Passenger

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Trans rights are human rights. None are free until all are free. The existence of billionaires is a failure of society. Free Palestine. Under the streets, the beach.

🇿🇦 but a long way from a patriot. Also a former resident of ANZ but my phone doesn't know the Tino Rangatiratanga flag emoji.

Climate pessimist. Revolution optimist. Lifelong pacifist. Data engineer by trade. Has been hating Musk since before it was cool.

If you want to follow me, be warned: I boost a *lot* of stuff.

Pronouns: He/Him
Main Org: Industrial Workers of the World
Rugby: Western Province
Rugby (UK): Wasps

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Last Notes

2026-05-03 13:48:19 UTC

Lazyweb question for literature people, boosts welcome:
Cervantes' book Don Quixote is often called the first novel. Fiction writing certainly existed before that, but the novel form is a specific subset of fiction writing, and would have had a start.
In a similar way, what was the first short story?

2026-05-01 05:08:06 UTC

I am writing this on Tusky, which is free software that someone had to write. It is running on an older Android phone, which someone had to assemble from components that other people had to make from raw materials that still other people had to produce.
You are reading this because it was transmitted via a sophisticated international communications system which someone had to design and someone else had to make from raw materials that someone else had to produce.
The electricity also had to be produced by someone, using machinery made by someone else.
Happy May Day, y'all. The world is nothing without our labour. Our masters know this; we should too.

2026-04-24 19:42:39 UTC

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Okay so there was this knife found by archeologists in Istanbul. Really old knife, probably Late Eastern Roman period. Unusually for a knife made in a Greek-speaking Roman empire, it had a Norse runic inscription.
This is not that weird, because the Emperors kept Norse bodyguards, most famously the Varangian Guard. But while Istanbul had loads of archeologists who could read Greek, none of them knew Norse runes, so they contacted an outside expert. It turned out that the inscription on the knife, when translated, said "KNIFE."
Every person I have ever met with a label machine has had exactly this sense of humour. And now that includes you.

2026-04-24 18:26:53 UTC

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Do you know the story about the Viking runic knife?

2026-04-24 10:49:36 UTC

Question for my fellow elder millenials, or anyone who knows about the history and economics of journalism.
When I was a kid in the 90s, there were lots of print magazines for almost every imaginable special interest. There were multiple monthly magazines which talked about which metal albums were good, for example. I remember them as being crammed with advertising. The magazines cost money to buy but even as a kid I knew that was less important than the advertising.
How did that work? Financially, I mean. Seen through modern eyes it just feels like it wouldn't be viable.
A magazine is just a website, in a sense. It has costs to run, and it has content to draw people in, and it's full of advertising to put in front of those people to make money. If the money from that advertising is greater than the running cost and the cost of content, the magazine makes money. The magazine is almost certainly produced by a larger company that publishes loads of magazines, and can thus engage with advertisers more effectively. This basic idea has not changed.
EDIT: The core of my confusion is, given that professional-grade special-interest websites with high-quality writing aren't really financially viable today, why were they back then? Is it the cover price?

2026-04-19 08:58:56 UTC

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I would have to read Malik's whole piece to make a fair judgment, but from the part you've quoted, it feels like there's a crucial distinction.
The sense of wider moral duty has waned, says Malik.
The sense of wider moral duty has always been contingent, says Césaire. To continue the metaphor of "waning", the amount of sunlight falling on the Moon has not increased or decreased, but now less of it is pointed at us, and we misunderstand that as a general worsening rather than merely a reduction of our own special place within it.

2026-04-19 08:31:49 UTC

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At the risk of sounding like the burned-out former academic that I am, remember what Césaire said.
European institutions have always had a population whose fate they controlled but were indifferent about, and another population whose fate they cared about deeply but were less able to control. When those institutions were created, the first group was "people living in the colonies" and the second was "people living in the metropole", but as Europe decolonised and then lost its influence, the institutions have shifted to different populations.
What looks like the collapse of society, says Césaire, is just colonial ways of operating applied to the home country.

2026-04-18 22:10:14 UTC

I want to give a shoutout to an often-underappreciated group of people: extremely stupid people with hearts of gold who have no idea about theory or ideology or anything but are solidly Leftist nonetheless.

2026-04-12 22:44:42 UTC

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Sleeping in the same bed as someone else is, I think, a more intimate act than boning down with them. You can pretend to be your insta self when having sex, but you can't when you're bleary and trying to wake up.
It's letting your guard down.

2026-04-10 16:24:41 UTC

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❤️🖤
That sounds really hard. I hope it goes well.

2026-04-07 15:52:26 UTC

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People have asked me, as a pacifist, what the right move is for them when their leaders are suddenly intent on nuclear destruction.
My answer is, you gotta plan this stuff ahead of time. It's not hard. We did it, you could do it too.

2026-04-07 15:50:21 UTC

No matter how awful a president we South Africans elect, no matter how despicable his beliefs are, he cannot nuke anyone. This is because we chose to get rid of all of our nuclear weapons in the late 1980s, inviting in foreign inspectors in 1991 to certify that we had no stockpile and no ability to create one.
South Africa is a long way from perfect but we are the only people in the world democratic enough to have rid ourselves of weapons of mass destruction, and thereby limited the powers of any future bad presidents ahead of time.

2026-04-02 12:29:56 UTC

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I remember years ago a Russian compa said something that stuck with me.
The point of Putin's lies isn't to persuade people. They don't persuade anyone. They are literally unbelievable. The point of them is to humiliate his enemies by reminding them that they are so weak that they don't deserve a credible lie. That's why Putin lies as often, and as absurdly, as he does.
That's how I interpret other far-Right presidents' lies and inconsistencies too. They know full well that the news media can't call them out on it, and therefore the more blatant and unbelievable the lie is, the greater the humiliation is.
This is an act of bullying.

