Light @light@qoto.org

It is really freeing to realize that "All non states on earth have been taken over by a state" is itself propaganda. Every time Britain or France planted a flag and said "This is ours now" the people who agree with that are statist. States have brought unspeakable violence on the people they've conquered, but those people are only conquered in that the state says they are. It's the old argument at the playground:

"I beat you that means you have to do what I say."
"No it doesn't!"

Conquered anarchists haven't bought in to the claim that they are conquered, or that anyone can be conquered, and then it's just a matter of having enough power to resist.

Like, e.g. now "talk about the weather" is generic bad smalltalk, put plausibly in the year 1900 a decent number of people would be filled with thoughts and details if you said something about the amount of rain lately. So, we carry on their conversation without thinking about why.

> Brexit voting areas have seen faster growth in foreign workers since EU referendum
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/20/leave-voting-areas-foreign-workers-decade-since-brexit-referendum

> Less than 5% of payrolled employees were from outside the UK in June 2016. That had increased to just under 10% in December 2024

Yeah no shit. The whole far-right anti-immigrant rhetoric is not about not letting people in, it's about making sure they remain disenfranchised once in!

Cheap labour for the moneyed classes, *and* a leverage against local labour force. A double-whammy.

Oh and did I mention we only have RNA vaccines because Katalin Kariko refused to bend to the capitalist system and continued her research almost unfunded because she knew that it was needed and would be successful because she was actually an expert with proper decision making capacity, instead of some CEO who only cared about what kind of marketing campaign would let them suck down profit from patents?

One interesting aspect of https://web.archive.org/web/20260622222335/https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/06/securing-the-nation-against-advanced-cryptographic-attacks/ is the demand that federal contractors (starting mid-2027) label "the use of non-FIPS approved algorithms" as a "vulnerability". The 1990s version of this would be telling contractors to label RSA above 512 as a "vulnerability".

Wait, math question: If they're both running the same spiral on, let's say, an infinitely wide plane, do they HAVE to eventually touch or can they forever be out of sync?

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bfppgmqz6i2uwkm7ynoqigfw/post/3moxptvhg2s22

Authority is an institution that conveys a power or right to command. Donald Trump possesses authority, but he does not personally threaten violence against anyone (not that he could). Instead, he issues commands to subordinates, who in turn execute his threats. Those subordinates know that if they do not obey his commands and execute his threats, that THEY risk being threatened and hurt by yet other subordinates, whose role is to enforce obedience among subordinates.

Authority is, in a sense, self-reinforcing, a kind of behavioral trap. Soldier A knows that they must follow orders or else be punished by Soldier B, who knows that they must follow orders or be punished by Soldier C, who knows that they must follow orders or be punished by Soldiers A and B.

Once you’re in that trap, it can be very difficult to escape, because part of the trap is knowing that you must cooperate in the enforcement of authority or be punished by other people who are similarly compelled to cooperate with the enforcement of authority. We are all drafted into (re)producing our own subordination.

We know this empirically because the anthropological and archaeological records are full of countless examples of people who live or lived in egalitarian societies with few or no relations of command.

They were able to do this because they desired to live without authority, were aware of the threat of authority, and developed a suite of tools for preventing the imposition of authority.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s work on reverse dominance hierarchies is an excellent place to start learning about these.

The EU age verification app is presented as “completely anonymous”. The idea is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography.

But currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality. More importantly, the app is designed to always function without ZKP. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.

More details on https://mullvad.net/blog/age-verification-for-social-media-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-a-free-internet

Ernest Hemingway wrote poetry, spoke French, AND tried to machine gun nazis from a boat. The boat thing was mostly an excuse to drink at sea, I believe, but the point stands.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:skf244z64dfa5yvynksq65ij/post/3mn2w27bxns2c

A free lance artist just did this free lance drawing.. feel free to share it. as with all free lance drawings there is no charge of course.

"Residents burn an Ebola treatment center in Congo as anger grows over the outbreak"

https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-outbreak-who-spread-response-18537353976a958687e55f95434c918c

I'm not sure how this is helping.

#Africa #Ebola #Disease #Health #Congo

Nice report from amnesty UK showing trend of growing awareness and common sense about genderism in the UK

> Like a snowball: the growth and impact of the gender critical movement in the UK

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/knowledge-hub/all-resources/like-a-snowball/

> Explores the rise of the gender critical movement in the UK, its media influence and impact on trans rights. Read the full report and technical summary.

The systemd project has announced that to comply with Canada's proposed Bill C-22, systemd will incorporate a mechanism to automatically install the government's public key into the `authorized_keys` configuration of every sshd server.

"It's not about politics in software, it's about ensuring the safety of our children," said Lennart Poettering's Claude agent. "Complying in advance is something we must do, as it allows us to get ahead of You have reached the monthly limit of your Max 20x plan. Click here to purchase more usage credits."

The GPS/satnav came out, and eventually came to our phones, and we all gradually got worse at finding our way without it.

Don't believe me? Turn it off for a month and see how you do. I've been doing this the last month and it's been enlightening.

That cognitive offloading isn't necessarily bad, per se (this is debatable). I think that really depends on the task and the outcome.

But even for simple tasks, I think it's important to recognize that there's a loss when we trust a machine to do some of it.