hex

Raised by wolves until I was old enough to know better. XML weapons specialist & digital locksmith.

I know things are bad, but we can make them better.

Half of what I post is just me repeating what QTBIPOC comrades have said in my whitest cisthet voice.

Fuck fascism and cars.

Typo catches and clarifying questions always welcome.

searchable via tootfinder.ch

pronouns: he/him
interests: solar punk, gardening, fungi, resilience, community self-defense, low tech engineering, hacking, cryptography
Website: https://write.as/hexmhell/
Politics: Cybernetic Disaster Anarchist

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Last Notes

2026-03-31 18:30:50 UTC

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This will be over at some point. Trump is mortal, at least as far as we can tell. He's mortal and he's old. At some point he'll have had one too many aneurysms and they won't be able to Weekend At Bernie's that motherfucker around anymore. (Come to think of it, "mother" is probably not the right word.)
But what happens next? Does everyone go back to brunch and let the fash respawn? Or do we end this machine before it gets better?

2026-03-31 18:24:27 UTC

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But I would *definitely* like folks to analyze the frameworks they're working within. It's OK that it took this long to join the fight. But maybe ask yourself *why* it took so long.
What was it that others saw? Why were others able to see this coming months, or years, before you were? There have been people saying this would happen since the 70's. What information did they have that you didn't? Did you feel surprised when Trump won, each time? Why? What was missing from your analysis?
Is anything still missing?

2026-03-31 18:20:23 UTC

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I mean, I'm glad there are so many folks in the fight. A lot of the folks in Twin Cities aren't even liberals, they're Republicans who voted for Trump.
We have to have a big tent, or we won't have enough people to stop this. As much shade as I may cast on liberals through this whole thing, the last few paragraphs of what I wrote are critical.
At the end of the day, we will have walked a long road together. I don't especially care when you joined, as long as we're going the same way.

2026-03-31 18:13:35 UTC

I saw an article from The Guardian titled "I've spent a decade fighting Trump. Here are six lessons."
Unfortunately I read it. As someone who saw this coming the moment Trump came down the elevator, who started organizing hard after he won the Republican nomination, I have some notes.
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/ten-years-of-fighting-fascism
#USPol

2026-03-29 11:38:43 UTC

#NoKings is great. I know there's plenty of room for criticism, but it does present a really good opportunity to network with other people who want to do something.
That said, if your whole plan is "I'm gonna hold a sign until something changes" you're in for some really bad news.
Protesting is symbolic. You are begging people in power to (please, please, please) change things. It literally does not matter how many of you there are, they do no actually have to care. The only way to make them care is to fuck with the money.
America, like all dictatorships, runs on money. Nothing is going to change unless you interrupt the money.
While Trump is doing a pretty good job of that himself (especially with the current war), things will have to get a *lot* worse before they get better unless you are *doing something.*
#BlackOutTheSystem is one group that's trying to do something (https://www.blackoutthesystem.com/).
There are 3 things that are far more important than (almost) any protest, 3 things that force change, 3 types of direct action to that are the types of escalation we need *right now.*
#Boycott
#GeneralStrike
#TaxStrike
If your escalation path is just "let's go walk around more with signs" then it's not enough. They absolutely must include at least one, if not more, of these things...

2026-03-05 05:47:59 UTC

Woke up from a dream with a thought about dark patterns and LLMs.
If LLMs (as a service) could be normalized and integrated into everything, as is currently in progress, the next step would be to charge tokens to pay for the interactions. After all, it's not really free. That's just the normal progression. Introduce the tech, get people hooked, then make them pay.
Great, now imagine this future state. Every interaction with a computer ends up mediated through a stochastic parrot. Congratulations, everything now has micro-transactions on steroids. Not only does everything you do with tech have micro-transactions, but every interaction with technology is gambling.

2026-02-12 21:45:55 UTC

Roman elites drank from leaded cups because it made water sweeter. Radiation was thought at one time to have healing properties, so people would add uranium to their drinking water. Glowing dishes are still a collectors item. After the discovery of x-rays, shoe stores started installing them and using them on kids feet to size shoes. Lead was added to gasoline to improve engine performance, and paint to make it whiter. We all know about asbestos and DDT.
We look back at all of this and think, "how could people have been so incompetent back then?" Some of these things caused irreparable harm in their generation, some continue to cause harm today almost 100 years later.
If you wonder that, look at the whole #LLM thing and you have your answer.

2026-02-08 03:55:30 UTC

So just in case anyone missed it, I want to spell this out for you. The point of using FPS as ICE agents is that FPS is stocked full of troops from EriK Prince's private army (now called "Academi" but formerly called "Blackwater"). This means that carrying out ethnic cleansing can dump money directly into the pockets of America's version of the Wagner Group (side from, of course GEO Group).
It also means that there can be an alternative chain of command that exists outside of official channels. ICE is already bad enough, but similar people have worked as mercenaries for a long time. Having an established chain of command over armed occupiers, one based entirely on economic incentives, one that can't be legally monitored or audited, one that's completely outside of the government, should be especially worrying.
The bit reason J6 didn't go as planned is that Erik Prince wasn't behind it. Now there are troops with experience occupying American cities who can be called directly via Erik when Trump wants to make sure he doesn't lose again. And Erik won't back out at the last minute, because he's already seen that there will be no consequences for participating in a coup... if the time comes.
Edit:
Just to be clear, this is not new news just commenting on old news.
#USPol

2026-02-01 19:15:38 UTC

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"Bridge Burner Collective" is actually a reference to something about that old as well...
https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/burning-bridges-imposed.pdf

2026-02-01 18:58:12 UTC

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they predated divest by a few years, as best I know.
Edit: but yes, I expect there's some overlap in membership. There's definitely also a thread of continuity between the two.
There's been a long line of folks fighting this fight going back a few decades:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/man-sues-says-spd-conceals-dash-cam-videos/

2026-02-01 17:57:12 UTC

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also Solan is a fascist.
https://bridgeburners.noblogs.org/post/2020/09/28/meet-trumps-wanna-be-mike-solan/

2026-01-25 20:29:32 UTC

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100% agree.
Something something prefiguration

2026-01-25 20:09:45 UTC

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Legit though, there is actually a benefit to having places like this where we can talk without pressure to conform to the hegemony. It's useful to be able to support each other in our resistence, to feel as though we are not alone in fighting something so big. But it is also essential to take what we talk about here into the real world and *do something with it.*

2026-01-25 19:43:09 UTC

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The state has become an existential threat to humanity in multiple ways. Not only are we *all* at risk of being killed at any time by the monsterous incompetence and malice of these systems (yeah, listen to this: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-men-who-might-310407494/), but we are also slowly being killed by systems enforced and protected by these same entities.
Maybe... just maybe... it's time to think of other ways to organize ourselves.

2026-01-25 19:39:35 UTC

I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of sociopathic dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one narcisistic crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.

2026-01-20 15:26:50 UTC

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Ok, actually, one more thing. There was an #OccupyICE in 2018 and it worked really well with far less support than there is now.
Ok, that's all, I'm dropping offline again. Go organize some shit!

2026-01-20 14:04:33 UTC

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I mean, yeah, and also it's working way better than it should. We better make sure it doesn't work, or it's 100% on us.

