#even if it's worker elected executives

[clockworkprism]

My hot take: business degrees should exclusively be masters degrees. Cause there are legitimate skills to running a successful business, which would apply even outside of capitalism. Things like managing people, complicated finances, tax implications (granted right now it's more how to exploit people, ensure maximum profit, and tax avoidance). People get promoted to management or executive positions and then have to learn all this on the spot.

Ideally, an engineering firm will be run by engineers who get a year off to get real training in the skills they'll need to be an executive. But going to school ONLY to do business as a generic concept? Yeah that should be completely abolished.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Amazon also invents implausible corporate fictions that allow it to terminate entire sections of its workforce for trying to unionize, by maintaining the tormented pretense that these workers, who wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, deliver Amazon packages, and are tracked by Amazon down to the movements of their eyeballs, are, in fact, not Amazon employees:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-drivers-unionized-then-amazon-tried-to-terminate-his-contract/

These workers have plenty of cause to want to unionize. Amazon warehouses are sources of grueling torment. Take "megacycling," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM that workers are plunged into without warning or the right to refuse. This isn't just a night shift – it's a night shift that makes it impossible to care for your children or maintain any kind of normal life.

Then there's Jeff Bezos's war on his workers' kidneys. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers notoriously have to pee in bottles, because they are monitored by algorithms that dock their pay for taking bathroom breaks. The road to Amazon's warehouse in Coventry, England is littered with sealed bottles of driver piss, defenestrated by drivers before they reach the depot inspection site.

There's so much piss on the side of the Coventry road that the prankster Oobah Butler was able to collect it, decant it into bottles, and market it on Amazon as an energy beverage called "Bitter Lemon Release Energy," where it briefly became Amazon's bestselling energy drink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

(Butler promises that he didn't actually ship any bottled piss to people who weren't in on the gag – but let's just pause here and note how weird it is that a guy who hates our kidneys as much as Jeff Bezos built and flies a penis-shaped rocket.)

Butler also secretly joined the surge of 1,000 workers that Amazon hired for the Coventry warehouse in advance of a union vote, with the hope of diluting the yes side of that vote and forestall the union. Amazon displayed more of its famously selective competence here, spotting Butler and firing him in short order, while totally failing to notice that he was marketing bottles of driver piss as a bitter lemon drink on Amazon's retail platform.

After a long fight, Amazon's Coventry workers are finally getting their union vote, thanks to the GMB union's hard fought battle at the Central Arbitration Committee:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/04/26/amazon-warehouse-workers-in-coventry-will-vote-on-trade-union-recognition/

And right on schedule, Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.

As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."

Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.

This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.

Again, the contrast couldn't be more stark. If you want to quit a union, Amazon makes this as easy as joining Prime. But if you want to join a union, Amazon makes that even harder than quitting Prime. Amazon has the same attitude to its workers and its customers: they see us all as a resource to be extracted, and have no qualms about tricking or even intimidating us into doing what's best for Amazon, at the expense of our own interests.

The campaigning law-firm Foxglove is representing five of Amazon's Coventry workers. They're doing the lord's work:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

In other words, if Amazon tries these tactics in the USA now, their union will be immediately recognized. Abruzzo has installed an ultra-sensitive tilt-sensor in America's union elections, and if Bezos or his class allies so much as sneeze in the direction of their workers' democratic rights, they automatically lose.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

Image: Isabela.Zanella (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballot-box-2.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[mwagneto]

something so wild it loops back around to being funny has been happening in hungary lately. the fascist government (fidesz) is waging an ever escalating war against budapest which just got even worse

the basic bg info is that fidesz has an overwhelming majority in the entire country but they can never fully win budapest even despite how much they cheat since most ppl here vote left, so instead they've spent the last few years trying to make life as impossible for the leftist lordmayor (KG here, for the sake of brevity) as they could, usually financially (withholding payments, making up new things the city is forced to pay, withdrawing random unexplained amounts of money etc)

then a year ago the mayor elections rolled around and fidesz attempted to get KG out of the office by withdrawing their own candidate and backing one they would've had more influence over, but even despite that (and fidesz committing massive voter fraud in front of god and everybody), KG won again, by like 300 votes (total number of votes was almost 800,000 for reference) which made fidesz's campaign against their own capital city even more aggressive, like they somehow think actively making the lives of the people in budapest shittier will make them not want to reelect KG aka the guy who isn't responsible for it ?? it's some insane pettiness you'd see on a playground but executed by a dictatorship instead, for some reason

anyway the latest development is that fidesz, without warning, withdrew 10 billion forint (~28 million usd/~24 million eur) from budapest a few days ago in order to finance the crumbling economy of the rest of the country, which essentially means the city is Entirely out of money. can't pay for anything. had to shut several services down and create an emergency council that constantly monitors their finances so they can attempt to stay afloat. it's an absolute mess and public transport workers are going on a demonstration strike this friday for 10 minutes as protest but will do a full strike later if fidesz doesn't listen

all this finally brings us to what this post is mainly about, which is that now i get to have the INCREDIBLE experience of sitting on public transport and seeing the usual anti-KG/pro-fidesz propaganda posters that are everywhere (like pictures of KG's face in black and white with his eyes blacked out like a 2015 animatic with a caption like HE WANTS TO EAT YOUR CHILDREN) while the bus/tram/etc radio occasionally plays a short speech about how fidesz is trying to sink budapest and we need to stick together against the government so they can't destroy our city. genuinely fucking unmatched. clown country

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Amanda Marcotte at Salon:

It's starting to look like Donald Trump is deliberately wrecking the economy. As Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect wrote this week, "no other president has gone out of his way to create a collapse," but there's no other way to interpret Trump's actions. Pointless tariffs will only jack up inflation. Illegally shutting down much of the federal government and laying off thousands at random will suck money out of the economy, forcing a recession. Both consumer confidence and the stock market are diving and a likely surge in unemployment — driven in no small part by Elon Musk recklessly firing federal workers without regard for law or necessity — will make it worse. And if all these federal cuts lead, as expected, to people not getting Social Security checks or health coverage, the disaster will likely spiral.  Kuttner can't decide if Trump wants the economy to crash or if his actions are "based on sheer ignorance and impulsivity." Trump, however, indicated malicious intent during his seemingly endless speech in front of Congress on Tuesday night. Trump mocked the fears over imminent inflation by sneering that it's merely "a little disturbance." It's a familiar rhetorical move of his to paint his victims as whiners. In this case, however, his victims include most Americans, who aren't independently wealthy and can't simply afford rising costs and massive job losses.  Trump mocked the fears over imminent inflation by sneering that it's merely "a little disturbance." It's a familiar rhetorical move of his to paint his victims as whiners. It's an understatement to call it "unprecedented" to have a president who hates most Americans, including his own voters, and wants them to suffer. But, as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times persuasively argued Wednesday, Trump's psychology makes it explicable. Trump's "every executive function exists to satisfy his ego," Bouie wrote. He continues to whine on a near-daily basis about losing the 2020 election. "[I]t stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public," Bouie concluded, adding that Trump is now undergoing "a retribution campaign against the American people." Thomas Edsall of the New York Times spoke with psychologists who confirmed Bouie's layman understanding of Trump's disordered mental state. They affirmed that Trump suffers from "a congenital sense of entitlement," whose personality is like that of "street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands and hate-crime perpetrators." Even in the 2024 election, he didn't get over 50% of the vote. It makes sense that, after nearly a decade of most Americans rejecting him, a malignant narcissist like Trump would detest Americans categorically, and wish nothing more than to punish them all.  As for his supporters, there's good reason Trump enjoys hurting them, as well. One of his favorite moves is to humiliate people who are dumb enough to fawn over him. Even during Tuesday's speech, he reminded us he loves to kick someone in the face after they bent to kiss his feet. After congratulating Marco Rubio for getting the secretary of state job — for which Rubio had to repeatedly prostrate himself — Trump threatened him. "Good luck, Marco. Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong," Trump said, relishing one more bit of public shaming of a man who has done so much to flatter him. 

