hex

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

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

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Last Notes

2025-04-29 05:42:40

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

2025-04-27 15:56:20

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@nprofile…aq7u @nprofile…4fjz is "literally Hitler" an option?

2025-04-08 20:28:14

Trump doesn't have a sense of humor. He doesn't joke. He knows what he says is absolutely illegal.
He's not good with money. He's not good at negotiating. He's not a business man. He has no skills that are valuable to any other person. But he is extremely good at getting away with fraud.
One of the skills required to get away with lots of fraud is knowing that you can trust your accomplices. How do you do that?
You can't just ask someone, "hey, wanna do some crimes with me?" They could be against those crimes. They could get your arrested. Even talking about some crimes is a crime itself. You also can't just ask someone straight out, "how do you feel about, say, tax fraud? You know, hypothetically... for a friend."
You have to understand where they're at. You have to explore their boundaries and beliefs in a way that's actually plausibly deniable.
Pretending to joke is invaluable to people like Trump. He follows mob rules when getting things done. Joke, test the waters, then imply directions but never explicitly give them. It should always be possible to pull back and claim you didn't say a thing or mean it "in that way." Ambiguity and plausible deniability are critical. This criminal skill translates perfectly to politics.
The far right has used this tactic for years to pry open the Overton Window. Legacy media has been complicit in the right wing tactic by perennially platforming fascists.
Trump starts by making a "joke." He'll keep making the "joke" until enough people around him think he can get away with it, then it stops being a joke and starts being a policy. Once you've become normalized to the "joke," the Overton window has opened enough to talk about the reality.
When he "jokes" about deporting American citizens, he means he's planning to use ICE to kidnap protesters like he did in Portland at the end of his last term. But he will send them to a death camp in El Salvador instead of just intimidating them. He is telegraphing his next move. Get ready for it.
#USPol
Edit:
ref https://social.treehouse.systems/@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes/114302728431458606
Edit:
Nor is this hypothetical or "at some point in the distant future." High profile targets, like Sam Beard (organizer for Luigi's defense fund among other things), are being chosen now:
https://bsky.app/profile/partygirls.bsky.social/post/3lmdlnr2gac2q
#FreeLuigi

2025-04-06 10:18:33

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

2025-03-30 07:33:45

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

2025-03-25 06:03:26

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

2025-03-11 14:36:29

Under GDPR, anyone in the EU has the right to request surveillance footage of themselves. #Tesla takes records videos but seems to kind of throw their customers under the bus in terms of compliance with GDPR.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/tesla-s-sentry-mode-is-a-privacy-8488081/
So how do we make this as big a problem as possible for Tesla and EU Tesla owners?

2025-03-06 10:22:56

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@nprofile…2u03 in the wake of George Floyd, management sends out all this messaging about DEI. They set up a meeting and all that. I'm a cis white dude so I'm not gonna try to get involved, just gonna listen and be supportive where I can.
Someone sets up a meeting on DEI. IIRC, it's led by a cis white man and a cis white woman. They start the meeting with just names, no pronouns or access needs. I'd brought up that maybe pronouns should be included in the past, but nope.
They introduce the absolute most entry level content that assumes an audience of shitty cis white dudes who are not immigrants. Sure, that's important, but this audience has a good chunk of black and brown folks, a lot who are immigrants from India and SE Asia.
They show a video that shows a white guy harassing a brown skin woman "where she's *really* from." The white folks leading the thing are like "don't ask people where they're from." A brown skin dude with an accent is like, "I ask people where they're from all the time. I'm an immigrant. If I see someone I think is from my country, I want to talk to them." White folks are confused and keep trying to say, "no, you can't because it's wrong." They don't say "microaggression" or talk about how context matters, they just keep insisting that it's really not OK.
These white folks spend the next hour or so continuing to whitely explain how to not be a shitty white dude to an audience with a good chunk of not cis white men.
Several meetings like this, but they never answer my request to either amend the gender selection for dependances so it doesn't force me to specify a binary for my (non-binary) partner or my kids (who we were raising gender neutral).
I saw several leadership meetings get planned around DEI. I even offered my help and joined one. People threw around some ideas. I chimed in with the idea that perhaps leadership meetings focusing on DEI should not be staffed exclusively by cis white men. I may have suggested bringing in a consultant. I'm not sure if there were more meetings after that, definitely none that I was included on. I think the next staff meeting after that was led by two white women.
This is what corporate DEI looks like from the inside. It's probably better than nothing, but it's also almost indistinguishable from nothing. I don't know what to say about the fact that they managed to make a DEI presentation racist by assuming a white audience, but there it was.

