A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.
Admin of SLRPNK.net
XMPP: [email protected]
In your account settings page, there’s a section for importing and exporting your user account:
Exporting it will give you a JSON file that contains your favorited posts/comments, community subscriptions/block, user blocks, and instance blocks.
That file can then be imported into any other Lemmy (or even Piefed! It’s compatible ^^) instance, bringing all those things with you :)
The only thing that cannot be exported are your own comments and posts.
Also @[email protected]
I just can’t understand how it got so bad, so quickly. Relatively speaking.
It’s not too different from other fascist takeovers. Hitler and Mussolini went from being jokes to seizing dictatorial control in a relatively short time. Their rise was spurred by the failures of liberal style governments to adequately tamp down the excesses of the capital owners, along with other economic factors.
To a historian, the rise of Fascism in the US probably wouldn’t be too surprising. We had a popular Nazi movement here in the 30’s that was clamoring for power. That collapsed due to their leader embezzling funds, and it’s successors being imprisoned under the espionage act during WWII.
But as for why it’s happening again, it starts with FDR finally implementing major economic reforms that provided desperately worker and union protections, high taxes on the wealthy, and social security. Those actions were directly responsible for ending the gilded age as well as finally giving the working class a sense of hope and that life could actually get better (at least… If you weren’t a minority, life still sucked for them, hence the civil rights movement a few decades later).
However, starting in the 70’s, conservative and liberal leaders have consistently and slowly whittled away all of those working class gains from the 30’s to the 60’s.
Throughout the 90’s to the present, we also had hard-right propaganda being allowed to be aired on TV (Fox News is one example), which fermented conspiracy theories for decades to an unfortunately uneducated populace.
All of that set up the perfect environment for a fascist to come in and perform their classic tactics of: blame minorities, promise a bright future, and convince their base that the left is literally evil and that they must be eliminated.
That’s glossing over a whole lot, but that’s kinda the ultra short version as to how we got here, and why it seemed to rise so quickly.
and what about general strikes and so on.
A general strike is desperately needed, but it genuinely isn’t as easy as just calling for one and hoping everyone jumps onboard. Unions need to coordinate together to organize a proper one that won’t fizzle out, which I will admit has been an agonizingly slow process, but it does appear to be happening.
The best thing we can do in the meantime is to unionize our workplaces if it isn’t already, help a friend unionize theirs, speak up at union meetings about the importance of preparing and organizing a general strike (set up strike funds, contact other unions and mutual aid orgs to plan a date and resources, etc), and joining a local mutual aid group that will help us weather the strike.
I’ve been spreading this guide showing how to prepare for resistance as far and wide as I can. If you’d like to chip in and spread that as well, you have my full permission to copy and paste it wherever you think it’d get the most eyeballs (that goes for anyone else reading this too, your help would be much appreciated. Just try to make sure you post it where it won’t be totally off topic and unwelcome).
You can access the markdown version of that guide by clicking the little page icon with the folded edge beneath it (on lemmy through the browser), so you don’t have to manually copy the links or the formatting.
We host an XMPP and Movim front-end that’s accessible to all Slrpnk members using their lemmy login (it queries the same database), if you’d like to try it out before recommending it to your group. It’s mentioned in our sidebar and in the monthly Meta posts (I guess that shows we might not be doing a terribly good job advertising it if you’re not familiar with it 😅)
I tried a lot, I think it has the most feature parity.
Have you tried Movim? It has most of the essential features, like group video calls, screen sharing, and a better E2EE method than matrix (IMO, anyway). It’s also much easier to set up and host since it uses XMPP.
Could put [AI Subject] in the title.
I played Choas Theory’s spy vs merc multiplayer before the servers were shut down (though there are fan efforts that got it working again).
I had an absolute blast with it, and as you mention it was extremely unique, I have yet to experience anything like it.
If it helps, the developers all hated Tom Clancy’s books and the conservative politics they pushed. They basically made the first splinter cell as a parody of the tropes in them. (The first game actually casts the US in a pretty bad light, showing that it’s propping up dictators who are friendly to US capital).
It’s also a running joke in the series that Sam Fisher hates Ronald Reagan with a passion.
Hm, I get the district feeling you’re talking past me at this point since none of that seems to engage with or acknowledge my previous message.
waiting just makes it worse, and your choices are fighting or full submission.
I don’t believe it’s a simple binary. During Nazi Germany’s rise, Hitler was extremely popular with the average citizen. I will agree that in that period, a militant option might’ve been their only real move, as the Unions, despite being far stronger than they are in the US today, didn’t seem to take the threat seriously enough to call for a general strike (or at least, I can’t easily find an example of them doing so) before he took power, or after Hitler began attacking the unions.
In contrast, the US unions (besides the teamsters) seem to be aware of the threat, and are actively making inroads to a general strike.
They’re not going to wait for an excuse, or they’ll make one. You’re dealing with a false choice here.
