I saw this tweet this morning, and – not for the first time – was quietly thankful for the folks at Merriam-Webster. They are an inspiration.
Please disregard the previous tweet.
Definition lookups are unlimited.Go nuts.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) July 2, 2023
(You’re not missing anything if you can’t click this and go to twitter – there’s nothing else related to this.)
Are there other non-political entities that stand up for democracy and the rule of law in quiet ways like this? That mock the famous and the powerful, that very much deserve to be mocked?
Our own DougJ does that, of course! Who else?
What are your quiet acts of resistance, defiance and rebellion?
Totally open thread.
oatler
The Musk-bot is making business decisions, like HAL -9000.
Suzanne
I love watching Elmo get trolled on his own platform. Hilarious.
WaterGirl
@oatler: The Musk-bot is an arrogant, entitled prick who has no idea how the real world works. How did they possibly keep that hidden for all these years? The answer, of course, is $$$.
But enough about him, I would rather talk about resistance. How do we fight these people every day, in our own worlds?
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: Do you think he even realizes? Or have his 6 remaining minions hidden all mocking tweets from him somehow?
Jerzy Russian
As a kid I judged dictionaries based on how many swear words they had definitions for. The more, the better, in case you are wondering.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I see banned-book giveaway tables are set up outside the Moms for Liberty convention. They’re doing a thriving business.
WaterGirl
@Jerzy Russian: I love the image of you looking up swear words. How old were you? 10?
Layer8Problem
@WaterGirl: I’m assuming a dedicated team of public relations contractors for years now devoted to the cause of burnishing his colossal self-image and propagating it to the unwashed masses, backed up by an immense cadre of willing fanboys-girls-people ready to explain that he is a real-life Marvel Comic Book Character™ whose intellect towers above ours.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: That is totally awesome. And inspiring. Don’t get mad, get even.
WaterGirl
@Layer8Problem: I chuckled at your imagery, but I think you are likely correct.
WaterGirl
The hypocrisy of all the Extreme Court decisions i mind-boggling. I truly cannot imagine how the 6 of them are not humiliated by the release of rulings that are so transparently discriminatory and contradictory to one another.
Nothing to click, just a single tweet.
Layer8Problem
@WaterGirl: I didn’t even put a sarcasm tag on it because, god help me, I actually believe that’s the case. I’m a hopeless cynic.
Jerzy Russian
@WaterGirl: This was during my Catholic school days, so grades 1 through 7. As I have noted before, I have been stuck at age 12 for the past 44 years.
WaterGirl
@Jerzy Russian: There are worse ages to be stuck at. :-)
edit: for people who are not sociopaths. When they are stuck, it’s really bad for us.
Jerzy Russian
@WaterGirl: That is an awesome tweet. I never thought about the issue like that, but in hindsight it is obvious.
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: Somebody needs to get a gun case brought before the court where they use the gay-cake ruling as precedent to hold gun sellers and gun companies responsible.
Make a mockery of the Extreme Court in hearings in front of them.
@Jerzy Russian:
I agree with you, and I hope someone uses that against them. Over and over and over using all these inconsistent and absurd rulings against them.
oldster
Over at LGM, their normal twitter-list in the right margin seems to be totally fritzed. It’s displaying no tweets, even though it says it still has 19 members.
More evidence of decay on the cursed bird site?
and let’s hear it for DougJ’s contributions to the resistance! From BJ all the way to the White House.
Betty Cracker
My bumper stickers! I used to have one that said “No really, he lost, and you’re in a cult” but someone peeled it off my car while it was parked in The Villages. (They didn’t bash in my window, so that’s good…) Now I have a “Make Florida Weird Again” sticker with a photo of DeSantis’s face in a red circle with a strike-through slash.
I have a whole pack of them, and yesterday I gave one to stranger who expressed admiration for mine in the parking lot of a restaurant near Tampa. I’m hoping to quietly start a movement to throw out all the goddamn fanatics and restore Florida to its formerly quirky, laid-back, oddball status.
Kristine
This info is from a developer. Of course this is Twitter Today so who knows.
Link to first tweet in thread for we the holdouts.
CaseyL
I’ve been thinking about the outrage over Musk’s destruction of Twitter: How can one person be allowed to do this?? The answer is “Money.”
Which is true.
But it also made me think about the enormous, unsalvageable damage “one person” is allowed to wreak in other areas. Like politics: Bush II in Iraq, Putin in Ukraine, Trump in, well, everything.
One person should not be allowed to have that much money.
One person should not be allowed to have that much power.
The guardrails that were supposed to prevent that sort of thing have proven to be not up to the task.
