Barx [none/use name]

This article is about one study, by CCDH, who did not publish much of anything about their methodology. CCDH’s CEO was an anti-Corbynite that fed into the false accusations of antisemitism against the left for having solidarity with Palestinians and CCDH continues to prominently focus on antisemitism and trying to blur the line between antisemitism and antizionism. The faction that he supported is currently in power in Labour and are supporters of Israel during this genocide.

I would not trust them to make good calls on what is an accurate community note vs. not. Community notes are all over the place but on average depict a bazinga liberal position, which is not actually the most accurate one. Having looked at their “study” paper, their first and most promindnt criterion for accuracy was whether community note aligned with fact-checking websites. Fact-checking websites are, to put it bluntly, bullshit, and really just reflect the author’s opinion.

For example, one of the things they claim is election misinformation is the claim that voting systems are unreliable. They are saying this is an inaccurate or misleading claim. In the US, it is accurate to say that it’s voting systems are unreliable. They are frequently run using voting machines from private companies, black boxes with no real way to verify their results that are actually implemented in most places, and polling stations often only gave 1 or 2, so when they break people are disenfranchised. Every computer security expert audit says you should not trust these systems and should use paper ballots with manual observable recounts. The allegation of misinformation is really about what is perceived to be voter suppression, of people feeling like they shouldn’t vote because it won’t count anyways. This is not actually misinformation, though: the voting machines are unreliable, that is the actual problem in this situation, not the use of repeating a fact in your favor.

It is salient that at no point do they highlight the naked propaganda for Zionism that has been rampant on social media, including about elections. This was presumably filtered out early on by their selection of what counts as a topic of interest for their analysis.

Finally, the clear purpose of CCDH is to lobby for having more oversight on social media, including large, centralized moderation teams that have historically been cozy with liberal governments.

Lifesavers because they are some sick Os

Really sticking it to those… friendly Russian kernel maintainers. Really doing your part for your individual Two Minutes Hate.

So presumably, as a consistent person that is outrages by invasions and death, you call for the expulsion of all Americans and Usraelis, right?

lmao okay buddy

As a start, follow the 3-2-1 rule:

• At least 3 copies of the data.

• On at least 2 different devices / media.

• At least 1 offsite backup.

I would add one more thing: invest in a process for verifying that your backups are working. Like a test system that is occasionally restored to from backups.

Let’s say what you care about most is photos. You will want to store them locally on a computer somewhere (one copy) and offsite somewhere (second copy). So all you need to do is figure out one more local or offsite location for your third copy. Offsite is probably best but is more expensive. I would encrypt the data and then store on the cloud for my main offsite backup. This way your data is private so it doesn’t matter that it is stored in someone else’s server.

I am personally a fan of Borg backup because you can do incremental backups with a retention policy (like Macs’ Time Machine), the archive is deduped, and the archive can be encrypted.

Consider this option:

1. Your data raw on a server/computer in your home.

2. An encrypted, deduped archive on that sane computer.

3. That archive regularly copied to a second device (ideally another medium) and synchronized to a cloud file storage system.

4. A backup restoration test process that takes the backups and shows that they restores important files, the right number, size, etc.

If disaster strikes and all your local copies are toast, this strategy ensures you don’t lose important data. Regular restore testing ensures the remote copy is valid. If you have two cloyd copies, you are protected against one of the providers screwing up and removing data without you knowing and fixing it.

You’re probably fine so long as it doesn’t have moisture!

Is it a “best by” date or a real “expires on” date?

Powders like this only go bad after being exposed to moisture. If properly sealed they will last decades.

OWS was not well-organized. Palestinian solidarity groups are doing better. The key difference is in being able to coherently make informed decisions as a group and then act on them as one.

Every OWS encampment was basically 5-30 orgs all doing their own thing and then fighting about horizontalism and being naive about how the cops and City Hall would treat them. We need to be able to act like 1-3 orgs (even if there are more), politically educate so we can avoid mistakes, and create good structure as early as possible so that expectations are set and time isn’t wasted and bad decisions are avoided.

