Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝

freelance librarian, anarchist

blog: https://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/
personal page: https://grconnect.com/rpuchalsky/index.html

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npub12aq09y5udxrslp23sfkxw7ph5wke3tkd3450n6xug3xn4u3463mq8xems2

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richpuchalsky_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

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nprofile1qqs9ws8jj2wxnpc0s4gcymr80qm68tvc4mxc668earwygnf67g6agaspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsvjxxrx

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-08-07 02:04:44 UTC

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Herders have been nomadic since way back

2026-08-06 14:53:14 UTC

On contemporary barbarism:
I saw some kind of right-wing media glorifying a cowboy riding alone etc. Whatever the historical realities of being a cowboy as a job were, this contemporary figure is a figure of barbarism: we are supposed to admire someone who is armed and ready to kill, uneducated, and not organized into any larger group.
Is this an anarchist figure? No it is not. There have been approximately no well-known anarchist cowboys.

2026-07-21 18:38:20 UTC

I vaguely understand that every left-of-center organization from DSA to National Lawyers Guild, is supposed to be run by Cuba now, accordingly to the official belief of the US. This is a new degree of imperial derangement.
It's notable to me that I haven't seen any pushback from the Democratic Party at all.
#uspol

2026-04-18 00:58:14 UTC

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It's not a matter of which empire is better. It's that the US is inextricably committed to the fossil fuel industry and China is committed to renewables. There is no chance for the planet to meet climate limits if US power lasts.

2026-04-18 00:13:22 UTC

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It's good that he's helping China

2026-04-14 16:48:20 UTC

Very glad that my life path did not require that I hang out with all of these horrible people (not the author -- everyone else)
https://www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/i-was-a-silicon-valley-sex-pet/

2026-04-05 16:31:48 UTC

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Thanks! I've bookmarked this and will study it later.
I've considered oulipo but I've never quite done it.

2026-04-05 15:39:07 UTC

An Easter message from the Pope. Posted here for alt text:
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/352/837/544/151/503/original/3a2ad2f86a3f0d97.webp

2026-04-05 15:23:55 UTC

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Putting in on the web is also difficult. Ideally it would be an everscroll kind of thing where as you go to the bottom you seamlessly continue. But I have no idea how to do this without some kind of "push" page which I find annoying. I don't want it to scroll without a human wanting to keep looking at it.
As a result I've never put it up in any kind of semi-permanent way.
Artists are very picky about this kind of thing. It matters (to us).
/fin

2026-04-05 15:21:10 UTC

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Maybe [@impermanen_](https://zirk.us/@impermanen_ ) might have something helpful to say about that aspect: this seems somewhat like a meditative practice.
In any case, the poem also presents publishing difficulties. When it was published I specified no title, not even "Untitled", and no page numbers, because that would imply priority of one page of the poem over another in a this-comes-first way.

2026-04-05 15:18:20 UTC

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This problem is because in some sense (although I do not believe in magic literally) the poem is a spell. I was sure to include "I'm pretty happy with it" because I am and because if I want to do Nietzsche's eternal return with a poem then happiness is the emotion I want to dwell on.

2026-04-05 15:15:20 UTC

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This poem presents special difficulties. It was written in 2013. Since then, it has been in some sense ongoing, although not mechanically ongoing. So... should I edit it? This is the first draft. When I think of the poem, I think of
"Will I have to die for them to be sure it's done?
But I've already died,"
and I think of it as "But I'm already dead," which is usually a sign that I should edit. But do I really want two versions of a never-ending poem?

