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languagelog_feedAt BMR, the first thing the doctors, nurses, and techs ask patients when they interview them is "Do you feel any pain?" And they want you to quantify it on a scale of 1-3-5 / small-medium-big.
What is pain? Physical, mental?
I tend to think of it rather as Sanskrit duḥkha (/ˈduːkə/ दुःख) than as English "pain", because the former is more all encompassing (corporeally, spiritually) than the latter, which I feel is more physical.
pain
From Middle English peyne, payne, from Old French and Anglo-Norman peine, paine, from Latin poena (“punishment, pain”), from Ancient Greek ποινή (poinḗ, “bloodmoney, weregild, fine, price paid, penalty”), from Proto-Hellenic *kʷoinā́, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷoynéh₂ (“payment”) (whence also Proto-Slavic *cěnà (“price”)).
Doublet of peine. Compare Danish pine, Norwegian Bokmål pine, German Pein, Dutch pijn, Afrikaans pyn. See also pine (the verb). Partly displaced native Old English sār (whence Modern English sore).
Duḥkha (/ˈduːkə/; Sanskrit: दुःख, Pali: dukkha) "suffering", "pain", "unease", or "unsatisfactoriness", is an important concept in Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism. Its meaning is context-dependent: it may refer more specifically to the "unsatisfactoriness" or "unease" of craving for and grasping after transient 'things' (i.e. sensory objects, including thoughts), or expecting pleasure from them while ignorant of this transientness.[1][2][3][4][note 1] In Buddhism, dukkha is part of the first of the Four Noble Truths and one of the three marks of existence. The term also appears in scriptures of Hinduism, such as the Upanishads, in discussions of moksha (spiritual liberation).
While the term dukkha has often been derived from the prefix du- ("bad" or "difficult") and the root kha ("empty", "hole"), meaning a badly fitting axle-hole of a cart or chariot giving "a very bumpy ride", it may actually be derived from duḥ-stha, a "dis-/ bad- + stand-", that is, "standing badly, unsteady", "unstable".
Duḥkha (Sanskrit: दुःख; Pali: dukkha) is a term found in the Upanishads and Buddhist texts, meaning anything that is "uneasy, uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult, causing pain or sadness". It is also a concept in Indian religions about the nature of transient phenomena which are innately "unpleasant", "suffering", "pain", "sorrow", "distress", "grief" or "misery". The term duḥkha does not have a one-word English translation, and embodies diverse aspects of unpleasant human experiences. It is often understood as the opposite of sukha, meaning lasting "happiness", "comfort" or "ease".
The word has been explained in recent times as a derivation from Aryan terminology for an axle hole, referring to an axle hole which is not in the center and leads to a bumpy, uncomfortable ride. According to Winthrop Sargeant,
The ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were a nomadic, horse- and cattle-breeding people who travelled in horse- or ox-drawn vehicles. Su- and dus- are prefixes indicating good or bad. The word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning "sky," "ether," or "space," was originally the word for "hole," particularly an axle hole of one of the Aryan's vehicles. Thus sukha … meant, originally, "having a good axle hole," while duḥkha meant "having a poor axle hole," leading to discomfort.
Joseph Goldstein, American vipassana teacher and writer, explains the etymology as follows:
The word dukkha is made up of the prefix du- and the root kha. Du- means "bad" or "difficult". Kha means "empty". "Empty", here, refers to several things—some specific, others more general. One of the specific meanings refers to the empty axle hole of a wheel. If the axle fits badly into the center hole, we get a very bumpy ride. This is a good analogy for our ride through saṃsāra.
However, according to Monier Monier-Williams, the actual roots of the Pali term dukkha appear to be Sanskrit दुस्- (dus-, "bad") + स्था (sthā, "to stand"). Irregular phonological changes in the development of Sanskrit into the various Prakrits led to a shift from dus-sthā to duḥkha to dukkha.
Analayo concurs, stating that dukkha as derived from duḥ-sthā, "standing badly", "conveys nuances of "uneasiness" or of being "uncomfortable". Silk Road philologist Christopher I. Beckwith elaborates on this derivation. According to Beckwith:
… although the sense of duḥkha in Normative Buddhism is traditionally given as 'suffering', that and similar interpretations are highly unlikely for Early Buddhism. Significantly, Monier-Williams himself doubts the usual explanation of duḥkha and presents an alternative one immediately after it, namely: duḥ-stha "'standing badly,' unsteady, disquieted (lit. and fig.); uneasy", and so on. This form is also attested, and makes much better sense as the opposite of the Rig Veda sense of sukha, which Monier-Williams gives in full.
(VHM: This is a perfect analogy for my own primary suffering here at BMH, which is caused by the insertion of a Foley catheter into my body at a particular point [a small hole], also my wobbliness when standing.)
