When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

This is of course true for other social democratic parties in Europe (and their environment) as well. The idea of the working class is a carricature of a white, straight, authoritarian and nationalist man in a factory. Ten years (and more) of trying to win them back has been an electoral disaster.

It seems a good day to remind people that in the UK 3 times as many people work in Indian restaurants or for McDonalds as in the whole coal and steel industry. 5 times as many are academic staff at universities. If Labour does not understand its electorate, there is no way to appeal to it.

Read the whole thread

“If you treat the misinformers’ frame as a legitimate, good-faith scientific critique, you are helping them produce doubt. Don’t do it. Don’t be a Merchant of Doubt.” Well said, @andrewdessler.com.

Welcome to the resistance, algae

Bloch believed that historians had the power to put truth and justice at the heart of their work by “making refutation easy” and revealing to the public the means of their historical constructions - something he believed also needed to be central in schools.

However Bloch also argues ignorance of the past “confounds contemporary action”. Therefore there is a need to engage rigorously with the past in a spirit of truth seeking, in order to guide just actions in the present. For Bloch, there was little appetite in his France for this kind of work.

Right now we see constant demands for children to study the past to better understand the development of their nation and its institutions (and in some cases the threats allegedly posed by migration). Such calls are attempts to create origin stories - not genuine attempts to understand the present.

For Bloch the core purpose of historical study was desire to better understand through a deep engagement with people and their tracks. And while he believed the past helps us understand the present he also warned of the push to try to explain the present through a study of origins.

For the #historyteacher today I think it is key we still hear is concern that we reject “not only the temptations of legend and rhetoric, but the still more dangerous…poisons of routine learning and empiricism parading as common sense”

16 June marks the 81st anniversary of the execution of historian, Marc Bloch. Always a salient time to reflect on his commitment to seeking hist truth in the face of xenophobic nationalism and Nazisim. He has so much still to say to us, as my recent cp on hist evidence tries to show #historyteacher

this is a *super short post* in which i urge us to reclaim 'free speech' in its broader public-interest, democracy-supportive meanings, rejecting the populist/maga right's bad faith cooptation. thx to the amazing team @knightcolumbia.org! i conclude with this:

Because, as everyone knows, protest works best when it's approved by the government. The entire judgement is based on a series of fairytales: about democracy, the benign nature of the state, the efficacy of polite, obedient and invisible protest and the harmonious course of English history.

If the Suffragettes were active today, there is not a shadow of a doubt that Keir Starmer's government would have banned them as a terrorist group, and insisted there are plenty of other ways in which women can register their dissent. Why don't they write letters to their MPs?

The Court of Appeal judgement on Palestine Action is frankly bonkers. It says PA is not "a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open." Right: the arson, bombings, slashings etc were all planned in open meetings in Parliament Square 🙄🧵

Liberal democracy update

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real. -Baldwin

They're not trying to surveil children (bad) they're trying to surveil everyone (worse).

3520 cases analysed. Conclusion: Meta is actively suppressing Palestinian content. “not the result of isolated errors, but reflects recurring patterns in policy application, enforcement practices, and communication with affected users.” 7amleh.org/post/meta-su...

They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway… latest @theintercept.com theintercept.com/2026/06/13/e...

Yikes. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/b...

More on Epstein’s relations with various academics and scientists, who were shown off to provided a sheen of intellectual glamour to his gatherings, who also formed part of a toxic stew of “scientific” support for a sludge of reactionary ideas. www.liberalcurrents.com/epsteins-gif...

This supposed objective news item in the Telegraph blames mass violence against non-white people on migrants, opening with, ‘The country’s foreign population has risen at almost twice the rate of that of mainland Britain’. Near the end of the article, it’s revealed we are talking about 18,553 people

On the (frankly terrifying) current state of things in the UK. (Terrifying both in developments themselves and in how they have been alternately minimized, enabled, egged on, and legitimated by the media and the Labour government)

20) Bearing that in mind, the current UK Govt is putting together an even more expanded toolbox for rights limitations and authoritarian mechanisms that any future Govt can use for easily expandable ends. This will become about YOU if it isn't already (the harm in many communities is already real).

