#state violence

thatdiabolicalfeminist:

“A conquered population is schooled in nonviolence through its relationship with a power structure that has claimed a monopoly on the right to use violence.”

— “How Nonviolence Protects the State” by Peter Gilderloos (via smarmyanarchist)

triviallytrue:

empathwoman:

empathwoman:

I encourage those who see Chris Dorner as an epic leftist hero to actually read his manifesto. Man was a RADICAL centrist. He killed cops because they didn’t follow *the rules*, not because he didn’t believe in them

He shouted out Hillary in his manifesto lmfao

Actually I think being the first radical centrist to nut up and shoot someone is based. Not good, mind you, but based

In two separate incidents during the manhunt, police shot at three civilians unrelated to Dorner

Hmm, one might come to think the LAPD has an issue with excessive force.

official-kircheis:

when Skynet launches the missiles AI risk deniers will really be like, “well that’s impressive, but it doesn’t have an internal conscious experience or qualia, it’s just executing an algorithm”

Even a very simple Dead Hand-style system could cause an unintended nuclear launch in the right combination of circumstances, but conceiving of that as “AI risk” that should be addressed by solving an “AI alignment problem” seems unlikely to lead to an effective solution.

rustingbridges:

I’m kind of curious what the abolitionist plan was circle 1850 for ending slavery

imo the most desirable way to do it has got to be a constitutional amendment. but how on earth could you have hoped to pass one?

in the event the confederacy provided the perfect setup for more or less legitimately passing such an amendment. but “provoke them into starting a civil war” doesn’t sound like much of a plan, yeah?

You might want to check out the political platform of the short-lived Liberty Party. You can see they shared many of the same strategies of the more mainstream not-outright-abolitionist anti-slavery activists: blocking the expansion of slavery, banning it in federal territories, etc. Their strategy for completing abolition was somewhat vague, but appeared to hinge on achieving power in state governments (presumably in slave states) and abolishing it from that position.

(Not necessarily the position of all abolitionists, but some).

collapsedsquid:

So would Sweden and Finland be interested joining NATO if Kyiv had fallen in the first week of the invasion?

The invasion of Ukraine provided both motivation and opportunity to join NATO. Motivation, because it showed Russia was still interested in aggressive action against its neighbors, and opportunity, because with Russia tied down in Ukraine its short term ability to pressure its neighbors is reduced.

If the invasion had been quick and successful, there would still be motivation, but perhaps not opportunity. So, probably more interested than if Russia hadn’t invaded at all, but less interested than in reality.

raginrayguns:

fruityyamenrunner:

raginrayguns:

vaniver:

raginrayguns:

raginrayguns:

trade secrets make sense to me as legally protected property, patents theoretically but maybe not the real life patent system. Copyright im not sure; it has the same kind of appeal as trade secrets in that it’s an original creation but it’s not “naturally protectable” like a trade secret

@vaniver​ said:

Note that ‘trade secrets’ don’t really have much in the way of legal protection; I actually really like the trade secret vs. patent distinction, where you only get socially enforced temporary control of something *if* you tell the public how it works.

(ofc implementation details matter and our current system isn’t great)

ive read about ppl getting in trouble over trade scecrets… this guy

why do you say this if its something ppl can go to prison over

So it’s true that stealing trade secrets is illegal, but the thing that’s protected is the method of acquisition rather than the idea. If I patent “pasta sauce with both garam masala and five spice in it”, and you come up with the same brilliant idea a year later, I can sue you for infringement, even without proving (or there being) a causal connection between my marketing the sauce and you making the sauce.

But if the ingredients of my sauce are just a trade secret, there needs to be a person that leaked it (or you needed to have reverse engineered my sauce, which is itself a crime) for me to sue.

A neat thing about trade secrets is that they better assess “how hard was this to come up with?” since they allow for independent rediscovery. [If you can keep your recipe secret for a century, then you can still have your trade secret a century later!]

oh ok. Yeah I wouldn’t describe that as “don’t really have much in the way of legal protection” but it’s true

this is quite a lot of protection for the kind of thing i think should be patentable, that is, stuff where inventing it actually is limiting, since the only way for someone to compete with you is to make a significant investment in the invention or to steal it from you, and this constitutes a barrier to entry (if they can’t steal it from you)

making reverse engineering a crime sounds bad to me

yeah, that seems bad to me in the same way copyright seems bad, it’s basically the same thing

The thing about Trade Secrets is there generally needs to be a contractual agreement to keep it secret. Under both USandEU law, reverse engineering is allowed if there’s no contractual relationship between the secret holder and the discloser (of course, contracts forbidding reverse engineering are extremely common). Likewise for actual disclosure, it’s allowed unless there’s a non-disclosure agreement, but of course any employee who works with trade secrets is going to sign a non-disclosure agreement as a condition of their employment.

