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Please take a moment to read this. A Canadian company (Highland Copper Company) wants to build a sulfide copper mine near Lake Superior (Copperwood Project), which holds 10% of the world’s freshwater. The mine would produce 98.5% toxic waste, stored in a dam just two miles from the lake. The dam can only withstand a 1-in-100-year storm, but the area has had two 1-in-1,000-year storms in the past decade. If it breaks, toxic water could contaminates Lake Superior & nearby freshwater sources, which could lead to acid mine drainage, where sulfide minerals react with water and air to produce sulfuric acid. This acid can leach heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, and mercury into the water, severely harming aquatic ecosystems and making the water unsafe for human consumption. Similar contamination events have led to long-term environmental damage and water quality degradation at other sulfide mines in the U.S., where nearly all have failed to prevent pollution. Additionally, this could negatively impact local communities by reducing property values, limiting long-term employment opportunities due to the finite nature of mining operations, and creating economic instability linked to environmental degradation. The company wants $50 million in taxpayer funding to move forward. The Michigan Senate is about to vote, if they don’t get the funding they can’t build it.

Sign the petition if you want to prevent this disaster by clicking the link below or searching “Protect the Porkies, Protect Lake Superior— Stop the Copperwood Mine!” at change.org.

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fuck corporate mythologies but uhhh

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Hi my name is Don Quixote of La Mancha the Knight of the Rueful Figure and I have a rueful figure (that's how I got my name) with purple bruised ribs and tall stature and gaunt features and hair turning gray and a rather hooked aquiline nose and large black drooping mustaches and a lot of people tell me I look like Amadís of Gaul (AN: if u don’t know who he is begone!). I’m not related to Lady Oriana but I wish I was because she’s an incomparable flowering beauty. I’m a knight errant but some of my teeth and grinders are missing. I have long lank limbs. I’m also a defender of damsels, protector of orphans, succourer of the needy, righter of wrongs, undoer of injustice, and I wander a magic countryside called the mountains of Spain where I’m in my first year of knighthood (I’m forty-nine). I’m a gentleman (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly armor. I love my great-grandfather's forgotten corner of the house and I cobble together all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a doublet of fine cloth with matching shoes and velvet breeches and a helmet, morion, visor, breastplate and backpiece. I was riding outside La Mancha. It was early morning so the rays of the sun fell obliquely and the heat did not distress me, which I was very happy about. A lot of giants stared at me. I put up my pasteboard visor at them.

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so i guess today i disrupted the UN "ai for good" summit and got arrested with a friend

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youtube recommended me an hour long video where someone rants about the decline of build a bear as a brand and I decided to watch maybe 15 minutes or so not for any insight, but instead as a form of people watching. what kind of life would an adult my age lead to feel that kind of consumer betrayal? not because build a bear is cringe but because build a bear is expensive. ridiculously expensive. the only time in my life where i walked into a build a bear and did not immediately walk out was when my old-old ex took me there for my 18th birthday and got me a twilight sparkle plush because we were looking at the cost of these custom bears and their clothes and going "holy fuck whaaaaat". a build a bear ride or die is built very different from me.

you probably deduced from the thumbnail (as well as from the nature of these consumer grievance type videos) that the thing this person has an issue with is the overall modern day "aesthetic". the store has downsized considerably in the last decade and resembles a regular toy store moreso than its older workshop-like setup. at one point she near-tearily mulls over how many malls only have a "dinky little kiosk" instead of an actual location. she hates the fluorescent lights and minimalist style shelves. she doesn't get why things that were once painted surfaces are now interactable screens. she gushes over the things she loved about the old store as if she's seeing it all for the first time in between talking extensively about her personal relationship to certain accessories and plush types. she hates that so many of the plushies are just licensed characters now. she misses the experience of being in the store as a child. she misses the bears from her childhood that she regretfully gave away. she doesn't like that these things that meant so much to her are going away and that she doesn't know how to get them back. at one point, she mentions that she tried to go back to the store a few years ago and (pausing repeatedly as if hovering above some kind of inscrutable alien truth) that buying a bear and paying $30+ for clothes "just wasn't...fun?" but immediately combats the instinct to investigate these feelings by arguing that this is the store's fault for not being fun. that build a bear is failing because it is not more accommodating to adults.

with any other youtuber who was confounded by the fact that novelty things from their childhood did not survive the forces of the market 15+ years later (and had to shuffle around its brand aesthetics to see what would maybe make investors happy while also minimizing cost) I would probably have just stopped watching at the 15 minute mark, but I found myself fascinated by this humorism powered hydraulic performance. she simmers in nostalgia happily, reliving her memories with every image of old build a bear she superimposes over the screen, before snapping into a state of sadness and confusion once the image has been taken away. it takes about 25 minutes in for her to start verbalizing her frustration towards all modern day toy aesthetics. "why did they do this? what makes them do this? why does everything look like this now? I don't understand" she's less asking a question and more unable to reconcile that a part of her life which once possessed tangibility no longer exists, and the transactional nature of her relationship with build a bear is what specifically makes her unable to make peace with this. she cannot accept that she cannot buy back this time that was lost because her time as a child in build a bear was something that she purchased in the first place. the experience is tied so much to build a bear as an enterprise and transaction that to simply separate what she liked about it and pursue something that resembles that is inconceivable, and instead that the only choice is to. retvrn to build a bear.

