Hi Friends,
I hope you are warm on this cold af day! It has been a wild weekend for me. Shayla and I provided a lot of support for community and loved ones. I am happy to be finally sitting and thinking.
I find that most things are in flux. Almost all my loved ones are going through some kind of change. The planets are sending us for a spin. Politics is wild; we are entering a new stage of adversarial politics with a dying empire.
In all this, I wanted to provide you, my friend, with a take we do not hear often enough as bulwark leftists.
We are winning.
The Fascists, in their own words, are pathetic.
We may not win every battle. We may not own the papers, software, or have any systemic support. However, when push comes to shove, communities reject fascism in spectacular fashion. They communicate and come out. Pride corner was joined by hundreds of St. Albert locals today, on the coldest day of the year so far,
to push back.
Thank you Pride Corner for having organized this gathering and win.
Want to take a cut at fascism? However kinda tired after protesting them all day? Here are 3.5 things you can do sitting on your couch in like 15 minutes:
- Delete all Meta products (click these to get started for Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp). These technologies are directly funding the Trump administration and these platforms are being used to harm queer community now. Consider alternatives like Blusky, Pixelfed, Signal or hell setup a Change Maker and just write your friends.
- Switch your email provider, especially if you are using google or microsoft. These corporations are the leading providers of compute for the colonial arm of the American empire. I personally use Proton Mail and they provide for the support that builds the back end for this newsletter (listmonk).
- Talk to your family about AI. Digital demons now exist and they can easily steal anyone's likeness with very little overhead. A quick conversation with folks about how you must verify any information you see through a screen is important. Pro tip - come up a code word for identity verification that you tell your most trusted. It wont be long until these likenesses are used on scale in social attacks on nations engaged in things like trade wars so may as well be prepared.
- Install a local AI. A fast all-in-one service is LMStudio however I personally use a Ollama, Open Web-UI, and Cloudflare solution that serves me Daisy.
Lots of love friends!