It seems counterintuitive that Hitler could emerge in a country that led the world in science, architecture, and industrial design, where every town had orchestras playing Beethoven. Germany in the 1920s was one of those places and times in history where you had this critical mass of geniuses. And yet it went down the drain and was replaced by Hitler’s unspeakably barbaric regime.

Standard disclaimer here that Hett is very much a classic American liberal democrat and thus espouses plenty of that ideology in his responses here, but even so it is very funny to see Hett rebutting the interviewer who keeps trying to say "but isn't this just like Trump?" with "No, it's actually pretty different."

I think it's easy to look at Our Current American Moment and try to map it to, say, 1930s Germany but it's actually something quite a bit mutated from that. Relatable, yes, but not 1:1.

[Hitler's] supporters had a tendency toward political nationalism and were happy to be in a situation where they could break some left-wing skulls. The party may have been centered in lower-middle-class tradesmen, but some prominent, wealthy businesspeople around Munich were also attracted to him. It wasn’t until later that the Nazis’ following crystallized around the rural, Protestant middle classes and, to some extent, the upper-middle class.

This is, imo, the most comparable aspect of early Nazism to our current moment -- the linking-together of the rural regressive elements with the moneyed capitalist interests, which exist in the upper-middle to upper class strata of American society. This is very Nazi-esque, without a doubt.

I have to admit, I occasionally have the highly undemocratic thought that, though it’s great in theory for everybody to have a voice, not all voices are equal in merit.

Maybe so, Hett! Maybe so! Maybe that's not that ridiculous of an idea when some voices are actually quite harmful. Maybe those voices should face some sort of consequences, lmao.

Hitler was also pretty hardheaded about certain realities, such as the fact that to conquer parts of Eastern Europe, he needed modern industry — a military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower would later put it.

Again, I think often people liken the Current American Moment to Nazis due to the traditionalist aspects, but that is, I think, not quite correct -- the Nazis were futurists, in a sense. Early fascism was very technologically focused, in the same way as many ideologies in the early 20th century were. It wasn't until after WW2 that you really saw the upswing in "back to the land" conservatism, partially in response to the horrors of WW2. An understandable trauma response in a sense, but not particularly progressive.

H-PRC is the H-Net presence of the PRC History Group, a network of scholars with interests in the history of the People’s Republic of China. We define history broadly, to encompass a wide variety of disciplinary approaches, and we understand the history of the PRC to include eras prior to the official change of state power in 1949.

There is a quiet competence that comes from this. You stop asking "Is the internet down?" and start asking "Is my links up?" You stop waiting for a technician and start checking the logs. This is a form of strength. To understand the system that carries your words is to be free from the mystery that keeps you dependent.

I am very interested in this project, as a noted fan of meshtastic, a similar but much less security-focused approach to meshnet communication over LoRa. I am specifically linking this page though (the "Zen of Reticulum" page) because I find it a fascinating peek into the anarcho-libertarian ethos at the heart of so much modern computing projects, even those that I think are generally good projects (like this one, to be clear).

The overwhelmingly centralized nature of the modern internet leaves it incredibly vulnerable to attack, from a million different vectors. One could theoretically cut all the wires carrying internet across the Atlantic and cause massive disruptions to the global internet. Not unfixable problems, to be sure, but massive disruptions nonetheless.

Various mesh projects have sprung up meant to combat this threat, or other similar threats caused by centralization. Federated tools, like Mastodon, are an attempt at this, as are even more trojan horse options like Bluesky. The threats that they are reacting to are real, to be sure -- but the solve being proposed is a greater reliance not on shared resources controlled by the public but increasingly privatized backbones of social communication.

This is, I think, an odd quirk of the modern technological landscape. The modern digital individual is constant predated upon by capitalist entities, so a rational response is to make oneself untraceable, untrackable, as much as reasonably possible.

Because your identity is portable, your connectivity can be fluid. You can be sitting at a desk connected to a fiber backbone one moment, and walking through a field connected only to a long-range LoRa mesh the next. To the rest of the network, nothing has changed. Your friends do not need to update your contact info. The messages they send do not bounce back. The network senses the shift in the medium and reroutes the flow of data automatically.

You are no longer a stationary node in a fixed grid. You are a wanderer in a fluid medium.