2026-04-01 23:48:23 UTC

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I am not a psychologist but I do a lot of research on weird groups with fringe beliefs. My understanding of the psychology here is that denialism comes from a specific place: the desire to not have to take action.
Decades ago, there were many excuses people could use to avoid having to take action. We're not sure yet, it could be a number of things, it won't interfere with business, it'll only affect other countries, the believers are just a bunch of reds.
Over time the excuses dropped away until now the only way to avoid having to take action is to go for straight-up total denialism. That's why more people are doing that.
We are not seeing denialists increase in number because fewer people believe the scientific evidence; we're seeing them increase in number because every position but those two is becoming untenable, and a lot of people just don't want to take the actions that they would have to take if they believed in the scientific evidence.
It's kinda the same pattern that we saw with creationists over the course of the 20th century.

2026-03-26 13:35:56 UTC

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I've been thinking about this. Mamdani took power and instantly became a cop lover. The weird ammosexuals took power and instantly stopped hating the idea of federal cops. Progressives are losing power and so are becoming less pro-cop. Communists love cops when they're in charge and hate them otherwise. Poor gay people chant "bottoms, tops, we all hate cops" but rich gay people support them.
I'm beginning to think that one's relationship to the police is not a matter of ideology, but a matter of specifically whether you have power or not. I think anyone who gains power (or who becomes part of the ingroup) is going to be corrupted into a cop-lover.
The implications of this, as an anarchist, are something I've been thinking through.

2026-03-22 08:54:20 UTC

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I've been thinking about this and I think it has a lot to do with the way UK people see the US and want to copy it. When fascism rises over there, it also rises over here; when it falls over there, it falls over here.
Tom Nichols pointed out that we are in an age of incumbent disadvantage: the party in power is, instead of being more likely to be elected, now held to blame for the ills of the world and becomes less likely to be reelected. This is true not only of parties but seemingly of ideologies as a whole.
As such, I think UK fascism is suffering from the fact that fascism is in power in the US, and therefore has the incumbent disadvantage effect even though they're not in power here.

2026-03-19 06:45:07 UTC

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Yeah I don't think it's about *making* people not pay attention, I don't think it's that top-down and nonconsensual. I think the people who are distracted choose to be distracted and are grateful for it, because they don't want to admit to themselves that it's happening.

2026-03-18 21:48:07 UTC

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Cesar Chavez.

2026-03-18 21:44:03 UTC

I have been around the antifascist scene way, way too long to be surprised that yet another male Leftist hero turns out to be a sex creep.
I wish I wasn't.

2026-03-18 21:19:42 UTC

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I would argue that the two are related: the moral panics over things that don't matter are a displacement activity so that people can avoid thinking about the things that do.
Not everyone buys into that displacement, of course.

2026-03-18 07:07:23 UTC

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If he can play the same game that Trump and Farage did (being unashamed enough to use the complaints of his enemies as free publicity, and relishing the hatred from conservatives because his base also hate those conservatives) then this might work out well for him. If he flinches and tries to appease the Daily Mail crowd, it might not. Let's see.

2026-02-28 09:20:35 UTC

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They did ask, there were leaked panicked internal Labour emails about it.
"If Corbyn wins a general election due to all the new Labour voters, then it will be very difficult for us to retain control of the party" was the takeaway mood of those emails. "Us" here means the Blairites, the professional party staffers recruited directly out of university politics and think tanks.
As ever, the Iron Law of Institutions holds: people inside an institution will tend to be willing to sacrifice the institution's overall good in order to ensure their factional control over that institution.

2026-02-26 23:31:27 UTC

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Me in 2007: "I'm sure the real estate market will continue to rise forever and keep the economy going with it. The age of crashes and misery is past."

2026-02-26 23:25:58 UTC

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When I've predicted things wrongly, then looking back at my opinion in the past makes me wince, and makes me want to do better.

2026-02-26 23:24:19 UTC

"AI was basically hype until December of last year and now it's real" says person who spent all of last year enthusing about how world-changing LLMs are.
This sort of breathless inconsistency fascinates me from a psychological point of view. Are they ashamed to have been wrong last year, do they think they were wrong, do they even remember what they said at all?

2026-02-26 06:19:13 UTC

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To the credit of Chinese leadership, a lot of the non-China drop is still due to China: they've become the main international-development funder these days.

2026-02-21 10:34:44 UTC

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@npub15t7…08hr
I became an anarchist and feminist for the same reason that my aunt became a teetotaller. She couldn't drink healthily and knew that it would kill her if she didn't stop, so she stopped. I have a lot of respect for her for doing that, since a lot of her life was structured around drinking and it took a long time to rebuild to a new way of living.
I use this as a comparison because I agree entirely with @npub15t7…08hr 's description of how people behave around authority in a democracy. We have shown that we cannot deal with it healthily as a society, and it will kill us, so we need to remove it from our lives.
There is a fantasy that "maybe we can just start dealing with authority healthily" and I think this is the sort of self-deception that a lot of people with addictions go through when they start to realise. Before I gave up caffeine I spent a long time thinking "well, other people can ingest it healthily, so I can do that too" before realising that no I couldn't, they could but I couldn't. It wouldn't have killed me but it was very bad for my health.
As any person who's gone through a psychological dependence can tell you, one of the hardest things is restructuring your life so as not to need the thing. How do you get to sleep without alcohol? How do you get up without caffeine? How do you relax without tobacco? What do you do when you're bored? We've all heard people say "well, I can't go to sleep without drinking, so I guess I can't stop drinking" and we know what comes next.
And this is the way I view anarchism: it is the attempt to remove authority from our lives, and to find a way to live without it, because we know we aren't healthy without it. The hard bit is that restructuring.
This is why, when someone says "but how would we have X with anarchism?" I view the question with sympathy: they're somewhere between the denial and bargaining stages. A direct answer will not make sense to them, any more than the answer "well, you just get up and be awake without caffeine" would have made sense to me.

