Tootfinder

"…the long arc of history has never been kind to those who rule by force rather than persuasion."
https://www.meidasplus.com/p/court-victory-masks-political-freefall

Court Victory Masks Political Freefall
As the President basks in Supreme Court victories and executive power grabs, his core supporters are peeling away—and the consequences may be deeper than he thinks.

[disclaimer: not a political scientist, just riffing here]
Plurality voting forces a two-party system. There will always be two parties (or if a third forms, the system will rapidly collapse back to two; this happened twice in US history).
The role of the two parties can change, however. Parties are coalitions, and coalitions are heterogeneous. There are lots of ways to draw lines through the myriad political interests to form two coalitions of roughly equal size. And those lines can shift.
3/

Seeking a distraction from his current political travails,
Donald Trump is attempting to relitigate the nearly decade-old controversy over Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
Trump claims that President Barack Obama committed treason,
-- a crime that may be punishable by death.
Trump is wrong on the facts and the law,
and his sensational allegation serves only to demonstrate how completely he has degraded contemporary political discourse.

Opinion | The Line Trump Crossed by Accusing Obama of Treason
President Trump’s history of intemperate remarks has earned him a perverse kind of immunity; the more outrageous his statement, the faster it is often dismissed.

Good Morning #Canada
July 1840 - British parliament passed the Act of Union 1840, and it was proclaimed officially on February 10, 1841, in Montreal. The act abolished the legislatures of Lower Canada (basically the East coast and Quebec) and Upper Canada (most of present day Ontario) and established a new political entity, the Province of Canada to replace them. British objectives were to exert more control of their colony and suppress the French speaking population. In 1848, the Province of Canada was allowed "responsible government," giving them limited rights to pass laws, and some of the more repressive laws of the Act of Union were repealed.
#CanadaIsAwesome #History
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/act-of-union

This is at the core of my depression.
For nearly all of human history, the majority of humans lived in what we today would call subsistence poverty. It was mostly unavoidable.
Sometime in the '60s we crossed over into being unequivocally able to feed everyone every year. People in the modern world only struggle to eat because of economic & political barriers designed to starve them. The world has worse famine problems right now than at any point in my lifetime.
1/x…

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/07/17/clive-palmer-united-australia-party-trumpet-of-patriots-data-breach-documents/
I don’t know enough about Australian politics but it sounds like the country’s version of the MAG…

Clive Palmer’s political parties suffer data breach affecting ‘all emails … documents and records’
Identical statements from both parties say a ransomware attack has obtained ‘email address, phone number, identity records, banking records, employment history, documents (including those provided subject to confidentiality arrangements)'.

Oh, good grief. Banning "Calvin & Hobbes" books? This is what happens when people don't think critically and look at things out of context. "They Called Us Enemy?" Yeah, heaven forbid kids learn about #WW2 history. #TN

‘Magic Tree House’ Author, ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ among hundreds of Tennessee book bans - PEN America
The removals in Tennessee are the result of a growing political movement to control information through book banning.

That Zohran Kwame Mamdani should be a serious contender for the leadership of America’s largest city is both a sign of the times and of his individual capabilities.
Polls show him within striking distance of the frontrunner Andrew Cuomo in what is now essentially a two-horse race, with Lander trailing a distant third.
Mamdani came to the US aged seven from Uganda where he was born to parents of Indian descent.
His father is a political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, and his mot…

“We know from history that authoritarian regimes aim to fracture coalitions and weaken solidarity among groups that, together, represent a formidable force.”
https://newsone.com/5732513/black-radical-project/

Protecting The Black Radical Project: A Call For Courage, Unity And Discipline In 2025
Black people must enforce a disciplined understanding within broader economic, cultural, social and political coalitions, writes Eric Ward.

