Tootfinder

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.

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

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.

I get immensely distressed when I see students building a little nest for themselves in just one proverbial corner of campus. Perhaps my most common advising conversation is “You do not need to take 3 classes at once in this department. What about <<category you’ve never studied>>?”
(Macalester is a liberal arts college, so our curriculum is carefully calibrated such that there is •room• for students to touch many disciplines. That’s the point. Yes, there are other kinds of schools where do you have to take almost all your classes in one dept. I am leery of 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…

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

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…

"Liberal inflation." Snort. Sit down Poilievre.

Democracy Noir, the 90-minute documentary
– opening in the US this week and portraying Orbšn’s creeping authoritarian takeover of an erstwhile liberal democracy through the eyes of three women;
Timea Szabó, an opposition politician,
Babette Oroszi, a television journalist,
and Niko Antal, a nurse
– has universal resonance and urgent relevance for American audiences grappling with the consequences of Trump.
“I’d say this is the most ‘hitting the zeitgeist’…

And no, I'm not promoting liberal "pacifism."
> All this is not to say that violence should not be part of a revolutionary movement, as liberals tend to assert. Liberalism sometimes recognizes this paradox and resolves it by pushing for their image of “non-violent” resistance. Violence can't solve problems, they assert, there is only protest. Revolutionary change always produces “bad” results (they tend to lack any analysis as to why other than “violence bad”), therefore incremental change is preferable. The thing that liberals don't understand, perhaps they refuse to understand, is that there is necessarily a continuum from protest to insurrection.

Pleased to work at a university whose leadership is willing to say this. It means it's not the university for everyone, but that has always been true.

A IL de vez em quando acerta. É raro, é muito, muito raro, mas lš de onde a onde, naquela do relógio parado dar as horas certas duas vezes por dia, lš atingem o alvo.
https://ciberlandia.pt/@d3/115124470436660063

Algebra: The Eighth Liberal Art?
S. Blake Allan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00201 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00201…

Algebra: The Eighth Liberal Art?
What is the role of algebra in classical mathematics education? How does it relate to the four quadrivial arts? These questions have troubled the mathematical community since the introduction of algebra into the Renaissance academy by men like François Viète, Guillame Gosselin, and René Descartes. Their challenge is perhaps most starkly articulated at the conclusion of Viète's Introduction to the Analytic Art, where he claims that his algebra "appropriates to itself by right the proud probl…

“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.”

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.”

TIL there's a town called "Liberal" in the state of Kansas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal%2C_Kansas

Liberal, Kansas - Wikipedia

„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.“

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…

As a liberal/progressive I'd like to remind us (myself included) that people who work with their hands are often as skilled as, or even more skilled then, those of us with advanced university degrees.
If we want to make political progress we must assure that that progress is for us all, white collar, blue collar: in other works for everyone.

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

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

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 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

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://

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…

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.

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

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.

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…

@… cf the Liberal party of Canada vs the Liberal party of Australia. Opposite ends of the spectrum.

What I find among the most fascinating cultural phenomena to observe is that people believe all sides are playing fair. Many, especially among the left or liberal spectrum, think that once they've just told the right argument or elaborated on the best point, alt-right figureheads will concede and see it their way.
While it's always good to be able to explain yourself, do you truly believe historical oppression and subjugation was honest?
Governments will call whatever you do equi…

https://www.nzz.ch/english/francis-fukuyama-trump-is-in-the-process-of-dismantling-the-whole-american-constitutional-order-ld.1893899
>The other [misinterpretation of liberalism] is identity politi…

Linda Reynolds wins defamation case against Brittany Higgins
😡 😡 😡
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/people/2025/08/27/brittany-higgins-reynolds-defamation

Linda Reynolds wins defamation case against Brittany Higgins
Former Liberal senator Linda Reynolds has won her bitter court battle with former staffer Brittany Higgins.

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 »

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.

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]

The day after Dutch parliament voted to get Antifa activists earmarked as 'terrorist organization', copying Trump, the Fa side shows its colors at an anti-immigrant rally in The Hague: windows smashed at D66 (liberal) party office, violence against police.
https://nos.nl/l/2583298

Relschoppers in binnenstad na anti-immigratieprotest • Onbekend aantal arrestaties
In Den Haag zijn relschoppers de stad ingetrokken na een uit de hand gelopen anti-immigratieprotest op het Malieveld.

