I'm sorry to be stupid but idk what a tor node is. I have tor but I don't know what is meant by 'running a tor node'. I also don't know what the phrase "you can also use onion repos in your distro if supported" means. I am wondering if you can help me out? I am a noob.

pls provide either sources or, at least, an explanation justifying your belief that climate change is no big deal? Genuinely want to see where you have gotten this opinion from. Thank you.

Yeah I definitely agree with you there. It's understandable for a great number of reasons-not just intellectually, but the fact we, as socialists and humans, want meaning in our lives and to make meaningful change. The idea that we're stuck in a society structured so hard against revolution-and that we are therefore impotent and cannot contribute to the meaning we have given ourselves in life-is difficult to tolerate. I mean what do you do if your whole life purpose is for nothing? Even beyond the intellectual side of things, it's easy to get into denial with it and try to rationalise some way in which you have a meaningful role to play in the events to come.

I don't really know what the answer to this is. I want meaning in my life but how do you get it in a place like, say, the UK? You either suck up that copium and pretend you can convince the masses or you just wallow in pity at your impotence-I haven't thought of any other options yet so I just swing between these two.

The problem with Tor is that it runs sooo slowly to the point it's pretty much unusable. For me it does, at least.

What good free VPNs are there? I was using one but then an article came out it was pretty much ran by the US government so I stopped using it as it seemed pointless. I wish there was a non-compromised free one that didn't massively slow your internet down.

Surviving mental illness.

I used to be in around the top 1% of CSGO players though it took me 2000 hours so it's not much of an achievement lol.

Probably political science just by merit of being educated in it though I wouldn't say I am especially gifted in it as such.

I am not very good at anything lol, I just read a lot to make up for my natural stupidity. I like reading though.

I think distrust and constant critique of existing hierarchies and authorities is always healthy + good no matter who is in charge frankly. Even if Lenin himself were leading America any good socialist must be constantly aware of the potentialities for leadership and once-revolutionary structures to go awry.

IIRC towards the end of his life Marx was beginning to think about these sorts of questions and the revolutionary potential of what we now call the global south (he focused on Asia and Russia) but then he very rudely died before getting the chance to really write about it.

Honestly I am completely doomer about the future and I've not seen a single thing to convince me otherwise. I know it's not fashionable to say because everyone likes to have a bit of hope but honestly I fundamentally do not believe we can make the changes necessary before climate change fucks up everything. Just look at what the average Brit or American is like politically. Just look at what happened when even a democratic socialist running on a social democratic platform (Sanders and, even more so, Jeremy Corbyn) becomes politically prominent.

I am desperate for some hope in this world but I find very little.

e,g., when Trump ordered a withdrawal from NE Syria, loyalist Republicans instantly switched from "The SDF are our vital counterterrorism partners and friends in building democracy in Syria blah blah" to "these PKK terrorists are a legitimate security threat to Turkey and we don't care if they boost Salafi-Jihadists".

Yeah same tbh. I think if you engage in good faith and explain things which are obvious to you but not might be to them then you can make them think. Not everyone, but enough. More than you would ever get on Reddit I feel like, where everyone is infinitely stubborn and arrogant.

Both are true really. Yes, global north working class people (I personally don't like the term 'labour aristocracy' but I think the point is true-just me being a pedantic prick) are largely pacified by superprofits from global south manufacturing, but it is also true that those radicals among us do face a technologically vast and all-penetrating regime of governmentality and surveillance. Intelligence services can know everything about your lives from your phones, laptops, can connect your accounts across websites by IP/email/device, can hear you through Alexas and such, can track you through dense networks of CCTV (especially in London where I live), and can generally know as much about you as YOU do. If you go to a socialist meeting, they can know. If you go to a protest, they more than likely have the capacity to know (unless it's in an area with little CCTV and you use good opsec). If you do anything actually more disruptive (e.g., even on the level of Just Stop Oil/Extinction Rebellion, let alone blowing something up like the good old Suffragettes did) then they will have all the resources to track you down.

The only limitation for them is capacity. e.g., in mass protest events it is unfeasible to figure out literally everyone there, but they can still decapitate the leadership (as they did post-Ferguson when they executed the organisers) and make an example out of a few. It's like when you hear about these Salafi-Jihadist terrorist groups-they're almost always already "known" to security agencies. They know because these Jihadists go on certain websites, they go to small meetings which are still infiltrated by the state, they communicate about it on their phones and laptops, etc. Police and such disproportionately focus on left-wing and environmentalist groups here in the UK even though they're all small and pathetic (especially the former-environmentalist groups have been kicking up more of a fuss lately) because capital retains some of its paranoia about socialism even after its pacification.

The problem is, you can't have a mass movement too big to realistically track without being a small movement first-and small movements are easier to track. Then the bigger you get, the easier you are to infiltrate, and the more visible the leadership is-the more vulnerable they are.

I don't want to say it's impossible, but organising 'revolutionary' groups (even if all they're doing is mutual aid, protesting, campaigning, and discussing theory) without the eye and boot of the state coming down on you is incredibly difficult and faces challenges never seen in the history of the world just because of how deep modern technology can penetrate into every moment of your life, and how easy it is for state intelligence agencies to get access to it. The only real hope is that you just have mechanisms of vetting people in important positions to limit the importance of infiltrators and that you somehow make yourself a low priority for as long as possible so they don't bother investing resources into tracking you.

