Activism

There are 112 posts filed in Activism (this is page 3 of 12).

How to stop Donald Trump

I entered the title of this post as a search phrase in Google, and here are some of the top results:

Indivisible.org: Defeat Trump Toolkit – This resource was created in January 2023, has suggestions for organizing events, recruiting group members, and links to other content at Indivisible.org.

DefeatTrump.org: Site created by Indivisible.org. Has a way to sign up for a mailing list, and more targeted resources.

A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump: Published in March 2020 and written by Barack Obama’s campaign manager. Quote from the Amazon page: ” A playbook for the common citizen, A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump addresses the many things individuals can do in 2020 every day, without having to leave their jobs, move to Iowa, or spend every waking moment on the election.”

Congressman Jerry Nadler: Some specific actions listed, slanted toward stopping Trump during his term as president.

The New Yorker: Nine Ways to Oppose Donald Trump – Written in December 2016 after the election, the article lists nine specific ways to help stop Trump from being successful in office.

The Guardian: “Election season has come. Here’s what you need to do to stop Trump from winning” – Written in September 2023, Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton adminstration) has some advice/suggestions for getting involved.

The joy of podcasting

Over the last few weeks, I restarted recording some short podcasts while I drive home from work. It was fun to do, and I decided on the last one to not do any post-processing or edits, and thought it sounded ok. WordPress automatically creates an enclosure, so anyone could subscribe to my podcasting (of my 3-5 regular readers). My “kit” consists of my Samsung A10 smartphone, the Voice Recorder Android app, and a Logitech H111 headset that plugs into the speaker jack of my phone – that’s it! That’s all that it takes to record the podcast. And, of course, anyone can use any podcast app to listen to the episodes. As Anil Dash said in a post earlier this year commenting on the “wherever you get your podcasts” line, “radical systems can survive and even thrive in the modern world of tech and media. They can inspire new creators to make similar systems that are unowned, uncentralized, and a little bit uncontrollable.”.

To close, I recently listened to a Radio Open Source podcast episode focusing on the life of Hannah Arendt, who lived under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. One line of her writing stood out to me: “We are free to change the world and start something new in it.”. I think that every podcast is a chance to change the world, and anyone is free to create one and send it out into the world. Thank you, Dave Winer, for making this possible.

An example of semaphore using email

Earlier this week, I commented on Ken Smith’s inquiry into the use of semaphore for communication, noting that I felt his interest in the use of semaphore was to inform people in case of a crisis. This morning, I received an email alert from the Americans of Conscience Checklist. This group sends email on a regular basis with selected actions to promote progressive issues (I am a subscriber). In this email alert, (called a “time-sensitive” action), subscribers were asked to call US senators to ask them to vote “No” on the FISA reauthorization bill. I think this fits the “use case” of semaphore that Ken Smith was discussing. The people subscribed to this list have been “trained” to take action on suggested items on a periodic basis, so they would have the necessary reflexes to take action for a time-sensitive request.

But, you may say, “I get emails asking me to do things (“buy stuff”) all the time – what is the difference?”. I think the difference is those emails mostly go unanswered, and the user has been trained to ignore most, if not all of them. If a group has been trained to take action in a certain way, and there is trust in the communication path, then emails like this can have an effect.

Some examples of resistance

On April 6, I published a post on “The Resistance” commenting on someone asking where “The Resistance” was. Shortly after after that post, there was a protest in Oregon over plans to log 14,000 acres of forest. This past Monday, my wife told me that there were protesters in Eugene, Oregon blocking the I-5 freeway to protest the Israel-Hamas war. There were also protesters in Hillsboro, Oregon, and later that evening I saw news coverage of multiple protests across the US and the world (see also Truthout coverage (via Denny Henke). The April 15 protests appear to have been a coordinated economic blockade by multiple groups. Looks like there is some resistance going on out there!

PS – see this Instagram post for additional pics

Can the use of semaphore be useful today?

