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Aldous Huxley ~ Slavery by consent You're being made to enjoy your servitude.From Aldous Huxley - Speech at UC Berkeley, The Ultimate Revolution 1962 Aldous...
On August 3 and the Days of Rage: Act, Mobilize and Escalate for Gaza and the Prisoners
“We call for active and massive participation on this national and global day in defense of our prisoners and our people in the Gaza Strip, to expose the brutal crimes of the occupation against them, and to support their rights and just cause….We look forward to making the 3 of August a pivotal day in all parts of Palestine, in the refugee camps and the diaspora, in our Arab and Islamic world, & among all the free people of the world, to support our people in Gaza and our free prisoners in the occupation’s prisons.” – Ismail Haniyeh, 29 July 2024
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network joins in the collective call for action on 3 August and throughout the first week of August, for days of rage and action in solidarity with Gaza, the prisoners, and the Palestinian people and their liberation, from the river to the sea. As the ongoing Zionist-imperialist genocide enters its 666th day of escalation — after over 77 years of a genocidal project being implanted in the region at the behest of imperialist powers — it is more urgent than ever for people around the world, especially in the heart of the imperial core, to organize, escalate, and answer the calls of the workers and students of Gaza, and of the heroic Palestinian resistance, for action to break the siege, liberate the prisoners and end the genocide.
The ongoing escalated genocide in Gaza is being carried out not only through bunker-buster bombs and artillery shells, but also through the massive use of the weapon of starvation against the Palestinian people. While the Zionist regime, with the full participation and complicity of the imperialist powers, has besieged Gaza for over 18 years, since 2 March 2025 it has almost entirely cut off entry of basic supplies and food, blocking access to the United Nations and internationally recognized food distribution projects like UNRWA and the World Food Program, initiating the US-Zionist death traps of the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (actually a CIA-private military contractor joint project), and funding and arming collaborator gangs to attack and steal aid trucks whenever they do enter, particularly to UN facilities.
As a result of the Zionist siege, Gaza is currently facing a level 5 famine, entirely created by the Zionist military machine and its imperialist backers in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, and fellow European Union powers. Over 1,000 Palestinians have been massacred at GHF “aid sites” — a mechanism to concentrate, surveil, abduct and ethnically cleanse Palestinians — while over 160 Palestinians, including 92 children, have been martyred due to starvation and malnutrition. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that over 1,200 elder Palestinians have been martyred in the past 2 months due to the effects of starvation and lack of health care, due to the all-out assault and destruction of the Palestinian health system by the Zionist war machine. While U.S. “mediator” Steve Witkoff, who appeared on stage alongside lead Trump donor and far-right Zionist advocate Miriam Adelson to pledge his support for the genocidal entity, appears at the GHF “aid” site in Rafah for a photo opportunity, Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif revealed that occupation forces were using suppressors (silencers) to shoot aid seekers in order to reduce the visibility of the crime amid the media attention.
Far from an “honest broker,” Witkoff and the United States — which claims to be a mediator while directing and arming the genocide — have repeatedly used ceasefire negotiations to instead slander the Palestinian resistance while presenting a false image to the public of the world, which is increasingly outraged by the widely shared images and testimonies of genocide and engineered starvation. While repeatedly claiming that an agreement is “near,” these parties have instead repeatedly rejected any kind of dignified ceasefire and instead plotted more war crimes and crimes against humanity, including ongoing aggression targeting Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, not to mention the massive outbreak of settler violence and military attacks throughout the West Bank of occupied Palestine.
At the same time, over 10,800 Palestinian prisoners — in addition to Lebanese and Syrian prisoners — are living the experience of engineered starvation and slow assassination inside the occupation prisons. Just days ago, Palestinian prisoners’ associations announced the martyrdom of Sayed Jamal Abu Rajab, the 75th identified Palestinian prisoner martyred inside the occupation prisons since 7 October 2023. The Palestinian prisoners are being subjected to extreme torture and abuse alongside malnutrition and denial of medical care, while the leadership of the prisoners’ movement have been held in complete isolation — and repeatedly beaten — for 22 months. In the prison camps like Sde Teiman and Anatot, Palestinians — especially from Gaza — are routinely subjected to sexual assault, physical violence and mass starvation. Palestinian prisoners are women and men, children and elders, from all political backgrounds — targeted as part of the ongoing assault on Palestinian existence and resistance.
