r/swoletariat

I hesitated for a while and finally decided to put a clear face to the account!

After watching Jim Queen (incredible movie, GO SEE IT) I wanted to take the persona and outfit to Pride, I even custom-made this DEEP tank top with the help of one of my lovers.

Some swoletarian comrades recognized the "cosplay" and, with light in their eyes, asked if they could also pose in the pics 🥰

Stay strong and look out for our communities, comrades. 🏳️‍🌈💪

A long time ago I posted a pic of me on this sub deadlifting 420 imperialist units (blaze it), eventually working up to 220 kg (485 lbs). Then I destroyed my lower back about a year ago.

Last week I finally came back to my old weights, 220 kg deadlift and 170 kg squat! It's not much but it was a long road to recovery, I'm so happy to finally be back 💪

Stay strong, stay swole, smash fascists.

Big squat today, 495x2. I’m heading in to the last week of my Silly Goose Lifting Club program ready to hit a big single.

We’re also gaining traction as a gym community, coming out of the summer slump. I try to make it easy to join and easy to quit, never charging fees, sliding scale, inexpensive training options… it’s tough being a business trapped in the capitalist hellscape but we’ve tried our best to be a good community member.

Yesterday I made a post endorsing the defense technology company Palantir. I proudly stand by that endorsement because I think Palantir makes systems that keep the free world safer and reduce the effectiveness of its enemies.

In the conversation that followed, some folks had a problem with me endorsing mass surveillance (I didn’t). When I asked a question (“what’s wrong with mass surveillance?”), I didn’t ask this rhetorically to endorse mass surveillance. I asked it literally because I wanted to see what folks had problems with, specifically, about mass surveillance. Because I myself have a few huge problems with mass surveillance, but I understand it also has potential upsides.

After working through a lot of posts and filtering out rather unhelpful comments like “kill yourself, kike,” I realized that both:

A lot of folks didn’t understand my position on mass surveillance.
Almost no one could actually cogently explain the downsides AND upsides of mass surveillance. Maybe they could, but they sure mostly didn’t.

So, here are my views on mass surveillance:

1.) First, what do I even mean by “mass surveillance”?

There is an enormous difference between mass surveillance of PUBLIC behavior and mass surveillance of PRIVATE behavior.

Public surveillance means systematic observation/recording of what people do in genuinely public spaces. Streets, airports, train stations, public buildings, etc.

Private surveillance means accessing what you do in your home, your private communications, medical information, etc.

I’m quite open to the former. I’m VERY skeptical of the latter without a warrant.

2.) The downside of mass surveillance is in its potential for at least two kinds of harms:

a.) Private individuals abusing access powers. Like a cop checking out vids of his ex gf and using them to harass her current bf.

b.) Governments being able to ferret out dissidents without due process by spying on them, mapping their associations, and locating them.

This second one is a very real downside. Better surveillance can make repression more precise and can help authoritarian governments discover opposition networks before they become powerful.

3.) The upside of mass surveillance is also at least twofold:

c.) Being able to stop terrorist organizations from causing harm by locating and interdicting them ahead of time.

d.) Being able to both deter and prosecute conventional crimes like theft, rape, and murder. If serious crimes happen in observable public environments, surveillance can make offenders much easier to identify and convict, and can potentially deter some crimes from happening in the first place. Over time, this can reduce the numbers of repeat offenders out in public and make society way, way safer.

4.) One point I think people MASSIVELY overestimate: lack of surveillance is not a particularly robust defense against tyranny.

Totalitarian governments don’t need perfect information to terrorize their populations.

If an unconstrained government suspects that one of 20 people is a dissident, it doesn’t need a sophisticated surveillance system to figure out which one. It can arrest all 20. It can arrest their families. It can punish their associates. It can manufacture charges. Or it can simply disappear people.

In fact, brutality can compensate for shitty information remarkably well. And indiscriminate punishment can itself become part of the terror: if merely associating with a dissident puts YOU at risk, everyone suddenly has a massive incentive to stay away from dissidents.

That DOES NOT mean surveillance has no value to authoritarian governments. Of course it does. Better information makes repression easier and more precise.

My point is that surveillance is not the limiting factor on totalitarianism. Unrestrained government power is.

North Korea managed to become an unimaginably repressive society without needing 2026 surveillance technology.

5.) So how do we make the right directional tradeoff between the upsides and downsides of surveillance? Perhaps in at least 3 ways:

e.) Limiting mass government surveillance primarily to public spheres. Private surveillance should generally require specific legal authorization, usually a warrant, with a high evidentiary threshold and independent judicial oversight.

f.) The power of government to punish people needs MASSIVE restraint and checks and balances. Due process. Documented legal authority. Independent courts. Judicial review. The right to appeal. And maximum civil liberties: freedom of speech, association, assembly, religion, property, etc.

The primary defense against tyranny shouldn’t be hoping the government is too blind to find you. It should be making the government radically constrained in what it is allowed to do to you.

g.) All mass surveillance systems need to, BY DESIGN, track who uses them, what they accessed, when they accessed it, and why, without the option to turn those features off.

Massive transparency and auditability.

If I’m a dirty cop spying on my ex gf, the system should know I logged in, exactly what I looked at, when I looked at it, and ideally why I claimed I needed access. There should be huge regular oversight and serious consequences for misuse.

And this principle should run BOTH DIRECTIONS. If citizens are highly observable when they act in public, cops and government officials exercising public power should be extraordinarily observable too. Public power should leave evidence.

My full thoughts on surveillance are more nuanced, but that’s the gist.

And I endorse Palantir in part precisely because I think they understand these tradeoffs very well. One of the things I particularly like about their approach is the emphasis on access controls, permissions, auditability, and accountability over who accessed what data and why. I think that’s the direction surveillance technology SHOULD develop: more capable, but also more accountable.

The society I want isn’t one in which government is maximally blind. It’s one in which private life is heavily protected, public conduct is highly visible, government coercion is radically constrained, and the use of surveillance power itself is surveilled.

Let me know what you guys think. I promise you my intentions are for all of us to be more safe AND more free.

And if you still want to call me a Kike after all that, at least capitalize the K. Have some fucking standards, pimps!

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Gained 2 kg in July, currently at 64 kg / 141 lbs.
Training 5 days a week (3 lower-body days, 2 upper-body days).
1 cheat meal a month.
I’ll probably start cutting around October.
Coach & consulting team: workout routine + nutritionist:
@feehzanfra / @teamzanfra

Don’t be like me comrades. “Working through it” isn’t always the best move.

Getting to really see the added mass from a bulking phase is pretty rewarding. Really makes you buy into the long process and not question things during those weeks where it seems like progress stalls a bit.