2025-03-05 17:05:56

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@nprofile…skc4 IMO, "here's how we dismantled an orphan crushing machine" is still a good story to hear in a society full of orphan crushing machines. It's always nice to be reminded that we win against the orphan crushers sometimes.

2025-02-23 09:59:51

I think it's worth reminding everyone that there was probably never a time in US history when fascism could have been prevented. The US is founded on slavery, genocide, patriarchy, and oligarchy. Oligarchy and patriarchy are literally written into the constitution.
The electoral college is explicitly anti-democratic. The Senate was designed to maintain slavery. The two party system is explicitly built to *prevent* democracy. The drug war was *specifically* created to stop the civil rights movement. The entire country is a blatantly illegal occupation of land where other people already lived, which violates multiple treaties signed with those people. They tried to coup FDR. Even Kennedy was killed by right wing stochastic terrorism. The opportunity to fork is older than any of us.
There was *maybe* a chance to fix this during Reconstruction, and we all know how that went.
No, Joe couldn't have done what's needed to fix things because that would require dismantling his own party. No, voting for Bernie would not have changed anything. They would have just boomerang Allended him during his first week.
The problem is, and has always been, the existence of the US itself.

2025-02-23 09:59:51

2025-02-13 19:18:57

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I'm excitedly awaiting news of the first US armored vehicle to be downed with a super soaker.

2025-02-13 19:16:13

I have good news for any countries interested in forcibly expelling US forces in the near future...
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g-s1-48571/trump-administration-order-400-million-worth-of-armored-teslas

2025-01-21 19:47:02

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There are a few different version of the sabotage manual in PDF linked from this thread too, but in case you want to download an epub, Gutenberg also has it...
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

2025-01-21 14:40:40

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I am riffing a bit off this. I actually think both should probably be used together. It can be valuable to push back, and it can be valuable to undermine. Choose your path wisely based on how you read the situation.
https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/113866093397576803
Edit: and if you boosted mine, you should probably boost this too.

2025-01-21 14:24:11

Hey fellow tech folks. We might get asked to do something terrible. I'd like to start a bit of an open discussion about how to deal with such requests.
The first thing I might recommend is enthusiastically agree to do whatever it is then forget about it and do something else. If asked about it in the future, pretend this is the first you've heard about it. Play as dumb as you can for as long as you can.
Now, if you can't get away with delaying by not doing anything anymore then find the absolute most complicated way to do whatever it is. This is actually a great time to use an LLM. Have an LLM write all your code then just run it. Ask the LLM to fix anything that's broken. Take some extra steps to force downgrade or upgrade libraries to incompatible versions. Write all of your own interfaces by hand. Write your own date parsing library. Write all of your own SQL without any abstractions. Add an LLM in the middle some how. Use libraries that haven't been supported for 15 years. Ever want to write code in Python 2.0? Now's your chance! Debug everything with Wireshark, no matter what it is. I bet there's a VB script library to do what you need to do, and if you can just write a C wrapper around that it'll interface perfectly with perl, as soon as you can get that old FoxPro program running in wine. I bet it would be easier without that commit hook that changes every zero to a capital letter O. "I'm getting the craziest error. It works on my system!"
There are a million ways to make things insanely complicated, and most of us have seen people legitimately do these things out of pure incompetence.
Now, if you end up against the wall and think you might get fired package everything up and hand it off to someone else, but make sure you make it clear that you're almost done and it should be super easy to finish. Leave behind some fun puzzles for the next person to figure out.
"How strange...the output changes when I change the whitespace, but not when I change the text. What is that?"
Who's got some other fun suggestions for extremely malicious compliance?

