[iteration-dave]

Covert Physical Surveillance

Join Patrick Diedrich for a look at the Covert Physical Surveillance class hosted by OPTEMPO Training Group.

Covert Physical Surveillance (CPS) is a powerful tool, often employed by law enforcement to gather intelligence, monitor suspects, and pursue criminals undetected. ... Understanding how CPS operates — and more critically, how to counter it — is vital not only for those in law enforcement but for civilians, too.

[headspace-hotel]

It's just such a big task, wanting to teach people the ways of the plants, articulating a way we can rely on one another and our ecosystems instead of capitalism, and beginning the work...learning to utilize the weeds that are our friends, cooking with the edible plants, being sociable with neighbors to form a community, destroying the wasteful tracts of unused Lawn to be replaced with wild flowers and grasses and trees...

"By learning how to craft from the materials of nature" I think to myself, "there would be no need for buying plastic objects and knickknacks which doubtless were shipped from overseas and are responsible for much pollution...and the ecosystem rejoices when its gifts are accepted."

I made a little basket. I'm getting much better at it! It's made of Eastern Redcedar bark, collected from standing deadwood.

So much space devoted to mown grass, that could be taking care of us in many ways.

[headspace-hotel]

Just think how much consumption could be reduced if everybody who was into crafts had the knowledge and access to natural materials found in the world around them!

Kudzu, Willow, Wild Grapevines are also good for this kind of thing...

[headspace-hotel]

Not everyone can be into crafts, but everyone can use the crafts! So they can be a gift!

I wonder what natural material makes good pot-holders and oven mitts...surely that's a very old invention

[narrativerehearsal]

Not everyone will be into every craft but that's the point of community.

At our allotments (like a community garden only the plots of British allotments tend to be a bit bigger than your average American community garden plot) there's a lot of swapping of skills, supplies, seeds, and actual food.

One of our neighbours is too old to get up a ladder and prune his plum tree, so we do it for him and have permission to pick some of the plums in return.

If one person ends up with too many seedlings of one type of plant then they'll give some of them to others and often get something else in return. If one person ends up with more beans or courgettes or kale or whatever than they can use then they offer the excess to friends.

I make a lot of jam and have several 'jam deals' with people where I have permission to pick their berries etc and return some in the form of jams or jellies. A different neighbour has a crab apple tree that he can't be bothered to do anything with but also won't cut down because it shelters his bee hives. I pick the entire crop of crab apples and give him crab apple jelly and butter in return. We also keep an eye on his bees when he's away and then we get some of the honey.

The same applies to skills and communities. You don't need to have everyone knowing how to make baskets from barks and grasses. You only need a few that can do that, while others are good at canning or sewing or growing pretty flowers or raising chickens or identifying tasty and non-lethal mushrooms. Then you swap skills and end products and so everyone has supplies and everyone gets fed.

That's how communities are supposed to work. You're not supposed to know how to do every possible task all alone. You're supposed to know how to do/enjoy doing a few things and then when you need something you don't know how to do yourself you turn to someone else who does.

[headspace-hotel]

@meganemaryam Luckily, there are a ton of wild plants that work great for spinning thread and yarn. I don't know where you live, but some of the best ones are Apocyonum cannabinum (dogbane; it has a lovely copper-to-peach color and is incredibly strong and tough, doesn't require retting you just beat it and scrape it a bunch) any of the types of nettle, Kudzu (Pueraria spp, haven't personally tried it yet but it was literally one of the fundamental textile fibers of ancient China and farmed for use as textile), Milkweed (Asclepias spp, you can use the bast fibers or the seed fluffs, the latter are very delicate and best to blend with something stronger, but I made a fantastic yarn out of 50/50 Dogbane bast fiber and Milkweed floss) and the new/green less-than-a-year-old sprouts off of grapevine (Vitis spp).