Like most abusers, Trump's go-to move when challenged is to blame his victims. Unlike most abusers, however, Trump has a small army of spinmeisters and apologists who will echo his victim-blaming rhetoric. As the economic damage starts to balloon out, the number of people who will be told that they brought this on themselves will grow — likely until most Americans are being blamed for what Trump inflicted on them. 

Malignant traitor Trump victim-blames Americans for his struggles to get a functioning economy.

[txttletale]

i am confused by some self described maoists opposing gun regulations and saying the proletariat must be armed, and i remember you once said most of this comes from misinterpreting one thing marx said about an already-armed proletariat, could you expand on that?

because my thinking is, 1) people are materially, demonstratively safer in places with less guns and less excuses for cops to shoot them and 2) ... it's not like places like the US seem any closer to a revolution unless I'm missing something, right? All of this to me sounds exactly like when some extremely online "communists" oppose a labour reform that will make material improvements for the working class because they perceive worse conditions as more conductive to a revolution, which is something that, if nothing else, is horrible optics for any communist to say since it sounds like they _want_ things to get worse, which rightfully would make any working person want to punch them

SRA and similar types drastically take the quote “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary” out of context in a very silly way, interpreting it as 'basically the 2nd amendment', as marx just saying that the working class should all own their own gun as individuals--when in fact marx said this in a very specific context, discussing an organized working class in the midst of a popular democratic revolution against feudalism (such as the february revolution in russia or the xinhai revolution in china) in which the proletariat and bourgeoisie were united against aristocratic and royalist elements, and the need of organized proletarian militias to maintain their weapons even after the success of such a revolution to guard against betrayal by the bourgeoisie of the sort marx wrote of extensively in the case of the french revolutions. here's the quote in its full context:

During and after the struggle the workers must at every opportunity put forward their own demands against those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeoisie sets about taking over the government. They must achieve these guarantees by force if necessary, and generally make sure that the new rulers commit themselves to all possible concessions and promises – the surest means of compromising them. They must check in every way and as far as is possible the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follow every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself. To be able to forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

—Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (emphasis mine)

it's a total and deeply unserious misinterpretation of what marx actually said, and imo it is indicative less of anything specific to maoism but of the usamerican individualist mindset, who cannot conceive of 'the proletariat' as conceiving of anything other than scattered individuals making personal purchasing and lifestyle decisions. to paraphrase the least annoying mcelroy brother, if you buy a glock you're not arming the proletariat, you're arming the justin. you and your SRA buddies owning guns is not an 'armed proletariat', it's an 'armed just some guys'.

& of course these people will make much hay about the black panthers' use of firearms while once again completely failing to understand what the black panthers actually were (an organization founded on marxist principles) and what they used those guns for (to patrol, in groups, around their neighbourhoods to prevent police from acting with impunity). not for personal 'self defence' but for organized, community self-defense. which kind of gets to the heart of it, a gun is not actually useful for 'self-defense', owning a gun doesn't make you safer, but because of this individualism the specter of the random street hate crime which you can epically john wick your way out of plays an oversized role in the political imagination of these people who, again, cannot envision what self-defense looks like on a community or class basis.

another argument that will be made is that "well, personal gun ownership isn't revolutionary action now, but if there's a revolution how do you expect the revolutionary party to become armed if not through preexisting individual gun ownership?" needless to say i think this is very silly. no revolutionary or guerilla movement in history has ever relied upon the personal gun ownership of its members, because that's a fucking stupid way to operate a serious fighting force.

now that doesn't mean i actually think that gun control legislation in the usa is prima facie a good idea -- i think if the last few years have hammered any point home it's that the cops don't need excuses to shoot people, and that any theoretical program of firearm confiscation would be accompanied by disproportional leniency for right-wing white gun owners and disproportional violence and brutality against latino and black gun owners. i don't think guns are ontologically evil, i think if you want to own a gun that's whatever--but i do think that SRA types are for the most part wilfully deluding themselves that their particular type of consumerism and hobbyism is serious revolutionary activism in much the same way that people who make a big deal out of buying from their local small business queer owned coffee shop are.

[trans-axolotl]

"Much ink has already been spilled on Harris’s prosecutorial background. What is significant about the topic of sex work is how recently the vice president–elect’s actions contradicted her alleged views. During her tenure as AG, she led a campaign to shut down Backpage, a classified advertising website frequently used by sex workers, calling it “the world’s top online brothel” in 2016 and claiming that the site made “millions of dollars from trafficking.” While Backpage did make millions off of sex work ads, its “adult services” listings offered a safer and more transparent platform for sex workers and their clients to conduct consensual transactions than had historically been available. Harris’s grandiose mischaracterization led to a Senate investigation, and the shuttering of the site by the FBI in 2018.

“Backpage being gone has devastated our community,” said Andrews. The platform allowed sex workers to work more safely: They were able to vet clients and promote their services online. “It’s very heartbreaking to see the fallout,” said dominatrix Yevgeniya Ivanyutenko. “A lot of people lost their ability to safely make a living. A lot of people were forced to go on the street or do other things that they wouldn’t have otherwise considered.” M.F. Akynos, the founder and executive director of the Black Sex Worker Collective, thinks Harris should “apologize to the community. She needs to admit that she really fucked up with Backpage, and really ruined a lot of people’s lives.”

After Harris became a senator, she cosponsored the now-infamous Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which—along with the House’s Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)—was signed into law by President Trump in 2018. FOSTA-SESTA created a loophole in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the so-called “safe harbor” provision that allows websites to be free from liability for user-generated content (e.g., Amazon reviews, Craigslist ads). The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that Section 230 is the backbone of the Internet, calling it “the most important law protecting internet free speech.” Now, website publishers are liable if third parties post sex-work ads on their platforms.

That spelled the end of any number of platforms—mostly famously Craigslist’s “personal encounters” section—that sex workers used to vet prospective clients, leaving an already vulnerable workforce even more exposed. (The Woodhull Freedom Foundation has filed a lawsuit challenging FOSTA on First Amendment grounds; in January 2020, it won an appeal in D.C.’s district court).

“I sent a bunch of stats [to Harris and Senator Diane Feinstein] about decriminalization and how much SESTA-FOSTA would hurt American sex workers and open them up to violence,” said Cara (a pseudonym), who was working as a sex worker in the San Francisco and a member of SWOP when the bill passed. Both senators ignored her.

