I saw a couple of takes framing the US shutdown as a trolley problem, which I don't think works in its own right (the choices and outcomes are both far too vague), but I think does help showcase some of the popular and valid critiques of the trolley problem (1/6)

It's important to keep pointing this out about the many people who have gone the same way. Too often we suggest or imply that the trans moral panic merely allowed these people to be who they always were. Not true. We're seeing a process of *radicalisation*. We can't fix things unless we name them.

No more noble British tradition than resigning over some nonsense everyone is only pretending to be angry about rather than all of the actually bad things you've done.

Let me shock you - the "patriotic" wing of British politics is not patriotic. It hates this country.

Just occurred that the BBC is the most literal example of Conquest's third law in that it is actually run by a cabal of its enemies.

A Quick Take on Team Cave’s Big Win talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-qui...

Conservation work has started on one of the most unusual mausoleums in the Roman Catholic world -- the Bedouin tent shaped tomb of Sir Richard Burton and his wife, Lady Isabel. www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/res...

Gary Lineker absolutely called it. bsky.app/profile/poli...

BYD has a market cap of US$120bn. It makes twice as many EVs per year as Tesla (4.2m in 2024 vs 1.8m) and is growing at 25%/year vs Tesla's 4% decline in 2024. Even in the best case where Tesla turns around and remains a major EV player, its current $1.3trn valuation is *still* out by a factor of 10

Anthropologists have discovered a lost tribe that uses the "one, two, many" system of counting.

this is the trump guy urtext

This. Tesla is a mid-sized car company with a valuation build on hype and lies, an ageing range of models, facing tough competition from multiple places and with a CEO a large proportion of potential customers actively hate.

This piece reads like a well-observed parody of "let's tear everything down over some petty whinging bullshit" bothsidesy nihilism, but I think it's meant to be serious www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

Same!

twitter being bought and turned into a propaganda machine for fascism, which is directly pumped into every journalist in the world's brain, is one of the worst things to happen in the last few years. we might not survive it.

Most annoying re the BBC Panorama thing is that a) Trump did actually incite the riot b) the evidence the show used was presented misleadingly... in a completely unnecessary own goal caused entirely by shoddiness in the face of an opponent where everyone knew his fawning bootlickers would do this

He explicitly encouraged the Capitol riot

When the Conservative Party in Korea declared martial law, the Korean Democrats knew if they didn’t send them to hell there would be no opposition afterwards. And look at them. They’re taking the ex conservative president and ensuring he never breathes free ever again.

That's actually an understatement. Even when presented with cold, hard data proving otherwise, people still argue that that basically everything is worse than it used to be! www.gapminder.org/factfulness-...

The single most important image to hold in your mind when dealing with the conjecture that "things were better in the past"

It is genuinely hard for most people to grasp how poor the past was.

“This man knows no beauty and his whole world has devolved into fights on the Internet.” Man: “Liar. I will fight you on the Internet.”

lol she got his ass and he knows it

Loving today's news that the mysterious "fedora man" outside the Louvre heist was actually a 15-year-old museum visitor who dresses like a 1940s French detective all the time, just because. apnews.com/article/louv...

While I don’t ride or die for Pete Buttigieg, the vitriol directed at him is completely insane. “When I was younger I wished that I could have taken a pill to turn me straight; but I have accepted and embraced my identity now” is an *extremely* common sentiment from Millennial and older gay people!

istg I think we've somehow made this a glonzo issue, for bsky posters at least

Everyone secretly yearns for Australia-style party discipline.

your basic idea is that an Indian Muslim whose father was expelled from Uganda for being Indian and whose maternal grandparents lived through the violence of the Partition, on the wrong side of the border, is predisposed to believe that countries have a right to maintain an ethnoreligious majority

I genuinely think there is a case that anyone using an AI product of this kind should face a short prison sentence. It's vandalism, just like painting on a wall or smashing a bus stop.

I’m sorry but the American spelling of centrist should really be centerist

fully funding SNAP a year out is what makes this a potential ceasefire not a surrender. it takes starvation off the table as potential stakes.

You'd think after 250 years of being a country, Yanks would know that their parliamentary chambers don't have a party whip system

I've never understood this conception. All technological details aside, at its heart copyright as a concept protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. LLMs here are no different from airport novelists, supermarket cola packages or Oasis thepoint.com.au/opinions/251...

This seems like the right call - in principle it's not a bad deal but the people it's being made with are the world's skeeviest liars

And they say there are no new sitcom ideas

Ah, 9 November – a sad one, this: 59th anniversary of the day Paul McCartney died, forcing the other Beatles to replace him with an orphan they had trained to impersonate him, and then (obviously) put clues in songs and on album covers so people could find out anyway

Rage against group think, writes Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times, by reading out a paragraph of what *I* think at the beginning of every BBC editorial meeting.

It's obviously absurd to blame David Lammy for the mess the system is in when he's been there a few months and the last government drove it into a wall. But it's this government who need to figure out some solutions.

Fond memories of fawning newspaper profiles a few years ago about “the footballer who reads Nietzsche”

This is "the rest of the Anglophone world" erasure. Ireland remains the only country in Europe except Albania to have no heavy rail electrification. Yanks, Canucks, Kiwis and Aussies also dreadful at this

french wikipedia is the only language that has a "list of bastards" article

This is very very good

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

The Orange Order going after the actual King now - you couldn't make it up. www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/norther...

Saw the Zohran campaign sign generator on Instagram and had to get this out of my head. Ok goodbye again.

maybe this is just a personal thing, but any time i'm forced to read postliberal, natcon, or integralist content, i can genuinely feel myself getting more of a left-liberal socdem by the second, primarily just out of irritation about how so many bad ideas can be rationalized

this one's funny because a big chunk of what is actually fucking Golden is that his union ties made him support insane tariffs, which falls squarely inside Matt's critique about how concentrated intraparty donor/activist power leads Dems to take unpopular positions, except from the wrong direction

The BBC is apologising for its Panorama edit. It shouldn’t. First, the narrative is true: Donald Trump *did* incite the Capitol riot. Second, the apology won’t appease those attacking it. So why not at least stand for something? Wrote this on it earlier this week: inews.co.uk/news/world/b...

They really ought to change their name to the Pro Israel But Totally Chill With Antisemitism League