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  It's the end of Halloween here in US Pacific Time and I just was re-reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis. I think Gregor Samsa was human the entire time. He had a mental break. 1) He was not an "insekt," he was an "Ungeziefer," from the Middle High German "ungeziber," an animal unfit for sacrifice. 2) Kafka insisted that Gregor "cannot" be drawn. A great way to maintain that ambiguity. 3) The narrator is a third-personal Gregor until he dies. Then...

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  America's elite opinion journalists spend most of their time trying to get readers to hate them. And they also lament that everyone hates them. Only a complete asshole would write an essay like the below Atlantic article. And only a troll would publish it. #halloween

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  If you're a progressive and live in an American state where you vote for prosecutors and judges, try to vote for people who are former public defenders since they usually will be more understanding to people swept up in the justice system. Don't forget to vote also! You throw away your power when you stay home. The only message you send by staying home is that you're naive.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/117527484509728641 Please share the post below if you could. I wanted to make a comprehensive reference for anyone who's challenged by someone who says that protecting trans people is bad politics. It isn't, and I have the numbers to prove it.

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  🧵 US Democrats are being tempted by right-leaning consultants to waffle on trans rights. The data and the recent drop in support for the UK Labour Party tell us that standing up for equality works much better. Join me for a deep dive into the data about why left-wing parties gain little by becoming anti-trans while risking quite a bit. Read along for the summary or click through for the entire 4,000 word analysis: https://plus.flux.community/p/standing-up-for-trans-people-isnt #lgbtq #TransR...

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  As Republicans' political fortunes have fallen due to Trump's increasing unpopularity, the far-right billionaires who control him have been working on a back door into the Democratic Party. Their primary vessel has been New York Times columnist Ezra Klein's innocuously named "abundance movement." This is development worth keeping an eye on. The "abundance" conferences and institutions are funded by far-right oligarchs. Don't let them pretend to be progressi...

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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...