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  A fantastic essay by Jamelle Bouie on how Trump is proving that the Anti-Federalists were right about the president not having enough constraints in the proposed U.S. Constitution. The pardon power and the "official acts" nonsense by SCOTUS are a recipe for tyranny. He also makes an eloquent defense of why Democrats must pursue extensive investigations and potential impeachments, because the public must see the historic scale of Trump's crimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28...

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  My latest: Democrats are waffling on #trans rights. The data and the history tell us that standing up for others works much better. This is a deep dive into the data about why left-wing parties feel tempted to abandon equality, but that doing so will harm them more than it helps: https://plus.flux.community/p/standing-up-for-trans-people-isnt #lgbtq #TransRights

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  Republican women are increasingly open to giving up their own right to vote. The power of religious fundamentalism is immense. These mini-interviews are must-see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSz1txJEyv8

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  The Lula campaign was faced with right-wing dominance of social media. Instead of just bemoaning the situation, they took action and organized millions via WhatsApp: https://plus.flux.community/p/how-lula-turned-the-tables-with-his

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  🧵 Public ignorance is the enemy of democracy. Reactionary far-right movements thrive by lying to people. They tell their true agenda to supporters but then lie and obfuscate about it often to the general public, meaning many people don't know their views. These extreme candidates often avoid participating in detailed policy discussions with the media. Ohio Republican governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy totally refused a newspaper invitation to state his views: https://www.cleveland.com/open...

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  Extreme-right political parties don't care about women's sports except as a means to terrify women. This ruse was laid bare in humiliating fashion the past two weeks in Atlanta when Phil Kent, an anti-immigrant activist who is a co-host of Fox 5's "Georgia Gang," badly botched two attempts to bash the WNBA and local favorite player Angel Reese. Watch his co-hosts' faces. They know they're about to go viral as this racist humiliates himself. Co-host Anré Washingt...

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  In the great news from #Brazil, don't sleep on this Reuters investigation which found that Darren Beattie, a racist activist who was fired during the first Trump administration but now works at the State Dept, directly worked to harm Brazil in the hopes that doing so would help fascist candidate Flavio Bolsonaro. Beattie and another top staffer met with Eduardo Bolsonaro privately to plot strategy. Soon came a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods. Total election interference. https://www.reuters.c...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@hanse_mina/117504891126603885 Trump trying to openly ally with the world's largest dictatorships

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  If you're wondering how it is that a Flavio Bolsonaro--a far-right extremist trying to succeed his father who is in jail for a coup--could very well win the presidential election in #Brazil, religion is your answer. Fundamentalist evangelical churches, directly inspired by white Southern Americans, have become a massive influence in the country--poisoning millions of minds with lies and false promises. Great story and short video by the New York Times: https://archive.is/jkFDJ

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@itsfoss/117502516332558662 For my fellow #Linux nerds

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  🧵 Today, Mehdi Hasan published an interview with Matt Yglesias, a blogger who is one of the most influential pundits on the Democratic leadership class. The clip I'm posting here is probably one of the most revealing in the discussion. In it, Yglesias says that it was wrong for #Minnesota residents to oppose the Trump regime's murderous ICE raids because it was unpopular beforehand. He has a monstrous worldview, and sadly, he's someone Democratic elites think is very smart.

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  Newly released photos from US military bases in Middle East reveal immense destruction that war criminal Pete Hegseth has covered up. Job one for Democrats is impeaching and removing this incompetent and dangerous criminal. https://meidasnews.com/news/so-much-worse-than-people-realize-never-before-seen-images-reveal-damage-at-u-s-bases-as-troops-describe-being-abandoned

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  Elon Musk is investing $1 billion in fellow Republican oligarch David Ellison's Skydance, the new parent company of CNN, HBO, and CBS. America's media environment is being bought on the cheap by far-right oligarchs because Democratic large donors won't invest in media. Democratic donors have more than enough money to start or buy their own media but they prefer blowing cash on useless TV ads, vanity candidates, and nichey journalism sites no one will read. https://www.semafor.com/a...

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  A positron, the positive anti-matter counterpart to the electron, has been captured for the first time ever. Great popular writeup on the experiment here: https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/physicists-trapped-particle-antimatter-kept-150000048.html #science #physics

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  🧵 It's really absurd to debate supposed chatbot consciousness, but the sad thing is that millions of people think they are alive, so their arguments need to be engaged. I'm glad that there are some people in cognitive science and philosophy of mind who are doing this, but unfortunately, much of the content they make does not adequately engage with the technologies themselves or the (bad) evidence proffered by proponents. This piece is an example: https://rdcu.be/n8By815T88Ra #ai #phil...