Afterword
téngtòng 疼痛
(VHM: I'm not sure how this common disyllabic "Mandarin" term (supposedly for "pain") relates to my own medical condition [see below].)
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(it) hurts; love fondly; ache
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ache; pain; sorrow | ||
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| simp. and trad. (疼痛) |
疼 | 痛 | |
| alternative forms | 疼疼 (thông-thiàⁿ) 痛疼 (thàng-thiàⁿ) 痛痛 (thàng-thiàⁿ) |
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疼痛
疼痛
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(it) hurts; love fondly; ache
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ache; pain; sorrow | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| simp. and trad. (疼痛) |
疼 | 痛 | |
| alternative forms | 痛疼 痛痛 |
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疼痛 (Southern Min)
Selected readings
There's another word in Sinitic that means "ache; pain", viz., tòng 痛, which can also mean "hate". Curiously, the same word can convey the sentiment of "love dearly; have tender affection for". Selectively continuing a very long list of different definitions for the same character, we have "painful; sad; grieved; sorrowful" and "very happy; delighted", as well as "harsh; bitter; severe", and so forth and so on. Cf. téng 疼 which can mean "ache; pain", but also "love dearly; dote on". This is why, when you read Chinese texts, you have to be on your toes and pay keen attention to context and what you think the author is really trying to convey.
flowing_data_feed
The National Park Service and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes data on national parks annually, but it’s not always straightforward to access. Kyle Frost brought the data into one place so that it’s easier to view and download.
Decades of national park visitation and outdoor recreation economic data are buried in government spreadsheets. I built this to make it actually usable, whether you work in outdoor rec or just want to know how many people went to Yellowstone last year.
It looks like Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park, by a lot.
Tags: Kyle Frost, outdoors, park
maru_feedflemmingseff_feedGoogle moved up its estimated deadline for quantum preparedness in cryptography to 2029—only 33 months from now. That’s earlier than previous deadlines, and they proposed the new post-quantum migration deadline because of two new papers that comprise a big jump in the state of the technology. It’s ahead of schedule, but not altogether unexpected. Cryptographers and engineers have been working on this for years, and as the deadline gets closer, it’s not surprising to see more precise timeline estimates come up.
The preparation for the Y2K bug is not a perfect analogy. Like Y2K, if systems are not updated in time, anyone with a powerful enough quantum computer will be able to more easily insert malware into the core systems of a computer and fake authentication to allow impersonation merely by observing network traffic. These are the threats whose mitigation timelines have been moved up.
But unlike Y2K, there’s a second sort of attack that we already need to be prepared for: quantum computers will be able to decrypt years of captured messages sent over encrypted messaging platforms shared any time before those platforms updated to quantum-proof encryption. That type of attack has been the main focus of engineering efforts so far and mitigation is well on its way, since anything before the upgrade might eventually be compromised.
Fortunately, not all cryptography is broken by quantum computers. Notably, symmetric encryption is quantum resistant. That means that if you have disk encryption turned on, you shouldn’t have to worry about quantum computers breaking into your phone, as long as your system’s keys are long enough. The problem is how you get the keys to do that encryption, and how you authenticate software on your device and in the cloud.
For those whose work touches on any sort of cryptographic deployment, you’re hopefully already working on the post-quantum transition. If not, you really should be; there are quite a few relevant posts and updates with more information about what this news means for you. Your key agreement systems should be upgraded soon if they’re not already because of store-now-decrypt-later attacks. Now it’s time to prepare for authentication attacks on forged signatures as well.
In some cases, you may need to wait on others to finish their work first. If you’re using NGINX to host websites on Ubuntu, for example, the security settings you need to upgrade key agreement were just released in version 26.04. Updates are rolling out, so keep checking in and upgrade your systems as soon as you’re able to.
But if you’re not in any position to be updating software or hardware, there may be some additional steps you can take to make sure you're as protected as possible. You’ll want to get the latest post-quantum protections as soon as they're available, so if you don't already have a habit of applying software updates in a timely manner, now’s a good time to start.
If you want to know if the website you’re using or the encrypted messaging app you’re chatting over will leak its data in a few years to anyone storing traffic now, you can search for its name with the word "quantum." The engineers are usually pretty proud of their work and have announced their post-quantum support (like what we’ve seen from Signal and iMessage). If you can’t find that information, you may want to have extra consideration for what you say over the internet, or switch the tools you're using. Those are the big areas to worry about now, before quantum computers are actually here, because they could result in the mass leakage of old messages.
The new deadline means that some technologies are simply not going to make it in time and will have to be left by the wayside, like trusted execution environments (TEEs), due to the slower speed of hardware deployments. TEEs are how companies do private processing on user data in the cloud, and they’re particularly relevant to AI offerings.