2025-01-20 06:41:32

If you're looking for the law to save you from Trump, Donald Trump is the law now. Rule of Law has always been a weapon of the strong to control the weak. It's not that he's turned it into a weapon, it's that he's less competent at hiding its true nature as a tool of oppression.
The good news is that you never actually needed the law to begin with. We've always needed community, and that's the real antithesis to fascism: not the law, but eachother.

2025-01-19 09:42:46

It's an interesting confluence of events we're seeing.
American and Chinese folks circumventing state mediation and talking straight to eachother. Drone warfare in Syria and Ukraine has changed the dynamics of combat in a similar way to how the machine gun eliminated the effectiveness of the most powerful horse cavalry in the world and redefined the way wars were fought. American anarchist volunteers cycling out of Syria and Ukraine and coming home with combat experience, specifically with drone combat. A guy shooting a CEO and the accused shooter being turned in to a folk hero, while media and talking heads burn all the trust they had left trying to portray him as a villan.
All while the most hated and incompetent president in history tries to take power, promising to carry out genocide specifically targeting, among others, people who feed the country and also promising to implement tariffs that will absolutely obliterate the economy.
Remember that authoritarianism takes more energy to maintain than egalitarianism. As the climate crisis continues to accelerate, the energy needs of hierarchy will continue to grow. Meanwhile, we are far past the peak oil.
The fact that the US military is the number one global consumer of fossil fuels is no coincidence. Oil is the fuel of oppression, and it's time is limited. Putin more than anyone else, is the oil dictator. Trump is modeling himself off of Putin, and will need an infinite supply of petroleum and to avoid natural disasters in order to maintain power... He is guaranteed to get the opposite.
Yeah, this is going to be wild.

2025-01-16 15:34:05

It's kind of hilarious that the backlash against the #TikTok ban had the unintended consequence of Americans using to #rednote and learning mandarin, but also it's even funnier that the influx of English also fucks up Chinese censorship.
I hope that this ends up being an opportunity for Americans to learn how to evade censorship and detection before the US turns the fash to 11. Maybe there will be unintended trouble for both authoritarian governments.
People of the world unite against their shitty governments.

2025-01-04 19:22:59

My partner sent me a pretty good #meme
#FreeLuigi #FreeLuigiMangione #luigi #luigimangione
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/771/700/435/097/284/original/0ccd5a96fa4989db.png

2024-12-25 18:47:23

Boomers: I'm going to retire to Florida at 65, maybe earlier.
X: if I take on a side gig as an Uber driver, I can probably retire at 75.
Millenials: I don't think retirement is going to be a thing when I get old.
Z: I don't think Florida is going to be habitable in 10 years.

2024-12-13 13:05:24

You know what I'm looking forward to on this #ACABDay? I'm looking forward to a video of folks in Mario and Luigi chanting #ACAB #FreeLuigi!
It's a meme I never knew I needed, and now I'm really enjoying it.

2024-12-08 11:08:42

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@nprofile…093s I deleted my Facebook a long time ago and my life has been much better ever since. Thanks for the heads up, I do appreciate it. I wish groups like this could organize in a way that's safe for the people they're trying to support.

2024-12-08 09:51:29

#dearlazyweb: is anyone aware of active #ADHD parenting groups in #Amsterdam, especially English speaking groups?

2024-12-04 17:27:36

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@nprofile…2c9f @nprofile…n90q cars have always been somewhat exclusive. If you're out in the middle of nowhere with lots of space you can maintain your own for relatively cheap, but they're far too easy to capture.
Anyone who cares about any kind of freedom needs to push as hard as possible for bikes and mass transit.

2024-12-03 07:38:38

13.12 is coming up fast. What are you going to do this year to celebrate #AllBastardsDay? #ACAB
It can be a fun surprise you keep secret, or a public project you share. I'm probably going to work on a story, but there are some public records I never went though so who knows.
I hope someone puts out a fireplace video that's just 3 hours of burning cop cars framed with a brick fireplace.

