Congress has set out a bill to stop the FCC taking away our internet. PLEASE SPREAD THIS AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4585

I listened to a classical economics podcast where he had a guest on to discuss a private city in India and how great it is, and the guy said it was an awesome idea except there’s no sewage infrastructure so the different private neighborhoods just pump their sewage into trucks and secretly dump it on other people’s property, and none of the companies will connect their electricity infrastructure so there are constant rolling blackouts, and none of them will connect their roads to each other so it’s turned into a bunch of isolated industrial office parks separated by stretches of abject slums. good city.

The FCC voted to repeal Net Neutrality, but I would like to reiterate to all of you that now is not the time to panic. It’s time to get angry and active, but not time to panic.

Clickbait sites are painting today as the definitive “end” of it all, but it’s not. This shit’s still got to go through the courts.

The FCC has tried to repeal net neutrality twice before, and both times it got repealed by the courts.

The voting public’s support for Net Neutrality is overwhelming. Last I checked, 83% of polled voters nationwide are in support of Net Neutrality staying.

Republican politicians and lawmakers are aware of this overwhelming support and have been voicing their support as well.

Doug Jones victory in Alabama was a wake-up call for Republican politicians, letting them know they are not invincible. 

Join the millions of Americans making their voices heard. Contact your representatives. Call them. Email them. Tweet at them. Anything you can do helps. Use the links provided on this website:

https://www.battleforthenet.com/

This is not a time for panic, it is a time for anger and for action. Let them know that this is not the end, only the beginning. 

If the FBI Approaches You to Become an Informant: An FAQ: What You Need to Know

Federal agents approach you. Perhaps they just ask a couple offhand questions; perhaps they have a deal to propose. They might tell you they are trying to help you; they might tell you that you are in a lot of trouble and it will just get worse unless you cooperate with them; they might tell you that they need your help to prevent something terrible from happening. But whatever they say, you can’t be sure what their real agenda is or what they’re trying to learn. Whether you’ve already been approached for interrogation or you simply want to be prepared for the possibility, this FAQ answers all the questions you might have. Don’t take our word for it—follow up with other legal scholars for more perspective.

The FBI went to great lengths to target Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panthers, and countless other activists and social movements through COINTELPRO and other programs like it. Just like the KGB or the East German Stasi, their operations depend on a population that is willing to inform on each other out of cowardice and self-interest. The “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” have both relied on informants to fill US prisons with millions of inmates. Under Donald Trump, we see police and FBI agents ramping up their activities to intimidate and entrap more people than ever, with the explicit purpose of suppressing dissent. We have to stand up to these bullies.

Am I obligated to cooperate with police?

No, you don’t have to answer any questions or supply names to the authorities. Neither you nor anyone else has a legal obligation to assist the police in solving a crime. You are not legally required to cooperate.

If I do inform, will they protect my identity?

Though the state often refers to informants as “confidential informants” or “confidential human sources,” prosecutors may be obligated to disclose your identity in court, especially if you were central in the issuance of a warrant or if you were present at the scene of whatever the defendant is accused of. The defense could also force you to testify in open court: they are guaranteed the right to do so under the confrontation clause in the Constitution. Generally speaking, the FBI and prosecutors only concern themselves with protecting the identity of informants as long as they have additional plans to utilize them.

If I don’t inform, can they make me testify in court?

If you lead a prosecutor or a law enforcement officer to believe that you have relevant information, you could be subpoenaed to testify. Your best chance at avoiding this is to refuse to talk to them from the beginning. That way, if they come after you later, other people will have good reason to trust you and support you in continuing to resist the pressures of the state. Your strongest and most secure right is the right to remain silent from the very beginning.

If they are threatening to arrest me in order to get me to inform, don’t they have to give me access to a lawyer?

While this might depend on the jurisdiction, the answer is generally no. You have a right to an attorney if you are being arrested, but law enforcement guidelines give officers wide discretion to make offers to get someone to inform. They may never formally arrest you, just detain you and question you.

Is the FBI obligated to give me what they offer when they are trying to get me to inform?

