A Harris presidency wouldn’t be threatening nuclear action.

Sure they would. They’d just keep it out of the public eye. Otherwise, we’d dismantle all our nukes. Keeping them is a threat enough.

The entire system needs tossed. And if that’s what you mean then say that.

I did, and I say that all the time. I’m openly an anarchist 🏴🏴🏴.

All this “Harris is the same” just promotes apathy at best, and derision between the left and liberals at worst at a time where unity is needed and doesn’t even hint at “the system is broken”.

Yes you absolutely should be apathetic to the circus of two-party politics. Of course we shouldn’t be apathetic to the brutal realities of capitalism, but both parties already are, and following the “circus” at all directs attention away from the reality of capitalism because that’s what it’s designed to do.

And do not get me started on liberals and their derision. It literally does not matter how nice and flowery leftists make our ideas, liberals will always shit on them and side with the fash until they stop being liberals, because liberals are creatures of the right. So at some point, we gotta put our feet down and say “This is what we stand for, and if you’re against that, you’re against us.” I’m willing to make “supporting one of the genocidaires is bad and should not be done” one of those things.

We need to get this snowflake narcissistic dumbass out of abolish the commander in chief role.

Then insert your own politician. Same analysis applies. The issue is the existence of the system, not the identity of the figurehead running it.

Although it’s not said explicitly, the article uses the “we’d be at brunch” sign as an example of rhetoric that uses the liberal “No Kings” framing. The writers of the article would disagree with the message of this sign, as would any anarchist worth taking seriously, because it argues that changing the figurehead (to Kamala Harris) would be a solution, instead of abolishing the figurehead at all.

Only if guns are your culture.

Yes guns literally are the culture in that part of the country. That’s my point. No it shouldn’t be that way, but it is. So right now, it’s absolutely not socially or legally abnormal in that part of the country to be open-carrying guns in public. And it doesn’t mean that the area is a warzone.

Yeah so the Black Panthers deserved to be shot at because they open-carried to demonstrate their power?

Yep.

Well I’m glad to know you won’t stand with people who defend themselves against their oppressors. Not sure why you’re in this anarchist community if you’re not even willing to support people who stand against their own oppression but whatever 💩💩💩

But walking behind a wall and pulling out a gun? That’s definitely not expected behavior. You can’t tell me you would expect that at a protest.

?? I didn’t see that? Is that what the cops said? Did anyone else say that?

It’s also not legal or expected behavior to hide your weapon after you are involved in a shooting and try to blend in with a crowd.

Again where does this come from? Would be suspicious if verifiable.

I like the spirit, but IMO we need more “on the ground” details to come to an actual conclusion. Cops suck but there are lots of ways to come up with “the opposite story”.

I’m working under “innocent until proven guilty” logic, but as of this posting I absolutely cannot make any positive conclusion about what happened other than the one second video clip posted in the comments.

if you have a gun, expect to be shot (at)

Yeah so the Black Panthers deserved to be shot at because they open-carried to demonstrate their power? Bad take. Needs more information.

Thanks.

I watched it several times in slow-mo. Seems to me like Arturo was walking towards the crowd before the peacekeeper fired, but he started running after the first shot in response to the shot. Looks like the barrel is down until shooting starts, at which point it goes up like 30° but still pointed at the ground. Video is quite blurry, from a distance, and doesn’t show the lead-up or aftermath of the shooting.

Utah is an open-carry state and it doesn’t seem like he was doing anything other than walking towards the protest with a gun, which is legal and expected behavior in that state.

But IMO Arturo is innocent until proven guilty, and if anything this is evidence that suggests his innocence.

Can you share it with the class? I couldn’t find it on Hexbear or through a web search.

Yeah send Venmo money to this random QR code!

Yeah actually, who does this actually get Venmo’ed to? The Mastodon post didn’t really clarify that IMO.

Edit: so I haven’t tried this myself, but according to Salt Lake County Corrections, you can donate online, but I’m not 100% sure we have enough information to do so. Also I imagine you’d have to give the State your personal info. Link is below for people who trust the cops more than the QR code. (Personally, my trust for the cops is negative so I trust the random QR code more.)

https://www.saltlakecounty.gov/sheriff/corrections/deposit/

“Innocent until proven guilty” mfs when the accused is a leftist

Liberal politicians, despite their bellyaching, always end up funding the police and standing up for them when push comes to shove.