2024-11-25 21:43:42

This is another reminder that disaster preparedness is the most valuable thing to focus on now and as long as the polycrisis of late stage capitalism continues. There are a number of reasons for this.
The state is always weakest in times of crisis. The more authoritarian the state, the less competently it handles disaster. The *most* effective organizational structure for handling disasters is egalitarian mutual aid. Disaster is defined by large amounts of information that needs to be processed quickly. Each level of hierarchy decreases communication bandwidth by at least half and creates bottlenecks around authority figures. This leads hierarchy to get stuck in turbo-paralysis. Meanwhile, non-hierarchal organizing completely skips this problem, allowing those with the most context on a situation to make the best decision with the information available. Peer-to-peer information sharing and distributed, leaderless networks are far more effective. Disasters present opportunities to demonstrate how anarchism not only works in practice, but works even when hierarchy completely fails.
Here at the end of capitalism, we are surrounded by crises that the state and capitalism are incapable of addressing. Not only does state/capitalism fail to address these problems, but it causes basically all of them and then expatriates the impact. As the crisis continues to compound towards a societal collapse singularity, the need for egalitarian organizing only grows.
There are no shortage of crises, and organizing for one can often help with others. In the Pacific Northwest, we organized disaster prep around the fire and smoke season. We put together information on building air filters. We stockpiled n95 masks. A few years later when the pandemic hit, we had masks to donate to hospitals and houseless folks again. We had air filters all ready to go.
In the event of a crisis there could be mass displacement. If you want to know what that looks like, look at a houseless camp today. If you organize to support a camp as though it were people displaced by a natural disaster (instead of a human one), you would be building all the skills you need and would be able to plan to scale in the case of a larger disaster.
In the case of a natural disaster, people will need medication, including hormones. This is also what people will need as the medical system is torn apart and as trans healthcare becomes illegal.
During Katrina, far right militas organized to raid and attack people. Community defense, including armed defense, is critical to keeping people safe from right wing "preppers." While we are preparing to keep as many people alive as possible, they have only bought ammo and have nothing to offer but terror and an armed savior fantasy.
Organizing for natural disasters is a plausibly deniable way to organize against human made disasters as well. Keep this in mind, as plausible deniability is a key part of survival under fascism as you never know what perfectly sensible thing might become illegal.
You can start today by looking at the existing landscape, threat modeling, and figuring out what actions you can take today. Start with making sure you have supplies: food, fresh water, a camp stove, possibly a tent. Once you have a kit for yourself, help other comrades build theirs. From there, plan how you can help others. Understand what organizations already exist in the community. Get a ham radio license and learn how to use it. Whatever you do, make sure it's rooted in what actually can happen (or is currently happening) in your area.
The most important thing, more important than any supplies or gear or anything, is community. Just the act of talking to other people makes you more prepared. If something happens to your house and all of your supplies, one of the folks you're organizing with maybe able to help you... And that's the difference between leftist prepping and right wing prepping. One actually helps you prepare.
#uspol

2024-11-19 09:06:11

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Elon Musk, very much a product of apartheid South Africa, uses Tesla to destroy mass transit because he and other oligarchs are afraid to be in stabbing distance of the poors.
You are forced to use a car because (1) the capitalist class uses cars to keep themselves safe and (2) having the world behind a paywall makes you easier to control.
Pay attention to how afraid people are of using mass transit. That anxiety is not just fear of safety, it's also fear of being perceived as lower class. It's class anxiety trained in to people to align them with the interests of the ruling class against the interests of everyone.
We can do this literally all day.
#uspol

2024-11-19 08:54:47

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Oh yeah, and that doesn't even touch how US foreign policy around Central America for the last century or so has been about creating the conditions from which some of these folks are fleeing. That is, the enslavement of whole nations through dictatorships that enforce US interests via right wing death squads.
Etc, etc, ad infinitum.
#uspol

