You should mask up in public indoor spaces and crowded outdoor spaces. Wear at least a KN95. This significantly protects you from COVID.
Others wearing masks would be better but this doesn’t mean masks won’t protect you. You should try to get COVID as few times as possible to reduce the chances of complications. It will also help protect people around you, particularly the immunocompromised.
Education and propaganda are praxis. Though I do recommend joining an org IRL because the skills of organizing aren’t taught here.
If it’s just inventory management for cop cars does this mean you’re just tracking make, model etc for each vehicle?
This sounds like a great way to learn what is useful about such a thing for the cops and then subtly disrupt it in favor of the people. I recommend taking the job and giving yourself a learning phase where you get a handle on what is what and how this information is actually used.
For example, if it really is about fleet management then it’s probably about oil changes and that kind of crap. Tracking this info is mostly about saving money for the city and so they might quickly trace problems back to you so this is more subtle than simply helping cops or throwing a wrench in their operations by doing a bad job. You’l want to ask tactical questions. What happens if a specofic kind of info is missing? Late? Wrong? What if it is tracked better, with a high degree of fidelity and timeliness? Is anything hidden from budgeting? The public? Could it be revealed?
I would bet that most info is relatively neutral or will take serious thinking to evaluate. Let’s say you find a way to make life more expensive for the police department. What happens next? Well, this depends on your city council. Will they simply increase the police budget? If someone removes the wrench you threw in, will the cops’ budget decrease or will you have effectively just helped increase the police budget that they can use for buying tactical gear and covering up their crimes?
The power to overtly and coherently fight the police lies in political organization. In preventing city council from increasing the police budget. If you make the PD more expensive at the same time that city council refuses to increase its budget, you will have done good work. If you do this when they will increase its budget, you might have just de facto defunded a good program, as city councils will usually shift money around to fund cops.
So I recommend learning as much as you can and being strategic. You are probably not helping cops very much in the first place but as you understand the role better you might be able to hurt them in the right way at the right time, messing with their budget. You’ll also get a lens into how the city really operates and can do that salting work that is probably far more impactful. It is a more strategic path to hurt police budgets by having a powerful union to advocate against cuts to any other department. And to do things like kick cop unions out of union coalitions.
James “Avatar is if the natives actually fought back unlike IRL” Cameron? He already had terrible opinions.
And a ceasefire makes it easier for them to survive. A ceasefire is not the defeat of Gaza. It’s not the defeat of Hamas. It’s the ceasefire of the endless violence so that they can rebuild.
This is not really a ceasefire. Read Biden’s quote again. The conditions he and Israel have set are for the resistance to give up its leverage and for the governing organization of Gaza and head of the resistance to give up power and disband.
And I disagree that the win condition is merely Hamas surviving. The win condition is the military/social/economic defeat of Israel and the end of the economic blockade of Palestine, the end of attacks on Palestinians etc.
The former is needed for the latter for any medium-term realistic scenario.
The Al Aqsa Brigades are West Bank right
Somewhat. In this instance they are working with and often within Gaza as part of the resistance.
Even if all the hostages are killed, it wont result in Israel losing. They cannot be used to defeat Israel, which can only be done through offensive military action.
“Israel” is an ethnic supremacist genocidalsettler colonial apartheid state. Its people depend on the sense of their superiority and invulnerability that this system provides them. The capturing of so many hostages and holding them for so long is much of what has made the population so freaked out. It shattered this psychology and they are trying to regain it. Getting them back is a step towards doing so, so there had better be something truly compensatory in any large exchange.
This is complete erasure of Gazan leftists who are critical of Hamas’ capability and strateg
Such as? The socialists of any importance are part of an alliance with Hamas. They are fighting in coordination.
as well as Gazan people who support Fatah over Hamas.
So something like 5% of the population?
I think you are also confused about what the term “erasure” means. None of your logic here suggests they erased anything you’ve described.
This is what I mean when “Gaza is not Hamas”, you can be critical of the practical strategy without automatically being in support of the genocide of Palestinians.
To me it sounds like you’re trying to justify why your criticisms of Hamas should be taken as valid, not anyone of note in Gaza.
An Al Arabiya link
Comrade, that is a bullshit Saudi state mouthpiece. These kinds of articles are meant to serve a simple and false narrative, which is that Hamas does not represent Gazans and is therefore separate from them and illegitimate. It is, “I hate the government not the people” but for the only militant governing party in occupied Palestine.
It is not hard to parse the tone and framing of the article. Example: “But some Gazans, who have lived in a climate of fear and restrictions since Hamas seized power in the territory in 2007, blame the group for the vast destruction caused by the war.” Look at how much work that little unsourced and unexplained editorializing aside just did. Notice that the primary source content of the article is… seemingly random people who all happen to be criticizing Hamas and wanting a ceasefire. How do you think that happened? Why do you think Saudi media would want to push the US-Israeli line?
