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Half the people in the Spectator Garden Party photos look like the Fascist in a 1940s film called something like 'I See They've Invited The Fascist'

England, like the overwhelming majority of other nations, usually don't win in the world cup, so it's important for us to lose in a way where something can be learned, as a nation, and I fear a pasting to Mexico on home turf is less valuable than a shock loss to an up and coming DRC.

I'm seeing a lot of posts on here that I feel, politely, do not reflect the best response to the differing experiences of people with historically more secure contracts in wealthier institutions vs those on fixed term contracts or in post 92s

It's the line "future priorities" which you see so much in University Restructuring Announcements that needs interrogating. It's nakedly ideological and loaded with assumptions.

www.theguardian.com/education/20... This really feels like it doesn't prove much. 'people who graduated into a global economic recession MIGHT worse off than people who we imagine in our heads' is not much of a metric, but serves a convenient attack line

'Enjoying the warm weather' is more of an April activity.

Chotiner: You sing that it’s been thirty years of hurt… England: That’s right Chotiner: but that song was written 30 years ago, it’s more like, well, Sixty, by my reckoning England: I suppose so Chotiner: Can you describe this pain? I’m just trying to get a clear picture of the situation.

Artist: "So Baroness, would you describe the Pimperne.." Orczy: "C**TY. And so help me god, If you go easy on it, I'll know and you won't ever work in this town again."

There’s something interesting about billionaires, who all basically crave to be liked and adored and worshipped by the public while refusing to do anything at all with their wealth to make that happen through good works for the public

This should be a decisive national scandal at the moment www.theguardian.com/global/comme...

(Trigger warning: any sociologists among us may wish to avert their eyes to avoid spontaneous combustion resulting from exposure to the worst theory of social action I have seen in decades) For the rest of you, beware if you are “unhappy” or “looking for justice” you may be on the road to terrorism

Anyone got any links to decent critiques of work and concepts of 'obesogenic environments'?

This is obviously great news. There's a list of who can get the jab here - if you are a man under 45 check the criteria and think carefully/discuss what's best for your partners www.nhs.uk/vaccinations...

There's a local factoid that circulates that Sheffield also currently produces more steel (and possibly at a higher value), than it did at the height of employment in the industry.

Microhistory really the sort of thing that loses out in the silly vision of higher education and big budget big data projects we have now, isn't it? Gets pushed off into being the curiosity of paperback history to sell to beach holiday dads etc.

Banning kids from social media means they seek out the spaces online where the people already banned from social media go. And the main group of people already banned from social media (now the Nazis seem to be permitted freely), is child abusers?

Devastating news. Abdullah Ibrahim has left us. A giant has fallen. An era has closed. iol.co.za/news/south-a...

okay but what if a 10-year-old thinks moby dick is better than middlemarch, what then. where are they supposed to go

Reframing data activism: Towards a broader understanding of datafied social movements by Juliette Davret, Danielle Hynes, Samuel Mutter and Joan Somers Donnelly in Big Data & Society journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I genuinely feel torn on the assisted dying bill, as someone who is likely to need palliative care much earlier than the average. I would like to be able to say "ok, ive had enough now" and to be able to make that choice and i don't think people who've helped others like that should be criminalised

If we're banning under 16s from social media are we going to be able to talk about sex on it again without being banned or?

Spoke to Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker (and lived to tell the tale). www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

I think this might be the most coverage I've seen the British Press give Northern Ireland since, well, the GFA?

Photo by Gareth Miller as public transport was suspended.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Interesting development in some recently tabled changes to Social Housing here. The spirit is welcome but I think applying an anti-carceral lens to this as much as any other punitive reform is necessary. www.gov.uk/government/n...

British Press this morning willing to imply a detailed genealogy of the DEI training and wokeness that connects 3 attacks by people of different ethnicities, nationalities and religions, but are absolutely stumped at what connects a few areas in Belfast.

Anyone else got twenty copies of one pdf because you always forget where you downloaded it to on your computer and just get a new one from the site instead? Me neither.

I keep seeing this story framed as positive, and I can see why - I'm not sure what else the groups involved could have done. But I can't help feeling that Reform's aim here isn't to shut down Pride-not yet. It's to shift greater burdens and use up more of the organizing time of the left.

Timothy Thornton. 'Anthony Head's Head.' (2016)

Feel like we didn't "Actually they tried that in Russia and it led to dictatorship" these guys enough to allow them this phase.

Not surprising to see the YIMBY-adjacent types having a hard time understanding the underlying dynamics of planning objections tbqh

2/3 Here’s how the same survey could have been reported: 85% of police taking successful inclusion course did not feel pressured or controlled. 98.9% agreed that they were free to talk openly. For the original evaluation of the course see: library.college.police.uk/docs/Practic...

A few years ago I wrote a profile of the Metropolitan Police for @lrb.co.uk. It was partly about how establishment attacks on "DEI" in policing were an effort to rebuild an alliance with rank and file officers that had catastrophically broken down in the 2010s... www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The May issue of Rundale on the theme of housing is out now. Five new contributions that approach housing and inhabitation in Ireland from new angles, offering different framings of (and answers to) ‘the housing question’. Quality analysis that you just don't find elsewhere. rundale.org

In 90s UK Blairite Pizza Express paradise, bumping into Blanche in a Codex meant being exposed to a legacy of the avant garde, and a little voice say, "if you look closer, there's the rot...". And another, louder, voice saying "Your death cult of dying empire worships a living corpse!"

Just heard that the great John Blanche passed on. No illustrator had more of an impact on my childhood. Blanche is probably the single person who most influenced the aesthetic of Warhammer 40,000 and a lot of modern fantasy / sci-fi as a result

Kotsko, 2015 - "When we read stories about artificial intelligence, we chuckle about how someone apparently didn’t watch 'Terminator', but I think there’s a deeper problem: it’s wrong to create a race of slaves." itself.blog/2015/08/27/o...

One thing I find remarkable is the way that George Osborne and David Cameron have been mostly allowed to simply walk away from any of the many many messes they created.

If you suggest police officers shouldn’t kick people in the head, you’ll get the chief of the Met condemning you on national television. If you say the police are institutionally racist against whites and suggest people should riot, you’ll get invited onto a BBC couch to expand upon your theories.

Things about national HE discourse make a lot more sense if you assume a ruling ideology that has internalised the idea that the British working class should be returned back to low-paid work it's cheaper to get humans than robots to do, in service to new geographical centers of capital.

We are launching our GlobalCORRIDOR Atlas today, alongside our project website....as part of our ERC funded project This beta version features dozens of corridors, hundreds of infrastructure projects, nearly a trillion dollars of investment. globalcorridor.eu/atlas

There are taxi drivers and hospitality workers in Europe and the US who are former academics who fled dictators, repression, or just plain negligence in their own countries. Do not think there is a comfy refuge, third sector, or consultancy waiting out there.

Neither fair on staff, nor on the winning author, who is going to have a tainted win on their book for the rest of time.

This is just an invasion by any other name. In a just world, Israel would face the same treatment as Russia.

So we're saying social media is the same sorta experience as cigarettes or alcohol in some ways. But we're also saying, "It's fine if governments use these as the primary method of distributing critical information during a disaster."

if we're arguing social media is too dangerous for kids 16 and under, we're basically saying it impacts the brain and potentially body like an addictive drug. this IS kinda true. people seldom carry that logic to its end. doing that would mean admitting every adult online is getting fucked up 24/7

this mural in Margate station pointing out that tseliot is an anagram of toilets won a Margate civic society town pride award