The goal sounds a lot like leaving the social fabric entirely, which relies on stability and fixed nodes. If I am a constant wanderer, I have no home. If I have no home, I have no neighbors. If I have no neighbors, I have no community.

I think anarchist solutions have a real purpose. I think this one is cool as hell and I will probably look into it as a fun option to have, for either serious or fun reasons. But I often glance twice when these ideologies are picked apart by their creators, because I think the takeaways are often driven by not a desire for community but a sense of fear.

This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.

Incredibly cool resource. I will probably download this later.

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

Cannot express enough how much you should get off of Google. I'm saying this for myself as well, to be clear -- I'm about halfway to setting up a Nextcloud and have plenty of self-hosted services already, but I need to get immich working for photos and a more stable cloud sync.

But I'm already off of the basic search in general, thanks to Kagi (which I cannot recommend highly enough -- it is both very good as search and refreshingly AI-critical).

Fuck Google, fuck genAI, fuck your LLM.

A Texas councilmember will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits" and "a total termination of all internet services."

Fascist crashout. #BANDERAMELTDOWN

The endorsements by Hernandez, Jurado and Soto-Martínez are aimed at denting left-wing support for Nithya Raman, who polls show is battling Spencer Pratt for a runoff spot against Mayor Bass.

Archive here.

Really odd moves here from some local candidates running on a DSA-LA slate. It's things like this that make me skeptical of electoral strategies by Left organizations like the DSA -- there's a worrying lack of discipline around these individuals.

I don't think that there is any guarantee of individual actions hewing to the Party line unless the Party is sufficiently fierce about discipline and political education. I'm not even a Nithya fan by any means, but this just looks sloppy and disappointing.

This linkserver is now running on Shaarli. It's a good piece of software, I can shout it out.

An autonomous submarine named Ran discovers strange structures under the Dotson Ice Shelf in Antarctica, before mysteriously disappearing.

so what the fuck does this mean.

Tours Into The Secret Heart of Los Angeles

No one can match Third Way’s dedication to keeping the corporate wing of the party punching left.

As always, it's a good reminder that the Third Way -- whether we're talking about an organization or the political concept of a 'third way' between communism and fascism -- is itself a project of liberalism, the moderate wing of fascism.

It seems as though only when we list out all that is happening around us, can we, for a moment, summon the vertiginous feelings of overwhelm and dread we seemingly do everything in our power to suppress. Three years of a genocide transpiring in plain sight — one by which we increasingly scroll with the flick of a thumb; a new, stupid and brutal war whose consequences include an impending economic and energy crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen before; the accelerating destruction of the planet; the dismantling or elimination of the institutions that protect and enrich us; the wanton targeting of things that many of us love — the earth, the birds, learning, reading, the arts, one another; an emerging global consensus in which children are increasingly viewed as disposable, the terrifying erosion of the rights of women, trans people, immigrants, the mentally ill, the poor, and the persecution of those on the Left — I can name more, but there is no point, save for perpetuating this mounting discomfort. To consider even a single one of these elements in its entirety is already too much for the ordinary mind to to bear, and yet we are asked to bear all of them simultaneously every single day.

Impossible to talk enough about the memorable quotes in this piece. Kate Wagner once again knocks it out of the park with this, combining the psychological with the social (the psychosocial, some might say) into a rumination, a paean about grief and perserverance.

I don't know where "we" go from here, but I also can recognize that "we" are situated in a moment that I would call 'imperial collapse' (as Kate also aptly puts it), and that things feel incredibly disoriented. Systems that once worked no longer work, horrors beyond measure are commonplace, even intrusive, even in the lives of those who do not directly see them.

I have become transfixed, these days, on trying to figure out how we got this way. I'm not a scholar, I'm not an academic, I'm just kind of an armchair history dork who is finally getting to the modern era, the 19th century and onward, and realizing that all that shit that Lenin was talking about re: the systems of capitalism building up and up and up and creating their own gravediggers might have something to it. There's a lot that I think you can point to the end of WW2 and say "ah, here is where things started getting really bad" and that might be true, but you could also point to a million other times. As Kate points out in the footnotes, the American Reconstruction era is another good touchpoint.

