I’ve said both. I’m a professional pentester / red teamer, and yeah, we send each other “I’m in” memes when we pop a box.

I’m curious, what do you mean when you say “tankie”? It’s a word that’s used to mean so many different things these days

Oh lol, that’s weird, I thought it was common knowledge that China censors some types of speech, similarly to every other nation. If I was running a state, I’d want to censor transphobic slurs, arguments for gender inequality, pro-Capitalist propaganda, racism, etc. IMO there’s nothing inherently morally wrong about censorship, and I see a lot of think pieces from US / NATO outlets like Voice of America yelling that China is bad because it censors speech, without giving any context or nuance about what type of speech is being censored and also distracting from the US’s massive censorship.

On the oppression point - I guess it mostly matters who’s getting oppressed. If it’s regular working people being oppressed, fuck that, but if we implemented policies as a society that forced billionaires to give up their wealth I’m sure they’d cry about being “oppressed”. I don’t have any sympathy for the cries of CEOs and mega-landlords about how they’re being oppressed by being forced to give back their stolen wealth.

Actually, the opinion I see most often on .ml is that modern day Russia sucks, and is bad because they’ve turned into a capitalist warmongering empire similar to the US. People are pretty mixed on China, but legit if you just look at the technological advances coming out of China - just verified stuff that’s been scientifically proven and then deployed - it’s pretty impressive, especially surrounding batteries. So, if you’re suspicious of China then any good news about China will come off as a conspiracy, but in reality things are pretty mixed and there’s a lot of good and bad about nations, and no one state is all good or all bad. Anyone reducing the complexity of geopolitics down to one nation = good / other nation = bad is either dumb, trolling, not speaking in good faith, indoctrinated or just repeating propaganda.

Check out Communications Workers of America - they’ve been pushing into the tech world

I’ve seen that reinforcement of workers who toe the line first-hand, people are scared and brainwashed into not acting up or demanding better. It’s why I have a hard time maintaining a job - not because I’m not good at what I do, but because I’m bad at pretending to buy into the capitalist ideology in the workplace.

Agreed, not all managers are bastards but the system they are working within creates horrible results.

I believe I’m one of those knowledge workers. I do cybersecurity and I’m actively working on trying to unionize the sector. I’m not management, and I don’t have hiring or firing power, and I’m reliant on wages to survive.

Actually, I can see the comparison. Many cybersecurity people don’t challenge the power relations in their workplace and instead act as enforcers of corporate policy. That always disappoints me, and I can see the pattern of how even our relative privilege is being actively reduced. I just hope more cybersecurity people will recognize the class struggle we have to wage and organize in solidarity with the rest of the working class.

I get where you’re going with this, and yeah, the PMC helps hold the current system in place. I was thinking about the cybersecurity/engineers/architects/other better paid workers who are still subject to class exploitation even though they’re better off than a line cook.

Also, I like your bit about the professional managerial class being an ideological shield - I see that happening in the workplace all the time where people won’t consider rocking the boat because they want to be management one day.

There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.

For those of y’all who say that we don’t have an antisemitism problem on the left - this seems to be another example showing that we do, and we need to deal with it. Similarly to how movements in the past have been sabotaged by excluding groups (like white-only unions excluding nonwhite people), this could similarly fracture us along identity lines.

Let’s arm the Palestinians instead. Or, we could send intentionally defective weapons to Israel. Israel’s genocide has to stop