Be heartened by the marchers not in NYC or DC or LA or Chicago. Be heartened by the small towns where they expected 25 people and got 500. Be heartened by the women who stood up in Middle America and put their faces forward and said “I’m not going to accept that this is the new normal.”

Yup. That’s why I had a pretty great high after attending our tiny hastily thrown together march. In an area that went hard for Trump in a swing state it was downright heartwarming seeing hundreds of like-minded individuals. I made a ton of acquaintances with progressives in an area I ALWAYS felt alone in.

Agreed. An activists job at a large successful action is not to whine about why the people who showed up weren’t at the previous actions, but to do something — other than whining — to make sure as many of them as possible come back to the next one. This article is not helpful.

Likewise: I was at the march in DC, and I loved the diversity of purpose: women’s rights, Black Lives Matter, pro-disability, Support Your Local Sex Worker, trans visibility and rights, pro-immigrant. I got the chance to talk with the people carrying those signs, and now I know more about what these movements (not all…

I work for an advocacy organization. We all went to the march, with our friends and our families.

Yeah, that’ll make the first-time marchers feel great. Can we stop picking at people who gave enough of a shit to come out and march in January, and then tell them it isn’t good enough? I think all women need to be respectful of the new-to-protest women who are now galvanized. Coming together on commonalities and…

“I also know several people who felt excluded ... and I think it’s because it was about so many things at once.”

Agreed, it seems wrong to be so cynical and mistrusting of people who are new to activism. They are in many ways “the middle” that activists spend so much time trying to convince and get involved. Well, they did, now let’s work to make them follow up.

What’s with these purity tests that people on the left require of one another?

Can’t this be a first step? Let’s encourage people to join and listen.

Sent to me by Sean Spicer.

“This is all a big witch hunt. The only reason that the CIA is investigating Flynn is because I called them a bunch of Nazis a week ago and then didn’t apologize for calling them Nazis when I spent half an hour talking about how great I am in front of a wall listing the names of CIA operatives who died in the line of…

You mean Angry Birds, the game about evil pigs stealing the property, heirs, and future of the protagonists and using it to build huge structures in which they live, and about the protagonists rising up in anger to wreak destruction on the real estate of the filthy pigs until they truly feel the wrath of the working…

Oh come on. No politics in Angry Birds? The antagonists are greedy, heirarchical pigs who steal the very offspring of the protagonists. In response, the birds retaliate by using more of their offspring as literal weapons to destroy the pigs and all they have built. It’s pretty crude, I’ll grant you, and it’s played…

I don’t recall Angry Birds having any political bent. Nothing political about Bejewelled. Farmville. Etc.

I’d say those games are implicitly political, in that they model systems analogous to those that exist today. Farmville functions as a managed capitalist system, for instance, giving minimal rewards for time and more for money.

There is certainly an implicit “meaningful” there, i.e. “How can you create meaningful art or entertainment without putting a bit of yourself in it?” Obviously flinging object As and object Bs doesn’t have much depth. But when you make a movie out of that, suddenly the experiences of the creators emerge.

Sure the game must have some sort of narrative aspirations for it to be influenced by politics. I don’t think tic-tac-toe is often getting critized for it political leanings.

How can you create art or entertainment without putting a bit of yourself in it?