“If the intention was to make Isaac Herzog feel at home by surrounding him with violent, racist thugs, then take a bow Chris Minns”. theshot.net.au/uncategorize...

This White House “Don’t Panic” press release is written by folks who can’t help being Paul Verhoeven’ Starship Troopers (1997) while trying to be Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959).

When the entire USA becomes fly over country.

21st Century Nuclear Logic: reduce safety guidelines & environmental protections. Increase worker risk. Relax security & accident reporting. Yet reactors will still be uneconomic, lack resilience to outages & accident risk, and blow build times. www.npr.org/2026/01/28/n...

@mattpolprof.bsky.social uses Mann’s Dr Faustus (1947) as guide to modern far right fascism. Including the rejection of the ‘machinery of scientific witness’, replaced by power alone deciding reason. jacobin.com/2026/02/mann...

What Abbott is technically saying is that because a legal ruling by a judge had a political consequence with which Abbott disagreed, Abbott wants to overrule the judge. It’s Abbott trashing the separation of powers, not the judge. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...

The ALP /antisemitism envoy’s Uni Rpt Card proposal “risks destabilising campuses, narrowing civic space, and weakening … democratic principles”. @albomp.bsky.social should rethink. @unimelb.edu.au should reject it. mvmau.substack.com/p/from-inqui...

Cathy Wilcox #Herzogout

The disgraced Antisemitism Envoy will harshly police and defund Australian universities that allow criticism of Israel on their campuses. Meanwhile, that same disgraced Antisemitism Envoy feels free to make huge donations to fund hate groups such as Advance, to sow discord in our community.

Season 2 finale of #severance is Winston in Rm 101 at the end of 1984. Discuss

Foucault’s Discipline & Punish (1975) suggests prisons replaced torture in modernity. But as Trump deploys ICE against his own citizens, is the US back to pre-modern torture, where crime (dissent) is an attack on the sovereign (fascist) punishable by public spectacles of retribution?

I wrote a review of the NASEM report on “Understanding and Addressing Misinformation about Science”. It’s an incredibly thorough survey of the topic. But guess who got confirmed as it came out? What do we do w/this knowledge, practically, now? How do we act? www.lawfaremedia.org/article/misi...

We have a new paper in Science today on how malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy. AI systems can already coordinate autonomously, infiltrate communities, and fabricate social consensus. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Led by @kunstjonas.bsky.social & @daniel-thilo.bsky.social!

Avoided emissions don’t magically cancel out other emissions. @ketanjoshi.co medium.com/lobbywatch/n...

The Liberal National Party coalition splits up after demanding unity post-Bondi

I've been doing a soft launch of my new Substack, Sensemaking Distortion, a blog about how our ability to make sense of the world around us is being profoundly distorted by digital and social media. I just published the Welcome post this morning. open.substack.com/pub/katestar...

No, the Nazis were not leftists or socialists. But, yes, fascism is the dream of “tiny men” offering a narrative of “dispossession and victimization”. @mattpolprof.bsky.social www.currentaffairs.org/news/why-fas...

Called it! Amazon Ring should just be banned, said @evanselinger.bsky.social and I. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

As Trump threatens to invade Greenland because Norway didn’t give him the Nobel Peace Prize, recall Hannah Arendt (1951) said the ideal subject of authoritarian rule is not the committed or sycophantic supporter, but citizens for whom it has become completely unclear what is fact & what is fiction.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s inspiration is Babylon 5.

This thread responds to Prof. Christian Dunn’s Telegraph piece on #climate communication. I argue it misdiagnoses public disengagement, underplays escalating scientific risk, & reproduces a media narrative that has actively shaped, not merely reflected, public resistance to climate action 🧵

Hayot & Seybold on how the attack on the humanities is an attack on civil society.

Crib Notes: you’re often being forced to use environmentally damaging and irresponsible Generative AI but Big Tech is busy pushing a BS narrative saying it’s all just efficiency.

