HeavenlyPossum

https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum

Anarchist, communist, opossum. But then, I repeat myself.

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Last Notes

2026-06-27 11:27:09 CEST

The fact that swatting exists—that someone in a place like the US can call the cops, falsely report a fake violent crime, and prompt the police to attack a random person with overwhelming violence—is a crushing indictment of policing.
And yet I don’t think I have ever encountered anyone, in public discourse about swatting, bring this up.
It’s always “what a tragedy” and “filing false police reports is a crime” and never “why did the state build a system that can be hijacked to kill random people like this”.
https://www.rawstory.com/amp/pete-buttigieg-swatting-2677117229

2026-06-21 18:23:07 CEST

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So how do we address interpersonal harms?
One great place to start is the abolition of institutions of coercion that abusers can control to shield and further their abuses. There would be fewer interpersonal harms without vast, powerful institutions that can be captured by serial abusers like Donald Trump. Similarly, there would be significantly less murder without states and their militaries and police to monopolize and concentrate violence, like we’ve seen with the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza.
Many people reading this will not have, in their mental models of crime, “the things that virtually states do on a systemic, routine basis.” But that’s because you’ve been taught that one abuser is a criminal, but an entire institution of abuse is *statecraft*.
Abolish the state and its attendant hierarchies and you reduce any abuser to the same status as any of us: just one person, without the subsidies provided by those institutions and hierarchies.

2026-06-21 18:09:59 CEST

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Prisons do not exist to address interpersonal harms. Not only does imprisonment tend to *increase* the risk of someone committing interpersonal harms after release, it is also the direct cause of many interpersonal harms.
Prisons are the sites of many interpersonal harms—rape, torture, abuse, murder—that people would never be subject to without having been imprisoned.
If we’re taking seriously a societal goal of minimizing and redressing interpersonal harms, and the fact that imprisoned people still count as people, and the fact that interpersonal harms committed against them are still “crimes” in our colloquial sense, then we cannot look to prisons as a solution.
We similarly do not need an “alternative” to prisons, because prisons do not exist to solve our problem.

2026-06-21 18:05:48 CEST

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Police do not exist to address interpersonal harms. They exist to enforce the state’s authority and rules. In addition to the outright crimes that police frequently commit, they also commit many interpersonal harms that are perfectly legal: assault, murder, kidnapping, and torture, all of which we are taught to think are not assault, murder, kidnapping, and torture because the state makes them *licit*.
Police spend a bare fraction of their time investigating actual interpersonal harms, the kinds of violence we normally think of when we talk about “crime”: rape, assault, murder, etc. Of those they do investigate, most do not end in the conviction of a perpetrator, and many of those who are legally punished for these crimes turn out to be factually innocent.
When we ask “without the police, what will we do about interpersonal harms,” we are asking the wrong question. Since the police don’t exist to solve “crime” in this colloquial sense, we do not need to discover an alternative.

2026-06-21 17:50:30 CEST

To most people, “crime” is a general signifier for bad things that people do to each other.
In reality, though, crime is defined entirely by *violations of some legal authority’s rules*, usually those of the state.
Many bad things that people do to each other are perfectly legal: war, pollution, exploitation. Many good things are crimes: feeding the homeless or protesting genocide or self-defense against an abuser.
The Holocaust was once legal. Freeing enslaved people was once a crime. When we ask “but how would we protect ourselves from crime without police or the state,” we are asking the wrong question. There is no crime without the state, because nothing can be licit or illicit without the state’s legal authority.
What we need to ask is: how do we best address interpersonal harms? Fortunately, that has nothing to do with the police or the state.

2026-05-29 00:09:09 CEST

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The second is Joseph Tainter, the American anthropologist who authored “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter argued that societies, when confronted with new challenges, tend to add layers of complexity to solve those problems. By “complexity,” Tainter specifically meant new specializations and new layers of hierarchy. But that complexity comes at a cost: while engaged in those new specializations or performing those new hierarchical roles, these people still need to eat, live in homes, wear clothes, etc. So, as complexity rises, so too does the burden on society’s primary producers who are feeding and clothing those people.
This is sustainable when returns on complexity are high. When returns on complexity stop rising, though, eventually society is directing all its spare resources into maintaining hierarchy. If that society that has no spare resources left encounters a new problem, it might simply not be able to respond, even if it is exploiting more resources than ever before, and collapse—an economizing process of shedding layers of complexity to free up resources.
This is, I think, another way of looking at Piketty’s problem of inequality. US society simply supports too many people who are simply filling roles in hierarchy without returning any benefits to society. Bureaucrats, sure, but mostly capitalists, landlords, and other rentiers. US society now devotes an enormous percentage of its overall economic activity not to anything useful, but to filling the pockets of Donald Trump’s adult sons, or paying for Jeff Bezos’ toy space program, or building LLM slop factories.
US society simply has no slack left and Donald Trump dragged it into a pointless war with Iran and it promptly began losing, even though the US has fought and won wars against much stronger adversaries.

2026-05-28 23:57:37 CEST

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There are two thinkers here who I think are relevant, from two slightly different angles.
The first is French economist Thomas Piketty, who has done exhaustive work on understanding the origins and operation of economic inequality in modern states. Piketty has argued that a state’s rate of taxation essentially reflects the ability of that state to mobilize public resources to achieve its goals. When tax rates are low, especially on the richest, then the rich can amass fortunes that represent a competing ability to mobilize public resources.
In the US, inequality has skyrocketed since the neoliberal rebellion began in the 1970s and tax rates on the wealthiest were slashed. Despite its massive absolute spending, the US government simply cannot mobilize the resources it needs to achieve its goals, because those resources have been captured instead by the rich and especially the ultra-rich.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-spars-with-spacex-over-starlink-price-hike-during-iran-war-2026-05-26/

2026-05-28 23:34:57 CEST

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You can trace the US imperial decline through those QDRs. By 2006, under Bush II, the QDR had retreated from its initial promise of fighting and winning two Gulf War-style conflicts simultaneously to “1-4-2-1” model.
The US would now maintain (1) defense of the ‘homeland,’ police (4) different regions of the world, and confront (2) adversaries simultaneously so it could decisively defeat (1) while holding off the other.
Basically, the US military either recognized or admitted that it absolutely could not fight and win two simultaneous wars; the most it could hope for was to defeat one adversary while buying time to shift its focus against another.
This was in the wake of Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq in the Second Gulf War, a conflict that bogged down the US military and vacuumed up its resources for years.

