Tootfinder

Popular Front recently did a piece on the current conflicts in Ethiopia:
https://popularfront.substack.com/p/everything-you-didnt-know-about-the
It's a good primer for anyone who's unfamiliar, but is definitely lacking if you know any Ethiopian folks or pay attention to much news out of the Horn of Africa.
The interplay between authoritarian liberal nationalism, as represented by Abiy Ahmed and his government, and tribal federalism , represented by various tribal factions, reads to me very similarly to the liberalization of Europe (enclosure of the commons, a push to sacrifice ethnic identities for nationalist ones, etc). Like the liberalization of, say, France, it's a lot more complicated than "old thing bad, new thing good."
Liberalism was violent and authoritarian. It often sacrificed leftists. Liberalism's focus on borders and national identity led directly to pogroms and Nazism. Similarly, liberalization of Ethiopia has led to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
People think of "the terror" in France as a leftist thing, but it wasn't. It was a Liberal thing, centrist extremism, carried out against right and left.
I understand that tribal federalism is also not a good system, but I don't have a ton of depth so I'm not going to try to explain it. During the European Liberal revolutionary period of 1848, ethnic minorities would often side with some monarch or emperor against liberalism out of fear of liberal nationalism. It makes sense to support a system that's bad if your other option is a nationalism that erases your identity.
But even in Europe at that time, anarchism offered an alternative but that alternative often also drew from simply a different branch of liberalism that also suppressed culture and identity. Today the world is different. Democratic Confederalism offers a solution to *exactly* this problem, tested for more than a decade in Syria and developing now in Myanmar.
But the cross pollination between Syria and Myanmar in terms of fighters really made the ideological cross pollination possible. I don't think anything like that is happening now in Ethiopia.
Eurocentrism makes it easy to ignore what's happening now, but Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union Commission. Ethiopia is a major military power in the region, so these developments carry a lot of weight. Especially as the US collapses and the world becomes more multipolar, the development of regional powers like Ethiopia will have a big impact on how that part of the continent develops.
If any folks are more familiar with Ethiopia than I am (which shouldn't be hard since I'm basically not), please correct me or add context if anything is missing or wrong.

Nvidia details its Vera CPU, its first CPU with a custom core design, featuring 88 cores and 176 threads, and set for general availability in H2 2026 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware)
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-component…

Nvidia deep dives Vera CPU for AI data centers — SPEC CPU 2026 benchmarks revealed, Olympus architecture specifics, and more
Setting the stage for a Vera / Venice showdown.

Breezing through the otherwise quite thoughtful bit of small-scale climate prophecy by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, I'm struck by (and not sure how to get past) the casual way Africa and Australia are totally destroyed in this brief mention on the last page of the imagined history.
#SciComm #CliFi

‘Last year, the online magazine 972 revealed the existence of a specialised military intelligence unit known as the “legitimisation cell”. Its mandate is narrative management. “Whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue,” the report said, the cell combed through intercepted calls and fragments of intelligence from Gaza to identify material that could be deployed to defend Israel on the international stage.
“If the global media is talking about Israel ki…

Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity • EQUATOR
Forty years after Edward Said demanded ‘permission to narrate’, the truth from Palestine has never been more widely known. And yet the annihilation continues.

The United States is continuing to bombard Iran amid an intensifying standoff over the Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. Central Command said on Sunday the United States had struck 140 targets in Iran.
In retaliation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had targeted U.S. military facilities across the Middle East.
“U.S. CENTCOM, Central Command, and the Pentagon at large have concealed the impact of Iranian strikes, in some cases entirely,”
says Jeremy Scahill, co-founder o…

“Iran Is Not Going to Capitulate”: Jeremy Scahill on Renewed War, Strait of Hormuz & More
The United States is continuing to bombard Iran amid an intensifying standoff over the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command said on Sunday the United States had struck 140 targets in Iran. In retaliation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had targeted U.S. military facilities across the Middle East. “U.S. CENTCOM, Central Command, and the Pentagon at large have concealed the impact of Iranian strikes, in some cases entirely,” says Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, add…

blah blah blah knicks blah blah trump blah blah "we should all not go to work and fucking take this country back"
(okay, now you've got my attention.)
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5o6k7jvowuyaquloafzn3cfw/post/3molwhnfl6c25

The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social)
“How do you feel about Trump?” KNICKS FAN: “I f*cking hate him… This shit right here? The revolution starts in NYC. Brunson is the Messiah— if we bring this energy to the pedophiles that run 🌎, we can do anything.” @nyknicks @NY_KnicksPR really going to the White House?😬

Only 13% of biodiversity promises from 180 influential companies pass accountability test https://phys.org/news/2026-07-biodiversity-influential-companies-accountability.html

Only 13% of biodiversity promises from 180 influential companies pass accountability test
New research by the University of Oxford and the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University has revealed that most biodiversity commitments made by large, influential companies are not precise enough to enable society to evaluate whether they are making progress toward meeting their commitments. The results have been published in One Earth.

Replace "tax" with "revolution insurance" whenever you're reading about taxes in the US, and it clarifies the stakes much better.
For example:
1) "'...the wealthiest folks...they're paying more for revolution insurance than the poorest folks. But are they paying as much in revolution insurance as they could pay to help run the country the way that we run it? And the answer to that is probably not,' said Anthony Infanti, a law professor a…

I tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.