The bill both demonstrably harmed sex workers and failed to drop sex trafficking. “Within one month of FOSTA’s enactment, 13 sex workers were reported missing, and two were dead from suicide,” wrote Lura Chamberlain in her Fordham Law Review article “FOSTA: A Hostile Law with a Human Cost.” “Sex workers operating independently faced a tremendous and immediate uptick in unwanted solicitation from individuals offering or demanding to traffic them. Numerous others were raped, assaulted, and rendered homeless or unable to feed their children.” A 2020 survey of the effects of FOSTA-SESTA found that “99% of online respondents reported that this law does not make them feel safer” and 80.61 percent “say they are now facing difficulties advertising their services.” "

-What Sex Workers Want Kamala Harris to Know by Hallie Liberman

[read-marx-and-lenin]

alright.

I'll start with Lenin first, then move to Marx. Lenin was an autocrat and a dictator. There's no way around it. He was unelected and created a one-party state. This was due to the fact that the revolution was led by a vanguard, which the members of, once they succeeded in overthrowing the old government, could easily set up a self-serving dictatorship. He's not a Marxist, and he's not a Socialist.

Since Lenin obviously did not in any way uphold the vision of Marx, I'll tackle him separately. A (stateless) communist society does eliminate many hierarchies, but leaves the most coercive systems untouched. Those being: the hierarchy of the collective over the individual and that coercion required of industrialism. In a commune, one's individual vote is negligible, since the outcome is only affected by one person's vote in very rare circumstances. Once the votes are tallied, the individual is expected to conform to the decisions of the majority, and to accept the commune's laws and customs. This leads to the individual becoming feeling helpless and weak.

Secondly, Marxism fails to address the coercion required to make an industrial society function. In order to have products, you must have a payroll of workers to stand where they are told to stand and do what they are told to do and go home and show up to work when they are told to do it. Instead of working towards goals that are immediate, which directly affect one's condition (such as building a house to live in), one must do a task or set of tasks that ultimately has little to do directly with one's own material well-being. Instead, the hyperspecialized work required in an industrial society is made livable indirectly via trade. This leads to a dependence on the industrial system as a whole, which requires a massive amount of cohesion to function.

Humans are no longer permitted to act autonomously since doing so would be a hindrance to the system. Behaviors which are not conducive to the system are disallowed, but all unimportant facets of our life which do not interfere with the functioning of the system are permitted to grow within said limits.

Lenin was elected as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Congress of Soviets a total of nine times before his death. His position was not one elected by the people directly, but rather he was elected by the congressional representatives of the soviets who were themselves elected by the people. You can argue that his position should have been directly elected if you want, but you cannot say he was unelected. Regardless, while the Chairman of the CPC was the head of government of the RSFSR, and later the Soviet Union, the CPC was not a one-person council and the council as a whole was subordinate to the Central Executive Committee, which was in turn subordinate to the Congress of Soviets. Lenin was not an autocrat or a dictator; he did not hold sole legal authority and the Soviet government had numerous checks and balances.

I see no reason to believe a vanguard party or a one-party state is undemocratic. The USSR was a dictatorship, but not a dictatorship of one person. It was a dictatorship of the proletariat, as the bourgeoisie were stripped of the right to vote and to be elected. You can object to this if you like, but I personally don't think that was a bad decision.

You seem to be arguing that Lenin was neither Marxist nor socialist because the nascent Soviet Union was not yet classless or stateless. Yet why should it have been expected to be? Communism is not something that can be achieved overnight, or even in one generation. In the meantime, there must be some mechanism for suppressing and overthrowing the bourgeoisie. No matter how democratic, how horizontal, and how people-oriented that mechanism is, it still constitutes a state insofar as it constitutes an organ for the oppression of one class by another. Unless you are arguing that the rights of the bourgeoisie should be maintained and protected, you cannot escape this fact.

At the point of achieving a stateless, classless communist society, I don't see why decision-making would necessarily be performed through simple majority vote. While it's rather pointless in my mind to be speculating about how a hypothetical communist society of the future might function, I think it's safe to say they'd be far more capable of exploring alternative forms of decision-making than we are now. In any case, the question of how a future communist society might function is entirely separate from questions of past and present systems of government.

You are right to point out that the industrial mode of production requires collective and specialized activity in order to function, but I fail to see what the alternative is. Humans are a social animal, our production has always been collective and we have always benefited from specialization in labor. The advancement in industry has made possible a reduction in socially necessary labor time, not an increase. It is capitalism and the profit motive that has mandated long hours and low autonomy in the workplace, not industry itself.

People are not inherently stupid or self-centered. They can understand very well the relationship between one sector of industry and another. You do not need to be building a house to understand how, for instance, the nails you are manufacturing will be used to build houses and other goods. You do not need to be manufacturing nails to understand how the iron you are mining will be used to make nails and other goods. The idea that it is alienating to be engaged in a task that is socially beneficial rather than merely individually beneficial is absurd.

You talk about social cohesion as if it is impossible or undesirable. But again, what is the alternative? An incoherent, fragmented society? No society at all, and people just fend for themselves as individuals? I fail to see how anything less than social cohesion is desirable.

You say that industrial society is coercive and prevents people from acting autonomously. I say, what does it mean to act autonomously? Humans must satisfy our basic needs before we can think about engaging in autonomous activity. If you are starving, you are compelled to seek food. If you are freezing, you are compelled to seek shelter. Individual freedom is subordinate to our material conditions, and only through improving our material conditions can we satisfy our basic needs and guarantee individual freedom.

If we are to have a society where the individual freedoms of everyone are maximized, then we must have a society which guarantees everyone their basic needs. Food, shelter, clothing, medicine, education, transportation, communication, etc. All of these must be secured before a person has full freedom to act autonomously. Improving the quality of these things and the efficiency of their production improves the standard of living and reduces socially necessary labor time, which allows for greater degrees of freedom.

You say behaviors which are not conducive to the system are disallowed. I do not necessarily disagree, but I feel you are intentionally obscuring the nature of such behaviors. What is “the system” here? The system is society. So a behavior not conducive to society is an anti-social behavior, a behavior that impedes or harms other members of society. Why should these behaviors be allowed? Is it maximizing autonomy and freedom to allow someone to steal or rape or murder with impunity? No, it is merely trading someone else's freedom and autonomy for your own.

You can certainly maximize your own freedom and autonomy at the expense of others, but if we are to live in a society where the freedom and autonomy of everyone is to be maximized, then there must be certain limits to individual behavior for the sake of others. Maybe someday humanity will evolve to a state where one can live in their own private world with maximum freedom to do as they please without worrying about impacting others, but until that day we will have to live in a society with other people and the social restrictions that come with that. Personally, I don't think it's such a burden to have to care about other people.

Society as it stands today is indeed imperfect and often oppressive. Socialist states in the past and present have yet to achieve the classlessness and statelessness that marks higher-stage socialism, i.e. communism. They too are imperfect and have restricted people's behavior in various ways, some I would argue are necessary, and some I would argue are unnecessary. However, I believe that socialism offers us the greatest opportunity to improve society as a whole and liberate humanity from oppressive structures. I believe that capitalism remains the central impediment to the advancement of society and the pursuit of human freedom. I believe that a vanguard party and a dictatorship of the proletariat have been the most effective means of combating the bourgeoisie so far. And I believe that the advancement of science and industry has been the most effective means of securing and improving the basic needs of the people as a whole.