2026-05-28 23:29:40 CEST

During the Clinton years, the US Department of Defense started producing the “Quadrennial Defense Review,” a massive study of threats, goals, and strategies.
In the very first QDR, released in 1996, the US military announced that it was ready to fight and win two simultaneous wars.
Recall that these were heady days. The Cold War had ended, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the US had recently defeated Iraq in the first Gulf War in an absolutely devastating manner. The US was globally ascendent in a way that’s hard to convey, but I think that hubris comes across a bit in that first QDR: the US could and would not only repeat its triumph over Iraq if it had to, but also fight a second war just like it at the same time—say, maybe one in the Middle East and one in North Korea?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrennial_Defense_Review

2026-05-16 13:13:35 CEST

When I first heard about LLM psychosis, I recall thinking “ah, another of the many problems caused by these shitty chatbots,” but then I started encountering people online who are very obviously experiencing LLM psychosis and now suspect this is going to turn into a tobacco-company-lawsuit kind of issue.
I strongly suspect there are many, many more people suffering LLM psychosis than anyone realizes.

2026-05-12 23:31:58 CEST

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Many of the public’s intuitions about how interpersonal violence works in our hierarchical society are shaped by the ways in which the state typically intervenes to STOP the victims of abuse from defending themselves.
So people end up thinking “the state is a thin barrier between civilization and the barbaric tendencies of terrible people, which are barely kept in check by the state and would be unleashed upon us in the absence of the state.”
When, in reality, it is often the state that creates that barbarism by empowering favored classes and constraining their victims.
https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-survivors-act-domestic-violence

2026-05-12 22:54:11 CEST

When I say “abolish the police,” someone often comes along and asks “but who will protect women from abusive and predatory men?” And the answer is that, for many women, the people who will defend them in the absence of police is those women themselves.
“According to statistics compiled by the ACLU, women who kill their partners will spend an average of 15 years behind bars, while men who kill their female partners serve much shorter sentences, on average between 2 to 6 years.”
https://www.domesticshelters.org/articles/in-the-news/women-serve-longer-prison-sentences-after-killing-abusers

2026-05-11 14:31:44 CEST

Discovering that Elon Musk was impersonating his mother on twitter (and, judging from the phrasing, his father too) really highlights both that
- capitalists have free time to engage in pathetic antics like this because they are utterly irrelevant to economic production, and
- the grotesque inequalities of wealth and power we experience have not managed to make the ultra-rich like Musk happy, either.

2026-05-09 14:27:05 CEST

A fun thing that happened was that I expressed concern that the Trumpists would attempt to hold on to power regardless of electoral outcomes and was assured that Trump et al had no plausible mechanism to rig national elections so I should just relax and trust in the anticipated Blue Wave to handle the problem.
And, well, here are the Republicans staging a judicial coup to cement their permanent rule regardless of electoral outcomes!
You might not be able to anticipate which particular strategy they’re going to pursue, but you can be confident that authoritarians will never stop trying, and certainly not because of some trivial obstacles like procedure or law.

2026-04-23 20:06:03 CEST

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Thank you for the kind words and concern. I think I’ve just been feeling really burned out and like I haven’t had much interesting to say.

2026-03-20 20:28:30 CET

A firm in Ohio denied a woman her request to work from home during a high-risk pregnancy and, as a result, she gave birth prematurely and her baby died.
Capitalists hate work-from-home, even though study after study has shown that workers are just, if not more so, productive at home than in an office.
This is because work-from-home threatens something worth more to the capital class than productivity and even an individual firm’s profits.
Work-from-home threatens the capitalist ur-myth that economic activity *must* take place in centralized locations under the supervision and surveillance of managers, bosses, and capitalist owners.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ohio-firm-must-pay-225-million-mom-whose-baby-died-was-denied-work-hom-rcna264321

2026-03-18 22:32:46 CET

Mark Zuckerberg directed the investment of something like $70-80 billion into his “VR metaverse,” which is now shutting down on 15 June.
I have been assured that capitalist ownership is warranted because capitalists take risks and because they make important decisions about capital allocation.

2026-03-14 10:11:44 CET

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“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

2026-03-11 19:33:22 CET

“False flag” operations are wildly more popular and common in internet conspiracy theories than they ever have been in actual warfare.

2026-03-10 22:27:04 CET

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These people are Capital-C Capitalists, people whose entire existence is about manipulating money to make more money. If *anyone* is supposed to pay attention to and understand these dynamics, it is these people, the JP Morgan Chases of the world.
And they have so colossally fucked up.
Proponents of capitalism have often assured me that capitalists earn their rents and ownership and power and status by performing the socially critical labor of allocating capital to productive purposes.

2026-03-10 22:23:06 CET

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Here’s another great line, this one from JP Morgan Chase:
“In the whole written history of the strait, it has never been closed, ever. To me, it was not just the worst-case scenario. It was an unthinkable scenario.”
Because something would be very bad, it not only would not happen, it could not happen, so it’s not even worth thinking about.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/persian-gulf-oil-squeeze-d9a39190

2026-03-10 22:19:42 CET

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Here’s a recent statement by Savita Subramanian from Bank of America:
"We thought the administration was going to be focused on affordability and quelling inflation, and that seems to be the opposite of what's actually happening."
Why would you think that? Why would you ever think that, much less in 2026, with uears and years of evidence that Trump is incapable of telling the truth or understanding things?
Because they hear what they want to hear.

