Ooh, that looks quite comprehensive, good stuff! Thanks man :)

Since there’s not any centralized group, there can’t really be any uniformity in how people will react. But I think you may be over estimating how willing people from our political persuasion would be to initiate conflict just because they become familiar with the tools. There is very little glorification of violence in our spaces, and with how widely available combat footage of Ukraine is, with its sheer horror and brutality of large scale modern conflicts, I think we’re more aware than ever how terrible of a thing that path is. I suspect most, if they do act, will do so purely in self-defense.

As for the Reichstag fire playing into their hands, I’m not convinced that made any meaningful difference in the outcome. The Nazis were planning on violently taking power no matter what, and historians even debate if that wasn’t a false flag operation by them to justify their violence anyway, as they had proven they were willing to do with the Gleiwitz incident.

If their enemies didn’t justify their actions, they would create that justification.

Does that apply in all cases? Hard to say. The Argentine Dirty War resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands, their right-ring spurred on by left-wing guerrillas. On analysis, the guerrillas never posed a substantive threat, but the right-wing, once in power, acted as though they did, and killed both leftists and moderates indiscriminately. Would they have been chill if the left-wing were pacifist? I’m doubtful, because at the end of the day, it usually comes back to class-warfare, and if the people in power ever feel threatened, they use violence to maintain it.

I’m open to this hedge your bets argument but for it to make sense the benefit needs to be bigger and more likely than the cost.

It’s impossible to predict what the future will necessitate. On an individual level, I think it makes sense for targeted groups to be able to defend themselves, like trans people and minorities, if only to defend themselves from the potential of right-wing hate crimes increasing, and there is historical precedent for that ability bringing positive outcomes..

On a larger scale, if we look at the Myanmar civil war happening right now, the government began to slaughter their civilians who were doing nothing but peaceful protests. Their only options, at least from what I’ve seen (I could be wrong, I’m not deeply proficient in the intricacies of that conflict), would be either to quietly accept the new dictatorship and hope for a better outcome, or to resist. Many chose to resist, and are in a very disadvantaged position due to lack of access to adequate tools.

As another example, Rojava is only able to exist thanks to having adequate means to defend themselves against those who would very much prefer them to be subjugated or killed. I suspect it would be extremely difficult if not impossible for Rojava to negotiate a peaceful coexistence with ISIS (religious/cultic extremism is unbelievably difficult to overcome), and negotiating with Turkey or the Syrian government would also likely be fruitless, as they will only really tolerate them as long as they can be subjugated, or lack real influence on their own destiny.

Ultimately, every person will have to make their own decision on what they want to be prepared for.

Are you talking about the Patreon link? That’s in the video’s description on youtube, and lemmy automatically shows a preview of the video’s description. The video creator or poster did not specifically post their Patreon link here.

That’s fair, I got a little puzzle fatigue myself in the first game. I did find the story to be quite compelling, maybe it’s worth a watch instead of a play? Though I think that misses out on all the messages between other AI’s and terminals in the game, which add significant world building.

His metric of underrated seems to be comparing the artistic quality of a game with its sales numbers, and I guess Talos II was a poor seller.

It seems like a well produced video, what’s spammy about it?

I don’t disagree at all, I see that as an absolute last resort, but I also don’t think it’d be a good idea to wait until the very last moment to start preparing for the worse case scenario, which isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

If he wins, it’s possible things will only get sorta bad, but he actually does leave office in 4 years, and things go back to ‘normal’. But it’s just as possible things get even more polarized, he pulls some weird shit, and then we’re left holding the bag.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, and right now things are rhyming pretty hard with the 1930’s, the world over (at least in regard to this wild shift in popularity of right-wing ideologs).

Bush never incited a coup attempt, nor spoke about being a dictator, nor praised authoritarian dictators for their displays of power, nor was there a cult of personality around him that saw him as a sole source of truth.

Not that I’m defending Bush as a good president, but Trump is absolutely different and significantly more dangerous, and the cultists who follow him are as well.

Let’s just say I’m a big fan of InRangeTV and Tacticool Girlfriend :)

There’s only so much that can be done politically if he manages to obtain and solidify power. At that point, it becomes about resistance, and trying to build communities that operate outside of politics and the system he controls. Engaging in mutual aid to build connections, and strengthening your local community will make it easier to organize effective resistance, in whatever form that takes.

I think it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to be prepared now for things going very south, but hopefully it never gets to that point.

Realistically, it would look something like how the Anarchists organized society in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, or how Rojava is organizing today with communal federations. Anarchism sidesteps the inevitable authoritarian regime that various Marxist theories have by not installing a ‘temporary’ vanguard state that quickly becomes autocratic and dictatorial, they just jump straight to decentralizing power immediately by giving it to the people.

