If it's just inventory management for cop cars does this mean you're just tracking make, model etc for each vehicle?

This sounds like a great way to learn what is useful about such a thing for the cops and then subtly disrupt it in favor of the people. I recommend taking the job and giving yourself a learning phase where you get a handle on what is what and how this information is actually used.

For example, if it really is about fleet management then it's probably about oil changes and that kind of crap. Tracking this info is mostly about saving money for the city and so they might quickly trace problems back to you so this is more subtle than simply helping cops or throwing a wrench in their operations by doing a bad job. You'l want to ask tactical questions. What happens if a specofic kind of info is missing? Late? Wrong? What if it is tracked better, with a high degree of fidelity and timeliness? Is anything hidden from budgeting? The public? Could it be revealed?

I would bet that most info is relatively neutral or will take serious thinking to evaluate. Let's say you find a way to make life more expensive for the police department. What happens next? Well, this depends on your city council. Will they simply increase the police budget? If someone removes the wrench you threw in, will the cops' budget decrease or will you have effectively just helped increase the police budget that they can use for buying tactical gear and covering up their crimes?

The power to overtly and coherently fight the police lies in political organization. In preventing city council from increasing the police budget. If you make the PD more expensive at the same time that city council refuses to increase its budget, you will have done good work. If you do this when they will increase its budget, you might have just de facto defunded a good program, as city councils will usually shift money around to fund cops.

So I recommend learning as much as you can and being strategic. You are probably not helping cops very much in the first place but as you understand the role better you might be able to hurt them in the right way at the right time, messing with their budget. You'll also get a lens into how the city really operates and can do that salting work that is probably far more impactful. It is a more strategic path to hurt police budgets by having a powerful union to advocate against cuts to any other department. And to do things like kick cop unions out of union coalitions.

James "Avatar is if the natives actually fought back unlike IRL" Cameron? He already had terrible opinions.

And a ceasefire makes it easier for them to survive. A ceasefire is not the defeat of Gaza. It's not the defeat of Hamas. It's the ceasefire of the endless violence so that they can rebuild.

This is not really a ceasefire. Read Biden's quote again. The conditions he and Israel have set are for the resistance to give up its leverage and for the governing organization of Gaza and head of the resistance to give up power and disband.

And I disagree that the win condition is merely Hamas surviving. The win condition is the military/social/economic defeat of Israel and the end of the economic blockade of Palestine, the end of attacks on Palestinians etc.

The former is needed for the latter for any medium-term realistic scenario.

The Al Aqsa Brigades are West Bank right

Somewhat. In this instance they are working with and often within Gaza as part of the resistance.

Even if all the hostages are killed, it wont result in Israel losing. They cannot be used to defeat Israel, which can only be done through offensive military action.

"Israel" is an ethnic supremacist genocidalsettler colonial apartheid state. Its people depend on the sense of their superiority and invulnerability that this system provides them. The capturing of so many hostages and holding them for so long is much of what has made the population so freaked out. It shattered this psychology and they are trying to regain it. Getting them back is a step towards doing so, so there had better be something truly compensatory in any large exchange.

This is complete erasure of Gazan leftists who are critical of Hamas' capability and strateg

Such as? The socialists of any importance are part of an alliance with Hamas. They are fighting in coordination.

as well as Gazan people who support Fatah over Hamas.

So something like 5% of the population?

I think you are also confused about what the term "erasure" means. None of your logic here suggests they erased anything you've described.

This is what I mean when "Gaza is not Hamas", you can be critical of the practical strategy without automatically being in support of the genocide of Palestinians.

To me it sounds like you're trying to justify why your criticisms of Hamas should be taken as valid, not anyone of note in Gaza.

An Al Arabiya link

Comrade, that is a bullshit Saudi state mouthpiece. These kinds of articles are meant to serve a simple and false narrative, which is that Hamas does not represent Gazans and is therefore separate from them and illegitimate. It is, "I hate the government not the people" but for the only militant governing party in occupied Palestine.

It is not hard to parse the tone and framing of the article. Example: "But some Gazans, who have lived in a climate of fear and restrictions since Hamas seized power in the territory in 2007, blame the group for the vast destruction caused by the war." Look at how much work that little unsourced and unexplained editorializing aside just did. Notice that the primary source content of the article is... seemingly random people who all happen to be criticizing Hamas and wanting a ceasefire. How do you think that happened? Why do you think Saudi media would want to push the US-Israeli line?

It's important to read media critically because if you aren't careful it will have you fighting against your comrades and the oppressed. PS there were zero leftist criticisms listed in that article.

It's a good place to start!

If you are interested in doing more, I would recommend organizing or participating in a local BDS campaign. It can be as simple as setting up a table outside a farmer's market and distributing literature. There are ways to upgrade this but I don't want to overload with info.

Our bravest soldiers in the War on Christmas.

