I just recently learned that Methyl anthranilate, the artificial grape flavoring, also repels birds and is used heavily by the agro industry nowadays. I imagine because of all the other products they also use they don’t need the birds around anymore.

You can also use old cd-roms tied to a long-ish string btw, the sparkling makes birds stay away.

he locked up a lot of people during the cultural revolution sometimes for quite arbitrary reasons

He was not the one who signed arrest orders or ran trials though, a lot of different people were involved in that. You can’t blame Mao as an individual for stuff that other people did. You can’t run an entire state with just one person.

the backyard steel and culling of the sparrows

Nobody in the 60s knew about the importance of sparrows in agriculture. Not even in the West. I think it’s easy to say “oh well duh of course don’t kill the sparrows” but who here among us is an actual farmer? Who here knew that sparrows ate more bugs than grain before it was told to them? I can barely grow a plant, I have no room to judge others when it comes to growing food.

I just didn’t find it to be very relevant to me

I’m an adult in Europe and I find Mao’s writing to be both relevant and applicable. But there is Mao the general and Mao the chairman. By the end of his life he was definitely saying some stuff that I don’t think even he believed in. But theory is an all encompassing body, and that is true in all fields. One couldn’t read one physics paper about gravity and then say “now I know how to launch a rocket to the moon”. I opened up my copy of the red book randomly and here’s one:

“Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them through, so as to form correct ideas and leadership – such is the basic method of leadership”

It makes perfect sense to me, but that’s also because I have the associated baggage to understand what he means there and how that fits in not only to more of Mao’s writings but also in regards to other figures, the ‘best practices’ if you will of organizing.

I also found it really interesting that deepseek would refuse to answer any questions on Mao

The deepseek devs want it to be mainly used for math, coding, and other STEM applications for lack of a better word. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact personally I think people should stop using LLMs as oracles so much and focus them on tasks instead. Deepseek produces great results (and all for free with no rate limits) if you give it some code to start with, because it needs proper framing of the project to avoid trying to overdo it. I usually start with chatGPT, have it do the first working version of the code, and then switch it to deepseek to finish it, and it works almost perfect on the first try.

Hinkle makes anti Zionism unpalatable and directly leads to the arrest of people like Mahmoud. He got retweeted twice by the state of “Israel” which each time gave him a ton of publicity.

By making his unhinged takes (he’s outright an antisemite, ACP is doing damage control every time he tweets something lol) he associates antizionism with people like him and with antisemitism so that people won’t call themselves anti zionist and if you do, you’ll look like a nutjob.

Hinkle worked with Tulsi Gabbard when he was younger (so 5 years ago), Gabbard being head of the psyop division in the US military or something like that (edit: she’s literally Director of National Intelligence). The info is super easy to find if you Google her name plus military but I forget the exact job title. He interviewed her last year again for some reason and never mentioned this past relationship.

Tucker Carlson’s father, Richard, was the director of Voice of America, close to Reagan, and US ambassador to the Seychelles. He was deeply embedded in US politics at the foreign affairs level, so Tucker is more of an untouchable. And tucker is far from doing any anti imperialism, moreso the appearance of doing anti imperialism

Feds don’t directly infiltrate anymore, or at least most of the time they don’t. They get informants to do it, see Beau of the Fifth Column (his name is not Beau and he fakes a southern accent). Usually as the result of a plea deal. Then after that I assume the snitch has sort of free reign in how they carry out their operation as long as they submit results.

The thing that everyone should be looking at is how Hinkle, who is based in the US, gets to meet with Putin, Dugin, Ansarallah, Hamas, goes to Iran – basically does everything the US state hates, BUT never gets in any trouble for it. There’s a man (Mahmoud Khalil) who is currently MIA after being adbucted from his home in New York by the police for talking about Palestine, but Hinkle gets to talk to an audience of 2 million + on twitter, he gets to travel around the world meeting heads of state that sponsor terrorism (according to US State Department of course), he gets to meet current war enemies of the US, and he gets to talk about that on social media openly, and he doesn’t even get questioned when he comes back? Even Blumenthal, who is the son of an aide to Bill Clinton, got detained and questioned when he came back to the US.

Dugin says a lot of “hmm… this could either be a good thing, or a bad thing… I can’t tell which” sprinkled in with super obvious stuff to anyone who’s paid attention to the topic he’s talking about in the last few years.

