The Supreme Court's trans athlete ruling matters to women everywhere

"Sex-based sports protections are built around biological reality, not beliefs. And biology matters. Women’s sport exists precisely because men and women are biologically different. Without protected female categories, women do not gain equality – they lose it.

Consistently, we have seen biological men steal wins from female athletes

The creation of women’s sport is what allows us to compete fairly. And, without fairness, sport is meaningless. Yet in the short years in which biological males have increasingly been permitted to enter women’s categories, female athletes have suffered unfair loss and harm. This is not unique to the United States but is happening worldwide.

A 2024 United Nations report examining the protection of women’s sport found that hundreds of female athletes have lost medals, trophies, and missed out on podium placements after being forced to compete against males. Despite repeated claims from activists that transgender athletes have no competitive advantage over women, the evidence tells a different story."

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NuNet Joins the Intercognitive Foundation: Building the Infrastructure for a World of Inter-Connected Minds | by Jennifer Bourke | NuNet | Jan, 2026 | Medium

"The 9 Pillars of AI Accessibility
The Intercognitive Foundation defines 9 essential pillars that make AI and Robotics accessible, interoperable and functional in decentralized environments. These pillars represent the core technologies required for machines and AI systems to navigate, coordinate and operate in the physical world.

NuNets work intersects most directly with several of these pillars, but we list all nine here as defined by the foundation:

Identity — Machine Passports
Unique, verifiable identities that enable secure and trusted interactions in decentralized systems
Fees — Peer to peer Transactions
Autonomous value exchange for compute, data and machine to machine services
Maps — Navigation infrastructure
Spatial awareness enabling robots and AI to interact with real environments
Sensors — Perceiving the World
Standardized sensor data for environmental understanding and decision making.
Positioning — Finding itself
Accurate, decentralized positioning beyond the limitations of traditional GPS.
Compute — Augmenting Capabilities
Decentralized compute Networks that empower AI models and robotics with scalable processing power
Connectivity — Always online
Reliable, decentralized communication between machines and systems.
Orchestration — Harmonizing System
Coordinating diverse systems, tasks and workloads across distributed network.
Standards — Cohesive Collaboration
Interoperability frameworks that allow decentralized ecosystems to work together effectively."

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Rush Job: Australia’s new hate speech bill set to be scuttled

" when the government convicts or harasses people for tweets rather than dealing with serious social issues such as discontent over migration and failed assimilation, the temperature does not subside, but rises to boiling, with aggressive policing of speech failing to tamp down protests.

As flagged by Dr Reuben Kirkham, director of the Free Speech Union of Australia, this bill “is an expanded copycat of provisions in the UK that are being used basically to arrest 30 people a day (for social media posts).” While some of these arrests have covered actual incitement to violence, police have shown up at people’s houses for complaining about a school on private messaging channel WhatsApp or sharing an anti-Hamas meme on social media.

With both the leftist Greens and the conservative Coalition coming out against the bill, it is certain that the current iteration will not pass given that Labor needs one or the other to have it passed in the Senate next Tuesday.

The Coalition is currently calling the bill “unsalvageable,” but it’s possible that the Greens will work with the government to craft a revamped version that’s even more restrictive. While the Greens have concerns over the bill’s impact on protest rights, they want hate speech protections extended to other identities including gender, sexuality, disability and religion.

However, no one in government seems to be much interested in whether the hate speech laws will actually do anything, or whether they are even justified, and political discussion of the bill has largely skirted the fact that the Bondi massacre appears to have been the result of intelligence and policing failures, not a lack of speech regulation.

We requested comment from authorities on whether the new laws would have prevented the Bondi terrorist attack had they been in place as far back as 2019, when ASIO first investigated alleged shooter Naveed Akram, but they refused to say. ASIO referred our enquiries to the Department of Home Affairs, and the Department deflected, stating, “the circumstances of this incident are part of an ongoing investigation.”

The impetus as far as the hate speech controls are concerned appears to be forcing a sense of cohesion on the community – but serious questions remain about whether this is possible in a multicultural society where people hold clashing values and beliefs."