2026-02-13 11:28:38 UTC

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For foreigners:
https://www.africanews.com/2026/02/13/south-africas-political-parties-largely-welcome-troop-deployment/

2026-02-13 11:27:12 UTC

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Worse, all our political parties are coming together to agree that this is good, with the only dissent being from the MK who feel that the problem is that the troops are not expensive enough.
Electoralism is so good, it's amazing. It solves all our problems.

2026-02-13 11:25:41 UTC

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Yes, the violence - particularly in the Gauteng area where it's related to undocumented mining gangs keeping enslaved people and killing each other - is genuinely shocking.
However, putting thugs in uniform with guns on street corners to replace thugs out of uniform with guns on street corners is only a solution if the uniform is the bit that matters.

2026-02-13 11:23:42 UTC

Sigh.
South Africa is deploying troops to be cops, because apparently that will reduce the amount of violence in the country. Someone needs to explain that this is not how troops work.

2026-01-30 18:24:41 UTC

London peeps:
If you're going on the Palestine march tomorrow, be advised that UKIP are going to attempt to intercept it with a "march with Jesus." They've explicitly asked attendees to chant hymns and carry crosses.
Given what UKIP is nowadays, this is likely to be a farce, but also may attract proper fash drifters and may give the Met an excuse to be even more Met than usual.
Mask up, stay safe.

2026-01-25 08:57:48 UTC

Mass arrests at Wormwood Scrubs last night. People have been taken all over London.
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/01/24/wormwood-scrubs-protest-arrests/
If you're a Londoner and you want to help, please get in your local station support chat and see if they need you to volunteer to stand support. If you don't know how to reach them, contact G&BC, or DM me and I'll do my best to steer you.
Fuck the cops.

2026-01-22 08:50:01 UTC

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Anecdotally, in my industry, when people say "AI is taking the jobs" they often mean "we have oversized our data and management functions for over a decade now, and the AI bubble gives us an excuse to cut these functions back."
Not always, there are some people (Wes Streeting) who have genuinely bought into the hype, but a lot of it is a way of saving face while admitting that the analytics bubble itself has burst.

2026-01-21 14:27:55 UTC

Happy new year everyone.
If you can make it to Calais on the 24th, please do so. English fascists will be going to France en masse to terrorise refugees. Locals will be rallying to resist them, but support is appreciated.
https://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/2026/01/19/jan-24-fafs-anglais-sur-le-littoral-appel-a-mobilisation-call-out-against-uk-fascists-coming-to-the-french-coast
Please boost, please pass around, please attend. Our struggle is international.

2026-01-18 23:15:46 UTC

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I think this is the answer.
(A lot of universities are, to a lesser or greater extent, just real-estate businesses which run an education business on the side. This is genuinely bizarre but I think strengthens your point.)

2026-01-07 13:35:33 UTC

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I also do this a lot, as one of the more extroverted people in a deeply introverted work team.
One of the things I come across a lot is that many people really, really dislike being paraphrased; to them someone who understands them is someone who can repeat back the same phrasing, rather than someone who can put it into their own words. I have noticed this more often in people who are in positions of power, and far more often in people who are *anxious* about the position of power they're in.

2026-01-07 08:27:39 UTC

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I don't even mean that it's intended as a distraction. I mean that we're looking at a nihilistic bully who likes violence for its own sake, and the nihilism scares us more than the violence does, so we reassure ourselves by ascribing motivations to him where none exist.
As Umberto Eco wrote about Mussolini and Franco, fascists don't fight for life, they live for fighting. The violence is the point.

2026-01-07 07:31:55 UTC

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That author really is doing everything they can to avoid thinking the line "it turns out that the antifascist movement were right all along, we should have listened to them back then, we should be listening to them right now."
I wonder why they're avoiding thinking that? There are several common reasons why people do, but I'm not familiar enough with them specifically to hypothesise about their personal motivations.

2026-01-07 07:21:36 UTC

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I think you're right, although the oil-based reason is an interesting aspect; I am not a petrochemical engineer but many people have been talking about how Venezuelan heavy crude is not that valuable any more.
I don't have this idea properly formulated yet but: to what extent is "we invaded for oil" merely a pretext like the narcotics charge (or, in Iraq, the WMD charge), aimed at hiding the fact that this is aggression for the sake of aggression?

2026-01-07 07:10:47 UTC

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I've been thinking a lot about the similarities and differences between the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the 2026 US attack on Venezuela.
In 2003 the Americans and their allies spent a huge amount of time and effort on propaganda and ritual, trying to build a legalistic framework under which the invasion could proceed. It was absurd, everyone at the time knew that none of it meant anything, but looking back from today it looks like they were trying to prevent their (lawless) actions from damaging the wider concept of international law. They didn't succeed in that, but I think they tried.
By comparison, one of the defining features of modern fascists is that they perceive the concept of law as an aggression against them. Look at the "judges are enemies of the people" rhetoric in the UK, or the "human rights law is destroying us" rhetoric in France. Law protects those they don't want protected and restrains those they feel should be unrestrained, and that's unacceptable to them.
The illegality of the 2026 US attack on Venezuela was, to many fascists, a selling point. As of the time I'm writing this, there are fascist telegram groups in the UK which are abuzz with the desire to have a leader who disregards law as flagrantly as Trump does, and which see that as a sign of strength which they so desperately long for.

2025-12-29 18:27:22 UTC

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Hey, this is a cool picture. Do you know who the artist is?

2025-12-23 23:23:48 UTC

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The QAnon movement got new jobs. They're out there in ICE jackets right now, being the secret government strike teams that they long fantasised about.

