Passenger

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Just another anarchist streetfighter I guess. Most of what I post is about my other interests.

If you want to follow me, be warned: I boost a *lot* of stuff.

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Last Notes

2026-10-06 11:53:36 UTC

"But this is divisiveness!" is something you hear from White people every time racism is pointed out. "There are people who are not going to be able to support you!"
There were already people who weren't able to support the previous policy: the victims of that racism. There was already divisiveness there, between racist and victim, caused by that racism. All that's happening is that other people are realigning to side with the victims rather than the perpetrators.

2026-10-05 08:34:59 UTC

There's a bunch of White people on my timeline who are sad that their racism is being pointed out, and are angry at the people pointing it out.
"By this definition of racism, I and many of the other White people I associate with in almost-entirely-White spaces are being called racist! I find this very insulting, especially considering that I've always conformed to what my White community has considered politeness and social acceptability!"
I mean, nothing's actually changed, White people are always saying this, but the surprise and vehemence with which they say it makes it feel as if every time is the first time.

2026-10-04 08:27:47 UTC

When I grew up, I learned about this faraway country called Scotland, as part of learning about various countries in the world. You know how it is when you're a kid, and you learn one or two facts about each place?
I learned about Scotland:
1. It rains all the time there. Constantly. Even more than in the Drakensberg mountains. Even more than in Wemmershoek.
2. In Scotland, people eat sandwiches with a knife and fork.

2026-09-30 09:09:24 UTC

"humanity is destroying the Earth" factoid actualy just statistical error. average human destroys zero Earths. Investments Georg, who lives in penthouse & builds natural gas power plants to run datacentres nobody wants, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

2026-09-05 21:20:41 UTC

This is just to say that if you're complaining about the fascists in Dover, and your complaint is about them wearing black and being masked, then be aware you're doing splash damage to antifascists, and that makes it hard to see you as an ally.

2026-09-03 22:34:56 UTC

I hear a lot of people talking about the need for a new approach to software. Some of these are people I respect; most are people I know nothing about but their arguments seem well-reasoned.
I think there's a mistake here though.

2026-08-20 17:15:42 UTC

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@nprofile…nmr0
This is well said.
I view voting kinda like I view prayer: if it brings you nice things then that's great, I won't turn that down, but it would not be prudent to plan assuming it will work. We actually have to do things.
And like prayer, while the act itself may be harmless, the act is often done by people who insist in pushing the belief that it's the only thing that should be done and we should not do things, which is not a harmless belief.

2026-08-20 15:02:45 UTC

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@nprofile…feag @nprofile…nm66
This is a strong point. Perhaps he got an LLM to tweet it for him.

2026-08-17 21:30:04 UTC

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@nprofile…vuvh
This is so cool.

2026-08-14 17:07:40 UTC

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@nprofile…glyx
I laughed for several minutes when I saw this.
Fedjacketing is absolutely the most harmful thing you can do in any movement. The charges cannot meaningfully ever be proven or disproven, and the mutual distrust it creates will never go away.

2026-08-13 12:30:41 UTC

It is hot enough today that my pot plants are all wilting.
I kinda feel they have a point.

2026-08-10 12:40:08 UTC

It breaks my heart to be a cop about this, but some people have been committing the uncool sort of crimes.
Safety glasses that allow you to view an eclipse are coded ISO-12312-2. However, people have been putting that code on cheap sunglasses and then selling them as eclipse-safe. Unlike fake Versace stuff down the market, this fake has consequences: you can harm your eyes using them.
At the time of writing there are three manufacturers in the UK who can be vouched for: Sollunae, Absolute Eclipse and First Light Optics. Be careful when not buying their stuff.

2026-08-08 08:04:29 UTC

If you haven't been around bigots enough, you may not know this, so this will be a reminder for some and news to others.
Bigots don't repeat slander because they think it's literally true.
Bigots repeat slander because if it was true, it would justify the actions that they would like to take (or see taken on their behalf.)
This is why attacking the truth of the slander they're repeating does nothing. It just exhausts us, platforms them, and they'll continue repeating it anyway.

2026-08-06 15:02:16 UTC

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@nprofile…2wxk
Vivian.
So that Musk will have to say his daughter's name in interviews.

2026-07-30 23:44:10 UTC

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@nprofile…aqfx
It's also often used as a way to make the service into a mark of shame, and therefore encourage people who can afford to go without it to go without it. This means that only politically powerless people use the service, so it doesn't need to be good.
It's nefarious.