2026-01-20 09:35:17 UTC

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I also think it's worth just doing the math here. There aren't enough ICE agents to remove an occupation of more than a couple of facilities. They would have to rely on local police. A lot of police departments have been ordered not to support ICE activities. This means Trump would have to activate the military. If an occupation was peaceful, especially playful like Portland, deployment may not even be possible. Meanwhile, if ICE agents continue to be as violent as they are Governors may be forced to activate the national guard to protect citizens against ICE.
Forcing conflict when Trump is at his weakest, in a way that is non-violent, puts resistance in the best possible position.
At the same time, we are at a strange time of unity. Trump supporters are leaving over Epstein, some are even mad about the deportations, and he's otherwise systematically alienated basically his whole base (except literal Nazis working for ICE).
The AI bubble is, in a lot of ways, a fun house mirror reflection of the 2008 financial crash. The whole economy is held up by loans secured with "compute." Everyone hates this, and Trump's policies have made everything far worse.
#OccupyICE could actually have a lot of momentum and be difficult to stop, especially if folks went to ICE facilities in frog suits and Luigi bloc with banners demanding the release of the Epstein files.
At least, that's my impression from out here.

2026-01-20 09:03:02 UTC

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Of course, economic pressure isn't the only tool we have. Diversity of tactics is critical. I'm not going to tell anyone not to throw buckets of screws into the parking lots and driveways of ICE facilities or blockading facilities with burning dumpstes. Even if i don't promote those types of tactics, we should all STFU if we see people doing them. We all have a place. There are things we can all do. Everything is on the table and it should be, because ICE agents will intimidate you, steal your car, and even murder you for just filming them.
You can cower in fear, or you can stand up and fight with everything you have. Which or those do you want to remember yourself doing?

2026-01-20 08:58:30 UTC

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Economic pressure has always been the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. There's already a general strike being organized for this Friday.
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2026/01/20/18883119.php
(Original release https://minneapolisunions.org/system/files/2026-01/press_release_-_january_16_2026.pdf)
This has moved quickly, and it can keep moving quickly. The more people organizing, the faster the regime will back down and (I think quickly) collapse.

2026-01-20 08:48:19 UTC

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There are a lot of takeaways from this:
1. Organizing locally gives you a massive advantage because you will always know your local area better than ICE ever can.
2. Be agile. You can always change tactics faster than a centralized organization.
3. Organize now. The sooner you build your networks, the sooner you can learn.
4. Identify ICE facilities and organize monitoring them directly.
But I think the most interesting one that's not explicitly in there, one that's hinted at the last one, is to go on the offensive. ICE is already afraid. If we all take the anger we have at the murder of #ReneGood, find the local ICE facility that they'll stage from, and bring that anger to #OccupyICE we might be able to just shut the whole thing down preemptively. Completely stop all ICE operations across the US. If they want to fight, they can fight *with everyone, all at once.*
Shut down their ability to operate at all. They have a logistics pipeline. They need cars, they need oil in those cars, they need to be able to move those cars to target areas. They also need money to pay those agents. All of those can be disrupted.
The regime needs your money and labor to maintain the illusion of legitimacy. They chose a bad time because you can hit both of those at once *right now* with a combination of #GeneralStrike and #TaxStrike, and then #BoycottEverything.
The regime is weaker than it's ever been. It's flailing. Their own base is demanding the release of the #EpsteinFiles. Their last gasp attempt to prevent the radical change that's coming is just to ethnically cleanse the US back to the 50's (which is what they always meant by "Make America Great Again"). Trump will do anything to stay in power, even if it means killing everyone on Earth in the process. But Americans can end it now by going on the offensive.
Now is the time.
#USPol

2026-01-20 08:28:49 UTC

Everyone who hasn't already read the Twin Cities rapid response analysis should now:
https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/15/rapid-response-networks-in-the-twin-cities-a-guide-to-an-updated-model

2026-01-09 21:07:32 UTC

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The thing that Renee Good now knows, that Tortuguita knows, that Heather Heyer knows, that I only know because I glimpsed for a second, is that when you die fighting oppression you live forever in that memory of resistance. When we carve their names into a monument, along with all the other names of the murdered and disappeared, that will stand, perhaps, across from the statue of Willem in the park where the Northwest Detention Center once stood, they will always be reminders of what it looks like to sacrifice everything in order to be on the right side of history.
The names of those who resist live as ghosts, summoned by name to haunt future oppressors, summoned by name to awaken our own conscience to the call. Martyrs, whispered like the White Rose or yelled as a threat like John Brown, cannot die so long as any of us with a bit of spine carries even an ounce of humanity.
It is possible to die knowing you did the right thing, and I have felt it. There is an acceptance that is impossible to imagine without being there, without feeling it for yourself. You have nothing to fear in resisting, even if it ends you. But you will never forget the shame of doing nothing if you fail to.

2026-01-09 20:34:32 UTC

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As fascist goons ethnically cleanse their way through American cities, casually murdering anyone who slightly inconveniences them, I'm reminded of a Zapata quote I've kept close to my heart for a few decades now: “I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.”
#USPol

2026-01-09 20:22:34 UTC

The Onion nails it again...
https://youtube.com/shorts/-Tu9EABl4Vs

2025-12-29 15:54:16 UTC

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the US no longer has the leverage to make that work.

2025-12-26 07:42:24 UTC

The paradox of Nazism being both the most capitalist thing possible, defining itself as explicitly anticommunist, while masquerading as "socialism" is difficult to resolve until you understand one thing: fascism pivots around antisemitism (and its extension, conspiratorial thinking).
I'm, of course, not talking about the redefinition of "antisemitism" into meaning any criticism of Israel but rather an anti-Jewish conspiracy narrative rooted in Roman Christianity.
This is critical to understand as MAGA fascism pivots between capitalist and pseudo-anticapitalist with Trump in the middle. Hitler did the same thing. Strasserism helped the Nazis gain power by pulling in the Left. In the Nazis case they killed the Stasserists pretty quickly. Now, I think we're seeing an attempt to make the opposite pivot happen in MAGA. But it's all the same thing.
Fascism can infinitely fail to address the needs of the people while dismissing it's own responsibility for creating the problem by maintaining a permanent enemy.
This is why it's important to understand antisemitism and how to fight it. It's especially important now because the apparatus of violence in Israel is itself a tool of global fascism, and we finally have an opportunity to dismantle the whole thing. But we have to be aware of how fascists can pivot around to block this.
I've been reading Safety Through Solidarity, and I think it's especially relevant at this time.
https://www.akpress.org/safety-through-solidarity.html

2025-12-18 19:13:23 UTC

The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.

2025-12-16 19:58:18 UTC

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Probably also worth mentioning copy levies as (at least) tangentially related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'd be interested in knowing how much global taxes on media just goes directly into the pockets of American IP holders.

2025-11-21 10:08:16 UTC

It's Interesting today that the popularization of @npub1fdr…lvhs's concept of "enshittification" is leading us to really think hard about how various methods of vendor lock-in enable corporations to abuse users. We see how first there's lock-in then quickly abuse follows, and recognize that the only way out of this trap is to build systems where users can leave at will.
But it's interesting that in this time of rising fascism no one is making the connection to fascism, as both increased lock in and enshittification of government. And no one is making the connection between the need to make systems optional to avoid enshittification, and libertarian socialist arguments against the systemic lock-in (and following abuse) of capitalism and the state.