With the exception of the milkweed floss, all of these fibers are bast fibers, meaning they come from the inner bark, you have to peel the bark off the woody inner part and then beat, soak, crush, and/or ferment the bark in some combination to extract the fine threads. It is surprisingly easy to get cool results this way

Pictured, Dogbane/Milkweed blend yarn, processed Dogbane fibers, a bunch of Dogbane/Milkweed yarn (don't mind the spool made from a macaroni and cheese container) Grapevine thread, Dogbane cord. I made it!

[anarchopuppy]

did you hear about trump signing an executive order to "establish a national commission to promote patriotic education"? i am quite frankly terrified. do you know any way we can fight against this?

One thing you could do is promote antipatriotic education?

Contribute to an anarchist library, whether by uploading something you have access to or translating into a different language

Support or offer your voice to Audible Anarchist to provide audiobooks of anarchist texts

If your area has an infoshop, anarchist bookstore, or anarchist bookfair, volunteer and donate! There’s no comprehensive list of these things so you’ll have to do your own duckduckgoing

Support anarchist news media like CrimethInc, It’s Going Down, Unicorn Riot, and Indigenous Action

Put up stickers or posters around your area

Print off or order some zines, books, or other reading material and stick them in local little free libraries

Yes, that executive order is some scary openly-fascist shit, but it doesn’t change our strategy much. The state has always flooded our lives with propaganda, and we need to constantly push back with our own propaganda. This development just means we need to resist the state the same amount we did before: as much as possible

[gothkrispies]

This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

Slave Narratives (x) (x) Linked to one I own, and the search results since there’s seriously a LOT

Preaching with Sacred Fire:  An Anthology of African-American Sermons, 1750 to the Present

Autobiography of Malcolm X

Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr

Our Non-Christian Nation (because these chuds have a hard-on for theocracies)

The Four Voyages: Being His Own Log-Book, Letters and Dispatches with Connecting Narratives.  (Because you can’t deny what he says in his own words)

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About…American History

The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Because I have a feeling they’re gonna downplay the slave trade or some shit)

[angel-of-anarchy]

RE: infoshops et al, Slingshot usually has a list in the back of their planners.  You can browse “radical contacts” on their site (contacts are listed by location, e.g, U.S. states)  https://slingshotcollective.org/the-organizer/

[kedreeva]

I offered to come check on my friend's animals while she's away for the long weekend

She thinks I'm joking

But I'm ready

[eunyisadoran]

Wait. Are there 200, but to be numbered 1-250? Did I read those tags right? 😲

[kedreeva]

Yes there are actually 202 of them, the company sent 2 extra in the package, and I will be numbering them on the bottom with sharpie marker 1-250. This will ensure even if she manages to find all 202, she will never truly stop feeling like there might be a tiny duck somewhere unknown in the house. Lurking. Waiting to appear at the strangest time.

[talesfromtreatment]

#sometimes you must be gently evil to your friends#so they know you love them enough

very very important

[ifririt]

hey op i don't think those are frogs like you said

[armayes]

they're right those arent frogs op.

[kedreeva]

I meant to prank my friend by hiding hundreds of small ducks after saying I would hide small frogs, but it turns out due to some quirk of only 3 people on the entire Internet knowing what a prank is, it seems I have pranked hundreds of other people by saying I would put 100 small frogs in my friends house, when in fact the prank was that it was 202 small ducks.

[kedreeva]

an update. it has been over 4 months and they are still finding ducks

[kedreeva]

1 year and 7 months later:

[parkayquarts]

hbo max blocks screenshots even when I use the snipping tool AND firefox AND ublock which is a fucking first. i will never understand streaming services blocking the ability to take screenshots thats literally free advertising for your show right there. HOW THE HELL IS SOMEBODY GONNA PIRATE YOUR SHOW THROUGH SCREENSHOTS. JACKASS

[parkayquarts]

somewhere out there is a guy who meticulously takes screenshots of every individual frame of his favorite tv shows and then painstakingly etches each one onto a roll of film which he puts into his old timey projector and recreates the footage as a silent film with his own lavishly hand-lettered dialogue cards and original score that he plays on his upright piano and charges audiences one shiny penny a play. at last, big media has finally outsmarted ol' Zachary Zoetrope

[theheroheart]

PSA for everyone who doesn't know, explained simply

this is NOT because of blocking screenshots, it's because of HOW streaming sites use your computer's hardware to optimise performance, which means the thing rendering the video and the thing capturing your screen aren't the SAME thing. so they can't talk together.

you can fix this by going to your browser settings, searching for "hardware acceleration", and turning that off.