My question to you remains: what is the alternative? You can criticize all you want, and thoughtful and rational critique of all things is both important and beneficial, but unless you have an alternative to socialist revolution and industrial society, then you're just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How are we to combat the bourgeoisie without a vanguard or a state? How are we to provide people with their basic needs without industrial production?

[tanadrin]

The recent talk about what would the democrats need to do the next election cycle to undo whatever damage done by Trump is possible to undo, and the observation that the US political system does already have to tools to do it on paper got me thinking, specifically about why this is happening much more than how

The present situation in the US, in a lot of ways, reads like a crisis of political will more than anything to me. But what I can't for the life of me come up with is, why is this will so lacking?

Even right now, a lot of Trump's actions could be halted if the political will existed to do so - not just among the politicians, but the average American person. Fed workers physically blocking DOGE employees, or just all the IT personnel forgetting all the server passwords and having a convenient server outage, hell just actually heated protests instead of some peaceful marches could make a dent. And politicians could of course also do more, all sorts of high ranking figures from illegally fired officials to House and Senate members could for example respond to the "move fast and break things" approach by, themselves defying dubious-but-technically-maybe-legal exercises of executive authority first and waiting for a lawsuit second, instead of the other way around. But that too, of course, needs to rest on an energised base that would appreciate this sort of thing to make the very real personal risk worth it

All of which sort of comes back around to political will - there exist solutions, but there seems to be an utter absence of actual electoral enthusiasm amongst the average American about actually using them - about asserting that this is a big deal and having a fight about it. Enthusiasm from the centre and left of it, anyways - the US right has sort of manifested that exact energy, and is using it exactly to do what they're doing right now

So like, what happened/is happening there with it? Why is the average American that actually participates in political life so apathetic to all if it, even the ridiculous bullshit they express a dislike for every time a poll or vote actually gets them to express an opinion on?

I am hardly an expert on this, but I think a big part of it is 1) the rot in the Republican Party specifically, and 2) the collapse of leadership in Congress generally, and I think these two things are related.

Movement conservatism has been hollowing out the Republican party as a "normal" political force for decades, and it really ramped up during the Bush years, when conservative political leaders and legal figures had to make increasingly contorted arguments for blatantly unconstitutional actions whose real justification was something like might makes right. The victory of Obama in 2008 accelerated the collapse because a certain kind of white American saw a black man get elected president and just kind of went crazy; they had to construct a post-hoc justification that wasn't "I still actually believe in the Jim Crow era racial hierarchy," and they couldn't really.

Movement conservatism also drove polarization in Congress starting in the 90s under Newt Gingrich, and Congress becoming a place for scoring political points rather than enacting policy, plus increasing deadlock (which again, accelerated under Obama, when figures like McConnell decided the play was to be as obstructionist as possible) de facto devolved a lot more responsibility on the executive and judicial branches. But you also saw, for instance, complete dereliction of duty to control and oversee warmaking and surveillance power under Bush--because, you see, that might open you up to some kind of political attack! Congress now is simply terminally afraid of taking a stand on anything, since to do so might endanger individual members' chances of re-election. And now that the Republican party is a Trump personality cult, there's no non-Trump wing of the party to appeal to against Trump's worst excesses; and feckless Democrats, who do not know how to actually demonstrate political leadership anymore, think the only solution to declining popularity is to try to chase the things that Trump does that seem to not be completely unpopular. Of course much of the electorate is zoned out--everything that comes out of any politician's mouths these days (save Trump and AOC and a couple of others) is a stock phrase that's been through a dozen focus-groups. The signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal, most political media does this simpering both-sides thing where they have to somehow act like the dull centrists and the rabid fascists both have valid points, and cynicism/doomerism/conspiracism runs wild on the social media that most people get their political coverage from anyway.

(And it doesn't help that the way American political parties are organized is stupid, and leaves them without any kind of central apparatus that can shape and direct political strategy when they're out of power)

obviously i am flattening out a lot of nuance and detail here for the sake of fitting it all in two paragraphs, but in the most general terms that's what i feel like is going on

[mariacallous]

Who gets to run out the clock?

It’s not often discussed, but the question of “who controls the clock” very much matters when one side is doing the wrecking and one side is trying to stop it.

When prosecutors were racing to hold Trump accountable for his multiple crimes around January 6 and his absconding with classified documents (and trying to cover it up), Trump’s lawyers played a game of delay. They understood that if they could tie the cases up in court and prevent trials from occurring before the election, then Trump could undo all of his legal risk by winning reelection.

The strategy worked, in part because he had a lot of help from specific bad faith judges and justices, and in part because our legal system isn’t set up for speed and can get bogged down easily.

But now the situation is somewhat reversed. The Trump White House is trying to do as much damage as it can as quickly as it can, while opponents are doing all they can to throw sand in the gears. Plaintiffs know that once there’s a preliminary injunction in place, the “status quo ante” will hold until a permanent injunction issues.

That’s why these initial court salvos wind up mattering so much. When the Supreme Court allows the district courts to do their work, unhindered by emergency appeals that stop orders in their tracks, then those courts can freeze conditions as they were just before the bad activities took place. That frozen circumstance then can last for months or years while the parties battle things out at trial and on appeal.

This will have the greatest impact on cases where the government has sought to freeze and impound money, but it could also keep in place key personnel (for example, inspectors general) who were illegally terminated.

This week, for example, another federal judge held that the government grant and assistance freeze order, initiated by the Office of Management and Budget, was illegal. He ordered the frozen money released. “Here, the executive put itself above Congress,” wrote Judge John McConnell in his decision. “It imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressional appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending.” That ruling, along with a similar one issued in another federal case last week, could spare thousands of projects and desperate recipients the pain and shock of permanently losing funds they had been expecting.

Another federal judge held that a member of the National Labor Relations Board was illegally terminated by Trump and has ordered her reinstated. “The President’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more aptly, his aspiration — is flat wrong,” wrote Judge Beryl A. Howell. “The President does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the Board was a blatant violation of the law.”

A third judge blocked the firing of the chair of the federal Merit Systems Protection Board. That’s a body which protects government workers from political discrimination.

The Trump administration is appealing all of these decisions. It hopes that the conservative majority will side with the notion that the president should have broad power to hire and fire within the executive branch, even if it now looks less likely that the Court will give him the power to withhold funds as he likes.

The High Court could also decline to hear these cases at this time, allowing the injunctions to remain in place and for the cases to develop more fully in the courts below. That would essentially allow plaintiffs to run out the clock for a change.

Not every case may or even likely will go our way. But with its 5-4 ruling in the USAID case, at least we know we have a fighting chance.

The takeaway

Stepping back, the big takeaway here is that the Supreme Court has now instructed the White House to obey a court ruling ordering release of funds the government had frozen. If Trump were truly a king, no High Court could order his government to do so. And if it did, he wouldn’t have to obey.

Moreover, the Supreme Court (again by a frighteningly thin majority) said to him, “Yes, in fact, a single district court has the power to tell you to do this, and we will stand behind that court’s power with our own.” It signaled there are in fact limits to Trump’s power, and the courts will say what they are.

