Barx [none/use name]

Excellent title, comrade

It’s not empathy that is the problem. You are looking at a problem that is simply a lack of education and consciousness. Liberalism is hegemonic. The default that anyone absorbs is a liberal take and a liberal approach. The only way to correct this is to become educated in ways resilient to liberal nonsense, which requires unlearning their illogical thought patterns, learning media criticism, learning history, and, of course, reading socialist theory. An effective way to do this is through party organization, forming reading groups and political education curricula and alternative media commentaries.

Unless you were a red diaper baby, we all had bad liberal takes at some point. We were all media illiterate. We knew selective and limited history. And our understanding of socialist thought was liberal straw men and cartoons. We have to bring people over to us and understand that they will have frustratingly bad takes all the while until they learn humility and gain consciousness.

Such an amazing turnout

The company you work for is not your friend. If it is their body can they will use it to their benefit. Any benefit you receive will be incidental or simply part if their propaganda to get you to wear it for them.

It will be used, primarily, to surveil employees. They will track your habits and ensure you are aware that every single thing you do for your shift is something your boss or their boss or their boss can come back to you with and reprimand you for. They will try to set performance targets that can be compared to your videos so they can tell you what an algorithm or a petty middle manager says you are doing wrong. Too much time helping a customer. You’re not folding clothes fast enough. Walk faster. No sitting. They will set keywords. Union. Break. Curse words. Your bosses’ names. They might not even review these things. The intimidation is enough. Maybe you’ll get new policies. See that black guy? Follow him. Get video. The algorithm said to do it so it can’t be racist. We’ll pass it along to the cops.

Companies wouldn’t pay for it if they didn’t see a business angle and the obvious ones are control over employees and being able to use more video for “liability” defense.

If you have mind control smells and that billionaire, why kill him? Make him into a class traitor.

GrapheneOS has an approach that always prioritizes security at a technical level over privacy over promoting FLOSS. I think the first two are difficult to balance as they are interrelated but sometimes come at the cost of one another. I think the second is reasonable to have below the first two given the state of app ecosystems in general.

F-Droid does need to improve its approach to security. I can see why projects don’t promote it as a default.

Al-Jazeera also posts bullshit. They’re useful for specific issues in the Middle East because they aren’t totally bought off against Palestine or Iran. They still suffer from the core fallacies of corporate journalism.

Ask certain NGOs and governments for takes, reoeat them uncritically or have some criticise others. Easy way to create or support a nonsense narrative.

A ton of countries send delegations to Venezuela to monitor elections and they always report boring results or are vague (from oppositional countries).

The AP is happy to reprint nonsense, especially if it is coming from a government or NGO.

Such as?

What in Marxism needs to be upgraded, specifically?

What in Marxism do you think needs upgrades?

The working class cannot win without overthrowing the owner class. The owner class is the ruling class and functions, under capitalism, to extract from the working class and make capital into more capital. It cannot escape this role so long as capitalism exists and the owner class is in charge. The fundamental mechanisms by which that system works is coercive on both classes. “Nice” members of the owner class are hammered into complacency through failure and exit (becoming working class again) or abandonment of their principals. Or they luck out and are minor and largely irrelevant, facing no competitors or predators. Real solutions require that we organize and spread class consciousness.

On an individual level, you can try to protect yourself from some of the most extreme economic violences, but they are inherently limited. Fiat currency only has value because the issuer is “good for it” and you can use it as capital and for personal purchases of commodities. Crypto is not money at all, it is an unlicensed security. If your interest is in money-like things, I would recommend inflation hedge-alikes gold and real estate. But these require you to already have significant savings. And they are something to hawk in order to leave the country and cannot replace a functional economic base or allow you to weather a true crisis staying in the country. Having a backup shelf-stable food supply and means to boil water is also a good idea.

Our fates are all tied together under this economic system. We will quickly starve and die of preventable disease in a real, sustained crisis, as it will disrupt agriculture and utilities. Only a stable productive base, a real economy that produces what humans need, can provide when borders close or trade halts. And, realistically, everything you can do as an inflation hedge is much better when done at the community level. Mutual aid is more effective than a personal bean stash (do both!). A network of like-minded people can secure travel and estimate when to leave vs. fight. You can buy real estate with less capital if you go in together. Etc etc.

Read histories of the USSR so you can dunk on him with specifics. If one is to defend the first socialist state against liberal attacks, they must understand it, its good sides and bad.

Invidious does have APIs. People host invidious servers and the clients connect to them, similar to piped. I don’t know anything about Redlib but it might work the same!

Of course! And don’t hesitate to ask questions here if you think vibes might be off. Sometimes things are normal lefty organizing but still a surprise (e.g. a construction crit session) and sometimes they are a red flag (a not constructive crit session).

I’m glad you’re looking to join an org! When we organize, we win!

You have to set a goal of what you want to understand and why you want to understand it, then read accordingly. If your goal is to know the usual number of eggs laid by a bird because you are trying to identify one from its nest in your yard, sure just read some Wikipedia and maybe read its sources. If you need to understand a broad topic in the social sciences in order to do your job or organize politically, well sucks yo be you, you need to spend months to years getting a handle on the various schools of thought and approaching them humbly and critically, reading many books.

Monstress is good.

Watchmen is a classic.

I’m not sure why but I enjoyed the Prophet reboot.

Anything by Moebius will at least be visually gorgeous (like Arch).

There is a Marx and Engels Manga. I haven’t read it so maybe you can and then give a review!

When choosing an organization, I recommend going to lefty events and making some contacts there, including asking if there are ways to help out. You can effectively do a “test run” if being in an org by helping with one of their actions, often a front group. For example, ANSWER will give you a sense for PSL. It can be hard to know which org to join without already being in one, but this helps with that.

Mutual aid also builds community trust in your organization and can be a way to be authentically present at actions. When you help, for example, an immigrant community that is otherwise left to suffer and you have a big banner at your tables, you have now basically done a tabling event while also strengthening the community you want to work in. It can also serve as a model for (partial) communal living. This is particularly effective when the people you’re working with are poor, marginalized, and low on free time.

The problem, in my experience, is that there is usually no strategy when people do mutual aid programs. No idea of who you’re primarily trying to authentically embed with. No idea how you will sustain the effort financially or with your labor. No idea what kinds of conversations you will have or when. No idea of how you will build a movement by making a community more stable, less exploitable. There are even tendencies that will frown on having political conversations at all or think that building your org and movement through such a program is gauche. These are the thoughts of naive people that really just want to do charity work and feel morally outraged that there are any motives outside of simply feeding or clothing some people and then turning off your brain.

The average Chinese citizen eats four blocks of tofu every day. You are simply not on their level.