Putting an org’s logo on a protest callout is not “working together”. Normally it’s just “hey is [org] ok to have their name on this” “yeah go ahead”, and I imagine that’s the case here.

In any case, the US left is pathetic. It’s not the left that needs to unite, but the working class. Remember that the majority of people who fought for the Red Army during the revolution were not communists; the revolutionary subject is the entire proletariat, not communists.

Get a burner phone with a removable battery that doesn’t have a camera (or cover it) and only use public WiFi.

This advice really depends on what you need to do. Most people in this boat would benefit more from using something like GrapheneOS that provides actual security. If you’re talking about cheap burner phones you can buy for a bit of cash, those will be running proprietary OSes and using entirely unencrypted comms like SMS. Besides, their association with people like drug dealers means that I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them come with purpose-built spyware preinstalled. The burners will work for some narrow use cases, or if you can’t get your hands on a Pixel phone, but for most people with state level threat models it’s poor advice.

If it’s just like, using a friend’s IP address, it’s not really serving the same privacy purposes as you won’t have the same IP address as loads of people, unlike using a commercial privacy VPN. I use Mullvad which is notorious for being blocked a lot, and even I can use the internet nearly completely unimpeded.

You can torrent fine without port forwarding, but having port forwarding is helpful for seeding (which everyone who can safely do it (i.e. everyone who can afford a decent VPN) should do; it’s good etiquette and keeps torrents alive). Without port forwarding you can only seed to people who do have port forwarding, whereas with port forwarding you can seed to everyone.

Mullvad or IVPN if you don’t need port forwarding. AirVPN if you need port forwarding.

“Severe US Deformation” could be your white Maoist band name. Add a couple dollar symbols and SSes of course.

1. Ask questions (to yourself, but to other people works too). Why did the author make this decision? Why are things this way? If you ask “why” questions you’ll come up with your own interpretation of the game.

2. You just kinda have to spend a lot of time thinking about it. There are some pieces of media I’ve really liked for a long time and as a result I have fairly developed views on them just from the length of time I’ve been thinking about them.