The day may still come when Trump defies the Supreme Court itself and we must lock arms in the streets. But at least for now, there’s still something left for him to defy.

We Dodged A Constitutional Bullet: A 5-4 Supreme Court decision on Wednesday leaves our distressed system alive to fight another day.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Google’s trial secrecy lets it control the coverage

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

"Corporate crime" is practically an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the single most consequential and profligate theft in America is wage theft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:

https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime

Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's Shield Of Boringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "white collar crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern. Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes – even those committed by organized crime – can't hope to match:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers. Take National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo's ruling in Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a union election, the consequence is now automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages…and the union would be smashed.

The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.

That's why antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale. Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail – they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.

The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

It's not just precedents in the outcomes of trials, either. Trial procedure has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is secrecy: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even describe. Take Project Nessie, the program that the FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706

Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files it based its accusations on have been redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon's claim, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."

It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."

It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists – or their editors – to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether. This, in turn, keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges that they can defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.

That's a tactic that serves Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the DoJ Antitrust Division, it demanded – and received – a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – published an editorial in Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "semantic matching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads – and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.

Google forcefully disputed this claim:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297

They contacted Gray's editors at Wired, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.

Wired removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:

https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529

She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.

I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't. But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.

I've seen this playbook before. During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet – including my own reporting – on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.

Like the corporate crimes revealed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:

Make everything as complicated as possible;

Make everything as secret as possible;

Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: Jason Rosenberg (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/

CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

--

Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[eaglet-if]

Орлёнок (Eaglet)

Орлёнок (Eaglet) is an interactive story set in a country similar to 1910s-1920s Russia. You're a member of the overthrown Imperial Family, shaping the future of the Empire by virtue of arms.

It aims to be equal parts role-playing, dress-up and strategy game, with an emphasis on romance.

Although there will be no explicit nsfw scenes, it does include graphic descriptions of the horrors of war as well as personal tragedies, so please refer to the content warnings at the end of this post.

(as the project is still a wip, this overview is somewhat incomplete and will be gradually updated in tandem with the progress of writing)

DEMO: here (v0.0.2a, 21.06.2024)

Forum post: here

Number Spelling Function (IF writer resource): here

Secondary project: @a-dying-wish-if Tertiary (mini-)project: @perceptron-failure-if Quaternary project: [redacted]

The Empire of Nevetskiya - old, proud, and utterly dilapidated. While the Industrial Revolution has enabled other Monarchies - after a few quickly suppressed workers' uprisings - to become modern colonialist superpowers, exerting their influence all over the world, Nevetskiya is still overwhelmingly agrarian, and barely holding onto its outlying territories acquired in golden times long past.

Your Father Emperor, while ruling with an iron fist and unquestionable authority over the common people, is completely dependent on the shaky loyalty of the High Nobility, who frustrate any attempt to modernize the economy or administration, out of fear upstart merchants might, in time, replace the old Aristocracy.

When a sloppily executed coup d'etat eventually leaves your family dead and you a refugee, it becomes time you grab the reins of your destiny and amass an army to liberate and rebuild the country in the way you envision.

(this is meant to be a concise overview - a more exiting and detailed description of features can be found in the offical Interest Check Thread post)

extensive character customization

extensive army customization - both in a strategy and in a dress-up game sense

focus on story over stats - success is determined on the battlefield, not by your character's personality

five distinct regions with a wide cast of characters

complex personality system - for example, how your character actually feels and what they show to the world are separate things

several ways to rule - will you become a traditional Monarch, a Military Dictator, a democratically elected Head-of-State, or maybe proclaim yourself a Living Saint?

choose how much modernization is needed - will you allow women to bear arms, at the cost of offending the traditionalist nobles? Introduce tanks at the cost of foreign powers gaining influence?

how far will you go for victory? A political police, mass executions and the use of special types of weaponry might give you an edge, but is your vision really worth it?

a total of ten romanceable characters

(this naturally might contain slight spoilers)

The ROs

★ Yakov Tymofiyevich Sokolovskiy / Liliya Tymofiyevna Sokolovskaya ★

The Intelligence Director (gender-selectable)

One of your four original companions. As a member of the High Nobility, you've met them before - maybe you've even been childhood friends?

But even if you know them, it's hard to tell what they're truly like, as they seem to switch personalities effortlessly depending on the situation.

Their work is a mystery to seemingly everyone, but they always get results: as long as you let them act freely, no enemy agent has any chance to harm you or your cause.

Age: mid-20s

★ Semyon Ivanovich Orlov / Selena Ivanovna Orlova ★

The Cavalry Officer (gender-selectable)

One of your four original companions. A war hero and renowned expert when it comes to horses, the only reason they were not yet promoted to a lofty position in the War Ministry is their pragmatic approach to new developments, which hasn't mixed well with the typically very traditionalist views of the old Imperial officer corps.

Possessing a subdued but strong charisma and deeply respected by their soldiers as a wise parent figure, they are a solid pillar of support to you, and will reliably get things done - though some people might consider the cost for that too high sometimes.

Age: early 30s

★ Mikhail Pavlovich Voronin / Marina Pavlovna Voronina ★

The Young Visionary (gender-selectable)

One of your four original companions. They shot up through the ranks by impressing the War Ministry with bold new ideas for utilizing modern technologies and are hailed as a genius by many - though the older officers dismiss them as a dreamer at best and incompetent fool at worst.

With you, they hope to have found someone who'll appreciate their visions for the future - plus, their relative eccentrism has left them in dire need of a friend.

Their technical expertise might just prove to be the key to your success - if you can secure the foreign support needed to get the modern equipment needed to utilize it.

Age: early 20s

★ Leon Isayev / Leah Isayeva ★

The Noble Academic (gender-selectable)

One of your four original companions. Born to wealthy nobles, they graduated the Imperial Officer Academy with perfect grades, and feel honour-bound to your family.

They were the one to gather your initial force of loyalists and act as your primary advisor. But their loyalty is to the Imperial system, with you just a symbolic representative - can you convince them that you and your vision deserve their loyalty beyond that?

Age: late 20s

★ 'Little' Semyon/Selena Shvets ★

The Hero (gender-selectable)

A young cavalry officer and leader of your Southern Forces. A protegé of the "other" Semyon/Selena, they lack their cynical pragmatism, but make up for it with a firm belief in the triumph of a better world.

Some may call their optimism naive, and their personality has been mockingly compared to a Golden Retriever, but they have proven time and time again that underestimating them on the battlefield results in a crushing defeat.

Age: early 20s

★ Nikola ★

The Rebel (nb)

Leading an anti-authoritarian peasant uprising in the West, Nikola is more likely to be your enemy than your ally - but they don't seem to care enough about politics to refrain from flirting with you, so... there might be a basis of mutual understanding there?

Their personality is pretty sweet, at least - if you ignore the fact they'll cheerfully gun down prisoners if they feel like it.

Age: mid-20s

★ Rakhmil/Rakhilya Feldman ★

The Logistician (gender-selectable)

A member of the Western Rebel Army and best friend of Nikola's adoptive sibling, they've poured their soul (and countless nights without any sleep) into somehow maintaining the rebels' supply network in the face of their rapidly swelling numbers.

