And that's a wrap - the newly refreshed laptop has been handed over to teen with most of the packages functional. Thanks for following along on this @… installation journey with me and thanks to all #linux maintainers, forum contributors and FOSS advocates around keeping the system running.
👏 WE REALLY APPRECIATE YOU!👏
The final judgement won't be clear until Monday when the first log in at school happens but hopefully it will be successful, or the IT support is going to have to deal with some very salty comments (from me).
16/16
FIN
#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
AVON: What the hell is that? [to Dayna, who enters] What happened?
DAYNA: Bayban got away from me.
TARRANT: He'll be making for his ship.
NORL: No! Let him go. He has no men left.
Niamh Sweeney, Facebook's former head of public policy in Ireland, is appointed as Ireland's new Data Protection Commissioner, starting October 13 (Peter Flanagan/The Irish Times)
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/09/17/ex-t…
TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?
Here are the email addresses to make your voice heard at Disney/ABC:
👉General Issues: DisneyABCtv_Support@disney.com
👉Publicity / Corporate Comms: Ashley.r.kline@disney.com
👉Audience Information: cheryl.pratesa@abc.com
👉Investor Relations: alexia.quadrani@disney.com
👉Disney Advertising: Disney.Advertising@disney.com
If anyone needs sample language, here’s a starting point you can copy and paste:
Dear Disney/ABC Leadership,
Your decision to silence a comedian for a harmless joke while protecting and platforming voices that openly promote cruelty is indefensible. It reeks of hypocrisy, cowardice, and corporate complicity.
Suppressing humor while elevating propaganda is how fascism gains ground. You are helping it along.
This is a warning: every dollar I once spent on Disney subscriptions, merchandise, films, and parks will now be withheld. I will also be encouraging others to cancel, divest, and pressure your advertisers and shareholders until Disney/ABC adopts clear, viewpoint-neutral standards that respect all voices equally.
History will not remember kindly the corporations that bent to fear and power, silencing dissent while protecting division. Right now, Disney/ABC is on the wrong side of that history. Shame on you. We will remember!
Sincerely,
- From Rob Brezsny on a different Social Media platform
#BoycottDisney #JimmyKImmel #FreedomOfSpeech
As usual we watched the "Stoertebekker" stage play at Ralswiek on Rügen Island. The stage setups and wardrobes were as awesome as always. They really try to improve on that every year and come up with clever mechanisms to transform the building for the various acts of the play. The script this year left room for desire ;) Nevertheless a happing worth attending
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The spectral Tur\'{a}n problem: Characterizing spectral-consistent graphs
Longfei Fang, Huiqiu Lin, Mingqing Zhai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12070 https://
Beyond the high score: Prosocial ability profiles of multi-agent populations
Marko Tesic, Yue Zhao, Joel Z. Leibo, Rakshit S. Trivedi, Jose Hernandez-Orallo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14485
Mind the Gap: A Closer Look at Tokenization for Multiple-Choice Question Answering with LLMs
Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Minh Duc Bui, Katharina von der Wense
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15020