Alan Shemper's Blog

They'd cursed and, worse, used logarithms. They'd waded through rivers and dabbled in trigonometry. [about] [disclaimer] [tags]

[alanshemper]

Saying that Judaism and Zionism are interchangeable is antisemitic

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 18 July 1969, Black Panthers held a conference in Oakland alongside the white anti-racist Young Patriots Organisation and Puerto Rican street gang-turned-radical group the Young Lords. The Young Patriots were a group of poor, mostly Appalachian migrants in Chicago. Although they opposed racism, they originally wore Confederate flags, which they believed were a symbol of rebellion. As they worked more with communities of colour, they abandoned the flag as an irredeemable symbol of white supremacy. Leading Panther Fred Hampton played a key role in building links with them and other white working class youth, until he was assassinated by police. In his speech, William “Preacherman” Fesperman of the Young Patriots, argued for armed self-defence against police brutality: “A gun on the side of a pig means two things: it means racism and it means capitalism and the gun on the side of a revolutionary, on the side of the people, means solidarity and socialism.” Learn more about the Panthers in these books by former members: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/black-panthers https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=663813302458555&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[allcops]

“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”

— An excerpt from Ferguson & the Criminalization of American Life by David Graeber (via actjustly)

[noneedtofearorhope]

since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isn’t just some hypothetical, it’s a reference to the killing of eric garner

Killing of Eric Garner - Wikipedia

this is the origin of the slogan “i cant breathe”, which was revived in the wake of the killing of george floyd.

[alanshemper]

On this day, 17 July 2014, Eric Garner was murdered by police enforcing a civic ordinance.

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Assata Shakur! (July 16, 1947)

An icon of anti-imperialist struggle, Assata Skakur was born in New York City and became aware at a young age of the prejudice and discrimination faced by Black people in the United States. She became a student activist in the 1960s, and soon learned that the forces of bourgeois law enforcement would not tolerate dissent from the status quo. Traveling to Oakland, she linked up with the Black Panther Party, helping organize community programs and protests. Dissatisfied with the direction of the BPP, she joined the Black Liberation Army, a more militant organization modeled after the Viet Cong and other armies of national liberation. Shakur and the BLA were quickly labeled terrorists, and she was imprisoned for several years for her activities. However, Shakur's comrades freed her from prison, and she fled into political exile in Cuba, where she remains today. She has published several writings including her autobiography Assata, which cover a variety of topics ranging from race to revolution.

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”

[alanshemper]

Happy birthday Walter Benjamin, born 15 July 1892!

“Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was a spectacle for the Olympian gods, has become one for itself. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

[alanshemper]

[alanshemper]

[alanshemper]

[alanshemper]

Was up to 4am reverse engineering the Claude Code harness and reimplementing basic agentic tooling... I can now spoof a web chat interface as an API for a coding harness. Why? That's a damn good question. But I did it. It mostly works. And it's kinda cool. And I did learn a lot about how the harnesses work.

Tired today though

[alanshemper]

[tidesandtwilight]

what is with the cop hate??

Oh sorry for the confusion. It’s because I hate cops

[alanshemper]

[alanshemper]

[srsfunny]

[srsfunny]

[userfish]

hey you 🫵 have you washed your water bottle lately? 🫵 it’s getting hot and mold is going to grow 🫵 wash it 🫵

[alanshemper]

Telling Tall Tales – “Uyghur Genocide” as a Political Stratagem | Barry Sautman

Telling Tall Tales

"Telling Tall Tales" published on 13 Apr 2026 by Brill.

Published April 2026. PDF is free to download.

Many claims of genocide do not present a prima facie case of the intent to destroy a group, let alone show guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They are a stratagem to enhance the claimant’s position in an inter-state or intra-state conflict. Claims about China’s Xinjiang are not based on the mass killings associated with genocide, but on birth limits for minorities in 2017-2021 that included practices previously applied to China’s Han majority for decades, plus brief family separations of a few minority children. These assertions impel Western sanctions and incite anti-Chinese sentiment but are empirically unsupported and degrade the concept of genocide.