everyone's talking about how bright and charming zohran must be, which is true, but then you remember the spider-brained cryptkeepers trump's surrounded himself with since '15 and realize a single smile from mamdani must have hit like barbecue spare ribs down the gullet of a 12th century peasant.

I gotta say, the updated Bluesky 🦋 logo makes me wanna yell "focus!" at the screen.

Knowing things is a verb. Believing things is a verb too. We don’t know or believe things because we acquired something static and stuck it in the belief hole. We actively do the thing that is knowing and believing.

This from @attackerman.bsky.social captures so well the bind that liberal zionists have placed themselves in. It is so painful to see so many commit to mislearning our shared history and, in an attempt to avoid responsibility, only take on a larger & larger share of this ongoing atrocity.

Well that was fucking incredible. He cast a charm spell on the most odious man alive.

I feel like the last couple decades of "is representation good or not?" discourse missed more important questions of "how fragile is representation?", "what do we do when multiple industries eliminate it as an intentional move against us?" and "how can we sustain queer artists when shit goes south?"

I guess this tells us that the transport industry is dependent on unqualified drivers www.rnz.co.nz/news/indonz/...

A great reminder of the dangers of teaching a sanitized history www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

More trees just in *Canada* than planets in the galaxy by fully a factor of 3

West Bank: After nine months of Israeli military operations, refugee camps are 'uninhabitable'

Crazy aura farming to go to a meeting about how your invention is impossible with a working version of your invention

couple of points; the longer you take to start, the more the cost is going to go up because this shit never gets cheaper. the best time to do this is in a time of economic downturn, because it's stimulus, and you dont want to be affecting business when things are humming, do you?

'My mana reignited': Attendees leave world's largest indigenous education conference feeling inspired

Jaimie Veale, the founding president of PATHA and Director of the Trans Health Research Lab at Waikato has written an excellent op-ed for the Conversation: "The government has placed a burden of proof on puberty blockers that we do not place on other paediatric care."

Once again, we are way too relaxed about the fact that "shooting Irish people is good actually" is a mainstream political position on the neighbouring island.

FYI: turning off "Smart features" also turns off spell check and the promotions and social tabs. And more. In effect, a lot of traditional tools in gmail are switched off if you don't let them upload your contracts, love notes, and sad messages to your friends into their plagiarism machine.

Defeating headline!

““We know data privacy is important to New Zealanders. Any technology solutions will be required to comply with the Road User Charges Act which contains strong privacy safeguards and strictly limits what information can be accessed.” Narrator: There are not strong privacy safeguards in fact.

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central #Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY. There was also a 71% drop in air pollution. Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

Wow, this is a great summary of COP30! All the COPs, come to think of it. 🤔

Attn #nzpol new Hamish Price shoes just dropped

Literally.

I'll just note this inquiry has noted that with 20/20 hindsight the UK should have acted... pretty much exactly as New Zealand did. Which a good portion of NZ's media and political class have spent 5 revisionist years trying to paint as an overreaction. Overwhelmingly, it wasn't.

We need to listen to experts and I'm sorry everyone, but if I understand the collected works of the menswear guy correctly this means all the gents in parliament gotta be buck naked like how the good Lord in his ineffeble wisdom made them

We’re watching a shift where AI simulates the cohesion and reinforcement that used to require an entire online community. A single person can now build a complete parallel reality with nothing more than a prompt window. Which seems bad.

LLMs give people with delusional belief systems a way to organise those beliefs. The model fills in gaps, supplies connective tissue, and wraps the madness in formal language. It doesn't make the claims more credible to us, it just tidies them up.

Absolutely incredible! www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

The way the word “slop” has re-entered the lexicon as a general purpose word describing “someone’s made-up bullshit that’s being forced on people” (even outside of AI contexts) is good because it feels like we didn’t have a simple way to point out how common that is aside from domain-specific jargon

Exceptionally bad headline. Doubling the number in training doesn’t double the number of clinical psychologists. And getting them into and through the education program does not mean there are enough internship places to qualify more clinical psychologists.

Solidarity (with bigots)

Absolutely get fucked! #NZPol

Today from The Detail: Kākāpō numbers are recovering at such a rate that we are running out of pest-free islands to put them on.

Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad

Samoa PM suspends country’s only daily newspaper from press briefings amid dispute over coverage

The Lemonade Stand podcast interviewed me for their Japan episode! We spoke about Prime Minister Takaichi, immigration, Sanseito, historical revisionism, territorial disputes, conspiracy theories, and a whole lot of other stuff! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc0z...

“Trust us! Marginalising these communities more will absolutely bring down the cost of a KG of Mince and get your job back!”

Oh, bullshit. So, you're saying the entire team is homophobic, transphobic? Did any adult get involved in this "debate'? www.thepost.co.nz/sport/360893...

THIS ONE WAS SO GOOD THANK YOU @asherelbein.bsky.social!!! You can read Asher's amazing Magneto essay here:

Anyway, he deserves to be buried in points of order from now to forever about the colour of people's suits and ties. Also that little police pin the PM was wearing last week. Or any NZ flag pin (because its a colonial flag and it can fuck off)

Trump in a room with a very charismatic person results in like half a day of Trump agreeing with everything that person said, so this has the potential to be very, very funny.

Yes, yes ... of course we can have complete confidence in the report findings of this inquiry set up for nakedly partisan purposes, given terms of reference designed to avoid criticism of a currently-governing party, and from which multiple professionals have run a mile. Why on earth would you ask?

Good news, I'm reviewing theatre again! The review is only available on FB, sadly, but if you still have an account you can read it here: www.facebook.com/share/p/1AXC... Tl;dr, Canterbury Repertory Theatre have just opened a BRILLIANT production of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Go see it!

Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.

Brownlee has banned "clothing conveying a political message" from the House. He's banned trans pins, pies, and shirts.

Picture the New Zealand Herald's senior Press Gallery reporter dismissing as a "C-grade scandalette" the chair of a Māori entity *cough* taking $27 MILLION of public money and putting it in a project in his own patch. #nzpol

Winston and Seymour are fighting over a populist segment of the electorate that hates the left. That's why Seymour is saying what he's saying. That segment might not like the RSB that this fight is over, but they hate the left more. Rule him out, let them fight.

Some opposition MP should put a "Regulatory Standards Act Repeal Bill" into the biscuit tin, approach the NZ First backbench MPs to sign on in support of it, and then see what happens if it gets pulled from the lottery ... NZ First didn't promise not to vote to repeal it once enacted!