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nprofile1qqspf9j5gwr86eu73th67jmk66hh3zlsp69jmnlee0j35yg09wjvdecpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsxdrf0w

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Last Notes

2026-09-09 17:13:09 CEST

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you found some straight lines in Venice

2026-09-08 12:35:30 CEST

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that is also brilliant. Thank you

2026-09-06 15:36:49 CEST

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You have my full solidarity. Thank you for all that you did. Is there a pot to put money in to thank you.
I will miss A/I but will not miss the humans because we are everywhere

2026-09-06 12:55:41 CEST

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I think it is easy to forget how much the ruling class despises or at least doesn't give a shit about the masses. These people are a kind of priestly caste who have thrown their lots in with the ruling class. I don't think that much has changed today.
In defence of the early economists, they were revolutionary. They had overthrown feudalism and they saw liberalism as liberatory. The problem with liberalism is that it cannot be liberation for all because it requires the exploitation of the working class. What they were not prepared to have was liberation for all because it would mean losing their power. I think that remains true today.

2026-09-06 12:12:42 CEST

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I think that they were aware that capitalism worked exclusively for the owners of capital, but they were also committed capitalists, no?

2026-09-06 11:23:29 CEST

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oh that is gorgeous. It is both otherworldly and familiar. You can see at a glance it is a rose, but as you look closer it becomes other things. My first thought was it was reminiscent of an unmade bed. I think this is because roses are sensuous. Now I see mushrooms growing and being beautiful and strange

2026-09-04 21:13:14 CEST

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some people have all the skills... me, I am happyif I don't spill my tea

2026-09-04 20:39:36 CEST

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one or the other

2026-09-04 11:31:30 CEST

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I am sorry

2026-09-04 09:41:48 CEST

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I have made this comment elsewhere, but I am going to repeat it. The issue here is the decision to prosecute Tony G and others for writing and speech that is only vaguely in the area of the offence charged.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/12
12Support.
(1)A person commits an offence if—
(a)he invites support for a proscribed organisation, and
(b)the support is not, or is not restricted to, the provision of money or other property (within the meaning of section 15).
(1A)A person commits an offence if the person—
(a)expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, and
(b)in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.
(The deeper problem is that the offense is even on the books. The s. 12(1A) offense is authoritarian. I might be an awful human being if I do, but I ought to be able to express support for any organisation involved in political violence. What is criminal is preparing or carrying out an attack).
Tony came nowhere near to commiting the s. 12 offense. He chose to sack his barrister and deliver the closing remarks himself because he was convinced that only a perverse jury could save him. I think that this is wrong. I suspect that the jury listened to the judges instructions and concluded that the offense had not been made out. How could it have been? Mr G clearly doesn't support Hamas, clearly didn't invite support for them and wasn't reckless about whether someone hearing him praising the October 7th jailbreak and killings would be encouraged to support Hamas. I reckon that the barrister would have done a better job.
Like I said, outrageous that he was prosecuted, but I see no evidence that the trial was rigged or Tony's defense team being silenced

2026-09-03 22:57:47 CEST

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match him with ikklegemz

2026-08-31 21:05:40 CEST

This particular Pakistan side may be a little too mid to be truly a cricket team from Pakistan, but the current PCB is going the extra mile to make up for it:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/31/pakistan-sack-head-coach-sarfaraz-ahmed-send-seven-players-home-after-england-test-series-defeat-cricket
#Cricket, #Pakistan, #EngPak

2026-08-31 20:08:27 CEST

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I saw this in the morning, checked the news to understand why this might be and shrugged, putting it down as one of the Internet's unsolvable mysteries. This evening, I found the ur-text. I have not blessed the fediverse this hard since that time we all made rhymes about funny English place names

2026-08-31 19:41:47 CEST

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I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded they should have licked the remnants of Bernard Manning from off their fingers
@npub1chv…m6s2 @npub1dj9…8r0u @npub1ewp…rvql @npub1ush…ssz0 @npub1c6z…q3gp @npub1nlg…gwv6 @npub1vt4…8qd4 @npub1wnw…9wy5 @npub13a4…r5vv

2026-08-31 19:37:40 CEST

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I strongly feel that this is one of the greatest things I have ever read

2026-08-31 17:58:34 CEST

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stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing the remenants of Bernard Manning on his fingers. You'll never guess what he did next

2026-08-31 17:28:17 CEST

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you can give your family my email address and phone number. They are welcome to copy me into all their correspondence. I promise that I will do no more than read it and store it

