How we talk about history is the issue where the media and political discourse is perhaps most out of touch with how out of touch Nigel Farage is with the British public, outside his core vocal minority

Nigel Farage and the Anti-Migrant Protestors Do Not Represent the ‘Silent Majority’ – HOPE not hate Prefer to listen? Click the play button to hear the audio version of this article On both social and traditional media it’s easy to find...

🚨On both social and traditional media it’s easy to find commentary claiming that Nigel Farage’s extreme deportations policy and the recent series of anti-migrant protests represent the will of the British people. But they don’t.⬇️ shorturl.at/RvFb3

The numbers aren’t there. Given the huge online efforts to stir up these protests, the headline should surely be how badly they’ve failed and fizzled.

In fact, the failure of the protests against the “public fury” narrative would be a major story. But it’s not what’s being reported.

Despite all the hysteria whipped up by the far right, certain sectors of the media and our own government, official figures show the UK has HALF the number of asylum applications that Germay has, and significantly fewer than Spain, France and Italy.

it's ireland isn't it

in britain the anchorites of asda dwell by the sacred stones, solemnly intoning the words “that’s asda price”, and performing the necessary ritual (the double bum slap) three times a day to bring about the great rolling back when we will all be redeemed

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.

Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

this comment aged like fine wine

ChatGPT is down but The Museum of English Rural Life still stands, proving once again that Silicon Valley cannot compete with the history of rural England and its people.

Look—I learned from Dune to mistrust computers, but also that mistrust of computers leads us to a tyrannical thousand year reign of a giant man worm, so I think it’s a little more complicated than you think.

OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry Before we go any further: I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help — I'm up for this year's Webbys for the best business podcast award. I know it's a pain in the ass, but can you sign up and...

Newsletter: OpenAI is a systemic risk to the tech industry, requiring more money than exists every year, threatening the financial health of SoftBank, Oracle and NVIDIA, their future dependent on impossible debt and unproven startups to build their data centers.
www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-...

PTCGLive giving everyone a free trans rights hoodie.

Counterintuitive, but: this will crush the US wine industry. Booze gets to market on distributors' trucks. These fleets need volume to run efficiently. Subtract EU wine from the equation & it no longer pencils out. Any gains from less competition would likely be paid back out in margin loss.

Planet Definitions xkcd.com/3063

That time of the week
Cheers all.

As an occasional writer about superhero things who used to complain that "supervillain runs for office and wins" storylines are stupid because everyone knows Norman Osborn is the Green Goblin and they've seen him murder people on TV, I've had to reexamine many of my priors