Tootfinder

🙈 Political parties mostly ignore existing economic inequality, large-scale analysis finds
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-political-parties-economic-inequality-large.html

Political parties mostly ignore existing economic inequality, large-scale analysis finds
Growing dissatisfaction among the population, loss of trust in politics, increase in crime and violence: Economic inequality leads to a variety of social consequences. Nevertheless, the issue plays a much smaller role in the election manifestos of political parties both in Germany and in other countries than researchers had previously assumed. These are the results of a current study by the Cluster of Excellence The Politics of Inequality at the University of Konstanz, recently published in the…

A surprising link between hosting a bike race and reducing support for far right politics.
https://road.cc/content/news/tour-de-france-reduces-support-far-right-parties-315979

The Tour de France helps reduce support for far-right political parties, new research finds
Tour de France reduces support for far-right parties

2023 elections, the Netherlands: many vote for weird parties hoping they'll do a better job than normal parties. Weird parties argue for half a year, form a coalition, do little and keep on arguing.
Same voters now: we really don't trust politics anymore. Politicians do little and keep arguing.

Why did Republicans close ranks around Donald Trump in 2016,
when they could have salvaged their old party and rebuilt after losing?
From the vantage point of today, it’s easy to dismiss the notion. “That’s just what parties do, of course, particularly Republicans in their era of hyperpartisanship.”
But the people who might say that have forgotten how unsettled Republicans were a decade ago.
The idea that they might be forced to withdraw support from Trump and accep…

MAGA Disarray And The Accumulated Debt Of Corruption
They'd bring America down rather than face accountability, but accountability is not optional.

WBD says it is expanding a strategic review and is open to a sale after receiving "unsolicited interest" from multiple parties; WBD jumps 7% pre-market (Sara Salinas/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/21/wbd-sale-warner-bros-media.html

💔 Survivre Š une dérive sectaire, c’est déjŠ un combat. Se reconstruire et chercher justice, c’est encore plus difficile. Aidons les victimes d’OKC Š faire entendre leur voix au tribunal. ⚖️ 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org

Association Chardons Bleus - Un combat contre la dérive sectaire OKC depuis 27 ans
l'Association Chardons Bleus réunit des victimes-survivants parties civiles dans l'affaire OKC en France après 10 ans de bataille judiciaire en Belgique

When you start to see that capitalism is nothing but systemic exploitation and domination, and that Marxism-Leninism only reproduces the same state capitalism under another name through authoritarian state socialism, you then realize that leftist parties don’t actually bring about any fundamental change, because they to keep power rigidly centralized, to preserve existing hierarchies, and to maintain the dominance of the ruling classes.
If you want a genuine alternative, one built on w…

Poll: Majorities across parties say 'extreme political rhetoric' was a contributor to Charlie Kirk's killing (Scott Bland/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-majorities-parties-extreme-rhetoric-charlie-kirk-killing-rcna243560
http://www.memeorandum.com/251117/p143#a251117p143

If you've been wondering how the poltiical situation in DE & across the EU is developing, some new research shows how the normalisation of the far-right . both by parties & the media has enabled their successes across the EU:
«The research highlighted the need for mainstream political parties to carve out their own discourses, said Saldivia Gonzatti, particularly when it came to topics such as migration and integration, rather than constantly trail after the far right»
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/german-far-right-setting-agenda-as-opponents-amplify-its-ideas-study-finds

swingers: Swingers and parties (2013)
A bipartite sexual affiliation network representing “swing unit” couples (one node per couple) and the parties they attended.
This network has 96 nodes and 232 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/swingers

What can we do against the rise of the hateful, anti-democratic far-right?
Stay informed, speak out, support democratic parties and humanitarian organizations, vote!
And more here:
https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/113681807165629296

So far as I can tell at the moment, Your Party will be stillborn,
https://chaos.social/@onepict/115235476888701531
Which is a big disappointment.

