Tootfinder

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

Join us for the 6th Annual 'Rethinking Thanksgiving' webinar!
Date: Sunday, Nov 23 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT
Theme: "Colonialism is the Problem, Solidarity is the Answer"
Register: tinyurl.com/2025rethinking
ASL, Spanish Interpretation and live captions in English.
This is a free event. It is a fundraiser and donations will be accepted. The event will be recorded, so if you cannot attend live, register and the recording will be sent to you.
Join us to challenge the legacy of the ‘thanksgiving’ holiday. We will discuss how to collectively work together to confront colonialism and defend Mother Earth.
¡Únase a nosotros en el Sexto Webinario Anual ‘Repensando el Día de Acción de Gracias’!
Fecha: domingo, 23 de noviembre, a las 4 pm ET / 1 pm PT.
Tema: “El Colonialismo es el Problema, la Solidaridad es la Respuesta”.
Inscríbase: tinyurl.com/2025rethinking.
Interpretación en lengua de señas americana (ASL) y español, y subtítulos en vivo en inglés.
Este es un evento gratuito. Se trata de una recaudación de fondos y se aceptaršn donaciones. El evento se grabarš, por lo que si no puede asistir en directo, inscríbase y se le enviarš la grabación.
Únase a nosotros para cuestionar el legado de la festividad de “Acción de Gracias”. Dialogaremos de cómo trabajar juntos colectivamente para hacer frente al colonialismo y defender la Madre Tierra.
Sponsors/Patrocinadores: Tonatierra; Indigenous Solidarity Network; Catalyst Project; Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ); American Indian Law Alliance; Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) Action; Honor the Earth; 350.org; Spirit of Mandela, Christians for a Free Palestine; Sudan Solidarity Collective; Anticolonial Arrivants; Land Justice Futures; Westchester for Palestine.

« Oskar », colonel ukrainien : « Une mobilisation massive serait une décision impopulaire, mais nécessaire »
https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/08/27/oskar…

« Oskar », colonel ukrainien : « Une mobilisation massive serait une décision impopulaire, mais nécessaire »
Agé de 34 ans, Vassyl Matiïv, dit « Oskar », appartient à une nouvelle génération de commandants émergeant à la faveur d’une réorganisation profonde de l’armée ukrainienne. Il raconte l’évolution des techniques d’assaut et insiste sur le besoin de renforts afin de tenir dans la durée.

Is this what’s going on with #ColonelSanders at the World Series? Did the curse transfer from the Tigers to the Buffaloes, Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s team? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Colonel

📝 Join us for the 6th Annual 'Rethinking Thanksgiving' webinar!
Date: Sunday, Nov 23 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT
Theme: "Colonialism is the Problem, Solidarity is the Answer"
Register: tinyurl.com/2025rethinking
ASL, Spanish Interpretation and live captions in English.
This is a free event. It is a fundraiser and donations will be accepted. The event will be recorded, so if you cannot attend live, register and the recording will be sent to you.
Join us to challenge the legacy of the ‘thanksgiving’ holiday. We will discuss how to collectively work together to confront colonialism and defend Mother Earth.
¡Únase a nosotros en el Sexto Webinario Anual ‘Repensando el Día de Acción de Gracias’!
Fecha: domingo, 23 de noviembre, a las 4 pm ET / 1 pm PT.
Tema: “El Colonialismo es el Problema, la Solidaridad es la Respuesta”.
Inscríbase: tinyurl.com/2025rethinking.
Interpretación en lengua de señas americana (ASL) y español, y subtítulos en vivo en inglés.
Este es un evento gratuito. Se trata de una recaudación de fondos y se aceptaršn donaciones. El evento se grabarš, por lo que si no puede asistir en directo, inscríbase y se le enviarš la grabación.
Únase a nosotros para cuestionar el legado de la festividad de “Acción de Gracias”. Dialogaremos de cómo trabajar juntos colectivamente para hacer frente al colonialismo y defender la Madre Tierra.
Sponsors/Patrocinadores: Tonatierra; Indigenous Solidarity Network; Catalyst Project; Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ); American Indian Law Alliance; Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) Action; Honor the Earth; 350.org; Spirit of Mandela, Christians for a Free Palestine; Sudan Solidarity Collective; Anticolonial Arrivants; Land Justice Futures; Westchester for Palestine.
!rethinking thanksgiving flyer (https://cdn.some.pics/adjb/690fbe4acd06c.jpg)

I got into the rabbit hole that is the youtube channel "Scary Interesting". It's basically just a calmly-narrated podcast about diving and cave exploration accidents. It's 50% about naive people who had it coming and 50% about ultra-experienced cave divers who died anyways.

As the Pentagon, particularly the Army, cozies up to Silicon Valley
four big tech executives with no military background, were directly commissioned to be lieutenant colonels, in the Army
-- and they will not recuse themselves from business dealings with the Department of Defense.
Earlier this month, the Army announced Detachment 201,
the name being a reference to HTTP code,
for the newly commissioned executives
from Palantir, Meta and OpenAI.
The ne…

Tech Executives Commissioned as Senior Army Officers Won't Recuse Themselves from DoD Business Dealings
The new formation is set to recruit tech executives to work on major Army challenges, but the service has not articulated exactly what those individuals would do -- instead focusing on recruiting talent and creating jobs around them.

Nouveau développement qui me semble important pour l'avenir de Madagascar : lors d'un entretien avec la presse, le colonel Michaël Randrianirina a déclaré que les militaires étaient prêts Š se conformer Š une décision de la Haute Cour Constitutionnelle (HCC) en date du 14 octobre.
Un fil Š dérouler ⇩ (1/10).
#Madagascar

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?

Child harm/death mention; Columbus
On Indigenous People's Day here in America, it's a great time to:
1. Remember that Columbus was a monster. Anyone who feeds toddlers to dogs actually deserves to burn in hell for eternity. Nothing else about this man should be remembered before this fact.
2. If you're in a colonized country, check out the website(s) for your local indigenous tribe (s) to remind yourself that they're still here. For me, that includes #LandBack, etc.
Me, I'm hopeful for a future in which the US is a distant memory and the hundreds of surviving nations on this territory flourish like budding plants after the winter snow.