cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41265204

I strongly suggest if you work for a company and you have the option to join a union please do! If the company you work for is non-union consider being a leader and push for unionization.

The dues may be small but they make a big difference for worker's rights and are worth it. You have people dedicated to fighting for your pay and your rights and rights of all workers.

Also part of the reason Democrats are not winning as much is because Unions used to support them, now there is less funding.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/41348159

European NATO leaders have issued a joint statement that "Greenland belongs to its people" and it is for the Arctic island and Denmark only to decide on its future, after President Donald Trump's administration reiterated its wish to take control of it.

The statement said that NATO and its allies had increased its activities and investment to make the Arctic a safe place and that Denmark and Greenland were part of that alliance.

South Africa gets "Literally 1983" status because of the ongoing white genocide there. It's basically reverse apartheid! /s

TL;DR: Mozilla has a new CEO and a new mission: transform Firefox into an AI browser. That has run into some snags, as Firefox users don’t seem that interested in AI. Mozilla is forging ahead, utilizing deceptive patterns (previously known as dark patterns) to nag and annoy people into enabling AI features. You can see this in the introduction of Link Previews, an extremely invasive anti-feature that exists solely to push AI into your experience.

Donald Trump has said Venezuela will be “turning over” 30 to 50m barrels of sanctioned oil to the US, as the South American country seeks to avoid deep cuts in output amid an ongoing blockade on exports imposed by Washington since mid-December.

“This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” Trump said in a post online.

Venezuela has millions of barrels of oil loaded on tankers and in storage tanks that it has been unable to ship due to the blockade imposed by Trump, as part of the pressure campaign that culminated in the toppling of Nicolás Maduro who was seized from his country by US forces over the weekend.

“I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately,” Trump said, adding that the oil would be “taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States.”

Terms and conditions for joining the polycule:

All applicants must able praise and insult Mamdani at the same time. If you cannot do this, practice in your own time until you get it RIGHT.

No stinky people (except owls)

No complaining about Dort_Owl using your toothbrush for art. They are very talented and you will praise their work.

You will not avoid macaroni Fridays I FUCKING KNOW YOU'VE BEEN AVOIDING MY HOMEMADE MACARONI I WORKED HARD ON THAT.

Using the comically large spoon to eat anything but grain during a famine is not allowed. It is not funny to hit other members of the polycule over the head and say "I'm spooning you! Haha!" This is harassment.

No twinks

It me >:3

[As a disclaimer, I put this on c/badposting for a reason. This is a bit. Please don't ban me]

I mined 24 clowns last month. The Hospital Children say they are pleased by my efforts.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7265201

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/17662

Newspaper clipping covering a 1919 rent strike in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

On January 4th, the newly inaugurated socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order directing relevant city agencies to hold “Rental Ripoff**”** hearings across the five boroughs for tenants to voice their grievances. The response on social media was animated, with observers alternately invoking Jonathan Crane (aka Scarecrow)’s municipal tribunals from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and ‘speaking bitterness’ campaigns from the Cultural Revolution. But a much more interesting comparison comes from our own city’s history. ​​

In April of 1919, amid a post-war revolt by New York City’s tenants, Mayor John Hylan launched the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering (MCRP). This was a municipal response to what at that point had been a year and a half of nonstop rent strikes exploding across the city like popcorn kernels on a stovetop. These strikes were organized and spurred on by emergent local tenant unions in nearly every neighborhood, tethered together by a coalescing citywide tenant organization and an activist Socialist Party.

The opening shot of this great rent strike was fired by 300 organized housewives in the Bronx in January 1918, in the context of a citywide coal shortage and a zero-degree winter. The Bronx Tenant League, started a year earlier, blossomed amid the crisis. Soon, thousands of Bronx households were on rent strike, and the Bronx Tenant League assisted efforts to form similar leagues across Harlem, Washington Heights, Williamsburg, and Borough Park. Between 1918 and 1920, over 100,000 New Yorkers went on rent strike. Just as notably, over 25,000 city residents affiliated with local tenant leagues and tenant unions.

