Antony Sheffield

Great. Fireworks night with two cats, an anxious toddler not sleeping well anyway, and an excitable 6 year old who likes to test bedtime boundaries. It can get in a bin as far as I’m concerned.

They could but given you posted that at 14:41 my time I’m guessing we’re probably good for another night.

Super writing n analysis from @nuclearanthro.bsky.social as always.
He knows his stuff. Plus bonus cats 😍

No Nuclear Explosive Testing, Not Today (Probably) | Martin Pfeiffer Get more from Martin Pfeiffer on Patreon

ICYMI:

I wrote up thoughts on the whole Donald Trump nuclear testing kerfuffle.

Free, public post.

www.patreon.com/posts/no-nuc...

At the end of the day, there is no national security while we leave Trump et al regime in power.

As part of this hostility to Ukraine, we get a pro forma acknowledgement that Putin is a "dictator", a "gangster" - immediately followed by the attack on Zelensky, as if the two regimes are the same and also as if which of them rules in Ukraine is a matter of indifference.

The reality is that Sultana and co are not actually very interested in workers' rights and struggles in Ukraine. Talking about Zelensky's anti-worker policies is just a way of expressing their hostility to Ukraine's rights.

First up - yes, Zelensky is no friend of Ukraine's working class in the sense that his government pursues right-wing, neoliberal, anti-worker economic policies.

Unlike Zarah Sultana, we actually know something about this...

You may not have food or healthcare for your children, but did you know that the White House will now have a classy dance floor for nepotistic pedophiles

Norms and duct tape, folks.

bsky.app/profile/mcop...

It won’t test the key issues at all. It won’t be mandatory and it won’t be used for any kind of enforcement at all.

If the digital ID scheme were about empowerment and was voluntary and optional (as it should be) this might be a good test. It isn’t.

All the people convinced that this time it was different should bear this in mind in 3-6 weeks when the White House starts up the "Trump's finally fed up with Putin and willing to do something" circus yet again.

Of course women don’t like the Cybertruck.

Women only want one thing, and it’s the Compact Pussycat

Is ‘Putinism’ a coherent ideology? Do Russians identify with it? Laruelle admits, the vast majority of Russians sense a lack of a state ideology. Her jobs then is to try to reconstruct something resembling a coherent set of beliefs or a world view and show how i…

For those interested in the vexed question of the Putin regime's ideology (Does it exist? What could it be?) Jeremy Morris' critical discussion of Marlene Laruelle's latest book on that topic is definitely worth a read.

postsocialism.org/2025/10/16/i...

On this particular point, there’s enormous appetite for the ‘you left Twitter because the didn’t like disagreement and have therefore abandoned the discourse for the Bluesky echo chamber’. But IN FACT, Twitter had become virtually unusable as a practical matter.

Putin turns 73 on October 7. He was 46 when he first became Prime Minister in August 1999. Since that time he has been either Prime Minister or President for more than 26 years, more than 1/3 of his life. In 2004, he said "one could go crazy" working as president for 7 years.

I’m no Tudor nerd but this is a biggie. Of course note the ‘public’ - scholars have undoubtedly engaged with it for a long time. But this is the sort of stuff that really should be easily accessible, so it’s good news.

UKR doing a pretty good job of making the RU public share at least some of the pain.

Yup. IMO key point is Trump can say most anything one day and something else the next day. What his administration actually does is a little less volatile, but even that is pretty random and hard to predict, esp re foreign and security policy. Still early days for this roller coaster.

Like the President, I too have been denied proper credit from the ivory tower elites for the conflicts I have halted between Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea, Portugal and Atlantis, and the United Federation of Planets and Klingon Empire.

Looks like a scene from The Running Man.

Some scary shit, really.

a picture of buzz lightyear from toy story with a quote that says there seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere ALT: a picture of buzz lightyear from toy story with a quote that says there seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere

This is my only response right now:

All over the world, governments have taken to branding everything they don't like as 'terrorist' because most of the legal restraints come off in the pursuit of 'counter-terrorism'. It's the sad, long term consequence of US stupidity after 9/11 in 2001 in creating a 'war on terror'. They all do it.

Yes and no - hard to think of who could compare nowadays with The Mary Whitehouse Experience but, on the other hand, the quality of standup has improved.

* we won’t know

We won’t but with a bit of luck the custody sergeant won’t have authorised the detention. They may have done though because of the need to “gather evidence” but with luck they won’t have proceeded to CPS after interviews.

Do you think that she wears that style of glasses in that manner to try and make herself look intelligent?

They were only following orders — and they had a quota to meet.🙄

Human edited - no hallucinations. The editing control systems are very good now as well.

I’m actually going to tell students to use Wikipedia if they want a quick summary of historical events because it is far more accurate than AI