Notices by HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social), page 2

@rad @MisuseCase @RD4Anarchy

Anarchism does not object to voluntary and consensual relationships that lack mechanisms of enforcement.

@holyramenempire @MisuseCase

This misconstrues the anarchist critique of authority. Voluntarily adopted roles and unenforceable decisions do not constitute hierarchy in the sense of *rule.* People taking on specified roles is more of an issue of taxonomy than of hierarchy, although we tend to colloquially use the latter term for both.

It’s popular to compare the behavior of the Israeli state in Gaza to that of Nazi Germany, probably because that is, for most people, the historical touchstone for this kind of violence.

But people don’t need to look that far away or that far back for an analogy. The closest comparison is to Israel’s neighbor and contemporary, Syria under the Bashar al-Asad regime.

Asad’s forces also use mass murder of civilians. They use sieges and starvation. They kidnap and they torture. They destroy infrastructure and bomb entire cities into ruin and rubble. They do all of this with the barest sanction from the international community and with the active support of major regional and global powers.

“The mound of discarded fabric in the middle of the Atacama weighed an estimated 11,000 to 59,000 tons, equivalent to one or two times the Brooklyn Bridge…clothing produced by the world’s most well-known brands: Nautica, Adidas, Wrangler, Old Navy, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Forever 21, Zara, Banana Republic. Store tags still dangled from many of her findings.”

We have more than enough clothes for anyone who wants them; there is no material reason for people unclothed or without shoes to remain so.

People go without because of capitalism: because capitalists profit by interfering with our access to the stuff we make together. It’s more profitable for them to dump mountains of clothes in the desert than it is to let people have those items.

https://grist.org/international/burn-after-wearing-fashion-waste-chile/

@hosford42

Ok…let me think about this a bit

“There’s a roughly 50% chance that I will be ruled by a fascist tyrant by the end of this calendar year. I will prepare for this by doing absolutely nothing.”

I’m not downplaying the threat of fascism: it’s very real and has been a real and growing fact in the lives of many Americans.

I’m mocking anyone who won’t shut up about how trump poses a fascist threat but also won’t change *anything* in their life as if fascism were an actually imminent reality.

If Biden loses—or, more likely, if Trump coups his way into power—I fully expect that a lot of liberals will devote more of their energy into yelling at people online for not voting hard enough than in resisting the fascism they keep warning us is imminent.

@hosford42

The most critical thing should be building networks of like-minded people who can be trusted and the second-most critical thing should be reading about the experience of the French Resistance. Like “how do I stay safe if someone in my network is captured and tortured to reveal identities of co-conspirators.”

@simon_brooke

I figured that those schools were mostly for marks to be exploited by the grifters, not for grifters to learn their trade

Something I find fascinating is the way in which awful people seem to instinctively know how to be awful.

So like abusers tend to follow particular and predictable patterns for manipulating their victims. Groomers have these strategies for grooming. Fascists come to power in similar ways to each other. Con artists win their victims’ trust in ways remarkably similar to each other.

Do they all go to some evil villain school to learn these techniques? Or are some people just legitimately born with these instincts? I’m somewhere on the spectrum and I struggle to intuit basic social interactions, much less routinely manipulate them to my advantage.

How does that work?!

@TruthSandwich@fedi.truth-sandwich.com @jeffowski

The funniest thing about this is that the “moderate left” in TS’s comment, ie, the center-right, is explicitly opposed to meeting everyone’s basic needs.

@lumpentrashbandit @hakan_geijer

Thank you both for posting these because I hate that fucker but was leery of being on the receiving end of yet another pile-on

@hakan_geijer

I am not surprised you disagree, because most people disagree when they hear this idea. It feels so supremely contrary to our own lived, subjective experience.

But it’s true! As you noted yourself, you made the change and then adopted a belief system that accords with that change.

Religious beliefs don’t make people do bad things. They don’t make people do good things either.

Beliefs generally don’t make people do anything at all. That is, beliefs are not really *causal* to behavior. People tend to act like the people around them, the people they associate with and can observe (in person or virtually). We adopt beliefs primarily as ex post facto justifications for *why* we acted the way we did. They make it possible for us to live with our actions, but they don’t *cause* our actions.

Culture? Ideology? Religion? Not particularly useful indicators of how someone will behave.

@RD4Anarchy @violetmadder @bontchev @aral

Global deaths from air pollution have risen steadily for at least the last three decades.

Heads up, the following accounts are all run by the same pro-genocide troll:

@jopy@universeodon.com

@dial@mastodon.world

@plan@mastodonapp.uk

@gentleegg7079@mastodon.cloud

You might have noticed that contemporary society is very complex.

There are a lot of people in the world—a staggering 8.1 billion people—which means a lot of potential relationships between people and a lot of potential interactions.

One consequence of this complexity is the need for lots and lots of information to manage it all. The world produces, processes, consumes, and stores an unimaginable amount of information every single day.

And, perversely, the production of all that information generates the need for yet more information, more management—and, thus, more complexity.

More information? You probably need more digital storage, which means more production, more serial numbers, more inventories. You might need more archivists, more documentation, more indexing. You can see how this snowballs.

1/10

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-generated-per-day#

Like I said, fairly mundane. But it adds up when you consider that this process is playing out in every single aspect of our lives. It’s everywhere. We are drowning in information, overloaded and overwhelmed by it.

So some people specialize in curating that information for customers. Or aggregating it. Governments around the world spend billions of dollars each year on intelligence apparatuses to collect, process, and convey information is a desperate attempt to make the world more legible to state leaders. And all of these processes create yet more complexity.

It is unsustainable.

Consider bitcoin, the consumate solution in search of a problem. Despite the promises of its boosters, bitcoin and crypto generally have not displaced any pre-existing currencies. They have just massively piled yet more complexity on top of the global economy, virtually all of it bullshit. Bitcoin “mining” now consumes two whole percent of electricity in the US, all to perform math problems that are entirely pointless by design.

None of that touches on the vast architecture that has accreted around cryptocurrency—the forums and the exchanges and the NFTs—like some cancerous tumor.

Complexity on top of complexity on top of complexity.

3/10

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/over-2-percent-of-the-uss-electricity-generation-now-goes-to-bitcoin/

Let’s consider a fairly mundane example. Amazon is a gigantic network of buyers and sellers. Its operation involves the use of huge quantities of information—about prices and quantities, supply chains and delivery dates, bank accounts and interest rates.

It is, in short, a tool our society created to help manage some of that enormous complexity and make sense of that vast quantity of information (Jeff Bezos’ parasitic rentier ownership aside).

Some enterprising individuals figured out they could exploit Amazon to sell fake products. This poses legitimate problems: some of those knock-offs might genuinely hurt people.

So: society had a lot of complexity and created a new system for making sense of that complexity, but now there’s even *more* complexity as a result. Rather than trusting the system to produce reliable results with minimal effort, customers have to expend additional effort to figure out if they’re actually paying for what they set out to buy.

Since Amazon doesn’t care—they get paid either way—perhaps we’ll see professional Amazon validators emerge, whom the public can hire to evaluate and aggregate Amazon information.

Complexity on top of complexity on top of complexity.

2/10

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazon-counterfeit-fake-products/