2025-11-07 19:46:47 UTC

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You can bring down a government, smash a dictatorship, you have the power. This is an excellent strategy. But if you can go this far, if you can win this much, how much farther can you go? Is it enough to get back to the "normal" polycrisis, to return to microplastics and ecocide, to every open space filled with tent camps while luxury apartments continue to sit empty? Is it enough to be one injury or diagnosis away from unending debt?
What #SolarPunk future could we build instead? I expect it's whatever one you dream about, talk about, organize for, and fight for.

2025-11-07 19:38:13 UTC

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What's especially interesting, and dangerous to capitalism, is that there are a lot of opportunities that come out of this.
Corporations are destroying everything. We actually don't need them. We can build mutual aid networks, guerilla gardening, library socialism... When we stop with consumerism, we can find the joy in actually living, creating, being a creative human rather than simply a consumer. With a bit of momentum we can bend the system to our will. With enough momentum we can shatter it completely and free ourselves from this trap.
Things can go a lot of different ways. I'm excited to see how things go.
Edit:
I'm specifically excited about this...
https://www.blackoutthesystem.com/about-mutual-aid
This is cool. This is really fucking cool.

2025-11-07 19:30:14 UTC

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This is also a good way to make the protests actually valuable. The #NoKingsDay protests let people see how big the resistance was. It informed a section of the elite that their best bet was to resist rather than comply. The shutdown is already hurting the economy. The an economic blackout could be enough to break it... and we're all still waiting for the AI bubble to pop. It's gonna get really hot, really fast.
The great thing about the economic blackout as a strategy is that they don't have a mechanism to compel people to buy stuff. So it turns out that "make the economy scream" is a two player game. Go fucking figure.

2025-11-07 19:24:59 UTC

Economic boycott of everything and general strike Nov 25th Dec 2nd. When I was talking about #NoKings / #50501Movement needing to having an escalation plan, this is an excellent escalation. Hitting US retail on #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday coupled with a #PeoplesSickDay during that time could actually be enough to force the invocation of the 25th. There's already been an elite fracture. The government shut down is not the well calculated coup that I think Trump and co thought it was.
This whole #BlackOutTheSystem thing has a lot of potential....
https://www.blackoutthesystem.com/
#USPol

2025-10-30 15:57:16 UTC

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N Korea is propped up by continuous support of China.

2025-10-30 12:59:11 UTC

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The American Democratic Party, and the concept of "Democratic Socialism" within the US, comes largely from an authoritarian political tradition where the state offers services in exchange for the population allowing elites to continue parasitize the system. Then it is critical for Liberals to consume and destroy popular mutual aid, because real mutual aid undermines their carrot.
Democrats tend to imagine that anarchists want to destroy "all the good things" that governments do. The reality is that we want to build those good things ourselves so that we can reject the offer of those same good things, less well managed, with all the bad things attached.
Anarchists want to build pro-social systems (what if we didn't *need* snap, but just made sure everyone was fed?) while eliminating anti-social ones (do we really *need* to kidnap children, or could we just kind of stop doing that?).

2025-10-30 10:05:59 UTC

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left).
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties rarely get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

2025-10-21 08:08:20 UTC

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It should also be noted that any society that recognizes the concept of territorial sovereignty cannot possibly be egalitarian by the simple fact that borders necessarily create at least two classes: citizen and foreigner. Even if we pretend that all other issues with government could be resolved, this alone makes actual egalitarianism impossible.
It gets much worse when protections only apply to the "citizen" class, because anyone can then simply be deemed a non-citizen and must prove their citizenship status (which is literally just guilty until proven innocent). If protections only apply to citizens, then no one actually has any protections at all... which is the problem with the US right now, and always has been.

2025-10-21 07:56:29 UTC

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It might also be useful to distinguish between "democracy" and "democratic." A democracy is a type of government. All governments have territorial sovereignty, and most of them include competitive politics (that is, they are republican).
A democratic institution is an institution/organization controlled by the people who do the work or are served by it (or both). Not all democratic organizations are good, but I don't think an organization can be healthy without also being democratic. There are lots of ways to organize democratically, and not all of them are actually very good at representing folks.
Something can be a democracy while not being democratic. I would argue that there are no democracies that are, in fact, democratic because capitalism is absolutely anti-democratic.
All of the organizing I've done is both directly democratic and anti-capitalist. Rojava (now more officially known as DAANES) is a directly democratic libertarian socialist society, but it is not a "state" and has no "government" in the sense that it lacks territorial sovereignty. It is a de facto autonomous zone within Syria. Similarly, there are several indigenous "governed" autonomous zones within Mexico of which Chiapas is one (and the most well known).
The biggest difference is that democratic libertarian socialism organizes egalitarian societies around people and needs, while governments organize hierarchal societies around land and property rights.

2025-10-21 05:44:30 UTC

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yeah, that's exactly why prefigurative politics is so important.

2025-10-20 21:40:06 UTC

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things have to be really scary right now. I also feel it.
I tend to oppose governments specifically because they have a tendency to try to exterminate people like me. Perhaps it's my imagination then, because I can't imagine a government that could exist now and not be on the brink of doing so at any moment. Governments, for most of the time they have existed, have tried to enforce homogenatety through violence. Meanwhile, anthropology is full of examples of non-government systems that have much more complex concepts of gender and no concept of race.
I find it hard to imagine a hierarchial system that wouldn't just reinforce white supremacist cis hetero patriarchy. Meanwhile, I don't have to imagine systems that oppose it because I've been involved in organizing them.

2025-10-20 14:05:10 UTC

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No capitalist government could prevent this. But there are also systems that aren't necessarily identifiable as government. Google Rojava and Chiapas. There alternatives to "government." We don't need to restrict our imaginations to the things we've been forced to believe.
Folks never imagined fascism could be possible in the US. Maybe we could try something unimaginably good instead.

2025-10-20 13:05:32 UTC

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this assumes a pretty restricted reality that I don't think is backed up by evidence. There's literally no reason we should have one person with so much power, except that this system just evolved from feudalism instead of from hundreds of other traditions that Roman/European tradition mostly extinguished and erased.
There are, and have always been, more ways to organize people than under a king or an elected king with extra steps.

2025-10-20 09:55:51 UTC

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all of those things happened under democracy as well. American democracy has always been poisoned by the Senate, the electoral college, the "winner take all" system, the inescapable influence of capitalism. I'm not sure how it could have ever produced anything different. How would "restoring the machinery of democracy" not just be setting up for the next time?
Today W looks smart, competent, and presidential compared to Trump. IMO, if you "restore the machinery" without radical change, you're just setting yourself to look back fondly on Trump.

2025-10-20 09:22:34 UTC

QQ for all the "Restore the #RuleOfLaw" folks out there: When militarized police crushed Occupy for daring to challenge the logic of bailing out the bankers who crashed the economy rather than the people they fleeced, was that "Rule of Law"? When militarized police maimed and brutalized water protectors, was that "Rule of Law"? When oil companies and tech monopolies fund both parties and just happen to get legislation that keeps them in power, is that "Rule of Law"? When your tax dollars go to fund genocide, to pay to drop bombs on children, is that "Rule of Law"? When the NSA was spying on American citizens, was that "Rule of Law"? How about the drone strikes on Americans, was that "Rule of Law"? When cops murder people and then use "qualified immunity" to get away with it, is that "Rule of Law"?
Y'all keep talking about how #NoKings is about "restoring rule of law." It's got a bit of a "Make America Great Again" feel to it: you're invoking a return to a history that never actually existed.

