@davidaugust@mastodon.onlineNo violence but state violence.
ice agent drives drunk with his own kids in the car, refuses sobriety test and claims to suddenly care if children are left alone (after him and his agency have abandoned, tortured and separated what’s gotta be thousands of kids at this point).
https://youtu.be/ilFPeIZohFg
@cdarwin@c.imIt is notable that the state and local police are all friendly witnesses for the plaintiffs in these cases
https://bsky.app/profile/kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3m4dzxfbwak2q
@chiraag@mastodon.online
@hex@kolektiva.socialThe 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
@cdarwin@c.imRE Mike Lee’s execrable proposal for "Pirates of the Caribbean "
a few days ago
—it’s bad, but
sadly in line with the right-wing movement to expand private actors’ privilege to use violence.
Darrell Miller wrote about this in what we called
“the new outlawry”
https://www.
@memeorandum@universeodon.comBlack People Knew This Would Happen (Alain Stephens/The Intercept)
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/08/chicago-ice-blitz-black-surveillance-state-violence/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251009/p2#a251009p2
@karlauerbach@sfba.socialI must have missed this - Netflix is possibly going to buy Warner Brothers.
My grandparents lived close to the old Republic Studios, and not far from Universal, Disney, Warner (and the secret Lookout Mountain studio.) The area wasn't called "Studio City" for nothing.
I remember one trip to Warner right after Kent State. Our class went to one of those cool viewing studios (the kind one sees in movies) at Warner to see the rough edit (with extra violence!) of The Wil…
@Dragofix@veganism.socialBrazilian Amazon’s most violent city tied to illegal gold mining on Indigenous land https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/brazilian-amazons-most-violent-city-tied-to-illegal-gold-mining-on-indigenous-land…
@cdarwin@c.imFrom subtle shifts in the procedural mechanics of
self-defense doctrine
to substantive expansions of justified lethal force,
legislatures are delegating larger amounts of
“violence work”
to the private sphere.
These regulatory innovations layer on top of existing rules that broadly authorize private violence
—both defensive and offensive
—for self-protection and the ostensible maintenance of law and order.
Yet such significant authority…
@davidaugust@mastodon.onlineAin’t no violence but state violence.
This time they’re “taking” someone while putting pressure on their neck, possibly making it so they can’t breathe, and then committing a hit and run to evade people peacefully standing filming them with phones.
ice is a clear and present danger to the safety and national security of the American People.
htt…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading
@hex@kolektiva.socialI 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
@cdarwin@c.imTrump’s assault on the city of Chicago began in September, and it claimed its first casualty quickly.
As Reuters would later report, on September 12, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez dropped his kids off at their school in the suburb of Franklin Park on his way to his job at a diner on the northwest side.
Villegas-Gonzalez had come to the United States in 2007 to flee the violence in his home state of Michoacšn, Mexico
—violence wrought by the Mexican government’s militarization o…
@arXiv_statAP_bot@mastoxiv.pageA Mixed-Methods Analysis of Repression and Mobilization in Bangladesh's July Revolution Using Machine Learning and Statistical Modeling
Md. Saiful Bari Siddiqui, Anupam Debashis Roy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06264
