Tootfinder

To continue this...
> Any protest that is unwilling to continue to escalate along that continuum can simply be ignored or crushed, if authorities are willing to escalate far enough. The thing that insurrectionary partisans tend to not understand is that the capacity for escalation is not the same as actual escalation. Not only are these not equivalent, but escalation that precedes capacity building impairs existing insurrectionary capacity. Escalation, who escalates and on what grounds, is actually a critical element of how the revolutionary conversation unfolds. (This dialog where Andor's revolutionary representation and historical accuracy excels.)
I've gone into much more depth in the past about this, specific to #FiftyFiftyOne/#50501Movement and the need to make sure they have the capacity to escalate. (To be 100% clear, the capacity to escalate and actual escalation are not the same thing.)
https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/115405456381131686

And no, I'm not promoting liberal "pacifism."
> All this is not to say that violence should not be part of a revolutionary movement, as liberals tend to assert. Liberalism sometimes recognizes this paradox and resolves it by pushing for their image of “non-violent” resistance. Violence can't solve problems, they assert, there is only protest. Revolutionary change always produces “bad” results (they tend to lack any analysis as to why other than “violence bad”), therefore incremental change is preferable. The thing that liberals don't understand, perhaps they refuse to understand, is that there is necessarily a continuum from protest to insurrection.

This is a rephrasing of something I've said a few times in the past, but I think needs to be said again... and again... every day, day after day, until we understand it.
> There is a cultural blindness to the equivalent exchange inherent in violence. Every scar you inflict leaves one behind. A warrior takes on a burden. It's not just about risking one's life: it's about dealing with the scars of survival. Dead warriors are the ones who got out easy. And those scars are not just on the warrior. They come back to the community. Trauma is not a static wound, but a living contagion. Every bit of violence we express, even for our own liberation, inflicts wounds on ourselves that we need to heal or it risk its spread.
> All violence, even in self-defense, incurs a debt. That debt is not represented in popular media, it is invisible within the current paradigm, because it is paid back with feminized labor. In the Star Wars universe, the traumatized simply die for the revolution. The duality of the Jedi and the Sith are simply two aspects of the masculine hero (even when embodied by feminine characters). The feminized labor of healing, community building, movement building, and logistics are not represented (except where they happen to intersect with subterfuge or combat).
#Andor

Adding another post. This one is a bit less polished, but I want to get it out. As things get harder for everyone, I'm seeing a greater tendency to want to grasp onto revolutionary fiction such as #Andor. I think there's value in that, but it has to come with an informed critique.
> We are so thirsty for hope that we will drink it up, even when that hope comes from a fiction and the truth behind the hope is poison. In Andor, we see the worst elements sacrifice themselves for some of the best. The revolution goes through a process of purification, the complicated elements weeding themselves out to make room for the simplified good, as the rebellion unifies. In reality, this tends to be the opposite how things actually work.
> [...]
> [The Urban Guerilla movement of the 60's through the 80's] centered militant revolution. In doing so, they omitted or cut themselves off from the logistic support needed to sustain such revolutionary activity. The trauma of carrying out violence further isolated and radicalized them. Lacking infrastructure for trauma healing, their decay escalated and became unrecoverable. Ultimately, their revolutionary movements both emulated and reinforced the status quo they were trying to resist.
> There emerges a strange historical parallel that is difficult to see from within the dominant paradigm. The competitive politics of electoralism derives from heroic competition, where people (typically men) compete (often violently) for control over a territory or people. Thus the insurrectionary enters into the very same competition as a challenger, not against the system of domination but for control over it. The success of the revolution, then, does not abolish the system of violent domination but changes rather replaces its management.
> Many modern anarchists will be quick to point out the disconnect between ends and means. While authoritarian projects often assert that "the ends justify the means," and Andor implies the same, anti-authoritarian projects assert the ends and the means are not only united but are, in fact, the same.
This is still very much something I'm actively editing, but I'd still love feedback to help me refine it to it's final form. Typo catches and clarifying questions welcome.
#USPol

Just to hammer this home a bit more, I knew a guy who joined the army. I met him after he went AWOL. When he went into the recruiter's office, they asked him if he had any open warrants out for his arrest because they couldn't recruit anyone with a criminal record. He said he did, then they said, "oh, actually, we can help you with all that, don't get caught before we ship you out."
He was just trying to keep himself out of jail. That's not supposed to happen, but it does. IIRC it was on a drug charge, which, also, they're not supposed to take anyone who tests positive for weed... but they also just tell you how to prepare for a drug test.
Another friend joined because she wanted to be part Army Corps of Engineers. A good chunk of the folks I went to school with joined the military after graduation because the other choices were working at the saw mill or working at the canary. If you join the military, you get to go to college. (Or you get to stay out of jail... as long as you don't go AWOL.)

It's also easy to imagine that Trump is sending his military to Portland. People forget that the military is actually really big and pretty complex.
Most people join the military because they want to get out of poverty. Some people join because they believe in it. A lot of people are just too young to have any kind of politics, but some of them do develop politics in the military... and some of those folks become anarchists.
There are Nazis in the military. It's a big problem. But there are also anarchists who signed up before they developed a critique of the state, and now they're kind of stuck for a few years until they can get out.
It's also worth recognizing that a lot of people join after they graduate. Basic training is like 22 weeks. So, assuming a random selection, there really aren't a lot of folks who would be deploying to PDX who would have joined under Trump. That's just assuming a random selection, and there may be other things at play that I'm not aware of, but the majority of the types of folks who would get deployed now would have joined under Biden.
The troops who will deploy (if they do deploy) may very much not want to be there. These are also not monsters wanting to kill (like Trump wishes them to be). They're kids from nearby towns. That's not awesome, most of Oregon has absolute shit politics. But joining the National Guard doesn't necessarily mean that a person has any politics at all. All of this is worth remembering.

