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Casmilus @casmilus.bsky.social · 6h

Opening Night
discontinuednotes.com/2025/10/12/b...

A while ago I found I had a copy of Floral Street (1986) by Simon Burt. I must have bought it cheaply second hand and left it in a pile and forgotten about it. I would have bought it as I would hav…

discontinuednotes.com

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 3h

The five global groups that shape support for international cooperation

Discover how Focaldata identified five global mindsets shaping support for international cooperation through in-depth analysis of public attitudes.

www.focaldata.com

Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 3h

Don’t fall for the authoritarian hype – Reform and the hard right can be stopped in their tracks | Gordon Brown

From the US to Europe and Asia, grievances are being exploited to gain power. But moderate voices are still in tune with the majority, says former prime minister Gordon Brown

www.theguardian.com

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 3h

So a clear majority can be constructed not just for humanitarian aid if money is well spent but also for global action to deal with global problems, like climate crisis and pandemic prevention, as long as this case is argued on grounds of enlightened self-interest, and if we stress the reciprocal benefits that flow to them and their own country. And thus for those who have long wondered whether we cooperate out of need or if we have a need to cooperate, the answer is both.

From: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/11/reform-nigel-farage-hard-right-politics-gordon-brown-labour

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 3h

Thanks for this

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 3h

Encouraging.

But all is not lost. The cement is still wet, and even as it hardens we can find hope in the common sense of the global public. In a survey by Focaldata, of 36,000 people in 34 countries we find a clear majority are more resistant to an exclusionary nationalism and more willing to embrace international cooperation than many of the leaders who rule over them.

Across the world there is, perhaps surprisingly, only a small group of hardened anti-internationalists representing 16.5% of the global population (even if 25% in today’s US) who either feel coexistence between ethnic and religious groups is impossible or have a zero-sum mindset that if they or their country do well, it has to be at the expense of others doing badly.

But there are another 21% at the opposite extreme, whom we might call committed internationalists, who either still see cooperation across borders through open trade as a positive sum win-win, or are what the US philosopher and writer Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “rooted cosmopolitans”.

From Gordon Brown at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/11/reform-nigel-farage-hard-right-politics-gordon-brown-labour

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James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 5h

Everyone knows at least one person (normally, but not exclusively, a guy) whose gone properly mental due to net rabbit holes.

We see public figures regularly go mad and destroy themselves.

And we have, at a policy level, just decided to put our fingers in our ears and go nahnahnah

Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 6h

Last night I heard of another friend of a friend who has been lost to a rabbit hole of online propaganda. We need to start treating this as a serious public health concern.

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Alastair Meeks @alastairmeeks.bsky.social · 6h

Last night I heard of another friend of a friend who has been lost to a rabbit hole of online propaganda. We need to start treating this as a serious public health concern.

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Lydia Polgreen @polgreen.bsky.social · 3h

I don't understand why no one has started a fast-casual baked potato chain. Choice of white or sweet; many different topping possibilities. Affordable, tasty, nutritious, filling.

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 3h

Nice place, lovely people, but I’d hold out for Italy, at least. You’ve only got one soul. Gotta sell it dear.

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Mollie Wilson O'Reilly @mollieoreilly.bsky.social · 4h

The Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale has added these (and more) quotations from various papal teachings about care and concern for immigrants to the windows outside its main meeting room. This is the kind of catechesis we need more of in the U.S. church.

A window pane with this text: "...No one would exchange his country for a foreign land if his own afforded him the means of living a decent and happy life." —Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891), no. 47

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien, and refugee of whatever kind, who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved friends and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil." —Pope Pius XII, Exsul Familia Nazarethana (1962), Apostolic Constitution

"The poverty and misfortune with which immigrants are stricken are yet another reason for coming generously to their aid... It is necessary to guard against the rise of new forms of racism or xenophobic behavior, which attempt to make these brothers and sisters of ours scapegoats for what may be difficult local situations..." John Paul II, World Migration Day (1996)

"Migrants present a particular challenge for me, since I am the pastor of a church without frontiers, a Church which considers herself a mother to all. For this reason, I exhort all countries to a generous openness which, rather than fearing the loss of local identity, will prove capable of creating new forms of cultural synthesis." Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013)

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 5h

Indeed.

