Adrian Riskin :anarchoheart2:

Anarchist, activist, abolitionist, angelenoLOLogist, unschooler, anti-zionist Jew, mathematician. Formerly at https://michaelkohlhaas.org and https://sunshinecoalition.net, now at https://chez-risk.in. Adrian Riskin :anarchoheart2: (npub1l27…zpk4)">https://justmytoots.com/Adrian Riskin :anarchoheart2: (npub1l27…zpk4)

Avatar: A black and white photo of Alexander Berkman rather than me.
Place: Los Angeles -- would we not shatter it to bits and then remold it nearer to the heart's desire?
Erdös number: 2

Public Key

npub1l27xdy4pns8r4ueexkd3wdy8dm64z2uqhqme4h8ee4e6rlpp228svgzpk4

NIP-05 Address

adrianriskin_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs040rxj2secr367vuntxchxjrkaa239wqtsdu6mnuu6uaplss49rcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsjj65dm

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1l27xdy4pns8r4ueexkd3wdy8dm64z2uqhqme4h8ee4e6rlpp228svgzpk4

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Last Notes

2026-06-01 16:27:16 UTC

This morning we have a lot of libs on here supporting mandatory voting in the US -- "We are very smart and rational and Harris would have won if more people voted so we have to make them!" Have they even considered how laws are enforced and who they're enforced against?
A government of, by, and for the people where cops extort, hurt, and kill those very same people for not voting -- what a great idea! But of course the same goes for all their laws, so I guess yet again I'm upset that liberals aren't anarchists. Sigh.
#Anarchism #USPolitics #MandatoryVoting

2026-05-04 19:59:02 UTC

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I had the opposite experience. My parents were red diaper babies. They took me to see Billy Jack with some of their friends and made sure we understood cops and ranchers are really the bad guys.

2026-05-04 16:30:59 UTC

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Yeah absolutely. I'm indifferent to fediverse symbols but as a mathematician I'm professionally obligated to mock that damned ∴ on sight.

2026-04-29 21:18:16 UTC

I solved the Rubik's cube...
#RubiksCube #Math #Mathematics #Puzzles

2026-04-16 17:47:47 UTC

I was smoking some lovely hash last week and I realized I could use a few more pipes. I looked on eBay, but then I realized that I had everything on hand to make one myself. I've made a lot of things out of clay but for some reason it never occurred to me too make a pipe. This came out of the kiln this morning and I plan to test it out thoroughly later today, around 4:20 I imagine!
It's porcelain painted with a cobalt oxide wash. I don't use much glaze in the studio -- mostly oxides and Mason stains either as washes or blended into the clay body. I just love porcelain and in this case it let me make the stem very thin.
#Ceramics #Pottery #Porcelain #StonerEngineering #420pm
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/415/587/304/731/698/original/9f5c7d176d180907.jpg

2026-04-04 20:08:14 UTC

This toot is in lieu of me reply-guying every time someone posts the "Ronald Reagan" version of this graph.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/348/224/352/238/332/original/5cebcc8a28571278.png

2026-04-03 21:59:58 UTC

The other day I had a fairly popular post talking about how mathematicians easily and often admit that they don't know things or don't understand things. Today at work a real-life example came up!
Original post linked to in the next toot since apparently I can't post a link and have an image at the same time ... wtf?!
I was helping a student with Calc I in my office. The question gave a function and asked for values of x where the tangent line was horizontal. The function is the first in the image.
This requires taking the derivative with the product rule. The result of this is the second in the image. Since the second term has a denominator (other than 1 of course) we need to combine the two terms so we can set the numerator to 0 and solve.
The result of this operation is the third in the image. Fractions are 0 when their denominators are 0, so the fourth line shows the equation to be solved.
The student got this far without any help but was unable to solve the equation. This is commonplace. After all, the hardest part of calculus is algebra. But I couldn't see how to solve it either, so I told the student this.
At this moment two of my colleagues were talking in the hall outside my office so I told the student I'd ask them about it. Neither knew how to solve it and told me as much. So I told the student, who was actually thrilled that none of use could solve it either.
So I asked Wolfram Alpha, which gave a solution using the Lambert W, aka the productlog function. I'm a combinatorial topologist -- I do graph theory of various kinds. I've heard of this function but otherwise know nothing at all about it. And I'm happy to admit it! Anyway, that's how mathematicians roll.
#Calculus #LambertW #HorizontalTangent #DifferentialCalculus #Math #Mathematics #Mathematicians
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/342/986/826/452/378/original/cb3931430f1b477c.png