I also want to thank #Portland for continuing to make great music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8jdzfHvCI8

Put another way, "be weird." In #Portland, the regieme has chosen an enemy for which they are absolutely unprepared. Because Portland has already mastered being werid, and weird is something authoritarianism doesn't know how to deal with.
Naked bike riders, Victorian tea parties, authoritarians only have one strategy and every time they're met with something they can't respond to with tear gas and battons they look incompetent and weak.

Hope and imagination aren't just a nice things. Authoritarianism is rooted in doom. Authoritarianism is naturally unstable. It's naturally weak. It's extremely complex and fragile. Authoritarian regimes often collapse rapidly and catastrophically. They keep people pinned in place by removing hope. They heap trauma on their victims because trauma destroys hope and reduces creativity. So hope and imagination are the most powerful weapons against authoritarianism.
The regime tells you that things can only get worse. The regime needs you to believe it. They want you to fight on their terms, so they can pick you off, or to run or freeze, so they don't have to fight you at all. Authoritarianism must kill the creativity of it's victims, because authoritarianism has already killed it's own creativity. When you respond with hope and creativity, the system cannot adapt.
It is not simply that we should imagine what could be because we may have the opportunity to create it. It is that hope manifests the opportunity to create what we've imagined.

What are you going to do when the regime falls? After calling all your friends, after the great memes, after the parties, what are you going to do to make sure it never happens again? What world should we create?
Taxing billionaires is great and all, but we could build systems where billionaires are impossible. Is hoarding wealth and using it to control people even something we should consider part of a functional and humane system? Any system where one group of people doesn't have rights means that anyone can be stripped of their rights, like has happened with all the US citizens who've been illegally detained and deported by ICE. Does the concept of "rights" that must be defended with violence, that can be stripped away by people who can exercise more violence, even make sense? Or should the bedrock of a functional system be the obligations that we have to each other and to society, that cannot be severed or taken from us, that tell us we *must* defend regardless of whether systemic oppression will impact us or not?
Americans have been so restricted by the limitations of the two party system, only able to choose between options acceptable to different sections of the capitalist class. Would we even be able to imagine what we could do if those restrictions went away?
The fall of the Berlin wall was a surprise. The fall of Assad was faster than anyone expected. One day the government of Nepal was an unrepentant oligarchy, the next it was on fire. Everything can change in an instant, faster than anyone expects. No one can predict revolutionary change. Will you be ready if the opportunity presents itself?
The US cannot be fixed. The economic system is a ponzi scheme that has been patched again and again, but has finally run out of options. Racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism are baked into the system at every level. Trump gutted the system of soft power that held the US economy together, now there is only a slow decline. Even after he's gone, the damage is done. Once we let go of how to fix something that cannot be fixed, we can start to imagine something that cannot be achieved within the current system.
This is a time of opportunity. Do not burrow so deep in terror that you miss your chance to dream.
#USPol

Cars are the absolute enemy.

Here's the original post, for any who are interested:
https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/115130220029500240
And with that, I'm gonna take a break and see if I can create something other than a critique. See y'all next week.

For any of my comrades who are using SNAP, I wish I had something better to say than "if you crush 4 buckeyes with a hammer and tie the pulp in a sock you can wash a good sized load of laundry." English Ivy also has saponins, but I've never been able to make soap from it myself.
Ivy is everywhere. Buckeyes (Horse Chestnuts) are common in city parks (there are a ton in Seattle).
Yucca is also a good source of saponins, but it also has silica. That makes it a good scrubby soap. You can find these plants all over they're pretty common to find in yards.
If you can find acorns still (it's a bit late, but who knows), acorn grits are great and something you can survive on for a bit. Acorns need processing (it's easy to look up, but feel free to ask or check out one or Black Forager's videos on it).
If you've been following me for a bit, you probably already know all this. But if you don't, I hope it helps.
Any other forager folks are welcome to drop hints here that might be useful to folks in the city.
#Foraging

I've benefited from a lot of these programs before getting into security. It turns out that trying to support a partner and a kid on $40k/yr, even in the early 2000's, is basically impossible. My parents were divorced, and my dad is a disabled vet.
Food security has always been important, long before organizing with comrades who also occasionally needed support. So if you have money, donate.
Eventually benefits will come back. Hopefully we can bridge the gap... But we won't be able to for everyone. When things come back, don't just feel relieved and move on. The system is collapsing. If it doesn't completely fall apart now, it will eventually. If you aren't affected now, you will be. Organize now around food security.
The disaster is now. The best time to prepare was years ago. The second best time is now.

And while we're in the area of disaster prep, here's another podcast that's awesome:
https://www.liveliketheworldisdying.com/

And here's another....
https://edgewood-nursery.com/podcast

And here's a good podcast to learn about gardening (and related skills, some of which don't require land):
https://www.revolutionarysgarden.com/

Of course, my default will always be "keep things out of the government so those things can't be held hostage" but that's a longer term goal. First, understand the situation then figure out how to respond.
Now that everyone is good and scared, and realizing that a whole chunk of the population can suddenly go without food, I'm gonna remind everyone that the time to learn to grow food and forage is not *when the food runs out*. It's in the years before that.
Here's a fun place to start with foraging....
https://youtube.com/@blackforager

I'm at an interesting intersection between poor as fuck (or adjacent, mostly anarchist) folks and generally well off (mostly liberal-ish) tech folks, so every once and a while I can help with some info that bridges that gap. Right now is kind of a critical time for that.
For anyone not extremely affected by the SNAP thing, here's a reasonable video:
#USPol

Two things are worth noticing right now:
1. The military brass *did not* respond well to Trump and Hegseth.
2. The deployment to #Portland keeps getting delayed.
The military will never say "no" to the president (unless he's literally ordering them to open fire on unarmed civilians or something equally obviously illegal). But there are ways to not comply that don't necessarily involve refusal. Brass showing that they aren't aligned with Trump may weaken his billionaire backers, who might be realizing now that weak dictators who can't lead their militaries tend to get toppled... and their oligarch-backers tend to end up against walls.
If folks being ordered to send troops to #PDX don't want to comply, delaying until the there's an initial response from the lawsuit would be basically impossible to detect. The deployment to LA went far too fast, running into logistical challenges like troops sleeping on the floor. The delays we've already seen could indicate either a more careful approach or quiet resistance.
Trump will continue to escalate at every chance he gets. I would be surprised if PDX didn't give him a fight. I doubt the troops will become more interested in serving a guy who's stabbed them in the back and wasted their time at every opportunity.
It is still possible troops just won't deploy. Trump will make something up about how just the threat of an intervention was enough to make things safe or something like that. If we see that, it's 100% the military telling him to kick rocks because he's not competent enough to know when to back down.
Honestly, I think Trump wants revenge for the resistance PDX put up at the end of his last term. Any backing down from that is absolutely a big loss for him.

