Cool thoughts from Noam Chomsky

omg bill gates slipped his wife antibiotics after he got an std from a russian hooker also is his foundation offering a fellowship

Watched all two hours and thirteen minutes of Highest 2 Lowest and have made myself a promise that I’ll place greater value on my time in future. Between this and Da 5 Bloods, I am willing to declare that Spike Lee is more than ready to retire.

taps sign

"Obama helped to put what was still in some ways a fledgling agency (ICE) and built it up into the institutional node that it is now. Obama is extremely important as a fulcrum between the origins of Homeland Security... and its hypertrophy and abuse in Trump." - Nikhil Pal Singh

A lot of folk still don’t know that Aramark own (super fancy) Avoca, as well as providing food services for Direct Provision Centres. Very easy not to go to Avoca, I reckon. Public opinion got them out of NGI, after all.

Purely based off my own experience but if you pay people well, give them autonomy and treat them with respect you probably won’t have staffing issues. You’ll also have a happy workplace. I can’t imagine morale levels in Amazon. Another 16,000 layoffs from a company that already makes amoral profit.

I know people from London think everyone else overpronounces their Rs, but honestly, every time I hear BBC Radio news I briefly think the Prime Minister of the UK is someone called Suckeyah Staama

We have a great lineup for our Semester 2 seminar series at Maynooth University History Department. All are welcome to join.

Here's the DCU report I co-wrote on research we conducted on the topic of Neurodiversity in the Workplace: www.dcu.ie/instituteofe...

Do US liberals not pause to think about the rest of the world when they outragedly emphasise the CITIZEN part? Let me tell you how it sounds: it sounds like you think murdering mere foreigners is not that big a deal, something you are prepared to maybe forgive a little bit of from a Democrat presdnt

If the US were a geopolitical rival the headlines would be like: US Secret Police Execute Second Dissident In the Streets As Militarized Occupation Enters Sixth Week

The leaders of the major British parties have sent a very clear message to Donald Trump today: you can’t lie about British soldiers. You can lie about war crimes, genocide, sexual assault, ties to paedophiles, electoral theft, every single thing you’ve ever done, but not British soldiers. So there.

Engagement with government accounts on X latest

Honoured to be in this issue of @memoiresdulivre.bsky.social on visibility & publishing, eds @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social & @julienlf.bsky.social Me & @michaelakralova.bsky.social wrote about publishing & translation, focusing on the sexy topic of metadata :-) www.erudit.org/en/journals/...

Dublin is run by people who want to turn it into a playground for Americans

National media should really be covering the fact thay every major school, museum, and arts institution in the Twin Cities, and hundreds of local businesses are closed tomorrow to protest federal occupation. Nothing like this at this scale has happened anywhere in America anytime in living memory.

In America we have city cops, different cops for your county, cops for the whole state, cops for soldiers, cops for malls, presidential cops, cops for the stock market, mail cops, federal cops, cops we secretly send to other countries. Even your neighbors get to pretend to be cops. We’re very safe

I co-edited this bilingual issue of Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture w/ @julienlf.bsky.social (an excellent collaborator). It's all open access.

I don’t remotely hate Americans, I hate that we’re so intertwined that the entire world gets put into danger because the citizens of Cornville, Iowa are scared the trans people are coming to take over their daughters’ softball league.

In a crowded field, Truss strikes me as the most shameless of them all.

Congratulations everyone, Big Brother wasn’t imposed on you, you bought Big Brother on Prime Day and installed him yourselves.

Phone memory just brought up my favourite photo I’ve taken: Teidí randomly meeting a ferret called Loki. They played together for half an hour after this and went on subsequent playdates

"AI is real," Simon Harris said in his speech earlier. "chatbots are real. Grok is real, and strong, and he's my friend."

Government building new data centres to cope with the volume of news reports on this clown being arrested

“Listen, son, if you don’t want this, I know a guy in Washington would love to have it.”

