Tootfinder

A profile of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left in 2002 and whose claims that Wikipedia has a liberal bias are fueling the right's campaign against it (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

A Wikipedia cofounder is fueling the right’s campaign against it
Larry Sanger’s claims of a liberal slant and mismanagement at the world’s dominant online encyclopedia are being enthusiastically embraced on the right.

A profile of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left in 2002 and whose claims that Wikipedia has a liberal bias are fueling the right's campaign against it (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

A Wikipedia cofounder is fueling the right’s campaign against it
Larry Sanger’s claims of a liberal slant and mismanagement at the world’s dominant online encyclopedia are being enthusiastically embraced on the right.

Trump has ramped up efforts to deploy the justice department to target his enemies.
He has pledged to crack down on leftwing groups in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing and has repeatedly singled out George Soros, a major funder of liberal groups, as a target.
“We’re going to look into Soros, because I think it’s a Rico case against him and other people,” Trump said on 12 September,
using an acronym to refer to racketeering charges. “Because this is more than like protest…

I dagens @… oversettes «liberal arts college» som «liberal kunstskole» 🤦‍♂️
«Liberal arts» er en samlebetegnelse for en rekke studier fra humaniora og samfunnsfag, og, nei, det har ingen ting med kunstutdanning å å gjŸre (som faller under paraplyen «fine arts»).
BA / MA (Bachelor of Arts / Master of Arts) er gradene liberal arts fŸrer til. BFA / M…

"Gender-confused people love degenerate, liberal culture, especially depraved video games, such as ULTRAKILL - an extremely violent, Satanic shooter, Fallout: New Vegas - an anti-American (Fallout series makes fun of 1950s American culture), pro-SJW RPG and Celeste - a platformer which gives gender-confused people unrealistic power fantasies (such as the ability to double jump, which they do not naturally possess)."
thanks conservapedia

BBC board member Shumeet Banerji resigns, saying he was cut out of discussions that led to the resignation of the BBC's director general, Tim Davie (Michael Savage/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov

Democratic senators fear getting 'hammered' after 'No Kings' for ending shutdown (Alexander Bolton/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5561362-liberal-base-backlash-democrats/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251020/p130#a251020p130

Dutch liberal party overtakes far-right nationalists in snap parliamentary election: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/30/dutch-liberal-party-overtakes-farright.html

If your boyfriend is a liberal, you're single to me. What's he gonna do? Vote me out of your DMs? 🚩

In an experiment, ChatGPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp expressed secular, Western liberal values regardless of the language of the questions (Kelsey Piper/The Argument)
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/do-ais-think-differently-in-different

Do AIs think differently in different languages?
What I learned by asking chatbots questions in Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi

Dieses Lokal ist dermaßen liberal, da werden Frauen mit aufgespritzten Lippen und Megakunstwimpern genauso nonchalant serviciert wie Männer ohne.

The Liberal Abandonment Of Greta Thunberg
https://open.substack.com/pub/donotpanic/p/the-liberal-abandonment-of-greta?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=e4myx
> The Swedish activis…

During the #COP30 climate conference in Brazil, Australia's opposition party withdrew from the country's net-zero by 2050 target. It now sees net-zero as a potential 'welcome outcome' of using Australia's resources (coal, gas) plus new energy technologies. Reckless.

Liberal Party formally abandons net zero by 2050 climate target
The decision brings the party closer to the Nationals, which ditched its support for the target earlier this month amid internal turmoil over the Coalition's policy.

While every liberal is toasting #NoKings day as an affront to #Drumpf
#ProPublica , Politico and others concede that the nation's actual cut throat commander in brief and deed is hardcore

RE: https://mastodon.world/@liberalcurrents/115715538811113964
Does he talk to any liberal women? Or, probably more accurately, do any liberal women talk to him?