[team-thickness12]

This also fixes screen sharing to other screens. It has been GODSEND

[lucarleigho]

type this in the toolbar to find this setting in firefox: about:preferences#searchResults

[mctreeleth]

ol' Zachary Zoetrope is back in business!

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[ellewantsrevenge]

aadam jacobs's archive

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[iatrophilosophos]

If ur rx drug is 1) common 2) ideally non-patented 3) ideally non-scheduled 4) doesn't have specific storage needs (a la insulin), you can get it from the same factories that sell raw chemicals to the local factories that sell it to the pharmacies that sell it to you -- this works for medications other than hrt & it is not illegal.

1. Look up your rx on Wikipedia and figure out whatever the chemical in it actually is. Navigate to that page.

2. Find the CAS #. This is a universal identifier that will help you overcome language barriers.

3. Go on madeinchina.com and search for ur drug by cas #. If you are very sketched by giving $$ to a company that can be hard to vet, you can also go on like reddit i guess and look for "hrt raw suppliers" with good reputations and see if they also carry what youre looking for but that can be less likely unless its a hormone med. Tbh i usually just trust companies that make a lot of pharmacueticals and that have a digital footprint going back at least five years. Very very common medications and especially things like cialis id be slightly more discerning about sources because theres more profit motive in scamming people over them; running a scam for random pharmacueticals is just...a strange thing to do with a low hit rate.

4. You'll need to actually email a human being to make an order :( confirm the CAS # to make sure ur talking about the right thing. Doing a buying pool with friends can give some insurance in case it ends up being weird

5. Optional IMHO but probably a good move: locate a drug checking service in ur general region. If its hard to find, find your nearest harm reduction group or street medic collective and ask them to shake the phone tree for you. If they're annoying about it find the second nearest. Etc. Ur looking for someplace that has a Mass Spectrometer and will check out a sample for you. Idk why some diy hrt guides tell you to pay for this out of pocket 💁

6. Dosingggg (for oral pills other stuff can get more complicated see note at end): you can get gel caps for cheap on like Amazon or whatever and use a tiny spoon (made with tinfoil) to measure each dose with a milligram scale. It's easier to put a whole pile of powder on the scale and take a little bit off into the scoop and measure by how much the weught goes Down, than it is to try to weigh and then cap each dose. +/-0.5MG is usually an ok tolerance. If ur stuff is dosed by MICROGRAMS look up thr 4theives miso card procedure

6a. I hate doing this so the other thing you can do is look up ur med on pubchem by CAS# and see what its soluble in. Graduated cylinders are cheap and accurate so if its water- or oil- soluble OR ethanol soluble in a reasonable amount (like your normal dose could be dissolved in <5mL of ethanol), you can do oral liquids! Oil solubility you might need to just test at home. Work out an appropriate mg/ML solution (you might need to do some hands-on testing with a small amount of ur powder to see what amount dissolves happily in what amount of solvent), figure out how many doses you want to make at once, mix that much powder and that much liquid together, and dose with an oral syringe. Water solutions you want to keep for no more than 1wk at a time or alternately, the max amount of time you wouldn't be sketched by drinking water left in an unsealed container, bc even tho drug raws & plain water arent the MOST microbe friendly itll grow Stuff eventually. Oral liquids WILL change metabolism, alcohol solutions will change it most, water will change it least. Metabolism is already super duper weird and variable by individual so for a lot of oral rx meds, adding a small variable is not going to drastically change the general variability of the population that that drug has been tested in. However: don't trust internet strangers to know everything about ur situation and do some reading on the pharmacology of ur specific meds and make decisions you think will be good.

