Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝

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

2026-02-26 21:55:18 GMT

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

2026-01-30 04:26:10 GMT

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

2026-01-26 12:38:56 GMT

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

2026-01-26 12:20:17 GMT

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

2026-01-19 02:12:24 GMT

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

2026-01-15 17:46:41 GMT

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

2026-01-15 17:45:10 GMT

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

2026-01-15 17:41:42 GMT

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

2026-01-15 17:39:36 GMT

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

2026-01-12 04:43:01 GMT

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

2025-12-22 20:07:18 GMT

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

2025-12-22 19:01:43 GMT

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

2025-12-22 19:00:04 GMT

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

2025-12-22 18:14:34 GMT

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

2025-12-22 18:11:56 GMT

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

2025-12-22 18:05:59 GMT

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

2025-12-22 18:03:12 GMT

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

2025-12-22 18:00:27 GMT

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

2025-12-22 17:57:13 GMT

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

2025-12-22 17:54:29 GMT

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

2025-12-22 17:50:59 GMT

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

2025-12-20 02:30:17 GMT

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

2025-12-16 04:48:32 GMT

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

2025-12-13 16:26:47 GMT

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

2025-12-13 16:20:33 GMT

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

2025-12-13 16:10:04 GMT

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

2025-12-13 16:04:33 GMT

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

2025-12-09 04:16:00 GMT

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

2025-12-06 04:19:36 GMT

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

2025-12-02 21:08:37 GMT

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

2025-11-26 03:48:15 GMT

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

2025-11-25 19:43:06 GMT

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

2025-11-25 17:52:28 GMT

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

2025-11-22 02:46:50 GMT

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

2025-11-18 17:38:28 GMT

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

2025-11-18 16:38:30 GMT

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I remembered that classpostures aren't classes, although I forgot the spelling of "Frostean" (the "ean" is from a third word and I tend to remember only the first two.)
I'm not comparing them to classes out of some belief that they are really classes: I'm trying to see how this fits and how it would modify earlier ideas.
So classpostures are not really classes (especially in a Marxian sense) and they are not subcultures: they are ways of relating to the overall culture?

2025-11-18 14:03:03 GMT

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In a sense, what you refer to as a kind of perquisitive estate seems to me to be like a social class, the class of retrospective good-choice-makers whose good choices mark them out as getting whatever society can give, and expecting what society can give them to be good.
These good choices are to some degree being born to some degree of wealth, but also work and education. So this is in part a eugenics-formed class, correct?

2025-11-18 13:58:25 GMT

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I chose this particular example because it was goods-productive. But in any case I'm going to try to restate parts of this in terms of older theories (not because i think it should be restated, but because this helps to differentiate it and it's probably the only way I can approach understanding it.)
The "Frostian bargain" part means life-paths that are presented as individual choices but are really inherent in society, I think.
1/n

2025-11-17 17:18:26 GMT

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I will reply more to this later: didn't want you to think I was ignoring it (just very busy).
I will have to think about ego-value as sunk cost vs plain ego-value. For instance I engage in introspective mental time travel a lot, and I value my past accomplishments and egoic self-definitions, even to the point of "making the right choices" (as when, at 17, I decided not to make weapons as most of my friends were) but I don't think I'm owed something for these.

2025-11-10 15:23:52 GMT

People on Bluesky are all stirred up because the Democrats are acting exactly as leftists predicted they would and the center-left doesn't want to admit that they are all suckers.

2025-11-07 17:39:42 GMT

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There was an anarchist group that filled potholes as a demonstration project. Dweebs responded by saying it was anti-worker because it could displace the local governmentally hired workers who fill potholes.
@npub1ul8…kek2

2025-11-07 14:49:17 GMT

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His money is just social power. There is really nothing to take: it's just numbers in various databases. We just have to stop agreeing that these numbers equal the power to command people.

