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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml
Posts 5
Comments 151
“A war between people and vermin”
  • First off: OP of course can do what they want with their screenshots. And I understand if the poster is in fact someone OP knows and not wanting to so easily lead people back to their own twitter presence. But let's not censor ourselves needlessly based off fears that have no basis in reality.

    However, it's a pretty white area. There is no meaningful legal liability from reposting publicly available, consensually posted content that has no copyright and iron-clad fair-use arguments for the purpose of comment, parody, educational use, etc. Effectively zero risk anywhere in the west to screenshot and comment on something posted publicly online (outside of stuff that breaks national security laws, grave intellectual property violations (think posting the coco-cola secret recipe level stuff), and child sexual abuse imagery) as it's widely understood posting online in public is doing so in an open forum and inviting this kind of response. It's only if the commenting, opinions, sentiment, speech itself violates the law that you have a problem and then it has nothing to do with not censoring or anonymizing names.

    Once you've accepted the risk of non-pre-screened user-submitted content such as pictures, text, you're already putting yourself in as hot of water as you end up in by allowing usernames to be present. I mean lots of reddit subs and other places used to straight up drop doxx posts on people connecting their online identities together and back to their real life ones, I saw a few on cth back in the day about prolific annoyances and I never heard of anyone dragged into court over that.

    The key to avoiding liability is timely good faith removal of potentially infringing content upon receiving a valid legal request. It's only persistent, flagrant, heavily repeated, demonstrably willful violations over long periods of time that have in the past successfully created liability. The biggest examples of successful online lawsuits I can think of include the gawker one which had to do with spreading revenge porn essentially and continually harassing a guy and not backing down when asked. There were numerous off-ramps that if gawker had backed down earlier they would have survived even a high-powered lawsuit like that. You really cannot get got for this stuff without being warned and ignoring the warnings.

    I mean half of social media is reposting content you don't own from others. We live in a society where random jerks with a camera can go around in public, get up in people's faces with a camera, insult them, antagonize them, harass the shit out of them for views and clicks and there's little that can be done with someone doing that for antagonism under the guise of "social experiment" while harassing and plastering someone's face and name all over. I mean if this were a legal issue the web would look a lot different.

    Now, you can potentially, hypothetically get in hot water if people on your website organize harassment and break laws to do so but that has nothing to do with showing usernames and importantly pretty much has to be a continued pattern of harassment and inaction after repeated notice. If people are saying "PM me for their info" and you're allowing it as people talk about harassment, bomb threats, whatever, then you could be in trouble censored names or no. But just showing something someone else voluntarily posted to a public space online? Nah. And we don't I think have a problem with users here harassing people to my knowledge even in an internet bullying way (correct me if I'm wrong of course). So the solution is not allowing a culture where people accept that, fostering one where people cry fed-posting and report such things before they can go anywhere and be used as evidence of anything.

    I'd be far more worried about the potential for all the "in minecraft" comments that I sometimes see than anything near this. Like the Palestinian situation has people heated and I've seen some stuff that really makes me worry for the person posting it because of the heat they could bring on themselves.

    Now if the people in the screenshots were breaking laws or in danger from the security state by spreading around what they'd been exposing or saying, or if their words could be construed as slander, there's an argument there. It doesn't apply here but there is one. That said, doing that won't protect most people who break serious laws, they need good opsec in the first place.

  • I don't like how people free themselves with violence so I, a Westerner, am going to side with the decade long oppressor
  • Relevant related reading: Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat.

    Of course this isn't just relegated to Marxism though the article focuses on it. There is broadly across the west this myth of peaceful resistance, of the noble peaceful resistor, of the noble martyr whose death brought about change without ever lowering or debasing themselves to shedding blood or engaging in violence themselves. This broadly connects back to the Christ mythos, Christ a figure who was martyred so the Christian religion says to save all of humanity. He died nobly we are told because he did not call upon all the powers of heaven to smite the oppressors, because even in his dying throes of agony he screamed "father forgive them" to stall the wrath of heaven. And through his glorious, noble, peaceful, pacifist sacrifice we are told all may have eternal life through belief rather than perishing.

