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ReadFanon [any, any]

@ ReadFanon @hexbear.net

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Joined
2 yr. ago

If I don't reply I'm probably struggling with basic communication or my health. Don't take it personally.

Multiple award-winning Hexbear effortposter

Webfishing yapper

  • Squash the Boss!

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  • 🥳 and another one to the smashing

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  • 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.

  • People always say "don't give the homeless money because they'll just spend it on drink/drugs"

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  • 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 in 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.

  • I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop

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  • 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.

  • czechmate

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  • It's really nice to be back

  • czechmate

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  • 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.)

  • czechmate

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  • 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.

  • czechmate

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  • Legendary work comrade, tyfys o7

  • New year's tarot reading, come get your new year's tarot reading!

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  • 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.

  • czechmate

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  • 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.

  • New year's tarot reading, come get your new year's tarot reading!

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  • 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.

  • Oh, shit! Finally found a real one, y’all!

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  • New year's tarot reading, come get your new year's tarot reading!

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  • 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.

    Tarot cards are such a Rorschach test, aren't they?

    Thanks very much for the reading, I hate it

  • Oh, shit! Finally found a real one, y’all!

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  • Hey! Don't make fun of shawties!!

  • New year's tarot reading, come get your new year's tarot reading!

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  • Sure, I'm down to hear what the cards have in store for me if you're willing.

  • (cw: suicide, domestic abuse) joyous future

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  • One must imagine Sisyphus joyous

  • czechmate

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  • Honesty, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants in this.

    That excerpt doesn't capture the half of it imo. For example, there were attempts to nationalize the telecommunications industry in Barcelona. The Generalitat conducted a census of the industry and, although the results were incomplete, there were hundreds of companies operating. Just in Barcelona. (I can't remember if it was over 300 or over 500, but the details don't really matter.)

    Obviously, especially in war time (and a civil war to boot), such critical infrastructure needs to be secured. This is straight up non-negotiable imo (putting aside the matter of the May Days for brevity here). I might be more sympathetic to other anarchist arguments but in these matters, you simply must seize and nationalize infrastructure and to do that you need a state, there's just no other way around it.

    Also this quote doesn't even address the issues of military discipline, which was atrocious amongst the Republic forces although Jorjor Well, of all people (lol), happens to discuss this.

    There were major issues in the Spanish Republic and I'm loath to pin its failure on one single matter however Catalonia and the surrounding regions that were held by the republic were the most economically productive in Spain, although critically they were almost always characterized by smallhold factories and production by small companies (think petit-bourgeois cobblers or tailors or very small factories that produced things like candles rather than big industrial factories like existed in Britain.) This made it virtually impossible to manage the economy and production well, especially for a revolutionary government, and it was well suited to sabotage and reactionaries doing what they do.

    Due to the political ideology of the CNT/FAI they didn't go nearly as hard on liquidating these smallhold companies and organizing a necessarily ruthless program of nationalization, much to the detriment of the war effort. On top of that you had classic trade union consciousness rearing its ugly head, given the nature of economic organization there, and so you have things like an hours-long debate in the government because the glassworkers' union was demanding that recycling efforts were ceased so that artificial demand could be induced to keep glassworkers employed.

    The government was jammed up for hours because glassworkers wanted to smash bottles and jars to create more work for themselves while the fascist forces were nipping at their heels the whole time. I'm still astounded by this, honestly, and we all know the consequences that poor organizing had on Spain and more broadly for Europe (not to mention WWII and, of course, Morocco.)

    If you get me talking about this long enough I end up getting legitimately angry for how this incredibly rare opportunity got pissed up the wall.

  • czechmate

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  • I'm trying so hard to remain a polite and respectful guest here and this reply is bringing the absolute worst out in me lmao

    If they were an actual lib I wouldn't be trying to hold it in right now.

  • czechmate

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  • I'm not baiting you into fedposting and I reject it entirely but it is possible to make references to historical examples or to talk in hypotheticals without signing your name to it, for example, after mentioning what you have then following up by saying "I've heard that the Venezuelan Colectivos are armed and trained to act as a community self-defense force so it will be interesting to see how effective they are and what can be learned from their model of community self-defense" - you aren't saying "we should do this" or "I'm forming this myself where I live" but the allusion is enough to gesture at an example without getting yourself dragged before a court, that is assuming you even want to discuss something like this publicly online in at all. It's easy enough to read between the lines but also you have boatloads of plausible deniability if you ever had to account for posting a comment like that. OpSec is always priority.

    I get what you're saying about draining away the power from capitalisms and/or statism but my question is - what has happened to every utopian commune to ever exist? Either they pose a threat and they get taken down (and it's not like any commune could resist against the forces of a power like the US military) or they peter out.

    In my opinion what you've described is a way of building the new world within the shell of the old, except with extra steps. This is going to come off as uncharitable but this is the exact trajectory that Revolutionary Catalonia took in terms of defending the revolution - they started largely with very classic anarchist-ish policy (including economic policy) and over time the issues with public safety, a mafia-like org holding too much power as a sort of shadow state, labor discipline and economic productivity, attempts to organize production and logistics etc. all led them to start reinventing the Bolshevik wheel. In a smaller, shorter way (that has much less in terms of documentation) this is also the trajectory that the Makhnovshchina took as well.

  • chat @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    A promising new YouTube channel focusing on Linux Mint 101 topics in bite-sized videos

    youtube.com /@lovelinuxxmint
  • music @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    Kokym - Zaffit El Tahrer | كوكيم - زفة التحرير (هي ما بدها خاتم)

  • Games @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    GOG just dropped Warhammer: Dark Omen, an old retro game with a cult following. Here's some rare mod files for it that don't exist elsewhere on the internet.

    www.gog.com /en/game/warhammer_dark_omen
  • diy @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    DIY hydroponic tower for growing vegetables (except cheap, easy, and off-grid)

    hexbear.net /post/7134881
  • Self Improvement @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    It's time to start learning how to grow your own vegetables, if you want to (hydroponic tower growing except cheap, easy, and off-grid)

    hexbear.net /post/7134881
  • gardening @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    It's time to start learning how to grow your own vegetables (hydroponic tower growing except cheap, easy, and off-grid)

  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    Graham Platner on Reddit 6 years ago commenting on a thread mentioning the totenkopf on a post discussing SS soldiers with a visible totenkopf in the photo

    undelete.pullpush.io /r/CombatFootage/comments/auy0bi/_/ehbh3n6/
  • disabled @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net
    CLOSED

    Webfishing drop-in peer support - you're invited!

  • disabled @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net
    CLOSED

    Webfishing Drop-In Peer Support - you're invited!

  • Book Requests @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net
    Featured

    PDF to epub OCR request thread

  • Book Requests @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    How to access books uploaded to LibGen & How to upload to LibGen

  • Book Requests @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    How to upload audiobooks to TankieTube, using the TankieTanuki-sanctioned method

  • Book Requests @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net
    epub

    (Example Post) The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

  • Book Requests @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net
    Featured

    "How do I request a book?" • Read this before posting a request

  • commrequest @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    /c/Book_Requests

  • fediverse @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    TankieTube accessible on Android via GrayJay app

  • neurodiverse @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    Ranting about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and ADHD

  • neurodiverse @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net
    Featured

    Suggestions for replacing ableist words

  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    Holy shit, Breadtube has become even more of a grift than it was

  • memes @hexbear.net
    ReadFanon [any, any] @hexbear.net

    Cute dress tho