An IRA just has tax benefits if you don’t cash it in before retirement age. It’s still basically just stock market gambling, you have to invest it in something (even just an index fund) for it to be worthwhile. If you have a 401(k) from a company and then leave that company it is better to convert it to a Roth IRA.

Individual financial planning is basically hedging your bets regarding larger trends that are not in your individual control.

Owning a house outright protects you from foreclosure if times get tough so if you are being conservative you might get a mortgage for a modest home and pay it off ASAP even if “on average” you would have made more money by paying it off slower and investing instead. Obviously simply choosing to have a mortgage isn’t realistic for many people, housing prices are increasing much faster than wages, so this is a good example of bet-hedging subject to wider economic conditions over which you don’t, as an individual, have control.

Keeping a good stock of dried rice and beans is a good way to hedge against massive food price increases and gives you the opportunity to isolate for months in case of emergency.

Stable-ish assets are a good hedge against inflation. They appreciate with inflation and can be exchanged for a train or plane ticket or a car if you need to flee. A common example is gold. Gold is silly as a hyperfocused investment strategy but as something you can always trade in fot cash it is useful. Real estate is also good for this, though obviously personal morality on land ownership (and what you do with it) comes into play. Having a small plot of land in an inexpensive area can be in the cards for many. It’s cheaper than a house. Note that taxes might eat up any expectation of this being better than leaving money in a bank account. Like gold this is an inflation hedge that will probably yield less money than an index fund.

Finally, I recommend joining an org and organizing. I’ve described individual actions and these are good, but communal are better. A mutual aid food bank is more efficient than a bag of beans in a pantry and will keep you plugged in. It also is a way to actually build against the systems of deprivation, as orgs can challenge them via direct action - ideally communist orgs.

Glad you’ve got Mullvad! It’s the best VPN imo.

I haven’t tried buying a phone number anonymously in a long time and the last time I tried it no longer worked for fooling Google, so unfortunately I won’t be super helpful there. But I do know it ia theoretically possible. It’s basically a VOIP provider that is verified to work with Google. Payment anonymously (like with cash) is probably the hardest part. If you go that route I would recommend using something other than a phone number for 2FA, like a yubikey or open source authenticator app, so that if Google eventually says, “we don’t accept this number anymore” you have a chance to log in. Sorry for being less helpful on this question!

Proton is theoretically better than Google for email. IMO email is inherently insecure as a technology and due to the domination from the big providers that will blacklist you for “spam” if you don’t jump through their hoops, which lractically necessitates paying a company to send your emails. The “best” setup that uses that third party and does not use GPG is to buy a domain, self-host your own inbox so that received email goes only to you, and and pay the third party just to send outgoing messages - which should be assumed to be insecure. In theory the best option is to run everything yourself with a domain purchased under a fake name with an anonymous paymeny method (which I haven’t personally tried yet) and being very on top of things so your sent mail doesn’t get marked as spam. And to encryot all your messages via GPG. But at that point of security concer , for most purposes I would just not use email at all and instead use something more inherently secure, ideally in-person conversations. Element and Matrix are better buy their funding model raises red flags so it is jusy something to regularly audit and understand. Avoid the habit of being too candid because you trust the software to protect you!

Linux is great and will help with getting more comfortable with digial security, so that’s a good thing to keep trying at! It has a learning curve so don’t get discouraged when things break the first few times.

Per my last email, …

If you do need to use copyrighted images for fair use purposes, modifying them a bit can help obfuscate them from bots. Let’s say you want to criticize Nestlé. Their logo is birds in a nest. You could swap the birds for different cartoon birds, for example. This can be an opportunity to do something artistic or interesting as well as satire, like making the nest be made of dollar bills, a baby bird be porky, etc.

Another tip is totally separate from the copyright question but I do think it is importsnt. In terms of social media, both platforms are not anonymous by default. While you can obfuscate via your username so that randos can’t ID you, both Facebook and Google tend to require a phone number to sign up/log in and both work with governments. So I recommend taking one of two approaches:

1. Accept that this may eventually be associated with your name and cater your messaging accordingly.

2. Go down the rabbithole of infosec to become more anonymous. For example, finding a way to buy a phone number with cash and not associated with your name and exclusively using a trustworthy VPN / VPS tunnel, again paid for with cash (Mullvad offers this, including with a voucher that is probably as secure as cash). This is a bunch of work but it is a generally enriching exercise that can provide value in irl organizing.

