softgrungeemu

All the people attacking the construction site were identified by the local police as "white", but police made no effort to confront, arrest, or pursue them, no weapons were drawn (and when have American police EVER shied away from a fine opportunity to draw their weapons on ACTUAL protestors?) and every one of the 35 arrests were peaceful attendees of a nearby music festival (whose goal was to also protest the construction), and were largely PoC + Native American.

This is sus as hell, guys.

Why the fuck then did they not even DRAW WEAPONS when FIREWORKS were being thrown at them?

Why would they refuse to do what COPS FUCKING ALWAYS DO unless they'd be doing so at their OWN PEOPLE? When was the last time you saw cops show RESTRAINT with people they've historically LOVED crushing under heel?

Answer me that.

This movement has always been welcoming to a diversity of tactics. And not welcoming to cop-jacketing liberals. Even many aboveground local organizers have stated that this was a legitimate action.

Where is your math when you think cops would hire 200+ people to effectively defend Atlanta Forest via property destruction, and inspire land defenders around the world? If this inspires enough people, this action is very likely to catalyze the defeat of cop city.

Also where is your math when this liberal talking point is brought up during any combative social movement, and disproved every time?

An estimated 31 million Americans have now been thrown off what’s been called “the hunger cliff.”

Those drastic cuts have food banks bracing for impact, and some grocery executives celebrating. On a late February earnings call of Grocery Outlet, a discount supermarket chain that relies on SNAP for a high percentage of its sales, the company’s chief financial officer cheered the coming reductions. “In many ways,” he told investors, it “is good for our model as those benefits decline.”

I attended a march to stop Cop City. Rarely have I felt so safe in a crowd. Between 300-400 people in masks, hoodies, with shields and banners, chanted in unison “we are unstoppable, another world is possible” and “viva, viva, tortuguita.”

Calmly, we approached the southern power line cut in the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. We marched toward the police, located on the far northern gate. Along the way, many people ripped up countless meters of silt fencing, the first phase of “pre-construction” carried out for Cop City. This work was conducted by Brent Scarborough Company on behalf of Brasfield & Gorrie. When we reached the police, they scattered. The crowd destroyed all of their equipment with ease and confidence, including their operations trailer, their floodlights, their vehicles. This act of mass collective sabotage was done methodically and without anxiety. Some individuals were heroically repelling police who approached the gate, which gave the rest of us the space we needed to take the time we needed to accomplish our goals.

The crowd left the area together after completing the sabotage. Nobody was arrested for taking part in this action, despite what media reports and police press conferences might lead you to believe.

An hour later, the police attacked Weelaunee People’s Park. They attacked a music festival taking place as a part of the week of action. The agencies responsible for the attack on the festival were the Georgia State Patrol, the FBI, the GBI, APD, Sandy Springs PD, and the Department of Natural Resources. The festival was at least one mile from the location of the sabotage. The festival was attended by over 1,000 people the day before, and hundreds were still pouring into the area for the second day.

After police attacked some concert-goers, multiple small groups worked to repel them from the parking lot area. In the distance, I could still hear the sounds of fireworks exploding. I had been saved by someone who was shooting fireworks at the police on the bicycle path. The State Patrol fired tear gas at us. They were shooting us with pepper balls. All around me, random people were de-arresting one another, throwing stones, and running into the woods. I do not know who they were. I do not know their identity, their language, their ethnicity, their gender. I cannot judge them by any of those. I cannot know if we were friends, if we would be friends. I do not know if they are the kind of people I would spend time with. I can only judge them by their actions. In that sense, they were heroes. Many, many people escaped arrest or helped others to escape.

Around 7:30pm, I was belly-down, hiding beneath the brush. I was dripping with sweat, covered in scratches. A drone hovered above me. A helicopter circled above the drone. I could hear search dogs across the river in the Prison Farm.

I thought I was going to be captured. I did not panic, but I was close to it. And then I heard the music. It was quiet where I was, but I heard it. It made me cry. I was scared, and I was grateful, and I was inspired.

The music festival had not been cancelled. I didn’t know it at the time, but the bands did not stop playing, even when police pointed rifles at them, even when they brought an armored truck into the RC field. When police approached the festival, still over 100 people, they all linked arms. They demanded to be allowed to leave. They won.

Don't fall for the liberal fear mongering and peace policing. Cops are not all powerful, or omniscient, or even brave. They can be beat, and they were, hence their retaliation against a "soft target".

People who pick up a brick are rarely a maga infiltrator or undercover. We are being subjected to endless and brutal class war; it is natural to fight back like your life depends on it, because it does. The actions of these brave comrades in Atlanta Forest are, frankly, a gentle response to the murder, arrests, and brutalization from APD.

Full support and solidarity to the forest defenders. Follow their lead, don't fall for the establishment's fear mongering and tall tales. Stop following leaders who demand we march peacefully into the meat grinder. Not the democrats, not republicans, nor the capitalists will save us. All we have is each other, and we're worth fighting for

If you're on the front lines, please drop ways to support, otherwise I'll just share the Atlanta solidarity fund

It seems like it’s only ever been because of massive state subsidized housing production, providing a boost to supply that would never be profitable if investors and developers had to build it all themselves.

The history of urban housing before the 20th century is just a history of slums and laughably inadequate housing provision. And the only reason that ever went away in the 20th century is because governments just went ham building millions upon millions of urban housing units, making non-shanty living quarters a reality for even the lower working class.

The history of urban housing before the 20th century is a history of laughably inadequate housing provision. And the history of food before the 20th century is a history of laughably inadequate food provision. And the history of clothing before the 20th century is a history of laughably inadequate clothing provision.

People before the 20th century were just shockingly poor in a way that's hard for us to wrap our heads around. Like, in the early 1900s, dress shirts came with detachable cuffs and collars. Why? Because cuffs and collars wear out quickly, and shirts are expensive. You don't want to have to throw away the whole shirt just because the collar wore out!

(And this doesn't just apply to the poorest; the 95th percentile in 1900 was still shockingly materially deprived by modern standards.)

Over the course of the 20th century, we got much, much richer. And one of the ways that manifested is that everyone got larger and nicer houses. Like, average square feet per person has doubled since 1975, and that's well after the boom you're talking about!

So yeah, in the 20th century we got rich enough that we could provide "adequate" amounts of housing for basically everyone. And we did! And this involved the government building a lot of stuff, and also private builders building a lot of stuff. There was just a lot of building.

And then some time in the 1970s, we...stopped. Sort of.

Over the last half-century we've been way less prone to building new stuff. In a lot of contexts we made it illegal to build new stuff! It's not like private developers just decided not to build more housing in urban areas; they're not allowed to.

And at the same time we're still getting richer, and people expect more stuff. See that graph above: the average family has twice as much space per square person as they did in 1975, which is around the cutoff where we stopped building new stuff in cities. And that means that real estate in those cities has gotten far, far more expensive.

I already have body dysmorphia and I already work retail. I feel like shit all the time already, y’all don’t need to make it worse

Hand holding. That's all it fucking took.

So catch me at Pride in a leather harness and holding a bat, because if hand holding is all it takes, we owe it to each other to stand together.

Call me a degenerate if you want. I don't care. It has always been the degenerates protecting each other when the cops raid our bars and inspect our clothing and haul us away for being cross-dressing, family-destroying, society-polluting, tranny dyke faggot freaks.

I know who I'd rather have on my side, and it's not the self-loathing pieces of shit who would rather destroy their own people than dismantle systems of oppression.