2026-03-10 22:15:31 CET

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But markets seem to have latched on to Trump’s first statement, that the war is nearly over, as if it were some sort of factual statement about reality and Trump’s intentions.
Oil prices have fallen, stock prices have risen…while Iran has started mining the Strait of Hormuz.
A fifth of global oil exports travel through the strait.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/10/politics/iran-begins-laying-mines-in-strait-of-hormuz

2026-03-10 22:13:21 CET

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These are two New York Times headlines from a few hours apart on Monday:
“Oil Prices Fall After Trump Says That Iran War is ‘Very Complete’”
“Trump Walks Back Idea That War Is Near End: U.S Gains ‘Not Enough’”
Now, Trump did not walk anything back, because that would require him to take a coherent position about anything ever, which he doesn’t and probably can’t. Trump just says whatever he feels will gain him the most personal advantage in any given moment. This fact about him has been obvious to anyone since *at least* he announced his candidacy for president more than ten years ago.

2026-03-10 22:09:46 CET

Oil prices just had their highest single-day increase in six years. They then proceeded to have their biggest single day *decrease* in four years. Global oil prices are just whipsawing up and down.
Why?
Because Donald Trump said the war was pretty much over.
Except it’s obviously not! And he said so himself…a few hours later!

2026-03-10 15:24:49 CET

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Borders are murder. They exist to herd us like livestock. Our ability to flee danger and find refuge someplace new should not be contingent on the chance that our case gets public attention, least of all from a monster like Trump with the attention span of a goldfish.

2026-03-10 15:21:53 CET

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These women were lucky in that their asylum claims had a high public profile. Donald Trump himself publicly lobbied Australia to grant them asylum.
Trump had been deporting Iranian refugees back to Iran, including LGBTQ+ refugees, who face torture or death, as recently as last month.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/iranians-lgbtq-asylum-deported/

2026-03-10 15:19:05 CET

Australia just granted asylum to five Iranian football players who faced credible death threats from Iranian officials for refusing to sing the Iranian national anthem at a match.
I’m very grateful that these women are safe. Good for them.
This is also a really good illustration of the capricious and arbitrary violence of borders. Australia maintains a concentration camp in the island country of Nauru where it holds refugees, *including Iranian refugees*, in atrocious and abusive conditions.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-16/iranian-asylum-seeker-exposed-to-torture-australian-detention-un/106234112

2026-03-08 13:45:41 CET

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There are so many people who instinctively imagine that negative consequences are enough to prevent people from making choices with world-rending implications.
Sure, we live in the same world in which events like World War II occurred, but we live at the End of History™️. Real things don’t happen anymore. Surely Trump wouldn’t make mistakes this bad, in ways that can’t be readily fixed?
But this is some real shit.

2026-03-08 13:37:26 CET

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Let’s also consider that many modern fertilizers rely on natural gas production, and so a considerable amount of global production of ammonium nitrate fertilizer occurs in the Persian Gulf.
This production has been disrupted by the disruptions to natural gas production, and shipments have been halted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Qatar and Iran are, respectively, the second and third largest exporters in the world. Prices in the US are already spiking, as this is the northern hemisphere’s planting season.
https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-war-on-iran-could-screw-over-us-farmers/

2026-03-08 13:33:35 CET

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What would it mean for, effectively, an entire country to evacuate in response to a catastrophic loss of drinking water? I have no idea! This would be unprecedented, and yet it’s suddenly a very real possibility. Much of the oil and gas production in these countries has been spun down, both because of concerns about Iranian strikes and because storage is full as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Getting production back up to pre-war levels will thus take some time even after the threat has passed. But what if these countries also have to evacuate? Maybe they can maintain skeleton crews to restart energy production later, but that also depends on a wide range of unknowable variables.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Kuwait-Shuts-Production-Qatar-Warns-Oil-Could-Hit-150-in-Weeks.amp.html

2026-03-08 13:28:23 CET

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Of course, Iran has responded with its own war crime, targeting a desalination plant in Bahrain. In contrast to Iran, which relies on desalination but not exclusively, Bahrain receives something like 90% of its potable water from desalination plants. In the UAE, it’s about 80%, while Qatar relies on desalination for effectively all of its drinkable water.
The loss of desalination, either through direct attacks on these plants or on energy infrastructure to run them, would render these countries literally uninhabitable to most of their populations within perhaps a few days. Water storage might extend that a bit; maybe they could truck some water in from elsewhere. But these countries are exquisitely vulnerable to disruptions to this one set of infrastructure.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/3/8/bahrain-says-water-desalination-plant-damaged-in-iranian-drone-attack

2026-03-08 13:24:21 CET

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Iran, like the whole region, is water stressed. Even before the war started, Tehran faced an acute water crisis, with calls to begin evacuating and relocating the capital last year. Targeting the production of potable water is a war crime, in the formal juridical sense, and an absolute obscenity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_water_shortage

2026-03-08 13:21:16 CET

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They can make a plausible argument that energy facilities are part of Iran’s military sustainment, which is true, though the main consequence of these latest strikes will be increased suffering by a civilian population that depends on these energy facilities for basic services.
But the US also apparently targeted a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, which provided potable water to some 30 villages on the island and lacks any plausible military value:
https://timesofoman.com/article/169185-irans-fm-condemns-us-attack-on-qeshms-freshwater-desalination-plant-warns-of-grave-consequences

2026-03-08 13:18:51 CET

It took about a week for the US and Israel to reach the point that all strategic air campaigns eventually reach: a shortage of obviously military targets that are easily identifiable, readily targetable, and vulnerable to degradation by strikes.
So now they’re increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure, starting on Saturday evening with fossil fuel storage and production:
https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/newseye.bsky.social/post/3mgj5tf2bss2k

2026-03-06 20:02:15 CET

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Many people recognize that there is an unacceptable amount of interpersonal harm in society, and conclude that the state is all that stands between them and an overwhelming amount of harm, a war of all against all.
But this misses the role of the state in creating, fostering, or facilitating those harms.