I feel like this is a bit relevant here too...
https://youtu.be/bIBUGQ0aYnc
I feel like this is the most mentally healthy of social media and I still feel like my mental health is much better when I'm not here or when I minimize my interaction.

There's another layer to this as well, I think. Any social media feed interlaces horrible things with wonderful things in a completely contextually devoid list. A funny cat picture and a traumatic picture or video of violence are both "rated" in the same way, with the same imaginary internet points, without any differentiation between good and bad.
I feel like this is also cooking our brains a bit.

Thoughts have been flickering in and out of my brain recently, evading capture, slipping through my fingers like sand. There comes a point where I become overwhelmed by the chaos.

Collapse
I'm definitely struggling against the hopeless, wondering if the global economy will collapse before or after the mass death...

You know those dreams where you're trying to scream, but no matter how much effort you put in you can't make any noise?
Cw: collapse and despair
#Poetry #ClimateChange

Kids and gun violence
The episode talked about how this mass murderer "true crime" brain-rot subculture flattens everything into just "content." They didn't talk about how algorithms play a role in this type of violence.
"The algorithm" incentivzes maximumally impactful content. When stripped of a moral framework, by capitalism and white supremacy, humans will search for a value system to inform them of what to do. A mass shooting is simply the lowest effort for the highest impact in terms of pure content generation.
This is simply the behavior incentivzed by the algorithm. The behavior incentivzed by capitalism is, of course, no less horrific but is presented as far more acceptable. It includes, of course, creating a machine that makes money off of content (without any differentiation in type) by maximizing engagement and incentivzing content generation.

Kids and gun violence
This week's Executive Disorder started with a conversation about the school shooting in Twin Cities...
#USPol

I'm especially interested in a few things if anyone is willing to help...
1) missing words and simple typos - My ADHD brain skips words coming out and fulls them in when reading, so it's easy for me to make mistakes and hard for me to catch them.
2) questions - I tend to work from a lot of assumed knowledge, collected from all over, and I'm really trying to make my work more accessible. I assume I'm talking about a bunch of stuff most folks don't know, but I don't know which of them come from some rabbit hole I went down and which are more common knowledge.
3) challenges - I get bored when having things explained to me so I have a tendency to keep explanations light... Which can mean I leave out a bunch of critical context or logical steps.

As a security engineer, whenever anyone talks about a control it's always important to ask "by what mechanism?"
> "Oh, that can't happen because we have a system to stop it."
By what mechanism?
> "We have documentation that says...."
Yeah, that's not a mechanism.
People keep saying, "Trump can't do that!" But like... by what mechanism?
> "The constitution says..."
Yeah... a documented list of rules is not self-enforcing. What is the mechanism?
What makes this impossible? Oh, it's possible under certain conditions? Oh, it's always possible and you're completely relying on the idea that there will never be a malicious actor? Yeah, that's gonna get exploited. Oh shit, now you're owned.
What do you do with a system that's completely owned? Once it's compromised it can never be trusted again. What would you tell a client who told you, "Patching is really hard, so we're just gonna ban the attacker's IP."
What, you're not even gonna reinstall?
I assume we've all had the "burn everything down and start again" client. I wonder how many of us thought we would see the US government ask for them to hold it's beer.
#USPol

I've been really anxious about what would happen with the Dutch election tonight. I'm starting to relax and I hope things keep going the same way.
My kid was playing outside of one of the polling places in Amsterdam. Just before we left, I overheard someone say "Fuck Wilders." I'm glad the polling seems to reflect that sentiment.

I had a dream last night that folks started using drones to track ICE, which then forced them to roll out jammers before raids, which then allowed people to use radio triangulation to find out where ICE was going to raid... which all makes me think that I may need to stop watching Civ Div videos before bed.
Edit:
...for anyone not familiar with Civ Div: https://youtube.com/@civdiv

I've been working on a bit of a larger project. It is still very much a work in progress. It's an attempt to combine blog and mastodon posts with other things I've written in the past, along with some original analysis, into a zine. I'm probably about 2/3 of the way through.
It's primarily focused on political theory and critique, which, I think, deviates a bit from how a lot of other folks view the world. It's pretty explicitly anarchist, though I don't think I've actually put the word "anarchism" or referenced the ideology anywhere so explicitly.
I'd love feedback (especially around editing and flow) if anyone would be willing to put eyes on it and tell me what they think:
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/

The American Democratic Party, and the concept of "Democratic Socialism" within the US, comes largely from an authoritarian political tradition where the state offers services in exchange for the population allowing elites to continue parasitize the system. Then it is critical for Liberals to consume and destroy popular mutual aid, because real mutual aid undermines their carrot.
Democrats tend to imagine that anarchists want to destroy "all the good things" that governments do. The reality is that we want to build those good things ourselves so that we can reject the offer of those same good things, less well managed, with all the bad things attached.
Anarchists want to build pro-social systems (what if we didn't *need* snap, but just made sure everyone was fed?) while eliminating anti-social ones (do we really *need* to kidnap children, or could we just kind of stop doing that?).