Because I’m annoying like that, I started waffling on about how this bottle of Hennessy cognac in Schindler’s List looks far too light and translucent, and Spielberg was being lazy with his props because it was in b & w. “Maybe Schindler is reusing the bottle for vodka” said my wife, inarguably.

Some tough viewing choices this evening for those of us with an interest in African football and snooker, but glad I flicked over to the AFCON for the maddest 20 minutes I’ve ever seen

Available from all good bookshops!

pretty sure he meant the other thing, grok, but very cool that those are your two things

A thing that gets overlooked a lot in AI discourse is that many of the people making key decisions around where and how it gets used have absolutely no idea what it actually is, or how it works. We need to keep that in mind far more.

Five Years Rock n Roll Suicide Black Star Hallo Spaceboy Boys Keep Swinging Let’s Dance Starman Ashes to Ashes Fame I’m Afraid of Americans

Insane to me that people still travel to the US when they don’t need to. Places where government-armed rogue militias staffed by the stupidest, most damaged idiots you can imagine take over cities at will and murder with impunity are just not desirable holiday destinations

We scratch our heads at why the M50 is so congested, but here’s Google Maps recommending using it and driving for 30km instead of 15, because it *might* save me 7 minutes. #spéirghorm

If the line isn't "I'm not willing to share the pitch on a site that is not just hosting, not just creating but also now monetising non-consensual images of women and girls" - then there is no line.

11 days from now marks one year since this guy got away with doing a Nazi salute on live TV. Since then, he - the world's richest man - has gutted govt programmes causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children and turned his microblogging website into a child porn generator. Consequences!

Are we allowed ask when all the decent citizens of the United States of America are going to please go on general strike and bring their currently-driven-by-a-pack-of-clinical-pyschopaths nation grinding to a halt??

About this time last year, Simon Harris was banging on about how Adolescence on Netflix should be “required viewing in schools” because of what it says about the Internet’s harmful effects on children. Now he won’t leave Xitter because he might not reach the far right and the perverts without it.

I'll never understand how working class "gender critical" activists, who are struggling to get by due to a deliberate widening of the gap between the wealthy and the poor, have been convinced that a billionaire smugly smoking a cigar on a superyacht has a keen interest in making their lives better.

"I stayed on Twitter through Nazi-ism and the owner causing 600,000 Africans to die so if you think a bit of child pornography is going to get me to leave you are barking up the wrong tree my friend" Some people apparently

Hegseth is an unstable attention addict playing tough and Trump wanted a situation room photo like Obama got. Perfect match. They ran the raid from Mar a Lago, dawg. He probably flipped open that curtain like the Phantom of the Opera and started bragging to the nearest busboy

This is what the US has always done – and yet they need some oriental metaphor to truly understand it

Future historians (note my optimism) are going to try to be even-handed, responsible and grown-up about the bombing of Caracas, and thus gloss over the simple fact that this happened because the dumbest people on Earth voted for a rotting child molester three times.

People keep claiming it's a "better window to the world" but actively posting and engaging on a platform where interactions and content are now effectively interchangable with 4Chan and whose own AI puts images of children in tiny bikinis on demand is a choice. There are far less harmful windows.

X is run by a Nazi and it's in built LLM generates child sex abuse material and pornographic images of people without their consent, but on the other hand, I am a dopamine addict who craves attention and need the validation of the remaining other addicts. So it's not so simple.

Match of the Day will be an absolute belter tonight

Americans I follow on Bluesky this week: I’m afraid I’ve only published two articles since Christmas, forgive me. Here are my top 25 outputs of 2025. Europeans I follow on Bluesky: I don’t know what day it is but isn’t it lovely to watch Die Hard with a few sausages and a Bailey’s between meals x

what a shocking turn of events who could’ve seen this coming

Swooping in on the 29th of December and comfortably claiming best film of the year,* it’s Sentimental Value. I’ve loved all of Joachim Trier’s films, but wow. Plenty to say about generational trauma, but just as much about art and integrity. *For me, obviously. But I’m right.