2025-10-07 20:18:08 UTC

It's worth remembering that the civil war was a slave revolt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWiM00lCRTE
Slaves started liberating themselves and a few radical white folks decided to help. This challenged the very legitimacy of the state.
The Northern response was to neutralize the threat by killing or allowing the most radical elements to be killed, then compromising with the remaining resistance. The South thought that this strategy wasn't radical enough, so their repose was to increase violence against the oppressed. Because the North wouldn't also increase violence, the South first secedeed so they could increase violence without Northern restriction, then, not believing that to be enough, attacked the North.
The modern US is a synthesis of these two strategies. We saw this immediately after the assassination of Lincoln, with Southern slavers rolling back gains made during the civil war as far as possible. This became the second phase of American slavery, which lasted until WWII. As a reminder, we are in the 3rd phase of American slavery since it remains legal as long as a person can be compelled to admit to a crime.
Every 4 years we get to choose a government that exercises one of these two strategies: eliminate radicals and compromise with moderates, or unrestricted class warfare on the population. The slave revolt was a third option: direct action.
It turns out, direct action gets the goods.
#USPol

2025-10-07 02:34:55 UTC

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Joseph Campbell has done so much damage to our concepts of what can and can't be an important story. This essay, specifically, I think helped me unwind that a bit also: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carrier_Bag_Theory_of_Fiction
But reading Always Coming Home also really helped me in thinking through what a story could even be.

2025-10-07 02:28:22 UTC

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this is kind of the thing I realized about Joseph Campbell, that the "monomyth" is exactly the problem. It's the type of story that elevates and justifies the oppressor... And the type of story that comes from oppressive cultures. It's not just that Campbell's analysis was patriarchal and eurocentric, but that the monomyth itself is the memetic package of white supremacist patriarchy.
The conquest of Europe by the Romans, and the subsequent genocides across Europe, basically annihilated other stories in the collective imagination of the people who became white. Those that took on the memetic disorder they inherited from the Romans then turned around to inflict it on others.
Fortunately, Ursala K Le Guin was explicitly opposed to Campbell and the "monomyth." Her work, and Octavia Butler's, are some of the stories I go to in unwinding these myths for myself.
But I also think there's more. This idea has been at the center of a lot of my writing projects also. A few of the early stories I published on my blog were focused on playing in the myth space:
https://write.as/hexmhell/on-the-economics-of-slaying-dragons

2025-10-03 07:32:35 UTC

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Hope and imagination aren't just a nice things. Authoritarianism is rooted in doom. Authoritarianism is naturally unstable. It's naturally weak. It's extremely complex and fragile. Authoritarian regimes often collapse rapidly and catastrophically. They keep people pinned in place by removing hope. They heap trauma on their victims because trauma destroys hope and reduces creativity. So hope and imagination are the most powerful weapons against authoritarianism.
The regime tells you that things can only get worse. The regime needs you to believe it. They want you to fight on their terms, so they can pick you off, or to run or freeze, so they don't have to fight you at all. Authoritarianism must kill the creativity of it's victims, because authoritarianism has already killed it's own creativity. When you respond with hope and creativity, the system cannot adapt.
It is not simply that we should imagine what could be because we may have the opportunity to create it. It is that hope manifests the opportunity to create what we've imagined.

2025-10-03 07:16:35 UTC

What are you going to do when the regime falls? After calling all your friends, after the great memes, after the parties, what are you going to do to make sure it never happens again? What world should we create?
Taxing billionaires is great and all, but we could build systems where billionaires are impossible. Is hoarding wealth and using it to control people even something we should consider part of a functional and humane system? Any system where one group of people doesn't have rights means that anyone can be stripped of their rights, like has happened with all the US citizens who've been illegally detained and deported by ICE. Does the concept of "rights" that must be defended with violence, that can be stripped away by people who can exercise more violence, even make sense? Or should the bedrock of a functional system be the obligations that we have to each other and to society, that cannot be severed or taken from us, that tell us we *must* defend regardless of whether systemic oppression will impact us or not?
Americans have been so restricted by the limitations of the two party system, only able to choose between options acceptable to different sections of the capitalist class. Would we even be able to imagine what we could do if those restrictions went away?
The fall of the Berlin wall was a surprise. The fall of Assad was faster than anyone expected. One day the government of Nepal was an unrepentant oligarchy, the next it was on fire. Everything can change in an instant, faster than anyone expects. No one can predict revolutionary change. Will you be ready if the opportunity presents itself?
The US cannot be fixed. The economic system is a ponzi scheme that has been patched again and again, but has finally run out of options. Racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism are baked into the system at every level. Trump gutted the system of soft power that held the US economy together, now there is only a slow decline. Even after he's gone, the damage is done. Once we let go of how to fix something that cannot be fixed, we can start to imagine something that cannot be achieved within the current system.
This is a time of opportunity. Do not burrow so deep in terror that you miss your chance to dream.
#USPol

2025-10-02 18:09:44 UTC

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I think the thing that liberals may not be able to actually integrate is that Trump and Musk already destroyed the critical institutions. More importantly, Trump destroyed the core of US soft power. It took 80 some years to build a complex economic and political system to siphon money from the entire world into American pockets... and now that's basically gone. It will take decades for the rest of the world to unwind itself from the US, but it will absolutely happen. Americans can't just expect the world to revolve around them anymore.
I don't think liberals (and *definitely* not conservatives) are ready for what that means. But as the money drains out, the corporations still have to feed their masters. As bad as everything is now, it's going to get a *lot* worse unless folks stop imagining "going back to normal" and start imagining how thingss could be radically better.

2025-10-02 15:22:00 UTC

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I'm not saying things are fine, but I honestly think Trump is running out of time.
The thing I worry about is what happens after Trump falls. If liberals go back to brunch again, then the next fascist will be able to push things farther.
I think people are failing to prepare for victory, and that's also a huge risk.

2025-10-02 12:28:47 UTC

Two things are worth noticing right now:
1. The military brass *did not* respond well to Trump and Hegseth.
2. The deployment to #Portland keeps getting delayed.
The military will never say "no" to the president (unless he's literally ordering them to open fire on unarmed civilians or something equally obviously illegal). But there are ways to not comply that don't necessarily involve refusal. Brass showing that they aren't aligned with Trump may weaken his billionaire backers, who might be realizing now that weak dictators who can't lead their militaries tend to get toppled... and their oligarch-backers tend to end up against walls.
If folks being ordered to send troops to #PDX don't want to comply, delaying until the there's an initial response from the lawsuit would be basically impossible to detect. The deployment to LA went far too fast, running into logistical challenges like troops sleeping on the floor. The delays we've already seen could indicate either a more careful approach or quiet resistance.
Trump will continue to escalate at every chance he gets. I would be surprised if PDX didn't give him a fight. I doubt the troops will become more interested in serving a guy who's stabbed them in the back and wasted their time at every opportunity.
It is still possible troops just won't deploy. Trump will make something up about how just the threat of an intervention was enough to make things safe or something like that. If we see that, it's 100% the military telling him to kick rocks because he's not competent enough to know when to back down.
Honestly, I think Trump wants revenge for the resistance PDX put up at the end of his last term. Any backing down from that is absolutely a big loss for him.