Dear @…,
people in Europe and especially in Germany are much frightened about the state of the free and liberal media in the US. So we'd love to hear more on this from your expertise with a focus on our knowledge of the system. Why not addressing us with the language of GUTENBERG directly in German? (Deepl will do the trick)
Wir sind gespannt…

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…

Destiny switching from Liberal Zionism to full “global intifada” as soon as Ethan Klein (H3H3) cut ties with him is peak cinema.
#politics #EHD #h3h3

Nice bit of trolling right-wingers

„Hilde Vautmans, a Belgian liberal MEP, said Europe risked losing its credibility. “This famine is not a natural disaster; it is a political act, and Europe must respond with political courage …. If Europe continues to speak of values while refusing to act, we will lose our credibility and betray our founding promise: never again.”“
Von der Leyen under growing pressure to take tougher line with Israel

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

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

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.

"The program totally backfired. People thought ELIZA was intelligent, they were confiding in the machine, revealing personal issues they would not tell anyone else. Even my secretary asked me to leave the room so she could be alone with the computer. They called me a genius for creating it, but I kept telling them that the computer was not thinking at all."
Oh, really, now, isn't that interesting, and so, of course, they reanimated it, because only a liberal socialist would call that a failure. 🤣
#posiwid #automatedgatheringofintel #agi

This is actually not a bad idea.
https://mastodon.hccp.org/@igb/115229101831129735

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

Do the European leaders really think that they'll have a material influence on the Traitor-in-Chief of Western Liberal Democracy?
Let's hope they will have that influence today and prevent Trump from rewarding Putin for his aggression.

#HotTake:
Liberalism is a syncretic religion where the highest deity is the State and all other deities are subject to it. Liberalism asserts this distinction by classifying political systems as deriving from "natural law" and religions as faith systems. Classical liberalism divided the world into "primitive" beliefs and "enlightened" beliefs. Atheistic anarchism aligns with this distinction by opposing the state and capitalism through logic, rather than asserting that the state and capitalism are themselves systems of faith. Atheistic anarchism further reinforces the narrative of the liberal state by aligning with the liberal understanding of religion as a "primitive" institution.
Graeber et al pointed out the connections between property rights as a form of fedishism (magic) and the evolution of currency, debt, taxes, and the state from temples.

In any case, day 2: Ursula K Le Guin.
As I've said elsewhere, part of her science fiction thesis is that "human" can encompass much more than what we mere Terrans think of it as, and that moral standing extends broadly throughout the universe. This is the antithesis of Tokens fantasy, wherein "race" is real and determines moral standing. For Le Guin, it's barely okay to intervene in complex alien politics unless you carefully ensure you're not causing systemic harms; for Tolkien, it's okay to ambush and murder orc children, because they are by nature evil.
Add to her excellent politics Le Guin's masterful worldbuilding and unparalleled range of plots, and you have the one author I loved as a decidedly liberal and naïve teen and love even more now that I'm an adult. She's an absolute legend and deserves a very high place on any list of women authors (or list of authors, period.).
For a short story, try "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" which you can read here: https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf
For fantasy "A Wizard of Earthsea" (also has a nice graphic novel adaptation), or for science fiction, "The Left Hand of Darkness" or if you want a more anarchist flavor, "The Dispossessed."
I'll close this with an amazing quote from her:
"""
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
"""

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

Over 100 liberal philanthropies,
including those that are being targeted by the Trump administration as part of an expected crackdown after the killing of Charlie Kirk,
are banding together to try and stave off attacks on the nonprofit sector.
The institutions, including the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations,
on Wednesday pushed out an open letter that forcefully defended the philanthropy sector,
even as its list of signers doubled as a…

100 Liberal Philanthropies Prepare to Push Back Against Trump Crackdown
The institutions published an open letter to defend their missions amid fears the Trump administration could target their tax-exempt status.

