neil 🍄 @neil@social.coop

Spread good vibes and good info.

Made a paper [[pacman lantern]] for our local Lantern Festival.

He'll have a real candle in his main body, and has 3 red LEDs connected to a micro:bit to cycle through to make it look like he's eating the pills.

It was fun to make!

Cooperation Jackson this Saturday - https://www.solidarityeconomy.coop/projects/conversations-with-gamechangers

Also germane to think how the artwork of Emory Douglas and The Black Panther paper got the party to places where they might not otherwise have reached.

I watched The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and The Weather Underground documentaries. Almost hard to comprehend what a powder keg the 60s and 70s were in America. The cold-blooded murder of Fred Hampton is truly shocking… words fail.

Reflecting that in 1976 The Lucas Plan was put together by factory workers to counter proposed job cuts. It was based on notions of socially useful production and included things like heat pumps, wind turbines, energy efficient houses. In 1976!

A heron and a little egret going their separate ways in the estuary.

Forget Running Up That Hill. Kate Bush's song about Ken Livingstone is clearly her best.

"KEN is the man that we all need
KEN is the leader of the GLC"

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=c1legm79WhU

#cat

A pretty stellar line up in these Conversations with Gamechangers

Cooperation Jackson, Aborîya Jin in Rojava, Grassroots Liberation in Nairobi, Zameen Prapti Sangharsh in the Punjab region, and @guerrillamediacollective

"A series of conversations with radical grass-roots solidarity economy organisations across the world who are breaking new ground in their own contexts while building power in their communities."

https://www.solidarityeconomy.coop/projects/conversations-with-gamechangers

say 'category error' again, i dare you, i double dare you motherfucker, say 'category error' one more time

I feel happy discovering more and more as I get older that sci-fi books I took off my Mum’s bookshelf as a youngun are in fact often allegorical for some kind of radical politics that I had no idea of at the time.

I like Iain M. Banks and I’m currently re-reading Look to Windward because in Red Plenty it was described it as an example of a 20th century Marxian idyll.

It’s good and all but I’m reading the Culture now as kind of all premised on Prometheanism / fully automated luxury communism.

I’m gonna reread A Wizard of Earthsea (last read as a young teen!) by Ursula K. Le Guin next as in Half-Earth Socialism they describe that as Jennerite, anti-humanisation of nature and that is more my bag lately.

This is a very interesting discussion. The book critiques the UN’s traditional approach of ‘state-building’, i.e. treating what it deems ‘failed states’ as simple machines where you can simply remove the bad part and replace it with a good part and all will be well. The author proposes treating them as complex systems, and ultimately as sites of self-governance, not world-building exercises from the outside.

"There is no such thing as an ungoverned space"

https://newbooksnetwork.com/states-of-disorder-ecosystems-of-governance