Given the Grokipedia and Elon's continued hatred of wikipedia I bring you, "informational autocracy" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Next time I get that Wikipedia funding prod, I'm doing it. Because freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four 👇

Shades of the ferries and Dunedin hospital and the polytechs. Scrap the existing programme without warning or planning, create an expensive muddle, then replace it with something less good and more expensive. All for the sake of ideology. #nzpol

jfc

Genomics for Aotearoa New Zealand - Public Webinar 14th October @nicrawlencenz.bsky.social will be giving a public webinar on myth busting de-exctinction. The webinar will run from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm including time for questions. Please boost this to help reach a broad audience. 🙏

Media council said RNZ should have recognised the story was pushed by a group with an anti-trans agenda and been more careful about balance as a result. Rnz have basically just said “no, we refute that entirely” in a way that shows an absolute misunderstanding of the context we currently operate in

It's independent media or bust these days. Every one of these outlets has capitulated to the government and are untrustworthy news sources. Never thought I'd see it from the AP, but here we are.

What a line from the Pope! I am so pleased he is carrying on Pope Francis’ advocacy for immigrants.

Eyes on the #freedomflotilla. The Alma called mayday and may have been intercepted. The others continue. www.youtube.com/live/YPHZzzB...

I've read a couple of history books and I can tell you for sure that rounding up your generals, having a drunk yell at them and call them fat, and then stopping paying them that same day is absolutely how you institute durable personalist rule

Today was my last day as a federal employee, but tomorrow I and my new partner, Ginger Quintero-McCall, open a new law practice, the Free Information Group. We are both FOIA lawyers, and we are very good at suing the government. 1/

if i were a would-be dictator whose only civilian check on power had been consumed by total-complete partisan loyalty, something i would definitely do is call an unprecedented in-person meeting of the only people who could stop me and then proceed to illustrate why they should stop me

Screaming: "do NOT plot with each other on your way to the airport to fly back to the military bases under your command!"

This is an unfathomably bad response.

Israel is about to do war crimes, including against NZ nationals, and I haven't seen a single NZ outlet livestreaming this. If they can somehow do a Charlie Kirk livestream, on multiple occasions, you'd think this would garner some journalistic attention

BREAKING: WE WON!!! 💥 💥 💥 Federal Judge William G. Young ruled today in our lawsuit against the Trump administration that the policy of arresting, detaining, & deporting noncitizen students & faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the 1st Amendment. Full ruling here:

This is important, and hasn't had nearly enough attention from MSM.

also on webworm today, michael organ is back to being, well, michael organ (today's webworm is for paying members, and has a bunch of updates and a feature on train hopping: www.webworm.co/trainhopping/)

Good, media complaints upheld against RNZ for that gut-churning and reprehensible article about trans teen Alex.

'Shaun Ryder has eaten half of the cash takings' 'Tony Wilson has declared that from now on Fridays are Experimental Icelandic Trance night' 'A New Order member has just remembered that they actually own the place and asked to have a look at the books.'

Reading this. I can't help but feel like the politics I'd like to be part of has more agency, starts more directly with people, rather than a sense of being dependent on some kind of macroeconomic slot machine. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

"no-nonsense corporate dealmaker" as head of TVNZ and fucking Serco nosing around our hospitals like an infestation of weevils I refuse to countenance this bullshit, I'm creating a time machine and going back to before David Bowie died and flapping a different butterfly's wings or something

Uhhmm….A LOT of us did??? And we screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed at you?? The GOP literally *wrote it down* into a point by point playbook called Project 2025 that outlined every single one of these things?? MANY many people had each and every one of these things “on our bingo card”?

In Nineteen Eighty Four all art for the "proles" is created without human intervention at all because they just feed a set number of scenarios and words into fiction machines and songwriting machines, which then create them and disperse them widely to keep the proles happy and FOR FUCK'S SAKE ORWELL

Stochastic terrorism . This is also meant to scare non white people

Because threats cease to exist if you ban everyone from talking about them.

'we completely blew out what the value of a life was'. Almost every commentary I've read or heard on the new earthquake regulations has been about the dollar savings to property owners. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

I’m joining Hugh Grant & @hackedoff.bsky.social in calling for fair, independent regulation to protect ordinary people from abuse and restore trust in the press. It's time to finally hold them to account. Please join us signing the petition to change the law🙏 you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/a-...

It's possible (albeit less likely since recording this) that Thailand could implement a Negative Income Tax in 2027, which could make it the first country with a permanent guaranteed basic income floor. What makes the approach different from UBI is the phaseout rate based on an income test.

Morning Bluesky. Spain has blocked US planes and ships carrying weapons to Israel from stopping at bases in Cádiz and Seville.

I’ve been training my cat to play ambient music. Last night he hit me with this hauntingly beautiful chord change after 10 minutes of A7sus4

Now we've seen the result of this appeal, journalists can start releasing their stories about how involved Jago was with the ACT Party and David Seymour, right? www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3608...

See, if you relied on the same donors as Republicans you'd be doing exactly what Hakeem Jeffries is doing. They feed from the same trough. Therein lies the problem. Shirley Chisholm called her memoir Unbought and Unbossed for a reason

It's really nice to hear a Democratic politician speak of the opposition with open contempt it's clear he actually feels

Another fantastic piece from Mick Hall, drawing the line between Peters' speech and the cabinet decision on Palestine and the government's broader extremism aligning it with the US mickhall.substack.com/p/new-zealan...

UN: “Kids dying of starvation… what we give them is a peanut butter paste. We’ve been told we can’t bring that in because it’s a luxury.” AMANPOUR: “Seriously?”

More kiwi heroes www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

What stage of late capitalism is this?

Interesting that UoA has done a u-turn on their *previously* compulsory Treaty of Waitangi course. Folding under the pressure of the white/right wing

“That leaves us with a massive asymmetry, where Charlie Kirks work against rule of law democracy, Ezra Kleins pretend that they don’t, and together they work to convince everyone that all this is fine, just normal disagreement, so the people taking attacks on democracy seriously are the problem.”

there are some *very* clear moral imperatives developing in terms of how we associate with people like this

Don't give that decrepit relic of the 1970s a second thought. Watch Ambassador Husam Zomlot instead. #nzpol

It seems NZ hasn't learnt anything after Christchurch. What's the point of showing solidarity to Muslims for a terrorist attack when you are complicit in their genocide abroad?

Therapist: Twerking David Seymour cake isn't real, he can't hurt you Twerking David Seymour cake:

Miss you Padre

Personally think we should consider making this not just the way it is

Watching The Manchurian Candidate, a crazy sci fi story about a Russian plot to put an unwitting idiot in the White House. Wild stuff.

How is being on the wrong side of the world's most public genocide, supporting the new US fascism, pragmatic? It's only pragmatic if your political state aspirations are to join that side with full, unfettered, allyship

Listen to someone who has been through it under Putin.