Curious to hear from all the people that have been in denial so far about how badly the Venezuelan state has always been compromised for this to be possible to come and explain how it is somehow chauvinism to call this what it is now.

Just look at the news megathread's thread on this article. It's full of mind boggling cope (and attacking OP for their post history which so far as I can tell looks pretty normal). It is odd to see such a divide between the majority of the site and the news mega. I was not expecting that.

Beyond sickening how a pillar of anti-imperialism, as Venezuela used to be, can so quickly become yet another comprador doing the empire's dirty work.

I would second this suggestion, even if you don't consider yourself technically proficient, still give LibreWolf a try because it works out of the box just as well as Firefox for 99% of web pages ime. If you're inclined to fine tune it, it walks you through the tweaks you might want to implement at the beginning.

For mobile I've been using Fennec, which has worked fine if not better than Firefox mobile. But there may be better suggestions out there for a mobile browser.

Here is a post with an explanation from a regular user, @Frank@hexbear.net, not a mod:

https://hexbear.net/post/464558

I'm not sure if it's what you're referring to because it's not quite a guide, but the same user you're replying to above, u/oliveoil, posted this at the beginning of the war, which was a request and some helpful advice regarding panic buying. And this thread from around that same time has a number of good comments about how to stock up on the essentials.

ETA quote from the first link:

If you can purchase these items with a partner or friend - you can be loud by talking to your friend about this issue and let others overhear you.

If you have successfully organized a community of people, please activate your groups to engage in this operation. Pretending to be independent couples and engaging at one popular supermarket (I.e. Trader Joe's, Costco) simultaneously will much more likely trigger the panic wave that is required. Or to stretch your numbers further - have one couple talking, and everyone else buying a lot of items independently in a line - make it visible that large numbers of seemingly unassociated people are engaging in this panic.

Your first line is completely and utterly proven false by your second line.

No one, not a single person, who ever seriously believed in the influence of "Russian bots" is capable of thinking critically.

I thought her whole thing was that she could put on a silly costume and explain things. She's in a constant battle with herself.

The constant battle with herself is the silly costume now. You are 100% spot on in identifying her cycle, but I would posit that she is not only aware of it too, but that she does it intentionally and by design. Now that putting on a silly costume under bi-lighting and bloviating/sermonizing for hours on youtube is (finally) considered passe, her method for getting attention is that exact cycle you described. She really is that cynical and narcissistic.

believing the next target of genocide after Palestinians would be wealthy American liberals if Trump won. That's what she believed. She believed, for some reason, Trump 2 would target her economic strata and liberal ideology specifically.

I personally don't think she really believed that. She acted as though she believed that, and yes, she all but directly said that's what she believed, but that was all just part of the ruse, the grift, imo.

Team Democrat's method for getting "middle class America" scared of Trump was to tell them, the comfortably affluent white people (technically working class but basically labor aristocracy) that Trump was hitler and that they would be the ones he'd be rounding up and putting in camps. The Democrats couldn't really say they would do anything that would actually be popular with people because either Trump and Team Republican beat them to the punch and already were saying it, or the popular things like no more genocide and healthcare for all were way too far left and would violate the entire purpose of the Democratic party which is preventing leftward movement and ensuring the Overton window has only a rightward trajectory. So Democrats didn't have any workable strategies for winning other than scaring "middle class Americans" into thinking Trump was gonna start coming for them, trying to appeal to the victim complex of the comfortable white people. That's where the liberal narrative about Trump being a threat to people like Contrapoints actually came from. But as usual, it was just another lie, another part of the grift. And she knew that.

Now she can use that narrative, which of course turned out to be false, to act all shocked that it didn't come about and stir up more drama to maintain her own personal relevance.

just an odd thing to volunteer unprompted

For a normal person, yes. But not odd or surprising at all when your only means for trying to stay relevant is to stir shit and hope people pay enough attention to get mad.

A- no one mentioned vegans

Yes they did. To imply that veganism is not relevant to the topic of not eating meat as a significant way to reduce the causal factors of climate change, is just vapid and disingenuous.

B- Straw man

Ad hominem! Tu quoque! No true Scotsman! See, I can uselessly say the names of logical fallacies that have no bearing on the conversation at hand too.

C- general experience is that vegans are the evangelists

Lol, whose "general" experience? The far right (fascist) carnists who start frothing and twitching when they are confronted with the fact that vegans exist? The meat eating libs who can't stand the cognitive dissonance they experience and the mental gymnastics they have to perform in order to patch together a justification for their regressive behavior that aligns them with CHUDs? My experience is that vegans calmly existing is constantly but falsely equated with "evangelism" purely because meat eaters can't reconcile the fact they value their treats over... well, literally everything including the literal world itself.

D-Veganism is not a choice for many. There are places where it is not possible to choose to be vegan due to lack of options. Don’t shame people for their lifestyle when you have no insight into their lives

Oh Fuck Off with that twisted bullshit, you disingenuous shitstain. Your other "aeguments" are worth an eye roll, but this one is so rank, it should be called out for the sheer slime that it is, trying to use "progressive values" against people who actually do something to benefit the world, including benefitting people who live in precarity.

I live in precarity. I am a disabled person who has been homeless and relied on dumpster diving to get food to live on. I still rely on food stamps (which is getting whittled away by the same people who grant billions of dollars in subsidies to factory farm owners so that they can keep their death machine and climate change-causing operations afloat). Yet I've been vegan for over 25 years. Literally no one would begrudge a starving person for getting whatever food they can, but that starving person is not you and it's not 99.9% of every carnist out there refusing to give up their murder-treats. Using people who have no access to treats in order to justify your own deeply problematic treat consumption is supremely disgusting and cowardly.

One of the easiest things we can do is to get rid of all of the billionaires.

That's not easy though. In fact it is one of the most difficult challenges we face. We absolutely do need to get rid of all the billionaires but if it ever happens, it will take a tremendous amount of organizing, work, and will inevitably cost many of us our lives. However, simply not eating murdered animal is something you can literally do right now without lifting a finger. It truly s easy, and it absolutely is something everyone should do by default. While organizing and carrying out a revolution that finally wipes out the billionaire class will be one of the greatest hurdles (and greatest achievments) that humanity will ever face.

The fact that changes in individual consumption alone won't bring about a revolution capable of dismantling the system that drives climate change perpetuates mass murder of sentient life, that doesn't mean that people refusing to eat meat en masse won't make a huge difference. It already has made a significant impact on factory farming, though there's still a long way to go.

And it's certainly no excuse not to go vegan.

Well, tbh a better time to have gone vegan would have been however many years ago a person was first able to comprehend that meat = animal. But I hear what you mean and fully agree that NOW is infinitely better than later, or worse yet, never.

If Trump's inane bumbling ends up getting fascist Ukraine to accept Russia's peace terms sooner (which is an eventual inevitability regardless of what Trump does), then that's a good thing, as fewer working class lives will be pointlessly, needlessly lost to the meat grinder.