*glances at twitter* “This new foundation model is amazing it’s basically replaced the entirety of human culture!” *looks* Aaand it’s another AI image of a lightly clad prepubescent girl with unnaturally large breasts and impossible eyes looking upward at the viewer And that’s it! All that’s left!

(All downstream of beauty standards society wide leaning on the pro-anorexia side)

Photojournalists are world-class detectives, I love them so much www.reuters.com/world/uk/how...

Reading Robert Musil's essay on Spengler's Decline of the West: 'I am not evaluating Spengler. I am attacking him.' Splendid.

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

the Andrew formally known as Prince

Hungarian composer György Kurtág turns 100 today. I only need the flimsiest of excuses to post him playing Bach duets with his late wife Márta, and this is not a flimsy excuse. youtu.be/O85lwrca-_c?...

One of the sad things about the WS is how it went from completely, consummately professional, completely free of the provinciality of domestic output to something far less focussed, with frequent air silences hinting at struggles to fill time on a shrinking budget

"Some lines have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed anymore." Analysis from the Munich Security Conference, with @irishjreuters.bsky.social & @sasilink.bsky.social

That old journalistic dilemma when a taxi driver gives you SPOOKILY apposite quotes but you know that if you ever used them people would ROTFL and make T*** L F****** jokes

Another reminder. Anne Frank and her sister Margot didn't die in gas chambers. They died of Typhus due to overcrowding at Bergen-Belsen women's camp, which also experienced outbreaks of tuberculosis and typhoid fever.

Par 36: The future is inevitable ? Is this some philosophical statement? Weird end. I mean of course it is

It’s right that the promise to “clean up” supposedly “Brussels-backed” NGOs after the elections will get the most attention from Orban’s distinctly Georgian-flavoured State-of-the-Nation just now. But it’s worth dwelling on something else:

Secretary of State Rubio - child of immigrants from Cuba who came to the US in 1956, says migration disturbed “continuity of our culture and of our people”

First you shut down the OSF’s Europe operstions, then you share a stage with Moldbug

Curtis #Yarvin, der "reactionary fascist" (JD Vance), tritt nicht nur bei den Identitären in Wien auf, sondern auch auf dieser von Ivan Krastev kuratierten Tagung in Schloss Elmau, neben @leaypi.bsky.social, Eva Illouz, Dan Diner und @quinnslobodian.com. www.schloss-elmau.de/kultur/sympo...

One thing about being back in Hungary is that Facebook is central to political discourse here: politicians and journalists all do their stuff on the white and blue site. So I’ve had to return there after a long absence. And it’s brain-squelching.

Frank Furedi and Hungary's state-funded think-tank cum youth academy is going to probe European Union and "EU-linked" actors' "interference" in national elections.

My pitch for Labour’s new strategy: "Full speed ahead to uber-woke, net-zeroist rejoinerism"

"Full speed ahead to uber-woke, net-zeroist rejoinerism" is the funniest thing a Labour MP has said for some time I'll give it that. It's like a Jordan Peterson quote about Elmo.

@vonbladet.bsky.social you’ve become a marble statue account?

Good news for everyone who was itching to gamify their washing experience!

Cork man Morgan McSweeney is embroiled in a scandal over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK Ambassador to the US

How it started, how it's going.

Problem with fiat money is you just keep on kicking the can and reinflating the bubble and sooner or later, a few centuries and a couple of industrial revolutions later, the bill comes due

-The UK had indeed a posh elite society arguably stronger/for longer than most allowing governance by customs/polite norms -The incoming Farage admin waving its majoritarian sledgehammer will strain it to unknown lengths -The world mood and new political divisions are not favorable to this style

He is eighty-six years old. The sheer _power_ of that voice

*looks at the telegraph* Now I want whoever did that running MY paper

Hot Take 2: if this is Mandelson's position, there is no reason for him not to issue a statement to this effect. If he has not issued a statement to this effect, the BBC's "understanding" of his actual position may be inaccurate. Stop letting people play this game.

Geopolitics in bio 🚩

... the problem with this is that this isn't sort of positional liberty that parties have (for certain in the UK & probably elsewhere). You can rotate your position clockwise (for Lab: more economic left and less social liberal) or anti-clockwise (for Lab: less economic left more social liberal).

Tempted to say the key difference between him and Epstein is income inequality: wealth in savile’s heyday meant a few million: nice houses, flashy cars and holidays; a billion and a private island gives totally different affordances; there may be a public policy conclusion to draw from this

There have been a lot of issues around clumsy comms and strategic confusion around Labour even before their election victory, but the Mandelson appointment is the first time I started wondering about the Starmer team's basic competence

One file, subject of which is an acquaintance of mine, goes: emailer: "Hey Jeff, interested in this accomplished and attractive young woman? Can introduce you under the pretense that you're a potential investor?" Jeff: "Nah, I need younger and more vulnerable"

Most of Epstein’s victims were either too frightened to come forward, or silenced through legal threats. Oh, and here’s a senior British politician giving Epstein tips on how to silence them

The British identity debate shows just how diverse a country the uk is - here a native Russian denies the Britishness of a Tory. For the Tories, the daughter of two Nigerian parents vouches to be staunchly on the right. /1

I devised an arbitrary index and then plotted movements in it and it showed a curve #methodology

Wow, there’s a methodology too!

Chomsky's profoundest innovation was turning linguistics into something cyberneticky enough to get on the DoD gravy train; I for one firmly decline to believe his work holds up on its merits

Chomsky, disgrace though he may be, isn’t famous because The Left, but because he did mind-blowing, field-creating research in the 50s and 60s.

In this BRIEF 44 second slop, the camera cuts 39 times, not counting each time they reached for the paper. I WONDER WHY

Why does ordering a quadruple whisky straight from the start feel like it's much more, well, alcoholic than ordering a double and then another double? (questions that only people from the dwindling number of generations that still drink would think of asking)

Is she still a Welt am Sonntag columnist though?

Something that feels like writing with a pencil or fountain pen but without the leaky ink and general trickiness?

Rare? What do the others do? Randomly assert that their country is ethereally Different?

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When you’re so pleased with your little joke you don’t realize you are literally doing a racist imperialism and are as culpable as the boss

Vermeule understands ‘no borders’ in the context of no migrant being ‘illegal’ naturally leads to a principled philosophical anarchism (‘no gods, no kings, no masters’): freedom of movement and bodily autonomy is central to liberty. He sees this fundamental truth and is repulsed: he opposes liberty

A big problem with The End of History is it’s far too long and has far too much Hegel so most people know the title but not the book and missed the crucial and prophetic caveat at the end. This book should have remained an essay