Throughout the genocide, the heroic resistance, particularly the armed resistance, continue to confront the occupation and impose a cost upon the genocidaires with unparalleled bravery and commitment to the struggle. In every area of Gaza where the occupation claims that the resistance has been eliminated or defeated, a new operation emerges to prove that the opposite is true. In fact, the occupation has utterly failed to achieve its stated military objectives of freeing its prisoners or eradicating the resistance. It is instead seeking to rely on political and diplomatic power to achieve these goals, as the resistance in Gaza has blocked them on every occasion. Let us be clear — demands for a “demilitarized Palestinian ‘state’” or the “disarmament of the resistance,” whether in Palestine or Lebanon, are demands to continue the genocide without repercussions and achieve what they have failed to do on the battlefield. In fact, it is the weapons of the Resistance that are currently standing as the foremost shield of humanity in the face of a vicious death machine wielded by Zionism and imperialism.
August 3 and the first week of August take on an even more significant meaning when we recall that the call to action for August 3 in 2024 was the final public statement and call to action of the martyred Palestinian leader, Ismail Haniyeh, Abu al-Abed, the leader of Hamas and a national leader of the Palestinian people, who was assassinated by the occupation in Tehran, Iran, on 31 July, only two days later, alongside his companion, Waseem Abu Shaban. This assassination was, like the genocide itself, a coordinated attack with the participation of the U.S.; on the same day, the Zionists assassinated Lebanese resistance leader Fouad Shukr of Hezbollah, while the U.S. bombed Iraq, targeting four leaders of the Iraqi resistance.
He was renowned for his high level of principle and commitment to Palestinian liberation and national unity, and for his rejection of the unjust and unacceptable conditions placed upon the Palestinian people — indeed, the attempt to bargain Palestinian lives for basic rights and dignity. As he declared, “The fortresses will not fall, the strongholds will not be breached, they will not snatch our positions from us, and we will not recognize ‘Israel.’” Throughout generations of struggle, the Palestinian people have made clear that the martyrdom of their leaders will not hold back their struggle; as we mark 3 August one year later, we must also make that clear internationally, and make Haniyeh’s last call to the public one that resonates through the years, for action and solidarity.
Those principles are perhaps more urgent than ever, with the Palestinian cause facing multiple forms of attack: of course, the genocide and starvation regime imposed by the US-European-Zionist aggression on Gaza and throughout Palestine, the taking of nearly 100 martyrs daily, the horrific war crimes against the population. However, the proclamations of Britain, France, Canada and other directly complicit imperialist nations (as well as of Saudi Arabia and complicit Arab reactionary regimes) about “recognition of a Palestinian ‘state’” (without actual control over land, borders and trade; without sovereignty or self-determination; ‘demilitarized’ and serving as a security arm of the Zionist regime; without the right to return of Palestinian refugees; and with the elimination of the resistance) are not about recognizing Palestinian rights but instead about a new project to liquidate those rights. In fact, these statements come as a new report reveals ongoing and widespread Canadian arms trade with “Israel” and as Britain declares Palestine Action a “terrorist” organization for confronting Zionist arms factories.
If any of these states actually seek to support Palestinian rights, the first steps that they can and must take are to impose a two-way, full arms embargo on the Zionist regime; expel ‘Israeli’ ambassadors and close their own embassies; end the criminalization of Palestinian resistance and Palestine solidarity organizations as ‘terrorists’; immediately send trucks and observers, and accompany those trucks to demand the immediate entry of aid to Gaza through the Rafah crossing with no interference or role for the Zionist genocidaires — not to mention the moral obligation to actively support the Palestinian resistance. They are instead aiming to pacify the outrage among their populations about the ongoing genocide, cover up their own complicity and protect the future of the Zionist project rather than recognizing the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people — without conditions — to full self-determination and sovereignty, not to mention return and liberation, on their entire national soil.
