Monique H

The Authoritarian Stack: Mapping Big Tech’s Capture of State Power - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung A new project exposes the infrastructure of techno-oligarchic control — and why Europe must act

“Infrastructure is never neutral. Who builds it, owns it, and governs it determines the future.”

#OnThisDay in 1898, Bertolt Brecht was born. He did not write for art’s sake, but to challenge injustice, expose fascism and inspire change. His plays demand an active audience — and his socialist critique remains sharply relevant today.

I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair/ With a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.” Leonard Cohen

The wealthy have a million ways to wriggle out of their debts, and as a result, when government debt is transferred to the private sector, that debt always gets passed down on to those least able to pay it: into middle-class mortgages, payday loans, and so on. The people running the government know this but they’ve learned if you just keep repeating, “We’re just trying to behave responsibly! Families have to balance their books. Well, so do we,” people will just assume that the government running a surplus will somehow make it easier for all of us to do so too. But in fact the reality is precisely the opposite: if the government manages to balance its books, that often means you can’t balance yours. – David Graeber

As a society, we need to stop treating people in debt as if they are criminals who committed a crime.

"Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that for decades we have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures." . - David Graeber

They want you to feel hopeless and believe that nothing can improve.

I’m just a simple man, but it’s almost like this global “competition” for “markets” and economic “growth” has led us to irreversible climate catastrophe and environmental disaster, not to mention ceaseless conflict, human exploitation, and war.

The rage you are feeling comes from the same place inside your heart as the love. This is why you refuse to accept a world where cruelty reigns and the fire consumes all. You have known hope and joy and kindness like you have known water. And justice is a river that demands you do not give up on it. - Nikita Gill

The grief the grief the grief.

And the rage and love.

We have it in us to be so much better than this.

i am running into a new year By Lucille Clifton i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six even thirty-six but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me

Always worth a post

Home - Freedom Trainers Collective Noncooperation Training for these times

Non-cooperation training... let's do it! freedomtrainers.net

Phantom View - Reactor A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father try to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.

New story day!

"Phantom View" is about a son caretaking for his father, and discovering a blurry person in all their family photos that he has no memory of. The same figure is in all his dad's paintings--and the figure may be in the house with them right now.

German far right setting agenda as opponents amplify its ideas, study finds Normalisation of far-right stances likely to affect success of such parties at ballot boxes across Europe, say researchers

AfD here, but presumably would be same in other countries too:

"mainstream parties had increasingly reshaped their communications to respond, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate."

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Dam been writing a book about this and she just TikToked it in 90 seconds.

Screenshot from the show Andor with quote: “And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try." The photo is a man wearing a red hat, looking a little run down and full of hope, spirit, and grit.

added alt-text bc this is my favorite 🤍🤍

Carson holds up a carved pumpkins with a face on it, he says, “I used a stencil”. Meg holds a pumpkin and a knife, I used my voice”. The pumpkin reads “free Palestine”🇵🇸

Hey so I’ve had some folks reach out and say they’re “tired” of my political comics. So here is a fun little fall comic to get us back in the mood 🎃🍂✨

"But we are supposed to honor and respect a liar because… civility.

Yet, when it comes to dead black bodies, there are no calls for reverence and dignity."

I shouldn't be shocked, but I'm still always brought up short to realize how many people think "civility" means "white people speaking in relatively calm voices" no matter what vile shit they say.

A quote I really enjoy from murderbot the books is where murderbot talks about misinformation and says

Misinformation just sounds like lying and I don’t know why they have a separate word for it

I seriously don't know how to explain to people that it is not in fact a sign of maturity and democracy to peacefully debate whether certain groups of people should be allowed to exist

Police can ruin lives just by doing their jobs. Landlords can make us homeless just by evicting. An employer might fire you if it's good for the bottom line. It seems that Capitalism wants us to be decent as children but then expects us to be corrupt and awful to each other as adults. Perhaps a system that delivers on the potential of that pro-social behavior we are taught as kids is a better system than the one we live under

It does not have to be this way.

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

Ursula Le Guin: “The shift from denial of injustice to recognition of injustice can’t be unmade.... Once you see the injustice, you can never again in good faith deny the oppression and defend the oppressor. What was loyalty is now betrayal. From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude.”

Recognition in the genocide for Anas Al-Sharif I emerged from sleep with the blood of Anas thick on my eyelashes, I came into the kitchen bowed under his assassination, I splashed my way toward a bag of bread to feed my children and not his, I looked into the mirror and saw only rubble, I popped a squat over the toilet and dribbled out another worthless presser, I flushed away the two-state "solution", good riddance to rank nonsense, that colonial stink; there are and have always been two states- one for the living, one for the dead- and Anthony Albanese can recognise neither. O Anas! You told us to use your blood as light, and so l pour it here on an F-35 country telling another to lay down its arms in order to be seen as stately by its murderers. I pour it everywhere, one body, one light, and everything unforgivable burns. Omar Sakr

Recognition in the genocide.

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

The first part of this James Baldwin quote gets thrown around a lot, but it’s the second half that stick with me.

The world needs to be filled with less people who think:

"Well, one day I might be a millionaire."

And instead more people who think:

"One day I might be a refugee."

An illustration by Henry J Garrett, of a white pill box on a blue background. The label reads: "Dehumanisation, for those times when empathising with suffering isn't convenient"

Thinking of this by Henry J Garrett today. Free Palestine, Slava Ukraini.

This isn’t a heatwave. It’s a warning. The EU is gutting the Green Deal and ramping up military spending.

Read our program for a just green transition. Join our movement to fight against climate inaction: gnde.diem25.org

‘I Feel Like I’ve Been Lied To’: When a Measles Outbreak Hits Home

i almost can’t read this it makes me so angry. delusional grifters with purity fetishes and eugenic worldviews have brought pain, suffering and death to children www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/u...

The reading for Starmer's Cabinet today:
"Blessed are the peacemakers ..."

Feeling so much safer now that 38 men have self-reported that the manosphere isn't dangerous *sarcasm*. Not all research is ethical or reliable, and there needs to be higher standards for research which potentially can impact vulnerable communities through shaping legislation

The likes of CNN and Foxnews paint the police as a noble force protecting us all.

David Graeber explains what the police are really about.