Rick Crawford

TBH, we could say the third law is a thought terminating cliche. But Robert Jay Lifton is not conservative, and I said I'd compare these laws to other conservative thought.

So here you go: Conquest's first law is just a shit version of Chesterton's fence.

That 2nd law is the one that seems to have been added, so focusing on the first and last...

"Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents" sounds exactly like the sort of radical thought that someone who doesn't know about an organisation would think.

Robert Conquest - Wikipedia

Having said that, Wikipedia indicates he never published these laws and when he discussed them with people, he only mentioned 2.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...

I gather there are three:
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Just found out about Conquest's laws, thanks to Sam's post. They make for amusing posts, but I think comparing them to each other and to other conservative thoughts reveals they don't serve much other purpose.

Maybe Keir should demand the heads of major US news networks any time they imply Britain is on the brink of civil war or that we live under sharia law. Or does it not work both ways?

Give them credit for not cropping the image to only show the white one!

And what an important piece too.

Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …

The corruption never ends

In 2025, Springer Nature sells a chapter titled “Detection of **Autism** in Children Using Face Recognition” riddled with tortured phrases such as ‘prior intercession’ instead of ‘prior intervention’…... In 2025, Springer Nature sells a chapter titled “Detection of **Autism** in Children Using Face Recognition” riddled with tortured phrases such as ‘prior intercession’ instead of ‘prior intervention’ ...

@springer.springernature.com produces another example for my presentation subtitled "what to be aware of when you decide where to publish" to academics and researchers.

www.linkedin.com/posts/guilla...

The worst kind of burn

Farewell then Tim Davie. Under his watch the BBC whitewashed genocide, had the BBC News website resembling a “migrant crime” X account, boosted trans hate and the right wing STILL hate him. Quite an achievement

This is unbelievable. Just a complete lack of belief in objectivity. And the BBC fucking caved to it

This is the most abysmal, pathetic thing. The BBC head resigning because the corporation is not supine *enough* to the far-right.

A great point. If you read the UK press, spend time on X and fall prey to elite radicalisation, you can very easily fool yourself into thinking you represent the silent majority when in fact you are an increasingly extreme minority. It's funny when conservatives scold liberals about their "bubbles"

oh so these people do pay attention to who politicians follow on social media, they just don’t care that the vice president follows a bunch of actual neo-nazis

Probably before Tony Blair.

Why do Microsoft insist on calling their Office applications apps? They aren't some shitty thing on my phone. They are serious work applications and you would think Microsoft would be keen to make that distinction.

The UK has a chronic inability to manage or understand the benefits of building infrastructure.

Why Council Tax Reform Is Fraught With Difficulty New analysis shows why council tax reform is such a hard task for the government as it faces widespread calls for the system to be updated.

Brilliant article, which demonstrates the mad outcomes of changing council tax without revaluation. The tax system is already arbitrary, irrational and unfair. That must change, or the same old problems will persevere.

www.politicshome.com/news/article...

Tired: two-factor authentication

Wired: n+1-factor authentication, where successfully authenticating on a new device just allows you to log in again, triggering another authentication request. Repeat ad infinitum

Precision vibe coding/er?

congrats to everyone for thinking this through before signing very big contracts to put it on every student’s device at the school or university you run

Computational Turing Test Reveals Systematic Differences Between Human and AI Language Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the social sciences to simulate human behavior, based on the assumption that they can generate realistic, human-like text. Yet this assumption rem...

LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text

But... can they? We don’t actually know.

In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test.

And our findings are striking:
LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵

We had fucking congressional hearings over Mortal Kombat.

Funny you should say that because the fact was stolen (if you can steal a fact) from Paul Sinha's Perfect Pub Quiz, where it featured as an audience question the other day.

The world’s first trillionaire initiated a move that has left more than half a million people dead, most of whom are children.

Something worth noting: Rockstar is leaning HEAVILY on the excuse that the unionising employees were "leaking private company information"

They want people to assume this means game info or assets.

But I will bet you CASH MONEY this translates to:

'they were comparing salaries and work contracts"

On Oct 1, 2025, GISAID informed us that they had ended updates to the flat file of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences and associated metadata that we had used to update Nextstrain analyses since Feb 2020. GISAID's stated rationale was that their "resources are limited". 1/5