Unfortunately they are the revisionists

Note that anon edits log your IP address, unfortunately we can't change that so I recommend a VPN or similar if you want. All claims also need to be sourced except for stuff that we can reasonably expect people won't bother checking (such as dates of birth, nationality or full names).

I echo what @cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml wrote and would like to add some of my own thoughts as well.

I checked the book you linked out and was surprised by Sison's argument, in that he said:

the term "people’s war" may be flexibly used to mean the necessary armed revolution by the people to overthrow the bourgeois state in an industrial capitalist country. But definitely, what ought to be protracted is the preparation for the armed revolution with the overwhelming participation of the people.

I find this interesting and will need to check more of him out. I can't read the entire book right now but looked through a bit of the initial arguments (Sison - Kinera - Belissario).

Sison's argument in this portion is basically that PPW starts at the point where organization for it is made. In this way any revolutionary act is an act of PPW. That's usually different from what most Maoists seem to think of when they say PPW and that's why I found it interesting.

Kinera seems to confirm my initial thoughts as he basically says that PPW is when you take up weapons. To illustrate that he points to various imperial core groups:

The Red Brigades of Italy was active from 1970 up to 1988. The Red Army Faction of Germany was active from 1970 up to 1998. Japanese Red Army was active from 1971 to 2001. The Weather Underground was active in the US from 1969 to 1977. The Black Liberation Army was active in the US from 1970 to 1981.

That all failed. They all got killed or captured. The previous sentence right before he lists them is "It is simply not true that an armed group must be overwhelmed by "the huge army" (!) as soon as it acts."

But what does it matter that the huge army becomes overwhelming 20 years later rather than 6 months later? The point of fighting is to succeed.

That's about all I can say about the book at this time anyway before I read it fully. But it leaves me at an impasse. It just leaves the taste in my mouth that Maoists want you to pick up a weapon and die to the bourgeoisie for martyrdom at your earliest convenience.

Palestine is waging PPW. Vietnam waged PPW. The Incas waged PPW. Revolutionary war doesn't have to be communist, certainly. But the impasse it leaves me at is that by making it universal, then it's not PPW, it's just war, and the word has no reason to exist and be debated as if it's something unique or different. I think Belissario talks about this in the third article:

Take note that in his two articles, Kinera sometimes uses the term "protracted people’s war" and at other times simply "people’s war". But it’s clear, especially when he argues vs. Sison, that he treats the two as interchangeable terms in the context of the theory’s "universality." This is a crucial weakness in Kinera’s arguments, since the protracted character of the people’s wars that liberated China and Vietnam has a precise socio-economic context and political-military meaning for agrarian or semifeudal countries that are oppressed by imperialism as colonies or semi-colonies. It is not merely expressed in numbers of years that armed revolutions in industrial countries could quantitatively measure up to.

It starts at a semantic distinction but it does lead to establishing differences. If PPW is not simple people's war, then it has material differences that warrant it being called protracted people's war specifically. And the universality of these conditions that make it specifically PPW is what must be debated. In that way I don't think Sison is making a particulary Maoist argument, and this struck me as soon as I read him; he's basically saying "as soon as you prepare for revolution then you are waging revolution" and being revolutionary is not something Maoism owns, even if western Maoists like Kinera seem to think so.

So even in saying that Palestine, China and Vietnam waged PPW I don't feel entirely confident. They waged war mainly against foreign occupiers for national liberation, not against their own bourgeoisie. And yes I know the history of the CPChina, I wrote about it too.

Interested to read at least the first three papers in the book though. Maybe it answers my question above.

Also, you might be interested in this book if you're delving into the topic of Maoism: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_CIA's_Shining_Path:_Political_Warfare

They didn't get him but that's not the point. Kill Mileikowski and Grün takes his place. The point is to let him and all of "Israeli" society know they're not safe anywhere. 3 drones were launched and avoided detection. This is a recurring pattern; remember Iran's strike on October 1. The deadly lunch just a few days ago (still need to find a funny name for it).

Everything goes through the Iron Colander and Hezbollah is showing this to the settlers in the most direct way.

