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 article databases for Another Project. Ho-hum. Set the alarm for 3am, by which time... Continue Reading →
Bodily resistance to the war machine – or “draft dodgers, jammy dodgers and giving the piss”
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 always). And as soon as the meatcogs are surplus to requirements, then see-ya-wouldn't-wanna-be-ya and you can be... Continue Reading →
On 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 (esp 20 or more years ago, but there's a lingering interest). The incident in question is from "The Operators" by one... Continue Reading →
Saying the quiet part out loud: when lobbyists gloat about having captured the state…
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 having to quit (2) because he boasted to an audience that 'We've been given opportunities to write entire briefing... Continue Reading →
Hype 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 what the political theorist Anton Jäger terms ‘hyper-politics’, in which politics is ubiquitous and absurd, touching on... Continue Reading →
Of 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 “many-shot jailbreaking”, whereby hackers can prime an LLM by showing it a long list of questions and answers, encouraging it to then answer a harmful... Continue Reading →
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 much of the 2009 climate march catastrophe, the "Big Wank" or "the Big Naive" or whatever it was called ("the Wave", btw). It... Continue Reading →
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, Green Party Alexander Bramham, Social Democratic Party Jacqueline Anne Brown Labour Sam Harper-Wallis Liberal Democrat Gavin Williamson, Conservative and Unionist Party [I... Continue Reading →
“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 Internet (and full disclosure, I am 50:50) have no real understanding of just how much boring physical work went in to... Continue Reading →
Dead rats, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Trump – #canalyomp
I said to myself I'd at least blog every long yomp, if not all the podcasts I listened to. You would think I'd know myself better by now. But how else ya gonna get outa bed if you aren't riddled with self-delusion? Yesterday I left the house at about 0940. I was wearing a weighted... Continue Reading →
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