2026-03-31 20:52:09 UTC

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I poured over your list and it really peaked my interest!

2026-03-24 20:14:38 UTC

Every thread on here about AI has at least one guy, and it's always a guy, in the replies who makes me desperately yearn for a downvote button to mash. I get why there isn't one. I think it would be a bad idea in general to have one. And yet. And yet ..
#AI #VibeCoding #ReplyGuys #Subtoot

2026-03-11 17:42:26 UTC

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Yuck I'm sorry to hear it. Being scammed is so hurtful.

2026-03-11 17:31:14 UTC

Can you find the teensy lil bird in the rose bush? I always think of these as finches but I don't really know what they are. They flit around in small packs of three to twenty. Or flocks, whatever.
#Birds #BirdsOfMastodon #LosAngeles #Finches
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/211/716/093/813/934/original/0f4e79af6ef6b559.jpg

2026-03-10 20:45:55 UTC

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One thing I was surprised by concerning trees in southwestern mountains, especially in Arizona, is how sharply species change with respect to altitude. E.g. around Flagstaff it goes from piñon/ juniper to ponderosa to aspen/fir. Not exactly a tree line, but it's also striking compared to East coast mountains I've seen, Blue Ridge, Alleghenies, etc.

2026-02-15 19:00:29 UTC

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Yeah that is a problem. Pachli supports on-device translation.

2026-01-31 15:24:41 UTC

A FORGOTTEN EPISODE in French-occupied Naples in the years around 1800—just after the French Revolution—illustrates why it makes sense to see mathematics and politics as entangled. The protagonists of this story were gravely concerned about how mainstream mathematical methods were transforming their world—somewhat akin to our current-day concerns about how digital algorithms are transforming ours. But a key difference was their straightforward moral and political reading of those mathematical methods. By contrast, in our own era we seem to think that mathematics offers entirely neutral tools for ordering and reordering the world—we have, in other words, forgotten something that was obvious to them.
In this essay, I’ll use the case of revolutionary Naples to argue that the rise of a new and allegedly neutral mathematics—characterized by rigor and voluntary restriction—was a mathematical response to pressing political problems. Specifically, it was a response to the question of how to stabilize social order after the turbulence of the French Revolution. Mathematics, I argue, provided the logical infrastructure for the return to order. This episode, then, shows how and why mathematical concepts and methods are anything but timeless or neutral; they define what “reason” is, and what it is not, and thus the concrete possibilities of political action. The technical and political are two sides of the same coin—and changes in notions like mathematical rigor, provability, and necessity simultaneously constitute changes in our political imagination.
#Mathematics #Math #Analysis #MassimoMazzotti #LAReviewOfBooks #Epistemology #Revolution #RealAnalysis #HistoryOfMath #HistoryOfMathematics
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/foundational-anxieties-modern-mathematics-and-the-political-imagination/

2026-01-02 22:18:32 UTC

California law repealing criminal penalties for parents of chronically truant kids took effect yesterday. Kamala Harris was, of course, a big fan of this when she was San Francisco County DA.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB461
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/01/california-harris-truancy-00591137
#Antischooling #deschooling #California #Truancy #CompulsorySchooling #ACAB

2025-11-27 01:07:20 UTC

I understand why people approve of violent coercive social systems -- they benefit from them! But to deny the obvious fact that violence is required to keep the system working is so transparently self-delusion I'd think they'd be embarrassed to expose themselves.
https://urusai.social/@nazokiyoubinbou/115618749947904327
#Anarchism #Unschooling

2024-09-19 20:22:04 UTC

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27 would work here too.