2025-11-05 01:00:29 GMT

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This is where I have trouble with understanding -- it's not a matter of agreement.
From what I can see, the actual transfer of perks from those that have to those that don't is so rare as to be effectively nonexistent. Almost no one makes this sacrifice. So I could see how the idea of it could be a psychological basis for a sector of society, as long as that did not include any actual basis.
1/2

2025-11-04 23:08:20 GMT

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With that proviso, the rest of this still works. People who want proof of their goodness to be good deeds want good deeds to be routine and easy, not difficult. So in an immiserated society you can do a good deed by handing an unhoused person a piece of money (rather than making it into a society where everyone is housed) and that's easy, rather than what you'd have to do to show goodness if everyone were housed.

2025-11-04 23:05:49 GMT

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On immediate reading, I strongly agree with some parts of this ("Society cannot function unless those bad things are done", "a license to idle one's ethical engine") while disagreeing in part with "To individualize the good deeds [...]"
Even in a good society it's possible to do individual good deeds. Who can cheer you up when you're feeling down? Who knows and can do the right thing? Good deeds still would exist, but they would be more difficult and not routine.
1/2

2025-11-04 17:24:11 GMT

I am not going to vote today, and you shouldn't either. Destroy the system, don't uphold it.
There are some anarchists who still believe in "harm reduction". What the US needs at this point is people who actually believe in what they are saying -- they don't need a few more people ineffectually trying to pull the levers on the machine. Most people can not act one way and really believe a different way, not if belief requites action.

2025-11-03 22:10:02 GMT

RE: https://mastodon.social/@richpuchalsky/115487881780200982
Wait, I think that I understand this now. It's like how businesses capitalize the profits and socialize the losses. A person who believes in this individualizes the good things they do, which prove that they are a good person, and socializes the much more numerous and serious bad things that they do, which society made them do.
@npub1vp3…xhfd analytical territory.
#note190r…n5lj

2025-11-03 21:27:07 GMT

The worst thing about the individualist American faith in good deeds proving that you are a good person is that nearly everyone is incessantly doing bad deeds.

2025-11-03 20:46:55 GMT

Teen Vogue is shutting down its politics reporters, which were about the only left-leaning politics reporters in the entire mainstream media. This was inevitable: no one working for mainstream media is going to be permitted to do anything worthwhile. It is incredibly cheap for a wealthy person to buy media and neutralize it.
1/n

2025-11-02 16:23:50 GMT

"The U.S., Canada, Australia, and Norway collectively increased their oil and gas production by nearly 40 percent since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 to 2024"
(the rest of the world decreased production over the same period)
#climate #climatechange
https://oilchange.org/publications/paris-agreement-planet-wreckers/

2025-11-01 18:46:38 GMT

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And the whole cursed thing could have been avoided if early spreadsheet and database programs had just used the defined ASCII separator characters instead of commas in the first place. But they didn't. Whoever decided on that cursed everyone forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#Field_separators

2025-11-01 18:45:04 GMT

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CSV (comma separated values) is a format that has to be used, but it's horrible. What happens when there is a comma in the data? You have to mark it as a data comma rather than a field delimiter comma. How to do this? No standard way! Surround text fields with double quotes is most common, but then what happens to a double quote in data? You escape it. What is the escape character? Again it's not standard! People give you CSV files with hidden dependencies!
1/2

2025-11-01 16:04:31 GMT

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For now, all we can really do is keep telling non-anarchists that this is what police actually do. They don't solve crimes like they do on TV. They kidnap 15 year olds who their mother has come to them to find and put the 15 year old in a concentration camp.
Anyone who still approves of police is supporting this.
/fin

2025-11-01 16:02:39 GMT

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What people new to anarchism often ask about is something like: what will we do without police, in an imaginary de novo society? That one is relatively easy. There have been many, many societies without police. Societal sanction has taken many forms.
The difficult question is how to do without police in a society where all of the alternatives are suppressed.

2025-11-01 16:00:33 GMT

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It's the same for serious crimes. Will anything good come of reporting most crimes to the police? No. Can subcultures of anarchists really find any good subcultural way of dealing with these crimes? Also no, because the larger society will subvert any sanctions that the subculture can come up with.

2025-11-01 15:58:32 GMT

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And we also have the Internet and whole networks of busy-body neighbors watching out for things. The resources available to find a missing child are exceptionally large, if someone could access them.
Can someone access them? No, because people have been taught to say, and think: "go to the police." There is no network of person finders because it's supposed to be a police activity.

