agitprop

This is not a request but merely a suggestion to consider if there is capacity within the mod team:

A calendar of important upcoming political and agitational(?) events

The way I see it, we did well (special mention to comrade Cowbee for being the exemplar) upon the Harris defeat/Trump win but I think as radicals we could, and honestly should, do better - we knew the election was coming up. We knew it was going to be Trump or Harris. I can't think of anyone who wasn't aware that this was happening. But we waited to act until after the election results came out.

Why? Should we not be ahead of the game and preparing our efforts at agitating prior to these known events? We were all talking about the upcoming election here, myself included so don't think that this crit isn't extending inwards and I'm not kicking myself (especially for waiting until now to raise this issue), but nobody put their hand up to say "Maybe this very large and world-affecting political event where we know exactly when it will occur should be used as an opportunity to agitate and educate, and maybe we should prepare for it?". I didn't. I can and should do better.

But what we can do is learn and ~~groan~~ grow from this, to organise better. (I'm frustrated with myself at the thought of me talking big about agitation/education/organising and not stopping to ask myself how to do those things in preparation for a moment that matters and usually only comes around once every four years.) And I think it would be great if the mod team would consider a calendar of upcoming known events at first so we can organise our efforts around them. Don't know the results of the presidential election? That's fine. How many outcomes did you anticipate from it? We can organise around one outcome, so it's not like we couldn't organise around an event where there are two known outcomes with just a little bit more effort.

I think if this is a success and it doesn't put undue burden on the modteam, this idea could be expanded and we could consider adopting a newsmedia model. Those ghouls have pieces ready to hit the presses in a matter of minutes for when a prominent figure dies (or, in Chomsky's case, survives). Surely we can do the same while probably inspiring a lot of optimism because we will literally be plotting the inevitable demise of our most hated political enemies. If there's a lot of agitational contributions on a megathread for George W Bush's death for example, when that hellspawn finally kicks the bucket and relieves the world of his sinister presence it would be a simple matter to dredge up the old megathread and start putting all the turboposting to good use. What, is that sick scumbag going to achieve anything else notable in his detestable existence? Unlikely. He's done. We can put together his ~~eulogy~~ diseulogy now and gleefully await his death.

Doesn't that sound kinda fun? We would get to celebrate his death twice, if you look at it from the right perspective!

(Sorry for being so negative and critical. I know this is off-brand for me. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed and maybe it's because I'm so disappointed in myself that it's dimmed my typically gentle and encouraging tone. I still love all my comrades )

Edit: I realised I have more to say about this and it's really about driving the key message of my post home. I have worked to support comrade Cowbee's efforts through DMs. He generously offered to credit me in his post but I refused, so if you are asking why he's taking all the credit it's because I was supporting him for the sake of helping my comrade's efforts and I'm not interested in glory or self-aggrandizement. So don't come for him because he stole no work, I gave him my input explicitly denying credit, and come for me instead I guess?

So when Cowbee made his first draft post, I checked over it and realised that I had a lot of those works uploaded as audiobooks on TankieTube. I made a list and started filling it out to find that I had all bar ~3 in audiobook format, almost all of them professional ones, so I collected up a list and contacted him to invite him to add this to his post. Obviously audiobooks increase accessibility and that's a big thing for me with regards to disability justice/liberation but lots of people don't sit down and read these days while plenty can be enticed to listen to audiobooks.

I fleshed out the audiobook offerings as much as possible and that's where you see the addition of those to Cowbee's post. But I was scrambling to make it happen. I'm not complaining, I'll do the work where the work is required but if I wasn't ahead on this with all the audiobooks downloaded and upped to TT and categorised etc. then it would have been an immense scramble to achieve this. Luckily it wasn't this time but by rights it shouldn't ever be a scramble.

The upshot of linking people to TT is that there's a lot of audiobooks of theory and more agitation/education works and adjacent works available there which aren't available anywhere else on the clearnet as far as I'm aware (and I go trawling through the Russian side of the internet and I dip my toe in the Chinese side of the internet so believe me when I say I cast a wide net in this regard). By directing people to head to TT , there's a good chance that they will undergo some self-agitation and autodidactic efforts as they start branching out and bookmarking other interesting audiobooks and documentaries and the like that they will discover over there for themselves. The place is a huge resource and tbh even we are sleeping on it. I say this without intending to drag Cowbee, the user who has by far put in the most effort towards this recent push as anyone to my knowledge, but even he was surprised to learn that I had all of this stuff sitting on a metaphorical shelf collecting dust. I'm sure if he knew, he would have added in all the available audiobooks on his own initiative. But if one of our strongest posters isn't aware of the absolute trove that TT has become very rapidly over the past few months since launch then whomst among us does?

You can ask yourself why I haven't created a Comrade Cowbee's playlist in TT yet - anyone can do it ;)
But I do intend set about making that happen in the next couple of days as spoons avail themselves to me in sufficient quantity for me to lock in on the tasks I need to do to make a clean playlist that accurately represents Cowbee's current iteration of the masterpost.