Some reasonable points here, and a challenge for us is to be open to the message!
Mastodon’s structure and culture of openness present opportunities to avoid many of the epistemic perils of biased and untrustworthy large corporate platforms. However, Mastodon’s risks include techno-elitism, white ignorance, and isolated, epistemically toxic communities.
Beyond Corporate Social Media Platforms: The Epistemic Promises and Perils of Alternative Social Media - @Lakephil@mastodon.social
Antiwar counter protesters
I really enjoyed this list of The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century
Afternoon sun
“Malaria is as old as Egyptian civilization itself, but the disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to its history and not its future” - Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
The Verge 2004 - a fun selection of articles reflecting on why this year was a turning point for our online existence.
superdoopermoon
With the European Peace Facility, the EU is seeking greater flexibility that will allow it to bypass the African Union and directly fund national and sub-regional military initiatives.
The blockbuster film of the last few years has achieved a synthesis of these two trends: color-rich saturated imagery, hammer on the head straightforward storytelling. I think that the actual visual pleasure offered by these new films is such a breath of fresh air that they disarm people’s critical faculties (See also: Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Banshees of Inishiren, Saltburn). What has emerged reminds me most of the USSR’s most maligned aesthetic legacy, socialist realism.
tl;dr the big variation in non-GP specialist fees in Australia is largely due to differences between individual doctors, rather than factors such as patient complexity or structural costs.
Sources of specialist physician fee variation: Evidence from Australian health insurance claims data 🔒
Guizhou has been the target of successive visions of state-led sinofuturity, which have developed the province as unevenly as its karst landscape.
Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency, offering the first hard evidence of the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population
Poverty in Argentina soars to over 50% as Milei’s austerity measures hit hard
Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war
It’s awful that Israel’s “escape forward” strategy, at the cost of thousands of lives, faces no meaningful international censure.
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Sticking an AirTag on my Kindle just saved me again. If it wasn’t for this I’d have lost it many times by now.
Another interesting piece, though it cements my view that American Catholicism has far more in common with with the evangelical churches of their countrymen than what is understood to be Catholicism in the rest of the world. Another flank in America’s pernicious global influence?
Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex - Vanity Fair
Interesting piece on Vance and his antecedents.
Who Owns America? was the Agrarian-Distributists’ last hurrah. The American public — including, ironically, the very farmers and working men that the movement sought to “save” — was simply not attracted to the philosophy.
The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right - Olivia Paschal in HNN
As above
Worth a watch if you’ve never seen it.