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.

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 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!