Tootfinder

In 1932, 75-year-old socialist #Clara #Zetkin stood in Germany’s Reichstag and, despite being so unsteady that she had to be carried into the building on a stretcher, managed to give a rousing speech lasting more than 40 minutes.
“The fight of the labouring masses,” she declared, is “the fight for their full liberati…

I am loving the story of Road & Track taking down a fantastic article on Formula 1 and failing to provide any suitable explanation for doing so. The article is a wonderful piece of sports journalism, and if the aim is to expand the audience for F1, it achieves its goal. Road & Track is now experiencing the Streisand Effect in full. Anyway, I recommend reading the article (which is on the Internet Archive of course):

Behind F1's Velvet Curtain
If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

"Lately I’ve started to argue that we should never refer to single projects as mutual aid. After all, mutual aid describes a relationship, it is a pattern that stretches across entire ecosystems. And it’s one of the most revolutionary concepts and practices at the heart of anarchism, and of stateless societies throughout history. With the explosion of “mutual aid projects” in the wake of the pandemic, it’s only healthy to worry about leftists1 and NGOs stealing the word from us and watering it down into a hip new form of charity, the way they systematically try to steal subversive concepts from us and pacify them, stabilize them, as they’re doing with transformative justice and abolition, intersectional and queer, as they did a long time ago with socialism (which referred to all currents of anticapitalism, until 1876 when a certain academic broke solidarity and destroyed a growing tool of internationalist organizing to keep from losing control over it...)
[...]
Scarcity and lack of care make us afraid in a way that roots deeply in our bodies and hearts. If we find something free, we take it, maybe we take a whole lot of it so we can stockpile, and we don’t look back. And we’ll take it again and again and again—whether it’s food or love or medical supplies or respect—before we notice the expectation that there isn’t going to be any tomorrow, the deep-seated belief that we don’t deserve this thing… before we’re able to stop, and turn around, and notice the person taking care of us, and give back."

Reflections on #MayDay, #MutualAid and #DisabilityJustice by @….
https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/may-day

Someone asked today what a 'sense of self' is.
I want to tie this into ideas of relationality. I am a distinct individual, let's start with that. I'm not disavowing that entirely.
But I am also ‘an unschooler’: but this is not an attribute of my education for comparison. It is a community, a network of relationships with people working in similar ways. It's connections to anabaptist traditions and to a mode of interacting with parents (both in concept and my actual parents)
I'm from Colorado. But it's not just a place on the map: it's my relationship to my sense of smell, and my tolerance for cold weather and bright lights. It's a love of dark skies and clear views of the milky way. It's a relationship to knowing I am very very small in a vast universe. This is not a universal explanation of from-Colorado-ness, but it's mine.
I'm transgender, but that's not just I-myself-was-born-in-a-wrong-body, but I have a community and network and sense of belonging outside of myself. I've got embodied knowledge of being a dozen ways that others don't get to experience. It affects and informs my relationship to my communities and my work.
I’m argumentative and sometimes a little arrogant, but this is also because of how I'm connected: there are things I know deep in my body that I cannot explain how I know, but I do. I forget that others see me as a ‘you' and not a 'we' sometimes, and so misunderstandings happen. But to change that would change me in ways I'm not quite willing to grow into, so there is going to be a small callus in how I socialize. And it's fine. It works. I am who I am, but I also don't think about _me_ that much. To think about me is to think of all the connections instead. They're inseparable.