Any Nederlanders please feel free to correct me. I'm still very much getting a handle on all this.

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

All this is to say, fuck Jordan Peterson.
https://write.as/hexmhell/western-civilization-of-theseus

Someone told me that asshole is coming to #Amsterdam again, and I'm just wishing I had the time to put a clown nose on all his flyers and post this meme next to them.

Even if the oligarchs pull back, all that tells them is that they need to slow down. This has all been a long time in the making, and if you don't believe me then go look up "the business plot."

Not everyone agrees...
https://youtube.com/shorts/gcO8dHeKjU0
But I think this assessment may overestimate the competence of the administration (they won't just crash things because their heads are just that full of shit), and may underestimate the ability of the administration (or really, the heritage foundation or other fash planners) to just make some shit up work around any limitation. The use of private donations on the ballroom and to fund military ops is a pretty clear test of that.
No matter what, the government will be shut down. All the things you care about will either be eliminated right now, or slowly over time. That's been happening since the 70's, and even faster since the 90's, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's happening now.
That's the scenario to prepare for, and you should prepare for it even if democrats somehow get control of the government again. Much of the public sector has been privatized and destroyed under democratic administrations.

Oh hey, relevant:
https://youtu.be/IOzwJ17VQrE
I have some critiques. I think the appropriate response is always community organizing first. But the "what if this is the coup" is pretty on point. There would normally be other problems if the government stayed shut down long enough, but Trump may just try to work around it with direct donations from companies.

#Portland beating Trump almost became a sport. The rest of us all got to cheer for you and you found more and more creative ways to resist.

I know it was 3000 years ago now, but I want everyone to remember that Portland beat Trump last time because normal people came out every night to resist.
Portland made Trump look weak once. He pulled out everything he had to terrorize and intimidate people, and federal agents got pushed out of the city anyway. He was embarrassed. Now he can do more and he probably thinks that he has more time, but Portland maybe able to prove him wrong.
Portland ended Trump's presidency once, and it can happen again... especially if Portland keeps doing a good job of reminding everyone that the whole invasion is an attempt to distract from #Epstein.
#USPol

One of our most important projects was the "food security committee" which made sure that our members always ate. It expanded out and now members of that committee still can food and bring it to houseless camps (among other things).
This is disaster prep work. We are in a disaster, how do you prepare for it to get worse? How to you prepare to come out the other side?
The only way we survive this level of disaster is together. Organize around that idea and you'll already be building the world we want to see on the other side.

As anarchists, when we were organizing against Trump, in the lead up to and early in his last term, we recognized the potential for repression. Radicals have always been targeted, but now he's going after moderate liberals. This is going to keep escalating, so it would be a good idea for liberals to *listen to anarchists* since we've been doing this for years.
Anarchists have been kidnapped and held without charges for months at a tim (check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_grand_jury_resisters. Only for those folks, they were kidnapped and held without trial under Obama.) Radicals have been doing this for years. It's worth your time to listen so you know how to prepare.
We had a bail fund set up. Support your local bail fund and don't try to start your own (liberals in Seattle did that last time). We focused on basic survival for our members. When the regime cracks down it will be random (since they can't get everyone). How are you going to support folks? Bail funds are a nice first step, but the whole process can take a long time. People can (and often do) lose their jobs, even if they aren't convicted of anything. Are you going to make sure targeted people are able to pay rent and get food? Are you going to make sure families are taken care of when a parent is kidnapped?
Resistence is only a threat if it's sustainable, otherwise they can just overpower and wait. You have to be able to wait longer. Occupations are *extremely* expensive. If you can support each other through an occupation, you can win.
So what is your plan? How are you going to make sure that those who fight can keep fighting? The best time to think about that question was under Biden. The second best time is now.

Ref: https://crimethinc.com/2025/09/22/nepali-anarchists-on-the-toppling-of-the-government-an-interview-with-black-book-distro

Really hoping to see some One Piece flags in the pictures from the next #NoKings Day protests. I also hope everyone has brotherd to check the notes from Nepal. Regimes can collapse faster than expected. Sometimes it can be a total surprise.
I know things feel impossible right now, but you need to have a plan for when you win because it might surprise you. The other good thing about having a plan is that it gives you something to fight for instead of just something to fight against.
#USPol

@… and also a good time to ask if there's any way I could help with something like that.

@… this is probably a good reminder for me to donate.

The WriteFreely instance at Infosec.press is cool. It ties back to their infosec.exchange mastodon instance. Thinking about how finding a blog space has been a barrier to some of my protects in the past (noblogs is great but is harder to get an account), I wonder what the prospects are for something like that at @…. Is this something that's on the radar?
@… had a handy writeup on this for their server: https://infosec.press/jerry/how-to-user-mastodons-built-on-oauth-provider-as-the-authentication-provider

It's also worth noticing that, when viewed through this lens, a government shutdown with no possibility of resolution is not a mistake. It's the objective. They see everything the government does (outside of violence) as unnecessary.
Their government exists to protect markets by providing capitalists with death squads. Everything else can be disposed of. They don't want to *resolve* the shutdown. The shutdown is what winning looks like for them.

There tends to be this implicit assumption that only the state can provide services to the people. It's endemic to liberals. If authoritarians seize power, the thinking goes, there's nothing we can do.
But we have ample examples of the opposite. Trumpism is a specific type of authoritarianism where the state withdraws to allow corporations to control most things. They get a degree of autonomy and, in exchange, bow to the sovereign.
This is common in South American dictatorships (often those backed and supported by the US). So it can be helpful to look to these as examples of how to deal with that type of regime.
#USPol

Let me rephrase that: this video is fucking awesome and anyone in the US should watch at least the beginning, and my hacker comrades should watch to the end, clone the repo, and have some fun....
https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround

This seems like a pretty good rundown on Flock cameras. Also, I like his style.
https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ
Edit: oh hey, he's on Mastodon: @…

Be the moral decay you want to see in the world.

