This dashboard tracks the availability of popular shadow libraries in real time from a US-based server
James Pogue's excellent reporting on the intellectual far-right always provides little glimmers of insight, though for the most part I still can't quite make sense of Trumpism. In this article he quotes Sumantra Maitra, of The American Conservative saying "It’s between national capital and international capital." I think that summarizes the outlines of the movement, though the appeals to the cultural right (like the anti-immigration or the general racism) seem to have little to do with giving capitalists more power (or more labor to exploit).
"The law of equal liberty is the fundamental precept of liberalism and socialism. Stated in various ways by many thinkers, it can be summarized as the view that all individuals must be granted the maximum possible freedom as long as that freedom does not interfere with the freedom of anyone else."
He got to choose his own fairly unassailable position statements, but I still think Alex did a fantastic job in this.
This is an essay by Jon Trott of Jesus People USA about Jonathon David Brown[1], an audio engineer for Petra (and many other Christian bands), who was a member (and funder) of the KKK and other white identity groups.
The essay goes on to look at some of the racist streams at the heart of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity; it is long, but worth a skim.
"I’m sure the disinformed and the uninformed were also joined by a large number of misogynists, racists, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists, who truly believe in the program Trump is about to unveil. But a lot of Trump voters just haven’t been paying attention. And that includes a lot of Mormons. I refuse to call them Latter-day Saints, because there is nothing saintly about ignoring everything their religion teaches them, including specific instruction in the D&C about electing “honest men and wise men” and “good men” (D&C 98:10). None of these words describe Trump."
I missed this back when it was published, but just stumbled on it and it is one of the best of the "leftists actually have guns too" type articles I've read.
Thomas Spence (2 July [O.S. 21 June] 1750 – 8 September 1814) was an English Radical and advocate of the common ownership of land and a democratic equality of the sexes. Spence was one of the leading revolutionaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814.
Good commentary from Matt Duss, former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders.
"In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans. As they enter the political wilderness, it’s time to reckon with what they got so wrong"
"John Dewey is commonly seen as the liberal philosopher par excellence. But his staunch commitment to democracy put him on a collision course with capitalism."
"You have a culture where you are fifty times more likely to get shot who have somehow convinced themselves that their attitude to guns keep them safer..."
I had to log in to Quora to upvote this one
"The decision not to inform or evacuate nearby civilians about the Trinity test came from the top-down. For Manhattan Project leader Gen. Leslie R. Groves, getting the bomb ready for wartime use in near-total secrecy was crucial and trumped all other considerations. Some Manhattan Project doctors and physicists had attempted to warn Groves and Oppenheimer about the possible exposure risk for surrounding communities"
From the pages of Genesis, which present work as a punishment for Adam’s sin, to the oft-quoted passage in The German Ideology in which Marx announced that in communist society it would be possible, instead of working, "to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind", a healthy mistrust of work is an integral part of our cultural tradition.
Agamben rediscovering Idle Theory: http://endgame.co.uk/idletheory/
Olha Illivna Taratuta (Ukrainian: О́льга Іллівна Тарату́та;[1][a] 1876–1938) was a Ukrainian Jewish anarchist and a founder of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC).
This thoughtfully anti-anarchist Atlantic article from 1902 (shortly after the assassination of President McKinley) is interesting to read today
"If there is one message I could share with the world, it is this: unless you and your community can determine your way of life, you are living within some form of prison. A carceral system that seeks to control and restrict our potential and imagination. If one of the most brutal dictatorships of the 21st century could crumble in a matter of days, then so too can the capitalist system that dominates and exploits our lives. We must be able to dream of that world, the way my father dreamt of Syria."
Good interview with Eugene from Hoods Hoods Klan -- antifascist Ukranian football hooligans fighting against the Russian invasion.
Here's also a short documentary about these guys from a couple of years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsodbPkjO3c
Adam Gadahn was a good writer
An Anarchist Programme
Good intro to anarchism
capitalism doesn't work
Good expose of the Red Guards Austin.
See also: https://maoistcultexposed.wordpress.com/
reading recommendations by the r/antiwork subreddit
"Ultimately, we cannot blame the Democrats for everything. We are the ones who failed to build movements powerful enough to survive their efforts to suppress us. We are the ones who are as yet unprepared to stop Trump from deporting millions of people and channeling billions of dollars more to billionaires and the security apparatus of the state."
"It’s senseless to have police randomly shooting people to enforce a $2.90 fare. The subways should be free, as they chiefly serve to put working-class people at the disposal of capitalist profiteers in the first place"
"Occupy Homes or Occupy Our Homes is part of the Occupy movement which attempts to prevent the foreclosure of people's homes. Protesters delay foreclosures by camping out on the foreclosed property. They also stage protests at the banks responsible for the ongoing foreclosure crisis, sometimes blocking their entrances."
"The Occupy movement was an international populist socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of real democracy around the world...
The first Occupy protest to receive widespread attention, Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, Lower Manhattan, began on 17 September 2011. By 9 October, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 951 cities across 82 countries, and in over 600 communities in the United States."
This is a good, concise history of the legal attempts to keep anarchists out of the USA and the beginnings of the Free Speech movement that formed to defend them.
Julia Rose Kraut also has a full length book that I'd like to read called "Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States"
"These extremely online young Christian men want to end the 19th Amendment, restore public flogging, and make America white again."
(On Eden Ahbez's "Nature Boy")
Zoe Baker traces historical meanings of the word proletariat and it uses by 19th century socialists.
A recording of Zoe reading the essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnxpfpXF_es
Today I learned that Shepard Fairey designed the Soviet-style Mozilla poster/mascot.