QQ for all the "Restore the #RuleOfLaw" folks out there: When militarized police crushed Occupy for daring to challenge the logic of bailing out the bankers who crashed the economy rather than the people they fleeced, was that "Rule of Law"? When militarized police maimed and brutalized water protectors, was that "Rule of Law"? When oil companies and tech monopolies fund both parties and just happen to get legislation that keeps them in power, is that "Rule of Law"? When your tax dollars go to fund genocide, to pay to drop bombs on children, is that "Rule of Law"? When the NSA was spying on American citizens, was that "Rule of Law"? How about the drone strikes on Americans, was that "Rule of Law"? When cops murder people and then use "qualified immunity" to get away with it, is that "Rule of Law"?
Y'all keep talking about how #NoKings is about "restoring rule of law." It's got a bit of a "Make America Great Again" feel to it: you're invoking a return to a history that never actually existed.

Catherine Connolly on the streets of Galway today.
People Before Profit members in Galway have enthusiastically supported Catherine's campaign for the Presidency and are honoured to be able help build the movement locally with so many other lovely people.
We're very excited to see a grassroots, people powered movement that has united parties on the Left along with independents and those unaffiliated with any political party.

Beware of snakes like Tricia Cotham in NC who switched parties and gave MAGA a veto-proof majority in the house.
https://ncnewsline.com/2023/04/05/rep-tricia-cothams-party-switch-gives-the-house-gop-a-veto-proof-majority/

Il y a des gens qui jouent Š #Codenames sur l'app mobile dans mon réseau ?
Le niveau des randoms est un peu triste, et j'aimerais bien faire des parties qualitatives :)
(je demande pas un niveau de ouf, mais juste des gens qui ont compris le jeu, genre "si deux mots peuvent être reliés par un indice évident et que c'est pas celui-lŠ qui est donné, c'est sûremen…

"German far right setting agenda as opponents amplify its ideas, study finds
Normalisation of far-right stances likely to affect success of such parties at ballot boxes across Europe, say researchers"
https://www.theguardian.com/world…

swingers: Swingers and parties (2013)
A bipartite sexual affiliation network representing “swing unit” couples (one node per couple) and the parties they attended.
This network has 96 nodes and 232 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/swingers<…

🚧 L’accès Š la justice est un combat. Encore plus pour des survivant-es de dérives sectaires. Aidons-les Š surmonter cet obstacle et Š voir leur dossier avancer. Chaque don compte ! 💙 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org

Association Chardons Bleus - Un combat contre la dérive sectaire OKC depuis 27 ans
l'Association Chardons Bleus réunit des victimes-survivants parties civiles dans l'affaire OKC en France après 10 ans de bataille judiciaire en Belgique

Incentivizing Time-Aware Fairness in Data Sharing
Jiangwei Chen, Kieu Thao Nguyen Pham, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Arun Verma, Zhaoxuan Wu, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09240

Incentivizing Time-Aware Fairness in Data Sharing
In collaborative data sharing and machine learning, multiple parties aggregate their data resources to train a machine learning model with better model performance. However, as the parties incur data collection costs, they are only willing to do so when guaranteed incentives, such as fairness and individual rationality. Existing frameworks assume that all parties join the collaboration simultaneously, which does not hold in many real-world scenarios. Due to the long processing time for data cle…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/german-far-right-setting-agenda-as-opponents-amplify-its-ideas-study-finds
Now that proper researchers say what we've been repeating for at least a decade, wi…

Both parties brace for a 'long conflict' as government shutdown hits two-week mark (NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/both-parties-brace-long-conflict-government-shutdown-two-week-mark-rcna236970
http://www.memeorandum.com/251014/p118#a251014p118

After bringing white South Africans to the United States as refugees earlier this year,
the Trump administration is now reportedly considering granting protection to members of far-right European parties.
According to the New York Times, the proposal that Donald Trump is now weighing would prioritize Europeans who are allegedly
“targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.”
The pro…

Trump could soon make America’s refugee program a tool for white nationalism
The White House is considering a plan to overhaul refugee admissions in favor of right-wing whites.

Payment Channels with Proofs
Chad E. Brown, Cezary Kaliszyk, Josef Urban
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08268 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08268

Payment Channels with Proofs
The fundamental building blocks of the Bitcoin lightning network are bidirectional payment channels. We describe an extension of payment channels in the Proofgold network which allow the two parties to bet on whether a proposition will be proven by a certain time. These provide the foundation for a Proofgold lightning network that would allow parties to request proofs (by betting there will be no proof by a certain time) and other parties to provide proofs (and be rewarded by betting there will…

I feel like a copious amount of Fedi drama could just be avoided by having both parties (who are no doubt well-meaning) just stop and chat (calmly and respectfully) with each other until they come to a conclusion.

