ActivistNet
Can you relay messages from activists in other places to activists close to you?
Example: if an antiwar guy at Oregon State needs to get in touch with a antiwar guy at NYU, and you go to NYU, can you help him?
One of the biggest obstacles to setting up national student networks is the lack of communication between campuses.
Cold emailing a stranger 2000 miles away whose address you got off a website doesn't usually result in meaningful connections. But if you knew somebody through a website (*cough LOSE THE LABEL cough) who goes to the same school as that stranger 2000 miles away from you, and they contact the person, you might get further (especially in that odd case that they actually like, real-life-KNOW the person you need to talk to). Relay the message, help other activists communicate, so they can make bigger things happen.
So by joining this group, you're pledging to relay messages from other activists in the group to activists in your area. And in return, those activists will return the favor, should you ever need it.
It's like an activist communication version of "Take a penny, leave a penny."
A Plan
How about this?
We make some amazing t-shirt designs to raise money and put it in a fund for new projects. We then announce an activism entrepreneur contest. People post their ideas on Lose the Label and the community decides which ones to fund. We can promote the contest on Facebook (through notes, and a group we invite a ton of people to), the blogs (I can make some posts announcing it, and maybe we can afford some banner ads), YouTube, Digg and whatever else we can think of.
We could repeat this project a bunch of times and probably expand it, too.
Police Brutality (or, Sometimes the World Makes Me Want to Purge)
So this is probably getting around by now, but I want to post this anyways.
Very recently, a UF student-Andrew Meyer, was arrested and tasered by UF police at a John Kerry speech in Gainesville, FLorida. After having his mic cut, Meyer was dragged from the mic by the police, while yelling "why am I being arrested?!" and "help me!". As the police dragged him from the auditorium, he began to resist the officers (All 5 of them) and so they threw him to the ground and tasered him. I linked two videos below, and you can hear the taser go off, as well as Meyer's screams of pain.
Dig on This
So I just got this e-mail today. I think it poses a good question. What are everyone's thoughts?
"Dear activists, colleagues, and friends,
Well Fox News went to new lows in their analysis of Petraeus' testimony last week, when our friends at Media Matters let us know that they had 7 to 1 analysts in favor of escalation. It was hard to believe, even for FOX!
White House has a Freaking Manual which Details How to "Deal" with Pesky Protesters
It seems that the White House has a manual that's issued to Secret Service Agents and White House organizers on how to deal with protests within the President's visual plane. This is not a manual on how to deal with security breeches, but how to deal with people smuggling in signs (look out for folded cloth!) or any other anti-whatever paraphenalia and effectively remove them from the President's sight, and into "free speech zones." It gets worse. Just read the article.
Humanity
So let’s imagine the apocalypse. Let’s assume that global warming – to put a contemporary (and highly probable) spin on it – has become irreversible. The climate is fated to change and change and change until the earth winds up, as Stephen Hawking put it, much like Venus— 250 degrees Celsius and raining sulphuric acid. We are doomed from this moment on. It’s a prospect that’s extraordinarily frightening. To face death is one thing. It is a personal struggle, but able to be handled because (and I am speaking for myself here, but I feel that it’s true with most) we have the knowledge that life will go on without us. We may die, but others are born and others live, and then they die, and more still are born, and so on. But death in the face of apocalypse?
ActivistNet: The Coolest Group in the Entire History of Lose the Label!
Let me tell ya a story. There are 2 parts.
PART 1
Antiwar Bob goes to Berkeley. He wants to link up with antiwar activists at UC Santa Cruz to talk about coordinating some events, but he doesn't know anyone there. And he doesn't want to email some stranger because that'll get him nowhere and probably take a lot of time.
But it's ok because he's a member of *drumrolllllll* ActivistNet.