If you can pull a few people out of filter bubbles, it helps. But it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the investment, it really depends on where you are and what you can do.
You can also engage in one-person propaganda efforts, like putting up critical posters/stickers. Just don’t get caught.
It’s a tough battle upwards, the established propaganda model helps make sure of that, but undeniably at the end of the day, the workers in the US hold more than enough power collectively to threaten decision makers into compromise (and, if you have the guts, submission). I’m not even talking about violence, I’m talking about things like withholding labor and simple sabotage.
You have power. Help us out: https://specificsuggestions.com/
See also: CIA guides to simple sabotage.
Absolutely. Trump’s and the Project 2025’s “America First” strategy is essentially turning US imperialism inward on its own citizens now that the former global dominance is waning.
On the other hand, some have explicit ideological positions or themes (e.g. lemmygrad.ml, slrpnk.net) and others are shaped by moderation (.ml taking a hard stance against the sinophobia normal in mainatream media, .world and a few other instances/staff banning comments making light of violence e.g. luigi)
Yep. I don’t judge a comment before reading it, but there are a couple of instances where I will think “yeah, not surprised” after reading a reactionary or low-quality post.
Technically yes, although the term “anti-Semitic” (as the German word Antisemitismus) originally became established through specifically anti-Jewish conspiracy writings in the late 1800s. So the term “anti-semitic” generally means anti-Jewish, rather than literally being against Semitic peoples.
I’m curious if people are sinophobic or anti Russian.
Some instances, notoriously lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, aggressively ban Sinophobia and Russophobia, so much that many visitors get banned without understanding how what they said was prejudiced (many of their prejudiced views are simply ‘common sense’ as a result of normal Western propaganda) and yell about the instances being Russian/Chinese genocidal propaganda. So if .world gives you trouble, these places could be worth considering.
Me, but it’s for the perfect book/article to autoscroll during my four minute shower.
It’s so polarizing like people how do you expect to improve if you can’t acknowledge your faults?
The scale of this problem is mind-boggling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Long story short, the US Armed Forces performed a practice war simulation, “costing US$250 million (equivalent to about $423M in 2023), the most expensive war game in US military history”. The two teams were “Blue” (totally-not the US) and the “Red” team (totally-not Iran or Iraq). The retired Lieutenant General of the Red team made the reasonable choice to adopt old-school low-tech tactics to avoid the Blue team’s sophisticated electronic surveillance network, as well as other asymmetric tactics like those used by real armies who have defended against US invasions. Red team won in one day. There were apparently a range of technical problems in the simulation which made it harder for Blue, so they re-tried with conditions to make use of the remaining thirteen days. However:
After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and during a combined parachute assault by the 82nd Airborne Division and Marines air assaulting on the then new and still controversial CV-22, Van Riper’s forces were ordered not to shoot down any of the approaching aircraft. Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed. The postmortem JFCOM report on MC02 would say “As the exercise progressed, the [Opposing Force] free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations.” :::
but the amount of practical real life skills I’ve acquired over the years
Are there any particularly unexpected ones?
Can reasonable people agree that humans are more intelligent than crows?
Generally. Conditionally.
There are a rare few people who are, and I mean this without exaggeration or irony, not smarter than a typical crow.
But if you want a semi-ironic response anyway:
Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open—you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can’t get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
“Human rights” are a nice idea, but unfortunately, they’re a joke in practice. History clearly shows how quickly even the most basic rights vanish. If you aren’t liberated, if you don’t have the power to defend them (whether collective or individual power), rights are only privileges. So in that sense, I can’t consider it a human right.
But do I think someone should be free to pursue that goal? I’m not sure. Remembering history is really important in our development and learning. For a more extreme example, if someone, say, worked as a hitman for organized crime, killing many people, and later regretted their decision and requested people forget about them, I don’t think someone who has had such a profound impact on a society should be able to simply demand that anyone, let alone the whole of their society, ignore their past actions.
I believe people can appeal for forgiveness, or even ask people to forget them, but I don’t believe in a universal right to be forgotten, such as legally punishing people who discuss someone who wanted to be forgotten (I really don’t know how else such a right could be enforced).
With all that said, the GDPR “right to be forgotten” is a distinct and wonderful thing and I hope more countries enforce it. But again, know it’s only a privilege. A company can literally just make an illegal copy and pass it around like candy, if they believe they can avoid prosecution.
That’s the bottom line.
The other answers are right, just explaining in simpler language in case anyone needs it:
Codeberg, like Gitlab and Github, is a site for hosting and managing code repositories. These make it easy for many people to collaborate on a software project, review code, keep track of changes and history, keep track of bugs and feature requests, and more.
Here’s an example of a (very active) code project to explore: https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity (An audio editor based on Audacity)
The most famous code repo management tool, GitHub, was bought by Microsoft a few years ago, so reliable community-run alternatives like Codeberg are increasingly important.
For what it’s worth, there is a long history of banning subreddits once they get negative mass-media flak, even if they were well-known on reddit beforehand. The site is a business nervous about its reputation.
Ah, the good old hackintosh routine!
I’m gonna download StreetComplete, it’s a neat incentive for exercise.
On one hand, yes, these people are pathetic and have little idea what the symbols they’re playing with truly mean beyond white supremacy. And yes, it is useful (and fun) to mock farcists.
On the other hand, some of these people are (literally) astronomically rich, in bed with leaders of one of the most powerful military forces ever to exist, and the others are those supported by these rich haute-booj oligarchs (just like the original Blackshirts and Brownsharts were supported by landowners and maginates). A Nazi salute, understood with respect to history and the powerplay of today, is personal to many people. If it’s a teenage edgelord fucking around to get a reaction, sure, dismiss them or let them ‘find out’, but Musk and Bannon are people with huge influence over politicians and mass media. Elon Musk, for example, literally owns a pervasive media platform. They can start sizable rallies gathering both the batshit unhinged and the ideologically driven, armed and hungry.
So if you’re someone who the Nazis would have sent to the extermination camps (and there are many, many groups that were, basically most of humanity), then that salute is someone with state power declaring they want you dead. I wouldn’t call it insulting as much as a credible death threat.