Thomas Hofeller was the mastermind behind REDMAP, the took used by
Republican dirty-tricksters to redraw state electoral maps after the
2010 census in order to deliver state and federal legislative seats to
Republicans even when the majority of people voted Democrats.
Hofeller was a secretive sociopath and had long been estranged from his
daughter, Stephanie, a self-described anarchist who only discovered her
father had died in 2018 when she read the obit pages of the New York Times.
When Stephanie recovered her father’s possessions from his home, she
came into possession of files detailing the REDMAP plans, files of the
sort that he had long exhorted his co-conspirators not to create or
retain.
Stephanie turned some of her father’s files over to the government
watchdog Common Cause for use in a lawsuit over North Carolina’s
redistricting; thanks to the frank admission of racially motivated voter
suppression in Thomas’s files, the court found that NC’s redistricting
was illegal.
How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn’t use the internet.
That’s exactly what Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are doing now, thanks to San Fransisco startup Bridgefy’s Bluetooth-based messaging app. The protesters can communicate with each other — and the public — using no persistent managed network.
The app can connect people via standard Bluetooth across an entire city, thanks to a mesh network. Chatting is speediest with people who are close, of course, within a hundred meters (330 feet), but you can also chat with people who are farther away. Your messages will simply “hop” via other Bridgefy users’ phones until they find your intended target.
That’s incredibly futuristic
Pi Zero W is $10 and has built in Bluetooth connectivity.
You can find Solar USB Power Packs for ~$25.
So for less than $50 and a little time investment to load some programs you can have an autonomous bluetooth repeater.
I think they only run at Class 2 or 2.5mw so 10 meter range… but there are DIY solutions to amplify it to Class 1 for 100 meter range.
But even at 10 meters, given this sort of program uses a packet delivery system, if you are constantly on the move you’re effectively a postman for the system as it will transmit every time it comes in range of another compatible program.
I bought the book after seeing a post quoting it float around Tumblr. Not bedtime reading.
I wanted to post these types because while most of us are familiar with the philanderer or hyper masculine abuser, it’s important to recognize these types.
You’re not “crazy” if you believe you’re being abused and the dude isn’t a violent drunk bro.
The last one is especially important with more and more men identifying as feminist without more reason than they’re not “one of those guys”.
These pages should be public service announcements on the television.
I bought this book and it took me a week to read it cause I had to keep putting it down.
On this day, 23 November 1887, the Thibodaux massacre occured. Black Louisiana sugarcane workers, in cooperation with the racially integrated Knights of Labor, had gone on strike at the beginning of the month over their meagre pay issued in scrip (not cash). The scrip was redeemable only at the company store where excessive prices were charged. When the first freeze of the season arrived and damaged the crop, the plantation owners were angered. After 2 white strike breakers were shot and injured, The Louisiana Militia, aided by bands of “prominent citizens,” shot and killed at least 50 unarmed Black sugar workers striking to gain a dollar-per-day wage, and lynched two strike leaders in what became known as the Thibodaux massacre. Here is a brief account: https://libcom.org/library/us-thibodaux-massacre-1887
Pictured: Louisiana cane cutters around this time https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1272414349610379/?type=3
It’s not just the anticapitalist right that the left needs to worry about here though. There’s been a real problem in spaces that outright call themselves leftist with the idea that climate change can be solved by literally encouraging human extinction.
These kinds of eco-fascists (though they’d never call themselves that, they’re more likely to claim they’re anarcho-primitivists) might seem like the polar opposite of the people in the first article but they’re really not, they too are obsessed with “purification” and while they claim it’s not based in any kind of right-wing race fantasy, as opposed to a general disdain for humanity, the kinds of victims they choose tell a different story.
This is the logical final stage of both leftism that thinks “civilization is evil” and liberalism that thinks “humans need to die off for the sake of the earth.” Mass slaughter of the most vulnerable.
“Like neoreaction, neo-Nazi accelerationism holds that the liberal-democratic order is a failure — that we should move beyond it toward a better future, and that the task of political action should be to accelerate the speed of that transformation. Only in their view, that “better future” is not capitalist authoritarianism, but the total collapse of a degenerate and corrupt Western society — and the rebirth, out of its ashes, of a new political order more hospitable to white domination.”
________________________
This is what I’ve been talking about on here with regards to the anti-capitalist right.
Leftists (especially those who are not strongly involved in antifascist work) need to be very careful in anti-capitalist spaces, because there are multiple strands of fascist anti-capitalist movements that seek to destroy Western governments as a goal. There is a ‘revolutionary right’ and they absolutely will use Leftist action to their own benefit to take power and implement their own vision of society based in white cis male supremacy and eugenics.
Not everyone who is anti-US government or anti-capitalist or anti-centralized government is a comrade. Leftists need to forefront our fight against racism (esp anti-blackness), antisemitism, misogyny (esp transmisogyny), and eugenics. Our primary goal as leftists needs to be based in liberation movements and the inherent value of individuals’ life, freedom, and bodily autonomy.
And imo, we need to focus much more on building mutual aid networks and laying the framework for the societies we want and need in a post-revolution world, because if all our energy is poured into toppling the current capitalist structure without having a robust plan in place for what follows, then our world will quickly fall to fascists who are already planning out how they want society structured.
Sort of a tangent, but climate change discussions are a prime example of just how insidious accelerationist rhetoric can be. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen blackpill talking points come out of the mouths of oblivious liberals. Usually white. Overpopulation, austerity policies, conspiracies about crisis response. Even the wannabe Rambo ass apocalypse fantasies are, at their core, reactionary.
But something like “overpopulation is the problem” sounds right to someone who doesn’t know how reactionary politics function. It seems like an obvious, indisputable fact when one doesn’t learn how to untangle the deeper implications behind political statements. So a lot of (white) liberals are especially susceptible to the type of recruiting that cryptofascists prefer to employ.
My brother, who would be horrified to know the origins of his belief, thoroughly believes the overpopulation lie. He’s a Terminally Online Zoomer opinionated white guy who is a perfect target for accelerationists: not at all likely to participate in their horrendous violence, but very likely to absorb the rhetoric that makes him feel paralyzed, apathetic, and misanthropic while they detonate the world around him.
If we care about stopping this tide of fascism, we are obligated to learn the ways in which they’ve camouflaged themselves. The term “dogwhistle” gets bandied about a lot, and applied to things like the (((three parentheses))), which has quickly moved from dog whistle to open, unabashed antisemitism. The actual dog whistles, the ones we need to be aware of and ready to critique, often sound on the surface like normal conversations.
If, like the previous commenter, you feel horrified by the scope of the problem, the quickest way to start getting active is to get intimately familiar with their rhetoric, their codes, the underpinnings of their politics, and the machinery that makes fascism run.
When I think of how $100,000 is small potatoes for Jeff Bezos, I just about wanna tear my hair out because Lord Almighty, that amount of money would solve so many problems for me.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
