all of the infrastructural manifestations of fascism are here: sweeping police state (bodily autonomy, crackdowns on anti-zionism), paramilitary infiltration (3 percenters, proud boys), dehumanization of the other (queer, immigrant, muslim, arab, jews especially anti-zionist ones), etc. is already here.

the last things left are explicit bans on proletarian organizations (unions, socialist parties) and sweeping restrictions on information (internet monitoring & censorship, especially of sexuality and anti-imperialism). oh wait, they’re already getting started on those (new york & antizionist social media, kosa/restrict, porn bans). fuck

Wear a face/eyes covering (e.g. mask and goggles), long black clothes that cover any body identifiers (e.g. tattoos), and perhaps some Kevlar gloves if you are paranoid. Ideally cycle to the location to & from a discreet clothes-changing station. The main threat here is doxxing and not legal-related.

I would approach this with the same caution that the Black Bloc approaches protests, especially since the “safety in numbers” is less of a factor here. Although if you are willing to accept some social risk, feel free to drop some of the more prohibitive precautions.

i’m sure that the IDF will totally respect even the 4 hours per day, and that the American media will totally hold them accountable.

when fascists say “so and so revolutionary movement will have you degenerates imprisoned and killed” they’re not doing so out of concern. it’s a mutually-suicidal curse directed outwards by those who will never be happy, and don’t want anybody else to realize their true potential either.

The proletariat of the Arab nations would riot. In the imperial core, the media will pretend it is just another day in Israel’s “peaceful” ethnic cleansing. Except in Germany, where so-called leftists will attack Palestinians and call it “direct action”.

ahh the us senate, that sham institution cosplaying as a democratic legislature.

the only thing “green” about the German party is their love of US greenbacks.

Basically it’s self-professed centrists who support “the gays”, NATO, & Ukraine (PS) plus their right-wing Christian conservative allies (OLa’NO) vs nationalist welfare chauvinists who hate Roma people and “George Soros” (Smer-SD) but are NATO-skeptic and want out of Ukraine, plus their right-wing nationalist allies who like Josef Tiso (SNS). Our good Nazis versus their bad Nazis, am I right?

Slovakia is a socially-conservative country in which since the fall of the socialist bloc, the nominal center-left and center-right have both expressed reactionary cultural attitudes. PS is a relatively new party that has been an exception; given that they would govern in coalition with right-wing Christian conservatives and with a socially-conservative center-left in opposition, I doubt their professed stance would do much other than pinkwash NATO. I’m not going to hold my nose and cheer for Smer, although if they actually pull Slovakia out of NATO it would be extremely funny (albeit unlikely — Smer is a party of the establishment and has governed for most of post-2000 without doing this, not some radical populist party as the media paints it).

he did nat zee this coming.

what organizational constraints do you see the us left needing to overcome for it to be able to meaningfully challenge state power?

Objectively, I think that the conditions for socialism exist in the USA. The population is increasingly disenchanted with its constitutional and economic institutions; criticism of capitalism itself has moved from unthinkable to accepted (if not mainstream); and the imperialist state apparatus is a bloated paper tiger that can barely win a war without hiring a suite of incompetent contractors and bribing the enemy’s generals with millions of dollars (and is incapable of reform due to being waist-deep in its own neoliberal dogma). The wannabe-fascists of the Republican Party (and cop-funded mayors like Eric Adams) are a threat to any emergent socialism (and human rights generally), but they have no power base outside of the same haute-and petty- bourgeoisie that would constrain their ability to deal with the crises of capitalism; this is in contrast to 30s-style fascism, in which the national bourgeoisie were content with letting fascist corporatism manage the crises of capitalism their own class leadership couldn’t. If there were a political vanguard that was capable of exploiting these conditions and winning the peoples’ hearts and minds, I would be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for socialism (although via horrific struggles with the previously-mentioned wannabes committing heinous crimes).

Oh yeah, about that last part…

A lot of us are radicalized first by learning about the present injustices of capitalism/colonialism, then learning about the past roots and trajectories of these injustices. But the possibility of a radical future comes from recognizing that the struggle to elucidate and narrate History is an ongoing dialectic. Our inability to know the whole, “objective” width or breadth of History is daunting but also the root of radical possibilities; for if even Humanity’s past is not set in stone, then surely it can reject the Historical finale that the bourgeoisie have written for us, and write a better one.

tl;dr: positivism + causalism = determinism, and determinism --> either accelerationism or defeatism.

(positivism = the belief that a complete, objective understanding of all social facts is possible; causalism = the belief that the past causes the future).

Lenin was not a member of a purely vanguard Marxist party either; the RSDLP contained genuinely vanguardist elements, but also thoroughly reformist ones that agitated for better labor conditions but downplayed and even abandoned their struggle against the repressive Tsarist state (i.e. “Legal Marxism”). Organizations such as DSA in the States and Die Linke in Germany are similarly “Legal Socialist” or “Legal Social-Democratic” parties; unlike pure reformist parties (SPD, British Labour) they openly criticize capitalism, but are afraid to openly challenge the liberal constitutional order for (admittedly valid) fears of being criminalized. But there are elements that are worth engaging with, just as Lenin did. There is no shame in splitting to protect the revolutionary faction from revisionists/liberals, but it’s also not ideal.

