HeavenlyPossum

https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum

Anarchist, communist, opossum. But then, I repeat myself.

My Email: TheHeavenlyPossum@proton.me
My Thread of Threads: https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/110016655952719317
Support My Work: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/HeavenlyPossum
My Profile Picture: A painting of a reclining opposum, clutching its chest with one paw as if gasping with shock.

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Last Notes

2024-08-29 06:04:36

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Michael Hudson has written extensively about Jesus as an economic rebel who demanded the return of the Jubilee, with its debt erasure and freedom for slaves:
https://michael-hudson.com/2017/01/the-land-belongs-to-god/

2024-08-11 07:03:55

Dear liberals,
Both
“Donald Trump will enable genocide in Gaza for corrupt, venal, and racist reasons,”
and
“Joe Biden is enabling genocide in Gaza for structural, political reasons,”
result in genocide in Gaza.
Love,
Possum

2024-08-10 18:45:11

Considering how close Prighozin got to Moscow during the Wagner rebellion last year, let’s see if these Ukrainians can’t get even closer.

2024-08-09 23:16:33

Solidarity with the Russian civilians being bombed by the Russian government to protect the Putin regime from the consequences of a war of imperialist aggression he started.

2024-08-07 21:22:06

I’m old enough to remember when suggesting Joe Biden step down from the race was among the most treasonous things a person could do

2024-08-05 17:14:39

White privilege is knowing the Nazis operating checkpoints in the UK won’t immediately recognize you as an adversary or target.

2024-08-02 07:37:14

When someone advocates for reducing poverty and increasing education as non-genocidal options for lowering birth rates, out of concern for overpopulation, they’re tattling on themselves.
People living in poverty, lacking education, are disproportionately likely to be brown and live in the global south. People living with wealth and enjoying education are disproportionately likely to be white and live in the global north.
The former also tend to have much smaller environmental impacts than the latter:
“The richest 1% of the world’s population produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 as the five billion people who made up the poorest two-thirds of humanity, reveals a new report from Oxfam.”
If we identify the problem as “too many people,” we are equally indicting *all people,* most of whom contribute marginally to the destruction of the environment and have no say over the systems and institutions that coerce us into overconsumption. But not all people are equally responsible.
https://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity/

2024-08-01 12:23:35

“Humans are a virus” overpopulation rhetoric is inherently fascist, because it identifies other people’s mere existence as a threat to the speaker.
Other people are not a problem or threat by virtue of being alive.

2024-08-01 08:56:10

Statements like “there are too many people in the world” or “people are self-destructive” implicitly position the speaker as being outside the community of humans.
It’s a smug, self-satisfied way of saying “the problem is other people but not me.”
You’re not stuck in traffic; you *are* traffic.

2024-07-29 22:19:29

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Archeologists can do this cool thing: measure the ratios of stable isotopes in ancient bones and teeth. As we go about our lives, our teeth and bones constantly absorb small amounts of elements from the water we drink and the food we eat. By studying ratios of stable isotopes (ie, the ones not prone to radioactive decay, so they leave a permanent signature), we can get a sense of the sorts of foods ancient peoples ate and even a sense of how their diets changed over their lives, or whether they moved from the place of their birth to a new environment.
So, archeologists did this with the bones found in the pit. They figured out that the pit was full of domesticated cattle bones, which probably came from three different locations, each about a day’s walk away from Coneybury.
The Coneybury Anomaly is, then, evidence of a local gathering of probably three different groups of these early farmers, meeting up to share meat and—based on chemical analysis of some pottery fragments—dairy products with each other.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers
2/4

2024-07-29 22:19:29

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I take away a couple of things from this.
First, archeology has radically advanced in the last couple of decades. New scientific techniques, like stable isotope analysis, are driving incredible discoveries and providing unparalleled insight into ancient lives. We’re learning so much all the time.
And second, that encounters between peoples from wildly different communities, with widely divergent subsistence strategies, are not automatically antagonistic or invasive, as I wrote about at length in my last thread. Newcomers with new technologies do not automatically overrun locals. People do not automatically fight each other because they look different or use different kinds of tools or find their food in different ways.
The past has so much to teach us about possibilities in the present.
4/4

2024-07-29 22:19:29

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But! Here’s where it gets really interesting: there was a fourth group at the feast, who seem to have brought deer rather than cattle. And, based on their stable isotopes, the deer had eaten a diet of wild foods, whereas the cattle had feed on a diet of plants that had been previously fertilized with manure.
The pit is also filled with tiny, delicate stone tools known as “microliths” which were a signature technology of the Western Hunter Gatherers.
So there was a fourth group at the Coneybury feast. Three groups of farmers, bringing cattle and other farmed foods, and one group of Hunter gatherers, bringing wild deer they had hunted in the forest.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-prehistoric-society/article/meeting-in-the-forest-hunters-and-farmers-at-the-coneybury-anomaly-wiltshire/D374C0D10E80DA5604482A3F9B7906D3
3/4