2026-03-06 19:53:55 CET

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So, in a really important way, the problem is not “who would keep us safe without the state?” but rather “how much safer would we be if we were free to defend ourselves and each other?”

2026-03-06 19:52:45 CET

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…but also explicitly punishes people who do try to defend themselves from abusers:
https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-survivors-act-domestic-violence

2026-03-06 19:51:34 CET

As an anarchist, I often hear questions about how, exactly, we would stay safe in a world full of rapists and murderers without the state’s protective monopoly over violence.
So I often have to remind people that not only does the state often decline to protect people facing harm…
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/05/queensland-police-kelly-wilkinson-turned-away-murder-inquest-ntwnfb#:~:text=Kelly%20Wilkinson%20was%20turned%20away,2021%2C%20an%20inquest%20has%20heard.

2026-03-06 00:02:16 CET

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How likely a scenario like that is depends on a lot of unknown factors: how many air defense munitions Bahrain still has, how many missiles and drones Iran can still launch, whether Iran even sees destabilizing Bahrain as a strategic objective AND has enough command-and-control over its forces to effect that goal, and so on.
But, what an immense shift it would be for any of the Gulf monarchies to fall as a result of this war. These are not pleasant regimes; the closest fictional analogy is Slaver’s Bay from George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.” We should not mourn the loss of any of them, which would also deny the US of a regional ally and probably cost it basing access to any country that does collapse.
Might we suddenly see a Shia republic in Bahrain, or perhaps an expat worker takeover of Qatar or the UAE? I have no idea, but *something* is going to give in the region in really unexpected ways as a result of this. And we’re only six days in! It’s somehow only March! What a world.

2026-03-05 23:56:31 CET

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In Bahrain, at least, there have already been protests against the war and the US presence. The regime has restricted media coverage of both the Iranian attacks and probably also the protests, so it’s hard to get a sense of what, exactly, is going on.
That doesn’t mean Bahrain is suddenly on the brink of collapse, but it is a noteworthy development. A few more strikes that disrupt not just Bahrain’s modest oil exports but also critical services might suddenly render the Khalifa regime very vulnerable. Bahrain is also connected to Saudi Arabia by one bridge, the King Fahd Causeway; if that were to be destroyed, it would be much harder for the Saudis to prop up the regime.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-iran-ignited-civil-unrest-bahrain

2026-03-05 23:49:37 CET

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I’ve seen speculation that Iran’s approach is to increase costs on US allies in the region in the hopes that these allies will pressure the US to ease its attacks. That seems plausible, but it’s also noteworthy just how brittle Bahrain and the other Gulf monarchies are.
They’re all heavily dependent on foreign workers; in Bahrain, just over half the population are non-citizen workers, while the citizenry of Qatar and the UAE make up only about 10% of the population in each country. They’re also exquisitely vulnerable to disruptions to infrastructure, which include the oil and gas facilities that generate most of their wealth but also to electricity generation that is critical for running desalination plants and air conditioning.
So part of me wonders if the Iranian approach isn’t to push these states towards the brink of collapse in order to deny the US its regional allies and divert adversary resources to dealing with the fallout.

2026-03-05 23:43:54 CET

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Bahrain is also a close US ally, hosting the US navy’s fifth fleet. This is why Bahrain has come under fire from Iran since the US and Israel attacked. There has been extensive damage to the US base, Naval Support Activity Bahrain, but it looks like Iran has also been targeting Bahrain infrastructure as part of its response. Some buildings in the capital Manama were hit with one-way attack drones, and it also looks like Iran has struck Bahraini fossil fuel infrastructure with ballistic missiles.
https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/shipwreck75.bsky.social/post/3mgd6swwrx22s

2026-03-05 23:32:46 CET

Bahrain is a small island country in the Persian Gulf, just off the coast of Saudi Arabia. It’s only about 780 square kilometers in area, into which are packed about a million and a half people. Like the other Gulf states, it’s an absolute monarchy under the Khalifa dynasty and only about half the population are citizens, with the rest being foreign workers. Unlike the other Gulf states, though, the majority of the citizen population are Shia Muslims, while the Khalifa dynasty is Sunni.
Bahrain’s Shia are generally discriminated against, shut out from any positions of power and living in poverty. During the Arab Spring, Bahrain experienced massive but peaceful protests against the monarchy, mostly by its Shia majority. Saudi Arabia feared the possibility of a Shia-dominated state just off its coast and sent in military forces, massacring protesters and crushing the uprising.
There have been a few efforts to get protests started again, and a half-hearted Shia insurgency that never accomplished much, but the regime and its Saudi guarantors were too strong and ruthless to overcome.

2026-03-01 13:07:16 CET

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In the same vein, members of the Trump regime are very obviously capitalizing on their advanced insider knowledge to make lots of money off betting markets:
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/02/28/suspected-insiders-make-over-usd1-2-million-on-polymarket-ahead-of-u-s-strike-on-iran
Which creates an entirely new angle for adversaries collecting intelligence on US actions around the world, including early warning of US military action.
To place this in context, soldiers on bases in foreign countries cannot log their jogging routes and post them to popular running websites because those routes create maps of base infrastructure that an adversary could exploit. The US government and especially military traditionally take information security very seriously, going to great lengths to ensure that seemingly-obscure and otherwise innocuous indicators can’t be exploited.
But these degenerate gamblers only care about their own status and wealth and are perfectly content to blast out whatever they want as long as it personally benefits them. This is a remarkable degradation of state capacity that is happening in real time.

