I don’t know what to add that has not been said before, in this thread or elsewhere. But this line was the one that made me want to write a comment:
“It was like a rollercoaster,” Tobias’ daughter, Luna, told me when I reached her by phone. “Always waiting for messages to know if he was okay.”
Tobias went to Ukraine because he saw a girl his daughter’s age carrying an AK in Kiev, and that made him want to enlist. But for what? He left his daughter behind, he might die in Ukraine and leave his daughter an orphan, for an unknown woman he saw on TV that reminded him of his daughter? But you have a daughter right here, at home, that needs you.
Ukraine is not your fight.
This might seem petty bourgeois and tell me if you think it is, but I started ordering my groceries over (not from the gig economy but from the chains themselves who use the national postal service to deliver) and I have never moved back. I started doing it because I got into a situation where I did not have my driver’s license at the time and lived in a so-called “bedroom town” with no amenities, and this was the only realistic option.
I have only had benefits from getting my groceries delivered. I get to keep an eye on my budget, I’ve reduced impulsive purchases, it’s freeing up a lot of time that I would otherwise spend waiting in line or navigating the store. I understand that I’m depending on the labour of others to deliver food that I could go get myself but I also think this is freeing and reduces labour (no word on how the deliverers, who work in the afternoons and evenings, manage their own grocery shopping and this would definitely need to be clarified). In this way I’m reminded of Kollontai’s Family and communism about socialised labour.
It also prevents me from taking the car out just to get groceries for myself, although I don’t know if their minivan (they deliver idk how many homes in one trip) is more efficient.
So yeah definitely recommend getting deliveries instead of actually going into stores.
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia
Orwell was a colonial cop who later on kept a list of “crypto-communists” and “anti-white” personalities that he gave to the British gov. It’s come to a point where there are serious allegations he was an informant even during his time in Catalonia. That’s the kind of thing I mean by siding with the bourgeoisie. But I am not talking about the Spanish revolution, I am talking about you as an anarchist in this comment section, and more generally all anarchists I’ve met.
I appreciate that. I was simply pointing out that your articles are very poor: either no sources or very shaky sources. You could do a better propaganda job if you put your heart to it
What sources should we have decrying anarchism as what it really is? Any marxist analysis of anarchism will ultimately lead to that same conclusion, quoting someone about it would only be a formality. This backhanded compliment does not faze me or any of our editors; we are not here to appeal to anarchists, we are here as a proletarian encyclopedia. We are a handful of volunteer editors and do not have the means Wikipedia (which you seem to be fond of) has, nor do we claim to. Our recent changes page is filled with edits every day, we’ll get around to adding things to the article on anarchism when we get to it. Decrying it as imperfect and thus faulty does not solve anything; it is better to publish something viable than not publish at all.
Here is the link you were interested in: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist
anarchists siding with the bourgeoisie against the mean tankies, what else is new? prolewiki is a proletarian encyclopedia, we do not hide the fact that we are marxist-leninists and that we reject anarchism as a petty-bourgeois, counter-revolutionary ideology. You are free to make your anarchist encyclopedia if you want to.
Edit: Zapatistas are not anarchists, and they have been saying that for decades. I know anarchists have nothing else to cling to, but it’s really appropriating to have them keep claiming the Zapatistas are anarchists when the movement themselves have had to put out press releases and articles explaining to please stop calling them anarchist.
lmao okay defend the Ayn Rand libertarian website if you want, what do you want me to tell you?
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Are you white and male by chance?
Wikipedia is not volunteer run… They’re using language to make it seem like it’s a little website with a dream being bullied by the mean Russians. Wikipedia is run by its administrators, who do not let anyone else encroach on their power. 3 editors are responsible for most edits (I want to say 90%). Famously there is one editor that edits from 6 am to 10pm every day without fail (mostly pro war edits) , and the most prolific editor worked as a TSA and ICE agent terrorizing migrants.
I am very interested in where these foreign fighters in Ukraine are getting paid though. They are “volunteers” on paper.
Yeah, that’s a very important question. There’s also NGOs now that help them get to Ukraine (not necessarily in fighting roles though, they’re also connecting volunteers for civilian and refugee support).
