It's been reverted now but, honestly, any sort of wiki citing another wiki as a source is bad. The "Trotskyites are considered reactionary" section is really good though and should stay.

This is an age-old debate (see Luxembourg's "reform or revolution").

The Marxist-Leninist line holds that protecting or enhancing the material conditions of the proletariat before the revolution can both increase the number of prospective party-members or militants (i.e. you can't organise rallies if you're starving) and gain the confidence of the working class by representing their immediate interests (i.e. protecting workers rights) unlike bourgeois parties.

Smaller more tangible reform fights are also ripe ground for recruitment of militants, as inexperienced comrades can get a lot of first hand experience organising for, for example, solutions for food security (Black Panther Party's free breakfasts).

However those reforms are means to an end, and that end is revolution. So reforms should not be a one-and-done thing (see the UK's NHS) but rather a front in heightening class war and highlighting capital as the enemy and their resistance to reform as evidence. I once saw a comment in another Lemmy instance that said something like "we tried to implement public healthcare, but capital resisted too hard so there's no hope". That is due to social-democrat and reformist monopoly over the discourse about public healthcare, which needs to be challenged by communists.

The term "class war" is not hyperbole. In a war, you should settle only for defeating your opponent, hopefully forcing them to capitulate or maybe even eradicating them. You don't take your single victory in a battlefield and pack your bags to go home, that's the reformist line represented by Jeremy Corbyn and in a more aesthetic sense, Bernie Sanders. But you also don't wait while your enemy marches into your territory hoping that their cruelty will materialise an uprising to defeat your opponent in a single blow, that is the spontaneists line held by every other Trotskyist splinter party or academicist communists.

The phase-out timeline

We will begin disabling Manifest V2 extensions in pre-stable versions of Chrome (Dev, Canary, and Beta) as early as June 2024, in Chrome 127 and later. Users impacted by the rollout will see Manifest V2 extensions automatically disabled in their browser and will no longer be able to install Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store. Also in June 2024, Manifest V2 extensions will lose their Featured badge in the Chrome Web Store if they currently have one.

from google

What Manifest V3 Means for You

That said, our team has had to make some changes to the uBlock extension in order to comply with the new requirements of Manifest V3. These changes are detailed below.

Allow List Limits

With Manifest V3, uBlock is required to limit how many websites our users are able to add to their allow lists. Going forward, you'll only be able to add up to 5,000 websites to your allow lists.

Ad Blocking Quality

Currently, our filter lists are updated automatically—often on a daily basis. So if you see an ad that has managed to get around the ad blocking filter, it’s typically taken care of right away because of these updates. Moving forward, we’ll no longer be able to enable automatic daily updates to filter lists. Instead, our developers will be frequently releasing new versions of the extension to address any ads that are circumventing our filters and still showing to users. Our goal is to ensure most users won’t notice a difference, as we plan to increase how much we release the extension to keep up with changing ads and filter lists.

from ublock

Manifest V3, or Mv3 for short, is outright harmful to privacy efforts. It will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit. Under the new specifications, extensions like these– like some privacy-protective tracker blockers– will have greatly reduced capabilities. Google’s efforts to limit that access is concerning, especially considering that Google has trackers installed on 75% of the top one million websites.

It’s also doubtful Mv3 will do much for security. Firefox maintains the largest extension market that’s not based on Chrome, and the company has said it will adopt Mv3 in the interest of cross-browser compatibility. Yet, at the 2020 AdBlocker Dev Summit, Firefox’s Add-On Operations Manager said about the extensions security review process: “For malicious add-ons, we feel that for Firefox it has been at a manageable level....since the add-ons are mostly interested in grabbing bad data, they can still do that with the current webRequest API that is not blocking.”

from the eff

What are we doing differently in Firefox?

WebRequest

One of the most controversial changes of Chrome’s MV3 approach is the removal of blocking WebRequest, which provides a level of power and flexibility that is critical to enabling advanced privacy and content blocking features. Unfortunately, that power has also been used to harm users in a variety of ways. Chrome’s solution in MV3 was to define a more narrowly scoped API (declarativeNetRequest) as a replacement. However, this will limit the capabilities of certain types of privacy extensions without adequate replacement.

Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest. We will continue to work with content blockers and other key consumers of this API to identify current and future alternatives where appropriate. Content blocking is one of the most important use cases for extensions, and we are committed to ensuring that Firefox users have access to the best privacy tools available.

from mozilla's blog

Google has removed ad blocking and privacy extension AdNauseam from its Chrome Web Store, and has taken the unusual step of flagging the extension as malware, thereby preventing AdNauseam from being used by those who have installed the software via Chrome's developer mode.

[...] Google in 2013 banned ad blocking for Android apps in the Google Play Store, for violating its prohibition on interfering with the function of other apps. It conducted another purge in early 2016, banning stand-alone ad blocking apps like Adblock Fast and Crystal. It subsequently formalized its stance with a Play Store policy update, allowing browsers with built-in content blocking support to remain.

from a completely unrelated theregister article

Google has “a dominant, near chokehold position on the market,” said Joanna O’Connell, an analyst who specializes in online advertising for the market research firm Forrester. “They don’t just have a buying platform, or the ad-serving market, or a content asset in YouTube, or the search market. They have all of those things.

[...] For the first time in 2019, U.S. digital ad spending surpassed traditional print and television advertising, according to market research firm eMarketer. By 2023, it is projected to account for two-thirds of all money spent on advertising. Last year, advertisers spent $124.6 billion on all U.S. digital advertising, including both search and display ads, said the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which measures digital ad spending.

[...] A large chunk of U.S. digital advertising, $54.7 billion or about 44 percent, is search advertising, for which Google is the undisputed market leader, according to the IAB. But the bigger piece — and where the antitrust regulators are focused — involves display advertising, the images, text and videos that often pay for websites like news, sports, blogs and smaller e-commerce sites.

[...] The Omidyar report doesn’t make any recommendations for how to bring competition back to the ad-technology market that Google dominates. But one option highlighted by U.K. authorities would be to break up some of Google by requiring it to sell off businesses within the stack so that it operates either only on behalf of ad-buyers or on behalf of ad-sellers.

from another unrelated article from politico

In yet another case of broken promises – or maybe fraud? – Google failed to honor agreements governing ad placements on third-party sites 80% of the time. The scandal was uncovered by ad-tracking firm Adalytics, which examined ad impressions from over 1100 brands from 2020-2023. Advertisers paid premium rates, typically higher by a factor of 20, to ensure their video ads would appear prominently on reputable sites. However, Google actually gave the ads substandard placements on numerous misinformation and piracy sites. Advertisers affected include not only companies like American Express and Macy’s but also government entities like Medicare, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Army. Now, advertisers are knocking on Google’s door demanding refunds – and Google is pretending not to hear them.

from creativefuture

The agreement between Facebook and Google, code-named “Jedi Blue” inside Google, pertains to a growing segment of the online advertising market called programmatic advertising. Online advertising pulls in hundreds of billions of dollars in global revenue each year, and the automated buying and selling of ad space accounts for more than 60 percent of the total, according to researchers.

[...] Adam Heimlich, the chief executive of Chalice Custom Algorithms, a marketing and data science consulting company, said the deal gave Facebook so much advantage that it was like allowing the social network to “start every tournament in the finals.”

Facebook promised to bid on at least 90 percent of auctions when it could identify the end user and committed to spending a certain amount of money — as much as $500 million a year by the fourth year of the agreement, according to the draft of the complaint. Facebook also demanded that data about its bids not be used by Google to manipulate auctions in its own favor, a level playing field not explicitly promised to other Open Bidding partners.

Perhaps the most serious claim in the draft complaint was that the two companies had predetermined that Facebook would win a fixed percentage of auctions that it bid on.

“Unbeknown to other market participants, no matter how high others might bid, the parties have agreed that the gavel will come down in Facebook’s favor a set number of times,” the draft complaint said. A Google spokeswoman said Facebook must make the highest bid to win an auction, just like its other exchange and ad network partners.

from the new york times

Uninstall your chrome.

I got a bit carried away, maybe I should make this a thread?

