Yet for those of us who have tasted the prospect of a world without rulership, this is simply a difference in degree of dystopia. If it truly were possible to achieve some kind of enlightened social democracy without wealth inequality, systematic disenfranchisement of minorities, and with some decentralization of state function, anarchists would still go to the barricades because this is not enough.

If anarchism is to mean anything of substance, it is surely not merely an opening bid from which you are happy to settle. Anarchy doesn’t stand for small amounts of domination: it stands for no domination. Although our approach to that ideal will surely be asymptotic, the whole point of anarchism is to actually pursue it rather than give up and settle for some arbitrary “good enough” half-measure. Such tepid aspirations is what has historically defined liberals and social democrats in contrast to us.

Nyah Mway, a 13-year-old refugee, was killed by police in Utica, NY the day after he graduated from middle school.

Fucking cops.

Out of the chaos that’s engulfed the city following the killing of Mway, Klo and the other Karen activists have forged deep bonds of solidarity at the grassroots level across a diverse array of local communities and groups. A series of actions have sprung up from these new connections.

Based on hundreds of sources, the risk for Long Covid hovers around 10 percent for both adults and children. That's the number given by an important study "The Immunology of Long Covid" in Nature Reviews Immunology. Conditions range from "breathlessness and neurocognitive impairment" to "increased risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, and types 1 and 2 diabetes." As the authors put it, "the oncoming burden of long Covid...is so large as to be unfathomable."

Another study in Medical Review puts the risk for Long Covid even higher, at 10-30 percent for a single mild infection. According to this study, that number doesn't include the organ damage caused by mild and asymptomatic infections. Once you take all the research into account, your risk rises to somewhere between 50 and 70 percent. As the authors state, "well over 50 percent of people...who have contracted Sars-Cov-2 suffer damage to their organs." That's worth repeating:

More than 50 percent.

Fuuuuuck

When you wear a mask, you're showing the world you care more about doing the right thing than what's popular or convenient. You're showing the world you actually trust science, and you don't cave to peer pressure or groupthink. It's both a symbol of collectivism and individuality. It's no accident that those of us still masking have already learned how to handle peer pressure, gaslighting, harassment, bullying, and abuse.

The Scientific American piece I opened with makes a good point. We have to acknowledge our mistakes, but what matters most is what we do going forward. We know Covid is airborne. We know there's no such thing as a mild case. We know masks work, especially now.

It's never too late to do better.

Ever.

As months go by, incidents where Threads consistently failed to uphold its understood promise of a better-moderated Twitter-like platform have added up. Today, for many non-white, non-straight, non-male users, it is a repulsive social media experience, where their voices are silenced and where hate speech offenders who target them go unpunished.

The CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) dashboard took a break in reporting updated data during the week of June 30 – July 6th, and is scheduled to resume updates during the week of July 7 – 13th. As a result, the weather roundup below is a reflection of national COVID spread as of June 27th, 2024.

Welcome to the Pandemic Roundup: an inclusive, curated selection of new information and fresh perspectives on Covid-19 published every Thursday.

I steal because I’m hungry or need something I can’t afford comfortably or at all. I steal because some days I’m just bored and frustrated from either working on the clock or trying to prepare to clock back in (days off/ vacation) and it feels good. And I steal because I don’t have any real choices in most things I do in day to day life (work to pay for rent, feverishly try to decompress in my time off so I can be ready to go back to work, repeat) and stealing dumplings from Whole Foods might be the only thing I do today that was truly my own freely made decision.

Nothing compares to the feeling of elation, of burdens being lifted and constraints escaped, that I feel when I walk out of a store with their products in my pockets. In a world where everything already belongs to someone else, where I am expected to sell away my life at work in order to get the money to pay for the minimum I need to survive, where I am surrounded by forces beyond my control or comprehension that obviously are not concerned about my needs or welfare, it is a way to carve out a little piece of the world for myself—to act back upon a world that acts so much upon me.

Love this one:

Shoplifting is a refusal of the exchange economy. It is a denial that people deserve to eat, live, and die based on how effectively they are able to exchange their labor and capital with others. It is a denial that a monetary value can be ascribed to everything, that having a piece of delicious chocolate in your mouth is worth exactly fifty cents or that an hour of one person’s life can really be worth ten dollars more than that of another person. It is a refusal to accept the capitalist system, in which workers have to buy back the products of their own labor at a profit to the owners of capital, who thus get them coming and going.