2026-04-05 15:12:23 UTC

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The poem continues here:
https://mastodon.social/@richpuchalsky/116352725301756653
but that is it in this thread for the text of the poem
#note12q0…yqe5

2026-04-05 15:10:13 UTC

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It includes all that by reference
The poem is the world, by reference
It only has pauses
I'm pretty happy with it
This is the first draft
I'm not sure if there could be another draft
once I started
It
doesn't terminate
except through the usual processes
of death or sleep or boredom
What does it mean
it doesn't end?
When I was reading the poem once
(or speaking it from memory, no
one is really sure which comes first)
I paused

2026-04-05 15:09:13 UTC

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any time I start
speaking, I could have stopped in mid-poem
years ago, and be about to continue
Or anyone else
could be about to continue a poem
this one or some other
Is there really another?
This wouldn't be
without words read in the past
back through what I've heard, read
what everyone near me did
back to other languages and dim time
It won't be
without people to wonder why
a pause brings a poem, not conversation
People in the future

2026-04-05 15:08:12 UTC

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When I was reading the poem once
(or speaking it from memory, no
one is really sure which comes first)
I paused
And started up again later
But how much later?
There is no set time for
a break in a poem
We read them as if they are
trains bumping over railroad ties
But
that is a convention
Once I paused
and people thought it was done
the poem was over
and it wasn't
Will I have to die for them to be sure it's done?
But I've already died,

2026-04-05 15:05:50 UTC

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The poem itself follows in the next post:

2026-04-05 15:04:56 UTC

#ClassicPoetry #NationalPoetryFoolMonth
#poetry
Yesterday I posted about a poem in which I consider whether poetry requires a human voice, humanity, or a voice, and conclude no. My next poem is about another radical consideration: does a poem really require a beginning or an end? (Like the law of headlines: also no.)
This untitled poem was written as a moebius strip. Every time I read I start at a different place. It does not formally end: sometimes I read more of it sometimes less.
1/n

2026-04-04 04:29:01 UTC

""This is a wake-up call," Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto said last week, in a call to push for electrification and renewable energy. Indonesia aims to have 100GW of solar power in "no later than two years", up from its current 11GW, he said, with earlier plans including battery energy storage system (Bess) deployments.
"We will convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles. All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric," he added."
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-market-news/2804990-se-asia-s-ev-push-intensifies-as-energy-crunch-drags-on

2026-03-31 03:22:35 UTC

A society that gets rid of its librarians should not have libraries. Let them be barbarians like they want to
https://fox17.com/news/local/rutherford-countys-top-librarian-is-off-the-job-after-a-heated-public-meeting

2026-03-30 17:03:09 UTC

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Love to see people "in tech" who have no idea how technology works and who think that wearing a proven technology, the N95 mask, against a deadly disease is some kind of phobia.
@npub1jay…80k8

2026-03-26 18:22:04 UTC

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Iain Banks, in this Culture novels, used to depict the anarchists from his Culture society as fitting very easily into aristocratic societies that they had to act as diplomats within, or whatever -- as long as they were supposed to be aristocrats.
@npub1lh2…wq3v @npub1s0w…7dfq

2026-03-26 17:43:27 UTC

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One of the parts of this that even some leftists don't want to admit to is that cop unions are terrible and have contributed to the public immunity for cops. When hundreds of cops surround a politician and yell at them about funding I'm sure that they or someone will describe that as a union action.
@npub1lh2…wq3v @npub1s0w…7dfq

2026-03-26 17:39:44 UTC

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This is very true in terms of small scale social cooperation among people who know (of) each other, and of course not really true in the sense that all of these people depend on the state in order to keep less-wealthy people in line.
@npub1lh2…wq3v @npub1s0w…7dfq

2026-03-26 13:29:22 UTC

One thing that absolutely should stop happening is naive liberals thinking that cops are going to impede, arrest, or investigate ICE instead of helping ICE and arresting protesters.
#uspol #ACAB

2026-03-22 23:47:51 UTC

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There should be no US and no US national anthem

2026-03-11 14:06:48 UTC

The general quality of American morality:
We support a genocide: you should have voted for the genocideur
We kill >100 schoolgirls:who cares
Gas goes up by 50 cents a gallon: OMG this is super important what happened

2026-03-11 01:45:23 UTC

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Forgiving gas taxes:
Bad news: less pressure to convert to renewables
Bad news: higher oil prices still mean that fossil fuel industry gets more profits
Pretty much a wash on the other two.
So the Democratic initiative just converts good news to bad news.

