Maoo [none/use name] @ Maoo @hexbear.net

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2 yr. ago

Argentinians like yourself are why you now have an ancap fascist LARPer in charge, lol.

Hope he dies in a funny way.

The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost, my child. Now do 12 Hail Marys and come back next week.

He's trying to get the fash to walk through the pro-Palestine protesters and to get the cops an excuse to fuck with them.

I gave up trying to get a smaller phone. Like you say, there's nothing on the market that is supported, not locked down and full of garbage, and not technically anemic.

Maybe someday 5" phones will make a comeback...

I'll echo others and say no discord!

Matrix is good though a little complex and unintuitive. I would recommend limiting your online chats in general for opsec reasons and maybe sticking to something simpler like Signal for announcements.

If you were explicitly hired into a remote role and they decide to try and force you to come in, that's a substantial change to your working conditions akin to constructive dismissal.

Depending on your state, you may be able to get unemployment from this situation if they fire you when you refuse this change to your role. The company will always lie about the circumstances but I've seen people still get unemployment out of it. This is much easier to demonstrate if you live far away from the office.

It is, effectively, a layoff that they want to avoid paying unemployment for.

Sometimes making large changes to your working conditions and role are considered a soft form of firing. It either is, or is in the neighborhood of, constructive dismissal. It really depends on how friendly your state is to labor, though.

It works in a certain kind of liberal. It's nearly Pavlovian now. Mention Zionist horrors and how we have to fight them and their automatic response is some kind of self-serving deflection to antisemitism.

It's "white lives matter" for liberal Zionists but darker in its own way because it cheapens actual antisemitic threats. Also the implicit genocide apologetics.

Car culture is the worst. Ever single one of those fucks could just take 3-5 minutes to loop around properly but instead acts like they might die if they don't cut across traffic RIGHT NOW.

This also applies to last minute freeway exiters.

I make bookmark folders for topic backlogs and go through the news ones every morning so I don't forget. This lets me avoid having more than ~15 tabs open at any time. I try to use one window per topic so that if I want to close the browser I can save all open tabs to a new folder.

You can get N99 or N100 masks. I haven't seen any that don't have a valve for breathing out so they don't protect others, just yourself.

For masks, the convention is that the number is its ability to filter out small particles and the letter is for whether it also protects (P) against oil-based particles or not (N), with R offering partial oil protection. There's nothing wrong with using a P99 or P100 but it's probably not doing anything more than an N99 or N100 for airborne diseases.

The silicone respirators that you can hook N/P100s to can be pretty nice. They have better airflow, in my experience, but are also much heavier. You'll get a wet face using one for hours.

As others mentioned, fit is important. If you have a gap in your seal you've kind of defeated the difference between N95 and N100 already. If you have facial hair, shave. Then fit your mask to your face by adjusting the nose thing or the straps if they are adjustable. Do some rapid breaths in and out and see if there's pressure/vacuum.

Also N95 is probably enough for the vast majority of scenarios. Given that money is limited, it might be better to buy many N95s rather than fewer N99s or N100s so that you can rotate them. I keep around the higher-Ns for occasions that seem particularly risky like poorly ventilated areas packed with people.

With that level of incompetence they're gonna get taken down by the first legal threat by some IP megacorp. Or become a honeypot.

1. "Offensive" was autocorrected to "official"

Okay so it's just a straw man then. Can you have this conversation without inventing things for me to defend?

2. Russians did not destroy infrastructure because they hope to use for themselves (the fact that I have to explain this makes me think engaging with you is a waste of my time).

Are you sure? Russians also have a cultural connection to Ukraine, particularly the Kievan Rus. There is/was also a need to manufacture consent for invading a "cousin". Also, how do you discount them simply being less brutal than the NATO countries that have consistently done far, far, far worse to their targets?

It seems you'd like to avoid the reality that Russia has been so much less brutal. After all, this flies in the face of the (usually racist) narrative about the invasion, which seems to have successfully indoctrinated you into a belief in simplistic camps of good vs. bad. You sure do seem to suffer under the childish illusion that if I push back on the anti-Russia nonsense out there I must be offering a defense of invasion, like I support it. In reality, this is so beside the point that I have never said anything remotely like this, but it is inconceivable to your propagandized worldview that anyone would be doing anything other than being for team A or team B rather than looking at a greater context.

That's the difference between a war of invasion and the mindless bombing the USA likes to do in whatever conflict they get involve in on the other side if the globe

I already gave the example of Iraq, which was two full invasions and a horrific sanctions regime.

Typing on phone is annoying, so my messages get a bit terse. But your whole rant previously is about how bad the Ukrainians are.

No it wasn't.

OK, sure. I have not much interest in that. But, how does that justify the Russian attack?

