Barx [none/use name]

Education and propaganda are praxis. Though I do recommend joining an org IRL because the skills of organizing aren’t taught here.

Performative and possibly even counterproductive. The other bags you can use will usually require a larger consumption of fossil fuels consumed over their likely use lifetime. Paper bags are more energy intensive (including burning fossil fuels for energy). Cloth bags are much, much more energy intensive, you need to use each one hundreds of times for it to balance out.

If the concern is pollution from plastics, grocery bags are a very minor contributor. Most can simply be reused as trash bags or trashed/incinerated. It’s tires and runoff from freeways that are the elephant in the room but addressing that requires building a real mass transit system.

Harris has more or less the same solutions for black America, as this article lays out. Both parties offer false promises while supporting the material bases of oppression. Both parties are the parties of mass incarceration, criminal injustice, gentrification, school defunding, and ultimately, widespread material deprivation of the working class, the poor, the unhoused. We’ve had a Trump presidency. It was, despite liberals’ panic at rude statements, more or less, the typical status quo right up until the pandemic hit.

This is not because Trump was good, it was because he did the same basic things as his predecessors and successor. Liberals temporarily cared about kids in cages under Trump and suddenly lost all interest under Biden, now pretending that it simply stopped because they aren’t hearing about it even as the Biden admin has ramped up imprisonment and deportations. Very little changed, materially. The same applies to the lives of black people. If anything, conditions have gotten worse under Biden through policies increasing unemployment, the normalization of the pandemic and ending of economic support during it, and the massive funds for cops, increasing criminalization of poverty, and decreases in universal funding, leaving communities subjected to the legacies of red lining and discrimination to self-fund. Fewer jobs, worse pay, less support, more observation and racially discriminatory criminalization.

Expect this to continue until we actually organize to build real leverage and address the actual root causes of these issues and why neither party identifies them.

First, don’t vote for genociders. I think if that isn’t the limit, you don’t have one and might as well admit to being a supporter of genocide.

Cool headline, but ultimately just another call to have people throw their votes to a third-party candidate in protest

Those who organize to vote third party do a better job at building leverage for their interests than sheepdogs that try to convince people to Vite Blue No Matter Who. Which one is throwing a vote away? You don’t even register on Dems’ radar as anything other than a “likely Dem voter” to maybe send a volunteer out to remind you to vote.

…which could just lead to Trump’s victory, which the article itself acknowledges would be the worst possible outcome.

The article does not say that. It is very clear on its line that neither party is the one to fight for black people. I have to assume you simply didn’t read it.

The time to fight the Democratic leadership is unfortunately past

The time to fight oppressive genociders never passes. Please stop telling other people to give up their fight for justice. I’m getting white moderate vibes from your comment.

PS Harris has never won a single state in a Democratic primary. What in earth do you think was the right time and right method of opposition and building if leverage? The party just dictated all of this at you and now you carry water for it.

and the only way forward to being able to win going forward is to vote for Harris.

To win what? The thesis of this article is that black people don’t win regardless of which party has the presidency. Who are you talking to and do they understand what you mean by “win”?

Voting for Trump (or casting a third-party candidate, essentially the same thing) is guaranteed to make things much worse.

Voting for a third party is not the same as voting for Trump. Get that nonsense out if here.

Uphold Amerikan Pharaoh thought.

The Western left, such as it is, has really shown their liberalism when it comes to COVID. What should have been a time for us to shine was dominated by a small liberal anti-mask sentiment, then a larger liberal anti-anti-mask reaction, and finally liberal normalization and a much higher anti-mask sentiment. We should be 100% top of caring for community, organizing in community, calling out liberal hypernormalization and building from it.

Instead, we have mostly seen opportunism. COVID-cautious folks (which is to say, correct folks) a minority in orgs, sometimes listened to at first. Orgs trying to say that wearing masks alienates you from the proletariat (lmao). And then people who are understandably tired of being the odd one out using this as justification to be massively inconsiderate, even dangerous.

There is still plenty to organize around, though the lightning strike moment has passed for now. Paxlovid is $1400 for the uninsured in the US. There’s currently a wave. There’s a new, seemingly better vaccine and we could organize around access to it. There are locales trying to ban masks in order to crack down on Palestinian solidarity protests. Public health aside, normalizing masks is good for our ability to safely carry out actions. It’s not out of the cards for lightning to strike again and give us dual pandemics, as COVID damages immune systems and public health had adapted to a “fuck it” status quo, flirting with bird flu for no reason other than a poultry lobby. Will your org be ready to agitate? Or did it alienate the people with the most knowledge and investment in this topic?

Promote correct positions (COVID-safe) and reject dominant liberalism (nornalization), especially in our own spaces!

Nothing breaks a liberal’s brain more than valid criticism from the left. They think of themselves as progressive darlings or the adults in the room and have adapted to a life where politics is mostly about being in a camp better than a camp to their right. Their usual way of coping is to try and slot left criticism into a right camp because they are politically illiterate and only know how to do that one thing. The political class knows this and teaches it

“Israel” is a terrorist state and always has been. As an occupier, the resistance has the right to oppose it by all means deemed necessary.

It sounds useful, though don’t forget that you’re basically doing free marketing for private businesses! This is very similar to “union made” marketing. It will also be a lot of work, as you will either need to fight hard to research a critical mass of worker-controlled businesses and/or once you do have a critical number you will have to critique them. The legal aspect is just one part! What do you do about co-ops that are really just run by one or two jerks despite what is on paper?

