"he’d already aroused suspicion by interrupting a meandering discussion of principles with a straightforward plan of action."
I feel seen.
a) Organizations and Conferences
- Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
- Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
- When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
- Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
- Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
- Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
- Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
- Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.-
The best part is by publishing this far and wide, anybody pushing for “careful consideration” and actual reasoned planning is immediately suspect, which leads to less reasoned decisions, which usually means more mistakes. If a victory is somehow won through violence of action and not careful planning, the support structure isn’t there to maintain the victory, nor are the people who win that victory well-suited to careful planning before the next engagement. The boring stuff is often what wins wars, simple things like plenty of fuel, adequate hygiene facilities, and dry socks can literally mean the difference between a division surrendering or winning a battle.
TIL that the OSS completely undermined the global business culture.
Those bastards!!!
these people already all fucking hate each other. They spend all their time arguing about minutiae
Oh shit, The Onion has clearly infiltrated a few leftist groups in their time. That's fucking hilarious.
This is too funny and hits the mark. Groups like ANTIFA and BLM during the protests don't get to be traceable groups exactly because of alphabet agency interest. Behind the Bastards podcast talks about their opsec being deliberately lacking organization of a sort exactly because they knew getting a distributed and traceable hierarchy of leadership would get everyone arrested, the were actively being infiltrated by alphabet agency types. They went out of their way to operate in independent cells of which only a few members had a way to contact another member in a group, etc. so that there was no list of leaders and members to be found. Deliberate disorganization. The Onion nails it again.
The Harpers in the Forgotten Realms operate this way
It's known as a (part of a?) security culture. The least amount of information is required to operate, the better.
And yeah, BtB are great.
Left-wing groups: disorganized
Right-wing groups: incredibly bad at opsec
Yet it still ends up as:
Left-wing groups: Beaten and arrested by police for peacefully protesting.
Right-wing groups: Attempt to overthrow democracy, get off scot-free.
get off scot-free
Given how they are being systematically hunted down and sentenced to long prison sentences one after the other and from the bottom up, I don't think this is accurate.
Commission data show that the D.C. court’s sentences for Jan. 6 defendants who assaulted police is below the national average.
Since Jan. 6 cases began, the average sentence imposed by D.C. federal judges in the Capitol attack under guidelines for serious assaults climbed to 46 months from 41 months but is still below the nationwide average of 51 months in 2022.
Even directly assaulting cops got these fuckers below average sentences, let alone the literal act of trying to overthrow democracy.
Just got to be on the white side of the aisle
When I was teenager, I got a speeding ticket in a different state and ignored it. Several months later, I got a notice that my home state was going to suspend my license over it unless I dealt with it within a month. Because I had skipped my court date, the only way I could do that was to drive 10 hours, show up early to court, and request that the DA and judge add my case to the docket.
So, I drove overnight, showed up early, and they agreed to hear my case. In the state I was in, at triffic court they have you stand in line and when you're 3rd in line the ADA asks your name and pulls your file to the top and the DA then reads the charges out load when it's your turn.
As I'm next in line, the DA starts reading the case of the person in front of me and it's almost identical to mine. We were both clocked going significantly over the speed limit (I was actually going slightly faster), we were both from out of state, and we had both failed to appear to our scheduled court date. The judge hit him with a $200 fine and $150 court fee that would be reduced to $100 if it was paid on the spot in cash. I began to panic. I only had $250 until my next paycheck and my license was due to be suspended before then. I could barely hear the DA read off the details of my case over my pulse in my ears. The judge listened then announced my fine: $75 plus the court fee.
The only difference between myself and the person in front of me was our race. Yes, we were in a southern state and, yes, the judge was an old, white man.
Not to defend these guys, but be careful when using statistical averages and drawing conclusions from them when you dont have the other contextual data.
Like for example sentencing guidelines give leniency to first time offenders, so If the sample of Jan 6 traitors has more first time offenders than the nationwide average, then we would expect them to have a shorter average sentences. I cant read the article you posted so I dont know if this is considered at all.
A few years for treason is not long.
Can't have bad opsec if you don't have an op to sec.
Ineffectual versus incompetent.
This has already happened with things like Tsunami in Catalonia. A totally decentralised movement that the police is still trying to understand 6y later and trying to find a nonexistant leadership. Incredible fun to watch them trying to understand how it worked
I know this is the Onion but the left is inherently anti-authoritarian and advocate of horizontal structure of society with no top-down leadership. Of course we'd be disorganised 😂 Case in point, this and the hodge podge of left wingers in the Spanish Civil War ranging from communist, social democrats, democratic socialists to anarcho-syndicalists. Spanish leftists even attacked each other. The Democrats also don't even get along and this is why Republicans under Trump is gaining more headway.
I'm proud that we're maverick, but this also leads to our characteristic factionalism and thus easier to be disrupted and destroy.
"Antifa has no leadership so can't be marked as a domestic terror group."
Oh. Okay.
Oh shit this is the onion.
Which is basically irl news at this point, or at least less biased than mainstream media.