Oh hey, relevant:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/erica-lagalisse-occult-features-of-anarchism

All we're asking is for y'all to catch up on some history so you understand what you're coming into. Even #NoKings grew from #50501Movement, which started as a decentralized protest before being taken over by the nonprofit industrial complex. Antifa networks were doxxing fash hard through the first Trump admin, but those networks go all the way back to the 80's... And they inherited an even older tradition. If you really want to get down to it, the whole "no kings" thing in Europe was at the very least heavily influenced by indigenous folks in the so-called Americas. There's a lot of history that's lead to this moment, and it's kind of all relevant to understanding how we got here and how we actually get out.

You ever go to a party at a house you don't know, then someone talks to you and you're like, "oh hey, who are you?" And they're like, "I live here, you're in my house."
That's the way energy liberals bring to antifascism. Like, we're all super glad you're here. Most of us understand why you're late, and we're just glad you finally made it. But like, you're kind of in our house. You didn't invent this shit, but we've been here for a while.
#USPol

Reagan's "Welfare Queen" rhetoric was a dog whistle. The whole "southern strategy" was full of dog whistles. Every time Republicans talked about gay marriage as a "states rights" issue, those were dog whistles. Naming a government agency "the Department of Homeland Security" was a dog whistle. Trump's speeches leading up to his first term were full of dog whistles.
Nazis have total control of all branches of government. They've cut off funding to all but the most oppressive elements of the government. There are concentration camps, both in client states (CECOT, among others) and in the US (Alligator Auschwitz, among others). They're actively carrying out ethnic cleansing.
When DHS puts out some Nazi shit, it's not a dog whistle. It's a vuvuzela. They're not trying to signal their intent without any of the "normies" noticing. They actively doing what they wanted to do. It's not a signal because there's nothing to signal. It's a celebration.
#USPol

Since leaving the US, things have gotten a lot better for me but it's still hard existing under capitalism. Just being a human is hard enough, but parenting is an order or magnitude harder.
Even here, with all the complexity of being an immigrant, it's somehow still less emotionally challenging than being in the US.
I wrote up a reflection on some of my feelings before leaving tangled up with some of the challenges I still have. I hope this helps some folks feel less alone, or makes it easier for other folks to understand why some parents are having a hard time.
CW: just.... Lots... Death, gun violence, trauma, etc
#USPol

"Here's Tom with the weather."
https://anarchoccultism.org/hex/a-psychedelic-cosmology

Ecofash like to claim that the earth is over its human carrying capacity. That's absolutely untrue for 99.9% of the population or so. But the carrying capacity of billionaires is zero.

This shit is straight up just the plot to Red Dawn, but the bootlickers can't even recognize it because the call is coming from inside the house.
#USPol

As a reminder of the contempt that the ruling class has for us, "pull oneself up by one's bootstraps" specifically references something that's literally impossible, and "tightening one's belt" comes from a euphemism for starvation.

I think the hardest thing to accept about this current reality is that our rulers are not terrifying Machiavellians who've built this monstrous dystopia, but scared little children who are also captured within the emergent chains of this terrible system.

Alright, I'm gonna turn this shit off and go build something. See y'all next week.

How? This is disaster prep. Imagine the US is collapsing (because it is). What do you need to do to keep yourself and your community safe when things shut down for 24 hours, 48, 72? What do you do when the government leaves and never comes back? Build that.
This isn't bunker and beans shit either. We all die if we try to live alone. The only way to survive is together. Once you build the thing that keeps you and your friends alive, expand... Go bigger.... Organize with more people.
That's a clear and actionable strategy that beats the hell out of "vote for the lesser of two evils until everything is evil."

And if you really want to push candidates left, you do what the Black Panthers did. You provide the service you want to see so the government is forced to play catch up. If you build the world you want to see, you force the state to follow you in order to remain relevant. You make enforcing unjust laws impossible while providing the service to believe should exist. THAT is direct action that wins.
Edit: and that is also shit that will get you killed. If you want to stop fascism, you have to do the real work. Voting can only matter if it's part of a larger strategy to force the system to do what you want. Otherwise you're just legitimizing the managed resistance.

The simple fact is that there are systems that are actually built to resist fascism. There have been a lot of advancements in the last couple hundred years.
We are at a breaking point. The political institutions of the US have been largely destroyed. Even another Democrat, even the best Democrat, even Bernie Sanders couldn't fix this. Every American instruction is rotten to the core.
It's time to face this fact, and figure out how to build something better. Stop believing in American exceptionalism and start looking for models of systems that are inherently resistant to fascism.

There is a giant mountain in the US carved with the faces of a couple of slavers, and two guys who tried to stop slavery. Now most Americans will stop right there and say, "wait, two? Lincoln did that though..." They'll say that because Americans don't know anything about their own history, including the fact that the practice of slavery remained central to the southern economy well through Roosevelt's administration. If this is not familiar to you (because, maybe, you were taught history in the US) and you'd like to actually learn about that, you might want to read "Slavery by Another Name."
But let's talk about half-slaver mountain for a minute. This mountain is functionally a sacred site for Americans, but it's literally a sacred site for Black Hills Sioux. Speaking of stolen land, did you know that JBLM (a military base in Washington state) is built on land promised the Puyallup in the Treaty of Medicine Creek before being stolen in 1918? I remember being taught that all the land was stolen a long time ago and now there's nothing we can do. Yeah, does anyone remember that DAPL was under Obama? In fact, unused federal lands are supposed to be returned to the tribes from which the land was taken but there's a whole site to auction off federal property... That's a whole section of the government dedicated to violating the Treaty of Fort Laramie.
They could just comply with the treaty, as they are legally obligated to do. These violations are ongoing. Slavery, again, is still legal. Slaves are still used by major corporations today, they just have to be tricked into confessing to a crime first. The sins that this country is built on remain fully active today... Because the system was built to preserve white supremacists patriarchy. How could the founding of the US not lead *directly* to Trump? How could this have been different, from the beginning?
But, please, tell me, how, exactly, are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms. How?

