Barx [none/use name]

Nationalism? In MY liberalism!?

The smart thing to do would be to take credit and demand concessions lest they do it again

Dedicated union members would sabotage the system with plausible deniability.

If this were true it would be commendable and deserve an award of some kind

The answer is always to read theory and organize. But neither of these have to be massive endeavors you’re doing all alone. Dip your toes in some local organizing. If there’s only mutual aid, do mutual aid and start a reading group. Get practice in doing solidarity work for unions. Attend any local pro-Palestine events and talk to organizers about how you can help.

PS Americans are better-educated than most populations that have organized and participated in any socialist or national liberation revolution. Their frustrating psychology is that of imperialist propaganda and white settler colonialism. It is indeed a barrier but not insurmountable, and the more people we have doing any kind of organizing work, the greater we can tip the scales in our favor.

lmao

Things like this always speak to weak parties and organizations. The candidates should be subordinate to their orgs, not the other way around. Even if a leader is particularly skilled, you are creating far too large of a liability when they inevitably fall out of power, at minimum because they will eventually die.

Kruschev was similarly an indicator of a party that could not reproduce competency and did actually overly depend on a team captain to not begin falling apart.

This is probably the most important aspect of protecting a revolution and it really seems like something that needs to be baked into the party/org before the revolution even happens. Where are the thousands of people ready to replace both Evo and Arce? Why are they not better-organized than these two factions? I’m sure the answer is in the details, but those are the details we have to care about.

There’s a certain brand of American pseudolefty that is constantly searching for the best way to weaponize any perceived marginalization they might have in order to justify being an abusive prick.

Like… actually beware. You’ve gotta kick them out of your groups before they start shit.

There’s a good chance this is the kind of stuff that gives him hope and he just wants to share that. Even if it’s annoying.

PS texting is a bad way to have disagreements, I def recommemd having a real convo if you want to push back on what is basically new age karma, which itself leads to victim blaming if one is logical about it.

The exile island is Madagascar and it’s for a “chosen people”. They were exiled there due to conflict with the European stand-in. So, basically the Nazis’ scuttled Madagascar Plan.

The author just also made the exiles fashy, too. And magic.

It’s basically, “what if the Nazis chose The Madagascar Plan and Jewish people always had nukes and were the real genociders all along?”

Their world map is just Africa + Europe with flipped north-south.

Sounds like you have not yet entered our exclusive 100% waterproof pants and shoes club. When you finally join us you will be pleased with yourself.

Always remember: never be French

This article is about one study, by CCDH, who did not publish much of anything about their methodology. CCDH’s CEO was an anti-Corbynite that fed into the false accusations of antisemitism against the left for having solidarity with Palestinians and CCDH continues to prominently focus on antisemitism and trying to blur the line between antisemitism and antizionism. The faction that he supported is currently in power in Labour and are supporters of Israel during this genocide.

I would not trust them to make good calls on what is an accurate community note vs. not. Community notes are all over the place but on average depict a bazinga liberal position, which is not actually the most accurate one. Having looked at their “study” paper, their first and most promindnt criterion for accuracy was whether community note aligned with fact-checking websites. Fact-checking websites are, to put it bluntly, bullshit, and really just reflect the author’s opinion.

For example, one of the things they claim is election misinformation is the claim that voting systems are unreliable. They are saying this is an inaccurate or misleading claim. In the US, it is accurate to say that it’s voting systems are unreliable. They are frequently run using voting machines from private companies, black boxes with no real way to verify their results that are actually implemented in most places, and polling stations often only gave 1 or 2, so when they break people are disenfranchised. Every computer security expert audit says you should not trust these systems and should use paper ballots with manual observable recounts. The allegation of misinformation is really about what is perceived to be voter suppression, of people feeling like they shouldn’t vote because it won’t count anyways. This is not actually misinformation, though: the voting machines are unreliable, that is the actual problem in this situation, not the use of repeating a fact in your favor.

It is salient that at no point do they highlight the naked propaganda for Zionism that has been rampant on social media, including about elections. This was presumably filtered out early on by their selection of what counts as a topic of interest for their analysis.

Finally, the clear purpose of CCDH is to lobby for having more oversight on social media, including large, centralized moderation teams that have historically been cozy with liberal governments.

