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Orange background with words Weinland Park Festival

Saturday, August 18, 12pm
Weinland Park Elementary School, 211 E. 7th Avenue
Neighborhood Festival for all ages

Fascism is a disease, a delusion, a toxic worldview. It’s encouraged and manipulated by propaganda. Its characteristics are numerous and to various degrees widespread and long-lasting. At what point their combination in sufficiently extreme degree rises to the level of fascism, as opposed to moderately fascistic tendencies I’m happy to leave to others to decide.

Fascism is not a tendency born into subhuman monsters who threaten the purity of our anti-fascist homeland, as one might suspect when reading posters like “The only good fascist is a dead fascist” at anti-fascist rallies.

Fascism is not easily eliminated and not best eliminated by simply any random opposition to it, even opposition that much resembles it. Eliminating fascism and how best to do it is a reasonable topic of discussion which necessarily involves opposing some tactics as less effective than others. This means that it is possible to oppose an anti-fascist act without being a fascist — although not without getting called a fascist.

Fascism is a disease, a delusion, a toxic worldview. It’s encouraged and manipulated by propaganda. Its characteristics are numerous and to various degrees widespread and long-lasting. At what point their combination in sufficiently extreme degree rises to the level of fascism, as opposed to moderately fascistic tendencies I’m happy to leave to others to decide.

Fascism is not a tendency born into subhuman monsters who threaten the purity of our anti-fascist homeland, as one might suspect when reading posters like “The only good fascist is a dead fascist” at anti-fascist rallies.

Fascism is not easily eliminated and not best eliminated by simply any random opposition to it, even opposition that much resembles it. Eliminating fascism and how best to do it is a reasonable topic of discussion which necessarily involves opposing some tactics as less effective than others. This means that it is possible to oppose an anti-fascist act without being a fascist — although not without getting called a fascist.

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN

Ilhan Omar is the second person this year to win a Democratic Party nomination for Congress in a Democratic Party district with a platform advocating peace in a way not seen inside the Beltway. The first was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City, whose advocacy for peace I wrote about. Ilhan Omar has just won the nomination from Minnesota’s Fifth District.

“He owned the gun legally and had a concealed carry permit.”

That matters?

In an otherwise neutral and informative article, this reads like a bit of legal fetishism. Another human being is dead, oh so needlessly and pointlessly, thanks to a moment of lethally armed anger in a convenience store parking lot in Clearwater, Florida last month. But the killer’s weapon was bureaucratically correct: clean as a whistle.

This is more than merely irrelevant. There’s something wrong here that our legal system is, apparently, incapable of addressing.

John James Audubon loved to paint birds...and shoot them.

 

Charles Darwin described the natural world…while blasting away at it. ("I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds. How well I remember killing my first snipe, and my excitement was so great that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands," he wrote.)

 

Theodore Roosevelt founded the National Wildlife Refuge program...while killing rhinos, hippos, elephants, lions and leopards.

 

Some say we are approaching a "me too" moment in which public figures' love of animal violence will be no different than their abusing a partner or committing rape. It will no longer be ignored or condoned as "boys will be boys."

 

White man with white hair facing a group of young women sitting in chairs facing him, with a white paper on a tripod

An issue might be burning through the community. Friends and colleagues might always be talking about a nagging issue. A problem or grievance that might have seemed personal turns out to be shared by many who want a vehicle to demand justice and win change. Whatever triggers the drive to build an organization dedicated to building power and achieving change, if is worth doing, it is important to keep alive, and that means that sustainability always matters.

Sustainability in organizing is a euphemism for self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency requires organizational control of financing.

There are two sources of organizational funding. One is external funding and the other is internal financing. Sustainability privileges either source if it is driven and determined by the organization itself.

“What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (ie, destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in mere seconds”

“An irradiated crucifix lies in the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral Following the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki”

 

73 years ago (August 9, 1945) an all-Christian bomber crew dropped a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki City, Japan, instantly vaporizing, incinerating or otherwise annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionately large number of them Japanese Christians. The explosion mortally wounded uncountable thousands of other victims who succumbed to the blast, the intense heat and/or the radiation.

 

Two people on their faces on the ground behind a chainlink fence

Privatized detention and incarceration centers are hell on earth--and they are big business for private companies. Ending private detention is a way to start ending detention - period.

Between 2014 and 2018, the Office of Refugee Resettlement paid private companies $3.4 billion to house migrant children. Further, 44 percent of those companies face serious, well documented reports and allegations of child maltreatment.

In these centers children suffer from:

  • Forced administration of psychotropic drugs
  • Jail-like conditions with armed officers
  • Physical abuse, sexual abuse and even death

Sign this petition to demand Congress end privatizing detention and incarceration now!

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