“You don’t know what hard work is like”: pre-Internet writing and collaboration
Quick post because am supposed to be doing other things, which scare me and I am (obviously) doing displacement activities, albeit Worthy Ones. We people who have spent most of our lives in/of the...
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The absence of R/reform: a personal take on the election hustings in Stone
About a hundred people (1) gathered last night to hear from five people who want to be the Member of Parliament representing Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge . The five present were Dannie Braine,...
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Zombie repertoires, lowest common denominators and Beasts of England…
Sigh. What can you do (non-rhetorical question). Three hundred and fifty organisations beg everyone to come to a march in London. “Thousands” (presumably a few tens of thousand?) do. Reminds me so...
View ArticleOf AI, jail-breaks and Yes Minister
Hannah Murphy’s FT piece- “Hackers manipulate large language models in effort to highlight flaws” – was fascinating. This bit leapt out Anthropic published research in April on a technique called...
View ArticleHype and hyper-politics
It’s easy (1) to fall in love with a new word/concept and over-use it, not see its gaps. That is the stage I will be in or the next however-long around “hyper-politics” “the Tories embraced a phase of...
View ArticleSaying the quiet part out loud: when lobbyists gloat about having captured...
You’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud. It makes it harder for everyone to pretend that the policy-making is not sock-puppetry for the rich (1). The latest example of this is a Canadian...
View ArticleOn raising and dashing hope for fun and profit…
I’m co-presenting something soon on the thorny question of “hope.” Rattling around in the back of my skull was an anecdote from one of the several Special Forces selection memoirs that I have read...
View ArticleBodily resistance to the war machine – or “draft dodgers, jammy dodgers and...
The war machine eh? It springs to life, opens up one eager eye. It takes in farmboys and factory fodder and turns them into killers, who come home in a casket or deadened in other ways (often, not...
View ArticleElection maunderings and “what it means?” brain vomit (why are you READING...
The plan was to go to bed as soon as the Exit Poll (all hail the Mighty Exit Poll!) came through. But an hour after the 410 vs 120 figure came out, I was still up, pottering around on various academic...
View ArticleMeetings, Gatherings or… “Fodderings”?
In this repetitive and defeated rant I look in despair at the “meetings” and “argue” that we need another word to distinguish incidences of people gathering/being gathered in one place from actual...
View ArticleWe don’t wanna talk about it, how we broke our hearts: climate, failure,...
Ever get the feeling nobody wants to talk about what you want to talk about? (1) Ever get the feeling that there are herds of elephants in the room, and everyone is studiously ignoring their...
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Gotta learn to think in wheels, not lines…
Found this in my downloads folder. I liked it at the time and I like it now. It makes me think of how bad I am at thinking in wheels/spokes rather than lines. We need to think in wheels and “pies” and...
View ArticleHeadshots, “humour” and Priming us?
The “hypodermic” model of media is sooooooooooo 1970s. Nobody serious believes that monkey see, monkey do. The whole thing is dodgy, and rendered politically unpalatable by those who try to use it for...
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Where does this come from, who is to blame, what is to be done? The usual...
Those people in the hotel in Rotherham must have been absolutely terrified. Sure, there may well be “economic migrants” among them, but I bet you a bunch have fled war zones, survived all sorts of...
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“Fascism simply burst like a soap bubble”– what not to say when your boss is...
One of the many MANY skills I have never mastered (1) is saying the right thing to people who can make life easier or harder. I think making “unhelpful” (career or life-limiting) observations about...
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“Two kinds of people”– fundamental attribution errors, shaping the rules and...
Okay, so this cartoon below is amusing, but also limited. It’s limited because it assumes that behaviour is mostly shaped by “what kind of person you are” (this is known in the trade as the...
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Masculinity, coal and… Weetabix. I kid you not
This from the early 1970s. Back when coal-mining was a suitable analogy for masculinity, and was used to sell… breakfast cereal. Somebody could probably squeeze a Master’s thesis, taking historical,...
View ArticleVideos of Michael Falk, “The Autistic Reporter” from Onion News Network
These are, imho, fricking hilarious. Perfectly scripted, acted, and really helpful too. I am only aware of five – if you know of others, lemme know… Now, in no particular order The missing hikers The...
View ArticlePost-mortems that are deadening…
We’re now at the stage where “movement” “intellectuals” are willing to say in public what anyone with two brain cells (#NotAllMovementIntellectuals) has known for years – that the GretaXR ‘wave’ of...
View ArticleMetaphors for thinking about power: the tug of war
You can come up with all the elaborate diagrams and schema you like for thinking and talking about power. They’ll definitely be read by reviewers one and two (it is always reviewer two, innit?). And...
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