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Reposted by Heleen Touquet

Natacha @natacha.bsky.social · 13h

Russian fascist propaganda is not unlike “gender-critical” propaganda.

Can’t imagine why…

Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 13h

The Kremlin's new film feature, Толерантность (Tolerance), presents Europe as a bubbling hellhole in which gays and lesbians have rights and bigots, racists and hooligans face repression. It beats the drum for the invasion and conquest of Europe to liberate the Europeans from themselves.

Пропагандистский фильм о Европе «Толерантность» с Захаром Прилепиным собрал в прокате сто тысяч рублей Бюджет, по оценкам экспертов — не меньше 200 миллионов — Meduza

Писатель Захар Прилепин сыграл серийного убийцу, противника европейских либеральных ценностей, в фильме Андрея Грачева «Толерантность». Это картина о вымышленном европейском государстве, где общество ...

meduza.io

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 14h

Monstrous.

"federal agents detained nearly every resident of the 130-unit building—including children and babies—placing them in zip ties and separating them by race into vans for more than two hours early Tuesday morning."

Daniel Knowles @dlknowles.bsky.social · 17h

Good reporting on the South Shore raid from South Side weekly here.

Confirms one thing I was told but didn't put in my own piece because I didn't have a second source and it seemed too insane: border agents segregated arrested residents by race

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

Federal Agents Storm South Shore Building, Detaining Families and Children

Families were woken by flashbangs and helicopters as hundreds of federal agents raided their homes. Days later, neighbors are still searching for the missing.

southsideweekly.com

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Melanie D’Arrigo @darrigomelanie.bsky.social · 18h

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

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Heleen Touquet @heleentouquet.bsky.social · 11d

Ik zou toch een masker dragen. Ik had beetje keelpijn maar vooral heel moe

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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 11d

From Montenegro to northern California, the tech elite dream of building “network states”—cities where they make the rules.

“This is a colonial project, aimed at tech empire ... Colonization 2.0,“ I told @telliotter.bsky.social

via @wired.com

www.wired.com/story/tech-b...

Tech Billionaires Already Captured the White House. They Still Want to Be Kings

From Montenegro to Northern California, the tech elite dream of building cities where they make the rules. Is this, finally, their moment?

www.wired.com

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Gillian Brockell @gbrockell.bsky.social · 17d

The second secret flight landed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Mali, according to pilot communications we obtained.

ICE, DHS, Air Force and the governments of those countries did not answer questions about whether that flight carried third-country nationals. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

ICE Is Deporting People to Africa on Nearly Un-Trackable Military Flights

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is deporting people to African countries like Ghana on military flights that are nearly un-trackable.

www.rollingstone.com

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · Aug 31

FYI

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Sociologist Nathan Kalman-Lamb, based in Fredericton, said he was required to hand over his phone during a recent trip to a conference in South Carolina.

"He claimed that it was just going to be a very cursory search," Kalman-Lamb said, explaining the officer's actions are legal.

"But the document that he gave me said they reserve the right to copy all the contents of your phone and distribute them to every American military and intelligence agency."

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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · Aug 31

Every authoritarian regime that embraced this aesthetic inflicted violence and chaos on its society

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Jannis J Grimm @jannisgrimm.bsky.social · Aug 29

Just today, I was asked by @amnesty.de journal about the conditions of protest in Germany and whether we are seeing a new quality of police violence at protests. You can guess my answer from this video. 2yrs ago we were discussing illegal pain compliance holds, now it's punches straight to the face

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Heleen Touquet @heleentouquet.bsky.social · Aug 21

Was mss gewoon het nieuws?

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Martin Sauerbrey @martinsauerbrey.bsky.social · Aug 21

Russian colonialism. A long 🧵

Some didn´t get the memo but Russia was - and is - a colonial power.

Let´s take a tour around this marvelous empire:

(I merged two threads here. That´s why the Balts are more thoroughly pictured)

1/x

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Alexander Luckmann @aluckmann.bsky.social · Aug 20

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

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Heleen Touquet @heleentouquet.bsky.social · Aug 21

Kan iemand het aan JM Dedecker laten weten?

Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they) @doctorvive.bsky.social · Aug 21

Anyway, this is what sea level rise looks like. Not only a slow incremental shrinking of the coastline, but also these larger events that suddenly reshape both local ecosystems and economies.

/fin

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · Aug 21

Good step that Chevening scholars from Gaza will be supported in getting to the UK, and hopefully this can be extended to others with university offers and scholarships
www.thetimes.com/article/bf52...

