reading Lenin's Brother by Philip Pomper. on forum dot effectivealturism dot org dot ru circa the 1860s, they're currently debating the QALYs of assassinating the Tsar versus going to the people

good news the organizationalists and theory nerds have formed an affinity group that looks to do structured actions instead of trying to get all the acivists who hate reading to join their org ✨decentralization✨

it wasn't crazy dangerous, but still wild to see someone who reads me engage in courageous direct action that risked harm to themselves

the real problem with cryptocurrency is that it was largely made and used by the sort of people that james c scott wrote about negatively instead of being made and used by the sort of people that james c scott wrote about positively send skeet

holy shit (Property is Theft!, Iain McKay)

its funny when it comes to object level claims i have a bunch of disagreements with david graeber, but when it comes to general ethos and orientation i have deep sympathies with him

good news i touched grass and my health has gotten to the point where i can now work something akin to a full time job that isnt doordash and now i have irl friends and am doing activism and so shortform platforms just aren't as attractive

people talk about far-sighted bakunin was in his arguments against marx, but don't mention proudhon's response to him (i am too busy to join your writing collective, also don't become overly dogmatic with regards to economics) www.marxists.org/reference/su...

thinking on the liberal bias of llms a little more, maybe part of the answer is that right wing value sets which place certain people above others tend to be arbitrary answers as to what should be placed where, whereas universalist values seem to converge to the same answers

ok but there's a point where the heat generated by economic activity causes the earth to become venus. yes renewables open up the potential for greater energy consumption without warming, but we still have to live within a heat budget

are there any quality writeups or papers explaining why LLMs converge on a set of political and ethical beliefs?

finally reading hardin's tragedy of the commons for the first time and his explanation for why pastures haven't already been exhausted was that people were too busy warring, poaching and having their cattle die of disease to overburden them

>cottage military-industrial complex www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04...

what

I think, as much as I am a sap myself, the Raynor-Kerrigan romance of WoL only works as kind of fanfic. The actual true love of that game is Tychus's love for Raynor

reading some old dominic cummings blog posts and yeah this would have absolutely one-shot me when i was at university

coming in late, but Murray Rothbard wrote an essay titled "egalitarianism as a revolt against nature" in which he sneers at shumalith firestone for making the rhetorical move of "yes, part of how patriarchy emerged and persists is biological difference, which should be overcome via technology"

the US is a big country that I've only experienced a small fraction of, but I find this surprising various chronic health problems meant I had basically zero IRL friends. I started seeing sustained recovery in 2023 and came across the local Food Not Bombs

fun fact: US defense contractors actively target trans women for recruitment because they know we are 1. generally very talented at our chosen fields and 2. basically unable to find high-paying work commensurate with that talent anywhere else if society were less transphobic this wouldn't happen!

yes but for better or worse until people see a meaningful difference they will default to assuming you mean Actually Existing Liberalism

”socialism is when the government does stuff“ is a fun ironic meme but I would like to propose an ironic corollary: capitalism is when markets do stuff

i really need to review The Queering of Corporate America which, among other things, details how AIDS activists targeted corporations to adopt consequential awareness training instead of the broader public because it was easier to make the shift

god help us if thomas chatterton williams ever reads the full catalog of every zine crimethinc has ever published

15.5k people watching a livestream of a massive spontaneous block party at the house of a video game designer who was just apprehended for attempting an attack at the white house correspondents dinner is quite cyberpunk

this is just how the average person not politically engaged sees the world. when socialist ideas had sway over a large percentage of the population and were sorta held by many people you saw similar incoherence and confusion

meat is subsidized in a thousand different ways and every person that a good enough alternative can peel off makes the task of undermining those subsidies easier to say nothing of other ways of imposing costs yes there will be lasting resentment but im happy to make that trade

important developments in anarchist economics are happening

woke 2 is making mainstream economics explicitly left wing, people are saying wedontagree.net/essays/what-...

since the end of 2024, there's been talk of "Woke 2" that has gotten more serious this year as the trump regime stumbles. much of that discourse takes the form of policy and while important, i think that ignores more interesting possibilities and developments this essay is about that

my favorite example of "omnicause" sneering are people who praise YIMBYism as an alternative approach that achieves success through a narrow focus when its really trivial to make the connection between housing availability and any number of issues (climate, labor, gender, sexuality, race, etc etc)

in retrospect the problem with solarpunk (as i experienced it anyway) was that as a bunch of pretty pictures it shied away from the social and geopolitical upheaval that will come with replacing the fundamental energy infrastructure of our civilization

the "right-wing authoritarianism construct" is great because it involves asking questions like "do you think that a guy dressed as darth vader should be blindly followed while the imperial march plays" and people will respond with "strongly agree"

this is an understandable conclusion to be drawn from the state of the discourse. thankfully if there has been a single advance in our understanding of society since 1948 you can get an edge in the discourse by considering said advances

I've wanted a writeup of how Ukraine has embraced decentralized infrastructure in response to Russian aggression for years now and then @dawnlightmelody.bsky.social posted this LessWrong essay www.lesswrong.com/posts/rDzMra...

if you, as a western marxist, believe that chinese state capitalism is superior to western capitalism and you aren't making an effort to visit or move there, what are you even doing poast duolingo streak and/or progress on your citizenship application

>anime that's a mashup of One Piece and The Many-Headed Hydra

My expectation for this war was 'everyone loses,' but to be honest, if those terms hold and Iran gets to pull in $40bn a year from the Strait to fund their proxies and build their nuclear program - if this is the deal - then honestly the Iranian regime simply...won.

booktok stuff just reminds me of this shit

lmfao get em sharon

waking up to people not being able to distinguish is-posting from ought-posting 😋😋😋

effective altruism is probably the best thing to come out of the original effort to Overcome Bias. doing the work to identify and correct for heretics like scope insensitivity that default people to ineffective charity and action in the world more broadly is of immense value

"if you find the right words people will vote for you" is lower than "if you find the right words women will sleep with you" pick up artist shit because at least they have skin in the game

its certainly true that many anarchists will concede or even champion a reduction in social complexity so as to avoid certain issues, but the dirty secret is that *nobody* has come up with a practical solution to this problem and that's part of why the world is the way it is

dunno if this study replicated, to say nothing of holding up 2 decades on, but if so, lmao

"there has been no meaningful anarchist developments since gandhi" damn alright guess they feed you scraps in formal political science classes huh

going to write a sick essay for the platypus affiliated society arguing that the most marxist thing to do today is trade options on robinhood and make predictions on polymarket with the intent of funding The Party whenever it finally emerges send post

along with murdering the (hard) efficient market hypothesis, they also enacted a public execution of the hippie theory that if you just got everyone in power to take LSD the world would be a better place and you say that innovation is dead

Some of the campus activists who remained moved on to different tactics. Brown U students who organized the encampment in 2023-2024 also organized hundreds of people to get ICE watch training and serve as witnesses at immigration court—but this is quiet work that gets less attention.

okay but its really really important to stress that while showing up for a protest is a good first start, the trick is to actually get people to *do* collective action beyond protesting

there's certainly some contingency at play and you can point to times when the affinities were flipped (in snow's the two cultures he points out that all the literary types are conservative while the physicists are communists) but the question is whether this is just arbitrary