Finn Conway

Perhaps we should all be banned from social media Focusing only on under-16s obscures the lack of internet safeguards for everyone else

My column in today's paper: on banning the under-16s from social media, the trade-offs and assumptions that the ban makes:

So glad we have massively restructured transgender care on based on the works of someone who believes absolute nonsense.

They said "free speech" and "academic freedom" but never believed in either and now in texas you need a permission slip to mention race in class and they're fine with it. Might not have worked if people with large platforms weren't furious about marginal increases of black people in their offices

you are not going to somehow "free market of ideas" Elon Musk out of turning the X platform into a platform for demolishing liberal governance in Europe

My clothing choices are practical and stylish, thank you very much

Pentiment Disco Elysium Oblivion Fallout New Vegas Baldur's Gate 3 Dragon Age Origins Breath of the Wild Red Dead Redemption 2 Knights of the Old Republic Ocarina of Time Stardew Valley Hades

Happy to help rig things for Pentiment 🫡

This is also underscoring how many of the top-rated games I simply have not played, which I should fix at some point...

With Plato in the Republic I think they're wrong about this; they're simply incorrect about their own self-interest. I didn't understand this until I saw in real life the exact kinda guys he was arguing with, and it's just utterly obvious from the outside that theirs is a pathetic and degraded life.

This is basically the view of the world that Plato sets out to refute in the Republic. One of the core questions asked therein is: why do powerful people think the mere fact of them exercising dominion makes it good for them to do so? Sure, you *can* get away with stuff if you're powerful - so what?

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

they're doing it for gender, imo

Since very few people are giving this absolutely GOATed JRPG any love:

THEN: Golden Sun
NOW: Golden Sun

look we're all making a big bet on AI! and if it pays off as big as we hope, well, it's going to make a handful of people super rich and you're going to lose your job but get to watch mickey mouse fuck geralt from the witcher. if it doesn't pay off well then you get to pay for the bailouts

Be clear, the American far right are coming for British democracy.

twitter being bought and turned into a propaganda machine for fascism, which is directly pumped into every journalist in the world's brain, is one of the worst things to happen in the last few years. we might not survive it.

This is also yet another case which even a few years ago would have been universally recognised as scandalously disqualifying even on the British right. Actual popular views haven’t shifted since then, but British elites have baked their brains on Twitter so they think this repulsive bile is normal

"Plans for a new artistic bench that have been two years in the making have caused outrage among a community."

Today in absurd Oxfordshire planning disputes

A paragraph that patronisingly describes what a party conference is.

Maybe - just a crazy idea, but bear with me for a moment! - the reason why the Lib Dems should not “get serious“ is that the UK’s most important media organisation covers politics in babytalk so much of the time?

(I think a lot of the BBC’s written output can likely be explained by them interpreting “need to write for a reading age of seven” as ”need to write for a moron with an adult reading age”.)

That is the point of a university you fucker.

Genuinely, how do I get the job as "guy who makes miniature displays for museums", because I think it would be great

All political tribes can be hypocritical but the right's current level of hypocrisy on free speech is deliberate. It's an assertion of power not a blindspot.

think if you're broadly a centrist and were suuuuuper concerned about attacks on free speech from the left and so you decided to give the right a hearing then you need to realise you were taken for QUITE the ride (and don't really have anyone to blame but yourself)

Anyway, mission accomplished: I found the stone I was looking for at Priene and we finally have some decent photos of it to accompany the bad squeeze from the 1990s

I have to wonder what the hardware store owner thought of me this morning when I, very obviously an English tourist in a resort town, arrived in his shop to buy a tape measure at 8:30 — can't happen very often, but we do need adequate tools for epigraphy

If I had a penny for every time a British politician had a 4-letter first name that begins with “Ke”, led one of the two largest parties in parliament, and was utterly unsuited to a moment of rising fascism, I’d have two pennies. Which isn’t much, but that I got them at the same time is distressing

This is a step in the right direction, but it isn't enough.

The issue here isn't an isolated statement, but that Musk is waging a concerted campaign (in part through exploiting his control of X) to foment ethnic and political violence in the UK in the apparent hope of overthrowing the government.

The causeway is very popular with beach-goers, no doubt all enthused by the new Airai inscription in ZPE

Paid an impromptu visit to Airai yesterday to get the lay of the land and see if we couldn't find anything

As it happens, we couldn't find anything, but interesting to see traces of old structures on the peninsula nonetheless

When Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell he was acting in the face of a majority in favour. Harold Wilson backed him up and called the speech “evil”. Long past time for Keir and Kemi to do the same.

Keep thinking of arguments for why it would be completely insane to dump a prime minister with a huge majority just 14 months in, and also about how if he's not going to say a single word in opposition to the kind of shit we saw today then I no longer feel convinced by any of those arguments.