So, back when I was a college student, I looked at human history and it seemed to me that larger social conglomerations were both a trend and a desirable evolution. City-states to nation-states to continent-states to multinational arrangements like the UN, EU, and so on. Desirable because unified laws and systems could be extended to cover and protect more people – or so it seemed to my college-age self.
I reckoned without entropy. Entropy exists, is a law of physics, and cannot be evaded forever.
The capacity for good and evil go hand in hand. The larger the social construct, the greater good and evil it can create. If the things that held the social construct together fall apart, disorder and chaos follows.
We live in an age of social constructs dissolving. We see it in our politics, our economies, and our social institutions.
We, all of us here on BJ, and a whole lot of other people are working as hard as they can to re-establish the guardrails and make the social construct work better.
I hope that effort succeeds because, after all, I am living here and now. I want things to be good, to run well, and I want evil to be defeated.
But entropy will do what entropy does. I’m not saying it’s The End of the World, but I do think we’re living in the end of a paradigm. I think the institutions that hold our world together are coming apart, and the forces driving them apart are stronger than the forces trying to hold them together. I think many things are driving this, with climate change being the most important, unpredictable, and unmovable.
We’ve been here before: the two global wars of the 20th Century being just the most recent and major examples. Those were the forces that drove the creation of our current world. From 1914 to 1945 – In less than 40 years – all of human society was vastly, vastly re-ordered.
I think we’re seeing that now.
H.E.Wolf
“What are your quiet acts of resistance, defiance and rebellion?”
Currently writing postcards (via PostcardsToVoters.org) to help defeat Ohio’s rightwing-sponsored Issue 1 on August 8.
My mom’s act of resistance is donating postcard stamps!
Ivan X
@Jerzy Russian: I mean, of course. Same.
@Jerzy Russian: Similar condition.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@WaterGirl:
I’m not sure they did. I remember reading something once, a while back, where Elon’s father talked about Elmo getting picked on as kid.
Now we know why.
Cacti
After a childhood of indoctrination in a strict, authoritarian religion, I made sure my kids were never forced into a house of worship against their will.
They are teens now, thoroughly secular in their worldview, and repulsed by the religious nuttery in mainstream Republican politics.
Redshift
@oldster:
Yeah, probably a blog plugin that uses the Twitter API. Everything that had free access to the API was cut off, and the prices for paid access were raised to exorbitant levels.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Betty Cracker:
Maybe we should run Jimmy Buffett as a candidate for governor in Fla.
From Wiki:
bbleh
As to quiet vs. overt, hmm — I’ll ask for the remote control and change the channel on any TV at the gym that’s showing Fox, how’s that?
MomSense
I would argue that everything is political. If we go back to the ancient meaning of the word it’s the relationship between the city/state and the household.
sab
@H.E.Wolf: Thank you so much for this. Ohio normies still don’t realize what is at stake.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Jerzy Russian:
Doesn’t everyone?
I gave extra credit for vulgarity etymologies.
Lacuna Synecdoche
WaterGirl @ Top:
I, uh…I post on political blogs.
Hmm, maybe I should do more?
Also, too, I vote.
Frankensteinbeck
@CaseyL:
Sure, but in my own studies of history, that’s almost a constant. The only times the world hasn’t been radically changing are too far back for us to see the changes that felt world-rocking to those who lived through them. 1980 to now? Huge political and cultural shifts. 1950-1970? Ditto. The first 30 years of the 1900s held a world war, a brutal pandemic with people reacting much the same as Covid, the Sexual Revolution*, Prohibition, and the start of the Great Depression just in America.
*Those happen a lot.
Redshift
For the last day of Pride, I was at a fundraiser for several of our school board candidates. I hadn’t realized that if they win (very likely in our very Democratic county), a third of our school board will be LGBTQ+! That’s a pretty awesome in-your-face to the bigots who’ve been harassing school boards (including ours) for the past several years.
Mo MacArbie
By the swear word standard, the best dictionary I saw was the Scrabble one. No definitions, though I still learned from there that the past tense was “shat”.
Percysowner
As an advice column junkie, I consciously work to use “they” when posting replies on all posts. Actually I try to use that whenever I post, it’s just that advice columns are the place where it is most necessary. I also argue for the use of they/them in the face of people who claim they honestly believe that grammar has feelings and we are insulting grammar when we “misuse” it to be inclusive. I sometimes use Shakespearean idioms to explain that, no language is not constant but does change. It’s not a big rebellion, but it’s something.
Kathleen
@H.E.Wolf: I did wrote postcards at Hamilton County Democratic HQ on Friday and plan to go back this Friday. Thank you so much for your efforts! Our next project is the November election! ETA Also donated money for stamps!
