Douglas Murphy

I have a horrible feeling that within a few years the world will get to experience what would have happened if you-know-who had won WWII

well there's a surprise

You'd think there has to be more to this quote, i.e. the method of choosing is at issue, but it does sound like "we're going to kill every single person who comes to the top" which admittedly has been their high-tech murder policy for quite a while now

it's waddling awkwardly and making fart noises with its mouth

what is becoming clear is that the means are the ends. The weapons aren't being used in pursuit of anything; Hegseth's goal is to be using the weapons, a far more deliverable objective than 'regime change'.

James Butler · ‘Need a lord on the board?’: Mandelson and the Lobbyists Why​ did a man whose political expertise was acquired in the departed era of broadcast television maintain such...

‘Starmer seems palpably and sincerely furious that he was lied to, but he has yet to explain why he acceded to a process that took as read Mandelson’s honesty and good character.’

James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on Mandelson’s fall.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This often turns out to be, um, a way of saying something else

"mr blobby undertaking a psychogeographic drift through the liminal spaces of east london" will forever remain my most popular twitter post

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

My mind has been returning to this video all weekend

“We thought we were living in a politically neutral slave state.”

If I ran a practice and received a text message like this from a part I I think I might just drop dead on the spot

Against All Enemies Foreign and Domestic

“ As Trump used to look for depressed properties to scavenge, now the neocons inhabit the decaying hulk of Trumpism.” @lioneltrolling.bsky.social captures the extraordinary apathy that seems to be driving this war open.substack.com/pub/johnganz...

Netanyahu says the difference between Israel & Iran is that Iran targets civilians & Israel doesn't

A reminder that Netanyahu is wanted for war crimes that include directing attacks against civilians & extermination or murder as a crime against humanity

like, you think, ahhh this is war crimes tribunal stuff, like all that was said about Gaza, but then who on earth will be administering this hypothetical justice

as you witness this kind of thing unfolding, you wonder "they can't possibly get away with this, can they" and maybe it will become clear eventually that they really were as stupid as they seemed but when they're bombing away and crowing about it, it's hard to understand

One might almost think that turning other countries into ungovernable failed states was the *point* of American foreign policy.

oh man

Labour minister Josh Simons resigns after falsely linking journalists to ‘pro-Kremlin’ network Makerfield MP has been under pressure over thinktank’s commissioning of PR firm to investigate reporters

Good day to bury bad news

Selma Dabbagh | Countercurrents When the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, the destruction was writ large in newspaper headlines and...

‘The British Museum has removed the word “Palestine” from some of its display cases, apparently because “audience testing has shown that the historic use of the term Palestine ... is in some circumstances no longer meaningful’.”’

@selmadabbagh.bsky.social on the blog.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

I can't fucking believe we're doing this again.

I am 5 years old and the US is bombing the middle east.
I am 15 years old and the US is bombing the middle east.
I am 28 years old and the US is bombing the middle east.
I am 35 years old and the US is bombing the middle east.
I am 50 years old and the US is bombing the middle east.

there's 1000000 flamenco players ratatatatting on your door right now

not even K-Punk could wipe billions off the stock market with a single post

still have my old starter in the fridge. Completely dead no doubt but at some point I will resurrect it, I tell myself

ok which one of you did this

one of my biggest regrets, if one can speak of such things, is not following through after they made a BBC computer available to me in primary school because I could write five lines of BASIC… distractibility got the better of me, as always

I do follow him but have a silly tendency to react to his posts like you would a dishevelled man yelling at you on the street

I refuse to say "close the feedback loop" because that's not what 'feedback loop' means

anti-drone netting in Kherson