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Men in Blazers Media Network @meninblazers.bsky.social · 5h

The Faroe Islands—population just 55,000—beat the Czech Republic 🤯

An astonishing result. The territory's population is smaller than the capacity of six Premier League stadiums, yet they've just won a third straight international game 🇫🇴

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Just some words @imnotherenow.bsky.social · 16h

A night without end

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 5h

If you’re going to sell your soul, get a good price

A Man for All Seasons (1966) - Rich's Perjury Scene (8/10) | Movieclips

YouTube video by Movieclips

www.youtube.com

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 5h

Doing really bad stuff from weak convictions for not much gain really is a special kind of badness.

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 5h

Can’t remember who first mentioned this, but it’s true: centrist liberals lack the conviction of the ethnonationalists, but also don’t really believe even in their varieties of weak universalism.

Snowden St. @snowden.st · 8h

At least in the historical record of the 21st century (or post 9/11), the Democratic Party’s main objection *has* been the tone/tenor of immigration enforcement. Obama was the Deporter in Chief until the second Trump administration, the numbers don’t lie.

good hyuck, babe! @markpopham.bsky.social · 8h

what is the official Democratic Party response to the violent detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants. what is it. what do we find officially objectionable about what is going on - that they're being too mean about it, that they're being sloppy?

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Isaac Samuel @rhaplord.bsky.social · 6h

Parliamentary systems and other pluralistic institutions in pre-colonial Africa

www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/parliament...

Parliamentary systems and other pluralistic institutions in pre-colonial Africa

The political history of several African kingdoms included systems of governance that were variously referred to as national “assemblies”, “councils,” or “parliaments,” which limited the power of King...

www.africanhistoryextra.com

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doleful moo of a cow @oulipien.bsky.social · 6h

Barbell guys everywhere seething

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Deanna Kreisel 🌱 @doctorwaffle.substack.com · 10d

In honor of National Poetry Day, the greatest parody rewrite of all time:

Screen cap of parodic version of William Blake's "The Tyger" that begins:
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
(Not sure if I spelled that right)
What immortal hand or eye
Could fashion such a stripy guy?
What the hammer that hath hewn it
Into such a chonky unit?
Did who made the lamb make thee,
Or an external franchisee?

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 8h

Thread

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 8h

After the Peloponnesian War - I promise this is relevant - Sparta installed an oligarchic puppet government, the Thirty Tyrants, in Athens.

What rapidly became clear was that Athenian democratic habits were so deeply rooted that tremendous violence would be necessary to remove them.

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Casmilus @casmilus.bsky.social · 9h

Whether or not Russell was the Antichrist, he certainly wrote about Satan (link near the end of this):
discontinuednotes.com/2025/10/11/t...

The Nova Mob

I watched the new disc release of Object Z (1965), a story of a world gripped with fear at the appearance of a new extraterrestrial threat. It was broadcast in 6 instalments of 25 minutes, each wit…

discontinuednotes.com

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 9h

Ah! I’d forgotten “Satan in the Suburbs”. But that’s fiction, and Thiel seems to have real trouble keeping hold of reality.

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 9h

“…. for if it prosper none dare call it terrorism.”

Ennius @enniusredloeb.bsky.social · 15h

A colleague once showed me a copy of an information pamphlet issued to British soldiers in Palestine in the 1940s. The pamphlet referred to 'Jewish terrorists'. The vicissitudes of history often change the definition of who is a terrorist and who is not.

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Adanedhel🌹 @danielwaweru.bsky.social · 9h

Slow, unsexy, even pedantic and boring. But it won’t do *that*.

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