BC in Illinois
@Jerzy Russian:
I don’t know what started it, but my father once stated the rule that “if the dictionary says it’s usually offensive, then it’s ALWAYS offensive.” He then had me test it [I’m pretty sure it was a Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary]:
Look up _____.
Now _____.
Okay, now _____.
Now _____.
They were mostly national/ethnic slurs ( including some he had learned from the British during WW II ). All of them “usually offensive.” All of them always offensive.
My mother put an end to the exercise. [“JOSEPH!!!”]
Baud
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
Oh, that’s good to hear. For some reason, I thought he was one of those aging rockers that went wingnut.
Anyway
@H.E.Wolf:
How do we do this? Is there a fund somewhere?
Betty Cracker
@Lacuna Synecdoche: If Buffet were 20 years younger and the kind of guy who would want that crappy job, he’d be perfect because he does symbolize the laid-back image the state used to have, which, along with the lack of snow and ice and the long coastline, was once part of the appeal.
To hear DeSantis tell it, people are moving here in crushing numbers to live under his pinch-faced, tight-assed brand of authoritarianism, but of course that’s 100% bullshit. The state’s population has damn near tripled in my lifetime, and I’m older than DeSantis.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: Entropy is literally just “there’s more ways to be fucked-up than to be organized.” That’s always true in any era and it’s the statistical fact behind the physics definition and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s not a force actively driving things toward the fucked-up states; there are just more of them, so we get there if we don’t actively try to be different.
I think what we’re seeing in the United States and globally is specifically a backlash against the effort to give marginalized people a little more. The backlash is happening because the backlashers correctly perceive a threat to their privilege that was not there before. 40 years ago, transphobia, for instance, wasn’t a major element of a political party platform because it was a normal thing almost everyone just accepted. Conservatives are correct when they call this a massive change. They’re just on the wrong side.
I don’t think it’s any grand physical force.
the pollyanna from hell
In Chattooga county all my rebellions are very quiet. In Methodist sunday school I argued that inflation is not a big problem.
narya
Thanks to you all here, I started writing postcards for Judge Janet, and I’m gonna do some for the Ohio thing, too. I vote–I’ll very rarely skip even a local race or primary (I live in a very blue precinct, in a very blue part of a very blue city in a pretty blue state, so . . . some of these truly do not matter much). I started wearing more pride stuff this year–a friend who does a lot of educating medical professionals about LGBTQ health care tells a story of a patient who came out to their provider because the provider was wearing a rainbow pin. It’s a small thing, but it may help someone know it’s a safer space for them. And I continue to find ways to push back verbally when I can. There’s probably more, but that’s all I want to say here/now.
zhena gogolia
Surprised no one has mentioned Penzeys Spices. Bill Penzey’s newsletter is a must-read. And the spices are FANTASTIC.
https://www.penzeys.com/
Jackie
@Dorothy A. Winsor: That’s AWESOME!!!
Jeffro
My acts of resistance:
And that’s just the stuff I try to do on an ongoing basis. I do all the usual campaign stuff (donations, door knocking, etc) in the months leading up to elections like you guys do. =)
Betty, I saw your note about bumper stickers, but as you alluded to re: broken car windows, I’d rather not be a target. Way too much downside for too little benefit.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: I like your style! Glad they didn’t key your car or smash the windows.
I hope you have a stash of these: “No really, he lost, and you’re in a cult”, because that’s awesome.
Early on in 2007 when no one else believed Obama could win, I bought Obama buttons by the hundreds, and I always carried some with me to give away. I would start up conversations in elevators, in line at the grocery store, everywhere. When I got close to running out, I would buy another hundred.
WaterGirl
@Kristine: Ugh!
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin: It is a grand physical force in the sense that the bigger things are, the more complex they are; the more complex they are, the more likely they will fall apart.
Yes, there are people who don’t want a more inclusive culture, who are actively working to keep marginalized communities marginalized. But to me, the question is, why are they being amplified? What processes are amplifying them?
You can say, because the MSM has been taken over by rentiers whose own wealth is wedded to promoting fascism.
OK, but how did that happen?
And then you get into the problem with entropy. Laws, policies, and economies of scale all resulted in consolidation of media into a handful of companies all run by oligarchs and oligarch-wanna bes. Including Twitter.
Mastodon has avoided this by using a non-centralized federated structure – which has been targeted by the likes of Meta, which is setting up its own instance, but one that will be a rentier parasite.
(This is part of it, too: the big companies are black holes, always needing more markets, more sources of revenue. They will continue to engulf whatever they can, wherever they can, to feed their bottomless need for revenue.)
