Chana [none/use name]

“Sure that community is full of fascists picking fights with our users but what about the important thing: my unrelated personal beefs?”

It has been used outside of the fascist context but it is also very much a dogwhistle.

The idea that “the goal” is to eliminate Turkic peoples in Xinjiang is absurd and not even what the fed-adjascent propagandists claim.

Media companies oppose left candidates. Left candidates threaten the material interests of the owners of these companies, the ad buyers, the people who fund think tanks and establish or otherwise embed in academic programs like journalism schools.

The remainder is non-left candidates. These are people who work in those interests and therefore receive media support. For example, Reform UK gets inordinate neuteal or positive media coverage as well as volume compared to even the greens who are not much of a threat to capital.

These mass surveillance laws are a reaction to an failure in this overall apparatus to control thought and speech re: Gaza. They want to track and suppress and oppress information and speech that runs contrary to ruling class interests. The ruling class is heavily invested in the genocidal settler colonial project of “Israel” both literally with piles of cash and politically-strategically as a means by which to control and profit from political destabilization in parts of the Middle East.

Their explicit statements about why they want to do this are just a lie, a pretext. They are not personally or politically invested in protecting kids, lol. These are the people that protected Jimmy Saville and impoverished and made food insecure huge percentages of UK children.

You should read the rest of the thread to get an understanding of why surveillance and deanonymization is being pushed. It is not to solve some real issue to the benefit of the public, it is a response to the failure of the media systems of control to control narratives.

Your claims about a “healthy democracy” are fairy tales. That’s propaganda about how it works, not how it works in practice. The UK has its current Prime Minister due to a series of coordinated media campaigns against the previous leader of Labour, for examlle, with an internal purge using bad faith claims following his removal. No element of that was democratic and none of the UK governments have been popular for ages.

Question why so-called democracies only produce unpopular governments. Why don’t the parties align with popular interests in reality? Whose interests do they align with?

I think if you asked the people whattl they voted for none of them would say it was this. And yet it is still set to roll out.

Makes you wonder what liberal democracy really means doesn’t it?

We probably can’t because the political formations that need to be organized take years to develop and grow. Namely, socialist organizations. And the ruling class and its political class lackeys already go after those as well, so it will be full of struggle. But it is the only real path forward for any kind of actually democratic system and is worth pursuing ASAP.

Stay safe, friend. If you are part of any serious and thoughtful left orgs this is a good time to analyze strategy vs. risk and whether it is better to lay low.

I don’t stream 4k through Netflix. I was expecting to get 720p or 1080p.

The last time I borrowed a Netflix account every show or movie would start at 1080p and then negotiate itself down to like 240p over 3-4 minutes. I have a very fast connection that can stream 4K just fine elsewhere and Netflix’s settings were set to high quality. They are just cheapskates that throttle based on your account patterns.

It’s a FNC host. They are rehearsed corporate propagandists. They will try out many lines to see what sticks in support of their agenda - in this case, militarized police via the NG.

Note that this general trend is bipartisan in its essence, they just use different terminology and implementations. The previous administration inflated federal funding for police and their use of “free” military equipment. You might get to enjoy this at future protests when they give you permanent hearing damage with an LRAD.

Both of these came in response to protests. It is the capitalist boot being laced to stomp on our faces. When we demand racial justice, no genocide, really anything against capital, they will do this. We have to be ready for it and not take advice from them on how to organize politically or protest.

But how else will you enjoy the smell of hot piss among 500 insufferable tourists?

Great job! I’ve always avoided Surfaces because the guides to running Linux on them are always like 30 pages long.

You did, of course, and I pointed out where. You can go back, quote it, and talk about it more if you would like to. And if you want to talk about the incoherent comment and its seeming continued straw men, I really will need you to rewrite it to be coherent, because I am not going to go into that potential spiral if you don’t actually care (and you absolutely show no interest in doing so).

I clearly explained my points to you while you were shitting on BRICS, and then you cowered out when I explained/proved you wrong about how BRICS helping other countries get around sanctions and access resources they were never able to before, is a good thing and anti-imperialist, and you said that wasn’t “enough” even though BRICS is helping the globe move in a more socialist direction.

A better word for straw man, at this point, might just be lying, as this is not remotely close to what happened and serves no purpose other than to gas you up / feel vindicated despite again ignoring nearly everything I have said in the last two comments.

To repeat myself, I got meta two comments ago because after writing up about 1/3 of a (long) reply and having it disappear due to a browser crash/refresh, I thought, “you know, this person doesn’t really seem like they care or are here in good faith, nobody is reading this thread but them anymore, so what is the point of being indirect about them phoning it in and being aggro?” Re: BRICS and sanctions, I honestly do not know exactly to what you are referring due to the equivocation I mentioned earlier. Would it be BRICS as an org? The member states? The general group of countries envisioned by the various academics? Who knows, you have been inconsistent in your use of the term and have no provided enough context for me to reliably answer.