2026-08-23 11:40:56 CEST

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totally agree

2026-08-22 17:58:09 CEST

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Wordsworth composed Toussaint an ode when he was taken prisoner by the French:
Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!
Whether the all-cheering sun be free to shed
His beams around thee, or thou rest thy head
Pillowed in some dark dungeon's noisome den,
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen Thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and Man's unconquerable mind.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_(Wordsworth,_1815)/Volume_2/To_Toussaint_L%27Ouverture

2026-08-13 08:11:02 CEST

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sure, but teachers are employees. I fully accept that their renumeration should take into account the additional expense and limitation of their holidays being fixed. Indeed it should take into account the job they do. They are hopelessly underpaid. They are not in the same position as their students. If the kids think that they will get more out of time off, then that is, or should be, the kids choice

2026-08-12 18:32:44 CEST

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I think that is true

2026-08-10 12:51:13 CEST

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exactly, you have to hold onto that thought

2026-08-10 11:12:00 CEST

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I am sorry about the drama. It can really shake you up. keep liking because it is so likeable

2026-08-09 11:05:12 CEST

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yeah, they were doing well until the nonsense racism at the end there. As you point out a vast number of these so called 'foreigners' are absolutely the people who live in, work in and belong in London, especially the ones on welfare. There is a massive problem with the financialisation of land and housing making London housing a very attractive investment for speculators the world over. Airbnb adds to the problem. Not only does it reduce the supply of housing and decimate communities, it inflates the cost of rent and thus house prices.
Indeed, when you look at the whole thread it is just reform propoganda. It says that you are a home owning, car owning suburbanite Brit. You are getting nothing for your taxes and, worse, the state is interfering with your (airbnb) investments. Instead of calling for solidarity and the provision of public goods, like transport, health, education, sewage, waste disposal and housing, by public bodies for the benefit of all, it concludes that the state should back off except to prevent you having to compete with foreigners. The only call is to make Jack's mate alright again.

2026-08-04 11:46:05 CEST

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what is glorious is people resisting the racist structures that would prefer them to die slowly in Morocco. Last I saw about 12,000 remain in Ceuta. If they end up back in Morocco, it is because we failed. Just like we failed with to respond to the Arab spring, the women, life, freedom protests, the Sudanese Revolution, the Great March of Return and I don't know what else.
If we don't learn solidarity soon, then we will have to conclude that we are in fact with Elon Musk and his racists. I would rather people were honest that they want fortified, leathal borders because they enjoy the benefits of global apartheid than kid themselves that they are anti-racist because they want a lucky few to be given a humanitarian visa.
Everyone who takes direct action against the border is a hero. I'm not brave enough to do so, but I can least give those who are my moral and practical support

2026-08-04 11:06:32 CEST

The response from the left to the glorious breach of Fortress Europe at Ceuta has upset me. Who cares if there is great political game? The people who moved are not pawns. They are agents. Perhaps they exploited a fault line in the ruling class. Good, let's pile into the breach they made and stop trying to repair it.
Donate to No Name Kitchen
https://donorbox.org/emergency-solidarity-with-ceuta
#Solidarity, #NoNameKitchen, #AbolishFrontex, #EndFortressEurope, #Migration, #Ceuta

2026-08-02 22:01:55 CEST

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good point, well made

2026-08-01 13:54:38 CEST

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This article, https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2026/07/22/the-liberal-capture-of-anarchism/, addresses the same issue but is looking for the cause of her revolutionary capitulation. It finds it in the university - NGO industrial complex. I suspect that is right. Not only are the universities and NGO's institutions of power, but the workers within them form the new working class, the precariat. They/we are unsurprisingly attracted to radical politics because they/we are now excluded from capital and are dependent on the wage. There is though a strong tendency to scab on the working class globally because previous generations of such adminstrators formed a priestly class and were rewarded for their loyalty to the owners of capital by being given access to things like home ownership and some of the surplus value that accrues to the owners of capital. The liberal wing of the establishment holds out the promise of restoring that.

2026-08-01 13:34:53 CEST

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amazing

2026-08-01 12:43:32 CEST

Paul Demarty is always worth reading. I hadn't previously realised that the popular front/any one but Trump/Farage/Hard Right horror show has to ultimately prop up the liberal wing of the ruling class. I thought that it was because the revolutionaries have to suppress their revolutionary demands for unity with the more powerful ruling class block. It also, as the article points out, because the anyone but position poses no alternative to the way that power works. It thus inevitably leads to more of the same
http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1596/sleaze-at-the-seaside/

2026-07-31 12:45:25 CEST

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interesting, people want to move though. They don't need their Government's encouragement.
The people of Ceuta clearly need our solidarity too. 40,000 people in Europe or even Spain is nothing. It is less than half the capacity of the Camp Nou. It is a crazy number for a tiny enclave

2026-07-31 12:00:22 CEST

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interesting, thank you. the Spanish government can tell themselves that. My guess is that the harraga are burning.
The Government is going to have to bring people to the peninsula, no?

