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  An important component of authority is *legitimacy*. We often colloquially think of legitimacy as a kind of “rightness.” That is, we might think of an authority as legitimate when that authority is earned, valid, right, just, etc. But, in reality, legitimacy (in this context, at least) is a measure of how likely we think other people are to endorse and support the actions of an authority.

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  Two things can be true at the same time: - Intellectual property is a regime of state-enforced monopolies that exists to extract value from people using otherwise non-rivalrous ideas, to the advantage primarily of the already-rich and to the detriment of a world deprived of the free expression of those ideas, and - Under a system in which people depend on returns to their intellectual labor to survive in capitalist markets, stealing the product of that labor with impunity does real harm to tho...

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  The US is a uniquely powerful actor on the global stage, and this has lead many people to conclude that the US is uniquely responsible for a malign and repressive global order. The most extreme version of this is the campist’s knee-jerk support for any actor, now matter how malign and repressive, that is antagonistic towards the US in any way. This ignores that many states are malign and repressive, and that many or all extant states participate in the reproduction of the global capitalist-st...

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  Not having any theory of the state or capitalism is how you end up with a society full of people who are intensely aware that things are failing and breaking down and falling apart but can’t explain why any of it is happening. So people on the right blame globalists or The Jews or DEI or trans kids in a desperate attempt to find someone to blame and sacrifice. And liberals blame leftists and anarchists for not voting hard enough or the general public for being too stupid to know they’re reall...

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  I had to attend mandatory training on the use of “AI” in the workplace today and two of the rules they told us are: 1) we can’t use AI to do our work for us, such as by asking it to reach conclusions that we might pass off as our own work, and 2) we can use AI when we have more data than is reasonable for a person to analyze, by feeding the data into an LLM and asking it to identify patterns for us. When I tried to explain that these are literally the same thing, and that the latter is just p...

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  British police will arrest pensioners for wearing t-shirts with words that merely *resemble* the name of the proscribed group Palestine Action but allowed a gang of masked racists to block the Port of Dover and terrorize people. The state will say a lot of words about its values and priorities, but its use of violence will always tell you what it actually cares about.

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  A foundational pillar of liberal electoralism is recognizing that some policies enjoy overwhelming public support but aren’t implemented by the state, and blaming the electorate for failing to want it hard enough rather than a system that consistently doesn’t care about the electorate. https://bsky.app/profile/radiofreetom.bsky.social/post/3msmgl64irc27

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  It’s easy to forget, but back in January, the US invaded Venezuela, murdered some people, kidnapped the Venezuelan president, and declared that it was now “running” the country. Although the US has never clarified what that means, it apparently includes collecting all the revenues from the sale of Venezuelan oil. For a while, that money was being directed to an account in Qatar, of all shady places, but is now collected in an account at the US Treasury. Some of this money has allegedly been d...

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  Many people say that generative “AI” is on the cusp of super-intelligence, but it keeps doing things like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/30/government-map-mislabels-african-countries

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  Rare good news: we can now store excess solar power to heat homes in giant batteries made of crushed soapstone sand: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/science/a-finnish-town-now-heats-itself-through-winter-using-a-giant-battery-made-of-2000-tonnes-of-sand-charged-by-cheap-electricity-and-holding-the-warmth-for-months/amp_articleshow/132531824.cms

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  Something I often encounter from STEM folks is a belief that understanding human behavior and human society is akin to understanding a math or engineering or physics problem. There’s one correct answer that you can discover or achieve if you know the parameters, define the variables, and do the math properly. And, if you don’t get the answer you were expecting, then it’s the people who were wrong, not the work, and so it’s understandable or even desirable to want to shove people into the corre...

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  “OpenAI has a model that escaped containment and hacked another company without being told!” no it didn’t. When will you learn that these people lie about everything constantly. There is zero reason to believe their version of events.

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  Trump has repeatedly and explicitly told the public that he intends to interfere with the US legislative elections in November, and a lot of reactions have taken the form of “well he can’t so it’s not a problem.” As in, “Trump lacks the legal authority and anyway he has struggled to occupy and pacify even a single US city so he’ll probably fail at this too.” And I cannot emphasize enough that he’ll still try, and still has a non-zero chance of succeeding, and still can do a lot of harm in tryi...

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  The total spending on generative “AI” since 2013 is something like $2.5 trillion. In perspective, this is like taking all of the economic activity in a country like Spain or Canada over the course of an entire year and redirecting it entirely into the manufacture of chips and data centers and the programming and training of LLMs. An incredible amount of resources. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/19/visualising-ai-spending-how-does-it-compare-with-historys-mega-projects

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  Back in March, when Trump’s war on Iran was still just a brand new baby war, Italy denied several US warplanes permission to land at an air base in Sicily while they were on their way to the Middle East. The reason wasn’t political. The US military simply hadn’t requested permission before the aircraft had departed the US, as was required by US-Italy bilateral military agreements. The US just…didn’t follow the rules, so Italy said no. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/07/why-did-ita...