2026-07-28 17:24:11 UTC

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@nprofile…6n3c
Nazis are usually nice to me* because I'm an able bodied cis het White guy from a Christian background in a country they like. This puzzled me the first time I came across it, and then I understood why.
To people who are as privileged as I am, bigotry comes off as niceness, and I think a lot of people don't understand that.
---
* Until they find out my politics and my opinion of them.

2026-07-27 14:59:40 UTC

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It turns out that climate collapse doesn't stop at international borders. When Americans and Europeans pump carbon into the atmosphere, our climate collapses too.

2026-07-27 14:58:39 UTC

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You might be thinking, "That's not that excessive, it's hot all over." And you would be right except for one thing: Johannesburg is in the southern hemisphere.
This is the depths of winter.
Even in summer, Johannesburg is the world capital of "bring a jacket just in case, it'll be colder than you think", and now in the depths of winter it is t-shirt weather.

2026-07-27 14:56:16 UTC

It's 19 C today in Johannesburg.
NINETEEN DEGREES

2026-07-24 19:45:07 UTC

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@nprofile…nmr0
I am not a classicist but I can absolutely vouch for Wilson's Odyssey. It's amazing.
I read it to my wife a section at a time, as a cute couple thing, and we really enjoyed it. It reads out loud very well.

2026-07-20 18:20:49 UTC

A pet peeve:
LLMs do not "democratise intelligence." They commodify it.
Democratising something means that everyone has the same access to it regardless of how much money and power they have. Commodifying something means that you can buy as much of it as you can afford.
You have to be really far gone to confuse the two.

2026-07-08 17:37:31 UTC

Britain, 2024: Farage says "Reform will make sure the bins are taken out"
Britain, 2026: Farage taken out by a bin.

2026-07-04 20:02:36 UTC

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Firstly and most obviously: the clothes are uniform.
No two people in a black bloc will be wearing the same getup, besides black and a mask. Some wear hoodies, some snoods, some baseball caps. Some wear trainers, some walking boots and some Docs. I often wear hoodies and army boots because it's what I'm comfortable in.
You will frequently see people turn up to black bloc wearing battle jackets, or band hoodies, despite these being a bad idea because they identify you.
These fash are all wearing exactly the same clothes. Exactly. This is a uniform and it means someone bought it for them (edit: or they have a supplier they all buy from, and enough discipline to ensure they all obey.) Either way this means there's organisation and money behind it, and while these fash might be the very visible front line, they're also just part of a larger machine.

2026-07-04 19:57:29 UTC

There's a few pictures currently going around of a group of Patriot Front fascist paramilitaries on Washington DC public transport.
A lot of people are worried by this. Some have talked at length about their worries.
As someone who spends a certain amount of time in black bloc, let me talk you through some things I haven't seen said about these pictures but that I think are very relevant.

2026-06-16 07:48:43 UTC

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@nprofile…z9vq
One of the issues in my area is that there is increasingly nothing else for kids to do. Youth centres are run on a shoestring or closed down entirely, parks react to groups of loitering kids as if they're criminals, and malls don't want them there unless they're going to buy something.
I suspect that a certain amount of why kids use social media is that it's a refuge: there is nowhere else for them to go to socialise with people their own age.

2026-06-06 07:22:15 UTC

RIP John Blanche, Marjane Satrapi, Anthony Head.
I was thinking about this and was struck by the thought that there have been far more deaths of nice people than of awful ones, and this is a reminder that there *are* far more nice people than awful ones. The bad may be loud and powerful but they're also outnumbered.

2026-05-31 20:28:27 UTC

London peeps:
This is a TEFL Workers Union picket organised with the IWW. Please pass it on, and if you want to come you'd be welcome.
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/671/061/050/168/156/original/dd48eecb91b25090.jpg

2026-05-22 22:03:00 UTC

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@nprofile…8kf3
I gotta say, "Google Search is added to the list of products killed by Google" was not on my year's bingo card.

2026-05-18 17:17:25 UTC

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@nprofile…nmr0
Your role as an oppressed person is to give up your life as a shock trooper fighting for liberation, evidently.
Usually only in ways that they consider acceptable and effective though.

2026-05-18 15:30:38 UTC

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@nprofile…z6hp
The man gives me the willies.

2026-05-17 20:19:39 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em @nprofile…j7pl
I had to look it up, yeah they still exist. (I have no idea which brands sell oranges, I just eat the things.)