7. Keep ur head up and stay thoughtfully engaged with this process. If the reason you take this med has some kind of metric you can test at home, like getting a BP cuff or something, you should be doing that and writing things down. Generally its a good idea to track ur own daily health situation in writing. Apps are bad for privacy, we know this. There are also really interesting consumer health metric items available like little patches that test ur blood sugar over the course of about 2wks.

If ur already financially ok and pay some amount out of pocket for ur rx I think you should strongly consider doing something like this because it is a gamble and if you can better afford to work out the kinks up front AND stop paying that bill every month in the future, congrats, chances are even a fraction of those savings put away for like, a year or less are enough to pay for someone else you know to do it again and snowball into a better situation for everyone.

Finally: compounded medications, like epinephrine injections, are a bit more complicated than all this. You will need to look up the compounding information including preservatives and stuff, which by law have to be publicly available for all medications (this is what's on those box inserts for ur drugs). You'll probably also need to read some compounding pharmacy industry publications and do some other weird research to find a version that seems safe and is achivable in ur situation. This is still a process anyone can do but if you've never done it before, it will be a higher gamble/learning curve.

[iatrophilosophos]

Just for reference you can do this for a lot of medications for under $20-$40 per person per year depending on what it is so even if your meds are ten bucks a month it can be incredibly worth it. Injectable hrt is even cheaper even with needing to buy extra conpounding chemicals but bc of bioavailability you need a lot less of it than oral meds

Another thing to do is look up how the meds you use expire. A lot of dry pills maintain >90% efficacy for a very long time past their expiration dates (the us military did a huge long ass study about this). Syntheroid specifically can be notably worse in 6mos past exp. A few drugs decompose into actually harmful compounds but the only ones I know about are antibiotics, you should check tho

One weird fact is that acutely lifesaving drugs like narcan and epi are a lot safer to use past the expiration date (*as long as they arent super discolored) because "use them until they work" is immediately obvious and built into how theyre administered; this is also true of misoprostel (the abortion pill/plan c). Navigating expiration with ur meds is a case by case sitch; a lot of stuff like hrt or a lot of psych meds you can monitor how ur doing and take slightly more if it seems neccesary. Maybe dont rely on expired birth control unless you have a good stash of miso or a similar backup plan. Make ur own decision abt ur own health condition how much of a risk it is for ur dose to go down slightly and plan how many years youll buy for accordingly. <3

[antifainternational]

All the clothing, accessories, helmets, weapons, what site can I find them all on?

Anon, please stop watching Fox for information about anti-fascism. 99% of anti-fascist work is entirely non-violent. The 1% that isn't = when anti-fascists are forced to defend themselves and their communities from fascist/far right violence. For what we hope are obvious reasons, we're not going to be giving out advice publicly about purchasing weapons, etc. to an anon ask on tumblr.

[anarchopuppy]

I will tho

From CrimethInc:

A Demonstrator's Guide to Helmets

A Demonstrator's Guide to Gas Masks and Goggles

A Demonstrator's Guide to Body Armor

From the Indigenous Anarchist Federation:

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 2: Basic PPE

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 3: Ballistic Protection

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 4: Primary Firearms

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 6: Secondary Firearms

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 7: Tertiary Firearms

Be smart and be safe. Don't just scroll down to the recommended equipment and DIY guides - read the articles, top to bottom, and take the advice they give seriously

And yes, anon is probably a weirdo fash who thinks that all antifas go to antifa.gov/merch for our officially licensed molotov cocktails, but just in case anyone out there is actually scared of the current climate and wants to arm and defend themself, I want them to be safe while doing it. All these articles are publicly available and easy to find and almost all of the recommendations they give are sold by companies with no political affiliation that fash would gain nothing by targeting, so don't give me any shit about "missing the point" or "playing into their hands" or whatever

[maggiemooo]

It looks like the IAF articles have moved to wordpress. They're a fantastic resources for all sorts of info, and I suggest exploring their collection of knowledge. here's updated links

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 2: Basic PPE

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 3: Ballistic Protection

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 4: Primary Firearms

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 6: Secondary Firearms

Skills for Revolutionary Survival 7: Tertiary Firearms

[ftmtftm]

I'd like to ask for some help from any intersex followers I have (or any intersex folks who come across this post!)