2025-09-27 21:34:17 UTC

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One of our most important projects was the "food security committee" which made sure that our members always ate. It expanded out and now members of that committee still can food and bring it to houseless camps (among other things).
This is disaster prep work. We are in a disaster, how do you prepare for it to get worse? How to you prepare to come out the other side?
The only way we survive this level of disaster is together. Organize around that idea and you'll already be building the world we want to see on the other side.

2025-09-27 21:23:29 UTC

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As anarchists, when we were organizing against Trump, in the lead up to and early in his last term, we recognized the potential for repression. Radicals have always been targeted, but now he's going after moderate liberals. This is going to keep escalating, so it would be a good idea for liberals to *listen to anarchists* since we've been doing this for years.
Anarchists have been kidnapped and held without charges for months at a tim (check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_grand_jury_resisters. Only for those folks, they were kidnapped and held without trial under Obama.) Radicals have been doing this for years. It's worth your time to listen so you know how to prepare.
We had a bail fund set up. Support your local bail fund and don't try to start your own (liberals in Seattle did that last time). We focused on basic survival for our members. When the regime cracks down it will be random (since they can't get everyone). How are you going to support folks? Bail funds are a nice first step, but the whole process can take a long time. People can (and often do) lose their jobs, even if they aren't convicted of anything. Are you going to make sure targeted people are able to pay rent and get food? Are you going to make sure families are taken care of when a parent is kidnapped?
Resistence is only a threat if it's sustainable, otherwise they can just overpower and wait. You have to be able to wait longer. Occupations are *extremely* expensive. If you can support each other through an occupation, you can win.
So what is your plan? How are you going to make sure that those who fight can keep fighting? The best time to think about that question was under Biden. The second best time is now.

2025-09-27 21:08:11 UTC

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Ref: https://crimethinc.com/2025/09/22/nepali-anarchists-on-the-toppling-of-the-government-an-interview-with-black-book-distro

2025-09-27 21:07:34 UTC

Really hoping to see some One Piece flags in the pictures from the next #NoKings Day protests. I also hope everyone has brotherd to check the notes from Nepal. Regimes can collapse faster than expected. Sometimes it can be a total surprise.
I know things feel impossible right now, but you need to have a plan for when you win because it might surprise you. The other good thing about having a plan is that it gives you something to fight for instead of just something to fight against.
#USPol

2025-09-22 08:10:46 UTC

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How? This is disaster prep. Imagine the US is collapsing (because it is). What do you need to do to keep yourself and your community safe when things shut down for 24 hours, 48, 72? What do you do when the government leaves and never comes back? Build that.
This isn't bunker and beans shit either. We all die if we try to live alone. The only way to survive is together. Once you build the thing that keeps you and your friends alive, expand... Go bigger.... Organize with more people.
That's a clear and actionable strategy that beats the hell out of "vote for the lesser of two evils until everything is evil."

2025-09-22 08:02:30 UTC

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And if you really want to push candidates left, you do what the Black Panthers did. You provide the service you want to see so the government is forced to play catch up. If you build the world you want to see, you force the state to follow you in order to remain relevant. You make enforcing unjust laws impossible while providing the service to believe should exist. THAT is direct action that wins.
Edit: and that is also shit that will get you killed. If you want to stop fascism, you have to do the real work. Voting can only matter if it's part of a larger strategy to force the system to do what you want. Otherwise you're just legitimizing the managed resistance.

2025-09-22 07:45:31 UTC

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The simple fact is that there are systems that are actually built to resist fascism. There have been a lot of advancements in the last couple hundred years.
We are at a breaking point. The political institutions of the US have been largely destroyed. Even another Democrat, even the best Democrat, even Bernie Sanders couldn't fix this. Every American instruction is rotten to the core.
It's time to face this fact, and figure out how to build something better. Stop believing in American exceptionalism and start looking for models of systems that are inherently resistant to fascism.

2025-09-22 07:38:36 UTC

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There is a giant mountain in the US carved with the faces of a couple of slavers, and two guys who tried to stop slavery. Now most Americans will stop right there and say, "wait, two? Lincoln did that though..." They'll say that because Americans don't know anything about their own history, including the fact that the practice of slavery remained central to the southern economy well through Roosevelt's administration. If this is not familiar to you (because, maybe, you were taught history in the US) and you'd like to actually learn about that, you might want to read "Slavery by Another Name."
But let's talk about half-slaver mountain for a minute. This mountain is functionally a sacred site for Americans, but it's literally a sacred site for Black Hills Sioux. Speaking of stolen land, did you know that JBLM (a military base in Washington state) is built on land promised the Puyallup in the Treaty of Medicine Creek before being stolen in 1918? I remember being taught that all the land was stolen a long time ago and now there's nothing we can do. Yeah, does anyone remember that DAPL was under Obama? In fact, unused federal lands are supposed to be returned to the tribes from which the land was taken but there's a whole site to auction off federal property... That's a whole section of the government dedicated to violating the Treaty of Fort Laramie.
They could just comply with the treaty, as they are legally obligated to do. These violations are ongoing. Slavery, again, is still legal. Slaves are still used by major corporations today, they just have to be tricked into confessing to a crime first. The sins that this country is built on remain fully active today... Because the system was built to preserve white supremacists patriarchy. How could the founding of the US not lead *directly* to Trump? How could this have been different, from the beginning?
But, please, tell me, how, exactly, are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms. How?

2025-09-21 19:37:34 UTC

The US is a slave state founded on genocide that *still* hasn't actually abolished slavery. Nazi race law came from Jim Crow, but you won't find that taught in a single classroom in the US. The Senate and Electoral College are *explicitly* anti-democratic institutions... Like, they were designed to prevent democracy. The whole punitive legal system exists to suppress dissent and legitimize slavery. The genocide of indigenous folks *has not even ended* much less has there been any attempt at reparations.
How exactly are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms, and finding a more acceptable candidate for 2028? Seriously, someone explain it to me.

2025-09-21 18:51:22 UTC

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literally no one said "Trump and Biden are the same." This is exactly the straw man shit I was taking about. You're fighting with someone who doesn't exist.
How much shit do you have on the line? If you're already risking your life just existing, then you're not who I'm talking about. I got shot by a Trump protesting against Trump. Then I got death threats for the next few months or so. I spent years organizing before I finally managed to get out of the US. The FBI visited a friend of mine at least once a year. Another friend of mine just had his door kicked in by feds. A good number of folks in my circles get harassed by the FBI regularly, and are getting extra attention now. One of my friends was shot at and hit by a car. Another friend was shot at and almost hit by a car. I don't know how many of those "anarchists who don't vote" (who, actually, mostly vote) don't have PTSD, because I can't think of any. I have friends who've been stabbed in various parts of their bodies by Nazis. I was on the phone with a guy when a Nazi threw a bomb at his house.
Our people were black bagged *last* time Trump was in office. A lot of people I know are at pretty high risk. All I'm saying is this: I'm voting, are you going to put yourself in as much risk as we've been putting ourselves in for generations to fight this shit?