Framing Migration: A Computational Analysis of UK Parliamentary Discourse
Vahid Ghafouri, Robert McNeil, Teodor Yankov, Madeleine Sumption, Luc Rocher, Scott A. Hale, Adam Mahdi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14197

Framing Migration: A Computational Analysis of UK Parliamentary Discourse
We present a large-scale computational analysis of migration-related discourse in UK parliamentary debates spanning over 75 years and compare it with US congressional discourse. Using open-weight LLMs, we annotate each statement with high-level stances toward migrants and track the net tone toward migrants across time and political parties. For the UK, we extend this with a semi-automated framework for extracting fine-grained narrative frames to capture nuances of migration discourse. Our findi…

was just reminded where i was 15 years ago today, at all tomorrow's parties' last stand at kutsher's (or maybe just kutsher's last stand), the only place i've ever encountered an out-of-order sign on a mattress. probably one of my last proper blog posts. https://jessejarnow.com/2010/09/all-to

"New Zealand accused of ‘full-blown climate denial’ over cuts to methane reduction targets"
#NewZealand #Climate #ClimateChange

La confiance est révocable.
Si vous avez aimé un produit ou un logiciel, et qu'il se détériore, que ses conditions changent, qu'il ajoute des fonctions d'espionnage, vous pouvez changer d'avis et cesser de lui faire confiance et de l'utiliser.
Vous devez toujours réajuster votre jugement lorsque vous recevez de nouvelles informations.
Cela s'applique aux produits, aux plateformes, aux entreprises, aux partis politiques et aux personnes.

Why do rightwing parties in Europe call themselves "freedom parties"?

Flip side of this: ~3 years ago, I got automated calls from “RBC Visa”. I ignored them.
Then my card stopped working.
So I called the number on the back of my card and said as much.
The agent gave me a hard time: “So you JUST IGNORED our calls about this?”
“No; I didn’t know they were you calling.”
“How did you not know they were us?! It says ‘this is RBC Visa’ when you answer!”
“That’s indistinguishable from fraud.”
He did not like that. He thought …

none of these words are in the bible

It's come to this.
Yaxley Lennon and Farage endorse Mahmoud's asylum plan. Most Labour MPs supine.
Progressive parties oppose them.
‘Morally wrong and politically disastrous’ – Labour's asylum plans slammed | Morning Star
https://mor…

Dear People I am done with following hyped music, manufactured, and promoted by money grubbing bottom dwellers . For the most part we know who the guilty parties are....

Jaguars, Travis Hunter reveal keys to getting the No. 2 overall pick more involved on offense

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/jaguars-t…

💔 Les survivants d’OKC ont surmonté des défis incroyables. Ensemble, luttons pour leur droit Š la justice. Rejoignez-nous pour mettre fin Š l'impunité. 🙏 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/

Association Chardons Bleus - Un combat contre la dérive sectaire OKC depuis 27 ans
l'Association Chardons Bleus réunit des victimes-survivants parties civiles dans l'affaire OKC en France après 10 ans de bataille judiciaire en Belgique

😿 The Crisis of the Portuguese Left
#politics

The Crisis of the Portuguese Left
The Portuguese Socialist Party once seemed to be a model for Europe’s center left, gaining support while its sister parties were in decline. But this year’s election was a crushing defeat that saw the Socialists fall behind the far-right group Chega.

N-Parties Private Structure and Parameter Learning for Sum-Product Networks
Xenia Heilmann, Ernst Althaus, Mattia Cerrato, Nick Johannes Peter Rassau, Mohammad Sadeq Dousti, Stefan Kramer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05946

N-Parties Private Structure and Parameter Learning for Sum-Product Networks
A sum-product network (SPN) is a graphical model that allows several types of probabilistic inference to be performed efficiently. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving protocol which tackles structure generation and parameter learning of SPNs. Additionally, we provide a protocol for private inference on SPNs, subsequent to training. To preserve the privacy of the participants, we derive our protocol based on secret sharing, which guarantees privacy in the honest-but-curious setting ev…

Low-cost Highly-interoperable Multiplatform Campus Network: Experience of YARSI University
Surya Agustian, Sandra Permana, Salman Teguh Pratista, Syarifu Adam, Iswandi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13954