2026-03-01 11:25:48 CET

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When I talk about fascism as an aesthetic first and foremost, one that can only parasitize but not create state capacity, this is what I mean. When I talk about eroding state capacity in the US as a sign and driver of unfolding state collapse, this is what I mean. Trump is running a cargo cult of a state, going through superficial motions of leadership because he doesn’t understand or care about the actual substance of actions.
I once again want to emphasize that I’m not harping on this from the perspective of a liberal institutionalist decrying Trump’s mistreatment of a sacred office or anything like that. I am an anarchist, though not an accelerationist, and am just trying to describe what I’m seeing through the lens of watching societal collapse in real-time.

2026-03-01 11:20:36 CET

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And yet here’s Trump and his team accessing JWICS at his Florida mansion, with cameras taking pictures and aides wearing smart watches, with what looks like only black curtains separating this area from the “public” areas of Trump’s estate.
It’s hard to convey how unserious these people are. Their priority is to present the *appearance* of serious government leaders doing serious war things, like they’ve seen on the teevee before, aping the sorts of photographs they’ve seen of Obama doing something similar in the actual White House situation room.
But because they don’t really understand why, or care about why, people do the things they do, Trump and his team are broadcasting photos of a JWICS screen in an obviously unsecured area in a room full of people with devices capable of (or that can be exploited for) electronic espionage.

2026-03-01 11:16:10 CET

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JWICS is the computer network the US government uses to handle top secret and sensitive compartmented information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Worldwide_Intelligence_Communications_System
“Top Secret” signifies information “the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause 'exceptionally grave damage' to the National Security.” “Sensitive compartmented information” or SCI is a protocol for restricting access to information to those with a specific need-to-know. This is, according to the US government, really important information that must be carefully protected.
That’s why access to JWICS is typically restricted to a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF. A SCIF is set up to protect that information from unauthorized access, observation, electronic monitoring, etc etc etc. *Really carefully protected secrets*. No cameras, no removable storage devices, no smart devices that can communicate electronically, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_information_facility

2026-03-01 11:10:02 CET

Trump has released photos of himself receiving briefings about the attacks on Iran in a room at his Florida mansion. There’s one in particular of Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, standing in front of two big monitors, gesturing to the screens while talking to someone off camera.
(You can see it here: https://eu.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/2026/02/28/inside-white-house-iran-situation-room-photo/88921886007/)
The screens are blurred out, but you can clearly see that one depicts a map of the Middle East.
See those yellow banners at the top and bottom of those screens? That indicates these monitors are connected to JWICS.

2026-02-28 13:36:48 CET

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Remember when Pete Hegseth demanded all the general and flag officers of the US armed forces gather to hear him deliver a TED talk, and they all sat stony-faced, oozing with contempt?
There was a lot of liberal glee at the thought of how much they hated him, how aware they were that he was a charlatan and a fraud. *The non-political, professional military will surely save us!* How’s that working out for you now? All of these officers took an oath to uphold the constitution, and every single one of them participating in this attack on Iran is blatantly participating in a violation of the US constitution. The president has no constitutional authority to launch this war, a power reserved by the constitution for congress. There is no AUMF this time, no plausible excuse or deniability. And they all followed orders and launched the war anyway.
I hope this at least gives the “Trump can’t just seize power, the military won’t follow orders like that” crowd *some* doubt.

2026-02-28 13:20:04 CET

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So many people will die, in Iran and elsewhere in the region, to achieve something unclear, with no ability to identify operational objectives that would allow the US to evaluate whether it has made progress towards its strategic goals (because it doesn’t have any).
The Saudis tried this in Yemen starting in 2015; they’re still fighting there, while the Huthis still rule much of the country. Let’s see how this latest war works out for the US.

2026-02-28 13:17:34 CET

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This is how we end up in a situation in which the US has gone to war with Iran, yet again, without even a clearly articulated strategic goal or desired outcome.
Trump has variously indicated that he wanted to intimidate Iran into negotiating with (ie, bribing) him, or to protect Iranian protesters, or to destroy a nuclear program he previously claimed he had destroyed, or regime change.
And the means of achieving whatever goal he wants to achieve is no more sophisticated than “drop many bombs on Iranian military and government targets.” This is simple punitive violence, the absolutely least sophisticated or precise approach to warfare. “Hurt them until they give you what you want” except that he hasn’t even articulated (and probably has not really conceived of) what he wants from the Iranians.

2026-02-28 13:12:38 CET

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That process no longer exists, as a meaningful contributor to policy, under the Trump regime.
Trump is deeply incurious, profoundly ignorant, compulsively impatient, and, worst, a fascist. As Umberto Eco observed, fascists are anti-intellectual, anti-rational, and fetishize action for action’s sake. A process like the NSC is profoundly antithetical to the fascist’s worldview.
Under fascism, the Leader issues a declaration about the state of reality and then all of his fawning, obsequious underlings begin a competitive process of trying to bring reality into a plausible accordance with the Leader’s declaration. That’s it. That’s the process.
No slow, patient, bureaucratic procedure for clearly articulating ends, identifying means of rationally achieving them, coordinating between different components to achieve a whole-of-government approach, ensuring all stakeholders have endorsed the policy and had their concerns addressed.
Just declaration and then action.

2026-02-28 13:07:17 CET

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It is a cumbersome, slow process that often produces policy that reflects a bland average of the decisions of many different bureaucrats. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee good outcomes, because these are ultimately policies to implement the goals of the US president.
But it’s at least a process, operating according to predictable rules, that is designed to produce achievable outcomes that match material means to explicit goals. We want to achieve X, so here’s how agency Y can legally leverage the resources it has to contribute according to a coherent plan.

