Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Paper is still punk.
Now thru 11/15, get 40% off select zines, pamphlets, and Comics here: https://www.pmpress.org/category/zine-sale

Except, of course, for their “iron-clad support for Israel,” and defense of the wealth and power of the richest Americans, for which they are generally in agreement

If anybody needs a script to grab Wikipedia "List of" article titles, here you go:

https://lab.brainonfire.net/drop/wiki-lists/dl_lists.python (Later I'm going to have to look into why my server is being weird about a regular .py file extension.)

And to filter out the less interesting (and overly long) names:

https://lab.brainonfire.net/drop/wiki-lists/candidates.sh

Today in Labor History November 5, 1855: Eugene Debs was born in Terre Haut, Indiana. He was a labor organizer, socialist, and cofounder of the IWW. In 1894, Debs formed the American Railway Union and led a strike against the Pullman company, which manufactured passenger cars for the railroad industry. At its height, 250,000 workers participated in the strike and boycott, halting all rail service west of Detroit. The National Guard killed up to 70 men during the strike. The Pinkertons also helped suppress the strike. When it was over, President Cleveland signed legislation creating Labor Day, as a bone to organized labor, but also to undermine the much more popular, and radical, May 1st International Workers Day, which commemorated the execution of the Haymarket martyrs and the fight for the eight-hour workday.

Debs spent many years in prison on trumped up charges for organizing, or for impeding the U.S. war effort during World War I. In 1918, he was convicted under the Espionage Act, and stripped of his citizenship, for encouraging young men to refuse the draft. He also ran for President of the U.S. five times, winning 3% of the popular vote in 1904 and 1908, and 6% in 1912. In 1920, he won 3.4% of the vote from his prison cell. He died in 1926 from cardiovascular problems he developed in prison. His citizenship was not restored during his lifetime.

You can read my article on the Pinkertons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/04/union-busting-by-the-pinkertons/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #eugenedebs #socialism #IWW #union #strike #pinkertons #haymarket #boycott #massacre #unionbusting #prison #POTUS #antiwar

In Tuesday’s midterm elections, voters rejected Trump’s billionaire-backed politics and attacks on working people. The winners need to show that a different kind of politics can deliver.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/populism-midterms-elections-democrats-blowout-trump-left

Ajamu Baraka at Black Agenda Report gets it:

"The Democratic victories in the November 3 elections are a setback for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But they should not be confused with a defeat of the political forces driving the consolidation of fascism in the United States and globally. Those forces are not confined to one political party in the U.S., nor are they simply the product of Trump's personal ambitions. They are rooted in the profound structural crisis of the global colonial/capitalist system...

"...An electoral victory in the context of neoliberal global control may slow down the consolidation of fascism, but ultimately, it is only the organized popular struggle that must defeat the social forces and material interests that sustain it."

https://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php/electoral-victory-not-defeat-fascism-black-radical-perspective-democratic-partys-midterm-victories

This feels like an apropos time to remind everyone that your opinions and those of your neighbors have exactly ZERO STATISTICAL EFFECT on policy outcomes. This is true regardless of which party is in power. The reason for this sad fact is simple: billionaires own all the politicians. Even the "good" ones are required by their Party to spend hours per day "dailing for dollars," i.e. calling rich people and asking them what they want. The design of the system ensures that only the uber-wealthy's opinions matter at all. The "blue wave" is not going to materially alter this reality. If you want a political system that does serve normal people, this reality must be dealt with. Those saying "now we put pressure on them to make sure we get what we want" must not remember the Obama administration. Barack himself encouraged his supports to pressure him and the Dems to do the right thing once in office...then proceeded to bail out banks, protect banksters, and violently crack down on Occupy.

Important reporting on the working conditions of the people building all those data centers. Sure, capitalism, it's exploitative, but the degree of neglect of safety standards and human rights is staggering.

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/electrocutions-mental-terror-and-withheld-wages-the-exploited-workers-building-europes-data-centres

@mcc @glyph Anti-trust enforcement created it. They were *required* to spend that money on R&D by the *government*.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jcoglan/117558987210071026

the spell this out a bit more forcefully: AI tools attempt to achieve lock-in by actively making non-users less productive when forced to engage with AI-derived artefacts

New post: How can a volunteer project keep going when your experienced volunteers are exhausted, trust is short in supply & you’re facing tremendous pressure in a situation ripe for catastrophe?

Lessons from the Ukrainian Wikipedia during the Russian invasion.

https://citizensandtech.org/2026/11/leadership-succession-in-online-communities/

One reason I despise the Chinese dictators is what they have done to Hong Kong and its people -- breaking every promise of "two systems" and running roughshod over free speech and other basic liberties. The ongoing, extended cruelty to Joshua Wong is just one example. https://hongkongfp.com/2026/11/05/truly-reflective-of-his-offence-police-welcome-10-year-prison-sentence-for-activist-joshua-wong-amid-intl-outcry/

Please: if you feel the need to suggest the use of plagiative "AI", consider not doing that. 🙏

And I mean even in jest. Even when it seems clear that it's a "clever" joke.

it adds nothing to the conversation; yawn, we all know these things exist. If we're rejecting them, then usually for a bunch of deep reasons.

So the predictable joke is simply tiresome. It's no longer funny. And, frankly, it's corrosive.

1/3

On the 3rd of November, I implemented my "Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically". Since then it has caught ~150 scrapers and cut ~75% of my traffic.

A Brazilian court has blocked #Meta from implementing its new terms of service that allow for the mass scraping of websites.

The court has set a daily fine of $1m reais ($182K) for non-compliance
https://www.anj.org.br/justica-proibe-meta-de-usar-conteudo-jornalistico-sem-autorizacao-apos-acao-de-anj-abert-e-aner/

This is fucking ridiculous. My https://openbenches.org/ website is serving over two TERABYTES of bandwidth per month!
That's up from 1.5TB the previous month.

While I'd love to believe that's all people fascinated by benches, I think it's more likely to be endless crawlers.

I'm lucky to have a very generous host with no hard bandwidth limits, but I'd want to find a way to block bots without having human-facing interstitials. Looks like robots.txt isn't cutting it.

RE: https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/117562786908197139

This is worse than an PR stunt. To liken what algorithms do in a data center with what humans do in a university is just one more step in the "AI are people"-push and all the shit this contains.

“What the Next Two Years Look Like”

https://davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/what-the-next-two-years-look-like

> One lesson that I hope we take away from last night is that cash spending advantages aren’t what they used to be. Elon spent around half a billion. Crypto and AI interests spend $250 million. It was all wasted. The media environment isn’t nearly as straightforward as it used to be. An advertising blitz simply cannot sway people who aren’t watching live television anyway.