Hivemind:
I am looking for suitable reading on data for a second-year undergraduate module called "Liberal Arts and the Public Sphere". Any recommendations for monographs or essays on critical data literacy or the importance of data to the political economy are gratefully received. The students do not necessarily have advanced numeracy or statistical skills, so the reading must be fairly accessible.
#HE

No Kings? bullshit. The Kings rule https://cathode.church/@okadaibro/115392718725342799

Nice bit of trolling right-wingers

Seems like the #PeePee strategy fell flat on its face today and it will fade from the headlines.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-vote-no-poilievre-pipeline-motion-9.7008658

I always know @… wil have a clear view.
https://www.readtpa.com/p/the-rules-of-grief?publ…

nazis. i hate these guys. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/german-far-right-lawmaker-calls-us-german-nationalist-alliance-maga-gala-2025-12-14/

Wikipedia’s rejoinder to Ted Cruz is entirely fair and accurate, but don’t kid yourself that Cruz is interested in fairness or accuracy, he’s just pushing back against the tendency of factual reporting to exhibit a liberal bias.
#wikipedia

Ted Cruz doesn’t seem to understand Wikipedia, lawyer for Wikimedia says
Wikipedia host’s lawyer wants to help Ted Cruz understand how the platform works.

"Liberal commentators are very eager to accuse the left of obsessing — and falling out — over things which, in reality, don't seem to the liberals to matter very much. They have a phrase for this: 'the narcissism of small differences.' Well, OK, we on the left do fall out over things which, seen from outside our spectrum, may seem trivial... But... let us, please, consider for the moment the beam in our brother's eye."

The Narcissism of Small Differences

Conservative MP says he's considering joining Canada's Liberal government (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/04/dentremont-considering-canada-liberal-government-00635851
http://www.memeorandum.com/251104/p109#a251104p109

"I have little to no sympathy for Tim Davie. He has helped create the problem by constantly opining on the BBC being too liberal. He has legitimised the critique which has toppled him. He appeased the same forces who have brought him down"
The truth about impartiality at the BBC - by Lewis Goodall
https://

The truth about impartiality at the BBC
And the hysteria of the current "crisis"

Gregg Nunziata: "Why Conservatives Must Defend Liberal Democracy," at the NYU Democracy Project - Election Law Blog
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=153405

🤦🏽 The Dutch Left Had Its Worst Performance Ever
#politics

The Dutch Left Had Its Worst Performance Ever
The Dutch elections were a victory for liberal centrists and a defeat for the anti-immigration Geert Wilders. Yet with the overall right-wing vote stronger than ever, there’s little reason for celebration.

Three liberal justices won another 10-year term on the Pennsylvania supreme court,
giving Democrats a key victory and allowing them to maintain their 5-2 advantage on a vital body that could issue important rulings on abortion and voting rights in an important battleground state in the coming years.

> In truth, Democrats were winning with this strategy, until the centrists in their caucus cut a deal to ensure that the party – and 20 million Americans on individual insurance plans – would lose.
https://zeteo.com/p/senate-democrats-schumer-shutdown-surrender

Furious Liberals Call for Schumer to Step Aside, Senate Dems Mostly Quiet
After their shutdown surrender, liberal lawmakers are begging their base to unite behind them anyway – as Trumpland celebrates that their opposition is a bunch of 'p*ssies.