You can read the UN text here: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1989/12/19891204 08-54 AM/Ch_XVIII_6p.pdf (english version starts on page 19), there’s a whole bunch of conditions (that must all be met as I understand it), but the one that comes back the most is essentially about money.
Possibly. But let’s get some perspective too, the two t-shirts you pulled are from the same seller and only 1 unit was ever sold. Those are the only two items on the website when you search for blackface, it’s hardly a widespread problem. Regardless I was able to report the items directly to ali and we’ll see if anything comes out of it. Moreover, Amazon sellers are usually just aliexpress resellers, except their items are 3x more expensive. Amazon is just being a middleman for aliexpress (with the added benefit, perhaps, that your items arrive sooner though I’ve had very good delivery times on ali).
The child did not die in an Alibaba factory but in a seller’s that sells on the platform, as alibaba and aliexpress are just marketplaces.
which is not exactly sounding like a workers’ utopia.
Nobody is saying China is a worker’s utopia.
things like Fairmondo are out there.
Only available in Germany though.
Consumers are not responsible for climate change, and reading the vice article was somewhat funny because now UK retailers that have been racing to the bottom are, once again, being outraced by China and crying about it. They created this commodification (or rather capitalism did, and they were the mere vectors), and now they can’t stop it. While we are in capitalism, as workers we will partake in it. The only way to stop the climate crisis is revolution, but until then there will be online retailers, there will be giants, and there will be labour exploitation.
Some other comments in that subreddit were claiming that foreign volunteers were being asked to be cannon fodder. No idea how true that is but it fits into the big picture.
In this article, an ex-soldier who went to enlist in Ukraine (and got away when he realised what he was getting into) explains what he saw. These foreign volunteers are by and large people that have never been in war, and they still sign up. The training is super basic, you get 3 days of it then get sent to the front. The recruiters tell you what you want to hear so you sign the contract – keep in mind this war is not even three weeks old, don’t pay attention to the “newcomers receive three weeks of training”; in three weeks, this war is over.
“This is nothing like fighting terrorists,” Priday tried to explain to other recruits. “You’re fighting a real country, with a real army, with a real navy, with special forces and heavy weaponry and superb tactical capabilities. And it’s all being conducted by a crazy man.”
(Ignore the crazy man comment lmao this cracker was a NATO soldier)
These supremacists think this is gonna be like Call of Duty and they’ll become heroes and all the Ukrainian girls will be at their feet.
Edit: I mean, they’re so fucking ignorant they go to Ukraine with their actual phones and post pictures on social media lmao. Probably how Russia found out about the base.
It’s the EU pressuring Switzerland. Due to their position as a non-EU landlocked country, bordered only by EU members (especially Germany and France, the two powers of the EU), Switzerland feels obligated to follow everything the EU decides, though usually by enacting their own laws rather than adopting EU regulations (allowing them to pull out of them). The EU is only a proxy of US power, but we see the nests of imperialism.
(4) Not a war crime per se but Ukraine’s creation of an international legion of foreign fighters has involved advertisements social media posts soliciting people from most countries of the world, including countries which are bound by treaty to not allow their citizens to join such units.
I’m keeping an eye on that one because Ukraine has signed the international convention against mercenary work, and the biggest defining factor of a mercenary is being motivated by pay, or receiving substantial amount of money as reward that soldiers of the same functions and grade would not receive. They’re not doing that yet…
Zelensky got his start as a TV actor, he used to play the president of Ukraine in a comedy series. That makes him great at looking the part.
I also saw that his cabinet was all formed by TV execs and old colleagues, but I don’t know if that’s actually true. That would give them an edge on PR and communication.
Make no mistake, Ukraine is not an innocent lamb to the slaughter in this fight. They want Ukrainian civilians to die, because that makes Russia look bad and drives foreign support.
The one issue with google mobile services (of which google play, their app store, is a part of) is that they are a monopoly, and every developer goes through them because that’s the biggest market, and possibly the easiest for them to enter. Every other problem you have with google on mobile is but a branch of that infested trunk.
I recently got a huawei tablet, one that didn’t come with google services, and the replacement is good enough. I can also easily install other marketplaces like aptoide. But, they clearly don’t have the same apps. Even local apps that are secondary to say, a website or PC software, is on google and nowhere else.