I would suggest to engage in the party’s associated organizations (youth orgs, student orgs). Look for what interests you, whether it is community/labor organizing, direct action, education, mutual aid, electoral campaigns, or even just showing up at a variety of the above and volunteering/baking cookies or something. If the party’s organizations have an open political culture, there are bound to be activists you have affinity for. Develop your politics with those comrades, participate in readings/campaigns with your circle, and maybe evolve into a revolutionary faction. Only by demonstrating that the revolutionaries of the party are more capable of leading the proletariat than reformists can Marxist-Leninists in a left party gain hegemony over the broader social-democratic movement.

you could look at this intersectionally. perhaps their hindu nationalist chauvinism outweighs their queer identity, and they emphasize their more socially accepted identities as a way to gather support (i.e. assimilation). here in the states, white cis women (including queers) love using white women tears to defend their positions when feeling threatened by transfemmes and/or people of color (look at tumblr).

there is also something to be said about petty bourgeois queers in cities having more visibility and social/economic capital than their closeted counterparts in poorer regions, so a nation’s queerness ends up represented by its most bourgeois elements (just as national cultures tend to overrepresent their bourgeois elements in general). regrettably, left chauvinists used to take this as pretext to repress LGBTQ culture on the spurious grounds that it is bourgeois, which makes as much sense as banning the English language because Britain is imperialist.

legalize, but also build growers’ and dispensary collectives so that “big marijuana” doesn’t become a thing.

the fact that the state violently criminalized black americans and counterculture elements in the war on drugs and is now legalizing/giving control of the legal drug market to bourgeois white liberals is a classic case of enclosure imo.

Even though there are lots of vendors, most SSD components are sourced from just a few companies: the NAND is from SK Hynix/Micron etc., and the controller is from Silicon Motion/Phison etc. Some of the larger vendors (Intel, Samsung, Crucial, Hynix, WD) produce their components in-house and are also more reputable, but the actual differences most of the time are minuscule. I would recommend purchasing from one of those vendors, but at lower price points (e.g. Intel’s 670p or Crucial’s P3) they often use cheaper QLC NAND which throttle the sustained write speeds when copying lots of files, and also have lower endurance. Laptop users generally don’t have a problem with these if all they need is snappy-enough everyday use, but professional users (e.g. copying tons of photos) might lose time or reliability depending on their use case. If I’m penny-clinching, I would recommend picking out the cheapest drives with the characteristics you desire (e.g. pcie generation and capacity), then doing your research as to componentry. If I wasn’t trying to save every last penny right now, I would probably get the Crucial P5 Plus 1TB because it’s from a reputable brand and a noticeable improvement over cheaper drives ($49). At higher capacities, I’d be more inclined to simply get the best of the best considering how cheap the (gen 4) prices are right now, or at least close to it such as with the samsung 980 pro 2TB.

For motherboards, having an m.2 slot is probably not an issue if you’re buying new. my advice would be to pick a chipset that supports the cpu you want (e.g. z790/b760 for intel’s latest, x670/b650 for am5), then sort by price while looking for the other qualities you might want first (e.g. overclocking, xmp, onboard wifi, networking, decent onboard audio). speaking of motherboards, what cpu do you think you’ll get?

I’m not qualified to speak on redundancy or backups.

Absolutely go with SSD. As others have said, the price premium between a tiny 128 gig ssd and even a 1 tb ssd is comparatively tiny these days so I’d recommend going with at least 500 gigs. A m.2 PCIe ssd (i.e. small and flat) is also much faster than a 2.5’ SATA (large and boxy) ssd and the price premium is negligible these days, but make sure your motherboard has an m.2 slot - most recent cpu platforms should have one.

If you live in a country where websites such as Amazon deliver, I would recommend going to PCPartpickers and sorting through the options by price/gig (here is an example of my parameters – https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#t=0&sort=ppgb&page=1).

At time of writing the best priced SSD seems to be the M450 1 tb for 25 USD, which is a ridiculous sale that I would personally jump on. (it is an m.2 so see above note).

Hard drives are only really good for cheap mass storage (e.g. if you have literal mountains of photoshop projects) and servers these days (e.g. those 6 or 14 tb disks from seagate), or if you’re building a computer out of literal trash with scavenged hard drives in which case i would refrain from saving anything important on them.

who knows, perhaps a few redditor crypto edgelords will get their hands on a few of the less lucrative ones.

“I bought a lignite coal mine on the Dnipro for $169,420!! Slava Ukraini!” --> 4,200 upvotes

“UPDATE: So it turns out lignite is f*cking worthless as a commodity, as an aside does anyone want to manage this huge mercury contamination on the property that I accidentally unleashed?” --> pepe emojis in replies