2025-12-21 09:50:13 UTC

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On that, if you ever want to see someone jump really quickly from descriptive to normative, point out to them how uncommon it is to wear a red poppy out of season. Very few people do it, and that observation is acutely uncomfortable to those who do.

2025-12-21 09:44:56 UTC

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(Chris, please tell me if you don't want to be part of this tangent thread.)
The easy answer is that empathy and solidarity are the Left's main weapons. These are very powerful weapons too.
Beyond that, though, I think a lot of it has to do with who you see as "like you." For example, I am White and I need to work if I want to be able to afford my rent. My landlord is White and wealthy. My neighbour is Black and also working-class. Which of the two is "like me"?
I think this is why a lot of Right-wing tendencies will seize on and aestheticise economic descriptors, for example by taking the term "working class" and redefining it as an aesthetic or cultural description, rather than one that describes everyone who needs to work for a living. As soon as they start seeing a poor White kid from a decaying estate as being the same as a poor Black kid who arrived as a refugee then they're on a very quick path away from the Right.
Likewise, it's why Left-wing tendencies will encourage concepts of internationalism, of the fellowship of ideas, and of seeing commonalities with minoritised groups. We view being heterosexual as no more or less weird than being homosexual or bi or pan or ace or demi or anything else, for example, despite heterosexuality being much more common, because as soon as we start viewing the world in "normal" and "not normal" terms then we're on a very quick path away from the Left.

2025-12-21 09:29:26 UTC

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On your second point, I think I'd agree with you. I am fine with being described as an intellectual descendant of Kropotkin and Goldman. Most modern Piers Morgan fans would interpret it as an insult if you described them as the intellectual descendants of Julius Evola.
This is partially because of antiintellectualism (Leftist kids are constantly telling each other to read theory, it's an in joke because of how common it is, and there is no equivalent to this on the Right) but I would argue that a bigger part of it is, as Altemeyer argued, conformism.
Many on the Right see being normal as good, and therefore they feel they must describe their ideas as being innately normal; for them to admit that their ideas are in a specific intellectual tradition is to place them outside of the mythical "normal, mainstream, common sense", which is profoundly uncomfortable for a conformist.
This isn't true for everyone on the Right, but it is true for many of them. Piers Morgan is not going to self-describe as a fascist; I believe he doesn't consider himself to be a fascist even in private.

2025-12-21 09:07:49 UTC

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I'm not sure I'd agree with that, at least beyond a superficial level. There are certainly a lot of Right-wing dudes out there who are very angry that people aren't taking their ideas seriously as an intellectual tradition, but:
A) Most of them haven't engaged with the actual intellectuals in their own tradition (Burke, Schmitt, Evola) and so are reinventing it constantly in a half-baked way;
B) A lot of them would strongly recoil from being placed within the intellectual tradition of those thinkers - you have to be *really* far gone to admit to yourself that you are the intellectual descendant of Carl Schmitt;
C) Given A and B, a lot of it actually comes down to, as Asimov would say, the demand that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.

2025-12-21 08:49:13 UTC

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Thanks!
Never let it be said that I don't engage with Right-wing thinkers.

2025-12-21 08:30:06 UTC

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There's an Evola angle to this too, I'd argue.
When you take a person who's been brought up to trust authority, and you show them that authority is not trustworthy, then what do they do? Often, they try to find a greater authority to appeal to. If the cops are criminals then rather than live in a world with no cops they try to find a supercop to arrest them, even if that supercop doesn't exist.
The QAnon movement is an example of this: faced with a government that didn't do what they wanted, QAnon believers invented a fictional shadow government that was going to swoop in and save them. It was nonsense but it fulfilled a very real emotional need for a greater authority to protect them.
More damagingly, other people appeal to superauthorities that do actually exist but that have no business acting as authorities to appeal to: the military, for example, or the bond market, or foreign governments or individual billionaires.
And that's how coups get legitimised.

2025-12-15 07:07:45 UTC

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I'm not really a jazz guy but I do absolutely love this album.

2025-12-11 07:39:15 UTC

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Throughout most of my adult life, there has been a war waged by Europeans and Americans against any brown person they could find: in Afghanistan, and for a large chunk of that in Iraq too, and then in Libya and Somalia.
Ritual human sacrifice is exactly the right term for it. The war wasn't being fought for the reasons most wars are fought for, there wasn't widespread economic mobilisation for it, and it didn't even matter that much to the public or decision-makers. Young people, mostly poor, mostly male, were being shipped off to kill people, and were coming back missing limbs or sometimes in boxes. It didn't make sense economically and it didn't make sense socially, but it makes a lot of sense culturally.
It was a ritual intended to make the rest of the culture feel strong, and it succeeded for a while, and the place of those young people was to be a sacrifice in it.

2025-12-11 07:31:49 UTC

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I sat and thought about that. In particular, it stood out to me because it reminded me of how much I dislike it when people say "thank you for your service" when they learn I'm an antifascist, and I think she had put her finger on exactly why.

2025-12-11 07:28:27 UTC

I've been mulling over the latest Morbid Zoo video (it's really good, by the way.) She talks about the distinction between soldiers and warriors, between a military culture and a warrior culture, and why a lot of modern societies crave the trappings of the latter but are in fact very far from them.
One of her points was that nobody in a warrior culture has ever said "thank you for your service" to a fighter. That stood out to me, and the following line stood out even more: "because that's what you say to a ritual human sacrifice."

2025-12-05 08:28:59 UTC

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It only took Germans a century to acknowledge what they did in Namibia. Belgium has kinda-acknowledged what they did in Congo but not fully. Neither have made the sort of restitution that would indicate genuine remorse. Britain has not begun to discuss what they did in Kenya; there were rumours years ago of British security agents planning a coup on the off-chance that a government was elected which did begin to discuss it.
Honestly, genocide does feel like a fairly core European value.

