ReadFanon

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 22h ago

A YouTube essay on this image - fat furry fetish art against fascism.

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 22h ago

For historical context, Scottish direct action against the military industrial complex has had some remarkable impacts on the world.

Here's a really good documentary called ¡Nae Pasaran! going into how Scottish strikes hampered Pinochet's regime. From the blurb:

Nae Pasaran charts the incredible true story of the Scots who managed to ground half of Chile’s Air Force, from the other side of the world, in the longest single act of solidarity against Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.
In 1974 a group of workers at the Rolls Royce factory in East Kilbride showed their support for the people of Chile by refusing to carry out the vital repairs of engines for Hawker Hunter planes, which had been used during the brutal military coup in September 1973. The boycott endured for four years but the Scottish workers never knew what impact they had; it was a matter of conscience and an act of solidarity. Bustos Sierra – himself the Scotland-based son of a Chilean exile – reunites inspirational figures Bob Fulton, Robert Somerville, Stuart Barrie and John Keenan to hear their story. With unprecedented access, Nae Pasaran also ventures much further to detail the horrors of the Pinochet years, meets survivors of the period and hears the Chilean side of the story.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 22h ago

The people who spend a significant amount of their paycheck on drugs (especially when you add in caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol) are telling you that it's bad if homeless people have money because they'll probably spend it on drugs is the biggest self-report. Just because you would do that if you had extra money because you already have your basic needs met doesn't mean that you can universalize that experience and project it onto homeless people.

Also if I was homeless I'd basically need drugs and/or alcohol to cope with it - I can barely handle working a cushy office job while having stable accommodation without needing to rely on drugs as a crutch, do you really think that I'd rely on drugs less if my circumstances were significantly worse?

If we want to talk about addiction and enabling, let's talk about useless NGOs and charities that are addicted to public funding and policy that enables them to redirect most of that money to shit like the salary costs for a bloated corporate hierarchy and so they can do shit like invest in property rather than effectively addressing the social ills they purportedly have a mission to fix.

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 22h ago

Been running dual-boot Linux and Windows for a few years now for the reasons you mentioned. I have the boot menu set to a 1s timeout and to default to Linux so it's easy if I want to boot to windows on start-up with very minimal impact on my boot time, although I rarely boot to Windows at all these days.

I play a lot of indie games and so some of them have stability issues with Linux, especially if it's a recent release, because they have small dev teams but generally my experience has been that Linux gaming is really good, better than I expected, even despite my experience being a bit of an outlier on the worse end of the scale. Most of the time performance is noticeably better too.

In terms of "owning your PC" it does sound hyperbolic but every time I boot into windows I get forced to deal with updates on windows' schedule (wanna boot to windows to run some utility for a quick 5 minute job? Hah, too bad! You get to have forced updates and you will reboot when we tell you to and now you have booted back into windows you have to get more updates and reboot again for some reason) and all the user account control measures and shit. I can't just run certain programs on start-up without the UAC prompts and I literally have to open submenus just to say "yes, I want to run this program and no, I am not concerned about the risks" or I can disable all the security controls and get ridiculous notifications that I have threats detected with my PC and, when I try to scan for threats it will tell me that none are found and it's only hidden within submenus that the "threat" is that my UAC settings are lower than recommended. Bruh, I set them lower because I don't want to have to deal with constant pop-ups making me confirm that I want to run the program that I just started. That's not a threat and I chose that so I don't need to be told to attend to the security center to figure out the threat that the security center doesn't inform me about only to discover that windows doesn't approve of my user-defined settings.

You get used to Windows being this way and always having mostly useless training wheels on it which dictate how and when you will use your OS but it's genuinely frustrating to go back to it when you've been free from it for a while.

Not gonna lie - my experience with Linux is occasionally that I want to do something but I don't know how to do it whereas my experience with Windows I that I want to do something and either it won't let me or it routinely puts up a series of roadblocks to actively discourage me from doing something even when I specifically chose to do that thing. So it's a choice between two different frustrations but overall my Linux experience has been trading a constant stream of Microsoft-induced frustrations for skill issue frustrations on Linux and the occasional "Why the fuck would in have to set up a hotkey binding for bringing up the system monitor when there should be one pre set upon installation?" type of frustration.

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 23h ago

It's really nice to be back

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

So real.

This is inside baseball kinda stuff but tbh if you want a real deep dive then, in my opinion, Morocco is kinda the key to understanding the SCW; it's where the forces that Franco would go on to lead were blooded, it's where Franco himself cut his teeth and rose to prominence, the Rif War was where the Spanish military would deploy tactics that would then go on to be deployed against the Republican forces (and later across Europe in WWII), and it was also pivotal in the sense that Moroccan troops would enlist in the war (regulares) and served as shock troops and relief forces that made Franco's forces much more numerous and effective.

