Oh shit you got me talking political theory. Here we go…

One thing I’ve observed when people discuss anarchist theory or practice is that it is frequently imbued with a radical absolutism that isn’t applied to other political theories. It’s common to see people asking how the world could work without any rules, or punishments, or coercion? You almost never encounter honest questions of a similar type for, say, socialism, e.g. how will I ever get anything done if I need the state to plan everything I do? Or the capitalist case, how would the world work if everything is someone else’s property? No serious socialist believes the state should plan everything. No serious capitalist believes that all things should be private property for profit. No serious anarchist believes that the world can be free of all regulation.

So why is this? I have a two part theory. When the socialist revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were unfolding, the socialist camp split between authoritarian and anarchist socialists. In the end the authoritarians (communists) won that conflict and expelled the anarchists. This left the world with two camps, the communists, championed by the Soviet Union, and the capitalists, championed by the United States. Both camps considered anarchists villainous enemies, and both camps spent the next 50+ years producing voluminous propaganda extolling their own virtues, and denigrating their enemies. This meant that anarchists were being dunked on by two super powers for most of the 20th century without anyone of even remotely similar influence to respond. As a result basically everyone’s understanding of anarchism is a caricature produced by anarchism’s opponents.

The second part of this theory is the fact that there really are a lot of self-described anarchists who adhere to this cartoon version of anarchism! I find this harder to explain. Perhaps it is that anarchism as an active political force was effectively destroyed during this period, and today’s anarchists are in some significant part the people who were exposed to the cartoon anarchism propaganda, and thought, hey I like that. It could be that political anarchism has no influence and thus no responsibility to achieve anything, so why not indulge in ideological purity contests. I don’t really know.

This bums me out, because I think practical anarchist theory has a lot to like. Not a theory that says I may do whatever I want whenever I want, and anything which impinges on that is oppression. Rather one that says that imbalanced power relations are necessary and sufficient for exploitation and oppression, and so we should build political structures that distribute power as broadly as possible. That we should minimize hierarchy and coercion to enable people to spontaneously organize to solve problems.

And when spontaneous organization isn’t sufficient for the problem, an anarchism that has the practical humility to apply different techniques. Utopia is a direction, not a destination.

Has anyone been able to find the list of persons included in the source? Vmfunc’s blog says that a list was published but later taken down.

EDIT: wayback machine of course

Swiss pikemen would become the last word in European warfare for some 200 years

Ahem… Marignano, Biccoca, Pavia

#team_landsknecht

Mitchell Hashimoto is trying to build a reputation system to combat this https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

Yes with one quirk. I don’t use the right shift, just the left. Not sure why I’ve ended up this way, or if it’s a common variation.

EDIT: looked it up. It’s very common

a very small number of its actions have amounted to terrorist action

Really? Most I found on their Wiki was beating up some guards during their break-ins. Assault? Sure. But terrorism?

https://www.cps.gov.uk/types-crime/terrorism

Oh. Disrupting a computer for a political purpose is terrorism in the UK. Hacktivists and bus bombers, basically the same thing.

Some quick googling suggests you can get a Blu-ray drive for under $100. What prices are you seeing?

Edit: example https://www.newegg.com/p/1FV-006F-00095?item=9SIC1DRKPJ0999&source=region

Revoking drivers licenses would probably be more appropriate than seizing vehicles. The upside to that is revoking licenses, I’d wager, is a whole lot cheaper than installing and monitoring speed trackers.

So long as the person with the speeding problem is paying for that I guess it’s acceptable. But then we have yet another example of people without much money getting a raw deal. Means testing? Everything gets complicated when it gets to the implementation details.

Not much in this article really. Starts out with claiming that progressives didn’t like pollution, and thus became anti science. Doesn’t elaborate. Drops the thread entirely, and continues with a couple different arguments.

First that subsidizing demand with constrained supply just increases prices. Fair enough. Second argument is that there are too many veto points in the building/producing pipeline. Probably also fair.

But that’s really the whole Abundance argument, and the article alludes to that book repeatedly. I can’t tell if this was supposed to be its own original argument, or just a description of the Abundance arguments. I bet there are better synopses of the Abundance arguments than this article though.

Are we talking about the Donut Labs battery, or is someone alse promising to bring solid state batteries to market this year? My gut says Donut Labs is like 1/8 odds of coming through.

A poignant reminder of how ludicrous it is that nearly all of our public information sources are privately owned.

Put a # TODO comment on it

Thermaltake Riing fan controller needs special python software. It worked fine from RPM in Fedora 42, but it hasn’t been updated for Fedora 43 yet. Tried installing with pip, and creating a systemd service, but it didn’t work immediately, and haven’t had time to fuss with it again. Probably just going to get new fans I can control through mobo.

Was using default Fedora gnome, but it started getting into hibernation loops. Swapped to KDE, but I’m not sure I cleaned up the gnome install perfectly.

What about coffee?

And now I have GPS brain like everyone else

I did this for a bit. I knew basically every street in half of a mid-size city, just like… in my head.

Qatar has much better relations with Iran than most Arab states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Qatar_relations

https://www.alexgrey.com/art/ for more. NSFW

Maybe they’re betting that the telcos have more money for their legal departments than the FCC does. I wonder though if it’s true that a jury can award damages in excess of the requested amount in the case of regulatory fines the same way juries can when deciding civil suits for damages. Maybe.

This is what the internet was made for