It’s the same mysticist bs. They quote Marx like it’s scripture, and they will quote lots of him but always fragmented, always stopping short of the next paragraph that will disprove their point. It’s very superficial and they make Marx Engels Lenin etc. say whatever they want them to say by quoting the same old tired quotes out of context. Their “good takes”, if there are any (they have long stopped producing any, now they got their hands full with ACP doing damage control for Hinkle, their most famous representative, saying unhinged take after unhinged take)

I can produce the same takes easily.

“When our turn comes, we shall make no excuses for the terror.” [said in response to the Rheinischer Zeitung being raided and shut down by the police but I will conveniently not mention that] “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun is actually wrong, the original Chinese is 枪杆子里面出政权 which reads more correctly as ‘the power of the gun exceeds the spineless child’ 🤓” “The young people are the most active and vital force in society”. "For the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed. For Son Sen and his family, yes. " (Pol Pot, but in infracel fashion I should misattribute to someone more palatable that quoted this quote or just not tell you who it’s from).

Clearly this means children are dangerous and we should “not make excuses for the terror” regarding them, and there is precedent for killing children, therefore communists must kill children. If you disagree btw you are a counter-revolutionary holding back the real communist movement which is exactly the one I’m trying to build a cult around.

Basically, find any and all quotes that support the point you are trying to make at face-value, and just blast them out everywhere. If people object to your interpretation, argue semantics or run them around in circles (“you clearly didn’t understand” but don’t elaborate, let them do the work). They have entire documents of these and you catch on pretty quickly when you talk to patsocs because they will always use the same quotes and never deviate at all. In regards to infrared specifically, well, they’re the ones that feed their audience this information in the first place.

*Regarding the translation it’s true if you read the Chinese absolutely literally with no sense of grammar or character combinations lol. I literally put the sentence in an online dictionary and picked which meanings I preferred to say whatever I want it to say.

He’s a mysticist like them. Write one thing, get it interpreted 100 different ways. But only one is the right interpretation - the one the patsoc wants. If you read him the “wrong” way, they’ll beat you with “read him again” again and again until you come to see it the way they do. I’ve read a tiny bit of dugin to get what the fuss was about, it’s meaningless nonsense. He says stuff one sentence and contradicts himself in the next. He goes off on pure vibes. Actually, I wrote a bit about him some time ago: https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/alexandr-dugins-absurd-mysticism

Now I’m going into armchair psychanalyst territory but if you’re ready to believe them about dugin then they can start pushing you towards other stuff like maupin or infrared. It’s the same mysticist bullshit.

if fed UK was sensible they would delete this comm before it spirals out of control

If we united the whole world together under one federation that federation would be a world superpower! I am ver yintelligent.

I think it’s DjuChe like Che Guevara

fyi for my comrades - hyphenation in Korean names is mostly a south Korean thing, DPR Korean doesn’t hyphenate so it would be Kim Jong Un. Now you know 🌟

its to contain all the juche inside of it

I don’t think we should compare everything socialist countries do to the US because the US is not the world. And I don’t necessarily agree with Getty either, who is a liberal, and shows his liberal bias by even giving credence to it in the first place.

Furr proved conclusively that Kruschev was the one who played up Stalin’s “cult” despite Stalin’s reluctance. So Getty’s argument is disproven here.

Perhaps the question you should ask yourself is, why would I believe socialist countries had cults of personality in the first place?

People like Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Lenin/Stalin, Mao continue to be very influential to their countries and to the broader struggle. They literally led independence struggles and worked tirelessly for the people. Read into their biographies, the common thread you’ll find is they all spent hours a day between shifts doing agitation, party work, educating themselves and others. And then when the conditions were right, using this base of support correctly to lead the struggle for independence.

Apparently to liberals recognizing these achievements and that these very human people worked selflessly is impossible. Nobody is truly selfless to the liberal and so they have to find some silly point to make up to tarnish their legacy. Kim Il Sung was apparently playing the long con of, uhhh, literally leading resistance against the Japanese at 21yo to the point that a company was eventually created tasked solely with hunting him down? He should’ve fucked off to Miami during the war like Rhee Syngman instead, and then get appointed president by John Foster Dulles, silly Kim.

And these are real people who died less than two generations ago. It’s very, very recent history. Like, our grandparents could have met with Stalin or Mao. Literally when Koreans see a statue of Kim Il Sung they remember, oh shit, I could be living under Japanese occupation as a sex slave right now. But I fucking don’t.