2024-09-19 16:01:24 UTC

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I'll see your Lonely Island and raise you a Lyle Lovett (pony included).
"Well kiss my ass I got a boat and I'm going out to sea."
https://youtu.be/hpM8FjO4Vko?feature=shared

2024-09-11 17:55:07 UTC

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So if a Democrat tries to pass a bill that a majority of Americans support he's helping Trump? Do you even hear yourself? I already know we don't have a democracy here but you don't seem to have caught on yet.
@npub177t…4ps0

2024-09-11 14:26:33 UTC

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I am American and I have a very good idea how our political system works and your argument makes no sense to me either. Harris is happy to keep paying American weapon manufacturers to send bombs to Israel, just like Trump is, despite the fact that a majority of Americans oppose it. How would Sanders's bill, which as you say has no chance of passing, convince anyone to vote for Trump over Harris?
[@jeremy_list](https://hachyderm.io/@jeremy_list )

2024-09-10 21:46:33 UTC

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Unless I made another careless mistake these seem to work... It looks like a pattern.

2024-09-09 22:49:47 UTC

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That would be exciting!

2024-09-08 16:32:03 UTC

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Some papyri aren't bad for this either, e.g. Oxyrhynchus 119:
Theon to his father Theon, greeting. It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to the city! If you won't take me with you to Alexandria I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you; and if you go to Alexandria I won't take your hand nor ever greet you again. That is what will happen if you won't take me. Mother said to Archelaus, "It quite upsets him to be left behind (?)." It was good of you to send me presents ... on the 12th, the day you sailed. Send me a lyre, I implore you. If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink; there now![
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Oxyrhynchus_119

2024-09-01 17:07:55 UTC

The Oregon legislature recriminalized drug possession, which was decriminalized by voter initiative in 2020. As a Californian this surprised me because the California Constitution forbids the legislature from repealing initiatives unless the text of initiative explicitly allows them to do so. So I checked the Oregon Constitution's section on initiatives and ... There's nothing in there stopping the legislature from just reversing the will of the voters.
Seems like kind of a serious omission!
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/drug-possession-becomes-a-crime-again-in-oregon-on-sunday-heres-how-portland-police-will-enforce-it/283-53dfc7b7-7be5-4d8e-afac-bca5a2082390

2024-08-29 12:55:18 UTC

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Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
-- Hebrews 13:2

2024-08-29 04:41:18 UTC

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Ammon Hennacy's Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist and The Book of Ammon are well worth reading. (Much of the first is included in the second). Here's a snippet and a link to free ebooks.
---------
Christian Anarchism is based upon the answer of Jesus to the Pharisees when He said that he without sin was to cast the first stone, and upon the Sermon on the Mount which advises the return of good for evil and the turning of the other cheek. Therefore when we take any part in government by voting for legislative, judicial, and executive officials, we make these men our arm by which we cast a stone and deny the Sermon of the Mount.
The dictionary definition of a Christian is: one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian Anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the money-changers, and who does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian Anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world.
https://drive.google.com/drive/mobile/folders/0ByfNi0UdxHLISXVoSFNjU0ZOR0U?resourcekey=0-PseVMCUls-qOSrvZKVrdag&usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/drive/mobile/folders/0ByfNi0UdxHLIRnE4b04xSjE4eTQ?resourcekey=0-F9exCAvLyZGn0S8TqwhJlA&usp=sharing

2024-08-28 23:37:59 UTC

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ah, yeah. How's that going to hurt tech oligarchs? It helps them recruit, e.g. They're all for lgbtq rights but encampments thwart their projects.

2024-08-28 23:34:11 UTC

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not disagreeing with you but which laws? I'm guessing ignoring them was at least consistent if not positive with respect to the interests of the zillionaires he works for, like not cooperating with ICE, maybe?