2026-03-11 01:42:54 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@richpuchalsky/116207457411613275
Most summary part of a recent thread. Now guess what Democrats are trying to do in response?
https://gizmodo.com/gas-prices-aaa-tax-holiday-iran-war-2000732093
#note14ny…kmh4

2026-03-10 23:24:40 UTC

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Good news: higher oil prices mean more pressure to convert to renewables
Bad news: higher oil prices mean fossil fuel industry gets to extract more profits
More good news: 85-90% of all oil produced is burned, so if this lasts it will mean lower GHG emissions
More good news: decline of empire

2026-03-10 23:21:22 UTC

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Iran can block the Hormuz basically at will.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-navy-tells-shipping-industry-hormuz-escorts-not-possible-now-2026-03-10/

2026-03-10 23:09:23 UTC

There is a chart going around, and I can't figure out where it comes from. But I saw it via the Polycrisis people, who are generally trustworthy, so...
I'm going to type it out so I don't have to just type it out as alt text:
Event/Conflict, Year, Volume of oil lost in MBPD (millions of barrels per day)
Hormuz Blockade (current) 2026 ~ 20.0
Iranian Revolution 1978 5.6
Yom Kippur War (embargo) 1973 4.4
Iraq-Kuwait War 1990 4.3
Iran-Iraq War 1980 4.0
Russia-Ukraine Invasion 2022 1.0 - 3.0

2026-03-08 15:00:07 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@judedoyle/116193925832008050
A good essay. I don't agree with all of it, but it's good.
I wrote a poem a while back that's about many similar things. Want to read it? Well whether you do or not, I'll put it in this thread. It's about considering the teenagers who sign up for war.
#note1e74…3ssf

2026-03-04 16:11:39 UTC

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Most software projects fail, most of what gets shipped doesn't work, *and also* most of them never needed to be written in the first place.
It's easy to ship a product when the purpose of the product is something like "discourage people from using medical care they've paid for."

2026-02-28 17:57:49 UTC

All sorts of people have been telling me that Europe was ready to stand up to the US.
"UK, Germany and France condemn Iranian attacks
The UK, Germany and France have condemned Iranian attacks on countries in the region, saying Iran must refrain from indiscriminate military strikes.
They did not comment on US and Israeli attacks on Iran"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/feb/28/israel-attacks-iran-as-blasts-heard-in-tehran-live-updates?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-69a2f2708f08e575db5bd5ee#block-69a2f2708f08e575db5bd5ee

2026-02-28 03:45:56 UTC

The "horses can do whatever they want since the invention of the car" AI clown brings up a supposed folk story about orangutans from some people who live near them: that orangutans can speak and understand speech, but they carefully pretend they can't because if people found out they'd immediately be put to work.
This has always struck me as a folk story that is basically true. Not that orangutans can speak, but that if they could we'd put them in grinding minimum wage labor right away.

2026-02-27 00:02:11 UTC

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I live in a town that had one of the only interracial communes before the Civil War, a center of Garrisonian abolition, a major stop on the Underground Railroad, and the home of some noted Black organizers and speakers. Not everyone needs to be absolved. The demand that everyone be considered equally guilty is just designed to ease the feelings of the people who really are guilty, not in the past but now.

2026-02-26 23:06:32 UTC

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Poor whites in the South turned out to defend slavery then, and the south is exporting fascism to the rest of the US now -- with decisions that are being made by people who were elected with their support.
I see no reason to forgive and forget. Historical memory is non-negotiable: people living there are going to have to get used to hearing that insofar as they keep that culture (which they are) they are bad people descended from other bad people.