I've had a few of these thoughts stuck in my craw all day because I watched this liberal historian talk about the Galleanisti.
https://youtube.com/shorts/93yHEn8BYE4
Basically, she says that "of course the government had the right to target them." Then she goes on to talk about how it became an excuse to carry out a bunch of attacks on other marginalized people. Now, the Galleanisti had been bombing the houses of politicians and such. I get where she's coming from saying that one of their targets "was in the right" to try to catch them. But there's some context she's not talking about at all.
These were Italian anarchists, so they were not white and they were part of an already marginalized political group. Basically all of Europe and the US was trying to wipe out anarchists at the time. Meanwhile, the sitting president at the time showed the first movie in the White House. That movie was KKK propaganda, in which he was favorably quoted. The US was pretty solidly white supremacist in the 1920's.
Like... A major hidden whole premise of the game "Bioshock: Infinite" is that if you went back to the US in the 1920's, and you had magic powers, you would absolutely use them to kill as many cops as possible and try to destroy society. There's a lot of other stuff in there, I don't want to get distracted, but "fuck those racists," specifically referring to the US in the 1920's, was a major part of a major game.
Those Italian anarchists were also stone cutters. They carved grave stones. But the dust from that can kill you, much like black lung for coal miners. So they were dying from unsafe working conditions, regularly raising money to support dying coworkers and then carving gravestones for those same coworkers.
Now, I personally think insurrectionary anarchism is a dead end. I disagree with it as a strategy. We've seen it fail, and it failed there. But of course it makes sense that they wanted to blow up the government.
...And that's the correct way to structure that. When you say, "of course they were in the right" you're making a very clear political statement. You could easily say, "the cops in Vichy France had every right to hunt down the French Resistance." You would technically be correct, I guess. But it would really say something about your politics if you justified the actions of Nazi collaborators over those fighting against the Nazis.
And you may say, "oh, but the Nazis didn't have justification for anything. They invaded a sovereign nation, so their government wasn't legitimate anyway."
To which I would reply, "have you considered a history book about the US?"

"Liberal inflation." Snort. Sit down Poilievre.

This article about a liberal reporter dating MAGA men really shows some of the core of what's breaking this world right now. And it's not just the US. Men are not okay. Like at all.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/rela…

Because calling for one's political opponents to be incarcerated is a perfectly normal and healthy part of a liberal democracy. 🙃
#uspol

„MAGA seems to think it can begin with coercion and then build hegemony. But they may be making the same mistake the Leninist parties did in the West: pursuing an insurrectionary politics unsuited to the terrain of an advanced liberal democracy with a developed civil society. They are pursuing what Gramsci called the “war of maneuver”—rapid, lightning assaults—rather than the “war of position”—a gradual and more deliberate kind of approach.“

Surprise defection leaves Carney's Liberals just one seat short of majority (Mickey Djuric/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/11/carney-short-liberal-majority-00688193
http://www.memeorandum.com/251211/p151#a251211p151

love my fuckin Tons

A look at MSNBC's rebrand as MS Now, as it builds an independent newsroom, hiring 36 reporters, aiming to maintain its liberal opinion and news analysis (Scott Nover/Washington Post)

Don’t call it MSNBC. MS NOW takes on Trump’s Washington.
Going it alone without NBC’s name or deep bench of reporters, the rebranded cable news network MS Now wants you to know nothing has changed — except for a few things.

House Republicans held a hearing Wednesday broadcasting long-standing conservative allegations of a left-wing bias in the small, prestigious Truman Scholarship program.
Witnesses called by the GOP said the winners disproportionately espouse causes such as promoting racial justice and fighting climate change
—and wind up working for Democrats and left-leaning organizations
—while few recipients profess interest in conservative aims.
But rather than counter the allegations…

House Republicans Accuse Truman Scholarship of Liberal Bias
Republicans held a hearing airing accusations that the prestigious program heavily favors left-leaning candidates. No one from the scholarship foundation was invited.

Done, canceled https://pnw.zone/@felix/115624265752458196

FWIW: Germany had only been a nominal liberal democracy for a dozen years and had a judicial class trained in the system of the Kaiser and Bismarck, no matter what the Weimar Constitution said.
Also: the vilest sorts of anti-semitism had been mainstream German beliefs since before Luther, who was awful. https://

The Trump administration is not attacking the "excesses" of "woke" scholarship. They're at war with the very idea of power analysis, with the feeling of deep empathy with the oppressed, with ethical commitment to make a just world.

