There is no way that anyone who knows anything about the UK will say the electorate threw out the Tories in 2024 because there was a global anti-incumbency movement 'in fact caused by the internet'. Will Stancil does however say that.

Ah, I see this post has crossed the Bad Faith Threshold: that indefinable moment on social media when people stop behaving as if you’re a normal human person who, say, loves your child and is making a mildly humorous observation, and start responding with wild criticisms and imagined slights.

A case in point. Look at this guy laughing at Reform councillors a) discovering how many problems local government face and b) thinking about doing something rational, ie raise taxes and preserve services. I hope he laughs equally hard when Reform do really well in the 2029 General Election.

A lot of left-liberal people are laughing at the Reform councillors who say these things. They shouldn't. It means Reform will be able to say to voters 'we understand how tough things are for you' in the next General Election. That's the language Labour should be speaking, but isn't.

Don't worry, an NHS where Doctors inadvertently starve a man with Downs Syndrome to death will have no problems implementing Assisted Dying. Vulnerable people and their families needn't worry.

This is utterly heartbreaking. Too sad for words. A direct result of underfunding the NHS.

So Britons should stop discussing immigration and asylum because a far Right US president- elected in very large part over voter discontent about, erm, immigration- is abusing his powers? This is not even trying to be a coherent argument.

I have just heard some really sad news that Peter Hall from Breaky Bottom, one of England's greatest winemakers, has just died. Wrote a little thing on the great man here: henryjeffreys.substack.com/p/a-tribute-...

And I'd argue that Plaid replacing Labour as the political embodiment of Welsh identity is potentially as consequential for the future of the UK Union as Reform gains

British units on deployment to Afghanistan in the winter would have a Christmas party, which included skits where the troops mocked their officers. I served in a company where the OC was 6 foot 4 inches. He was played in the sketch by two squaddies, one sitting on the other's shoulders.

networkcultures.org/blog/2015/01... Thanks for that - I searched and found this! Amazing! I was shot in the head with a Colt .45 at a distance of six feet when I was 14 years old — and have suffered from mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) ever since. MILD - not really!

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

UK politics Bluesky for the next year is going to be middle class left-liberals shouting at each other 'No, it's YOUR stance on ID cards that's reactionary and xenophobic!'

Update, from the horse's mouth: 'I am unable to think of arguments against an ID scheme beyond what people say to me on social media. I am a Professor of Political Science at Manchester University.'

'Here I will set out and then demolish a series of weak and poorly-expressed arguments against the Government's ID proposal. Stronger arguments? Sorry, can't think of any. Oh how I wish the British public square had more serious discourse on the major issues of the day.'

Age 13: Government "You must NEVER be on smartphones." Age 16: Government "You must ALWAYS be on smartphones."

In the spirit of promoting more Canadian mili thought and history, some book recommendations! First up, this one (surprisingly available in the UK too)! An examination of a Canadian victory which I believe has more lessons to teach than Vimy Ridge- covering everything from staff work to logistics.

The British Army was by 1918 one of the two most competent armies in the world, together with the German, and played the key role in securing victory on the Western Front. Its ability to recover from the initial defeats in spring 1918 was remarkable.

Just a small thing, but, if Downing Street were serious about accomplishing its policy aims, it would, while firing all but three of the London MPs in the government, found a job for Helen Hayes in the DfE.

Why, oh why, do I think this gentleman has problems with rage, and why do I hesitate to accept his opinions on other people's mental health?

Since WW2, 19 seats in Westminster have been won with less than 30% of the vote. Ten of those were last year. They'll be a lot more next time.

This is an excellent thread on immigration to the UK by @benansell.bsky.social : detailed, honest, and clear. We should take it as a model for talking about this subject, and all difficult and emotive topics.

So good to see a Jamie Kenny post going viral. Anyone interested in politics, war, China and human folly should spend some time reading the archives of Blood and Treasure: bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasu...

A man so convinced of the soundness of his arguments that he writes in a calm and rational manner, happy to let his words convince all who read them.

It's almost as if Starmer and McSweeney's patriotic rhetoric was an entirely shallow and opportunistic affair based on photo ops with 'flags and veterans' and they had no idea at all of what kind of country they wanted to see and what might threaten it, or something.

That feeling when you try to explain to someone that 'material conditions' and 'ideas' can't be easily and clearly separated as causal factors in history, as that person had argued, and then the same person announces that, ackshually, a fiscal crisis has both material and ideological aspects...

Fortunately, we British centre-left intellectuals do not have an 'echo chamber' and are not prone to hysterical rage, unlike our benighted opponents on the right. Here to prove it is Professor Jonathan Portes re-posting Ian Dunt on 'Nazi fucking bullshit'.