2026-02-26 22:09:32 UTC

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This is historical revisionism and I don't find it convincing at all. There was a whole civil war fought over slavery and yes, it was based in the South.

2026-02-26 21:55:18 UTC

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Civil war animus is a good thing -- I would have assumed you'd agree, given your username. It's not simply "assigning blame to folks who live somewhere according to birth lottery": there are distinct regional subcultures that still follow historical lines

2026-02-26 20:08:34 UTC

Periodic self-repetition: I'm extremely tired of people saying "you can't say bad things about [US] red states because good people live there too."
When Hitler was coming to power, did people say "You can't say bad things about Nazi Germany because Jews live there too?"
After the war, did they say "You can't say anything bad about the German people because a few people opposed the Holocaust?"
No.

2026-02-25 18:34:37 UTC

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This is the exact economic placement of the US that Trump would like to destroy, and can destroy. With contemporary productivity there is no actual need for cross-national trade for large nations. For the rare things that you can't get, you can have your military coerce.
This comes with less wealth for elites, but more power over people, and the latter is what they really want.

2026-02-25 18:18:48 UTC

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We do actually win "hot" wars, in the sense of conventional wars -- see e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan for recent examples. Or even Vietnam. We roll in, destroy conventional opposition, and occupy the area.
What we lose is the ensuing guerilla war, which may take a decade or so. But no wealthy country will risk that. No industrialized country's leaders are going to think well let's defy the US, it's OK because after guerilla war and devastation, we'll win.

2026-02-25 17:12:28 UTC

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my usual:
https://mastodon.social/@richpuchalsky/116106244134702463
#note17dl…3ect

2026-02-21 02:24:48 UTC

It's very common -- even in my TL -- for people to disparage Trump as incompetent for not understanding soft power and thinking he can do everything with hard power.
Bur this hasn't actually hurt him yet. The US has a whole lot of hard power!
"Soft power" is a concept that US client states like and that Democrats within the US like, because it means that they can pretend that they aren't hostage to hard power.

2026-02-20 21:17:49 UTC

LAPD and the public schools are part of the same carceral system, and children between 6 and 18 are legally not allowed to be anywhere else during school hours unless a parent is with them. #ACAB
https://laist.com/news/education/lapd-warns-legal-consequences-as-school-walkouts-continue

2026-02-16 02:47:56 UTC

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These curses are, of course, quite literal if you don't believe in religion. Why should any of our victims forgive us? I certainly wouldn't. We just sponsored genocide. Or if you prefer something more physical-law in nature, our own actions are worsening global climate change that our children will suffer under.

2026-02-16 02:44:03 UTC

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How can anyone think that our society or people are good? This is past "we are the baddies" and into "we are Sodom and Gomorrah" or, if you prefer something else "we are setting ourselves up for generational curses".

2026-02-16 02:41:33 UTC

I didn't post this because previously it was purported CCTV footage and could have been anything. But now it's been verified as a news story.
#ICE faked car trouble to get a helpful person to come help them, and they grabbed and disappeared him.
They are doing every taboo thing that G-d or gods cursed peoples for. Doing violence to the people who made them food, parading good food in front of captive children and then making them eat worms.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/minnesota/news/ice-agents-fake-car-trouble-to-lure-man-brooklyn-center-minnesota/

2026-02-14 03:37:57 UTC

There are a lot of recent posts of mine that I've hashtagged by US state. That's because the acts of goodness and evil in the US are generally playing out along completely predictable geographic / cultural lines that go back to slavery. Cultures do not change very quickly.