2026-05-17 08:37:41 UTC

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@nprofile…j7pl
As a South African:
The fact that you didn't sell us weapons (and later, oil) was a bigger deal. It helped drive our fascist regime towards surrender, which in turn drove it towards the negotiating table.
But the weapons and energy embargoes could not have happened until the smaller embargoes had shown the way. Did sports and entertainment sanctions drive South Africa to revolution? No. Would the later more effective sanctions have happened if the sports and entertainment sanctions didn't happen? Also no.

2026-05-08 07:45:02 UTC

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@nprofile…aamq
Nazis: *does exactly the same thing the conservatives did, only with some added brutality*
People: this sucks, I'm gonna vote for a centre-right party
And thus the great cycle continues.

2026-05-06 10:34:14 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq
I read it differently: I think Starmer has blocked all attempts to replace him because there have been no serious organised attempts to replace him; this in turn is because his internal enemies would like him to take the fall for what will probably be disastrous council elections.
Like, anyone can see that tomorrow is going to be ugly for whoever is the party leader. I can see it, you can see it, and presumably the party insiders can see it too. They may not have wanted to fight for the honour of drinking from the poison chalice.
Let's see what happens after tomorrow.

2026-05-03 13:48:19 UTC

Lazyweb question for literature people, boosts welcome:
Cervantes' book Don Quixote is often called the first novel. Fiction writing certainly existed before that, but the novel form is a specific subset of fiction writing, and would have had a start.
In a similar way, what was the first short story?

2026-05-03 09:56:00 UTC

For those who don't read Francophone social media, there is currently hilarity.
Jordan Bardella, a fascist and the probable next president, has tweeted that "when all seemed lost, Jeanne d'Arc lit a fire. We as a nation must do likewise."
Given what happened to Jeanne d'Arc, this is pretty funny.

2026-05-01 05:08:06 UTC

I am writing this on Tusky, which is free software that someone had to write. It is running on an older Android phone, which someone had to assemble from components that other people had to make from raw materials that still other people had to produce.
You are reading this because it was transmitted via a sophisticated international communications system which someone had to design and someone else had to make from raw materials that someone else had to produce.
The electricity also had to be produced by someone, using machinery made by someone else.
Happy May Day, y'all. The world is nothing without our labour. Our masters know this; we should too.

2026-04-23 13:42:39 UTC

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@nprofile…vuvh
To follow on from your last point: to lobby not only to reduce the fee, but also to raise it on everyone except you, so as to drive any new competitors out of business.

2026-04-19 20:10:07 UTC

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@nprofile…nmr0
This is kinda what Graeber says too: instead of the old model of overturning the state and then deciding what comes next, we build the replacement society first and only then are able to overthrow the state.

2026-04-19 08:31:49 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq
At the risk of sounding like the burned-out former academic that I am, remember what Césaire said.
European institutions have always had a population whose fate they controlled but were indifferent about, and another population whose fate they cared about deeply but were less able to control. When those institutions were created, the first group was "people living in the colonies" and the second was "people living in the metropole", but as Europe decolonised and then lost its influence, the institutions have shifted to different populations.
What looks like the collapse of society, says Césaire, is just colonial ways of operating applied to the home country.

2026-04-17 22:03:04 UTC

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@nprofile…440k @nprofile…8pur
The size of a really large hailstone, probs.

2026-04-17 21:26:48 UTC

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@nprofile…prl4
❤️🖤

2026-04-15 12:49:01 UTC

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@nprofile…sgzh @nprofile…nmr0
My current working hypothesis, as an ex-Christian, is that Christianity is two things:
A) Whatever a given community's norms on a given matter are;
B) A set of aesthetic signifiers which can be applied to A.
A is intensely localised. If a given community feel that feeding the hungry is good, then it becomes part of Christianity to them. If they feel that oppressing LGBTQIA+ people is good, then that becomes part of Christianity to them. As such, it may be more accurate to talk of "christianities" rather than "Christianity."
The same is true for Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Satanism and every other religion of course.
B, on the other hand, creates ambiguity and disguises this. One community's christianity tells them to murder Muslims; another community's christianity tells them to reject violence. Both communities make depictions of Jesus endorsing their actions, and thus both believe that they have some ideological common ground.

2026-04-12 21:33:26 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y @nprofile…fvgq
Let's see what happens. I am not a fan of fascists even if they choose to play well with the EU, as Meloni does.

2026-04-12 21:27:48 UTC

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@nprofile…fvgq @nprofile…la7y
People keep saying this and I worry that it's wishful thinking: Magyar is far more pro-EU than Orbán, but their positions on Ukraine (and on refugees) are broadly the same.
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-peoples-party-hungary-weapons-war-in-ukraine-aid-peter-magyar/

2026-04-10 18:00:13 UTC

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@nprofile…nmr0
Goodhart's Law keeps coming up, doesn't it?