2025-11-30 09:59:48 UTC

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My understanding is that this is also a money thing?
Trial by jury is expensive and slow. If you're the UK, which is a country that's slowly ratchetting the state onto more and more of a shoestring, it's unthinkable to actually fund as many trials as you'd like to hold, and that has very much been a brake on mass arrests over the last five years or so.
Trial by magistrate is far cheaper and faster. It makes mass arrests affordable, which means that the UK can have carceral brutality without having to properly fund that carceral brutality.

2025-11-29 08:03:53 UTC

Boycotts aren't enough.
A boycott doesn't tell a company that they've pissed you off: it tells a company that you have the option to not consume their products. It's very hard to boycott the electricity company or the water company, because you need their products.
This is why Google and Amazon are who they are. You want to boycott Google products? Good luck living in the modern world. Google have intentionally made themselves too important and ubiquitous to be successfully boycotted. It's not just the tech companies either. If you live in a town which only has one supermarket - and many people do - then you can't realistically boycott them.
We, and by we I mean the masses, are too weak to boycott these companies. Consider that for a moment. Consider the staggering power inequality that this demonstrates. We need stronger weapons.

2025-11-26 08:43:01 UTC

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I trained as a physicist. Like many other physicists, I hold economics somewhat in contempt, seeing it as closer to theology than to science.
This piece is a really good example of why. It acknowledges that its entire method is wrong, then blames the people who were right, and immediately retreats back into the method which produces wrong results. A wise person might think that if writing about dollars did not lead them to the truth, perhaps they should stop fucking writing about dollars. A fool would think that they are here to write about dollars, so that's what they'll do; whether or not they are right is incidental.
Having said that, not all economists. There are smarter economists than this. There are economists who base their work on empiricism and who see theory as something to extrapolate into rather than to retreat into. But this piece is not an example of that.
Come get your boy, I guess.

2025-11-26 08:37:26 UTC

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To me at least, the most urgent issue in this piece isn't the actual discussion about poverty. That's a vital discussion but we've been having it for decades without this dude and we'll continue having it for decades without him too.
The most urgent issue is that when he says "leftists told me this and they were right, but they said it in emotive terms and used justice-centred language so I ignored them" he doesn't understand that this is a sign that his decision-making about what to ignore and what not to ignore is broken.
It is every person's duty to find and believe the truth. If the truth comes at us in emotive terms, then we have a responsibility to prioritise listening to emotive language, not to blame truthtellers for using it.
Until he fixes that and starts to listen to people who are consistently right, he's only ever going to be right by accident, and that means that his contributions to the discussion can never be taken seriously.

2025-11-26 08:04:01 UTC

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It's incredibly cringe. It's the least self-aware piece I've ever read, and I read fascist social media so that's saying something.

2025-11-20 22:56:55 UTC

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I've heard good things about social.coop

2025-11-17 17:52:00 UTC

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If the boot isn't suitably big, they'd feel foolish licking it.

2025-11-17 14:08:03 UTC

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I would love to see this data broken down by race and income.

2025-11-17 08:46:32 UTC

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Anarchist activist hat off, statistician hat on.
The UK's reported 2023 female life expectancy is 82.90, which is almost equal to the 2015 number of 82.80, and isn't far above the 2010 number. As such, the UK can fairly be accused of stagnating. However, this is not the same as a decrease. Things aren't getting worse, despite the covid pandemic having impacted lifespans.
What's happening is that other countries are doing better. We should congratulate them on this! Female life expectancy is an important statistic, especially since older women are often invisibilised and neglected.
Life expectancy isn't like land, it isn't a fixed pool of resources we fight over, where one person doing better means another person must be doing worse. We can all improve, and that means relative rankings aren't a very useful metric.
Okay, statistician hat off, anarchist hat on. Why is the UK not improving as fast as other countries? My guess is that it's something to do with our crippling shortage of medical workers, which in turn goes back to issues of immigration and education, but that's just a guess.

2025-11-06 23:30:49 UTC

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Yeah, this feels like the worst-case scenario is that we end up with the people who can least be trusted with weapons having control of them - which is to say, where we are right now.
"The worst outcome is that we're back where we began, and most potential outcomes are better than that" is a pretty positive statement.

2025-11-03 08:55:31 UTC

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It was invented by Simon Kuznets, who was a contemporary of Keynes.
Amusingly, when Kuznets introduced the metric for the first time in 1934, he added two important notes on its limitations: that it should never be used as a measure of wellbeing, and that it is meaningless for other tasks unless accompanied by a metric for income inequality. If only people remembered these.

2025-11-01 14:09:41 UTC

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I think what a lot of terves don't realise is that, outside of their weird online spaces, their politics are deeply unpopular.

2025-11-01 14:08:25 UTC

The terf turnout today was pathetic. We didn't get a very big turnout but even as it was we outnumbered them.
They hoped for sixty thousand. Lol.

2025-10-26 10:04:27 UTC

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I read a line recently which really crystallised this for me.
"<person> thinks that if they're really good at chess, they can beat the truly powerful at a fair game. That's just not true. The moment they start losing, the powerful will just flip the board and punch them in the face. The illusion of the civilised game is only there as long as there's no challenge to their power."

2025-10-23 14:41:12 UTC

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Yeah it's really good. It's a fascinating read not just from a Leftist perspective, but from an anarchist perspective, comparing various flavours of Leftism.

2025-10-13 07:09:14 UTC

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Or, for those who believe in Lord Acton's dictum: anarchism is the belief that because power corrupts, it's something that even a decent person can't be trusted with.

2025-10-06 20:23:27 UTC

Welcome to fedi, new friends.
What's your favourite metal band, and what's their most underrated album?
(Please boost so new people can see it.)