2026-02-13 17:19:54 UTC

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Sure, but I don't think that anyone other than beekeepers actually did anything to "save the bees", so I don't know whether measures to save honeybees really had any widespread bad effect.
@npub156z…hx3t @npub1yn6…qdnt

2026-02-13 16:24:51 UTC

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Did "save the bees" cause harm? Actual question, don't know the answer myself etc.
(I dislike all individualist "solutions", and think that "just plant trees" was a distraction and possibly caused more harm in terms of fire regimes than good.)
@npub1yn6…qdnt

2026-02-06 02:04:12 UTC

People will go on about "community values" without extending this to its obvious corollary that there are good communities and bad communities. There are some that will help you in every way and some that are cursed by their values and by the people raised in those values. I don't think that every small town could have had the good response that this one did.
https://www.welcometohellworld.com/a-surprise-zone-of-interest/

2026-02-03 14:55:03 UTC

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Repression succeeds sometimes, though. It succeeds more often than it fails. It may well fail this time, but as a general principle the entire mechanism of the state is there so that when people protest and demand change it comes to nothing.

2026-01-30 05:00:39 UTC

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I basically don't believe that there is something really special about the people who can see through this that other people don't have. I think that anyone who really wants to can see through it. Unlike a sales presentation, there's an accumulation of things that people see throughout their lives, and you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

2026-01-30 04:53:45 UTC

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At one level this is a distinction without a difference. The vast majority of people in the US believe that democracy means that they are in control in some way, and that it's desirable. If they believe that, and keep on insisting that we follow democracy into the death drive off the cliff, then what's the difference? They are still acting according to their beliefs.

2026-01-30 04:40:48 UTC

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We can blame the elite class that runs our society for this, and I certainly do. But these elites have not worked out a magical system of impunity that makes people helpless. We live in a democracy and we have to face that a majority or near majority of people in our society want this.

2026-01-30 04:37:28 UTC

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Just to refresh peoples' memory, all of these causes of death and trauma are completely voluntary on our society's part. They are not tragedies that we can't avoid.
1) We know how to clean indoor air so that Covid transmission is much less prevalent. It's not expensive for a wealthy society.
2) Most societies do not have school shootings, and policy changes that would stop them are obvious.
3) We don't have to have a fascist goon squad.

2026-01-30 04:30:14 UTC

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I think that people in the US have a sense that everything is so screwed up that they want a clean slate, like restarting a video game. Freud expressed this as something like "an aspect of libidinal energy that seeks 'to lead organic life back into the inanimate state'", to quote wiki. This clean slate means no children because children carry on memory and the results of decisions being made now.

2026-01-30 04:26:10 UTC

People humor me onhere when I write about death drive society or about how many people really do want others to die, but .... our children are going through zero protection from Covid, school shootings complete with school shooting drills, and #ICE raids like this latest "please drop my kids off in prison because that's the only place I can watch them."
It's a society that wants children to die. Children remind people of the future, which they find intolerable.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/29/2-more-kids-from-liam-ramos-columbia-heights-school-in-ice-custody

2026-01-29 17:13:11 UTC

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"Oh but there are good people there as a minority" my ancestors lived in Eastern Europe as a Jewish minority. We did not say that everyone should support the Tsar or that the society was good because we lived there. We got out.

2026-01-29 17:11:24 UTC

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"Oh but the politicians in Texas do not speak for all Texans" I don't care and neither should anyone else. The people living there tolerate what goes on there. They boast about how they are armed and ready to stop governmental overreach and clearly they do not think that having agents of the state kill children constitutes anything that they should care about.

2026-01-29 17:08:44 UTC

It's time to stop pretending that people in the US are one heterogeneous mass without local cultural differences. Not every place is Minnesota and not every place can be Minnesota.
Some places in the US export fascism to the rest of us and have done so for as long as they have existed. #Texas, for instance, is the site of all of those "child died in #ICE prison" events and its population is fine with that.
#uspol

2026-01-27 13:32:29 UTC

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It was the FBI. Included the famous attempt to get MLK Jr to kill himself.