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The Least Objectionable Equilibrium - by Chor Pharn

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The Phase Transition - by Richard David Hames

"In the evolving architecture of our collective consciousness, few transitions have so profoundly reconfigured society as the reading revolution that dawned over three centuries ago. This quiet upheaval – the mass diffusion of print and literacy – unlocked a vault of knowledge once sealed to all but the elite. Books became the neural pathways of cultural transmission, synaptic bridges linking minds across continents and generations. In their pages, ideas could sediment and accumulate, allowing each generation to build on the last in a recursive spiral of civilisational advance. The Enlightenment, democracy, socialism, scientific revolutions – all sprang from this newfound connectivity of thought. Yet now, in our own time, those hard-won pathways are deteriorating. The cognitive scaffolding erected by print culture shows cracks, and the flow of knowledge through society is choked by entropy. What was once a robust network of enlightened minds is in danger of devolving into a fragmented void.

Evidence of this reversal is all around us. In an age of unprecedented information, reading itself is in relentless decline. By many measures, we’re drifting from print’s shorelines into uncharted waters of post-literacy. In the United States, the share of adults reading for pleasure has plummeted by roughly forty percent in the past two decades. Over a third of UK adults now confess they rarely, if ever, read books. Children’s literacy is at its lowest ebb since records began – a “shocking and dispiriting” collapse, to quote a National Literacy Trust report."

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Monitor Gemeenschapseconomie - openresearch.amsterdam

"Amsterdam kent een grote beweging van bewonerscollectieven en -organisaties; tussen markt en overheid in ontfermen ze zich over allerlei voorzieningen en maatschappelijke vraagstukken. Ze beheren en organiseren bijvoorbeeld lokale voedselproductie, zorgnetwerken, energiegemeenschappen, kasmoni’s, stadsdorpen, wonen en deelmobiliteit. Deze Monitor Gemeenschapseconomie brengt voor het eerst de omvang en reikwijdte van die beweging in beeld."

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The dawn of the post-literate society - by James Marriott

"
This is not to say literate societies are “better” or more intelligent than oral societies. As Ong writes, oral societies are capable of feats of memory that are staggering to outsiders. But it is true that literate habits of thought seem to be essential to the kind of advanced and complex civilisation we live in."

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WASS Courses

"The political, legal, and academic calls for governing food and its varied material and cultural components as a commons rather than a commodity are growing in importance and recognition. Food commons are increasingly recognized as essential to a number of interconnected struggles for the right to food, food security, food sovereignty, food justice, and degrowth. At the same time, food commons are often overlooked as relics of a distant past, doomed to enclosure, or too messy to govern. Together we will investigate why this is the case, and identify opportunities for research and action.

This five day intensive summer school introduces students to inspiring case studies of actually existing food commons through field visits and lectures, while testing the relevance of different theoretical and methodological approaches. Together we will explore and apply different theoretical perspectives to understand different types of food commons – ranging from food and seeds, to soil and land, to food knowledge and public health – in diverse rural and urban contexts. We will draw on transdisciplinary expertise in food studies, law and legal studies, sociology and geography, and community economies, to develop a relational, culturally, and materially grounded approach to understanding food and food systems as commons. Finally we will experiment with a variety of arts-based and action-research methods for growing the food commons."

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Welsh Dad Banned from Coaching Despite Facebook Post Acquittal

"Welsh Football Coach Still Banned from Sidelines After Acquittal in Free Speech Case Over Facebook Post
Acquitted by law yet condemned by policy, Jamie Michael’s case exposes how "safeguarding" has become a tool of quiet political control."

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The Curious Case of the Bisexual Tradwife | Compact

"While I had heard of mixed-orientation-marriages, in which one partner in a heterosexual marriage is openly gay, and lavender marriages, where both heterosexual partners are openly gay, the case of these bi tradwives was different. These women simultaneously assert a non-conventional sexual identity and embrace traditional gender roles within a heterosexual marriage. Such a brazenly non-comformist posture equally flies in the face of both leftists, who are terrified that “regressive” tradwife influencers like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, and conservatives who worry that deviation from a heterosexual norm risks eroding social order. "

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