maysaloon

tl;dr I view lack of organization as one of the biggest weaknesses of boycotts of our time, and an app to help organize it may be beneficial.

Some thoughts

• boycotts can work
• many boycotts don't work
• in my opinion, boycotts work best when they are: well organized, clear stated goal and demand, and have large participation
• boycotts that are lifestyle oriented, indefinite, too general (encompassing too many products or companies) and do not have clear demands have low participation and do not work as well.
• In general, people tend to follow trends, and participation drops when a boycott takes too long
• in my opinion, boycotts are much more effective when they focus on a few targets at a time for maximum damage, to deliver their political message and bring attention to their movement. On the other hand, issuing a boycott against a large number of companies will have lower participation and will be harder for regular people to follow.

I think having an app can be helpful for organizing. Here is what the app can do:

• show you the boycotts with the most participants (or let you indicate your participation). This will encourage the user to participate when there are other participants
• shows you the rationale for the boycott, with sources and evidence.
• shows you the boycott's most common demands and political message.
• shows you progress on the demands or the political message.

The app can also serve as a database for all active boycotts, their rationale, demands, progress, timeline and participants.

What are your thoughts? do you have any recommendations for me if I make this app?

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/731575

It seems there are a lot of propaganda arising on certain lemmy instances parroting propaganda that lemmygrad and Communists support human rights violations, and equating Communists to the alt right.

This is an extremely ridiculous assertion, given the historical context of the left being the main force fighting Nazism and fascism. But I write this post as there are probably many people misled by all the dishonest propaganda out there, who may be accepting of reason before seeking to silence us.

Please link this post in other instances if they are parroting propaganda about Communists to justify demonizing us. Reasonable people will understand and oppose these motions.

What is NOT Communism? in short, communism is NOT:

• "when the government does stuff"
• "capitalism but everyone gets paid the same"
• an incursion on personal freedom, or forcing people to do what they don't want (unless the thing they don't want is not exploiting others and not wishing mass murder on ethnic groups, etc).

Then what is communism? in simple terms, it is the belief that the working class (i.e. the people, the masses) must own the means of production (factories, work places, etc) and control the direction of production in society, so that we produce for our own needs rather than to fulfill profits.

Why? we spend most of our lifetime working, so why should we cater it towards profits of a minority class of capitalists rather than our own and out community's needs and wants? Why shouldn't we be masters of our own destinies?

You may not agree with this, but this is not an excuse to silence us or lump us with genocidal ideologies

This thread is not meant to convince you with communism, but to demystify it and break the cold war era propaganda that some of you continue to parrot.

you support USSR? What about their human rights violations? (applies to Cuba, China, etc)

We do, but we do not support human rights violations as we believe there are tons of propaganda surrounding this. Equating this with Nazism is EXTREMELY DISINGENUOUS. The prevailing propaganda against the USSR is even acknowledged by NATO countries themselves. Nazism is an ideology founded on genocide, and this is easy to verify from Hitler's writing himself.

Maybe in the end, we are wrong and despite the propaganda, there are human rights violations. But our support for the USSR comes from their achievements to better the human condition, and we hope to build on it. There are no human rights violation that inspires our ideology like it does for fascism or Nazism.

Disclaimer: I am just a random Communist. I have no authority over lemmygrad or connections to the admins, just to make sure I don't upset the admins saying this.