CarlMarks

He can have some positive influences while still being the same thing I described. For example, Bernie focusing on vulgar class analysis and making socialism a more acceptable word (despite bastardizing it) were both useful things and yet Bernie is a pro-genocide chauvinist that sheepdogs for Dems. If Hasan's pattern holds, his takes on China will be, "China somewhat bad but USA worse and targeting it with nonsense" while trying to humanize actual Chinese people. His pattern is based on a vaguely left-liberal-with-socialist-language anti-racist internationalism of having empathy for people that the imperialist state seeks consent to do violence to. It's a good and useful thing to have voices opposed to that. But under his pattern, what will be the call to action, implicit or explicit? It will be to try to "push left" some Democrat imperialists and keep the focus on dead end electoral reformism. The only positive outlet for that is the same as for Bernie: disillusionment that we can build on for recruiting.

It is possible that he might give up on the electoralist angle eventually, which would also be useful if his audience is large. But I don't see that as his current trajectory.

An important element of deprogramming liberals is to explain how a political party should actually function (e.g. in the neighborhood of demcent and cadres) and then contrast it with how liberal parties are just top-down corporate efforts that only use facade of democracy to get you to do free labor and unquestioning votes / lack of opposition.

Hasan is a slightly-left-of-AOC streamer doing the "we can push them left" thing, where the "them" is imperialist social democrats/left liberals. The place at which his followers arrive is, "I will only reluctantly vote for Kamala Harris" and, "I wish I could vote for AOC 2028". He occasionally arrives aa socialist positions and language like a toddler finding a new toy. He learns the toy, plays with it for a while, talks about it on stream, and then discards it. He wants to be on the edge of mainstream. Can't let the toy get in the way of that.

This is only good and useful in the same fashion that Bernie could be thought of as useful: some will be inspired by the toy, the appeal of possibility and pointing to (mostly) correct culprits of oppression, and then their disappointment at nothing changing may help radicalize. But many, probably the vast majority, will be led back to the Democratic party and liberalism, as Hasan neither offers them an onramp himself nor points anyone to next steps. He just returns to stream about electoral politics, Trump, the next elections, etc. And his audience follows him there.

Hasan should be considered situationally useful. We should be there to pick up the disaffected, as he is not pointing them to us. And doing it through our organizations. If we are not, then he is not part of any pipeline to developing more socialists, but just creating more Bernie-adjascent electoralists that sit at home and will be susceptible to most propaganda.

Email is inherently insecure and should be treated as such regarding corporate-government surveillance. This goes double for any company hosting an inbox. At minimum you need to control your own inbox, but of course that just means you're as vulnerable as the outbox of who sends you emails and the inbox of those you send emails to. Using gmail is just making it extremely easy for a spying-friendly group to see all your info, but degoogling isn't enough to have decent infosec.

Glad it was just a couple! Almost definitely the usual culprit then - just little bits from the gel in your eye moving around and getting stuck in your field of vision. Harmless!

You have framed the question correctly, which means you are already 80% of the way to knowing! How do we oppose capitalism? Well, together! Individuals can do very little against the dominant system, but in an organized group we can use tried and true means - of organized withholding of labor, of takinh direct action, of increasing the size of our ranks, of educating ourselves and each other, and, usually out of necessity, arming ourselves.

So the question then becomes: okay, duh, we need lots of people working together, but how do we do that, what are better ways of doing it than others, and how do I get involved? This is a very important question because historically there are examples of success, failure, and outright counter-productive movements that all had this same stated goal. This is every dedicated anticapitalist's biggest thing to fret about: which lessons from history apply to us and which do not? What is best in your locale may not be what is best in someone else's and there may be many pathways that are better or worse than the other. How do you choose which to avoid and which to embrace? Where do you, personally, fit into the equation?

The othet answers have the right gist: personal education and joining and contributing to an organization.

There is a substantial catalog of political theory, history, philosophy, media criticism, and practical organizing skills that are almosy entirely untaught in capitalist-dominated school systems. Reading a good chunk of that catalog is important for choosing the right actions personally as well as contributing to the decisions made by an organization. You don't have to read all of it before you begin work in an organization, but you should start reading ASAP. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds first, it is very short and digestible and provides a good framing by which to question the modern history of capitalists, socialists, and fascists. From there I would gravitate to Marx and media criticism, such as Heinrich's explainer (which I would eventually compare to works criticap of Heinrich) and FAIR.org or the podcast Citations Needed. Add some Engels as well. From there you can branch out in any direction you would like, but an understanding of the October Revolution, its precedents, the USSR, and a critical approach to its critics is helpful for understanding what the hell everyone is talking about in a given organization (and people are often saying incorrect things on these topics). There is a recent Liberation School series on the topic, effectively by PSL, that I recommend. Others to look into after this: Goldman, Gramsci, Mao, Che, Kalecki, Amin, Fanon, Freire, Bobby Seale, George Jackson, Michael Hudson. This will provide some of the "Greatest Hits", albeit Western Centric. Dedicating time to the history of every socialist revolution is valuable. It will take yeara to read all of this and this is normal.