2026-07-31 09:57:26 CEST

I am sure that people are becoming overwhelmed by all the requests for financial support from fediverse users in Gaza. I did some research:
There are about 250 campaigns listed on the Gaza Verified site. That is the bulk of our compañerxs in Gaza.
According to FediDB there are over a million monthly active users.
Back of an envelope stats:
Half the monthly active users have some spare money. Half of them believe in solidarity with people in Gaza. That gives 250,000 potential donors or
1000 fediverse users outside of Gaza per users inside Gaza.
Now, my friend Angham El-Khalil, https://www.chuffed.org/project/186653-urgent-assistance-for-angham, needs about $500/month to keep her family of four housed. I cannot see why we collectively cannot manage to keep her and all our friends in Gaza from being without basic needs.
What is required is that we put our money where our mouths are. The Gaza verified team could perhaps tweak their interface so that people can sign up, anonymously or otherwise, to commit to ongoing monthly support. It would prevent people having to beg all the time and give people a bit of stability.
Meanwhile, do please support Angham or anyone else who is in need.
#GazaVerified, #Solidarity, #Palestine, #Gaza

2026-07-31 09:26:57 CEST

40,000 people have made their way into Ceuta in the last few days. That is an extraordinary piece of direct action against borders. We need to find ways of building on that. I'm not sure what solidarity looks like here, but I am open to suggestions
#AbolishFrontex, #FreeMovement, #FortressEuope, #Migration, #Ceuta, #Spain

2026-07-31 08:56:29 CEST

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I missed that nuance. Whoops

2026-07-30 23:05:49 CEST

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I am sure someone posted one just the other day. It could have been a different telescope

2026-07-30 14:14:43 CEST

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I agree that the choice is in fact spend 50k for a 50% chance of a million. It is just that you are, unusually, no worse off than the moment before the game started if you lose.
I disagree that you are always being offered good odds. See my comment about discount upthread

2026-07-30 11:06:09 CEST

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all such a thought experiment shows is that not all pounds are created equal. There is a diminishing utility as the pounds increase. I think that the economists call it discount, no? Almost everybody flips if it is £1 or £1000 and almost nobody if it is one billion or one trillion.
Depending on your circumstances, the rate of discount changes and so the point at which the riskier outcome is less than twice as good as the safer changes. We are not so good at calculating discount but not taking the bet is a rational choice for many people, perhaps most. I do not know. You can do a lot with 50k
I am a home owner and have secure disability benefits. I reckon that if I put my mind to it, I could earn 50k. I think that I would flip. If I leave with nothing, my life is ok. If I leave with a million my life is transformed. That is more than twice as good.

2026-07-29 10:44:06 CEST

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my respect for open source developers just went up several more notches. I sort of assumed that you didn't need to care about the hardware and anyway you used some sort of emulator/wizardry for testing.
It turns out, no. You actually shell out for hardware and try to make it work across multiple devices. I'm sat. Hats off

2026-07-29 09:19:10 CEST

So over 1000 people have been charged with illegal arrival. This is 'the crime' of reaching the UK without authorisation. The prosecution decisions are somewhat, a big cohort of boat drivers (expected given the Government's desire to equate the people who pilot the unseaworthy craft with smugglers), but also people who came by other routes, normally if they had previously tried, including by state sanctioned means, to come to the UK.
The judges, in general, have been sentencing people to under 12 months on a guilty plea, at least for those with no previous attempts to come here. This is crucial because you are only excluded from asylum if you get 12 months or more (nb. You still can't be deported if you would otherwise qualify but you are not given leave).
In response to the 'problem', the Government introduced a bunch of new offences, endangering life at sea can be commited by checking tide times, sharing safety information and so on. This will bring your sentence to over the refugee convention exclusion limit.
Why are they so keen to do this? Because it is meant to deter people from taking it the backroute. It obviously doesn't and they know that. What it does is makes these journeys more perilous and disproportionately criminilises the poorest and thus most vulnerable. It is predominantly black Africans who captain the boats because they can't afford a seat any other way.
The civil servants and politicians know all this, but they carry on regardless. It allows them to put out breathless press releases about smashing the gangs. It kills more people and leaves thousands of people in administrative limbo. The obvious conclusion is that their problem is neither the boats nor the deaths at sea, but the people.
As someone said yesterday, they don't want to stop the boats, you would do that by ending visas, they want to stop the people.
https://freemovement.org.uk/1000-people-convicted-for-illegal-arrival/
#UKPol, #Migration, #Refugees, #AbolishFrontex