Another aspect of conglomeration is the hollowing out of local economies. And when local economies are hollowed out, the people in them get poorer. Poorer people are less generous in all ways: they are constricted, they’re scared and angry, and their one overriding motivation is to hold onto what little they have.
So you have giant economic cancers devouring entire cities and states, tossing the people living there into the trash bin, and then moving on when they’ve sucked everything dry. Nothing stops them: they’re driven by portfolio managers, stockholders, and politicians who want their donations. No one cares about the local impact of what they do, because no one lives in the places they desolate.
They are both mindless and hive-mind. They are entropy embodied.
WaterGirl
@bbleh: I believe that everything helps.
WaterGirl
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
We can never go wrong by doing more.
Jinchi
Do Elon groupies still talk nonsense about paying him $8 a month because they support free speech?
Jinchi
@Betty Cracker: Is Florida really so humid that you can easily peel a bumper sticker off a stramgers car?
Come to think of it: that, plus a stack of your “cult” stickers, could make for a great prank at the Villages.
Jackie
Heh! Speaking of rebelling:
“Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.”
https://www.rawstory.com/google-twitter/
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
Hell, 15 years ago. 10 years ago. I’ve said before because it’s important context: They’re attempting to legislate now what mainstream culture used to enforce for them.
dnfree
@CaseyL: Entropy as used in physics doesn’t necessarily translate well to history or political science. The anti-evolution-theory Christians try to use entropy to “prove” that evolution couldn’t happen, but as is frequently pointed out, entropy only applies to closed systems (no external energy coming in), and the earth is not a closed system. Neither is politics.
I agree with much of your point, though. I was raised to think that monotheism is “superior” to polytheism, but eventually I asked myself why that would be the case. Look around; does this place look like it’s run by a single deity? Far from it; a bunch of quarreling deities struggling for power among themselves and paying little attention to humans makes more sense.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Thanks for clearing up that entropy is not a force. People using scientific terms with a specific meaning (and a mathematical definition) to mean whatever it is that they want is a pet peeve of mine.
I also agree with your backlash theory. True about India as well as as here
@CaseyL:
Nope Matt M is right, entropy is not a force. Force in physics means something pretty specific.
Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system.
H.E.Wolf
@sab:
@Kathleen:
There are a lot of us out here writing for our neighbors… and some of those neighbors live in faraway states!
It’s a small, concrete action, and it boosts my spirits to be doing it.
H.E.Wolf
@narya:
Thank you for what you’re doing, in both instances. I firmly believe that it makes a difference for the better.
PaulWartenberg
I am quietly – as a librarian after all – defending gay YA fiction from the anti-Christian right. Although I do wish the book banners would go after science fiction novels so I can actually enjoy what I have to read and review (after the third straight teen romance book, I can’t take any more!!!).
laura
My personal act of resistance- I’ve been attending City College taking art classes since retirement. Turning Point USA has a table in the quad every so often to recruit the Yutes of Today into their version of fascism. So I bought a big ass poster board and wrote these fuckers are nazis with a big directional arrow and I’d go and sit silently next to them until they folded up their table and scuttled off to wherever. They HATE IT- just absolutely so very bugged because I do not engage, I just sit right there calling them out. Not gonna lie, my knees may be knocking, but do it I must because fucking nazi’s in my face.
schrodingers_cat
Acts of resistance
H.E.Wolf
My mom donates them to me. :-)
Maybe ask around in your circle of acquaintances to find out if anyone’s writing cards and would like some stamps? It’s a great way to provide support!
Kathleen
@H.E.Wolf: I told the people at HQ on Friday that you were writing postcards and they were impressed and surprised that out of state people can also help!
One other thing I’m doing is working to focus on what I can do and not allow myself to give my power and energy to these evil forces. I’m tired of living in fear of them. My fear feeds them.
H.E.Wolf
@schrodingers_cat:
Thank you; thank you; thank you.
Many of my family are/were naturalized citizens, and some of them served in local politics, so your story has extra resonance for me.
Montanareddog
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
An activity as sold as dictionaries:
H.E.Wolf
@laura:
I salute your courage and your integrity!
Roberto el oso
@dnfree: regarding the relative superiority/inferiority of polytheism to monotheism. I had a Jesuit instructor (8th-9th grades, taught world history), who would often have us discuss or write essays on what he liked to call ‘saboteur’ topics. One of these was whether monotheism might actually be a failure of cultural imagination, as compared to polytheism. He regularly implied that the cult of the saints as intercessors in Roman Catholicism was very much an attempt to fill the void presented by a single deity. I’m pretty sure his own faith was secure, but I’ve sometimes wondered how many of his students were hastened along on the road to happy apostasy by his cleverness.