I agree with you that it should move away from rote memorization and standardized testing, that method seems to just absolutely stamp out any curiosity that kids naturally have, which will lead them to having a much less fulfilling life.

As an example of how it could be improved, I like how this teacher is doing things, which looks like it’s a solid step in the right direction, at least within the limits on what they can reasonably do in our current system.

Personally I just use Ublock origin on Firefox combined with SponsorBlock, which has worked flawlessly for me.

Ah, in this case definitely could be.

That’s been a common issue with most invidious mirrors. It’s caused, AFAIK, by google attempting to limit bandwidth to mirrors as part of their attempts to combat adblockers. I may be wrong on that though. When it loads slowly for me, whenever I check the main list of mirrors at invidious’s website, it’ll say bandwidth is limited upstream.

This video was already posted yesterday: https://lemmy.world/post/13117684

OP, I posted this video here the other day, and with similar results, so I took it down. I was confused by the negative reaction, until when I went back to look at it, and finally noticed the description, which, if you don’t watch it, makes it seem like a right-wing conspiracy video.

Having pondered it for day, I’ve concluded that regardless of the validity of the content in the video (virtually all of it IS based on confirmed true conspiracies that were proven true by freedom of information act requests and declassified documents), the way Johnny Harris chose to present it was, honestly, deeply irresponsible, to the point that it made me almost suspect of his intentions, and resulting in me doing a short investigation of Harris’s credibility as a journalist.

So first, the video title, description, and intro using sound-bites of Vivek Ramaswamy (Trump sycophant) saying a vote for Trump is a vote against the Deep-state, are calculated choices. As others have noted, it was likely designed to get right-wingers to click on it. In and of itself, that isn’t a terrible idea, but the damning part is that the video does not adequately distinguish that or illustrate that Trump is using this concept as a grift.

the only pushback against Trump is at the very beginning, when he mentions that he uses the term Deep-state to refer to anything he doesn’t like. The rest of the entire video does nothing to de-legitimize Trump’s use of that word.

If the goal was to educate right-wingers of how these political machinations work, and how Trump will do nothing to fix it, then they failed utterly. I think this video will simply be fuel for the fire of right-wing conspiracy theorists, who have difficulty separating factual conspiracies from fictional ones, and thus are easily manipulated. The brief mention of Trump using the word for things he didn’t like will be easily dismissed by the audience he is attempted to target, while the rest of the video will only seem to reinforce their belief in Trump being their savior, since he’s “the only one talking about it.”

Looking into Harris further, I found that there was a strong controversy of a video of his that was essentially sponsored by the World Economic Forum, which advocates for the neoliberal concept of ‘stake-holder capitalism’ over shareholder capitalism. In response to criticism that the video seems like a blatant piece of propaganda, Harris said that his ideals and the WEF’s ideals just happened to align, and that they had no influence on his finished video. This is eerily similar to Kurzgesagt’s response to criticism that their videos sponsored by the Bill Gates foundation just happened to line up with what they also already thought, and the fact that they exclusively used Bill Gate’s preferred research source that happened to back-up Bill Gate’s ideology was merely a coincidence, as that was ‘the best source’.

And that’s just one of many criticisms of his work.

In conclusion, I now think Johnny Harris makes beautifully shot and edited videos, but his Journalistic integrity is suspect, and this latest video is only further damning in that sense. He’s worked for years as a journalist, he’s hired many people to work with him, to help him edit the video, I assume to bounce ideas off of on how to frame it, who to target, etc. And I just… find it hard to believe that they didn’t see the problem with how this video was done, and considering what’s on the line in this upcoming election, for them to not do their due diligence in ensuring the content they’re putting out won’t actually help a dictator come to power is extremely irresponsible.

I will no longer be posting his content online, and that’s a damn shame, because he could’ve done a lot of good with his content.

The creepiness of that Alabama senator, holy crap dude. 😂

Interestingly, Marx became much more Anarchist-y later in life, influenced by the Paris commune. He began to backtrack on his earlier proclamations about needing to wait 100 years or so for an agrarian country to industrialize under capitalism before communism could commence.

He previously believed only industrial workers could be relied upon to understand class and mobilize with each other due to their urban proximity and increasingly poor conditions, but later acknowledged that rural peasants could understand their exploitation as well (he was a little elitist), so the need to let capitalism run rampant was eliminated.

He also later advocated for a bottom up system of control, instead of top down ‘transitionary’ state that Lenin and Stalin and even Trotsky all doubled down on. Marx’s later writings were never published in Russia purposefully, as it would’ve given credence to Anarchism, which advocates for decentralized control and abolishment for any hierarchy that cannot justify its existence.

Unfortunately, Marx never tried to repair the rift between Marxists and Anarchists, mostly due to ego, as far as I can see.

If you’re interested in this topic, I’d recommend this video on the subject, and the second part here.

Grist Magazine is pretty good, mostly focuses on environmental news