Kate Haskell - Bactroid.net (Page 4)

Mutual Aid

> Over the next month, Luis, Christine, and ARECMA, took over the group’s storm-ravaged hilltop center and set up the Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo (Project for Mutual Aid). I flew back home to New York before I could see it open. They began by feeding hundreds of people a

Politics

Ephemeral Alliances

I’m reading through Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, and I can’t help but feel like he predicted leftist Twitter: > Possibilists , Collectivists , Radicals , Jacobins , Blanquists , will be thrust together , and waste time in wordy warfare . Honest men will be huddled together with the ambitious ones , whose

Politics

Anti-Fascism

> Also, many of their followers think that this is a game, that this a joke, that they can come off the Internet and into the streets without this having very serious implications. And a lot of what antifa is doing is making it perfectly clear to them that if

Politics

Silver Spoons

> At that time the contracts for farms ran for a long time, often for ninety-nine years. The progressive fall in the value of the precious metals, and therefore of money, brought golden fruit to the farmers. Apart from all the other circumstances discussed above, it lowered wages. A portion

Finding God

How on earth should I characterize this? Some years ago, while writing morning pages [http://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/], I decided that I didn't want to just mindlessly transcribe my thoughts. Instead, this thing fell out of my head and onto the screen. I ended up really liking

Politics

Download More Proles

> Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn’t actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won’t make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that’s precisely the point.

Redesigning Your Environment

I recently bought an Apple Watch in an attempt to filter out unwanted noises while still allowing notifications and communication through in a calm and less disruptive way. Having a permanently silenced Apple Watch on my wrist and receiving notifications silently via a gentle tap on the wrist enables me

Scenes from My Marriage

Me: Success! Wife: Yatta! Me: It's so easy… Wife: Happy go lucky. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yatta! [https://youtu.be/rW6M8D41ZWU]

Nature

Poison Dart Frogs

Taken at the Florida Museum of Natural History [https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu].

Religion/Spirituality

Racism and Homophobia in the KC Pagan Community: The Asatru Folk Assembly

> For two months, however, I have been combating racism and homophobia being brought to my community. It has taken over my time I reserve for blogging and, in the past few weeks, sleep and self-care too. I've needed to step away from social media and the ugliness

Nature

Suspended in Mid-Air

Spider web holding morning drizzle, Gainesville, FL.

Nature

Spiderwort

A small flying insect takes a moment of rest on a spiderwort bloom. Taken at Depot Park [http://www.depotpark.org] on August 26, 2017.

Politics

A Foundation, Not a Net

> Under laissez-faire capitalism, income is only distributed to the factors of production, i.e. labor and capital. If you don’t own a whole bunch of capital or have the capacity and opportunity to work, capitalism has no use for you and would, left alone, starve you to death.

Politics

Fiat Currency, Socially Necessary Labor Time, and Other Causes for Revolution

I’m currently reading through Capital, Volume 1 by Karl Marx, and I’ll readily admit that it’s not always an easy read for me. Theoretical complexity isn’t usually an issue for me. I have read and enjoyed Levinas and Hegel, both of whom really demand a lot

Politics

What Is Antifa? A Scholar Of the Movement Explains

> Disruption is necessary for social movements. It’s used precisely to make it clear that business as usual can’t move forward without some kind of change. In the end, the growing struggle between antifa and fascism is a material struggle that’s going to take place in the

Politics

Socialism at Play

> Alas, it turns out that the crucial component of informational capitalism is distribution. Conglomerates like Apple, Sony, and Microsoft quickly adapted to this peaceful seizure of the means of production. They opened their markets to indies and even supported some of them, while consolidating control over the vectors along

Politics

On Queer Liberation vs. LGBTQ Rights

I have mixed feelings on assimilation. On the one hand, to borrow from Harry Potter lore (as I so often do), I am a Slytherin. I prefer to blend into crowds rather than risk my own safety. On the other hand, I am a self-confessed radical who seeks to change

Programming

Your App Will Eventually Be a Legacy App

I just spent an hour debugging a problem with an aging legacy system for my job and other thirty minutes fixing the problem and cleaning up the mess after all that debugging. A MySQL mediumint auto_increment key had overflowed on a very central and very important table, leading to

Politics

In Charlottesville, the Local Jewish Community Presses On

> For half an hour, three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood across the street from the temple. Had they tried to enter, I don’t know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either. Perhaps

Politics

Enough Is Enough: Fighting a White Supremacist Culture

I am not confident in my ability to speak eloquenty or cogently on the events of this past weekend in Charlottesville. I am too fucking angry to be a critic, an essayist, or a theoretician. In this moment, I am almost fully the furious id of a poet and a

Link Article

The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter

> Many members of YA Book Twitter have become culture cops, monitoring their peers across multiple platforms for violations. The result is a jumble of dogpiling and dragging, subtweeting and screenshotting, vote-brigading and flagging wars, with accusations of white supremacy on one side and charges of thought-policing moral authoritarianism on

Politics

Wrestling All Night with an Angel

In digging through old notes, I came across this piece of writing I was putting together right after the 2016 Presidential election. My emotions were raw, and I was trying desperately to make sense of things in my head. It seemed like there might be some value in sharing to

Politics

What Socialism Means

The constant cries of “socialism” for every government program from the American right has really diluted the meaning. > Socialism refers to a system where sectors of the economy and basic aspects of human society are moved outside of a market system and into communal ownership. This process of the

Humor

The Cattleman's Creed

Shortly after I became vegetarian but before I went vegan, I found myself in a barbecue restaurant with my entire family. While most folks were quietly accepting of my new and strange dietary habits, my brother upon hearing that I wasn't eating meat anymore simply declared with neither

Link Article

Socialism’s Future May Be Its Past

> Capitalism is an economic system: a way of organizing production for the market through private ownership and the profit motive. To the extent that it has permitted democracy, it has been with extreme reluctance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Socialism’s Future May Be Its Past [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/