These aren’t reasons not to do it, just some ways to take a critical lens to aspects of the idea so that you can prepare for the effort and make it better.

In my opinion, the key things to focus on are who is going to do this with you, how will it be sustainable if you eventually leave the project, and are there any angles by which to turn this into more than a consumer tool.

For example, co-ops are unfortunately rare, so this would not be very useful for someone wanting to see all the new co-ops to see in the town they live in. There are probably 2-3 tops. Checking the site even weekly would be fruitless for them 9 times out of 10. So really, this would only be for people to check rarely, like when visiting a new town, or because they haven’t thought about this before. If you want people to hear about new co-ops, you would want a mailing list of some kind.

So, my logic is that this would make the most sense as part of a wider effort. Maybe part of a local lefty paper rather than a totally separate thing. Local papers already try to do this with “traditional” businesses, particularly restaurants, curating databases and announcements that pepper their issues. Maybe it ties into a specific organizing druve to get more co-ops to form. When businesses may close, some cities have a tradition of offering the business for sale to the workers. Can your site help with that? If so, the ways it can help may assist you with figuring out where this project really lives and how it could have impact and engagement. IMO the ideal outcome is less about consumer choices and more about using the impression of a consumer choice platform to do organizing.

Peak performance

If you are supplying thousands of devices to an org the first thing you should do is verify the supply chain / your infosec around the ordering process and then disassemble some when they arrive. All it requires is a screwdriver and a spudger at most. Personally, I would have been looking out for recording devices or GPS devices, but you would also discover the bomb material if you did this.

You need oxidants to live. Issues stemming from oxidants are about levels of free radicals getting too high in the wrong places for too long.

Getting good sleep, eating a balanced diet, reducing stress, and getting enough exercise are the best ways to reduce the chances of such a scenario. Realistically, these things are also just a way to maximize wellness and health overall and it is probably not very useful for most people to think of this in terms of oxidation.

Oxidative stress happens every time you exercise. People need exercise to have better health. Oxidative stress is actually a necessary part of a healthy life.

If aliens exist they would probably have many things just as strange. They would also need a way to harvest energy via some cycle. It is possible they would require even more reactive substances to live.

When we and other known organisms take energy from food we are actually taking molecules with higher-energy electrons, converting them into the high-energy molecules our cellular processes can use to do make cell things happen, and producing very similar molecules with lower-energy electrons. Rather than infinitely accumulating these molecules, our cells dump low-energy electrons onto another molecule that is amenable and thereby convert into a molecule ready to accept high-energy molecules from food (with a bunch of steps in between).

For us, as aerobes, the electron acceptor at the end of respiration is oxygen.

Oxygen as an electron receptor is newer than several others. Anaerobes came first. It was only after photosynthesis had produced a ton of atmospheric oxygen that it became a viable option, really. But it O2 is a comparatively good electron acceptor because the process in which it accepts those electrons allows cells to grab quite a bit of energy from that last step. It is fairly “electron needy” compared to earlier electron acceptors.

So, basically, aerobes get more energy per food unit (sugar molecule) than the vast majority of other creatures. You need it to live because it is an essential part of how your cells get food, namely, how it can recycle molecules at the last step of the respiration cycle.

The dietary antioxidant fad is mostly BS. They’re supposedly meant to counteract oxidative stress and specifically free radicals. Both of those things are part of a healthy life and you would die without them. So any real impact is not so simple as “just counteract those bad things”. Dietary antioxidants don’t always lead to higher intracellular antioxidant levels, either.

Some dietary antioxidants so lead to higher intracellular levels and may help buffer oxidative stress (like from exercise) but there isn’t much evidence that it doesn’t just boil down to “eating your vegetables is good for you”.

This is the kind of thing that should motivate every nerd to realize that they do have something to contribute to the revolution even if it seems small at first. Help with opsec and infosec! Orgs are busy thinking about other things! They will be safer if you help them decrease their attack surface.

Fairy tales that middle managers tell themselves so they feel important and smart for sucking up to the company owner.

lmao the Harris campaign is so incompetent. Imagine feeling the need to make up or selectively edit things to attack Trump with. Imagine doing this so much that you make your own BS the story instead.

As a start, follow the 3-2-1 rule:

• At least 3 copies of the data.

• On at least 2 different devices / media.

• At least 1 offsite backup.

I would add one more thing: invest in a process for verifying that your backups are working. Like a test system that is occasionally restored to from backups.

Let’s say what you care about most is photos. You will want to store them locally on a computer somewhere (one copy) and offsite somewhere (second copy). So all you need to do is figure out one more local or offsite location for your third copy. Offsite is probably best but is more expensive. I would encrypt the data and then store on the cloud for my main offsite backup. This way your data is private so it doesn’t matter that it is stored in someone else’s server.

I am personally a fan of Borg backup because you can do incremental backups with a retention policy (like Macs’ Time Machine), the archive is deduped, and the archive can be encrypted.

Consider this option:

1. Your data raw on a server/computer in your home.

2. An encrypted, deduped archive on that sane computer.

3. That archive regularly copied to a second device (ideally another medium) and synchronized to a cloud file storage system.

4. A backup restoration test process that takes the backups and shows that they restores important files, the right number, size, etc.

If disaster strikes and all your local copies are toast, this strategy ensures you don’t lose important data. Regular restore testing ensures the remote copy is valid. If you have two cloyd copies, you are protected against one of the providers screwing up and removing data without you knowing and fixing it.

You’re probably fine so long as it doesn’t have moisture!