This is a grey area. Federal agents may offer formal informants a written agreement that is supposedly enforceable like a contract—but the FBI is obviously the more powerful party in this negotiation, with little to lose from failing to follow through. Law enforcement officers often maintain a network of unregistered informants whose testimony is not used in court but rather provide tips and useful information to aid in investigations. Many informants think they will get off for snitching, only to learn later that they still face time for lesser or reduced charges.

In short: the FBI cares about repressing communities and disrupting social movements, not about protecting informants.

Can’t I just feed them false information to keep them off my back?

18 U.S.C. §1000 makes it a federal crime to knowingly mislead or lie to federal officials, including law enforcement. Federal agents have used this law to prosecute those they suspect of “domestic terrorism” when they have no other evidence to go on.

Remember, if law enforcement is looking for informants, there is a good chance they don’t have a case against whoever they’re trying to target. Don’t give them a case against you.

Couldn’t I just give them worthless or meaningless information?

It’s always better to remain silent and not cooperate when approached by the FBI, then speak to a lawyer as soon as possible. Information you might assume to be irrelevant could be of interest in an entirely different case; it could implicate people you did not intend, or give the Feds a reason to really harass you. If you give them information about anyone, however harmless you think that information is, you increase the likelihood that they will attempt to intimidate and interrogate that person and likely others—and that they will come back to keep trying to learn more from you.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can control the situation by talking. You can’t know what the actual goal of their inquiry is, or what their strategy is in approaching you. The only control you have is in refusing to speak to them.

Don’t FBI agents need to have something on me before they can approach me?

FBI agents can run with what is called an “assessment.” It doesn’t require a warrant or approval from superiors, and it can be just as invasive as a full-fledged investigation. According to their guidelines, this assessment can be used to “seek information to identify potential human sources [i.e., informants], assess the suitability, credibility, or value of individuals as human sources, validate human sources, or maintain the cover or credibility of human sources, who may be able to provide or obtain information relating to criminal activities in violation of federal law, threats to the national security, or matters of foreign intelligence interest.”

In other words, they are free to approach you and say whatever they like without any information whatsoever.

What are the chances they are going to approach me? How many informants are there, and how important are they to the activities of the FBI?

Law enforcement is dependent on informants. The FBI alone maintains a network of some 15,000 informants just for their counterterrorism program. Since September 11, 2001, nearly every major terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation with a government informant at the center; there have been at least 416 defendants in terrorism prosecutions involving an informant.

While it is impossible to determine what the chances are that any particular individual will be approached to become an informant, it’s reasonable to assume that federal agents will approach members of our communities whenever they see an opportunity to collect information or disrupt our organizing.

What if they have already talked to me and I agreed to help them because I was scared?

You are not obligated to cooperate. You can invoke your right to remain silent at any time. If you have already spoken with law enforcement, seek an attorney immediately.

You also need to be honest with everyone in your life about the conversation you had with them. If you fall into one of the traps that the FBI is so good at setting, you should be completely honest and transparent about it and recount the encounter in full. This is the only way to deserve the trust of your companions, be accountable for your actions, and make it possible to obtain support from others if you need it.

Even if you do not divulge any information whatsoever, you should report any interactions with federal agents to your community at large. You don’t need to keep it a secret that you are being targeted—the ones targeting you already know. Bringing FBI activity to the attention of the general public can discourage federal agents from harassing people. It also enables people to organize together and support each other.

What should I do if I am approached to become an informant?

Remember these four things:

-Non-cooperation is the best way to protect our communities and movements against state repression.

-If they are approaching you about informing, they probably have a weak case if they have a case at all.

-You do not have to cooperate. You have the right to remain silent.

-Contact an attorney as soon as possible.

Further Resources on Repression and Resistance

If an Agent Knocks

You Have the Right to Remain Silent

Tilted Scales Legal Collective

Grand Jury Resistance Project

What Is Security Culture?