2026-07-28 09:45:50 CEST

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Of course, it is fine to have or be an authority in some situations, my house, my rules is totally acceptable. If you want to run a cafe, online space or club your way, go ahead. It makes sense. Here is my gay mens' bicycle club. There is no space for TERFs/kink shaming/soliciting donations for Gaza.... You do you. You don't need to have a non-hierachical bicycle club open to all. If the members don't like it, they can form their own club. Ditto for your fedi instance
If you generalise that to society, you end up with a problem. At best you have a juridified Human Resources department determining what is acceptable. At worse, you have those rules used to crush dissent.

2026-07-28 09:33:45 CEST

Now that Mr Farage is having Mr Polanski investigated for inciting violence online because of an off colour punk joke will people on the left realise that trying to regulate and criminalise speech is a really terrible idea.
If you have rules, you need an authority who will enforce them. That authority will never enforce the rules in a neutral way. They couldn't even if they wanted to. There is no neutral rule enforcement, because you need a rule to implement a rule. It requires making a value judgment.
See also the ban on Palestine Action.
#UKPol

2026-07-28 08:59:49 CEST

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you probably know about William Cuffay, a leader of the chartist movement and an interesting figure in black and working class history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cuffay
The Pinkerton connection is really bizarre

2026-07-26 15:07:15 CEST

I know that it is de rigeur to criticise the execrable BBC current affairs, but this does a very good job of dissecting the problem
https://samberkson.substack.com/p/grounds-for-complaint

2026-07-26 14:42:33 CEST

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very, very possibly, yes. I have never heard of the original because I am an ignoramus

2026-07-26 14:16:21 CEST

Someone will know... every now and then I chant 'Il-lay-gal, Il-lay-gal, all my friends are Il-lay-gal'. My friend asked me where it is from. The answer, I think, is song made by people on the move in Greece or the Balkans in 2015 as part of the long summer of migration. It is a rather cheesy song, but now I want to find it and play it for my friend. Does anyone know its title or the artist
#AskFedi, #NoBorders, #RefugeesWelcome, #Migration, #AbolishFrontex, #Welcome2Europe

2026-07-26 13:03:34 CEST

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yes, the franchise should have ended with the death of the toys in 3. I know that the had the deus ex machina, but at a deeper the toys dead. Andy's childhood is over. The toys are discarded. In the end they are junk. It is a brilliant ending. 4 made no sense. 5 can't be any good

2026-07-26 12:36:59 CEST

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Toy Story 3 was a masterpiece. How bad can 5 be? Maybe film sequels are like symphonies. if you liked Beethoven's 5th, you're going to love his 9th

2026-07-25 20:00:17 CEST

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no idea, sorry

2026-07-24 22:41:12 CEST

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I think that sounds right. It relates to both 1 and 2. Once upon a time revolutionaries moved freely between the third world and the first and second worlds. now you are much more likely to be a refugee.
You see it in the difference between Gary Sobers, Viv Richards and Brian Lara. Sobers is an internationalist who understands that his talent will open doors for him. Richards is a nationalist who understands that his talent can be used to force open spaces for him and Lara is an individualist who understands has his talent will let him stay where he is

2026-07-23 10:33:22 CEST

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je ne connais pas cette affaire. Moi, je suis anglais. Mais tu as raison. Tout le temps on attaque les cibles faibles entre nos camarades, surtout en ligne, parce que c'est beaucoup plus facile que porter le combat à le vrai connards avec le pouvoir

2026-07-23 10:01:22 CEST

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that is no doubt true. I guess that I have this sense that we often create a story about sexual predators and abusers that monsters them and others them to exonerate ourselves. The paedophile ring, the grooming gang, the Epstein class... but when I walk down the highstreet, the women in the photos in the shop windows modeling underwear or bikinis look like teenage girls to me

2026-07-23 09:42:12 CEST

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I am sure that there are interconnections between the perpetrators. I also think that it is too convenient to think that it is a number of weirdo men over there, colluding with each other and egging each other on.
Take domestic violence and other forms of male abuse of their (our) partners. It follows well worn patterns. It can feel like their is a manual when you here enough accounts (despite being a man, my work trying to assist migrants with housing brings me into contact with a lot of women escaping abuse). Of course there is no secret network of wife beaters. It must be part of the patriarchy and thus part of all men.
Like you say Mme Pelicot is a hero

