woodenghost

In addition to the advice about a group, like if you don't have a group try to join one and talk to them and so on: In the meantime think about your limits and needs for yourself. It's okay to feel overwhelmed and you don't have to be able to deal with the stress in a certain way. You can still contribute meaningfully, if you know your triggers and are mindful of them. Decide beforehand, what to do if a situation is too much, like getting out or getting some distance or trying calming exercises.

Edit: You might even decide not to go to a protest, if police presence is too high and that's okay too. You can still connect to people and help organize or render support.

Also talk to them beforehand about what you will do in specific situations, like if the police attack or threaten arrest or if it just feels like to much for you. Decide where to meet if you're split up. You could have three meeting places for the start, middle and end of the route of the protest.

And within your group, you could have pairs or triplets of people who agree to stay together no matter what. Within these, the member least willing to engage further in an action or protest should determine when to leave with no shame or questions asked.

And talk to people afterwards too to debrief. This whole concept is called an affinity group.

They all end with "In conclusion..."

No, but I'm not sure, it would help. I'd really like to dns block made-for-advertising sites. They have exploded because of AI. One would need to create an index of them like there already are for ads, pornography and gambling. I'm talking about the blogs full of long AI articles and pictures on every conceivable obscure topic.

Wow, I hadn't realized it's gotten so bad. I use duckduckgo and just tried it. I also got some of these. A little fewer though.

Yes and also, nuclear power is really expensive. No one would ever invest in it without state help. No one insures it. The cost per watt is way to high and set to rise further with depleting uranium deposits. And much much higher, if it was mined in a slightly less destructive and exploitive way. Higher still if security precautions were forced to be up to date. Incredibly high, if waste was properly taken care of and the costs included in the calculation.

Nuclear power was never profitable. The only reason it ever gets founded is because governments are motivated by the urge to amass more and more deadly nuclear weapons. Or keep that option open. Or to feed the industrial complex that grew around that.

It's the most roundaboud, stupid and primitive way to go about creating electricity to collect rare ultra poisonous, slightly warm rocks, throw enough of them into water until it boils and push that through something similar to a steam engine. All the technology around it is just to keep the rocks from poisoning us too quickly.

Compare that to all the genuine novel research that goes into solar and batteries. The advanced materials like complex semi conductor alloys. The clever techniques using the latest in quantum and nano technology. How they squeeze every bit of efficiency out of remotely collecting energy from the nuclear fusion in the sun, that's already going on for free and at a save distance.

Nuclear energy on earth is superfluous, dangerous and expensive and every month new advancements are made in solar and battery and other genuinely green technologies, that make them even better and cheaper and widen the gap even more. And of course China is investing heavily in both solar and battery research.

Will we finally get an official "welcome on Elbaf" chapter next week? Or are we somehow still on a ship or nearby island?

I got fascist undertones from My Hero Academia and stopped reading long ago. Was I wrong?

Yes, exactly. I completely agree.

Yes, that's definitely a good heuristic, if applied correctly.

All workers can understand that they are being exploited because they experience it, and rising up against the exploitation is a unifying idea.

If only that were true. But not yet. Class consciousness is lacking and structures like racism, sexism, etc. destroy class solidarity not just ideologically but materially. A cis, straight white male worker in the west is privileged in many very real ways, that allow him to profit off less privileged workers.

He profits from unpaid or badly paid reproductive labor and care work from women at home, can boss around racialized people in lower paying positions at work, has an advantage over openly queer people at the labour and housing market, has an material interest in maintaining global imperialism for a steady flow of cheap products and resources to his country and so on.

These are material contradictions in the marxian sense. Calling struggles around them "identity politics" can be problematic, because it implies, that they are only ideological rather than material.

Furthermore, they are structural. Sexism is needed in capitalism for reproductive labor. Racism for colonialism and imperialism.

So they have to be addressed along side the contradiction between socialized labor and privatized profits. Not just as an afterthought. That requires self criticism and giving up privileges. One can't do that by dismissing struggles that don't immediately concern oneself or saying:"Wait your turn, the main contradiction comes first".

people end up being laser focused on their particular cause and see anybody championing a different cause as competition.

Yes, I agree, that we shouldn't see these fights as separate or competing, but need to support all of them at once to unite them.

All in all the problem you describe is real, but not new, only it's real name is not "identity politics" but opportunism. And that's not foreign to labor struggles either. E.g. there are plenty of opportunistic unions.

I just checked, Polaris is about ten times younger than sharks. The other two stars of its ternary star system are older, but not visible to the naked eye, so early sharks would not have been able to use them for purposes of navigation.

Yes, class solidarity and class consciousness are necessary for revolution. But criticism of "identity politics" can serve reactionary purposes too and we have to be weary of it.

The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

These are precisely the things, the ruling class uses to split the working class. Organizing against them is class solidarity. Denouncing genuine class solidarity as mere "identity politics" can be reactionary and it happened before, parties have split over it. E.g. trotzkists in Ireland (and all of Europe) split over queer rights, the feminist movement split over trans rights, anarchists in the Spanish civil war weakend themselves by excluding women from active battle to gain back international support that never came.

On the other hand, movements acting in solidarity but without class consciousness wield a blunt weapon and are therefore deemed "acceptable leftists" by the ruling class. They even go against class solidarity, when they opportunistically exclude or distance themselves from class struggle and revolutionary action. That's of course, what Parenti has been saying all along.