The US is a slave state founded on genocide that *still* hasn't actually abolished slavery. Nazi race law came from Jim Crow, but you won't find that taught in a single classroom in the US. The Senate and Electoral College are *explicitly* anti-democratic institutions... Like, they were designed to prevent democracy. The whole punitive legal system exists to suppress dissent and legitimize slavery. The genocide of indigenous folks *has not even ended* much less has there been any attempt at reparations.
How exactly are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms, and finding a more acceptable candidate for 2028? Seriously, someone explain it to me.

I'm still a bit upset that the people with basically all the money in the world have decided to burn a huge chunk of the global economy, and potentially kill billions of people and end complex human society, because someone invented math that could flirt with people who, despite having basically all of the world's money and the ability to kill billions of people and end complex human society, are the most incompetent and pathetic fucking losers on the planet.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Olhz2JXrll8

Thought Slime posted a video on Liberals and Charlie Kirk (linked in my post). It touched on a few ideas I've been wanting to explore more.
Why is it that, even though we talk "memes" going "viral" we are still talking about "Free Market of Ideas" as though ideas were inanimate objects we could handle and observe objectively? Perhaps that idea is it's own infection.
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/memetic-effluent-and-the-wet-market-of-ideas

A while back I wrote this very discordian inspired bit of text. I finally found a good place to put it. :)

I think I need to clarify some shit for (white) liberals.
How many times have you wondered if someone you're talking to in an informant sent to entrap you? How many times have you or a friend of yours been hit by a car, intentionally? How many friends have been hit, or almost hit? Ever been stabbed? Know anyone who has? Has the FBI ever knocked on a friend's door? Have police ever kicked down your door? Have you ever been arrested? Pepper sprayed? Does the sound or smell or blast balls give you flashbacks? Do you ever wonder what all the CS exposure is doing to your body? How many times have you been shot or shot at? Do you wonder every day if this is the day they'll come to kill you? Would anyone in your social circle answer these questions differently?
When you vote, you risk nothing (big asterisk, but if I'm talking to you then it doesn't apply to you). What you get out of voting is exactly what you put into it. Direct action is the same.
If you aren't worried about someone murdering you, then you probably aren't actually threatening the system. That's the difference between voting, and doing something useful. If they had to murder all the liberals in order to keep going, fascism would end. If they're only murdering radicals and marginalized people, then you're just like all the "good Germans" who hated Hitler but did essentially nothing.
It's already that bad for some people. How much are you willing to risk? How many people are you willing to sacrifice for your comfort? These are the questions we're all thinking about every time you tell us to vote.
(I'm tagging this #USPol so it's easy for folks to filter out if they're already well acquaintaned with the horror. I'm not CW, because USPol is just expected to be triggering.)

Hey liberals, I'll make you a deal. I'll vote, if you do something actually useful.
Fun fact, I've already voted in every election I've been eligible to vote in. So you're gonna organize to feed houseless folks in your area, protect trans folks, run ICE out of your neighborhood, film the police every time you see them....
No one ever voted fascists out of office, but we do know how to stop them. Make it impossible for them to govern. That's the trick. So maybe we can spend a little less time fighting straw men and a little more time being ungovernable.
Cool, glad we're on the same page.

To be clear, none of this is to say "this is definitely fake evidence." People talk in really strange ways when they're under stress. People are weirder than you think. Reality is weirder than you think. I don't think this is clearly "this is fabricated."
But I don't just trust it by default, especially when it lines up really well with what the administration wants.

I was going to drop this into a group chat, but I decided to make it your problem instead. You're welcome.
Now I'm going to disable mastodon on my phone for a few days and let this simmer. Nothing could go wrong.
Something something "all gods, no masters."
Edit: I lied. :P

#HotTake:
Liberalism is a syncretic religion where the highest deity is the State and all other deities are subject to it. Liberalism asserts this distinction by classifying political systems as deriving from "natural law" and religions as faith systems. Classical liberalism divided the world into "primitive" beliefs and "enlightened" beliefs. Atheistic anarchism aligns with this distinction by opposing the state and capitalism through logic, rather than asserting that the state and capitalism are themselves systems of faith. Atheistic anarchism further reinforces the narrative of the liberal state by aligning with the liberal understanding of religion as a "primitive" institution.
Graeber et al pointed out the connections between property rights as a form of fedishism (magic) and the evolution of currency, debt, taxes, and the state from temples.

I posted about meme shootings and a bit about how they're incentivized by "the algorithm." I felt like there was a lot more to talk about, so I expanded it to a blog post. (Thanks to @… for the video link, I also referenced in the post.)
CW: kids and gun violence, self harm, possible reference to sexual violence, the general traumatic stuff you'd expect from this subject
#USPol #GunViolence #MemeShootings #TCC #Capitalism #StochasticTerrorism

QQ for all the "Restore the #RuleOfLaw" folks out there: When militarized police crushed Occupy for daring to challenge the logic of bailing out the bankers who crashed the economy rather than the people they fleeced, was that "Rule of Law"? When militarized police maimed and brutalized water protectors, was that "Rule of Law"? When oil companies and tech monopolies fund both parties and just happen to get legislation that keeps them in power, is that "Rule of Law"? When your tax dollars go to fund genocide, to pay to drop bombs on children, is that "Rule of Law"? When the NSA was spying on American citizens, was that "Rule of Law"? How about the drone strikes on Americans, was that "Rule of Law"? When cops murder people and then use "qualified immunity" to get away with it, is that "Rule of Law"?
Y'all keep talking about how #NoKings is about "restoring rule of law." It's got a bit of a "Make America Great Again" feel to it: you're invoking a return to a history that never actually existed.

There's a trick for liberals who are still coming to terms with everything: from here on out, ask yourself "If this was a case in Putin's Russia, would I believe the evidence?"