2024-07-29 22:19:28

There’s an archeological site in Britain called “the Coneybury Anomaly” (the anomaly part just refers to its discovery via magnetometer survey). It’s a refuse pit located near the modern site of Stonehenge, though it predates the monument. It’s filled with animal bones and little stone tools—the remains of a feast.
It dates back to just under 6,000 years ago. Britain at the time was populated by Western Hunter Gatherers, whom I discussed in my last thread. But farmers had just started arriving in Britain shortly before the pit was dug, descendants of those earlier farmers who migrated out of Anatolia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_hunter-gatherer
1/4

2024-07-28 13:20:55

Thread: the spread of agriculture and the rise of the state.
You have probably heard some variation of this argument:
“Humans are bad in some way—violent, rapacious, hierarchical, etc—because bad social structures outcompete good social structures.”
Violent societies outfight and conquer peaceful societies. Agricultural societies outbreed and swamp non-agricultural societies. Hierarchical societies mobilize more labor and resources and bludgeon egalitarian societies. It’s a sort of folk-Game Theory argument that’s quite popular in certain misanthropic circles, especially among people who enjoy feeling holier-than-thou without explicitly resorting to racist myths or social Darwinism.
1/12

2024-07-26 06:51:16

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What a time to be alive

2024-07-25 17:29:50

“JD Vance fucked a couch” is honestly the only good thing to happen to the US in a long time.

2024-07-24 08:57:33

The law is not some software that the hardware of the state mechanically executes.
Law is the formalization and codification of power.
It is interpreted by those in power to constrain some and privilege others.
It should never come as a surprise that those in power seek and find some tenuously-plausible interpretation of a law to suit their needs, no matter how self-evident the plain-language reading of the law might seem.

2024-07-21 19:30:06

What a wild time to be alive

2024-07-21 09:54:21

Sabotaging crypto server farms is self defense
https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/

2024-07-20 08:57:59

The Romans held a festival every year on 15 February called “Lupercalia.” During the festival, goats and dogs would be sacrificed by a priesthood of young men known as the Luperci—“brotherhood of the wolf”—who would then cut strips of of hide from the sacrificed animals.
These young men would then run naked in a circuit around the city’s walls and ritually strike people with the strips of hide. Women who sought to become pregnant would present their hands to be struck, because they believed this would help them with pregnancy and delivery.
It was, in other words, a fertility festival. Those strips of hide were known as februa, the origin of our word “February.” Lupercalia survives to modern times, shifted a day from the Roman festival calendar, as Valentine’s Day.

2024-07-14 16:01:33

Contra the “humans are a virus” discourse that’s popular among eco-fascists and, unfortunately, a sizable segment of the left that likes to imagine other people (but never them) are The Problem, humans have a long history of sustainably and often *beneficially* interacting with their environments.
“Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth’s land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as ‘natural,’ ‘intact,’ and ‘wild’ generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural.”
In other words, much of the wilderness we imagine as pristine reservoirs of biodiversity is in reality the product of human effort.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023483118

2024-07-14 12:07:05

DSA-types are very worried that an assassination attempt on a fascist leader might interfere with their strategy of very slowly, very gradually doing nothing.

2024-07-14 11:18:53

I will reiterate: sensible liberal decorum is the devotion to the idea that the risk of violence against any one member of the elite is worse than the certainty of massive, constant, grinding violence against everyone else by those same elites.

2024-07-12 19:11:00

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Who?

2024-07-12 11:07:01

The Right has an easier time achieving its political objectives in electoral systems like that of the US because electoral systems like that of the US are fundamentally designed to produce the Right’s political objectives.