2024-08-28 23:27:21 UTC

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City of Grants Pass v. Johnson
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Grants_Pass_v._Johnson

2024-08-28 20:43:58 UTC

A whole damn article by a learned historian, Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University, purporting to answer the pressing question of how Europe got so rich in the 18th Century, all without so much as mentioning the five continents they plundered, the millions they enslaved, the land and raw materials and precious metals they stole, and so on.
Given what he left out who cares what his theories are? Obviously they're wrong. Does anyone of good faith doubt that one of professors' main roles in capitalism is to lie to us authoritatively? Sheesh.
#JoelMokyr #GreatEnrichment #Europe #Slavery #Colonialism
https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-europe-become-the-richest-part-of-the-world

2024-08-26 22:26:19 UTC

The ability of individual people to defend themselves is a central aspect of anarchism of every variety. One of the first things every state does is monopolize violence and so prevent people from defending themselves as they see fit. Every anarchist understands that under the state "people are institutionally prohibited from defending themselves."* Every anarchist understands how absolutely necessary this prohibition is for the survival of the state.
How can this be true?! As a recent interlocutor had it, "I'm not sure where you get the idea that most people are institutionally prevented from defending themselves. There are statutes in every state that delineate the legal means of doing so, up to and including homicide."**
#Anarchism #Anarchy #SelfDefense #RuleOfLaw #StateMonopolyOnViolence
* https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/112961155204138076
** https://kolektiva.social/@npub1rt6…37gs/112965895241148429
H/T @npub1s02…zz9t
1/6

2024-08-25 20:17:34 UTC

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As late as the early 70s in the US they recycled glass beverage bottles by actually just washing and refilling them. I remember distinctly that soda machines had metal cases next to them to leave bottles in and the bottles had worn-down rings of roughened glass where they rubbed against each other in transit.

2024-08-23 00:02:21 UTC

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yes, I do!
You can see pix on my Etsy shop but I'm happy to send a bunch for free if you want to DM or email an address...
https://angelcityab.etsy.com

2024-08-16 15:11:26 UTC

Why, then, do police see threats all around them? To understand this phenomenon, Sierra-Arévalo spent four years, from 2014 to 2018, observing three police departments in the Northeast, the Southwest, and the West, pseudonymized as Elmont, Sunshine, and West River. From the moment that officers join the force, he found, they are bombarded with the message that the public is out to get them. In academy rooms bedecked with military imagery, instructors screen grisly videos of officers murdered on the job. “Reality-based” scenarios suggest, falsely, that hidden guns are common during traffic stops. A PRISim simulation video in Sunshine teaches recruits when to “neutralize” an armed suspect—and how to justify it despite the department’s stated policies. This tough-sounding “tactical” stuff far outweighs the instruction on defusing potentially violent situations. Elmont, for example, devotes 170 hours to weapons training and just 10 to de-escalation techniques. The ruling message of police education, Sierra-Arévalo writes, is that their work is defined by “a constant fight for survival that must be won at all costs.”
#Police #Abolition #ACAB #MichaelSierraArevalo #TheDangerImperative
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/michael-sierra-arevalo-police-danger/

2024-07-10 17:53:48 UTC

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Celery soda, though. Dr. Brown ftw!

2024-07-09 16:26:22 UTC

Watching The Godfather of Harlem (set in the early 1960s) and someone mentioned homeschooling. There've been other anachronisms and this struck me as one, but I was wrong. It's been used at least since 1848 per the OED. I imagine this has something to do with the public education movement, since prior to that why would a word be needed?
#Homeschooling #PublicEducation #Education #TheGodfatherOfHarlem
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/757/454/807/014/635/original/af735d84db4096d1.jpg

2024-07-07 15:27:00 UTC

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Pachli too.

