On The Road - To Xi’An 🪭
在路上 - 去西安 🪭
📷 Minolta Hi-Matic AF
🎞️Kentmere Pan 200
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
@… feature refinement request: when replying to a toot that has another account @ mentioned, my compose window pens with all @ mentioned accounts listed and all but the author of the toot highlighted for easy deletion. I love this❤️. If I choose to delete the space following the author’s @ mention is deleted as well and if I just start typing it’s appended to the @ me…
Raiders’ Ashton Jeanty Gets Honest About Facing Travis Hunter https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/ashton-jeanty-facing-jaguars-travis-hunter/?adt_ei=[email]
TikTok suspends its live feature for the "next few days" in Indonesia, citing "increasing violence in protests" over lawmakers' pay (Stefanno Sulaiman/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific
Investigation of structure and anisotropic electrical resistivity in single-crystalline CoSn kagome metal thin films for interconnect applications
Tomoya Nakatani, Nattamon Suwannaharn, Taisuke Sasaki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21711
Sim2Field: End-to-End Development of AI RANs for 6G
Russell Ford, Hao Chen, Pranav Madadi, Mandar Kulkarni, Xiaochuan Ma, Daoud Burghal, Guanbo Chen, Yeqing Hu, Chance Tarver, Panagiotis Skrimponis, Vitali Loseu, Yu Zhang, Yan Xin, Yang Li, Jianzhong Zhang, Shubham Khunteta, Yeswanth Guddeti Reddy, Ashok Kumar Reddy Chavva, Mahantesh Kothiwale, Davide Villa
htt…
Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors
TikTok suspends its live feature for the "next few days" in Indonesia, citing "increasing violence in protests" over lawmakers' pay (Stefanno Sulaiman/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific
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?