Tootfinder

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #PacificNotions
James K:
🎵 Collapse (falling forward blissfully all the time)
#JamesK
https://jameskmusic.bandcamp.com/track/collapse-falling-forward-blissfully-all-the-time

Internal email: xAI lays off hundreds of data annotation team staffers, following a strategic shift to prioritize specialist AI tutors over generalist roles (Grace Kay/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-xai-layoffs-data-annotators-2025-9

Musk's xAI just laid off hundreds of workers tasked with training Grok
XAI laid off at least 500 of the workers on its data annotation team on Friday night.

@… filmfriend.de is an offer by german public libraries to stream a large number of films for free (limited to card holders of german libraries. If your residence is outside germany, you can create a free account with Goethe Institut, than register online with the public library of Goethe Institut, than login into filmfriend.de). If you try to stream a fi…

@… filmfriend.de is an offer by german public libraries to stream a large number of films for free (limited to card holders of german libraries. If your residence is outside germany, you can create a free account with Goethe Institut, than register online with the public library of Goethe Institut, than login into filmfriend.de). If you try to stream a fi…

It seems like, again, just following the plain logic of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence (which, again, I do not subscribe to), that every law passed under Trump, every supreme court justice appointment by Trump, every supreme court ruling by Trump appointed justices, all the illegal firing, etc, must all, necessarily, be null and void.
And if not following from the insurrection act, or from the oath of office, then following from the Declaration of Independence itself. The logic here being that a constitution is a contract between the people and their government, which the later upholds in order to maintain its legal status. The violation of said laws by the government violates "consent of the governed" (which, again, I have issues with the concept entirely but we're just going to ignore that) and therefore nullifies the authority of that government, granting " the right of the people to alter or to abolish it."
That seems a lot like the hard reset some folks have been looking for. Given that existing flaws allowed this state to be reached, it would also be necessary for the true authority to correct those mistakes before assuming authority that derives from these principles.
Now, personally, I don't subscribe to any of this logic but it's interesting to explore, as an outsider, where the logic goes.

Hyperfixiation Joy, Stay if You Love It, Scroll if You Don’t!
Next year marks a decade since I first heard Loin d’ici by Zoë Straub. Ten years of the same song looping in my mind, ten years of clinging to every word, every note, as if it’s the only thing keeping me afloat. I remember May 14, 2016, like it’s a scar, the day my hyperfixation began. Time keeps slipping past me, but the song stays, haunting and comforting at once, as if Zoë herself is quietly following me through the endle…

Cowboys fans are falling for an all too predictable George Pickens fallacy https://fansided.com/nfl/cowboys-fans-falling-all-too-predictable-george-pickens-fallacy

As we continue down this path of escalating nihilistic meme violence, it can feel like the worst things have become viral. We are drowning in the memetic effluent of a capitalist media that profits by maximizing engagement. But I wonder if anyone remembers "Pay it Forward?"
A movie came out in 2000 about a kid who started a viral kindness campaign. The idea was that you do something nice for someone else with the expectation that they do the same in the future. I never really saw the movie, but I do remember the time. There were a few weeks, maybe a few months, where people started doing it. People would just be randomly nice, and everything actually just started feeling better.
Over time, the world caught up. Capitalism consumed the whole thing, and life went back to normal. 9/11 happened the next year, and the US started down the path of becoming the most twisted and evil version of itself. But there was a short time that doing nice stuff was a viral meme, a thing that people just started doing.
Gun violence doesn't have to be the only viral meme we have. We can make good things happen too.

Now personally, I'm not invested in the law and I reject the logical underpinnings of the whole thing. The US is founded on land that already had people on it, that already had multiple systems of authority, so there can be no claim that it has any legal authority to exist at all.
But it's hard to ignore the inconsistency here. Accepting the logic from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, there is no way in which the current state can be legitimate and which Trump has the authority to do anything. The last legal president, again, following the logic that assumes such a thing even possible, was Barak Obama. Since the transfer of power, the country has failed to enforce the law.
If the executive cannot complete their oath, then they are considered vacant under the 25th amendment. If the cabinet fails to invoke article 4, then they too are involved in the insurrection (again, simply following the logic outlined pretty clearly here) as are any who would fail to support the invocation.
Since a full takeover of the federal government by insurrectionists wasn't really planned for, I'm guessing that it would necessarily go to the states, being the only remaining legal authority.