2026-07-21 17:30:07 CEST

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I love your commitment to food poisoning

2026-07-20 18:40:38 CEST

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that too, yes. No taxation without representation and all that. I was trying to explain to the dinosaur why, even if you restrict the electorate, you can be comfortable with some non-voters voting

2026-07-20 12:43:27 CEST

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I don't care if some non-citizens vote in elections, no. See my lots of words. Do you care? If you do, you're wrong. See my lots of words. They were written to justify my position

2026-07-20 11:49:56 CEST

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There are a lot of things going on here. Perhaps they boil down to the sacred and the mundane.
You want, perhaps, elections to be sacrosanct. That means that you at least want only eligible voters to vote. Some people go further and want all and only. You also want each vote counted correctly, so that the final tally is a completely accurate record of the valid ballots. You maybe old enough to remember the hanging chads in Florida. Working out which ballots are valid is a non-trivial task.
I get the desire for sanctity. There is also the mundane. You want, in a first past the post system, the candidate returned to be the candidate with the most valid balots cast by the eligible electorate. It does not matter if the actual number is wrong.
You could almost certainly do a clever enough sampling of the ballots to get the right result with the same degree of certainty as counting all the ballots. You wouldn't because the sanctity of the election is important. Equally though you wouldn't have three people manually doing each step of the process watched by a jury of 501 because it is overkill. Simillarly you don't ask people to attend the polling station naked, inspect any orifice and ask them to produce 8 pieces of ID.
In short the optimum level of fraud, from a practical perspective, is not zero. I understand the wish for a perfect election, but, like a crime free society, it is not possible. What you want is to be generally safe in your interactions with others and to be sure that the right candidate was returned

2026-07-20 11:12:08 CEST

You hate data centres? Good, now understand that they are being built to feed the war machine. It is time to hate empire.
Honestly, neither tech bro nor government has any interest in the chatbot. They are betting that the wars of the future (read: continuing extraction of resources and exploitation of the poor) will require huge transformer architectures fed vast quantities of data. That is what they will burn the planet for.
#NoAI, #NoWarButClassWar, #DataCentres

2026-07-19 19:55:57 CEST

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that is very true

2026-07-19 14:14:45 CEST

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I am sorry

2026-07-19 14:14:19 CEST

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probably? There can be no doubt. Sobers must be the greatest all rounder who ever played. Jaques Kallis is the only one behind daylight. Sobers was a more than competent front line bowler and one of the greatest batters to have graced the game. Imran Khan, Kapil Dev and even Botham (much as it pains me to say it) were great players, but none of them come close to Sir Gary

2026-07-19 14:01:56 CEST

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true that

2026-07-19 14:00:57 CEST

With the death of Sir Garfield Sobers, I have reflecting on the different responses to the great West Indian teams of the 60s, 70s and 80s. The team of Sobers, Walcott, Weekes, Worrell, Hall, Kanhai must have been a truly brilliant team. It did not receive the hatred (and posthumous adulation) of Clive Lloyds and Viv Richard's teams.
Some of that will be white horror at the sustained brilliance of black teams and some the humiliation of having to face the relentless pace of the later teams. Hall, Griffith and Sobers were no slouches, but Garner, Holding, Roberts, Marshall... that is another level.
I suspect that at heart though it is because of changing attitudes to independence. The earlier teams, I think, understood themselves to be struggling for the sort of independence that Australia, New Zealand and South Africa enjoyed. Perhaps more than dominion status, but very much as part of a block of countries that shared a history and political and sporting tradition. The British, at that point, were supportive of that vision.
By Clive Lloyd's day, Caribbean independence is part of a broader third world movement for liberation. Britain is opposed to that. It knows that it can no longer hold on to its empire and will not have black countries in its new atlanticist club. Being humiliated repeatedly by the West Indies cannot be allowed to stand. The teams of the 70s and 80s respond with Viv's arrogant swagger. The 50s and 60s see Sobers' casual genius.
Tragically structural adjustment changes the rules of the game and the world is deprived of Caribbean genius in test cricket and in so many other areas.
#Cricket, #SirGarfieldSobers, #RIP, #CliveLloyd, #VivianRichards, #WIndies, #Empire

2026-07-19 13:15:07 CEST

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it is one reason why it is so hard to raise money for people in Gaza. We used to understand that it was part of solidarity. Now we somehow expect that the same people who are destroying Palestine will fund 'aid'

