Today I learned that being Italian is a subculture of Scotch-Irish military culture.

A question for any STS-scholars on here: has anything good been written on actor-network theory and AI (since the release of ChatGPT and the explosion of LLMs etc)?

Anyway, I think we have enough now of smug european countries trying to replace the NSF (annual budget: 10 billion) with a one-off scheme valued at about two million euros, while blithely ingoring the intense racism and anti-migrant agitation in their own countries 👍

Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist. 30/ bsky.app/profile/drja... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio...

Any time I look to see what the Labour government is up to in the UK it turns out to be things like making posters that Alfonso Cuarón put in the background of the long tracking shot that opens “Children of Men”.

"The point is not that what progressives do must never be criticized; the point is that the relentless drive to find fault with both sides equally results in a sense of (false) equivalence among those taking cues from supposedly trustworthy centrists."

The best time to delete X was 2 years ago, the second best time is right now

📣 Today @felicitycallard.bsky.social and I have published the first peer-reviewed response to the 'Sullivan Review' of research and data on sex and gender. doi.org/10.1111/tran... The Review could threaten trans rights and inclusion, erode academic freedom, and undermine research quality.

Guys, the Odyssey is a work of fiction. There is a cyclop, a sorceress, and a bunch of gods. A hero and a princess and a man lost at sea. We can all be one of them if we want to. It belongs to everyone and no-one can forbid anyone from having it.

Curious how not a single member of Alex Ferguson’s teams has ever had any success as a manager, and that the limits of their tactical insight is to drone on about cod psychology for podcasts sponsored by betting firms, set in fake wine bars

I hope all the sociologists at Wayne State University know that Jukka Savolainen is openly advocating for their firing and removal, along with any other sociologists that he--the ultimate arbiter of Scientific Truths--considers a radical.

Chris Rufo is so upset about the Minneapolis protests that he is resorting to anti-Nordic racism christopherrufo.com/p/the-curse-...

The lesson the United States is having to learn is that constitutions don’t “work”; they are applied. Whether or not you can carry a copy in your pocket is not the decisive factor.

working with good coauthors be like

This seems like the easiest job in the world. Sit in an office, answer a few emails, and say a few things that sound vaguely ‘philosophical’ and deep. What is it like to be a chatbot? Qualia! Chinese room! Turing test!

At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.

Anyway. In 2024-5, over £15bn of interest was applied to student loans. Repayments totalled just £5bn. And now those young people are coming into their professional prime with what is in essence a bespoke additional tax. And people are panicking. Finally. www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

The President of the US is a eugenicist white nationalist. It’s like having Woodrow Wilson back in the White House, only without any of the good parts.

Hard agree. I'm increasingly just zero sympathy for the cowardly chauvinists who can't handle places where lots of different people get along together.

mad king moment from the PBS Newshour correspondent

The neocolonial attitude amongst many elites - entangled with weird tech dreams, focused especially on AI - is really something else (at a minimum: this is a topic ripe for humanities dissertations...)

Me, reading and studying history: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me, realizing I am living through a historical event: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

🚨 This @rollingstone.com piece about the Danish investigators is explosive & deeply alarming The whole episode gets murkier by the day The author of the piece got access to e-mails between Danish PI Dr Stabell Benn & 2 HHS staffers with anti-vaccine histories😳 www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

People forging intimate emotional relationships to ChatGPT, which then starts to introduce advertising, is unlocking a whole other level of dystopia

Apropos of nothing, let's check in with how things are going at Bari Weiss's free speech university. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

I'm sure this is common experience but: I once had reviewer 1 recommend my manuscript be accepted as is (first and only time that has happened!) and reviewer 2 reject it wholly (I think). I then did the revisions, resubmitted and had a new reviewer 2 assigned whose new changes I also did 1/2

Good that the City of London is doing this, and about time, too.

But reckoning with that means protecting and investing in spaces for kids to hang out unsupervised outside of the home and school, which hasn't been happening (as I discussed in my review of his book here www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... )

The half of Haidt's thesis re 'anxiety' that gets completely ignored is the arguably more interesting one, that children are no longer being allowed to take IRL risks any longer, and therefore don't learn how to judge them. Excess 'schoolification' and 'helicopter parenting' are real IMO.

thought of this for no reason whatsoever en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_...

If, like us, you find psychology curiously devoid of what JL Austin called ‘middle-sized dry goods’, we’ve got an article for you: Drawing on STS, technopsychology is a way of doing psychology where technology isn’t background noise—it’s part of the conversation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

While I love my niche stupid hobby of historical board gaming, sometimes it does just make me want to scream. Take the latest example, a board game about the Irish Potato Famine where you get to compete with friends to see who survives best (?) www.kickstarter.com/projects/com...

Caroline Fraser's excellent book "Murderland", which is about violence, capitalism and pollution, really couldn't have been more timely.

A parent of a 2 year old told me that it’s the main worry of parents in a South London nursery. It’s become the totem of ‘modernity’ onto which any cultural and sociological anxiety can now be thrown

I’m more sympathetic to the Haidt book than many people, but am constantly struck by how mad the moral panic surrounding phones has got amongst some parents. Those who are still years away from the problem seem most deranged, like people in least diverse communities being most anti-immigration

I’m slowly coming to the realisation that perhaps we *do* need psychoanalysis to understand the appeal to LLMs in everyday life…

You have to read this brilliant essay in @eflux.bsky.social on “The Crisis of Masculinity” crisis by @weakanalogy.bsky.social www.e-flux.com/journal/159/...

This seems like it would be a big electoral win for Labour (so they won’t do it)

Kære danske og grønlandske politikere, uanset hvad I er enige eller uenige om, så PLEASE hold den her slags møder på Signal eller en anden open source end-to-end krypteret tjeneste, som amerikanerne ikke kan lytte med på..! Det kan da ikke passe, at det blev holdt på Teams??

Begging the blue sky americans to read one (1) history of the twentieth century.

No wonder they wanted colonialism off our syllabi

Expect to see a lot of this classic Onion headline, from 23 years ago, over the coming weeks.

Spouse of shadow president promises occupation of a NATO ally’s territory. Surely just for likes.

funding lotteries have been waiting for this moment

Special issue on the Sociobiology Debate at fifty. Important new archival discoveries. No paywall. online.ucpress.edu/hsns/issue/5...

The implications of this are bleak, not least for the (many?) people who use ChatGPT for emotional support (whatever you may think of that, it’s a real phenomenon)