Listen up, liberal! https://youtu.be/KRucySRgNXs

I finished "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao a few days ago. It's a lovely platonic "romance" that deals explicitly with aro/ace identity, post-coming-out identity work as opposed to the initial realization journey, and Wellesley College student culture (although if unlike me that's not relevant to you, it's not like you need to be interested in this to enjoy the book).
It felt slightly weird to be reading a book by someone who I'm pretty sure could have been in one of my classes (but as far as I am remember wasn't). Probably would not have read it were it a normal romance, because that would have made character empathy super awkward. In any case, it feels useful to get an inside perspective on almost-contemporary student culture, especially the part that's a reminder of how many students love the liberal and progressive aspects of said culture, despite its flaws.
Super enjoyable and honestly pretty cozy book.
#AmReading

Norman Podhoretz, who transformed Commentary magazine into a controversial and influential neoconservative voice as its EIC from 1960 to 1995, has died at 95 (Joseph Berger/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/us/politics/norman-podhoretz-dead.html

Norman Podhoretz, Influential Editor and Neoconservative Force, Dies at 95
A New York intellectual and onetime liberal stalwart, his Commentary magazine became his platform as his political and social view turned sharply rightward.

Welcome to the Resistance:
Eric Blanc, Leah Greenberg, and Waleed Shahid
on the liberal resistance’s sharp left turn since Trump returned to the White House.
Liberals are voting for Zohran at the ballot box,
fighting ICE in the streets,
and just generally looking favorably upon social democracy.
This discussion puts the moment in historic context and plots out the strategic exigencies and opportunities ahead.

Welcome to the Resistance w/ Eric Blanc, Leah Greenberg, Waleed Shahid
Podcast Episode · The Dig · 12/12/2025 · 2h 5m

Tennessee sheriff defends jailing liberal activist for posting Trump meme about school shooting (Phil Williams/WTVF-TV)
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/tennessee-sheriff-defends-jailing-liberal-activist-for-posting-trump-meme-about-school-shooting
http://www.memeorandum.com/251029/p103#a251029p103

Guilbeault quits Carney’s cabinet over energy deal with Alberta | CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/guilbeault-quitting-cabinet-9.6995299

Guilbeault quits Carney’s cabinet over energy deal with Alberta | CBC News
Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault has quit cabinet over the federal government signing Thursday’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta.

Checking in on the politics of civility.
https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/09/29/labour-labelled-nasty-party-after-minister-calls-ed-davey-fat-bloke-in-wetsuit/

Labour branded ‘nasty party’ after minister calls Ed Davey ‘fat bloke in wetsuit’ - Politics.co.uk
A senior minister has referred to the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, as a “fat bloke in a wetsuit”. Torsten Bell, who serves jointly as a pensions and Treasury minister, delivered the remarks while speaking to a fringe event at Labour Party conference.  Bell said: “What Britain needs to tackle [Reform UK leader Nigel] Farage... Read more »

Now, for any person with a shred of moral dignity, there's some time during US history where you would have to admit that an insurrection or rebellion was necessary. Only complete scum bag fascists would try to argue that a slave revolt wasn't an absolute good, and that it was a bad thing when those revolts were crushed. Anyone with a shred of moral decency has to admit that there is at least one point in US history where the nation was doing something so incredibly evil, that it would have been good if people would have rose up and stopped it.
Today we're talking about the displacement and genocide of people in Gaza. We can look at any number of genocide on US soil carried out by the US government. Who, with any moral clarity, wouldn't point to those and want to believe that they would have resisted, violently if necessary, against those slaughters. Who, that today condemns slavery, could look at John Brown and not wish to have the moral integrity to fight and die along side of him?
Every liberal who actually believes in justice, who isn't just virtue signaling out of guilt, should be able to point to a time in history where they would absolutely agree with the most militant resistance. For those folks, I always wonder, when did that evil end? Where is your line? Have you thought about that?

🤑 Wealth tax would be deadly for French economy, says Europe’s richest man
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/sep/21/wealth-tax-would-be-deadly-for-french-economy-says-europe-richest-man-bernard-arn…

How ideology-driven AI chatbots like Grok and Gab's Arya position themselves as alternatives to mainstream chatbots accused of liberal bias (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/busines

Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars
Once pitched as dispassionate tools to answer your questions, A.I. chatbots are now programmed to reflect the biases of their creators.

