Joseph O'Mahoney

@dsquareddigest.bsky.social calls these "accountability sinks", like heat sinks.

One perhaps surprising difference is that if you are on t and r in the UK you probably have half or less the contact hours of the majority of faculty in the US.

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

Also, there is more variety in the US, private research unis, public research, public teaching, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges.

"Uniformly" is wrong but the big private universities are way better funded than the vast majority of universities here.

Many institutions in the UK now use assistant/associate professor not lecturer/senior lecturer.

The #1 way to explain America working properly is by saying “comedians can make fun of he President on TV.” A good way to explain fascism is “the President forces companies to fire those comedians as a condition of allowing them to conduct business.”

YouTube video by Voice of America Hong Kong Protesters Put Out Tear Gas Grenades Using Traffic Cones

youtu.be/hpqEQARnVbs?...

What It’s Like to Be a Student Who Hates ChatGPT “Everyone is using it”—almost everyone.

you've heard about the college kids who can't do anything without ChatGPT's help—but what about the students who oppose generative A.I. for myriad reasons and refuse to rely on it as a shortcut? well, I found and spoke with a few of them here: slate.com/life/2025/07...

The Enshittification of American Power First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech.

1. @abenewman.bsky.social and I have a new piece in @wired.com on the enshittification of American power. It repurposes arguments from our book, Underground Empire amzn.to/3PbIyqX , and Cory Doctorow's idea of enshittification to explain how the Trump administration is trying to remake the world.

Let's wait until something actually happens until we report it as 'breaking' news shall we?

Do you have a source/cite for the explanation that "finding a plausible war to start isn't always easy" specifically in the diversionary war lit? This would be useful to me.

Britain's Opposition to German Reunification, 1989–1990: The Fine Line between Strategic, Political, and Personal Factors Great Britain had no interest in a reunified Germany, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), in a sec...

Why did Margaret Thatcher oppose German reunification 35 years ago? Yes, she disliked the Germans - but her deeper fear was socialism creeping into Britain through the Brussels backdoor, driven by an increasingly dominant Germany. Probably my best research. Let me know if you’d like a copy.

People spent years trying to rationalize Trump foreign policy in terms of “realpolitik, “great-power competition,” & “great-power concerts.” This is, as we say in social science, bullshit.

He’s a kleptocratic authoritarian. His foreign policy is about accumulating personal wealth & status

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The consequences of JCPOA withdrawal in graph form www.ft.com/content/193f...

Journalists are adding extra checks to keep ahead of the fake experts Fake experts and SEO: How journalists must adopt new checks to keep one step ahead of AI-generated responses provided by fake experts.

"Barbara Santini is a psychologist who has been quoted hundreds of times in news publications around the world - including the Telegraph, BBC and Independent - and who, I can now state with certainty, does not exist."
pressgazette.co.uk/news/fake-ex...

Postdoc with a focus on quantitative narrative geopolitics Description The postdoctoral position is part of the interdisciplinary research environment on narrative geopolitics, established with funding from the Swedish Armed Forces. The role involves interdis

Swedish Defence University is advertising a postdoc in quantitative narrative geopolitics. The role involves applying data science methods to examine how narratives shape international security, great power relations, and geostrategic rivalry.
Deadline: August 31.

fhs.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

"ji"? Did you want to go to Jira, the #1 bookmarked tab you open 80,000 times a day? Or did you want to travel across the country in the middle of a Thursday to visit 𝗝𝗶𝗳𝗳𝘆 𝗟𝘂𝗯𝗲 𝗟𝗶𝘃𝗲? These are my best guesses, based on 30 years of tracking your every movement, action, and thought online.

I've said this before, but the problem is that the acceptable rate of wrong answers depends *heavily* on the task in question.

Counterintuitively, the simpler and less important the task, the *lower* the acceptable failure rate!

3/3 Only at the very end of this rehearsal of the lore do we get to the real basis of the problems here:

@timleunig.bsky.social (h/t @stephenkb.bsky.social) Source: timleunig.substack.com/p/internatio...

Mearsheimer has the highest fame to value ratio in the whole field of IR.

Holy Crap, this seems to be real?

Or to put it another way, overseas students now subsidise the cost of teaching each UK undergraduate by an average of £2,500 each. Take them away and you've got an absolutely existential crisis for universities.

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/pol...

"Decisive" in the sense of ending the conflict by itself, it was not.

They’re building rainbow cycle tunnels in Norway. With no cars. Nice video by Critical Mass Bergen.

Soviet occupation of the Baltics was a “done deal” for decades, and then Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania achieved their freedom in 1991. The fact that we never recognized their illegal incorporation in the USSR became important when the Cold War ended.