2024-07-07 15:04:54 UTC

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From "criminal conversation," a tort arising from adultery. A 19th century detective invented a device to detect vibration through walls called the crimconometer, which I can't find an online source for, but I learned about in "Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_conversation
https://search.worldcat.org/title/18959531?oclcNum=18959531

2024-07-07 13:48:37 UTC

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The owner: "hopefully, the right people will hear this message and make the right moves to save the city."
This is more true than he knows if the message is that it's possible to loot gas stations safely when the cops are otherwise occupied.

2024-07-06 23:50:41 UTC

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Absolutely sickening.

2024-07-06 14:07:21 UTC

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it's not prudent to be too forthcoming with details about one's Canadian girlfriend

2024-07-05 15:58:52 UTC

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I mean they can't possibly hurt

2024-07-05 14:55:07 UTC

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❤️🖤

2024-07-05 05:00:41 UTC

LA's fireworks game is tight as ever.
H/T @npub1xdp…2fx4
#LosAngeles #LAPD #ACAB #Fireworks #FourthOfJuly
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/732/120/019/548/998/original/2d01b4d54d5ce51a.mp4

2024-07-04 15:47:07 UTC

Some people favor mandatory schooling because they're afraid kids will learn a lot of crazy shit without it but it's hard to imagine any shit crazier than the crazy shit they learn now. Land of the free? Whoever told you that was your enemy.
#RageAgainstTheMachine #Unschooling #FourthOfJuly

2024-07-02 23:14:42 UTC

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This is not even to mention LA school police, LA airport police, LA port police, and other city agencies that field "peace officers," like Street Services. I don't know if other cities in the county have so many specialized police agencies, but in the City of LA LAPD is only part of the problem. Metro just voted the other day to establish its own PD.

2024-07-02 14:00:37 UTC

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What's weird is that it's not even LAPD. Riverside is like 60 miles east of here in a whole different county. I don't know what they think he did, there was no way to talk to him after he came out, but they did have a dog with them so maybe drugs?

2024-07-02 13:57:10 UTC

The Riverside police department raided my neighbor this morning, this is in the city of Los Angeles. At about 5:30 AM they started announcing on their loudspeaker that they had a search warrant and everyone inside should come out with their hands up. They also set off a couple of explosions before I could get out and start filming.
There were at least 15 cops in army green jumpsuits with rifles and helmets, one armored vehicle, and at least two RPD cars. Eventually the neighbor came out and they're still searching his house. He apparently called his mom before he came out because she showed up and the cops are letting her unlock things instead of breaking into them.
#LosAngeles #Riverside #Police #ACAB
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/717/222/177/251/895/original/6b232006b96db9b2.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/717/222/488/376/261/original/7d91b29588b7ccbf.jpg

2024-06-26 18:01:41 UTC

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LOL you're living a fantasy. Thanks for talking, not I'm done here.

2024-06-26 18:00:49 UTC

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We are nowhere near agreeing. If you have laws you have to have state violence to enforce them. Never in the 5000 year history of the State has this power been controlled by anyone outside the ruling class. It can be destroyed, or terrified into reform to some extent, but it can't be and never has been controlled in the way you suggest.

2024-06-26 17:56:42 UTC

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Ridiculous. Might as well say that all the power of the enslavers comes from the enslaved. People have lives, children, responsibilities. They can't easily face the level of violence involved in taking away power from the ruling class.
Or are you talking about voting or regulation or some such things? In which extra ridiculous.

2024-06-26 17:54:05 UTC

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>>> laws are our collective story about how we think things should be done
No, they're not. Not at all. At best they appear to embody such stories as camouflage. Consider the use of hate crime laws to persecute minorities, civil rights laws to protect white supremacy, and so on. The stated purposes of laws are unrelated to their capabilities, which are all that matter.
You wouldn't give an ax murderer an ax because he says he wants to chop some firewood. Laws in the hands of the State are the same thing.

2024-06-26 17:47:53 UTC

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yes, that's what happens when a few people don't obey. I understand that. A lot fewer than five percent.

