206 points

“he’d already aroused suspicion by interrupting a meandering discussion of principles with a straightforward plan of action.”

I feel seen.

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57 points

a) Organizations and Conferences

  1. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
  2. Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
  3. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
  4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
  5. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
  6. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
  7. Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
  8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.-
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26 points

The best part is by publishing this far and wide, anybody pushing for “careful consideration” and actual reasoned planning is immediately suspect, which leads to less reasoned decisions, which usually means more mistakes. If a victory is somehow won through violence of action and not careful planning, the support structure isn’t there to maintain the victory, nor are the people who win that victory well-suited to careful planning before the next engagement. The boring stuff is often what wins wars, simple things like plenty of fuel, adequate hygiene facilities, and dry socks can literally mean the difference between a division surrendering or winning a battle.

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7 points

TIL that the OSS completely undermined the global business culture.

Those bastards!!!

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2 points

Maybe the OSS are the real socialism!

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2 points

It’s a great read

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1 point

Wow, that’s literally what Maxim Katz in Opposition Council did

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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111 points

these people already all fucking hate each other. They spend all their time arguing about minutiae

Oh shit, The Onion has clearly infiltrated a few leftist groups in their time. That’s fucking hilarious.

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95 points

Left-wing groups: disorganized

Right-wing groups: incredibly bad at opsec

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74 points

Yet it still ends up as:

Left-wing groups: Beaten and arrested by police for peacefully protesting.

Right-wing groups: Attempt to overthrow democracy, get off scot-free.

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-38 points

get off scot-free

Given how they are being systematically hunted down and sentenced to long prison sentences one after the other and from the bottom up, I don’t think this is accurate.

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52 points
*

Commission data show that the D.C. court’s sentences for Jan. 6 defendants who assaulted police is below the national average.

Since Jan. 6 cases began, the average sentence imposed by D.C. federal judges in the Capitol attack under guidelines for serious assaults climbed to 46 months from 41 months but is still below the nationwide average of 51 months in 2022.

As of last month

Even directly assaulting cops got these fuckers below average sentences, let alone the literal act of trying to overthrow democracy.

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22 points

A few years for treason is not long.

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-12 points

In what prison Putin is now? Here’s the answer.

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-48 points
*

Buildings burn and people die when overthrow is attempted. Therefore that’s exaggeration.

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46 points

People did die…

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7 points
*

Your dictionary sucks lol

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6 points

🤓

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25 points

Can’t have bad opsec if you don’t have an op to sec.

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12 points

Well that’s where the FBI comes in

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5 points

It’s hard to justify infiltrating activist groups like Food Not Bombs if they never plan an attack on a federal building. For a fun listen, the second season of Bundyville talks about a small group with “anti-government” leanings and how the Feds tried to encourage them to act violently. My favorite part is when one Fed texted another Fed questioning their exact plan, because the cell of five members had multiple Feds! Multiple Feds to infiltrate and influence (what’s the exact line for entrapment I wonder) a small number of people and even then they were ineffective. I guess there weren’t enough lonely autistic teens in the group.

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6 points

Ineffectual versus incompetent.

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3 points

Around here they are definitely the same picture

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90 points
*

This is too funny and hits the mark. Groups like ANTIFA and BLM during the protests don’t get to be traceable groups exactly because of alphabet agency interest. Behind the Bastards podcast talks about their opsec being deliberately lacking organization of a sort exactly because they knew getting a distributed and traceable hierarchy of leadership would get everyone arrested, the were actively being infiltrated by alphabet agency types. They went out of their way to operate in independent cells of which only a few members had a way to contact another member in a group, etc. so that there was no list of leaders and members to be found. Deliberate disorganization. The Onion nails it again.

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14 points

The Harpers in the Forgotten Realms operate this way

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5 points
*

It’s known as a (part of a?) security culture. The least amount of information is required to operate, the better.

And yeah, BtB are great.

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3 points
*

Anti-antifa police branch when 😂

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1 point

That’s just, like, a long long way to run, man.

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0 points

Never listened to that podcast before. Any idea which episode that was?

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2 points

No, sorry. It’s been a year or three since I heard it, and I don’t remember if it was one of the It Could Happen Here episodes or a regular BtB one. You might have better luck than me searching for it. He primarily focused on the Portland protests.

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0 points

Shit, you just reminded me of it could happen here. lol.

I started listening to it a while after the 2020 protests, while living in Portland, and was super surprised realizing that it was from like a year or two before.

Man, that one was scary. By then we had those big fires where crazy fucks and their pig friends were blocking roads and stopping people to ask where they were going because they’d been told that antifa was starting the fires. That’s when I realized it would legit be impossible to try and escape back to CA in an emergency.

I said this recently, I’ll say it again here. I’ll never forget how Americans turned on protestors in Portland. This is America

/rant ✌🏽

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35 points

This has already happened with things like Tsunami in Catalonia. A totally decentralised movement that the police is still trying to understand 6y later and trying to find a nonexistant leadership. Incredible fun to watch them trying to understand how it worked

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