"So that was the time that I somehow convinced a multi-billion dollar corporation to give away the source code to their flagship product and re-brand it using propaganda art by the world's most notorious graffiti artist." -jwz
"Jesse Stewart survived from ad revenues on YouTube, but fame came at a cost"
"From Soapy Smith in the 1880s to James Hogue in the 2020s, scammers are a staple of Colorado."
"Mathias Rust (born 1 June 1968) is a German aviator known for his flight that ended with a landing near Red Square in Moscow on 28 May 1987. A teenage amateur pilot, he flew from Helsinki, Finland, to Moscow, without authorization."
"In the early hours of February 4, 1999, an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student named Amadou Diallo (born September 2, 1975) was fired upon with 41 rounds and shot a total of 19 times by four New York City Police Department plainclothes officers: Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Kenneth Boss."
"Although Congress instructed the Attorney General in 1994 to compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force, this was never carried out, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not collect these data."
I thought it could be interesting to discuss some what-ifs, trying to imagine what the future of technology will look like in the face of this strong global anti-democratic trend. What technologies will we all be asked to make and what concessions will be forced upon us?
"The Uihleins have used their wealth to funnel millions of dollars into the most extreme right-wing politicians and movements in the United States."
Crypto For The Homeless is a non-profit that uses cryptocurrency to reimburse volunteers who deliver supplies and food to homeless and houseless humans around the world.
Listen to it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sfnwFV92XY
"This form of Christianity with no justice and no compassion must be rejected. It’s not worth preserving and it is not liberative, prophetic, and Christ-centered to emancipate Black people and people of color in this nation. Its basic premise is the denial of Black humanity and dignity, and Black rights and future possibilities in this society."
"Dolge is an anarchist, an atheist and a communist." – Judge Hardin
Somehow I have never heard of Alfred Dolge -- an inventor of musical instruments and an industrial-socialist who built a utopian town in New York around a felt factory. This audio program by Dave Hilowitz tells the story of the the rise and fall of Dolgeville.
I didn't listen to this whole thing (almost 6 hours!) but it seems comprehensive!
Here's a link to my own AT hike in 2011/2012:
https://mretc.net/~cris/AT2011/
Good 2018 talk by Cory Doctorow on the impossibility of crypto-anarchy (or at least of crypto-anarchy alone).
This is the article where I first learned about Kurt Steiner
"I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here."
I met this guy on my 2013 Colorado Trail thru hike when he was doing a section he skipped. He also has a good journal of his Northville-Placid Trail thru hike (https://trailjournals.com/journal/entry/477698)
"Over 40 people delayed the sweeping of a South Dallas homeless encampment on Friday morning, blocking off the camp with their bodies and cars. Some were armed with rifles."
"We are abolitionists fighting for the rights of unhoused people through mutual aid and direct action."
an essay on nostalgia
On the JIS ghost characters
video essay comparing EZLN to anarchist thought of Magon.
good guys FIF
I found this helpful for an aran sweater I'm about to start
For almost 40 years Ken Smith has shunned conventional life and lived without electricity or running water in a hand-made log cabin on the banks of a remote loch in the Scottish Highlands.
This blogger took a tour of the ecovillage founded by Gabriel of Urantia (who I've written about previously: https://americancynic.net/log/2012/6/7/gabriel_of_urantia/). It looks pretty nice.
An interview with the Russian anarchists who run antijob.net
How Life Imitates Chess, by Garry Kasparov
Larisa Arap (Russian: Лари́са Ива́новна Ара́п; born in 1958) is a Russian opposition activist who became a victim of involuntary commitment in the psychiatric facilities of Murmansk and Apatity, soon after publishing her article about mistreatment of patients in the same hospital where she was committed in July, 2007. She was released after 46 days of confinement, on August 20, 2007.
John Pike ("Pepper Spray Cop," "Pepper Spraying Cop" or "Casually Pepper Spraying Everything Cop") was a lieutenant in the UC Davis Police Department. He gained notoriety for pepper spraying peaceful, sitting protesters during the UC Davis protest on Friday November 18.
See also the documentary "God's Cartoonist - The Comic Crusade of Jack Chick":
A readable summary of Advaita Vedanta theology and epistemology.
[Philosophy East and West, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jan., 1962), pp. 231-237.]
An interview with Sarah Kernochan about making and later finding the negatives for the Marjoe documentary.
Putting all of these movies on my to-watch list.
Check out this hipster doofus.
Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (1851 – 8 May 1919) was a Russian revolutionary. She was friends with the nihilist Sergei Nechaev, tried to kill the governor of St. Petersburg, and co-founded the first Russian Marxist group.
Obviously chess and tetris are both very leaky metaphors for life, but I liked the comparison and the emphasis on inner life of tetris over external struggle of chess.
Police don't prevent mass shootings, though they do maintain a society where they regularly happen and then use them to try to justify their own existence.
See also my article "SWAT Team Fife" that focuses on the Columbine response: https://americancynic.net/log/2018/6/7/swat_team_fife/
Chess players in Myanmar protest the military coup and arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi by playing without their queens.
microRevolt projects investigate the dawn of sweatshops in early industrial capitalism to inform the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labor
Cory Doctorow on GMErgate and why shorts are actually good.
I think one reason the GameStop thing is fun is because it is apocalyptic in the sense that it reveals the hypocrisy and opt-in delusions of capitalism. I like this take:
"And the Redditors said, “Who cares? I don’t care about your equations. I don’t care about your valuation models. I’m going to make the price go up because all it is to me is a number on the screen.” So they just stripped all the pretense out of Wall Street and used that to expose it and to screw it."
"So to sum it up, don’t be a fucking idiot and bypass White Metal because you don’t like what they’re saying because guaran-damn-teed you will miss out on some critically great stuff due to blind ignorance and…fear."