2026-04-06 16:26:15 UTC

Anyone who does not spend all day every day watching Coca-Cola ads, reading kpop stan twitter and browsing incel buildmaxxing forums is:
A) A sensible person.
B) Living in a filter bubble, and making their life far richer as a result.
C) Ceding all right to complain about other people's filter bubbles.

2026-04-04 21:46:48 UTC

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@nprofile…d6rh
The longest thread in Leftcom online political history

2026-03-22 08:54:20 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq
I've been thinking about this and I think it has a lot to do with the way UK people see the US and want to copy it. When fascism rises over there, it also rises over here; when it falls over there, it falls over here.
Tom Nichols pointed out that we are in an age of incumbent disadvantage: the party in power is, instead of being more likely to be elected, now held to blame for the ills of the world and becomes less likely to be reelected. This is true not only of parties but seemingly of ideologies as a whole.
As such, I think UK fascism is suffering from the fact that fascism is in power in the US, and therefore has the incumbent disadvantage effect even though they're not in power here.

2026-03-20 13:51:48 UTC

(Please boost for wider views)
Of all the books you own, what's the one which a) you have never read, and b) is least likely out of all your books to ever be read, but c) you're unlikely to get rid of?
Mine:
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.

2026-02-28 09:20:35 UTC

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@nprofile…425c @nprofile…5807 @nprofile…x9tq
They did ask, there were leaked panicked internal Labour emails about it.
"If Corbyn wins a general election due to all the new Labour voters, then it will be very difficult for us to retain control of the party" was the takeaway mood of those emails. "Us" here means the Blairites, the professional party staffers recruited directly out of university politics and think tanks.
As ever, the Iron Law of Institutions holds: people inside an institution will tend to be willing to sacrifice the institution's overall good in order to ensure their factional control over that institution.

2026-02-27 12:01:49 UTC

This #followfriday , I'd like to shout out:
@nprofile…prl4 for being an amazing poet who more people should read.
@nprofile…meeq for having some of the most on-the-nose political analysis on fedi.

2026-02-26 06:19:13 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq
To the credit of Chinese leadership, a lot of the non-China drop is still due to China: they've become the main international-development funder these days.

2026-01-30 18:24:41 UTC

London peeps:
If you're going on the Palestine march tomorrow, be advised that UKIP are going to attempt to intercept it with a "march with Jesus." They've explicitly asked attendees to chant hymns and carry crosses.
Given what UKIP is nowadays, this is likely to be a farce, but also may attract proper fash drifters and may give the Met an excuse to be even more Met than usual.
Mask up, stay safe.

2026-01-25 08:57:48 UTC

Mass arrests at Wormwood Scrubs last night. People have been taken all over London.
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/01/24/wormwood-scrubs-protest-arrests/
If you're a Londoner and you want to help, please get in your local station support chat and see if they need you to volunteer to stand support. If you don't know how to reach them, contact G&BC, or DM me and I'll do my best to steer you.
Fuck the cops.

2026-01-22 08:50:01 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq
Anecdotally, in my industry, when people say "AI is taking the jobs" they often mean "we have oversized our data and management functions for over a decade now, and the AI bubble gives us an excuse to cut these functions back."
Not always, there are some people (Wes Streeting) who have genuinely bought into the hype, but a lot of it is a way of saving face while admitting that the analytics bubble itself has burst.

2026-01-07 07:31:55 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq
That author really is doing everything they can to avoid thinking the line "it turns out that the antifascist movement were right all along, we should have listened to them back then, we should be listening to them right now."
I wonder why they're avoiding thinking that? There are several common reasons why people do, but I'm not familiar enough with them specifically to hypothesise about their personal motivations.

2025-12-29 18:27:22 UTC

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@nprofile…fn6n
Hey, this is a cool picture. Do you know who the artist is?

2025-12-23 23:23:48 UTC

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@nprofile…2n40
The QAnon movement got new jobs. They're out there in ICE jackets right now, being the secret government strike teams that they long fantasised about.