2026-07-19 12:05:12 CEST

I am becoming old (and starting to shout at clouds). Thinking about what has changed politically in my time, I think that it is the collapse of internationalism. I am talking about the left here. This is odd because leftists spend a lot more time thinking about racism now. In many ways young leftists, white and 'of colour' have a much more sophisticated understanding than we did when we were young. So what has gone wrong? A few guesses:
1. The failure of the anti-colonial movement. Independence was formally achieved, but in the best of scenarios the colonial powers were replaced by a new extractive ruling class. In the worst, the faces changed but the power relations remained.
2. The end of Bretton Woods accelerated the divergence between golf and non-golf playing nations. In the 70s life in this country was not so vastly different from the majority of the world. For example, cities were chaotic, dirty, smelly places of industrial life and communities. Villages were not just dormitories. The difference between Paris and Dakar is much starker now.
3. The rise of the university here and at the same time the fall of the organised working class. This is incoherent in my head, but for all the radical posturing of academics, the academy is an institution of power. Much of the critique is aimed at 'making space for outside voices' that reduces to 'finding a place in the middle class'
I think what that means is that internationalism looks like a dead end. There isn't an exciting movement to join holding out the hope of liberation for all. If Ukrainians throw out Zelensky and NATO, what have they got? Putin and Russian. Similarly in Iran, Sudan, Palestine and Syria. Equally leftists in golf playing nations are embedded in the global ruling class. We are in islands of security and order. It is hard to want to overthrow that even if you are not focused on becoming middle class.
#Internationalism, #TheLeft, #AntiImperialism

2026-07-18 22:34:54 CEST

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that looks wonderful

2026-07-18 14:27:08 CEST

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thank you. That was really helpful

2026-07-18 12:01:11 CEST

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I guess that 'passions of the people' is code for 'pesky things that the ruling class don't like'. Equally though any system does need a conservative drag for stability

2026-07-17 13:41:33 CEST

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Schoolbook
There used to be a certain current amoung educators for such an approach

2026-07-17 00:29:01 CEST

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/16/atmosphere-lhs-1140b-exoplanet-could-water-scientists
Can we send all the tech billionaires there immediately please?

2026-07-16 23:58:03 CEST

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I am sorry to hear that. Get well soon

2026-07-16 23:18:34 CEST

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I think that from a legal perspective there are two big things going on. It is possible that the democrats are not adverse to either one of them.
The first is this orginalism nonsense. This, I think, maps onto a debate we are having here about the European Convention on Human Rights. The Strasbourg court early on decided that the Convention was a 'living instrument'. This gave the court license to develop thicker more robust rights. It upsets the signatory states who find that it stops them doing things that they want to do. They want very thin rights. They would say that when we signed up to a right to a private life, that meant that we couldn't censor your correspondence. It didn't mean that we couldn't site a runway next to your house.
I think that this orginalism malarky is about something similar. It is the court saying that we are going to undo the whole of US constitutional history (and go against the obvious intent of the founders) to cease to be such a robust check on power. The constitution will be tamed in the name of giving the elected branches of government more power.
It is not so politically horrifying. Remember that FDR clashed repeatedly with the Supreme Court because they wanted to block his progressive agenda. I bet that radicals in the 30s thought that the constitution was being inflated beyond the intentions of the founders.
The second big change is deference to the executive. The US has a very 18th Century democracy. That in my view is a good thing. It sits uncomfortably with the so called modern administrative state. In Europe the executive wields enormous power. This is seen as democratic because they owe their position ultimately to a vote.
Constitutionally that is not the case in the US. Your executive is just one branch of the legislature. Contrast that to here where, practically speaking, no statute is enacted unless the Government of the day wants it and, almost as a rule, the Government can enact any statute it wants. It seems to me that another goal of the supreme court is rewriting the constitutional settlement so that your executive will have European powers.
I suspect that both projects have bipartisan support. I could be wrong. It maybe that the Justices are just partisan bastards doing whatever it takes to own the libs
@npub1f22…ltwj @npub19ks…ga7x

2026-07-16 22:46:35 CEST

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in many ways England and Wales at least have a much more democratic structure than now. Government is weak, Parliament is supreme and administration is done at a local level by the citizens. Of course the glaring problem is that the citizens are restricted to landowners. It is interesting that as the franchise is extended so the democratic character of the state recedes. The Whigs give way to Benthamites, administration become professionalised and centralised. Government expands and Parliament recedes. It is almost as if the price you pay for the franchise is a reduction in what you can do with it