See what I mean? You're limited by your ideology to conceive only a team sports understanding. You can't imagine that I would (correctly) describe UA from a critical perspective without being pro-SMO. Not only that, you seemingly can't imagine there being anything else to care about. Only this one thing enters your mind, lol.

I don't think my framing has been that myopic to leave so much room for interpretation, though. I am pushing back on false imperialist propaganda narratives that have successfully misled those in imperial core countries and among sycophants for those countries. The wider problem is imperialism itself, which first undermined the Soviet Union and contributed to its destruction, then dismantled Eastern Europe, killing tend of millions, and finally isolated Russia et al from the imperial spoils, giving them the third world / peripheral treatment. Capitalist Russia was forced into its current position as paraiah by pushing back against this and attempting to reestablish itself as an independent power (national bourgeois interests) rather than an exploitation factory for the US, UK, Germany etc (intentional bourgeois interests). And in response, it has received a new cold war treatment of isolation and maximum pressure from the groups drawing from the literal legacies of literal Nazi staffing and ideologies and pogroms.

If you want to understand the point of this, aside from the value in not being constantly wrong about geopolitics, it is that you should fight to end this regime of maximum pressure, exploitation, and militarism that your own country, whatever it is, likely either supports, (proximally) benefits from, or has significant movements attempting to do so. I would hope that being consistently wrong and having to literally make things up about what I'm saying to make your arguments easier would be the impetus to become informed and start pointing the right fingers and doing the right work in your own local context. Or maybe just not saying things until you've done research?

How is any of this Ukrainian nenonazi stuff relevant?

All of it. The imperialist narrative tries to paper over the coup, the ethnic cleansing, and the nature of the civil war that are proximal root causes of the invasion. The timing and quantity of shelling in Donbas is conspicuous just prior to invasion. So is the Western imposition on killing negotiations right after invasion. These things are all tied together - who funded the neonazis? Why are they in military command? Where and when did they become organized? It all comes back to imperialist projects.

Russia was never under threat from Ukraine.

This is absurd. You don't think NATO encroachment and a civil war on the border is a threat? What world do you live on?

Even if literal-Hitler was reborn there, how is bombing Kiev helping anyway?

Hitler was just one guy. Naziism was born of the conditions and politics of Germany and its capitalist class, a lashing back against the left that took great inspiration from US empire and genocide.

Anyways, why bomb Kiev? At first, to try and force early contrition and negotiations of a Minsk III type deal. Guess who put a stop to that.

Authoritarian governments LOVE wars

This is a dog whistle for political miseducation. All governments are authoritarian. This includes yours. Many people forget this because they accept, or are ignorant of, where that authority is directed and who has to accept the violence. What is more authoritarian than pushing a coup in UA, for example? Perhaps your government helped with that. Either way, every state is authoritarian.

it gives them an enemy, it gives them power, it gives them a mean to get rid of political opponents.

If the bourgeois that dominate a country don't want a war, it won't happen. The main impetus for war is usually a geopolitical struggle that has, at its base, ruling class interests. Russia is a direct threat to the piece of the pie that Western imperialists want for themselves. They want to own and sell, for example, Russia's oil. They want to have control over the people, resources for which they contend with Russia. Similarly, instability and extraction from countries near Russia benefit the imperialist project but hurt Russia (e.g. Syria). This is a constant and dominant aspect of capitalist geopolitics. They do not let you rest or develop independently. You will be destroyed if you are not aggressive in opposition. There is a massive graveyard of countries that failed to do so sufficiently.

Russia plays a role as a country isolated from the international capitalist pie that faces constant and extreme pressure to become that aforementioned extraction target by international capital. Its international actions are grounded in a reaction to this: the interests of its national bourgeoisie that would aspire to be international were they allowed into that fold.

So we can either believe Putin a philanthropist ready to sacrifice bravely his troops for no benefit but the de-nazification of a nuke-free, not-in-nato country, or we can recognise this as just a pretext for grabbing land (supported by the preservation of infrastructure).

Obviously there are other, more correct ways to think about this aside from this Great Man Theory false dichotomy.

Oh and that part I wrote about authoritarian governments loving war applies to Russia just as well by the way.

I assumed you were applying it exclusively to Russia.

After all of this, if Russia is in it for no personal benefit but a moral victory, why are they not withdrawing? After all they have supposedly nothing to gain by continuing the war, since they don't intend to occupy the country?

