Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.
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A look at neighborhood newsletters in NY and elsewhere, which tend to be solo operations with small-scale followings, but point to a desire for local media (Kyle Chayka/New Yorker)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/your-friendly-neighbo…
Why are we having fewer children?
(Interview with Berkay Ozcan, Professor at LSE)
- Couple formation happens at later age
- Women are choosing "careers" and not just "jobs"
- More people choose not to have kids at all
What else is going on? Short anser: we don't know yet
Even in countries providing a lot of support to parents, fertility rate has still declined
Immigration is no silver bullet. It's part of the solution, not th…
She was murdered by a driver coming out of the car wash right next to my old house; for years I've been predicting exactly this would happen. The car brained drivers filling up to get on the freeway do not care one ounce about pedestrians here. https://missionlocal.org/2026/04/danni
The scale of Orbšn’s defeat has left Moscow with little choice but to acknowledge the loss of a key partner in Europe.
“Hungary made its choice. We respect that choice,” Russian Foreign Minister Peskov said on Monday.
“We were never friends with Orbšn,” said Peskov,
adding that Moscow remained open to dialogue and to building good, mutually beneficial relations with Budapest.
Moscow appears to be playing down the loss of a key ally in Europe,
striking a tone rem…
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Yesterday I explained my mixed feelings regarding LLMs to a friend by comparing them to cars ("I don't like cars, they destroy a lot, but they are also so very convenient"). Today I read the same argument here: https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future
Just finished Iveliz Explains It All by Andrea Beatriz Arango. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down till I finished it, in less than a day. A really tender and entrancing novel-in-verse about a kid Puerto Rican kid struggling with some deep stuff. I loved the way that the journal focalization let deep feelings flow while also giving the reader a bit of a puzzle in the beginning to understand what exactly was going on. Deals with friendship, loss, and mental health (including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and flashbacks).
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