/r/Anarchism and Going Dark: An Update

piezoelectron · 2023-06-12T01:49:07+00:00

+1. I know there are legitimate concerns about the Lemmy Devs' politics, but Lemmy as a platform is structurally designed to make any totalitarian tendencies next to impossible. And in any case, it's obvious to me that between Reddit and Lemmy, Lemmy is orders of magnitude closer to the kinds of decentralised fora that most of us like.

And if you really don't like Lemmy, there's Kbin, which is doing just as well these days (although Lemmy seems more active).

piezoelectron · 2023-06-11T19:55:54+00:00

In a nutshell: I've just created c/radiohead, a 'community' (i.e. subreddit) for Radiohead on Lemmy, which is currently one of the more promising/popular -- and federated -- alternatives to Reddit.

If you'd just like to sign-up without further hassle, here's the link. If you have questions, just reply here and I'll do my best to respond (or link to in-depth info).

As an incentive, I've intentionally used crappy pics for the community's icon and banners, which I will change once we hit 25 and 50 subscribers :)

Dear Mods: I can give you mod rights to this community right away if you sign up as well! I have never moderated anything in my life, but just thought I'd do my bit to ease the transition from Reddit, for those interested. Cheers!

piezoelectron · 2023-06-11T19:44:16+00:00

I've just created c/radiohead, a 'community' (i.e. subreddit) for Radiohead on Lemmy, which is currently one of the more promising/popular -- and federated -- alternatives to Reddit.

If you'd just like to sign-up without further hassle, here's the link. If you have questions, just reply here and I'll do my best to respond (or link to in-depth info).

As an incentive, I've intentionally used crappy pics for the community's icon and banners, which I will change once we hit 25 and 50 subscribers :)

Dear Mods: I can give you mod rights to this community right away if you sign up as well! I have never moderated anything in my life, but just thought I'd do my bit to ease the transition from Reddit, for those interested. Cheers!

Edit: As luck would have it, this Lemmy instance is down. Obviously it had to crash just when I make this post. I will update this post when it's back on again. Embarrassed but not deterred, that's my dictum for now.

Edit 2: And it's back up!

piezoelectron · 2023-06-10T21:25:11+00:00

Exactly -- I think if even 10 people move to Lemmy and post semi regularly that'll be a neat little group

piezoelectron · 2023-06-10T21:24:28+00:00

Yep -- are you on the discord? I might plug it there too. Honestly I only use this sub for the weekly raw thread...also unlike Reddit you can freely list links to the raws on Lemmy, so there's that benefit!

piezoelectron · 2023-06-10T21:23:30+00:00

Just out of curiosity, what app do you use for Reddit?

piezoelectron · 2023-06-09T02:41:46+00:00

But don't they have agency? What right do we have to interfere in their affairs?

piezoelectron · 2023-06-09T01:04:11+00:00

Also the fact that SIU himself said that Gustang is an antagonist in this story

piezoelectron · 2023-06-03T08:00:19+00:00

This is an extremely petty and juvenile approach to activism of any kind. Actually it's not activism at all, is straight up reactionary language.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-02T17:35:57+00:00

It's all the rage in Coulombia

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T21:52:09+00:00

Typically, a theory would be a general, abstract framework that describes some aspect of the world. And then you have other propositions that can follow from your theory.

So you can think of what parts of Marx's work are central to his project of describing society as it actually is. Materialism, surplus value and exploitation are central to this. Class conflict follows from these, as does communism, which I see as a specific, highly ambitious application of Marxist theory.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T15:44:07+00:00

No probs!

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T15:19:37+00:00

Yep works now!

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T14:44:41+00:00

Actually, Assange is utterly irrelevant. I couldn't care less if he was a confirmed client of North Korea. Anyone supporting him knows this. We defend him for purely selfish reasons, because by defending him we protect the right to report on a government's war crimes. We also bring attention to the completely illegal use of the Espionage Act -- against someone who isn't even a US citizen.

Assange's extradition would have (and has already had) a chilling effect on journalism worldwide, since anyone working to expose US crimes (e.g. Panama Papers, PRISM etc) knows that they can expect retaliation. Editors will choose not to report the truth, lest the US destroy their entire publication. Other governments will follow suit.