The movement’s peak was a mass meeting in March 1920, where nearly 650 delegates—from tenant leagues, labor unions, and mutual aid societies across the city—represented a purported 800,000 renters. The New York Times’ account of this event emphasizes the growing effort to organize renters citywide:

The delegates were exhorted to combine, not as they have been doing, in houses, but in entire blocks and in sections of the city, and to withhold all excess of rents they deem oppressive. It was pointed out that the city could not afford to hire enough marshals to make the wholesale evictions such a movement would call for.

Quoted in the same article, Socialist Alderman Baruch Charney Vladeck gave a rousing speech: “Call it Bolshevism or anarchism…but I call it one of the tenets of real Americanism, when the people of the city get together to better their condition. Organize and instead of the politicians leading you they will follow you.” Vladeck later became one of five founding appointees to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and his name still adorns a twenty-building NYCHA complex in the Lower East Side.

This meeting emerged out of a recent tradition of mass working-class assemblies. The year before the rent strike erupted, an assembly of 2,000 working-class housewives declared a citywide boycott on chickens, fish, and vegetables in response to rising grocery costs. Rent strikes across the city were launched through events of this sort, and neighborhood tenant leagues held rollicking deliberative assemblies where actions and demands were decided by the tenants themselves.

Mayor Hylan’s MCRP, chaired by city Tax Commissioner Nathan Hirsch, had three major functions: 1) provide legal counsel to tenants, 2) convert church and armory spaces to shelter evicted families, and 3) arbitrate disputes between landlords and tenants. Most relevant to today, the MCRP held public hearings throughout 1919, frequently attended by thousands of residents.

Held in courtrooms, libraries, and gymnasiums across the city, these hearings often ran from 8 pm until 1 or 2 in the morning. Tenants testified to unsafe and unsanitary conditions and argued against rent hikes. Landlords who showed up, too nervous to ignore a summons, told their side of the story, and were subject to raucous jeering from an angry proletarian crowd. Things often teetered on the brink of violence. Historian Robert Fogelsong recounts that at one hearing attended by three thousand tenants at Morris High School in the Bronx, a landlord took a swing at the chairman, who ducked and hit him in the chest.

Real estate interests bemoaned the MCRP for tarnishing their image. Even the name, they argued—rent-profiteering—presupposed an undeserved guilt. On the other hand, tenant unionists and socialists bemoaned the MCRP for undercutting proletarian organization. In April 1919, Greater New York Tenants League activist Morris Gisnet wrote that the MCRP was created purely because city officials were “afraid that the tenants [would] join the Socialist Party and the Tenant League.” Echoing Gisnet, MCRP chairman Nathan Hirsch described the circumstances that made the Committee necessary: “Bolshevism, unrest, and anarchy are increasing rapidly because of the activities of these so-called anti-rent societies, and a stop must be put to their work.”

In the end, these hearings were largely toothless. Landlords weren’t required to attend, and rarely did so. Though it mediated disagreements, the MCRP couldn’t formally adjudicate, let alone stop or prevent evictions or rent hikes. One of the only effective tools wielded by the MCRP was the threat to report intransigent landlords to the Department of Taxes, which subjected them to fine-toothed financial scrutiny. The MCRP also launched investigations into tenant activists, with seven leading tenant unionists jailed or sent to workhouses on account of MCRP investigations in the fall of 1919.

By 1921, the carrot and stick of legal reform and repression had greatly diminished both the density and militancy of the New York City tenant movement, and the MCRP had an important role to play in this decline. Historian Jared Day describes how the Committee “modeled the arbitration board and its services after similar arbitration committees offered by the tenant groups.” The MCRP, and unlike tenant-run organizations, “[r]ather than focusing on systemic inequalities in landlord-tenant relations, … used the hearings to showcase and punish ‘bad’ individual landlords.”

The tactic of arbitration, and particularly public arbitration, is identical. But between the citizen-run tenant leagues and the city-run MCRP, the intended outcomes were directly opposed. Organized tenants, armed with particular manifestations of class oppression, organized to generalize the struggle across the city through independent working-class institutions. The MCRP hearings took that simmering class revolt against rent and channeled it into individual grievances.

Through the duplication of the tenant league’s arbitration and public assemblies, the city undermined the basis for their organizational existence. For a brief moment, these tenant leagues were able to marry mass deliberative democracy with consequential control over the means of reproduction. Life-making and decision-making were united through independent working-class organization.