Because we members of Western society are not socially permitted to express despair in everyday life, we are more often than not forced into a kind of cruel and unsustainable quiescence. We learn as children that the suppression of our emotions is integral to social equilibrium within the family, something which is then extrapolated onto public life at the high, high cost of the subconscious belief that our emotional needs do not ultimately matter beyond ourselves. The despair of others frightens us in part because it forces us to reckon with that same bargain. What makes you so special? What gives you the right to cry?

My therapist would chastise me (politely) for agreeing with these feelings, and she would be correct to do so. I grew up a man, I grew up in America. These two things have instilled in me a pathological distaste for expressing tender emotion. It's not a good thing.

The breakdown of the society in which we were born and raised has, in fact, already happened. It has happened and continues to happen by way of several concurrent historical processes from which one can cherrypick their best narratives about how precisely it all came to pass.

The committee's own data shows that DSA's growth derives not from its sect-like internal processes but from its moments of class-like political action. The organization grows when it acts as a political force in the world, and withers when it retreats into self-administration.

I consider myself electorally-critical at best and thus I would argue with many of the points brought forth in this story, but I do think there's value in it overall. The nature of the DSA is that it tends to spike in population when it has something to rally around, and it withers when it does not. In this, at least, myself and the author are aligned. You must be a shark, always moving, never staying still. Grow the tendency, guide the tendency, shape it into a party, take control.

Three competing narratives of the second Trump administration.

Jon Ganz committed a terrible crime in his youth, but he survived prison, fell in love, and started over. His new life unraveled in a way nobody could have predicted.

The first version of this article was written after the first three months of being back in China after too long away. The version written then contained many immediate impressions and experiences, which I interpreted on the basis of extensive earlier research. There is an…

A pleasure to drive, Low-tech Magazine’s handcart demonstrates the advantages of slow, human-powered transportation.

[T]he working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

• Marx

Michael is a bad movie. Let’s just get that out of the way now. It is a movie designed less to tell a story than to recreate moments, ones you are probably already familiar with. It is a movie designed to give you a karaoke experience in a theater setting with other like-minded Michael Jackson…

The way Iran has been able to stand up to the West has become a source of admiration across the formerly colonized world. Where does that confidence come from?

Most of what we hear about Tiananmen in 1989 focuses on student activists, since they dominated Tiananmen square itself and waved banners demanding “freedom and democracy.” However, the real history of the protests is a bit more complex.

A comprehensive guide and in-depth historical overview of vintage Levi's 501 jeans, one of the world's most recognizable, yet varying, clothing garments.

Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page has since been taken down - one reason why I'm a bit of a digital hoarder. It specified some of the…

Frustrated by your employer's generative AI policies? We're here to help you organize. We're uniting tech workers who recognize the consequences of employers rolling out AI policies without the input of their workers. Workers are not helpless in the face of these top-down initiatives — we have the tools to demand our seat at the table, and to have our say in how technology is implemented and deployed in our workplaces.

Review and analysis of DSA internal politics.

The Soviet Union carried the overwhelming weight of the war against fascism.The Eastern Front dwarfed the Western one in every measure that mattered. The Red Army faced and destroyed roughly 80% of the Wehrmacht's combat power. The Soviet people lost over 27 million lives — military and civilian alike. That is more than 60 times the combined military deaths of the United States and Britain. The Red Army stopped the Nazis at Moscow and Stalingrad, broke their back at Kursk, liberated Auschwitz, and planted the Victory Banner over the Reichstag in Berlin.Without the Eastern Front, there would have been no D-Day. Without the Soviet sacrifice, there would have been no victory in the West at all.

The underlying hope, one imagines, is that you’ll become more reliant on machines instead of real people for your informational needs. Pretty much every other AI slop factory has a similar operating mindset, which makes all of them, collectively, an active threat to human civilization.

As always fuck AI and fuck Google. I recommend Kagi.

Many Marxists now agree that the revolutionary left’s protracted crisis is rooted in its failure to escape the “sect” form. As Hal Draper has explained, revolutionary sects are defined less by size than by their mode of organisation: a top-down culture, a haughty and exclusivist attitude towards others on the left, and a puritanical fixation on a “perfect” programme enforced by an intransigent leadership. Such groups prioritise their own growth over the needs of the wider movement and, because their unity rests on rigid doctrinal agreement, have a tendency to repeatedly split over relatively minor theoretical differences. This sect form has become the norm among Marxist organisations, leaving revolutionaries scattered across many small, largely irrelevant groups.