    So the west is very obsessed with this idea and it stems from I believe this and of course is actually propagated in school teaching and so on with figures like MLK and Ghandi because it supports the hegemonic domination of the west, the submission of the proletariat, perpetuates ineffectual tactics which are handily beaten down with laughs and hands the participants trophies while regaling them with revisionist tales of how it didn't work this time but it did this other time as long as you ignore all the violence and other pressures that actually led to the victory falsely claimed in the name of non-violent, peaceful, and non-disruptive protest.

  • Looking for a recommendation to torrent music
  • Rutracker dot org has a massive selection of albums in flac quality. Many artists have whole discography uploaded. Use tools like cuetools to convert single album flac to individual tracks and/or to convert to mp3’s or other preferred format (I like aac).

  • PSL Statement: Modi’s police target progressive Indian outlet NewsClick with mass raids - Liberation News
  • This was likely caused by a NYT hit-piece on the newspaper saying their funder was trying to push the Communist Party of China line. The NYT directly led to this. Reminder that western 'journalists' have blood on their hands, more than a few stains they are soaked in it and their own guilt as much or more than any soldier of empire and equaled only by the black bag intelligence ghouls.

  • What will happen once Ukraine loses the war?
  • It really depends on the terms of the loss. There’s the potential for stabbed in the back anger from the Nazis there that turns violent against Western Europe, there’s also the possibility that’s avoided and instead they conduct decades of terrorist attacks against Russia with the west’s continued support.

    I’m somewhat doubtful Zelensky will be reasonable, so Russia may have to choose between a costly offensive that takes Kiev and chases the government to the west while degrading it or a frozen conflict with Donbas and other newly Russian regions under Russian control but disputed and not recognized as such in the west or by Ukraine. Because Zelensky knows he’ll have a chopper and a plane waiting for him even if Kiev falls whereas if he negotiates the Nazis there or the CIA will kill him.

    We’re already seeing fascists in the European Union and NATO calling for more expansion eastward and calling it imperative and a necessity. So I suspect color revolution attempts in CIS countries like Georgia, the -stans. They’ve already pulled shit in Armenia. The goal being to distract and overcome Russia by pushing up to their borders in too many places for them to militarily defend at once with their limited troops.

    Long-term I think they want enlargement to indoctrinate the peoples there with anti-Russia sentiment and eventually throw them into a grand conflict with Russia to cause enough internal trouble, instability and profit loss to allow a coup to replace Putin with someone more pliant to the west. They’re not giving up, there are degrees of success for the US and though Ukraine hasn’t succeeded as much as they hoped they’ve in some way’s strengthened their hand by pulling Europe inescapably into their orbit it seems (reactionary populism though could undo that in the next decade or two).

  • Need some help from u/parentis _shotgun
  • Genzedong on Reddit is also sadly being infiltrated by reactionaries though they aren’t making posts just comments and upvoting each other while downvoting Marxists. Unlike Juche gang though GZD is well and pretty much dead with maybe a post a day.

    IMO thought should be given to whether it doesn’t make more sense to lock certain low volume subs and direct people to come to lemmy.

  • How can we find more left unity?
  • No unity with the distorters of Marxism. Down with them.

    Feds don’t give a fuck about you having anti-capitalist thoughts or feelings. They care about real threats. Ergo it is in their direct interest and past playbooks to divert people down false paths, into Maoism, into Anarchism, into Trotskyism, even into Pat-Soc-ism. All of these are effectively anti-communists with a veneer or being progressive and anti-capitalist. It allows them to put wolves in sheep’s clothing among the workers to wreck, divert, instigate and direct most people back to supporting or being ambivalent about US imperialism and policy and being therefore ineffective at addressing capitalism or weakening it.

  • Anarkiddies calling Marxists “tankies”
  • There’s a liberal lurker here who I can see on my alt account on another instance but not from here (weird).

    They said they hope we know Russia isn’t even nominally socialist anymore, here’s my reply.

    We know. News to no one but dementia addled US politicians.

    But we support Russia obviously. Because it’s fighting the evil empire. Because it’s on our side. We didn’t choose that, we have no power to make it so. Russia didn’t even want to choose that. They tried to buddy up with the capitalist west but were rejected multiple times, they’re too big and can’t be subjugated and exploited so they’re a threat that must be fragmented into manageable pieces or isolated. The west chose that. They beat them and backed them into our corner and chained them to us and after the west stabbed them in the back a few times with lies about peace (Minsk agreements, Merkel and Sarkozy admitted they were lies all along) they’ve gotten the message.

