Some of this is good advice but I recommend evaluating every protest, having a real plan for transportation and a buddy system, and trying to be as secure as possible by default and only making exceptions when necessary.

Most of the guide is about phones and how they can leak information. The only surefire way to prevent your phone from leaking location information to show you were at a protest is to leave it at home. That should be your default. The next option is to use a burner, but you must be very careful about when you charge your burner and turn it on, as you never want it to be on near where you live or work. Cell signals can be triangulated to a few block radius. The next option is put your phone in airplane mode and turn it off. Your phone is now an emergency device, you won’t turn it in at the protest unless a safety critical situation develops, such as being separated from your group by police or other right wing violence. Under no circumstances should you use your main phone to coordinate day-of at any event. If you are an organizer, use a burner to do this. This is also a reason to not use Signal for day-of coordination, as it will pressure you to either turn your burner on at home so that you can coordinate or associate your signal account with other devices traceable to your home or work. Walky talkies are best but Signal alternatives like davel suggested are also better.

Also, cover your face and wear sunglasses.

I’m gonna download more copyrighted media today just because you told me not to.

I am correcting your false claims and am getting amused by the fact that you abandoned any pretense of reading or responding to explanations in the previous thread, even making excuses for not having the time to do so, even though now that you clearly do have time you are using it to instead double down on your misconceptions while still lashing out at “the tankies” (me).

You lobbed insults and denigration and now plead victimhood when receiving mild criticism of your claims and behavior.

It is very funny that they’re back here complaining about “the tankies” and rehashing the same talking points they couldn’t defend a few days ago. It’s like they are trying to embody the stereotype of the “Western leftist”.

There is ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang in which China has piggy-backed on the US “war on terror” as an excuse to repress muslim population.

There is not. There are no hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing nor evidence for one. The think tank propagandists behind these claims - they are all in the same funding networks connected to the NED/USAID - spent ages just trying to shoehorn what was actually happening into a wishy washy definition of “cultural genocide”, which is to say, there is no mass death, no mass expulsions, no attempt to eradicate the population in any way.

Re: “cultural genocide”, even with a wishy washy definition, that is also specious, as Uyghur culture has not been disrupted or banned. The exact opposite is the case, it is lifted up culturally, promoted materially. What is oppressed is anything in the neighborhood of salafism, which has never been part of Uyghur culture, but in their infinite (islamophobic) wisdom, the western pro-think tank critics have conflated it with Uyghur culture simply because they are largely muslims.

And you have, yet again, uncritically accepted the liberal propaganda narrative against the designated enemies of the US state. Are you noticing the pattern? It seems you are more interested in living in a fantastical liberal bubble than ever acknowledging that “the tankies” actually can defend their ideas while you cannot.

This is officially called “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism”. Do I really need to say more?

Yes, you do. You can of course understand almost nothing about this from that title. I would challenge you to tell me what you think it means and what is going on in your thought process.

Taiwan has its own democracy and wants to be independent, yet China claims it as its own.

A few days ago I broke this down for you and you ignored it entirely. If you deigned to read what others told you, you might understand the basics of the detente with Taiwan.

Yes there’s asterisks and details and questionable involvement from the West in all of this, but these aren’t “myths”.

The content of both claims are, in fact, mythological. In the first case it is very literally the propaganda outfits of CIA cutouts and the promotion of some expat grifters working together in an absurdly lazy information war. In the latter case it is a false pretense of having no idea or way of knowing what the tension is over Taiwan and opting to present it in an intentionally vague way to put it in a worse light while also using a liberal framing re: praising it as democratoc, whereas any anarchist will not uncritically celebrate bourgeois electoralism, and certainly not in defense of an ethnocentric state. Taiwan did actually do an ethnic cleansing, which is ironic for your case.

Sinologists from various countries have stated that they or their colleagues have been barred from entry or held by authorities for weeks because of what they’ve said about China. For example I just heard Weigelin-Schwiedrzik say this on a marxist podcast.

Literally who cares.

The only burden I’ve ever placed on you is to be self-consistent and not use homophobic insults.

And I don’t need your support for China. You are largely indistinguishable from other liberals that think they are anarchist for some unclear reason, having done no work to shed the liberal propaganda against the US state’s designated enemies. And now that you are over here having clearly done no reflection or self-criticism regarding your misconceptions and bad faith behavior, why do you think anyone should spend time trying to educate you?

Least genocidal liberal

lol you’re still at this after abandoning this thread? The one where you jumped in, whinged about “tankies”, and then ignored nearly everything that I said to you while apologizing for not having the time to respond?

Why are you now here and still whinging rather than back at that thread actually engaging? Why are you doubling down on this nonsense when you couldn’t defend it directly against your targets of insult?

Remember when you resorted to the homophobic remarks I predicted?

This is completely unrelated, but now is a good time to get into shooting paintball guns at pieces of circular glass about 2 cm in diameter.