Always a trip to watch capitalist media act like it is a bad thing to strike when you have the most leverage. They always use the same playbook trying to convince everyone to think of themselves as inconvenienced consumers rather than fellow workers that benefit from stronger labor.

Ah, seems like an old-fashioned power struggle. Thank you for the detailed rundown!

Thank you! This is very helpful for getting initially oriented until I do some proper reading.

wrt folks that say Evo is splitting the party, do you know what are the takes on Arce calling their marches and blockades an attempted coup?

While what I'm gonna say is too friendly to capital, it would feel more right for big stars to have to pay everyone else's wages for wasting everyone's time being a diva.

Maybe more reasonably, productions should be less penny pinching in the first place and maybe The Rock Does Christmas doesn't need to exist.

Oh sorry I asked a very unclear question. I mean do you have a read on which camp (Morales vs Arce) has more shenanigans?

Harris has more or less the same solutions for black America, as this article lays out. Both parties offer false promises while supporting the material bases of oppression. Both parties are the parties of mass incarceration, criminal injustice, gentrification, school defunding, and ultimately, widespread material deprivation of the working class, the poor, the unhoused. We've had a Trump presidency. It was, despite liberals' panic at rude statements, more or less, the typical status quo right up until the pandemic hit.

This is not because Trump was good, it was because he did the same basic things as his predecessors and successor. Liberals temporarily cared about kids in cages under Trump and suddenly lost all interest under Biden, now pretending that it simply stopped because they aren't hearing about it even as the Biden admin has ramped up imprisonment and deportations. Very little changed, materially. The same applies to the lives of black people. If anything, conditions have gotten worse under Biden through policies increasing unemployment, the normalization of the pandemic and ending of economic support during it, and the massive funds for cops, increasing criminalization of poverty, and decreases in universal funding, leaving communities subjected to the legacies of red lining and discrimination to self-fund. Fewer jobs, worse pay, less support, more observation and racially discriminatory criminalization.

Expect this to continue until we actually organize to build real leverage and address the actual root causes of these issues and why neither party identifies them.

My vibes-based bias is towards Morales, his ability to mobilize, and against the government's limitations on who runs. But I don't know enough to be confident. Do you have a read on where the most shenanigans are?

the left wing parties are correct in their critiques about capitalism and corporations but seem to have a blind spot against their own imperialism on the Global South and even keen on perpetuating anti-China propaganda.

What left wing parties are these? There are certainly no major ones in the US. The two largest formations that actually criticize capitalism are PSL and a few caucuses in DSA. PSL is anti-imperialist and defends against imperialist attacks on China. Red Star caucus in DSA does as well. There are DSA caucuses that criticize capitalism and are still imperialism. These are either Trot or are Bernie liberals that retain substantial reactionary sentiment and are quite ignorant.

In the US, liberalism and imperialist apologetics are the baseline. Most people are politically illiterate in a deep sense and have nobody around to explain why they are exploited or how it is connected to exported violence. Most don't even know about the exported violence. When they are informed they often recede and become defensive, having been raised in a culture where not knowing something is an unforgivable weakness and politics is about being in camp A or B where the camps differentiate themselves by how explicit their racism is.

Really, your question is asking why there are no popular and proper socialist parties in the imperial core.

First, it is very difficult to have non-socialist anti-imperialist parties in the imperial core because they are in the oppressor country and have no framework by which to accidentally become anti-imperialist - and their entire state apparatus is set up around imperial extraction. You can see some legacy anti-imperialism in e.g. Ireland due to their recent history of resisting colonization, though their best anti-imperialists are still socialist. The closest that non-socialist parties come to anti-imperialist stances is through anti-warism. They don't know what imperialism is, how it ties to the economic system, etc. They draw on a simple moralism of seeing war and being against it. They might say "no wars for oil" and be accidentally correct due to the petrodollar and a need to control trade and use energy as a weapon. But they are easily coopted because they don't understand power or build out orgs realistically. The idea of building and using leverage never enters the equation. They are fundamentally idealists and there are large propaganda apparatuses that reaffirm their ineffectual idealism.

So then the question vis why aren't there major socialist parties in the West? Why are they all liberal parties that want social programs, labor imperialists, and reactionary legacy parties? That would take a long time to properly answer. It is many things. Propaganda. Gladio. Red scare. The education system. Bad organizing. Being "bought off" with treats and/or free equity.

To me, the question should be what success looks like, what you hope to achieve, and how to realistically work towards that goal given a historical education in failures. Look to what is currently deficient and ask how to change it and see who stands in your path. Becoming familiar with real OTG failures, if stagnating organizations, of anti-imperialist work that accomplishes nothing, these are the important questions. And they should be inverted: how do you grow your org? How do you set real and material goals and achieve them? Who do you work with? How do you educate? How will you protect yourself?