2024-07-12 08:28:38

“The only possible appeal of that kind of [centrist] politics is ‘well, at least they’re not Nazis’…It strikes me that what’s called ‘the moderates’ are the most immoderate people possible. And the reason why they’re so uncompromising, I think, is because they realize they don’t have a lot of positive arguments. They’re not really for anything.”
https://davidgraeber.org/videos/david-graeber-on-the-extreme-centre/

2024-07-11 13:48:07

Something that I think a lot of people struggle to internalize, to really feel subjectively, is that a lot of what people did in the past is still present.
People grow up hearing about all sorts of things that people did in history and experience it as *exotic* and *archaic.* ie, “witch hunts” belong to a distant, superstitious, paranoid past, until you hear about some guy shooting up a pizzeria in Washington, DC because he heard Hilary Clinton was drinking the blood of infants to power her occult rituals.
Anyway, I give you the pharaoh and his tomb filled with treasures to accompany him into the afterlife:
https://archive.is/a2ITL

2024-07-11 08:05:04

Campists are crying “fake news” about reports of Putin sending 120,000 or more Russians to die in Ukraine for his fascist adventure and meanwhile the Russian state has been resorting to forcing Indian tourists and migrant workers to fill out its ranks.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/9/families-of-indians-duped-into-russias-war-hope-modi-will-bring-them-home

2024-07-11 05:51:41

Joe Biden should drop out of the election.
So should Donald Trump.
The election should be canceled.
The government should be dissolved.
All states should be disbanded. All capitalists should be dispossessed of their ill-gotten power.
All people should be free.

2024-06-21 05:35:26

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The proof that a source is biased is that it disagrees with what I already believe

2024-06-21 05:19:04

“You had better have sources to back up all those claims!” -> “I refuse to read your sources to back up all those claims”
https://mas.to/@TheEmpororHasNoClothes/112651291940628884

2024-06-20 07:17:33

UK comrades, what’s up with the Lib Dems? My understanding was that they were basically just libertarians but their party platform would seem to put them distinctly to the left of Labour.

2024-06-19 20:05:14

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Even if it were more complex and demanding than a kiln, the principle would remain the same:
I make pots. While I am making pots, a farmer grows food to feed me. While the farmer is growing food, she is clad by a garment worker. While the garment worker is weaving, he is shod by the shoemaker. While the shoemaker is cobbling, they cook their meals in a pot I made. Each worker delivers product to the next, expecting that each will in turn be supplied by those other workers, in a giant and never-ending network of credit.
Those relationships can be organized using money, but they don’t have to be, and even if they do involve money, they don’t have to look anything like capitalism. The capitalist does not produce but *interposes* themself into those networks of credit, skimming off the top by pretending to own the whole effort of all those workers. The “creditor” is similarly just a capitalist who has established a toll booth on the creation of credit itself—you can’t extend credit to other workers without first paying a fee to the creditor.

2024-06-19 18:41:42

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Yes, both are capitalism, which is bad. Both reflect hierarchical structures of “business” that only exist because of structural violence.

2024-06-19 18:02:26

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Owning shares is a synonym for owning someone else’s labor. Just because it can provide some benefits to some people *in the context of capitalism* doesn’t mean it’s actually good or desirable *in general.*

2024-06-19 11:29:48

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And yet, every step of the way, there are leftists who are willing and eager to credulously accept any Russian state lie and dutifully apologize for any Russian state atrocity because they’ve decided that an antagonistic relationship with the US puts the Russian state on some “good team.”
A settler colonial state that commits imperialist interventions on a global scale, ruled by a mafia clique of ultra-rich capitalist oligarchs, is not and cannot be your friend. Cheering for the US against Russia or Russia against the US makes as much sense as medieval peasants cheering for rival lords to come slaughter them, or a beef cow at auction cheering for rival butchers to place the winning bid.
4/

2024-06-19 11:22:26

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When Russia sold Alaska to the US in 1867, it did so as a colonial power, a peer of the US imperialist project. It was not transferring “Russian” territory but rather the lands and indigenous peoples of Alaska, whom Moscow had conquered, as chattel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Russia
2/

2024-06-19 11:22:26

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It is in this context that we can understand much of Russia’s recent behavior on the international stage—its invasion and dismemberment of Georgia; its invasion of Syria and transformation of the Asad regime into a client; its mercenary adventures in Africa’s Sahel region; its pursuit of a naval port in Sudan; and, most saliently, its war of conquest in Ukraine.
Yes, Russia claims pretexts for its imperialist aggression in each of these cases. But just as we’re able to see through those pretexts when other actors claim them—is the IDF really “the most moral army in the world”?—we’re smart enough to see through Moscow’s pretexts as well.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/30269/wagner-group-countries-of-operation/
3/

2024-06-19 11:22:25

Russia is an imperialist, settler-colonial state.
There is a reason there are Russians living from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, more than seven thousand kilometers away: successive iterations of the Russian state ruled from Moscow have invaded, conquered, settled, and ruled vast areas of the Eurasian continent. This was always an explicitly imperialist project replete with frequent genocides against indigenous communities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide
1/

2024-06-17 14:16:14

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What does Ukraine’s status as a former colonial subject of Moscow have to do with Russia’s current relationship with Ukraine?

