let's not forget it was Keir Starmer's patient and cunning questioning that elicited the lies for which Johnson has at last been punished. And SKS knew it at the time
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Steven Poole
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Steven Poole’s posts
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at some point if I remember correctly he actually said something like "ok, noted, that's on the record now, maybe we'll come back to it in the future"
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it is hilarious and telling how this objectively true tweet is attracting hysterical abuse from furious Corbyn fanboys
now that my 1990s band has been mentioned on TV by , i feel like i can retire from rock'n'roll
yes that was the beauty of it: he simply didn't understand that he had been outmanoeuvred by a superior intellect
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don't you understand it's not worth winning elections and thereby improving the lives of millions if in order to do so you have to compromise your sense of moral purity
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this can't be true because he has recently explained that he only blocks people who are abusive
absolutely everybody understood at the time that the famous letter to the Guardian about its gender coverage was a response to 's closely preceding column. Those who continue to deny it had anything to do with her just because she wasn't explicitly named are lying
i never met Martin Amis but i was once in the same room as him and i could tell he thought warmly of me: he had an unfailing antenna for genius
I think "vote Labour to save the BBC" might prove a more popular slogan at the next election than you dumb nasty fucks presently suppose
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This licence fee announcement will be the last. The days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors, are over.
Time now to discuss and debate new ways of funding, supporting and selling great British content. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1
here i am in the Graun on some good books by Iain (M.) Banks
1980s: don't sit too close to the TV
2020s: please literally strap these two TVs to your face
AI doomers have a lot in common with ChatGPT in that they have both been trained on bad science fiction
not only is this a baseless allegation, it is a baseless allegation "from the past"; only allegations from the future should be taken seriously
it is for transferring wealth from citizens to wealthy Party donors; in this sense it is a normal Conservative government
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'What is the government for now that it has ‘got brexit done’?'
James Forsyth
Watch the ep 
youtu.be/PRxXqJUGXXk
James Forsyth
Watch the ep
youtu.be/PRxXqJUGXXk
how exactly could we tell if the ERG went completely and utterly beserk
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ERG holds its regular Monday meeting later in Westminster.
Senior member tells me they'll go "completely and utterly berserk" if there were any move towards a Swiss-style arrangement.
"For many of us, it's the defining issue of why we are in politics."
this must be stamped our immediately
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First time I’ve read a book where the ‘further reading’ section at the back is just QR codes. Neat idea although think it works better with an ebook, looks quite weird in print
i am delighted and not a little smug to announce that the results of this election, while not yet technically "known", absolutely confirm in all particulars my pre-existing political narrative
narrator: of course, he had personally worked to ensure the erosion of British science funding
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Lots of spads texting Vote Leave 'can we get a job in your new startup party when we collapse?'
Some of you yes, those of you attacking science funding you will be hung from no10 lamposts...
dominiccummings.substack.com/p/snippets-9-t
wait, so you're saying that MBAs teach managers to be successful by... simply screwing the workers? this feels like it is somehow important economist.com/business/2022/
who better to tackle the problems we are now facing than I, who created the problems we are now facing
if anyone is for some reason suddenly interested in the rhetoric of Germany in the 1930s, may i recommend Victor Klemperer's classic The Language of the Third Reich
starting a movement that I'm going to call "Ineffective Altruism". Leave a fresh packet of cheese and onion crisps on the pavement in your local high street
idea: become a productivity guru offering productivity tips on how to be more productive as a productivity guru
what if the "cost of living crisis" were actually an "excess profits crisis"
the right to withhold one's labour is what separates employment from serfdom. Fuck absolutely everyone who is complaining about workers going on strike
has any irremediably second-class intellect ever fancied itself so massively
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watching Remainiac academia 6 yrs after referendum they're still overwhelmingly at JCR-level of practical politics + have an astonishing degree of trust in what they read in newspapers, if they dominated a referendum on ECHR they'd be destroyed & it wd be much easier than in 2016
i read this and then subscribed to because it seemed good that there should exist at least one literary outlet in which people can intelligently discuss the greatest living writers
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I wrote a piece for 'Bookforum'. bookforum.com/print/3001/don
i was hoping that The Deer Hunter would inspire a generation of kids to become infantrymen but it really missed the mark on that, 1/10
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i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that.
let's get that movie made!
