samibabble.bsky.social

Me, aged 13: In the future we’ll have jetpacks. Me, aged 55: No jetpack, mate, but we might need to get a certificate from the Author’s Guild to prove we’re human.

Favourite cabinet minister among Labour members is Ed Miliband, followed by Angela Rayner. The PM is 17th most popular and two ministers have a net negative rating: Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves. Via Labour List labourlist.org/2025/03/cabi...

When I wrote my camps book, people sometimes had difficulty understanding how concentration-camp regimes were proud of what they were doing and wanted attention for it, even as they also hoped to keep many aspects secret and terrorize vulnerable classes. Anyway, this is what that looks like.

Keir Starmer to drive through welfare cuts for UK’s most severely disabled people, more than 600,000 benefit claimants could lose out on an average of £675 a month. Awful, inhumane. No cuts to corporate welfare, won't tax the rich. People sacrificed to gods of neoliberalism.

One thing that’s become very clear from media interviews about a possible Ukraine ceasefire last night and this morning – and not for the first time – is that the summary of what Putin said that is being fed to Western newsrooms in English is very different from what he actually said in Russian.

Its not that ministers have seen some incredible use case for LLMs that we haven't. When they say it will revolutionize government they mean that maybe chat GPT will give them some original ideas. (It wont).

After the AfD's surge on Sunday, far right parties are the most voted-for of any grouping in Europe, for the first time in history: www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

I don't think you can look at what is brewing in Washington right now and just assume that the US will still be a functioning geopolitical actor this time next year

"Labour's cracking down on illegal immigration so now I'll vote for them" - the Labour Right fever dream for 25 years, never spoken by a single actual voter

Ah damn it turns out this whole political system relies on false assumptions about how big of an asshole someone could be

The veneer of polite society in this country is one of our most pernicious evils.

The irony is that America is itself founded on a reconfiguration of geopolitics driven by hubristic trade policies (Ottoman levies on Silk Road after fall of Constantinople in 1453 incentivised European bids to find western route to Asia).

I've built a machine that can be Confidently Wrong. It can also make pictures that all look a bit the same, as well as make a video of you kissing any celebrity or person you know. In payment, I'd like to boil the world's oceans dry, & steal all literature. For some reason, my head is not on a spike

This is still the greatest email ever.

Trump and Johnson taking time out to rage about Bishop Budde's very normal and thoughtful sermon is a good lesson that these guys are easy to sidetrack and should be confronted and opposed at all times

I think the main reason the space is so right-dominated is that the right's lack of ethics and integrity and domain expertise in SEO from running scams gave them a big, big leg up when media consumption shifted to being algorithmically determined bsky.app/profile/msza...

Fun fact: Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun, who developed the V2 (and later the US Apollo moon rockets), wrote a book in 1953 called “The Mars Project” in which colonists are governed by an elected “Elon” and his cabinet. Space Caligula’s father read the book and named his son Elon.

An efficient facism does not require much direct state violence. It merely requires the assurance that private violence aligned with the desires of the regime will go unpunished.

NO

I don't know why we on this website can't all come together and agree that everyone's political ideals are equally pointless in a world where Henry Kissinger died of natural causes at 100.

I've no patience for commentators who continue to describe Musk's behaviour as "inscrutable" or "whimsical". There is nothing mysterious or even surprising about this person and his actions, but outmoded journalistic etiquette requires that we prance about the point in the cosplay of euphemism.

To cut a long story short, the richest man in the world has recognised that representative democracies are, at this point, an impediment to his further accrual of wealth and power, and so is acting directly against those democracies. His peer group is following suit.

Thanks @liannewildlife.bsky.social. Yes, 33 years in the making, Den of Spies is the real life spythriller abt the treasonous covert op in which the Reagan campaign sabotaged the 1980 presidential election by making a secret deal with Iran. www.harpercollins.com/products/den... (RTs appreciated.)