It’s important to read media critically because if you aren’t careful it will have you fighting against your comrades and the oppressed. PS there were zero leftist criticisms listed in that article.
It’s a good place to start!
If you are interested in doing more, I would recommend organizing or participating in a local BDS campaign. It can be as simple as setting up a table outside a farmer’s market and distributing literature. There are ways to upgrade this but I don’t want to overload with info.
Our bravest soldiers in the War on Christmas.
Always a trip to watch capitalist media act like it is a bad thing to strike when you have the most leverage. They always use the same playbook trying to convince everyone to think of themselves as inconvenienced consumers rather than fellow workers that benefit from stronger labor.
Sleep is important! If meditation gets you sleep I think that is a good thing.
Hexbear is overall pretty good at empathizing and trying to understand and help - and often has folks that have relevant personal experience so they don’t try to offer bad advice or make it all about themselves. I think it has a pretty good culture around this kind of thing!
lmao okay buddy
You mentioned that when you relax to meditate, you fall asleep.
Do you think it may be that you are just low on sleep? It might be good to just let that happen or to try meditating around when it would be okay to fall asleep for the night.
Ah, seems like an old-fashioned power struggle. Thank you for the detailed rundown!
Thank you! This is very helpful for getting initially oriented until I do some proper reading.
wrt folks that say Evo is splitting the party, do you know what are the takes on Arce calling their marches and blockades an attempted coup?
And then I, an armchair know-nothing reviewer, get to call it derivative!
While what I’m gonna say is too friendly to capital, it would feel more right for big stars to have to pay everyone else’s wages for wasting everyone’s time being a diva.
Maybe more reasonably, productions should be less penny pinching in the first place and maybe The Rock Does Christmas doesn’t need to exist.
Performative and possibly even counterproductive. The other bags you can use will usually require a larger consumption of fossil fuels consumed over their likely use lifetime. Paper bags are more energy intensive (including burning fossil fuels for energy). Cloth bags are much, much more energy intensive, you need to use each one hundreds of times for it to balance out.
If the concern is pollution from plastics, grocery bags are a very minor contributor. Most can simply be reused as trash bags or trashed/incinerated. It’s tires and runoff from freeways that are the elephant in the room but addressing that requires building a real mass transit system.
Oh sorry I asked a very unclear question. I mean do you have a read on which camp (Morales vs Arce) has more shenanigans?
Harris has more or less the same solutions for black America, as this article lays out. Both parties offer false promises while supporting the material bases of oppression. Both parties are the parties of mass incarceration, criminal injustice, gentrification, school defunding, and ultimately, widespread material deprivation of the working class, the poor, the unhoused. We’ve had a Trump presidency. It was, despite liberals’ panic at rude statements, more or less, the typical status quo right up until the pandemic hit.
This is not because Trump was good, it was because he did the same basic things as his predecessors and successor. Liberals temporarily cared about kids in cages under Trump and suddenly lost all interest under Biden, now pretending that it simply stopped because they aren’t hearing about it even as the Biden admin has ramped up imprisonment and deportations. Very little changed, materially. The same applies to the lives of black people. If anything, conditions have gotten worse under Biden through policies increasing unemployment, the normalization of the pandemic and ending of economic support during it, and the massive funds for cops, increasing criminalization of poverty, and decreases in universal funding, leaving communities subjected to the legacies of red lining and discrimination to self-fund. Fewer jobs, worse pay, less support, more observation and racially discriminatory criminalization.
Expect this to continue until we actually organize to build real leverage and address the actual root causes of these issues and why neither party identifies them.
First, don’t vote for genociders. I think if that isn’t the limit, you don’t have one and might as well admit to being a supporter of genocide.
Cool headline, but ultimately just another call to have people throw their votes to a third-party candidate in protest
Those who organize to vote third party do a better job at building leverage for their interests than sheepdogs that try to convince people to Vite Blue No Matter Who. Which one is throwing a vote away? You don’t even register on Dems’ radar as anything other than a “likely Dem voter” to maybe send a volunteer out to remind you to vote.
…which could just lead to Trump’s victory, which the article itself acknowledges would be the worst possible outcome.
The article does not say that. It is very clear on its line that neither party is the one to fight for black people. I have to assume you simply didn’t read it.
The time to fight the Democratic leadership is unfortunately past
The time to fight oppressive genociders never passes. Please stop telling other people to give up their fight for justice. I’m getting white moderate vibes from your comment.
PS Harris has never won a single state in a Democratic primary. What in earth do you think was the right time and right method of opposition and building if leverage? The party just dictated all of this at you and now you carry water for it.
and the only way forward to being able to win going forward is to vote for Harris.
To win what? The thesis of this article is that black people don’t win regardless of which party has the presidency. Who are you talking to and do they understand what you mean by “win”?
Voting for Trump (or casting a third-party candidate, essentially the same thing) is guaranteed to make things much worse.
Voting for a third party is not the same as voting for Trump. Get that nonsense out if here.
You’re going to do what? To my WHAT!?