The US left is basically slowly relearning the basics of organizing. Get involved and make it go faster!

Why does it need to be a scripting (by this I assume interpreted) language? For your requirements - particularly lightweight distribution - a precompiled binary seems more appropriate. Maybe look into Go, which is a pretty simple language that can be easily compiled to native binaries.

They made her wear a unique low-cut purple spandex suit for the first half of the series.

The low resolution will blur out all hint of anatomy, don’t worry

Wonder what will happen to Firefox if this ruling means Google can’t pay them to default to their search engine. That’s a large chunk of their funding.

All committees are authoritarian regimes, if they have any power. Making any decisions with power to back it up is authoritarian.

The question is whether you want decisions made by 500 bankers and some military conteactors or by collective deliberative organs that respond to the needs of the people at large, and assuming the latter, how do you make them function robustly?

A smart approach would borrow from the successes of others while allowing a bit of experimentation. Most real-world sociakist systems have implemented both a bottom-up local governance system for some domains and top-diwo national level policies for other domains. There is a real-world practical need for both.

Re: The councils in this cartoon, they are referring to, more or less, workplace democracy. Practically speaking, this requires a similar system: workers deciding how to run their company but also there is a need for national/regional coordination, for capital investment, and to balance against the bourgeois tendencies of what is basically a wirkers’ cooperative.

A key promise of socialism is not to immediately establish utopia, but to set the groundwork for how we may develop society for ourselves. There may be a form of workers’ councils that you prefer but that I might critique as unworkable in the current world. But it would surely be something made possible by socialist steuggle over time, as the comic explains: we would work to decrease necessary work time, to live our lives more how we want to. Once free if, say, imperiakist wars and expensive dirty energy, perhaps local workers’ council politics can adopt a simpler, more fair and autonomous form.

Basically, deconstructing oppressive systems would be an ongoing process that would have to be weighed against what is “more important” (e.g. not getting nuked), not one leap. So the form taken would depend on the context of how we win, what threats we face, borroeing from others’ successes, and how our experiments go.

The exact plan is something that would be developed based on the political-economic situation that led to the revolution in the first leave and the needs that arose. There can be no perfect prescription because one cannot predict the exact situation we will inherit.

Immediately following revolution in the Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks had to fight a war against invading capitalist forces and domestic capitalist revanchists. They implemented forms of fatm collectivization that were largely restorative of traditional practice but without feudal lords and while also attempting to industrialize. This went less efficiently than needed so they adopted the NEP, then abandoned it for further central planning once its purpose was fulfilled. They ensured housing for all, placed doctors, cafes, and housing at factories, invested heavily in infrastructure and education, promoted women as part of the workforce and larger society against patriarchal attitudes, and prepared for the inevitable further invasion by capitalists, this time the fascists. They built based on their ability to control the means of production by and for those who work and based on the conditions they faced. They faced poverty, landlordism, a poor level of industrialization and infrastructure, joblessness, external military threats, etc. They implemented many policies over time attempting to work around hurdles, most of them imposed by capitalist countries trying to destroy them.

In China, they faced an even greater level of landlordism, of petty landowners that would routinely exercise inordinate control over people’s lives and abuse them. China was even poorer than the Russian Empire, being a colonized country forced to subjugate its economy to foreign capitalusts. China had to fight a war against Japanese invaders and developed in the context of not just a liberatory nationalism but a betrayal of the communists by the KMT. They similarly had to industrialize, to deal with poverty, to deal with foreign aggression from capitalists that promptly encircled them and instituted sanctions. They achieved transformatiobs never before seen, of skyrocketing life expectancy, an end to famines, industrialization without stealing through colonialism.

When revolution comes to your country, what state will it be in? Will you have to kill neofascists that started a civil war? Will you need to rebuild a militant labor movement? Will there be an economic underclass most poised to contribute and then make demands of the transition?

Basically, when the working class has a liberatory victory, it can now more directly demand change. What changes will be a product of what is needed for the working class’s own interests. In Cuba many villages had no doctor and essential medical care required a group of people to carry the sick for a day or more. So they built hospitals and trained doctors. They now have the best medical system in the world for a country with their size and wealth.