Many lessons from history we need to keep in mind in our current political moment…
From The Atlantic: “Hitler Used a Bogus Crisis of ‘Public Order’ to Make Himself Dictator” (paywall free link)
#ResistAndHeal

That Zohran Kwame Mamdani should be a serious contender for the leadership of America’s largest city is both a sign of the times and of his individual capabilities.
Polls show him within striking distance of the frontrunner Andrew Cuomo in what is now essentially a two-horse race, with Brad Lander trailing a distant third.
Mamdani came to the US aged seven from Uganda where he was born to parents of Indian descent.
His father is a political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, and hi…

UK satellite TV channel Islam Channel acquires politics magazine Tribune, plans to increase its print frequency, and launch new formats like podcasts and video (Rob Waugh/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/magazines/islam-channel-tribune/…

UK political mag Tribune taken over by Islam Channel owner
Tribune magazine has been bought by the Islam Channel, former editor said "one of weirdest things to have happened history of British media

When @… goes on a dunk-fest like this,
somebody should provide Talmudic annotated marginalia explaining each joke (I only understand about half of them.)
This commentary would provide a complete reference guide to the socio=techno-political history of the Fediverse

Direct Action! Always!
https://mastodon.online/@Geri/114777663457053836

"""
Writing has been an instrument for some of the highest expressions of the human spirit: poetry, philosophy, science. But to understand it — why it came into being, how it changed the human experience — we have to first appreciate its crass practicality. It evolved mainly as an instrument of the mundane: the economic, the administrative, the political.
Confusion over this point is understandable. Some scholars have equated the origin of “civilization” with the origin of writing. Laypeople sometimes take this equation to mean that with writing humanity put aside its barbarous past and started behaving in gentlemanly fashion, sipping tea and remembering to say “please.” And indeed, this may be only a mild caricature of what some nineteenth-century scholars actually meant by the equation: writing equals Greece equals Plato; illiteracy equals barbarism equals Attila the Hun.
But, in truth, if you add literacy to Attila the Hun, you don’t get Plato. You get Genghis Khan. During the thirteenth century, he administered what even today is the largest continuous land empire in the history of the world. And he could do so only because he had the requisite means of control: a script that, when carried by his pony express, amounted to the fastest large-scale information-processing technology of his era. One consequence was to give pillaging a scope beyond Attila’s wildest dreams. Information technology, like energy technology or any other technology, can be a tool for good or bad. By itself, it is no guarantor of moral progress or civility.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)

"the United States is experiencing a constitutional crisis that threatens to end our democratic experiment.
...
Without the maintenance of truth, without the preservation of moral clarity, no other form of opposition is possible.
...
the responsibility to resist, to bear witness, to hold the center—that responsibility falls to each of us, whether we're emotionally prepared for it or not."

The Emergency We Cannot Feel: On the Psychological Unreadiness for American Collapse
Why the most dangerous political crisis in modern American history is met with emotional denial, moral distortion, and cultural distraction.

Talk: “Tripartite Lineages and Cremation Ground Revelations: Crossovers Between Early rDzogs chen and Kaula Śaivism” by Paul Thomas https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20070611/talk-tripartite-lineages-and-crem…

Generative Exaggeration in LLM Social Agents: Consistency, Bias, and Toxicity
Jacopo Nudo, Mario Edoardo Pandolfo, Edoardo Loru, Mattia Samory, Matteo Cinelli, Walter Quattrociocchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00657

Generative Exaggeration in LLM Social Agents: Consistency, Bias, and Toxicity
We investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) behave when simulating political discourse on social media. Leveraging 21 million interactions on X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we construct LLM agents based on 1,186 real users, prompting them to reply to politically salient tweets under controlled conditions. Agents are initialized either with minimal ideological cues (Zero Shot) or recent tweet history (Few Shot), allowing one-to-one comparisons with human replies. We evaluate t…

Talk: “Tripartite Lineages and Cremation Ground Revelations: Crossovers Between Early rDzogs chen and Kaula Śaivism” by Paul Thomas
https://ift.tt/K4nvPYO
When did aliens become a problem? The Mediterranean Association for Marine Biology and Oceanology in…
via Input 4 RELCFP