For the avoidance of doubt: there is video footage showing far right extremists walking / driving through our communities to identify people as possible immigrants; they are literally being hunted down our streets and in our neighbourhoods, with homes set on fire etc.

4) Reporting of what is happening mostly does not recognise 1) to 3). 5) This leads to things like the description of events as incidents or protests when they are forms of race riots carried out by far right extremists - riots that exhibit some pogrom characteristics and paramilitary behaviour.

There are, in my view, 25 things everyone needs to understand in light of recent events: 1) Those out in our communities last night were not protestors, but organised far right extremists. 2) Their actions align with fascist ideologies. 3) So yes: these are fascist practices on our streets. 🧵

The Labour gov is good at taking every single opportunity to make the absolute worst decision imaginable

It's time to read the Church Committee Report! Published by a major press for the first time for it's 50th anniversary, we abridged it to its most jaw-dropping findings chronicling the abuses of the FBI, CIA, and Military from the 1950s to the 1970s. Order here: bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

This is, like, *the* report that springs to mind reading the one tweet about "people look at you like you're crazy if you tell them about things the government has publicly admitted to doing"

When they say "protect our women and children" we need to take the "our" seriously. This isn't motivated by concern over violence. They just want to be the ones doing the violence. www.thedetail.tv/articles/one...

So glad that Luqman Saeed - an academic at Ulster University - has written this piece about the Belfast riots. I hope I could write this clearly and perceptively were I under similar pressure right now. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

This has all been actively driven by a Labour government though. 'Legitimate concerns', 'stopping the boats', the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity, the refusal to take on Musk and the algorithms; Labour has birthed this. It's not just or even mainly the far right and their suited avatars.

136k already. Come on folks let’s get those numbers higher.

You can have viewpoint diversity. Or you can have peer review. But you cannot have both. And without peer review, you cannot have credible knowledge at all. shorturl.at/2Ji1X

"A pastor at the scene where multiple houses were on fire said people were being put out of houses "because they're black". In another scene, 100 masked men made their way down a street & kicked in doors & broke windows.They said they were "getting the foreigners out"" www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cr...

It is astonishing how quickly the police can turn up and arrest a student with a cardboard sign outside an embassy but are somehow entirely helpless in the face of a publicly organised campaign of targeted arson and violence.

🚨 race war was always and remains a nat sec issue. Drum I’ll never stop beating and my hands are getting calluses after 6 years

Orchestrated racist far-right terrorism in Northern Ireland again in response to an attack in Belfast, gleefully reported by RTC

Rioters "momentarily enjoying the arbitrary power of both the traffic warden and the border official" (as Richard Seymour wrote of similar checkpoints in Middlesborough during the 2024 riots) illustrates alignment of "street" & "state" racism; this is explicit extraparliamentary border enforcement.

This is what a pogrom looks like: men in masks coming to drive you from your home. This is a collective failure of our political and media class because we did not have the courage to say no, and because too many were allowed to embrace this without shame

I almost can't believe this, but *right now*, BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a programme about the scourge of illegal immigration, through a lens of faux concern.

The only question we need to hear at PMQs today is whether our representatives condemn the racist violence Every party leader needs to answer

This was a race riot. Families were driven from their homes. People were targeted because of who they are and where they come from. Words matter. Those who fuel hatred and division bear responsibility too. We have more in common than that which divides us.

I don't know how Keir Starmer can wake up in the morning, see that pogroms have been taking place under his watch, that they are being fuelled by literal illegal activity on social media, and not make it his entire purpose to stop it. We know you're no politician, but are you not a lawyer?

From here

Your reminder that this is supposed to be the good guy of British centrism, the one who’s our last chance of defeating the far right

Very important article about qualitative data sharing and the risks of doing so in a rapidly changing environment, powered, in part, by AI tools.