Is S/He an Informant? A Ten Point Checklist

Bounty Hunters and Child Predators: Inside the FBI Entrapment Strategy

Towards a Collective Security Culture

[WATCH] Palestine TV female reporter is being harassed on air by Israeli occupation terrorists in Aboud, West Bank

Men are disgusting … And these soldiers are right at the top …

scum of the earth

It gets even worse when you listen to what she’s trying to report. She’s saying that the policy of collective punishment pursued by the Israeli government is a racist endeavor meant to strangle and suffocate the Palestinian citizens into submission, and the IDF scum are berating her, mocking her, and trying to tell her that she’s wrong [while the cameraman tries to encourage her to ignore them and keep on reporting]

The soldier to our left is continuously repeating “Allahu Akbar” in a taunting manner, while also mocking the Muslim call to prayer. IDF scum are literally berating a news reporter with racist and xenophobic taunts AS she’s reporting about their racist practices

There is literally no chance of us civilians being able to overpower giant telecommunications megacorporations and their lobbyists from killing net neutrality

dont wanna sound like some fucking nihilist but democracy is dead, whoever has the most money always wins, folks need to go out and destroy the rich in able to achieve anything

government agencies don’t care for you, they wont listen to your petitions, being a citizen voter doesn’t matter on the federal level as the bourgeoisie will just pay for laws that provide them more profit, the proletariat don’t have $50,000,000,000 to slip into the pockets of the FCC chairman to “persuade” them

what does work though folks is direct action, the bureaucrats aren’t going to even consider your thoughts or needs unless you torch their $100,000 cars and throw cans of paint on their $4M houses

Seriously folks, if it gets destroyed, which it WILL, you people need to go out into the street and cause property damage to telecomm conglomerates and scream at the FCC until they bring it back

If net neutrality is killed and all we see are angry posts and a few buzzfeed articles discussing how Disney characters would react then there is absolutely no hope for the people of this country to stand up to any sort of authoritarian control if they can’t do anything besides blog about their rights being taken away

And don’t listen to any of the propaganda being spewed by bourgeoisie institutions like Bloomberg or CBS or NBC saying this is a good thing, literally every argument for it is saying “the internet is too chaotic and messy”, who else would say this besided the owners of the parent corporations who will make TRILLIONS off of the earnings of us proles

Another effect of this will be restriction of freedom of speech, the working class won’t have a way to communicate and express themselves when you have to pay 15 bucks a month just to use a website. And you bet your ass that those that do are going to be presented content that aligns to the corporation’s political, social, and economic leanings

Tumblr, which is owned by Yahoo and it’s parent company Verizon (which would be one of the 3 telecomm megacorps that would make tremendous amounts of money off of net neutrality being killed) has begun to delete posts regarding net neutrality awareness, as well as automatically removing the net neutrality tag from people’s saved tags

Corporations have the ability, and will enforce it, to silence opposition against their profits, spread this like fucking wildfire

#NetNeutrality

Imagine that you’re twenty years old. You were born in 1996. You were five years old on 9/11. For as long as you can remember, the United States has been at war.

When you are twelve, in 2008, the global economy collapses. After years of bluster and bravado from President George W. Bush — who encouragedconsumerism as a response to terror — it seems your country was weaker than you thought.

In America, the bottom falls out fast. The adults who take care of you struggle to take care of themselves. Perhaps your parent loses a job. Perhaps your family loses its home.

In 2009, politicians claim the recession is over, but your hardship is not. Wages are stagnant or falling. The costs of health care, child care, and tuition continue to rise exponentially. Full-time jobs turn into contract positions while benefits are slashed. Middle-class jobs are replaced with low-paying service work. The expectations of American life your parents had when you were born — that a “long boom” will bring about unparalleled prosperity — crumble away.

Baby boomers tell you there is a way out: a college education has always been the key to a good job. But that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. The college graduates you know are drowning in student debt, working for minimum wage, or toiling in unpaid internships. Prestigious jobs are increasinglyclustered in cities where rent has tripled or quadrupled in a decade’s time. You cannot afford to move, and you cannot afford to stay. Outside these cities, newly abandoned malls join long abandoned factories. You inhabit a landscape of ruin. There is nothing left for you.