2024-11-19 08:51:40

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You can basically point at almost any policy and find the same thing.
Immigration? Yeah, abolition of chattel destabilized agriculture in the US. Immediately sharecropping, prison slavery, and debt slavery filled the gap. Debt slavery was largely ended in the lead up to WWII because it was seen as a propaganda liability during the war. Chain gangs used to be rented to farmers but that lost favor after a few high profile instance of white prisoners being murdered by overseers. Immigrant labor has been the primary solution since then.
If immigration is illegal, then immigrants can be kept in defacto slavery under threat of being returned to their place of origin (which can be the same as the threat of death). So the US food system is a slave system that's massively subsidized by border patrol.
Anti-imigration rhetoric increases the pressure to maintain this slavery, breaks down working class solidarity between different levels of exploited people, and distracts exploited people from their own exploitation.
Scratch #uspol anywhere and you'll find slavery or genocide.

2024-11-19 08:21:32

Slavery continues to be the main driver of right wing #uspol at all levels.
The most salient horror for a lot of people is abortion access. Forced birth is literally "involuntary labor." Forced reproductive labor is simply corvée (temporary de facto slavery) enforced by the state.
Forced birth serves at least 3 purposes related to slavery. It forces women, especially black and brown women, to stay in low wage jobs. Black and brown women are the basis for the service industry. Forced birth is a mechanism to enforce wage slavery.
Wealthier people tend to be able to circumvent laws against forced birth, so it's really about targeting people who are already disadvantaged. Families who can't plan birth are more likely to reproduce generational poverty.
When combined with the push to strip away support, children of forced birth are more likely to themselves be in poverty. Two pipelines exist to siphon forced birth children in to other forms of slavery: school to military, and school to prison.
Folks who don't have military family may not realize that the military is a form of slavery in the sense of people being owned. Some military jobs can pay a lot. They can lift people out of poverty. There is a reason people join the military, beyond adherence to Americanism. But none of that makes it not slavery. If you get a hand tattoo, you are charged with "damaging government property." Soldiers are government property. It's pretty literal.
Prison labor is a pervasive element in the US economy. Basically all major corporations use it. Whole folks may say that the things I've talked about so far are not literally slavery, or may contest my use of language, prison labor is often explicitly slavery justified by the gap in the 13th amendment ("except as punishment for a crime").
Those who aren't siphoned off generally remain in poverty to perpetuate the next generation of this system.
Now, the thing about slavery us that the point isn't actually the free labor. In terms of labor, these pipelines are actually more expensive (to society) than just having a free society. Just think about it. Chattel slavery required a massive portion of the society to suppress slave revolts. Police, today's slave catchers, are *by far* the largest part of any city budget and prisons are incredibly expensive. The "free labor" that corporations get is really massive subsidization. The point of slavery is to maintain social stratification.
All wage workers are, in a sense, kept (to lesser and lesser degrees) in subjection by the threat of more extreme forms of slavery. The high wage worker obeys because they are afraid of becoming a low wage worker. The low wage worker obeys because they are afraid of being houseless. Houselessness is made illegal so they can be swept in to prisons and enslaved. The entire capitalists system is built on increasing threats of subjugation and violence, where stratified classes are aligned more and more with the dominant class and have more and more incentive to enforce it's will on other subjugated people.
It's slavery all the way down.
Malcolm X was taking about this structure in 1963.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo

2024-11-18 06:21:29

There is a playbook for resisting fascism specifically in the US. It's loaded with relevant information about what has worked and what hasn't. It covers everything from peaceful resistance strategies, to fascist coups against democratically elected governments in the US, to how firearms fit in to resisting oppression, to carrying out a successful guerilla warfare campaign against authoritarianism.
It's called "black history."
#uspol