2024-06-17 13:49:06

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From an anarchist perspective, what do you consider Russia’s valid concerns to be?

2024-06-16 12:26:19

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I’m very familiar with what the Russian state has identified as its grievances, and also what the Russian state’s apologists have identified as its grievances.
I’m asking you, as someone on an anarchist instance who presumably holds anarchist beliefs—such as the foundational rejection of the state as illegitimate—what you believe are the Russian state’s “legitimate” gripes.

2024-06-16 08:33:17

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$25 million for funding a designated terrorist group. Chiquita was sold in 2014 for $1.3 billion. It’s a rounding error. Chiquita has that in loose change in its couch.

2024-06-16 08:30:59

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Since you’re on an anarchist and anti-colonial instance, I’m curious about what gripes you believe the Russian state legitimately holds at all, but especially outside its borders in Ukraine?

2024-06-16 08:23:59

By now, many of you have undoubtedly heard that a Florida court has ruled against Chiquita, ordering the company to pay $38 million to the families of people murdered by right-wing death squads that Chiquita funded in Colombia in the early 2000s.
This is of course a pittance, but still a positive step.
I haven’t dug into the details of the case but two things leap out at me:
- First, the group that Chiquita funded—the AUC—was a US-designated terrorist group at the time. Chiquita was separately fined $25 million a few years ago for that, but it’s wild to imagine how different the reaction would be if the terrorists Chiquita funded were Muslims.
- Second, my many thanks go to Chiquita for once again illustrating the impossibility of capitalism in the absence of state violence, contrary to the claims of ancaps. If powerful and wealthy firms lack state support, they’ll simply hire state-like violence on the market.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/6/11/us-court-says-banana-giant-chiquita-funded-colombian-paramilitary-group

2024-06-16 07:56:38

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Right—that was Minsk II, I think, which for some reason included Russia as a party to talks regarding a dispute among Ukrainians. Russia subsequently conducted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, so I’m wondering how you envision those talks unfolding, ie, what concessions should the Ukrainian people offer to appease Russia to end its aggression?

2024-06-15 20:38:59

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Thanks for your answer, but I was specifically asking about this
“There could have been a peaceful resolution to this conflict a long time ago by the “permanent war” enthusiasts vetoed any dialogue between Ru & Ukr so here we are”
I should have been more specific

2024-06-15 14:39:41

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What kind of peaceful resolution do you think should or could be achieved through dialogue?
@npub1lx7…usf8 @npub16uh…lsxe

2024-06-15 09:48:25

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There is a certain kind of crass genocide denialist who will insist that this or that genocide can’t possibly be happening because the perpetrator has not killed enough victims yet, or hasn’t been killing them quickly enough, to meet some arbitrary model of genocide they hold in their head.
But genocide is not merely *mass murder.* Rather, genocide is the process of destroying a group of people as a distinct community. It certainly does involve mass murder, but it encompasses many other kinds of related crimes—including efforts to stop that community from being able to have children and forcible assimilation of members of that community.
4/4
#genocide #ukraine #russia #palestine #israel #gaza

2024-06-15 09:48:25

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Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has kidnapped and deported possibly *hundreds of thousands* of Ukrainian children. It has subjected these children to forced Russification and adopted them out to Russian families, on a scale that potentially dwarfs the comparable Nazi program that operated over a much vaster area for many more years.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/05/25/fresh-details-russias-forcible-transfer-ukrainian-children
3/4

2024-06-15 09:48:25

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In December, Israeli forces destroyed Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, destroying thousands of frozen embryos and denying hundreds of Palestinians experiencing fertility.
These people—those who haven’t already been murdered—have been denied the possibility of ever becoming parents because of this destruction of yet another medical facility in Gaza.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/5000-lives-one-shell-gazas-ivf-embryos-destroyed-by-israeli-strike-2024-04-17/
2/4

2024-06-15 09:48:24

During its reign of terror, Nazi Germany implemented an effort to encourage reproduction by “racially pure” Germans called the “Lebensborn” program.
Part of this program included the kidnapping of children from conquered territories who met the Nazis’ arbitrary phenotypical qualifications for racial superiority—things blue-eyed and blond-haired. Unlike other members of their communities, who were destined for enslavement or mass murder, the Nazis believed these children could be adopted out to German parents and incorporated into German society.
(Few things emphasize the nonsensical bullshit of Nazi racial theories than this sort of arbitrary selection of “pure” children from “subhuman” communities.)
The Nazis kidnapped tens of thousands of children, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, from communities they conquered—Czechia, Poland, Russia, etc. They deliberately destroyed records at the end of the war, so many of the children who survived were never identified.
After the war, during the Nürenberg Trials, this action was correctly identified as an *act of genocide.*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
1/4

2024-06-15 06:36:49

If you look straight down at a political map of the world, you of course see states crammed together like puzzle pieces, filling every inch of the world. It’s easy to conclude from this mundane and omnipresent depiction that the world really does consist of a patchwork of competing national teams.
But if you tilt that map ever so slightly, you’ll see that those states are really just a very thin layer hovering above a borderless world of all different kinds of people, most of them toiling endlessly to support the goals and interests of those states—that superstructure—floating just above, but separate from, the people.
It’s a fun trick you should try it sometime.