Low-cost Highly-interoperable Multiplatform Campus Network: Experience of YARSI University
To some organizations, building campus network is sometimes considered to be very expensive; and this has made the project uneasy to perform. Moreover, if the organization without sufficient IT knowledge does not have capable IT engineers, leaving this project to third parties without supervision would lead to unexpected larger expenses. For this reason, in the year of 2003, YARSI University formed CMIS (Center for Management Infor-mation System) to perform tasks in designing, operations and ma…

Parties have split over less disastrous results, just saying

https://theonion.com/local-teen-walks-in-on-family-masturbating-1819575823/

Local Teen Walks In On Family Masturbating
SALEM, OR—In a humiliating incident that all parties involved said they would “never get over,” Peter Miklewski, 15, confirmed he came home from school early Monday and accidentally walked in on seven members of his family masturbating in the living room. “Aaagh! Get out of here, goddammit!” shouted Peter’s parents, David and Jessica; his sister, Virginia; his older brother, Caleb; and his grandmother Emily, while his younger brother, Mark, and his aunt Fay reportedly scrambled to t…

Just because the educational work of Anarcho-Syndicalists is directed toward the development of independent thought and action, they are outspoken opponents of all centralising tendencies which are so characteristic of most of the present labour parties.
Centralism, that artificial scheme which operates from the top towards the bottom and turns over the affairs of administration to a small minority, is always attended by barren official routine; it crushes individual conviction, kills …

Late to the party (tbh, I don't attend many parties), but David Gilmour's album Luck and Strange is full of music I like:
https://album.link/i/1742106033

"An SNP victory in May’s Holyrood contest would hardly be an earthquake, after 18 continuous years of nationalist government. It would, though, signal a remarkable comeback from a period of eclipse, and from an often dismal record on public services. For Labour, which did so well in Scotland in the 2024 general election, it would signal a crisis moment, imperilling Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership"
#UKPol

It's been a while since an energy supplier in France offered dynamic prices to households. Since this month, there's a new one.
Sobry doesn't offer smart device control yet, but for most EVs and many heat pumps and A/Cs, device manufacturers or 3rd parties offer tools.
https://www.sobry.co/particulier

📸 2018 : entre deux procès de la secte OKC.
2025 : en Belgique, certaines indemnisations ne sont toujours pas versées.
Et en France ? Le dossier est gelé.
⏳ 8 ans d’attente pour les parties civiles.
🔇 19 audition. 1 mise en examen. 0 arrestation.

omg parents stop getting meat pizza for your kids' bday parties.
The cheese pizza disappears in 3 seconds and everyone is left with the gross meat pizza. Every time!

Cheat-Penalised Quantum Weak Coin-Flipping
Atul Singh Arora, Carl A. Miller, Mauro E. S. Morales, Jamie Sikora
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03218 https://arx…

Cheat-Penalised Quantum Weak Coin-Flipping
Coin-flipping is a fundamental task in two-party cryptography where two remote mistrustful parties wish to generate a shared uniformly random bit. While quantum protocols promising near-perfect security exist for weak coin-flipping -- when the parties want opposing outcomes -- it has been shown that they must be inefficient in terms of their round complexity, and it is an open question of how space efficient they can be. In this work, we consider a variant called cheat-penalised weak coin-flipp…

DC Department of Parks and Recreation installed a new plaque at T Street Park memorializing William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved DC resident who was one of the country’s earliest advocates for LGBTQ rights.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the…

The First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Was a Formerly Enslaved Man
In the late 19th century, William Dorsey Swann's private parties attracted unwelcome attention from authorities and the press

Businesses are throwing parties celebrating his resignation...
OK GOP State Senator, Essentially: Ryan Walters’ Mandates Were Performative Bullshit | Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/06/ok-gop-state-senator-essentially-ryan-walters-mandates-were-performative-bullshit/

@… You gave me the idea to build something like it internally to my employer.
I see so many PowerPoints presented to clients with random redirects to shady 3rd parties.

swingers: Swingers and parties (2013)
A bipartite sexual affiliation network representing “swing unit” couples (one node per couple) and the parties they attended.
This network has 96 nodes and 232 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/swingers

A US district judge rules that Amazon must face a class action lawsuit involving 288M customers over claims it overcharged for products sold by third parties (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/a

Modern politics is an iterated prisoner's dilemma where one of the parties has repeatedly said and repeatedly proved that they don't care how much they screw themselves over as long as the other guys get screwed too.