Even now, though they offer more protection than processing data in the clear, TEEs are not as secure as homomorphic encryption or doing the processing on device. Post-quantum, the security level gets much closer to computation on cleartext, and even with strong user controls, that makes it way too easy to accidentally backdoor your own encrypted chats. If you’re worried about the contents of messages in an encrypted chat being exposed, you’ll probably want to completely avoid using AI features that might leak that content, such as summarization of recent chat history and notifications, and reply composition assistance.
The work to update the world to post-quantum is well on its way. NIST finalized the standards for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms back in 2024. The larger platforms, websites, and hosting providers have already updated their algorithms, so even now, you’re probably already using post-quantum algorithms to access some of the internet. Measurements vary pretty widely, but up to about 4 in 10 websites currently support a post-quantum key exchange.
There’s still some work to be done in figuring out how to make the needed changes—for example, the way you find out a website’s private key to make HTTPS possible is being reworked to make room for larger signatures. Some technologies are just coming to market, like the post-quantum root of trust available now in some Chromebooks. In practice, this means that as you think about replacing your current devices in the next few years, you may want to check if you’re picking up hardware that has post-quantum support, if those specific protections are required for your threat model.
For the areas that still need updating, how much can we expect to actually get ready by the new deadline? It’s likely that not every cryptographically-capable device and deployment will be ready in time, and hardware with hard-coded certificates will probably be the last to update. We saw that happen when SHA-1 was deprecated; Point of Sale systems in particular were late adopters. While governments and large companies with quantum computers may not be interested in stealing money from cash registers, they will be interested in accessing secrets about people’s private lives. That’s why it’s so important that everyone does their part to upgrade, to protect the details of private communications and browsing.
And there’s a good chance that older devices that won’t receive quantum-resistant updates were probably vulnerable to some other attack already. Quantum computation is just one type of attack on cryptography that’s notable for the scale of migration required, and how every public-key cryptosystem and authentication scheme has to do the work to prepare. That’s not a difference in kind, it’s a difference in scale, and some systems will inevitably be left behind.
Quantum preparedness hits different industries and services in different ways, but services that handle communications and financial information are particularly susceptible to risk, and need to act quickly to protect the privacy and security of billions of people.
languagehat_feedTom Johnson’s LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 6 · 2 April 2026; archived) of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin opens with a passage containing a goodly selection of little-known specialized terms:
Adam Smith began his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by arguing that the division of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.’ He listed the shepherds, wool sorters, carders, dyers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dressers who ‘must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production’. The division of labour wove all these people together in unknowing co-operation, such that ‘the very meanest person in a civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation.
Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of workmen elide the generations of clever hands and centuries of folk knowledge required to make that coarse woollen coat. To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures and washed in a river before being sent to the shearing men. If you couldn’t afford sheep of your own, you could go into the fields after the clip and gather the leftover scraps.
Once the wool was off, it needed to be washed. Christine Cooper had to cull ‘about seven todds of very coarse and feeble tarry’ wool from tegs, scouring off the tar and sorting it for carding. The wool wasted in the process was called ‘twickings’ – another chance for the gleaners. Once carded and the fibres smoothed into a fluffy substance known as ‘batt’, the wool could be spun into yarn. Spinning was women’s labour, and women were doing it constantly: in street doorways, while chatting to their neighbours, in the back rooms of their houses while they watched over their infants and kept cauldrons of ale from boiling over. Low-status and badly paid, spinning was so ubiquitous it was simply called ‘work’; the distaff was a symbol of womanhood. Twenty-year-old Joanna Pittman of Cullompton in Devon earned sixpence a week spinning at a neighbour’s house. She was paid by the week ‘but may go from them at every week’s end if she please’. Historians have estimated that between 50 and 65 per cent of the labour required to turn wool into cloth was made up of carding and spinning.
Only after the wool became yarn could it be entrusted to male artisans, and even then with some misgivings. Women were rarely involved in the relatively well-paid labour of weaving, but after hours at the distaff, they knew their stuff. Mary Dawdon of Masham in Yorkshire gave eleven pounds of yarn to James Thompson in August 1695, but when he returned the finished product she was sure he had cheated her. ‘[It] being fine wool she did expect to have again eight yards of fine cloth, the list of the said run web being all white, but … Thompson did bring [her] a much coarser woollen web with a black list, [she] being very certain that it was not her web.’ Once woven, the cloth had to be ‘litted’ or dyed – the spinster Jane Browne was hired to dye some wool green, blue or white in 1630 – and if it was one of the loose-woven ‘old draperies’ such as kersey, it had to be fulled (or ‘tucked’) to draw the fibres closer together, and napped to remove loose hairs from the surface of the cloth, ready for cutting.