In reality, I offered to reply to the comment you claim I “cowered out” about, by which I assume you mean “chicken out” or “cowered”, so long as you just write it up to be minimally coherent. With enough context to know what you are replying to, quotes, or even just in the same order as the comment you are replying to so that I can more confidently parse it and reply germanely. So far, you have not even acknowledged that request and have instead begun escalating further and are now entirely misrepresenting what happened. This confirms my initial thoughts in not rewriting that earlier comment: your comments are not in good faith, so there is little point in continuing without an equalization in effort / good faith. Being comradely includes treating others in good faith and I have provided a lot of leeway to you given your initial comments, and even continuing to reply to you at all right now and explain this to you. Most people will dismiss you and move on immediately, something I will do soon.

I would be surprised if this kind of interaction ever works out for you well irl, let alone others, and highly advise that you take a step back and do some self-crit, e.g. Actually processing what I have said instead of defensively lashing out. I am not your personal critic, I am criticizing poor behavior towards me, and those behaviors are corrosive to all involved.

I apologized once for if seeming like I strawmanned you, which wasn’t my intention, even though I only took your point to it’s logical conclusion, but it seems like you want me to suck you off or something.

Please refrain from sexually pathologizing this discussion.

Re: straw manning, you are continuing to misrepresent what I have written and my intentions - intentions you guessed at, despite having an actual explanation of them right in frony of you that you ignored, with guesses not coincidentally putting me in a bad light.

I don’t expect most straw manning or misrepresentations to be particularly intentional, as in, “I have come up with a great stratagy to defeat this jerk! I will simply lie!” I think you are just being repeatedly defensive about criticism of your positions and escalatory approach and consequently noy thinking over your responses very carefully: it is more important to characterize me and what I say as wrong rather than really interrogate what I am saying or your own stated positions. But this is still bad faith behavior, it is uncomradely, and I have been patiently pointing it out, explaining it, and giving you opportinities to correct and move forward, and you are not taking thr opportunities to do so.

Re: taking my point to its logical conclusion, that is 100% opaque. There is no thread of logic presented and it is not clear or intuitive. I’m sure it is an actual conclusion your mind jumped to, but I do not reside in your head, you have to explain things and clarify where needed and acknowledge that sometimes you could get it wrong illogically. We might never know, however, because the actual objects of the straw men werr never really directly addressed. I doubt we will have chance to discuss those things. You seem uninterested.

You’re crying victim while you insult and blame me for calling out your cowardice, while you call me “non-comradely”. You’re being a jerk and tone policing me.

This is the defensive behavior I am referring to - it was hinted at in your first comment being needlessly escalatory, seemingly because you had a different opinion than I do on BRICS. I am not a victim, this is absolutely nothing to me in terms of a personal negative reaction, but these behaviors are also overall toxic and you should recognize and improve them for the sake of others.

I can even break down the elements here and tell you how you are incorrect:

• “for calling out your cowardice”: I don’t recall this ever happening. You haven’t called me a coward until this comment so far as I can tell, nor referenced this supposed thing. How can I be responding to something before it happened?

• “cowardice”. This is a new personal insult about intentions and emotional content to personally insult me. Note that I have not personally insulted you, just made not of some behaviors that are out of line and unfair. A common thread in defensive behaviors is a focus on “criticizing the critic” rather than engage with what they say. Note that you have almost entirely ignored my comments since I asked you to recompose because your comment was incoherent. But you have plenty of gas in the tank for things like this, apparently. What does that say to you?

• “while you call me “non-comradely”.”

I referenced specific behaviors that were uncomradely and asked you to refrain from them, ideally to do self-crit on them. That is a fair thing to label and ask, despite how you are presenting it.

• “You’re being a jerk” I am being more patient than nearly anyone you will ever interact with and am directly addressing our inability to communicate, a roadblock that is almost entirely on your end of things. I have explained why and you have opted to escalate instead of acknowledging and addressing the issue(s). If you ever organize irl you will face much more direct criticisms than this, just so you know, and things will not go well for you if you can’t accept and process comradely criticism. I have to assume you do not organize much irl because of how much criticism is involved and how much more escalatory people will be. If you think I am a jerk for saying you don’t seem invested because you wrote something so incoherent and I said you should be more comradely in putting in a basic effort to explain and not misrepresent, I cannot imagine you have locked horns with anyone in or between organizations. I am being mildly critical and offering many, many off-ramps that would allow you to continue the actual content of this discussion, as you have more or less prevented it from happening with such an unclear and disorganized comment.

and tone policing me.

The only extent to which I have tone policed you is in describing your responses as needlessly escalatory, in asking you to not use ableist language, and now, in this comment, to avoid sexual pathologizing language. I think these are reasonable requests.

You keep projecting and should take a look in the mirror.

What would I be projecting? I am still waiting for you to just write out your previous commeny to make it mininally understandable and we could then continue. You are now hung up on the criticisms around that. This does not describe my behaviors.

You have multiple times and likely because you’re just not really putting in any effort to understand or communicate - such as in writing an incoherent out-of-order reply with no indication of what you’re even replying to with each paragraph. Another example would be that your most recent comment ignores nearly everything I wrote but does lash out at me - just like your first comment.

Please be comradely. I am not your punching bag.