It doesn’t end at just the app store though. Apps that have microtransactions (for example a note-taking app that unlocks with a one-time in-app purchase) usually use Google services and nothing else. Meaning you can’t unlock the app because you don’t have google mobile services installed.
There’s also a lot of shovelware on the huawei store lol, let’s be honest. There’s dozens of poppy playtime clones and the games page is overwhelmed with those. But that’s more of a problem with how app stores work.
The huawei store sends you to apkpure to sideload the app if they don’t have it in store, but this is a shoddy replacement. First of all I have no idea what I’m downloading on apkpure, and secondly it doesn’t restore mobile services (they need to use huawei mobile services for it to be compatible with my tablet). Although the store is capable of tracking versions and telling me when there’s an update on apkpure. I can also just download the apkpure store ig.
edit: despite any of this, I still recommend huawei for tablets and mobile phones. Very good quality at a third of the price or less. They are also building their own ecosystem so expect more interesting things to come in the next years. I also see Xiaomi is even cheaper and just as good, but I’ve never tried their devices myself.
But that’s not really money laundering, more like value inflating. On top of that you need someone else to buy your overpriced NFT and I’m not sure I can envision a crypto billionaire buying an ape picture at 15 million $ when the previous owner bought it for 7.
I definitely see the bubble though, and people hoping that by buying at 15 million they’ll be able to resell at 25 million.
A colour revolution uses legitimate griefs people have with their government to co-opt the movement and promote regime change instead for foreign interests that fund the revolution.
For example a colour revolution is currently attempted in Cuba by mobilising the diaspora who, in turn, mobilises the Cuban population. The embargo is hitting Cuba really bad (cost 60 billion dollars since 1960) and this prevents them from having much-needed medical supplies (especially against covid), cheaper internet access or just more consumer goods.
That’s a legitimate grief that has led to some unrest sometimes – even if the embargo is not Cuba’s fault and is literally only supported by the USA and Israel. But it’s being weaponised by the United States and they’re funding protests in Cuba so they can point and say “look, people don’t want the communist party in charge! They’re protesting for more freedoms!”. What was originally “we’re tired of not having these simple things, please give us them and we will stop picketing” now has turned into “we will topple the government and throw molotov cocktails at the police”.
The pattern of a colour revolution is: foreign funding -> local “leaders” -> protesting masses. Foreign powers start funding and even sometimes training people who align with their interests and they put them to work for co-opting protests to promote regime change. Sometimes the people that are funded are not really leaders and locals didn’t even know them until they suddenly took an interest. Sometimes protests are started by bought locals. The common point is that they’re using legitimate unrest to ask for something else entirely.
Colour revolutions were and still are a favourite of the CIA because you can’t really trace it back to them (not in time at least) and all it takes them is money and meeting with locals. It also creates a ton of support at home because the protestors want “freedom”, and who doesn’t want freedom? What kind of monster is stopping their people from wanting freedom? And if the targeted government retaliates against the protestors in any way, you can also say “look they’re putting down the protests, these people just want democracy why is the government so afraid of giving it to them?”. But they don’t want democracy, they want regime change. They want to install a neoliberal government that will let their natural resources be exported by American companies.
So the CIA funds loyal people and if the protest doesn’t work out, they were never there. That’s the genius of it. All you have are receipts through front companies (because the leaders are paid for mobilising people against the government) and it’s the protest leaders that get arrested, not the American agents. This means you can try again with another patsy if your fall guy gets busted.
I set up a slur filter first thing when I made r/antifastonetoss – but I left reddit last year, so I don’t know how the discourse progressed after that. But the mod team on AST is composed of various ideologies and marginalised people which was instrumental in setting up a slur filter without seeming like we dictated our vision too much on the community.
We made it to foster a safe environment where people can feel welcome to, and so they feel they have the right to participate. Ultimately it needed some tweaking, because the community used some words a lot and their status as a slur was not entirely clear yet. IIRC we only ended up removing the words id.ot and st.pid from the filter. Overall, it worked well. It did remove a lot of bad actors straight up (fascists and reactionaries who wanted to argue), with very few false-positives.
