ProdigalFrog

A general strike needs to be organized and initiated by unions. Unions have strike funds that pay out money to members on strike to help them afford not getting paychecks during the strike, that's why unions are so important, as without them, your options for non-violent resistance are more limited.

If you, the reader of this comment, are not currently in a union, please contact a union today by sending them an email about organizing your workplace. Doing so is literally essential to our last chance to avoid entering a bloody civil war.

The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to directly demand real changes (Ending the war in Iran and Gaza, and Abolishing ICE should be towards the top of the list).

The General Strike was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would've had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.

There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).

Learn First Aid! ⛑️

Violence is being used against those who resist and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.

Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.

But you'll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.

Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.

Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊

If you haven't already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

These are groups using direct action to solve each other's problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We've been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.

This isn't only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don't want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.

Join a Union to help prepare for a General Strike! 💪

If you aren't in a union (or even if you are, it's worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you'll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to make a general strike possible.

Once you are in a union you and your coworkers will need to pressure your leadership to prepare for a general strike, as well as pressure them to organize with other unions to enact a general strike. This is especially true if you are in a more traditional union that isn't the IWW. Your local shop may need to organize directly with other unions if your union leaders are too cowardly to do so.

Most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then will be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner.

You can contact the IWW with the link below:

🌍 US/Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)

And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn't listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they'll help you set up a new local branch.

🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
🇮🇹 Italy: USI
🇮🇪 Ireland: IWW Ireland
🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️

Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.

Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.

Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.

Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.

We'll start it off with some General Advice:

Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
Be careful about who you meet online
Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don't have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.

For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you'll need to scroll down. I'd add it here, but it won't fit in this comment).

I'd also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).

Ah, so you are! My mistake :p

until they work on the UI toolkit to allow a different approach (like e.g. Firefox does allow)

Like how Firefox lets you drag and drop icons and spacers around? That would be cool to have in Libreoffice.

Apple’s UI is good not because it’s ‘bare-bones’, but because it organises elements visually instead of piling them all into a giant toolbar for the user to wade through.

Could definitely see that as a big improvement, even as someone quite used to the Windows 95 way of doing things (or at least, I prefer the old way to the ribbon), hopefully someone who has a similar itch to us as well as the capabilities to implement it does so someday :)

Ah, I assumed you were comparing it to MS Office as the gold standard, and chose the tabbed mode to make it closest to that, though I don't personally use it that way myself.

LibreOffice has a simpler mode, though not quite as bare-bones as your Apple example. It's how I how use it personally:

There's also a Sidebar mode, which can collapse out of the way when not in use, or be brought back by pressing a small button on the side of the program.

I agree it could stand to offer a mode with much more spacing and just the essential options, but I think for the most part, the simpler toolbar mode which I use is pretty adequate, and doesn't feel overwhelming to use.

Alternatively, Libreoffice is quite customizable, so a user can remove every option from the toolbar they never use, and make it appear nicer and less cramped.

"Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours?"

-Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

Is there an office suite you had in mind that looks futuristic? Comparing a slightly old version of LibreOffice with a modern version of MS Office... They look pretty similar to me? (The gray document background in libreoffice is from me, it defaults to something closer to MS office).

Also @bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works

for something that they themselves admit would likely only get around 7 years of support.

Do you know of an android device with longer support than 7 years? The norm is 3 years.

There's quite a lot of reputable people that showcase how they are ineffective, or in the case of this video, even suggests that the way they are structured would actually accelerate global warming.

Just a heads up, OP; Carbon Offsets are extremely ineffective, and are pretty much just green washing. What counts as an offset is completely unregulated, and much of it is just kinda made up. The real use of Carbon Offsets is to allow companies to continue to emit without consequence, and to be able to slap a 'We're totally green!' badge on the smoke stack.

I believe that community is anti cashless society, as they appear to feel being forced to use a digitally tracked exchange method, either through a bank or other digital means, gives up ones privacy by needing to attach a transaction history to a known individual, where as real cash is anonymous.

A society that eliminates cash and thus requires a bank may also make it difficult to create a bank account if one does not have a government issues ID, or is homeless, which essentially would be discrimination against the poor or those who don't want to have a government issued ID.