    Not that Russia ever really left friendship with the oppressed peoples of the global south. Bucking the US empire and trading goods, cooperation, weapons when the west refused. Call it opportunism or realpolitik, the result not intent is what matters.

    But Russia will just become an evil imperialist empire and replace the US you scream. And that’s why you’re a liberal. They can’t. Idealism, wants, dreams, propaganda do not manifest into reality. The US didn’t will itself into its place by magic. It ascended to it as the result of material and historical forces going back centuries, specifically occupying and subjugating Western European colonial empires after WW2, it took on their power, assumed the reins over them and agreed to share the spoils. Various forces and reasons assure us the US will not hand over its crown to Russia peacefully as Europe did to the US. In fact even now Russia’s resistance, heroic, is inspiring Africans to push the French out. When all is done there will be nothing the west is left holding onto to barter with or hand to Russia, no colonial holdings. Russia cannot simply re-subjugate Africa or Asia or Latin America in a decade once they stand up. The original conditions which led to it don’t exist.

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • See, I look at this and then I look at crying liberals (including many so-called leftists) talking about how Trump winning again will bring mask off fascism or whatever to the US and for that reason they claim Biden/Kamala has to win again.

    And well uh it’s here, the Dems are bringing it, and this is the type of proof you should rub their noses in (not that they’ll care because fascism is when support whatever countries US State dept deems authoritarian in their addled heads).

  • US Poll of views on economic systems by gender
  • I mean yes, women are somewhat more empathetic (socialization, toxic masculinity, etc) BUT I would challenge this as I challenge all polls/surveys on such things as to if they defined socialism for the participants and what they defined it as. Because 95% of the people for socialism in polls when asked without clarification consider it Bernie-Sanderism or basically welfare capitalism, social democracy, the so-called nordic models.

    Ask the same question but use communism and watch those numbers among both sexes absolutely plummet to irrelevancy.

    People want better conditions but sadly they still believe the propaganda about evil communism and thus have no meaningful path to those conditions.

    Socialism in the context of western polls should always until proven otherwise result in an immediate mental substitution of the word "social democracy with lots of welfare and safety nets".

    The west is a mess. Hope springs eternal of course but well I really doubt the west can decline fast enough that I'll live to see the revolution.

    Honestly I would be interested in a poll that polls about support for communism, Marxism, etc and a breakdown of that along gender/racial lines but I doubt the polling companies will ever have an interest in doing that because those who want to fearmonger about socialism only need this inflated definition and many liberal academics believe Marxism dead so asking about it pointless.

  • Would you date someone who wasn't a Marxist-Leninist?
  • It depends on what kind of person.

    I frankly wouldn't be able to trust someone apathetic about politics in the increasingly repressive situation we face in the future in the west (or well in general, how can you look at police brutality against black people and shrug and say you simply don't have an opinion, being apolitical in the US is tantamount to saying you're comfortable with the status quo and can afford to not care. Which is different to be clear than being for progressive politics but checking out because of despair, mental health reasons, feeling a lack of progress, feeling it adds too much stress, etc. Like I get that, I don't watch the bourgeois propaganda called news anymore because it's just lies and it upsets me. I don't need to know every development within the charade of domestic politics).

    A well-meaning Bernie-Sanders type that supports Cuba and doesn't fully believe imperialist propaganda about the latest AES atrocities, sure. But someone who just kind of ignores your politics to be with you and who disagrees or "doesn't have an opinion" (especially the latter as that's just an empty head waiting to be filled and if they're not letting you fill it, sooner or later their liberal friends, the state, bourgeois propaganda will) can just as easily wake up one day and think "oh shit, the news is right, I'm with a dangerous commie".

    People don't want to hear it because they think love conquers all or some such but the reality is couples fight, break up, grow apart for all kinds of reasons having nothing to do with the entire propaganda apparatus of state and nation-wide peer pressure bearing down on them. Sure you have the possibility of having to contend with his/her friends saying you're an extremist and they should get away from you even if you're not a communist simply because their friends take a disliking to you, but when you are a communist the chance is much higher and as the contradictions heighten it only gets worse.