It was also pivot point for this chapter of history - a Moroccan delegation sought independence under terms that were very favorable to the republic early in the SCW but the republic turned the offer down to maintain their colonial aspirations. If there was Moroccan independence from Spain at this point, it could have led to:

An earlier wave of decolonization
A second front in the SCW that Franco would have fought in order to try and maintain the Spanish colony
Cutting off the supply of regulares to Franco's forces (both of which would have significantly weakened Franco's position)
Potentially even having Moroccan troops supporting the Republican forces, which could have proved deadly since they actually knew what they were doing with war

Any or all of these could have turned the tide of the civil war. But the European radicals opted to cling to colonialism to their own detriment (a tale as old as time). The fate of the colonized and the fate of the colonizer are inextricably linked and it's such a shame that this wasn't recognized.

I understand that the Moroccans were vilified in Spain, both for the Umayyad Caliphate and for the more recent history where Moroccan troops were sent in to break miners' strikes in the region that would later be incorporated into the republic (Alcora or the Asturias, I forget - geography isn't my strong point) and the Moroccan troops were really brutal in this, but not on account of their skin color or their religion but instead on account of the demands of the then-Spanish government. I wish there was more solidarity amongst the Spanish people to recognize that their enemy wasn't the Moroccan people.

Anyway, I'm yapping. Here's a fascinating scholarly article on the role of Morocco in the SCW. If the SCW was the prelude to WWII then the Rif War was the prelude to the prelude.

You can connect this to Stalin's attempts to appease Britain and France and his advice to the Republic to not accept the overtures for Moroccan independence, since those were the big players and both had a vested interest in maintaining their colonial empires. Then the through line connects Britain and France's lack of enforcement of the SCW non-intervention pact to Stalin figuring out which side these two would be on with regard to the nascent fascist forces and him recognizing that the USSR was basically going it alone against Hitler soon. This then leads directly to decisions like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the earlier economic ties between the USSR and Nazi Germany because, imo, it was a strategic and temporary appeasement to buy time as well as a sort of canary in the coalmine to signal when war was coming down the pipeline to the USSR. Michael Jabara Carley is really good for this stuff. He's written a few books on it including Stalin's Gambit.

If you want to understand what was influencing the USSR's perspective and actions in the lead up to WWII then understanding the SCW is foundational. (Personally, I don't take anyone seriously if they have an opinion about the M-R Pact or similar stuff but they can't connect it directly to the SCW.)

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

Right? There would be almost nothing.

Speaking of which, the info on the glassworkers comes from the account of Dolores Ibarruri's They Shall Not Pass.

I can also recommend International Solidarity with the Spanish Republic (1936-1939) which is quite dry but it's good especially for a primary source for details on the military aid to the republic.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

Legendary work comrade, tyfys o7

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

Thanks for the kind wishes. It definitely reads as positive change. I'd just prefer if it fell into my lap rather than having to work for it but maybe I will find a moon to do the heavy lifting for me? Lol.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

I absolutely agree with this take.

This is from the first volume of Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War by Robert Alexander. It's the most comprehensive assessment of the economy of Revolutionary Catalonia in Parts 3 & 4 that I've ever encountered.

Alexander is a really interesting one - a Trot and a Lovestonite who worked closely with the US State Department, a lifelong member of the CFR, did a lot of work for the AFL-CIA, was advisor to JFK and helped bring about the Alliance for Progress. But his historical scholarship is good, albeit very anticommunist (surprise!) and he's naturally very sympathetic towards the anarchists in the SCW given that the Trots and the anarchists were in close alignment there.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

Yeah, one reading is definitely that I'm getting exploited somehow and I'm gonna have to stand up for myself or get myself out of some sort of scam and then suddenly there will be a big reveal on exactly how I was being exploited or how it was affecting me.

Honesty it would seem very much like this year the cards are telling me that I will need to struggle to remove myself from a long-term abusive relationship but I'm not in one so this doesn't apply to me. Which I guess is good.

If I were to believe in it, it's mostly health/mental health related and honestly it does fit from that perspective - I'm imbalanced in how much of myself I give and how little dedicate to taking care of myself and my own wellbeing, I have to struggle to rectify this in myself and to establish firm boundaries, and my mental health will improve as a result. I really don't need the seven of wands in the second card right now though lol, I'm already so tired.

ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

Many moons ago a certain user might have chastized me for this very thing but, alas, my bit has been ruined because the comment was deleted when the account was purged. But memories aren't so easily erased.

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ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net 1d ago

Hm. So I have been too generous and gullible, I'm not making good use of the healthcare at my disposal, I have to sort my health out and it's going to be a big struggle ahead, I need to stop giving away as much of myself as I have been giving away freely, I'm likely deceiving myself about how central I am in creating my own circumstances and I'm either to have a big watershed moment in how I understand things and my mental health is probably going to improve? Interesting.