This is something the Victorians understood: that democracy is dangerously vulnerable to plutocracy, and that it needs to build defences against that. Our defences are in tatters. Rebuilding them is one of the most urgent tasks facing our politics.

Yes, sadly, you have made it very clear that you strongly support the idea that if I, or any ethnic minority, call the police, we should be treated as suspects!

It's a minority. They want everyone to think otherwise. Don't do their work for them.

We should be two “D&D Honor Among Thieves” sequels deep.

This is so fucking disgusting.

My least famous formulation to discuss prejudice of any kind is ‘imagine if this was about x minority group instead.’ Because…. It probably already is.

This is really bad

It's interesting that getting rid of the triple lock has become the defining example of a sensible grown-up policy while at the same time it's widely accepted that trying to means-test the winter fuel allowance was a disaster for Labour.

Sophy Ridge: "There is an argument that the Starmer project started with a political project, which was to expel what they would describe as the far left from the Labour party, right?" When its safe to start noticing things.

“To defeat the scourge of populism, the government should do a procession of things that sound suspiciously like the populist’s manifesto, but crucially filtered through the economic priorities of the people paying me to write this”

The whole saga would have benefited if Pong Krell was live action and in Attack of the Clones and the second film was a pure war film. Jedi generals should have been routinely sacrificing clones like it was the Great War.

this is why all the software is so bad, imo. not even because like "men are bad" but just imagine how gnarly the social dynamics would have to be to get an outcome like this, and then those people were put in charge of designing the mediums for doing socialization on..........madness

I’ve always thought that the load bearing wall of right wing ideologies is misogyny and wrote about it here www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/o...

Imagine for a moment what he could do if he were the prime minister, had a legislative majority, and appointed both the Chancellor and the Culture Secretary.

These people should be cool like me, and take a psychic wage from being a massive nerd who gets a little weepy whenever I read a story about how GLP-1s have changed or saved a life.

This show needs to be shut down right now - it shouldn't be able to survive this. And more broadly, I hope it signals the beginning of the end of shows where people are thrown together in the hope that they'll shag each other and then have dramas. It's a shit, exploitative model that needs to die

it's insane that the Mandalorian started seven years ago and has three seasons. this is not how an episodic Space Western is supposed to work. there should be seven seasons and 100 plus episodes by now. would they all be good? hell no. but they don't have to be.

What happened was not people woke up to the terrible realities of the policy (realities so terrible and real none of the many countries that did adopt this policy have, err, actually seen any of them) but that a well-organised hate campaign successfully made the whole issue toxic and scared people

Using this guy’s replies for good. Some opinions I hold that I haven’t changed my mind on: Tina Carr is a fantastic jazz vocalist and performer. Check out her records. I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is a brilliant videogame. Arsenal are the best team the world has ever seen. Farage bad.

If Lisa Nandy had just, you know, done her job as Culture Secretary, made nice with the big stakeholders*, rather than alternating between sulking and profiling for the leadership, she would be prime minister by now. *A group with huge overlap with the 'potential big Labour donors' group!

This letter is really something, my god.

counterpoint: he's a transphobic piece of shit

Quite. Then the even more revealing follow-up of "the viewers at home want to know, prime minister, and yes this is nerdy, but your own MPs are saying you're a twat that everyone hates, prime minister"

April - 2026 Ayatollah Khamenei Jr is master of Hormuz. Only the British fleet stands against him. Oceans are now battlefields.

Largely agree but there’s an argument that defence spending is a way of smuggling industrial policy past neoliberals.

Yeah unfortunately that group is a load-bearing part of some major newspapers’ business models. Those papers are absolutely not going to take the risk of losing them by telling them to calm down.

I went and looked at claude code's github issues because I thought I have a bug and oh friends i have such delights to show you github.com/anthropics/c...

pca.st/episode/df90... @stephenkb.bsky.social using Twilight Struggle's definition of Europe.

Everyone is yelling at Ian about this but the article is good and this is a real problem! If you are a straight guy trying to get laid 99% of the advice you come across will be right wing-coded.

This rage-engagement bait was so effective that most of the qts didn't read the piece and then "dunked" on it by repeating the articles' message. Dunno if deliberate, effective strategy if so.

God, the number of people who were willing to believe that the South Yorkshire police were too woke to prosecute sexual abuse cases, when in fact the police force was itself an instrument of patriarchal sexual violence. It’s like a case study in the worst excesses of the British press.

And this is how you tell us you co-reigned with James VI? (I know this is a really stupid joke, but I've spent most of this afternoon in a pub garden drinking G&T)

Have you read: - @qntm.org’s Lena? It’s short and amazing - Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space? It’s long and amazing Both explore very much this sort of thing

well well well your hero doesn't sound so cool anymore, does he, checkmate libs

We're staring into an era in which sustaining public information and combating deep fakes, disinformation and misinformation will be essential to our democracy. But sure, for the Labour Govt, having effective university courses in this field is relatively unimportant: www.ft.com/content/ec74...

Our latest report: 900,000 UK companies haven't a single UK director. That's currently lawful - but our analysis shows they're *17 times* more likely to show signs of fraud than companies with a UK director. It's a serious problem. But there's a simple fix. 🧵:

We all know *the person* in No. 10 who thought they were playing 5D chess by reviving Enoch Powell’s fascistic phrase “island of strangers”. Keir Starmer approved it — then parroted it. Shame on all their houses.

Discworld QOTD, from Jingo “It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country," he read. "This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.”

Trump is learning what Truss learned before him: that the market is the last bastion of commonly-accepted truth, which all sides accept as empirically real open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

*gazes wistfully out a window*

increasingly irritated by the loudest critics of this technology being emphatically, demonstrably, and, worst of all, stubbornly and proudly wrong about it, because their volume blocks out the correct criticisms of the business practices that are the *actual* problem.

"The older that I get, the more I understand that there aren’t a lot of people who are stupid, but there are a lot of people who are incurious, and their incuriosity is understood by people who were curious about something as stupidity." - this is a fantastic piece about AI use but also about life:

checking in on decentralized assets intended to be independent from governments and big banks

*takes a drag off a cigarette and says in an extremely hard-boiled voice* the truly dangerous snakes reside in the offices and streets below me.