Good 2018 talk by Cory Doctorow on the impossibility of crypto-anarchy (or at least of crypto-anarchy alone).
Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (1851 – 8 May 1919) was a Russian revolutionary. She was friends with the nihilist Sergei Nechaev, tried to kill the governor of St. Petersburg, and co-founded the first Russian Marxist group.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
"There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
"To vote is to abdicate. To name one or several masters for a short or long period means renouncing one’s own sovereignty. Whether he becomes absolute monarch, constitutional prince or a simple elected representative bearing a small portion of royalty, the candidate you raise to the throne or the chair will be your superior. You name men who are above laws, since they write them and their mission is to make you obey."
Black originally wrote this in 1982. It could have been written today.
"the immiserating orderings of society have never been voted away, but that electoralism—for all the plaintive promises that we can both rabble-rouse and ballot-box—has regularly served as a mechanism of capture for potentially transformative social movements."
Some history on the anarchist tradition of abstention candidates
"As to the anarchist position that universal suffrage did not legitimize authority, it is worth taking seriously. ... Even if we disagree that authority is never legitimate and Dewey’s self-aware public has been achieved, not all uses of authority — especially when it comes to state violence — can be justified by the vote. To do so would be to treat suffrage as a mythical unquestioned good rather than a reasonable choice."
This is an audio documentary series. I've listened to the first two episodes. It is well produced, and I understand Trump a tiny bit better now.
The genesis of the Gadsden flag comes from a May 1751 editorial cartoon from Ben Franklin’s newspaper. It ran alongside a story calling for colonial governments to unify, act as one.
Today, it means almost the opposite.
On what it means to be grill pilled. "Basically, just a few people treating each other decently is about all we can hope for."
More than anyone ever wanted to know about Nick Fuentes and his Groypers.
Joshua Clover, as usual, with the good takes on the current riots.
"To Trump, the Bible and the church are not symbols of faith; they are weapons of culture war. And to many of his Christian supporters watching at home, the pandering wasn’t an act of inauthenticity; it was a sign of allegiance—and shared dominance."
The New Yorker's 2013 profile of Qassem Suleimani. He loved war and intrigue, and he died doing what he loved.
Just learned about August Willich who once challenged Marx to a duel (apparently because he thought Marx was too conservative to be a leader of international communism) before traveling to America to fight as a Union general in the civil war.
I started reading about his disagreements with Marx, but got bored.
An interview with Joshua Clover (author of Riot. Strike. Riot) on the biopolitical turn toward eco-nationalism
Nobody likes terrorists
The only social policy the Russian state pursues consistently is the policy of atomization. The state dehumanizes us in one another’s eyes. In the state’s own eyes, we stopped being human a long time ago.
