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🔗 Human rights 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Elections and Referendums

Democratic backsliding is a form of autocratization, a process of regime change toward authoritarianism in which the exercise of political power becomes less limited and more arbitrary and repressive. Democratic backsliding specifically assumes a starting point of a democratic system. The process typically restricts the space for public contest and political participation in the process of government selection. Democratic backsliding involves the weakening of democratic institutions, such as the peaceful transition of power or free and fair elections, or the violation of individual rights that underpin democracies, especially freedom of expression. Democratic backsliding is the opposite of democratization.

Democratic backsliding is a gradual process, composed of instances of decline. It is not sudden nor dramatic, and typically follows legal processes to weaken democratic institutions. The Democratic Erosion Consortium categorizes these events of erosion into precursors, symptoms, acts of resistance to backsliding, and destabilizing events.

Proposed causes of democratic backsliding include economic inequality, unemployment, culture wars, culturally conservative reactions to societal changes, populist or personalist politics, and external influence from great power politics. Economic inequality is strongly associated with democratic backsliding in the 21st century, even in wealthy democracies. During crises, backsliding can occur when leaders impose autocratic rules during states of emergency that are either disproportionate to the severity of the crisis or remain in place after the situation has improved.

During the Cold War, democratic backsliding occurred most frequently through coups. Since the end of the Cold War, democratic backsliding has occurred more frequently through the election of personalist leaders or parties who subsequently dismantle democratic institutions. During the third wave of democratization in the late twentieth century, many new, weakly institutionalized democracies were established; these regimes have been most vulnerable to democratic backsliding. The third wave of autocratization has been ongoing since 2010 after the Great Recession, when the number of liberal democracies was at an all-time high. More than half of all autocratization episodes over 1900–2023 have a U-turn shape in which the autocratization is closely followed by and linked to subsequent democratization.

🔗 Physics

Absolute hot is a theoretical upper limit to the thermodynamic temperature scale, conceived as an opposite to absolute zero.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software

Phantom OS is an operating system mostly made by Russian programmers. Phantom OS is based on a concept of persistent virtual memory, and is managed-code oriented. Phantom OS is one of a few OSes that are not based on classical concepts of Unix-like systems. Its primary goal is to achieve simplicity and effectiveness in both the operating system and applications at the same time.

Phantom is based on the principle that "Everything is an object", in contrast to the Unix-like approach of "Everything is a file".

🔗 Books 🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Media

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism is a memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of public policy at Facebook (renamed Meta), published on March 11, 2025. The book is a critical account of Facebook's internal culture and decision-making practices during Wynn-Williams' time there. The book is highly critical of Facebook's responses to global sociopolitical events, including its role in the Rohingya genocide and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's alleged efforts to censor on behalf of the Chinese government. Additionally, Wynn-Williams accuses several Facebook executives, including Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan, of engaging in harmful behavior in the workplace, including sexual harassment.

The book gained media coverage following reports that Meta sued to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting the book; public backlash against Meta's response has been credited with boosting sales of the book, a result known as the Streisand effect. By late March 2025, Careless People had reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Following the book's publication, Wynn-Williams was invited to testify before the U.S. Senate, where she accused Zuckerberg of having been willing to censor content in order to gain access to the Chinese market. The title of the book is a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Germany 🔗 Politics 🔗 Cold War 🔗 European history

The Stalin Note, also known as the March Note, was a document delivered to the representatives of the Western Allies (the United Kingdom, France, and the United States) from the Soviet Union in Germany on 10 March 1952. Soviet general secretary and premier Joseph Stalin put forth a proposal for a German reunification and neutralisation with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for "the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction, and assembly" and free activity of democratic parties and organizations.

James Warburg, a member of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, testified before the committee on 28 March 1952 and observed that the Soviet proposal might be a bluff, but he thought that it seemed "that our government is afraid to call the bluff for the fear that it may not be a bluff at all" and might lead to "a free, neutral, and demilitarised Germany", which might be "subverted into Soviet orbit". That led to an exchange of notes between the West and the Soviet Union, which eventually ended after the West had insistence for a unified Germany to be free to join the European Defence Community and to be rearmed, demands that Stalin rejected.

West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Western Allies characterised Stalin's move as an aggressive action that attempted to stall the reintegration of West Germany. However, there was later a debate on whether a chance for reunification had been missed. Six years after the exchange, two West German ministers, Thomas Dehler and Gustav Heinemann, blamed Adenauer for not having explored the chance of reunification.

🔗 Occupational Safety and Health

Lock Out, Tag Out (LOTO), Lock Out, Tag Out, Try Out (LOTOTO) or lock and tag is a safety procedure used in industry and research settings to ensure that dangerous machines are properly shut off and not able to be started up again prior to the completion of maintenance or repair work. It requires that hazardous energy sources be "isolated and rendered inoperative" before work is started on the equipment in question. The isolated power sources are then locked and a tag is placed on the lock identifying the worker who placed it. The worker then holds the key for the lock, ensuring that only he or she can remove the lock and start the machine. This prevents accidental startup of a machine while it is in a hazardous state or while a worker is in direct contact with it.

Lockout-tagout is used across industries as a safe method of working on hazardous equipment and is mandated by law in some countries.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Poetry

"The Centipede's Dilemma" is a short poem that has lent its name to a psychological effect called the centipede effect or centipede syndrome. The centipede effect occurs when a normally automatic or unconscious activity is disrupted by consciousness of it or reflection on it. For example, a golfer thinking too closely about their swing or someone thinking too much about how they knot their tie may find their performance of the task impaired. The effect is also known as hyperreflection or Humphrey's law after English psychologist George Humphrey (1889–1966), who propounded it in 1923. As he wrote of the poem, "This is a most psychological rhyme. It contains a profound truth which is illustrated daily in the lives of all of us". The effect is the reverse of a solvitur ambulando.