The mainstream media loves making it seam like dysfunction in Washington is coming from both parties.
Hello?
Much of the GOP no longer accepts the rule of law, or the norms of democracy, or the legitimacy of the opposing party.
Enough of the false equivalence.
https://bsky.app/profile/rbr…

Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social)
The mainstream media loves making it seam like dysfunction in Washington is coming from both parties. Hello? Much of the GOP no longer accepts the rule of law, or the norms of democracy, or the legitimacy of the opposing party. Enough of the false equivalence.

💢 Research shows there are no easy fixes to political hatred
#politics

Research shows there are no easy fixes to political hatred
Tune into American politics today, and you'll hear something far more sinister than simple disagreement. The language has escalated: political parties trash talk each other—blaming rival parties for policy failures or even for causing incidents with national implications.

Finally, Dutch parliament (on initiative by D66) may determine that all political parties need to be open to members.
So far, the PVV was allowed to operate with only one member, by definition. Guess who.
https://www.tro…

Serieuze kans dat partijen straks leden móeten hebben, en dat heeft grote gevolgen voor de PVV
Een voorstel om partijen te verplichten leden toe te laten maakt een goede kans op een meerderheid. Dat zou grote impact hebben op de PVV van Geert Wilders.

DRAssist: Dispute Resolution Assistance using Large Language Models
Sachin Pawar, Manoj Apte, Girish K. Palshikar, Basit Ali, Nitin Ramrakhiyani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01962

DRAssist: Dispute Resolution Assistance using Large Language Models
Disputes between two parties occur in almost all domains such as taxation, insurance, banking, healthcare, etc. The disputes are generally resolved in a specific forum (e.g., consumer court) where facts are presented, points of disagreement are discussed, arguments as well as specific demands of the parties are heard, and finally a human judge resolves the dispute by often favouring one of the two parties. In this paper, we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) as assistants for the h…

"Although the leftist alliance led by Jeannette Jara of the Communist Party, who served as Boric’s labor minister, is ahead in the opinion polls, she will not get an outright majority in the first round as Boric did.  And a collection of right-wing parties is likely to combine their vote and get Kast into the presidential office in the second round in December."

Chile: another turn to the right?
Chile has a general election today. Around 15m voters can take part in the first round to elect a new president, the lower house and half the seats of the senate. Incumbent President Gabriel Boric,…

⚠️ Les survivant-es d’OKC se battent contre un système judiciaire lent et souvent violent pour les victimes. Aidons-les Š franchir cette épreuve et Š porter leur affaire jusqu’au procès. 🙏 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/

Association Chardons Bleus - Un combat contre la dérive sectaire OKC depuis 27 ans
l'Association Chardons Bleus réunit des victimes-survivants parties civiles dans l'affaire OKC en France après 10 ans de bataille judiciaire en Belgique

ORQ: Complex Analytics on Private Data with Strong Security Guarantees
Eli Baum, Sam Buxbaum, Nitin Mathai, Muhammad Faisal, Vasiliki Kalavri, Mayank Varia, John Liagouris
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10793

ORQ: Complex Analytics on Private Data with Strong Security Guarantees
We present ORQ, a system that enables collaborative analysis of large private datasets using cryptographically secure multi-party computation (MPC). ORQ protects data against semi-honest or malicious parties and can efficiently evaluate relational queries with multi-way joins and aggregations that have been considered notoriously expensive under MPC. To do so, ORQ eliminates the quadratic cost of secure joins by leveraging the fact that, in practice, the structure of many real queries allows us…

swingers: Swingers and parties (2013)
A bipartite sexual affiliation network representing “swing unit” couples (one node per couple) and the parties they attended.
This network has 96 nodes and 232 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/swingers

"Labour has also won every time the Senedd has been contested, as it will be again in May. Yet, if the most recent Wales-wide poll holds good, that is set to change. Plaid will instead be the largest party, just ahead of Reform UK, with Labour third. Though still a minority, Plaid would be in government. In Welsh terms, that would be a political earthquake. Perhaps in Britain-wide terms too"
#UKPol