This moment has also highlighted the complicity of reactionary Arab regimes that have engaged in normalization with the Zionist project, from Camp David to Wadi Araba to the “Abraham Accords,” in the continuing genocide. From Egypt refusing to open the Rafah crossing to enter goods and international journalists due to the dictates of the U.S. and the Zionist entity, to Jordan criminalizing support for the resistance and even protest while shooting down drones from Yemen and Iran, to the United Arab Emirates creating a “land bridge” to evade the Yemeni blockade of the port of “Eilat” (Umm al-Rashrash), these reactionary regimes are now facing real pressure about their active complicity in the siege, starvation and genocide of Gaza at the behest of the imperialist powers. Meanwhile, in Syria, despite the government’s repeated assurances of its interest in “peace” and normalization, the occupation continues to invade, take over territory and abduct Syrians.
In contrast, at the same time, every day, in Lebanon, resisters and people of the South are targeted for assassinations in rampant ceasefire violations while the U.S. demands the disarmament of the Resistance, while Yemen continues its massive popular mobilization for Palestine alongside and fully integrated with the actions of its armed forces to actively intervene to bring an end to the genocide and cut off its supply lines in an example that should serve as a challenge to all.
This 3 August — and every day from now — must be a time for action, but also a time for escalation. 22 months, 666 days of genocide, amid rampant engineered starvation, the deliberate promotion of disease, and the mass murder of Palestinian children, adults and elders, men and women, in schools, mosques, churches, refugee camps and residential buildings.
Let the first week of August become Days of Rage everywhere—especially in North America and Europe.
We call upon the masses of our Palestinian people, the allies and supporters of the resistance, and all anti-colonial forces around the world to raise their voices loud and clear, take to the streets, besiege Zionist embassies, and turn every public square and city into a point of direct confrontation, until the siege is broken and the aggression is ended.
We must stand up for the martyrs, and for the imprisoned martyrs that the occupation continues to jail after death, and witness for them. Stand up for the wounded, for the health care workers fighting to save lives under the bombs. Stand up for the heroic resistance fighting every day for a free Palestine. Stand up for the prisoners, confronting the occupier daily behind bars, holding fast to freedom.
Confront the arms factories that trade with the occupation or are owned directly by occupation companies — like Elbit Systems — with blockades and direct action. Shut down the economy of genocide.
Besiege the embassies of the occupation and its complicit imperialist partners. Shut them down and make it impossible for them to carry out their genocidal business.
Shut down streets, government buildings and institutions of the imperial core. The genocide is an emergency. Every day, Palestinians are being massacred and it is clear that the imperialist states will not exert pressure for the genocide to end unless their own interests are on the line directly.
Continue the escalations at the embassies of complicit Arab reactionary regimes. These regimes must be concerned about their own futures in order to create counter-pressure to the Zionists and imperialists.
Wherever you are, organize, escalate and act. Ramp up our organizing and our mobilization, be louder, more visible, and create a greater obstruction for the business of the war machine. It is clear that the genocide will not end so long as its perpetrators enjoy impunity; if we cannot rely or wait for the courts, we must impose popular accountability through action.
The Palestinian resistance is today on the front lines defending Gaza, Palestine, the Arab nation, the Islamic world, and all of humanity. Our actions must live up to the example they set every day, to end the human-made famine, end the starvation, end the genocide — and fight for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.
Canada’s secret arms trade with Israel, exposed: This hard-hitting report exposes the damning data—hundreds of shipments, hundreds of thousands of bullets—and the Canadian government’s web of lies that has been concealing its role in arming genocide …
This week, I faced trial for opposing genocide, Zionism, and for challenging Germany’s unconditional support for Israel. The state prosecuting me may have legal authority, but its moral authority has collapsed as it again participates in a genocide.
"“We call for active and massive participation on this national and global day in defense of our prisoners and our people in the Gaza Strip, to expose the brutal crimes…"
NPA Unit Kills 7 AFP Troopers In Defensive Action In Bukidnon Province: Philippines
The New People’s Army (NPA)-Bukidnon defended itself against the 8th IB troops in a clash that occurred on July 1, at 7:20 in the morning, in Sitio Tubigon, Barangay Busdi, Malaybalay City, Bukidnon Province. No less than seven fascist 8th IB soldiers were confirmed killed in the battle.