om man skulle beskriva situation på hagvidsons för en liberal skulle de vara säkra på att det handlade om sovjet men det är bara helt vanlig marknadsliberal politik https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/QM1eyP/person…

Nya larm från förskolorna: ”En banan per bord – barn går hungriga”
Aftonbladets avslöjande om att förskolebolaget Hagvidson – trots vinster på över 60 miljoner – ville spara in på förskolebarnens Bregott har väckt reaktioner. F

If I'd be a #conspiracy theorist, I'd conclude, that the #murder of #CharlieKirk was staged by the

Ok, then. So, the super-rich think it’s a bad idea to have a tax that ensures they contribute a *tiny fraction* of their worth to the public purse, thus ensuring governments can provide services for all. How very surprising. https://www.

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

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

Event: Religion and Democratic Ideals: Reproductive Healthcare Access and White Nationalism
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2024, 6 – 7:30PM This event is free and open to the public. A liberal democracy should produce societies that are inclusive, equitable, dynamic, and responsive to the needs of citizens. This series will focus on where religion intersects with democratic ideals and institutions. We will discuss the outcomes we want from a democratic system and how such an…

Lecture: Yen-yi Chan, “Presence and Performance: Devotional Images of Shaka and His Sacred Body in Medieval Nara” (Kanagawa U., Wed., 24 Sept, 3:30–5pm; in-person only)
https://ift.tt/HdtXZYz
Summer 2026 Vietnamese Language Study with Indiana University Kathleen Evans 09/19/2025 - 9:31am …
via Input 4…

Thanks Neo-Liberals and Conservatives of the 20th and 21st century!
"Experts say growing inequality is the result of decades of government policy choices and dramatic increases in executive pay.
And the biggest factor has been gains for the highest-earning one per cent of Canadians."
Looking at you: Liberal Party of Canada, Conservative Party ("Progressive" and not) and the neo-Liberal wing of the NDP.
#liberals #canada #canpoli #cdnpoli #cpc #ndp
https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/08/25/How-Rich-Canadians-Got-Even-Richer/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial

JD Vance vows retribution on liberal institutions after Charlie Kirk killing
Vice President JD Vance vowed to dismantle institutions on the left that he said promote violence and terrorism,
denouncing two of the country’s most prominent liberal foundations in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Donald Trump later in the day also attacked groups on the left and renewed his talk about potential racketeering prosecutions of unspecified g…

JD Vance vows retribution on liberal institutions after Charlie Kirk killing
Vice President JD Vance hosted Charlie Kirk’s podcast as he mourns his friend and potentially cements his position as the heir to the political movement built by Kirk, a powerful GOP force.

#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.

Now I feel old. He was 89!
Oscar-winning actor, director and activist Robert Redford passes away at 89 | Obituaries News | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/16/oscar-winning-actor-direc…

Oscar-winning actor, director and activist Robert Redford passes away at 89
Redford was a liberal activist and godfather for independent cinema under the name of one of his best-loved characters.

How the outrage over Jimmy Kimmel's remarks on Charlie Kirk ballooned, starting with one X user, who monitors late night shows for liberal bias, posting a clip (Stuart A. Thompson/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/technology/kimmel-carr-outr…

How Outrage at Kimmel Grew to a Shout From a Whisper
Right-wing users on social media on Tuesday were frustrated but not yet apoplectic about Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue. Things changed.

If you still share Klein's work I will judge you for it.
"The Nazi did politics right: By being a demagogue who attacked any marginalized group he could find - even if I, a liberal laserbrain am uncomfortable with what he said (mostly in style)" is a take that is impossible to come back from.
https://

Mathematical Discovery of Potential Therapeutic Targets: Application to Rare Melanomas
Mahya Aghaee (Department of Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA), Victoria Cicchirillo (Small Animal Clinical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA), Kyle Adams (Department of Mathematics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA), Alberto Riva (ICBR Bioinfor…

Mathematical Discovery of Potential Therapeutic Targets: Application to Rare Melanomas
Patients with rare types of melanoma such as acral, mucosal, or uveal melanoma, have lower survival rates than patients with cutaneous melanoma; these lower survival rates reflect the lower objective response rates to immunotherapy compared to cutaneous melanoma. Understanding tumor-immune dynamics in rare melanomas is critical for the development of new therapies and for improving response rates to current cancer therapies. Progress has been hindered by the lack of clinical data and the need f…

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

A group of left-leaning writers led by Jerusalem Demsas launch The Argument, an outlet to counter the populist right and boost liberal ideas, with $4M backing (Max Tani/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/17/2025/with-the-argument-the-left…

The left gets a new publication
The Argument aims to articulate what the left is for, not just against.