Unhappy with Nikola's carefree attitude, they might end up aligning with you instead in order to save their cause.

Age: late 20s

★ Arseniy Matveyevich Lebedev / Amaliya Matveyevna Lebedeva ★

The Enemy (gender-selectable)

Grand Duke Lebedev, the main leader of the Aristocrat faction, stood by and watched when your family was executed. Arseniy/Amaliya is their younger sibling, and serves as military commander of his personal forces that aid several warlords in their efforts to establish their own petty kingdoms.

But they're already uncomfortable with their brother's methods, and if you can convince them that you're not actually "an incompetent little puppet who's trying to ruin the country out of arrogant delusions", they might become a very valuable ally.

Age: mid-20s

★ Lyudmila Demyanovna Naumova ★ (f)

A minor noble who reluctantly turned into a Warlord in order to protect her territory and her people. All she wants is peace - but she'll not hesitate to fight if she believes it necessary.

Unfortunately, you can't just ignore her - all must choose a side in this war - but you have options how to deal with her. Will you subdue her by force? Or fall back on the age-old option of political marriage to secure an alliance?

Age: late 20s

★ Jan/Jana Novotný ★ (gender-selectable, under certain circumstances)

A member of your Personal Guard who has distinguished themself and eventually rises to become its commander. Others might betray or doubt you, but Novotný only cares about one thing - your continued, unharmed existence.

And they will go to any lengths to guarantee it.

Age: mid-20s

CONTENT WARNINGS

...will be added as they become relevant in the demo.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Reich:

Friends, Demonstrations against Trump are getting larger and louder. Fabulous. This is absolutely essential. But at some point we’ll need to demonstrate not just against Trump but also for the America we want. Trump’s regressive populism — cruel, tyrannical, bigoted, authoritarian — must be met by a bold progressive populism that strengthens democracy and shares the wealth. We can’t simply return to the path we were on before Trump. Even then, big money was taking over our democracy and siphoning off most of the economy’s gains. [...] Instead, lawmakers responded to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and big corporations — those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. And “when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.” Notably, Gilens and Page’s research data was gathered before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in Citizens United. After that, the voices of typical Americans were entirely drowned.

In the election cycle of 2016, which first delivered the White House to Trump, the richest one hundredth of one percent of Americans accounted for a record-breaking 40 percent of all campaign donations. (By contrast, in 1980, the top 0.01 percent accounted for only 15 percent of all contributions.) The direction we were heading was unsustainable. Even before Trump’s first regime, trust in every major institution of society was plummeting — including Congress, the courts, corporations, Wall Street, universities, the legal establishment, and the media. The entire system seemed rigged for the benefit of the establishment — and in many ways, it was. The typical family’s inflation-adjusted income had barely risen for decades. Most of the economy’s gains had gone to the top. Wall Street got bailed out when its gambling addiction caused it enormous losses, but homeowners who were underwater did not. Nor did people who lost their jobs and savings. Not a single top Wall Street executive went to jail. A populist — antiestablishment — revolution was inevitable. But it didn’t have to be a tyrannical one. It didn’t have to be regressive populism. [...] Strengthening democracy by busting up big corporations. Stopping Wall Street’s gambling (e.g., replicating the Glass-Steagall Act). Getting big money out of politics, even if this requires amending the Constitution. Requiring big corporations to share their profits with their average workers. Strengthening unions. And raising taxes on the super-wealthy to finance a universal basic income, Medicare for all, and paid family leave. Hopefully, demonstrations against Trump’s regressive, tyrannical populism will continue to grow. But we must also be demonstrating for a better future beyond Trump — one that strengthens democracy and works on behalf of all Americans rather than a privileged few.

Demonstrations against Tyrant 47 show a vision for a better America.

[txttletale]

how do ml's reconcile with lenin going for a bigbrainhaver hierarchy which just so happened to place him at the tippy top? most of the things he's quoted for writing make a kind of sense in that longwinded academic philosopher way, but, like, russia went from having a revolution against monarchy to having a monarchy, essentially, and what folks do tends to align with their desires, yeah? wouldn't that make everything he said, idk, suspicious?

we reconcile with this because none of this is even remotely true. lenin did not 'happen to be placed at the tippy top' but was in fact elected by the soviets, who worked in a very simple electoral system by which workers and peasants would elect representatives to their local soviet, who as well as administering local services would also elect members to higher bodies. the quote unquote bigbrainhaver hierarchy system in question was as follows:

The sovereign body is in every case the Congress of Soviets. Each county sends its delegates. These are elected indirectly by the town and county Soviets which vote in proportion to population, following the ratio observed throughout, by which the voters in the town have five times the voting strength of the inhabitants of the villages, an advantage which may, as we saw, be in reality three to one. The Congress meets, as a rule, once a year, for about ten days. It is not, in the real sense of the word, the legislative body. It debates policy broadly, and passes resolutions which lay down the general principles to be followed in legislation. The atmosphere of its sittings is that of a great public demonstration. The Union Congress, for example, which has some fifteen hundred members, meets in the Moscow Opera House. The stage is occupied by the leaders and the heads of the administration, and speeches are apt to be big oratorical efforts. The real legislative body is the so-called Central Executive Committee (known as the C. I. K. and pronounced "tseek") . It meets more frequently than the Congress to which it is responsible-in the case of the Union, at least three times in the year-passes the Budget, receives the reports of the Commissars (ministers), and discusses international policy. It, in its turn, elects two standing bodies: (1) The Presidium of twenty-one members, which has the right to legislate in the intervals between the sittings of the superior assemblies, and also transacts some administrative work. (2) The Council of Peoples' Commissars. These correspond roughly to the Ministers or Secretaries of State in democratic countries and are the chiefs of the administration. Meeting as a Council, they have larger powers than any Cabinet, for they may pass emergency legislation and issue decrees which have all the force of legislation. Save in cases of urgency, however, their decrees and drafts of legislation must be ratified by the Executive Committee (C.I.K.). In another respect they differ from the European conception of a Minister. Each Commissar is in reality the chairman of a small board of colleagues, who are his advisers. These advisory boards, or collegia, meet very frequently (it may even be daily) to discuss current business, and any member of a board has the right to appeal to the whole Council of Commissars against a decision of the Commissar.

—H.N. Brailsford, How The Soviets Work (1927)

you might notice that the congresses of soviets were not directly elected -- this is because they were elected by local soviets, who were directly elected, in a process that many people have given first hand accounts of:

I have, while working in the Soviet Union, participated in an election. I, too, had a right to vote, as I was a working member of the community, and nationality and citizenship are no bar to electoral rights. The procedure was extremely simple. A general meeting of all the workers in our organisation was called by the trade union committee, candidates were discussed, and a vote was taken by show of hands. Anybody present had the right to propose a candidate, and the one who was elected was not personally a member of the Party. In considering the claims of the candidates their past activities were discussed, they themselves had to answer questions as to their qualifications, anybody could express an opinion, for or against them, and the basis of all the discussion was: What justification had the candidates to represent their comrades on the local Soviet. As far as the elections in the villages were concerned, these took place at open village meetings, all peasants of voting age, other than those who employed labour, having the right to vote and to stand for election. As in the towns, any organisation or individual could put forward candidates, anyone could ask the candidate questions, and anybody could support or oppose the candidature. It is usual for the Communist Party to put forward a candidate, trade unions and other organisations can also do so, and there is nothing to prevent the Party’s candidate from not being elected, if he has not sufficient prestige among the voters. In the towns the “ electoral district ” has hitherto consisted of a factory, or a group of small factories sufficient to form a constituency. But there was one section of the town population which has always had to vote geographically, since they did not work together in one organisation. This was the housewives. As a result, the housewives met separately in each district, had their own constituencies, and elected their own representatives to the Soviet. Here, too, vital interest has always been shown in the personality of every candidate. Why should this woman be elected ? What right had she to represent her fellow housewives on the local Soviet ? In the district next to my own at the last election the housewife who was elected was well known as an organiser of a communal dining-room in the district. This was the kind of person that the housewives wanted to represent them on the Soviet. Another candidate, a Communist, proposed by the local organisation of the Party, was turned down in her favour.