2026-02-28 13:04:42 CET

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This process goes up and down a hierarchical chain. At the lowest level, you have relatively junior personnel working out the nitty-gritty aspects of policy: who will do what, exactly, with what money, according to which laws. These recommendations are kicked up to higher levels, who might either approve them or send them back down to be revised, or to answer questions, or to consider more contingencies.
Eventually, though, something like a coherent set of options might make its way up to the principles committee—the actual NSC—who will then present those options to the president to either select one to approve or restart the whole process if he doesn’t like them.

2026-02-28 13:02:56 CET

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That process works something like this:
The president sets a goal for a country or region and wants policy options for achieving that goal. This is communicated to the NSC, which gets the interagency process rolling. Meetings—so many meetings—will be convened, involving representatives from every government component that might plausibly play a role in achieving that goal.
This includes the usual suspects, like the state department, the military, and the intelligence community, but might also include everyone from agriculture to the department of justice.
The goal is to both leverage the full capacity of the US federal government while also avoiding duplication of effort, figuring out costs and risks, assigning roles, mediating disagreements between different agencies, identifying potential allies who can help, etc etc.

2026-02-28 12:57:28 CET

Most people only have a very vague idea how US national security and foreign policy decisions are made.
Most of the time, these decisions are made through the National Security Council (NSC) and its interagency process.
You might have heard of the NSC, which statutorily consists of the president; vice president; secretaries of state, defense, energy, and the treasury; and the national security advisor.
But the national security advisor also has a whole staff—usually people on rotation from places like the state department, pentagon, and intelligence community—that manages a vast interagency process.

2026-02-28 11:24:43 CET

I hope we can finally put the “wisdom of the founders” trope to rest. Even if the framers of the US constitution had been attempting to create a sort of stable democracy—they weren’t, they were mostly slaver oligarchs—then their tricameral system of checks and balances has failed utterly and spectacularly.
It’s done, gone. The US political system has concentrated absolute power to launch global wars on a whim in the hands of a fascist pedophile who has probably also been suffering from frontotemporal dementia at least since his first term in office eight years ago.

2026-02-23 22:51:33 CET

Special shout-out to the Democratic Party for spending decades working with Republicans to build an imperial presidency and then hand it over to a demented fascist pedophile to use as his personal toy.

2026-02-18 19:28:50 CET

I think a lot about Joseph Tainter’s explanation for why societies collapse.
In his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter argues that societies tend to add complexity to solve problems, but experience declining marginal returns to that complexity. If that additional complexity reaches a point where returns have stopped growing, the society becomes vulnerable to collapse; if those returns turn negative, it will probably collapse, a shedding of complexity that makes sense as an economizing response.
1/3
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/093/041/693/269/153/original/8398ecb75af8c582.png

2026-02-17 16:37:06 CET

Someone tried to burn down a warehouse in Kansas City that ICE wanted to buy for its concentration camp system.
This person is now being hunted by police and will be arrested and prosecuted for a crime if caught.
If someone had burned down Auschwitz during its construction, that person would be remembered by history as a hero.

2026-02-16 19:06:35 CET

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Thank you, thats very kind of you to say

2026-02-12 23:39:37 CET

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For people engaged in the exercise of authoritarianism, such as any cop, criticism, disagreement, and disobedience all constitute *violence* that justifies violent self-defense.
When your person and identity are “authority,” independence is an explicit threat.

2026-02-12 22:46:44 CET

Cops in Sydney assaulted people protesting against a state visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog. They broke a 69-year-old woman’s back in four places. They accused the protesters of violence because the protesters marched *in the direction of police*.
I think it was just last month that some Australian lib was telling me that police are only bad in the US but fine everywhere else.
#ACAB
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/10/woman-four-broken-vertebrae-sydney-protest-isaac-herzog-police-ntwnfb

2026-02-10 13:11:49 CET

The next time you receive medical care, make sure to ask if the provider is relying on “AI” before they do anything to you:
“Cerebrospinal fluid reportedly leaked from one patient’s nose. In another reported case, a surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull. In two other cases, patients each allegedly suffered strokes after a major artery was accidentally injured.”
…
“One FDA report in June 2025 alleged that AI software used for prenatal ultrasounds was misidentifying fetal body parts. Called Sonio Detect, it uses machine learning techniques to help analyze fetal images.”
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/ai-enters-operating-room-reports-arise-botched-surgeries-misidentified-body-2026-02-09/

2026-02-06 14:28:20 CET

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Through what mechanism? Do you think the Democratic Party would hold treason trials if it wins majorities in the next election?

2026-02-06 14:23:44 CET

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By whom, exactly?

2026-02-06 13:01:17 CET

There has been a measles outbreak at an ICE concentration camp in Texas:
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/measles-cases-prompt-quarantine-other-steps-ice-facility-texas-report-says-2026-02-02/
I’ve seen headlines reporting the same about a facility in Arizona.
This seems particularly problematic in light of how little effort ICE is making to provide medical care to the people it had kidnapped:
https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/ice-stopped-paying-for-detainee-medical-care-as-population-surged/
Most of the people who die in concentration camps, historically speaking, die from disease.

2026-02-06 11:13:43 CET

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I’m not even suggesting that people reading this take any specific actions to stop Trump. More than anything, I just don’t want to be surprised when it happens.
“But that idea is obviously stupid and can’t work for XYZ reasons” and yet here we are, in the darkest timeline, because the world does not abide by your calculations about your adversary’s calculations about his own best interests and options.

2026-02-06 11:11:41 CET

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People like Trump do not experience shame and are not deterred by obstacles. The Trumpists will not share your calculations that their efforts are unlikely to succeed and give up pre-emptively; they will try many things all at once and shift to new options if their initial efforts don’t work.
The January 6 coup attempt was premised on absurd readings of US political processes and was unlikely to succeed *and they did it anyway*. Real people actually died as a result. The coup attempt failed because people in power actively chose to resist and sideline Trump, and not because “the law” is somehow self-executing. And, despite failing, *Trump is president again*.

