also I swear to god, any leftist fart-brained enough to claim that we don’t really need FEMA, we actually just need Mutual Aid provided by some guy named Steve who owns a mini van….

I’m cool with it if Steve is driving one of those old VW buses.

Let's offload responsibility for disaster relief from the trillion dollar entity that brings in trillions and put it on a whole bunch of broke people who struggle to put 5 bucks in their friends cancer GFM, who are utterly underpaid at (insert job here). That's progressive as hell, definitely.

One of my least favorite things in all politics discourse is the framing of "The Government" - talking about it like it's some ephemeral entity that acts in a vacuum and can never be affected. It's what we make it & the more people that actively try to change it, the more likely it will change.

Look, last night I watched a video of mules delivering supplies to people in western NC and that was cool. 20 minutes ago a C17 Globemaster landed at my regional airport and that is going to help WAY MORE PEOPLE.

The parallels with all the people I grew up with down south claiming they just need neighbors with chainsaws and backhoes are telling. None of these people have backhoes, only a few even have chainsaws.

There is good mutual aid I’m sure but also lots of times groups that show up provide nominal aid and lots of intimidating ‘looters’

Government is a very big mutual aid scheme

Anytime someone has a knee jerk reaction that we don't need something it's useful to go back in time before that thing existed to understand why it was created. Sometimes new technologies makes a thing obsolete. But like mutualaid has always existed in some form. We didn't just invent it.

Wait who is saying this

Mutual aid reminds me of the right wing call to "donate to charity" because it is the same basic thing, and direct giving or giving to charities can not replace the power of the modern state. Same arguments, same outcome, only the side making the argument changed I guess.