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Revolt of the Surplus

The American state is cutting off countless people from healthcare right now while ramping up its anti-immigrant policies and its already heavily militarised police forces. The overlap between these is a naked attempt to reduce surplus population.

Capitalism designates a certain amount of the population to be "surplus" because they don't fit inside the parameters that make someone a productive worker. This is why racist stereotypes constantly paint immigrants as lazy and parasitic - they can't be allowed in OUR country if all they're here to do is LIVE. The maintenance of the surplus population is one way that capitalism manufactures our consent - this is why the French had a massive riot when Macron raised the retirement age by two years - you are working until you can't and then the system will take care of you. That's the rationale anyway. The material incentive is what people have recently been calling "extractive abandonment" where a state is able to squeeze value out of the processes of classifying, diagnosing, treating, housing, and "caring for" the surplus population to the minimum viable level.

Fascism has no interest in maintaining a surplus population. Yes those are concentration camps. Yes a tonne of rural hospitals kept afloat by medicaid are going to shut down. Yes they would prefer trans people kill themselves than live happy lives. Why does your analysis end there?

We have to center the surplus in our organising against what the state is doing. I'm saying this as a British trans woman but you barely have to squint to see that the UK is playing the part of 51st state right now, moving in lock step with America. We have to center the surplus population and that means both the people whose lives are considered completely "luxury" or "unnecessary" by the state (queers, elderly, disabled) and those whose lives are going to have the "unnecessary" parts, the parts where they get to live, legislated out until it becomes clear that they have been turned into a new class of slaves (migrant labourers, prisoners, "unskilled" labourers, communities of colour). Centering the surplus means organising a parallel structure for these populations to exist within at some distance from the state in as self-sufficient a manner as possible.

To make this possible, we need democratic structures so that the social organisms of these populations can understand themselves and have something close to a decision making faculty. The model I've been proposing for a long time now is assemblies. I think that getting people together for a structured discussion can achieve a lot very fast, and as I've written before, it escapes the invisibles traps of the "activist class" thinking. That is to say there are lots of issues and solutions that occur to non-activist members of communities that aren't apparent in the frameworks of thinking that we, as activists, think have made us superior and therefore in a position to dictate strategy to others. Getting together the community to talk about what their issues are and how to solve them is an incredibly powerful engine for change. Also, some people will find it too slow and frustrating, and that's great too! Those people will find each other in that meeting and get together to organise the more rapid and radical things that they feel frustrated the assembly isn't doing already. If done correctly, an assembly model could have frequent local or smaller assemblies tackling immediate community specifics while feeding back to larger regional assemblies and maybe even into something national. It is possible for us to create a structure that gives us a truer freer democracy than bourgeois electoralism ever could.

As an aside here, I am sick of seeing neoliberal propaganda and attitudes infect the thought processes of well-meaning leftists in the imperial core. Your mutual aid structure isn't a startup, your affinity group isn't a podcast, you don't need to find your USP and your niche and compete to be the best at communism. When I see people saying that big structures inherently corrupt and oppress, and therefore we must never have any centralisation, any large scale organising, it feels less like an anarchist perspective and more like McCarthyism wearing a red and black pin. Please stop being scared of Big Organising, we are going to need to do some Big Organising in order to win. Decentralised horizontal structures, federations and coalitions and so on can get really big, but we have to have the impulse to actually work together, to coalition build, to distinguish between minor ideological or interpersonal differences in order to actually make something happen.

The example I'm most familiar with is trans people, being a trans woman myself, so I'll outline my idea for trans assemblies that I've talked about in a few places now:

Meet regularly with a venue open for a couple of hours before the start of the assembly for a volunteer group to cook food for everyone. With the venue open, people can come in and socialise, get ready for the meeting, help with the food if they want, or use the space for anything else (perhaps they have legal or medical admin they've been putting off). Then, when the assembly begins, start with a rundown of the agenda by the facilitators (the agenda should have been available to everyone before the meeting and the facilitators should have volunteered at the end of the last assembly). After this, floor speeches. Allocate a number of slots for fixed length speeches for any attendees to give their perspectives on whatever they'd like. If they want to use this time to talk about community mess, that's just fine, if they want to use their time to talk about the assembly itself, great, if they wanna just let their feelings out, that's vital, if they wanna promote their surgery fundraiser, literally why not. After this move into the agenda items. Create working groups to achieve goals - you want to phone blockade the office of a transphobic politician so you're creating a working group to plan it while taking hands in the room for potential participants; you want to start a regular letter writing program to trans prisoners so you create a working group who will find a venue and regular time to convene to write together; you want to make a community HRT production process, start a working group with volunteers to make it based on the estimated size of the need for supply, discuss in the assembly what people's concerns are and how best to satisfy them; you have a lot of trans people with precarious housing, so you have a housing working group who are working closely with renters unions while putting together queer houseshares who need a flatmate with trannies about to be evicted. (All these working group examples are based on organising I have seen, to be clear, but through an assembly they could be plugged into each other more effectively and benefit from each other's and the community's resources better) Consider having a fund for working groups that anyone can donate into - there are a lot of tech trannies and cis allies with comfy salaries who would love to contribute money rather than time. After the main discussion consider having something like a "member solidarity" section like renters union branches will do where people with specific issues bring them to the group and the room splits into volunteer bunches to help those people. After this, do your AOBs, get people to volunteer for next time to facilitate, take hands, take minutes & keep time, and make sure everyone knows who to speak to concerning the operations of each working group.

