Sergio Graziosi

We’re in dark times already, but the stakes are growing exponentially day by day.

So it’s a good time for a reminder for all of us: performative vs. effective solidarity approaches.

Everyone needs this reminder, especially when we already “know” - the heat of the moment can make us forget.

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WE SHOULD LISTEN.

Until it breaks and gets A LOT more TLC than what was required initially, I would imagine.

#EPPI-Reviewer new (major) release:
Version 6.17.0.0 adds a new system to create prioritised lists of items to screen, as well as other improvements to screening systems.
Also extends the list of supported LLMs, adding Llama and Mistral.

All details: eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Default....

Stop blaming migrants and tackle UK’s real problems, 100 charities tell home secretary A letter warns Shabana Mahmood that ‘targeting refugees will do nothing to tackle’ problems with housing and the NHS

📣 Scapegoating people seeking safety in the UK won’t fix inequality, housing shortages, or the NHS.

The Government must acknowledge this.

We’re proud to join over 100 orgs calling on the Govt. to unite communities.

We need compassion, not division.

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

Shabana Mahmood accuses asylum seekers of making ‘vexatious, last-minute claims’ Home Office says it will review modern slavery laws to save PM’s ‘one in, one out’ returns deal with France

The comments made by our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, are deeply harmful, concerning and misleading.

There are many reasons why claims are 'last minute' - we know this from our work over the years supporting hundreds of refugee women.

1/🧵

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

As a society, the one thing we were totally unprepared for was annoying leftists being right.

*"on the condition of NOT changing the trend"

For anyone legitimately questioning this:
Replacing Dodds with Reeves signalled this intention as clearly as possible before the election. After the election? Look at how Trump was handled, including Mandelson's appointment. The evidence is very clear.

So, their problem is 3-fold, with the 3rd problem being self inflicted.
They can't get many people to like them, unless (1) they change the trend (decidedly) AND (2) also change the narrative.
Self-inflicted (3): current leadership has no intention to try doing either.

THAT'S the big picture.😢
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Ppl with loads of money to use, use it to defend their position (those who don't, lose their extra money). So the information landscape gets more rigged by the day.

The current Labour government knows it, and has been allowed one turn in government on the condition of NOT changing the trend*.
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from https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7484/CBP-7484.pdf figure showing the "share of net household income going to the top 1%". From 1961 to 2019 - goes a tiny bit down until 1979 (3%), very much up (to about 8.6%) until 2009, falls to 7% around 2010-2012, then goes uneavingly up to end at about 8.5% in 2019.

I wish I could believe you're being disingenuous, but no, I think you really do believe what you're saying. Except that "the big picture problem for Labour" is quite different.

Summarised in one picture (source in alt-txt). Too much money keeps going to too few people. The rest follows.

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It's not just that there are lots of racist extremists on X (there are) or attempts to 'interact' with them are doomed to failure (they are), it's that your participation on the platform further enriches the racist extremist Elon Musk and amplifies his agenda. Why cannot people understand that?

I need you to understand what this country feels like right now for those of us who look different. I'm sitting here, trying to plan for Saturday, make sure I don't even need to go to the corner shop for milk, like it's Christmas Day or lockdown. Why? Because I live near where Yaxley-Lennon will 1/

#philsky #EpistemicInjustice #YouthMentalHealth #edusky #projectEPIC

Warning! The rightwing junktanks behind the Tories’ worst disasters still have the keys to No 10 | George Monbiot Who is running the government’s ‘growth school’ for civil servants? The answer surpassed my worst fears, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

2. The craven appeasement of powerful lobby groups, which, in the absence of a moral compass, have been able to steer this government any way they want. 2/2 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The core belief of junktanks, and therefore of Starmer (and many others), is that any invented reality can be made to stick, with enough support from the media.

Which is a justified belief, on the basis of quantity/frequency (works most often). Until it inevitably breaks, always catastrophically.

Image credit: Solen Feyissa via Unsplash, a close up of a mother with darker skin holding a newborn close to her chest, with her finger ove the baby's hair, covered by a blanket.

Research Spotlight: Exploring what life is like for families when their baby is in hospital. This co-production study in Mexico by @rosamendizabal.bsky.social will help inform future infant and family development programmes. #coproduction
www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departme...

Stefano Benni wrote things that, when I was a teenager struggling with everything, gave me the courage to focus on becoming me.
Fuck received wisdom, fuck the rules, fuck small minded teachers, fuck comformism.
Think for yourself, make mistakes, find your own way.
Now he's dead and I'm heartbroken.😢

I can’t highlight the importance of this research enough. It clearly shows that children must not be in school with covid infections. Schools must treat this like TB and remember there is no current cure for long covid.

Long COVID: a clinical update Post-COVID-19 condition (also known as long COVID) is generally defined as symptoms persisting for 3 months or more after acute COVID-19. Long COVID can affect multiple organ systems and lead to sever...

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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How about: politicians on the left should *know* they *will be* held to higher standards and thus should act accordingly?

The right: everyone is selfish and that's OK.
The left: cooperation is good, actually.
Hence: if, being on the left, you act selfishly, you *will* get a bigger reputational hit.

Radical right accommodation really does not work.

New paper out with this exceptionally talented team
@katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk

doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Mental illness: I don't want to do anything

Mental wellness: I want to do nothing

Trump’s Right-Wing Socialism The president is embodying the type of big government that right-wing politicians and thinkers have been warning about for a century.

It's called fascism. Fascist regimes, like Mussolini's Italy, directly nationalized some businesses. American journalists need reminding that this isn't necessarily a 'socialist' thing. Articles like this don't help the public interpret what's happening in the US. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

If it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Perhaps one of the most contorted takes I have ever read from the Atlantic.

This is the merger of corporation and state under the direction of an individual- it defines fascism.

!! We're mutuals! I guess you know this already, but I have an odd "direct message" from you. Might be where most of the damage happened, I fear.
Hope the cleanup/fallout won't be too difficult/brutal.

"Even if some individuals may benefit from AI interactions, for example where the AI functions as a benign and predictable conversational anchor, there is a growing concern that these agents may also reinforce epistemic instability, blur reality boundaries and disrupt self-regulation."

OK, I'm sort-of with you (selling may be a positive step, sort-of).

But, booting out people and then increase the rent by almost 20%, having failed to sell (so far)?
That's solidily inside the boundaries of the core problem, and the more it's normalised, the bigger the problem.

Is what she did "normal", as in: happens all the time?
Yes.
Can it produce homelessness?
Also yes.
So, the problem is that it's normal behaviour: it happens frequently. Which is why this behaviour feeds into the single biggest cause of homelessness.
Conflating normal with reasonable is spin, IMNSHO.