That is a good idea just so that you don’t have to think about any potential privacy issues. Your email could be {firstword}{secondword}{4 numbers} and so long as the words and numbers are randomly generated, you can avoid accidentally including personal references or biases.

Your username does not need to be high-entropy, though. It will be semi-public. So it’s not about strength against dictionary attack or similar, it is just about leaving the selection process up to a random process that isn’t witnessed by a third party. You can write scripts that will generate these kinds of things using Python and the faker library.

Traditionally, people like myself get killed due to bad opsec.

That’s true! I’m glad I didn’t say anything like, “the system is corrupt because I’m in the minority”.

PS, the ruling class is a minority.

This is a whole lot of conspiracy bs with no sources provided.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s out in the open. I don’t know what claims you would want sources for. Feel free to ask.

But it includes the usual keywords “the system”, “design”, and “ruling class” so you can get your upvotes from like-minded fellows in your bubble.

You might notice that this is a public community on a non-socialist instance. So, the opposite of what you are saying. Personally, I expected a mix of responses.

Have you considered that politics and economics is a little bit more complicated and a lot of gears make the machine?

Complexity vs. simplicity means nothing in this topic. What matters is identifying dominant powers and the mechanisms by which they function. Many of those mechanisms are somewhat complex, though not that complex that anyone can’t read about them and understand them if they actually want to.

Have you read any socialist theory?

But “the elite pulling the strings” is much easier to understand and you conveniently get an enemy.

Class conflict is actually something that emerges from base social interactions that constitute the primary economic system: how and why we work. The dominant class does have more realized power, by definition, but it is still subordinate to the mechanisms of the economic system itself.

For example, you cannot simply choose to be a nice business owner that pays everyone as much as they deserve. You will, eventually, get outcompeted by the business owners that will keep pay lower and profits higher. While small businesses are still commonly owned by petty tyrants, their loss to big box stores is an example of how a larger mass of profits can be leveraged to destroy the competition (initial low prices), then using monopoly status to earn even more profit by cutting wages and increasing prices.

The political class is just the functionaries of the state that serves the dominant class’s interests. You can call them elite because they personally get a bigger piece of the pie and have power on paper, but they are several rings lower on the hierarchy.

Learning media criticism, history, political economy, and how past groups have organized takes a decent amount of time. Namely, socialist theory. So does unlearning the ideological falsehoods that cloud our ability to think and investigate. And so does recognizing what builds power, what actions are effective, what cooption looks like and how to counter it, etc. So I don’t recommend just doing one thing, but instead working from where you are to be closer to a stronger consciousness. I suppose the closest thing to a single recommendation I can give is humility and curiosity around all of the aforementioned topics and to give people grace IRL when you begin working with an organization.

If you are interested in reading recommendations and info about your thoughts on politics I’d be happy to think of something you might appreciate. Or if you feel like you’re ready for action and are in the US I can recommend some orgs that are reasonably good to “start” with (many stay in them and that is also fine!).

Congress is an organ of the ruling class and always has been. When they (rarely) do something seemingly against ruling class interests, it is still a strategem to best keep the capitalism boat afloat (it tries to sink every 5-10 years).

Sure, Congress is corrupt, but it always has been. The system is working more or less as designed. And if you want to oppose this design, the system is also designed to fight you to the death. And funneling all of your capacity into sheepdog voting is how your masters tell you you should oppose them. So if you want to oppose this system, you must become informed as to how it functions and join up with like-minded individuals to develop actually effective means of resistance.

Privacy is a shield. It is useful to protect against a threat. It doesn’t have to perfectly protect against the threat. But the important thing is to have a threat model and construct your privacy concerns around it.

Ask yourself what you believe will be a threat to you and then criticize those beliefs. Use this self-critical process to decide on your first idea of a threat model.

Piped should build out better error messages so that users know this is a problem with Piped getting the video from YouTube.

The only surefire form of privacy is to not store information digitally in the first place, ideally not at all.

But sometimes we do have information that needs storing. And in that case privacy requires that you control the data at rest and encrypt the data at transit. All free cloud services can snoop your data if they really want to. If you value privacy, minimize your use of them.

You should assume that every social network is ride with spying, both for corporate and governmental purposes. For example, the main reason TikTok is currently getting threatened with a banning is because they have a less fed-friendly algorithm, so large masses of people are actually seeing the horrors in Gaza. If you watch the nightly news, you won’t see that content. If you go to YouTube, you won’t see that content. You also will barely see it on Reddit (which literally hired someone that worked at the CIA to be their community manager person lol). Do your best to dissociate your online activity from your personal identity. Use a good VPN that you pay for with cash or a proxy system like a voucher that can’t be traced back to you. Use burner email accounts. Etc etc.

If you do run local, properly use a firewall to prevent it from phoning home. Or airgap.

Of course!