Johnson goes on to discuss the difficulty of analyzing work in the premodern era:
Yet there remain significant problems with using data on wages and the organisation of labour to understand the surge in economic growth in the 17th and 18th centuries. This is partly because the data itself is not as sound as it first appears. Premodern records are often incomplete, so historians must make assumptions. In order to calculate annual wages that can be used as the basis for measures of productivity or living standards, for instance, it has often been assumed that people worked a five-day week. Yet we also know that work patterns varied a great deal by season and there was no strict dichotomy between days for labour and days for leisure. Most servants, living in the homes of their employers, were given only half a day off at most. Sunday was a day of rest, but not for everyone: Benjamin Hooper, a shoemaker’s apprentice in Somerset, ran away in 1650 ‘because his master did make him work upon the sabbath days’, cleaning shoes, ‘packing of wares’ and managing the shop. There is a mismatch between the clean threads of modern econometrics and the rough batt of 17th-century labour relations.
A great deal of work, moreover, yielded compensation in forms other than money wages. In 1669 John Corker, a cobbler in Rotherham, was receiving pieces of scrap iron in exchange for ‘mending shoes for the workmen’ and their wives at a forge. He took the iron three miles down the road to a blacksmith in the village of Whiston, whose servant and apprentice weighed and ‘presently wrought [it] up’ in the shop. Fishermen of South Huish in Devon were accustomed to receiving their payment in the form of the catch itself: as many as forty men stood on the shore to haul in the seines of mackerel, and each received his share. The time of year when most rural people worked for wages was the autumn harvest, when every spare hand was needed to reap, gather and bind the crop: customary forms of payment were honoured, as labourers received food and drink from their employers.
Wage data, naturally, only tells us the kinds of labour that were done for wages. And yet in a premodern economy organised around household production, a vast portion of work – most of it done by women – was never compensated and only occasionally recognised. In the 1680s John Wood’s neighbours noted archly that his wife had been entrusted with very few duties: ‘only with the necessary affairs of housekeeping incumbent of a wife to look after … as the taking care to provide meat and other necessaries for the family and the making of butter and cheese and such like’ – the small matter of countless hours at the dairy churn. Anthony Fitzherbert wrote in 1523 of ‘an olde common saying, that seldom doth the husbande thrive without leve of his wyf’.
Historians concerned with measuring growth haven’t been generous in their recognition of women’s work (even today the UN refuses to include housework and care work in its calculations of GDP). […]
It is the great originality of The Experience of Work, a research project led by Jane Whittle and now published with her research team Mark Hailwood, Taylor Aucoin and Hannah Robb, to have found a solution to this problem. Rather than looking at financial records that yield data on wages and prices, they have turned to oral testimonies given before law courts, in which witnesses narrated the circumstances leading up to a crime or conflict. These sources don’t tell us much about wages or prices – they contain relatively few figures – but reveal a great deal about everyday life.
If that kind of thing interests you, you will want to read the whole thing. (Warning: may induce rage if you allow yourself to identify with premodern women.)
eff_feedAs long as people have had more than one purchasing option, they’ve been comparing those options and looking for bargains. Online shoppers are no exception; in fact, one of the potential benefits of the internet is that it expands our options for everything from car rentals to airline tickets to dish soap. New AI tools can make the process even easier. These tools could provide some welcome relief for consumers facing sky-high prices that many cannot afford.
Unfortunately, Amazon is trying to block these helpful new tools, which can steer shoppers towards competitors. Taking a page from Facebook and RyanAir, they are trying to use computer crime laws to do it.
Amazon’s target is Perplexity, which makes an AI-enabled web browser, called Comet, that allows users to browse the web as they normally would, but can also perform certain actions on the user’s behalf. For example, a user could ask Comet to find the best price on a 24-pack of toilet paper, and if satisfied with the results, have the browser order it. Amazon claims that Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by building a tool that helps users access information on Amazon and engage with the site.
Unfortunately, a federal district court agreed. The court’s fundamental mistake: relying on the Ninth Circuit’s misguided decision in Facebook v Power Ventures, rather than the court’s much better and more applicable reasoning in hiQ Labs.
Perplexity has appealed to the Ninth Circuit. As we explain in an amicus brief filed in support, the district court’s mistake, if affirmed, could lead to myriad unintended consequences. Overbroad readings of the CFAA have undermined research, security, competition, and innovation. For years, we’ve worked to limit its scope to Congress’s original intention: actual hacking that bypasses computer security. It should have nothing to do with Amazon’s claims here, not least because most of Amazon’s website is publicly available.