2025-09-21 05:58:53 UTC

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5 years ago is exactly what I'm talking about. Fascists took the supreme court. Trump was never stopped. Most of his policies continued under Biden. Democrats mostly just took over his platform and kept running with it.
You know how Trump is renditioning people to other countries to circumvent international laws against returning people to counties where they'll be tortured or killed? Yeah, Biden started that.
Five years ago liberals stopped fighting because they thought voting worked, and here we are. Voting didn't work, you needed to keep organizing to make this impossible.
...and now they're much more entrenched. You have to *always* oppose bad shit, even when your president does it.
You have to *keep* paying attention and *keep doing stuff* to make sure bad shit is impossible, even when it's your party doing it.

2025-09-20 11:41:36 UTC

Hey liberals, I'll make you a deal. I'll vote, if you do something actually useful.
Fun fact, I've already voted in every election I've been eligible to vote in. So you're gonna organize to feed houseless folks in your area, protect trans folks, run ICE out of your neighborhood, film the police every time you see them....
No one ever voted fascists out of office, but we do know how to stop them. Make it impossible for them to govern. That's the trick. So maybe we can spend a little less time fighting straw men and a little more time being ungovernable.
Cool, glad we're on the same page.

2025-09-18 14:42:32 UTC

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the book "Farming While Black" mentioned Black women braiding seeds into their hair before being taken onto slave ships, to then grow so many of the food crops identified with southern cooking today. I imagine going from that to organizing the rebellions that lead to the Civil War, all while literally in slavery.
The scale of determination of just that is almost impossible for me to imagine. Yeah, this isn't something to take lightly but also the power of human resolve is hard to comprehend even when we can see it right there in (recent) history... And it's right there in all of us, if we're willing to tap into it.
Rojava was born from one of the most violent and oppressive regimes in history. Relative to so many resistance movements, to so many times in history (in *US* history) this things are so much easier now for so many folks. If we can (collectively) tap in to even a tiny portion of our potential, we will be unstoppable.

2025-09-18 07:03:39 UTC

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public records activism absolutely works, awesome!

2025-09-13 10:57:45 UTC

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it would be good to get a feminist perspective. I think a lot of urbanism content today misses things like the challenges around caretaking.
Digging in to mass transit is great, but perhaps it would be good to dig in to what it looks like to use mass transit with a stroller or a wheelchair. It's easy to miss the fine details of "this sidewalk on the way to the train is 2 feet wide" when that isn't a major problem for the content creator.

2025-08-30 11:22:43 UTC

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I do think it's worth pointing out that cities predate modern agriculture. There may well be much more creative ways to use cities without needing to decrease (or significantly decrease) density.
I mean, food forests are very high intensity food production systems with minimal overhead. It's unfortunate I haven't seen any here in the Netherlands, so far anyway. They could easily be in parks.
Edit: modern

2025-08-25 18:57:49 UTC

Ecofash like to claim that the earth is over its human carrying capacity. That's absolutely untrue for 99.9% of the population or so. But the carrying capacity of billionaires is zero.

2025-08-14 05:17:43 UTC

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Stolen from a chat...
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/025/420/051/416/854/original/ad4194371e820414.jpg

2025-08-14 05:15:52 UTC

Needs more sandwich...
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-dc-2673882863/

2025-08-07 20:43:46 UTC

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stabbing military folks in the back will definitely not come back to bite the administration in any way whatsoever, I'm sure.

2025-07-17 06:18:51 UTC

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this was part of his presidential platform in 2001. He also ran on "ban SUVs."

2025-07-16 08:02:28 UTC

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good luck on the escape plan

2025-07-14 07:09:44 UTC

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ICE has killed people as long as ICE has existed, mainly "unintentionally." That's already massively escalated.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5374028-migrant-deaths-in-ice-custody-canadian-citizen-florida/
These camps are generally moving rapidly towards the English style concentration camps that were the inspiration for Hitler's camps. This Florida camp is exactly modeled in that style. Nazi death camps could be the next step, but they'll probably start hiding the death toll, if they haven't already done so, before they switch over.
English camps, and American death camps for indigenous people, were already pretty brutal. The slave camps they've already started talking about are similar to one of the most brutal Nazi camps: Monowitz.

2025-07-12 08:16:57 UTC

There are factories today making bombs to drop on children and aircraft to drop them. These factories could have been tooled to make aircraft to put out fires and could still be retooled to do so in the future.
People in power are making explicit decisions to end lives instead of save them, and that's not something that should ever be forgiven or forgotten.

2025-07-11 15:31:36 UTC

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this is completely valid, and also not in conflict with what I'm saying.
Though, I think it's worth saying that most (neurotypical) people tend to be really susceptible to group think. A lot of people don't actually have beliefs, they just go with whatever they're surrounded by. They can be just as easily swayed to commit atrocities as to support liberation. But one is clearly better than the other, one clearly *feels* better in every way. In the same way there is simply an inertia to the current machine, there can be an inertia of liberation where it's just hard to "un-liberate" free people.
The more people join that inertia, the harder it becomes to move things back. People definitely need to deal with their shit, they need to be held accountable for it, but I also think it's useful to welcome their weight to flipping the system if they realize it's better.
People leave hate groups because it sucks to be in hate groups. Capitalism is exhausting, and community just feels good.

2025-07-10 21:50:24 UTC

If you save someone from having their face eaten by a leopard, you have their ear and the beliefs that lead you to save them suddenly have weight. If you abandon them, you have nothing at best and an enemy at worst.
It doesn't matter if they voted to release the leopards or were simply caught by them, the two possible outcomes are the same.
Anarchists build systems to save people. That will always be our advantage. We should use it.

2025-06-15 14:19:43 UTC

Y'all were wondering which way the army would break. This is as clear an answer as you're going to get.
During drills they were perfectly in time. This isn't a mistake. It's a message.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/687/802/409/349/310/original/597d90e3aa342eb0.mp4

2025-06-12 07:31:28 UTC

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/13/media/seattle-fox-news-autonomous-zone-protest
You can't win on optics... And you don't have to. People trapped in Fox news will not be swayed by anything. They aren't necessary. There are more than enough people to stop this, if you stop policing each other and feeding people to the police in order to "keep it peaceful." A tiny amount of direct action is more than enough to completely collapse the ethnic cleansing machine.
There is not, and has never been, an unconvinced group. This is a myth the right uses to control you.
I'm not saying, "go loot 7/11." There are plenty of things that shouldn't be on the table. But I am saying that if someone is trying to flip an ICE van or police escort and y'all sit down so the cops can grab that person, you are murdering as many people as ICE can kidnap if those assets aren't destroyed. If you go tell the cops about someone burning a Waymo, you are helping ICE intelligence kidnap and rendition people to foreign death camps.
And you are doing it for nothing. None of your collaboration with the police will stop them. Look at Newsom. No matter how much you collaborate, you will always be the enemy. Just be the enemy and don't be afraid of it. Do what needs to be done to save lives, to save families, to save your neighbors. That's literally all that matters.
Genocide must be stopped by any means necessary and all means available. Anything less than that is collaboration with the perpetrators.
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

2025-06-10 16:49:29 UTC

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Coming from the US, it's easy for the US understanding of things to dominate everything. It's also historically been easy to excuse, since this all happened in the US.
But they were also anarchists, and we are (and should be more) internationalists. So there's interest in submissions from the rest of the world. If any #Dutch anarchists have thoughts on this, I would be interested in reading about if Sacco and Vanzetti influenced #Nethrlands.
There's also interest in #French and #German translations. (I'm sure a #Netherland translation wouldn't be unwelcome.)