And if it isn't, it will be irl news within a decade.
"We can get access to only so many parents' basements via the courts," the FBI lamented on Tuesday.
I swear I thought this was a NotTheOnion post. They are no longer more absurd than real news.
They just need the right leader:
https://www.theonion.com/man-finally-put-in-charge-of-struggling-feminist-moveme-1819569515
I'm a member of a smallish leftwing party in my own country and having over 20 years professional experience in various industries and several countries it really riles me just how damn incompetent and disorganised they are - I mean, most have their hearts in the right place (even if they easilly succumb to serve their own petty emotional needs, like ego, rather than principles), but damn even how they go about fighting the problems in the country (pretty much 100% reactive) and the organisation and quality of the material in their campaigns is really frustratingly "amateur hour, every hour of they day, every day of the year".
Funnilly enough a leftwing part I was a member of in another country I lived in was also a lot "good intentions but very naive and a bit lost".
PS: Note that all this might be just the bias from never having been a member of a rightwing party. Maybe they're all just as bad and judging by professional standards the typical political party invariably leads to the conclusion they're pretty inept.
IIRC this has actually happened. Cops got little more than a map of who's blocking who, and gave up because there's just... there's just so much reading.
To be fair, the journey of a thousand miles does - or at least should - not begin with a single step, but rather with figuring out which direction to go in.
I want to add much more detail to my own reply, so here goes:
I recall a story that I read on the site-that-shall-not-be-named where this guy ran a business, and he tried to be part of the solution but after dealing with people's dumb-shitty-STUPIDNESS he just gave up. The issue is that due to capitalism, many pricing structures in the USA are enormously opaque with tons of hidden fees (like internet service for "$5" - plus also $100 in fees that they don't tell you about in advance). Rather than a price such as "$1.99 + tax", which depending on area could be I dunno lets say $2.17, he instead sold his wares (whatever they were) for "$2 flat". So not only did he single-handedly fix the opaqueness issue, at least in his own business, but he offered the item for LESS than the competition.
But... - can you spot where this is going? - people chose the $1.99 + tax option, b/c when you sort online by "price", 1.99 + tax shows up above the $2 flat price, even when the former is actually $2.17 after tax so the latter is significantly lower cost.
i.e., There are REASONS for why things are the way they are. And we ignore these at our peril. Case in point: Trump did not "win" in 2016 so much as Hillary Clinton lost. And now we are going to try the same experiment again in 2024... Trump vs. democracy. All they have to do is keep playing the Russian Roulette game - the odds are, after all, in their favor.
So back to this aforementioned business guy: he gave up. I think he went out of business entirely rather than just caving in to do the same pricing structures that everyone else did. He apparently could not both fight the system and win, so he lost both instead.
But that begs the question: if he had just "advertised" his "prices" as $1.82 (or whatever price would, when combined with taxes, even out to $2 flat) online, but then when people walk in the door there are signs saying like "just pay $2 flat", could he have succeeded? i.e., if he had flexed just a little, would it have saved his business? We will never know I suppose, nor am I advocating for caving in especially as it pertains to ethical matters - I have walked away from jobs rather than cave on such a line, so I mean it when I say that I am NOT suggesting to do so at all costs!!!!!
It is not enough to have a desire to save the world, or even your own little corner of it. THEY won't let you. I think that is why liberals fight amongst ourselves so much though: b/c while it is SO VERY EASY to fail, it is so very hard to get an answer correct. Like to the question of "what is 1+1=?", there are so MANY wrong answers, but only one CORRECT one. And even fewer when you factor in economic and other business necessities.
That is why I am super impressed with the job that Biden is doing. Walking that tightrope is HARD. But the media does not seem to report on half of the positive stuff that he does, so I fear that Trump will win this next election as a result. It is not enough to make the hard calls - you apparently also have to be the right kind of clown that drives clickbait engagement media stats that brings media corps higher profits too. All I know is that whatever comes next, we absolutely seem to deserve all of it, b/c we brought this on ourselves.
Security through obscurity!
If Lemmy is any indication, the FBI doesn't even need to infiltrate them, because US Nazis and Russian trolls already have.
Don't forget the Chinese trolls.
Gods trying to get my friends to think about pushing politicians leftward on the scale of 4/6/8 years pissed them off. They will only focus efforts on yelling at Biden to drop out as if it will happen or help. They don't care that no world exists where they are remotely happy in nov 2024, that's the only thing they can think about
This is where the old adage "Don't let perfect stand in the way of progress" applies.
Biden may not even be considered progress by some, but at least he's not a rapid sprint backwards into fascism.
Part of the problem the left currently faces, regardless of revolutionary thought in general, is that environmental concerns are past the election cycle.
It is already too late to stop global warming at the 1.5 C target suggested in 2018.
Gradual reform will be too late. There is no way around it, we are acting too slow, and even if every country in the world flipped Green or whatever in 2028 that might still be too late.
doing something violent to the communal spaces in their community
That seems counterproductive, let’s do something violent to the fash spaces in our community.
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