Anyone interested in reading Soviet partisans manuals with me?
Yes. We had a tactics comm that I liked a lot but it was closed. I'm not sure why? I assumed its content was worrying some people.
/c/tactics
Tactics posts are probably my favourite posts. I know it might be few and far between them but I do think it's good having a space around to encourage that content.
I think the tactics stuff is also very dependent on what's currently happening. There was a lot to talk about during BLM and then it got quiet. There were some interesting tactics posts around the Ukraine war particularly because of combat footage of infantry battles. Maybe there'd be some tactics posts right now about student protest tactics. But in-between global quiet periods there won't be much.
Maybe /c/effort would be a good place for tactics posts?
Sounds good but I think regardless of what is in the manuals we should continually discredit its validity in modern times for Minecraft purposes so as to not attract attention. Knowmsayin?
Sounds fun, also I think we should train like Robert The Bruce trained the Scots with pikes
That does sound pretty interesting and I’d be up for checking it out. Also, not sure if this would fit, but I’ve been curious for awhile to learn more about propaganda, including how it works, how to identify it, and how to use it. I feel like that would be some pretty useful knowledge maybe.
There's the oldschool PR stuff like that of Edward Bernays' (may he rot in piss for all that he did to Guatemala and women).
There's the newer era of propaganda tactics that are countercultural and draw heavily upon the works associated with Letterist International and situationism, particularly Debord and the concept of détournement.
Then there's the in between space that is like Soviet realism art and things like protest slogans that aren't really in either of those camps, generally speaking, although a protest slogan is a lot like an advertising jingle I guess. You also find a lot of performance art-related protest stuff that falls into this space too. Art theory comes into play here oftentimes.
For media literacy there's Inventing Reality by Parenti, of course, and less great is Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. There's also stuff like Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Wheeler.
I think that one of the best tools for countering propaganda is having a solid grasp of logic. As in, doing a free online university course in logic and not like "searching up which logical fallacy I can shoehorn your statement into fitting" kinda logic; if you can trace out an argument and how it is framed then you are in a much better place to identify counter propaganda. It's also quite fun once you have a solid grasp of the basics of logic because a lot of people don't, especially R*dditor types, and you can usually run rings around that type of person because you'll be able to deconstruct their argument and identify where they're signalling that the argument is heading and you can pre-empt it (or even get them to agree/disagree with a proposition which will later undermine where their argument is going), which is kinda fun to rub in people's faces if they're being shitheads about the whole thing.
Depends on what you're most interested in and where you want to take it. Any study in English, philosophy, sociology, statistics, psychology, art theory, media studies, and history can all be used in service of either creating good propaganda or countering propaganda. (Well, almost any)