Am I getting that right, @activistPnk@slrpnk.net?

This driver will work with any motherboard that's newer than the 915 chipset (which uses single core Pentiums). So if your motherboard supports dual-core CPUs at the very least, it will be compatible. Ivy Bridge for sure.

I haven't personally attempted to install 98 or ME on more modern hardware, so I'm unsure if there's any special steps to do so, or if it just sorta works like it would've on an older PC.

Ah, my bad! I was still on version 1.76.2 due to the Aurora Store not showing an update available. I reinstalled it from Obtainium to get on 1.78.2 and the issues is now gone.

Sorry for the mention, but thanks for making me check that to fix it (Love the app btw, you did a fantastic job with it!)

No worries, cheers for adding it! ^^

EDIT: Wasn't running on the latest version, fixed now!

@idunnololz@lemmy.world. Hi there, just wanted to let you know I noticed on this post that the Summit app doesn't seem to properly display the title of spoilers (at the bottom of the main post, the Meta Archive and Union Resources spoiler). It only displays the first emoji, with the rest of the spoiler text only showing when the spoiler itself is revealed. I believe this may be due to the text inside the spoiler being formatted in bold.

It displays correctly from the desktop Lemmy-UI and Voyager app, it's only not displaying correctly on summit (I believe the Jerboa app had/has the same issue as well, which goes away if the text is not bolded or italicized).

100%!

For communication/collaboration tools between mods, our XMPP and Movim instance (you can use your existing slrpnk credentials to login) for group chat or voice calls, paired with our Etherpad for collaboratively working on announcements/ideas works really well (both are mentioned at the bottom of our Meta posts, in the Community Resources section).

but I don’t think I was notified about it (via voyager app)

Voyager unfortunately doesn't have any mechanism to alert you to moderator stuff, it requires that you go to the profile section (the middle button in the dock labled slrpnk.net) and select Administrator Zone, which lets you look at the mod queue.

Personally I've found the Summit lemmy app to have the best mod tools of any of the mobile apps, and importantly it does give a notification in your inbox for new user reports.

Also forgot to mention, but thanks for volunteering! :D

Hi there, could you add the duration of the video to your title? Like this: [12:34]

Thank you :)

Also i have contacted @SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net to help mod the art and aesthetic communities, and we were wondering how adding someone as a mod worked.

I sent 'em a DM explaining how it works a few minutes ago, they should be able to get you modded up soon :)

It does bring up the point that actions like that aren't really explained anywhere, they can only be discovered from experimenting with the UI. It'd probably be a good idea for us to add a guide for it in the wiki to help any future mods (though probably best to wait until we've switched to Piefed)

In the meantime, for any other community mod who may be unfamiliar with it, here's the guide I sent SolarMonkey:

How to add a moderator to a community

To add a moderator to a community, the usual method from the normal desktop Lemmy-UI is to have the user you want to add to comment on an existing post in the community, or make their own post there.

If they make their own post, you must first navigate into the post by clicking on it (so that you could read the comments or leave your own), and then click the 3 little vertical dots menu at the bottom of their post, where it will give you the option to add them as a moderator. If they left a comment on a post instead, those same 3 little dots will be below their comment.

Alternatively, if they have not made a comment or post in the community, you can use our Photon front-end, which has the ability to add someone as a mod even if they haven’t interacted with the community yet.

If you go the Photon route, you would log in, then navigate to your community and click the ‘Edit’ button with a gear icon next to it in the sidebar. That will open the edit menu. At the top of the edit page there is a ‘Team’ button, which will show you the moderator roster. You can then add new users at the bottom of it.

Pyrex can often be found used in thrift shops too ^^

The Movim XMPP client has an integrated blog feature that groups can use to write articles or make announcements, which can be commented on or subscribed to as well.

People keep recommending Parenti’s Inventing Reality

Just so you know if you read that at some point, Parenti does engage in historical revisionism, and is very much an apologist for authoritarian socialism (USSR, Castro, China, etc), as he feels that the gains for the working class like increased literacy, healthcare and housing are worth living under extremely authoritarian hierarchies and the negatives they bring (while also downplaying those negatives, such as minimizing the murders of political opponents in Soviet gulags).