Tootfinder

The paradox of Nazism being both the most capitalist thing possible, defining itself as explicitly anticommunist, while masquerading as "socialism" is difficult to resolve until you understand one thing: fascism pivots around antisemitism (and its extension, conspiratorial thinking).
I'm, of course, not talking about the redefinition of "antisemitism" into meaning any criticism of Israel but rather an anti-Jewish conspiracy narrative rooted in Roman Christianity.
This is critical to understand as MAGA fascism pivots between capitalist and pseudo-anticapitalist with Trump in the middle. Hitler did the same thing. Strasserism helped the Nazis gain power by pulling in the Left. In the Nazis case they killed the Stasserists pretty quickly. Now, I think we're seeing an attempt to make the opposite pivot happen in MAGA. But it's all the same thing.
Fascism can infinitely fail to address the needs of the people while dismissing it's own responsibility for creating the problem by maintaining a permanent enemy.
This is why it's important to understand antisemitism and how to fight it. It's especially important now because the apparatus of violence in Israel is itself a tool of global fascism, and we finally have an opportunity to dismantle the whole thing. But we have to be aware of how fascists can pivot around to block this.
I've been reading Safety Through Solidarity, and I think it's especially relevant at this time.
https://www.akpress.org/safety-through-solidarity.html

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

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

⛐ Bridging Vision, Language, and Mathematics: Pictographic Character Reconstruction with Bézier Curves
#cs

Bridging Vision, Language, and Mathematics: Pictographic Character Reconstruction with Bézier Curves
While Vision-language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong semantic capabilities, their ability to interpret the underlying geometric structure of visual information is less explored. Pictographic characters, which combine visual form with symbolic structure, provide an ideal test case for this capability. We formulate this visual recognition challenge in the mathematical domain, where each character is represented by an executable program of geometric primitives. This is framed as a program …

Near-infrared photometry of the central stars of planetary nebulae with the VVVX survey
Dante Minniti (Instituto de Astrof\'isica, Depto. de. F\'isica y Astronom\'ia, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Universidad Andr\'es Bello, Santiago, Chile, Vatican Observatory, V00120 Vatican City State, Italy), Vasiliki Fragkou (Observat\'orio do Valongo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil), Javier Alonso-Garc\'ia (Centro de Astronom\'ia), Danie…

Near-infrared photometry of the central stars of planetary nebulae with the VVVX survey
Achieving accurate photometric characterizations of central stars of planetary nebulae (CSPNe) toward the galactic plane is significantly hindered by the high levels of interstellar extinction in these regions. However, near-infrared (NIR) observations offer a more effective alternative, as extinction is substantially reduced at these wavelengths. By mitigating the effects of interstellar extinction via NIR observations of the Galactic disk and bulge, we seek to improve the identification and c…

Ground state magnetic structure of Mn3Sn
Jeppe Jon Cederholm, Zhian Xu, Yanfeng Guo, Martin Ovesen, Thomas Olsen, Kristine M. L. Krighaar, Chrystalla Knekna, Jian Rui Soh, Youngro Lee, Navid Qureshi, Jose Alberto Rodriguez Velamazan, Eric Ressouche, Andrew T. Boothroyd, Henrik Jacobsen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06808

Ground state magnetic structure of Mn3Sn
We use spherical neutron polarimetry to determine the ground state magnetic structure of Mn3Sn. We find that Mn3Sn adopts an inverse triangular structure with spins parallel to <100> (Type III) rather than spins parallel to <110> (Type IV). Density functional theory calculations reveal no energy difference between these two structures, suggesting that the selection is caused by subtle effects such as sixth-order anisotropy. Partial control of the magnetic domain population through a moderate ma…

SafeSteer: Adaptive Subspace Steering for Efficient Jailbreak Defense in Vision-Language Models
Xiyu Zeng, Siyuan Liang, Liming Lu, Haotian Zhu, Enguang Liu, Jisheng Dang, Yongbin Zhou, Shuchao Pang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21400

SafeSteer: Adaptive Subspace Steering for Efficient Jailbreak Defense in Vision-Language Models
As the capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) continue to improve, they are increasingly targeted by jailbreak attacks. Existing defense methods face two major limitations: (1) they struggle to ensure safety without compromising the model's utility; and (2) many defense mechanisms significantly reduce the model's inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose SafeSteer, a lightweight, inference-time steering framework that effectively defends against diverse jailbreak atta…

A review on the Parameter Space Concept and its use for crystal structure determination
Matthias Zschornak, Muthu Vallinayagam, Melanie Nentwich, Dirk C. Meyer, Karl Fischer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02755

A review on the Parameter Space Concept and its use for crystal structure determination
We present a comprehensive review of the emerging crystal structure determination method Parameter Space Concept (PSC), which solves and refines either partial or complete crystal structures by mapping each experimental or theoretical observation as a geometric interpretation, bypassing the conventional Fourier inversion. The PSC utilizes only a few \xray (equivalently neutron) diffraction amplitudes or intensities and turns them into piecewise analytic hyper-surfaces, called isosurfaces, embed…