2024-06-14 20:22:07

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Here are what I think are the most *telling* parts:
‘“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”’
…
‘China’s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.
“We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,” a senior U.S. military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. “So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”’
What an incredible admission that the US has nothing left to offer, materially, to compete for influence. The richest country that is or ever was and it’s not even trying to bribe or induce or ingratiate with a potential partner like the Philippines.
It’s just left with the pettiest, cattiest, most tweenage gossipy bullshit imaginable: shit-talking its geopolitical rival behind its back.

2024-06-14 20:14:16

This is an absolutely bombshell report from Reuters:
“At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.”
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

2024-06-14 19:13:17

Believing “Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine by the US” is a bit like believing “Chiquita was provoked into hiring death squads to murder Colombian labor organizers by rival fruit companies.”
It makes a certain sort of sense, from a structural perspective, but it also assumes that any of these actors—capitalists or the states that work for those capitalists, these systems of competitive power politics/profit-seeking—should even exist in the first place. Chiquita was only in a position to be provoked by capitalist competitors because its owners chose to be capitalists. Russia was only in a position to be provoked by the US because its owners chose to be rulers of a great power.
We don’t have to naturalize the effects of terrible systems.

2024-06-13 19:45:48

Tankies are testing out “the rise of the far right is good because they’re nationalists who will realign Europe with Russia instead of the US” in response to the EU election results.

2024-06-13 17:32:50

The idea that “all people who belong to some demographic group—all the people of a national group, or a religion, or speakers of the same language—belong under the rule of the same state” emerged out of 19th century liberal nationalism.
It reached its abysmal conclusion with Nazi Germany and its “ein Volk, ein Reich” bullshit.
No, people do not automatically belong to some state because they are members of some arbitrary group. No, not state has the right to invade and annex people because they share some arbitrary quality with the rulers of that state.

2024-06-12 19:47:46

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Putin is not concerned about *Russian* security any more than a butcher is concerned about *cattle* security. Putin is concerned about himself, his class allies, and his continued rule over the Russian people.
To take seriously his concerns is to internalize the logic of the ruling class and mistake it for your own. He has no right to rule and thus no right to self-defense. Neither do any of his class rivals ruling over any other state.
You know how it became quite popular to point out that an occupying power has no right to self-defense against resistance by an occupied community, because the occupation itself is the initial act of aggression? All states, all capitalists, are our occupiers.

2024-06-12 19:42:21

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Oh no, NATO did Vladimir Putin a fright? I don’t fucking care! States don’t have rights and they don’t have legitimate interests, least of all capitalist oligarchs ruling fascist entho-states.
It absolutely boggles my fucking mind how many leftists feel the need to white knight for their class antagonists.

2024-06-12 19:39:38

Of course Russia invaded Ukraine. It was provoked.
Of course the US invaded Iraq. It was provoked.
Of course Israel invaded Gaza. It was provoked.
Of course Germany invaded Poland. It was provoked.
Of course Baron Fuckwad invaded the lands of Duke Horseshit and slaughtered his peasants. He was provoked.

2024-06-11 06:27:31

The presence of actual fascists in the Ukrainian military, like Azov, no more invalidates the legitimacy of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression than the presence of Hamas invalidates the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance to Israeli aggression.

2024-06-10 05:36:31

Ideologies that have failed and are collapsing tend to produce radical and extreme reactions as they die.
Industrial capitalism produced the Nazis. Authoritarian communism produced the Khmer Rouge. Political Islam produced ISIS.
Super excited to see what further horrors neoliberal capitalism has in store for us as it, too, fails.

2024-06-08 12:37:29

For some reason, “left unity” in practice always means anarchists aligning with and subordinating themselves to authoritarians, and never authoritarians adopting the practice of anarchism.

2024-06-08 06:44:32

Praising a state like China or the Soviet Union for its “development” is like praising Israel for “turning the desert green” or the US for putting a tv in every person’s home.
It misses the immense violence and unfreedom involved and the inequality of results.

