50501 General

Protests are well known, and popular. The trouble is, when I look back on the one-off protests I’ve joined over the years, I don’t remember a single one that changed the policy we were protesting against.

In February 2003, I joined millions of others around the world on the eve of US/British war on Iraq. The BBC estimated that a million protested on 15 February in London alone. In the US, unprecedented numbers turned out in 150 cities, according to CBS.

The New York Times said in a front page story that the protest indicated a ‘second global superpower’. I wish. Even while we were in the streets, I realised that the protest wouldn’t prevent the war, because the protest’s leadership wasn’t telling us what we would do next, and that we would escalate after that – how we would take the offensive. The leadership didn’t offer us a campaign.

George W Bush and Tony Blair had a plan to persist. We did not. The peace movement in the US never recovered in the years since, even though the majority shifted and came to agree with us while the war continued. After mounting that one-off protest, and then failing to shift strategy to focus on direct action campaigns, discouragement and inaction accompanied the growing suffering and death in Iraq.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department plans to lay off more than 1,300 of its employees as part of an effort to halve the organization’s staff -- a prelude to President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the agency.

Department officials announced the cuts Tuesday, raising questions about the agency’s ability to continue usual operations.

The Trump administration had already been whittling the agency’s staff, though buyout offers and the termination of probationary employees. After Tuesday’s layoffs, the Education Department’s staff will sit at roughly half of its previous 4,100, the agency said.

The layoffs are part of a dramatic downsizing directed by Trump as he moves to reduce the footprint of the federal government. Thousands of jobs are expected to be cut across the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration and other agencies.

The department is also terminating leases on buildings in cities including New York, Boston, Chicago and Cleveland, officials said.

RFS' mission is to recruit and support diverse, progressive Democrats age 40 and under, running for the first or second time in local and state races. You can learn more about our endorsement criteria here: https://runforsomething.net/run/candidate-endorsement-process/

Public comment period is open until the 17th. You can do so anonymously. The Trump admin has backed down from some fights when enough push back occurred, so don't think this is hopeless. The chance of success is never zero. It's minimal effort, so worth a try even if for no other reason to make them the think about slowing down future attacks

(The ACLU is also suing about this in court too)

Can we get a community for Canada?

Find protests locations and times at the link above. Here are some of their flyers:

And here's another with more words https://www.nalc.org/news/body/Public-flyer.pdf

This was popular in 2017 and 2018, and is even more relevant today.

Keep resisting.

The title of this community is "general". When people do a community search on "50501", it will not show up in the search results. Can we please rename this to "50501" or even "50501 - General"?

https://opdreadnought.com/

Twitter was replaced by this website for a couple of minutes. In the website, it states that it's purpose is to fight the fascism plaguing America, and lists helpful info/resources on protesting, OPSEC, and evil groups assisting with Trump's agenda. It even mentions 50501 and Tesla Takedown within the resources.

https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym

With a likely increase of people here from Reddit, might be helpful to use this to offer a old.50501.chat domain so people have something familiar

See what it looks like on some instances:

https://old.lemmy.world/

https://old.lemmy.zip/

How Hitler used hate to gain power and that its not worth it to fall for hate. Worth a watch, you can even do a movie night on it maybe, its scary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Be_a_Sucker

Videos:

https://spectra.video/w/t4sN6wtVxGox9V8MyK1EzX

https://archive.org/details/dont-be-a-sucker

Response to https://50501.chat/post/12085

I'd say that we should not mirror Reddit comments if our comments will not be mirrored to the subreddit. It will not allow for Lemmy users to give their thoughts on the sub's posts because it would be hard to find Lemmy comments. But afaik, the mirror only saves posts for 15 to 30 days? With that restriction, it might be slightly pointless to not mirror comments.

I would like to be able to cooperate with the people on Reddit, but it might not be a good idea to mirror Lemmy posts/comments either because Reddit might crack down on it. Hoping for screencaps though.

If you wanted to see comments from Reddit, you could go to Reddit directly or use a privacy front-end like Redlib. (If you are gonna use that, I'd recommend the LibRedirect add-on!)

Thank you for this! I've been wanting to contribute to the movement, but Reddit won't let me post with a VPN. :<

Could you put the announcement post back up at Reddit? I don't think many people noticed it, I'd like the Lemmy instance linked in the fiftyfifty.one website too.