Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science! 🧪 🔭 🟰 I have taken the first 100 Fellows recently announced by the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences and considered them by pronouns. What do you notice? What do you wonder?

Like most of us the rich tend to build their worldview around their own interests. (Welfare = taxes on me so bad). But their interests diverge more from the majority than the norm. And they have fewer people around them willing to point out when they're wrong.

Well done to Sky for correcting this bit of ignorance. As shown extensively in the Epstein files there's plenty of proof that being rich doesn't mean you have any great insights into the world.

It's a specific point being made in context, but also fairly evergreen

When chatbots are given complete information on medical conditions, they typically spit out correct diagnoses and recommendations. Actual patients, however, often describe their conditions with incomplete or irrelevant information and the chatbots cannot handle it. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cable tv is the carcinisation of business models

Because what 'enough to live off' varies from person to person. The living costs of a single person with no dependents or a married person whose partner also works are lower than someone raising a child alone. That's why you can't fight poverty with wages alone.

No-one seems to have noticed, but many of the core developments in the Mandelson/Epstein story these last few days have been broken on this website. @pickardje.bsky.social and @petergeoghegan.bsky.social are both posting each breaking development on BlueSky, not X.

it's like our entire sense of morality has been filtered through the act of consumption, and the highest good we can imagine is feeling good and clean and pure as individuals, unpolluted by the obvious evil are around us meanwhile, real change requires the kind of work you need a drink after

the Spectator accidentally recycled a subhed from a previous day’s article about Tehran

On Starmer/McSweeney appointing Mandelson. Great piece full of gems.

Starmer's reported condition - incredibly unpopular, shorn of authority, probably un-reelectable and yet will stagger on for want of an alternative - is just the new normal of how Britain is governed. It was also true for two-thirds of May's premiership, half of Johnson's and all of Sunak's.

5/5 PMs with approval ratings of measles isn't just a feature of failed leadership. It's Brexit Britain. There's no money for anything people want and were promised they would have, and no one can blame the people who got us into this mess because they got 52% of the vote (let alone reverse it).

Finally getting around to checking out @bobchipman.bsky.social's video on Hopalong Cassidy and the American Western, and my God it's good to get back to his long-form video essay content. If you're remotely interested in the history of Westerns, check it out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Kc...

Why the new narrative that 2024 Labour MPs are Mandelson clones is nonsense. www.newstatesman.com/politics/lab...

"Normal person" is a character, and he plays it really well

The problem with Dan’s argument is, I think it looks really cool, and I think they should spend the money. It’s literally spread over 2 decades. It’s a rounding error in one year’s annual budget! Spend the money.

Happy Six Nations to all who celebrate!

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

The Western civilisation the nationalist right claims to treasure looking monsters like Trump, Vance, Farage and Jenrick straight in the face and telling them to fuck right off.

A fascinating conversation to look back on - I'd say that both parties say some things that are very prescient and others that have proved not to be quite correct. But it was definitely a good intellectual discussion

Meaning Starmer's real mistake was thinking he could ride that wave, forever, back home. Which is very different from the narrative today that he somehow wanted nobody to notice.

Weird and almost universal revisionism today. Even at the time, it was pretty clear that Mandelson wasn't appointed *despite* his dodgy links but *because* of them. Trump's Washington is a dirty swamp. Mandelson was deemed a man able to swim in it. This wasn't a secret. Everybody said it out loud.

Throttle House a) is a good watch anyway and b) has been deliberate aping peak TG for a while so this makes a lot of sense

UPDATE - I have now received a reply from the Greens apologising for the oversight in using my image and quote without consulting me and giving assurance it won't happen again. That's good enough for me, so I won't be taking any further action beyond writing it all up for my Substack

It is worth recalling that the position of U.K. Ambassador to the US was not vacant at the time the Prime Minister chose to appoint Peter Mandelson to the role. A highly competent and respected woman was replaced.

I have yet to receive a reply to this from anyone in the Green Party - my image and quote appear under the title "Everyone Agrees, Labour Are Done!". As the excerpt from the same article quoted here I reproduce below makes clear, I do not "agree". This clearly misrepresents my views.

Radical left culture is increasingly demonstrating itself to be "we must fight in the streets, fight on the barricades, fight everywhere, but also if this fight involves me being exposed to any kind of material risk that is unacceptable", and sorry but this just is not remotely serious

once again these things boil down to “is your group a bohemian cultural identity” or “is your group actually trying to do things?” and the key tell is whether your activity centers on policing of in-group behavior or whether it centers on, again, tangible goals

Theory: 2025 was characterised by *relatively* little (non-state) MAGA violence because they felt like they were winning. 2026 is already full of MAGA violence because they feel like they're losing.

Wondering if the lack of a comprehensive exploration of the Winter Olympics by @samfr.bsky.social is a result of recovering from medical procedures, a lack of interest in winter sports, or both

Did you catch the new Channel 4 show #SecretGenius last night? Alan Carr &Susie Dent teamed up with #Mensa to set puzzles for participants. The show helped to illuminate some of the issues with discrimination/inequality that are surfaced by trying to ‘measure’ intelligence. Some thoughts..

Here’s a fun thought experiment: imagine US retail banking offered the services British retail banking did. No PayPal. Or at least not as valuable a PayPal. No PayPal mafia. “In this essay I will argue that the US use of cheques led to the breaking of the West…”.

The sardonic irony here is so thick that I find it hard to believe that Chotiner is not in fact British

If there's one polity that should get British political anoraks' attention, it is - as Will suggests - Australia.

We don’t owe them anything. They spent a decade ignoring obvious evidence implicating the most guilty while fabricating insane accusations against the innocent.

Excellent thread. I've been saying for a while that the fascists want to turn immigrants into something like sharecroppers or even Helots. The Gulf labor model detailed (exceptionally well) here is the mechanism by which they intend to do it.

I think a big part of the Gulf thing is that Trump likes Gulf royalty so much, and they get him. Dynasties, oil, taking wealth from the public, garish real estate projects, the right to imprison/torture/kill anyone you want, failsons, multiple wives; Trump is a brother from another mother to them

The main features of radical right parties are authoritarianism and nationalism (increasingly ethno-nationalism). Irregular immigration can be an important part of their narrative but it doesn't need it to succeed.

Also evidence that essentially eliminating irregular immigration - as Australia has - doesn't, by itself, stop the radical right.

This is the kind of service someone would come up with if they were a 4 year old

Heroes come in many forms and this is one of them

"It's round now?"

...they told her no, didn't they

The DOJ begging for lawyers over DMs and X trying to get a world famous author to train Grok for $40 an hour suggest that maybe, just maybe, those HR departments were there for a reason.

I wanted to shout "Yes" and "Amen" at virtually every line of this @volts.wtf and @michaelhobbes.bsky.social discussion. I flagged one particularly important section, but the whole thing is essential. www.volts.wtf/p/all-about-...

For many years I have been posting little observations online. What you may not know is that for many years, artists have been illustrating them - for no reason other than they wanted to respond. Below is a thread of some of these beautiful drawings because they should be seen 🧵

Qanon never stopped any CSAM production, never saved any kids, but did help keep a guy in power who probably raped kids with his best friend The World's Most Famous Pedophile. So, in the end, I guess the real Qanon was the friends they met along the way, on the CSAM enthusiast website.

One of the funniest conspiracy theories is that Kubrick was killed for Eyes Wide Shut but at the same time they were like "well he worked really hard on this, only fair to give it a wide release"