H.E.Wolf
Quoted for truth. Thank you for the reminder.
CaseyL
@H.E.Wolf:
Postcards are definitely a spirit lifter! And one of the candidates I did cards for won a close election, so I was able to feel like I’d made an impact, which was great.
Montanareddog
@Montanareddog:
*An activity as old as dictionaries:
Doh!
CaseyL
@dnfree: Well, one argument for monotheism is you waste a lot less time, food, and everything else because you don’t have to pray and sacrifice to multiple gods anymore :)
I sort of intellectually understand why humans invented gods in the first place (vestigial herd instinct for the authoritarianism, and answers to questions that were otherwise unavailable).
I don’t understand why belief in gods/God has persisted. It seems to me to be an adaptation that has not only long outlived its usefulness, but is actively destructive.
SuzieC
@H.E.Wolf: Currently writing Vote Forward letters to targeted young female voters to defeat Ohio’s right-wing Issue 1.
Ivan X
@laura: This is more than just resistance, it is bravery. Heroic!
WaterGirl
@laura: You are my hero!
Jay
@CaseyL:
Statistically, poorer people are 50X more generous than the comfortable and the wealthy.
What happens when a community becomes impoverished, is that the poor become more generous, the comfortable and the wealthy become meaner and hoard more.
H.E.Wolf
@CaseyL:”Postcards are definitely a spirit lifter!”
So true, O collaboratrice par excellence! :-)
WaterGirl
@Ivan X: I see that you and I had the same reaction to reading about laura’s actions!
H.E.Wolf
Wow! This is a brilliant GOTV tactic!
Jay
@laura:
Thirded, you are a hero.
Shana
@Baud: There was an article in the New Yorker recently about Margaritaville a Florida retirement community that sounded like a liberal answer to The Villages. Yes it’s Jimmy Buffet affiliated
Redshift
@Jackie:
It’s really just applying the standard rules. Open-access content gets ranked higher in search than content requiring a login or a subscription, because it would be really annoying to google for something and have to page through results to find something you can actually read.
Cheryl from Maryland
As the Steward of two Little Free Libraries, I have multiple banned books in the libraries I oversee. I also have bottles of blow bubbles, coloring books and crayons.
laura
@Jay: thanks all- I dont feel like a hero, I am obliged to act in a manner that makes clear which side I am on to myself and to my community. Silence = complicity. Should I be asked what I did when the monsters showed up on my main street, I called the motherfuckers out every single chance.
Subsole
@Layer8Problem:
And yet, somehow, I would bet a hundo that I don’t even have that he is painfully aware.
Man’s way too arrogant to actually be confident.
Subsole
@bbleh:
Believe it or not, that can actually help.
I don’t think people realize just how thoroughly folks in the Deep Red just…marinate in that shit.
Once heard it described thusly:
“Conservatives have decided to be brains floating in a warm bath of propaganda.”
Eunicecycle
@laura: OMG I love this!
Subsole
@Jinchi: No. They just mock everyone who doesn’t as being too poor to afford it.
Subsole
@Frankensteinbeck:
That’s a really good way to put it.
I mean, John Roberts is basically nothing more than “the asshole who brought back Jim Crow”.
That’s all he is. That’s all his party is. “The assholes who brought back Jim Crow.”
catclub
@bbleh:
isn’t it possible to make any smartphone a TV remote?
TV Remote – Universal Control on the App Store
catclub
@Subsole:
assumes brains not in evidence
catclub
shouldn;t BJ rebellion involve pants or lack thereof?
Scout211
Apologies if this has been posted already. An example of overtly fighting back. Out loud.
Activists spurred by affirmative action ruling challenge legacy admissions at Harvard
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Yes! I have been hoping/waiting for a bunch of someones to do this!
Elizabelle
@CaseyL: You’ve made some really good points.
Bill Arnold
@Betty Cracker:
My first car (of 5+) to ever have been keyed was my current hatchback Toyota Prius C. Wingnuts are often quite nasty people driven by deeply held delusional beliefs.
Wingnuts make me tempted put out some wingnut bait, catch them in the act, with at the very least video and a police report.
Bill Arnold
@Kristine:
They deleted that, and replaced it with this. Twitter embed so everyone can see the text:
There’s basically no way to prevent people from using information gathered from crawling the web, including a specific site, in whatever ways they chose. If there are obvious copyright violations, they can be pursued. A site policy saying otherwise would be sooth some people but it would almost entirely lack enforce-ability.