I find this reply hard to follow. It is definitely not in the same order of what I wrote and it is seemingly responding to and it does not provide enough context to be certain about what is meant about half the time. It reads like you read parts of my comment and then started responding, but I don’t always know which parts you’re responding to. I was going to try and organize it into something I could respond to, but it ended up being similar to the last one: seemingly disagreeing with things I didn’t say (straw men), basic factual errors about BRICS and equivocation between the organization, its members, and some nerds that predicted an eventual BRICS-like entity, and enough incompleteness that I had to constantly revisit ky previous comment to see what main points had not been addressed. I wrote maybe 1/3 of a reply before my browser crashed. So, this would be a lot of effort on my part and seems silly given the content of your comments so far.

So I don’t think this is a particularly serious discussion or that you even really care. If you do, then I would need you to rewrite your comment so that it makes sense.

Your comment doesn’t really address most things I said and appears agitated. Please consider whether that comment is fair and comradely.

Are you seriously expecting BRICS to come out and say “fuck America, we’re de-dollarizing!” That would be fucking ridiculous, as much as I wish sometimes that would happen.

No and I didn’t say or imply that. You are exaggerating, really straw manning, what I sais. Though in BRICS’ founding statements, they absolutely did prioritize holding each others’ reserve currencies, which is of course the beginning of dedollarization. And most of their founding statements are a direct response to US / OECD domination of finance, trade, and international relations in general, calling for instead following international law and using the UN democratically.

BRICS was also first theorized as primarily a trade/development bloc

By some crackers that didn’t actually found BRICS, sure. As actually envisioned via summits and documents it is not only economic, it also extends to cooperation on law enforcement, climate change, multipolar diplomacy, respect for sovereignty, etc etc. The economic is of course the driving force behind any of those things.

but China is steering it into a vehicle for a new vision of the world

How so? What has BRICS done in the last 4-5 years, as I asked and received no answer?

which is fervently anti-imperialist

BRICS is not fervently anti-imperialist by a long shot. It could become functionally anti-imperialist by way of forwarding multipolarity, but only with discipline.

and BRICS has allowed dozens of countries to dodge sanctions and get resources they would otherwise be locked out of.

BRICS itself, as an organization or strategy, can’t take much credit for that. Causation here is reversed. BRICS and multipolarity and fueled by imperialist sanctions regimes and dollar hegemony. Direct trade in each others’ currencies, for example, is a consequence of their own previous economic development and the sanctions regime itself, not the institution of BRICS.

BRICS collectively increases the GDP of all participating countries by multiple billions of dollars

GDP is a magical quantity that tends to mean different things for different countries. China’s real estate bubble drove up GDP but was actually an economic drag, for example. Actual mutual development would be something to look for, and one would need to tie it to BRICS. I am not sure what you are referring to when you say BRICS itself increases GDP, anyways.

BRICS operates more like a parallel G20. It is a diplomatic vehicle and pulls on the same types of levers as international capitalism, but from the perspective of global majority states. Think tanks, lending bodies, friendly vision statement versions of cooperation agreements. The language is like you’ll find from World Bank ghouls but from the (correct) perspective that it is unfair to the global south.

allows trade and exchange to occur faster and more effectively than anything the imperialists would allow.

I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you using BRICS as a stand-in for all direct trade agreements made between its members / other global south countries? That is of course a good development but again I think causation here is reversed.

To question if it’s progressing at all, is fucking nuts.

I didn’t do that. And please do your best to avoid ableist language.

I think it’s extremely premature and unfair to say that BRICS isn’t living up to it’s potential at the moment.

Why? They have slow-walked (and to am extent, reversed) dedollarization and excluded countries like Cuba, indicating a lack of commitment to multipolar ties (it indicates the opposite trend - pro-imperialist concerns). It is a truly barebones “this is purely for our own trade interests” show at this point and has done very little compared to its founding statements and theory. What positive progress has it made in the last 4-5 years?

It’s important to compare the material base to the theory and see how it is measuring up. One can’t build expectations too much from the theory, only the concrete actions can provide hope and analysis.

Multipolarity is the only option by which to transition away from unipolarity, US domination. Any alternative will look fairly multipolar, even one with two main rivals, as other countries position themselves relative to them (like when the USSR existed and there were aligned/“non-aligned”).

Multipolarity as advocated by e.g. BRICS envisions multiple counties holding to mutual win-win pacts to have non-US-based economic ties. The feasibility of this is a materialist question, it will be about economic and military outcomes over the next few years and arguably BRICS is not living up to its potential at the moment. But as a goal or organizing principle it is a good strategy when no other countries are ready to become an opposite pole to US imperialism. Instead of going it alone, it is better to foster mutial ties and interests and devise strategies by which they could, if necessary, decouple from the imperialist countries. US domination, and therefore imperialist domination, is not just wars or the IMF, it is also the many economic tendrils weighing on your country and people for attempting to have sovereignty. The imperialists will pull and pull and pull with thousands of strings. If a country achieves a greater degree of sovereignty, what allies can they depend on if they are also subject to those strings? Integration with many counties is a way to create an intertwined economic world order that can (I think, at least) resist imperialism from a single country or even a bloc.