China’s BYD made plenty of headlines when it debuted its second-generation Blade Battery and latest-generation Flash chargers. When combined, the two can make EV charging basically as fast as getting gas, with up to 1,500 kilowatts going from the DC fast charger to the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) pack.

Things are happening... in China.

A curated collection of open source and privacy-focused alternatives to Google's products. Replace Gmail, Google Drive, Maps, Android, and more with tools that respect your data and give you greater control over your digital life.

Now that I'm a de-googling guy I think this'll be quite useful.

The Game Workers Conference is an entirely new game industry event made by and for the countless workers who make this massively influential industry and artistic medium succeed. The first iteration of the conference is being hosted by a partnership of various game industry unions and worker-cent...

Happening now! Some good talks so far.

Many old house owners have been left guessing “How old is my house.” This post will give you the tools to answer that question.

My dad was a housemover -- the kind that moves physical houses, not the stuff inside houses. It's a weird, very bespoke job that is mostly done by specialized contractors working with high-value buildings that need to be physically moved usually at the whims of a collector or rich guy. My dad helped move at least one Frank Lloyd Wright house in the 90s, strapped it to a couple of trucks and slowly walked it down the highway to a new location. There's some photos of it online if you look it up, I think.

But anyway, growing up around that has meant that I have always had a fascination with houses and housing. It's one of the aspects of life that is easy to overlook given the fact that buildings, broadly speaking, are everywhere. But every building has a history! If you can look deeply at these little bits of history, you can find out some really amazing things.

today I learned that upcoming indie game... distributor? Highlighter? Bundler? Glizzy, began life as a Web3 games hub. So that's not exactly related to this but it does remind me about how this entire ecosystem is stupid grifts

Let us be clear: workers are being displaced by AI in the workplace, but that displacement is not due to the actual ability of AI technology doing the jobs of workers to the same quality, or even to a sufficient quality. It is a market-oriented move by firms to brag about becoming AI-first, while finding cost-savings by laying off employees. And the workers who do remain in their jobs are left to deal with labor intensification, that is, a combination of doing more work with less time, the addition of other work tasks as a result either new technological processes, or taking on the task of other people who have been laid off. As one of us wrote in a recent book, “AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier.”

The nature of AI is that it is almost entirely a fascist project, not in a moral sense per se (though I think you could make that argument and I would if pressed) but in the sense that it is a tool meant to empower greater private corporate control over various spheres of life. It creates a worse environment for workers and a better environment for bosses, and in turn it empowers firms to take over more aspects of public life.

The balance of American experience is between public and private infrastructure. Public infrastructure principally serves a purpose for the public, private infrastructure serves a purpose to the shareholders and owners in the form of profit.

I have yet to see a way that largescale "AI" can be used for a public, pro-social end. I think that when we talk about fighting fascism, we have to understand that at least at this time, in this moment, the generative AI 'project' is undoubtedly a fascist one.

Furries arrived in formal wear, some toting their fursuits in. Pursell arrived wearing his authentic Escamillo matador costume from that evening’s performance of Carmen. Before the show, he hosted a free meet-and-greet, handing out stickers, signing posters, and giving out head pats.

awesome. very cute. amazing looks throughout.

George Psalmanazar (c. 1679 – 3 May 1763) was a Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa (today Taiwan) to visit Europe. For some years, he convinced many in Britain, but he was eventually revealed to be of European origin.

Historical crazy white boy. What a wild con.

Back in March, I wrote about Bitwarden doubling their Premium price — and specifically how they did it. Buried in a feature announcement. Priced in fake...

I'm happy with 1Pass and have been for a long time, but this is a concerning development if you're a *Warden user.

Private equity vultures are disgusting. Yowch.

In Commemoration of the Twenty-eighth Anniversary of the Communist Party of China

classic piece, also notable in comparison to the piece right before this -- i feel like you can see the presaging of modern China in a bunch of this.

Art and artifice in the fake 1990s

America's latest obsession with Wasians is more dangerous than you think. Hudson Williams, Charles Melton and the problem with Hollywood's obsession with mixed race asians.

From its dialogue to the story it tells, Mixtape feels less like tribute and more like an escape into a fantasy no one’s actually experienced.

A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed, with graduating humanities students yelling out, "AI SUCKS!"