2025-09-29 21:25:13 UTC

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Speaking as an antifascist who spends a lot of time monitoring them: usually 5% - 10% with this sort of flagshagger crowd.
This has an interesting effect. Because women are so rare, it's possible for a woman who is willing to toe the party line completely to become a spokesperson or even leader quite rapidly. All you have to do is know what they want to hear and repeat it back to them. The fash love to hear a woman saying what they want to hear, because it makes them think that it's a more widespread view than it is, and there's money in doing that. This was the grift that Anne-Marie Waters and Posie Parker ran. There isn't much longevity in it though: the fash will also inevitably move on to other leaders after getting bored with you. Ask Waters or Parker how relevant they are today.

2025-09-27 09:36:05 UTC

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Thank you for talking about your feelings. It helps.
Yeah there's definitely an extent to which it doesn't go away. It's like the joke about the pilot being annoyed that he has to keep burning the engines even once the plane is in the air: "I beat gravity, what do you mean I have to keep beating it?"
I think of it via the metaphor of a cold sore, like people sometimes get on their lips. Even when it goes away it doesn't fully go away, it just lurks and waits until your system is once again run-down enough for it to emerge. I find the lens of insurrectionary anarchist theory to be useful here.

2025-09-27 08:48:58 UTC

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May I ask why you find it depressing? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm interested in understanding it because it may help me communicate more successfully with others who feel the same way as you do.

2025-09-27 08:25:56 UTC

London peeps. Please come. Please reblog. Please share elsewhere.
Antifascist Coalition Autonomous Bloc is supporting the callout by Nijjor Manush, ROT Collective, East London Community Defence, and many other local groups to mobilise on the 25th October in Whitechapel to help keep the area safe from UKIP’s fascist street mob.
📢 Saturday 25th October
🕛 meet at 12 noon
🚝 Whitechapel Station
The East End was, still is, and always will be built and shaped by generations of immigrants. From the Huguenots, to the Irish dockers, the Jewish Anarchists, the Bengali, Somali and Caribbean communities as well as generations of migrants who moved to the East End from across the country to work in warehouses, tunnels, sites and factories, this is who we are, our history and identity the far right can never co-opt or take away from us.
This is where in 1936 thousands of locals stopped Moseley’s blackshirts from marching at the Battle of Cable Street. This is where the Asian Youth Movement fought the National Front and the Asian Action Group fought the BNP and Combat 18 out of Brick Lane. This is where in 2011 the All London Anarchist Revolutionary Mob alongside hundreds of militant Asian youth stopped the EDL from marching, and where the Anti-Fascist Network stopped the EDL from marching again in 2013.
Fighting fascism is a proud East End tradition. Whitechapel is where, time and time again, fascists come to lose, and we intend to keep things that way.
Nick Tenconi and UKIP operate in the interests of the rich - the bosses, the bankers, the politicians, the landlords and their class who spread racist hate thinking they can divide and control us and keep us down - We won’t let them.
For many of us the End End and Docklands is Hometown. For the rest of us, we’ll be travelling from across London to support the local community in putting a stop to fascist violence.
Whitechapel is Anti-Racist!
Whitechapel is Anti-Fascist!
🎉 People’s Rally on 19th October at 1pm in Altab Ali Park.
No Pasaran.
See you on the streets!
Remembering Means Fighting.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/274/942/870/385/966/original/ed0306176abdb997.jpg

2025-09-21 08:03:49 UTC

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I found the Ireland map interesting because the two main cities on the island are both built in the driest areas - however even a dry area by Irish standards is a wet area by global standards. Possibly this means that Belfast and Dublin are where they are partially because it's dry enough for the ground to be firm.
Also, Ireland has the same "dry east wet west" effect despite not having any mountains to cast a rain shadow.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/241/201/438/269/434/original/a20c82d143a67d97.png

2025-09-19 08:31:15 UTC

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It's fine to ask questions in good faith, go ahead.
I actually used to work at a supermarket, one of the big chains that own their own supply chain and have immense buying power. They sold products that they made the farmers give them for free, because the supermarket could functionally dictate prices, and so if the farmer didn't give them some free stuff then the supermarket wouldn't buy their other stuff. The supermarket, of course, made their buying price as low as possible and their selling price as high as possible. The farmers did the same for the temporary labourers they depended on, demanding as much work as possible and paying as little as possible.
They didn't do this out of greed or malice. They did it because their investors demanded growing profits out of a shrinking business, and that's only viable if the company passes the pain on to someone. They passed the pain on to their suppliers and their workers, because those people were least able to go elsewhere. If the supermarket or the farmers did otherwise then the investors would drop the share price, they would be unable to pay their debts, and they would go bust.
Exploitation is the right word to use for this sort of system, where the pain goes not to those most able to bear it, but least able to find alternatives.
What I want to focus on is the "least able to find alternatives." If you live in a town with a single supermarket, as many people do, your alternative to buying from them is starvation. If you're a seasonal farm worker, as many people are, then you're not doing it because you love the work or the hours are good, you're doing it because you have no other employment options and if you aren't employed you don't get to live.
To a pacifist, the transaction "give me your wallet or I'll drop you off the side of the boat into the ocean" is an act of violence, and remains an act of violence even if you give me your wallet and so I don't drop you off the side of the boat. Technically, even if I did, I could argue that I didn't kill you but the ocean killed you; however this is pedantry that most people wouldn't find persuasive.
In the context of supermarkets, this means that the farmer underpaying their workers is an act of violence, and the supermarket demanding free goods from their suppliers is an act of violence, and the supermarket demanding high prices from people who would starve otherwise is an act of violence; all because it comes with an unspoken "or else I'll put you in a situation where we both know you will not survive."
And so if you're giving out free food to people, you're creating an alternative. They can survive not buying at the supermarket, which means it has to lower its prices to compete with free. Likewise, if you provide basic income to all people, even convicts and undocumented people, then the farm workers will have an alternative and the farmers won't be able to threaten them with starvation.
On the other hand, if you were to demand that an individual farmer give you food for free without also getting the investors and creditors of that farm to cease their demands for profitability, then yes that wouldn't work within the current system. The farmer would refuse, or they would accept and then go bust and be replaced by someone who didn't refuse. Either way, the violence exists because of the wider system of power in society, and so we call it systemic violence.
The philosopher Kwame Ture pointed out that a lot of people are uncomfortable with seeing systemic violence; to them "violence" means bad things and choices made by individuals, which means that if it's done by them personally or is systemic then it can't be bad, which means to them it isn't violence. Ture uses the example of a person saying "the police are necessary [for my business to exist] so they can't be violent."
But it is violence, and we must understand it as such.

