On the morning of Keir Starmer's conference speech here's a new post on an odd psychopathology in British politics - our main parties don't like the people who vote for them - the dreaded Professional Managerial Class. And so they are acting out like a divorced dad seeking cooler voters. 1/n

The median human being (Chinese man named Mohammed Singh, lives in a giant city and makes $10,000) is Indonesian

Moldova is now firmly on the path to not join the EU because the existing members look down on Moldova for being poor and are ready to unleash the hostile environment of the accession process. Congratulations to Moldovan voters - at least you guys want it, even if the Brussels bureaucrats don't.

Many of you don’t want to hear this but the liberal international order currently rests upon the shoulders of a Ukrainian Comic and a former AQI insurgent

I have multiple high-follower count mutuals who are discussing a hypothetical place that would be living entirely on remittances earned elsewhere. I love you guys, but can we please discuss how the places that are net importers of migrant workers rather than net exporters are governed?

By contrast, Trump has always spoken the language of the blue-collar white working class, based on a shared reactionary cultural vision in which straight white men are once again dominant and women, minorities & LGBTQ+ are subordinate and invisible. But his political economy was and is oligarchic.

For reasons of Argentina's social, economic and political development at the time he emerged, Peron was authentically committed to strengthening the industrial working class and bringing it into the political arena as a central actor, even if there was no small amount of opportunism at play.

Everyone yells at Deutsche Bahn ‘Your punctuality has collapsed has collapsed because you are running too many trains on a creeking network that can’t cope’ and they just shrug and run more trains. I actually…admire that. They like running trains, damn it. www.deutschebahn.com/de/presse/pr...

We are still selling them a battalion's worth of tanks.

TS I'll walk the fine line between news and politics (which I avoid): Parts in Netanyahu's speech that felt written by Trump and intended for his base on the American conservative right, especially people who oppose him over Israel. It had many messages and examples that the US was at the center of.

Compromise proposal: remove all the elevated highways, so there's no need to find anyone to name them after. Spend the money on public transit instead.

It says a lot about where Israel is now that Lieberman is centering the hostages. In October 2023, he said that the war aim should be the elimination of Hamas rule over Gaza for good and even said he'd join the coalition if that were the stated war aim. Bibi just never stated any war aim.

The IPC declaration of famine in Gaza was fraudulent, based on misquotations and bad data analysis, and should be retracted. @nuritbaytch.bsky.social explains the errors here: sites.google.com/view/retract...

In the US, even a “cheap” transit bus costs 2-3x more than in Asia or Europe -- and one agency may pay twice as much as another for nearly identical vehicles. In Bloomberg, I explored a ripe opportunity to improve transportation by applying Abundance-coded, supply-side reforms. 🧵

Native-born white British and Irish people eat black pudding, which is more disgusting than eating ducks from the river. I call for the imposition of sharia law on Great Britain and halacha on Ireland (Northern Ireland can choose which side to be on).

So true I love coming to the UK to eat swan

Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a "battle" rather than what it truly was: a massacre of over 250 Lakotas, mainly women, children, and the elderly. 1/

There is shit on the floor of the Berlin Ostbahnhof Geldautomat.

Phonics is undoubtedly the best way to teach reading but the “One Weird Trick”-ification of it by centrists is really tedious. It’s irrelevant to reading above the 2nd grade level, and Japan and Taiwan’s PISA scores blow us out of the water despite a writing system requiring rote memorization

I'm worried my Jewish identity is getting stronger to the point that I might make an effort to eat pork on Yom Kippur - usually I eat the same things on Yom Kippur as any other day and, because Cid is vegan, often it's kosher.

Netanyahu orders IDF to broadcast his UNGA speech over loud speakers in Gaza. I'm dead serious.

Bumping this to main, because pro-Israel discourse overfixates on UNRWA's special characteristics and misses how the international order fails refugees and their descendants more generally. Rohingya born to refugees in Bangladesh and Malaysia are born stateless, for example.

I've put together a wider scale map covering the inner suburbs. One of the things immediately evident is the weakness of the Millennium Line compared to the other lines, with its route on a wide suburban boulevard and paralleling a major freeway as well as the forced transfer travel time impact

List 3 things you can talk about for 3 hours without prep (no trains) 1. The history of modern Israel 2. Number theory and abstract algebra 3. RPG system and narrative design

Terrorism is an expression of hope, not desperation. The desperate don't think it will help. @shanymor.bsky.social points this out re 7.10, but this is equally useful in understanding Cold War far left terrorism and present-day far right terrorism.