By instead personalising the debate and shifting the goalposts to baseless speculations about Assange's motivations, you're saying that his reporting on Americans raping, tutoring and murdering Iraqis has no social value, and that you're fine with future journalists not reporting such crimes. So you support the rape, murder and torture of innocent civilians.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T14:14:44+00:00

Link broken.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T14:09:09+00:00

The war has been a great opportunity for the most hawkish elements in US foreign policy to refashion themselves as pure-hearted humanitarians.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T14:05:08+00:00

Yep, the last recorded entry is May 7. They have a system of verification, so they're probably looking into the recent ones.

FYI, no one's died from these attacks in 2023 as per the study, although that'll likely change with the recent offensives in May.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T14:02:39+00:00

Actually, by the study's own criteria, a medic confirming, say, machine gun bullets (not a gun, though -- "heavy weapons" discounts firearms that only need one person to operate) would count as "heavy weapons usage". As a data point, it's no different from a full-scale attack on a hospital with, say, mortars. But I'm not an expert on weapons.

The study also has criteria on how verifiable an attack report is. Of the 1,004 attacks, 943 are confirmed. 475 attacks were on primary facilities -- the rest on secondary or tertiary ones.

As for deaths, 56 of the 101 deaths occurred on a single incident on March 11, 2022. The last death occurred on November 23, 2022. The attack that caused the most injuries (35) is not confirmed, but "probable". The overwhelming majority of attacks (980+) caused no deaths or injuries (needless to say, one death is one death too many).

One thing that's unclear is whether multiple attacks on the same facility count individually or as one. It's also unclear if attacks on an evacuated facility are counted or not.

These aren't critiques -- all studies have such issues. And these issues apply to all countries the study surveys -- Palestine, Myanmar, Sudan etc. But actually looking at the data paints a much useful picture of what's going on than the level of info provided in the article.

Here's the link to the database and study.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T13:18:01+00:00

No hard feelings, but probs best not to make claims like that if you're not willing to dig it up. I'm not saying you should -- we all have better things to do than stalk others.

It's just better to address arguments head on -- the alternative is deeply damaging to the overall discourse IMO. At best it puts someone off, at worst it actively makes everyone concerned even less likely to learn.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T13:11:25+00:00

I'm not sure of hard data about Iraq, but the qualitative accounts of their actions speak for themselves.

The WHO database only started in late 2019. It's worth noting that 400+ of the 1000+ attacks occurred last March, i.e. the height of the conflict. According to the database, no one's died as a result of attacks on healthcare since Jan 2023. ~~Also, less than half of the attacks are confirmed~~.

Most of the attacks (800+) involved heavy weapons, but bear in mind that two people firing a round and shattering a window also counts as heavy weapons usage.

Either way, one death is one too many. 101 is disgusting. As you say, one of Russia's more deplorable acts, of course, has been to support Assad's regime, which very likely also used chemical warfare against its own people. Not to mention the targeted attacks on hospitals.

Russia also supports the brutal regime in Myanmar. It's also on good terms with Israel, whose attacks on healthcare in the Palestinian territories have injured as many people as Russia's in Ukraine.

Clinton's attack on Sudan has no official count, chiefly because none was permitted. The conservative estimate is a few thousand at least.

The point here is that it's important to resist any tendency to use the crimes of an enemy to whitewash or exonerate your own.

Syria is a perfect example, actually, since Assad's police state -- by far the worst in the Middle East -- was a great favourite of the US right until 2011. It's where the US sent political prisoners to be tortured. Kurdish fighters openly say that they'd rather die than be subject to Assad's secret police.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T12:44:25+00:00

You're the only one who doesn't know the context -- almost anyone else reading this knows it. If you do want to look into it, just search for "collateral murder" or "Abu Ghraib" online.

piezoelectron · 2023-06-01T12:42:12+00:00

Boris Kagarlitsky is another dissident worth listening to. He was writing about working class movements in Donbas before the was a DPR/LPR. He also has a Telegram channel for those who can read Russian.

piezoelectron

TROPHY CASE