2024-06-07 11:45:08

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
- Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”
“Before her eleventh-hour decision to reverse course and ‘indefinitely pause’ a landmark plan to charge drivers higher prices for clogging up Manhattan streets, Democratic New York governor Kathy Hochul received $36,000 from lobbyists for state automobile dealers. Half of that money came from a lobbying group that opposed congestion pricing, citing ‘consequences for dealers and the thousands of people they employ.’”
https://jacobin.com/2024/06/kathy-hochul-congestion-pricing-nyc

2024-06-06 17:02:25

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I owe this understanding of the economy to the brilliant @npub1glr…8qmc who, in the essay below, argued compellingly that credit was and should be a commons. Anyone can supply anyone else, with the expectation that they will be supplied in turn—a giant network of constantly-turning over credit.
*Financial* investment is, then, a reflection of the state’s enclosure of credit. The state monopolizes the production of money with its capitalist partners, banks and other financial institutions. If you want to access the money you need to invest—to access that network of workers advancing product to each other—you have to first agree to pay interest to banks on loans, ie, rents on their control of credit.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-credit-as-an-enclosed-commons

2024-06-06 16:54:55

Investment is something of a myth.
I *don’t* mean that people can’t or don’t work to expand economic production. I do mean the idea that people frugally and virtuously defer consumption, forgoing now to create stockpiles they can use to greater use in the future, doesn’t actually reflect material reality.
In reality, all of this work is both social and current. If I decide to work to expand production—build a factory, plow and manure a field, whatever—I can’t also be producing the food I need to eat or the clothes I need to wear. Someone else has to be doing that work while I do mine, in addition to anyone supplying me with the tools and raw materials I might need to do my work.
And they’re almost certainly not doing it from stockpiles reflecting past work. They’re doing it from *current production.* No one first stockpiles all the food a team of workers needs to eat for a month or a year before those workers start to build a factory. *They feed them as food becomes available,* out of constant current production, just like anyone else.
So when that field or factory is done and can start producing more stuff than was possible before, those new products will in turn go to those original workers who supplied me while I was doing my work, or to yet some other worker making something entirely different, who will in turn supply my original benefactor.
That’s all the economy is—a giant network of workers constantly doing useful work, making things of value for each other, advancing their product to each other with the understanding that others’ products will be advanced to them.

2024-06-02 07:51:11

Capitalism is a system of rule by capital owners.
Capital is an abstracted, commodified, tradable right to command the labor of other people.
That’s it.

2024-05-31 21:49:09

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If the stock market vanished and workers’ collaborative effort was no longer owned or ownable by capitalists, most of them would very suddenly be much better off.

2024-05-31 21:42:23

If you’re worried that getting rid of capitalism would be too disruptive to people’s lives, just wait until you hear about capitalism and how disruptive it is to people’s lives.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-sharp-sudden-decline-of-americas-middle-class-234917/

2024-05-30 16:39:59

Jerry Seinfeld, who is a billionaire because he owns government-issued copyrights to intellectual property, believes we had an “an agreed upon hierarchy” in the 1960s, which we no longer have, causing all kinds of modern problems because “we have no sense of hierarchy” and humans apparently need to know their place.
It’s just absolutely fascinating how our elites (take note, Noah Smith) justify their power and privilege to themselves.
“The lessers long to be ruled by their betters.” Not thanks, get fucked Jerry.
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/jerry-seinfeld-dominant-masculinity-laughs-bad-reviews-1236018889/amp/

2024-05-27 12:55:09

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There is a direct line from this map to the band of coups and civil wars across Northern Africa to the refugee crisis that fascists across Europe have been exploiting to gain power.

2024-05-24 08:55:44

Earlier this month, Charles Littlejohn began serving a five-year prison sentence for the crime of making public the tax returns of Donald Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans.
Littlejohn is the reason the public knows the effective tax rates of rich Americans, which is lower than the tax rate paid by everyone else.
Littlejohn is, in short, a hero.
Under sentencing guidelines, the maximum penalty for the crime of disclosing tax returns is 10 months. The federal judge who sentenced him—a Biden appointee—gave him six times the maximum sentence.
If you ever wonder why Biden has been so reluctant to address Trump’s many, many crimes, Littlejohn’s case serves as a clear answer: preserving the status quo, including the secrecy and prerogatives of the ultra-rich, is by far more important than addressing the crimes of one of those ultra-rich, even one who attempted a coup.
Our elites would rather take the risk of Donald Trump blowing up their system than knowingly help plebeians like Littlejohn threaten the whole edifice.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