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  “Both at his West Palm Beach home and at the office, survivors say Epstein sometimes sexually assaulted them while an officer in uniform was nearby, ostensibly to keep an eye on the newly registered sex offender. At the Florida Science Foundation, a rotating roster of officers would sit near the entrance to the office. Two women said they remembered thinking that the officers seemed afraid of Epstein.” ACAB because police exist to protect the interests and prerogatives of elites, not to protect...

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  In Texas, a woman was murdered by a man with his car after he became angered by a gesture her boyfriend made. Never let anyone tell you that the US lacks honor killings, because that quite clearly what this is. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/boxer-hannah-rapp-killed-texas-driver-strikes-bicycle-rcna588234

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  Proponents of capitalism have explained to me repeatedly that market competition drives prices down and that capitalists cannot possibly collude to raise prices, because one of them will inevitably defect to undercut the others. Anyway: “The states and federal government accused Cal-Maine Foods, Versova and Hickman’s Egg Ranch of a behind-the-scenes arrangement to ‘artificially inflate the daily price quotations for eggs’ between June 2022 and March 2025. In particular, their investigation fou...

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  The wildest thing about the Argentinian claim to the Falkland Islands is that Argentina had never exercised sovereignty over the islands. And also that the people who live there don’t want to be ruled by Argentina. And also the attempt by Argentina to rule the Falklands was concocted by a failing military dictatorship that wanted to distract the public by starting a war with a foreign power it thought it could easily beat. You would think that the Argentinian public would still not be so i...

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  I’m fascinated that the “fertility rates are dropping below replacement so humanity is doomed” folks seem to have learned literally nothing from the “population growth will soon overwhelm and destroy the planet” folks *who are mostly still around and enjoyed prominence just a few decades ago*.

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  I have discovered that my boss’ boss has been an enthusiastic adopter of the Claude LLM. I already had little respect for this person, who holds the job mainly because of fortuitous timing when joining the workforce and a stubborn willingness to outlast anyone with actual talent. When editing some of my work, this person stumbled over a particular sentence of mine (it was perfectly fine so this was mostly a them-issue). Instead of offering edits, or asking me to rewrite it, this person sent me...

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  The dominant pattern of Irish community organization used to be something called the “rundale.” The rundale was a system for managing and dividing up village agricultural land according to need. The word derives from two Gaelic words—“roinn,” or division, and “daíl,” a meeting or assembly. The rundale, then, was “the meeting to divide up the land.” Each peasant village, or clachan, owned land in common. Some of it was used as common grazing land for cows and other livestock; some was used for g...

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  Something weird is going on! Last month, Donald Trump admitted that his war on Iran, which closed the Strait of Hormuz and sequestered about a quarter of global oil production, had driven global oil reserves to nearly zero: “We run out of reserves at about four weeks. You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it. It would be bedlam.” This was the moment was Trump signed his humiliating and catastrophic...

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  There is a certain kind of doomer who seems to believe that humanity is intrinsically, fundamentally bad, and that climate and civilizational collapse and even potentially extinction are our just desserts for being bad.

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  Every single one of you deserves so much better than you’ve ever been offered. You all deserve the entire world.

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  Here is some rare good news: when you pair solar panels with the planting of native flora around those panels, you get a restoration of insect populations AND commensurate befits to nearby agriculture, in a addition to carbon-free electricity generation: “We found increases over time for all habitat and biodiversity metrics: floral rank, flowering plant species richness, insect group diversity, native bee abundance, and total insect abundance, with the most noticeable temporal increases in nat...

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  @prolrage@todon.nl @RD4Anarchy@kolektiva.social @itsmeholland@mastodon.social Have Olympics but for people rather than states

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  Never forget that the US Supreme Court told then-President Joe Biden that he had absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts he committed in office. And then Joe Biden—“the most progressive president of our lifetime”—chose not to drone strike the fascist who attempted a coup against him but instead told that fascist “😍welcome home😍” when that fascist returned to the White House to assume the presidency.

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  US representative Ro Khanna was recently in the West Bank where he was detained by armed Israeli settlers. When Israeli soldiers arrived, they sided with the settlers and continued to detain Khanna. This is an excellent illustration of the concept of “legitimacy” when it comes to state violence that I’m frequently harping about. The legitimacy of an actor’s violence is a measure of the probability that other actors will endorse or support that violence. Here, the Israeli state is telling us th...

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  Another day, another revelation of a secret society of the rich and powerful who routinely meet to plan their class rule over the rest of us. This one is a Wired expose on Peter Thiel’s “Dialog” group. https://archive.is/0LtzQ Among the usual suspects—capitalists, military officers, politicians, pundits—are liberal fixtures and darlings like columnist Ezra Klein, prosecutor Preet Bhahara, and senator Cory Booker. They attended because, and I cannot emphasize this enough, there is just one par...