I don’t even think it’s a “liberal plot”. It’s just shitty police work on top of the mistake of one trigger-happy peacekeeper. But it’s absolutely ridiculous to think that Democratic and Republican parties are practically different when it comes to funding the police.

If we are to learn from the successful movements of the past, we can see that all successful pressure has been the collusion of the peaceful and non-peaceful aspects of the movement, such that the peaceful party can lobby the state to concede, saying to them “now see? Wouldn’t you rather deal with me than them? Sit down and make some concessions to those suffering people.” Meanwhile, the non-peaceful protesters escalate the aggression of their actions such as to put a clock on the state. Direct action should therefore not be seen as a chaotic by-product to be avoided. It should instead be seen as a necessity to extract outcomes for the movement. Ultimately, if the demands of the protests are not met, revolution should be the threat. In this way, we are to transform the state to our whims, not vice versa. And if it does not concede, we will have built the bodies of prefiguration that will be prepared to replace it.

— Black Flag Catalyst Revolt Guide (Partial video reading by Anark here).

We need both peaceful and non-peaceful actors. Obviously for individual actions (non-peaceful and peaceful) you gotta use your own judgement as to whether or not they’re helpful, but we absolutely need some non-peaceful actors to get shit done.

ME TOO!

I feel like the signal processing community is really passionate about their work. It comes out in their books. I know I can talk for hours and hours and hours about signal processing. And my DSP professor was like that too. That was such a fun class.

Face recognition might be usable to spot agent provocateurs at protests but can be a double edged sword

I’m extremely skeptical that facial recognition would be better at this task than a group of trained humans (although I’m personally terrible at faces 😆). Existing facial recognition software is trained on datasets that reinforce existing oppressive biases, so you’d probably have to train from scratch on a fresh dataset or do some extremely careful transfer learning to even begin to get anything useful. (IMO getting a sufficient dataset is the hard part since you can do basic facial recognition with an eigenvalue decomposition on any computer.)

IMO, other than to fight against establishment AI-powered projects, avoid LLMs and image generation for public facing anarchist agitprop for now because it’s currently associated with and controlled by the capitalist class. There isn’t really a particularly great application area for LLMs and image generation where I would rather have a machine do the work than a human.

Optimal control theory and reinforcement learning can be used for peaceful robotics applications. Classical machine learning is used all the time in the background without controversy. We can keep doing that. IMO the CEOs and business people don’t actually understand the mathematics behind the systems they work with, so if you like math and have the time to pore through research papers, you can expose the business people as jackasses who don’t know shit about fuck (even more than they already do themselves).

In the background, work to wrest control of AI from the capitalist class if you have the resources and time. We should periodically revisit the issue as the culture changes and people learn how to use (and misuse) AI tools. IMO it makes sense to introduce it into anarchist spaces only when we can run our own AI resources independently from capitalists. But before that, we’re also going to need some technically informed theory about the ethics and philosophy behind AI.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think we need more technical training on how to use AI, both the training/testing workflow and the mathematics behind it. In general, I think that we need to learn more about the technical tools of the oppressors, like missiles, UAVs, LRADs, surveillance technology, etc., so we can properly combat against them.

There is no justification for genocide, including genocide itself.

Even still, there is no good version of America as a piece of culture or ideal worth living up to. In all its forms, America is a vessel for white supremacy and settler colonialism. Even when distinguishing between the current US government and any other moment in American history, the reality is that at no point has America ever been a good project for the people it lords over.

As Americans, we need to make a clean break from the “America” brand at all levels if we ever want the rest of the world to trust us ever again. “Liberal” patriotism is still patriotism and needs to be smashed.

The liberal experiment failed

Nope. The liberal experiment in the US has succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Racism and settler colonialism are alive and well, capitalists run the country, change is impossible for ordinary people to enact, and the government is slowly transitioning into the streamlined violence-only institution it was designed to be.

The Founding Fathers were monsters too, but they were monsters with decorum and a slightly larger base of support (capitalist class) than the feudalism of yesteryear (royals and the Church).

America was trash and is trash and always will be trash as long as it exists, and Americans need to mobilize against the American government, police, and army as if they were an occupying military presence, because they are a military presence occupying our public spaces.