It's easier to trick people when they're socially isolated, especially from one another.

all of it.

what was it, aaron?

which atrocity drove your desperation to
set your body on fire to match your burning spirit?

was it the baby starving to death on camera?

was it the children eating food for livestock?

was it the artillery shot towards children
celebrating at the border?

was it the millionth mother
grieving her dead baby?

or was it
the silence?

Studying history is important if for no other reason that it makes it harder for people to lie to you. Most of the lies people tell are not new, and the propaganda of earlier times is always easier to see through than modern propaganda which we are always immersed in.

Our current dominant political system used to impress people like old infomercials, but is increasingly understood as the phony sales pitch it has long been.

If money is all the machine understands, we can only be heard by putting money where our mouth is.

Let's talk about changing American foreign policy....

[Build power for yourself and your community instead of borrowing it from elected officials.]

[If you want to make a difference in areas where the USA invades, you're better off buying solar panels or an electric car because it helps shift the dynamics to not require the resources for that intervention.]

Let's talk about Biden, banking, and overdrafts....

[USA banks make over eight billion dollars a year from overdraft fees (by charging people who don't have money).]

respect for construction over destruction

Kevin Komisaruk, American-Canadian Keyboard Musician

messaging that bombards us daily: fear and compliance are the new virtues to signal and will ensure our survival.

I also wonder how they process the contradiction of seeing our society celebrate those who disrupted history with peace and compassion, while persecuting those trying to do the same today.

Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust

A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.

Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche.

Germany today is Israel's second largest arms supplier following the U.S.

Some reflections on last night’s hawtt Jew-on-Jew action with @thedandelionking

['Might makes right' disqualifies someone from leftism.]

@danielbmate x @thedandelionking

[What's the difference between destroying in the name of your country versus your god?]

On a whim, but a deeply felt one, I went live to share some impromptu thoughts on Israel, Palestine, condemnation, and context. Thanks for tuning in and considering.

[Might seem futile to add one's voice to the cacophony of others on social media, especially as it makes little difference to people suffering over there, but my voice is all I have.]

The War on Informality

People cram off the Tube to cram into Pret for coffee to cram into work, before cramming into the self-service checkouts at Tesco for lunch. You'll never see the bosses or shareholders of the production lines, but you will see a series of CCTV cameras, touch-screens, QR codes and employees, with the latter increasingly subordinated to the technology.

As people cram into the bars in the evening, they’ll leave their Pret cups and Sainsbury’s sushi containers crammed into bins. Those will be emptied before dawn by an army of unseen cleaners, many of them immigrants, who will un-cram the city so the process can continue when everyone drains from the catchment area of the suburbs into the trains again. Once on the platform, our minds can get crammed afresh with the cutting edge of automation ideology, which in London means pervasive fintech ads, like this one from the automated investment manager Nutmeg.

The fintech scene primarily exists for one thing: to help bridge the gap between Big Finance and Big Tech.

London is a city of endless helpful requests coldly delivered to sound like orders, alongside matey propaganda designed by M&C Saatchi to make corporate platforms look warm and cuddly. When I lived here, this mix of dripping corporate inauthenticity and stultifying paternalism was there like a suffocating blanket, but the city had a strong counterculture to balance it out.

Isn’t it strange that a bunch of financial elites were invited to sit on the board. Someone should report that to the See It, Say It, Sorted help-line as suspicious behaviour. I fantasize about calling the operator and saying:

‘I’ve noticed London has been taken over by two colossal American payments firms working in conjunction with Big Finance and Tech, and people don’t seem to notice. Suspicious?’

I can imagine the operator looking for ‘corporate takeover’ and ‘apathy towards ruling class hegemony’ in the list of threats to UK democracy. ‘No, sorry, we only act upon terrorist threats, homeless people, brown people, and people who take photos of our CCTV cameras’.

One of the classic symptoms of deep urban commodification is that the identity of a place gets ripped away from those who live there and displayed back to them from the outside. You don’t host the spirit of Soho. You consume it. You live inside a product, and the local authorities begin to view themselves as product managers.

People ask me why I focus so much on cash. It’s because the arrival of so-called cashlessness is an eviction notice served to non-commercial spirits. The formal sector is slowly assassinating the informal economy, like an imperial death squad hunting down rebels. The creep is like a virus, and old Brixton punks must watch as it spreads into the body of the neighbourhood that hosts their identity. It appears to them as a sedation of the spirit, and a great forgetting of a world where solidarity, disdain for authority, and acceptance of imperfection were standard.

Their – perhaps reactionary – fear, of course, is that young Londoners will be born into this situation of capture, with their brain patterns calibrated within the formal system, such that they can’t recognise an outside. For example, many young people no longer have a concept of ‘money outside the bank’. Money is ApplePay. What is friendship without WhatsApp? What is directions without Google? There is no world that precedes the digital corporate overlay, with its filtering, auto-correcting and curating. The very concept of un-intermediated life is an endangered species.

Why don’t the Democrats adopt the obvious winning strategies?

[Since the Clinton era, US Democrats want to lose because it enables them to continue campaign funding as a lucrative income, as the Republicans started to do decades earlier.]

Let's talk about what peace will look like and news for the next generation....

[When the slogans that people shout are more important than the lives of a future generation, it guarantees the continuation of horror.]

[Peace in this conflict will mean heartbreak, rather than celebration, as authorities tell the families of victims that their cases will no longer be investigated.]

The Roads to Reaction and Response

[Doing 'something' as a reaction to moral injury isn't always the right move.]

[Hot takes feed the cycle of reaction.]

[Algorithms ensure everyone has an audience, no matter how small.]

[Your desire to 'just do something' will be co-opted by those in power to ends that aren't in your interest.]

'Infectious agency' as a design goal so that features enable a feeling of so much possibility that everything else should have similar affordances.

first they laugh,
then they want it,
then they can't have it

(decentralize as) decomposing the remains of zombie networks too big to die so that new life can sprout everywhere like grass