Like I said, Russia initially wanted to force a Minsk III, as evidenced by its actions. The Western controllers of UA, who gladly support its Nazi militaries, prevented this. The RF then had to choose between withdrawal with no gains or an attempt to maintain a status quo invasion, occupying the Donbas and further pushing for contrition. This is, further, in the context of the West using their financial nuclear options on Russia (and really, the economies of Western Europe as well) and utterly failing to directly damage Russia, and in fact subsidizing it via higher oil and gas prices on oil they were still easily selling. The status quo was comparatively tolerable. There is the additional outcome of the long attritional war strategy they have undertaken, which is the effective demilitarization of UA over time due to lack of manpower, materials, and economic base. This accomplishes a similar goal to exclusion from NATO. The territory of the Donbas additionally buys a buffer zone from NATO and access to coastal oil reserves.

In short, Western actions made the current trajectory the most favorable one for Russia to head in.

I think we agree! Maybe one way to rephrase my angle is that I see many people getting overly concerned with what they imagine the state will use as an excuse and I think they're usually overestimating the impact of the action itself (usually!). I think that inoculation of the public against the state action or in favor of the radical political project is more important. Or as you mention, spreading a consciousness against the legitimacy of state action (and perhaps the state itself), including by inviting certain kinds of overreaction.

For example, I don't think there are many people out there that are more receptive to cops because anarchists burned a bunch of their cars. In my opinion it's unlikely to prevent radicalization and it's unlikely to create a reaction that is legitimized by the burning of the cars. I think it's actually more likely to help radicalize younger people for whom the image itself is inspiring and transfixing. It could draw the focus of budding fascists but I am skeptical that it would, itself, be pushing them into fascism.

What might push people away from radicalization is the pointless infighting from the supposedly anarchist post itself, but that's its own whole thing.

It's more productive to just out-organize anyone doing dumb things. And usually pretty easy because the people doing dumb things are usually either small in number of terrible at organizing.

Most of the time, calling people out just draws attention to infighting. Sometimes it's useful and necessary but most of the time it seems to be an exercise in personal validation and a distraction from doing work. This goes for the people with whom you (probably rightly) disagree, but unfortunately they're not going to see this message and they're also not going to internalize it even if they did because it's just some individual saying things.

Instead, imagine being able to mobilize 100, or even 1000 comrades with a unified plan and its own goals. This could be an org or a united front. You will eventually be able to marginalize wrong voices through largesse and progress to a stage of semi-open criticism that is no longer perceived as infighting, but instead a denunciation of and separation from organizations that are screwing up your work. You will no longer be that individual or those 4 people from the weird org fighting with other vague lefties. You'll be a wall of voices making an intentional decision that can't be ignored.

Basically... have a good internal political education program, recruit, and work in coalition. Resist the urge to crit publicly. It usually backfires. Only do so strategically and with intent and while considering your audience. Be prepared to play a longer game than the immediate issue or action. You want to be trusted by and recruit from the people in these spaces. They will care more about you being a contributing member than a person with the better argument.

There's no such thing as peaceful protesters when every protest is indiscriminately labelled as violent (and antisemitic!) because there's a chall drawing on the ground.

And there can be no such thing as our escalation when every protest is met with incredible police violence and often federal charges.

The state will escalate whenever it wants to and it feels threatened not because some cop cars are burned but because it sees a people's movement as being in direct opposition to the material interests of the class it serves, is of, and is funed by. It doesn't really need a seemingly valid excuse, it can invent one from thin air. Throughout the US, over the last local election cycle, there were candidates (who were then elected) on raising police budgets because the police had been defundee. The only problem is, they weren't defunded. The state wanted more money for cops at the behest of the chamber of commerce so it latched onto something and made some shit up and it worked.

The risk of adventurism is not that the state will have an excuse to escalate, it's that the wider public may be alienated by it rather than have a chance to recognize the role played by capital and the state. If a small group decides to blow up commuter rail train tracks to disrupt white collar workers' participation in the military industrial complex, it's unlikely to be understood that way by the general public unless they've already been long innoculated against that.

I guess there's another risk: your comrades getting arrested and/or killed. That's actually important as well as there are not very many of us. We always need to do a reality check on what we hope to accomplish vs. what we risk. The system to which we are opposed does such monstrous things that many of us begin to feel a sense of selfless opposition, but it is important to recognize that five years of good organizing is much more valuable than punching a single cop.

Anyways I'm ranting and not really arguing against you. Just wanted to add context for how to think about adventurism.

A clean public walkway with people using it is ominous to burgerlanders that have never seen such a thing.

The guy that got racists to say they weren't racist but then they went back to doing KKK stuff like a week later?

Honestly I really hope they do though.

The habit of this court is to rule in favor of whatever they want while trying to claim it's a limited decision (and even saying to not use the decision as precedent!).

I think that's the most likely outcome. They'll say it's a special case because of some technicality and go forward with it.

Or hell they might just do the usual, "national security trumps all" piece of misdirection I dunno.