Let's Start A NikaRiot!

But the more I think about it the more I think the opposite is where the comedy is.

Like:

“Oh,” he said, “I think I will spend a few lifetimes on Tumblr, most likely.”

The warlord was astonished. “Your merit and virtue are renowned far and wide!” he responded. “Why on earth would you be condemned to Tumblr?”

This is a long read but it's so worth it. Partly because of this:

The left-leaning protests with the Revolutionary-era call against President Donald Trump as a would-be monarch and authoritarian had the broadest geographic reach of any single-day protest in the United States in more than a half-century [that's an indirect reference to Earth Day 1970]. They included not only familiar precincts in New York and Los Angeles and Austin but also communities in all 50 states and every congressional district, including rural and Republican areas." So it was not only big but dispersed not in the sense of diluted, but distributed --deeper into non-urban areas and in every congressional district in the country (and every continent – at the urging of a friend I scrambled to try to make contact with someone who might take a picture of a No Kings moment in Antarctica; I failed but someone did it). Tennessee Indivible notes, "Pulaski, TN [a town of less than 10,000] showed out today — 100 people came together in a county where most folks said organizing would never take root.In a place with this much history, this much pressure, and this much expectation of silence, seeing that many neighbors stand up is nothing short of a breakthrough.This is what a shift looks like in a red state."

But also partly because of this:

Just before #nokings this Saturday, March 28th, a lot of criticism of it, of big protests in general, and of the organizers and participants in this one began to appear. When a lot of people suddenly begin to say the same stuff, I always wonder if division is being sown, and if so, by whom? It was the sudden online proliferation of these attacks that made me wonder; some of it was from real people, including people I know, but one friend reported a bot popping up on her social media to do it. On BlueSky disparagement of "normies" suddenly became a thing. A lot of the stuff I saw often made the same argument: that the people going to No Kings are not doing anything else and those who go consider that going to the protest is the whole job of addressing the crisis of advancing authoritarianism (advancing but also crumbling authoritarianism to be exact). That the participants are, in that most scornful term of those who consider themselves the true left, "liberals," a term that seems to equate to meekness and mildness and Not A Revolutionary. The evidence suggests that a lot of mild-mannered people have been radicalized. One BlueSky guy reported 'Walking thru the “Ultra Normie” No Kings rally in my extremely rural, white town and there are Patagonia wearing moms carrying signs that say “DEAD PEDOPHILES DONT REOFFEND” and “ICE GETS THE WALL” and I hi fived an old guy with a sign that said MY DADDY FOUGHT NAZIS AND SO WILL I” this is wild. I cannot stress enough how these are PTA moms and soccer coach dads and I can best describe the vibe as “festively bloodthirsty.”' But the whole idea that there's a small cadre of revolutionaries who do all the political heavy lifting in this country isn't really accurate; a lot of it – I hope to do an essay on this soon – has been not just for decades but centuries by those who might be dismissed as nice ladies.

Beware of bots trying to waste our time and discourage us from getting out. Because remember:

"At the People’s March in January 2025, 10% of participants said they heard about the event through an organization. Yesterday, that number was 34%. Word-of-mouth from family and friends, historically the most common channel for protests, dropped from 48% to 38%. People are no longer being summoned by just outrage. They are being mobilized by infrastructure, which now likely includes their friends and family. This is the difference between a movement that surges and a movement that can win.

What you are watching is the conversion of protest attendance into activism. [Nonviolence scholar Steven] Levitsky described the three domains in which democracy is defended or lost: the ballot box, the courts, and the streets. His point was that no single one is sufficient — and that the streets, far from being the weakest, are the foundation the other two rest on.

He continues, "Protests rarely achieve their maximalist demands on their own. But they do things nothing else can: they shift public discourse (Occupy didn’t break up the banks, but the language of the “99%” permanently changed how Americans talk about inequality), they energize waves of downstream organizing (the Women’s March fed directly into the candidate recruitment and voter mobilization that flipped the House in 2018), they build relationships between people and groups who might never have connected otherwise, and they make visible the scale of opposition in a way that no online petition or social media post ever will."

They want total control over you. Not just trans people. Not just queer people. You. Everyone.

Trans people are just a scapegoat. They want total control over everyone's self expression. They want the right to mold you into their perfect little cog in their dehumanizing machine.

Whether you can leave emoji reacts in the groupchat

Whether you can leave regular messages in the groupchat

Whether you can HAVE a groupchat

Whether you can have Electronic Devices

Closest match: Mya arenaria isolate MELC-2E11 chromosome 1 Common name: Soft-Shell Clam

People SAY that your health 'suddenly' starts to decline in your 30s but that's not really a good way to put it A) bc that's not really accurate and B) bc it frames this decline as something inherent and unavoidable, which does nothing to convince you that you have some agency about this.

