6·
2 days agoFair enough :p
A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.
Admin of SLRPNK.net
XMPP: prodigalfrog@slrpnk.net
- 5 Posts
- 24 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 4th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
Ding ding!
It’s the name of the channel, not a description of what Oracle does (hence the pipe between them). I edited the title to add a bit more context and make it more clear that they do not, in fact, do good work.
3·3 days agoAgreed!
The most effective non-violent action we can take is to organize a General Strike.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. 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.
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), please 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).
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.
It wouldn’t let me there either. Not sure it’s my VPN or my browser, but I figured most people aren’t going to have as intense of a privacy set-up as we do. I also don’t know of an alternative to that site now that the ICE Block app was removed from stores.
You could warn your area if you see ICE around on this website.
Finding and getting involved in a local mutual aid group would be quite meaningful, as it would allow you to meet people who share your same concerns IRL, and be able to plan and organize for how to react in your area. It’s very make a meaningful difference alone, finding a solid group is very important.
Attempting to unionize your workplace if it isn’t already would be very helpful to further prepare for a General Strike (as they usually have strike funds to make a general strike financially bearable), which is pretty much our last non-violent option to prevent all of this from progressing. You can see how a general strike helped cripple Chile’s government while civil unrest was occurring in this documentary.
I’d recommend contacting the IWW, who will gladly train you to become an organizer with proven techniques to unionize your workplace.
Lastly, I’d also recommend checking out the book Full Spectrum Resistance for a more complete guide on how to prepare and respond.
There’s a 3rd type of socialism that was more rarely spoken of in the 60’s and 70’s, because it didn’t have the drawbacks of centralized soviet style communism: Anarchism. This ideology was successfully implemented for a few years in parts of Spain during their civil war, and its success in creating a non-hierarchical decentralized and free society even attracted George Orwell to visit it, and join their cause to fight for what they were building.
It was eventually crushed by both fascists and communists, as both sides were terrified of that concept spreading. If we’re able to implement it again someday, possibly in a spot where it would be much harder to crush militarily, then it would be a genie impossible to put back in the bottle, as it would be so self-evident in how superior of a way of life it provides to everyone, without the downsides of a centralized dictator.
If it were replaced with massive investment into public transport and new dedicated high speed rail between US cities, it’d be a huge net positive.
A man can dream, anyway.
To do it again would literally kill air travel in the country for the next 30 years. People would literally stop flying.
From a climate perspective, that would be fantastic.
2·25 days agoIf you’re using that currently, do you notice that on a fresh reboot, if you sit at the desktop and just wiggle the mouse for a while, or keep creating selection boxes with your mouse, KDE will freeze for a random amount of time?
There’s still time for a general strike. The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. 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.
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), please 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.
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.
We rapidly need to switch to Linux Mobile. PostmarketOS and Mobian are the two most promising projects, and I would highly recommend anyone reading this to donate to them if you have the means.
Both projects directly use your donations to hire developers to build and polish the critical essentials to get this alternative viable as a daily driver.
Agree 100%! For others reading, here’s a good article on the merits of dual-carding.
The problem is there absolutely is many, many wrong paths to take, and we have to learn from past attempts to avoid their mistakes. Notice how the arab spring movement, while initially promising, ultimately failed to prevent a new authoritarian regime from taking hold in most of those countries.
There are going to be different prescriptions from all political ideologies, but most of them can be dismissed to narrow down the possibilities.
- Right-Libertarians will advise we privatize everything and remove regulations - Doesn’t work. Creates the conditions for Neo-fuedalism and capital dominating every aspect of life.
- Moderates/Social Democrats will suggest we can reform our way out of this by voting for the right people - Didn’t work in Nazi Germany, didn’t work in Franco’s Spain. Due to corporate capture, they ultimately cannot resolve the issues that cause people to foolishly shift toward fascism in hopes to escape those issues.
- Marxist-Leninists will say we just need a revolution with a Vanguard party - Doesn’t work. Results in extremely unfree authoritarian states like the USSR, North Korea, and China’s CCP. Basically state capitalism under the guise of socialism in name only.
That leaves the Libertarian-left/Anarchists. We have evidence that their methods result in pretty sweet outcomes, they just have never survived very long due to the whole world usually being against them.
Okay, so what do we do to in our case? First off, avoiding a civil war or extreme violence is vastly preferable, as the alternative has some big downsides. The best non-violent method we have at our disposal is a General Strike, which directly targets the machinery that fascist states rely on. Combined with mutual aid networks and civil disobedience, it has a rather good chance of preventing a fascist takeover with a minimum of violence.
The alternative is straight up revolution, which requires the participating population to be educated on a shared vision, methods to organize, and how to avoid centralizing power structures or cult of personalities which lend themselves to co-option by the above mentioned groups.
If the law would lead us to fascism, then the law must not be followed. They will come for us regardless of if we follow the law or not.
That’s why mutual aid organizations are essential. They operate outside of the legal system, so can’t be directly targeted as easily. If you or anyone else reading this have the time, please consider joining your local mutual aid group. That could be Food Not Bombs, a different group local to your city or town, or even your local church if you’re in a rural area.
If you don’t have one in your area, start one! Here’s a little guide on how and where to find likeminded folk to start one with: https://infosec.exchange/@tinker/113589807117870451
I’m familiar with the depressing statistic already, a little under 10%.
However, bear in mind that the majority of the most critical infrastructure for making profit, such as ports, trains, trucking, and medical care have the highest rates of unionized jobs, and would still be incredibly effective for a general strike (Generally only 3.5% of the population would need to participate to have a meaningful effect). Even with our abyssal rate of unionization, we still hold incredible leverage if we choose to use it.
The UAW has a general strike planned for May 1st 2028, which has real odds of working. Unfortunately it’s still 2 years out, and by that time may be too late. I’m hoping it’s moved up at some point.
Unions build up strike-funds with membership dues so that members can continue to receive a salary while striking, that’s why unions are so essential for working class people to be able to flex their power non-violently.
Consider that Chile is a much less wealthy country than the US. but was able to successfully commit to a general strike for over a month.
It was founded in 1905, and at one time had 150,000 members. Its membership was gutted by extreme persecution during the red scare, and the Taft-Hartley act essentially outlawed their (very successful) tactics. Historically, the AFL-CIO raided members during those persecutions to swell their own ranks.
The IWW’s membership has been steadily growing in recent years as their tactics become needed once more, especially now that the NLRB has been captured and is effectively union hostile. Traditional unions are very much reliant on a friendly NLRB to function and thrive, and are not generally well equipped tactically to fight back against the current regime. We’ll need to call upon those old tactics to survive this period, and hopefully to give unions their teeth back, as they are currently quite a moderate group content with marginal gains that often barely keep up with inflation.
There’s a lot of merit in joining the IWW to help build it up back to its former glory, as it’s the only union in the US that is at its core is working toward abolishing capitalism, instead of becoming content making it slightly more bearable.
The UAW was planning a general strike for May 1st 2028, but that was before Trump was elected, and when they likely thought we had more time.