Thiel is insane, and dangerous, and it is both insane and dangerous that he has been allowed to accrue political influence in the US.

6 years of research: "The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism—the tendency to be self-centered & entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status—& the more they favored return-to-office mandates."

I really hate that AI has turned the internet into a pit of suspicion. It used to be a place where you could go to marvel at the weirdness of the world and now we have to evaluate every single thing that seems wondrous.

picturing inspiring stuff like "means tested tax breaks, but racist" incredible lmao

It’s worth noting here that the reason it’s been taboo to say that Starmer’s leadership campaign was a bleak and stupid fraud was: for the first six months to a year of his rule, all the lobby journos treated the idea as an insane conspiracy theory that yet again proved how deranged the left are.

lmao absolutely banger complaint. "i would be more popular if I weren't a twat". an all timer. get this woman a special hat or something

Anyway I think if I was the UK's most profitable podcast network I probably wouldn't advertise a job writing half hour, 7-day turnaround audio drama adaptations without royalties for £1k as a competition but I guess that's because I believe in labour laws @writersguildgb.bsky.social #Goalhanger

uk media unable to understand why pm who did everything they wanted was so despised

went down to the centrist convention. they’re all shaking and crying, I heard one guy say “I’m starting to think a better world IS possible.” the lady next to him slapped him in the face

With apologies to @mattielubchansky.com & @edzitron.com

On the Private Eye podcast, leading satirists & dogged holding-to-accounters Ian and Helen choose to own Stop Brexit Man by explaining how much Starmer likes peaceful protest 🤔

So all of these "heterodox thinkers" are just myna birds, aren't they? They're just making sounds they heard somewhere else and stringing them together like memes and this apparently imparts some kind of meaning to people who share a certain worldview? As long as you don't stop to think at all.

This is true of all ‘plain speaking’ ‘truth telling’ political commentators, it’s all euphemism and innuendo that keeps them on the mainstream circuit.

So extraordinarily telling in how morally abject this response is. For Starmer, crushing the left & shoring up factional power within Labour was worth more than Palestinian children whose lives he can write with a cheap gag & a chuckle

Britain about to get its seventh Prime Minister in ten years. I can’t say I’m surprised. As a people they’re often wonderful of course—very musical, for example, many charming customs, and always joking around in their quirky way—but they just don’t have the temperament for stable self-government.

We had our share of Centrist Dads lecturing us on how Biden was actually the most progressive presidency since FDR, with absolutely no sense of shame. Every counterpoint is met with "That's a pet issue, we must look past your purity tests"

So you've got this kind of spin doctor in the UK too? This makes me feel better, as a yank. If you cherry-pick the data and squint just so, you can make the point that Blair and Starmer were basically Attlee.

I'm not saying that everything he did was bad, but as a disabled, trans woman he has led one of the most destructive attacks on me and mine in British history. He says he ended austerity, he lies. He said Britain is fairer for everyone, he lies www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ck...

My mindset on almost everything, from forced AI adoption, to subsidising of private schools, to efforts to erode Irish neutrality, to letting the drones rip over Dublin is the same. I know I couldn’t win against someone who did debating in school, but I know the side of the dickheads when I see it

The UK papers ran a full multi-day panic after the trans demo in response to the Supreme Court ruling stripping away basic legal protections for trans people because someone chalked ‘FAG RIGHTS’ and a heart on the Millicent Fawcett statue

Everyone yelled at me when I said this guy was a banker and he’s going to run the country like a banker.

Any halfway decent software architect who interviews at Palantir will immediately see through all the hype and go "Oh so this is all unmaintainable bullshit glued together with maintenance contracts" Literally the WORST kind of shop to work in. You'd never get anything new built. Dog and pony shows

Companies like Palantir exist to quarantine corporate incompetence behind expensive implementation and maintenance contracts. Palantir does nothing out of the box. Their shit does not work unless you have a team of Forward Deployed Engineers onsite 24/7 to continually paper over the cracks.

I really need people to understand that Palantir is not an engineering marvel; it is a multi-billion-dollar contractual containment layer wrapped around the world's ugliest legacy open source frankenstack. It's a shitty Snowflake for companies that don't know how to do data engineering.

consider these two facts: ▪️ starmer radically transformed the country to appease the new right ▪️ starmer's premiership was a historic failure if you hold them in your head together, a conclusion emerges but that is basically unthinkable for our press, so they're treated as entirely separate

i'm getting a bit annoyed with this "starmer didn't do anything" narrative ❌️ sweeping changes to the immigration system ❌️ biggest asylum reforms in 70 years functionally ending refugee status ❌️ moved from a reasonably tolerant regime to the most trans-hostile developed democracy

If you're blocking people pointing out how communities at the sharp end of far-right politics have suffered from Starmer's choices then you're really proving the point...