2026-02-06 11:08:52 CET

It is trivially obvious that the Trump regime does not plan to leave power ever again and is making preparations to interfere with legislative elections later this year to that end.
And many of the responses to this obvious fact have been frustratingly pollyanish. Elections are run by states, you see, so the federal government has no statutory role over them. Trump can’t cancel elections, that would be against the law. There are too many polling stations for ICE to interfere with them all. Repression on Election Day will just galvanize voter turnout against them. And on and on and on.
And I am begging people to actually take this threat seriously, because however true these statements are, *they are insufficient for managing an unprecedented fascist threat that the US political system has been so far unable to contain.*

2026-02-03 19:26:23 CET

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Don’t 👏 have 👏 heroes 👏

2026-02-03 19:19:05 CET

If you need a quick pick-me-up, the Chomsky subreddit is going through some things right now. You can witness a community going through every stage of grief simultaneously.

2026-02-01 23:33:45 CET

ProPublica has identified the cops responsible for Alex Pretti’s murder:
https://www.propublica.org/article/alex-pretti-shooting-cbp-agents-identified-jesus-ochoa-raymundo-gutierrez

2026-02-01 23:30:34 CET

“The Epstein Class” is probably a much pithier way of identifying the cadre of capitalists, politicians, and various media and other hangers-on who collectively rule us and who are the authors of so much of our suffering under late stage capitalism.

2026-02-01 15:04:56 CET

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I think about that quote a lot, because it so perfectly encapsulates a feeling that so many members of various ruling classes have experienced over the years.
In Portland yesterday, protesters marched past an ICE facility. They were scrupulously nonviolent and didn’t even stop in front of the building, but merely slowed down while passing in front of it.
ICE still responded by firing tear gas and flash bang grenades into the crowd, which included children.
ICE might as well be Richard II here. When ICE deploys torturous violence against children for merely being part of a peaceful protest, ostensibly (but not really) protected by the constitution, they are conveying a message:
We have a natural right to rule you, and publicly questioning that natural right warrants torture as a response until you and anyone watching remembers your place in that natural order.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/31/labor-against-ice-portland-oregon-immigration-protest/

2026-02-01 14:59:53 CET

At the end of the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, King Richard II told the survivors:
“Villeins you were and villeins you will stay – not as before, but worse. Your slavery will be an example to others.”
You can almost feel the sputtering indignation. How *dare* they think they could overturn the feudal order. How *dare* they think they could ever be anything but slaves.

2026-01-30 14:06:40 CET

The chief of the Los Angeles Police Department has publicly announced that the LAPD will not enforce a state law prohibiting federal agents from wearing masks in the state.
A big problem with policing is that it constitutes a local monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. So when those cops decide that they won’t enforce the law, or flagrantly break the law, as they do often do, they don’t suddenly become outlaw criminals themselves because *they possess the means to violently impose their preferences on the rest of society*.
They do whatever they want and everyone else is supposed to either hope that what the cops want aligns with public preferences, or adjust public preferences to align with the cops.
They’re not public servants; they’re a militia that has been deputized by the state to maintain the state’s rule over us.
https://www.dailynews.com/2026/01/29/lapd-wont-enforce-ban-on-federal-law-enforcement-officers-wearing-masks-chief-says/

2026-01-30 14:00:57 CET

Now that the Israeli military had acknowledged that the casualty figures published by the Gazan health ministry are correct, I’m wishing a great big FUCK YOU to all the genocidal monsters who spent years on fedi and elsewhere insisting to me that those numbers were blood libel and couldn’t possibly be correct.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgpd1x00exo

2026-01-27 17:12:47 CET

I identified Trump as a fascist the moment he stepped onto the political stage a decade ago. Any anarchist and most leftists could have and did.
The whole point of being able to readily identify fascists is to stop them *before* they hold state power. But having the courage to publicly identify a popular and major political figure as a fascist risks being seen as alarmist, and the people who inhabit this particular socioeconomic niche build their identities around sensibility.
People like Rauch, with a voice in a major publication who might have actually used that voice for good, are sensible. Which is to say, they are so terrified of being perceived as alarmist that they would rather be wrong and ruled by a fascist than be correct but seen as alarmist by their peers and employers.
I’ve written before about how the risk of passivity in an emergency is actually greater than the risk of panic. Most people don’t panic in emergencies, contra the popular myth, but some of them do dither—preferring to be seen as sensible rather than alarmist, sometimes even to their own deaths.
This is the political equivalent: proudly announcing that you’re finally ready to acknowledge Trump’s fascism a decade after it would have been brave or useful or insightful.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/america-fascism-trump-maga-ice/685751/

2026-01-26 18:28:18 CET

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Even before the development of firearms, most adult human beings have been roughly equally capable of killing each other, at least since the development of the thrown spear.
The problem of lethal violence in the US is not because some or even many people have guns, but rather because the US as a settler-colonial garrison state has maintained an (increasingly radicalized) cadre of armed auxiliaries among the public ready to do lethal violence to maintain hierarchies of race, sex, and capital.
Alex Pretti did not murder people with his gun. He did not provoke a fascist state militia into murdering him by possessing a gun. His gun and his possession of it did not somehow transitively contribute to the US rate of gun deaths.

2026-01-26 18:15:17 CET

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If someone’s response to a fascist pogrom is “don’t defend yourself because you will contribute to some miasma of gun violence” or, worse, “you’ll just provoke the murderous cops,” then I don’t feel particularly comradely towards them.
This is not some vague problem of more guns = more gun violence. This is a specific problem of a fascist state using guns to murder people.