The people’s army reported that its fighters were walking when they encountered the 8th IB. The battle lasted for 15 minutes, during which the NPA-Bukidnon managed to fire shots and safely maneuvered.
In retaliation, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) fired cannons on July 1 and 2 for the damage the NPA damage wrought to the 8th IB. No NPA-Bukidnon unit was hit, but the bombing terrorized the farmers and Lumad communities in the area.
The AFP first fired four artillery shells at 12:30 p.m. on July 1. Two Black Hawk helicopters retrieved the killed soldiers’ remains. Then two more artillery rounds were fired at 3 p.m.
On the next day, the AFP again fired four artillery rounds at 3 a.m. while the civilian population was resting.
“The Party congratulates the NPA-Bukidnon for taking the initiative in the recent encounter to defend itself against the fascist soldiers,” Communist Party of the Philippines chief information officer Marco L. Valbuena, said. He added that the people’s army must further develop guerrilla warfare to consistently defeat the fascist attacks and repression campaign of the US-Marcos regime and its armed forces.
Meanwhile, Valbuena condemned the AFP for its indiscriminate shelling which traumatizes civilian communities. “The AFP shelling clearly aims to sow terror and intimidate the farmers and Lumad to break their fighting spirit,” Valbuena stated.
He added that the Filipino people must continuously expose the AFP’s crimes and violations of international humanitarian law in the countryside.
The New People’s Army (NPA)-Bukidnon defended itself against the 8th IB troops in a clash that occurred on July 1, at 7:20 in the morning, in Sitio Tubigon, Barangay Busdi, Malaybalay City, Bukidnon.
"The New People’s Army (NPA)-Bukidnon defended itself against the 8th IB troops in a clash that occurred on July 1, at 7:20 in the morning, in Sitio Tubigon, Barangay Busdi,…"
ahhh, yes, its time to discredit and bad jacket one of the main "stop killing games" people who has managed to attract a good amount of international attention to the cause, including an EU VP.
Yeah I heard he's got some skeletons in his closet hah hah hah hah pwned right kids.
I have literally watched numerous videos of him campaigning for stop killing games, and I've listened to him talk about it at length on several streams recently, and I have no idea what you are saying.
I don't know what that is, but I've seen 3 or 4 interviews with Thor/Jason, im not confused about who he is at all, and I appreciate the efforts he has put into stop killing games? You keep saying things, but these things don't jive with the interviews he has given.
Is the gaming industry THAT pissed at him?? Time to accuse him of sex crimes, too?? Wow.
I think we miscommunicated. I thought you switched the names and positions of the Stop killing games guy with the fake guy, who is basically opposing all of it on behalf of game devs lol.
this is a really hot subject right now lol. This could change the economics of gaming and of software dev in general, and of course corporate devs are doing misinfo.
wait. There are people in this thread above claiming Thor is the OPPOSITE of who he is - that he is ATTACKING his own movement lmaaaaooo ok, ok. I see what's up.
Here is an easy breakdown of how I feel about this initiative.I cannot and will not support a vague and potentially dangerous start to this conversation. Cal...
This guy is the Stop Killing Games guy who advocates the correct (imo) perspective. Who is the other guy (the long haired guy OPPOSING stop killing games???)
Official channel of Accursed Farms, videos created by Ross Scott. Includes Freeman's Mind, Ross's Game Dungeon, Civil Protection, and more. Check the main website (accursedfarms.com) for news and updates.
He didn't do much harm I guess but it's just so sad to see that again someone with a massive mouth gets so much attention while doing zer0 of the actual work
There are so many amazing indie games that will barely be downloaded because too much attention goes to scammers like Thor
aaah, can't escape this guy. He kept popping up with his shorts and now there are so many posts and videos about how he faked his things. I watched some videos where you could see his code and I was shocked how bad it is. I don't know the language he's working with, but as a software engineer, I think I can assume that the language he's using isn't so restrictive that he has to develop like he jus learned his first hello world program.
@Emmanuel Florac Is everybody really sad or just people who are accustomed to being compliant and apathetic? It seems like such a generalized summary. Indeed much of the observations are relevant, however, not all of us follow the trends.
