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 nefarious (CENSORSHIP!!!) purposes. And of course, the historians and sociologists will point - with some plausibility - to previous moral panics around... Continue Reading →
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 so on. The planetary limits dashboard people do a decent job, but there... Continue Reading →
We don’t wanna talk about it, how we broke our hearts: climate, failure, “democracy” and all that jizz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwTP9AJObSY 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 trumpetting, as you would if your boss/king/Prime Minister had just let rip with with a loud and evil-smelling fart?... Continue Reading →
Meetings, 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 meetings where people meet. Being in the same room is not “meeting.” It’s a gathering in of people. It’s the creation of the... Continue Reading →
Election maunderings and “what it means?” brain vomit (why are you READING this, there’s so few tolerable years left!)
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 →