Gaza scholarship students to be evacuated to Britain

Nine Chevening scholars will be helped to leave before their courses start next month but dozens of other Palestinian students will be left behind

www.thetimes.com

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Kate Ross @kateross.bsky.social · Aug 21

White woman puts Mexican flag on her truck to waste ICE’s time.

Scooby
I am as white as a hotel towel, and the closest thing to Mexican I am was a single all inclusive resort stay in Cancun. I put a Mexican flag sticker on my old Tacoma abd was promptly pulled over by ICE in San Antonio. I'm happy to waste their time
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RookaTX
This is the way

Scooby • RookaTX
Their big question was like, "why the sticker" I told them it was on the truck when I bought it-and they suggested I remove it. Obnoxious creatures.
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John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · Aug 21

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

Karen Graubart @kbgraubart.bsky.social · Aug 20

Universities doubling down as public sentiment shifts away from dependence upon AI. This is the problem with the buy-in.

Theo Nash @theonash.bsky.social · Aug 20

The University of Michigan is now claiming that students have an ‘ethical responsibility’ to use AI.

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Kurt Bassuener @kurtbassuener.bsky.social · Aug 21

Today's Danas front page. Headline reads "SNS...assembles in 50 locations in #Serbia in response to months of protest - The Struggle to Remain in Power at All Costs"

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Iva Vukušić @vukusiciva.bsky.social · Aug 21

This is now out, another expert lineup, I'm in it, and we're all saying the same thing. Now there's a broad agreement, across disciplines, and specialties. There is no excuse anymore for states to continue "business as usual". #Israel #Palestine #Genocide #ICJ www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhT5...

Why leading experts say Israel is committing genocide | Expert Witness

YouTube video by Middle East Eye

www.youtube.com

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Colin Wilson @colinwlondon.bsky.social · Aug 21

Study finds that most kids who come out as trans when young stay trans; 12% of initially cis kids come out as trans; 33% of cis adolescents express queer romantic/sexual interest; young people see gender, sexuality as fluid. No sign of "social contagion". Striking rejection of cis and het norms.

Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development | SRCD Journal | Wiley Online Library

As increasing numbers of transgender, gender diverse, and queer youths come out to their friends, families and communities, their rights to express their identities in public life have become the sub...

srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social · Aug 21

'When people think of themselves as the 'good guys' regardless of the violence they inflict, there is ultimately no atrocity they are not willing to justify.'

Textbook example of how the debate on genocide is not a debate about evidence or interpretation - it's about cognitive dissonance...

Isaac Chotiner @ichotiner.bsky.social · Aug 20

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

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Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · Aug 17

I don’t know how to be around so many friends who—to my mind and I deeply hope I am wrong—seem so in denial about the totality of what both Trump and AI augur for any hope of a stable, much less just, society.

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Matthew Parkinson-Bennett @matthewpb.bsky.social · Aug 16

Wow Sally Rooney. Fair play.

‘I feel obliged to state once more that… I too support Palestine Action. … If the British state considers this "terrorism", then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith
and the BBC.’

ted.
In this context I feel obliged to state once more that - like the hundreds of protesters arrested last weekend - I too support Palestine Action. If this makes me a "supporter of terror" un-
der UK law, so be it. My books, at least for now, are still published in Britain, and are widely available in bookshops and even supermarkets. In recent years the UK's state broadcaster has also televised two fine adaptations of my novels, and therefore regularly pays me residual fees. I want to be clear that I intend to use these pro-ceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on support-ing Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can. If the British state considers this
"terrorism", then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith
and the BBC.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · Aug 16

The Gestapo violence is horrible--but it's noteworthy that almost every ICE attack that gets recorded includes bystanders at a minimum telling them they're evil, and sometimes being even more engaged. Proud that so many are standing up to the thugs.

Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · Aug 16

While masked agents were violently attacking a delivery worker this morning, bystanders repeatedly asked to see their badge numbers but they refused.

Bystander: You guys are ruining this country, you know that, right?

Agent: Liberals already ruined it.

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David Burleson @davidburleson.bsky.social · Aug 15

"The choice is stark: rule by the many, or rule by the billionaires who already act as if they own the world.

Across the globe, extreme wealth has overpowered democracy."
publicseminar.org/2025/06/how-...

Naked Oligarchy - Public Seminar

Salvador Santino Regilme explores how billionaires captured power and hollowed out democracy.

publicseminar.org

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