I do genuinely wonder if this guy's reading on the French Revolution is even up to 'decent history undergrad' level. For example, what does he think his very vague term 'material conditions' means in the context of the Revolution? Which five conditions would be top of his list?

'What if, and hear me out, all those scholars who spent years studying the French Revolution were wrong to say it was a complex phenomenon with many necessary causes, and I was right in my freshman essay that said it was all down to printing?'

This is a perfect description of what David Cameron and George Osborne did to Britain, and how rarely they have to deal with even the mildest adverse comment on it.

As the author, I’m immensely proud of this report. But mainly I hope people read it and take notice. This is about the rise in ‘fake e-bikes’, and what’s driving it appgcw.org/resources/in...

Freedman's point is true, but he also feels very complacent about where the UK is. Large anti-immigrant protests and/or riots have *not* been frequent events in post-1945 Britain. There was the 1958 Notting Hill and Nottingham riots, some NF/British Movement stuff in the '70s, and then 2024.

While no one disputes that Europe needs to do more for its defence, the focus on defence spending percentage of GDP won’t get us there. Indeed, making Europeans commit to an arbitrary spending target is the best way to keep Europe from reaching strategic autonomy. My rant in the @financialtimes.com

Newsletter: This is the Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble: genAI is nothing like Uber or Amazon Web Services, there are no profitable genAI companies, agents do not and cannot exist, there is no AI SaaS story, and everything rides - and dies - on selling GPUs. www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...

100% Add Pitt Rivers, the Horniman, and for good measure the Menil Collection in Houston. Personal "Collection" museums are fascinating.

Kettle's Yard. The Ruskin collection in Sheffield. The Garman-Ryan Collection in Walsall.

It's nice to see that Rob Hutton thinks that 'intellectual' racists are halfwits. Perhaps he'll get round to saying so in his regular column in 'The Critic', which publishes many articles by some of the worst of them, like Charles Cornish-Dale, or 'Raw Egg Nationalist'*. *This is not an invention.

This is how insane people sound when you tell them why A.I. is bad

'How could we make this even worse?' 'Well, not a lot of Labour MPs share all Rachael Maskell's politics, but they agreed with a lot of what she said about PIP cuts, and they regard her as a very decent, courteous person. If you really wanted to screw things up, you'd suspend her.' 'Genius!'

On which note, I see that Keir Starmer has identified the culprits for the Government's humiliating U-turn on welfare payments and its general chaotic mess, and they are... three backbench Labour MPs.

NB that @preachypreach.bsky.social didn't say that the article was profound: rather, he said that he had sighed profoundly at its stupidity. And he is now entitled to have an equally profound sigh at my dumbness in mis-reading him.

It is surely hard to use the word 'alleged' more stupidly than here: 'As in the war on terror, [in Ukraine] the US was determined to take the offensive against the alleged aggressors – the Russians – who, despite their pretensions to civilisation, were in the popular imagination barbarians too. '

This LRB article really isn't 'profound'. Among other things, the clown who wrote it believes that 'Waiting for the barbarians' is a phrase originating with J.M. Coetzee's novel. Perhaps he can buy a translation Cavafy's collected poems with his fee.

I once gave an initIal report on my treatment of a casualty who'd lost three limbs to an IED, maybe 2 hours after it happened. I remembered clearly that I'd put all the tourniquets on him myself. Later, we watched balloon-mounted surveillance camera footage. It showed the casualty, then me...

The Office for Budget Responsibility has an appalling record of getting its forecasts- which are key to Reeves's fiscal rules, as they were to Hunt's and Sunak's - wrong. So it's quite possible to object to this fiscal framework, and every one since Osborne invented the OBR, without being sexist.

"Could AI become its own novel and distinctive form of information processing and social coordination, rather than a secondary technology? In other words: Does it make sense to treat some AI as an emerging form of governance in its own right?"

Yes, I too block anyone who mildly criticises me for expressing a view that I am absolutely, 100% certain is correct, as @twlldun.bsky.social has done here. Imagine presenting yourself as a sceptical left-liberal and calling those with fears over a miscarriage of justice as ''Letby truthers'.

Forty years ago, the word 'truther' hadn't been coined, so people like @twlldun.bsky.social had to use other language to insist that the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were indeed mass murderers, caught by the brilliant work of ace detectives. Lucy Letby's story will end the same way.

Private equity control of UK veterinary services. Vets under "consistent pressure" to generate income - meet targets or else; encouraged to carry out unnecessary procedures on pets. Customer bills up by more than 60%. More pets will be abandoned. No govt stands up to private equity menace.