Would love to see Robert Jenrick’s face right now

It is genuinely mad that Biden saying Putin and not Zelensky was like the "d'oh" heard around the wall and hastened his downfall and Trump gets to do about 100 of these a day and nothing happens.

Mafia goon: Nice house you got here...it'd be a shame if something happened to it Media outlets: Mafia goon rules out use of force. Expresses regret at the mere thought of it

Dangerous indoctrination going on in my classes

From American Carnage to American Cartman

Just such a bewildering experience to watch the collapse of the Western alliance and it resemble Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds

Bear in mind that multiple NATO allies of the US – including Denmark! – have troops that fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq in the war on terror, after 9/11. Trump repeatedly saying America “never got anything in return” from NATO goes down like cold sick in these nations.

Hurrah for the Blackshirts

You can’t reform ICE — or LE more generally — due to the massive aesthetic sorting that occurs in the *personality type* that applies for grunt-level work Good luck setting “new” standards that will curb an army of military-wannabe mustachioed failsons from cosplaying their authoritarian fantasies

This guy doesn’t realise how much of a symptom of the problem he is. A back-combed, permatanned avatar of smugness handing out lectures to people whose responsibilities he can’t even begin to encompass.

Just read Newsom's comments and couldn't be any more angry. The US inflicted this lunatic on us and he has the gall to say Europe looks "pathetic ... at least from an American perspective". It's like a man who willingly lives in a pigsty claiming that someone who trod in dog shit smells bad.

I am not sure Americans grasp the degree of damage that’s been done. Trump could leave office tomorrow and it would take a generation to fix relations with the countries that used to be the US’s closest friends.

Prime numbers 2-4999, animated with ggplot2+gganimate. #Rstats code: gist.github.com/stephenturne...

Tell you what. Not a great time to be a mid-sized nation going it alone

At the Balknization blog, a bunch of political scientists + law profs reviewed @maxwell-stearns.bsky.social 's book. He as the author responded last here: balkin.blogspot.com/2026/01/a-fa... If you scroll, you'll see each of our reviews of this thought provoking book about how to restore democracy.

I'm perfectly aware this is by far not the worst thing he's done, but Trump's constant presence - day after day after day - in the lives and headspaces of hundreds of millions of people (billions?), in the US and outside, is so taxing. Every morning, we wake up and have to think about this asshole.

You might not like it, but this is what peak punditry performance looks like

🚨New article in @electoralstudies.bsky.social🚨 New method using open-text survey, parliament speech analysis & conjoint experiment to detect policies/issues where all of: 1) bottom-up public demand 2) elites are neglecting it 3) would motivate vote choice if party adopt it tinyurl.com/44ryyybc 🧵

The very stable geniuses of British politics should not be allowed to forget their sycophancy towards Trump.

In any somewhat functioning democracy this would lead to the removal of the leader

Trump is a simpleton -- and these people know it. I would love someone to push them to state whether they think they're smarter than him or not. They'll say he's smarter, given they're willing to go out and say this garbage, but we should at least record their obsequiousness in their own words.

Something that slightly terrifies me about the London elections is that the nonsensical voting system, specifically chosen to keep third parties from having a chance of building a power base in the capital, is also the exact one you’d choose to benefit a two-party bloc over a three-party bloc

Two key figures in Greater Manchester have resigned this week following @manchestermill.bsky.social investigations: The chair of the Uni of GM and the CEO of Rochdale Council. This is the kind of accountability local areas need and that they lose when papers stop taking risks and turn to clickbait.

Good to see Labour politicians talking about blocs! labourlist.org/2026/01/avoi... If you want to know more, you can read our article introducing the idea in Britain here: academic.oup.com/pa/article/7... Also Green and Miori's excellent work here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

A huge chunk of our political class has "book-you-see-in-an-airport" brain. Just no interest in rigour.

The problem Labour have is that they haven't done the hard work. They need a clear philosophy and that requires hard work. You can't simply swap out the personnel and magically fix not having done the necessary groundwork!

The world is a bleak place right now, but there is a shining light: the latest series of Statistical Rethinking is now live courtesy of @rmcelreath.bsky.social 🙌 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbY...

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