Extracted from an essay published in April 1917 (in Hsin ching-nein). Mao Zedong.

Enabling workers to fight back against AI and automation at work.

"We can dress it up however we like, but the truth is that Mixtape is a vibes-driven experience riding high on some kind of media nostalgia. It is an on-rails narrative experience where you do some light exploration of a sleepy little woodland town among a group of three friends who are sitting on three different versions of the razor’s edge of adulthood, and the thing that pulls you through that narrative is a series of songs arranged into a mixtape that sets the mood for each scene in sequence. It has more in common with a set of narrative music videos like Dirty Computer than it does most other games that it sits on digital platforms with. I am sure there are people I am uninterested in engaging with who are mad about this."

Good piece by cmrn about Mixtape and late capitalism.

A spectre is haunting China—Mao Zedong. This is not the ossified image of the national founder found in official party histories, but a living, breathing idea rediscovered by the country’s youth. The evidence for this resurgence is both unexpected and unmistakable, and its most dramatic stage is China’s elite universities, where the country’s political, academic, and business leadership is cultivated.

Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding…

All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

I have seen this argument for at least half a decade now, its probably existed past that, but I want to add my bit to it, because, well, fuck this “bigtent” bullshit Idea. I have worked very hard and studied intensely for a very long time now and I refuse

The inter-generational struggle to find clothes that fit more than a tiny portion of women

The CPUSA, FRSO, PSL, and DSA are not identical, but all suffer from a palpable stagnancy.

Critics of crime fiction dismiss the genre as hopelessly reactionary, but its history tells a different story. From hard-boiled American detective novels to the explosion of Scandi-noir, crime fiction has been deeply influenced by socialist writers.

With Latin America in Trump’s cross-hairs, a report from Buenos Aires on the social stalemate that allowed far-right firebrand Javier Milei to impose the harshest shock therapy in Argentina’s history. Mosquera mobilizes the conceptual legacies of Gramsci, Trotsky, Otto Bauer and Angelo Tasca to identify the function of the region’s highly successful new rights.

There is a fundamental contradiction in many of the Marxist studies that are produced in the West. Every time that they speak of Marxism in Asia — in China, Korea or Vietnam — or when they speak of popular movements in Africa such as in Egypt or Libya, they highlight the…

This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. I added some shots of the slides I used as a structure for the text which might make it look a bit weird. You can just ignore the images if you want to. They are kinda like subchapter marks. The text is not exactly what I said but a longer version of my arguments that should be easier to read.

After millions in NFT sales, the hyped “play to earn” game was effectively dead in weeks.

For Marx, theory was never separate from practice. This remains the key divide between Marxism-Leninism and Western Marxism, especially in debates over the People's Republic of China.

Abolitionists waged war on the two party oligarchy. Jenna Grove suggests we can learn from their forgotten triumph.

The Hungerford Building in Rochester, New York is a sprawling, four-story industrial center that overlooks a train yard. A hundred...

Japanese music of the 80s collection blog.

Abstract—The online-based group known as antis, which originated around 2016 in the United States, exhibit morality-based, cult-like behavior and perpetuate hate speech and censorship in online spaces. Anti ideology has encouraged harmful, obsessive, and dangerous behaviors among its members, specifically minors and young adults. An analysis of the antifandom movement through political, sociological, and behavioral lenses reveals its damaging effects on women, people of color, minors, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Educational and inspirational resources to help us imagine the end of capitalism instead of the end of the world.

This looks like a great set of resources/links for folks interested in communist, socialist, or anarchist education.

The right-wing push to “shrink the government” meant displacing the costs of social reproduction onto private households and privatizing many of the state’s administrative capacity. What came of that was a new practice of citizenship where the ideal of public deliberation over the organization of society gives way to what Berlant calls the privatization of citizenship where “acts that are not civic acts, like sex, are having to bear the burden of defining proper citizenship,” and issues regarding personal morality are central to public discourse.

A bit academic-brained and makes the mistake of assuming that communism died with the USSR, but other than that has some interesting insights.

Anyone who’s ever been to hear a paper or a talk given has seen the person who takes the mic with the pretense of asking a question, but who instead goes on at length about their own interests, or research, or supposed insights. This type of groan-inducing off-topic interruption may be bearable (may be!) in an academic conference, but where there’s real work to be done, it’s an unforgivable waste of time.