The court’s approach would be especially dangerous for journalists and academic researchers. Researchers often create a variety of testing accounts. For example, if they’re researching how a service displays housing offers, they may create separate accounts associated with different race, gender, or language settings. These sorts of techniques may be adversarial to the company, but they shouldn’t be illegal. But according to the court’s opinion, if a company disagrees with this sort of research, it can’t just ban the researchers from using the site; it can render that research criminal by just sending a letter notifying the researcher that they’re not authorized to use the service in this way.
A broad reading of CFAA in this case would also undermine competition by enabling companies to limit data scraping, effectively cutting off one of the ways websites offer tools to compare prices and features.
The Ninth Circuit should follow Van Buren’s lead and interpret the CFAA narrowly, as Congress intended. Website owners do not need new shields against independent accountability.
eff_feedAfter almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.
We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, EFF was clear about what needed fixing.
We called for:
Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we're joining them.
Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
EFF exists to protect people’s digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance.
Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. These platforms host mutual aid networks and serve as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the apps isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:
Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how these platforms suppress marginalized voices, enable invasive behavioral advertising, and flag posts about abortion as dangerous. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices.
We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members’ support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we’re here to help you take back control.
languagelog_feedFollowing up on the DP's April Fools "AI-yatollah" article, an Ayatollah pun from Admiral James Stavridis, USN, Ret.:
— Admiral James Stavridis, USN, Ret. (@admiralstav.bsky.social) April 8, 2026 at 7:57 PM
Wikipedia explains the etymology of Ayatollah:
The title is originally derived from the Arabic word Āyah post-modified with the word Allah, making ʾāyatu llāh (Arabic: آية الله). The combination has been translated to English as 'Sign of God','Divine Sign' or 'Reflection of God'.
The Admiral's joke was presumably a response to this: "Trump says he’s considering ‘joint venture’ with Iran for Strait of Hormuz tolls".
index_on_censorship_feedThis article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illiberal vision is seducing the Western world, published on 2 April 2026.
Pedro Frazão is a Portuguese far-right politician who fancies himself as something of an orator. At the Battle for the Soul of Europe conference in Brussels last December, the youthful 50-year-old cut a dynamic and sharp-suited figure as he outlined his vision. He called for “patriots” across the continent to fight for its fragile, inherited freedoms. Without the courage to fight, he suggested, the whole edifice of Western civilisation could collapse.
He ended with a flourish: “The West is here and being reborn.” Commenting on his YouTube channel immediately after the conference, Frazão refined his message: “Global elites buy media, hide truths and try to silence those who defend sovereignty, family and national identity. We cannot give in. It is up to us to protect the homeland, the borders and freedom. Portugal needs patriots who will not bow down.”
The conference was organised by MCC Brussels, an offshoot of the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian institution with close links to the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Politico has described the MCC Brussels as “the EU’s most prominent hard-right pressure group”. Far-right revivalists such as Frazão claim they are fighting for key enlightenment values, including free speech, which they say are under threat from a tsunami of wokery, driven by European Union bureaucrats.
The line-up at the conference was a Who’s Who of the European far right, including the British academic Matthew Goodwin, who later announced he would be standing for Reform UK in the recent Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election (which he lost). Goodwin told delegates there was “a political revolution under way”, which would destroy the traditional two-party system in the UK. “We will root out diversity, equality and inclusion policies or woke ideology from taxpayer-funded institutions,” he said, warning that a Reform government would look more like Donald Trump’s second administration in the USA than his first.
Other speakers included Alice Cordier, the French anti-immigration activist and founder of the Collectif Némésis; Patrick Deneen, the prominent conservative author of Why Liberalism Failed; and the Polish Christian philosopher-politician Ryszard Legutko.
The star turn at the Battle for the Soul of Europe was former Czech president Václav Klaus, a key dissident ally of Václav Havel during the Cold War who has tacked further and further to the right in recent years.
MCC was founded in 1996 as a private higher-education institute by the conservative, anti-communist Tombor family and has grown into a hugely influential network of interlinked bodies. Combining the functions of a university, a youth movement and a think-tank, it has also developed a programme of political education under the banner of “talent development”.
MCC Brussels is headed by the Hungarian-British academic Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in the UK and a former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party there. Furedi’s latest book, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History, is a staunch defence of the legacy of Western values and history against attacks sustained during the culture wars. He sees his role, which he took up two years ago after a chance meeting with the Hungarian prime minister’s political director Balázs Orbán (no relation), as providing a counterbalance to European liberal orthodoxy.
The links to the Fidesz government are explicit, with more than $1bn of government funds transferred to MCC at the beginning of the 2020s.
Last year, the Brussels arm of the organisation received $6m from sources allied to Viktor Orbán, according to Politico. Balázs Orbán is its chairman.