2025-09-19 05:20:37 UTC

A basic tenet of pacifism is that a supermarket is an act of violence. It's a business which gives you food if you give them money, which means that it will not give you food if you have no money, and its existence is threatened by anyone who gives you food for no money. A supermarket cannot exist without starvation.
This is the sort of thing pacifists spend our time thinking about: about the deep implications of violence and the threat of violence, and the moral complicity of people involved in it. Pretty much every pacifist you'll ever meet has already gone way beyond the basic ideas like "there is no difference between enacting violence and benefitting from it."
This has two implications.
Firstly, if you believe things like "getting others to do violence on your behalf doesn't make you nonviolent", then you may already be a pacifist.
Secondly, if you think that statement is an attack on pacifism, be aware that you come across like one of those "if humans evolved from monkeys then why are there still monkeys" people. It betrays a certain lack of understanding, and perhaps more worryingly, a contentment with that lack of understanding.

2025-09-12 05:58:54 UTC

Passing this one on. London peeps:
If you were at the arms fair protest on 9 September and you saw the cops being violent, Netpol would like to hear from you.
https://netpol.org/2025/09/11/call-out-did-you-witness-police-violence-at-the-arms-fair-protest-on-9-september/

2025-09-03 18:45:49 UTC

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This is really good practise and I endorse it, especially to people who are still taking their first few timid steps away from being an obedient citizen into the wide world of being a good human being.

2025-09-03 06:11:51 UTC

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This is your gentle reminder that it's not Corbyn's party, it's Sultana's party. She's been doing all the work for it.
I know the media like to ascribe Brown womens' work to White men, but that's not something we need to do too.

2025-08-12 21:28:53 UTC

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Okay so let's speak as anarchists.
When we give advice to someone we put ourselves in a position of power over them. This is inescapable. If I go to my doctor and ask her what I need to do to be healthy, I am building a temporary hierarchy and putting her on top of it and myself below it.
This is, in my opinion, a really good example of a hierarchy that can justify its existence, which is something that many anarchists like. An important part of that is that it's consensual; another important part is that it's temporary both in time and in scope. I am not asking my doctor to also be in charge of what colour I paint my ceiling. If these stop being true then it stops being a hierarchy that can justify itself, and that's something many of us dislike.
When someone butts in to give advice, they are building a hierarchy with them at the top and the other person at the bottom. When they do so in a way that's both unasked-for and irritating, then they're doing so nonconsensually. A lot of the time one sees people do this with advice that isn't even useful, just out of sheer desire to build that hierarchy. Once we understand this from a power aspect, we can see very clearly what's happening here.
We can be better than this.

2025-08-06 03:27:01 UTC

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My parents' university, in the late 70s, bought a computer. It was more powerful than they needed so they sold some processing time to local businesses to run their payroll.
It's remarkable how we keep doing the same tricks over and over again.

2025-07-23 08:42:05 UTC

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Imagine if British politicians, decades ago, were arrested for raising their voices against a brutal, white-supremacist country which was perceived as being a valuable regional ally.
(This is why many South Africans of a certain age have strong opinions about Corbyn and Cameron.)

2025-07-20 09:40:50 UTC

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In a lot of these cases, we get arrested simply as a way of taking us off the street then and there. A dissident arrested may walk free the next day, but that's the next day's problem. Public order policing is all about handling that particular day.
It also makes the cops happy, which I think is more important than a lot of people realise. The cops are pretty mutinous these days, and one of the few bennies their commanders can give them is the chance to rough up some Lefties.

2025-07-18 18:43:59 UTC

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"Both candidates are transphobic so you might as well vote for the one who has good other policies" is strikingly similar to the gameplan that happened about the climate, the Palestinians and undocumented people. The ratchet really does seem to move Rightwards.

2025-07-12 08:08:05 UTC

Outside a Tube station. One drunk beating another's head against the pavement, shouting "GIVE ME MY MONEY" while the cops watch, doing nothing.

2025-07-02 07:46:20 UTC

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Zizek said that liberals do sincerely want to allow protest, but they also want to be able to ignore it and not notice that it's happening. To them, being unable to ignore it is an act of force against them, in that they have been forced to notice that people disagree with them; and they will feel emotionally justified in responding to that with actual force.
Zizek isn't always right but when he is, he is.

2025-06-22 10:36:00 UTC

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You're only a criminal if the government decides what you're doing is criminal. Hence, in the UK, helping refugees is a criminal act while arming genocidaires isn't.
Criminality sounds pretty empathic right now, come to think of it.

2025-06-22 09:57:03 UTC

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To an extent I think there's some survivorship bias here: there are loads of empathyless assholes who achieve nothing in life, but we never hear about them.
But in an unequal society, where "success" is defined as the ability to tread on others, empathy is a disadvantage. We can build a better society in which this isn't the case, but we can't do so in a way that requires the buy-in from those who are "successful" under our current system. Master's house, master's tools, and all that.

