Chana [none/use name]

“Ceasefire now” was a milquetoast and easily appropriated demand and I pushed local groups (somewhat successfully) to demand something more clearly material and agitational, like ending weapons and money for “Israel”. It coalesced wuickly due to liberals embracing their default anti-warism, which they inevitably abandon and fight for with tactics that do nothing.

While the US would also balk at demands like no weapons or money, they raise facts that liberals like to ignore. About their neighbors, about themselves, about their country. “Ceasefire now” allows placement of focus on someone like Netanyahu, to scapegoat him, and for Biden to pretend he was fighting for a ceasefire while sending unlimited weapons and money to “Israel”. Demanding an end to weapons and money confronts one’s own role and also makes unions pick sides - many imperial core unions are “defense” contractors and many other unions try to have uncritical “solidarity” with those contractor unions.

Keep in mind that I’m emphasizing the impact this has in the imperial core, not on Palestine. That’s the main impact of any of this, as we are still far behind in capacity to coerce demands. But just think about how many liberals believed, wanted to believe, and still believe Biden et al wanted a ceasefire. How many are only expressing sympathy for Palestinians now that Trump is president. How they are manipulated by manufactured and misleading headlines like, “Hanas rejects ceasefire deal”. Liberals thrive on moving the goalposts away from the material when they want to get away with something. The idea that “Israel” should be cut off never enters their minds.

The most important part of dentistry is getting divorced during a midlife crisis and buying an expensive car and bicycle, FULL lycra mode.

In the first case it is generally charity bereft of political education or organizing their communities. They’re basically doing NGO charity work without the tax breaks and calling it radical. Membership is sporadic and mostly free of political education themselves, being mostly liberals dipping their toes in but arresting their own progress by spending 90% of their “free” time actually doing “mutual aid” (actually following a charity model). This is an easy thing to casually join and leave and is rarely more political than volunteering for any charity. There will be some members who are politically educated, but this is not something that typically occurs through the work itself and it is also in no way exclusive to anarchists, as mutual aid groups will also have MLs and Maoists.

The latter is a long-standing bias in the West, where Trots were the least-repressed communists because they were and are hypercritical of nearly every socialist project and do roundabout propaganda work fir empire. This also makes them appealing for liberals in the imperial core because they can still embrace their own chauvinism while changing their language and reasoning to feel like they are its antithesis. Trots also have their own canon, they read a carefully curated list of Trot works and actively avoid even reading Capital, in my experience, preferring Trotskyist summaries and oddly paternal (and rife for abuse) mentorship instead. I do not, honestly, see Trots doing much political education or agitation, mostly just attending actions (with their pamphlets) organized by others, taking credit for things they didn’t do, and doing a bad job at tabling. Trots are more about getting you to join and therefore start on a path to worthiness while paying a tithe.

There are several ML orgs in my area and those for which I have this kind of knowledge are growing rapidly. They do the work of organizing protests and rallies, hosting teach-ins, hosting political movie nights and discussions, gathering money for Palestine, etc etc. I think their historical paucity has more to do with needing a critical mass of people to have the capacity to do political work and they have been historically repressed. It is a full-time job to create and run an organized and you have to build enough capacity to rotate roles, otherwise it isn’t really organizing in the first place (organizing must build capacity!). I also think that pipelining is challenging for MLs due to the larger jump from liberalism a person must make. This is why groups like PSL have probation periods and FRSO has two tiers of membership. New members usually don’t know shit, they must be educated, and these are the people willing to join a communist org in the first place that runs counter to everything they have previously been taught. Feeder orgs (including fronts) have historically worked to address this but also require a critical mass of people to do the organizing work. And they are being actively targeted, e.g. principled pro-Palestine groups run by commies. Samidoun gets shut down but your local Trots are unscathed.

The ones depicting US soldiers / vehicles often have direct involvement of the US military about how they may be depicted. Just like in Hollywood. This ensures that the US is never shown to be the bas guys. And that the bad guys are always at least vaguely similar to the targets of US empire.

I think the US military tries to target fairly aimless young people. The point at which they are targeted is before the first recruiter talks to them, it is in media directed at kids and teenagers.

Thom Yorke (Radiohead guy) has put out a liberal Zionist statement that centers himself, chalks up the genocide in Gaza to Netanyahu and explicitly letting the genocidal “Israeli” public and other politicians off the hook, and criticizing those who say Free Palestine by talking about Hamas and hostages.

Nice to meet you, Touch Grass.

It’s actually the opposite of a weapon. It is false catharsis. Liberals watch shows like John Oliver’s and feel like they’ve resolved a problem when all they’ve really done is make themselves feel righteous.

lmao holy shit chat is this real he was a Maoist Third Worldist?

Incredibly cringe. Fascists want communists dead, though they usually don’t even know what communists even are and will kill you, too, liberal, and call you a “tankie” while doing it. Because “tankie” doesn’t mean anything except someone to the accuser’s left that pushes back on anti-left smearing.

And that is your level of discourse and understanding and it is why we must distinguish ourselves from you as much as possible. You’re the civility troll for imperialist genocide.

Never. Those who realize the types of actions needed will go down a path that removes their liberalism.

Every time I want to know something about a topic the results are 7 AI slop “articles” with incorrect information, 2 forums posts from the 2000s, 5 Reddit posts with incorrect answers because Redditors think they know everything even when they’re just making things up, and 1 authoritative and correct result from a company website.

Public relations and advertising are always propaganda. Anglos just reserve the scary P word for nations or people they want you to villify.

How to counter ICE: 🔫

“Gonna be better” doesn’t mean anything when they are not discernable qualities. Not even worth arguing about whether one is or not, it is throwing money away.

And yes a USB-C to 3.5 mm with a half-decent DAC in it, which you can get for $15, will sound just as good unless you are in a perfectly silent room with electrostatics or something. At which point you don’t want or need something portable.

With what army?

?

Haha get fucked Netherlands

They’re really not worth it. A $15 USB-C dongle and a smartphone will put out audio quality better than almost any audiophile’s headphones can discern.

Also you can get DAPs for like $50-$100 that will be the same type of deal: indiscernable.

Best country for slapping a French guy by far.

Others already have good recommendations for the provider so I will add some other notes.

First, please note that with the way DNS works, your home IP will now be recognizable as “the IP this domain points to” so make sure the chain of networking devices are secure, starting at your router. At minimum make sure the router firmware is up to date. The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to have a VPS as an intermediary, essentially a tunnel, though there are fancy new ways of making tunnels more powerful, like self-hosting tailscale-like services. But that has its own security downside, which is trusting the VPS provider. I think a DNS entry for your own home IP is generally better in terms of security vs. time invested but the VPS can be made theoretically superior by being careful with cryptographic strategy.

Second, yes you can, generally speaking, forward external requests on a given port to a local network IP and port. This is a decent way to slightly obfuscate ssh. By default it is port 22, so instead of opening 22 externally, you make some high-number (like 55342) port externally route to a server on port 22 locally. When sshing externally you just specify the high number port. Your router firmware may limit how well this works.

Third, yes the IP changing can cause DNS problems. You can set up a dynamic DNS service that changes your DNS records if your router external IP changes. If you run router firmware like OpenWRT the router itself can run this service. But you can also run dynamic DNS on a local server and have it do the same thing. Using a provider with a good API like porkbun makes this easier.