Given the other things listed it is a reference to the reimposition of slave-like conditions on liberated slaves, who were provided with nothing when slavery was abolished and of course still needed to feed themselves. Sharecropping was basically where they turned plantations into landlords for farm workers that had previously been slaves, who provided large shares of what they farmed to the former planter/new landlord. It had a transitional character, representing a move from the feudal character of chattel slavery towards the capitalist character of wage farm workers.

It goes in the pile of items removed because it makes America look bad because it did terrible things to black people beyond slavery as well. Any struggle against racism or capitalism seems to be their theme for removal.

Control Theory is mostly just dynamical systems math using linear algebra to represent the system behavior. It becomes control-y by adding one thing into the mix: the controller itself that acts in the system in response to what it can observe. This is fleshed out for different considerations, like what properties you want the controller to have, what tradeoffs to make (e.g. faster but less accurate, the reverse, etc), whether the system is continuous or discrete, whether there are delays and how they are reoresented, how fancy you are being in terms of modeling observations vs. estimated internal state (e.g. a Kalman filter).

If you’re interested in getting into the theory, the main places to start are linear algebra and differential equations. These are often coupled together in colleges because of their relevance to representing dynamic systems and concepts like “Jacobian” only make sense if you know both. I would recommend learning differential equations first because linear algebra texts might assume knowledge of them.

ty!

It’s effective as a thought-terminating cliche, which is a sign that they are experiencing cognitive dissonance and what you are saying is almost working.

The solution to a thought-terminating cliché is to not let them change focus. Keep attention on the thing they called Russian disinformation and walk through it.

It sounds like this is online or via text. As a warning, this is the worst possible way to have this kind of conversation. In-person is much more powerful, in no small part due to the fact that liberals rarely actually know anything and they have to Google things to keep up.

American political engagement is thoroughly atomized. Americans have no immediate political vehicles for their frustrations or ideals outside of things like charity, they have no ideological struggle into which they can plug in as community or a real participatory agent. Instead, they have media “discourse”, like TV, radio, podcasts, streamers, YouTube videos, where their role is as an observer slotting themselves into the chair of some pundit and seeing how far they can agree with or defend them. They do not curiously investigate and inform themselves on a topic, but they feel desperate to have an opinion so that they can “win” and be condescending to their “enemies”. Under this thought regime, "I don’t know " is a sign of weakness and means you aren’t political and don’t care and aren’t a good person.

It’s important to understand that, accorsingly, Americans’ political opinions are usually worthless, they are inconsistent propaganda premisesed on contrarian aggressiveness and dismissiveness with nothing below the surface to back it up. This is annoying but it is also fragile, so you, as a much cooler person that does know things, can have a lot of power over a conversation and can go in basically any direction that you would like to - so long as you practice keeping your cool (not that they deserve it, it is just a valuable tool).

For example, let’s say this is a friend or family member and you want to convince them. This is actually mostly about how much they like you and whether you can get them to listen to positive cases for what you advocate for. If you make them feel good for listening to you and get them to watch some videos or read a book or attend actions, you will probably eventually win, as in get them to adopt much better positions. They may need to process this information for some time and may come back to you to tell you about them as if they made these discoveries all on their own and without your help, lol. It can be useful to debunk some of the things they say, but without a displacing narrative they will probably not have a good way to resolve the cognitive dissonance this creates. For example, why support PSL? Well you can provide your own case of course, but I might say something like, “we need to advance socialist working class organizations to build a just alternative for humanity’s sake and this is one small and easy way to do so.” You can of course say why the two genocidal capitalist parties are inadequate, but this will lead to long and rambling discussions. And while doing so, you want a calm, patient, and friendly attitude where what you really want them to do is to read Blackshirts and Reds or something. You want to get to the point of making a specific ask because them understanding your perspective is important to you and it would be a supportive thing for them to do and you will read it with them. That kind of thing. Or get them to join a propaganda action. Move them towards personal connection and involvement. Obviously there is a caveat: if the person is abusive towards you disregard all advice and take care of yourself.

Or let’s say they are an acquaintance and you just want to shut them up. Well then you can be critical as shot. They will fall apart in seconds.

“I can’t believe anyone has trouble with this” I say, having been born with crampons and a Sherpa companion.