That's the thing, half of all plastics in existence have been made since about 2000. They've just displaced everything else that we used to use in packaging, and lots more.
One of the biggest sources is clothing made of polyester. Fibers come off each time you wash it. Plastic wrapping might be the biggest- everything that is bought retail or wholesale in plastic wrapping is part of this.
It doesn't get chemically broken down, but it does get scraped and ground down into really small pieces, and even the sun causes it to peel and chip and splinter on a micro level.
To note, they do happen to be a splinter from a splinter of a Trotskyist party. It's not determinative, but it is a funny coincidence.
I don't think that "fighting cops", fun and righteous as it may be, accomplishes anything in and of itself. I wouldn't have picked a fight there; what I would have done is a tactical matter that I'd share only on private channels. But I sure as hell wouldn't have turned on the people I went to a demo with.
I won't try to say that everyone should do as I do; I'm specifically arguing for the opposite of that, to have coordination without subordination. It's not one single party structure pulling it off, and never was.
My position is that if there's a diverse composition at your rally, and there have been stirrings of confrontation for a while, if you see people getting physically combative against the cops or against property and you act to impair them or to facilitate their arrest by police, you are becoming part and parcel of policing.
This is an ethical matter of "do you turn to the ruling authority to resolve division in your movement". For anyone to call themself a genuine leftist, the answer must be an unambiguous "no".
Iff you feel the need to control people using the tide of law enforcement rather than denouncing them or dissociating from them, you show that you're not only unfit for allying with, on top of this you've got more in common with the forces of repression than the forces of liberation.
Leaving aside how no plan survives first contact, the whole point of organizing is to be transformative. If you are trying to change the world, you leave room for adaptation and change in your own movement. The majority of what becomes possible is not something you can rigidly or linearly plan for beforehand.
The Left in America has largely been "following the plan" for 100 years; the FBI reads their plan and runs circles around them.
When the plan is obviously going nowhere, what do you do? More of the same?
A person being violent is not forcing everyone in the vicinity to be violent.
A "protest marshal" corraling someone for the police is an attempt to force them to be nonviolent.
Do you understand the difference here in terms of autonomy and coercion?
You probably have "but the media will smear everyone as being violent" up your sleeve. Sure, that can and will happen. A corollary of this is that they don't even need any real material; cops could send anyone in to throw hands or rocks and invoke the same media treatment on a 100% peaceful protest.
If you don't want to throw bricks and fight cops, no one is interfering to force you to. If the cops attack everyone, that is the fault of the cops, not of the small agitating minority of protestors. You are ceding all ethical judgment to the police.
The stance here is against people who would split their own movement into "good protestors" and "bad protestors" for the sake of optics that will be promptly ignored or discarded. The subtext of what you are saying is that there was a tacit agreement with the authorities not to escalate- an admission and commitment to impotence. What's the point of protesting the DNC at all if you're just going to follow a script that you know will just be ignored because it's played out a thousand times already?
Throwing burning things into the Third Precinct was inadvisable too, but it worked. Leaving room for people to protest in their own way is how you sustain the life of a protest movement, instead of strangling it.
We celebrate Palestinians who throw rocks at Israeli tanks, for not accepting the premise that disproportionate revenge is "the adversary's hand being forced (by the less powerful)". We shouldn't conceptually exclude this attitude from the imperial core.
@SxarletRed@twitter.com is the kind of person who would have taken down the tents and moved them off the quad in compliance with campus police, for the sake of "keeping activists safe".
Fighting the police in a position they've got extremely well-fortified is silly, but turning on anyone who wants to do that is ten times worse.
"Nooooooo you're ruining my designated pressure outlet where I get a feeling of catharsis from doing something purely performative! How dare you give people a practical introduction to escalation, that wasn't in the plan!"
It may be the case that the police had the complete ability to secure the building against anything short of the whole city stampeding.
But still, miss me with that "good-protester-bad-protester" :LIB: shit. Too amped up on respectability and the illusion of "free speech changing the course of history" to allow for their conflict to actually take form, to the point where they will turn their opposition inward on their own movement.
It's like we learned nothing from the past few years of history. Does the phrase "diversity of tactics" mean nothing to you?
"Oh but there were children there" yeah I'm really fucking glad that there is a universal standard, where cops and the IDF never conduct violence within a 200-meter proximity of a minor.
I will not condemn Hamas.
I will also not condemn the demonstrators trying to fight cops.
@infuziSporg
@hexbear.net