Paul C(innamon) Kirby

i am truly grateful that all my haters are motivated exclusively by jealousy, if there was any other component to it that would do my head in

Our horror at the genocide in Gaza, at the mass murder of civilians on Oct 7 2023, and at today's atrocity in Manchester, comes in each case from the same, inherent part of our shared humanity. We need to assert that shared humanity as loudly as possible, and in as many practical ways as we can.

Of course, wildly veering *is* the strategy, and some people are being well-paid, and occasionally feted as electoral masterminds, for it.

1970.

Traveling to the ruins of Austin to consult Elon Musk's holocron

The sons and daughters of people who may have fought in World War II.

meanwhile at the Riyadh Comedy Festival

Join us for our first event of the academic year in collaboration with @lseir.bsky.social and other great co-hosts!

Bringing together four leading experts, we will explore the legacy and future of the UN WPS agenda.

www.lse.ac.uk/gender/event...

@aikoiiris.bsky.social @drkmillar.bsky.social

Early last semester, Droubi said, students began approaching Cheyfitz with complaints that a graduate student in the “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance” class appeared to be recording them, possibly to “gather their names and comments” and intimidate them. “We believe that a student came to the course for the sole reason of surveilling and potentially harming students in the class,” Droubi said. “That ended up proving itself to be true because multiple students came forward and shared their concerns with Professor Cheyfitz.” Cheyfitz said one Palestinian student quit the class after telling him she felt upset and frightened. Current Issue Cover of October 2025 Issue October 2025 Issue According to Cheyfitz, the graduate student often steered conversations away from the assigned readings—which at that point mostly focused on definitions of genocide and international law on Indigenous rights—to defend Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza and argue with others in the class. “He clearly had not done the readings,” Cheyfitz said. “It was disruptive.” Cheyfitz said he met with the graduate student in late January and spoke to him about concerns from his classmates. During the conversation, he asked the graduate student to drop the course, and by the next class, he did, Cheyfitz said. The graduate student, Oren Renard, a PhD candidate in computer science whose identity was confirmed by other students in the class, previously served in Israel’s elite military surveillance agency, Unit 8200, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Cornell is cancelling a distinguished professor's classes on Gaza and suspending him because of the complaints of a student who previously served in Israel's military surveillance agency and was literally recording the comments of other students in class and deliberately derailing discussion.

'well, I believed in MedBeds because an attractive young woman looking me in the face directly on Tiktok told me they were real and I was being cheated of relief by the Democratic establishment to help big pharma, but now I've read this paper in 'Semiotics of Health' boy do I feel an ass'

Absolutely beyond parody that Dave Chappelle is headlining a comedy show for Saudi royalty after what, a decade of whining about cancel culture

Women, Peace and Security Intensive Course Apply for the two-day intensive course on women, peace and security hosted by the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security.

The Women, Peace & Security Intensive is back!

If you're looking for a deep and steep intro to WPS - from international law to grassroots activism, participation to cyberwar, Afganistan to Ukraine - then this course is for you, or maybe a friend.

Spread the word.

www.lse.ac.uk/women-peace-...

Microsoft cuts off some services to the Israeli military Software giant’s move follows investigation into use of its products to surveil Palestinian civilians

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

www.ft.com/content/3206...

Anyways, I think anti-feminist backlash/male identity politics is going to be one of the dominant pan-ideological elite obsessions going forward, for much the same reason that transphobia is so popular: It lets you cosplay as a brave outsider while pandering to the most powerful people in the room.

Sure, Kissinger was one of the great war criminals of the 20th century, but on the other hand he was curious and generous enough to perceive that Star Wars had a politics so who can really say?

“In a way, Donald Trump cares too much about other people”.

An inspiring commute for the first week of term, watching the UCL student in front of me repeatedly paste module questions into deepseek chat and then type the instant answers back into his assessment form.

It just straightforwardly *insane* how much political chatter in the United Kingdom is about the next general election, an event that is a long way in the future, and how basically none of it is about 'uh, this policy agenda doesn't look adequate to the scale of the inherited problem'.

Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff OpenAI’s flagship GPT-5 model will be provided across the University and Oxford Colleges through ChatGPT Edu, a version of ChatGPT built for universities that includes enterprise-level security and

Honest question: why do you need a deal with ChatGPT-5 to digitise Bodleian Libraries’ collections? www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

Can France’s Palestinian Proposal Change 75 Years of Failed Diplomacy?

“The trouble is on the ground; the actual state people are talking about is shrinking by the minute,” he said. “Since Oct. 7 on the West Bank alone, the amount of new territory taken by Israeli settlers is about three times the size of Gaza.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/w...

Fantastic piece. This graph particularly caught my eye. What is going on here?

why would liberal arts college students do this?

Yes, fair, not obsolescence as an institution (universities will still exist, and offer experiences unavailable elsewhere) but dramatic collapse as a mass participation project. The graduate premium will decline precipitously without robust AI-proofing, though our leaders are acting otherwise.

This is the crux. Though no AI integrationist will address it, obsolescence is the obvious end state for universities. So why the eager embrace? Just for some short-term cachet, to be seen as at the cutting edge to donors and gullible students?

This isn't funny. There's something very wrong with the UK government attitude to higher education & it survived a change of gvt.

Also - more broadly - it's yet another piece of evidence that Labour government ministers and their advisers live in a weird right-wing Americanised information space.

Can’t be overstated that the audience for Young Conservative bullshit is not actually young people, but old people who want to believe there is an authentic young conservative base.

Mandelson not given in-depth vetting before appointment, says Foreign Office Letter to MPs says former US ambassador went through process only after his new role was announced to public

In order to deny the most likely truth - that the infamed Prince of Darkness was chosen because of, not in spite of, his sordid connections - No. 10 seems willing to make the Foreign Office out as incompetent, even though there is no Ambassador left to defend.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

A poor show, but then you have to wonder at the cynicism of the people who sent this particular member of the government out to defend No. 10.