2024-05-23 15:46:12

Paul Parkman died earlier this month. He was the first person to isolate the measles virus and helped develop the vaccine against it that’s still in use today.
He purposefully gave away his patent rights so the vaccine could be distributed as cheaply as possible. He saved countless lives. A tremendous hero.
The next time someone insists that capitalist greed is human nature, that no one will ever labor “for free,” remember Dr. Parkman and the countless other scientists and doctors who have saved so many of us.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/auburnpub/name/paul-parkman-obituary?id=55136675

2024-05-21 20:40:08

During apartheid, the South African government established “homelands” for Black South Africans that were ostensibly independent states—though no other country recognized them—so the regime could pretend Black South Africans were foreigners ineligible for rights in South Africa.
I used to think that this was purely for international consumption, a weak pretense to avoid sanctions and stay on the good side of allies.
But, having heard from Israelis who genuinely believe things like “there is no occupation” and “there is no apartheid” and “there is no ethnic cleansing” I now realize that white South Africans were the primary audience for the ruse and they probably ate that shit up.

2024-05-21 05:50:04

Just got a
“Unless you have a decisive plan to liberate Palestine proven to be 100% infalible, you have *no right* to criticize no Palestinian.”
Which is the mirror image of the
“You can’t criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza unless you have a decisive plan to defend against Hamas proven to be 100% infallible”
that I routinely hear from apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
And, no. That’s not how morality works. You don’t have to be a military strategist to object to the mass murder of children. Some things are simply ok to oppose.

2024-05-20 20:20:04

“You can’t criticize Hamas for committing atrocities because that sounds like something a Zionist would say”
Comrades, if you have to self-censor because you’re afraid that stating obvious and banal truths will help an oppressor, then you have no faith in soundness of your own position. Genocide by Israel doesn’t become good because Hamas is a bad actor. Opposing genocide stands on its own merits. Liberation stands on its own merits.
You’ve got to kill the idea that life is a series of team sports and you’re a cheerleader who’s going to help the home team score the winning goal.

2024-05-19 16:23:51

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Sorry, which one are you asking for a citation? Or both?

2024-05-19 16:20:56

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It strikes me as an odd position to take when we know that Hamas a) routinely violates the laws of war and b) routinely oppresses the same Palestinians it’s ostensibly defending. ie, why would they be fine with indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilians but not shooting down IDF medivac helicopters? Why would the Palestinian public be so precious to them as to prompt Hamas to take action to protect them?

2024-05-19 16:16:22

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Immoral acts don’t become moral just because they’re done for a good reason. “Our adversary is so terrible they warrant any response” is also how the IDF justifies its own atrocities.

2024-05-19 16:11:39

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Just to check: you think it would be morally ok for Hamas to do it, but it’s morally virtuous for Hamas not to do it, and Hamas refrains from doing it because it’s too morally virtuous to do it?

2024-05-19 08:54:50

A lot of people seem to have adopted the erroneous belief that liberation involves the oppressed switching places with their oppressors.
Freedom is not revenge and it’s not getting a turn to exploit and oppress.

2024-05-19 08:29:07

Russia and China are both imperialist settler colonial states and they don’t magically become the good-guy team by antagonistically opposing other imperialist settler colonial states.

2024-05-18 16:56:59

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It’s just banal power politics masquerading as some interesting or unique insight. Boooooring

2024-05-18 11:31:25

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I don’t know what relation your question has to anything I wrote

2024-05-18 09:30:40

Capitalism is the state enclosing a common resource, water, so private owners can serve the public literal shit water and still collect rents from the public like feudal lords while we grovel and say thanks for the sewage.
I fucking hate hate hate hate capitalism.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/27970119/devon-water-bug-symptoms-spread-lates-news/amp/

2024-05-18 06:49:29

I’ve encountered more than one US liberal who a) believes that Americans will be subject to fascist dystopia if they do not re-elect Joe Biden and b) refuses to engage in even the slightest effort to persuade people to vote for Joe Biden, preferring to rage and insult instead.
I can’t help but notice this discrepancy and conclude that, on some level, they don’t actually believe (a). Either they’re not as worried about fascism as they claim, or they’re not as confident in the effects of voting as they assert.
So (b) seems more like a pressure-release valve for them, or perhaps a pre-emptive scapegoating, for when voting fails and they end up with fascism anyway.
It can’t be the *system* that fails them; the system can only be failed by unbelievers who don’t vote hard enough.

2024-05-17 05:07:21

The failure of liberalism, at least as a mode of analysis, is its utter inability (or unwillingness) to consider systems as systems.
To liberalism, an institution is, at worst, a neutral tool that can be wielded by anyone for any purpose. Problems emerge not from the system itself, but rather from the personalities of the people in charge of the system.
It does not occur to them that systems produce the results that they do systemically.
“If we just elect the right person to run the worker-crushing machine, we will soon be able to use the worker-crushing machine to help workers!”

