jayeltontoro

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Joseph Dilnot (British, 1997) - Woden (2024)

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Canning blackberries in simple syrup this evening. A couple of jars ready to be topped off.

We'll see how they turn out, I usually only do rowan berries this way.

That old cloth protecting the worktop is ignominiously referred to in the household as my jam rag. Some people!

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Irene Chou (1924-2011) —Infinity Lawnscape [watercolour, chinese ink, on rice paper, 1990]

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"the digital equivalent of an Ikea showroom"

Brilliant!

What we’ve gotta understand is that “the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for adults” and “the modern Internet is abolishing space for children” are compatible phenomena. Neither group is being favoured: the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for adults (i.e., because grown-up topics aren’t advertiser friendly) and the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for children (i.e., because online communities which consist principally of people who have no money are hard to sell things to). The Internet that contemporary corporate interests are trying to build isn’t a space for anyone – it’s the digital equivalent of an Ikea showroom.

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'By day she made herself into a cat'

Artist - Arthur Rackham

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Caregivers...

Sources:www.pintrest.com//mine_edit

2025

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The government should never have the power to do anything with your body! It should not be able to make medical decisions for you, it should not be able to kill you! This applies to even the worst people among us. Regardless of what we feel they deserve, the government should never have the power to make those decisions. One, because human rights are human rights. Rights are not conditional, they are not just for good people. Two, what happens when the government decides that you qualify as part of the group that should be castrated or put to death? "It's only happening to so and so group" right, so what is stopping the judicial system from deciding that anyone is a sex criminal or a murderer or a terrorist? Nothing. Absolutely nothing

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2nd year running that starmer has resolutely failed to say even the most middling words of reassurance to immigrants and ethnic minority communities in the midst of white supremacist rioting in the UK

Last year, he managed a 'won't someone think of those poor police' speech, this year he just keeps tweeting about 'stopping the boats' and 'smashing asylum seekers the gangs'

All whilst participating in the genocide of Palestinians by Israel

And yvette Cooper hasn't said a peep; I guess these blokes aren't 'terrorists' because they don't oppose genocide 🙃

Almost like they're fascist

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Margaret Nazon — Seyfort Galaxy (fabric with beading, canvas, 2019)

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Courage on display

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Stephen miller, like Heinrich Himmler a repugnant man with hideous ideals attached by sycophancy, like a lamprey, to the 'charismatic' future corpse of a totalitarian.

Stephen Miller is a white supremacist fascist pig.

🖕🖕🖕

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Oh okay, so because of the devolution bill, Cornwall is being pressured into having a joint mayor with Devon which would essentially strip its national minority status away. Which, I don’t think needs to be said, is extremely fucking bad. As well, it puts a lot at risk: funding for Kernewek to be taught in schools, Cornwall ever having its autonomy, as well as the few and tenuous regulations that protect Cornwall’s interests first (price gouging, second and third home owners, and the complete undermining of Kernow’s history and centuries of trying to be its own independent state).

And I absolutely do not do this whole Cornwall vs Devon rivalry bs as it’s a waste of time, it’s ridiculous and it’s like having two different conversations. So, please, if you’re in the UK, sign the petition to grant Cornwall nation status, write to your MP if you’re in Cornwall or Devon and remember the people who don’t want an autonomous Cornwall the most is Reform UK who’ve made it abundantly clear they view it as a “threat to English identity” (and also to their own profits).

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Herbert Migdoll, Pippin (ballet), 1972

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Going to risk fangirling a little here;

Hardback as soon as it came out here - I didn't want to wait for paperback and I'm too scatty to listen to audiobooks

Loved it.

Reminding myself too that when it came out (before Trumps second term) I was thinking it might be overdoing MAGA, (not a spoiler - don't worry) but... History has already corrected me. Fucks sakes!!

All (antitrust) politics are local

The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.

The US government has abandoned antitrust. Today, companies facing antitrust jeopardy can just pay key Trumpland figures a million bucks, and they will make a discreet visit to the fifth floor of the DoJ building, have a little shufty around the Antitrust Division and the whole thing will just…go away:

https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/

Federally speaking, antitrust is now just another hustle. The fish rots from the head down, of course: Trump brings baseless lawsuits against media companies so that they can offer him a (colorably) legal bribe in the form of a "settlement":

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/03/institutional-failure-cbs-wimps-out-pays-trump-16-million-bribe-to-settle-baseless-lawsuit/

This opens space for "MAGA influencer lobbyists" whose boozy back-Broom deals with antitrust targets like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks swap legal immunity for personal "consulting" payments in the millions of dollars:

https://unherd.com/2025/07/the-antitrust-war-inside-maga/

But here's the thing: even though the fish rots from the head down, the world rises from the bottom up. The global wave of antitrust vigor (which swept up federal enforcers in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the EU and China) did not start with government enforcers.

Rather, these enforcers were driven forward by an unstoppable current of popular fury over corporate power. That fury is ubiquitous, and it's growing. Federal enforcement was the channel that current was forced into, but merely damming up that channel does not cause the current to abate.