2024-06-26 17:46:37 UTC

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Which civil rights act do you mean? 1866? 1875? Do you think the existence of laws determines the general state of goodness? How does that work? I've even heard people argue that the existence of laws stating that people are equal under the law means that people are equal under the law.
Laws don't impress me because irrespective of what they say they're tools in the hands of people powerful enough to wield them, and those people mean us no good.

2024-06-26 17:39:43 UTC

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In the US things are not worse. They've always been this bad or more so. A few things are better. I don't know anything about Europe.

2024-06-26 17:38:06 UTC

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So you agree states are not emergent? Are you asking me what state collapse would look like? How should I know. I can't see the future. Can you?

2024-06-26 17:36:56 UTC

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Wow. Think on a historical time scale, please. It took 250 years of people saying no to racialized chattel slavery in the Americas to get to the 13th Amendment. We haven't eliminated slavery in the US even now, 400 years on, but we're working on it by continuing to say no. Also I didn't realize you had such a narrow view of saying no. Actions speak louder than words, but they're still speaking.

2024-06-26 17:32:28 UTC

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States are absolutely not emergent. They are tools intentionally constructed by a small number of individuals for very particular purposes and require constant maintenance through radical violence and control. Folk culture is emergent, language is emergent. Not only do these require no upkeep they can't actually be repressed or controlled. Jet airplanes and states are not emergent. They require constant upkeep.
Theorizing life with out the State is entirely actionable. The state is very fragile. I'd bet that if just 5% of people stopped obeying the police for a few weeks the state would collapse.

2024-06-26 17:24:02 UTC

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how are enough of us going to come to say no unless some people say no out loud now? Taking an appropriate measure of personal responsibility makes one's no more credible to people who are still questioning. How else have enough people ever come to say no to anything if not by a few people credibly saying no first?

2024-06-25 04:08:10 UTC

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This reminds me a little of honeyguides leading people to honey so they can eat the scraps. Not such a complex relationship as wolves and ravens though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeyguide

2024-06-25 03:55:58 UTC

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The mayor and the city attorney are so corrupt, so incompetent. This is sickening. These motherfuckers are tearing this city apart.

2024-06-24 18:26:17 UTC

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I'm rereading cannery row, which is why I thought to finally search for this...

2024-06-24 18:22:04 UTC

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These two species were just everywhere, and I haven't seen either one in many years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patiria_miniata
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisaster_ochraceus
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/672/972/050/095/170/original/9af2d9019ec342fe.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/672/972/334/735/792/original/4e8511622a6716ba.jpg

2024-06-24 18:12:58 UTC

I was just wondering why I never see starfish in LA tide pools any more -- they were everywhere when I was a kid. It turns out that the population was devastated in 2013-4 by sea star wasting syndrome, a poorly understood phenomenon that can basically dissolve a sea star in just a few days.
#LosAngeles #Tidepools #Starfish #SeaStars #MarineBiology #SeaStarWastingSyndrome
https://marine.ucsc.edu/data-products/sea-star-wasting/

2024-06-24 08:49:22 UTC

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is this it? I think older posts from other servers get deleted from one's local server (I don't really know). I've had this prob before. I found it by looking at the account on their server in the browser. I've had to do this before with older posts which didn't show up in my server's view of an account. I wish there was a way in apps to force them to load missing stuff!
https://mastodon.social/@ifixcoinops/105778289798706182

2024-06-22 19:33:48 UTC

I don't post here about ceramics (yet!) but I just fixed my own kiln, which is so exciting! The thermocouple went bad and I followed the directions in the manual and replaced it. OK, it was really easy, but still, so empowering! I wonder if I could ever learn to replace the coils, which seems overwhelming, and I always hire someone to do it.
#Ceramics #DIY #FreedomToRepair