Every now and then, people revolt. When you are fifteen, Occupy Wall Street captivates the nation’s attention, drawing attention to corporate greed and lost opportunity. Within a year, the movement fades, and its members do things like set up “boutique activist consultancies.” When you are seventeen, the Fight for 15 workers movement manages to make higher minimum wage a mainstream proposition, but the solutions politicians pose are incremental. No one seems to grasp the urgency of the crisis. Even President Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat — the type of politician who’s supposed to understand poverty — declares that the economy has recovered.

I know stuff like this has been a topic of conversation on my dash for years but this bit was a nice articulation:

“Surrender Donald” – Gay activists rally outside Trump Tower in New York, protesting the city’s tax breaks for luxury real estate developers while thousands of people with AIDS sleep in the streets. Oct. 31, 1989

via reddit

They been wanting his head for years.

All someone gotta do is go get it. It gets more and more appealing every day.

this is the angriest bird i’ve ever seen

To the people in the comments saying the guy is doing this “just for show”

He’s not

With this kind of bird, they are VERY attached to their cages, so if you need to replace the cage, you need to the show the bird you’ve destroyed it so it will accept the new one. It’s upset bc the cage it liked is gone, but the cage was too small for it so it needs to be replaced. The bird is fine.

Thank you for explaining that! I’ve been wondering about this video.

That bird was livid!

that bird sound like a white frat boy who found out his momma cut off his xbox live subscription

this is the funniest shit i’ve seen all 2017

I am dying , sis is pissedt!

Learned something new.

what timeline is this from

2018

@commissarraege

This is why communists can't get along with other communists.

#internalcommitteepurges

Also, even when people know that a corporation has deeply unethical practices, the products they make might be so indispensable a tool for modern life that people have no choice but to buy them anyway. Cellphones are a good example – the fact that the production chain involves super-exploitation of sweatshop workers is basically common knowledge now, but modern capitalism has made cellphones a necessity. And this isn’t even getting into the increased atomization of workers under neoliberalism, a trend that implicitly seeks to rob people of their organizing potential (for boycotts and strikes and such).

☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿☝🏿

Worse still often if I boycott doesn’t get publicity enough to drop the stock prices, the capitalists won’t lose any money and will instead just fire employees, cut wages, and create robots to do the job instead so that they can keep hauling in their hugely inflated salaries. Capitalism is built by capitalists to shield themselves from the harm they do. That what makes America free, capitalists are free from consequence

The amount of times people try the ‘if you hate capitalism why do u have a smartphone’ shit it’s rage inducing

“I oppose fascists, but I also oppose antifa” to me might as well just read “I claim to oppose fascists, but I also oppose the only thing that can meaningfully stop them from recruiting and organizing for genocide.” People seriously don’t get that the tactic of swaying the public through debate doesn’t work against fascists. Fascists don’t need majority approval or support to do horrible things, they just need to feel like there aren’t any significant social repercussions for it. If they don’t face backlash when they spread their propaganda and declare their intention to commit ethnic cleansing, that’s when they’ll know that they’ll be able to get away with actually doing what they intend to do.

And don’t delude yourself into thinking that you can convince fascists to change their mind with reason, because their arguments aren’t meant to adhere to reason or truth. Instead, they’re performative statements with two purposes: the first is to state what would need to be true to justify their existing intentions, and the second is to signal themselves to other members of their in-group so they can more easily join together to form a coherent political force.

This is why, when dealing with fascists, the only effective tactic is to raise the social cost of being fascist, so that they’re afraid to spread fascist propaganda openly. Sometimes this means violence, other times it just means denying them a platform to spread their ideas and recruit other fascists.

Because of this, when liberals defend the “free speech” of fascists, this effectively gives fascists a space to signal their intentions to other fascists, allowing them to group together and organize. Allow fascists to organize, and they’ll commit acts of terror against the most vulnerable populations.

You don’t even necessarily have to like it when antifa resort to black bloc tactics, but if you oppose antifa in general, you’re a stooge. The way you oppose fascists is by shutting them the fuck down, and if you’re against that, you’re doing nothing but aiding the enemy.

This.  Stop being a stooge, liberals!

Liberals are the protostate of the alt-right;

They value "personal liberties" over the censorship that needs to happen. Liberals don't go full-tilt Nazi in one go, generally.