2026-07-16 22:34:22 CEST

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I agree about the fascinating insights from knowledgable people.
Looking at the 17th Ammendment, it does seem like it makes explicit provision for this temporary appointment. It also at least forced any states not yet electing senators by statewide polls to do so. I could well imagine that that was just tidying up. It would not surprise me if it merely put existing practice on a constitutional footing. I would not be surprised if it was novel either. I know very little of US constitutional history.
That states can appoint a senator if the seat becomes vacant remains surprising until you learn that a senator is meant to represent her state and that they were orginally all appointed by state legislatures. I think that Babaramon's point may well still stand. This slight oddity could be a legacy of Art 1 §4

2026-07-16 12:07:12 CEST

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pulling together some of the things that you said elsewhere on the thread, the system of appointment by nomination may have ended many moons ago, but the senate remains a representation of the interests of the states and not 'the people'. That strikes me as a deliberately conservative role and a check on popular democracy.
It is in many ways a desirable feature of any system that it is stable. That is going to require some conservative drag. By giving each branch of government equal legislative power, you very much inflate that conservative drag.
Here the second house cannot prevent the elected house from passing legislation it really wants to pass. Unfortunately the real conservative brake is drawing the executive from Parliament whilst nominally having the MPs represent local areas. It means that the Government of the day can do what it wants. This is coming to the US through the legal doctrine of the unified executive.
You don't need Masonic networks of Jewish conspirators to ensure that the state functions in the interests of a small ruling class. It is enough that the state is run by and for that class. The democratic centralist's dream is of a stable system run by and for the majority in their interests. The Marxist bet is on that being the interests of all. The anarchist critique is a rejection of the Marxist bet and so the rejection of centralism in favour of local power. The anarchist must forgo, I think, the phenomenal material prosperity that comes with centeralised governance. The Marxist must accept some level of subordination

2026-07-16 11:06:55 CEST

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there are even more reasons not to let some individual appoint a senator.
It is ok to think that the governnental system in the US is not perfect. I find it liberating to be comfortable with criticism.

2026-07-16 00:10:27 CEST

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I think that, being an outsider, I am not grasping the constitutional nuances. This is really helpful. Thank you

2026-07-16 00:06:13 CEST

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that is true of all systems, I think

2026-07-16 00:04:17 CEST

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that is really interesting. So 'election' is interpreted broadly enough not to require voting? The state can decide that the governor or, presumably, just the third person to buy an ice cream on the last Thursday in May can elect the senator?

2026-07-15 23:54:34 CEST

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there is that aspect. Someone else in thread pointed out that the whole senate used to be by appointment of the state governors. I didn't know that. It does feel a little aristocracy by the back door

2026-07-15 23:52:34 CEST

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interesting. Do people not find it an odd way of appointing people to congress?

2026-07-15 23:49:48 CEST

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fair enough. I'm surprised that people don't seem to find it problematic

2026-07-15 23:48:04 CEST

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I was intrigued because from here, the UK, the US seems to have a much more democratic character. The citizens seem much more engaged in civic life are expected to vote for and participate in far more areas of the state, schools, police, prosecution, local government more generally. That seems to come across in people taking part in meetings, campaigns, parties etc. Although we have this almost entirely unelected second house in Parliament (and the only people who can stand or vote in the tiny elected bit are heredity peers of the realm ie Lords, Dukes, Ladies etc), the idea that an elected member of parliament could be replaced by someone a big wig chose would be really extraordinary.
I'm not sure why you have to have tha vacancy filled though if you don't have time for an election or why you can't just do elections with short campaigns. A by-election here is six weeks, I think. Even with primaries, why couldn't you do it in 10-12 weeks?

2026-07-15 23:36:40 CEST

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thank you. That is really interesting. Is there an argument that the senate was designed as a check on popular democracy? Perhaps it still is in many ways given the cost of running a campaign for election

2026-07-15 23:33:49 CEST

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right, but leaving it vacant seems the better option. It could be the best part of 6 years with the Governor's appointee in place if the death was early in the term. Here we had a minor scandal about a few councils not holding elections because they are going to be dissolved early next year and councils are pretty toothless, unlike senators. I'm still surprised those are the rules

2026-07-15 23:28:57 CEST

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I guess that falls under 'states' rights'

2026-07-15 23:27:47 CEST

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seems an odd rule to me. Why not leave the seat vacant if democracy is trop cher?