So I'm going to explain this in LOOSE NON-SCIENTIFIC language:

When you are an infant or child, you are actively growing. Nature is throwing tons of new cells into you bc your body needs to BUILD BUILD BUILD. What you're able to do, eat and heal from is all largely dictated by this-- for example little kids often LOVE sweet foods or dairy-like foods and are relatively less interested in anything else. This is bc their body is running on HIGH all the time since building body parts is very energetically intensive. They can eat a fistful of sugarcubes and burn them off in an hour. Ask me how I know.

When you are a YOUNG ADULT you are actually still developing to a secondary extent, but your bones and such are fused and now that development goes into solidifying the structure and also finetuning its reproductive capabilities and features-- these, too, are HIGHLY energy consumptive when they first come online. Nature is STILL, thus, throwing tons of energy and new cells your way hoping you'll do something cool with them. You regenerate very quickly, and recover from harm rapidly-- But please note: swift recovery from harm is not absence of harm. This most relates to the consumption of 'junk food' and alcohol-- many people say they could 'eat whatever they wanted and nothing would happen' when they're in their 20s or that they could go out drinking and 'not be affected'. You were affected. You didn't notice.

Once everything has come online you go into maintenance mode. Nature stops throwing excess cells and energy your way bc you don't need that-- your body is yours and you are now responsible for maintaining it...hopefully with what you learned by experience in your 20s. IF YOU WERE NOT PAYING ATTENTION, you did not learn this, and are in for a surprise in your 30s bc your 'free recovery' subscription has ended. Recovery and maintenance- processes that are constant in the human body- now cost MINERALS & ELECTRICITY. You can go into DEBT now, and that debt will come in the form of joints that pop, inability to recover well, lowered immune function, and feeling like shit.

This debt accrues interest RAPIDLY once you hit 36-- the age of around 36 to 46 or so is a kind of reckoning stage where Nature assesses how well you've managed your body and you will be SWIFTLY downgraded if the result is you were just winging it.

So how do you build this account? 2 main things ( LOOSELY SPEAKING this is so not 100% scientific but I have to be general here): MINERALS -- you get these from eating well, mostly. You might want to take supplements based on your unique needs. But you need Minerals & Vitamins (i'm lumping these two together) bc they are the chemical building blocks (currency) your body uses to rebuild and fix up cells. ELECTRICITY is- again loosely speaking- having the proper chemical voltage throughout your body. This 'voltage' drops when you don't move enough, or when you're dehydrated. The building and repairing process your body wants to do may have the materials (minerals and vitamins) but there's not enough power in the factory, or the AC isn't working and the workers are overheating and can't work well. To fix this, drink lots of water and MOVE AND STRETCH your body. The action within your muscles and bones GENERATES ENERGY and it keeps your cells happy.

So the thing is, it's not that you suddenly find yourself taking damage after 30+. You were taking damage the whole time. You're just kept from really feeling it bc you're young and full of extra juice and given time to figure things out.

But at some point Nature expects you to do that, and you will pay if you don't.

Best to start out giving a shit, even if none of your friends think you're cool, even if you get called a 'health nut' bc you will still be able to frolick at 45, 50, probably so on while everyone who said it was dumb to have 'balanced meals' shares memes about how they wake up feeling like shit every day.

like. they are talked about in most sources as part of a rash of violent protest in england in the early 19th century. they are discussed in really violent terms - mob, threaten, force, overwhelm are all words that show up across sources

and then those same sources (both contemporary and historical) will acknowledge that, at least in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire*, almost nobody got hurt

like. to a truly remarkable degree. we are talking about a movement that came out of a deep societal anger, in a time when England was experiencing one of the worst economic downturns of the 19th century, when high food prices and rising unemployment were causing famine and when the continental war had already been going on for decades. we are talking about a movement whose main activity was breaking into people's homes and businesses (often not separate buildings in this context) armed with hammers, spanners, and actual fucking guns, and forcing those people to give them keys so they could destroy valuable machinery.

and nobody got killed (except the Luddites themselves, when the military got involved). nobody even seems to have been hurt. you can guarantee that if there had been as much as a broken bone or a black eye, in the 1811-13 frenzy of fear about the Luddites which stirred up both the government and the media, it would be in the records - but it just isn't. they rarely even stole anything (again, during a famine and society-wide recession).

that's a level of non-violence that goes beyond "these people weren't setting out to commit assault" and into "these people were shockingly well-regulated, focused, and careful in avoiding violence". if you break into hundreds of people's houses and smash their - often well-guarded! - stuff, avoiding that turning into a brawl is remarkable.

but that's a hard sell when you need to deploy the army and stop the rebels from damaging the all-important progress of capitalist economies.

so what's a government to do?

well. one thing you can do is make frame-breaking a capital crime (the Act doing this passed in October of 1811, I believe). now how can anyone deny that these people are violent criminals? they're being punished to the full extent of the law, as they would be for murder or assault or military desertion. so it must be just as bad, right? if you look at the Luddites being charged, and 90% of them are sentenced to either hanging or decades-long transportation sentences, well, they must have done something violent to deserve that, eh? and they do love to smash things. and they do seem very angry. and they brought a sledgehammer to a military base weaving shed. why would they do that, if not for smashing skulls?