Edmund Griffiths

Canute You’ve heard the story. He came down to the sea past stands of thorn with little orange berries and great barrel jellyfish crashlanded in the sand, all shining shoulders; behind him toiled the interior minister and the logothete of the revenue, one fat, one thin, heaving the throne, and the procession was completed by a quorum of the secretariat waving small flags and singing his name. Holidaymakers stared at them marching across the beach. The meeting was opened in proper form, the text of the resolution was grandly unrolled, and the swerving gulls looked down and saw Canute the King commanding the water. You’ve heard the story: he was making a point. But you won’t have heard (though perhaps you’ll have guessed) that for a short time then the wind blew offshore so the tide did pause in its inevitable advance, and for more than a minute he thought it had worked.

New poem: Canute
www.edmundgriffiths.com/canute.html

Articles on sortition for the YP conf:

me, proposing it
edmundgriffiths.com/newpargetsor...

Jack Conrad, anti ("let me put it politely—the suggestion is criminal")
weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1549/...

Paul Demarty, anti
weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1549/...

Max Shanly, pro
medium.com/@maxshanly/b...

More on Edmund Griffiths' proposal for sortition in a yet to be founded new left party in the United Kingdom. #SortitionUK
@edmundgriffiths.bsky.social @lijphart.bsky.social @nuttlos.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
www.edmundgriffiths.com/newpargetsor...

Planet Sloe

Dr. Peter Rollberg @gwu1821.bsky.social reviews for #SlavicReview:

@edmundgriffiths.bsky.social, Aleksandr Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2023. Distr. by @columbiaup.bsky.social

@aseees.bsky.social @basees.bsky.social @dgoberlin.bsky.social @ieres-gwu.bsky.social

1561 newsheet with a mysterious picture of a space battle centre on the sun

Happy space battle over Nuremberg day to all who celebrate @edmundgriffiths.bsky.social

@pierssy.bsky.social I'm afraid it looks as though your account on the other micro blogging app might have been hacked

Motonormativity: who must travel out of their way to go through a dingy underpass, and who gets a smooth uninterrupted route across the surface?

BREAKING 🇵🇸 The Inaugural Joint Statement of The Hague Group.

https://buff.ly/40E8yRF

Can someone phone in a joke about the state of the Tory party please? I’m having difficulty.

apokálypsis

Does the FT not have a house style for spelling Greek words? Hard to believe it would be that one. Maybe Mr Thiel is rich enough to sidestep it

Алла, сакла аны, Күрекле патшаны, Алла, сакла! Җиңүләр бүләк ит, Данлы, бәхетле ит, Хакимебез дип хакла, Алла, сакла!

Wikipedia includes a metrical translation of God Save the King into Tatar, that can be sung to the original tune—a thing nobody in history has ever wanted

I think the last time the United States bought a dependency from Denmark was in 1917, when the Danish West Indies became the US Virgin Islands for $25m. The population (larger than Greenland's) still have no vote for president & only a non-voting "delegate" in the congress

Across all industries, organizations are rapidly embracing generative AI. Among them, makers of home appliances like fridges and ovens. Generative AI in your oven? Why not? Ater all, AI has been creeping into our homes for years (think smart lightbulbs and Alexa) – but thanks to generative AI, these interactions will become even more human and more personal. Imagine, for example, asking your washing machine whether it’s safe to wash a beloved item of clothing on a certain setting – literally, asking it out loud or via an app. Or you could say to your fridge, “Hey, when am I going to run out of milk?” and it’ll tell you. Integrating generative AI into everyday products could lead to a new era of smart appliances that are not only more adaptive to our needs but also more interactive and engaging.

Hell. You are describing hell. Nobody wants an “interactive and engaging” dishwasher. They just want their dishes cleaned. www.forbes.com/sites/bernar...

I still can't get over this comment.

I'm glad you enjoyed it

Haunting Europe: the vision of Dr Fu-Manchu Oxford Communist Corresponding Society, 19 December 2024 37:17

Just posted: my talk on Fu-Manchu from this evening
edmundgriffiths.com/fumanchu.html

The Mansi one uses a Latin script instead of Cyrillic, so you'll need to look up the Mansi Cyrillic orthography if you want to read Shestalov poems in the original; but it does mark the long vowels, which Balandin doesn't (the standard spelling in 1960 didn't include length yet)

A couple of links to textbooks on languages of Siberia, both adapted from Soviet-era books in Russian:

jehsmith.com/1/2019/07/sakh…
Introduction to Sakha, JEH Smith, based on LN Kharitonov

copius.eu/files/balandin 
Einführung in das Mansische, Timothy Riese, based on AN Balandin

There is indeed such a word

Wiktionary has an example of the masculine adjective

Naïve itself is (in French at least) the feminine form of naïf, which you do occasionally see used in English

Been reading Sax Rohmer novels pretty intensively to prepare for this one. Now I need a bit of a brainwash (not the kind that gets administered in a secret headquarters under Limehouse when the last thing you can remember is an overpowering scent of hawthorn)

If you're around in Oxford on Thursday, I will be speaking at a CCS meeting on the title "Haunting Europe: the vision of Dr Fu-Manchu". 7:30pm Thursday 19 December, Quaker Meeting House (St Giles'), all welcome

How did they ship this. bsky.app/profile/dave...

Nobody is asking for it. It costs a lot of money. It's extremely hard to monetize. The actual use cases where it shines are mostly meant for power users, and are overshadowed by all the “hallucinations” that make it unreliable for anything that's actually important.

AI enshittification must be the most pointless act of corporate self sabotage in the history of capitalism.

First light

Bridge is a superb example if that etymology is sound

I think that's a bit like apparatchik: it usually has a bit of a Soviet flavour to it