Tootfinder

Behind the Blog: 'Free Speech' and Open Dialogue https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-free-speech-and-open-dialogue/

Career suicide (or residual revenue suicide) example.
(Seinfeld has made me laugh - he is a master of contrived absurdity. But I've never found him humorous on the basis of intellectual wit like George Carlin and Jon Stewart, or even of brain-involved context switching like Gracie Allen, Robin Williams, or Noel Coward.)
"Jerry Seinfeld compares Free Palestine movement to Ku Klux Klan"

The Senator Will Not Yield -- REVIEW: 'Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation' by Zaakir Tameez (H.W. Brands/The Washington Free Beacon)
https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-senator-will-not-yield/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250810/p18#a250810p18

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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"The two were honored for cofounding the preeminent biomedical preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv."
Totally deserved, if you ask me. Also if you don't ask me.
https://www.cshl.edu/inglis-and-sever-earn-royal-society-research-culture-awa…

Inglis and Sever earn Royal Society Research Culture Award | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s (CSHL’s) John Inglis and Richard Sever have earned The Royal Society’s 2025 Research Culture Award. The two were honored for cofounding the preeminent biomedical preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. Established in 2013 and 2019 respectively, these online repositories empower scientists worldwide to share their research fast, fairly, and free of charge....

Great article by Michal Ganzarcik for Shiftmag explaining the nuances of "Just say no" in a career space (Software Development theme, but I believe it applies to work in general).
I especially love the last line under "What's the solution?":
> **Don’t reward or idolize overwork.** Encourage a culture that values balance and sustainable effort over relentless hustle.

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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Trump in the Crosshairs -- REVIEW: 'Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination ... (David J. Garrow/The Washington Free Beacon)
https://freebeacon.com/culture/trump-in-the-crosshairs/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250706/p6#a250706p6

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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ANN: Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Volume 51 Issue 2
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You know what was released on the #InternetArchive yesterday?
Johannes Grenzfurthner‘s documentary movie “Hacking at Leaves” about US history and the racism that built it, the Navajo Nation, hackerspaces and hacker culture, COVID-19, and much more.
It’s now free to watch, share, and talk about!

ANN: Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Volume 51 Issue 2
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"But articulating a left alternative is just the start. Success means winning mass working-class support for socialist politics, possible only through readiness to learn from past mistakes, free and open debate — a call-out culture based on denouncing heretical views breeds a bubble mentality — and an outward, alliance-building approach to local labour movements and grassroots campaigns."
To defeat the far right, build a class-conscious left | MS

The Conservative Media Ecosystem Is Coddling Amy Coney Barrett (Jay Willis/Balls and Strikes)
https://ballsandstrikes.org/legal-culture/amy-coney-barrett-book-tour-conservative-media-free-press-bari-weiss/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250904/p87#a250904p87

I learned¹ about the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature² that has more than 10000 books scanned and available online. Just great.
It is hosted by the University of Florida. So let's hope that it stays available, i.e. that the Republicans don't find the old children's books from 1750 to woke.³
__
¹via

Open Culture (Official) (@openculture@toot.community)
Attached: 1 image Enter an Archive of 10,000+ Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized & Free to Read Online https://www.openculture.com/2025/06/enter-an-archive-of-10000-historical-childrens-books.html

Time for another "review". This one's hard. While the book was quite interesting, it required me to be quite open-minded. Still, I think it's worth mentioning:
Robert Wright — Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The book basically focused on a thesis that both biological evolution and cultural evolution are a thing, they are directional and this directionality can be explained together using game theory — as eventually leading to more non-zero sum games.
It consists of three chapters. The first one is is focused on the history of civilization. It features many examples from different parts of the world, which makes it quite interesting. The author argues that the culture inevitably is evolving as information processing techniques improve — from writing to the Internet.
The second chapter is focused on biological evolution. Now, the argument is that it's not quite random, but actually directed towards greater complexity — eventually leading to the development of highly intelligent species, and a civilization.
The third chapter is quite speculative and metaphysical, and I'm just going to skip it.
The book is full of optimism. Capitalism creates freedom — because people are more productive when they're working for their own gain, so the free market eliminates slavery. Globalisation creates networks of interdependence that make wars uneconomic. Increased contacts between different cultures makes people more tolerant. And eventually, the humanity may be able to unite facing a common "external" enemy — the climate change.
What can I say? The examples are quite interesting, the whole theory seems self-consistent. Still, I repeatedly looked at the publication date (it's 1999), and wondered if author would write the same thing today (yes, I know I can search for his current opinions).
#books #bookstodon @…

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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ALIGN: Word Association Learning for Cross-Cultural Generalization in Large Language Models
Chunhua Liu, Kabir Manandhar Shrestha, Sukai Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13426 h…

ALIGN: Word Association Learning for Cross-Cultural Generalization in Large Language Models
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate cross-cultural communication, their behavior still reflects the distributional bias of the languages and viewpoints that are over-represented in their pre-training corpora. Yet, it remains a challenge to model and align culture due to limited cultural knowledge and a lack of exploration into effective learning approaches. We introduce a cost-efficient, cognitively grounded remedy: parameter-efficient fine-tuning on native speakers' free word-…

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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ANN: Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Volume 51 Issue 2
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How ironic - the the maga-regime now is trying to block visas to visit the US on the grounds that the applicant believes in (and perhaps practices) our First Amendment right of free speech...
"New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles"
https://www.

The COVID Reckoning Cometh (Christine Rosen/The Washington Free Beacon)
https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-covid-reckoning-cometh/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250622/p21#a250622p21

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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ANN: Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Volume 51 Issue 2
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ANN: Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Volume 51 Issue 2 https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20121770/japanese-journal-religious-studies-512

Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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Pirino on Suzuki, 'Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire: The Global Evolution of the Japanese…
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Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2
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Pirino on Suzuki, 'Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire: The Global Evolution of the Japanese…
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ANN: Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Volume 51 Issue 2
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Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 51/2 #acrel https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20121769/japanese-journal-religious-studies-512…