You know that moment when it stops being funny laughing at an opposition manager and it quickly feels like bullying. We got there very quickly with Rosenior. Fella doesn’t stand a chance.

It occurs to me: what if the epidemic of phone theft in London - a thing that I never hear about, in Scotland - is just minor political figures getting an alibi in, after they’ve their phones into the Thames once a year

really one of the strangest media cycles in history, where mainstream media actively hid the fact that the columbine killers were popular upper class preppy kids with full on neo-nazi ideologies and instead pretended they were victims of bullying

“Solar is taking away all this land [0.3% of UK land, less than airports] that produces food [and biofuels], when you can build a Sizewell C [in 25 years for 1000% the cost] with less impact [if you ignore the waste and dump it somewhere I don’t walk my dog].” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

if you get angry about kids in pubs i think fundamentally you are just quite an antisocial person

It is again worth asking why Israel has “settlers” at all, given it is not 1870 and we are not on the wagon trail out west.

You’re going to want to sit down for this one, because it’ll come as a big shock, but: they mean “drive out the people who live in southern Lebanon, demolish the existing towns and cities then replace them with a million crank psycho settlers”.

It’s now strongly in Iran’s interests to make this crisis so bad, so globally catastrophic, that nobody can ever fuck with them again without the entire planet rising up to shout against it. There are no incentives here for them to moderate in any way, that I can see.

Well well well beating Everton / Brighton isn’t for everyone now is it

the report itself is an extraordinarily damning document written by a man who had been told he was not allowed to indict the President directly but clearly believed that he had committed serious misconduct and should be removed from office, which is very obvious if you actually read it

One of the laws of the universe is that people who are mean to servers and retail workers are mean people, and they are letting you in on their true nature when they act this way in front of you, don’t mistake it for anything else but insight on their character

Once more, there are wind turbines on the shores of Lake Garda.

CHLOE KELLY, TAKE A BOW 🙇‍♀️ #ArsenalWFC #BarclaysWSL

is that how it's supposed to work

Not really off the cuff but when I was getting into Dylan age 18 I put Blonde On Blonde on in the car while Mum drove me to my Saturday job and “Just Like A Woman” came on and I got 25 years worth of her righteous hate for how sexist it is

It’s bad enough that politicians feel they can just lie so brazenly but what should worry us here is: the press just vacantly repeating the lies. You should be asking “If they repeat lies this dumb, this easily and without a pang of conscience, then what else have they been happy to lie about?”.

Me: (looking you dead in the eye while I shit into your welly boot) It’s pretty muddy out today, isn’t it

Welcome to capitalism, the most efficient economic system. This company spent 100 billion dollars on making Wiis sentient and failed. The company gets to continue existing.

Rory Smith put this perfectly on the Libero podcast (I just saw a clip). Yes, neutrals want City to win, but that’s because no one cares about City. The big difference between us and Carragher’s beloved Liverpool is we don’t think of ourselves as so special that neutrals must love us

The correct ranking of teams you want to see qualify for the CL is. 1. Villa - not complete bastards, Emery keeps his job, so therefore unlikely rivals (bonus - they might be bad at spending money) 2. Liverpool - bona fide club, Slot might keep his job 3. Chelsea - I wish they were dead.

To go full circle, law is about developing intersubjective understanding. Understanding is a core feature of being human, it is one of the very few things that make us unique. And law, as distinct from the broader concept of rules, is a uniquely human product.

And if we keep rewarding glossy case law overviews with minimal reflection at the end and no methodology to speak of, it's no wonder AI slop is lurking around the corner.

At worst, it allows authors to obfuscate their interests by cloaking it in claims of neutrality and description, or worse, objectivity (*shudder*). Remember: law is about giving meaning to words. I would like to know why that meaning, and why you're fighting for it.

But what I do know is that this article will not contribute anything of significance to the academic debate. Because Claude has no position or perspective, it has no interest to defend or outcome to realize. It *does not understand*.

Mind you, if Claude can use it to produce new text, it was ALREADY PUBLIC. It was OUT THERE. Others could ALREADY READ IT. Even better, it was in a form that was simply scannable by a text-based algorithm.

