Don’t DIY your IUD while getting a DUI or you might become an IED.

There’s a reason they quit teaching “John Brown’s Guide to Protest Etiquette” in schools and told us peacefully standing on the side of the road for an hour (after securing all the necessary permits) and cooperating with all directives from law enforcement is how Americans “make themselves heard”. They hear us, and they know they don’t have to listen.

There are, and like any social/political group it’s not a monolith but has plenty of various subsections that would broadly be called “anarchist” but aren’t themselves all in agreement (and at times accuse others of not being “real” anarchists). This watered down meme is just [insert political group here] Utopianism jingoism. Of course people tend to help each other that are like them, leftists tend to be more likely to help outside their tribal communities, but the extent to how much they help and under what circumstances is not blind enabling. If I see a person drowning I’m not going to ask who they voted for before helping. If I see some Trumper with a flat tire… fix it yourself, asshole.

Reconstruction was not mishandled, it went down exactly how the wealthy and those in power wanted it to. It set the standard for how those with means respond to crisis, buy low, sell high, stoke animosity for “others” among your voting base as if they are the source of their woes. The Gilded Age and Yellow Journalism came on the heels of the Civil War for a reason. Accountability for war would have been long, tedious, and if done legally would have fizzled because most people have lives that need attended to. By the time Davis or Lee was tried, appealed, retried, and hung most Americans would have moved on and barely read about it in the paper, their bloodlust simmered.

The technology may have changed but we are in the same loop. A substantial portion of the population has achieved social progress over the decades and either wants to push further, prevent regression, or see what they gained actualized. Wishing the Confederacy had been punished is an exercise in modern wishful thinking, pretending like if just one or two things were done differently we wouldn’t be where we are today. But I doubt it would look much different if we had hung leadership, or what, mass executed every soldier who wore a grey uniform?

And now that point is moot, they’re all dead, the shoulda/coulda/woulda of revenge is meaningless. If we want to break this cycle of crisis-elite power grab-discontent-blame your neighbor who is not like you, the source is not in just holding accountable the ones who become the faces of the fight, but all the quieter ones that gamble on both sides and then cash in when one wins without the rest of us noticing they were playing us all. Current leadership is just the metastasized ugliness of a disease that never gets treated. Removing it would only mean we didn’t have to see it in all its hideousness for a while, but it’d still come back with a new face.

Every last leader of the Confederacy could have been hung and we’d be in the same position we are today because Northern elites and power climbing Southerners would have bought up what they could and filled political offices with candidates that promise “vote for me and I’ll do X” but never deliver or “your grievances are with the other guy whose success is a loss you were entitled to”. If we don’t want to end up here again we have to use the lessons of Reconstruction (ie capitalism and it’s handful of elites don’t care about morals/social equity/justice) and get to the root of what makes any fight for progress so difficult and makes backsliding into tribalistic appeals to emotion so easy.

There’s enough distrust and conspiracy theorist in me to question if the whole thing isn’t a good cop/bad cop publicity stunt to attract “conscientious” consumers.

“Hey all you anti-authoritarian, anti-AI, anti-surveillance types, we’re your friend; we’re the un-AI. Now be good idiots and plot your dissent on our service.”