The other step is to join and organization. This gives you the opportunity to learn practical skills for getting people involved, educating people, being educated by others, and taking action. Not all anticapitalist organizations are created equal and there is a tendency for infighting between them. Some are actually highly counterproductive, so this isn't just pointless infighting though a lot of it is pointless. So long as you avoid abusive organizations that burn you out (or worse), being in any org is better than trying to pick the best one to join on your first try. I will suggest avoiding these kinds of organizations: Trotskyist, non-profits, Maoists that are up in each others' business, liberal identity politics groups (socialist/Marxist identity-focused groups can be good though!), and any group that spends most of its time on things like electoral politics and letter writing campaigns, i.e. what capitalists want their opposition to waste their time on. The first 3 groups are the most likely to be abusive and burn you out. The last is basically not actually anticapitalist at all even if they claim to be. To find options for local organization I recommend using a combination of attending events that sound cool and wors of mouth recommendations. "Anti-imperialist" is a decent indicator that a group is fairly cool, though it is not a guarantee. Go to a few events and feel them out. Protests, teach-ins, hosted political movie watching events, rallies, etc. You want to focus on the groups organizing these things, not just attending them, and only rule them out if they meet the above ezclusionary criteria. If they can't be ruled out, ask them how you can get involved. Any good organization will be very excited to loop you in and get you attending meetinfs and reading sessions within a few weeks.

If it was a lot of them at once that is a sign of retinal detachment and should be treated ASAP.

I think the baseline default was around 20% before, which makes 30% still an increase.

Probably very few because most companies still source inputs from China so they either need to start pricing in higher input costs or decrease production while they hold off on orders hoping the tariffs are rolled back. Since this impacts basically everything, the inflation will hurt demand, so companies raising prices will also have difficulty selling, and not just because their own product's price went up.

This is basically a stagflation self-own.

Drink pink or die

The post with 16 active cards. And not out of desperation, but because they think it's the best grindset.

Essays should be done in class if they are graded. Not to add a time crunch, but the opposite: at-home assignments leads to unrealistic and often classist expectations of homework time and parental/tutor support. Yes, spending time writing alone is valuable for learning. So is homework. Neither should be scored for a student's grade. At-home essays suffer from the same rampant cheating that homework does, which does a disservice to everyone involved in terms of learning. It's important to distinguish evaluations from the act of learning itself, the two are not synonymous: if students' essays are to be graded, they should be done under proctorship and with time and venue alotted for fairness, subject to special cases. Many standardized tests have essay portions and for all the problems with standardized testing, it is appropriate that they don't let test takers go home and mull over it for as long as their economic and support sotiation allows.

Writing essays in class runs into a time crunch in most primary and secondary schools because each class is alotted an arbitrary hourish window once per day. But there are schools that do 2+ hour sessions and have off days, making this practical. A student can write a rough draft one day, turn it in, get feedback, and then polish and turn it in for a grade. And universities can always dedicate appropriate amounts of class time, they just don't want to pay TAs for anything that can be turned into homework time. Too busy doing financialized real estate schemes instead.

Re: LLMs, they can produce essays yep. This is an indictment of a course that grades take-home essays. The course was already inappropriately constructed. The LLM didn't cause the problem here, it just exacerbated the existing problem that manifests as standard cheating (paying/bullying for essays), generally accepted soft cheating (parents write the essay), generally accepted classist legs up (parents help but don't write it/tutors do the same), and the inequalities in free time that impacts students heavily enough already.

but what if the synthesis itself was in the training data?

Then it has a good chance of regurgitating it. But this is very close to reusing test questions, which is already bad practice and leads to cheating. It's true that an LLM will solve a problem that none of the students have seen if the teacher's strategy of synthesis is to Google for examples, though. That pary is unfortunate but an assessment shouldn't be done in the context where someone can use an LLM anyways. Either way it's not synthesis.

In HS and undergrad level courses, how often are the topics at hand really novel enough to rely on that not being the case?

The topics aren't novel at all. But that doesn't really have anything to do with rote memorization regurgitation vs. synthesis. Synthesis questions are often new and different, even just changing the words used for a biological process for a question will strip memorization and force a focus on concepts. Add a follow up question to relate it to something else that was learned and you get synthesis. This is actually a very easy kind of test to write if you practice it.

Or how often is the syllabus really flexible enough to allow teachers to reframe all assessments into synthesis questions?

Assessments should be done in-person. In-person assessments can include simple recall questions. At-home work that is simple recall questions can already be solved by just Googling things. And you're describing a problem in course design. It's not individual teachers' faults that schooling is broken.

Re: the rest, you seem to think that I am picking on teachers. Not sure why.