The details on Zohran’s “Rental Ripoff” hearings are, as of yet, few but worth considering:

At these hearings, working New Yorkers will be able to speak about the challenges they face – from poor building conditions to hidden fees on rent payments. Following these hearings, the Mamdani administration will publish a summary and report detailing common themes and areas of opportunity, and the testimony shared at these hearings will directly inform policy interventions to take on these ripoff tactics.

Thankfully, Zohran will not have rabid anti-communists run these hearings, nor will they operate with a mandate to undercut tenant organizing, nor will they take on sidequests to criminalize tenant activists. But they still run a risk of obscuring and individualizing, rather than clarifying and generalizing, conditions of class discontent.

The hearings themselves will serve an advisory function, with the professionals of the administration tasked with interpreting content into actionable policy. This approach reflects the politics of the administration so far: duly listen to the working-class, but leave the actual implementation and decisions up to the experts. The administration, and Zohran in particular, should emphasize two things clearly and repeatedly: 1) that the hearings serve only an advisory capacity; and 2) that the hearings are not replacements or substitutes for organization. As the old tenant unionist adage goes: make every tenant an organizer.

Today’s tenant movement is far weaker than that of 1918-1920. But instead of a cap on radicalism, Zohran’s administration could provide an accelerant—but only if we take advantage of the opportunities given to us. Each “Rental Ripoff” hearing will be an occasion for the most militant and outraged sections of the city’s tenancy to gather together. That is an incredible organizing opportunity.

We should invite our neighbors, our fellow tenant association and tenant union members, to join these hearings with us, and spread the good word that the revolt against rent continues. Equally, we should conduct outreach among the angry, disorganized tenants who do attend to arm them with knowledge and solidarity. We can collectivize the successes and failures of our movement—both its recent history and its deep past. Tenants can link up with organized groups in their neighborhood, and where none exist, start one themselves. Those who are politically motivated can join the Democratic Socialists of America and its Tenant Organizing Working Group.

All of this discontent can and should be channeled into an effort to build wider organization that remains rooted in the day-to-day struggles of the tenants themselves. There is great risk in judging our movement exclusively by the metric of reform—whether or not the rent is frozen, and how effectively Zohran’s administration can translate the grievances of these hearings into policy. We must also assess the socialist movement by the strength of our organization, our roots in the working class, and our ability to wrest genuine democratic control over production and reproduction from capital. The next 4 years, much like 1918-1921, will prove that one does not necessarily flow from the other unless we make it flow.

From The Socialist Tribune via This RSS Feed.

I see this on Imgur and Bluesky as well. Here's a great example, and the one that prompted me to finally ask. My daughter has autism and ADHD. She takes speed to slow down. Best friend is ADHD, same deal. But they're basically "normal" people. I'm truly sorry is this comes off as insensitive.

• It's normal to be aware of how people perceive us. We are apes. Need I elaborate?

• We ALL mess up more when someone is watching. Forget the word, but it's a well-known psychological tic.

• Yes, we all conform and hide parts of ourselves in public, doesn't mean you can't "be yourself". Want to see someone who doesn't mask at all? Trump.

• If you're not aware of threats, Darwin would like a word. And yes, many things we perceive as threats are dumb monkey perceptions. We're all silly in this way.

• Uh, I double check my door locks. Not paranoid, but my situation in America makes that a simple, smart move. Some people live around lots of strangers, checking your private space is a normal thing.

• We all hate being stared at. That's a monkey threat. We evolved that way.

The "suspicious sounds" thing is the only part I'd pick out as a bit strange. But who hasn't jumped when the ice maker kicks in? I've often thought someone crawled in the dog door. (A bear did one time, a hybrid wolf another, so let me slide on that one.)

I can go on /c/autism and pick 100 other memes for examples. Almost every single thing I see there, "Yeah, we all go though that/feel that way/do that thing." Here's one:

https://piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone/posts/6k/Lb/6kLbDigyQuftk4k.jpg

Doesn't everyone do that now and again?! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Serious questions:

• Does lemmy have an above normal number of autistic/ADHD people?

• Is this perception a way for young people to feel special and different?

• Maybe young people don't realize just how fucking weird growing up is and think they have a problem?

• Do people not realize that even after adulthood, we all have weird foibles?

• Are people so socially isolated that they think their weird thoughts are uncommon?

Just want to start the discussion. Help me understand.