    I guess I'd ask whether someone only tolerating that side of you by ignoring it won't jump ship the moment their friends and society start pressing them too hard on what a horrible person you are because (propaganda). Fair weather love for anyone is easy, as is the first year or two where the passion is hot, its whether they have any tolerance for stormy seas after things cool a little that I guess I think matters.

    So having a good foundation not built on apoliticism of one partner for the other's beliefs is I think important. They don't have to be an ML but they can't be the type of empty-headed liberal who frankly is just waiting to be turned into an anti-communist liberal who at the very least looks at you with contempt and thinks you're delusional and irrational. Obviously if they're empty-headed and are receptive to theory and education that's one thing, being the type who gets stressed or looks distant at the mere mention of politics, theory, capitalism, exploitation is another.

  • ⚠️⚠️⚠️
  • Most household varieties of hydrogen peroxide and vinegar aren't concentrated/strong enough to make paracetic acid. You'd need vinegar of a much higher than 6% concentration typically sold and ideally higher concentration peroxide than the drug store kind (like the kind you could get for industrial applications without a special permit). Not that you should mix household cleaners without a clear understanding of the chemistry but I'm just doubtful this is a risk for most people who don't have access to commercial strength varieties of both.

  • Do you ever feel guilty about enjoying liberal media?
  • No. I'm too busy seething at the incredible low quality garbage Marvel/Disney and everyone else churns out to stop and be too angry about that. I just keep reminding myself the quality of art/culture will improve after the revolution and not before. Right now I must suffer the decay and pain of having garbage shoved in my face and having other people effusively tell me how great it is. Not even getting into the propaganda which is awful, on the merits, technical/story-telling etc level it's just a wasteland out there and I weep. Lots of slop. Not that I don't occasionally find a piece I guiltily enjoy.

    Though admittedly I kind of avoid the worst offenders. I mean I do enjoy older media and I guess I excuse it as it was just that way back then, they were just sexist, racist, homophobic etc (I cringe at the really in your face stuff but the casual pervasive things not so much). To me it's all an academic exercise. I know what I'm watching is a reflection of a time and place and type of thinking. I think older stuff actually helps in that I can say it just was that way whereas if you shove some 2 year old Marvel movie stuffed full of end of history liberal nonsense that raises my hackles because hey, these people are around me and they're annoying and smug and gah.

    I zero in on like subversive elements in older movies too and I think in a way modern movies are much less subversive in ways that matter, end of history and all that nonsense rotting people's brains. Take just as an example Terminator 2, the main bad guy robot is a cop and he's a cop for a reason and Cameron has stated that's because cops see themselves as better than other humans, they're apart from us, they use violence, etc so in what's otherwise a mindless effects and explosion-fest you have these little nuggets to chew on. Truly dangerous to capital they're not but at least they're not full of the open militarism you see in films these days, worship for the US military, America-Fuck-Yeah stuff even if there are no military it's American scientists or cops or researchers.

    Side-track but fucking fuck Arrival. Fuck the writers. Writing America as the country that has reasonable, rational researchers who discover the aliens don't want war, meanwhile the irrational Chinese/Asians are so war-like and aggressive (just like in real life the writers want to nudge you, whereas America in real life they nudge you, is just like the protagonist) they get bent on a warpath with the aliens and act exactly as the US would act in actuality in trying to rally everyone to attack them.

    So I guess I could say I don't feel guilty because I get annoyed if it's too bad and then I just stop. As to guilt, it's what I have. I speak English, I live in the west, the US is the primary media creator, only China remains and very little of their content gets even subtitles let alone a dub.

  • Imagine you're a landless peasant, western leftist copypasta

    Imagine that you're a landless peasant from a poor country in West Africa:

    You've been ground down your entire life, toiling for 12 hours a day in the sun for a small barely subsistence wage. Your parents were born as colonial subjects in a European colony. Your grandparents were essentially slaves. Your great grand parents were formally slaves. After decolonization, the CIA backed a coup in your country that installed a brutal dictator that terrorized your people and chopped up your parents for having been involved in the decolonial struggle.

