Ramblings from Apalapachia...

Watterson pulled no punches

I grew up on Calvin and Hobbes... this hits harder as an adult.

these all happened in the second half of march so happy anniversary to vanessa hudgens saying “it’s a virus and i respect that and like people are going to die which is terrible but like inevitable” on instagram live and happy anniversary to ellen saying “this [27 million dollar mansion] feels like a prison” and happy anniversary to madonna calling the virus a “great equalizer” while bathing in a bathtub with rose petals in it and happy anniversary to sia posting a picture that just said “virus <3″ and happy anniversary to priyanka chopra clapping to her empty garden and happy anniversary to gal gadot et al.’s imagine video

Please remember this when the rich blame a few weeks of lockdown for things like kids being sick all the time all of a sudden or the economy. It was just a vacation for them and many others, yet they conceptualize it as a prison sentence, a punishment. Had we held out for just a few more weeks, had the government footed the bill to feed and home and protect people for just a few more weeks, we could be living in a world that is actually free of covid instead of pretending it’s gone while it circulates at levels higher for this time of year since wastewater testing began.

when the capitalists die out either thru global warming or revolution will we be able to start homegrown internet

been reading about dual power and how to grow my own tomatoes and i’m wondering how and if we’ll be able to start commie internet lol

like obviously the internet is this huge electric capitalist controlled hardware infrastructure thing so after all that shuts down is there a way to do it ourselves lol

i want to come home from a hard day on the communal allotment, kiss my Wife, crank up my generator, and start sharing meams!

GOOD NEWS: the homegrown commie internet is in the works! Across the world, people fighting against censorship and for a more democratic internet are building mesh networks (meshnets) of long-range wifi (LoRa)

Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!

Small antennae, like for connecting across the neighborhood, can literally be built out of trash

And a larger, more accurate one can be built pretty cheap too

(You can also reuse an old satellite TV dish, or really anything else that’s roughly parabolic)

There are LoRa meshnets in places like New York, India, and all over Europe: Spain (pictured below), Greece, Austria, Germany, etc

As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc

What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing

You can read more about this kind of stuff here (or here if it’s cloudy in Barcelona)!

there’s also the work being done by the DCPT, left-behind Detroiters meshing together their neighborhoods to share overpriced high-speed connections among the community and producing these good good educational documents, especially this rad resource page. building meshnets to share a global uplink is very similar to building meshnets for the purpose of intracommunication and these resources are useful in both cases

I’ve had a couple people ask about how to join/organize something like this, which is great! The best list of active projects I know of is here, though you should also do a search online if you don’t see one in your area in case they missed it. For those without a nearby group, put a pin here and try contacting nearby pins as well - you can use the instructions on buildyourowninter.net as well as the DCPT’s resources as linked above to get set up!

Please reblog this version so others can get involved!

This is a good article.

We have entered a phase of regression,and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. 

In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. 

The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. 

Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration - check. 

The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. 

Social and economic mobility is low. Check.

Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.  

Even with a diploma, you will likely find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives. Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to crucial healthcare.

How did we get this way?

What happened to America’s middle class, which rose triumphantly in the post-World War II years, buoyed by the GI bill, the victories of labor unions, and programs that gave the great mass of workers and their families health and pension benefits that provided security?

Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.

 Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”

What can we do?

We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging.

If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly. 

The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions. 

We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans. 

We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector,

 reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and

 focus on embracing an integrated American population. 

We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.

 We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone — including some of the rich people.”

Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority. 

Without a robust middle class, America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.

In Other Words Revolution

Capitalism’s bad

I really hope i don’t see any fellow white Americans on this post talking about how we don’t deserve this because we’re “the greatest country in the world” or how “this shouldn’t be happening in America of all places”. It shouldn’t be happening ANYWHERE, it doesn’t need to be happening anymore, and the fact that it was already happening in predominantly nonwhite countries is largely the fault of white supremacy

Reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society…

universities be like: Ha ha yes, we totally c$are abou$t you$r Educa$tion!! our $tudent’s learning is our numb$er one pri$ority :$)

always reblog COMMUNIST TREK. <3

Star Trek is radical in so many ways people often forget.

The future that liberals want

The future anarchists want

I’m pretty sure the federation is a socialist utopia but go off I guess

This future isn’t even on the communist-capitalist scale that we only think of when it comes to contemporary economics. The United Federation of Planets is a “non-monetary economy” where internal capital does not exist, people can get whatever they need when they need it thanks to advanced technology and highly-efficient distribution systems, and trade with external organizations is funded through monitored allowances so as not to destabilize foreign economies.

Basically, the idea is that once the survival and comfort needs of a population are met then they can devote all their time to personal, community, and societal enrichment by pursuing their own dreams free of worry. Want to be a scientist? Go to school tuition free and have access to all the lab equipment you need. Want to be a gourmet chef? Find a kitchen you like or open one on your own and cook as much as you want. Want to explore the galaxy? You can still do any of that other stuff, but now you do it on a spaceship!