Cw: discussion of #transphobia; JKR; politics and power
Someone in a Facebook group I'm in asked:
"What the f☆☆k has JK Rowling got to do with removing the appalling Zionist Keir Starmer & the rest of our neoliberal NATO supporting warmongering parliamentary representatives from power?
Asking for a very angry feminist socialist lesbian disabled 70 year old."
I thought this was actually a deceptively good question, so I thought I'd share my answer here...
The thing to understand is that trans rights and trans healthcare are being used as a 'wedge issue' by the right wing: something to divide and distract us while they get on with their usual business of plundering everybody.
Rowling, as a billionaire with a huge platform and a great deal of time on her hands, has done more than practically anybody else to drive this wedge deeper.
Like every scapegoating campaign used by the right - against gay people, immigrants, minorities, benefits claimants and so on - the anti-trans moral panic has serious, material consequences for its targets.
The ones who benefit from these hate campaigns (and often fund them, directly or indirectly) are largely indifferent to the harm caused; the distraction and division are the main points, but stoking fear and hatred are time-worn methods of achieving those.
Hope this helps!

SocialGFs: Learning Social Gradient Fields for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Qian Long, Fangwei Zhong, Mingdong Wu, Yizhou Wang, Song-Chun Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01839

SocialGFs: Learning Social Gradient Fields for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Multi-agent systems (MAS) need to adaptively cope with dynamic environments, changing agent populations, and diverse tasks. However, most of the multi-agent systems cannot easily handle them, due to the complexity of the state and task space. The social impact theory regards the complex influencing factors as forces acting on an agent, emanating from the environment, other agents, and the agent's intrinsic motivation, referring to the social force. Inspired by this concept, we propose a novel g…

"Lately I’ve started to argue that we should never refer to single projects as mutual aid. After all, mutual aid describes a relationship, it is a pattern that stretches across entire ecosystems. And it’s one of the most revolutionary concepts and practices at the heart of anarchism, and of stateless societies throughout history. With the explosion of “mutual aid projects” in the wake of the pandemic, it’s only healthy to worry about leftists1 and NGOs stealing the word from us and watering it down into a hip new form of charity, the way they systematically try to steal subversive concepts from us and pacify them, stabilize them, as they’re doing with transformative justice and abolition, intersectional and queer, as they did a long time ago with socialism (which referred to all currents of anticapitalism, until 1876 when a certain academic broke solidarity and destroyed a growing tool of internationalist organizing to keep from losing control over it...)
[...]
Scarcity and lack of care make us afraid in a way that roots deeply in our bodies and hearts. If we find something free, we take it, maybe we take a whole lot of it so we can stockpile, and we don’t look back. And we’ll take it again and again and again—whether it’s food or love or medical supplies or respect—before we notice the expectation that there isn’t going to be any tomorrow, the deep-seated belief that we don’t deserve this thing… before we’re able to stop, and turn around, and notice the person taking care of us, and give back."

Reflections on #MayDay, #MutualAid and #DisabilityJustice by @….
https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/may-day

Poll: 44% of Ukrainians believe West tired of supporting Ukraine: https://benborges.xyz/2024/02/27/poll-of-ukrainians.html

Wikipedia has your playlist for today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_songs
Happy international worker’s day to one and all. Stand up for economic and social justice for all. Stand against capitalism. Stand for the rights of people everywhere to live in peace an…

Cw: discussion of #transphobia; JKR; politics and power
Someone in a Facebook group I'm in asked:
"What the f☆☆k has JK Rowling got to do with removing the appalling Zionist Keir Starmer & the rest of our neoliberal NATO supporting warmongering parliamentary representatives from power?
Asking for a very angry feminist socialist lesbian disabled 70 year old."
I thought this was actually a deceptively good question, so I thought I'd share my answer here...
The thing to understand is that trans rights and trans healthcare are being used as a 'wedge issue' by the right wing: something to divide and distract us while they get on with their usual business of plundering everybody.
Rowling, as a billionaire with a huge platform and a great deal of time on her hands, has done more than practically anybody else to drive this wedge deeper.
Like every scapegoating campaign used by the right - against gay people, immigrants, minorities, benefits claimants and so on - the anti-trans moral panic has serious, material consequences for its targets.
The ones who benefit from these hate campaigns (and often fund them, directly or indirectly) are largely indifferent to the harm caused; the distraction and division are the main points, but stoking fear and hatred are time-worn methods of achieving those.
Hope this helps!