[...]

The election of delegates to the local Soviet is not the only function of voters in the Soviet Union. It is not a question here of various parties presenting candidates to the electorate, each with his own policy to offer. The Soviet electorate has to select a personality from its midst to represent it, and instruct this person in the policy which is to be followed when elected. At a Soviet election meeting, therefore, as much or more time may be spent on discussion of the instructions to the delegate as is spent on discussing the personality of the candidates. At the last election to the Soviets, in which I personally participated, we must have spent three or four times as much time on the working out of instructions as we did on the selection of our candidate. About three weeks before the election was to take place the trade union secretary in every department of our organisation was told by the committee that it was time to start to prepare our instructions to the delegate. Every worker was asked to make suggestions concerning policy which he felt should be brought to the notice of the new personnel of the Moscow Soviet. As a result, about forty proposals concerning the general government of Moscow were handed in from a group of about twenty people. We then held a meeting in our department at which we discussed the proposals, and adopted some and rejected others. We then handed our list of pro¬ posals to a commission, appointed by the trade union committee, and representing all the workers in our organisation. This Commission co-ordinated the pro¬ posals received, placed them in order according to the various departments of the Soviet, and this co-ordinated list was read at the election meeting itself, again discussed, and adopted in its final form.

—Pat Sloan, Soviet Democracy (1937)

Between the elections of 1931 and 1934, no less than 18 per cent of the city deputies and 37 per cent of village deputies were recalled, of whom only a relatively small number — 4 per cent of the total — were charged with serious abuse of power. The chief reasons for recall were inactivity — 37 per cent — and inefficiency — 21 per cent. If these figures indicate certain lacks in the quality of elected officials, they show considerable activity of the people in improving government. The electorate of the Peasants' Gazette, for example, consisted of some 1,500 employees, entitled to elect one deputy to the Moscow city soviet and two to the ward soviet. For more than a month before the election every department of the newspaper held meetings discussing both candidates and instructions. Forty-three suggested candidates and some 1,400 proposals for the work of the incoming government resulted from these meetings, which also elected committees to boil down and classify the instructions. These committees issued a special four-page newspaper for the 1,500 voters; it contained brief biographies of the forty-three candidates, an analysis of their capacities by the Communist Party organization of the Peasants' Gazette, and the "nakaz," or list of "people's instructions," classified by subject and the branch of government which they concerned. At the final election meeting of the Peasants* Gazette there was literally more than 100 per cent attendance, since some of the staff who for reasons of absence or illness had not been listed as prospective voters returned from sanatoria or from distant assignments to vote. The instructions issued by the electorate in this manner — 1,400 from the Peasants' Gazette and tens of thousands from Moscow citizens — became the first business of the incoming government.

—Anna Louise Strong, The New Soviet Constitution (1937)

does this mean that the soviet project was some utopian perfect system? no. there were flaws in the system like any other. it disenfranchised the rural peasantry (although not, i would like to add, to any extent greater or even equivalent to the extent to which the US electoral system disenfranchises the urban working class) -- the various tiers of indirect selection created a divide between the average worker and the highest tier of the executive -- and various elements of this fledgling system would calcify and bureaucratise over time in ways that obstructed worker's democracy. but saying that it was 'a monarchy' is founded in absolutely nothing except the most hysterical anticommunist propaganda and tedious orwellian liberal truisms.

even brailsford, in an account overall critical of the soviet system, had to admit:

Speaking broadly, the various organs of the system, from the Council of Commissars of the Union down to the sub-committees of a town Soviet, are handling the same problems. Whether one sits in the Kremlin at a meeting of the most august body of the whole Union, the "C.I.K.," or round a table in Vladimir with the working men who constitute its County Executive Committee, one hears exactly the same problems discussed. How, be-fore June arrives, shall we manage to reduce prices by ten percent? What growth can we show in the number of our spindles, or factories, and in the number of workers employed? When and how shall we make our final assault on the last relics of illiteracy? Or when shall we have room in our schools, even in the remotest village, for every child? Was it by good luck or good guidance that the number of typhus cases has dropped in a year by half? And, finally, how can we hasten the raising of clover seed, so that the peasants who, at last, thanks to our propaganda, are clamoring for it, may not be disappointed?

—H.N. Brailsford, How The Soviets Work (1927)

genuinely, i think you should take a moment and think about where you learned about the soviet union. have you read any serious historical work on the topic, even from non-communist or anti-communist sources? because even imperialist propagandists have to make a pretence at engaging with actual facts on the ground, something which you haven't done at all -- and yet you speak with astounding confidence. i recommend you read some serious books instead of animal farm and reflect on why you believe the things you believe and how you know the things you think you know.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Get Informed

Join the Trump Accountability War Room, which offers fact sheets on the bad actors in Donald Trump’s Cabinet and primers on their policies, and the AFL-CIO’s Department of People Who Work for a Living, which tracks how funding cuts are affecting federal workers.

Follow MeidasTouch Network, a pro-democracy news organization with a massive social media presence and a suite of podcasts. MeidasTouch personalities such as Leigh McGowan (a.k.a. PoliticsGirl) and Aaron Parnas have reinvigorated the resistance on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack.

Monitor constitutional oversteps and the legal challenges to Trump’s executive orders with Lawfare or Just Security.

Get Strategic

Explore Choose Democracy’s interactive Choose Your Own Adventure activity, which asks you to “guide us towards a better, more humane democracy.” In “What can I do to fight this coup?,” the group offers drop-down menus of resistance techniques arranged by level of difficulty. It also provides training agendas on everything from de-escalation to mutual aid.

Study Indivisible’s Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, which shares strategies for defending the democratic process against authoritarian creep and a list of tactics constituents can use to pressure their elected officials.

Review the tool kits, how-to manuals, and informational leaflets at Build the Resistance’s comprehensive, crowdsourced resource hub.

Get Outside

Check NoVoiceUnheard, which compiles peaceful protest opportunities, viewable by state or by organization, across the country. For an even more expansive inventory, look at The Big List of Protests.

Brush up on your rights at the ACLU’s protesters’ rights page, which shares information on the kinds of locations where you are protected, when you need a permit, and what to do during a police encounter. Call the Resistance Hotline at 1-844-NVDA-NOW or email gotyerback@resistancehotline.org with your questions, and you’ll get a response within 24 hours.