2024-06-22 18:39:12 UTC

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I guess I don't see it as a dichotomy between billionaires and ad hoc requests. As others have said online mutual aid requests are a stopgap that mostly makes sense under capitalist oppression. In a sense, to me, they're only marginally mutual aid since they're not really based in a reciprocal community. They're much more like charity even if some recipients do manage to contribute in turn. Charity is good and necessary now, but it's not mutual aid.
That being said, my vision of genuine mutual aid is informed by my experiences in Los Angeles over the last ten years. We've built a strong, incredibly capable community, here, which goes back long before 2014, when I got involved. It's deeply committed to activism around homelessness, hunger, tenants' rights, and political violence and repression. It includes outreach to encampments, large scale food distributions, actual housing projects, and mutual aid against evictions and police violence both in courts and in streets.
It's not charity because it really is mutual. Just for instance, we've built networks that included both housed and unhoused people with capabilities that have brought us right up to the limit of mutual aid that police will allow. See for instance the community-building in Echo Park, which was violently ended by police in 2021.
Homeless people benefit from outreach and free access to the necessities of life, but housed people benefit too. Directly, e.g. by empowering the homeless to participate in politics, which makes everyone's positions stronger. But indirectly too, through the relationships and knowledge that we all build with one another. We've built capacity together to the point where I have no doubt at all that if we could put an end to police repression we could end homelessness and hunger in Los Angeles basically tomorrow. To me this is a genuine foreshadowing of the kind of actually mutual aid that would be possible in the absence of violence to prevent it.

2024-06-21 04:07:38 UTC

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also spelled atomy!
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/652/636/758/348/380/original/a0a8d335668a4d20.jpg

2024-06-21 04:04:44 UTC

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https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/ek3a45y
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/652/624/280/203/547/original/17a0531de5616af1.jpg

2024-06-21 03:32:43 UTC

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An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick...
-- W. B. Yeats

2024-06-21 00:50:50 UTC

#LosAngeles #Palestine #Protests #ShutItDownForGaza #Gaza #Israel
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/651/857/203/984/824/original/528e44f586cd52d9.jpg

2024-06-21 00:14:19 UTC

#LosAngeles #Palestine #Gaza #FreeGaza #Israel #SettlerColonialism #Protests
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/651/712/809/662/514/original/0fe3375ee7fab556.jpg

2024-06-20 22:06:21 UTC

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"how can we make this plausible to people east of San Bernardino?"

2024-06-20 22:02:17 UTC

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this has been a normal thing in LA since I can remember, back to the 60s so surely before. No idea why. It was even on Six Feet Under.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/651/198/875/632/325/original/f5b9436bf2f3468a.jpg

2024-06-20 18:19:19 UTC

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https://en.rarbg-official.com/movies/fta-1972

2024-06-20 18:19:02 UTC

F.T.A. is a 1972 American documentary film starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland and directed by Francine Parker, which follows a 1971 anti-Vietnam War road show for G.I.s, the FTA Show, as it stops in Hawaii, The Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan. It includes highlights from the show, behind the scenes footage, local performers from the countries visited, and interviews and conversations with GIs "as they discuss what they saw in battle, their anger with the military bureaucracy, and their opposition to America's presence in Indochina." Called by Fonda "a spit and a prayer production" it was far from a big budget Hollywood movie, or even a well-funded documentary. While the movie "is raw," it "underscores how infectious the movement of the 60s and 70s was", and chronicles both the Tour itself as well as the soldiers who came to see it and "the local talent of organizers, labor unions and artist/activists" in the countries visited.
#DonaldSutherland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.T.A.

2024-06-20 17:20:24 UTC

Last boost. By far the weirdest anti-anarchism take I've ever seen.
#Anarchism

2024-06-20 17:16:47 UTC

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It's probably true that states can't form without a locally dense population. To assume that this means density causes states is the fallacy of the converse. There were dense cities for millennia before the invention of states. The first cities were neolithic, the first states bronze age.