I've been struggling a lot to find proper terminology for intersex issues in my research because Google is all gunked up and Tumblr is just as hard to parse through.

So, if anyone could point me in the direction of any good literature by intersex authors or any good online resources (especially that define terminology) that would be incredibly helpful!! I'm still doing work myself but any sort of direction would be wonderful!

(tl;dr I want to be a better ally to intersex folks in trans feminist conversations about sex/gender and approach my own theory with intersex experiences in mind better! So, any and all resources would be appreciated!)

[ipso-faculty]

Glossaries and terminology 📋️

Intersex terminology masterpost by @intersexfairy

Media and style guide by IHRA

Intersex variations glossary by InterACT

Other Basic Things To Know 📣 (tumblr posts)

Some common misconceptions addressed by @skelejon

"Please stop acting like being intersex is just 'cool quirky genitals'" by @identitty-dickruption

"People need to understand that some intersex people find out late" by @none-gender-left-man

The Social Model of Intersex by me

"Unfortunately, most intersex people are not told outright that they are intersex" by @genderpunks

Tumblr intersex polls without votes from non-intersex people by @queercripintersex

Intersex PSAs for trans allies 🏳️‍⚧️ (tumblr posts)

PSAs for perisex trans people by @moonshinedyke

Please remember AFAB/AMAB doesn't mean "typical anatomy" by @asocial-and-antisocial

"God I wish perisex trans people would stop tokenizing and fetishizing intersex people and our bodies" by @chaos-in-one

How to talk about transition goals without being intersexist by @identitty-dickruption

Examples of casual intersexism from trans people by @hiiragi7

Exercise: Exposing intersexism in yourself by @hiiragi7

"having issues with the term transintersex is not terf rhetoric" by @hiiragi7

"In the United States, the people that are actually getting targeted with genital mutilation and nonconsensual hormones are intersex kids, not trans kids" by @trans-axolotl

"I’m begging people at this point to realize that hate towards intersex people isn’t just. Fucking misdirected transphobia" by @theforesteldritch

Make "space for ipsogender, intergender, and/or ultergender folks" by @queercripintersex

"When there's an actual discussion happening about biological sex and how it's actually super complicated, it hurts to get excluded [by trans people]" by @queercripintersex

In polls about gender, give options for intersex-specific genders rather than "intersex" by me, replying to @asocial-and-antisocial

"Those are intersex animals, not trans or nonbinary" by @heckacentipede with a reply by me

On supporting intersex people who want to go on HRT by @thehmn

"Perisex trans people have been the front of people being intersexist to me" by @oy-gayvalt

[edited to add links in purple]

"intersex trans people who can’t go on HRT for any reason are no less trans" by @identitty-dickruption

An experience of being objectified by trans people by @genderpunks

Academic Literature 🎓️

Holmes, M. (Ed.). (2016). Critical intersex. Routledge.

Horlacher, S. (2016). Transgender and intersex: Theoretical, practical, and artistic perspectives (pp. 1-27). Palgrave Macmillan US.

Orr, C. E. (2022). Cripping Intersex. UBC Press.

Davis, G. (2015). Contesting intersex: The dubious diagnosis (Vol. 10). NYU Press.

Reis, E. (2021). Bodies in doubt: An American history of intersex. JHU Press.

Lock Swarr, A. (2023). Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine (p. 245). Duke University Press.

If you don't have access to a university library, copies of those and other intersex books can be accessed via the @intersexbookclub discord!

