cammie

cammie wrote (edited )

Orgzly on the phone. Emacs Org-mode on the lappy. Syncthing or git-annex on both devices to keep things in sync. Org-roam (which is a zettelkasten system on top of Emacs Org-mode) for notes that are reference/study notes.

it's good because it's libre/free software, it's all plaintext files for the notes, and no third parties are required to keep things in sync. and it's probably about as flexible/extensible as it gets, it does a lot more than just note taking too.

it's bad because Emacs does a bit more than the average text editor so it takes a bit more getting used to than the average text editor. but for some things the initial time sink can be worth it in the long run, I think this is one of those things.

Regardless of if it's text files or pencil and paper, i think the notetaking medium is less important than the notekeeping system. Keeping lots of notes is only as good as your ability to understand them and zettelkasten seems to be one of those system that allows things to be more than the sum of their parts.

The Org-roam manual puts it like this:

The Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It places heavy emphasis on connecting ideas, building up a web of thought. Hence, it is well suited for knowledge workers and intellectual tasks, such as conducting research. The Zettelkasten can act as a research partner, where conversations with it may produce new and surprising lines of thought.

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cammie wrote

Another reason these comparisons can fail is not that comparing oppressed humans to other oppressed animals is a problem per se, but that when using one of these comparisons the argument tends to strip important context from the oppression of people, and it often results in a simplistic characterisation or a insensitive sort of revision of the oppression that just comes off wrong.

Not that it can't be done of course. plenty of oppressed people have likened their oppression to the oppression of animals in various ways --you don't even have to hang around vegans for it to happen-- but when someone doesn't know the oppression they are talking about, it's easy for them to fuck up the delivery and undermine their own argument.

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cammie wrote

I don't like that take.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how.

Maybe I don't have the very simplest anarchist beliefs, but plenty of people are "unreasonable" under the best of circumstances. The reason I want more anarchy is because of these unreasonable people not despite them. If they're unreasonable under ordinary circumstances who'd want them having any power?

But i'm also not sure that people can always organise themselves and their communities when left to their own devices, I just think having people in power makes any attempts at organising harder. You're more likely to fail to get organised* when there are people out there whose position of power is dependent on them doing the organising instead of you.

*(insofar as that's really a desirable thing anyway, depends on your idea of 'organised', but much of the time it seems to mean "organized and able to continue life as it were, with plenty of factory jobs for the proles")

The second is that power corrupts.

Yeah ok whatever, that's fine, if a bit vague. I think power is bad regardless of what it does to those in power.

Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.

Who's "we"?! People live by vastly different and irreconcilable notions of common decency. Isn't indecency one of the top five favourite reasons used to justify genocide?


If we're doing bad takes then mine is that what's good for the goose is good for the gander and anarchy is good for this goose :)

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cammie wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by moonlune in by !deleted32548

Another handy thing is that you can just click into the start of the url bar and put !wayback or !wbs in before the url to see if there's an archived page for the current url. Also, you can use !bang to search for more. If you don't want javascript or the ads then there is https://lite.duckduckgo.com too.

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cammie wrote

Reply to comment by !deleted27729 in advertising by plasticspoon

I know that using chroot you can install a linux distro alongside android and then ssh or VNC into it from native android apps, but I'm not sure about how to do it without a rooted android host.

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cammie wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by !deleted27729 in advertising by plasticspoon

for the android phone, running arch on android then installing spotify and something like spotify-cli-linux may work.

Edit: I vaguely recall there being apps on f-droid to run arch without needing root, not something i've done though.

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cammie wrote

Reply to comment by NoPotatoes in cope thread 9: copefinger by zoom_zip

although not sure if I would want to share it with the world.

If you mean that it's a personal thing, then yeah ok, ikwym, but if it's a matter of it being "worth sharing" then I'd go for it.

I tend to doubt myself and delete/bury things, maybe a little too readily.

Even if you're not sure enough about it to put your name to it, then I'd still encourage you to make an anonymous or throwaway account and submit it somewhere, provided it's not specific enough to easily ID you. In my experience it's interesting to see how people receive it and it's nice to know it reached other people.

There's can never be too much poetry.