Artificial Authority: From Machine Minds to Political Alignments. An Experimental Analysis of Democratic and Autocratic Biases in Large-Language Models
Szymon {\L}ukasik, Natalia O\.zegalska-{\L}ukasik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25286

Artificial Authority: From Machine Minds to Political Alignments. An Experimental Analysis of Democratic and Autocratic Biases in Large-Language Models
Political beliefs vary significantly across different countries, reflecting distinct historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. These ideologies, ranging from liberal democracies to rigid autocracies, influence human societies, as well as the digital systems that are constructed within those societies. The advent of generative artificial intelligence, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), introduces new agents in the political space-agents trained on massive corpora that replicate a…

If you have a Liberal MP, you might consider writing to or calling them to let them know this is insane (for any number of very good reasons - you pick). As an historian, I can tell you that the archives are full of angry letters to MPs, cabinet members, and PMs and that at certain times waves of correspondence moving in the same direction have changed policy.
You might consider demonstrating too. A similar observation applies.

Call For Papers: Rendering Violence in Textual and Visual Media (April 2026)
https://ift.tt/edryosF
updated: Tuesday, October 7, 2025 - 12:36pmfull name / name of organization: The Liberal Arts…
via Input 4 RELCFP …

The president of the United States is invading multiple US cities and liberal strongholds, in troop deployments that are now the primary component of his vast, lawless, smash-and-grab efforts to shred the nation’s constitutional and democratic order, all in the service of his personality cult.
And his enthusiasm for doing so is partially, and meaningfully, fueled by how mad he gets while binge-watching hours and hours of TV, current and former Trump advisers tell Zeteo.

Trump’s Addiction to Watching Fox Is Killing American Democracy
Our country is falling apart because one old man, Trump advisers and former administration officials say, won’t stop ‘yelling’ at his TV.

Australia can slash energy bills AND cut emissions—it's not either/or.
As aging coal plants need replacement, renewables with storage are now the cheapest option. Gas has become uncompetitive, and it's actually coal/gas prices driving bills up, not renewables.
The path forward: faster approvals, better competition, and switching homes to electric heat pumps and solar.

Australia doesn’t have to choose between energy affordability and emission reductions 
Emissions reduction targets are often cast as incompatible with energy affordability, the latest example being the Liberal Party dumping its net zero target. IEEFA has found that this is not the case.  

the more I hear Liberal MPs and others justifying the MOU, it is just.... infuriating. The oil and gas and nuclear focused messaging and greenwashing is at extreme levels.
This Liberal Canadian government is the worst environmental government since Harper.
And the paternalistic approach to First Nations consultation is a massive step back.
Canada, just days after COP30 closed, has screamed from the rooftops its willingness to burn the planet down.
#canpoli #cdnpoli #climate #environment

Manchester, Woodhouse Park ward by-election (Thursday 25/9)
Greens held the seat on a very low turnout in this predominantly white 'working class 'ward. Reform POX (who didn't campaign) pushed Labour into 3rd place.
The Green Party – 826 (43.8% -5.7)
Reform UK – 556 (29.5% New)
Labour – 386 (20.5% -23.2%)
Conservative – 72 (3.8% -1.6%)
Liberal Democrat – 47 ( (2.5% 1.2)
Turnout 16.29%

I'm at an interesting intersection between poor as fuck (or adjacent, mostly anarchist) folks and generally well off (mostly liberal-ish) tech folks, so every once and a while I can help with some info that bridges that gap. Right now is kind of a critical time for that.
For anyone not extremely affected by the SNAP thing, here's a reasonable video:
#USPol

SCOTUS appears ready to give Trump greater firing powers, over sharp liberal warnings (Chris Geidner/Law Dork)
https://www.lawdork.com/p/scotus-ftc-slaughter-humphreys-executor
http://www.memeorandum.com/251208/p134#a251208p134

Ok, yeah, I'm not done processing my anger over liberals doing shit like this. So this historian sees a rise in right wing violence, sees the US government carrying out ethnic cleansing, sees a rise in white supremacist terrorism, and then says, "oh yeah... this reminds me of a time right around the 1920s. Hum... yeah, ANARCHISTS fighting the government! Yeah, that's the same thing."
FFS, IT'S THE RED SUMMER! If you want a parallel between today and some horrible time in US history, TALK ABOUT THE RED SUMMER. The point of the language of dehumanization that the right uses, the point of all the anti-black and anti-emigrant rhetoric, is that it leads to genocide. Trump already carried out an act of genocide (#USPol

