@bobmueller@mastodon.world2025-10-29 14:30:07
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-11-21 18:54:12
Any sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from revolutionary dual power. This essay is a bit of a transition between the theory I've written earlier, and more concrete plans.
Even though I only touched on my life on the commune, it was hard not to write more. These are such weird spaces, with so much invisible opportunity. But they're also just so unique and special. For all the stress and uncertainty of making sure you stayed on Lorean's (the head priestess), there were also those long summer nights with the whole community (except the old lady) gathered around a fire, talking and drinking. There was almost a child-like play to the whole time.
There were so Fridays I'd come home with a couple of gallons of beer from the real world, folks would bring things from the garden, someone would grill a steak, everyone who didn't cook would clean up, and we'd just hang out and have fun. So many evenings I'd go over to Miles place with a guitar, or with his guitar, and we'd pass it around over a few beers, talking about philosophy, Star Wars, or some book or other. It's hard not to write about the strange magic of that space.
My partner and I bonded over similar experiences, mine on a weird little religious commune in California and theirs as a temporary worker at Omega Institute. Both had exploitation, people on weird power trips, frustrating dynamics, but also a strange magic and freedom. Both were sort of fantasy worlds, but places that let us see through this one, let us imagine something that something else is possible behind the veil.
There are many such veils.
Perhaps it's fitting that this is more meandering, as a good wander can help the transition between lots of hard thinking and lots of hard working.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/evaluating-options
Editing feedback (especially typos, spelling, grammar) is always welcome, as are questions and even wider structural advice. I've been adding the handles of folks who provide feedback to the intro in a "thank you" section. If you do help and wouldn't like to be added, please let me know.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-09-14 12:01:38
TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?
@arXiv_mathAP_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-23 11:39:50
Motion of a massive rigid loop in a 3D perfect incompressible flow
Olivier Glass, David Meyer, Franck Sueur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17881 https://arxiv.…
@DominikDammer@mastodon.gamedev.place2025-11-17 17:09:35
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@burger_jaap@mastodon.social2025-11-12 09:36:00
Now, 10,000 EV drivers in Finland are contributing to grid stability. The smart charging service Synergi, which already optimises EV charging according to dynamic power prices, now provides FCR support to the national grid using this aggregated fleet.
https://tech.eu/2025/11/12/finlands-fi
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-10-02 19:43:19
"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)
@akosma@mastodon.online2025-09-07 07:22:07
"Whenever anyone asks me for advice, I tell them: we don’t realize how deeply the nine-to-five fractures us. The weekends, the holidays, the fixed friend group—whatever rigidness exists in your behavior will exist in your perception, and it will exist in your ability to think critically."
Victoria Brugger, "Last Words of an Ego on Death Row"
@arXiv_csNI_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-19 08:18:31
1Q: First-Generation Wireless Systems Integrating Classical and Quantum Communication
Petar Popovski, \v{C}edomir Stefanovi\'c, Beatriz Soret, Israel Leyva-Mayorga, Shashi Raj Pandey, Ren\'e B{\o}dker Christensen, Jakob Kaltoft S{\o}ndergaard, Kristian Skafte Jensen, Thomas Garm Pedersen, Angela Sara Cacciapuoti, Lajos Hanzo
https://
@arXiv_physicsinsdet_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-19 08:52:21
Performance evaluation of compact plastic scintillating fiber modules for muon tomography applications
Yiyue Li, Huiling Li, Hui Liang, Cong Liu, Chenghan Lv, Hongbo Wang, Weiwei Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14674