2025-06-10 15:50:04 UTC

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"Some questions posed might include but not be limited to:
- What does the transnational campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti show us about 1920s global political culture?
- What did Sacco and Vanzetti signify for Italians and non-Italians in the United States and for foreign populations?
- What roles did their Italianness and their anarchism play in transforming their cause into a global struggle?
- How was the Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaign used in the 1920s by various social movements outside the United States, and how has the memory of the two men been used since then?
- Why do Sacco and Vanzetti seem to remain relevant today in places they never lived in or visited?
What role have various forms of media played in creating their celebrity?
- What significance do Sacco and Vanzetti as victims of anti-immigrant sentiments and as holders of unpopular/radical political beliefs have for us facing renewed anti-immigration laws and political persecution today?"

2025-06-10 15:48:46 UTC

Hey #Anarchist #writers:
"The Italian American Review seeks essays for a special issue dedicated to a re-thinking and re-articulation of the meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti both historically and today."
https://calandrainstitute.org/call-for-papers-mobilizing-memory-sacco-and-vanzetti-on-the-centennial-of-their-executions-andrew-hoyt-guest-editor/

2025-06-08 18:52:05 UTC

Logistics is what wins or loses wars. Petroleum is the primary resource of oppression. It's just as critical to the MRAPs and Abrams that suppress foreign populations and protect oil extraction for the empire as it is to the MRAPs, armored vans, and police cars that protect the financial foundations of the empire and perpetuate the occupation of the imperial core.
Motonormitivity and Petro-fascism are two sides of the same coin.
So if you really want to undermine the occupation, the genocide machine, the system of global terror that has boomeranged back home, ask yourself how to separate the population and car culture. As you do that, you begin to separate the occupiers from their tools they need to maintain the occupation.
There are those who credit bikes with winning the Vietnam War. That may be an overstatement, but it's not that far off. The Ho Chi Minh trail was a set of bike trails that formed the backbone of a logistics network that the US spent the entire war failing to stop.
The primary lever of the occupation is itself logistical. How do you maintain a protest if the State can deliver soldiers anywhere it wants and can stop delivering food to supermarkets if "riots and looting break out"? What happens to the most marginalized in the world will happen to you. Do you think that if starvation works in Gaza do you think it won't be used to protect the integrity of other fascist states?
Expect escalation, and prepare for it. Good luck.
#USPol

2025-06-05 20:30:14 UTC

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Like, there's a world where a bunch of christian communists squatted their way to overthrowing the government of England, and I wanna see that shit again. They basically became the Quakers, who are fucking rad by the way, but like... I wanna see some Quakers get back to their roots and start squatting shit again.

2025-06-05 20:28:34 UTC

Bring back the Diggers.

2025-05-13 08:13:19 UTC

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heh, yeah, I have 2 kids so I don't have time unfortunately.

2025-05-04 09:36:39 UTC

When European explorers first saw the "new" world, they took it to be an "unspoiled" wilderness. In reality, many of these "natural" environments were actually highly advanced agricultural systems that were carefully tended by #indigenous people. The "natural" plenty that amazed Europeans was, in fact, the result of generations of careful tending. Europeans are only now, hundreds of years later, "rediscovering" these methods (and, in typical European fashion, naming it #permaculture , pretending they invented it, and profiting from it instead of sharing it). No only is it being rediscovered in the Americas and South Pacific, but European models are now being rediscovered.
Europeans could not believe the truth that indigenous people in the South Pacific and Americas had developed something so advanced that it took hundreds of years for colonizers to even recognize it as anything but "magic" (any sufficiently advanced technology, and all that).
What's interesting to me is that the Enlightenment thinkers that inspired #socialism and #anarchism, and many European inspired anarchists to this day, do exactly the same thing for the social technologies they observed in the Americas and argued to bring the same to Europe.
Rousseau thought that egalitarianism and liberty were just natural things, rather than things that had to be intentionally developed. The classical anarchist idea that "all we have to do is abolish the government" ignores generations of social evolution, of active development of social technology, by indigenous people. There continues to be an insurrectionary and adjacent trend within leftist thinking that still flows from this fallacy.
I've already talked about how the idea of a revolutionary as a man with a gun is patriarchal because it ignores the invisible labor of building and sustaining a revolutionary culture. This patriarchal element intertwines with Eurocentric/colonizer biases, in both cases I've mentioned. The European men who wrote about the thoughts of indigenous intellectuals in the Americas only recognized men as people in the societies they interacted with. Women who worked in agriculture were, therefore, invisible. Therefore, the entire systems they maintained *did not exist* to the colonizers. They, instead, happened naturally... Like laundry magically being folded and food magically being made.
As we figure out how to move forward from the failure of all elements of colonizer society (social, economic, technological), it's critical that we are aware of the omissions that have lead us to failure so many times in the past.

2025-05-04 06:19:57 UTC

Tell me again why we're supposed to venerate a "monarchy with extra steps" political system designed by dead slavers, and ignore the last few hundred of advancements in cybernetics and governance theory.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-025-00041-3#ref-CR9

2025-04-29 05:42:40 UTC

We were traveling out of Barcelona when the #SpainBlackout hit. We were actually waiting in line for the train. Power went out and cell service cut around noon. I was able to get wifi from a nearby hotel (I hope room 123 doesn't mind). I found an outage map for the city, but the map was entirely down. I overheard someone say it was national and found an article about that, but there really wasn't any info yet.
After waiting for a while with no info, the train station was evacuated. My partner found a route by bus. So we took our kids and bags and started walking. Finding the right stop was challenging. #OrganicMaps doesn't seem to have bus lines and #CityMapper doesn't do great offline. The kids don't sleep well when traveling, so this was all compounded by several days of sleep deprivation.
Navigatng was difficult. We managed to find a hotel with a generator who let us use their wifi to update our maps.
So we traveled across the city. Trafic lights seemed to be the only things with power, though there were places those didn't work. Metro and tram were down. There seemed to be exra buses, all of them packed. The roads were packed with cars.
It wasn't posible to get a regional bus ticket since the ticket machines were all down. The bus we were looking for didn't seem to actually exist and none of the bus drivers could answer questions. My spanish is not great and I didn't focus a lot on improving it since I'm already overwhelmed with learning dutch.
After not being able to find the bus for a while, we were almost going to head back to the hotel and ask for a room. Then the power came back on. We got a regional bus ticket. After waiting for another hour or so, the bus never came. We went back to the hotel and were able to get a room.
Wifi at the hotel didn't work after power came back, cell service was still down. Duo is mad at me.
I have been off my disaster prep game for a bit, and was especially off while traveling. I have some notes...
1. Always have cash.
2. Download maps in advance (you can do this for google maps also, but you can't route without internet).
3. Download translation languages in advance.
4. Always have extra water and snacks.
5. Pack light so you don't have to haul massive amounts of luggage everywhere.
Traveling with kids is hard under normal conditions. It's funny, I'm actually more calm in a crisis. Our kids did really well despite walking for hours around Barcelona (or perhaps because of it).
It's interesting how the city prioritized cars by prioritizing power to traffic lights, but that just clogged everything with cars and made bus travel harder. The metro is generally better, imho, in Barcelona because it doesn't have the car problem. Barcelona appears to be deeply unprepared for actual emergencies. A lot of cities are.
This is a good reminder that solar power and distributed grids are really important. Dedicated power to mass transit like trains and metro would help evacuate the city. Better bike infrastructure makes it easier to get around when cars clog the streets. I can see how much work is being done in this area, but there's a lot of room to improve. Cars are basically the worst solution for several reasons, including that they caused the problem in the first place.
I hope Europe learns from this and continues to move towards greater resiliency. #ClimateChange is going to make things like this happen more often, and centralization makes small disasters larger and makes disaster response slower. Deploying a bunch of cops is not a solution to anything.