Enlist with the ACLU’s “grassroots army” of volunteers working to safeguard civil liberties. Visit the program’s website for a wealth of actions, including signing the organization’s petitions, that will take just a few minutes.

Get out Your Wallet

Donate to legal defense and bail funds. The National Bail Fund Network maintains a directory of pretrial bail funds and immigration bond funds.

Get on the Phone

Call Congress using 5 Calls, which provides policy guides, office numbers for your representatives, and call scripts.

Get in the Way

Flood the Office of Personnel Management’s anti-DEI tip line at DEIAtruth@opm.gov to protect federal employees targeted by the Trump administration’s crackdown. —Kate Mabus

Timothy Noah

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.

[palms-upturned]

For US unions like the UAW — which has thousands of members in weapons factories making the bombs, missiles, and aircraft used by Israel, as well in university departments doing research linked to the Israeli military — the Palestinian trade union call to action is particularly relevant. When the UAW’s national leadership came out in support of a cease-fire on December 1, they also voted to establish a “Divestment and Just Transition Working Group.” The stated purpose of the working group is to study the UAW’s own economic ties to Israel and explore ways to convert war-related industries to production for peaceful purposes while ensuring a just transition for weapons workers.

Members of UAW Labor for Palestine say they have started making visits to a Colt factory in Connecticut, which holds a contract to supply rifles to the Israeli military, to talk with their fellow union members about Palestine, a cease-fire, and a just transition. They want to see the union’s leadership support such organizing activity.

“If UAW leaders decided to, they could, tomorrow, form a national organizing campaign to educate and mobilize rank-and-file towards the UAW’s own ceasefire and just transition call,” UAW Labor for Palestine members said in a statement. “They could hold weapons shop town halls in every region; they could connect their small cadre of volunteer organizers — like us — to the people we are so keen to organize with; they could even send some of their staff to help with this work.”

On January 21, the membership of UAW Local 551, which represents 4,600 autoworkers at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant (who were part of last year’s historic stand-up strike) endorsed the Palestinian trade unions’ call to not cooperate in the production and transportation of arms for Israel. Ten days later, UAW Locals 2865 and 5810, representing around forty-seven thousand academic workers at the University of California, passed a measure urging the union’s national leaders to ensure that the envisioned Divestment and Just Transition Working Group “has the needed resources to execute its mission, and that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim workers whose communities are disproportionately affected by U.S.-backed wars are well-represented on the committee.”

Members of UAW Locals 2865 and 5810 at UC Santa Cruz’s Astronomy Department have pledged to withhold any labor that supports militarism and to refuse research collaboration with military institutions and arms companies. In December, unionized academic workers from multiple universities formed Researchers Against War (RAW) to expose and cut ties between their research and warfare, and to organize in their labs and departments for more transparency about where the funding for their work comes from and more control over what their labor is used for. RAW, which was formed after a series of discussions by union members first convened by US Labor Against Racism and War last fall, hosted a national teach-in and planning meeting on February 12.

Meanwhile, public sector workers in New York City have begun their own campaign to divest their pension money from Israel. On January 25, rank-and-file members of AFSCME District Council (DC) 37 launched a petition calling on the New York City Employees’ Retirement System to divest the $115 million it holds in Israeli securities. The investments include $30 million in bonds that directly fund the Israeli military and its activities. “As rank-and-file members of DC 37 who contribute to and benefit from the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and care about the lives of working people everywhere, we refuse to support the Israeli government and the corporations that extract profit from the killing of innocent civilians,” the petition states.

In an election year when President Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates will depend heavily on organized labor for donations and especially get-out-the-vote efforts, rank and filers are also trying to push their unions to exert leverage on the president by getting him to firmly stand against the ongoing massacre in Gaza. NEA members with Educators for Palestine are calling on their union’s leaders to withdraw their support for Biden’s reelection campaign until he stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel,” marching from AFT headquarters to NEA headquarters in Washington, DC on February 10 to assert their demand. Similarly, after the UAW International Executive Board endorsed Biden last month — a decision that sparked intense division within the union — UAW Labor for Palestine is demanding the endorsement be revoked “until [Biden] calls for a permanent ceasefire and stops sending weapons to Israel.”

[classycoffeecat]

If You Can’t Go to the Protest, Here's What You Do Instead

rethinking visibility, labor, and contribution in movement work

Not everyone can, or should, be in the streets. The assumption that physical presence at a protest is the only valid form of political participation flattens both access and impact. It erases the people sustaining movements from behind the scenes: caregivers, immunocompromised comrades, undocumented organizers, disabled activists, low-wage workers, trauma survivors, and those navigating complex material realities. Movements require more than just bodies in public space; they require infrastructure, strategy, and support.

Here are ten ways to contribute meaningfully when you can’t physically attend a demonstration:

1. Redistribute Wealth: Movements need money to function. Bail funds, mutual aid projects, and grassroots organizers often operate without institutional backing. Even small contributions help build capacity. Prioritize local and BIPOC-led initiatives.

2. Amplify Strategically: Digital platforms are both battlegrounds and broadcast systems. Share protest updates, livestreams, donation links, and safety information. Algorithms tend to suppress radical content; your engagement helps visibility. Center and amplify marginalized voices, especially those organizing on the ground.

3. Offer Practical Support: Protests are logistically complex. Offer rides, prep protest kits, provide meals, babysit, or create respite spaces for frontline activists. Material forms of care are often undervalued but essential to sustaining resistance.

4. Participate in Jail and Court Support: Those arrested need people waiting when they are released. Bring water, warm clothing, food, and emotional care. Court support is equally critical; showing up at arraignments demonstrates communal solidarity and discourages punitive overreach.

5. Coordinate Communications and Safety: Monitor police scanners, livestreams, and protester reports. Help disseminate accurate, real-time updates. Signal-boost urgent calls for help. Digital vigilance can reduce harm and increase coordination.

6. Engage in Direct Political Pressure: Organize phone zaps, email campaigns, and petitions targeting elected officials, agencies, or institutions involved in the harm being protested. Targeted pressure campaigns have measurable impact when executed collectively.

7. Host Educational Spaces: Facilitate teach-ins, reading groups, or workshops to build shared understanding of the issue at hand. Education creates informed solidarity. Frame your efforts as political education; not charity, not “awareness,” but power-building.

8. Create Cultural Interventions: Art is not a luxury; it’s strategy. Design flyers, zines, posters, or projection campaigns. Use visual media to mobilize, memorialize, and provoke. Culture work shifts narratives and creates shared language for resistance.

9. Write and Document: Narrative control is part of the struggle. Write public reflections, op-eds, social media threads, or personal essays that contextualize and support the protest’s demands. Archive movement histories as they unfold; documentation is defense.

10. Sustain the Long-Term Struggle: Protest is a flashpoint, not an endpoint. Long-term commitment involves joining organizations, redistributing resources, building community safety networks, and practicing political care in your daily life. Movements need consistency more than spectacle.

Protest is a collective ecosystem.

There is no single “right” way to contribute. If you are not able to show up in one way, show up in another. What matters is that we remain connected to each other, materially and politically; and that we resist the idea that visibility is the only form of value.

(Note: This is not mine- I do not have the source. Please let me know if you know the source, so I can give them credit) ✊️💗✨️