Even in the case of words that could be used in several ways (homophones mostly), we basically knew how many instances of false-positives and true-positives there was and could decide to filter them on a case-by-case basis. Of course if you want to deploy this to a whole project and its future instances, it’s a different question.
It’s a dialogue between your users and your vision. I firmly believe you get the community you deserve, meaning that your actions as a community manager (or moderator or admin whatever) will shape your community. We removed the words mentioned above because it was causing a lot of frustration and we never had someone write us to say “hey I’m glad you filter these two specific words”. Or even after removing them, we never had someone say “I prefered when they were filtered because I feel targeted”. Lacking a proper audit of our community, this was our way to gauge . So in the end it removed some frustration and the users were overall happier that they could use these two words, even if I personally believe there are other words that work just as well. We felt we were driving people away and it was counterproductive to keep them in when it was having 0 noticeable benefits. Of course this doesn’t work for every word lol. I’m reminded of the “t-word” debate on animemes and in this case I think they were right to ban it.
Yes, some words have been reclaimed. And not everyone considers the same words to be slurs. What we did was err on the side of caution, and figure that words that have been reclaimed were allowed because there was only a very small chance of someone using it disparagingly – and if they did they would usually be mocked in the comments. Of course though this applied to a subreddit where a) we live with fascists on the whole site (one of the reasons I left reddit altogether) and b) our community was already mostly aware of these issues and knew not to push the buttons. We could also trust them to push back against people using these words as slurs, as did the mod team.
As for words that some didn’t consider a slur when it applied to them, we kept them in if the status was unclear. Because while some people didn’t think it was a slur and laughed about the word, others did consider it a slur, and we took the stance of doing more good than harm which was to ban the word.
We also allowed people to censor the words with some characters (asterisks aren’t ideal because markdown uses them), YMMV. We figured that in most cases a censor would be enough not to trigger anything but we’d see if someone would mail us to say censors are not enough for them. Ultimately nobody did, so we kept it like this because
There’s also one other very important benefit to a slur filter: not only does it frustrate fascists so much that they just stop writing (and their comments are not seen, that’s a win-win), but the filter also helps keep conversations level-headed. I don’t want to be a lib and worship peace, but in our project it was important that people could get along and focus their anger at stonetoss, not at each other. If your comment gets removed because you didn’t think and used a slur, it would get removed, and you’d get a private message telling you which word you used and to please censor it or delete it. That also gave them time to think about what they really wanted to say, because often you realize after writing your comment that you don’t really care all that much and what is even the point of sending it?
People circumventing the filter was never an issue, except to fascists who would get banned for other reasons. We did take a no-nonsense policy on this and flat out said in the private mail that circumventing the filter on purpose will result in a permanent ban. Most of the time if there was any issue, it was people not understanding how some word was a slur, but after explaining it they usually understood. That’s why people – in this particular community at least – didn’t circumvent the filter; they understood to some extent that the word wasn’t a good one to use. And really it’s easier to put in an asterisk or period than to try and make it go through.
But I wanted a slur filter day one on antifastonetoss to make people understand what kind of community we wanted. We didn’t want the edgy teens, we didn’t want the cryptofash, we didn’t even want the libs. We wanted leftist people who wanted to really hurt a fascist and could remain respectful between themselves. We wanted people who had some amount of knowledge about these issues in the first place because again, you get the community you build. Of course we had no issues with newcomers and understood that some people had no idea about fascism (which is why I wrote some articles for the subreddit) or that they may not understand why we had a filter, and we were prepared to explain that with the help of the more knowledgeable part of the community.
“Tankies” are marxist-leninists or marxist-leninists-maoists (or ML and MLM, it’s easier to write lol). The etymology specifically refers to marxists-leninists, but the thing is that today the word has been so overused after online leftists and “leftists” (V*ush loves using it) gave it a second life that it doesn’t mean anything beyond "leftist whom I disagree with). Now even neolibs are using it against anarchists, who popularized the word in the first place!
It’s difficult not to empathize with the civilians this leaves behind but man, zelensky, just surrender… I said this when the war started and I’m saying it again, he’s holding for what exactly? Personal pride? Just surrender and move on. All of this could have been avoided.