2024-05-14 18:56:32

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There’s no intrinsic obstacle to Jewish people and Palestinian people living side-by-side with each other in their shared ancestral homeland or literally anywhere else in the world. That’s called “anarchism.”
But there is a *political* obstacle, a state claiming exclusionary sovereignty, which assigns some kinds of rights to some classes of people and fewer or no rights to other classes of people.
Palestinians get no rights, as victims of occupation, or substandard rights, as second-class citizens of Israel. Jews get a suite of rights,* unless they protest the state, in which case they’re likely to be treated like Palestinians and catch a cop’s fist to their jaw.
This is not self-determination. This is state sovereignty “in the name of” the Jewish people.
* I originally said “full rights” but since those are still the constrained rights granted by state authorities, and not the full rights of actually free people engaged in genuine self-determination, I corrected myself.

2024-05-14 18:27:11

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Over and over I hear critics of anarchism fret about the possibility of violence in the absence of the state, when the violence of the state is right in front of them, every day, everywhere in the world.

2024-05-14 18:25:36

I saw someone describe Zionism as
“the right of self-determination of the Jewish people in their historic homeland”
and yeah! That doesn’t sound bad! I would like Jewish people to enjoy self-determination in Israel/Palestine and, you know, everywhere else too! I want that for everyone everywhere!
The problem, though, is that “self-determination” isn’t being used here to describe actual individual freedom or free communities. Baked into this definition is *exclusionary sovereignty* that is embodied not in individual and autonomous people, but in “THE Jewish people” as a corporate body.
And this, more than anything else, is why there is endless violence: because while self-determination is inherently pluralistic—we are most free when we cooperate voluntarily in communities of equally free people—sovereignty is exclusionary. For “the Jewish people” to have their own state, the Palestinian people had to be excluded from their homes or reduced to subordinate and inferior status within Israel.
State sovereignty, like the private property model that is the other side of its coin, doesn’t allow for overlapping rights or shared ownership. You’re an owner or you’re not; you’re a full citizen or you’re not.

2024-05-08 22:14:38

When we see things like the Israeli state demolishing Bedouin villages because they lack official permits, there’s an understandable impulse to ask how to get them the proper permits.
Lots of people around the world suffer, I’m told, because they lack formal property rights to their homes and resources, and the world would be better off if we *expanded* the formal ownership of every square inch of the world.
This makes a certain kind of practical sense, in the same way that we might help stateless people today by working to get them citizenships and passports.
But this is all based on the idea that the state that withheld those permits in the first place did so out of neglect, rather than malice. That being without permits is an accident or an oversight, rather than deliberate strategy by that state to game its own rules to “legalize” ethnic cleansing.
When the state will only acknowledge your rights if it grants you a permit, you can either work to get the permit or you can work to get rid of the state.

2024-05-08 06:41:21

If a political party doesn’t deliver on the agenda you imagine it represents, even when it controls essentially all levers of political power, then maybe that political party doesn’t exist to deliver that agenda.
Maybe you have projected your own preferences, goals, and even sense of identity onto a party that’s happy for your votes and donations but doesn’t actually share your agenda as an institution.

2024-05-05 13:20:50

Criticizing the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people does not imply support for the Soviet Union or Stalinism.
Two things can be bad at the same time. Morality is not a team sport.

2024-05-01 19:00:15

Probably good to remind everyone that zip ties are relatively easy to escape for many people if you’re familiar with some basic techniques.
https://youtu.be/zDtupkfW-Ps?si=4oCVbgbyBGQHnkt8

2024-05-01 16:58:36

This Fox News headline is about the use of explosives against unarmed student protesters.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/366/886/031/681/115/original/47e642933eb26cc5.jpeg

2024-05-01 10:36:28

What Uvalde taught us, if nothing else, is that cops will absolutely let your babies die horrifying deaths if there’s any risk to themselves but will gleefully smash your skull if they think you’re unarmed.

2024-04-30 06:09:51

The funniest thing about the last couple days of my timeline is that I have not once told anyone not to vote. I haven’t even said whether *I personally* will or will not vote.
And yet a lot of people are furiously convinced I’ve been lobbying against voting because I made factually correct observations about the electoral process.
In other words, the process indicts itself.
Friends, if a discussion about how voting works sounds like advocacy against voting, then the problem is with voting, not with the discussion.

2024-04-28 11:59:18

So if someone wanted to vote for “a society in which snipers are not deployed against student protests,” which candidate should they vote for?
#Vote #JustVote #Vote2024 #Election2024