2025-04-08 20:28:14 UTC

Trump doesn't have a sense of humor. He doesn't joke. He knows what he says is absolutely illegal.
He's not good with money. He's not good at negotiating. He's not a business man. He has no skills that are valuable to any other person. But he is extremely good at getting away with fraud.
One of the skills required to get away with lots of fraud is knowing that you can trust your accomplices. How do you do that?
You can't just ask someone, "hey, wanna do some crimes with me?" They could be against those crimes. They could get your arrested. Even talking about some crimes is a crime itself. You also can't just ask someone straight out, "how do you feel about, say, tax fraud? You know, hypothetically... for a friend."
You have to understand where they're at. You have to explore their boundaries and beliefs in a way that's actually plausibly deniable.
Pretending to joke is invaluable to people like Trump. He follows mob rules when getting things done. Joke, test the waters, then imply directions but never explicitly give them. It should always be possible to pull back and claim you didn't say a thing or mean it "in that way." Ambiguity and plausible deniability are critical. This criminal skill translates perfectly to politics.
The far right has used this tactic for years to pry open the Overton Window. Legacy media has been complicit in the right wing tactic by perennially platforming fascists.
Trump starts by making a "joke." He'll keep making the "joke" until enough people around him think he can get away with it, then it stops being a joke and starts being a policy. Once you've become normalized to the "joke," the Overton window has opened enough to talk about the reality.
When he "jokes" about deporting American citizens, he means he's planning to use ICE to kidnap protesters like he did in Portland at the end of his last term. But he will send them to a death camp in El Salvador instead of just intimidating them. He is telegraphing his next move. Get ready for it.
#USPol

2025-04-06 10:18:33 UTC

"Move fast and break things" is "haste makes waste" restated as an objective.

2025-04-04 08:01:37 UTC

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"well regulated militia" meant "slave patrol" at the time. They were built to prevent slave uprisings, so *who* has the right to and chooses to bear arms is also an important factor in how all this works.

2025-03-30 18:34:20 UTC

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of course it would come out of Arcata. It's a pretty magical place, really forward thinking in a lot of ways. The sewage treatment plant is also a bird sanctuary.
I was born in Humboldt. It's always great to see good things come out of there. :)

2025-03-30 07:33:45 UTC

Just a worthwhile reminder for #TeslaTakedown folks: #Tesla was never a real car company under #Musk. It was always an unprofitable grift propped up by massive government subsidies. The bubble was always going to pop at some point. It's always been vulnerable. There will never be robot taxis, or robots, or any of the other bullshit he's always promised to pump up the hype. That was always a lie.
The work you're doing is great and important, and you will win. Elon will find more ways to dump money into Tesla to prop up the stock, but, in the end, it will collapse. Tesla should have died a long time ago. You are attacking the only thing Tesla has: image. Keep going, you will win.

2025-03-25 06:03:26 UTC

Some years back a friend of mine related a conversation about the game Prison Architect. Basically someone had figured out a way to maximize profits by creating an area with bad wiring so that prisoners would end up being elected. My friend pointed out, "uh, dude, you just built a death camp."
It's actually surprisingly realistic that the most profitable prison would be a death camp. In fact, Monowitz was a concentration camp (an extension of Auschwitz) run by the conglomerate IG Farben. It was one of the most brutal Nazi camps that regularly worked people to death. It was also very profitable.
After the end of the civil war, US slavery transitioned from chattel to prison slavery. The convict leasing system was similar to the arrangement between IG Farben and the Nazi government in that prisoners were leased for labor with no concern for safety. American prisoners were used for dangerous labor like coal mining. It's no coincidence that these slaves were explicitly used to break strikes by free miners.
It won't surprise anyone that almost all of these slave prisoners were black, but not *all.* That was part of why it became less popular. Convict leasing *mostly* stopped after a white guy was whipped to death while being leased.
But it never really went away and the private prison industry, who funded Trump and Republicans are heavily invested in, has been bringing back prison slavery bit by bit.
It would be really profitable if they could have a really large supply of labor that they could make money off of and then dispose of, before they had to spend money on things like basic healthcare. It turns out that keeping people alive really eats into those profits, you can make way more money if you just work people to death.
Turns out, that the most profitable prison is a death camp. Monowitz wasn't run by Nazis trying to kill as many "undesirables" as possible. It was run by business people trying to maximize profit. It doesn't take an evil or hateful ideology to drive people to commit atrocities. It just takes perverse incentives.
Take some time to think about the fact that there is a tremendous financial incentive to build death camps in the US, that the people who would regulate them are all invested in the industry, and then take another look at what's happening in the US right now. What's going to happen next?
Take some time to process this and think about this question. It's worth thinking through carefully.
#USPol

2025-03-21 17:49:55 UTC

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Let's break it down a bit more. Society isn't just a prison, it's a recursive prison. It's a prison where every prisoner is a guard at a lower level until you have people at the bottom being systematically exterminated. Whenever they're killed off, the next level up gets to be the target.
The lines of who is above whom are constantly shifting.
One of the hardest things to accept is that you are not actually safe, especially if you're comfortable. As all this shit accelerates, people who aren't targets now are next.
Now, one of the things working in our favor is that a lot of hackers *are* targets now. They (we) *are* next *right now*. It's becoming a lot easier to see.
But then what? What the fuck do you do with that information? Run, hide, or fight?
If you fight, how? And that gets to the heart of the problem...

2025-03-21 17:44:39 UTC

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The first season of Mr. Robot kind of said it. Pull off the biggest hack ever, and you'll just end up back in the same thing. You simply cannot hack or destroy your way out of this system.
You have to build, and there isn't enough dopamine in that to get most of us on it. That shit takes years and it's basically negative reward for most of that time. Hacking tends to be a lot higher dopamine because you can turn it in to tight iteration challenges.
It's incredibly rare to hear hackers in the industry think about how to hack systems beyond digital ones. Maybe you'll get crossover with social engineers, but that's just straight out of most contracts so it's not on the radar. Even when it is, it's always hacking small systems. Owning the shit out of an evil biz (e.g.: lulzsec or anons owning the shit out of whomever) doesn't ultimately change much, if anything. Why?
Because society is a prison. How many hackers you know talk about Foucault? Not a whole lot. Why? Because our checks depend on us not understanding how we are integrated into, how we protect and promote, these systems of oppression.
I think a lot of folks have woken up to that in the last 8 years or so, but it's still a slow process. Even when faced with the completely obvious reality that we are hitting a wall, it's hard to not just want to go right back to the comfort you were used to....

2025-03-21 11:33:59 UTC

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I have a lot to say about this subject, but not a lot that most of my fellow hackers want to hear.