2024-11-15 20:31:56

I'm going to say something that's already been said a couple of times now because I think it's worth repeating.
Just because some white folks are new to it, the battle against fascism has already been going on for generations now all over the world. @nprofile…ps99 pointed out (in a thread I can't find now) that the civil rights movement has very much always been against fascism. (Paraphrasing @nprofile…ps99) MLK said it softly, Malcolm X said it straight out, but this has been clear for a while. @nprofile…74ya painted out (here, and elsewhere https://kolektiva.social/@emsenn/13482201156861535) that fascism is just colonialism but with white people.
This is not in any way a new point (especially not from me), but it's worth repeating again and again. One reason it's worth repeating is that it means we have hundreds of years of years of experience to look back at and guide us. Fascism never really changes the playbook, they just never taught it to *you*. Rage against the Machine lyrics are *more* relevant today than when they were written. Malcolm X quotes are evergreen. Parable of the Sower may feel prophetic, but it's just what you get when you follow the logic of oppression without interruption.
If you are new to fascism and want to know how to fight it tomorrow, start by fighting colonialism and racism today. Learn the history, learn strategies you don't need to reinvent, and support the people who point this out regularly like @nprofile…74ya, @nprofile…ps99, etc.
(others folks want to add in here)
Who are targeted by these systems first, and why? Who are marginalized, and why? Following these questions leads to the weaknesses in the system. Look at what is happening to marginalized people today. White folks are used to being able to mostly ignore it. That was always a mistake, but now it should be completely obvious that if you aren't in the meat grinder then you are next.
Learn while you aren't the immediate target (if you aren't already). Fight early, before everyone you'd stand next to is dead. We've been here enough times to know how this shit works. If you don't already know it, then you have homework to do.

2024-11-07 11:41:55

I remember, as a kid and adolescent, watching planes fly overhead, far far away. They were just lines, contrails, going from one side of the horizon to the other.
I'd flown a few times. My grandparents lived in Hawaii. They were pretty well off. I'd been there a couple of times. A lot of the folks I knew had never left whichever little town we lived in at the time.
My mother left California for a lot of reasons. Really we couldn't afford it after my parents divorced. The economic pressure of Regan's America destroyed a lot of families and made the (old) American dream unreachable. Rural Oregonians hated Californians because... I don't know... Because they hated a lot of things.
Both of my parents lived in various trailer parks before moving further into the country. We occasionally lived in trailer parks even in the rural area.
Living in the country is different. It stays the same for a long time, generations. The run down grocery store in the middle of town was built in the 1800's when the place was settled. The building was never updated, at least on the outside. The ideology was basically the same. The school taught about how Manifest Destiny made America great, Jim Crow was bad but MLK fixed it, Malcolm X and the Black Partners were either not mentioned at all or only mentioned as unhelpful in comparison to nonviolence.
I didn't really know any black folks until I was 18 or 19. There was one black guy in the town I went to highschool in. He was adopted. There were a few hispanic folks, but they were generally pretty segregated. I remember one of the white kids breaking up, I assume broken up with, a hispanic girl who spoke limited english. After their breakup, she just disappeared. There were stories that he had called INS (before ICE) and that she had been illegal.
I remember being on the bus once and one of the kids talking about how he finally beat up his dad. His dad had beat him and his mother for years and he finally beat his dad up. He was proud. He was a bully who regularly started fights and intimidated people.
Most of my sr class didn't graduate. I dropped out half way through because I had enough credits to get a diploma. A few folks did this. A lot of people just did meth and went to work at the mill. A kid who was a Sr before I was a freshman robbed the Circle K with an air pistol and went to prison.
Folks who lived on the same street as the police station knew what a patrol looked like. There was only one cop on patrol at a time and response times could be two hours if something happened at the farthest extent of a patrol.
The kid had planned that part out, but, of course, the person working at the store knew exactly who he was because that's how small towns work. I don't remember if he wore a mask or not. It wouldn't have mattered if he did.
People thought that the US should invade Mexico to stop the migration. People thought that the US had the god given right to invade Canada. People thought that indigenous people didn't exist, even though one of our classmates was Blackfoot... But everyone saw him as white, even when he pointed it out.
People who aren't white were "the OK ones," or invisible, or actually the enemy, depending on who you were and who they were. There were really racists, straight up klansman, but they were rare and mostly made fun of. The pervasive racism and misogyny was not the dedicated and explicit one of incels and vocal bigots, but a deep ignorance.
The government was far away. There were cops, sometimes. The local government was wildly corrupt and opaque. You were either in the good-ol-boys club or you didn't know how it worked. There is no electoral integrity in rural America... And that's why all of this is so familiar.
Rural folks voted for what they knew. They voted for what was familiar. The hand of the state is most strongly felt in cities. Trans folks would have been killed, so they were invisible there. Gay folks would have been killed, but that became a bit less of a thing as time went on.
Sex Ed was basically non-existent. The church has all the power. They say abstinence, and that's what kids learn. The idea that abortion should even be legal was something I was debating with people in the late 90's.
Basically, government policies didn't impact people except when "the liberals shut down the mill to save the spotted owl" which collapsed the already weak economy. What government programs didn't help people, or were invisible. Disabled people weren't visible because there was no infrastructure.
What I'm saying is that all the people Trump will hurt are people that rural folks don't think about, are ignorant about, or don't care about. They know that it makes city liberalis mad, and that's all they care about. The system has been fucked for them for generations and Trump was finally an opportunity to make it fucked for everyone. He's the corrupt sheriff of every small town. He's the crooked mayor who's rigging elections and embezzling. He's familiar.
There are plenty of rural leftists. I was a Communist before being an anarchist, and I picked that up partially from my friends. But the dominant culture is strong. Most of the people who voted for Trump have no idea what they did, and no idea how many people around them they will hurt... Including their families and theirselves.
The real hard analysis to accept is that we have failed to help rural America for so long, and it has decayed so far, that it was easy for rich fascists prey in that weakness. Liberalism has failed. It's failed to protect vulnerable people in cities and it's failed to improve the living conditions of folks outside of them. It has failed to offer real hope... And without hope people are vulnerable to revenge.