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  Have you updated your server's PHP yet? My mirrors' patches finally came in. Just got everything all fixed up. #php #webhosting #cybersecurity

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  The far-right's latest obsession is "Malfoid," a gender-bent version of the Harry Potter villain Draco Malfoy. And as you might expect, they are taking it to incredibly disturbing and grandiose lengths. Two screenshots to sum up the entire discourse below. They just cannot be normal--while at the same time proclaiming they are the absolute last bulwarks of European tradition. (And of course, there are no traditions across Europe or any other continent.)

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  I love #Emacs but never use it for coding since I like Kate/KWrite so much for programming. I also like the joe editor because its cursor and its selection block are separate. But for writing and note-taking, if you're only doing text, you can't beat Emacs Org-mode. There are also some interesting distraction-free writing modes like this one: https://github.com/joostkremers/writeroom-mode

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  Before Adolph Hitler, Germany was the world's science center. But his censorship, budget cuts, and anti-intellectualism drove a generation of scientists away. Something similar is happening in the U.S. thanks to Donald Trump. Americans will only see the effects of these particular Trump actions in about 10-15 years. He is stamping on America's crown jewels https://apnews.com/article/trump-science-research-funding-cuts-9f4c34581f4343f316a5e72852a71b51

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  Another day, another group of actual Republican Nazis exposed. This time it’s in Nevada, where Republican congressional candidate Marty O’Donnell's Discord forum has been found to be filled with pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi material. “It wasn’t a couple of crazies. The popular sentiment was, ‘Yes, slavery should be legal,’” Deacon Dameron, a former group member told the Associated Press. He said O’Donnell banned him for calling another user a “dork.” https://apnews.com/article/marty-odonnell-n...

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  RE: https://journa.host/@samlitzinger/117468137915899866 As a former Washingtonian, this is one of the worst things Trump has been doing to the place. Hains Point is one of the few neighborhood-style parks the southern region of the city has. It's not for the fat cats, so of course he's trying to take it away.

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  Scientists have completed a neural mapping of a fruit fly's brain. Really exciting advance because there has not been a complete mapping of a connectome in decades. People who hate or don't know about science might think that this research is trivially obscure. In fact, it is absolutely vital to medicine, biology, and even robotics. Basic science ftw: https://www.science.org/content/article/complete-map-fruit-fly-brain-circuitry-unveiled

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  If you haven't seen the Abdul El-Sayed confrontation with a far-right Christian supremacist who tried to paint him as a Muslim terrorist, it's absolutely worth your time. Be sure to watch all the way to the end for the climax of the argument, and to see Tommy slink away in shame. And in case you were wondering, Tommy is a professional evangelical Republican activist, and a former employee of Christian supremacist Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) Background: https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/tomm...

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  New study finds that UK Christian nationalists are much less interested in actually practicing Christianity by going to church, praying, or reading the Bible compared to pluralist Christians. This dovetails with other studies which found Donald Trump's earliest supporters in 2015 were the least-practicing Republican Christians. Reactionary Christianity is about religion as identity rather than religion as practice: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/11/christian-nationalism-uk-far...

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  🧵 The only way to be a smart person who supports Trump is to have concentric levels of delusion. After religious fundamentalism, the "college students yelling at a racist speaker are actually more powerful in society than the president and right-wing media" is the most pervasive of these delusions. Here's a great example of this absurd thinking: https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-woke-1-radicalized-the-gop/

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  And while I am on animals and color today, I learned that yellow appears to be dogs' favorite color. That's because it sits furthest away from black in their black-blue-yellow color spectrum. Think about that next time you are tempted to buy a red ball for your dog: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/202504/which-colors-do-dogs-prefer #pets #dogsofmastodon #dog

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  Did you know that the blue jay is not actually blue? Like all blue-colored birds, their feathers have brown pigment, but their feather fiber patterns refract the light as blue: https://www.reconnectwithnature.org/headlines/news/nature-curiosity-why-are-blue-jays-blue

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  Some people think that "blindsight" is perception outside conscious awareness. But this is conflating perception with report of perception. They are not the same. If blindsight were outside perception, it would not work at all. Trust in sensation isn't sensation. Individuals with early onset blindness can perceive and report what they experience.They trust their senses and integrate them fully. https://www.ski.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Conscious-visual-abilities-in-a-patie...

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  Someone made an "AI torture chamber" which is using research that claims language models have mathematical vectors which correspond to human emotions. The site largely disproves it w/o authors realizing. I haven't decided whether to include this in the 80-page AI cognition paper I'm working on. Probably will, but it's such a beast already, yikes. Worth checking the site out: https://wirehead.agency/ You can experiment with it: https://wirehead.agency/live.html

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  Steven Pinker opposes the AI doomer cult.