@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-22 16:34:50
Keir Starmer has announced his resignation as the United Kingdom’s prime minister and leader of the Labour Party
following growing pressure from within his own party to step down.
During his time in office, Starmer faced mounting opposition over his embrace of austerity measures
amid a cost-of-living crisis in Britain,
as well as his brutal crackdown on Palestine solidarity protesters.
Former Manchester Mayor
Andy Burnham is widely expected to become the…
@scottmiller42@mstdn.social2026-06-21 19:27:43
Pic 1: My house guest Goose is getting a little intense, challenging me to a game of High Card Low Card. The message his eyebrows are sending has me a little concerned.
Pic 2: Whew, I honored his love for the game by accurately predicting the outcome, and he is relieved he does not have to express his disappointment.
#AnimalCrossing
@memeorandum@universeodon.com2026-04-23 00:05:48
What Trump's Bible stunt says about his complicated history with Christianity (Adam Gabbatt/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/22/trumps-special-relationship-with-christianity
http://www.memeorandum.com/260422/p142#a260422p142
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.de2026-07-22 11:00:04
marvel_partnerships: Marvel character partnerships (2018)
A network of partnerships among characters in the Marvel comic book universe. Nodes are either heroes or villains, and edges represent partnerships between such characters. The partnership network was extracted from Wikipedia pages of these characters, which indicate partnership relations with other such pages.
This network has 350 nodes and 346 edges.
Tags: Social, Fictional, Unweighted
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-07-21 17:26:50
Just finished "Snake-Eater" by T. Kingfisher (@…). I'd read and thoroughly enjoyed her "Digger" webcomic, and found this book to be quite enjoyable too. There's something indelibly heartwarming about an anxious character growing to feel more comfortable and self-assured, especially when escaping and unlearning emotional abuse, and I'm certainly a sucker for heartwarming characters. I like the way that Kingfisher has taken time to talk about and try to avoid cultural appropriation, in a way that I feel is reasonable, although of course I'm not an expert judge of the nuances and I'm biased by having liked the book, so I'm willing to be told things are complicated in that regard it others judge differently. I also really liked the window dressing of a vaguely solarpunk future society, in a book that's not at all about that society. I'd love to see Kingfisher write something focused on how that society could work (or maybe she already has?).
Probably going to look up some of Kingfisher's fantasy books soon.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-07-22 11:37:14
Popular Front recently did a piece on the current conflicts in Ethiopia:
https://popularfront.substack.com/p/everything-you-didnt-know-about-the
It's a good primer for anyone who's unfamiliar, but is definitely lacking if you know any Ethiopian folks or pay attention to much news out of the Horn of Africa.
The interplay between authoritarian liberal nationalism, as represented by Abiy Ahmed and his government, and tribal federalism , represented by various tribal factions, reads to me very similarly to the liberalization of Europe (enclosure of the commons, a push to sacrifice ethnic identities for nationalist ones, etc). Like the liberalization of, say, France, it's a lot more complicated than "old thing bad, new thing good."
Liberalism was violent and authoritarian. It often sacrificed leftists. Liberalism's focus on borders and national identity led directly to pogroms and Nazism. Similarly, liberalization of Ethiopia has led to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
People think of "the terror" in France as a leftist thing, but it wasn't. It was a Liberal thing, centrist extremism, carried out against right and left.
I understand that tribal federalism is also not a good system, but I don't have a ton of depth so I'm not going to try to explain it. During the European Liberal revolutionary period of 1848, ethnic minorities would often side with some monarch or emperor against liberalism out of fear of liberal nationalism. It makes sense to support a system that's bad if your other option is a nationalism that erases your identity.
But even in Europe at that time, anarchism offered an alternative but that alternative often also drew from simply a different branch of liberalism that also suppressed culture and identity. Today the world is different. Democratic Confederalism offers a solution to *exactly* this problem, tested for more than a decade in Syria and developing now in Myanmar.
But the cross pollination between Syria and Myanmar in terms of fighters really made the ideological cross pollination possible. I don't think anything like that is happening now in Ethiopia.
Eurocentrism makes it easy to ignore what's happening now, but Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union Commission. Ethiopia is a major military power in the region, so these developments carry a lot of weight. Especially as the US collapses and the world becomes more multipolar, the development of regional powers like Ethiopia will have a big impact on how that part of the continent develops.
If any folks are more familiar with Ethiopia than I am (which shouldn't be hard since I'm basically not), please correct me or add context if anything is missing or wrong.
@bobmueller@mastodon.world2026-05-22 20:00:08
I'm glad Michael Passons has found people to heal with. CCM is a machine that chews up and spits out anyone who doesn't toe the industry line. That's not a Christian attitude. Or at least it's not supposed to be. It's one of the reasons I deconstructed.
https://www.friendlyathei…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-05-21 20:14:54
The result that should really cause you to update your beliefs about this year’s midterms is not in the topline or the Times’ official reporting, but hidden deep in the poll’s crosstabs.
A big story of the 2024 election was that Donald Trump made inroads with non-voters who traditionally leaned Democratic, and even got some of them to turn out for him.
But now it’s looking like he has squandered those gains and put his party on the path to midterm defeat in the House
— an…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-22 14:41:33
The ESO VLT has four Unit Telescopes (UT).
Yet at present only one of them, UT4, has an adaptive optics facility, which includes a deformable mirror.
Adaptive mirrors play a crucial role in adaptive optics facilities that correct observations for the atmosphere's blurring effect.
Because of this and its highly demanded instruments,
UT4 is one of the most oversubscribed telescopes on Earth.
Today we signed a contract with AdOptica for the design & produc…
