@benansell.bsky.social
Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions, Nuffield & University of Oxford, FBA. http://benansell.substack.com. BBC Reith Lecturer 2023. Host BBC Radio 4 Rethink. Columnist for Prospect. Director, Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods (CASSM).
For those who are now Claude-Code-curious: this is the best single set of slides and one hour talk you can check out to start using agentic AI in your research:
outstanding-panther-851.convex.cloud/api/storage/...
The wonderful world of the British political-media ecosystem, where you can hold entire events about trends you've made up and which experts - who are crucially not invited - have debunked multiple times.
I just think this was never going to happen. I think there will always be a large constituency for socially conservative, economically anti-redistributive policies.
I think if they reversed the order of the clauses it might make more sense.
Giving me warm feelings about my home county of Kent there
Don’t you live in the Southeast Phil?
I think the second paragraph doesn’t even scan. Is it missing a word or something?
I think everyone who follows me here probably knows my views about the merits of the government’s immigration policy but let me just add that this is total word salad from the Home Office (what does para 2 even mean?)
www.ft.com/content/4493...
I simply refuse to believe this isn’t a Chris Morris sketch:
The long shadow of McSweeneyism maybe wasn‘t just McSweney
Think this kind of messaging is just self-sabotaging, reinforces the mad meme that “energy costs go up when supplies of energy drop” is about wicked profiteering and not a literal resource constraint, makes government look weak when nothing happens.
What are you going to do with the sandworms James?
Can this be a solution?
Why can’t Americans simply accept that we have a legal drinking age of two?
I feel like someone should let him know how bad British state pensions were until recently (certainly as compared to Social Security) but ain’t gonna be me
Oh God, Matt Yglesias just found out about the pensions triple lock. Lock the gates - the discourse is coming…
A procurement crisis absolutely everyone saw coming but which the Department of Health and MoD will now have to tackle, with zero good outcomes – as they've both now signed contracts and have technical reliance on Palantir.
Both xAI and Meta seem to be falling behind in AI, based on the departure of key xAI staff,the bad Grok 4.2 benchmarks and reporting thst Meta’s own AI releases are very delayed.
Frontier AI models are really a three way race at this point.
this reads like one of Labour’s explanations for how an NI rise is not an NI rise if you think about it exactly maybe it is ;)
So so good. Gets so well at what makes Farage politically successful but also polarising and ’ever-shifting’ despite his claims otherwise.
Almost exactly ten years ago @henrymance.ft.com had lunch with Nigel Farage www.ft.com/content/864c.... It remains legend. Quite a lot has happened over the subsequent decade so we sent him back in. as.ft.com/r/edeac2c6-0...
Very funny on X where Neil is gamely fighting back by saying no you don’t understand, I supported Starmer letting the US use bases to attack Iran. Yes. That’s correct. That’s what we are saying was tje wrong call.
i feel like if i was tasked with not starting a war and bringing back US manufacturing jobs, i could have done a better job than this
How it started ... How it's going
Think there is a corollary to the "Nothing is true and everything is possible" nihilism which is rooted in the idea that nothing is serious.
We should reject it. Fight against it. It's inhuman and at the heart of the slide into neo-authoritarianism.
And there I was thinking that Stephen Miller was emphatically against foreign politicians interfering with national sovereignty.
the stink of gender resentment coming off Silicon Valley has been obvious for a while. these men hate women because they hate being told no.
How could ‘sexy murder poet’ Pete Hegseth be wrong?