What’s special about trade secret law as opposed to it being just a contract is that it sometimes makes what would otherwise be a civil matter into a criminal offense, and it sometimes spreads liability wider than it otherwise would be spread. For example, the business person you linked to above didn’t sign any non-disclosure agreement himself, but he hired people who he knew had signed non-disclosure agreements and knew they were violating those agreements while working for him. From the DOJ press release:

The defendant then set up a U.S.-based corporation, CBM International, Inc., (CBMI) and hired ex-employees of a victim company that manufactured syntactic foam, located in Houston, Texas.  These employees had access to trade secrets developed by the victim company, and the defendant was aware that they had signed agreements with the victim company not to disclose proprietary information.  The former employees of the victim company then transferred proprietary information to CBMI and the defendant, who used the information to create a syntactic foam manufacturing process in China.

(ETA: Or if it’s otherwise unlawful. Like if they literally steal it from you, as in break into your offices and take something from them, that also qualifies even without a contractual relationship.)

raginrayguns:

max1461:

liber-legis:

Michael Hudson: America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies | naked capitalism

The Iron Curtain of the 1940s and ‘50s was ostensibly designed to isolate the Soviet Union from Western Europe – to keep out Communist ideology and military penetration. Today’s sanctions regime is aimed inward, to prevent America’s NATO and other Western allies from opening up more trade and investment with Russia and China. The aim is not so much to isolate Russia and China as to hold these allies firmly within America’s own economic orbit. Allies are to forego the benefits of importing Russian gas and Chinese products, buying much higher-priced U.S. LNG and other exports, capped by more U.S. arms.

The sanctions that U.S. diplomats are insisting that their allies impose against trade with Russia and China are aimed ostensibly at deterring a military buildup. But such a buildup cannot really be the main Russian and Chinese concern. They have much more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the underlying question is whether Europe will find its advantage in replacing U.S. exports with Russian and Chinese supplies and the associated mutual economic linkages.

What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO?  And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?

These are the concerns that have prompted French President Macron to call forth the ghost of Charles de Gaulle and urge Europe to turn away from what he calls NATO’s “brain-dead” Cold War and beak with the pro-U.S. trade arrangements that are imposing rising costs on Europe while denying it potential gains from trade with Eurasia. Even Germany is balking at demands that it freeze by this coming March by going without Russian gas.

Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat. All countries have come to realize that the world has reached a point at which no industrial economy has the manpower and political ability to mobilize a standing army of the size that would be needed to invade or even wage a major battle with a significant adversary. That political cost makes it uneconomic for Russia to retaliate against NATO adventurism prodding at its western border trying to incite a military response. It’s just not worth taking over Ukraine.

America’s rising pressure on its allies threatens to drive them out of the U.S. orbit. For over 75 years they had little practical alternative to U.S. hegemony. But that is now changing.

the world has reached a point at which no industrial economy has the manpower and political ability to mobilize a standing army of the size that would be needed to invade or even wage a major battle with a significant adversary.

I really hope this is correct.

Article from February 7. Invasion began February 24.

Point about US being a bad economic ally is still true. It’s weird how we were in a trade war with Europe and no one I talked to seemed to know. During his campaign, Biden just avoided the question of whether he would continue Trump’s tariffs on aluminum+steel imports from European countries. When people asked his trade advisor, Katherine Tai, about tariffs on imports from Europe, she would literally just answer by saying we have to be tough on China. I guess there’s no politically convenient narrative for why we’re fucking over our “allies” in Europe so they just avoid the subject. But Europeans have plenty of reason not to be happy with a US-led economic bloc. (we have a trade deal with the EU now and while it resolved some issues it includes import quotas on metals that keep the imports at the reduced post-tariff levels)

All that is still true except instead of taking advantage of it, Putin just went ahead and proved the need to put up with it. It seems so fucking stupid.