2026-01-27 03:38:20 UTC

Remember: FBI is no better than ICE
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/fbi-investigating-minnesota-signal-minneapolis-group-ice-patel-kash-rcna256041

2026-01-26 12:38:56 UTC

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The mention of Corey Robin in this article is instructive. When did Corey Robin go from someone I thought was worth reading to someone that sadly I thought wasn't? When he penned his book on Clarence Thomas and what Thomas really believed, as if some kind of conservative legal philosophy guided Thomas' decisions and not the crudest kind of bribes.
Once Robin did that investment in himself, in his own judgement, he could never go back and admit that it was really more simple.

2026-01-26 12:20:17 UTC

I missed this one (from Dec 18, 2025). An article on Americans who saw this all coming that doesn't interview a single anarchist. At least it says so: the author writes that their focus is "on those in the Democratic base".
The people interviewed are fine in themselves: the article tries to use the interviews to figure out why our pundits are so bad. But of course they are bad because power created them. So it's symptoms without cause.
https://newrepublic.com/article/204254/survey-2024-election-cassandras-trump-2025

2026-01-25 19:57:31 UTC

#Minneapolis, today -- Tiananmen Square moment.
Notice that the cops who come in and disperse people at the end are wearing Conservation Service identification. When the state is threatened by popular action it calls in every kind of cop and they all pitch in to repress the public. All cops are bastards, not just #ICE.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/957/494/955/669/034/original/cc3335c80911f3c8.mp4

2026-01-24 15:46:36 UTC

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All cops are bastards. Also, by the way, veterans are suckers and hired killers unless they were drafted.
@npub1s02…zz9t

2026-01-19 02:12:24 UTC

A video of uncertain provenance showing an elderly Hmong man being arrested by ICE in sub-zero weather, wearing very little.
The Hmong in Minnesota are there because they were US allies in Vietnam. People should remember: never be a US ally. The US will not remember.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/919/330/558/386/095/original/5f14fa52f9fd6f4b.mp4

2026-01-15 17:46:41 UTC

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I can say that the governor doesn't speak for Texans because I don't believe that governors in general speak for anyone. I think that our whole democratic, electoral regime should end.
But if someone doesn't -- where do they think that the bad decisions come from?

2026-01-15 17:45:10 UTC

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For instance, Texas AMU is busily destroying more classes after earlier destroying its library, due to rulings by Texas' governor. I replied on Bluesky that Texans don't deserve libraries or, really, universities. Promptly got something back from a Texan telling me that the governor doesn't speak for all Texans.
OK why do you believe in democracy then? When a majority of voters choose something that's not a real choice?

2026-01-15 17:41:42 UTC

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I have especial scorn for people who defend democracy as rule by the people, even indirectly, and who are also unwilling to ever hold a people responsible for its democratic decisions.

2026-01-15 17:39:36 UTC

"if you’d been in Germany in the 30s what would you have done” is a question that is really about your neighbors, not yourself except at a personal planning level. (I planned to run. I got too old to.)
My assumptions about my neighbors have turned out to be pretty much correct. Minnesotans are generally good but most people suck. I don't see what's to be gained by pretending otherwise. Mostly people say you should pretend otherwise so you can manipulate people.

2026-01-12 04:43:01 UTC

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They're considered to be separate illnesses in part because they are likely to have been caused by different pathogens: EBV for ME/CFS, Covid for Long Covid, etc. Even what people think of as polio is probably "long polio".
Some might be different presentations caused by the same virus, but most aren't. Even if they were, there are some syndromes that are differentiated by presentation even when they have the same underlying cause.

2025-12-22 20:07:18 UTC

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I think that the more important failure in connection with this is forgetting history, including people's personal history. For instance let's say that a certain LB is connected with a project. Should we be slow to judge, and hash out the process by shouting at each other? No, because LB has a repeated history and the time for slow judgement has already passed.

2025-12-22 19:01:43 UTC

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I don't really think that "going back to shouting at each other" is what this is about, because people get tired of shouting at each other. People have to recognize bad faith and then just not deal with it. You can't expect people to spend their lives dealing with the same few abusers over and over.

