@jake4480@c.im2026-07-22 03:41:12
For those interested, all the animation news from the middle of this year, and everything coming up - so much good! https://animatedtvblog.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/mid-to-end-of-20…
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-07-22 11:37:14
Popular Front recently did a piece on the current conflicts in Ethiopia:
https://popularfront.substack.com/p/everything-you-didnt-know-about-the
It's a good primer for anyone who's unfamiliar, but is definitely lacking if you know any Ethiopian folks or pay attention to much news out of the Horn of Africa.
The interplay between authoritarian liberal nationalism, as represented by Abiy Ahmed and his government, and tribal federalism , represented by various tribal factions, reads to me very similarly to the liberalization of Europe (enclosure of the commons, a push to sacrifice ethnic identities for nationalist ones, etc). Like the liberalization of, say, France, it's a lot more complicated than "old thing bad, new thing good."
Liberalism was violent and authoritarian. It often sacrificed leftists. Liberalism's focus on borders and national identity led directly to pogroms and Nazism. Similarly, liberalization of Ethiopia has led to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
People think of "the terror" in France as a leftist thing, but it wasn't. It was a Liberal thing, centrist extremism, carried out against right and left.
I understand that tribal federalism is also not a good system, but I don't have a ton of depth so I'm not going to try to explain it. During the European Liberal revolutionary period of 1848, ethnic minorities would often side with some monarch or emperor against liberalism out of fear of liberal nationalism. It makes sense to support a system that's bad if your other option is a nationalism that erases your identity.
But even in Europe at that time, anarchism offered an alternative but that alternative often also drew from simply a different branch of liberalism that also suppressed culture and identity. Today the world is different. Democratic Confederalism offers a solution to *exactly* this problem, tested for more than a decade in Syria and developing now in Myanmar.
But the cross pollination between Syria and Myanmar in terms of fighters really made the ideological cross pollination possible. I don't think anything like that is happening now in Ethiopia.
Eurocentrism makes it easy to ignore what's happening now, but Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union Commission. Ethiopia is a major military power in the region, so these developments carry a lot of weight. Especially as the US collapses and the world becomes more multipolar, the development of regional powers like Ethiopia will have a big impact on how that part of the continent develops.
If any folks are more familiar with Ethiopia than I am (which shouldn't be hard since I'm basically not), please correct me or add context if anything is missing or wrong.
@cdarwin@c.im2026-07-20 23:15:06
Republicans are all abuzz about socialism because the party’s political prospects look dire this fall.
Donald Trump’s approval ratings are in the thirties,
Americans are experiencing surging energy prices,
and Trump and other Republicans are engaged in open corruption while cutting vital government programs.
They need something, and in a pinch, socialism has always been the go-to emergency button for the right to push.
@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-05-21 19:35:48
Sources: Starbucks shut down an AI program for automating inventory counts, nine months after deploying it, after it frequently miscounted and mislabeled items (Waylon Cunningham/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/starbucks-scraps-a…
@NuclearDisorder@mastodon.social2026-05-23 06:06:10
Heute vor 59 Jahren: Am 23. Mai 1967 testen die #USA die Atombombe "Scotch". Die Operation #Latchkey war eine Serie von 38 US-amerikanischen #Kernwaffentests, die 1966/67 auf der Nevada T…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-21 16:32:49
If the U.S's new intelligence apparatus,
powered by AI and irresistible to America’s top commanders
is hastily integrated into the nuclear arsenal,
the fallout will be anything but “exquisite.”
An examination of government documents, private sector contracting records, and the little noticed statements of military commanders
suggests that the same artificial intelligence that allowed frictionless decapitation in Iran
is now coming to the nuclear arsen…
@NuclearDisorder@mastodon.social2026-06-22 06:07:22
Heute vor 59 Jahren: Am 22. Juni 1967 testen die #USA die Atombombe "Switch". Die Operation #Latchkey war eine Serie von 38 US-amerikanischen #Kernwaffentests, die 1966/67 auf der Nevada …
@NuclearDisorder@mastodon.social2026-05-21 06:01:27
Heute vor 56 Jahren: Am 21. Mai 1970 testen die #USA die Atombombe "Morrones". Operation Mandrel war eine Serie von 53 US-amerikanischen #Kernwaffentests, die 1969 und 1970 hauptsächlich auf der Nevada Test Site in Nevada unterirdisch durchgeführt wurde.
@cdarwin@c.im2026-05-19 15:57:54
Just a couple of weeks into his war in Iran Trump began demanding other countries solve the problem he had created.
“Many Countries,” he said on social media on March 14, “will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the [Hormuz] Strait open and safe.”
He added that “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others” would put their own sailors in harm’s way on his behalf.
They didn’t.
“This is not our war, we h…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-12 17:16:25
Malcolm Gladwell:
Big news! My new book on the roots of American gun violence is coming this fall. Very proud of this one.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/articles/malcolm-gladwe…
