on copyright
A system of stealing science and art from the common ownership of the masses into the hands of the rich.
free software
The spirit of cooperation once prevalent among hackers.
on piracy
Creative works are the shared property of humanity.
on procrastination
Procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.
on guns
The american fetish.
on israel
The west's military installation in the middle east.
alienation
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Nice little graphic that helps bring the insane hoarding of wealth into perspective.
http://berniewouldhavelost.com/
A long and thorough explanation of how the democratic primaries were able to ensure Bernie lost despite his unprecedented lead. The known history of election rigging and electric voting machines is covered and an argument is made that Bernie would've lost the general election anyway. Not out of a lack of popularity, but rather that the democrats would much prefer Trump to Bernie.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/
Long and detailed explanation about how the spartans were nothing like the pop-culture imagination many have of them today. Post gets VERY cringe at times by comparing horrific practices in Sparta to whatever the US claims it's state enemies are doing without putting any thought into it. If you can get past that it's otherwise a good article.
https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/09/03/david-graeber-whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun/
What purpose? What purpose does a fucking bear have? The job of a bear is to be a bear. Productivity-brain prevents us from ever valuing the base essence of something, the thing itself. Everything is always for something else - a tool to achieve some other thing. You aren't on vacation to experience a vacation. You are on vacation to "rest and recharge" so you can work more later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
All police forces operate similarly to gangs.
It is said that, just before the Sino-Soviet split, Nikita Khrushchev had a tense meeting with Zhou Enlai at which he told the latter that he now understood the problem. “I am the son of coal miners,” he said. “You are the descendant of feudal mandarins. We have nothing in common.” “Perhaps we do,” murmured his Chinese antagonist. “What?” blustered Khrushchev. “We are,” responded Zhou, “both traitors to our class.”
biden
xinjiang
Official UN report, no other source or news article/video should be used besides this: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf
China's response: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/ANNEX_A.pdf
TL;DR: UN said that the conditions of the strike hard campaign had led to instances of human rights violations, many of them very much China's responsibility to prevent. China says it was doing it to reduce extremism and gives context for why the campaign happened. Cut to 3 years later, Xinjiang is a visa-free tourist destination with more mosques per muslim than the number of churches per christians in England.
unsorted politics
silly bits
it's, i'm gonna say gratifying, when the white supremacist structures of capitalism are made really explicit in these ways. like, call center workers sound foreign because they're living in countries where it's legal to pay them pennies to get yelled at by amerikkkan hogs, probably because the CIA killed someone the people there voted for in the 20th century, but the system loathes to admit that obvious fact, it has to maintain the illusion for the ideal white middle class USian consumer that they don't live in a dying empire situated precariously at top of a global economy. Like the fact that they have these workers adopt aliases like Kyle should feel unbearably condescending to any American with a functioning brain, but it's what market research shows people want so they can engage in that willing suspension of disbelief.
“Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism.” –Literally Hitler
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/25/revealed-police-barred-from-searching-queens-estates-for-looted-artefacts
conspiracy theory
The idea of the ‘conspiracy theory’ was developed by the anti-Communist philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper was against the view that war, unemployment, and poverty were the ‘result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups’. Theories of society – such as Marxism – which attempted to understand the social mechanisms of war and unemployment could be softly dismissed as merely conspiracy theories. Popper pointed out that conspiratorial groups were paranoid and – like Nazism – would lead to totalitarianism and genocidal policies. Popper’s liberals viewed any left-wing criticism of the US state and society as conspiratorial; the actual conspiracy theorists – such as Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society – were sniffed at, disparaged, but not taken seriously (after all, as Daniel Bell wrote, the Communists – unlike the John Birch Society – had a conspiracy that ‘was a threat to any democratic society’). This was not a principled objection to conspiracies, but a class attack on any criticism of capitalism and imperialism.
The idea of the conspiracy theory was used to delegitimize genuine investigation of covert behaviour by the government. Implicit faith in the goodness of US power generated the view that the US government would never use illegal means to secure its ends, and that if there was any suggestion that the US had fomented a coup – that suggestion was dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
Those who suggested that the US participated in a conspiracy against the Árbenz government would be roundly mocked as conspiracy theorists. Later, when the documents proved that the critics had been correct it was too late.
Vijay Prashad, Washington Bullets
balkanization
I think American balkanisation will look less like Yugoslavia and more like the Holy Roman Empire. It will not be a sudden rupture but the gradual realisation among states that they can do as they please.
There will still be an emperor, a president, in Washington and some idea of belonging to the same nation but the central government will be powerless to either help states or to force them to follow orders and the president's role will be that of a mediator between essentially independent states, not that of leader of a unified nation. To make up for the lack of a working central government states will ally with eachother in a complex patchwork of alliances and treaties.