PFLP confirmed the news on Al-Mayadeen according to aldanmarki on Twitter so moratorium is lifted. Yahya Sinwar has been martyred while fighting on the frontlines in Gaza.

Nothing until Hamas makes an announcement

As long as it's after the resistance makes a statement!

Yeah, anons can edit main wiki pages and the edits go into a moderation queue where trusted editors can approve or reject. It's quite new, I think from some time this summer?

Then the application form should be to write a wiki article for something that doesn’t have one yet [...]

Certainly, but like I explained in my previous comment once editors get access they can write about anything they want and we kinda have to trust that they know what they're talking about, or spend time and effort patrolling all their edits and discussing if it's factual or not and if we should remove or not. We need to know as much as we can about them which involves all sorts of topics.

Why should I (or anyone else for that matter) have to answer them again?

I meant specifically the Lemmygrad questions, sorry for the confusion. The Lemmygrad vetting questions haven't changed since we first started account vetting actually, except for the anti-AI question that's a copy and paste task. ProleWiki is completely independent from Lemmygrad as a project and while we can use someone's Lemmygrad profile (or other profiles) to help expedite their account request if they tell us the info, they still have to answer the questions at this time. It's not that easy to change the PW vetting or any other system we have there as decisions are made collectively with the editorship, so almost everything takes a while to discuss and implement.

Imo and from reading the comments the consensus seems to be that the post isn't quite loli but was still disliked. A co-admin already removed the post but the discussion is still good to continue. However, I think it's worth recentering the discussion on the post itself and expand to posts like it that may appear, because "loli" has by itself not really been a problem or something that's even come up on Lemmygrad. Like when I hear "loli" I think little kids with exaggerated childlike traits being treated like adults including potrayed sexually. I don't know personally if I would say this post is loli regardless of what else it may be.

Under rule 4 we already remove all sexually explicit content so there's no risk of explicit porn or loli being posted. To that end if you haven't already please check the original post (if still possible, I don't know if you can open removed posts as a user) before commenting.

edit: since you can't see post here's the picture that was in it. It's nothing visually explicit, you can open this link safely. https://lemmygrad.ml/pictrs/image/7d605124-e786-414f-a336-60927854c60c.jpeg?format=webp

It was surprising the first time I realized trolls were very blatant about their intentions. Except for a certain thermonuclear one, but he's an exception. I don't know why they don't put in effort, they probably get dopamine from just submitting troll answers and that's all they need.

check my answer itt

In regards to Lemmygrad we keep it very simple. I think the questions are the same ones you had to answer back when you made your account, with the addition of a copy-paste job meant to prevent AI (and it works great). There's essentially 4 questions and you can keep it to one-two lines per answer because we have other systems on top of this one. On a forum like this trolls usually come out pretty quickly and get found out eventually because they keep posting. If they never post then they're not really a troll and cause no bother.

In my experience trolls and other bad actors actually don't bother trying to infiltrate the questions, they answer earnestly. Most of the rejections on lemmygrad are bots and people who wouldn't fit in here, so we direct them to an instance that would be better for them.

I can also shed light on the ProleWiki vetting since I'm involved in fashioning it. We start from the premise that if you are going to be writing long articles on an encyclopedia, then you would be more likely to answer a longer vetting form. Experience tells us that our premise is not entirely wrong for two reasons:

1. We ask for feedback on the process at the end of the form and people tell us that they actually enjoy the questions, it forces them to think about things they might not have known about before. There's a possibility that this is biased, i.e. the people that enjoy the process are the ones that go to the end of it in the first place, but -
2. We used to exist without a vetting process, you just had to tell us a bit about yourself freeform, and we didn't get that many more account requests than we do currently. I think our average number of account requests has been pretty consistent since 2021.

This leads us to believe the barrier to entry is somewhere else and that the vetting form doesn't factor in all that much.

The questions are designed to tell us a lot about the prospective editor, there's a need to prevent bots which is a huge problem on Mediawiki, but we also need to make sure new editors are knowledgeable in all topics, i.e. that they are marxists. We want to be sure our editors won't publish wrong or controversial information based on vibes. Once you get an account you can edit any page, so it's totally possible that your area of expertise is in economics and you don't know a lot about philosophy for example, but it works on the honor system and you promise to yourself you won't edit philosophy pages. If we didn't ask questions about philosophy we would never know that.