Indeed, much of the food supply is over processed poison but is anyone really being forced to consume it? No, many people do so willingly, the choose to do so. Some others eat from the land and eat our animals from head to tail. Just saying.
@Carter Braxton we are mostly determined, biologically, then culturally, then socially. Though our feeling of free will is strong, it's actually mostly an illusion.
@Emmanuel Florac Is it really? I know power may be an illusion but what's stopping a person in the supermarket from choosing a package of beef liver over a package of frankfurters? Is that choice non existent? Which food item offers the most nutrition?
@Emmanuel Florac It's not complicated to me. I went grocery shopping with my sister this morning, She bought her goods I bought mine. I bought meat and milk, including beef liver, and when we got to her home she started heating up some franks.
She and I, have from time to time been exposed to the same advertising gimmicks, we roughly have the same educational background, she makes more money than I do and yet, she opted for the sodas, the refined carbs and the fucknig frankfurters as her first meal of choice today.
She literally made the point that I made with you yesterday in this very thread. Also, when I used franks and liver as examples, they were purely random and she, by her own actions, made my argument relevant. I love being right. So it isn't complicated at all. Some people know better but they're just fucking stupid.
A Popular Flood is Coming, and Saudi Arabia and France are Leading a Political Extermination of our National Rights
In an interview with “Palestine Today TV” Barakat: A popular flood is coming, and Saudi Arabia and France are leading a political extermination of our national rights
Palestinian writer Khaled Barakat affirmed in an interview yesterday with Palestine Today TV, on the program Al-Madar, that the global popular uprising against the genocidal war and starvation policies will inevitably erupt — and its flames may reach American, Canadian, European cities and beyond. This uprising will be capable of strengthening our people’s steadfastness and contributing to halting the ongoing U.S.-Zionist massacres that have continued for 22 months.
Barakat, a member of the Executive Committee of the Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, indicated that we are on the brink of a new revolutionary phase that will turn the balance of power upside down. He stressed that the Zionist entity is gradually becoming a burden on Europe and the United States, pointing out that “there is fertile ground for the explosion of a great global flood.”
Barakat considered the commemoration of the martyrdom of the great national leader Ismail Haniyeh to be a historic moment for declaring a state of disobedience across all arenas, and for isolating the Zionist entity, which continues to pursue policies of massacres and starvation with U.S.-European support and official Arab silence.
He emphasized the decisive role of the Palestinian, Egyptian, and Jordanian masses in particular, and the Arab masses in general, calling on them to tear up the “Camp David,” “Wadi Araba,” and “Oslo” agreements, as well as the infamous so-called “Abraham Accords.” He urged them to force the Egyptian regime, through popular power, to open the Rafah crossing and allow essential supplies, such as medicine, food, water, and more, to reach our besieged people facing genocide in Gaza.
Barakat reiterated his rejection of the so-called “two-state solution,” describing the Saudi-French approach as “a comprehensive liquidation project” of mere deception, lies, and misinformation practiced by regimes and colonial powers for decades, as a ready-made formula for erasing Palestinian national rights and as a gateway to normalization and recognition of the Zionist entity. He characterized the factions of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah as being akin to the Arab regimes: complicit and impotent.
Barakat noted that the Zionist crimes in the Gaza Strip will drive Palestinian youth in the diaspora to return to armed struggle and the path of fedai (guerrilla) action once again, as the crimes and genocidal war will not pass without a collective Palestinian response and without massive historical consequences for the entire region.
He launched a fierce attack on the hypocritical positions of Canada and Europe, which justify the enemy’s crimes, sell it weapons, and then offer Palestinians illusions in the form of what is called “recognition of the Palestinian state.”
In an interview with “Palestine Today TV”Barakat: A popular flood is coming, and Saudi Arabia and France are leading a political extermination of our national rights Palestinian writer Khaled Barakat affirmed in an interview yesterday with Palestine …
A Popular Flood is Coming, and Saudi Arabia and France are Leading a Political Extermination of our National Rights abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/206…
"In an interview with “Palestine Today TV”Barakat: A popular flood is coming, and Saudi Arabia and France are leading a political extermination of our national rights Palestinian writer Khaled Barakat…"
A woman who replaced her front lawn with native plants was issued a fine because officials said it was too ugly. CBS News New York's Carolyn Gusoff reports. ...
