there should be, what the priorities of people who care about […]
I’ve been seeing a resurgence in recent months of people arguing about the use of “Zionist” and related terms, people using those terms while obviously not knowing what they mean, and so on, so I guess I need to do a post on this, to try to make the discourse less terrible and useless. This […]
I’ve been seeing some argument lately around how people new to activism and how people not new to activism talk to and about each other.
To those who are bitter. To the ones who were derided as foolish children because of the issues they fought for, issues which perhaps are newly fashionable. To the ones […]
Ever since I checked social media after medicking the Inauguration Day protests in DC, I’ve been seeing bad, frustrating takes on the black bloc. For the uninitiated, a black bloc is a group of protesters who wear all black, including bandannas or other masks, to anonymize themselves, and usually move as a group or set […]
Here is a story about coalitions and working together that seems appropriate for our time.
In May of 2012, after a winter and spring of Occupy infighting about ideology and tactics, I was pretty insecure about how other activists saw me. Back then people weren’t saying “left” and “liberal”, they were saying “radical” and “liberal”, […]
As I’ve mentioned before, I am a Bernie Sanders supporter! I also have some thoughts, regarding different subsets of people, about the mess in Nevada and some of the resulting Internet conversation.
To the people who doxxed, harassed, and threatened a Nevada Democratic Party official: Stop being assholes, okay? And no, the fact that the […]
First of all, I know I’m nearly two weeks late posting about this, but as many of you have already seen, the final charge against me was dropped! So, hooray, my criminal case is over.
Unrelatedly (well, mostly unrelatedly), I want to make a point about the Democratic primary and identity.
My approach to this […]
This is the companion to my previous post. There, I focused on my experiences of the protest, and explaining the concepts behind it (e.g. “What is pinkwashing?”). This time, I address why I was motivated to participate, why I don’t think groups that engage even in relatively mild forms of pinkwashing belong in the programming […]
As some of you are probably aware by now, Creating Change, the big annual LGBTQ+ activism conference, had a higher-than-usual controversy quotient this year. There were a bunch of reasons for this, but probably the one that received the most publicity centered around a Friday night reception given by an organization called A Wider Bridge, […]
November 8th, 2015 | Activism, Politics | Tags: climate, environmentalism, freedom of speech, keystone xl, Occupy, policing, street medicking, theory of change, tw:police violence, we ARE struggling together | By now, many of you have seen the news that President Obama rejected a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. While TransCanada is reviewing its options to keep the project alive, but experts are dubious. This is a major victory for environmentalists – as a friend commented upon hearing the news, five years ago it […]
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