2025-11-01 15:56:14 GMT

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In this case, anarchist ways of solving this kind of problem clearly exist: this is one of the easiest cases for them. There is a very large and reasonably trustworthy population of people who are motivated to help find missing kids. When my kids were young, we told them what to do if they were lost or in trouble: "find someone who looks like a mom". That is by far the safest thing you can tell small children.

2025-11-01 15:54:01 GMT

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What could the mother have done in this case? It's very easy (and true) to say "don't go to the police, because any interaction with them is dangerous". But what can someone do within a society where non-police ways of doing something have been purposefully closed off?

2025-11-01 15:51:48 GMT

A 15 year old autistic child went missing, his mother filed a missing persons report, the police found him and turned him over to ICE, and ICE still has him in custody.
I haven't content warned this as US politics because I'm going to say a couple of things about it from an anarchist viewpoint that people from other countries may actually want to read.
1/n
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/missing-emmanuel-gonzalez-garcia-houston-autism

2025-10-30 17:04:53 GMT

Some questions about Linux on the "desktop" (actually, the desktop and/or laptop)
I've steadfastly resisted doing this since I hate to do #Linux sysadmin work on my server and don't want to do it on anything else. But Windows has gotten ridiculous and Macs Just Don't Work.
Assuming I want to do this:
1) which distro is the least work?
2) what hardware should I get? I started with Macs in the first place because of zero fan noise so that's #1
3) what cell phone(s) should I get?

2025-10-23 00:59:35 GMT

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I read it: I hate it. It basically says that wikipedia is great, so we need a state form that has cops to shoot people.
I'm not an anarcho-primitivist. This "live without hospitals" thing is just one more rendition of Engels' bit about how could anyone imagine a modern factory without discipline and a boss.

2025-10-22 12:41:15 GMT

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What new idea should there be? Become an anarchist!
That's a big step, so people struggle to reintroduce state left ideas even as they have failed in the rest of the world. Generally they have some idea that Europe is social democratic, or that China is Communist, rather than both being different flavors of state capitalism. America is provincial so Americans never have to test their ideas against what is actually happening elsewhere.

2025-10-22 12:32:31 GMT

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But a popular resistance that can't coalesce around some new idea can't go anywhere. If the only idea that people can broadly agree on is "RETVRN to the Great Society" then all they are doing is pushing for fewer fascists, more neoliberals. If that succeeded, in short order you'd get more fascists again.

2025-10-22 12:28:28 GMT

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In fact, every US institution and industry is run by people who are participating in making it collapse. They are either fascists or neoliberals -- the two political tendencies of the US. Within each tendency, they all make the same kind of decisions. It's the same whether you're talking about the Supreme Court, the airline industry, academia, or anything else. There is no sector that is magically untouched.
That is why there is no elite resistance. It's all popular resistance.

2025-10-22 12:23:28 GMT

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Trump didn't force Harvard to cut back on new grad students. It wasn't his demand and they didn't give in to his demand. He cut back on Federal funding and the administrators of the university are the same neoliberal scum who run every major institution in the US, so naturally they cut back on the least powerful (but most load-bearing) part of their institution. They didn't have to do this: there were innumerable ways to cut back on something else.

2025-10-22 12:20:51 GMT

Harvard cutting back on new grad students is a small case study in societal decline.
The "vulgar liberalism" (phrase used as a match to "vulgar Marxism") idea of decline is that it's from some central source, some bad person, probably supported by an imperial enemy. This is why liberals were beclowning themselves since Trump's term saying that he was a Russian agent. They've backed off (a little?) on the Russian bit but still seem to think it's all Trump.
1/n

2025-10-21 01:03:34 GMT

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"Big projects" are one of the historical disputes between state socialists and libertarian socialists (anarchists, pretty much). Engels sneered about how did the anarchists think people were going to organize and run a modern factory without discipline and hierarchy? Basically, state socialists think that the big projects are what civilization is about.

2025-10-21 01:00:48 GMT

From a recent discussion: what is a "big project"?
A big project is a kind of cause and effect of the state. Why do you need a state? For big projects. Why do you need big projects? To support a state.
Big projects are not things like "science", "agriculture", or knowledge about them. Those are done by networks. Big projects are things like massive tombs, army corp organizations, jet fighter modela, nuclear weapons, state law books etc. They are organizational or engineering.