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. --
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
My next nonfiction book is "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 7:
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Cory Doctorow back to San Francisco for the release of Enshittification at Public Works. More to come, but grab a ticket and join us!About the bookEnshittification: its not just youthe internet sucks now.
The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Cory Doctorow back to San Francisco for the release of Enshittification at Public Works. More to come, but grab a ticket and join us!About the bookEnshittification: its not just youthe internet sucks now.
Co-op Congress brings together those working to build a fairer economy to share ideas, get inspiration and take action. See the full programme of Day One at ...
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Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly …
Türkler Müslüman olmamıştır Müslümanlar Türk olmuştur. Kemalizm hiç bir zaman gerçekten laik veya seküler bir ideoloji olmaz. Çünkü ittihatçı Kemalist faşizm Müslümanları Türkleştirmiş ve yapay bir ulus yaratmıştır.
Havana, August 1 (Prensa Latina) Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez condemned the coercive measures imposed by the US government against members of Palestinian organizations.
George Washington's Barlow pen knife. Mother of pearl scales. 1 3/4 pen blade.
The smaller bolster would typically be classified as a jack knife, not a barlow, these days. It's also atypical (for both a jack and a barlow) with only a single smaller pen style blade. Typically these would have a single larger clip point or spear point blade or two blades with one of these larger blades and a secondary pen blade which both extend out of the same end.
Come out King Bramis you fat fuck once I take you down I'm gonna change this statue to be of ME kicking your ass and I'll call it "The REAL Lord of the Fallen beats the kingdom's biggest loser and little bitch (Whose great grandmother had incestuous sex with a nigger which explains why he is a faggot)"
This is the actual plot of Lords of the Fallen by the way I am media literate
In 2015, wildlife photographer Christophe Courteau took this close up of a 6ft 6, 400lbs silverback gorilla, right before it punched him in the face. redd.it/1mfq6dz
Anyone who unironically calls themselves neurodivergent is literally stating that they are a victim of their own mind and are too lazy to understand or fix their thinking.
As Israel obliterates Gaza with Berlin's backing, German public support is plummeting. Yet the government is crushing dissent and refusing to change course.
“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.
“Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past,” he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk.
Shawn P. Wilbur: An exercise in theoretical synthesis-distillation of anarchist thought and practice autonomies.org/2025/08/shawn-p…
"This is the first opportunity that we have had, as a collective, to celebrate and acknowledge the very impressive work by Shawn P. Wilbur of translating, publishing (into English) and reflecting upon – with others – “classical” anarchist theory and … Continue
Gustave Courbet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 1865 This is the first opportunity that we have had, as a collective, to celebrate and acknowledge the very impressive work by Shawn P. Wilbur of translatin…
Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. --
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again."
Automation can be transformative, relieving us of danger and drudgery by getting a machine to pick up some of the heavy work. Ideally automation seamlessly swaps a human for a machine at some stage in a process (ideally, the boring, dangerous and/or difficult phase). Like, whipping egg-whites for a meringue is hard on your wrist.
But swap your whisk for a hand blender, and suddenly that tiresom process becomes fast and easy. If the blender is cordless, you can use it anywhere in your kitchen, including wherever you would have stood over a bowl with a whisk.
A mixer, by contrast, requires more labor on your part: you have to decant the contents of your mixing bowl into the mixer, run its motor, and then scrape the whipped whites back into your bowl for the next phase. It's worse automation.
But the worst automation would be a mixer that requires a special electrical outlet, a different fridge, and a special egg-carton. You would have to redesign your whole kitchen to use that thing. Sure, it might produce *perfect* meringues, and sure, if you had a meringue *factory* it might be a great solution. But for everyday use, it's a solution that creates more problems than it solves.
AI pitchmen promise that seamless swapping of a human tethered to some choresome drudgery for software. That's the whole point of self-driving cars: each of us can swap a standard car for one with an autopilot and use the same roads, with the same road-users, to get to all the same places. We don't have to tear up all the roads and lay tracks, or fill the roadside environment with sensors and beacons to help the "self-driving" cars navigate the system.