A Tennessee special election to replace a Republican congressman who stepped aside this summer
has resulted in crowded primaries for both major parties,
a new test for one of three districts that GOP lawmakers drew as safely red in 2022 by dividing left-leaning Nashville.
The race to fill the seat vacated by former U.S. Rep. Mark Green could gauge the popularity of Donald Trump’s authoritarian second-term agenda, especially with suburban Republican voters.
There had be…

Special election in Tennessee draws a crowd in both parties
A Tennessee special election to replace a Republican congressman who stepped aside this summer has attracted crowded primaries for both major parties. The departure of former U.S. Rep. Mark Green has resulted in the contested primary Tuesday in one of three districts that GOP lawmakers drew as safe red seats in 2022 by dividing left-leaning Nashville. Eleven Republicans are running in the 14-county district, with most attention centering on state Reps. Jody Barrett and Gino Bulso and former Ten…

Less than 2 years ago, the right and far-right parties later forming the now double-failed Dutch government coalition got 88 out of 150 seats in parliament. They're now polling at 53 seats.
The two parties still in the caretaker government together at 21 seats.

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

"UN urges nations to submit overdue climate plans 'as soon as possible' ahead of COP30"
#UN #UnitedNations #COP30

UN urges nations to submit overdue climate plans ahead of COP30
Most parties, including the EU, missed the February deadline to submit new climate plans, and pressure is mounting as the UN climate summit approaches.

Perfectly-Private Analog Secure Aggregation in Federated Learning
Delio Jaramillo-Velez, Charul Rajput, Ragnar Freij-Hollanti, Camilla Hollanti, Alexandre Graell i Amat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08683

Perfectly-Private Analog Secure Aggregation in Federated Learning
In federated learning, multiple parties train models locally and share their parameters with a central server, which aggregates them to update a global model. To address the risk of exposing sensitive data through local models, secure aggregation via secure multiparty computation has been proposed to enhance privacy. At the same time, perfect privacy can only be achieved by a uniform distribution of the masked local models to be aggregated. This raises a problem when working with real valued da…

Structure of quantum measurements implementable with one round of classical communication
Arthur C. R. Dutra, Ties-A. Ohst, Hai-Chau Nguyen, Otfried G\"uhne
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09381

Structure of quantum measurements implementable with one round of classical communication
Measurements that can be implemented via local operations and classical communication (LOCC) constitute a class of operations that is available in future quantum networks in which parties share entangled resource states. We characterise the different classes of measurements implementable with LOCC, where communication is restricted to a single round with a fixed direction. In particular, using the framework of constrained separability problems, we provide a complete characterisation of the clas…

I believe the dismantling of capitalism and the state must come through direct action and self-organization by the working class, united in democratic, federated, and recallable unions. Power must grow from the bottom, from the workplaces and communities of ordinary people, instead of being handed to parties or leaders who claim to act on our behalf. Emancipation will only be achieved when workers collectively take control of production, end exploitation, and organize society through free co…

swingers: Swingers and parties (2013)
A bipartite sexual affiliation network representing “swing unit” couples (one node per couple) and the parties they attended.
This network has 96 nodes and 232 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/swingers

🚧 L’accès Š la justice est un combat. Encore plus pour des survivant-es de dérives sectaires. Aidons-les Š surmonter cet obstacle et Š voir leur dossier avancer. Chaque don compte ! 💙 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org

Association Chardons Bleus - Un combat contre la dérive sectaire OKC depuis 27 ans
l'Association Chardons Bleus réunit des victimes-survivants parties civiles dans l'affaire OKC en France après 10 ans de bataille judiciaire en Belgique

Flight delays could force parties to the shutdown bargaining table (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/08/flight-delays-shutdown-bargaining-00598848
http://www.memeorandum.com/251008/p140#a251008p140

Spoiler: of the existing parties (i.e. not including Your proto-Party), the #GreenParty wins by a league.
Which political parties support public ownership? | We Own It
https://weownit.…

"Converting debts into income streams for third parties is the true basis of the finance industry. It's the means by which socially useless intermediaries extract ever-mounting rents from the productive economy" -- @…

Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
#USPol

⚖️ Survivre Š une secte, c’est dur. Obtenir justice, encore plus. L’instruction de l’affaire OKC-Spatz arrive Š un moment clé. Aidons 6 parties civiles Š aller jusqu’au procès. 🙏 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/cagnotte-en-ligne