2025-12-22 19:00:04 UTC

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The Bad Space wanted to build a project that, if it ever got widespread buy-in, would exclude "bad" servers from the rest of Mastodon, basically destroying them. They didn't get buy-in because they quickly demonstrated that they were untrustworthy, and the project is now a dead letter.
But of course it was in bad faith. I've seen other decisions made by the people involved. They didn't genuinely believe anything: they just knew that making that claim was a good move.

2025-12-22 18:14:34 UTC

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So my general recommendation to people is: do not let a scene handle what you need to do to protect yourself. If you need to communicate with people, do that yourself. If you need the support of friends, call on your friends as friends. This is not a solved problem, and the people who suggest abstracted methods don't seem to have a good answer for why those methods always seem to fail.
/fin

2025-12-22 18:11:56 UTC

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Anarchists have their own ways of dealing with abusers in scenes. They are not good. Maybe they call for sanction on the abuser more than the victim(s) more of the time than not?
But basically there is a lot of belief in mediation, community justice, and reparative justice processes and I've never seen these things work. Abusers are fine with them because they go along to a certain point and then if they aren't controlling the story, they bail out.

2025-12-22 18:05:59 UTC

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This is only an online version of what goes on much more seriously in non-online spaces all the time. Every scene has at least one resident abuser. That's because scenes are the kind of habitat that abusers want.
This abuser will of course learn whatever form of defensive / offensive words that the scene uses. It's not difficult.
If a scene can't reject its abuser(s), the scene will not necessarily die, but it'll become horrible.

2025-12-22 18:03:12 UTC

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kolektiva justified the almost-removal as because I had written a post "calling out" The Bad Space and that this was somehow encouraging inter-server conflict, but it was really because the initial mod assumed it was racist.
kolektiva, to its communal credit, decided not to remove me after all (but after posting to all and sundry that I'd done something questionable). I thanked them and quietly moved to mastodon.social.

2025-12-22 18:00:27 UTC

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Gelderloos had written about this exact kind of thing and she'd slagged him, one week before she wanted support against people slagging her the same way. That's why she blocked me.
I later had my own collision with The Bad Space. I pointed out that they were telling everyone to block the kolektiva server and they ginned up a brigade to ask kolektiva to remove me. kolektiva almost did because any criticism of The Bad Space was called by The Bad Space a racist criticism of a Black developer.

2025-12-22 17:57:13 UTC

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Then a week later, a loose group of bad Mastodon mods, including some people from / with The Bad Space, went off on AnarchoNinaWrites. Why? Ostensibly because of the usual identity politics kind of thing: AnarchoNinaWrites had written something disparaging about captialists or bankers that they aggressively took to be antisemitism. Plus a lot of general "anarchists are toxic".
I supported AnarchoNinaWrites of course, but I was pissed that she was demanding support.

2025-12-22 17:54:29 UTC

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One of the most popular anarchist follows onhere is AnarchoNinaWrites. I've been blocked by her. (I think her pronoun is her: I can't look it up.) Why? Because Peter Gelderloos -- another anarchist writer -- approvingly linked to a piece that I forget the title of, about unspecified horrible toxic people that wanted to go off on other people in scenes, and AnarchoNinaWrites went off on him because it was unspecified and therefore suspect.
Then a week later...

2025-12-22 17:50:59 UTC

A mutual is going through a bad time with a community. This brings up a lot of past experiences that I've observed people go through and it's a part of my bad opinion of American people in general, both in liberal and leftist communities.
Do people know that abusers exist? Do they rely on a simple "Believe X" rule that fails when the abuser is an X?

2025-12-20 02:30:17 UTC

My children are 25 and 22. If they were younger -- let's say, K-12 age -- I would have had to find the energy to move the whole family out of the US.
If you have children and can do it, emigrate for their sake. In between fascism, mass shootings, horrible education, and diminished life prospects, there's also now non-manditory vaccination for everything. That's really upping the deadliness.
(I haven't even included multiple Covid because that's going to be more or less true everywhere.)