A self-driving car shares the road with human-piloted vehicles, even when they are driven by humans who don't see why they should allow a robot to merge into their lane or have the right of way, even if the human is turning left into oncoming robo-traffic.
Self-driving cars are not very good at this stuff, as it turns out. When that became apparent, self-driving car hucksters announced that it was only reasonable for their products to require something of the rest of us.
> “I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” Ng told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.”
> “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.”
New limitations in deep learning — called “AI Winter” by skeptics — could pose a serious problem for autonomous car projects by Tesla, Waymo, and Uber.
This is an incredible act of shameless bait-and-swtichery. In just a few short sentences, Ng's cars go from being the kind of automation that is purely the concern of the person who uses it - the owner of a self-driving car - to the kind of automation that *everyone in the world* has to adjust to, lest we become part of the "pogo stick problem."
Making a car that can navigate a well-behaved, non-adversarial world is relatively straightforward. But demanding that the entire world behave itself? Well, that's the hard problem of 100,000 years of civilization and ethics. A product that only works in an ideal world isn't a viable product.
Self-driving car boosters didn't invent this wheeze, either. The entire concept of "pedestrian" (and later, "jaywalker") was invented by the auto industry to shift blame for the death and destruction the wealthy owners of their products inflicted on everyday people to the victims:
This is the story of how, in the 1920s, the auto industry chased people off the streets of America — by waging a brilliant psychological campaign. It’s one of the most remarkable (and successful)…
The latest peddlers of pogo-stick demands are the agentic AI people. They have raised (hundreds of) billions of dollars by promising that they will make AIs that can autopilot your browser to accomplish tedious, time-consuming tasks, visiting the same websites you would visit, locating and processing the information needed to perform the task you've set for it.
This will supposedly make all kinds of human workers obsolete (which is where the hundreds of billions of dollars come in - the whole AI investor pitch is "We are developing technology that will let bosses fire their workers").
But agentic AI sucks. Asking a chatbot to take a screenshot of a website, then make guesses about which parts of it are links and what those links do, choose one link to fire a click at, and then start again is a recipe for incredible dysfunction.
That's even before we get into "hallucinations" (this is AI jargon for "errors").
A more mature agentic AI apologetics admits that while no one knows how to make an AI that can navigate the whole internet, we can make specialist agents that can perform one kind of task, then hand off the output from that task to the next agent, and the next.
This also sucks: you're created a whole menagerie of AIs, each of which is prone to its own failure modes, and then combining them, multiplying all those error potentials together, sending erroneous findings careening through a cascade of downstream AIs. This is broken-telephone-as-a-service.
Give it your credit card, ask it to order a bag of jucing oranges, and six months later someone's gonna back a 16 wheeler up to your front door with $40,000 worth of frozen OJ and a receipt for a futures contract you're on the hook for.
The latest agentic AI pitch "solves" this problem by asserting that the whole internet will simply have to accommodate itself to AI agents.
Every website will have to adopt robust, accurate semantics that describe its navigation and offerings, standardized across every domain of human activity. This would be great. The semantic web people have been trying to make it happen since 1999, with no success to speak of, for reasons I identified more than 20 years ago:
The reason websites don't make their results easy to scrape and compare is that they want to cheat you. They want you to buy something more expensive and/or inferior than the best match for your desire. There is no way for an AI agent to know when a website is lying to it.
Websites that lie the most are incentivized to have the *best*, highest-grade automation hooks for an AI agent to connect to (just as spammers have the best, most pristine anti-spam incidia, from DKIM to SPF to DMARC records).
And these cheaters aren't fringe players - they're the biggest companies out there. Amazon knows that Prime members don't shop around, so it presents them with higher prices than non-Prime users.
The hard part of comparison-shopping for an airline isn't sorting a database of all the prices offered to all customers under all circumstances: *it's compiling such a database*.
We don't need complex AI-based techniques to perform a simple sort - we need AI to solve the problem of knowing what prices every airline is charging at this instant to every flier for every itinerary.
When agentic AI grifters insist that the entire internet has to adopt and faithfully use standard APIs so their bots can accurately analyze the internet's contents, they are re-inventing the pogo-stick problem.