2025-12-21 21:12:54 UTC

From comrades in Manchester. Please boost, please share, please attend.
* * *
This is a national call to oppose fascism and racism on our streets. From across Greater Manchester and the rest of the country, we must stand together on February 21st and make it clear that these fascists are not welcome in our communities or on our streets.
Britain First have called a ‘March for Remigration’ in February, a racist dog whistle that is calling for a white supremacist ethnic cleansing of the United Kingdom by the forced expulsion of non-white people.
Groups from across Greater Manchester are now banding together to call for a huge show of unity in opposing this horrific racism. Britain First and their supporters have been at the forefront of a four month campaign of racism in Fallowfield, and if they are allowed to walk through Manchester unopposed their racism, homophobia, and misogyny will run rampant.
This is a city with a proud Anti-Fascist heritage and it is vital we become the latest generation to stand up and be counted when far-right racists try and claim our streets as their own.
More details will come in time but for now: Save The Date, Get Organised, and Get Ready to Oppose Britain First and show them that racism and fascism will never be welcome on our streets.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DSiISkbjB8h/

2025-12-21 09:50:13 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj
On that, if you ever want to see someone jump really quickly from descriptive to normative, point out to them how uncommon it is to wear a red poppy out of season. Very few people do it, and that observation is acutely uncomfortable to those who do.

2025-12-21 09:44:56 UTC

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@nprofile…5awk @nprofile…hzyj
(Chris, please tell me if you don't want to be part of this tangent thread.)
The easy answer is that empathy and solidarity are the Left's main weapons. These are very powerful weapons too.
Beyond that, though, I think a lot of it has to do with who you see as "like you." For example, I am White and I need to work if I want to be able to afford my rent. My landlord is White and wealthy. My neighbour is Black and also working-class. Which of the two is "like me"?
I think this is why a lot of Right-wing tendencies will seize on and aestheticise economic descriptors, for example by taking the term "working class" and redefining it as an aesthetic or cultural description, rather than one that describes everyone who needs to work for a living. As soon as they start seeing a poor White kid from a decaying estate as being the same as a poor Black kid who arrived as a refugee then they're on a very quick path away from the Right.
Likewise, it's why Left-wing tendencies will encourage concepts of internationalism, of the fellowship of ideas, and of seeing commonalities with minoritised groups. We view being heterosexual as no more or less weird than being homosexual or bi or pan or ace or demi or anything else, for example, despite heterosexuality being much more common, because as soon as we start viewing the world in "normal" and "not normal" terms then we're on a very quick path away from the Left.

2025-12-21 09:29:26 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj
On your second point, I think I'd agree with you. I am fine with being described as an intellectual descendant of Kropotkin and Goldman. Most modern Piers Morgan fans would interpret it as an insult if you described them as the intellectual descendants of Julius Evola.
This is partially because of antiintellectualism (Leftist kids are constantly telling each other to read theory, it's an in joke because of how common it is, and there is no equivalent to this on the Right) but I would argue that a bigger part of it is, as Altemeyer argued, conformism.
Many on the Right see being normal as good, and therefore they feel they must describe their ideas as being innately normal; for them to admit that their ideas are in a specific intellectual tradition is to place them outside of the mythical "normal, mainstream, common sense", which is profoundly uncomfortable for a conformist.
This isn't true for everyone on the Right, but it is true for many of them. Piers Morgan is not going to self-describe as a fascist; I believe he doesn't consider himself to be a fascist even in private.

2025-12-21 09:07:49 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj
I'm not sure I'd agree with that, at least beyond a superficial level. There are certainly a lot of Right-wing dudes out there who are very angry that people aren't taking their ideas seriously as an intellectual tradition, but:
A) Most of them haven't engaged with the actual intellectuals in their own tradition (Burke, Schmitt, Evola) and so are reinventing it constantly in a half-baked way;
B) A lot of them would strongly recoil from being placed within the intellectual tradition of those thinkers - you have to be *really* far gone to admit to yourself that you are the intellectual descendant of Carl Schmitt;
C) Given A and B, a lot of it actually comes down to, as Asimov would say, the demand that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.

2025-12-21 08:49:13 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj
Thanks!
Never let it be said that I don't engage with Right-wing thinkers.

2025-12-21 08:30:06 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj
There's an Evola angle to this too, I'd argue.
When you take a person who's been brought up to trust authority, and you show them that authority is not trustworthy, then what do they do? Often, they try to find a greater authority to appeal to. If the cops are criminals then rather than live in a world with no cops they try to find a supercop to arrest them, even if that supercop doesn't exist.
The QAnon movement is an example of this: faced with a government that didn't do what they wanted, QAnon believers invented a fictional shadow government that was going to swoop in and save them. It was nonsense but it fulfilled a very real emotional need for a greater authority to protect them.
More damagingly, other people appeal to superauthorities that do actually exist but that have no business acting as authorities to appeal to: the military, for example, or the bond market, or foreign governments or individual billionaires.
And that's how coups get legitimised.

2025-12-15 07:07:45 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj
I'm not really a jazz guy but I do absolutely love this album.