2025-10-19 16:42:54 GMT

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I understand that, but as I get old I get less concerned with "sharing rhetorical space" and more concerned with saying what I think. In particular, I don't think that anarchists have a direct democracy program ready to go and that our last prefigurative one (the Occupy General Assembly) was a massive failure.
@npub1xn8…q8vz

2025-10-19 15:47:39 GMT

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The one of these that I now come down on the other side of is that I now usually go for Democracy is Bad. Representative democracy was always bad, for anarchists (see e.g. Trump getting voted in legally) and direct democracy also actually sucks in most cases.

2025-10-18 14:03:17 GMT

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As far as I can tell, unless you're a professional accountant LibreOffice can do anything that Microsoft Office can do. The school's IT support will probably say that you need Microsoft Office, but if you ask them why it may turn out that you really don't.

2025-10-15 19:23:45 GMT

A couple of things:
1) Ben Gvir personally oversaw the torture of Greta Thunberg
2) Ben Gvir was set to be sanctioned by the United States government in February 2024 but was personally taken off the list by President Biden.
(via @diplomatofnight.com on Bluesky)

2025-10-10 13:08:15 GMT

María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize: she described Trump sinking boats as courageous, visionary etc.
There are no good people in this story -- not Maduro, not Machado, certainly not Trump, and not the people on the Nobel committee who gave the prize to someone pushing for US sponsored "regime change" for her country.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/maria-corina-machado-nobel-prize-trump-venezuela-b2843103.html

2025-10-08 00:15:11 GMT

Now that harvest season is ending it's time to consider what lessons I've learned from #gardening (I'm a relative newcomer, my partner was always more into it.)
The #1 lesson: don't grow what you can buy in the in grocery store, grow better varieties which you usually can't buy.
For US New England, these include:
delicata or pattypan squash
romano beans
garlic (for garlic scapes)
ground cherries
fresh herbs if you like them
1/2

2025-10-07 11:49:12 GMT

Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization.
Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.

2025-10-06 14:27:53 GMT

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I've already noticed the sudden return of "Welcome new users! Here are ten totally unnecessary tips for how to use Mastodon, as if you can't figure out a social medium by yourself"

2025-10-03 18:52:28 GMT

probably the 3 worst:
#1: This is not what America really is
#2: This is not what Christianity really is
3#: This is not what capitalism really is

2025-10-01 16:06:20 GMT

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Being an anarchist involves a lot of smiling and nodding as people reflexively call on hierarchical power in all contexts in which it is the least bit comforting.

2025-10-01 16:04:35 GMT

Bill McKibben: "Today, the guy who’s got more claim than anyone else on earth to actually being in charge of religion told him in the kindest possible most pontifical way that he’s out of line."
Ah yes, the emotional high that a "sometime Methodist" gets from finding a big time religious leader on the right side of the #climate. But no, the Pope is not in charge of religion, much as the Vatican would like convince people of this.

2025-10-01 02:46:20 GMT

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Anyways, my complete guess is that Korean anime, manga, web comics and so on do this more effectively because Korea has such a thriving KPop industry to model it after.
(The most actually hot-guy US anime-related series, the second Castlevania one, just has its characters be openly gay or bi so it doesn't need female gaze either.)
/fin

2025-10-01 02:42:26 GMT

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And at first I was like "OK, this is a stereotypical Korean thing about how hot guys *also* have to be really tough and heterosexual, so the authors have to reinforce how het it is."
But wait, yaoi is very popular in Korea as far as I know. That means that the women gazing at the hot male characters are probably themselves supposed to be het (or bi, etc.) but the presumed hotness of the guys doesn't depend on them being so.

2025-10-01 02:36:57 GMT

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_Noblesse_ is full of hot male vampires, who for very thin plot reasons are the principal, a few students, and security guards at a high school. And in every scene where they appear in front of students there are female students swooning or whatever over them in the background. Often talking to each other about "they are so hot" as well, but the artist put in the time to make gaze an actual thing.

