Reiterating my point that if the protest is within walking distance, it’s alright to attend, but if you have to drive 40+ minutes and pay for parking, you’re better off spending that money on Palestinian gofundmes.

If you want a more “leftist” reason, once you’re spending 40+ minutes to drive to another location, that really isn’t your community anymore, so everything that various people, both socialists and progressives, say about building community is not applicable for the simple reason that community is only applicable to people within walking distance (or a short <10 minute drive if we’re talking about suburbia since suburbia is hostile towards pedestrians).

I don’t believe a fucking thing they say after what they did to Imran Khan.

My opinion for these types of protests is if they’re within walking distance, you should attend because if nothing else, it’s good exercise. But if you have to drive 40+ minutes and pay for parking, don’t bother. That money is better spend on Palestinian gofundmes.

Thank God you’re still alive. I thought the unthinkable has happened since you were gone for months.

Also bump.

I think there are many ways to approach art, but “art for art’s sake” shouldn’t be seen as a model. If anything, it should be treated somewhat dismissively.

L’art pour l’art arose out of 19th century France when the French bourgeoisie finally controlled the entirety of French society. Art being done for its own sake or being done as a form of self expression arose out of capitalist society. This was 100% not true in feudal society where artists weren’t expected to even credit themselves. Various socialist art movements like socialist realism also eschews l’art pour l’art for its literal bourgeois origins.

The idea of some dirt-poor artist channeling their mental illness to produce sublime art is just some stereotype that arose out of capitalist society.

I say you’ve grown up when people start looking to you for advice instead of the other way around.

Start with https://popularresistance.org/. They are a news aggregator of anti-imperialist and progressive articles from other anti-imperialist and progressive websites. When you find a good article, go to the original website and subscribe to their RSS feed. You’ll rapidly build up your RSS feed.

The instance is going to be discarded by the end of the month lmao

Also you’re 100% correct about the rock stacking thing, it was a completely innocent, informative post politely asking people not to go out of their way to do a random environmentally harmful thing, and a bunch of people went crazy over it for no reason.

That struggle session was so stupid because it was obviously started by nerds who never go outside let alone do any hiking, meaning they wouldn’t even be in a position to be stacking rocks. People who actually hike would be hit with leave no trace signs while on the trail. The question was settled decades ago.

Nah, you’re good. Oldest PCs I still have are a bunch of beige boxes with Windows 2000 still on them and an Inspiron 9400 with Windows 7.

Me crumbling to old person dust when a gen alpha calls Windows 8 an ancient OS.

I guess it’s not funny if you can imagine it actually happening in excruciating detail.

Who else are they going to vote for in 2028?

Additionally, the main perpetrator has been promoted to moderator on the [email protected] comm where they consistently post pro-ukrainian-nazi propaganda and wish death upon the Russian people.

The real fucked up thing is being a mod of a Polish comm while denying war crimes perpetuated against Polish people. This is how far gone the admins are in “sticking it to Putler.”

Just a reference to the timeless LA classic Fuck Donald Trump.

lol

Democrats returning to their “slavery was good for slaves” roots.

It’s alt history at this point. Would you consider the NOI, which had a paramilitary called the Fruit of Islam, to be militant? And a lot of Black nationalist militancy can trace its roots to Marcus Garvey and Garveyism, so how would that work out? Malcolm X’s father was a Garveyist who got murdered by white supremacists for his political beliefs. To make it an even bigger mess, Ho Chi Minh himself was partially radicalized by Marcus Garvey while he was at the US.

This hypothetical basically has to assume that Garvey and Garveyism was still around (so Ho Chi Minh would be partially radicalized by them) but that Garveyism didn’t spread past a certain point. But the problem is that his org the UNIA was one of the largest radical Black-led orgs in existence, meaning there will always be people who see it as inspiration.

And as a final point, one of Hoover’s first assignments back when the FBI didn’t exist yet was to bust the UNIA and nab Garvey on trumped-up charges. Hoover led the BOI to bust Garvey and he led the FBI to harass Black radicals of the 60s. We’re talking about multiple generations of Black radicals being harassed by the same asshole cracker.

It’s non-lethal in the same way pellets or even smaller calibers are non-lethal. Just look at this:

This is the caliber needed to kill the animal with a single bullet at center mass. For .223 LR, you can reliably kill rats at center mass but can’t reliably kill squirrels at center mass. That’s fucking it. It doesn’t mean squirrels are somehow impervious to .223 LR or that you can’t kill a squirrel by aiming at its head or that a squirrel can survive getting mag dumped or the squirrel would survive getting shot by a .223 LR at less than 5 yards. It just means if a rat gets hit by a .223 LR and it wasn’t at its tail, the rat is completely fucked while a squirrel may or may not immediately die.

Going back to rubber bullets, I’m pretty fucking sure they’re good enough to reliably kill rats. And those “uh aktually, you’re suppose to aim for the ground and let it bounce up to hit people instead of aiming at people directly” rounds are good enough for squirrels and rabbits.

Self defense was a major part of their praxis, yes, and is the part that drew most attention. However, the popular narrative reduces the Panthers to a single-dimensional organization that only confronted the police. That is propaganda, and we should not buy it.

My point is that community defense was their origin story. That was their initial praxis as an org. And it technically wasn’t even community defense. It was more like a police watchdog org. That’s hardly militant. And the cop killer stuff was more the BLA’s forte. You didn’t address my point about the BLA. In a hypothetical situation where the BPP was less militant, feds would just lump the BPP and BLA together, which they already did to the point where most people consider the BLA to be an extension of the BPP instead of a separate org. So now your hypothetical is if the BPP was less militant and the BLA didn’t exist.

And there’s plenty of militant Black nationalist orgs that the feds could lump the BPP together with even if the BLA didn’t exist. Recently, a Black-led org called the African People’s Socialist Party almost got busted on RICO charges because they were falsely accused of being Russian agents. Their chairman was a member of SNCC and the party itself was a merger of multiple orgs during the early 70s, including one called the Junta of Militant Organizations. And this is just one non-BPP militant org.

The BPP competed with multiple militant Black-led orgs, most of which still had Black nationalism as their guiding ideology. In your hypothetical, the BPP would’ve just been replaced by another militant org, probably some Black nationalist org. Maybe it would’ve been the NOI again, which was the go-to Black-led militant org until Malcolm X left the org. Remember what Dr. Huey Newton wrote in Revolutionary Suicide. He only formed the BPP because the OAAU fell apart after Malcolm X’s assassination, so the BPP itself only existed because the OAAU no longer existed as the go-to Black-led militant org. The BPP became popular because they were rightfully seen as the successor org to the OAAU. If they were less militant, another org would’ve been the successor org and the BPP would’ve been a relatively obscure party that no one knows about like the APSP.