A New Democratic Think Tank Wants to Curb the Influence of Liberal Groups (Reid J. Epstein/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/us/politics/democrats-liberals-jentleson-searchlight.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250917/p11#a250917p11

Lecture: Yen-yi Chan, “Presence and Performance: Devotional Images of Shaka and His Sacred Body in Medieval Nara” (Kanagawa U., Wed., 24 Sept, 3:30–5pm; in-person only)
https://ift.tt/kwlQfiU
Summer 2026 Vietnamese Language Study with Indiana University Kathleen Evans 09/19/2025 - 9:31am …
via Input 4…

This is an interesting series
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/series/the-age-of-extinction

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…

"It has long been understood that the capitalist class has numerous means of functioning as a ruling class via the state, even in the case of a liberal democratic order. On the one hand, this takes the form of fairly direct investiture in the political apparatus through various mechanisms, such as economic and political control of political party machines and the direct occupation by capitalists and their representatives of key posts in the political command structure."

Monthly Review | The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime
John Bellamy Foster revisits and critiques the contention that the U.S. capitalist class is not a “governing” class, or indeed a class-conscious bloc in any sense. However, he writes…

And with a thud felt on every doorstep, the Austerity Times of Mark Carney's Liberal government lands.
Massive layoffs on the way in the public service, likely starting at Canada Post.
Everyone remembers what came after the government of the last austerity-Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin*, right? RIGHT?
(shockingly, also a "Finance Guy”)
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #Economy #CanadaPost #Liberalism #Centrism #Rightwing #Pandering #EndStageCapitalism
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-transformation-changes-1.7643345

Indigenous Beadwork as a Method of Teaching Linear Algebra
Sarah Plosker, Cathy Mattes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10477 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10477

Indigenous Beadwork as a Method of Teaching Linear Algebra
In this work, the authors describe efforts aimed at Indigenizing a second-year linear algebra course at a small liberal arts university in Manitoba, Canada. This is done through an assignment, part hands-on and part written work, that explores the connection between Indigenous beadwork and linear algebra. Our collaboration was perhaps unconventional: Sarah, the first author, is a mathematics professor; while Cathy, the second author, is an associate professor in art history. However, we both ha…

He's never held public office or donned a judge's robes,
but an arch-conservative Los Angeles County attorney is racing toward confirmation on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals,
accelerating the once-liberal court's sharp rightward turn under President Trump.
A competitive target shooter with a background in cryptocurrency,
Eric Tung was approached by the White House Counsel's Office on March 28 to replace Judge Sandra Segal Ikuta,
a Bush appoin…

Trump taps 'Tough Patriot' — L.A. lawyer known for crypto, guns — as 9th Circuit judge
President Trump's pick to fill a vacant seat on the West Coast's federal appeals court is a Pasadena attorney who is anti-abortion, pro-gun and has a backgro...

Liberalism for the 21st Century (Paul Crider/Liberal Currents)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-for-the-21st-century/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250812/p20#a250812p20

Lecture: Yen-yi Chan, “Presence and Performance: Devotional Images of Shaka and His Sacred Body in Medieval Nara” (Kanagawa U., Wed., 24 Sept, 3:30–5pm; in-person only)
https://ift.tt/WXV1OpP
Summer 2026 Vietnamese Language Study with Indiana University Kathleen Evans 09/19/2025 - 9:31am …
via Input 4…

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?"

