BeijingPalmer

There's a lot of mean-spiritedness about people who have gone to live in Dubai. We need to help, and ensure they have secure accommodation in the UK for 91 days of the next tax year.

rip dan simmons, shame about the racist bullshit of his later years but CARRION COMFORT and THE TERROR remain great pulp horror novels. (HYPERION is a second-rate version of Gene Wolfe, but why not just read Gene Wolfe instead?)

Iran Does Not Have Nuclear Weapons It’s time to say it again: It’s highly doubtful that the Iranians were pursuing a nuclear weapon. And they certainly don’t have any. Donald Trump insists that (one of the purposes/ the purpose) of …

Cheryl Rofer (former scientist at Los Alamos): 'It’s time to say it again: It’s highly doubtful that the Iranians were pursuing a nuclear weapon. And they certainly don’t have any.' nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2026/03/01/i...

Reflecting on this and the fact that the UK is actually very good at economic and social outcomes for immigrants…

What if we built our immigration policy around the fact we’re GOOD at this stuff? And used the lessons of what has worked well to talk about national identity, welcome and integration?

'there is a demon that lives underneath Downing Street and possesses every Home Secretary' remains a pretty strong theory tbh

Testing Tripwire Theory Using Survey Experiments Many scholars and policymakers assume that attacks on forward deployed U.S. troops—“tripwires”—will prompt strong domestic political support for escalation against the attacker. This conjecture inform...

Given rumors about an attack on Embassy Kuwait, I feel obligated to mention that in earlier research we found that casualties among diplomats were viewed as seriously as casualties among soldiers

preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/...

Reform win a seat: The true Volk have spoken and we all must listen.

Greens win a seat: Early reports that Muslims may have ‘voted’ (an ancient Islamic practice designed to steal elections). How severely should the franchise be limited in response?

for reference, 73% of americans supported the war in iraq in 2003 — two years after 9/11 and two years of the bush administration making the case for it. this will be different, iran's in much worse shape to begin with, but it's starting wildly unpopular and will only get worse with consequences

Zionism is *at least* as Jewish as Shabtai Zvi and Spinoza, you should be laughed at for considering their ideologies "not Jewish", and I consider both of them heretical

Thank you (?) for the sentiment, it's usually meant to be protective, but just stating flat out that "Zionism isn't a Jewish ideology" is a ludicrous thing to say if you aren't a Jewish religious anti-Zionist, in which case you're make a prescriptive doctrinal statement

Honestly you could say this about the last decade. The number of quasi-insurgent activities regularly taking place on Bahrain over the last decade is jaw-dropping. And you hear like nothing about it because it's essentially a fortress island for the US Navy

the Guardian is quite a bit better than it used to be, thanks partially to a revolt by its U.S. staff internally!

I'm bouncing stuff between Claude and Gemini all the time for my ideation process. Occasionally I'll throw something in ChatGPT and I get so shocked by how unreadable it is.

The product is _horrible_. They are not meant for cautious tool-builders. They're built for slop.

normally I would trust 60 minutes to do this reasonably well. do i trust a Bari Weiss CBS to do it? absolutely the fuck not.

the thing is Pahlavi *is* a political actor in all this - and it's entirely reasonable to get him on something like 60 minutes and question him about it. it's just those questions have to be actually interrogative ones, not a soft serve. 'why should the Iranian people trust your family' is a big one

lol you're the dude who was arguing that the far-right podcast he was praising was actually ironic, based on nothing more than your own sweaty desperation about your Big Boi favorite.

Part of what makes this so bad - with the NYT - is that media concentration, local news elimination, the financial juggernaut that is the Times, the reverence in which it is held as the paper of record, make its long term patterns of choices so important politically in a way no other news org can

also it's good to raise these criticisms from the outside *and* on the inside because this is, eventually, how places change. the NYT was institutionally homophobic for decades (like everywhere else) for instance

there are also often ongoing struggles *within* large institutions.

that doesn't mean everybody there is transphobic, or that they don't also publish good stories and pieces on trans issues, sometimes even by trans people! it means that the decision-making leans toward the dismissal of trans voices and the acceptance of soft bigotry.

you should not take one article in a paper as evidence of its editorial position but you can absolutely look at decisions over time. the NYT, for instance, has a clear transphobia problem, one called out by its own staff and writers.

I can tell you from experience, for instance, that the most banal right-wing geopolitical takes are treated with an automatic 'seriousness' that, for instance, gender analysis of geopolitics is not granted.

this is also not incompatible with a range of opinions! exactly what that range *is* and what gets given the most prominence matters.

I’m telling you young ’uns it has got /so much/ better in our lifetimes. Like, beyond the dreams of any queer rights campaigner in the 1980s.

also a reasonable amount of UK racism is against white people, especially Eastern Europeans.

for Americans, this is UK rural, which means '30 minutes drive to the city'

not all rural people, just - way more common, across the class spectrum.

the big distinction I always encountered in the UK over racism wasn't class; it was rural vs urban, and rural was way more racist.

the trick is that working class people are people, neither irredeemable thugs or shining examples of proletarian virtue; just people who have a wide range of opinions for good and bad!

i've talked to quite a few people who've attempted to lobby the gov & the always talk about appealing to 'the working class'

apparently if you say 'i am a working class person & i support trans people' they look at you like you have 3 heads, it just doesn't compute