2025-10-01 02:34:04 GMT

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In Chinese anime or whatever it's called, there is invariably going to be some gay male flirting that suddenly emerges that is not openly acknowledged, except for the series where the two guys are long lost lovers.
It's Korean stuff that really seems to go for female gaze. I first noticed when reading _Noblesse_ on Webtoon. (It's a kind of funny web comic about vampires in modern society)

2025-10-01 02:30:14 GMT

Someone else was writing about male gaze and it made me think of the female gaze aspects of certain Korean media.
So anyone reading this is prob familiar with Japanese #anime, manga and so on, with its weird conventions about hot guys (a male protagonist can hardly ever be actually hot because they are a male viewer identification figure, so women and/or other men are attracted to them for no discernible reason). That needs more than gaze, it requires overt "wow you're so hot."
1/few

2025-09-29 19:51:29 GMT

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There are too many leftist theories at this point for me to really judge how prevalent this is within them.
For anarchism broadly, it used to be more common to see an assumption that people are typically cooperative until bad social structures make them not so, and now it's more common to see "people have lived in all sorts of ways."

2025-09-29 14:04:28 GMT

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Usually, someone who says that the default condition is kindness says that we have been socialized to respond differently by social structures -- but then those people don't tend to think that an aphorism will be enough to change things, it will require changing those social structures or living differently as a subculture.
(I'm not defending/adhering to this view. The usual anarchist view is that other than some very basic things, there is no "human nature" or "natural state".)

2025-09-29 02:58:55 GMT

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I'm not sure what the thread in general is about, but if someone started washing my car without me asking them to I would assume that it was a hostile jape about how dirty my car was or a passive-aggressive demand for some kind of attention.

2025-09-26 23:25:26 GMT

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Oh, the 80 year old guy. One ICE wasn't brave enough to detain him by himself, it took 3 of them, dislocating his elbows, bravely shouting "You don't fuck with ICE!"
Just the most cowardly people in the world.

2025-09-26 14:41:54 GMT

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"ompletely destroy military cohesion and morale"
So what? There is no one attacking the US. The military will be reconstituted using the large group of Trump thugs, and if it doesn't work as a military that doesn't matter.

2025-09-26 14:12:12 GMT

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If you don't like subservience, an alternate way of describing this part of it is imperial pride. "Our military leaders don't resist elected leadership, that would be a lesser country thing."
What would a dissenting group of generals even do? Report this to the press?

2025-09-26 14:01:58 GMT

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As in many of our past conversations, I agree about how inept MAGA fascism is, but I don't think it matters. The US is a deeply subservient country and they will succeed even with the most foolish possible self-coup plan.

2025-09-26 13:56:09 GMT

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My completely uninformed guess is that it's going to be some varient more suited to our time. Like telling them that they have to support the President and telling them to sign an anti-"DEI" statement that effectively repeals US military anti-racism and any regs on not killing US civilians, then firing anyone who doesn't.

2025-09-26 13:21:38 GMT

Ah yes, here we go. A message from the retired US general who once served as the commanding general for US forces in Europe.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/270/789/527/767/629/original/e56c41ccdb02ef12.png

2025-09-25 22:30:20 GMT

Why are the fascists calling all the military brass to a single in-person meeting? People who have never heard of fascism before are puzzled
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/09/25/hegseth-generals-quantico-meeting/

2025-09-25 16:25:24 GMT

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"Liberals deserve better": do they though?
It's not like being born into an ethnicity. People can change their minds. The relevant and well-known folk wisdom here is "suckers deserve it".

2025-09-25 13:34:50 GMT

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Read my bio, Blue MAGA dude. I'm an anarchist.
As I wrote before, half of America has strong feelings that our empire has to be respectable as we kill people. That's what "decorum and international relations" means.

2025-09-25 13:29:13 GMT

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I don't care about the law, decorum, or international relations: I care about things like genocide, aggressive war, and state enforced racism.

2025-09-25 12:54:29 GMT

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So, no, Trump's actions in, let's say, shooting random civilians in boats in the Caribbean are not unusual for America. People approving of them is not unusual for America. Nor are fascists doing fascism because they expect to rule forever: they know that even if they lose power, no one will punish them. Punishing them would call all of American history into question, and all American political leaders.