    You find out about a subversive political group that's been preaching everything you know intuitively but could never articulate. They say that your labor is exploited, and the reason your pay is so low is because a cut gets sent to the West where white people will get to use it to live lavishly. The group is your local Communist Party.

    You get educated through free classes by the Communist Party and eventually become a member. You risk imprisonment for just being a member and the ruling regime has been known to disappear and torture Communists. You don't care, it's worth it. You've now read virtually all of Marx and Lenin and Mao and Fanon etc despite never having attended school. Your involvement in the Party over the years gets you into influential positions within it.

    You attend an international meeting of Communist Parties as a representative from your country. It's an extreme honor to work with comrades from all around the world. You hear their stories and realize that their struggles are the same whether they're in Africa, the Middle East or Latin America. The group sets out to work on a principled anti-imperialist line to help liberate all these comrades from the grip of imperialism and eventually capitalism. You understand that socialism is impossible in your country until the aggression and exploitation from the West ceases, so this is very important to you. You and your comrades have decided that despite many of their flaws, you should support Russia as a counterweight to US Imperialism which has utterly decimated your peoples, as well as DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and China, which have all always stood by your comrades when they fight Western occupation and exploitation.

    On the other side of the world, sitting in an air conditioned suburban home that is worth more than all the homes and possessions of all the people in your village combined, is the infamous western anarchist (or democratic socialist, whatever they're going by at the moment). He's 28 and recently laid off from his job as assistant manager at pizza hut. He's not a millionaire or anything but he never has to skip meals, has electricity, clean running water, and owns a catalog of video games worth more than your annual salary. He's never had to work more than a 10 hour shift baking bread sticks. He's been living off his parents who are both retired and receive generous pensions funded by collecting dividends from companies that exploit your village. The western leftist looks at his laptop made with rare earth minerals from your country (three of your cousins died in the mines) and is also worth enough to feed your children for three years.

    He sees on Twitter dot com that an international group of Communist Parties has released their Anti-Imperialist line in support of Russia. The western leftist reads it as he sips coffee that was made from beans grown in your comrade's home country, where his mother, father and aunt and uncle were all killed by CIA-backed death squads. The western leftist reads the article and is incensed. "How could they do this? How could they be this stupid? Fucking tankies, don't they know you can support oppressed people without supporting authoritarian dictatorships"?

    (Taken with slight modifications from an old post on CTH, that place had the occasional gem)

    12

    Given this is an explicitly Marxist instance. I nominate this community be removed

    lemmygrad.ml Analytical Unity - Lemmygrad

    A community dedicated to critical left unity and the synthesis of ideas. Everyone is welcome here, but, please avoid uncritical or unproductive sectarianism. Rules Rule 1: No unproductive sectarianism. Sectarianism that is not based in a coherent critique, or which assumes bad faith of another user,...

    Analytical Unity - Lemmygrad

    > A community dedicated to critical left unity and the synthesis of ideas. Everyone is welcome here, but, please avoid uncritical or unproductive sectarianism.

    (Please read the rest of their sidebar as well to get a feel)

    We as Marxists (regardless of whether ML, trot, Maoist, etc) I believe tend to universally uphold the notion that left-unity is not Marxist. That we practice only Marxist-unity (and with plenty of criticism amongst ourselves at that for non-ML's especially that often goes as far as exclusion for those who don't support AES at least critically).

    To put it bluntly: I do not want people who practice left-unity to get a beachhead or toehold here with a dedicated community.

    There is an anarchist alternative (raddle), at least one anarchist instance to my recollections on lemmy itself and most liberal and left leaning instances on lemmy allow anarchists but explicitly ban Marxists.

    In other words, this is our one, singular space which these people are now pushing into. We should not cede an inch of it to allowing non-Marxists and those who discourage vicious criticism and yes even venting and sneering and meming on of the compatible-left, the CIA-left, the synthetic-left and other such names.

    I'll note that hexbear is basically a left unity platform and will be federating with us shortly. They tolerate and allow anarchists and discussion between them and ML's so such content would be better there.

    I believe at any rate that anarchists are not disallowed from here if they're here to ask honest questions and not just spew imperialist propaganda and anti-communist, anti-AES dogma. Thus the community serves as nothing more than an attempted safe-space for anarchists and other deviations (left, right, etc), a safe harbor from site rules and standards.

    2