We're all really used to an FBI that is incredibly evil, but generally pretty competent. They have no problem using child sex offenders to infiltrate groups of clowns. They have no problem trying to convince civil rights leaders to commit suicide. They have no problem with sowing confusion within leftists groups and trying to get them to kill each other. They've always been radically anti-left, but they've also always been competent.
Fabricating evidence in a really obvious way would always have been off the table because they wouldn't be willing to throw a case. But those competent people have been pushed out of the FBI. It's now Kash Patel's clown show. It serves the whims of the regime above all else. It will sacrifice decades of hard built trust for a quick win, because no one involved is competent enough to understand the consequences of such actions.
In the past, they may have used torture to elicit a confession. They may have entrapped people. They could have deleted exonerating evidence, but they would probably not have just completely manufactured obviously fake evidence just to forward the regime's narrative. I don't think that we've seen anything like this, at the very least in our lifetimes.
We have to foster a new level of skepticism, far beyond what we have been used to... and this is especially true of Liberals, who still don't understand the level of corruption and incompetence in local law enforcement today.
#USPol #CharlieKirk

I just woke up from a dream. For every parent there is a time when, with shame, we have to explain how the world actually works... when they become a little too old to keep saying, "I'll explain it when you're older."
Amsterdam is full of reminders of the occupation, of the Holocaust. It's impossible to pretend there hasn't been a great evil here... One that's not in the past, but still very alive in the present.
At some point things will have to change because fascism can't last forever. It is a thing which necessarily contains its own downfall. We will, at that point, have an opportunity to make the world one that we can be proud to tell our children we created. We can stop short and reestablish the status quo that got us here, or we can build a world that we will no longer have to explain to each new generation in shame.
What would it look like?
(Shout out to the comrade who prompted me to be thinking about this.)
There was also a sign in my dream that said, "we created the bike, therefore we can do anything." This may or may not be related.

Liberals: You have a choice. When Trump comes for you, you can buckle and comply or you can radicalize and fight harder. Decide now what you're going to do, because a lot of us will die if you decide to save yourself.
We will win in the end, with or without you. But, if you survive, you will always know which choice you made and you will have to live with it.
#USPol

Every time the leopards eat the members of the leopard party...

I'm gonna bump this again since it's relevant to #NoKingsDay
#USpol

I keep saying the same thing over and over with my kids: you don't make decisions with your voice, you make them with your body.
"I want to go to the park."
"Ok, put your shoes on."
"I want to go on my play date."
"Put on a jacket and get in the bike."
"I don't want to be late to school."
"I don't control time, if you don't want to be late you have to brush your teeth."
There's a fundamental truth underlying this concept though, one that I hadn't really thought about. On some level, I feel as though, any choice you can't make with your body isn't a real choice. If you're begging someone to do something for you, it's ultimately not something you control.
As I'm compelled, by threat of violence against my family, to pay for war against my comrades and to kill people I don't even know, I think about that. How far is our concept of freedom from the police state we are taught to imagine as the global beacon of liberty. My participation in the violence had always been compulsory.
Perhaps we could do better than just #NoKings.
#USPol

What would win the next US election?
#USPol #Shitpost
An anthropomorphic guillotine
Barnaby Jones's last single
3:22 of silence from The Offspring
The WKUK "it's illegal to say" sketch

"It Could Happen Here" did an episode on #CharlieKirk and what information we actually have. It's a few days old, but I'm not sure we've gotten any more clarity.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/charlie-kirks-assassination-sorting-fact-from-294279444/

I also have this idea that somewhere there's a a transbian policule coven who take money for hexes and curses against fascists and use it to fund the revolution.
Unlreated question... if a coven is a legally registered church, shouldn't paying for a hex be a legally tax deductable charitable donation? Asking for a friend.

For anyone who'd appreciate a Cowboy Bebop reference, Mad Pierrot embodies the essence the sovereign.

Actually, I do want to come back to masculinity under patriarchy and whiteness under white supremacy because I think it's worth talking more about. The "man" under patriarchy (at least "Western" patriarchy) is represented as power and independence. The man needs nothing and thus owes nothing to anyone. The man controls and is not controlled, which is intimately related to independence as dependence can make someone vulnerable to control. The image of "man" projects power and invulnerability. At the same time "man" is a bumbling fool who can't be held accountable for his inability to control his sexual urges. He must be fed and cared for, as though another child. His worst behaviors must be dismissed with phrases such as "boys will be boys" and "locker room talk." The absurdity of the concept of human "independence" is impossible to understate.
Even if you go all Ted Kaczynski, you have still been raised and taught. This is, perhaps, why it is so much more useful to think in terms of obligations than rights. Rights can be claimed and protected with violence alone, but obligations reveal the true interdependence that sustains us. A "man" may assert his rights. Yet, on some level, we all know that the "man" of patriarchy acts as a child who is not mature enough to recognize his obligations.
White violence and white fragility reflect the same dichotomy. "The master race" somehow always needs brown folks to make all their shit and do all the reproductive labor for them. For those who fully embrace whiteness, the "safe space" is a joke. DEI shows weakness. Yet, when presented with an honest history adults become children who are incapable of differentiating between criticism and simple facts. *They* become the ones who must be kept safe. The expectation to be responsible for one's own words and actions, one of the very core definitions of being an adult, is far too much to expect. Their guilt needs room, needs tending, needs caring. White people cannot simply "grow the fuck up" or, as they may say of slavery, "fucking get over it."
And again, interestingly, it is *rights* that they reference: "Mah Freeze PEACH!" I find it hard to distinguish between such and my own child's assertion that anything she doesn't like is "not fair!" No, these assertions fail to recognize the fundamental fabric of adult society: the obligations we hold to each other.
At the intersection of all privilege is the sovereign, the ultimate god-man-baby. Again, referencing the essay (https://hexmhell.writeas.com/observations-on-domination-and-trump)
> This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.
While law enforcement is the ultimate representative of sovereign violence, privileges allow a gradated approximation of the sovereign. Those who are "closer" in privilege to the sovereign may, for example, be permitted to carry out violence against those who are father away. The gradation of privilege turns the whole society, except for the least privileged, into a cult that protects the privilege system on behalf of the most privileged. (And immediately Malcolm X pops to mind as having already talked about part of this relationship in 1963 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo.)