2025-06-22 09:08:47 UTC

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Every hyperwealthy person in existence has been hitting "DEFECT" on the prisoner's dilemma, over and over, from the moment they became an adult. We shouldn't expect them to behave any differently now. This is what money does to a mf.
Patriotism is just a lie they tell us to distract us from noticing.

2025-06-16 14:42:48 UTC

London peeps please boost (and attend if you can.)
---
🏳️‍⚧️🏴 JOIN THE FEMINIST ANTI-FASCIST COUNTER DEMO AGAINST TOMMY ROBINSON AND THE FAR RIGHT 🏴🏳️‍⚧️
On the 28th of June, racist and zionist agitators including Tommy Robinson and the 'Democratic Football Lads Alliance' (DFLA) want to march from Russell Square to Downing Street against "grooming gangs".
The far-right is attempting to weaponise survivors' pain to incite racist pogroms when sexual violence is caused by patriarchy, not immigration. Fascists don't care about the safety of women and girls, they're out for their own gain.
We won't let this happen. Join us in taking a stand.
No rape! No racism!
No silence to violence!
We keep us safe
All genders welcome
28.06.25 - 11.30am
Central London location TBA
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/693/567/564/526/321/original/801c594d2b262cb4.jpg

2025-06-09 10:48:21 UTC

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I was struck by a recent comment that "if libraries didn't exist, then proposing them in the modern day would seem utopian."
As Fisher said, dismissing an idea by calling it utopian isn't a judgement on the practicality of the idea so much as a judgement on the imagination of the speaker. Many good ideas seem utopian and then work.

2025-06-08 08:41:33 UTC

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I think that is what the government wants, yes - and more broadly what the Westminster consensus wants.
I remember back a few years ago when the Tories were discussing bringing back conscription, a lot of the commentary in favour of it was not about its military value (which is low in the modern day) but in its value as a tool of social conformity - a way to "whip the kids into shape" and instill nationalistic and obedient values.
This is, I think, a big part of the current European push for remilitarisation, and especially in the UK where it's depressingly common for older people to openly hate the younger generations and actively wish misfortune upon them. Conscription is a way to hurt young people, and the increased ability to fight wars is just an added bonus.

2025-06-03 06:21:36 UTC

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I keep coming back to the paper about LLMs being far more addictive than we thought.
It makes me think of this less as "technologist enthuses to you about how their favourite tool is great actually" and more as "cokehead enthuses to you about how cocaine is amazingly good and isn't bad for them."

2025-05-26 20:57:41 UTC

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"Criminal", to reactionaries and a lot of conservatives, doesn't mean "person who breaks the law as it's currently written" but "person who we feel should have the violence of the state used against them." This often ties into ideas of hierarchy. Trump taking bribes doesn't make him a criminal in their eyes because he's a powerful person and powerful people get to do that. Trayvon Martin not having committed crimes doesn't mean that he wasn't a criminal in their eyes, because he's a member of a racialised underclass and therefore automatically a target for state violence.
This is, I think, the way ICE and a lot of other cops view deportations. They are the violence of the state, and therefore any person they want to target is automatically a criminal. It's a philosophy which neatly justifies anything they want to do.
It's not new either. Any police abolitionist can tell you about this having gone back decades.

2025-05-17 10:20:24 UTC

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I still remember going canvassing for the Greens in 2019. We were a mixed group of Greens and anarchists. While walking, one of the Greens rambled about how she thought vaccines caused autism and people should instead protect themselves from disease by doing crossfit.
We anarchists were horrified. Some of the Greens looked quite embarrassed at her and some of them were just blanking it as background noise.
She then went on to rant about how our anti-police sentiment was going to alienate people, and how nobody would want to work with us if we took such extremist positions.
This is my experience with grassroots Greens. I won't say that it's necessarily representative of the entire party, but I do think it goes to show that it's a party with a very wide range of opinions within it; and this might complicate any attempt to turn it into a lifeboat for the Labour Left.

2025-05-16 07:56:19 UTC

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This is a good point! The "you have to check its output" argument also contradicts one of the main use cases put forward for LLMs, which is that they help inexperienced people and learners.
If you don't have the experience to check the resulting output - which inexperienced people by definition don't - then should you be using an LLM? Well, the marketing pitch still says you should.

2025-05-15 11:30:50 UTC

Someone has been putting long-winded terrible low-quality Nazi memes up in part of North London. I've had a fun lunchtime tearing them down.
"Here's a list of books THEY don't want you to read!" (The protocols is on it, of course, as is Hayek and - for some reason - Arendt.)
"Immigration is a plot by international financiers to destabilise western society" <continues for an entire page of size-12 font text with no subheaders>
"All freemasonry is inherently Jewish!" <picture of a Jewish man wearing a tefillah onto which a Masonic symbol has been badly photoshopped.>
It's as if some dumbass Nazi with access to his office printer saw that joke about Leftist memes being too wordy and took that as a challenge.
They also stuck them up badly, only gluing the edges, so they were really easy to take down.
I'm aware that fascism is the ideology of aggrieved mediocrity, but I've seldom seen it this mediocre before.

2025-05-09 05:57:07 UTC

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In the specific case of Reform I think it's definitely window dressing - nobody who's seen Farage operate for any length of time expects him to keep his word - but also more fundamentally that the Reform view of the world is one where Fujimori's maxim applies: "for my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law."
I.e. it doesn't matter what the upper tax rate is, it's not actually going to be enforced because under such a system laws aren't binding on the privileged.
So all it exists to do is provide a useful stick that can be used to beat wealthy people who are of the wrong opinions or ethnicity or who step out of line in some way. Likewise, they can talk about stricter rules about assault or street crime because it's tacitly understood that these aren't going to be applied against White people, and about a more generous welfare state because it's tacitly understood that this isn't going to be available to queers and Muslims.