If it’s US law then you can use copyrighted images for “fair use” purposes, which includes but is not limited to education and criticism. Though with automated bot reporting there is always a chance your video would get unfairly reported. There are also public domain stock images if that’s the kind of thing you need.

Consent of the governed exists basically nowhere, including so-called liberal democracies. There is no “do you consent to this government?” question that results in a major change if you or even a majority say no. All are subject to an oppressive state, the only question re: consent is whether you want that state organized for or against the ruling class.

The primary issue here is in the broad-brushing and lack of care in the post (e.g. the title), which makes it easy to leave impressions of antisemitism. In your spoiler quote, you say things along the lines of, “if a state that exists in your name commits genocide, of course you will be hated”. While you are not explicitly saying so, the sentiment here has a rhetorical next step: “so antisemitism is valid and correct”. I’m not saying you believe this, but it would feel natural to have seen that written next by the flow of the rhetoric. The post is playing with being on the edge of antisemitic language and possibly crosses that border depending on how you interpret it. I don’t think that’s a very effective way of communicating in addition to the possibilities for causing harm.

Contrast to something like this: “Zionism is perhaps the greatest purveyor of antisemitism on the planet by engaging in ethnonationalist genocide and conflating everything they do with Judaism. In addition to the inherent antisemitism of associating race hate mass violence with Judaism, it inspires antisemitism among those who sympathize with the victims, as there has always been a real risk that those sympathizers take “Israel” at their word in conflating their project with Judaism. Even just adopting and then negating Zionist language can lead to problematic statements.”

Basically the same sentiments, but communicated in a way that is careful about how it is presented.

I would also disagree that Jewish people, including Ashkenazi Jewish people, are fully integrated into whiteness. They are partially integrated. Most can pass as white basically any time they want to by just not saying certain things. A lot of (most?) white people are going to treat them as white, as will others. But there is still a reactionary group that others Jewish people, follows and maintains antisemitic mythologies, and participates to one degree or another in ensuring there is always a bit of a threat in the background. In the most reactionary circles this does lead to overy antisemitic actions and violence, but the soft reactionaries and edgelords help to pipeline them. There is a dual character of whiteness and Jewishness for Ashkenazi Jews in white supremacist societies and which is dominant various regionally and on an individual basis. So on one hand most Jewish people in the US face very little discrimination due to being mostly assimilated into whiteness. On the other hand, there is still antisemitic violence and rumbles of more if reactionaries become more powerful and numerous and.

I would agree that antisemitism is not as common or extreme of an issue as islamophobia or anti-blackness and that Zionist organizations lie about what constitutes antisemitism, thus diluting it. But your thoughts that overstate Jewish assimilation into white supremacy may be a case of reacting to and negating Zionist framings too simply and on their terms. Zionist organizations call every single expression of sympathy for Palestinians antisemitic. Those organizations are lying in support of an active genocidal ethnonationalist project. But they also list real cases of antisemitism that should not be dismissed.

Re: moderation, well it’s a friendly socialist instance so I don’t want to exactly start a fight about it, but I would say they are quick to ban and bad at conflict resolution and explanations. They tend to describe this in terms of protecting their members, but I think it is mostly a consequence of having basically zero irl organizing experience and therefore making the mistakes of young organizers. Having no interest in listening to or guiding disagreement and being quick to drop a hammer is one of those mistakes. Communists grow out of this if they are self-critical after joining and leaving (or watching implode) a few organizations. At the same time, you should consider that your post was fairly flippant, inconsiderate, and flirted with antisemitism, so I wouldn’t say they made a greater error.

Sorry friend but you don’t know anything about China. Shenzhen Television also has HR. And of course it is managers and producers making the hiring decisions in question.

The CCP is involved, in this case, at the city level, with officials establishing themselves through merit and elections.

State-run and state-funded is an arbitrary distinction. At some point they need to hire people to run the network with limited funds allocated selectively by bureaucrats.

Compare this to Shenzhen Television. How does a person get on the board to dole out funds to BNNVARA? How does a person get hired to run BNNVARA? Who funds the funders? Compare this to Shenzhen Television. How do you become someone choosing to dole out funds to Shenzhen Television? How do you get hired to run a program at Shenzhen Television. The differences are suvtle but ST is more democratically run.

In the sense thst they were basically just mercenaries, the Freikorps has been maintained by the US for ages in the form of groups like Blackwater (now Constellis). But there is no local left to oppress militarily, there is no crisis requiring mercenaries domestically. The US can simply use cops for almost everything. The cops themselves receive increasingly militarized training to use on a civilian population, treating members of the pu lic like an enemy soldier ready to kill them at any moment (while also feeling superior to them). Notably, the major training operations for cops are IDF associated and mercenary groups like Blackrock. There is definitely a UA connection there via mercenaries.