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cammie wrote (edited )

WE ARE SHORT STAFFED.

sure, this is good because that's less wages paid for more work. And sure, we were aiming for this level of work/wages ratio eventually. But it's bad because we got here faster than we had time to adjust for so our workers may not have become enured to this level of overwork yet. Please give us time. With some training they'll come good.

PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH THE STAFF THAT DID SHOW UP.

not because we care about the staff, no, we want you to adjust your expectation because the only winners here are us, and the customers should not feel entitled, they should be patient with the remaining staff. That way the customers get to feel good too, they are helping our business in these trying times, and by helping us they help our staff. Our remaining staff are morally responsible enough to be here and keep working for us, so by helping our business the customers are morally good.

NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE.

don't you know about one of the pillars of economics, that welfare and government handouts makes people lazy, and disincentivises a healthy work ethic. Look what has happened to us hard working business owners that still value our work ethic. We are suffering because of the immoral sloth of the poor people who are now content to remain poor because they got a taste of that easy welfare money.
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cammie wrote

Just fyi, Afghani is the currency and Afghan is the demonym.

Where I'm from has a military with a bad history in Afghanistan too, so not sure I've got the disinterested point of view you're looking for, and I don't really know that much about the topic, but from what I do know I think it's a sad story for the poor interpreters.

They made a deal with the devil and they got left with a devastated country and a broken promise, and probably a bunch of neighbours who might not be too pleased with them for helping the yanks. So it's just shit all round it seems, but I do feel sorry for them. I remember stories from sympathetic USGIs years ago recounting how some of the interpreters where there to try and stop the soldiers from resorting to shooting for lack of ability to talk. The soldiers would get frustrated or scared when people wouldn't move the right way or follow the orders that they attempted to give in broken Farsi or Pashto, so they'd just start using violence. Apparently the interpreters felt obligated to be there to explain to people what the angry soldiers wanted so that less people would get hurt. I can't fault the interpreters for the call they made to help the USA, it's not like the USA was just going to leave, so if they wanted to try and mitigate any damage that's fair.

And of course if they believe they stand to benefit from a move away from a war-torn country to the USA, then they might want to take that offer even if the USA is part of the reason for the war in the first place.

I have a hard time faulting people for their stance on an ethical matter when they are just trying to survive. They were put in that position by the USA and Australia too, so the blame lies there foremost.

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cammie wrote (edited )

I think it is hard to find a really pan-leftist take on why the police should be abolished (as opposed to just reformed), because much of the left is not opposed to authority, and to me it seems like an important part of the problem is the position of authority that the police occupy. And many of the supposedly pro-abolition arguments just amount to abolishing the police and then simplistically replacing them with an institution of equal cause for concern, where they do all the same things as police, but they wear different hats or something.

For me the only really convincing arguments against the police are the anarchist ones, which is not to say that people from the non-anarchist parts of the left won't find them convincing, it's just that if they do then they might be considered anarchist-leaning lefties, and so it would still not be a truly general leftist argument.

Anyway, here's what I just threw together, more for my own entertainment. I'm not suggesting it's good, there are better pieces out there of course, and I'm sure it could be made more concise and there are a few bits i don't like, but I've got to put it down and sleep, so consider this a draft i guess. Feedback welcome.


The primary purpose of the police force of a state isn't to keep people safe, it's role is to safeguard state power (for which capital is a proxy of under capitalism.) The police force only keeps people safe insofar as doing so protects capital. An effect of this is that the people with more capital are the ones kept more safe, those with less are less safe, and those that are deemed to be a threat to capital are the primary opponent of the police force and as such are unsafe.

This forms a sort of calculus of safety in which someone with a lot of capital that does something seen as a minor threat to capital will retain a level of safety that someone without the same capital would not have. This, in combination with systemic racism, ableism, sexism, and homophobia, amongst a litany of other forms of discrimination, leaves us with a police force that only really provides safety to a subset of rich white people.

But even if it were possible to reform away the discrimination, including the discrimination inherent to the primary role of the police, then it would still leave the police force as a group of privileged individuals with special powers that give them the exclusive authority to use violence against the people of the state, and that authority needs to be guarded against corruption, but the state can only do so by further applying authoritarian means of control, which only moves the problem further up the chain of command. Every issue averted at a lower level is compounded and moved upwards. So by this process, eventually responsibility falls to the heads of state, and so the matter of policing becomes a matter of government accountability.