2025-12-05 08:28:59 UTC

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@nprofile…lu0c
It only took Germans a century to acknowledge what they did in Namibia. Belgium has kinda-acknowledged what they did in Congo but not fully. Neither have made the sort of restitution that would indicate genuine remorse. Britain has not begun to discuss what they did in Kenya; there were rumours years ago of British security agents planning a coup on the off-chance that a government was elected which did begin to discuss it.
Honestly, genocide does feel like a fairly core European value.

2025-11-30 09:59:48 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj
My understanding is that this is also a money thing?
Trial by jury is expensive and slow. If you're the UK, which is a country that's slowly ratchetting the state onto more and more of a shoestring, it's unthinkable to actually fund as many trials as you'd like to hold, and that has very much been a brake on mass arrests over the last five years or so.
Trial by magistrate is far cheaper and faster. It makes mass arrests affordable, which means that the UK can have carceral brutality without having to properly fund that carceral brutality.

2025-11-29 08:03:53 UTC

Boycotts aren't enough.
A boycott doesn't tell a company that they've pissed you off: it tells a company that you have the option to not consume their products. It's very hard to boycott the electricity company or the water company, because you need their products.
This is why Google and Amazon are who they are. You want to boycott Google products? Good luck living in the modern world. Google have intentionally made themselves too important and ubiquitous to be successfully boycotted. It's not just the tech companies either. If you live in a town which only has one supermarket - and many people do - then you can't realistically boycott them.
We, and by we I mean the masses, are too weak to boycott these companies. Consider that for a moment. Consider the staggering power inequality that this demonstrates. We need stronger weapons.

2025-11-17 14:08:03 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua
I would love to see this data broken down by race and income.

2025-11-16 07:23:21 UTC

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@nprofile…08mx
Hopefully he also repents for being the person who enforced, prior to becoming pope, every Catholic hospital in North America clamping down on gender-confirming surgery.
And by repents I mean undoes it.

2025-11-09 11:38:23 UTC

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@nprofile…l56c
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/519/529/486/181/945/original/9c0d18528affebff.png
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2025-11-08 17:03:31 UTC

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@nprofile…ew96
I have been persuaded by the argument that it's because a lot of bosses (or people who fancy themselves bosses) resent dealing with programmers and other skilled computer folk, and want a computer that makes us unnecessary.
Over the years there have been many computer products that have promised this dream, and they've all been briefly popular but all have failed because the dream itself is impossible: there is no product that can free you from the burden of having to think hard about abstract concepts and express yourself without ambiguity.

2025-11-01 18:37:38 UTC

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@nprofile…tvnd @nprofile…jjp5
Over here it got picked up by cryptofascist social media to replace "cuck" because that term got them laughed at, and then percolated out to the Right wing in general. Future academics could probably do an interesting study in how the term's spread shows how ideas percolate outwards from fascist networks into the broader Right.

2025-11-01 14:09:41 UTC

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I think what a lot of terves don't realise is that, outside of their weird online spaces, their politics are deeply unpopular.

2025-11-01 14:08:25 UTC

The terf turnout today was pathetic. We didn't get a very big turnout but even as it was we outnumbered them.
They hoped for sixty thousand. Lol.

2025-10-20 11:10:43 UTC

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@nprofile…e4ry @nprofile…2glr
"We will change the plan to suit humanity."
"We will change humanity to suit the plan."
I feel that Jane Jacobs had a lot to say about the choice between these two things, and while I'm sad that we lost her, I'm sort of relieved that she didn't live to see the Line.

2025-10-08 07:19:41 UTC

London peeps, please come (if you're not going to the Jewish anti-zionist demo.) Please boost. Text below is from the callout. You know the drill.
(This one might be quite fluffy but recently we can't assume anything.)
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🚨Emergency Protest🚨
Stop the far right in Whitechapel!
📆8 October from 5pm
🏢Town Hall, 160 Whitechapel Rd, E1 1BJ
The Pink Ladies (far right group who say immigration causes safety concerns for women and girls) have called a demo outside of Tower Hamlets Town Hall to protest a motion calling for action over the far right. Their call out has been retweeted by Tommy Robinson.
As Tower Hamlets Council workers, we know refugees don’t make us unsafe - the rise of racism is the real threat. We work with residents affected by poverty and we need to make clear that austerity has made living conditions worse, NOT migrants!
Join UNISON on the steps in front of our workplace from 5pm (or earlier if you want to help us leaflet)
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/337/316/186/013/237/original/bc996bdb9d884cbc.jpg

2025-10-06 20:23:27 UTC

Welcome to fedi, new friends.
What's your favourite metal band, and what's their most underrated album?
(Please boost so new people can see it.)