2025-12-16 04:48:32 UTC

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Apple's current position is that you aren't allowed to do anything, especially not anything fun.

2025-12-13 16:26:47 UTC

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I think that what most FOSS people don't understand is that it is a skill and that the vast majority of people want no part of it.
Like fixing your car. I grew up in a time/place where you were supposed to know how to fix your car. People bemoaned how this became more difficult to do, but really most people do not want to learn how to fix their car.

2025-12-13 16:20:33 UTC

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I've used Linux on a server for decades and Unix before that. I've tried to use various FOSS tools for as long as FOSS has existed. Solutions that involve using rclone or whatever are just as likely to lose your stuff, except that if will be through some failure of volunteer maintenance, either yours or the person maintaining the tool.

2025-12-13 16:10:04 UTC

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But the coming AI boondoggle has meant an upcoming rise in server rental prices, unless the bubble pops first. It may be back to having a physical server in a closet at home, or something, unless the price of hardware goes up similarly with hosting. In which case I'll have to call on my academic connections to see whether I can get space on a university machine.
The small circle of hobbyists who can do this is shrinking.

2025-12-13 16:04:33 UTC

Just boosted a post about someone losing their family pictures because Apple froze their Apple ID. I should point out that while Apple sucks there is basically no recourse in moving to anything else. All of its competitors are equally bad and doing things yourself with Linux etc. is a lot of work and is probably similarly likely to lose things through your own mistakes.
My solution (for work things) was to rent a Linux server, which really meant paying for a fractional Linux sysadmin.
1/2

2025-12-09 04:16:00 UTC

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Israel doesn't have FPTP, and look at their genocidal election outcomes. I think that all campaigning to change electoral systems is misguided reformism, as if by getting the system details write we can stop the state from doing the same thing over and over.
(Australia also has horrible results without FPTP. Not as bad as Israel, clearly, but it's still going ahead with coal.)
@npub1zvl…qckq @npub1san…jgxu

2025-12-06 04:19:36 UTC

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You will never get people on the left in America to stop fat shaming people. America is a nasty society and the leftists in it are not immune, nor are most people who are going to do it really educable in any way.

2025-12-02 21:08:37 UTC

@npub1rsg…gw0v (who I think is more active on Bluesky than here) apparently has a new book, The Extended Universe, coming out. I normally would not read anything that involves Disney but her last book, In Defense of Looting, was good.

2025-11-26 03:48:15 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tess/115613452377202318
OK, I've been seeing this article go around and... I do not think the author really has a good feel for what poverty involves.
The only people who spend $30K/year on child care are people who are not poor. It's true that once you're middle class you can absorb a lot of money doing things like this. But poor people with kids work and also do not spend $30K.
#note1r4y…0u8x

2025-11-25 19:43:06 UTC

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Unless you're extroverted, the most annoying places are usually small towns because there are no anarchist groups around.

2025-11-25 17:52:28 UTC

Rhetoric: grow your own food in your garden!
Reality: we grew too much squash, and we can't give it away. Food banks do not want perishable foods, even when (as with squash) they will last unrefrigerated for 3-6 months.
#gardening tip: you probably want only 5 squash plants for personal food

2025-11-22 02:46:50 UTC

Bluesky is going wild about big political news and as far as I can tell all it is is that Trump smiled at Mamdani and a noted crank congressperson resigned, which positions her better to run against Trump. I dislike the way that liberals manufacture a big storm of "things happening" out of nothing: it's what they have done for years and years of Wait For Mueller Time.

2025-11-18 17:38:28 UTC

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I'm not so much concerned with task, as just apologizing that I'm generating clarifications of things that I shouldn't need to have clarified. (For instance, I remember the derivation of Frostean from Frost, Faust, and Proteus). I am operating at very partial capacity which is bad for this kind of thing.