If you're concerned about far-right politics being mainstreamed, it's clear that Starmer is one of the worst Prime Ministers If politics is all a game to you and you're confident your rights are safe thanks to your privileged position, then you may disagree but that is also a political choice

I’d compare this to Hillary standing up in 1994 and saying that whatever misgivings we might have about e.g. Mr Karadzic, there is no alternative to besieging Sarajevo. But that doesn’t work: the civilian death toll there was around 5,500, a thing that was rightly said then to shame all of Europe.

The 20-point plan for Gaza is bad because it's at face value something you'd see out of the League of Nations era colonial offices of the UK and France, does not actually enshrine Palestinian self-determination as a defined end goal, and gives Israel effective veto power over any progress.

Fucking what? By who???

And the TLDR of this that I can never get our of my head is that society would be in a much better place if Gordon Brown had had the fortitude not to take back his entirely accurate observation that Gillian Duffy was a bigoted woman.

People have commented on his politics, but here's a concrete illustration - that the GFA was a capitulation is literally a trope from right wing Conservative circles (Gove et al).

there was a reason why for 20 years or so the consistent advice given to every young person was "NEVER USE YOUR REAL NAME ONLINE. BE CAREFUL ABOUT ACCIDENTALLY GIVING AWAY YOUR LOCATION" etc. But we all did a total 180 the second fucking opinion columnists (FAKE JOB) got involved

arsehole turned off replies but ofc 'require users to use real names' gives a large number of people, but particularly children and young people, a choice between having their safety hugely compromised or being 'read-only' online participants. totally fucking incoherent to propose it as For The Kids

is Maurice Glasman aware that the kids of those working class parents chose to go to university *and plenty of those working class parents were delighted with that*

Al Carns, buddy, the entire point of the GFA is to ensure there is a political, nonviolent path to what the IRA were trying to achieve. what do you think happens if you take that away?

This from the person interviewing Richard Spencer about his Pepe pin when he got clocked, is just galling.

This explains a lot, actually - wants to remain cosy with the tech firms by refusing to regulate or sanction them for the way their platforms do harm kids. But happy to destroy the online communities of kids whilst allowing those tech firms to continue doing harm as much as they please.

Musk deserves more ire than he's gotten, not less. But there's plenty to go around, and much of it should be directed at the army of sensible, respectable suits who've nodded along while fascists flood the zone with racist bile, eagerly sanitising their talking points for as long as I've been alive.

Also, laying the blame so fully on Musk - who is absolutely a dangerous and contemptible racist creep - is very convenient for the UK's newspapers, news channels and politicians who've either spread the self-same racist myths, 24/7, for decades, or have entirely abandoned any pushback against them.

Sohrab is turning that big dial that says racism.

"We're shipping so much more code with AI!" "Good, stable code?" "Oh heavens no. No no no. not at all. We couldn't possibly"

A “national conversation on resilience and readiness for war” consists of spooks & army guys saying “we would like more money” and then if there’s any pushback, “you don’t understand how scary it is out there. I’d like to tell you but I can’t.”

Excellent point. During Covid the small Irish far right goons held rallys & even rioted in the city of Dublin & the Irish media went into a ‘we need to understand their concerns’ orgy. In fact they were mostly criminals with records, teens loving some excitement & maybe 200 actual Neo-Nazis*

In the past hour, Musk agrees w/ and boosts posts saying that: - The UK govt has no "value or legitimacy" - The price of "diversity and multiculturalism" is white people getting beheaded in the street

The UK is a state conditioned to treat all political actors on the right of politics as basically good chaps, and left activism as dangerous subversion (the story of Ewing & Gearty's work). It isn't (just) a Starmer personality issue, its a systemic defect that is now being mercilessly exploited:

She is an unconvincing liar, repeatedly contradicting herself. Her replies are littered with sinister comments painting trans women as deceptive and violent, eg they claimed to have rights they didn't have, their use of single sex services prevented distressed cis women accessing them. Neither true.

If the story is about drunkenness - a UK-wide problem - then his origins do not matter. It was an editorial decision by metro.co.uk (available for free on the bus) to make this story about him being an asylum seeker. It becomes a culture war: foreigner hates ‘us’ bcs he damaged a war memorial.