2025-08-28 12:22:35 UTC

What's the musical moment that was most unexpectedly exciting for you? Something that hit you during a song and made it absolutely transcendental?

2025-06-16 14:42:48 UTC

London peeps please boost (and attend if you can.)
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🏳️‍⚧️🏴 JOIN THE FEMINIST ANTI-FASCIST COUNTER DEMO AGAINST TOMMY ROBINSON AND THE FAR RIGHT 🏴🏳️‍⚧️
On the 28th of June, racist and zionist agitators including Tommy Robinson and the 'Democratic Football Lads Alliance' (DFLA) want to march from Russell Square to Downing Street against "grooming gangs".
The far-right is attempting to weaponise survivors' pain to incite racist pogroms when sexual violence is caused by patriarchy, not immigration. Fascists don't care about the safety of women and girls, they're out for their own gain.
We won't let this happen. Join us in taking a stand.
No rape! No racism!
No silence to violence!
We keep us safe
All genders welcome
28.06.25 - 11.30am
Central London location TBA
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/693/567/564/526/321/original/801c594d2b262cb4.jpg

2025-06-08 23:05:22 UTC

Reminder:
When a state calls people "violent" it doesn't mean that those people are actually behaving violently. What it means is that the state wants to make those people a target of its own violence.
It is not possible to be so peaceful that a hostile state doesn't call you "violent."

2025-06-08 08:41:33 UTC

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@nprofile…60lz
I think that is what the government wants, yes - and more broadly what the Westminster consensus wants.
I remember back a few years ago when the Tories were discussing bringing back conscription, a lot of the commentary in favour of it was not about its military value (which is low in the modern day) but in its value as a tool of social conformity - a way to "whip the kids into shape" and instill nationalistic and obedient values.
This is, I think, a big part of the current European push for remilitarisation, and especially in the UK where it's depressingly common for older people to openly hate the younger generations and actively wish misfortune upon them. Conscription is a way to hurt young people, and the increased ability to fight wars is just an added bonus.

2025-06-02 17:07:18 UTC

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@nprofile…4h8l
"M"
"F"
"X"
"What are you, a cop?"

2025-06-02 02:50:33 UTC

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Today's headline should read: "Man throws Molotovs at violent genocidal mob. Maybe his motives for doing so were awful."

2025-06-02 02:48:42 UTC

Sigh. I go away on one march and I come back and see a whole lot of people queueing up to defend the innocence of genocide supporters.
It. Is. Not. Possible. To. Peacefully. Call. For. Genocide. Even if the person doing that call has no intention of doing the genocide themselves, even if they're expecting some uniformed thug to do it on their behalf, they are doing violence. This is important when viewing the acts of suburbanites who know they don't have to do their own violence because there's a class hierarchy insulating them from it, but whose support is the lifeblood of every genocide.
To put it another way: punching a zionist, a transphobe or a White supremacist is always an act of self-defence, even if they lack the courage to get dirt on their own knuckles.
We all understand this, right? Please tell me that we all understand this? Because I see a lot of people not understanding it.

2025-05-17 10:20:24 UTC

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@nprofile…60lz
I still remember going canvassing for the Greens in 2019. We were a mixed group of Greens and anarchists. While walking, one of the Greens rambled about how she thought vaccines caused autism and people should instead protect themselves from disease by doing crossfit.
We anarchists were horrified. Some of the Greens looked quite embarrassed at her and some of them were just blanking it as background noise.
She then went on to rant about how our anti-police sentiment was going to alienate people, and how nobody would want to work with us if we took such extremist positions.
This is my experience with grassroots Greens. I won't say that it's necessarily representative of the entire party, but I do think it goes to show that it's a party with a very wide range of opinions within it; and this might complicate any attempt to turn it into a lifeboat for the Labour Left.

2025-05-09 05:57:07 UTC

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@nprofile…60lz
In the specific case of Reform I think it's definitely window dressing - nobody who's seen Farage operate for any length of time expects him to keep his word - but also more fundamentally that the Reform view of the world is one where Fujimori's maxim applies: "for my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law."
I.e. it doesn't matter what the upper tax rate is, it's not actually going to be enforced because under such a system laws aren't binding on the privileged.
So all it exists to do is provide a useful stick that can be used to beat wealthy people who are of the wrong opinions or ethnicity or who step out of line in some way. Likewise, they can talk about stricter rules about assault or street crime because it's tacitly understood that these aren't going to be applied against White people, and about a more generous welfare state because it's tacitly understood that this isn't going to be available to queers and Muslims.