2026-07-15 06:19:36 CEST

Can someone explain how this works? A senator dies and the governor can just appoint any person she likes to replace her?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/14/darline-graham-nordone-south-carolina-senator
Really? Why not just hold an election like any normal democracy?
#USPol

2026-07-14 13:36:14 CEST

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please don't die. That would be horror

2026-07-14 12:06:09 CEST

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definitely sexy

2026-07-14 10:31:17 CEST

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this is so well put. Exile is double punishment.
Interestingly a lot of the hated ECHR immigration jurisprudence was developed because continental European countries were not prepared to deal with the 'gastarbeiter'. You had people who were clearly Dutch or French or what have you, even to the point of being second or third generation, but who were treated as temporary residents. The judges in Strasbourg felt that you can't have two tiers of citizenship in which some people are punished more because they have foreign origins. It was brief period in the late nineties-early 2000s.
The UK, until recently, despite the draconian border controls, didn't create 'gastararbeiter'. If you were here, you could fairly quickly settle here. Nationality was not so hard to aquire. Children born to settled parents are still British citizens. In France, for example, there is no permenant residence. The max is ten years. Your children are not French unless you are.
The Mahmoud reforms are the culmination of the move to bring the UK into line with the rest of Europe. It is completely backwards. It will create both economic and social problems

2026-07-13 22:17:43 CEST

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you, my friend, are a miracle

2026-07-12 23:06:47 CEST

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I will say, ' I didn't know the guy but he was quite funny on the internet'

2026-07-12 22:34:15 CEST

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that is very true. I like that thought. It is tricky to work out where you stand your ground and where you compromise. It is particularly difficult given the multiple directions from which particularly nasty social harms come at us. I guess different people quite legitimately draw the line in different places

2026-07-12 18:37:18 CEST

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that is probably right about the Queen. It is certainly more charitable than my reading.
I agree about the changing school. There are people out there with austere views on commercial, invasive software. That is ok. I was really irritated by having to use outlook. That is mostly because I am so comfortable using Thunderbird to monitor multiple accounts. It is not so much because I would never use Microsoft. I like FOSS because I get to chose how I use it. I get people being ideologically commited to it because we lose so much when we let Google, Microsoft et al set the defaults.
I did find it funny because it seems so extreme, but my only real critique is of our (my) failure to see the good in people and, perhaps, a certain kind of call out culture.

2026-07-12 13:15:13 CEST

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he he, yes. I think that your joke goes to the nub of things. We often demand that our fellow travellers adopt pretty anti-social or perhaps contra-social behaviour: don't fly, reject any software with any LLM generated code, avoid any data mining software...
Really we should be doing the harder work of getting certain practices banned or least abnormal. The mistake is to think that we can do that through placing the demands on our fellow travellers.
I do want to stress that I genuinely liked the guy. He was trying to help and that is kind

2026-07-12 13:05:45 CEST

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Yes indeed. I do also think that, unlike Marie Antoinette, my man was trying to help. Perhaps we should refuse to accept systems that impose Microsoft on us? It is no more outrageous a position than shunning anyone who uses OpenAI

2026-07-12 13:01:36 CEST

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I liked the guy. He was trying to help. My use of 'friend' was not meant to be ironic. He probably wasn't 100% serious, but really didn't like Microsoft. He is probably right. It is easy for me because I am a. A man, b. Respected in my own field and c. I don't have any computer skills, so you can't patronise me and I am not looking for respect.
I think that the douchebags are very few and far between. In all different fields we forget that things that are obvious or important to us are just not like that for outsiders.

2026-07-12 11:22:49 CEST

I got mastodoned the other day. It made me smile. I was asking for help setting up grapheneos to minimise Google invasive behaviour. I made a throwaway comment about my first love, lineage. A kindly fellow, enquired why I had switched operating system. I explained that my school was enforcing use of outlook and Microsoft's authenticator. My new friend suggested that I change school.
My first thought was that this was a proper fediverse or FOSS baptism. I now think it is a bit deeper. Assuming the suggestion was sincere (and I think it was), I could see why it would be annoying. It is so unhelpful, so supercilious and so not to the point. On the other hand, it is just some guy (probably) with a very narrow focus. There is no hostility, just someone who doesn't know how to express solidarity with others in writing. It was kind, well meant and wrong.
It is easy to read the lack of solidarity as a put down, especially if you are of low status in that context, like I am, or low status in lots of contexts like any non-normative person. I do think that we have to try to see beyond the 'merely' linguistic before we judge interactions as put downs or exclusionary.
My friend probably thought that the suggestion was friendly, not supercilious at all. He (?) would change school because Microsoft are so terrible. To not speak up is to treat me as a special case. That would have been a real lack of solidarity and not just a failure to read the room.
#Fediverse, #Culture

2026-07-11 18:13:40 CEST

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an opportunity sorely missed