2026-01-26 17:58:55 CET

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Liberals have done such an extraordinary job of connecting guns per capita with gun violence *causally* that some of them have convinced themselves that the mere act of possessing a gun causes gun deaths, as if contributing to some general gun-violence miasma.
So we end up with a situation in which the state is literally summarily executing people in the streets and all they can focus on is trying to talk people out of arming themselves in self-defense.

2026-01-26 17:55:58 CET

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Setting aside the fact that gun violence in the US is largely the product of a fascist gun culture and decades of a simmering fascist insurgency, rather than guns qua guns…
…there’s a difference between a preference for less gun violence (understandable) and responding to fascist state murders by decrying people who want to defend themselves as “part of the problem” (obscene).
People do not cause gun violence merely by possessing a gun, as if committing some spooky action at a difference, and especially not by arming themselves in the face of a fascist pogrom.

2026-01-26 17:34:19 CET

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I get the sense that more Europeans than I had I realized have crafted their identities around a sense of smug superiority over primitive, barbaric Americans and a handful of stock issues like “the guns.”
Which is how you end up with people who probably imagine themselves to be sensible liberals laser-focused on “gun violence” as if it is a cultural trait rather than on the guns that literal fascists are currently using to murder people on the streets.

2026-01-26 17:31:06 CET

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@WiteWulf/115962212168435175
There is something particularly obscene about watching Americans literally fighting and dying in the streets of Minneapolis to protect their immigrant neighbors from a fascist pogrom and choosing to focus on “gun violence” as an abstract issue to solve by disarming those same Americans.
#note1uhp…5xjm

2026-01-25 20:23:30 CET

There are liberals out there who, if they encountered the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, would complain that it was a riot that destroyed property and gave the Nazis the excuse to crack down they were looking for and oh my god can you believe all the guns, This Is Not Who We Are.

2026-01-25 14:24:21 CET

There is a crowd-sourced list of known ICE agents and I think it’s good to remember that if we can hunt down and prosecute Nazi death camp guards in their 90s, we can also hunt these people down for the rest of their lives.
https://wiki.icelist.is/index.php/Main_Page

2026-01-25 14:02:57 CET

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The right’s view of rights, laws, and rules, is that there exists some in-group (them) that should be protected by power and an out-group (you) that should be bound by power.
That’s it. That’s the motivating idea. Rules, laws, principles do not exist to be consistent, logical, or defensible. They exist to give them what they want at your expense. There is no compromise you can reach, no shame you can provoke them to feel, only your submission to their domination.
Do not take the words these people say seriously except when they are explaining how they intend to hurt you. That’s the only time they’re telling a consistent truth.

2026-01-25 13:59:08 CET

A lot of people are correctly noting the galling hypocrisy of US conservatives who spent decades fetishizing gun rights and specifically the insurrectionary theory of the 2nd amendment suddenly justifying a man’s public, summary execution on the grounds that he was (legally, non-threateningly) armed when he encountered police.
And I get it. They are hypocrites. The hypocrisy is galling. I get it.
But I am begging you to move rapidly past this realization to a place where you never, ever take this people seriously for even the tiniest moment. Everything they say, every single thing, is said instrumentally to achieve their goal of power in that particular moment. There are no principles. They will not feel shame when caught in the discrepancy. Do not waste time on it, do not entertain it, do not debate it, do not lend it credence as an idea that warrants a serious and considered rebuttal.
Do not take them seriously ever again.

2026-01-25 12:30:47 CET

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“They might deploy the army” motherfucker this is literally deploying the army.

2026-01-25 12:27:29 CET

RE: https://gascoigne.social/@Charles/115955427309922919
When Minnesota deploys troops to protect ICE, those troops do not constitute a neutral force. A neutral force would be acting to protect *any* person from violence. Those National Guard troops are deploying to protect ICE at Whipple; they are not out on the streets protecting people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
#note1ghv…jfsf

2026-01-25 11:51:40 CET

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In case you thought #ACAB somehow only applied to ICE or US cops, here’s footage of British cops beating the shit out of protesters in London:
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/video/newsfeed/2026/1/25/mass-arrests-at-uk-protest-in-support-of-hunger-striking-detainee

2026-01-25 11:06:15 CET

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Governor Tim Walz had activated the Minnesota National Guard…to relieve the cops guarding ICE at the Whipple Federal Building from protesters.
But Walz has assured the world that he’s very upset and has once again asked Trump very sternly to remove ICE from Minnesota.
https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/walz-activates-national-guard-after-federal-agent-kills-man-in-minneapolis

2026-01-25 10:10:34 CET

A number of people got really upset at my last post calling to #AbolishThePolice because they think ICE isn’t a police force and policing is actually good and necessary and honorable and anyway here are state cops assaulting protesters in order to protect ICE in Minneapolis:
https://www.kttc.com/2026/01/23/minnesota-state-patrol-issues-dispersal-protestors-whipple-federal-building-minneapolis/

2026-01-25 00:10:26 CET

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ICE is a police force that Biden kept around and deployed against the American public. There isn’t even a plausible “abolish ICE” choice in the US political landscape.

2026-01-24 23:59:23 CET

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If “abolish ICE” is too radical for you, as it was for Biden, you *are* supporting fascism.

2026-01-24 23:24:10 CET

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I wonder if Biden’s campaign and Harris’ subsequent campaign failed because their administration relied on ICE to ethnically cleanse the US in a manner that did not sufficiently differ from Trump’s fascist approach to immigration.

2026-01-24 23:09:57 CET

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Joe Biden’s “hands-off” approach to immigration involved deploying ICE to arrest more than a million people.

2026-01-24 11:29:14 CET

Anytime I say #AbolishThePolice someone inevitably comes along and asks “but who will keep us safe without the cops?” and meanwhile thousands of regular people in Minneapolis have spontaneously self-organized a round-the-clock patrol of the city, replete with a city-wide intelligence network and radio dispatch system, to keep themselves safe from violent assaults by the police.