But we don’t get any of that in the west because even in communist circles we don’t have any figures to look up to to remind us that the struggle is protracted, and we all need to pull our weight, and it doesn’t fall on just one person to do all that. So we point and laugh so that we don’t have to look at our own legacy of failure in the past 100 years of “organizing”.

If you’ve read my other comments in this thread I talk a lot about the design thinking method which is the 5 steps. In your case everything will hinge on the first step imo, Understanding. What sort of feedback can you get from prospective meeting-goers? It would definitely pay to get their opinions on what they’re looking for, what they like, etc. Create a persona of your average and/or ideal member. Everything you can know for sure that you don’t have to guess will be helpful later. You’re correct that not having enough time is usually not the problem, because you can’t really find a solution to not having enough time. You can’t switch around their classes for them and invent a new hour in the day.

If other people in the club are interested in helping out with that project, become the facilitator and hold, mostly for the identification or ideating steps, group sessions to brainstorm or think about solutions. Collective thinking is really cool, it makes ideas appear that you’d never have by yourself. There’s other tools you can use at different steps, there’s probably online blogs that list them lol. Otherwise one day I might have to make that whole list myself. AI is actually really knowledgeable about these tools if you explain your problem and ask it for a list.

Also once you prototype something (in your case it will probably be a meeting with the new guidelines you’ll have ideated), don’t hesitate to pass around some paper after the meetups and ask for members opinions on what they liked and what they didn’t like. Then improve one meeting at a time. It’s built over time.

Would you not say that some forms of propaganda aren’t necessarily meant to spur action per se, but rather serve as an opener or starter?

That’s actionability too :P

Before you even pick up the pencil (or the mouse) ask yourself questions and think about what you want to convey. Turn that into something actionable, which is kind of a buzzword, but basically to us means something that is able to turn theory to practice. Most non-designers and beginners will say “I want to draw something that will get people to act!” and this is correct, but that’s not super actionable. We know this from our organizational practice, as we criticize liberals for thinking “acting” ends at holding up a sign in congress when trump is speaking or whatever. It’s the same thing here. If we want to guide people to effective practice, then we need to point that out.

This takes experience which is built with trial and error. It’s why designers have so much workshop time in school lol.

You can also reverse engineer existing material, but this takes work. Again I often see people giving an existing piece one look, think they know everything about it, and then proceed to make something tangentially related, getting the form of it but not the actual content of it. I was like that too. But if we want to learn, we have to struggle with the material. It doesn’t just fall into our lap. Take the time to really engage with examples of what you’d consider good propaganda, as much time as you need. Takes this leaflet dropped on US troops during the invasion of Korea:

(text on the left reads “Frozen Rations eaten on the run. Any moment he may have to run again, to fight or die - and so may you.”)

This leaflet was the result of a process of decisions, some of them conscious, some of them probably subconscious. It’s also pretty easy to study: disheveled and depressed soldier on the left in black and white, happy family celebrating christmas in technicolor on the right. And a message that would finish me off if I was in his place fighting at Chosin lol.

What makes this effective? The first thing that makes this effective is if it worked in practice. But worked at what? can we reverse-engineer this leaflet to figure out what they wanted to happen with it? First, who was it even made for? From reading the copy it seems pretty clear: US soldiers find a way out, it’s no disgrace to quit fighting in this unjust war. It’s telling soldiers to remember their family at home and invoke emotions, and then it sends a call to action (you should look into the AIDA model too btw, it’s pretty ubiquitous and also super old, older than the 20th century lol). It’s telling soldiers, do whatever you can to go home. Shoot yourself in the foot if you have to.

Was it effective? Well, it probably wasn’t the only piece of propaganda they dropped on the enemy that christmas, and it was probably sent at the right time. Do it enough times, to enough people, and eventually you’ll probably have a few who will hesitate to pull the trigger, or who will surrender just a second faster than they would have otherwise. We gauge the theory on real data in a theory->practice->theory dialectic. Theory informs practice informs new theory.

This is a constant iteration process, improving a little bit at a time. Sometimes success is difficult to measure, but it pays to do this type of self-crit at the end of a project. Make something, send it out, then study if it worked, why, and how. Then do just a little bit better next time. I think the first thing people have to divorce from their design self is self-loathing. It’s okay to take time, it’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s okay to improve just one tiny little thing. Even just reducing typos the next time you submit something is an improvement.