Ken Smith recently wrote about the use of semaphore and RSS in transmitting information. He relates an experience where he organized students to send a message across a university campus. The historic use of semaphore flags was to communicate between ships. In the 18th century, the “optical telegraph” was developed, and messages could be sent from Amsterdam to Venice in an hour. With the development of the electric telegraph, the use of the optical telegraph fell to the wayside.

Today, people can use RSS readers to monitor posts on websites, and use other social media systems (Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky) to do the same. The rssCloud protocol also provides almost instant notification. I think that the question Ken Smith is asking is “can a group of individuals use this to be able to respond to a crisis“. The answer is “Yes”, but people “would have to be trained to do more than just send or receive a message on the system”.

So – do we choose to do something here? What crisis should we work to avoid?

Democracy is not a spectator sport

Several weeks ago, I read a Substack post with this same title, as well as a Vox article titled “The courts were never going to save America from Donald Trump”. The bottom line of both articles were that the only way to defeat Donald Trump was going to be at the ballot box. But what else should we do? In my post/podcast earlier this week on “The Resistance”, I also pointed out that “doing something else” meant doing more than writing a blog post or a social media post or a podcast. I did review one of the resources I linked to in my resistance post, and it offered 3 concrete recommendations for taking action:

  • Once a month, show up to either a trigger event protest with game change potential or a small, group-led action.
  • Once a week, put pressure on decision makers with phone calls or at town halls.
  • Vote for and do get out the vote work for movement candidates in local, state, and federal elections.

In addition, the resource gives some good guidance about finding or forming a group to take action. Let’s get out there and win this thing!

Where is the Resistance? (post + podcast)

I decided to record a podcast about recent posts from Dave Winer and Ken Smith concerning “the Resistance”.

I am including some links to items I mentioned in the podcast:

Dave Winer’s original comment on Scripting News

Same comment on Twitter, with Ken Smith reply

Another Twitter post from Dave Winer, giving an idea for a resistance movement

Expanded post from Dave Winer

Ken Smith summary (part 1) (part 2)

Threads post from Ken Smith, with Dave Winer reply

Atlanta activism podcast post

Lifelong Activist site from Hillary Rettig

Activism links collected by Andy Sylvester collected as an OPML file

Americans of Conscience checklist for April 5, 2024 – concrete things you can do

“Resistance Guide: How to Sustain the Movement to Win” – Written in 2017, the PDF linked to this page gives a short history of resistance movements in the US and provides ideas.

Activism toolkit by Ken Smith

The topic of text boxes

Recently, in another post on the subject of textcasting, Dave Winer made a comment about text boxes:

Every time you see a tiny little textbox that’s a sure clue they’re trying to own you, and hoping you don’t notice.

http://scripting.com/2024/02/01.html#a154043

I think this is a reach. In my opinion, the simplest reason to use a text box for text entry is that users are used to it and it is easy to implement (using Occam’s Razor here). Another explanation is that it is use of prior art, as Dave Winer has written about before (see here, here, and here). No sinister plan to “own” anyone here. Could text editors be better/have more features? Sure they could! Could writing apps cooperate with each other and have APIs? Sure they could! Should people be demanding these things? Sure…maybe….or maybe they could make those things happen…or maybe they could submit a feature request….

If the software is open source (Mastodon et al), someone could make their own changes. If the software is a service provided by a company that does not charge for the service (hmmm…Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky come to mind), it seems more difficult for users to request features and drive changes. If a group of users REALLLY wanted something and no other app seemed interested, maybe they could create their own product (thinking Kickstarter here). To me, it comes down to this: how bad do you want this?

Finally, another take on this sentence comes from Ken Smith:

Ken Smith comment on Dave Winer’s “text box” statement.

Based on Ken’s comment, I take this as “any antisocial behavior” in the blank – racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination, manipulation…the list can go on and on as Ken points out. This Quora thread has some good points about someone trying to “own” someone.

Seth Godin nails it again, identifying powers that we all have but might not be aware of:

The power to speak up, to participate, to invent, to lead, to encourage, to vote, to connect, to organize, to march, to write, to say ‘no’ or to say ‘yes’.

https://seths.blog/2024/01/unaware/