I agree with having people talk about themselves, but I don't think one necessarily needs open-ended questions for that. What I find with that type of question is that people usually keep it short instead, which ends up providing very little information about them. When evaluating an account request on ProleWiki we normally only have their answers to go with and nothing else. If something is not made explicit in the answers, then we won't know about that thing, so we need to encourage answers to be exhaustive.

The goal of this exhaustive process is not to gatekeep people but to make sure they have the knowledge required to become autonomous editors basically.

You were also wondering about the Principles. We have edited the principles to reflect editor commentary, e.g. wording or when we see the same point of confusion arise across different account requests. It allows us to see how people interpret our principles and we can also talk to them about that. There's major disagreements that lead to a request being denied, and then there's minor disagreements that arise from a reading misunderstanding (we can correct that by talking to the editor afterwards), or that as long as you agree not to reflect that disagreement in your edits is fine to live along with. If the question was simply "repeat that you agree to our principles and will not break them" we would be losing that self-crit component and might also be losing out on some requests because they feel a major disagreement that is actually only minor after we're able to talk with them about it.

It's a lengthy process but by our estimations it takes around 45 minutes on average to go through. This is a lot of time for some people and very little for others, but we are mindful of how long the process takes (along with how people discover it and how we can improve all of that package). The website doesn't save it I think, which is something I'd like it to do, and I also think there's too much text before the questions proper, but you should be able to copy the questions to Word, answer them at your pace there, and paste back into the PW form when you're done. That way you don't have to answer them all in one sitting.

edit: I wanted to add this but forgot. I like the idea of giving people one page to edit to see how they write etc. This is doable through the newish anon edits feature we rolled out some time back. But we might run into the same problem that this only tells us one facet of the prospective editor. But it's something I can definitely see us explore eventually.

Cushy non jobs for his friends and family I would assume

Changing theme seems to work on my end, I'm on desktop. I would suggest trying a different device otherwise maybe @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml might be able to help.

Are you clicking the Save button at the very bottom of the section where you change your display name?

(compliment)

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading! They mentioned it in my high school history classes as part of the Cold War, but we basically spent maybe two classes on it and then moved on as "nothing major happened". The Battle at Chosin Reservoir wasn't "minor" though. It's still called the Forgotten War nowadays in the West because our involvement didn't last very long compared to WW2 and Vietnam and it gets kinda sandwiched between the two. I doubt that for Koreans it was as silent as it is for us.

I don't think anyone needs further comments with the body of content readily available below but it's customary that we leave a comment when we lock a topic.

Long story short everyone who commented on this thread disagreed with Larkin's sequence of events, and eventually it was reflected that most of them were getting tired of him insulting them and trying to rile them up when they were just trying to help as third-party observers. It's right around here in this comment chain: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5943585/5296505

This was the main prompt for Larkin's final, permanent ban. I'm locking the topic because there's not much else to say here now that he's been banned.

The other factors for this ban were that he was changing his discourse depending on where the other person was sympathizing with him, showing he had no good faith. We knew that from the moment he posted this thread (you can read the OP above) but this is the purpose of this community, to let people appeal their ban.

His attempts at splitting this community over imagined mod abuse didn't take and I have no doubt that he'll go into his other communities crying about what an injustice this is but this entire thread is available as evidence, so you can judge for yourself.

edit: because this was also a point of contention and seems to be sparking a discussion, Larkin makes references to a thread that he considers to be "kiddy porn" even though it's not porn by any stretch of the imagination but whatever. He claims to have made reports about the thread at the time (15 days ago) but I've been ctrl+f'ing in the reports log and cannot find any report about this thread or its comments in the timeframe. The log is a bit difficult to navigate but it should still show up with a search.

I am impressed with this, it’s honestly better than I expected.

Oh fuck off and delete your account already, save us the click. I told you several times we don't delete comments or ban and you insulted me over it every chance you got by convincing yourself I was trying to threaten you or ban you, and the moment you realize people aren't following along in your attempts to wreck this community you change your discourse completely.

Go back to reddit you'll fit better there. Bye.