In addition to the problem of managing the authority of the police, there is the ethical question of what sort of things are considered unsafe enough that the police need to protect people from them.

So the matter of policing becomes a matter of government accountability and ethics. If there is some way for the people to hold the government accountable to their will, and some way for the people to define the ethics by which the police should operate, and some way for the people to all completely agree on what both their will and ethics are, then that is the way that the police can be made to keep the people safe. But it is demonstrably impossible for a large and diverse group of people to share a common will and ethics to the degree that is required to make the police safe. So it is better to have no police force than to have an unsafe police force. There are other solutions to the problem of community safety that do not involve providing special powers to privileged individuals in the hopes that they share a common will and ethics, and are incorruptible.

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cammie wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by AnarcheAmor in by !deleted30

If capitalism = bigger booties and thicker thighs then I want more capitalism.

A finger on the lobbyist's hand curls up.

Capitalism now equals bigger booties and thicker thighs, and more heart disease.

Which works great because heart disease will be good for the medical industry, and there won't be so many unproductive old people that can't work. Life will be a nice simple understandable fate of:

living with joy and terror for the first few years

spending your time learning your place for the next two decades

spending your time, as a productive member of society, working for the next four decades

spending ten years dying of heart disease and paying all the savings you scrounged for in the last forty years to maintain a steady state of discomfort until you run out of money and are evicted from the hospital to spend your last days on the street where you are fortunate enough to score some good gear that helps you spend the last moments of your existence dreaming --with at least some comfort-- of big booties and thicker thighs, and trying your best to forget all the spending you had to do along the way...


and GDP will be booming, so winners all round, right :)

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cammie wrote (edited )

On the day that the Belgian officials arrive with the court order to have the stone moved back in the way of the tractor, if the farmer has moved the stone to the other side of their plot of land, then the court will have no jurisdiction over the farmer, and they will have to invade France to issue the orders. Alternatively the farmer can cut the stone up into little bits and make a maze out of the French-Belgium border that leads to their house. If the maze is sufficiently complicated then no Belgian officials will be able to make through to issue the orders.

Edit: lastly, if the farmer cuts the French half of the stone up and places it around the border of France and does the same with the Belgian half and Belgium, then it will create an inverse France and Belgian shaped void where neither country exist, thus destroying both countries and freeing the farmer from having to dodge an inconvenient rock they insist on putting in the way of the tractor.

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cammie wrote

You'll have to excuse me for not reading the whole piece yet, but just on the opening quote:

Attention to all racists: we will not just “replace” you, we will erase you. All trace of your worthless empty lives will be discarded from history. Your murderous temper tantrums will be like so much static noise lost forever as you are shuffled into the dirt.

-- William Gillis, Twitter

They will not be forgotten, but they will not be remembered kindly. I don't think racism is something that can be beaten and then moved on from. Fighting racism is a continual pursuit, and remembering the history of racism is important in that fight.

I may just be misinterpreting that tweet though.

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cammie wrote (edited )

Fuuck mate, those one liners they throw around to dismiss the poor sods trying to inform them of their mistake.. it reeks of conceitedness.

These same people are presumably anti-capitalist, right, at least they haven't got that confused too?!! So then this seems like the second hurdle after passing beyond capitalist realism: 'democratic realism' where it is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of democracy.

Ironically if something doesn't change, like if the mods of r/anarchism don't sticky a post to explain some common aspects of anarchy*, then the archists may become the majority there (if they haven't already), and they'll talk about their favourite forms of 'justified hierarchy' and democratically (via the downvote) coerce or exclude anyone who takes issue.

*This works doubly because the mods will be seen as authority figures and so their opinions may not be so easily dismissed as "blog post bullshit" by the archists.

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cammie wrote

Just to add to the point that things look bleak here, the Police Minister of NSW's view that “we don’t have a race problem in Australia” is not at all uncommon. It's not like that's just something a right wing minister of police would say, it's a point of pride for many aussies that "Australia doesn't have the same amount of race problems that the USA has."

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