Magadh

Humans, Engines, and the Strange New Life of Chess - Blasting Theory 1. The Game That Survived the Machine There was a time, not long ago, when people thought computers would kill chess. The logic seemed airtight: a machine that could calculate every variation faster, ...

blasting-theory.com/2025/10/15/h...
The point of this post is not "AI is great, there's nothing to worry about." The point is, "the interaction between humans and prosthetic intelligence has some interesting and (for the moment) non-catastrophic elements.

blasting-theory.com
More to come here...

Shackled, Prosecuted and Elected to Parliament The Case of Ilaria Salis

thebattleground.eu/2025/10/10/s...

The Trouble with Triumph Sinn Féin and the Left

Some sketches to prep for a project on Irish politics...
thebattleground.eu/2025/09/05/t...

Signal/Noise Three Fictions of Hyperreal Los Angeles

open.substack.com/pub/magadh19...
Up late. Writing to try to make myself sleep...or wake up...

Not really a book review, but some thoughts about the codes that govern our lives...

Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You New Partnership Announcement

thebattleground.substack.com/p/coming-soo...

The New Feudalism Populists and Their Enemies

open.substack.com/pub/thebattl...
I wrote the first half of this months ago and only finished it the other night. Props to my editor at The Battleground for making it seem...coherent?

Liberalism: A Ghost Story in Several Acts The twentieth century began with liberalism at the height of its powers.

magadh1916.substack.com/p/liberalism...
From my Substack...

We can (and should) lament the passing of an order under which a lot of progress was made. But it pays to be realistic about what it actually was...

Reading Chris Wickham's The Donkey and the Boat. Because an 800 page book about the medieval economy is about 100 times less depressing than anything happening now...

Good news: Matt Gaetz won't be the AG.

Bad news: The replacement candidate is the prosecutor who decided not to prosecute him.

Same shit, different day.

Macron 1, France 0 The Fragile Left

The only beneficiary of the French government's collapse was Emmanuel Macron. @magadh.bsky.social, on why the Nouveau Front Populaire should hold together until the next parliamentary election.

Bad news Democrats: even after Trump voters aren't going to be all that enthused about billionaire liberalism.

Tfw the weather isn't shitty enough for my job to close but I have to fight through a frozen hellscape to get there...

Office Ambience What I'm Listening To

The left needs more soundtracks. Yours truly, with this week's Battleground playlist featuring Goat, Sneaks, Slow Cooked, Under 45, Valentina Magaletti, Astéréotypie, Benefits, Zera Tonin, Ezhel, Murda, Aitch, Lvbel C5, Mdou Moctar and Elephant Stone.

Quite possibly the greatest misprint in newspaper history.

Self-Defeating Resentment Orgy Why Trump Won

Americans voted against their own self-interest. @magadh.bsky.social, on Trump's victory and how rage at the professional-managerial social class helped make it happen.

I'm reading this post and I'm like, "Oh shit, what are they going to threaten to do?" Then I got to the end and I was like, "Well, really, that's not a bad solution." Thanks Bluesky...

Office Ambience What I'm Listening To

Punk against Trump. @magadh.bsky.social, with this week's Battleground playlist.