It might seem weird to claim that shoplifting is a good thing, but really, shoplifting is just stealing from those who’ve stolen from all of us.

[...]

Shoplifting gives a way for you to get what you need-or just want-without reinforcing capitalism, and instead hurting the bottom line of the corporations that exploit us and destroy our environment. It’s rarely seen as a tool to fight against your oppression, though, because unlike other actions, like voting or going to peaceful protests, it can’t be used and exploited by political parties or groups looking to convert your frustration and desire for a better world into support for their town self-serving goals. Instead, shoplifting affirms your own freedom. It shows that your needs aren’t being met in the current system and that you’ll seize what you want instead of waiting for somebody else to free you.

These are the sounds of Palestine, ringing louder than ever.

When a Palestinian is brought onto Western media to talk about what’s happening in Palestine, it’s never in good faith. This video satirizes the hostile and bad faith questions that Palestinians confront during mainstream media interviews.

SecureJoin protocols provide a usable model for message end-to-end encryption which is secure against attackers trying to break authenticity, confidentiality or integrity of messages as can occur with compromised servers and networks. They are implemented, user-tested and continuously refined in production-releases of the cross-platform Delta Chat messenger. Other messenger implementors as well as researchers are welcome to submit remarks, questions or critique either through github or by contacting Delta Chat teams.

We analyse the cryptographic protocols underlying Delta Chat, a decentralised messaging application which uses e-mail infrastructure for message delivery. It provides end-to-end encryption by implementing the Autocrypt standard and the SecureJoin protocols, both making use of the OpenPGP standard. Delta Chat’s adoption by categories of high-risk users such as journalists and activists, but also more generally users in regions affected by Internet censorship, makes it a target for powerful adversaries. Yet, the security of its protocols has not been studied to date. We describe five new attacks on Delta Chat in its own threat model, exploiting cross-protocol interactions between its implementation of SecureJoin and Autocrypt, as well as bugs in rPGP, its OpenPGP library. The findings have been disclosed to the Delta Chat team, who implemented fixes.

Real estate firms are touring North American cities marketing homes in Israel — and in illegal West Bank settlements.

A general, group-by-group overview of some tankie and authoritarian entryist Left orgs in Philly (though partly relevant to other contexts; many are national groups), to help more autonomous, uncontrollable rebels better understand and defend against their manipulations. Includes some reflections and propositions at the end ('Anti-Social Social War?').

The Old Computer Challenge announcement for the year 2024. Grab your old hardware and have fun for a week.

Yes! It is dangerous in both its initial infection phase as well as its long-term phase.

Unless you make it a hobby to follow COVID news and studies, you're probably going off old info. Businesses have a clear interest in you not worrying about COVID and governments want to claim "victory" by hiding the problem.

A zine was made on resisting mask bans. It calls for a different set of strategies than the public health model, advocating for a diversity of tactics. The model proposed in this piece is inspired by the prisoner revolts against neglectful COVID practices in 2020.

Instead of a large group laboring to make democracy work so they can agree on a course of action, it would be far more productive for smaller groups made up of people with shared interests to splinter off and co-operate to follow their own plans that require no compromise because their interests are already aligned.

Throughout history, democracy has existed to legitimize authority, providing justification for hierarchical power structures by framing every oppressive action the state takes against us as "the will of the people". It has long enabled the powerful to crush the powerless. People who insist on associating anarchism with democracy are trying to legitimize anarchism, to associate it with comfortable institutions embraced by thoroughly indoctrinated liberals. But anarchy has no want or need for legitimization. Anarchy doesn't need to be watered down to broaden its appeal to a public that is high on hierarchy.

Yon is a little UI for knowledge designed to be used every day. Add your notes, write your diary, and connect thoughts with bidirectional links. Explore your text through an acme-inspired interface to dive deep or go wide and always find your way back. Yon code and your notes are contained in a single standalone html file with no dependency, so that you can open the lid and tweak any part of it and make it your own.