Right now, that rage is finding vent in municipal politics, which makes sense if you think about it, because corporate power is most vividly felt at the local level. When a billionaire rains flaming space-junk down on your home, or poisons your water with fracking, or jacks up your electricity and water bills by building a data-center, that's because a local politician has been captured by an oligarch. Very few of us are personally familiar with America's oligarch class, but a hell of a lot of us know where the mayor lives.

Writing in The American Prospect, Ron Knox documents the rising wave of successful local mobilizations against corporate power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-09-02-shifting-anti-monopoly-landscape/

In Portland, Maine, the community has risen up against the monopolist Live Nation/Ticketmaster's plan to build a 3,300 seat venue that would have destroyed the local music scene, which pulled off a miracle of mutual aid and survived the covid lockdowns and nursed itself back to health.

The Maine Music Alliance and its allies won their fight by packing town meetings, circulating petitions, and bollocking their municipal representatives – you know, all the stuff that has totally stopped working at the federal level, but which still moves the needle when it comes to local politics.

The Portland/Live Nation victory is a story of a couple thousand everyday people thoroughly trouncing a globe-spanning, rapacious, corporation that grossed seven billion dollars in the last quarter. Moreover, these everyday people beat Live Nation/Ticketmaster at the same moment as the feds were making noises about dropping their antitrust investigation against the company. Where the feds surrender, the people of Portland fight – and win.

It's just the latest installment in a series of similar victories, including well-known ones (Queens, NY blocking a giant corporate giveaway to build a new Amazon HQ), and quieter ones, like Tuscon rejecting an Amazon data-center. Localities are fighting the fire-engine cartel (three companies that control fire-engine production and screw cities on new vehicles and maintenance):

https://pdfserver.amlaw.com/legalradar/pm-59657794_complaint.pdf

For a guy who loves to throw his power around, Trump has a very primitive theory of power. He thinks that illegally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board will put a lid on the generationally unprecedented support for unions among American workers.

But the NLRB doesn't exist to make unions possible: unions made the NLRB possible. We have labor law because illegal unions fought so hard and terrified their bosses so much that the capital class had to sue for peace. Firing the referee doesn't end the game – it just means we don't have to play by the rules.

Trump has illegally torn up the contracts of a million unionized federal workers. It's "by far the largest single action of union busting in American history":

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-trump-celebrates-labor-day-as-most-anti-union-president/

And the Grinch stole Christmas. So what? The Grinch thought that the ribbons, tags, packages, boxes and bags made the Whos down in Whoville feel all Christmassy. But he had it backwards: the Whos had Christmas in their hearts, which is why they surrounded themselves with the tinsel, the trimmings and the trappings. He attacked the effect, but the cause was left intact.

We have a cause. The historic highs in popular support for unions are part of a massive wave of anti-corporate anger. We see it everywhere. It's in juries, which is why corporate lawfirms are panicking at the thought of their clients falling into ordinary peoples' hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire

And the reason we're so angry at the oligarchs is that they're so terrible. They've figured out that the only way to keep their billions is to crush democracy and replace it with fascism, which the tech PACs are doing right now, in an open scheme to end elections as means to change society:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-is-there-a-silicon

As Matt Stoller writes, "if the voting booth isn’t a meaningful way to fix problems, people will find other mechanisms to seek redress, using uglier tactics."

Which is why every fascist takeover was ultimately defeated by revolution, not elections:

https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop

But one place where democracy is still alive and well is at the local levels. Local races are weird and silly and bush-league, but they're also legible to people in a community that state and national elections are not. MAGA figured that out during the Biden years, packing library boards and town councils with insane chuds and culture warriors – but once decent people caught wind of it, we were able to trounce those weirdos in the next election.

I love municipal politics. My 2024 solarpunk novel The Lost Cause is all about local politics as a microcosm of – and a base for – global movements to address the climate emergency:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause/

For the past several months, I've been immersed in a seeming contradiction: global, local politics. That's because I have new all-time fave podcast, "No Gods No Mayors":

https://www.patreon.com/c/NoGodsNoMayors/posts

Every week, the NGNM crew profile a mayor – past, present or future, from all over the world and all through time – and prove, repeatedly, that "mayor" is the highest office to which a true oaf can aspire. NGNM has been an especially important balm for me in these brutal political times, because it scratches my burning need to think about politics, without making me think about the country's terrifying slide into fascism (it helps that Riley Quinn, November Kelly and Mattie Lubchansky, the podcast's hosts, are both infinitely charming and very, very funny).

As a confirmed NGNM stan (I've started sleeping with a mayoral sash under my pillow) I am duty-bound to consider municipal politics to be funny and, generally speaking, trivial. But municipalities are also cradles of democracy, and at now that cities are the front line of the fight against Trumpism – from antitrust to militarization of our streets – I feel like my NGNM-imparted encyclopedic mayoral knowledge has prepared me to join the battle.

Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act-locally/#local-hero

Image: Onbekend (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guillotine_Rijksmuseum_Gevangenpoort.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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About time.

Technically there's limits on how much the devolved assembly can do. Westminster dictates foreign policy. The Scottish assembly is not permitted to engage in international affairs, only internal affairs.

We need independence.