2025-05-09 05:30:27 UTC

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@nprofile…60lz
I'd argue that it's not useful to see it as the Right adopting a Left position. Rather, I'd argue that the way to see it is that extremely low upper-rate taxation is a uniquely Centrist position, and when Right-wing regimes abandon it, it's a sign that they are abandoning a compromise with the Centre.

2025-05-02 20:17:51 UTC

I just realised that somewhere out there, there is almost certainly someone who's asked ChatGPT to give them the proof that P = NP, is now sending the resulting text to every academic they can find, and doesn't understand why they aren't being taken seriously.

2025-04-20 08:27:19 UTC

There's an argument about praxis going on right now between a bunch of my mutuals and I'm not going to tag them but they know who they are.
I'm just going to say this:
It is our responsibility as anarchists to reject forced dichotomies. "You must either support X or Y" is a false framing that exists within oppressive systems. It is the opposite of a politics of liberation and imagination. We can do better than that.
It is also our responsibility as anarchists to not get used as stormtroops by people who will later cynically dispose of us once they no longer need us. Remember the lessons of Kronstadt. Lenin was far better than the Tsarists, but he was also our enemy.
Finally and most importantly, it is our responsibility as anarchists to live as if we're already in a better world, inasmuch as this is possible. This means not turning a disagreement on tactics into value judgments about people's integrity. I know how hard this is when we live in failed capitalist states, with the legacy of the failures of liberalism all around us. We're all exhausted and it's easy to lash out. I get it. But let's do our best to form liberated zones among ourselves where we can breathe free air.

2025-04-19 06:06:55 UTC

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@nprofile…gd49 @nprofile…n2s5 @nprofile…92y4
I've often felt that it's analogous to the gadgetbahn problem in urban transit: that anyone pitching mass transit to a city has to reinvent the train from first principles and call it something new. Trains are a well-understood technology and that understanding extends to the costs of installation. Therefore, if you want to charge more than that, your idea can't be trains, it has to be upside-down trains or some other reinvented gadget with enough obfuscation.

2025-04-15 06:16:29 UTC

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@nprofile…60lz
I wonder what happened 17 years ago? That headline seems to suggest that mortgage lending has returned to a state that we saw then. I hope whatever happened back then was sustainable.

2025-04-13 21:20:01 UTC

I would love it if first-world people didn't use the phrase "third-world" to describe their countries' own political collapse.
Just a minor irritation, you know?

2025-04-09 06:19:45 UTC

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@nprofile…qkzz @nprofile…60lz
Interestingly the earliest known usage of that phrase is from a century ago, said by Elizabeth Bowen about Aldous Huxley.
"Mr. Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch-party. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person’s idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks."
It's a good phrase, which is why we reuse it.

2025-04-06 10:29:25 UTC

Finland is a country currently ruled by Nazis, and this becomes ever more apparent by the day. My sympathy to all residents of that unhappy land.
If you're a European, please consider the sort of people who are in charge within your bloc before you condescend to Americans. Yes, their country is current also in a very bad situation, but at least they're aware of how bad it is.
Yes, I am very angry.
https://piipitin.fi/@whangdoodler/114290462662711463

2025-04-05 09:24:11 UTC

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@nprofile…args
I just did the maths here.
I'm assuming we want Venus a little further out than Earth to compensate for its thicker atmosphere and to avoid gravitational problems, but still in the habitable zone.
I'm also assuming that we're using Saturn V heavy launch engines, because I happen to know the stats for those.
It would take 4.678 x 10^24 kg of fuel. Weirdly and conveniently, this is about 95% of the mass of the planet Venus, including its atmosphere. In other words, rather than moving the existing Venus, it would be as easy to make our own.

2025-04-04 22:20:20 UTC

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@nprofile…x3v4
Masks may not protect you against the cutting edge facial recognition that the best cops have, but:
A) The cops don't always get to play with their best toys, especially if they're overwhelmed by numbers.
B) Cops are only one threat. Fash are perhaps a more immediate threat, and journalists a more lasting one. If you're protesting outside a Tesla dealership then they'll have cameras too. None of these three groups have access to high-end police systems.
I've had fash try to dox me and fail because I had a simple covid mask on. Cops could probably have done it but it wasn't cops I was facing that day.

2025-03-27 22:15:09 UTC

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@nprofile…zc3x
Based on how much money they're spending on longevity, the last two humans alive on this planet are going to be Putin and Kurzweil, I swear.