Felon Trump has been using “common sense” as a way to avoid spelling out his racist logic. I could talk ten minutes on that, but I won’t.

Instead I want to lay some heartland common sense on the Republican party. Here’s a little nugget that we all understand at some instinctual level.

If the law does not apply to all, it is not justice, it is oppression.

If you are playing poker with someone and they start looking through the deck to pull out the card they need, you are not in a card game any more, you’re in a fist fight.

Common sense.

You can’t ignore the rules and expect others to follow them.

Republicans, when you elected felon Trump, you changed the rules. There could not have been any clearer message that the law was for others, not you.

Back when the Republican party had some intestinal fortitude, back when they had two ideals to rub together, before they sold out completely, they were fond of saying “actions have consequences” and they were right.

Common sense.

Today, we call that FAFO. F-ed around and found out. Different name, still common sense.

So let me tell you what my common sense tells you, the Republican party, to expect.

When you changed the law from justice into oppression, you made the American people an oppressed people. History and common sense tells us that oppressed people fight back.

Your actions, Republicans, changed breaking the law from an injustice into an act of rebellion against an oppressor. This knowledge is instinctual. Not everyone will be able to express it, but every oppressed person feels it.

Some Americans will act out through civil disobedience as great people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King have done. You’re familiar with that and probably expecting it. So I won’t say much about it.

Instead I’ll mention things you might not be expecting, but should be.

Some Americans will fight back through economic means. Inside Corporations you can expect work slowdowns, reductions in efficiency, general friction. Outside the corporations, you can expect American consumers to be very careful about what businesses they support.

You thought “cancel culture” was bad, just wait. People will eventually follow the money and realize that they can assert their power to stop feeding the broligarchs.

Not everyone is so polite, though. Other Americans are going to start fighting back in more physical ways.

Expect some to fight back by breaking rich people’s stuff. I would not be surprised to start seeing country club greens torn up by big trucks. To see vandalism at resorts and high-end restaurants. Eventually we’ll see sabotage of yachts and private aircraft, damage or blockage of roads in affluent areas. Any symbol of wealth and status will be a target. If I owned a swastikar I would be VERY careful where I parked it.

Eventually there will be more violence against the rich. You, Republicans, are the main reason we have more guns than people in this country. The main reason we have police that look and act like military units. The main reason that we have an absurdly high military budget. What did Jesus say about living by the sword?

Oppressed people find ways of fighting back. It is the “Found out” part of FAFO. It follows naturally. Common sense.

Republicans, in November of 2024 you changed crime into a patriotic act. You made heroes of armed insurrectionists. You made a hero of a felon and sex offender. You chose to steer our country off of the path the forefathers set us on of order and rule of law. We are on a different path now, but by no means a new one. It is the path you CHOSE with your actions.

Actions have consequences.

If the law does not apply to everyone it is no longer justice, it is oppression.

Oppressed people fight back however they can.

Common sense.

#uspol #GOP

Journey Jovial is the next step on the personal A-Z Ethical Revolution.
ethicalrevolution.co.uk/journe…

A big part of Sam's advice here is not to get overwhelmed and anxious by the barrage of negative news. This advice wasn't timed for this particular point in time, but it couldn't be more apt. Indeed, I have been memorized by the train wreck of Trump's first weeks in office, and actually, I feel it's right not to look away. Nor to look away from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, or the war in Congo that is affecting families of people I know. On the other hand, it's true - I am suffering from information overload spending so much time on the computer reading stuff.

Sam's advice is get news from trusted sources - he suggests a few- and don't feel like you have to keep up with it everyday.

The primary source he suggests is The Conversation, in which journalists work with academic experts to produce a variety of articles on current events and developments in many fields. It is good...but let's see, I'm already getting daily to weekly newsletters from several sources, adding another might be counterproductive to the intent of this step?

I do daily peruse the headlines from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:C… as a RSS feed; it's very succinct, but alerts me to events happening in parts of the world I might not otherwise hear about.

In addition, I get a daily newsletter of local news from 'Town and County', a feed of mainly environmental Canadian news from The Narwhal (several articles a week, but I usually only look at the first paragraph), a weekly newsletter from Global Voices, and Good Sunday Morning, a weekly letter from Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May which is always very interesting. Now I've added a twice weekly digest from the Conversation Global. Then there's a couple weekly and various other sporadic newsletters related to my profession. Too much?

I'm tempering this by reminding myself I don't need to keep up with all the internet news on a daily basis, or keep checking them every hour as I am wont to do. I have them going to a feed reader (Inoreader) rather than cluttering up my email.

And then there's my two print hardcopy newsmagazines (one leftleaning but mainstream, one more radical) that I subscribe to, and more to the point, actually read - I'm proud of that. And once in awhile I listen to the Canada Broadcasting Corp. news on the radio

I realized I've got my news sources corralled quite well; the real problem for me is social media, even though I have been very selective with my social media sources including this lovely Friendica instance, it is an endless source of stimulation that can easily become too much, and this is where I really need to be more selective with my time. At least leave it until the end of the day.

How do you get your news and how do you feel about it?

I messed up with my previous Google Photos export and ended up with duplicate photos and garbage photos (screenshots, memes, etc) when all I want are my photos. This mess was already in my Hetzner-hosted Storage Share / Nextcloud and fixing this over the internet is tedious.

So, I thought I'd just re-request the archive again from Takeout, but I neglected to set the file piece size higher than 2GB. So, I could click through 220 individual download links, or I could request one more time with 50 GB file size.

I thought "I can script this. 220 files is fine."

I didn't consider how Google authenticates in ways that make downloading with curl more than a little bit of a pain in the ass. Rather than throw good time after bad, I just re-requested with 50GB chunks. Then a bit of local cleanup and re-upload the old files to Nextcloud.

I stopped sending photos to Google in April 2024, so there's no overlap between Google and my Nextcloud / Flickr archive. Cleaning up the files before April on Nextcloud should be straightforward. Once this is finally done, I should be able to stop paying Google for the extended storage space.

I moved my primary email over to fastmail around April as well, managed to get the foo.ca domain dns records properly setup for email there as well. It's super easy now to use any alias when sending email - something Google didn't really allow for.