Unfollow influencers who promote over consumption, start feeding your mind with healthy, eco friendly, good news pages. My faves are @sambentley & @newlifestyleabb on tiktok. The #deinfulencing on tiktok too. @greengirlleah & @pattiegonia on Insta

Get a library card! Go to a public library, or use free public books archives like Internet archive

Block big brands on social media. Don't let them influence you. Trust me, once you stop consuming their advertisement, you're gonna forget most of them even exist because you don't actually need them.

Find your local No Buy group. No buy groups are people who give away what they No longer need, for the price of $0. Aim to stop buying certain things, and support your local community without hurting your pockets.

Trade with your friends and family! That one skill that you have is not useless, share it with your people. Do people's hair, in exchange for art. Share your tea bags in exchange for some sugar.

Start or join a mutal aid. Help your community directly, even starting group chats help if you don't have the means or finances to go outside

Organise a community fridge. Share food for free and get others to donate food. Set it up in your school, college, or neighbourhood

Support worker co-ops, they're organisations run by the workers. Buy from them if possible, you can even create your own.

Help your loved ones avoid exploitative jobs or landlords. Share information about workplaces and areas, educate each other on red flags, protect your people.

Live collectively if possible. Shared housing leads to reduced costs and less capitalistic dependency

Organise rent strikes or tenant unions. If your landlords are treating you poorly, if rent is too high, or your building has poor conditions then organise a strike

Join a protest or a direct action group. You'll find plenty of local protests for specific issues on Facebook. You don't have to be on the front lines, you can support with food, art, security, word of mouth, and medic roles

Start a free school, share your knowledge for free. Education is important, knowledge is power. Teach what you know, and get others who know what you know to teach others too.

Practice autonomous living. Grow your own food, fix your own things, support others with these things too.

Depends on what definition that means.  Marxists/Anarchist would call me a liberal, but they kinda call anybody they don’t like liberal, so it is kinda meaningless as a term.  If you are engaging with certain online discourse, liberalism just kinda means “bad guy” which makes it very confusing to actually use as a term (SJW is another such term).  This is even more true of the term “neoliberal” which is even more corrupted 

There is a philosophy of liberalism but it first emerged in the last 17th century, and as you might imagine, has transformed and altered across time and space since then, as any political philosophy does.  According to Marxists, liberal is just equivalent to “Capitalist” but that is a pretty simplistic take on the larger philosophy which has a lot of variations.  And Marx has a very bad habit of making his own definitions for things and then insisting everybody else go by them, so that is suspect anyways.  

Roughly speaking (very roughly) liberalism tends to believe in the following

Belief in a democratic representative goverment

Values Freedom From, or Negative Freedom, aka Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Movement, 

Really into Private Property Rights

Secular and tends to be really into Enlightenment values 

Focus on individualism

Some degree of international conception of rights

belief in goverment based on both Checks and Balances and a Constitution, holding it in check

A tendency to value professionalism, education, and meritocracy 

At least to some degree supportive of capitalism 

Now with the exception of private property (which I am far more...ehhh about) and support of capitalism, I think I fall pretty solidly into that, I think those are good values.  Its worth noting that liberalism has a LONG history of talking up values, and then denying them to most of the population, like how John Locke basically said non white people don’t deserve property rights.  SO one of the debate around liberal values tends to be “Hey those sound nice...maybe everybody could enjoy them and not just a small wealth cabal?”.  

But even beyond that issue, I kinda don’t think liberal values are enough.  You can’t just have Freedom From, you also need Freedom too in my mind.  Which includes

Access to universal healthcare

 Universal education

Protections for marginalized people 

access to food, housing, clothing, and basic survival needs 

Of course none of that address the social questions, like protections of the Queer community, women, abortion rights, and the state providing rights to racial minorities.  Liberal is just too simplistic of a term honestly.  

I also tend to be very much in favor of regulation of the Free Market, high taxes, intense oversight, and the public sector getting more than the private sector.  However, I wouldn’t be a full socialist since I don’t really want to abolish capitalism, so much as regulate and control it.  

me:

THEY: Breaking Down the Gender Barriers

I have been inspired recently to post more of my fiction writing. Blame it on my friends I guess. While I was overseas, I recently completed my first short story. I a  now working on my second. What follows is approximately the first two pages of my story, simply entitled “They”. Freak. He-She. Faggety-Ann. These were just a few epithets amongst the many that had been spewed their way since…