I’ve said both. I’m a professional pentester / red teamer, and yeah, we send each other “I’m in” memes when we pop a box.

I’m not normally one for conspiracy theories, but there’s a massive motivation for the US government to find anyone who looks about right and is disgruntled and then frame them, or plant evidence on someone they found through an illegal means. The US surveillance state uses parallel construction all the time to hide the actual (often illegal) ways they find someone.

Plus, if you don’t have a suspect, the message to all the proles out there is that you can kill CEOs and get away with it. The internet just showed that the only reason the working class aren’t doing The Purge on CEOs is fear of consequences. That’s a critical threat to the ruling class, and they will 100% frame, pay to take the fall or blackmail someone into it rather than not convict somebody.

It doesn’t line up at all that he brought a handwritten copy of his manifesto plus his fake IDs and his recently used murder weapon to a Macdonalds. Especially after being careful about escaping the city, and the amount of practice he had to smoothly clear the jams when he shot Thompson shows this was premeditated.

Unless he takes the jury stand and uses it to verbally blast the ruling class and try to incite more violence, this ain’t the shooter IMO.

Oh lol, that’s weird, I thought it was common knowledge that China censors some types of speech, similarly to every other nation. If I was running a state, I’d want to censor transphobic slurs, arguments for gender inequality, pro-Capitalist propaganda, racism, etc. IMO there’s nothing inherently morally wrong about censorship, and I see a lot of think pieces from US / NATO outlets like Voice of America yelling that China is bad because it censors speech, without giving any context or nuance about what type of speech is being censored and also distracting from the US’s massive censorship.

On the oppression point - I guess it mostly matters who’s getting oppressed. If it’s regular working people being oppressed, fuck that, but if we implemented policies as a society that forced billionaires to give up their wealth I’m sure they’d cry about being “oppressed”. I don’t have any sympathy for the cries of CEOs and mega-landlords about how they’re being oppressed by being forced to give back their stolen wealth.

Actually, the opinion I see most often on .ml is that modern day Russia sucks, and is bad because they’ve turned into a capitalist warmongering empire similar to the US. People are pretty mixed on China, but legit if you just look at the technological advances coming out of China - just verified stuff that’s been scientifically proven and then deployed - it’s pretty impressive, especially surrounding batteries. So, if you’re suspicious of China then any good news about China will come off as a conspiracy, but in reality things are pretty mixed and there’s a lot of good and bad about nations, and no one state is all good or all bad. Anyone reducing the complexity of geopolitics down to one nation = good / other nation = bad is either dumb, trolling, not speaking in good faith, indoctrinated or just repeating propaganda.

Capitalists can choose to give up their property and become workers like the rest of us, or they can get the wall and then their property is redistributed. The capitalist class has colonized our society, and their enforcers are the police. And according to Franz Fanon’s books on anticolonial struggle in Algeria, colonial relations never go away unless fought with anticolonial violence to oppose the violence of the colonizers. Ultimately, violence is what is needed to force those in power to give up their wealth, and if they gave up their wealth willingly then violence would not be necessary.

Did someone say “One Big Union”? Sounds like the IWW would be right up your alley. It’s coming back to life again - definitely check if you have a local branch!

https://www.iww.org/

The IWW is an explicitly radical militant union devoted to overthrowing the tyranny of the wage system and settling the class war through full worker control of all enterprises. It’s an entirely different animal than the bloated business unions who settle for a “fair share” of the profits. The IWW asserts that all of the value produced by the labor of workers should go to workers, and the bosses can just become workers like the rest of us.

I’ve seen that reinforcement of workers who toe the line first-hand, people are scared and brainwashed into not acting up or demanding better. It’s why I have a hard time maintaining a job - not because I’m not good at what I do, but because I’m bad at pretending to buy into the capitalist ideology in the workplace.

Agreed, not all managers are bastards but the system they are working within creates horrible results.

I believe I’m one of those knowledge workers. I do cybersecurity and I’m actively working on trying to unionize the sector. I’m not management, and I don’t have hiring or firing power, and I’m reliant on wages to survive.

Actually, I can see the comparison. Many cybersecurity people don’t challenge the power relations in their workplace and instead act as enforcers of corporate policy. That always disappoints me, and I can see the pattern of how even our relative privilege is being actively reduced. I just hope more cybersecurity people will recognize the class struggle we have to wage and organize in solidarity with the rest of the working class.

I get where you’re going with this, and yeah, the PMC helps hold the current system in place. I was thinking about the cybersecurity/engineers/architects/other better paid workers who are still subject to class exploitation even though they’re better off than a line cook.

Also, I like your bit about the professional managerial class being an ideological shield - I see that happening in the workplace all the time where people won’t consider rocking the boat because they want to be management one day.

There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.

Both Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are great, and protests should be disruptive, otherwise they’re just ignored. Maybe they’re not doing enough disruption and damage to force governments to listen. Or, maybe someone should go after energy/oil companies directly via sabotage or other means and cause enough economic damage that the cost of polluting and resource extraction becomes too high for them to profit from.

Yes, exactly. The IDF intentionally attacks civilians in Palestine by shelling houses, for the purpose of demoralizing the population into surrendering to extermination. Sounds like terrorism to me!

For those of y’all who say that we don’t have an antisemitism problem on the left - this seems to be another example showing that we do, and we need to deal with it. Similarly to how movements in the past have been sabotaged by excluding groups (like white-only unions excluding nonwhite people), this could similarly fracture us along identity lines.

Last time I looked there wasn’t anything particularly associated with being queer, but the sample set of people who both have this and know that they do is pretty small so who knows! Could be, and we could just be missing the data. Or they could both be correlated with some other factor

Yeah, as I commented elsewhere, I’m damn impressed my code managed to compile and run. I guess life has a pretty fault-tolerant compiler at times, or maybe I was just super lucky to not have the errors be in spots that’d completely screw me over.

I really feel for the inevitable handful of trans men with Androgen Insensitivity syndrome. Imagine how bad it’d be if you were born with the wrong body, and couldn’t change it through hormones - it’d be an actual nightmare.

I found out because I was doing genetic work to test for Ehlers Danlos and I’d gotten my entire genome sequenced, so I figured I’d look for other stuff as well. I’ve suspected for a few years now that I’ve got some sort of intersex condition for a while because of very low testosterone and a weirdly fast transition, but finally got the confirmation earlier this week and wow my genetics are kinda a mess. Tbh I’m amazed that my code actually compiled XD

IMO being infertile is a plus - can’t accidentally have any kids, and can’t be coerced into doing so.

OMG yes it is - it’s especially fun to tell it to TERFs who are all “but muh chromosomes”

Oh look, it’s me! I found out a few years ago that I have De La Chapelle syndrome. I’m actually a trans woman though and not a guy, so I consider it a bonus rather than a downside since it made me have very little testosterone growing up.