This local assembly could have representatives feed back to a city or regional assembly, ideally with representatives changing each time - this is sometimes called using "spokes" - but the regional or city assembly should still be open to everyone. The same on a level above to a national assembly. A regional assembly can make projects like housing bigger, or put more funds towards HRT production that enables higher level safety & sterilisation than any small group could afford for their startup costs. It could also coordinate large marches or actions very effectively. A national assembly could mobilise enormous mass demonstrations, deliver political demands to the government and work in concert with trade unions to make sure that trans issues are taken seriously by organised labour.

The organised structure that makes the assmblies happen can be very small and isn't the same as the assembly itself. It isn't even the same as the facilitators, except maybe in the first meeting of each assembly. People aren't joining an org by coming to any assembly, and the volunteer facilitators come from the community by design. This is similar to how some orgs will have paid staff organisers who aren't the same as their chair, treasurer, secretary, comms officer and so on. The people who get together to organise the assembly are in an obvious position where they could hold power over the community, so getting the assembly out of their hands and into the hands of the community asap is an important part of this. It's also worth saying that no trans person should be excluded from these - community conflicts aren't the job of the assembly to resolve and the situation is too critical to be locking people out of the room. For these reasons I suggest that the people getting together to organise an assembly make consitutional and protocol documents right away to figure out how they get from organising the logistics of the first assembly to sitting back and letting it carry itself on its own momentum.

This all is a rough outline of my idea for trans assemblies, but the same model could be applied to various populations considered surplus to create a democratic voice that can turn your population from a political football into a political bloc. If there were trans assemblies at every level and disabled people's assemblies and migrant community assemblies, the surplus population could start to intentionally build in a direction away from these states that are currently transitioning into fascism. Their whole plan revolves around cutting off the surplus population, killing us outright or letting us die, while trapping the productive workers into a perfect machine that will get the maximum value out of their labour with no possiblity for revolt. If the surplus population can constitute a movement that is self sustaining, then the "productive workers" can simply start jumping ship, joining on to our parallel structure and leaving their fascist world behind.

A friend of mine has been getting super into potlucks and community food sovereignty, and she sent me this amazing stoner text at 3am the other day - the gist was that every meal you eat that was provided by your community instead of capitalism is a meal you're eating in the future, and if you have one potluck a week then once a week you're eating in the future, and if you can keep increasing the number of community meals around you pretty soon you can be eating in the future all the time. The steps from where we are to interdependent self-sufficiency without the state are smaller and less scary than they want us to think. The state is saying "if you walk out that door you'll die! you'll never survive without me!" to the people it considers valuable units of labour. To us, it has already made it clear we should die either way. So let's leave, and take them with us

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donald trump will die on july 20th 2025 at 1pm pacific standard time

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If it comes from parents who model the behavior they want to see, then this is good parenting.

The problem is that many parents don't model this behavior. Many parents are authoritarian and rule by fear. Many parents take advantage of the fact that they're bigger, they control the finances, their power is upheld by society, and their children are dependent on them. And they complain when their child starts treating people the exact same way.

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If you, speaking now to those citizens of the imperial core, can only remember one thing about automation, it must be this: automation does not reduce the amount of labour required for a given process (in truth it greatly increases it), rather it relocates the labour, and changes its form.

Installation and operation automated grocery store checkout involves more labour-hours of concerted effort than the hiring of a checkout worker. However, more of these labour-hours are realised inside the computer factory (rather than the store) and are carried out through the acts of manufacturing, transport, and maintenance than the complex and multifaceted task of a human worker.

It is more efficient, not cheaper. In the context of global imperialism, it produces a greater profit by shifting production to global south countries, where the cost of labour has been maintained (through military and political action both overt and covert). It is essential for the imperial core citizen to recognise this fact; the job is not gone, in fact, there are more jobs required to do the work, but they are happening elsewhere, to people in worse conditions.

If you can remember this, you will be able to very quickly understand which direction the correct position on a given instance of automation is. Many arguments fall apart when faced with this simple fact; that automation only relocates labour, rather than creating or destroying it.

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Kind of painful to admit that at the heart of the lack of revolutionary struggle in the US is the fact that conditions haven't deteriorated enough. Like when people talk about declining standards of the quality of life they're talking about "fries used to automatically come with a burger now you have to pay extra if you want a side".

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