this is the simple answer to people who keep saying NATO expansion matters. Sure, it matters because it presented an obstacle to Russian imperial ambitions. Putin didn't invade because he hated NATO expansion, he hated NATO expansion because he wanted to invade

The weirdest thing about all of this is that Ken didn’t appear to have a substantive disagreement with anything Walker has *actually* said. He’s been tilting at windmills. His followers could also do with less of the circus seal impressions.

impressive bait

One of my kids gave me this for Christmas and if ever you want to make someone British in Japan happy… Merry Christmas bluesky peeps! 🎄

It may sound arrogant to claim that progressives on average produce better work, but don’t forget that American conservatives had to invent the Intellectual Dark Web to platform the best of their best and that best included Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein.

Looking at these awards from supposed news organisations and it really exposes how “serious” journalism has changed from a profession into more a branch of the entertainment industry.

This is genuinely horrifying. Fact-free far-right agitprop given accolades by credible media across the political spectrum.

The thesis of the book is that early COVID lockdowns weren't worth it and mid-COVID mitigation measures like masks, contact tracing and business closures don't work. This is laughably false and the authors have endorsed the people now running Trump's HHS.

Absolute quality thread. Stunning. I haven’t watched Eastenders in over two decades (for obvious reasons) But right now, after reading this, I’m really missing it…

Click through to see why she’s in the news

Absolutely Lynchian visage going on here.

Getting slightly jumpy at people misusing the word “enshittification” to mean simply “shit” It is a name for a specific process in how online services and apps decay. eg WHY Facebook is shit. GenAI causing harm isn’t enshittification.

Holidays and a boomer relative is telling me AI is amazing and why? Because of an instagram influencer who records herself asking Claude questions then nods as Claude makes shit up about the “hidden gospels” and now I am going to walk naked into the woods in this blizzard until I cannot continue

Jesus Christ

In a move that definitely isn’t at all weird or stupid in any way, Sally Jenkins accuses Canadians of being “treacherous” because Bari Weiss forgot to stop the broadcast there.

I’m even older - but this is a really charming video that makes its nostalgia infectious.

I mean, this doesn’t sound like a major national security risk for the US in any way whatsoever

It used to be that the United States would use Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to transmit truth across the borders of repressive regimes. Now the work of American reporters, having been censored, is being smuggled across the border to reach Americans.

Omg Conor Friedersdorf thinks Bari Weiss is ethical and also he does not know how news works. Good thing he isn’t a journalist. Oh

It's truly remarkable how there will be news organizations and journalists who correctly identify that RFK is a menace and that HHS can't e trusted when he pushes stuff about vaccines or Tylenol causing autism... but cover the anti-trans stuff like "Well, HHS says so, and we should trust HHS!"

The dishonesty Goldberg displays here is in pretending there is some kind of mystery about why Weiss censored CBS. Her grounds - that the White House declined to comment and so there are balance issues - is laughably wrong.

"free speech warriors"

A good link here that relates to the discussion about the American Historical Association’s AI-illiterate guidelines. How LLM summaries often aren’t actually summaries in the sense we mean and need them to be.

So the minute the right wing “free speech” movement gets into power, it censors, it fires people, it covers up, it sues and suppresses. Say, @ezraklein.bsky.social, is this doing free speech the right way? Or have centrist commentators been tricked AGAIN

Very good article detailing the truth around these blocker bans: they are harmful, and they are being driven through by politicians who, like Cass, ignore practitioners and patients.

I’m pretty sure a big problem is that people making these decisions don’t understand at all how LLMs work. There are a LOT of people in expert professions who bluff. The problem is that people good at bluffing impress others and are also motivated to bluff. So they tend to get higher positions.

BREAKING: At least 16 files from the Epstein release disappeared from DOJ's webpage, including a photo of Trump, with no explanation.

LEAK of Hilary Cass talk: Check other quote skeets for detailed analysis. Basically, Cass is using an entirely unevidenced/contradicted by evidence idea that kids are being pushed into being trans. This is anti-trans propaganda: the debunked “social contagion”/“trans the gay way” theories.

GenAI slop is *infecting* the system, reproducing and multiplying itself.

This fleshes out the fundamental problem of pushing generative AI to do "creative" work. Creative ideas do not appear in a flash, or in a single execution.

Jamelle is usually right about everything. But the sense of crisis wasn’t the same. The hopelessness wasn’t the same. What I think has gone is a sense of collective mission, and inequality is worse now. Inequality matters.

“Objective” here is being used in a specific sense, and as such, it is used wrongly.

One of the funny things about Starmerite loyalists on here is while they’re just as dogmatic and unable to discuss policy as Momentum Xitterites were, they lack the historical inheritance of a bag full of political insults to hurl. Instead, they just radiate a weird inarticulate robotic smugness.

The thing is, I could do a similar thread saying what Starmer and Farage have in common and it would have a LOT more substance and evidence.

A big problem with Starmer’s Labour is it’s become entirely about electoral positioning. This is, paradoxically, a bad strategy for winning elections. Comparing a climate change denying racist fascist like Farage to soft left Polanski is obviously silly. You don’t mean it. People don’t vote fake.

How the nyt used the Cass report to restart its anti-trans propaganda campaign in the US: Coverage of the report was initially assigned to a nyt UK correspondent, usual practice for a UK report. The story being prepared cited critics who called Cass a shoddy, political document that defied science

I do love that a year that began with Trump asking Canada if they wanted to be the fifty-first state ends with their Canadian cable gay hockey romance show pulling us along the floor like Ilya’s chair and we don’t want it to end—and it got tax-payer arts funding to boot.

One of the major anti-trans orgs tricked a senior figure in the evidence based medicine movement into giving people the impression he was supportive of them. When he realised what was going on, he made it clear they were full of shit. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

The story told in the NYT here - of the Cass report changing European health care - is an anti-trans narrative at odds with the facts. The journalists are abusing their position to secretly peddle a lie to their readers.

Reports say Walliams claims it’s the first time he was informed by Harper Collins of a problem - wtf, creepy shit, his behaviour was an open secret - and that Murdoch papers dropped the story because Rupert Murdoch owns Harper Collins. I was given one of his kids books once. My kids hated it. ✌️

A quite demented Leader column published today by The Times. First, this in which it says that the Supreme Court decision mandated that single sex spaces be divided on the basis of "biology" not gender.

It’s just occurred to me that LLMs are a form of virtual reality. They’re trained to emulate the real world of text produced by humans. And I think that captures the uncanny valley they create.

It feels like so many cannot see the wood for the trees. These are going to result in really marginal gains.

It occurs to me that such AI hallucinations may have a higher tendency to catch on and pollute information spaces because they are the product of something trained to tell users what they want to hear.

The externalities - the costs paid by someone else - of GenAI continue to multiply. Making fraud hugely easier and less costly maybe isn’t a good idea.

RFK jr’s entire career is based other people being avoidably killed young

Every word of this about the Republican war on trans people "This narrative is and always has been a lie. What these people actually have is a seething, obsessive hatred of trans people. They want them either back in the closet or dead." prospect.org/2025/12/19/t...

It is scandalous how much Tory and Labour governments have deliberately chosen specific individuals hostile to transgender care to key policy roles - people who are actually against mainstream international expert medical opinion.