Faire un don | Association Chardons Bleus
Transparence Le bilan total des dons sera actualisé toutes les deux semaines. Quand vous faites un don hors-ligne par virement bancaire, votre montant de do ...

swingers: Swingers and parties (2013)
A bipartite sexual affiliation network representing “swing unit” couples (one node per couple) and the parties they attended.
This network has 96 nodes and 232 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/swingers

You can hate me all you want, but when it comes to Zohran Mamdani, the reality is clear. He is a democratic socialist running as a candidate within the Democratic Party. Ultimately, by participating in the Democratic Party’s electoral system, he is operating within and effectively supporting the framework of American capitalism and imperialism.
The two major U.S. parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, are fundamentally aligned in preserving the capitalist system that m…

⚖️ 6 parties civiles se battent pour la justice dans l’affaire OKC-Spatz. iElles n’ont pas les moyens de payer leurs avocats. Chardons Bleus est lŠ pour les soutenir. Aidons-les Š poursuivre leur combat ! votre don peut faire la différence 💙 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/dons

Cagnotte Juridique | Association Chardons Bleus
Depuis 2015, nous luttons pour la justice contre les dérives sectaires de l’Ogyen Kunzang Chöling (OKC)

swingers: Swingers and parties (2013)
A bipartite sexual affiliation network representing “swing unit” couples (one node per couple) and the parties they attended.
This network has 96 nodes and 232 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/swingers

💔 Survivre Š une dérive sectaire, c’est déjŠ un combat. Se reconstruire et chercher justice, c’est encore plus difficile. Aidons les victimes d’OKC Š faire entendre leur voix au tribunal. ⚖️ 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org

Association Chardons Bleus - Un combat contre la dérive sectaire OKC depuis 27 ans
l'Association Chardons Bleus réunit des victimes-survivants parties civiles dans l'affaire OKC en France après 10 ans de bataille judiciaire en Belgique

France starved, Louis and Marie build magnificent buildings, threw fancy parties, and glutted on exotic foods.
Too bad Trump slept through history classes.
It didn’t turn out well for them,
and I hope Trump eventually sees accountability.
https://bsky.app/profile/gerardtb.bsky

Gerard (@gerardtb.bsky.social)
Let him have the bunker. Tear down every Trump building. Flatten Mar-a-Lago. Erase everything he worked for. A siege can last a long time, but eventually it ends. Just make sure he doesn't flee to his master in Russia.

Podemos's maximalist posture is preventing Spain enacting an arms embargo on Israel. Other parties (Sumar, ERC) agree it's inadequate but say they can then work to strengthen it, e.g. with surveillance at ports.
Un embargo de armas como respuesta a un genocidio

Un embargo de armas como respuesta a un genocidio
El decreto del embargo de armas a Israel recibirá el apoyo de los socios del Gobierno, pero Podemos se niega en el pleno a garantizar su aprobación por considerarlo falso e insuficiente. Álvarez de Toledo utiliza hechos desacreditados sobre el ataque de Hamás en 2023 para atacar al Gobierno

⚠️ Les survivant-es d’OKC se battent contre un système judiciaire lent et souvent violent pour les victimes. Aidons-les Š franchir cette épreuve et Š porter leur affaire jusqu’au procès. 🙏 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/

Association Chardons Bleus - Un combat contre la dérive sectaire OKC depuis 27 ans
l'Association Chardons Bleus réunit des victimes-survivants parties civiles dans l'affaire OKC en France après 10 ans de bataille judiciaire en Belgique

Many of the details of the agreement reached after 3 days of indirect talks in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh remain unclear and challenges of implementing its terms are immense.
But in recent days, negotiators have closed gaps between Hamas and Israel over the details of the first phase of the 21-point plan announced by Trump in the White House last week.
It was not immediately certain whether the parties had made any progress on thornier questions about the futu…

Un procès est essentiel, mais le financement est crucial pour faire entendre leur voix. Soutenons les 6 parties civiles de l’affaire OKC-Spatz pour obtenir justice. 💙 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/

Robert Spatz, le gourou d’OKC, est toujours en liberté. Au moins un abus est en cours en Espagne. En France, seules six parties civiles se battent pour qu’un mandat d’arrêt international soit enfin délivré.
https://youtu.be/R04H6ht2QU4?si=cjoqHTQjSsS9jmdU

This year's federal budget runs out September 30,
and although lawmakers from both parties have signaled they will reject most of Trump's cuts, it's far from certain that Congress will pass a budget for the next fiscal year before the looming deadline.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has directed NASA managers to make plans to close out missions tagged for cancellation.
Without specific congressional direction, the White House would have a clear hand at imp…

GOP may finally succeed in unrelenting quest to kill two NASA climate satellites
One scientist says it’s like buying a car and running it into a tree to save on gas money.