I agree that they will eventually pull a Reichstag fire, but it’s not clear to me that accelerating a confrontation is wise. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend checking out the article I linked in my previous response.
which is about exactly the use of non-violence in the US Civil Rights movement
I’m not sure that’s applicable, or perhaps we’re using the word violence differently. I’m not at all against property destruction or riots, but you didn’t see Black Panthers actively going on the offensive and gunning down cops. Had they done so, it would’ve brought the whole military down on them and they’d likely be wiped out without mercy, which the government was itching to justify as evidenced by the Desire group being shot at with 30 thousand rounds without provocation.
I think the Civil rights movement used property destruction and the very real threat of violence quite effectively, but I’m unsure how things would’ve gone had Malcolm X openly called for the movement to open fire, as he almost did after the murders of Nation of Islam members. Maybe that would’ve kicked off a successful revolution, another civil war, or the quick extinguishing of those radical members by the military. It’s hard to say.
As to the quote in the photo you left: I agree that a peaceful protest will change nothing without a credible threat to back it up. A general strike is one threat, and a very effective one if enacted (as evidenced by how the government of Chile reacted to one). Property damage is another, as are riots. The last option is the cartridge box, it should not be the first option unless you know you can win, and have a pretty good idea that it will save more lives than not using it.
No prob! I’m excited for it too ^^
If you have a link to a discussion or issue where they’re tracking this, I’d love to follow it.
They’ve mentioned needing to accelerate the development of it on their Mastodon account in light of the Discord blunder, such as here, and they just had a user poll there that resulted in Discord-like grouped channels/spaces being the most requested.
I’m very familiar with it. Matewan (which takes place before the battle for Blair Mountain) is one of my favorite movies.
The difference is in the period where the US labor movement employed violent resistance; The government was not literal Nazis, the US had not yet become the most advanced military on the planet, and the police and strike-breaker thugs weren’t as well equipped as the military itself, nor had state funded billion dollar budgets to boot. Hell, the workers at Blair Mountain could’ve done a lot of damage, maybe even inspire a popular revolt across the US, had they not been persuaded to stop.
We, and the US labor movement, is at this moment facing a problem much closer to the consolidation of power ofNazi Germany, where unions were destroyed by an overwhelming state violence.
I’m not saying that it’d be a bad idea to be prepared if non-violent resistance fails, I’ve made posts in that area as well. But at the same time, it’s quite clear that the regime is looking for an excuse to call martial law, cancel the elections, and unleash the military upon all who oppose it.
I’m personally not super confident that the US military will refuse orders, or that a large enough faction within it would split off and join the resistance if ordered to round up and kill US citizens. Without that, being the initiator in a violent resistance would light off a powder keg that is not to our advantage, as it would then reduce our resistance force to only the most militant. And again, if the military blindly follows orders, it would be open-slaughter in a straight up fight. At best, the resistance could manage a Troubles like reaction.
There’s a point where we may be forced into that position regardless, but we’re currently dominating in winning public sentiment, and lowering the popularity of the regime, which also doesn’t seem competent enough realize that they’re speedrunning the violent suppression part (Hitler and Mussolini built it up patiently over a decade), and aren’t providing the economic gains to their base to compensate for the violent shock.
It would seem prudent to let the regime continue to hang itself as we further ferment non-violent resistance and educate workers of how much power they can wield with a general strike, and to organize for one before it’s too late. And at least in my opinion, it’d be damned foolish not to even try the non-violent path considering how effective its been demonstrated to be, especially when the alternative is a tremendous amount of death, and possibly a new civil war.
Piggybacking off this:
XMPP and Deltachat are two excellent decentralized, self-hostable, federated, encrypted communication platforms. Deltachat is limited more to text (though it can send videos or audio files that can be played in the app like snapchat), but with XMPP, we could use the Movim Client.
Movim can do group video calls, screen sharing, differing permissions in groups, and even user blogs! And I believe the devs are working on adding discord-like channels with multiple groups under a single community. It’s currently our best option to shift to, and due to being FLOSS, will only ever improve (we’ll never need to worry about investment capital enshittification), so it’s not just kicking the can down the road, it’s a long-term, almost permanent solution.
Movim (an XMPP client) covers most of that. I think it’s currently working on having a collection of rooms be in one channel, but it already has group chats, group video calls, screen sharing, and permissions in groups.
It doesn’t have forums in it, but it does allow users to have blogs.
We haven’t even tried our most powerful non-violent tactic yet: a proper, long-term, nation wide General Strike.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to simply ignore the democrats and their lack of spine, and instead demand real changes (abolishing ICE should be towards the top of the list).
That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).
As we’re seeing, deadly violence is being used against us and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.
Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.
But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.
Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.
These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in [email protected] to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.
This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then may be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner.
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.
Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.
Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.
Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.
We’ll start it off with some General Advice:
For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).
I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).
We have a mealtime videos community right here on Lemmy to make it much easier to find something interesting :)
No prob :D