In an interview with Index last year, Furedi said: “We are funded by two companies, the oil company MOL and Gedeon Richter, the pharmaceutical company. Now, you could argue that MCC Hungary [the orginal MCC] has got a close association with the government and it empathises with the government’s politics. Our particular organisation is entirely autonomous. That was the condition on which I took the job or set it up…”
Furedi is a staunch supporter of the idea that there is media freedom in Hungary despite Fidesz and its allies owning 80% of media outlets, according to Reporters Without Borders.
He also said: “I do think the attacks on Orbán’s government and Hungary over the free media are misconceived… You have a situation where there are TV channels in Hungary that are anti-government and have a very large viewership. You have a situation where the opposition has got a far greater presence on social media, on social media platforms, than the government has. [If] you go to Budapest and you go to newspaper shops, you’ll find that there are plenty of newspapers, not one, two or three, [that are] hostile and critical to government, so I don’t see it the way it’s represented.”
Since it was established in 2022, MCC Brussels has pumped out a stream of anti-EU reports. In 2025 alone, the think-tank has published 11 substantial reports in an attempt to expose the supposed woke bias of the EU as it wages a war against the free speech of the silent majority. These include Mission Creeps: How EU Funding and Activist NGOs Captured the Gender Agenda, Brussels’s Media Machine: EU Media Funding and the Shaping of Public Discourse, Rule of Lawyers: How the ECHR is Hampering Action on Migration, and Indoctrinating Children: How Brussels Embeds Gender Identity in the Classroom.
The ideological direction of travel is clear, but these reports are not the intemperate ravings of the traditional extreme right. These are detailed arguments honed over the years by the intellectual allies of Furedi as he made his way from the hard left to the populist right.
The consistent message at Battle for the Soul of Europe was this: European civilisation is under threat from the combined forces of mass immigration and political correctness. Free speech for people wishing to raise these issues is being stifled. Patriots of sovereign nations need to wake up and fight for the Christian values of the West and come to some kind of understanding with Russia. Just a week after the conference, Trump made it clear that his national security strategy’s Europe policy was based on precisely the same principles.
Writing in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, Nick Cheeseman, Matias Bianchi and Jennifer Cyr identified the concept of The Illiberal International, which brings together far-right politicians to reshape the global order. They identified key gatherings of the far right such as the Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid in February 2025, hosted by the right-wing party and MCC ally Patriots.EU. The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which met in Hungary in 2022, met again in Budapest on 21 March 2026 – just before parliamentary elections – with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the keynote speaker. These set-piece events provide a forum for what the Foreign Affairs authors describe as “narrative diffusion”.
December’s Battle for the Soul of Europe was just such an event. The Illiberal International article describes this process brilliantly: “Attendees endorse each other in speeches, cultivate networks of contacts, and share ideas, building international connections that provide visibility and legitimacy for domestic movements. And because these events include both conventional conservative discourse and outright disinformation, they can blur the boundary between the two, making authoritarian messaging appear more palatable to mainstream audiences.”
Viktor Orbán’s concept of “illiberal democracy” has often been cited as an inspiration for the Trump regime, and in recent months the ideological links between Budapest and Washington have become increasingly explicit. At the beginning of February, MCC welcomed an investigation by the USA’s House Judiciary Committee into alleged EU censorship. A statement from MCC Brussels claimed “internal communications from major technology platforms provides incontrovertible proof that the European Union’s regulatory framework is a ‘censorship operating system’ designed to systematically throttle free speech”.
For some time, MCC Brussels has warned of an alliance between unelected EU institutions, tech companies and state-funded NGOs to stifle right-wing political speech. As far as the US committee and the European right are concerned, the EU’s Democracy Shield – an initiative launched in November 2025 by the EU Commission to target disinformation, fake news and foreign interference – is, in fact, a cover for silencing dissent by the liberal orthodoxy.
In response, it launched the Democracy Interference Observatory to counter what it sees as EU interference in elections taking place in sovereign European states. It has announced that its first test case will be April’s Hungarian elections, where it will target EU attempts to identify foreign interference and electoral malpractice.
The battle lines have been drawn. Opposition candidate Péter Magyar has already warned of Russian interference in the forthcoming election and has urged a stronger EU response. Meanwhile, Magyar’s chief of staff, Márton Hajdu, has called for the application of the EU Digital Services Act to counter disinformation. The latest AI-generated political advert from Viktor Orbán’s party shows a father being executed by a soldier in what looks like German uniform because the EU has dragged Hungary into the war in Ukraine.