Republicans hold a 219-213 majority in the House,
but they could lock in more seats if reapportionments go their way
Normally, redistricting only occurs after the US census counts residents in each state every 10 years.
But a demand from Donald Trump to lock in more Republican-leaning districts in Congress,
together with a changing legal landscape around partisan gerrymandering,
set off a chain of mid-decade reapportionments.
Republicans and Democrats have…

> 7 ans après ce post.
30 ans après les faits.
En France, les victimes engagées en tant que parties civiles attendent toujours que la justice bouge.
Le dossier OKC-Spatz a été rouvert en 2021. Depuis ?
Silence.
La Belgique a jugé.
L’Espagne a protégé Spatz.

⚖️ 6 parties civiles se battent pour la justice dans l’affaire OKC-Spatz. iElles n’ont pas les moyens de payer leurs avocats. Chardons Bleus est lŠ pour les soutenir. Aidons-les Š poursuivre leur combat ! votre don peut faire la différence 💙 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/dons

Cagnotte Juridique | Association Chardons Bleus
Depuis 2015, nous luttons pour la justice contre les dérives sectaires de l’Ogyen Kunzang Chöling (OKC)

⚠️ Les survivant-es d’OKC se battent contre un système judiciaire lent et souvent violent pour les victimes. Aidons-les Š franchir cette épreuve et Š porter leur affaire jusqu’au procès. 🙏 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/

Association Chardons Bleus - Un combat contre la dérive sectaire OKC depuis 27 ans
l'Association Chardons Bleus réunit des victimes-survivants parties civiles dans l'affaire OKC en France après 10 ans de bataille judiciaire en Belgique

⚖️ Survivre Š une secte, c’est dur. Obtenir justice, encore plus. L’instruction de l’affaire OKC-Spatz arrive Š un moment clé. Aidons 6 parties civiles Š aller jusqu’au procès. 🙏 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/cagnotte-en-ligne

Faire un don | Association Chardons Bleus
Transparence Le bilan total des dons sera actualisé toutes les deux semaines. Quand vous faites un don hors-ligne par virement bancaire, votre montant de do ...

📸 2018 : entre deux procès de la secte OKC.
2025 : en Belgique, certaines indemnisations ne sont toujours pas versées.
Et en France ? Le dossier est gelé.
⏳ 8 ans d’attente pour les parties civiles.
🔇 19 audition. 1 mise en examen. 0 arrestation.

Un procès est essentiel, mais le financement est crucial pour faire entendre leur voix. Soutenons les 6 parties civiles de l’affaire OKC-Spatz pour obtenir justice. 💙 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/

> 7 ans après ce post.
30 ans après les faits.
En France, les victimes engagées en tant que parties civiles attendent toujours que la justice bouge.
Le dossier OKC-Spatz a été rouvert en 2021. Depuis ?
Silence.
La Belgique a jugé.
L’Espagne a protégé Spatz.

> 7 ans après ce post.
30 ans après les faits.
En France, les victimes engagées en tant que parties civiles attendent toujours que la justice bouge.
Le dossier OKC-Spatz a été rouvert en 2021. Depuis ?
Silence.
La Belgique a jugé.
L’Espagne a protégé Spatz.

⚖️ Survivre Š une secte, c’est dur. Obtenir justice, encore plus. L’instruction de l’affaire OKC-Spatz arrive Š un moment clé. Aidons 6 parties civiles Š aller jusqu’au procès. 🙏 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/cagnotte-en-ligne

Faire un don | Association Chardons Bleus
Transparence Le bilan total des dons sera actualisé toutes les deux semaines. Quand vous faites un don hors-ligne par virement bancaire, votre montant de do ...