Donald Trump: the president who destroyed ISIS in record time in his first term and also the president who is boldly taking on the ISIS terrorists in his second term.

"Like Amazon Prime, but with human beings."

The science museum in Berlin has a section on trains. Which is cool. The section on trains has a long mea culpa on the train company’s enthusiastic complicity in moving humans efficiently and lucratively. Which should make you stop and think.

Doing Christmas Eve properly this year (heading to Sydney Fish Market at 3:30am and eating salt and pepper squid for breakfast)

The problem is that Streeting is just a total charisma sink. He sounds like a politician, even if he can do “being combative” well. What Labour needs is a philosophy and a strategy, not a new face plastered over more of the same.

Unprecedented levels of click beat happening courtesy of HistoryExtra Magazine

This is why I increasingly think that the insularity of a lot of US elites is a big problem for them - when your own elections are so close, you are better off looking outside your country to gauge 'what works'. Ultimately the Democrats in 2024 were far and away the best performing incumbent.

Weird thing about this is you could end up with a situation where you have a Plaid + Lab + Green coalition where Labour have to adjust to having about as much sway in cabinet as the Greens…

I think this is the first time that Labour have been third in Wikipedia’s poll of polls

fascism is a project whereby one comes to abhor all humanity including one's own. once someone has sufficiently bought into it, they are not capable of mourning. a fascist agenda necessarily fashions itself as immortal and supreme and says that anyone or anything that can be killed should be killed

Meloni thinking: Next time we do a sit down meeting

it drives me crazy that the preferred solution for these guys to ostensibly avoid war is to return to the world order and social structures that gave us 100% of prior World Wars

Finally made it to the Chinese restaurant inside the brewery named after Bob Hawke

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

The general failure - among politicians and media - to push back against this stuff is reprehensible.

Always jarring to see the "race" variable from Crossley 1944. But quite useful for demonstrating that race is 100% a social construct.

Would really recommend this discussion between Wolff and Krugman on Europe and the US. Not least for the magnificent coda podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

Neither of these PMs will be in power in 5 years and they only have themselves to blame. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

It's all so bizarre because ... we just don't have to live like this? Rather than pick Denmark to emulate, they could pick Spain. It has encouraged some immigration and is booming compared to the rest of Europe 🤷‍♂️

Visiting the land of the free in the near future? You got to be kidding.

*small domino* my mum tells me not to drink diet coke because she read in the Guardian that it causes dementia *BIG DOMINO* zoom meeting with the editor-in-chief of Neurology to discuss errors i found in multiple peer-reviewed papers

London (population 9 million) has had fewer murders year-to-date[1] than Birmingham, Alabama (population 200k)[2] [1]: www.london.gov.uk/london-recor... [2]: www.bhamwiki.com/w/2025_Birmi...

Pushing policy to new and never-before-seen boundaries of craziness. London is a great city! Not as good as Manchester, sure, but you can't have it all. That some Americans have convinced themselves that it is a dangerous hellscape is bizarre.

I think central planning by the dumbest guy you've ever heard of is bad for the economy

Use of mental health medications in the population of Swedish PhD students is 40% higher than a matched sample by the fifth PhD year. Be kind to PhD students. Don't take up PhD students you can't invest in. Alert prospective students of the reality of a PhD. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The US has turned to ethno-nationalism and so has more in common with the Russian version than with the liberal objectives of EU and allied states in Europe.

🚨🚨 God #America, this is grim and a very stark wake-up call to European political ledaders on the (non) future of the "transatlantic alliance":

If it were steel works we would have a government bailout plan, yet losing thousands of jobs at unis is met with a shrug. & unlike steelworks universities were profitable when they had foreign students. You are killing the golden goose… one of our best exports… HOW IS THIS HELPING GROWTH?!

There just are a bunch of people who revel in ostentatious cruelty, this kinda comfy no-actual-risk-taken-on performance of toughness that really just consists in barbarous violence.

I wouldn't be surprised if Labour were to run on rejoining the single market/customs union at the next election. One of the primary challenges they will face (if present conditions continue) is to unite the liberal left behind them and against Reform/the Tories. Brexit 2 is a good way to do that.

A concern I have about abolishing trial by jury which I haven't seen articulated yet is that it removes one of the few examples we have of the effective use of sortition in our society. Arguably, this is something we should rely on *more* not *less*.

"You see, Christmas is not a holiday. It is an ideological apparatus of family unity and consumer fetishism. The magic of the film—what we enjoy without knowing—is this collision between sweet kitsch and brutal violence. This overlap is not accidental; it is the truth of Christmas under capitalism."

These people claim to be Christians

there is no legitimate definition of the term "democracy" under which maps like these are "democratic." this level of stovepiping is banana republic shit. this is effectively no different from stuffing a ballot box

Look, y'all know I hate AI as much as the next passionate hater of AI, but ChatGPT has nothing on the University of Oklahoma deciding that based on the first amendment students can literally say anything in their papers as existential threat to the university.

Taagepera (1972)

breaking: reviewer that doesn't share your approach thinks your article manuscript is not ready for publication

I'm flying to Australia and back this Christmas (≈48hr travel total) and will need something to read. Ideally, some mind-bending non-fiction or gripping fiction. Any recommendations? For instance, I loved Ed Yong's "An Immense World" and Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Other Minds".

This is the most alarming story I’ve read today. Giving up the fight before it’s started

Took a day to run, but it actually worked! Way faster than I expected too

Any takers for the Greens? We're one short of a full set

Would be hilarious if they opt for "For the Many" since it's based on text taken from the Labour membership card written by ... Tony Blair.

It’s clear that the primary interest of the US in “peace negotiations” is to create opportunities for Trump, Witkoff, their family members, business partners and cronies to make billions from business deals with Russia, and Ukraine is just the annoying nuisance in the way.

I always remember a tweet by Sunny Hundal from about a decade and a half ago where he described US politics as being equivalent to an eternal contest between the BNP and the Lib Dems. Never been more true (though comparing the Democrats to the Lib Dems is probably unfair on the Lib Dems...)

FINALLY worked out how to deal with a modelling problem I had and all that it requires is that I fit a Gaussian process to several models with ≈30k rows of data 💀💀💀

We're recruiting! Please do spread the news far and wide. We're excited by the prospect of being joined by another great new colleague!

Well that's the regression discontinuity design RUINED

Less than half of people resident in England and Wales describe themselves as Christian. Of them, a large number will be 1) elderly Conservative voters 2) first or second generation immigrants who have other reasons not to vote Conservative. What is this intervention for?

Why we can't have nice things in Britain: Hairdresser teams up with wine importer to offer tastings while you have a trim, applies for alcohol license. Council objects because its a "high impact area" (bustling affluent shopping district and tourist attraction). www.theargus.co.uk/news/2565512...