They closely relate to the conservative right, and they use a lot of the same buzzwords, so there is more of a connection than to anything on the left. The minute AntiFa start smashing faces, as they should, the Alt-Right then say "They are refusing our God-given rights to freedom of speech, press, etc, whatever." Which then gets the liberals to sympathise with them.

This is how the Nazis began their censorship campaigns. Actions happened, they went "Help help! I'm being oppressed!" Which in turn allowed them to drop the hammer and begin censoring freedoms themselves, under the guise of protecting the freedoms they claimed were under attack. The "They made me do this. We wouldn't have had to do this if they would have just played by the rules."

Which then devolves into a totalitarian state where they hold all the power.

The Liberal is not your friend. The Liberal is a Nazi sympathizer and must be punched as well if they cannot be educated to the errors of their ways.

Down with the Misogynistic Left, Death to the Rapist Left

In light of what has transpired these past five days within the leftist domains of this website we would like to deliver a concise statement in hopes of directing this conversation in a way that roots out and directs social pressure upon the male chauvinists, the rapist apologists, and misogynists that plague and a form a base of reactionary undesirables that be must fiercely combated with no mercy.

We would also like to express our utmost solidarity and support towards victims of rape, and especially those that have been affected during the course of almost a week by the continuous ceaseless hounding, harassment by vile scum such as sobercommunist and his allies (cultural-gulagist,bangawang,among others).

The left, whether it is communists, anarchists, marxists, marxians, left-communists, or any other tendency where organisations are entirely composed by men bear the stain of patriarchy: misogyny, rape, and other forms of socio-economic violence.

Back in March 2017, we published an open letter to both Red Guards Austin (an u$ organisation) and Tjen Folket (Serve the People - Norway) - organisations which are known for collaborating with each other in small projects and having a direct relation - regarding their actions towards a comrade member of the Tjen Folket organisation who was raped by another member. Instead of siding with the victim, Tjen Folket chose to suspend the victim and maintain the rapist among its ranks. This matter was brought within the social channels of the Red Guards Austin, to which the leadership answered with suppression and censorship of any criticism. They went as so far as to indirectly reply to our letter with this embarrassing denunciation of ‘identity politics’. This is a recurring problem within leftists organisations, and one that continues unanswered today.

The past five days we have witnessed some of the vilest, most disturbing examples of this ‘left’ once again defending the aggressors, and not the victims of rape.

You know who these ‘leftists’ are, they are our enemies, they are the enemies of victims of rape, they are the enemies of women, they should treated with the same regard as assailants themselves: through strong condemnation, social alienation, and revolutionary violence. We stand with victims of rape when they say they want their rapists to be executed, and it’s our role as communists to ensure the protection of victims of rape through organisation and mass work against those who represent an obvious reactionary wing of leftism.

We would like to conclude this message with an appeal to username cannability who in part holds responsibility for giving leeway to people like sobercommunist through her callous, disconnected posts of which she does not accept any criticism on while quote parroting to dismiss anyone who opposes idealist utopian prison abolitionism and ‘restorative justice’ as dumb radicals.

Solidarity.

Death to rapists, child molestors, and any ilk that support the notion that these things are ok.

Age is just a number? I've got a 7.62x25 with your name on it. That just a number?

She was asking for it? Boy, your asking for it.

It has been imperically shown that you cannot reform a rapist or child molestor. You can lock them up, but there is a much simpler, much more cost effective solution...

The men and women coming forth during this shitsorm of allegations against many parties is due to the simple fact of solidarity and power in numbers. They wait till these monsters are dead or they have distanced themselves in years and miles because they generally have power of one form or another over the raped individuals life; fear, intimidation, familial ties, job ties, etc.

Hang them from the lampposts.

I just needed to share this with… you know… the world. 

If you donate they’ll send you presents

#teamCondor

Their FAQ though

—–

I DON’T LIKE THAT YOU’RE GETTING POLITICAL. WHY DON’T YOU JUST STICK TO CARD GAMES?

Why don’t you stick to seeing how many Hot Wheels cars you can fit up your asshole?

I’D LIKE TO CANCEL MY ORDER.

We’d like to cancel the 2016 election, but neither of us is going to get what we want.