2024-06-20 17:03:44 UTC

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lol human nature. 300K years of anarchy, 5K of violently imposed states, ~200 years of the world-spanning state system, and the latter is due to human nature. Here's a decent starting place to fill in the gaps in your knowledge:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)

2024-06-20 15:35:49 UTC

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No, colonies were part of one state and separated themselves into another state. Not being a state was never an option. Territories were territories of a state. Also, you're equivocating on two meanings of the word "state." Territories were territories of the US state -- already part of a state, and just voted to change their status within that state.
From the beginning of English colonization of North America not being part of a state was never an option. The Virginia Colony was a state-sponsored enterprise. When the Sea Venture shipwrecked on Bermuda on its way to Jamestown and the people decided to stay there and live outside of state control the English sent a military expedition to force them on to Jamestown. Being part of a state has never been voluntary.

2024-06-20 15:24:06 UTC

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Nobody chooses the state. From their beginning states have been violently imposed on people by ruling classes that are not themselves subject to state violence. The first states had walls to keep their subjects inside them. States have always violently imprisoned their subjects. Now the walls aren't so physical, but it's still impossible to leave.

2024-06-20 14:25:22 UTC

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Right now the people who control polluting industries don't live near the pollution. It's externalized to poorer areas, either locally or globally. If the people living in a place controlled what happened there why would they choose to pollute it?

2024-06-19 01:59:51 UTC

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my mom grew them in the back yard in LA and they weren't a problem ... Not like those goddamn blackberries! They're delicious raw right out of the ground..

2024-06-18 17:57:37 UTC

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I mean, it's not really lost per se, just goes to the wrong people. Here in LA the airport is a highly effective tool for transferring public money into the coffers of zillionaire contractors. The level of lobbying, corruption, and revolving door scams at LAX are astonishing.

2024-06-16 02:06:07 UTC

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You're misunderstanding my point. The infinity of primes is true in a community of knowers. It's not universally objectively true, only intersubjectively. Health and security can be understood in communities so that conclusions are also true intersubjectively in those communities. It's not really possible to compare intersubjectivities across communities of knowers. It would make as much sense to say that sentences expressed in one language are truer than those expressed in another.
I think it's the epistemologically privileged role mathematics plays these days that makes this hard to see, but it's true.

2024-06-15 17:42:10 UTC

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This is a common but fairly pernicious misconception about mathematics. Axioms are an aesthetic standard for defining mathematical concepts agreed to by a community that uses them. Acceptable means of deduction are community-designed epistemological standards. Deductions aren't verifiable without entering into the community's ways of knowing and in that strong sense are not at all objective, but instead are intersubjective. It's been known since Gödel that it's not possible to capture mathematical truth via axiomatization and checkable deduction outside of human insight. All deduction checking in mathematics is a community process.
This is the same way that communities can define any concepts that are essential for their needs, including health and security. They can then proceed to use the community's epistemological standards for drawing conclusions. Mathematics is exactly as concrete as any other intersubjective community knowledge. It's crucial to recognize this because the false idea that mathematics provides externally checkable concrete truths leads to its use by politically dominant communities to discard the conclusions of the people they dominate.
For an example of the failure of axiomatization and deduction it's not even necessary to look to Gödel. Just try to deduce Lagrange's theorem from the axioms of group theory -- that in finite groups the order of a subgroup divides the order of a group.
For an example of differences in community epistemology even among mathematicians compare constructive analysis to standard analysis.
For an example of the use of putative mathematical objectivity to dismiss subordinate people's understanding of their world compare the US government's insistence that the economy is doing well based on some formulas compared to the understanding of rent-burdened impoverished people who can't afford the necessities of life
To get back to OP's point, there are communities of computer users that spend a great deal of effort understanding what they mean by the security of the services they use. Through discussion and shared knowledge they can and do arrive at understandings that are as concrete and as intersubjectively rigorous as mathematics, and not to be dismissed from the outside.

2024-06-13 01:36:15 UTC

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wow!
https://fgc.ca.gov/Regulations/Current/Upland-Game-Birds#300a1g

2024-06-13 01:34:22 UTC

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omg! I've never even heard of this.