I saw this and at first thought "no, there's no way 'we definitely had alternative leadership in mind for Iran but I blew them up alongside the schoolgirls using AI' is what the White House is actually saying, that's too clueless and evil to be real"
a sombre morning for british columnists as they move their "The electorate has spoken, we must listen" articles to the recycling bin and upload their "the greens victory shows just how far the west has fallen" articles instead
The richest man owns X.
The second and third richest men control Google.
The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post.
And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.
See the problem here?
‘Please explain’
Lots of Americans in my timeline looking on very jealously at the UK right now
First past the post: the best voting system, apart from all the rest of them
SBS Seminar Series 2026. Professor Carl Bergstrom. Seminar 1: Information foraging in a social media world. 11am-12pm Seminar 2: Modern day oracles or bullshit machines: How to thrive in a ChatGPT world. 1 pm -2 pm Venue: 114-G14 Time: 11 am - 2 PM Thursday 19 February Light refreshments 12pm-1pm
Hi Auckland friends, I'll be in town and giving a couple of seminars this coming Thursday. Details below.
My review of two new books on Habermas for @liberalcurrents.com
www.liberalcurrents.com/also-a-revie...
Nice piece! To me, there are still so many illuminating elements of Habermas’s work: his theory of discursive justification is vital, his telling of the story of the emergence of the modern world order is clarifying (and is basically taken over wholesale by more fashionable figures like Wendy Brown)
Even as elites abandon any pretense of giving a shit ... climate change is accelerating.
Husserl didn’t spend enough time reading history? Bro, Husserl didn’t even spend time reading philosophy.
New Zealand’s score in the @anticorruption.bsky.social Corruption Perceptions Index has dropped yet again. Over the last decade we’ve slipped 10 points, and gone from equal first to equal fourth.
Greens & Labour must take integrity issues seriously and act.
www.transparency.org.nz/blog/falling...
Assaulting people while they pray peacefully in public is a new low for the Australian police. Shame on them. #Herzog #Gaza
Nothing winds me up more than Luxon and assorted other suits saying we need to be wealthier before we can afford doctors, nurses, water we can swim in etc. Meanwhile wealthier kiwi households have stacked up huge piles of savings (cash, shares, equity etc). The economy works for the few. [🧵 1/n]
This is excellent & draws out something the rest of the media is ignoring: among other things, the Epstein files have made it super, super clear that the entire "anti-woke" cultural hysteria was engineered by powerful men averse to accountability.
Siouxsie is a hero. Useful summary of recent events here for anyone unaware
How many pillars of the US media system will be broken during this Presidential term? Such rapid decline.
(That’s not to say these institutions are models of socially valuable independent journalism. But they have the resources to do journalistic work at scale, and will be hard to rebuild)
The next step in the autocratization of the US… following the playbook
Man on a local news street interview: The earth is a resort for like 500 rich people and the rest of us are just the staff.
This shit hits like a sledgehammer right now. It's not even remotely an exaggeration.
💯
Chef’s kiss
I keep thinking again, in light of the latest Epstein files dump, about how MeToo “went too far.”
That’s an interesting thought, worth writing up! It brings to mind that the practice of argumentation doesn’t get off the ground unless parties are willing to assert and justify positions that might turn out to be bunk (as per Mercier and Sperber)
"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled."
That's from a group of more than a dozen prominent climate scientists. Probably nothing.
DOJ has since killed this link. This is what was there:
"as a tool of authoritarian conflict management, the Board of Peace arguably upholds three basic principles: Might is right, ethnic cleansing is an appropriate tool of conflict resolution, and war is an opportunity for real estate development."
read @danaelkurd.bsky.social
I was a sensitive kid. I loved cats. I had OCD, undiagnosed.
When I was 9, a fraternity brother tortured a cat to death in my hometown. The details even now are beyond imagination. archive.is/xdmUL
I was traumatized for years from reading the news story.
The torturer? Now the head of the NRA.
I lived in Stanmore once upon a time. Newtown is fun. Glebe too
Oh nice.
Bondi? Clovelly?