Inarguably provocative title of course, but that's the Red Clarion for you. I find a lot of their writing to come off as somewhat juvenile, even though I have (and will continue to!) praise many pieces that they've published, such as this and this and this. They embody a definite communist angle that I can quite respect, overall.

This is a good example -- yes, as mentioned, provocative title, but the overall point is much more moderate I think. The problems with the stack are embedded in its horizontalism, and horizontalism is something I am more and more finding a thorn in the side of any activist or organizational space (honestly, doesn't even have to be activist! this is as much true in corporate meetings as it is in radical spaces). I fundamentally agree with the concerns expressed in this piece: Complete horizontal free speech opens the door to actual harm as much as it opens the door to, frankly, just obstructionist behavior.

I am more and more finding myself aligned with models that allow for targeted suppression of behavior that does not align with the group's stated aims. The key is, of course, having a robust debate about the group's stated aims and a regular series of check-ins about the current status of the group's stated aims. One might call it a sort of democratic centralism, perhaps.

Until now, riders needed to purchase and reload a TAP card to ride Metro buses and trains. Transit officials say the new system eliminates that extra step by allowing passengers to tap a contactless credit card, debit card, smartphone or smartwatch directly at fare gates and onboard bus terminals.

Real contactless NFC payments for LA Metro! World Cup stuff notwithstanding this is a great step forward for the Metro.

The balance of power has shifted, and nations of the Middle East will no longer accept a regional order dictated by the US and Israel.

History continues apace!

Remember Girl Talk? God we are all so old and so millennial

Ali Kadri is an esteemed Professor at various institutions around the world, as well as the author of many important books including Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction, and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.

Okay, I'll admit that I haven't finished listening to this episode yet. But what I've heard so far is excellent. A great breakdown of the role of the CPC in constraining and managing capital excesses from the Mao to Deng era and beyond.

And what John was trying to tell Joanie was for the first time he was at the center, how dazzling it felt to be the sun an infant was orbiting, the one true creator of the universe.

bitter and biting and heartbreaking, as jenn's writing usually is.

In December of 2025, I found a used 2025 VW ID Buzz in Texas that was selling for a great price, so I flew down, bought it, and drove it back.

This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.

With reactionary forces bearing down upon us, we, the children of these struggles, must take on this banner and win the war once and for all. To do so, we must develop the means to secure our survival outside of the support from the state or any liberal institution. We must develop cadres that can bring the masses into our joint struggle for liberation, underground communication networks through digital encryption and physical dropbox networks, resource depots (which will form the backbone of a logistical network) to secure the supply of necessities to the people and our revolutionary fighters, basic physical and medical educational programs so cadre are fit to engage struggle they are met with, and we must develop cells within every pore of this country from which we can mount our organized counter-attack. [...] Most of the work of a revolutionary army is logistics, followed by aiding in the work of the people by acting as a pool of concentrated labor, then engaging in direct confrontation with the enemies of the people. The People’s Liberation Army undoubtedly harvested more pounds of rice and millet than can be counted in spent bullet casings. A Communist party is nothing more than the rationalized organization of the people’s collective will, for every gain of the people is a gain for the party, for every loss of the people is a loss for the party.

I always find it enlightening that Mao's theories around guerrilla warfare mesh so well with those of Lawrence of Arabia's, as I think there's a lot to learn from both sources. Putting the organization of trans & queer liberation into these lenses aligns a lot with my feelings.

Iran's claim over subsea chokepoint pushes US tech companies to overland fiber.

Uh oh hee hee hee

Welcome Hunters fans to this bonus update of my detailed timeline shenanigans. With The Mandalorian & Grogu out in cinemas in 3 days, I’ve been doing some work in the 9-10 aby portion of the timeline after rewatching the whole show. Being in that era of the timeline gave me the perfect edition to add the abundance of content that was tucked away on the official (now defunct) website for Star Wars: Hunters.

Someone went and archived all the lore for SW:H and posted it all here. Fascinating little artifact of a now-dead game.

Perhaps Android was a great idea back in the old days, but since Google transformed it into a spyware platform, Google Android devices are effectively working against their owners. That's why I started to look for alternatives, and perhaps you have the same reason for reading this article now.