Australia’s social media restrictions on U16’s: still access content, but can only use platforms logged out, which minimizes exposure to risky and exploitative design features. @jonathanhaidt.bsky.social archive.md/Qa6Go

I think overconfidence in a technological, free-market and autopilot energy transition also inspires a follow-on dismissiveness around governments approving, supporting or encouraging fossil fuel infrastructure (on the grounds that it won't compete with cheap renewables and therefore isn't a worry)

The ‘About this Account’ feature on X reveals 1/2 of online MAGA = foreign trolls/bots & that X is: - a “worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors”? - “Post-truthification [where] nothing is true and everything is possible”? - it’s a “Russian nesting doll of bullshit”? www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Australia’s social media ban for > 16’s starts 10 Dec ‘25. Does algorithmic opacity, inferential profiling & information asymmetry (@frankpasquale.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy) render ‘we can fix it’ (@crikey.com.au) unicorn thinking? www.crikey.com.au/2025/11/10/f...

Australia’s university system has somehow managed to devolve: from a free to an affordable education, but recently toward an inequitable and unfair funding scheme based on poor assumptions about both students and jobs. theconversation.com/how-did-aust...

I reckon the most interesting subset of discourse here is when presumed [good] factors are actually either actually bad, or there to downplay or dismiss the bad even if the amount of good is way smaller than the bad. A short thread to explain: on "training for electrification" + "demand response"

Nuclear power is a poor fit with renewables. montelnews.com/news/1ea628e...

Nuclear power is a poor fit with renewables. montelnews.com/news/1ea628e...

There’s a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect happening where people who read widely, consider various perspectives, and put in effort to understand views they disagree with worry that they don’t do that enough, while people who don’t do any of that accuse others of being in a bubble and call it a day.

When Buzz Aldrin replied “it never happened” in response to whether “anything scary” happened during his moon landing, Kim Kardashian thought he was referring to the growth of her brain. #moonlanding #nasa

When Trump refers to resuming nuclear weapons testing ‘on an equal basis’, he just means the USA, Russia & China are already the big outliers vis-a-vis the Comprehensive Nuclear-Ban-Treaty and he is committed to keeping it that way.

notes on gatesnotes, in a thread "A new way to look at the problem" - er, no, he's been running this line for DECADES On the headline: you can absolutely guarantee anyone presenting themselves as telling tough, hard truths is about to deliver some self-aggrandising nonsense

Just imagine the Australian Coalition opposition as an AI undergoing “model collapse”, where AI’s trained on the output of other AI’s become dumber, disconnected from reality & forgetful of established knowledge.

In a 2024 paper criticizing the 'billion-dollar-disasters' database, Roger Pielke Jr. published analysis that is best described as a Russian-doll of errors. Here's my in-depth take down of his appallingly bad work. economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/10/26/r...

How many classes today were canceled because a whole suite of EdTech services are built atop AWS? You know what platform never crashes?

“It is hard to imagine an achievement more worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize”. NOT. Talking military action against Greenland, Canada, Panama & his fellow Americans fails the criteria? 1) fraternity b/w nations 2) abolition or reduction of standing armies 3) formation & spreading of peace congresses.

Sargent’s suggestion that the Trump Regime is manufacturing a crisis by exploiting the attention economy fits well with accounts of modern fascism as growing out of late capitalism & the spectacle society. @gregsargent.bsky.social @timothysnyder.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2014...

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom are doing something new and important: They understand Stephen Miller's theory of fascist power politics, and they've developed a theory on how to combat it. More Dems need to reckon with Miller's understanding of the moment. New from me: newrepublic.com/article/2014...

Like the debate in statistics that cautions against precision obscuring significance, fine if you want to call the Trump Regime illiberal democracy. But it includes fascist elements: threat othering, conspiracy thinking, truth delegitimization. Maybe substantive significance trumps precision here?

“AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations”. - Cory Doctorow. pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/r...

It is more expensive for Finland (w/ 41% nuclear share of electricity) to prioritize nuclear over RE expansion but the Australian pro-nuclear lobby thinks it cheaper to go nuclear over RE despite Oz having 0% nuclear. When you don’t need a study.

Painting the battling of online disinformation as a ‘censorship industrial complex’ is exactly what the right wing propaganda industry wants you to think. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Trump seeks arrest over Escalatorgate? What is the charge? “Walking oneself upstairs is a social injustice”?

Dear Brett, tell us you don’t know the difference between opposing hate speech and censorship without telling us …

AI inevitably hallucinates and lacks the humility to admit uncertainty. Every “but humans make mistakes” answer hallucinates a social world where we forget AI systems are being sold as decision-makers free of human fallibility. www.computerworld.com/article/4059...