More and more such incidents happening daily www.bbc.com/news/article...

#SouthAsia 🌏 Zulker Naeen's article for @globalvoices.org highlights how the stateless Rohingya people are silenced twice in #Myanmar, #Bangladesh, and #India. "Already stateless, they become censored online and blamed for social problems."

Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, has unveiled the route of the metro system it is planning to build – and which would be only the second in the country.

Import people who speak languages with distinct /h x/ phonemes, become a place whose language has distinct /h x/ phonemes.

All polls on socialism: Do you support [socialist programs]? Y: 69% N: 18% [Country implements socialism] What is your biggest hope in life? To be able to emigrate to [country that didn't]: 69% Other: 31%

Short connection between the boat and the train home and I just missed the subway. Thankfully, it's Stockholm.

It's not a coincidence that this is also the country with matar judíos festivals and a transport minister who calls French Jewish teens who he thinks misbehaved on a plane Israelis.

Israel feed: can you help? I don't know if Bnei Brak and such have a reputation for having dirty streets or just every other stereotype that mainline Jews have of Haredis.

Fascinating look at trauma and recovery According to researchers at the U of Haifa, MDMA…has turned out to help survivors of the music festival massacre, but those who took cannabis and alcohol before Hamas' attack are finding this detrimental to their recovery www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Konservative 🤝Rechtsextreme = politischer Selbstmord? In vielen EU-Ländern versuchen konservative Parteien durch Kooperationen, rechtsextreme Parteien zu „zähmen“. Die CDU-nahe Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung hat untersucht, was das für Konsequenzen hat. Spoiler: Es funktioniert nicht. 1/6🧵

Mario Draghi & Christine Lagarde are pleading with Europeans to wake up and realise federalism is the only way to survive in this new strongman era But Europe's centrist Atlanticist establishment won't listen, & nationalists are winning the argument lamatinaleeuropeenne.substack.com/p/le-mur-nat...

The manufacturer of Paracetamol poisons wells and kidnaps children for religious rituals.

Agreed. Public transport should run on Saturdays, the state should require schools to teach core subjects and not just halachic law, marriage should be based on civil and not religious law (inc. gay marriage), and yeshiva students should serve in the military on the same basis as everyone else.

Please send me links to your undergrad institution's math curriculum, I want to sanity-check something I've been thinking about with the NUS and Columbia courses (tl;dr NUS had too much fluff in the upper level courses when I was there, and only got rid of part of it; Columbia is just strange).

The Peace Now poster riffs off a Rosh Hashana song, saying "In the coming year, another state will be founded by our side," and then, at the bottom, "a Palestinian state is good for Israel."

🇵🇱⚖️The recent headline news in Poland is a massive drop in trust for the Catholic Church, but the actually alarming part is a nosedive in the trust in the judiciary under the government that vowed to repair the rule of law. Whatever the Tusk government is trying, it's not sticking to the wall. 1/

Subtly downgrade a band Boykindasmart

The year is 2030. Every European country as well as the US and India implements North Korea-style sanctions on Israel, and all Holocaust memorials have been demolished. Only two countries maintain friendly relations with Israel: Syria and Palestine. www.reuters.com/world/middle...

Last night's declaration of a $100k fee on H-1B visas has been hugely disruptive to many Asian American families. Even with the update that it doesn't apply to current H-1B visa holders, it remains an attack on many already living in the US and had been counting on getting one to remain. 1/

First draft, I am still uncertain about a bunch of these. @amirvaxman.bsky.social

I propose that people cosplay as the minotaur, complete with boffer axe, and wander around labyrinthine subway stations and offer people help with wayfinding (it's D&D-canon that minotaurs have uncanny direction sense in mazes, regardless of intelligence score).

Social worker in Finland explains why Finland ended all social problems and she has no work to do except poasting: we base all of our policy on factoids we read in text JPEGs shared on social media - the opposite of what America does.

12 years of CSU control of the ministry of transport with pro-car policy led to the elevation of civil servants who were interested in and knowledgable about building highways more than railways, which made it hard to suddenly change policy under Ampel (the Greens gave up the ministry in any case).

The EU and NATO, too.

That would be a dangerous escalation. Being an historian, my colleague @radchenko.bsky.social must remember the WWIII that started last time a NATO member shot down a Russian plane that violated its airspace. Consultations and deep concerns work just as effectively as a deterrent