Few MCC authors are mainstream academics, and most are referred to as “independent researchers”. The most prolific of these is the Italian journalist and author Thomas Fazi, who writes on EU propaganda and media manipulation. His report on Brussels’s Media Machine is a direct challenge to the EU consensus on disinformation and dissent, arguing that it closes down genuinely alternative voices. He says Brussels funding is used to bolster mainstream media narratives within the EU and, significantly, beyond its borders. His arguments mirror those used by the Trump administration to cut funding to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United States Agency for Global Media.
“The EU funds media outlets in Ukraine, the Western Balkans, the South Caucasus and Russian/Belarusian exile media. These efforts, under the guise of ‘supporting democracy’, often reflect geopolitical and strategic goals, mirroring methods associated with USAID-style influence campaigns,” he said. Fazi also pushes the MCC Brussels line in mainstream media outlets and is a regular contributor to the British publication UnHerd. Here he is last November on the European Democracy Shield: “[This] is just the latest vision in unfreedom: suppressing dissent and policing speech under the pretext of defending democracy from foreign interference and fake news.”
EU commissioner for democracy, justice and the rule of law Michael McGrath told critics in the European parliament in November: “To those who question the Shield and who say it’s about censorship, what I say to you is that I and my colleagues in the European Commission will be the very first people to defend your right to level robust debate in a public forum.”
Zalán Zubor of the Hungarian investigative non-for-profit publication Atlatszo, has been tracking the activities of MCC for several years. He said there was a common methodology to its work, where it identified freelance writers and paid them yearly grants to undertake unspecified research while writing specific articles adhering to the MCC line.
He explained the forthcoming election was a high-stakes moment for the organisation as Magyar has pledged to set up an agency to prosecute groups that have been the beneficiaries of state largesse. “The MCC is going to be the target,” said Zubor.
The future of MCC Brussels is unclear, but it is possible that it is part of the global strategy of the Hungarian far right in case Viktor Orbán loses the election. For Zubor, this would be an obvious next step for the Hungarian leader. “It is very clear he sees himself as an international figure, the Hungarian leader of the far right.”
While a storm is coming for the MCC and its Brussels branch if Magyar wins the election, the same may be true for independent media if Fidesz returns to power in April. At present, Hungarian citizens can donate 1% of their taxes to civic society groups, including non-profit media organisations such as Atlatszo. The government recently withdrew proposals to make it illegal for these donations to be made to organisations judged “political”, which would have effectively bankrupted independent media. But if Fidesz wins, there is every possibility it will reintroduce the measure.
Hungary and the British Right
The Matthias Corvinus Collegium has funded right-wing propaganda in British universities and paid the salary of Reform politician Matthew Goodwin (left), according to investigations in the UK and Hungary.
Legal campaigners Good Law Project revealed in February that the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) has received almost $700,000 from MCC since 2023, amounting to 90% of its funding. Directors of the RSLF, set up in honour of the conservative philosopher, include Spectator editor and former Conservative Cabinet minister Michael Gove and Nigel Farage’s senior advisor James Orr. According to its founding documents the foundation is an “international network of institutions and scholars dedicated to furthering the philosophical and cultural achievements of the West”.
In April 2023, the MCC signed a deal with Sophie Scruton, the widow of Sir Roger Scruton, to provide opportunities for Hungarian students at its “talent centre” to study at Oxford and Cambridge universities. RSLF has since organised conferences at both.
Then, in June last year, the RSLF ran Now & England, a conference in Westminster, which brought together right-wing thinkers and politicians including Rupert Lowe, the Great Yarmouth MP who left Reform to set up his own party, Restore Britain, shortly afterwards and Conservative MP Danny Kruger, who defected to Reform in September 2025. Publicity for the event stated: “England stands at a crossroads. Mass immigration, detached elites, and decaying institutions have strained the country’s sense of identity and direction.”
The connection between RSLF and Hungary was further reinforced when the country’s embassy hosted the Roger Scruton Symposium last October. Right-wing thinkers gathered to celebrate the legacy of the philosopher. They included Goodwin, who stood as the Reform candidate in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election in which he came second to the Green Party.
Goodwin is a “visiting fellow” at the Matthias Corvinus Collegium and spoke at this year’s MCC Feszt, a festival of right-wing thought also addressed by Viktor Orbán and PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. According to leaked documents obtained by the Hungarian investigative reporting site Direkt 36, visiting fellows at MCC are paid between $6000 to $12,000 per month “plus housing, office space, health insurance and, where appropriate, family support”. The Direkt 36 investigation also revealed the vast sums the MCC spends on events, with $1.8 million laid out for catering alone. Many of these events take place in the Budapest café in the MCC’s Budapest headquarters. The name of the venue? Café Scruton.
The post Hungary leads the far-right charge on free speech appeared first on Index on Censorship.
languagelog_feed
Mouseover title: "I think I accidentally installed an Overton window in my bedroom. A few months ago, the sun wasn't in my face in the morning, but now it is."