All that, on top of a population not receptive to socialism anyway, makes for a near-impossible job for us global north socialists. I have absolutely no answer for it (I've tried organising w/ other socialists and it never works because the orgs in the UK are all shit and everybody hates them) and it's part of why I am so badly mentally ill and blackpilled about the future (haha!).

When you put it like that it's fairly obvious they should be added to the Dangerous Dogs Act list of dogs (I guess they are only just different enough from the current list to be legal?). I love dogs and I'm sure most are nice but it just isn't worth the risk with such a muscular, big dog. Yeah there are other big breeds of dogs but most of them have been bred for 100+ years to have good temperaments. A high enough % of the British public are shit owners that you cannot exactly trust them.

It's more so that stuff just appears on the hexbear.net front page and people comment on it (like this one). I don't even know what Lemmy really is so I just comment on whatever's there! There is no organised brigading effort as such, it's just how Lemmy works combined with the unexpected introduction of an active community changing the pre-existing community balances.

tbf it seems like the majority of people there replying to you are replying in good faith, though it is obviously not good even when a significant minority of people are mean/rude. I do agree with you in part with what you were saying on there (not in full as I do not feel generous towards the US motivation towards its support for Ukraine) and honestly I've never been receiving hostility for my position when I've talked about it on here (see my recent post history if you want proof). I guess people are seeing the new @lemmy people commenting and getting jumpy unjustifiably and thus being more harsh. I hope that sort of thing goes away when they're more used to seeing other lemmys in their communities but I don't blame you for feeling not great about it (even if plenty were also engaging in good faith that doesn't get rid of the bad faith ones). I hope it changes.

I vehemently disagree with Hexbear's support of the modern CPC but I don't think that makes them bots or indoctrinated or whatever, they just have a different viewpoint on the matter and it doesn't take much prodding to get past the shitposting and to get a fairly detailed/nuanced understanding of why from a lot of users on the site. Same with their thoughts about Russia and Ukraine and such. Again, I disagree w/ the majority of people on Hexbear on this issue, but you wont get attacked if you engage in good faith (at least, I don't) and people are more than willing to explain themselves.

I fundamentally disagree w/ the notion that there is any significant amount of actual "Kremlin bots" or "CPC bots"-I mean this community has been its own isolated thing, a dwindling relic of an old Subreddit, for 3 years before federation happened, what'd be the strategic value anyhow? They all show their humanness if you give them the time and the good faith, so to speak.

I agree that deplatforming is good against Nazis and the like, 'debate' as a sacred virtue is just not how you defeat these sorts of awful belief systems (and people acting upon them, more importantly). I think studies have shown repeatedly that deplatforming does work + that debating them just boosts their message.

As you say, I think equating socialists (even revolutionary socialists) with Nazis and fascists is completely wrong though, for certain. It's unfortunately too common these days in certain areas of the internet.

At the end of the day 'evil' is not a particularly valuable analytical framing if we are being proper social scientists (since, of course, "the capitalist becomes capital personified", e.g., their actual personality traits don't matter and they needn't be sociopathic to do horrible things. Though a disproportionate of landlords are horrible people ofc). On a social media site, however, there's nothing wrong with using emotive language like 'evil' and using venting memes like the guillotine pictures and I guess there is a disconnect in how it's perceived to the 'materialist' mode of analysis that does not focus on individual personality traits + does not see the individual as the supreme and singular unit of analysis.

This is on the front page of chapo.chat/Hexbear.net. Isn't the whole deal w/ federation that the communities merge their posts and their commenters? I apologise if I am misunderstanding. Personally I just comment on whatever things I think are worth commenting on regardless of what community it's on as I think my comments never violate any particular rules anyhow. It's not brigading it's just people wanting to comment on what's in front of them and directly referring to them, IMO. I understand how it would feel that way when it has come so suddenly, though. It's just what happens when an old and active group suddenly joins a bunch of smaller and/or less active ones (or, at least, larger to a small enough extent that the new commenters are still noticeable).

Ah sorry if I misunderstood. That's my bad.

Anglo scholarship is primarily centred around the idea it was from political errors-bordering on negligence-but it was not with the intent of destroying the Ukrainian people as a national group. Hence while it was mismanagement to the point where it was perhaps even criminal, it was not genocidal. I am not pro-Stalin but from what I gather there is not evidence that the Ukrainian people were systemically targeted to destroy their national group as such.

IF anything has a legitimate claim to genocide it'd be the forced denomadisation of the Kazakh people and the agrarian reform there which was much more obviously outrageously stupid and led to the deaths of a huge portion of the population + the ethnic cleansing of others. I don't know enough about it to have a proper opinion on what you'd classify it as though to be honest.

Obviously Ukrainian historiography is very different but I've not read any of it (because it's in Ukrainian) so I cannot assess if they have access to better sources or what-e.g., what the actual historiographical reason is for the divergence in conclusions.