Degenerate Nation: RFK Jr's Far-Right Disease Prevention (Alan Elrod/Liberal Currents)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/degenerate-nation-rfk-jrs-far-right-disease-prevention/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250811/p70#a250811p70

Zelensky apparently warned the world today of nuclear-armed drones if authoritarian and lawless governments continue to be allowed to wage war and threaten liberal nations.
ugh.
#ArmsRace #nuclear #RussiaUkraine #Ukraine

Curtis Yarvin wears racial hatred as a badge of honor
—and clearly doesn't come into contact with people of color on a regular basis.
Yarvin, who hides behind a screen, wouldn't have the guts to utter these slurs on the street. -- In the real world, that kind of talk tends to carry consequences.
Instead, he flings epithets from the safety of his tony Craftsman home in ultra-liberal Berkeley, performing racism online for an audience of anonymous far-right Twitter use…

Curtis Yarvin Just Can’t Stop Using This Racist Word
His slurs are public. His ideas are toxic. But to men like JD Vance, Yarvin is still worth following.

Lecture: Yen-yi Chan, “Presence and Performance: Devotional Images of Shaka and His Sacred Body in Medieval Nara” (Kanagawa U., Wed., 24 Sept, 3:30–5pm; in-person only)
https://ift.tt/kwlQfiU
Summer 2026 Vietnamese Language Study with Indiana University Kathleen Evans 09/19/2025 - 9:31am …
via Input 4…

Yoram Hazony's National Conservatism Wants to Abandon Liberal Democracy so that the Jewish People Maintain Hegemony in Israel (Michael G. Holzman/The UnPopulist)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/yoram-hazonys-national-conservatism
http://www.memeorandum.com/250810/p35#a250810p35

Jerusalem Demsas left The Atlantic in recent weeks to launch The Argument,
a new publication that aims to push back against the populist right by strengthening the ideas and arguments of modern liberalism and convincing readers of their legitimacy.
“To move out of this post-liberal, populist moment towards a better future
— one with equal rights, material prosperity, and commitment to human progress
— will require our government, culture, politics, and people to recom…

The Argument | Substack
Join Us. We're Libbing Out. Click to read The Argument, a Substack publication.

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?

One of Charlie Kirk’s main legacies was a “watchlist” of professors who Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, considered too liberal;
People on the list often were targeted for smears and death threats.
TPUSA also bussed people to the January 6 insurrection, and Kirk was a major proponent of “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories.
Among many other horrific statements, Kirk said that stoning LGBT people to death is part of “God’s perfect law,”
and that gun dea…

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning
The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn’t a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division

Lecture: Yen-yi Chan, “Presence and Performance: Devotional Images of Shaka and His Sacred Body in Medieval Nara” (Kanagawa U., Wed., 24 Sept, 3:30–5pm; in-person only)
https://ift.tt/0ixpmAw
TOC The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol 18, 5 (2017) …
via Input 4 RELCFP

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

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.

Lecture: Yen-yi Chan, “Presence and Performance: Devotional Images of Shaka and His Sacred Body in Medieval Nara” (Kanagawa U., Wed., 24 Sept, 3:30–5pm; in-person only)
https://ift.tt/KsP1Mnt
TOC The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol 18, 5 (2017) …
via Input 4 RELCFP

In a stinging dissent joined by her two liberal colleagues,
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote:
“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed
simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.
Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”
Department of Homeland Security attorneys have said immigration officers target people bas…

Lecture: Yen-yi Chan, “Presence and Performance: Devotional Images of Shaka and His Sacred Body in Medieval Nara” (Kanagawa U., Wed., 24 Sept, 3:30–5pm; in-person only) https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20125…

So Carney tries to force AC employees back to work after less than 12 hours. Every day, he shows the Liberal Party has abandoned working people, and Carney is just the latest. Trudeau’s government didn’t care either.
“Steven Tufts, associate professor and labour geographer at York University, says Air Canada has become dependent on the federal government to solve its labour-relations issues.
He mentioned last year's dispute between the airline and the pilots' union. Air Canada asked for the government to be ready to step in before the two sides reached a tentative agreement in September 2024.”
#canpoli #cdnpoli #union #cupe #solidarity

Lecture: Yen-yi Chan, “Presence and Performance: Devotional Images of Shaka and His Sacred Body in Medieval Nara” (Kanagawa U., Wed., 24 Sept, 3:30–5pm; in-person only) https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20125…

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 …