It was a dumb article to write on February 7, too. Even if there was no way to predict just how far Russia would go this time, there was still Crimea and the Donbass, plus South Ossetia etc against other countries. The Ukraine invasion was an escalation of Putin’s modus operandi, but not a fundamental change; pretending that there was no threat of Russian aggression of any sort was willing blindness.

centrally-unplanned:

morlock-holmes:

So does anybody know what Putin’s desired end-game is here?

Like, if everything goes perfectly for Russia what’s the result?

I don’t think I can remember a war where the goal was so unknown to the outside world. It’s frightening and, of course, highly discrediting.

Argumate, myself, and others had a lot of discussion of this and I generally agree - it appears that the goal is annexation of the eastern territories and a puppet regime in Ukraine, but that goal just seems so half-baked - no puppet would survive the universal disgust of its populace, surely? And yet a complete annexation seems to hugely fail the cost-benefit analysis, while an “okay we occupied you, taking like 5 acres and leaving now byyye” gets you nothing but a neighboring country swearing revenge.

I do think it will be that first path, and the justification is just…emotional. Great Power. Empire. Show of Strength. The fake ideals of the old order that survived in the Soviet-Russian military establishment as they fell away in most the rest of the world. Shitty reason for a war, but a normal one in history.

(Tyler Cowen and others believe that there will be additional steps against NATO partners as part of a strategy to discredit NATO. I definitely disagree with this, way beyond Russia’s military capacity IMO, but its an idea serious people are discussing so worth sharing.)

an “okay we occupied you, taking like 5 acres and leaving now byyye” gets you nothing but a neighboring country swearing revenge.

I’ve heard some people saying that Putin considered Ukraine to be implacably hostile already, so the cost of “a neighboring country swearing revenge” isn’t something he’s considering, and annexing just a small area and maybe extracting some commitments to neutrality/demilitarization would be net positive for him.

I guess that qualifies as an optimistic opinion at this point.

centrally-unplanned:

(I forget the source for where I read this recently, my apologies) Something interesting about modern war is that army sizes are actually much smaller than they were in the past. Russia’s population today is ~145 million; in 1914 it was ~90 million. Yet most estimates for Russia’s army in 1914 put it at 6 million, while Russia’s invasion force for Ukraine is estimated to be only about 200,000. 

This shift is primarily a result of technology - “man with a rifle” just gets so utterly shredded by modern combined arms that you might as well not bring them, and instead you spent those resources on material. However, what it means is that in war, you no longer have the manpower for a “front”; that big battle line snaking across the entire country, with soldiers posted every few hundred meters at minimum. Instead it becomes a war of maneuver and focality - with way more space than men, armies need to move around to find each other and battle.

This actually naturally leads war to focus on cities - just like they convene the local economy around them, so too do they lead armies that are groping around for each other to convene in one spot for battle. Its also I suspect part (though only part) of why Russia’s advance is so uncontested right now - you can’t have troops everywhere, so instead you cede ground and focus on the point of effort of your choosing.

It seems like comparing numbers with the WWI mobilization isn’t comparing apples-to-apples. 

Lookinghere it seems like Russia’s current active-duty armed forces as a percentage of population is roughly comparable to its peacetime levels in the late 19th and early 20th century, with enough reservists* to match the spike for the Russo-Japanese war. A bit less, maybe, but not, like, a ton less.

But it does seem like technology drives those personnel away from front-line boots-on-the-ground. Less than a third of Russia’s ~1 million active duty personnel are in the army, and as you say only a portion of those are in Ukraine. I guess that amounts to a similar effect.

*Which, best as I can tell, are still mostly not mobilized, though some are.

The state is, fundamentally, an organisation of force.

It exists because there are unequal social classes. It is used by the capitalist class to suppress workers, through protecting the means of production as the private property of capitalists.

The means of production are factories, plants, facilities, machines, and so on.

The state is used by working people to take ownership of the economy, so that the economy belongs to the people who operate it.

It does not mean persecuting workers who are self-employed.

Social ownership of production means that everyone in society has equal relations to property. This eliminates economic inequality and abolishes social class.

Without social class, there is no group to oppress, and so the state, without a function, does not function at all. The conditions that gave birth to the state would have been ended.

A stateless and classless society is referred to as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’.