A gathering with reporters took place in the Oval Office last month
as Trump ordered a crackdown on “leftwing terrorism”
and threatened to investigate and prosecute those who financially support it.
“If you look at Soros, he’s at the top of everything,” the US president said.
There is no evidence linking George Soros,
a 95-year-old billionaire who has supported democratic causes around the world,
or Reid Hoffman,
who helped start PayPal and the netwo…

The Washington Post hires three conservatives as opinion writers: Spectator's Kate Andrews, National Review's Dominic Pino, and Boston Globe's Carine Hajjar (Ewan Palmer/The Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeff-bezo…

Bezos’ Washington Post Hires New MAGA-Friendly Columnists
They will work for its new opinion editor who admits its readers are “overwhelmingly liberal.”

Nancy Pelosi is out, and Zohran Mamdani is in.
Or so Republicans hope.
After spending years — and tens of millions of dollars — pillorying Ms. Pelosi and seeking to tie her to seemingly every Democrat in America
Republicans are betting that their next boogeyman has arrived, just in time.
For Republicans facing a newly re-energized Democratic base and a potentially challenging midterms environment, a fresh foil couldn’t come soon enough.

Republicans Retire Pelosi as a Villain, and Turn to Mamdani
Searching for another liberal boogeyman, Republicans have zeroed in on Zohran Mamdani. Whether their strategy will work in the midterms is less clear.

This is absolutely on brand for Ellis Ross. He was a known ____ when he was a BC Liberal MLA for the same area.
The BC Liberals were also well known for their boosting of the trophy hunting industry, so OF COURSE he's going to go to the local Rod and Gun club before he calls the Nation that was devastated by the Grizzly attack.
A good reminder that not all First Nation "leaders" are environmentally, or socially, conscious.
What an ass.
#CanPoli #BC #Grizzly #FirstNation #CdnPoli
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/grizzlies-bella-coola-ellis-ross-9.7012997

It was National Voter Registration Day,
and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was on her way to a small liberal arts college
for a voter registration event.
That’s when she learned the US Department of Justice
was suing her over how she manages Maine’s voter registrant list.
While the DOJ appearing as the official plaintiff was new,
what the federal government sought through the lawsuit
—access to Maine’s complete, unredacted voter roll file

Trump’s DOJ is building a voter purge machine—powered by your private data
The federal agency ordinarily would prevent attacks on voting rights. Now it’s carrying them out.

Trans Panic? More Like Trans Apathetic (Katherine Alejandra Cross/Liberal Currents)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/trans-panic-more-like-trans-apathetic/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251201/p46#a251201p46

#GOP #Tennessee #sheriff defends #imprisonment of liberal retired #PrisonGuard

Tennessee sheriff defends jailing liberal activist for posting Trump meme about school shooting
A Middle Tennessee sheriff is defending the arrest of a man for posting an online meme quoting President Donald Trump.

“Tariffs are an import tax, plain and simple. I would assume the administration understands that.
“I actually am surprised that it was so lacking,” Senator Maria Cantwell added, of the administration’s case.
The court did not appear persuaded, either.
“You want to say tariffs are not taxes,” said the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor. “But that’s exactly what they are.”

Good #Morning #Canada
You may not like #PeePee but you gotta respect his ability to promote a divided Canada. Today, the Duke of Divisiveness will ask the house to vote on whether they support the Liberal's MOU with the province of Alberta. He knows that there is environmental grumbling amongst the Liberals in Parliament and he thinks this is an opportunity to weaken Carney's leadership image. A vote could cause friction within the Liberal ranks and at the very least put individuals on record so their vote can be used against them in the future. It should be an interesting day.
Recently Angus Reid released survey results showing 50% of Canadians would support a new pipeline. What about you? There is a straight forward question below - Yes or No - but please add any opinions, comments or caveats to support your choice.
Do you support a new pipeline from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia? Please boost for additional reach.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CanPoli #PipelineMOU #Pipeline
No, I do not support a new pipeline
Yes, I support a new pipeline