I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol

The fascist coalition was never going to hold. It couldn't. Fascists want everyone to be exactly the same. That's their whole thing. Leftists want diversity, so we can actually form coalitions. Fascists will always reach a point where they have to kill all the other fascists who aren't exactly like them.
Project 2025 betrayed this. It wasn't consistent. It was a jumble of different ideas that couldn't actually be implemented together. Someone gets left out. The Groypers haven't been getting what they want. Things have been moving too slowly for them. So now we get to see what happens. If they keep accelating, Trump could be forced to choose between cracking down on the far right (and destroying his coalition completely) or letting his people get killed. I hope that's a choice he has to make.
🍿
While Rome burns, go build things that help people and get other people involved in it. The way we win is by not getting involved in that mess, but rather just clearly demonstrating that we can make things better.

People keep trying to point to an event where the "right/left" political violence thing got out of hand. You cannot point to anywhere in US history where the right hasn't been murdering leftists. It has never happened.
They've been talking about civil war since they lost the last one, and most of US politics before that was just trying to prevent the first one.
There isn't a wave of right/left violence. Right wing violence has just gone unchecked for so long, and been so accepted, that now they're killing each other regularly. The Trump assassination attempts were all from the right. #CharlieKirk was killed by another fascist for not being fascist enough.
Fascists have so completely taken over that they see each other as legitimate targets because they've run out of "leftists" worth murdering. That's the story. That's what people can't wrap their heads around.
Everyone is worried about the right wing response, worries about right wing escalation, but they called for civil war over the cracker barrel logo. They're already maxing out their base. All the proud boys and other Nazis are already hired by ICE. They're also already going as hard as they can. They don't need any excuses. They have total control of everything. This bumbling mess is *the best they can do.* They call for civil war every few days.
We're not seeing a war between the left and the right. We're seeing a war between the right and the far right, where both side opportunistically punch left when they can and liberals help them justify their actions.
#USPol

It should be noted that the Nacirema absolutely do kill those outside of their tribes during highly ritualized combat. In fact, they are known and feared by many surrounding tribes for their war-like nature. But the previously mentioned taboo seems to be against the execution of the ritual for either enslavement or sacrifice of outsiders for sacrifice or enslavement within tribal territory. Similarly, the Nacirema will not seize slaves during their war raids to bring within their territory. However, it does seem that the tribute system which the Nacirema impose on other tribes favors slavery.
The Elihcian people even tell stories of a chief who tried to end a slave-like practice among their people and refused tribute to the Nacirema. The chief of the Nacirema send emissaries to plot the murder of great chief of the Elihcian with the strongest nobles who were the largest slave owners. The war chief of the Elihcian, a friend of the Nacirema chief, then took over the tribe, enslaved many and paid even more tribute to the Nacirema chief. Many tribes to the South of the Nacirema have very similar stories.
Strangely, again, the Nacirema do not see themselves as war-like. Rather, they see themselves as peaceful. When talking about war and war-raids, they will even sometimes use a phase that means "maintaining" or "sustaining peace" to describe them.
Again, it seems to be the use of ritual that allows them to declare slavery and human sacrifice as "justice" and to declare war as "peace."

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Nacirema people is their insistence that they do not participate in practices of which they clearly do. Equally unusual is the fact that, unlike other sacrificial cultures who raid neighboring tribes for victims, both slaves and victims for human sacrifice are only taken from within the society. In fact, there is a very strong cultural taboo against sacrificing or enslaving those from other tribes.
They are aware of the rituals of human sacrifice in other tribes, but claim such rituals to be inconsistent with their society. Yet their human sacrifice rituals are some of the most elaborate in the world. These rituals are so important that there is a whole part of Nacirema society dedicated specifically to arguing about who should and should not be sacrificed, restraining and feeding the potential victims for the years during which these arguments take place, and ultimately preparing and administering the ritual poison.
This is strangely similar to their approach to slavery. Both human sacrifice and slavery were once a much larger part of Nacirema society. Their human sacrifice rituals now take far longer and happen far less often, but at no point have they ever recognized these ritual sacrifices as such. Meanwhile, the Nacirema do acknowledge that slavery was part of their culture once. During the time when they did recognize their practice of slavery, they did raid other tribes for slaves. Now they follow the same complex ritual for slavery as they do for human sacrifice.
It is strange that, by following this ritual and only choosing victims from within their society, they seem to become incapable of seeing their behavior for what it is.

As we continue down this path of escalating nihilistic meme violence, it can feel like the worst things have become viral. We are drowning in the memetic effluent of a capitalist media that profits by maximizing engagement. But I wonder if anyone remembers "Pay it Forward?"
A movie came out in 2000 about a kid who started a viral kindness campaign. The idea was that you do something nice for someone else with the expectation that they do the same in the future. I never really saw the movie, but I do remember the time. There were a few weeks, maybe a few months, where people started doing it. People would just be randomly nice, and everything actually just started feeling better.
Over time, the world caught up. Capitalism consumed the whole thing, and life went back to normal. 9/11 happened the next year, and the US started down the path of becoming the most twisted and evil version of itself. But there was a short time that doing nice stuff was a viral meme, a thing that people just started doing.
Gun violence doesn't have to be the only viral meme we have. We can make good things happen too.

Oh hey, another good take on #CharlieKirk
https://youtube.com/shorts/pehI9clHp2M

While it's not uncommon for people to know that the political terms of "left" and "right" come from the French Revolution, fewer people realize that using "fancy pants" as a derogatory term also comes from it.
@… #MediumQualityFacts