ICYMI: Wikipedia on "Overton Window".
More comically interesting: the menu of "Mode" choices now routinely displayed below the cartoon:
You should try them all!
foodpolitics_feedThe new MAHA dietary guidelines could mean that changes are coming to school meals. Or so the USDA says.
While waiting for the USDA to issue new rules, various groups are urging specific improvements.
United We Eat, a coalition of MAHA-supporting groups, urges the USDA Secretary to get busy Aligning School Meal Standards with the MAHA Mandate to Protect Children’s Health. It is especially concerned about the poor quality of meat served in school meals (something I hear a lot about from school food service directors).
These processed animal products often contain additive heavy formulations, including preservatives
such as nitrites and nitrates, which health authorities have associated with increased colorectal cancer risk in processed meats, as well as other processing agents such as sodium phosphates that raise broader nutritional concerns and kidney damage….Beyond the concerns with processed meat, majority of all animal proteins served in schools are sourced from industrial supply chains that rely on routine antibiotic use, growth-promoting drugs including ractopamine, and feed grown with significant pesticide inputs.
Another coalition, this one of nearly 200 food service professionals, school districts, and other groups, is pressing for plant-based meat alternatives in the protein group.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, including those released in January, have long recommended diversifying protein intake across plant and animal sources. Yet in practice, school menus remain heavily dominated by animal-based proteins. A forthcoming analysis of a sample of 45 school district menus from November 2025 found that, excluding nut butter and jelly sandwiches, fewer than one in ten school lunch entrée offerings utilized plant-sourced protein to fulfill the M/MA requirement. More than 90% of school lunch entrees contained animal-sourced proteins…a plant protein subgroup within the Meats/Meat Alternates category would provide a clear, practical framework to diversify protein intake, increase fiber consumption, and improve inclusivity within child nutrition programs.
USDA ought to be issuing new school food rules soon. I can’t wait to see what they are. In the meantime, this is a good time to weigh in.
The post New school food rules on the horizon? appeared first on Food Politics by Marion Nestle
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Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was published 30 years ago. To commemorate, Christian Swinehart made Infinite Digest, an illustrated companion to the book:
Now, 30 years after its initial publication, I’m revisiting Infinite Jest and exploring those old intuitions about its structure by visualizing them. Part reader’s guide and part analytical tool, this collection of interactive graphics is my attempt to give readers a unifying view of the book’s whirlwind of characters, narratives, and interlinked references.
The work is based on static graphics that Swinehart illustrated in 2021. They explore timelines, the endnotes, and character connections. So far, there is an interactive version for plot lines and footnote distribution. He also made the data available to download.
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Hi everyone. This is issue No. 383 of the Process, where we aim for data graphics that beat the defaults. I’m Nathan Yau. This week we look for ways to diverge towards the unexpected.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
languagelog_feedFrom Mark Dow:
The ACLU's national legal director is Cecillia Wang. She argued the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, in front of the Supreme Court this month. This case heavily depends on the 1898 case Wong Kim Ark. I asked Cecillia — a birthright citizen herself — whether the names Wang and Wong are transliterations of the same word.
She replied by email: "I tried to figure out whether Mr. Wong has the same last name. My understanding is that we don't. Cantonese-speaking immigrants in the 19th century had their names transliterated through a different system, and perhaps not through any system but an ad hoc interaction with a customs official. "Wong" was most commonly used for two surnames, one now transliterated as Wang (meaning "king") and the other as Huang (meaning "yellow"). I think Wong Kim Ark was a Huang."
I'm sharing this, with Cecillia's permission, in case Language Log readers might have something to add.
Selected readings
isisjames_davis_nicoll - Light of the Song (Sword Goddess Acolyte Chronicles, volume 2) by Joyce Ch'nglanguagelog_feed - PAINflowing_data_feed - National park visitation and outdoor recreation dataneonvincent - Walk the Dinosaur 3maru_feed - Happy Birthday Hana!flemmings - My great big transit adventure pt the whatevereff_feed - Yikes, Encryption’s Y2K Moment is Coming Years Earlylanguagehat_feed - Twickings, Batt, Work.eff_feed - Comparison Shopping Is Not a (Computer) Crimeeff_feed - EFF is Leaving Xlanguagelog_feed - The Aya Toll Boothindex_on_censorship_feed - Hungary leads the far-right charge on free speechlanguagelog_feed - _ Modefoodpolitics_feed - New school food rules on the horizon?flowing_data_feed - Visual guide for Infinite Jestjames_davis_nicoll - Little, Big by John Crowleyflowing_data_feed - ✚ Off the axeslanguagelog_feed - Birthright citizenshipisis - wednesday reads and thingszvi and 