Anyways I just want to emphasize that the domestic violent force we face us cops and there are far too few of us in thr first place for there to be organized resistance in the near future to prompt a correlary escalation. It will be more things like the George Floyd protests where those involved are mostly random liberals doing ineffectual disobedience and getting disabled or killed by cops in response.

Who?

White supremacy was and is a way for capital to create and maintain a marginalized vs. privileged group. This benefits capital in many ways, so it is constantly recreated and enforces by individual capitalists, capitalist consortia, and capitalist propaganda. It’s important to understand that capitalism did not invent marginalization in general, and so marginalizations that even still exist can predate it, but capital finds use dor many, especially white supremacy.

So, for some context, I would first note that there is not really just one white supremacy, but a constellation of interlinked white supremacies as defined and reinforced by different formations. So, for example, we might describe the overarching currents of US white supremacy on one hand vs. UK-based white supremacy on another vs. German white supremacy, and they will havr their own distinct aspects while fulfilling the same basic function. Race is socially constructed, its rules are built for social purposes and the very specifics originate from local context.

So, when it comes to class analysis, there are of course many classes, but under capitalism the major two are workers and owners, proletarians and bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are the ruling class, the dominant class under capitalism, as stewards of self-perpetuating capital. White supremacy serves many functions for maintaining the oppression of the working class by the ruling class and is therefore created, maintained, and tolerated by the systems of control they maintain. I will list an incomplete set of examples.

• Scapegoating. When capitalists make unpopular decisions, they seek to deflect blame and mollify angry workers. Nowadays capitalists pay top dollar to PR firms to handle this kind of thing for them. White supremacy offers an easy out: “it wasn’t me firing you (for profit), it was those brown people stealing your job!” Individual capitalists constantly recreate this aspect of white supremacy and some even believe their own scapegoating, as white supremacy ends up producing its own canon of illogic and fantasy storytelling. The class analysis effect of scapegoating is to keep workers from correctly blaming and organizing against the capitalists picking their pocket.

• The creation of superexploited economic underclasses. Poor working conditions breeds frustration, anger, and pain among workers. One way to disrupt solidarity and empathy between workers is to make the most exploited also be marginalized by other workers. Many OECD countries maintain a superexploited underclass. Usually an immigrant underclass. In the US, of course, the elephant in the room was chattel slavery, which was entirely premised on white supremacy to operate. Chattel slavery was not quite “pure” as a capitalist class relation, as it had a heavy dose of feudal relations, but the function of marginalization was the same and continued after abolition, where thr black economic underclass has been systematically oppressed to this day. The fundamental unit here that benefits the ruling class is to create a locus of precarity and hyperexploitation that is tolerated by the rest of the population. In the US this also applies to undocumented immigrants, where there is little in the way of worjer solidarity due to decades of anti-immigrant and racist (white supremacist) propaganda that teaches other workers to be angry at “illegals” who are “stealing jobs” instead of angry at companies hyperexploiting vulnerable fellow workers. This is another side of the scapegoating point.

• White supremacy also justifies, to the white supremacist public, other forms of violence and propaganda. When capital creates war for profit, it builds a propaganda appararus to make the public tolerate it. White supremacy helps with this as it reflects and reinforces historical colonial lines of exploitation and violence that capital is revisiting, i.e. the resubjugation and redivision of the global south. White supremacy makes the targets of violence by capital “deserving” when there might otherwise be empathy and solidarity. In the US, its other major use of white supremacy was for genocidal conquest, to justify the killing and disposession of indigenous nations. White supremacy made it easier to create bounties as it dehumanized the targets. White supremacy made it easier to steal land because the targets were “undeserving” of the land. This has been a constant theme of capitalist disposession of entire nations and regions and it continues today. The US form I described is settler-colonial and has perfect echoes in Israel, where ethnic supremacists dehumanize their targets to ethnically cleanse them and steal land. They even have the same, “we use the land better so we deserve it” racist talking points to justify disposession. This also happens in non-settler-colonial contexts. For example, destroying the Iraqi and Libyian states was about maintaining US (and to a lesser extent, EU) hegemony, of domination of currency, oil, and imperialist policy in general, against states attempting to build basic sovereignty. These incredibly destructive actions were only tolerated via white supremacy, of the member countries of bombing campaigns’ citizens accepting those as worthy targets, as people who are “other”. You can see this dynamic in action in Ukraine, where Ukrainians are white-ified in the language used about them and the value of their lives while Russians are given dehumanizing epithets and orientalist canards. Whiteness serves the function of humanizing an in-group and target of marginalization for ruking class interests.