I have been thinking about alternative phone OSes for a while now, and I found this piece very enlightening as to the actual working experience of a couple of these options. I understand why the author didn't try out GrapheneOS (it is... understandable but annoying that it only works on Pixel phones) but given their critical eye I wish there was more of it. That said, still a great piece overall.

Also damn, what a website. Now that's a Webbed Site

Great album by a friend. Been playing it all day.

State and Capital I: Understanding How the Chinese Communist Party Has Redefined the Function, Boundaries, and Political Position of Capital

fantastic piece on the role of capital in China.

I don’t think I was supposed to get these emails in full. The city had just gotten a new public records officer, and the folder I received in response to my right to know request had both redacted and unredacted copies. I’m pleased to have the unredacted versions, though, because they narrate the push to clean up Downtown succinctly and honestly, spelling out the true drivers of policy: the unbridled revulsion of much of the propertied class for people who have the audacity to exist as poor in public.

Truly wild post here about the insanity of the petit bourgeois in America. I think people who have not experienced "local politics" may not be aware just how fucking evil the average small business-owner is as soon as you mention "the homeless". This is a good article to illuminate how much these people do not need to be listened to.

I think a lot about how the path after whatever This is has to involve a conscious disciplining of the petit bourgeois. Sorry if that's too straightforward of a way to put i, but it's just important to remember that you don't have to listen to these people. Not 'you', reader, necessarily — I have to hope you-the-reader are already not listening to the woes of the Small Businessowners in your neighborhood on homelessness issues — but 'you', the potential ruling majorities of the future.

I would say that the ruling majorities of the present should also keep this in mind, but as it stands the Businessowner class basically already rules, and they don't give a shit about the homeless. Sure would be great if that wasn't the case!

I don’t like Mixtape (Beethoven and Dinosaur, 2026). I am going to be a hater in this review. If that’s not something you’re looking for, I have good news! Quite a few other criti…

An article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up.

I haven't followed any of this that closely because bluesky is still somewhat repellent to me, but this is an interesting analysis of how "WSocial" has grabbed the news cycle.

I hope we all now understand that forging strategic policy partnerships with fascists is like trying to develop an intimate relationship with a running chainsaw.

fairly milquetoast in the critique as would be expected from a liberal outlet but the reporting is solid.

Why hasn’t the so-called u.s. left, despite all of the efforts made over the last two years, been able to meaningfully intervene in a live-streamed genocide?

The creation and imperfect preservation of The Elder Scrolls' intentional incoherence.

Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded. Behind Meta’s new smart glasses lies a hidden workforce, uneasy about peering into the most intimate parts of other people’s lives.

A major theme in Bolshevik literature was the transmutation of flesh to metal. In the communist imagination, the fires of revolution could forge a metallized man. No one better personified this than Stalin, the “man of steel.” In my latest article, I explore the power of a name.

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.

The following article is the result of a visit to the People’s Republic of China to participate in celebrating China’s 80th Anniversary of its victory over Japanese fascism. Dee Knight and DSA China Working Group coordinator Anlin Wang were part of a five-person self-organized delegation of DSA members.

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

In 1986, a corporation that made women's lingerie bought every backpack brand you've ever trusted.

Under the sterile blue lights of his studio, Fallon laughs endlessly at the same pseudo-jokes, rubs elbows with Trump and Sam Altman, and ushers in the death of culture.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), darling DSA Socialist in Office (SIO), has received her fifth consecutive endorsement from NYC-DSA. She is sailing towards what is almost assuredly a safe re-election and will start her fifth term as a representative in Congress in 2027. NYC-DSA’s endorsement has opened the door to yet

On Marathon (2026).

Jake Paul’s ascent in boxing is a cultural symptom of an empire in decline. It reflects a country that now prefers empty spectacle over real strength, both in sports and on the world stage.

US Presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings due to war. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90% in 2001 as the wrathful nation geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H. W. Bush ranks second place with 89% in 1991, right as the US…

Originally anonymously published on Zuoyi23’s WeChat and Zhihu pages, this essay explores the rise and fall of the capitalist class in China. The author takes a critical look at how the relationship between the state and capital continues to shape the relationship between the capitalist and working classes in China—and how young workers are returning to Marxist critique to shape the future.

Appreciated this nuanced take from Qiao Collective on the current(-ish) situation with tech labor in China.