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

Thanksgiving, Above All, Celebrates Our Escape From a Pre-Liberal World (Arthur Melzer/The UnPopulist)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/thanksgiving-above-all-celebrates
http://www.memeorandum.com/251127/p28#a251127p28

Folks look at you like you’re crazy when you say we’re in the midst of the worst, most unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis in 🇺🇸 history, & then, well, here we are:
-- Mark Copelovitch
https://bsky.app/profile/mclem.org/post/3m27pjeavrs27

Michael Clemens (@mclem.org)
The US Congress created, mandated, and funded the agencies of the Executive Branch of the US government. No Liberal or Conservative president has any power, any authority, any right to amputate them at will. This lawless rampage is shredding our Constitutional order and poisoning our democracy. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

While the US can protect security in Europe and deserves our undying gratitude for having done so for the last 80 years,
Europeans cannot protect democracy in the US.
They can and must, however, protect liberal democracy in Europe,
which risks becoming a collateral victim of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agenda.
What happens in America doesn’t stay in America.
It is often a precursor for trends in Europe.
Just as the

Steven Guilbeault lays out the truth. Canada will not reach its climate targets.
““[Carney] thinks we’ll be able to do this with the market, with private investment. Of course, we have to do that, but I also think we need to have regulations in place to ensure that we achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. And by abandoning many of these measures, that becomes impossible.
“I mean, if we are honest with Canadians, we can no longer achieve our targets for 2030 with the announcements that have been made recently. It’s not possible.””
... he goes on to say Danielle Smith is (effectively) Donald Trump.
"“In my opinion, she is not a reliable partner in this negotiation.””
It is now abundantly clear that the Liberal Party and all Canadians really did lose something when Mark Carney became Prime Minister.
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ABPoli
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/climate-change-guilbeault-carney-9.6998944

Billionaires Are Hoarding Power, Not Money (Samantha Hancox-Li/Liberal Currents)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/billionaires-are-hoarding-power-not-money/#/portal/signup
http://www.memeorandum.com/251010/p29#a251010p29

May this haunt Mark Carney for his entire tenure as Prime Minister as #TMX did for Trudeau.
Our federal Liberal and Conservative revolving door governments are simply incapable of extricating themselves from oil…
Canada will continue to literally burn because of it.
#EndFossilFuels #ClimateSellout #ClimateEmergency #CdnPoli #CanPoli #BCPoli #ABPoli

Fascism has arrived in the US. Here's a video of a (liberal) lawyer just straight up saying the courts won't save you.
The system only speaks two languages now: money and violence. If you want a chance to avoid the second, now is the time to use the first. #MassBlackout is a #Boycott of the American corporations that support the dictatorship. By showing that people have the power to shut down the economy if elites don't listen, we can hit them where it actually hurts.
From now until December 2nd, do as many of these things as you can:
- Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)
- Stop work
- Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases
This is one of the few times that boosting stuff on social media and doing nothing else actually *can* make a difference. Boost posts tagged with #WeAintBuyingIt, #MassBlackout, and #BlackOutTheSystem. Make sure everyone you know knows about it. Hold each other accountable to keep from spending. You may already not be spending because.... well,.. #Trump has already made everything too expensive. The thing is that elites can't actually tell the difference. Spreading word, making the protest seem as big and impactful as possible is all that's really needed to fracture elites and turn them against each other. Boost, write your own post, make these tags trend on every platform you can, then do nothing.
Don't buy things, don't work. Just stop. Refuse to participate in capitalism. This is the ultimate "fuck you, make me" because they absolutely can't make you. This is the ultimate reminder of where power actually comes from.
If you're outside the US, (continue to) boycott American products (if the tariffs haven't already taken care of that) until the regime falls. Cancel all American streaming services, and any other American tech you can. If you're stuck on American tech, spend some time to look for local alternatives.
It turns out the world is more interconnected than capitalists would like you to believe, and we all actually have the power to change things. It's time to prove it.
#USPol