Non-academic literature 🧙‍♀️

Intersex #OwnVoices books by Bogi Takács

[modern-politics111]

[disregardandfelicity]

sounds very similar to a radio story i heard in 2014 ago about credit card debt. the debt got sold to a collection company and a couple received a court summons. they knew they had taken on debt, but they were confused about who this new company was and where specifically the number they were supposed to owe came from.

they show up in court and just ask the lawyer for the collection company: can you prove where this number comes from? Do you have a contract showing that you purchased our debt? probably luckily for them, a reporter researching a book on the topic showed up and asked the same questions.

10 minutes later they get in front of the judge and the collection company drops the whole case and theyre free to go. story is below, it has a transcript in the link too

Prologue - This American Life

Ira talks to reporter Jake Halpern about a scene he saw take place in a Georgia courtroom where a couple uttered some magic words that seeme

[evolutionsbedingt]

https://twitter.com/BrianManookian/status/1674963884703088642

Link to the twitter thread for accessibility!

[bitchesgetriches]

Alert citizen of Bitch Nation @sobekcrocodile brought this to our attention and we're sharing, but with a caveat:

WE HAVE NOT YET LOOKED INTO THIS.

... but holy shit it's worth pursuing if you're drowning in debt and these are your circumstances. I'll definitely be adding this to the Big List of Future BGR Topics. Here's more of our advice on debt:

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about How to Pay off Debt

Our Final Word on Student Loan Forgiveness 

[violetsandshrikes]

to all my researchers, students and people in general who love learning: if you don't know this already, i'm about to give you a game changer

connectedpapers

the basic rundown is: you use the search bar to enter a topic, scientific paper name or DOI. the website then offers you a list of papers on the topic, and you choose the one you're looking for/most relevant one. from here, it makes a tree diagram of related papers that are clustered based on topic relatability and colour-coded by time they were produced!

for example: here i search "human B12"

i go ahead and choose the first paper, meaning my graph will be based around it and start from the topics of "b12 levels" and "fraility syndrome"

here is the graph output! you can scroll through all the papers included on the left, and clicking on each one shows you it's position on the chart + will pull up details on the paper on the right hand column (title, authors, citations, abstract/summary and links where the paper can be found)

you get a few free graphs a month before you have to sign up, and i think the free version gives you up to 5 a month. there are paid versions but it really depends how often you need to use this kinda thing.

[thefifthtetrahedron]

researchrabbit works similarly. you do need to create an account to use it, but it is completely free (as far as I know), meaning no limits to your collections/graphs.

[jstor]

100 open access books on JSTOR

African American Studies

An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Revised and Updated Edition

Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies: Theories and Transgressions

J. A. Rogers: Selected Writings

The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny

African Studies

Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa

Lagos Never Spoils: Nollywood and Nigerian City Life

American Indian Studies

Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History

The Urgency of Indigenous Values

Anthropology

Graceful Resistance: How Capoeiristas Use Their Art for Activism and Community Engagement

Lacandón Maya in the Twenty-First Century: Indigenous Knowledge and Conservation in Mexico's Tropical Rainforest

Maya-British Conflict at the Edge of the Yucatecan Caste War

Neobugarrón: Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice

Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America

Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land

Voices of Indigenuity

Archaeology

Living Ceramics, Storied Ground: A History of African American Archaeology

New Deal Archaeology in the West

The Cretan Collection in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, volume III: Metal Objects from Gournia

Violence and Inequality: An Archaeological History

Architecture

Waterhouses: Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos

Asian Studies

Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Geopolitics and Informality, 1963–1985

Communication Studies

Covid and…: How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic

Hillary Clinton's Career in Speeches: The Promises and Perils of Women's Rhetorical Adaptivity

Influential Machines: The Rhetoric of Computational Performance

Migrant World Making

Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting

Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now

Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907

Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives

Cultural Studies

Cultural History of British Alternative Cabaret (1979-1991)

Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect: Online Reading Communities of the New Nigerian Novel

Reconstructive Memory Work: Trauma, Witnessing and the Imagination in Writing by Female Descendants of Harkis