Anyways with that said I’ll try to answer your specific questions.

Summer cottage?

lol who cares? A second home in a country full of homeless people!? I cannot be asked to care. Most likely it will be ignored because socialists are far too kind.

Family farm?

If you live in a rich, Western country these no longer exist. Farms are large agribusinesses owned by companies. Pappy had to sell his farm to them in the 70s and 80s.

What happens to pensions/retirement savings

These are numbers on a spreadsheet that are currently held by a bank or government. Their purpose is to guarantee retirement. During any real revolution the banks in question will be seized and repurposed, possibly even abolished depending on conditions, as they are the organ of society most antagonistic to us. There is no guarantee that the accounts will have anything in them nor that the government would have had any legitimacy to guarantee retirement before we won. They will try to take the money and run. They don’t care about your pension, lol. It’s just capital for them to lend out and make profits from.

Traditionally, socialists have simply guaranteed retirement via the state. An actual guarantee. And because socialists have also traditionally made so much of life available at no or low direct cost to the individual (housing, healthcare, transportation, food), this mostly just means you get to live your life exactly the same but just don’t have to work.

land ownership

If the socialists are competent they will make the state the owner of all land and then figure out how to use previously corporate land for the public good and find a reasonable compromise on personal land. But it really depends on the conditions of revolution. Is land reform a revolutionary promise? What land and for what purpose?

inheritance

Should probably be largely abolushed but this also depends on the revolution. Nobody is coming for granny’s keepsakes but you don’t get to inherit the slave plantation.

small businesses

This is a term used for tax purposes in certain rich Western countries. It’s not really meaningful for when to expropriate and plan, for example. Many industries should not even exist, they are parasitic, and this includes many small businesses. Smart socialists will not make decisions based solely on a tax bracket aside from needing to be practical about how to allocate transitions and planning resources. For example, China institutes more control over businesses as they become larger, both via government oversight and worker control.

the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent…

If you’re doing that you’re a financial idiot lol. Much better for the state to allocate your housing and keep you away from such decisions.

Socialists have traditionally guaranteed housing via various mechanisms, starting with building enough of it and ensuring it exists where people should be for economic activity. Connect it to transit, make it available bear industry and retail, etc.

Yeah, I know, these things tend to be out of reach for younger folks these days, precisely because of hyper wealth concentration.

Basically everything you mentioned is out of reach for the vast majority of humanity due to the capitalsti system. You’re describing things that only the petite bourgeouis in impeeialist countries even think about. This us a very small number of privileged people even in those countries.

So with billionaires and mega corps out of the picture, the question still stands.

It doesn’t stand at all, you are just unfamiliar with two centuries of working class political struggle and geopolitics. This is understandable, as Western educations do their very best to ignore most of it and misinform about the rest. One of the things they teach is the cartoonish impracticality of socialist systems that they describe with fanciful and false stories, basically fairy tales to appease reactionary capitalists that promote such propaganda in the first place and, for example, dictate what textbooks the Texas Board of Education buys and therefore the content in classrooms nationwide.

The untold reality is that socialists are actually very practical and realistic people that build from the needs of the wider working class and have traditionally tracked commodity prices and investments and military funding allocations and run and led worker revolrs and run and led wars of liberation. We are practical to a fault and endeavor to understand the world as it is and what is needed to liberate ourselves from an oppressive system and offer a vision of: what if we built this world for ourselves and not bankers or a noncorporeal profit-generating machine?

It’s good because most of the American audience is too politically miseducated to recognize it otherwise.

apt is good for most things.

Flatpak is good for applications where you want the people who write the software to be creating the releases and for closed source apps that you want to isolate a bit from your system.

For example, on a new system you might install everything using apt except for Zoom. Zoom isn’t in the Debian repos, it’s closed source and proprietary. But you can get the official Zoom application using flathub. Zoom will also be fairly isolated from the rest of your system so it has less access to your files and can be removed more cleanly later on if needed.

It’s realistic if security is a priority.