Yes, if you could get the entire world to arrange its affairs to your benefit, you could surely do some *incredible* things, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a rollerskate.
Even if you *could* get everyone to adopt a standard set of APIs and use them well, this is a *titanic* engineering challenge, at least as big as anything the agentic AI people are promising to do.
There's an unassailable response to the assertion that you could do amazing things as soon as everyone else upends their life to make things more convenient for you, the sacred principle of "wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which will be full first":
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
So I guess this'll be their next form of the two-tier internet of the enshittifiers' dreams.
Those who want to use the whizz-bang AI agents will be limited to the handful of big corporate sites who've built out specific infrastructure tailored to (lying to) AI agents.
I'm truly fascinated how we are still able to keep going in the worst possible direction, full speed. Things didn't change - at all. This blog post reminded me (apart from having a blog - which looks terrible) of a post I wrote in 2019.
This Week in F-DroidTWIF curated on Thursday, 31 Jul 2025, Week 31F-Droid coreF-Droid and F-Droid Basic were updated to 1.23.1 fixing the index diff bug we’v...
Had a dream where I was playing a vidya and defeated a boss by charging up and yelling NIGGER with immense force at him repeatedly and then the game said NOW YOU'RE FIGHTING HOLY and some metal song started playing
Russia is willing to negotiate but the West displays a lack of “genuine interest” in reaching a peaceful settlement in the Ukrainian conflict, former CIA officer Larry Johnson tells Sputnik while commenting on the latest remarks by Russian President …
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"We have a shared responsibility[..] to promote education about the Holocaust and combat antisemitism, both online and offline[..]we will continue to fight hate speech online through our policies, tools and programmes... Hate speech targeting the Jewish community is a particularly pernicious example of hateful content that we are committed to tackling on YouTube"
Some of the really good things about this tree: blooms at just-above-eye-level, surrounded by other green plants with good pink/white contrast, and the contours of the blooms complement the shape of the feeding hummingbird.
I had to wait a couple hours to get the shot in my previous post. It was a bloom at the outer edge of the tree. Most of the feeding action happened in a much messier interior environment with better cover.
Shots like the one in the previous post are good practice though. I found at times I needed to bump my manual focus ring in a bit so it would “find” the bird, which was important to learn for when it came out into the open. Sometimes you only get one good chance and it’s a heartbreak if you miss it!
It was also good to understand something about hummingbird behavior. Apparently they are able to make mental maps within their territory to maximize the flower’s replenishment of nectar. They won’t usually return to the same bloom in consecutive feeds if there are other options. So—theoretically—if I waited long enough, it would eventually get to the grouping of flowers that I wanted to shoot.
And the offshoot photography tip: make sure your hands know which direction your knobs and the rings on your lens go. You can probably see it in the viewfinder but sometimes that split second can make a huge difference. I couldn’t actually TELL you which way the knobs go (aperture is on my thumb and shutter is on my index) but when my hands are on the camera, it’s automatic.
Haha the muscle memory thing is so weird. I was trying to think of how I do exposure compensation but I’m not 100% sure! I think I hold down a button with my index finger and there’s a dial for my thumb on the back? If I think about it I don’t remember but with the camera in my hands, I know.
That’s the fun challenge of the whole thing. Some things you can control and other things are completely not up to you. So I do my part and show up and see what the birds will do.
#FotoVorschlag 'Dinge, die mit "Z" beginnen' Zugschwellen, -geleise und Zaun In einem unserer Nachbarorte fahren nur sehr selten Züge, deshalb war dies ungefährlich, bringe trotzdem ein CW an. Nun könnte ich so ein Foto aus gesundheitlichen Gründen nicht mehr machen. Handyshot Herbst 19
They slashed your healthcare, hiked your bills, and left you screaming into the void. This isn’t policy; it’s punishment. And millions of Americans are done staying quiet.
A Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by TNR signals top-level discussions about a potential escalation of the Pentagon’s domestic anti-immigration role, and lays out new details.
I say, if death is the penalty for proclaiming truth, then I will proudly and defiantly pay the costly price! Truth crucified in Socrates, in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, Galileo still lives -- they and others whose number is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow! -- August Spies
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