Toward a Gameic World

Development Studies

Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar

Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Education

Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland

The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education

Environmental Studies

Ecologies of Imperialism

Unsettling Agribusiness: Indigenous Protests and Land Conflict in Brazil

Feminist & Women's Studies

Reclaiming Time: The Transformative Politics of Feminist Temporalities

Recovering Women’s Past: New Epistemologies, New Ventures

Film Studies

Han Heroes and Yamato Warriors: Competing Masculinities in Chinese and Japanese War Cinema

Monsters on Maple Street: The Twilight Zone and the Postwar American Dream

The Rise of Central American Film in the Twenty-First Century

Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity

Food Studies

The Visible Hands That Feed: Responsibility and Growth in the Food Sector

Gender Studies

Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939

Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770–1940

Women, Nationalism, and Social Networks in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1918

History

Captivity's Collections: Natural History and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade

Our People Are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization

Reimagining the Educated Citizen: Creole Pedagogies in the Transatlantic World: 1685-1896

Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi

Language & Literature

Abraham Lincoln and the Bible: A Complete Compendium

Blood and Ink: The Barbary Archive in Early American Literary History

Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism

Faking It: Victorian Documentary Novels

Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China

The Lost Texts of Confucius’ Grandson: Guodian, Zisi, and Beyond

Understanding Agatha Christie

Latin American Studies

Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution

Law

Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, the Constitution, and Secession in Antebellum America

Linguistics

Cantonese Since the Nineteenth Century

Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field

Middle East Studies

Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces

Music

Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism

Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson

Lieder in America: On Stages and In Parlors

On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone

Peace & Conflict Studies

Remaking the World: Decolonization and the Cold War

The Coup and the Palm Trees: Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras

The End of the Future: Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia

Uniting Against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe

Unwilling to Quit: The Long Unwinding of American Involvement in Vietnam

Performing Arts

Sonic Strategies: Performing Mexico's War on Drugs, Mourning, and Feminicide

Staging Existence: Chekhov's Tetralogy

Philosophy

Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges

Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious: Vol. 2 The Affective Hypothesis

Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis

Political Science

Beyond Othering: A Gandhian Approach to Conflict Resolution in India and Pakistan

Local government and democracy in the United Kingdom

Paradoxes of Emancipation: Radical Imagination and Space in Neoliberal Greece

The Cost of Voting in the American States

The New Star Chamber and Other Essays: Annotated Edition

Population Studies

Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century

Psychology

Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe

Public Health

Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1870

Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011

Religion

Christan Colleges and Universities: An Empirical Guide

From Jesus to J-Setting: Religious and Sexual Fluidity among Young Black People

The Hispanic Faculty Experience: Opportunities for Growth and Retention in Christian Colleges and Universities

Science & Technology Studies

Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City

Sociology

Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence

As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity

Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa

Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana

Research as More Than Extraction: Knowledge Production and Gender-Based Violence in African Societies

The Souls of Jewish Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anti-Semitism, and the Color Line

Technology

Transnational Families in Africa: Migrants and the role of Information Communication Technologies

Urban Studies

Living Politics in the City: Architecture as Catalyst for Public Space

[jstor]

FYI, all of these books were made open access as part of our Path to Open program, where included books are set to become open access three years after their publication date.

Many of the above books can be downloaded as PDFs in full!

[crimethinc]

As Halloween approaches, there is still time to organize a haunted house—whether to raise funds, raise morale, or send an educational message.

https://crimethinc.com/hauntedhouse

Here, you can read a guide for anarchists, complete with a report and video walkthrough from a #StopCopCity haunted house.

[veluigi]

this is rad

[determinate-negation]

We must draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy. Mao I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political par

imo anyone involved in the protest scene or student movements in the western liberal democracies over the past few years should read this if you havent already

[kropotkindersurprise]

This pamphlet pairs very well with that one, and goes more in-depth on the practical organizational aspects.

[kropotkindersurprise]

Hard times are coming.

[crimethinc]

The Forest Occupation Movement in Germany

Tactics, strategy, and culture of resistance

https://cwc.im/ForestDefense2021

Over the past decade, forest defense actions have proliferated around Germany. We explore the different approaches that activists and saboteurs are experimenting with.