Not directly answering your question but I was watching a guy explaining MLM the other day and the very beginning he stressed how Scientific Socialism is scientific due to falsifiability. Then much later on he does the classic "Denying MLM to uphold ML is like denying Einstein to uphold Newton" and that tickled my brain.

So ML is scientific because it has successfully led to revolutions, but MLM is even more scientific because it has successfully done... what exactly? Temporarily occupied rural areas with guerrillas? Even if you buy their position that the ML states reverted to Capitalism, it's not that much of an improvement.

Honestly I just think it's obscurantism. Most MLM's I've found would start the explanation with "some aspects of the Cultural Revolution are universal" but then flounder in explaining which specific ones those were. Probably because if they peg one down they'll cause dogmatic splits in their groups. But then they get to claim that you just don't understand, it's all peak Marxism, and all other Marxists aren't real Marxists. I've been doing a lot of reading on different authors this year and major difference between (most) ML authors and (most) MLM authors is that the former are actually pretty intuitive while the latter were very confusing and all-over-the-place.

How do you feel when it's treated in a more sensible way by the narrative? For example, in Fire Emblem Path of Radiance

Also if you read the Silmarileon critically you'll notice that elves are basically settlers in whole constructions made by and for dwarves, who had been driven out. Several of their halls are passingly mentioned to have been built by dwarves, and there are even stories where jealous dwarves are portrayed as "greedy" for wanting the fruits of their labour for themselves.

This is a fantastic thread. Now we need a second one about the "Judeo-Christian Greco-Roman values" folks having most of their symbols being from 19th century Western Europe.

It's a dicey situation because it can put a bigger target on your back. If you're black, poor or otherwise noteworthy to the police this could become one of those "police shoot person 5 times in the back of the head in self-defence" situations.

But if you know how to use one it can be useful for protecting you or your comrades against extra-judicial force or in the odd chance of a revolution. But if you're in a gunfight, your odds of survival are already not good, just look at the Marcelo de Arruda case.

But since you're just collecting, you'll mainly be weighing the cons against your own happiness so that's very subjective. It's not a bad idea in itself.

Not to spoil it, but it starts out very strong but the political quality goes down exponentially over time after the first season. I couldn't bring myself to finish the last season because I was pretty bored.

Yet another interesting movement to be crushed by third world infighting led by the USA and their puppet UN. I can't even see a positive outcome out of this, let's just hope this isn't as brutal as the Brazilian one. Maybe the Bwa Kale movement and FRG9 can pull out an actual revolution even then, but that'd probably only prompt an even worse intervention.

Not a single time. There was this exact one mass shooting in another far away state when I was a kid and I remember how irrationally on edge everybody was for a couple weeks, so I can't even imagine what it would be to have those happening regularly like that. I understand training kids to do it if you already have a school shooting problem, but those are really rare over here.

I've even heard from colleagues from gang-controlled regions that, in the case of a shoot out, they usually purposefully avoid having those near schools to avoid collateral child deaths.

It's honestly rather silly that you think the solution for it is "consuming less" when some 30 million people on the richest country in the world rely on food stamps, and some 60% live paycheck to paycheck. Do you honestly think there's any more "fat" to cut for those?

It's seen as disconnected from reality because it actually is. The problem is not that all (or majority of) people consume too much, but that the production itself (and the waste disposal aftwards) is the most climate-inneficient it could ever be. How is one to "drive less" or "eat less meat" when those are the only ways they could afford to live?

"Local vacations" lmao

Pointless foreign war going badly? ✔

Worsening internal proletarian conditions? ✔

Popular distrust in government and its fundamental philosophy? ✔

Encroaching police state and murdering of protesters? ✔

I could see the USA going the way of either 1905 or 1932 sometime soon. Obviously I prefer first, but it's the Yankees, they probably will go for the latter. But it's not like this hasn't happened at least once every decade for the past 70 years and no revolution materialised. The true sack of potatoes were the American Tubers all along.

Honestly a general strike might be a cool idea at least for basic things like healthcare, rent control, guaranteed sick leave and other things like that, that basically every other stable country already has. Socialist parties are missing out on the opportunity.