Oh man these are difficult questions. You know, as much as we got flooded with shitty AI images and clearly GPT comments and replies on the web since 2023, I don’t think I’ve seen a website entirely coded with AI yet. Or maybe if I have, it passed for a normal website and I didn’t notice. Honestly Wordpress already has so much of the market that I think switching web design to AI may not change much, functionally. AI generations are all kinda samey due to the training data, but so are wordpress websites (unless you really go full custom but then the trend now is doing headless).

I do use AI for JS though, which I’ve never learned and don’t feel like learning, and it’s got me out of a bind once in a while. It’s very simple stuff though, I wouldn’t use it for a whole website. In terms of design I do use AI to help guide and rephrase my thoughts when I go through the process, it doesn’t do everything but it helps. But I wouldn’t use it to code a whole website or even make a mockup, I’m not sure it even could generate a coherent mockup at this stage.

These days I mostly design for ProleWiki and acquaintances, so I’m lucky in that I can use whatever I prefer to use since I’m the only one using the design documents. I usually do my mockups on paper with super crude boxes lol, but because I’m the one implementing them, I don’t need them to look great. To me design is not only having ideas but also bringing it into the world; union of theory and practice and solving of the problem-solution dialectic. So I’m designing at every step of the way and trying not to overthink it and reinvent the wheel each time.

Btw wix is “Israeli”, if you can avoid using it at all.

I think what I enjoy most is unveiling the concept for the first time and gathering feedback. Seeing it all come together once you’ve correctly identified the problem too, and confirming that your shots in the dark were right.

I’ve written some of my own here: https://criticalresist.substack.com/t/design

Otherwise much of it will be learned through practice and solving real problems. Design thinking is the fundamental basis of all design imo, it’s really where people should start. Then in each step, you can use certain tools to help achieve results.

If you are ready to join ProleWiki, we could definitely let you get started on designing stuff for real problems we face. Though just to clear that up, I’m not the one that decides who gets an account haha.

AI can also help, but it’s a crapshoot. Sometimes if you prime it correctly it can come up with amazing results, and sometimes it’s barely coherent. Tell the AI to act like a designer you hired as an advisor to help with X problem (describe the problem) and, still in the initial prompt, ask it to first tell you about the design thinking method and send that. It will explain it just fine, but the real value afterwards is going into each step individually, taking as much time as you need for each, and basically get the AI to pull you through from start to finish. To do that you need to send something (in the 2nd prompt) like “you are now going to help me through each step of the design process. We will go through each step one by one, taking as much time as we need every time, and I will let you know when I am ready to move on to the next step so there’s no need to ask or decide for yourself. I will decide when I’m ready to move on. Secondly, I don’t know anything about design, so I’m counting on you to guide me through everything and speak to me as someone who wants to learn, but simply doesn’t know”

In each step of the thinking process there are certain tools you can use, such as brainstorming sessions in the ideation step, or empathy mapping in the empathy/understanding phase. There’s no trick to it, you have to use the tool to become comfortable with it and only then will you be able to say if it’s prescribed for the problem you are solving or not. You can ask the AI to name these tools and methods and describe them to you too.

But like I said, solve real projects even with the AI. I’ve never liked fake projects because, well, you know they’re fake. You’re finished with them and they disappear. You can’t measure impact, and usually the problem of the project is given to you (or conversely you don’t have enough information to start with). To me, making things look pretty like you might see in visual or web design is secondary to the actual point, which is communicating something and solving a problem. The ribbon UI in the Office Suite for example is ubiquitous now, but the problem wasn’t “we want to make our UI look different and pretty so that it looks good on screenshots”, the problem was, “we’ve got too much shit to show the user and they have to look in sub-menus hidden in sub-menus hidden in sub-menus. How can we make that easier on them?”

The real skill of design tbh is twofold: verbalizing the problem, and then uncovering the solution.

General tips would be to use the design thinking method for this:

Everything will hinge on the first part, the understanding/empathizing part. Then ask fundamental questions such as: why am I making a UI? What is the purposes of a UI?

Proper planning saves on a lot of waste later on. For UIs I think composition theory is very important, i.e. getting the user’s eye to where you want it to be (i.e. where it needs to be).

Then do mockups/wireframes and submit the prototype to be tested by actual people. Let them play around with it and record everything they say about it without offering any input, and use that to refine prototype on top of prototype until you have a satisfactory result, then finish up the UI with all the bells and whistles.

I talk more about this process here: https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/how-we-redesigned-the-prolewiki-homepage