@chiraag@mastodon.onlineWoah. I just found out that Sanae Takaichi wrote a book in 1994 about Hitler's electoral strategy as a blueprint for winning elections in the modern age, with *citations from Mein Kampf*. She also posed with a Holocaust denier in 2014.
https://www.france…
@hikingdude@mastodon.socialThe weather is cold and wet.
I'm not sure if there's a lot of outdoor activity today. But I've finished a book and wrote a quick review on #bookwyrm .
Funny - I NEVER wrote reviews on any platform. No Idea why but nowadays I'd only put it on bookwyrm because then I do not give my writing to any company for free.
@bobmueller@mastodon.worldAlways, always, ALWAYS check out the "source" of any promotional offers you get. Don't click links in the message. Go to your favorite search engine, look up the organization, and verify from there.
And if they ask for money? Run. #writingcommunity #writers
@saraislet@infosec.exchangeI keep thinking "surely there are good candidates" and then we inevitably end up with someone that's somehow two brain worms and three murdered dogs past a Nazi tattoo, who defends themselves by saying "well I didn't realize it was a Nazi thing because it was just the logo of the guy who wrote my favorite book"
@hex@kolektiva.socialThere's a word at the beginning and end of Dawn of Everything that feels self-referential right now: Kairos.
> We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible. Philosophers sometimes like to speak of ‘the Event’ – a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic masterpiece – that is, a breakthrough which reveals aspects of reality that had previously been unimaginable but, once seen, can never be unseen. If so, kairos is the kind of time in which Events are prone to happen.
> Societies around the world appear to be cascading towards such a point. This is particularly true of those which, since the First World War, have been in the habit of calling themselves ‘Western’. On the one hand, fundamental breakthroughs in the physical sciences, or even artistic expression, no longer seem to occur with anything like the regularity people came to expect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet at the same time, our scientific means of understanding the past, not just our species’ past but that of our planet, has been advancing with dizzying speed. Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.
Reading this as I write something very inspired by this work feels especially serendipitous, especially at this time. When they wrote the book, I think that kairos felt more serendipitous itself. But as the frequency of opportunity increases, the veil between realities feels more malleable... that perhaps we can poke a finger through and open a portal to a completely different future than the one we've felt locked into for such a long time.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/the-coordinated-swarm-lyhr
@tarah@infosec.exchangeI wrote a book review of "Geopolitics at the Internet’s Core" by Fiona Alexander, Laura DeNardis, Ph.D., Nanette Levinson, and Francesca Musiani. It initially seems to be a dense technical history of Internet Protocol—that constellation of technical specifications and social agreements that makes the internet work. But this would be a profound misreading.
What Alexander, DeNardis, Levinson, and Musiani have actually written is something far more elegiac: a cenotaph for a bygo…
@rasterweb@mastodon.socialI wrote a blog post that could be seen as depressing, but I think it's full of hope and perhaps you'll agree.
I'd like to hear what you think.
https://rasterweb.net/raster/2025/12/16/the-book-of-pete/
@cdarwin@c.imMiami Herald investigative journalist Julie K. Brown
—whose 2018 reporting essentially reopened the Jeffrey Epstein case
—wants to know ⭐️ why her flight information is in the Epstein files.
“Does somebody at the DOJ want to tell me why my American Airlines booking information and flights in July 2019 are part of the Epstein files (attached to a grand jury subpoena)?”
she wrote Sunday on X.
“As the flight itinerary includes my maiden name (and I did book this fli…
@brian_gettler@mas.toNew book on the history of McGill University - written and edited by historians, not the university's comms department. I wrote a chapter on how Indigenous dispossession and colonial politicians saved McGill when it was in danger of going broke. Others cover McGill's ties to chattel slavery, Japanese exclusion, research of various sorts, student lives, queer experiences, and more.
Check it out:
@brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org"Public AI, Built On Open Source, Is The Way Forward In The EU". -Glyn Moody @…
This seems to opens the door to work on important problems, for instance building a solid climateGPT in Europe.
@cdarwin@c.imOrwell wrote
Nineteen Eighty-Four
not as a prophecy
but as an extrapolation and a warning.
As he explained:
“I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive.
But I believe, allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire,
that something resembling it could arrive.”
