Barx [none/use name]

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 20th, 2024

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  • 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.




  • 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.




  • 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!



  • On this particular topic the two parties basically just throw lawyers at the system they created for themselves in order to fight each other. For example, they made networks take down some reruns of Trump’s shows during the last election. As if that would matter when the networks give him infinite free coverage, lol.

    Third parties have little recourse both because they don’t have the cash to throw around and because the two major parties just constantly put up barriers to entry, usually needing to exceed an arbitrary percentage of votes in the last election (an arbitrary percentage that the two parties increase whenever a third party gets close).

    This country is basically just 100 capitalists in a trenchcoat making us all fight them and each other and people overseas over all the problems caused by the system that keeps them in power.







  • Trump isn’t a fascist. In action he is actually a pretty standard reactionary liberal. You will notice that Biden has continued the salient policies that made liberals call him a fascist, such as extreme and horrible border policies (Dems actually outflanked the GOP on this from the right), anti-China policy, and extending militarism (like maximum pressure on Russia via Ukraine).

    He’s mostly just openly racist whereas the political class usually wraps itself in polite jargon bullshit before it fucks with a bunch of brown people.


  • The main ways you’re exposed to microplastics is through ingestion and breathing it in.

    To limit ingestion, yes the main thing to do is to avoid food and drink that comes in plastic containers. Reducing your consumption of processed foods will help with this. Eating mostly produce is a simpler way to approach this. Even though produce may often be transported in plastic, if you wash it before consumption you’ll have done pretty well. Ideally you would also have a reverse osmosis filter at home, as your water probably has microplastics as well (but less than bottled water!).

    To limit breathing it in, yes avoid frequent exposure to busy roads. They are often full of tire dust that is getting kicked up. This is cumulative, though. Walking by a busy street once is no big deal. Walking along one twice a day may add up.

    Overall, however, to address microplastics we will have to control the production of plastics and the use of plastics in the first place. For example, there would be a lot less tire dust if we used more rail to get around. And there would be less need for bottled water if water fountains were ubiquitous and so were standardized stainless steel water bottles. In addition, we could use biodegradable plastics for more packaging so that they don’t accumulate in bodies or the environment.

    But this last point, despite being the only real solution, will literally require the overthrow of capitalism. I’m for this and am happy to talk about it more, but it is a lot.