Socially it is nothing but good that the US is openly hostile and lashing out at China. In China, this works against liberals there trying to emulate elements of US economics that are a capitalist road. In the US, this undermines the anti-China sentiment that propagandists have been provoking for over a decade.

This is ecofascism and unacceptable

No. There is nothing as dynamic or independent going on in the US as in the Weimar Republic. In the Weimar Republic there were actual organized factions taking actions against one another using various levera of power. SPD, KPD, Freikorps, monarchists, liberals, Nazis, etc were literally fighting in the streets, taking over cities, protecting or attacking marginalized groups.

In the US, it is important to understand that it is already essentially a Nazi country, it is just hegemonically so and presents itself as liberal. The Nazis themselves wete inspired by the US, its genocides, its racial segregation and oppression, its ethnonationalism. In policy it was more Nazi than the Nazis. The distinguishing feature of Nazis was that they wanted to claw back power for Germany using similar strategies under somewhat different conditions. In a more crowded space, imperially, with surrounding countries already posed for large scale war and a timeline of years and not decades or centuries.

Trump is just the “mask off” moment of American liberalism. His policies are not actually particularly different, they just lack liberal veneers. Biden did much more mass deportation, he just had people in uniform do it and crossed his Ts and dotted his Is legally. The genocide of Gaza was laundered primarily by the Biden admin. The war on Ukraine was stoked by decades of liberal policy and broken agreements to push push Russia into a corner rather than allow them regional influence. They wanted war and they got it. The US has been mass killing civilians and invading other countries for over a century and has always rationalized it through nationalism and racism. The US killed over a million in Iraw alone since 2003 and yet you are meant to care far more about a smaller number of dead in Ukraine - because they are white and becauae they are against the US’ designated enemy. The US maintains global white supremacy via its military, but also through finance. Far more die from US-based capitalism than from any war. Deprivation the world over is a product of imperialism, of the various evolutions of colonialism. You know the articles about USAID funding cuts leading to deaths? In a void this is peddled to you as the virtue of USAID, but its actual function is to threaten countries with that starvation. The US creates dependencies, not food secure nations, and it targets the non-white global south to do it. The US marks such countries for death when they pursue food sovereignty. Nothing puts a target on your back like land reform.

So anyways, the US is already a well-oiled Nazi machine. It has a massive state apparatus by which to already do anything a Nazi could ever want. There is no substantial left formation to oppose it, just ineffectual collaborationist liberals. There is no need for a Freikorps or similar. People call ICE the Freikorps, but they are not. ICE are cops. They are fully integrated agenta of the state. They do not need to be purged to do Nazi things or consolidate power, they are already beholden to it. No Reichstag Fire is needed, Trump can just say “fentanyl emergency” and do whatever he wants because Congress already consents. This has already been the case previously, they just applied a liberal veneer. The War on Terror was a series of largely undeclared wars executed by the executive based on a combination of Congressional blank check (which Trump is using, this is why he calls everyone he targets terrorist) and emergency powers.

Nazis have been here.

Sorry that was a typo, it was supposed to say Nazi. Here’s a UA propaganda outlet describing the reorg: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/51054

I’d need to dive into their specific funding model, which seems opaque, but if it is government funded then it is the same as all the Chinese networks that Westeen chauvinists label “state-backed” every time they’re mentioned.

Just FYI this applies for when something is processed by customs. If you order something now it will probably arrive at customs after May 2 and you’ll have to pay tariffs. If it arrives in the US on May 1 you’ll still probably have to pay tariff because everything is going to get backed up because they’ll be gearing up to inspect every package.

If you measure success as fitting the preferences of a white supremacist society, you cannot win. For example, the people who cozy up to powerful whites and repeat their reactionary thoughts are still not truly accepted by them.

To win you’ve gotta care about what cool people think, not white supremacists. Cool people will not care how stereotypical you are except to maybe ask you to tone it down if something seems like it perpetuates something harmful. Like it’s fine to like something stereotypically Asian, don’t sweat it one bit. You can like things!

UA has integrated neo-Nazis into the upper levels of their military and seem to make decisions based on their ideas. They have increased funding for groups like Azov, who have been running little Hitler Youth camps for years, and have recently integrated them into a larger and more powerful Baxi force.