2024-10-22 21:00:08

Apropos of nothing, who would be interested in the idea of an #OpenSource #religion?

2024-09-04 08:44:32

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@npub1p9t…mltx it's especially telling that this is not one of the crimes that democrats seem to care at all about.

2024-07-16 19:59:21

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@npub1k7q…3lrw do it!

2024-04-06 16:05:41

You know, we could solve a whole hell of a lot of problems by just abolishing the concept "passive income."

2024-03-28 12:15:33

A few days ago @npub1hyk…3p33 was on "It Could Happen Here" talking about his new book The Bezzle:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/private-prisons-finance-ghouls-and-the-161844728/
Definitely worth listening to, but it really made me think about that concept. The Bezzle...

2024-01-14 13:39:21

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@npub15th…6nvx I can't stress how on point this is.
My favorite committee we ever put together was the food security committee. Before I left there were folks regularly delivering food to housless camps that they had canned in their kitchen. When any of our folks needed anything, they were always covered by the pantry.
You can fight a revolution without guns. You can't fight a revolution without food. If you want to change things, make sure your priorities are straight.

2023-09-30 06:57:07

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@npub1p9t…mltx Medical bills in the US are absurd. $250k is a pretty reasonable estimate of what it will take to get through the first part of recovery.
After the initial medical bills there's still a lot for everyone to go through. Having money can go a long way to reduce one stresser on a family already under a lot of stress. There are also a lot of expenses that wouldn't be covered by even good insurance.
The go find me is almost half way to its goal, so please take the time to donate what you can.

2023-09-13 05:54:36

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@npub1g2d…83a0 every time a CEO says something completely evil, everyone cries out for the #guilotine. But guillotines are only useful once you've already won. They're a tool of revenge.
But what revenge is a quick death? I want these people to see the world they prevented. I want them to be utterly powerless in our utopia, like we have been completely powerless in theirs. I want the narcissism that drives them to have to face the fact that they were never the brilliant people they thought they were. I want them to live in a world built for everyone by everyone, instead of a world built by them for them, and understand every day that it's fundamentally better.
Everyone calls for guillotines, but there's no number of guillotines you can build that will get us closer to a better world. If you hate these people, build thing libraries, plant food forests, create shared pantries and free thing dispensaries. Channel that anger into building a world where guillotines are unnecessary.
Guillotines don't make them afraid. Us building a world without them is what they really fear.

2023-09-13 05:54:36

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