My question is: if Claude can save you 90% of the hours spent on an article, what the hell were you using those hours for in the first place? And more importantly, what kind of article do you think you were writing, that the bulk was summary and synthesis of previous work?

Side note, I *intensely* dislike how the author in question talks about said student and/or assistant, and I think they world is better off if they continue talking to a glorified chatbot rather than to an actual human.

This is exactly how the author used Claude to write the bulk of an article in the way, as described by @orinkerr.bsky.social: have it do all the work collecting, summarizing and synthesizing existing material that you would otherwise farm out to a grad student or research assistant.

And now at last we get back to AI. Because AI, specifically in the form of LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, is the absolute antithesis of this. By definition, it can only summarize and consolidate - it cannot ever *add* something.

Another way in which our lives are both easier and harder is that our writing really requires very little practical work. I don't say this to disparage my profession, but the hours I spend reading cases and literature pale in contrast to the hours in a lab my biology colleagues make.

As others have already pointed out, this all means becoming a lawyer means getting good at using language. Using it in a careful, structured way, peeling apart the specific legal meaning of words, dissecting texts, pointing out contradictions, balancing probable meanings, et cetera.

Our methods, insofar as we are able to articulate them, are a lot closer to literature studies, and most of all to history and philosophy - although they often lack the rigour of the former and the argumentative of the latter, but that is another story altogether.

While law is often grouped with economics and certain social sciences when it is part of larger faculties, or when we're applying for grants, as a discipline we actually have very little in common with either. I'm riding one of my hobby horses here, but law is part of humanities.

This precludes any empirical claim. Law articles, ambitions to the contrary notwithstanding, do not have any claim to how the world *is* but at best to how a particular thing could or should be *understood*.

Watching America preparing to inflict yet another sociopathic politician on the global consciousness fills me with a rage and a dread that I cannot describe.

Hyped for this!

'Dragged into war' is an attempt to legitimise Starmer's murderous decision to join Trump's illegal war by implying that Iran attacked us first. That's not true. Starmer's knees buckled under Trump's glare BEFORE Iran hit Diego Garcia. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

“It’s inevitable” “you can’t roll it back” “you just have to accept it”

Fair play to my local Lib Dems, they took control at the last locals and they've managed to get agreement for the town hall that the Tories and Labour wanted to turn into flats to be renovated into a community venue with a four screen cinema

It’s certainly true that some countries have turned a blind eye to the relentless atrocities and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Britain is not one of those countries: we have been actively helping the criminals throughout.

This isn’t quite right: certain countries helped to crush the UN aid agency by pretending to believe that it was a Hamas front, and then they loudly paid no attention at all when the agency was replaced by soldiers firing machine guns at hungry people trying to pick up bags of flour.

Not only that, but this war will have utterly discredited every notable Iranian public figure who ever pushed for moderation and concessions, on the grounds that the US and Israel were reasonable and could be appeased. All of those people are now fucked and excluded, I would assume for decades.

1 in 5 lebanese citizens displaced by israel

I increasingly suspect these people might be statists not out of philosophical principle or cost-benefit analysis, but simply because they enjoy wielding power and behaving cruelly to outgroups.

Damn you're telling me that if you cut two hours of commuting out of people's days, that they suddenly have time to reallocate to childcare and leisure and thus are more willing to have children, the world's largest and more adorable time suck?

This is so utterly stupid and I don’t know who it benefits. Making dual nationals get a UK passport makes no difference to the immigration statistics. It just makes life difficult and expensive for them for no reason. There was no problem with the previous system. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

What’s going on here? Who knows? Who cares. Nothing is real, except whatever we have to say tomorrow morning, which is also fantastical.

Yes, look, nothing is real. Very little in British politics has ever been real, it’s always been this core of utterly self-interested swine and an outer ring of courtiers who are heavily invested in all of this drivel being real, telling themselves and each other fun stories. But it is not real.

Britain is very obviously facilitating a war of aggression against Iran, just as we have obviously been facilitating the genocide of the Palestinians for two and a half years. But if nobody who matters wants to see it, then it just *isn’t real*. And that is how Britain has always worked.

We're on the brink of a global catastrophe but what really matters is internal beef at the Guardian, apparently. This predictable Jonathan Freedland piece is motivated by anger at stablemate Jonathan Liew. It's a kind of displacement, I guess. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...