(i think the social network managed to do this for startup founders.)
this would be awesome, a repeat of the shellshocked Tories choosing no-hopers like Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard for years
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* gave me a peerage when I was resoundingly sacked by my constituents
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Boris:
A stonking majority
Got Brexit done
Stood up to Covid gloomsters (& general hysteria)
World-leading vaccines that saved countless lives
Economic recovery, jobs, optimism
World champion for nature & climate.
There’s a reason the left (&remain/covid fanatics) want him gone
*grudgingly digs out his most recent review of the appalling garbage emitted by this fool* theguardian.com/books/2019/sep
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Malcolm Gladwell slams working from home: 'What have you reduced your life to?' trib.al/nP98YQQ
the first and last person who ever sacked me (from a part-time subbing contract) was Amanda Platell, and where is she now
who cancels *whom*
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it's really interesting that the scandal of taxpayer-funded guaranteed profits to privatized public goods is just assumed to be perfectly normal and so never discussed until a bolshy union leader dares to bring it up
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Mick Lynch from the @RMTunion points out that during Covid, in the worst year of revenue on the railway, the private rail companies extracted £500 million in profit. Thats the scandal, not working people fighting against real term pay cuts during a cost of living crisis.
i would just like to point out that in "Land of Confusion" by Genesis (1986), Phil Collins promised that his generation would put everything right, and i think enough time has now passed for us to safely conclude that they absolutely did not
here i am in the Grauniad on a fine speculative novel about intelligent octopuses
this is a brilliant idea and quite a good reason to have an efficient, pleasant, nationalized rail service
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To fight climate change, France bans domestic flights where cities are linked by train with a journey time of two and a half hours or less. Will mean flights between Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux and Lyons will be shut down.
Is the first country in the world to introduce such a ban. twitter.com/CBeaune/status…
it is a curious fact that the people who say they just *have* to write, who cannot go a day without writing, who simply *love to write*, are objectively the world's worst writers
please stop using the word "tragedy" in this context; tragedy requires that the character brought low by a fatal misreckoning be basically honourable to begin with
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People often adored Boris Johnson when he spoke. And that was the tragedy of the man econ.st/3RfvlxH
surprised we can infer anything about brains from studying bombshells
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Can brain scans reveal behaviour? Bombshell study says not yet nature.com/articles/d4158
more people should adopt the strategy common in modern philosophy whereby arguments are rhetorically depersonalized. Say "the view I am defending" rather than "my view". It is perhaps an overlooked marker and enabler of civility in disagreement
what if "world book day" were simply a day when children could read whatever book they liked instead of being forced into dumb cosplay 🤔 twitter.com/zsk/status/149
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full disclosure: some of my best friends are lawyers
If you were a geneticist trying to engineer a leader you would probably say that they would need three things as a prerequisite: intelligence, charisma and empathy. I can only think of one in decades who genuinely had these three qualities
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(unless of course you intend to follow it with "it's gonna start raining men")
bands can't afford to tour but the CEO of Universal Music made $300m last year, seems fair
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Touring is broken
It’s even harder for smaller artists
Something needs to change, and fast
me: *causes unprecedented instability*
interviewer: will you resign
me: i think what people want now is stability
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Your bio currently claims "I do real news" so maybe you want to update that
in a rational world this answer, both factually false and despicably contemptuous, would immediately disqualify the speaker from any role in government
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Sebastian Payne - If you weren't a politician, what would you be?
Audience - Train driver
Liz Truss - "It would be less stress & probably more money as well"
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eh, but bacteria and viruses reproduce much better than humans
i absolutely did not suspect, back when i first thrilled to The Terminator as a child, that would become the greatest political communicator of our age, but here we are ❤️🤘🏻
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This is my message to anyone who has chosen the path of hate. Please listen.
if you say "for the first time", you literally do not need to add "in HISTORY"
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| NEW: For the first time in HISTORY, millions across the country will be asked to make their promise to the King by saying the following out loud:
“I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.”
since there is renewed Tory blather about "cutting red tape", it's time for me to re-up my explanation of why this generally means killing more people:
this is way too many colons in a single sentence
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What a surprise: the censorious left is censoring research about the machinations of the censorious left: the modern university in action, folks: alumni: stop donating. You are funding your sworn enemies: telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/1
I see people are taking about "debating" loons again so here is my definitive explanation of why that is pointless
starting to think that what we really need to help us understand the world right now is a new book by Alain de Botton
i fear that everyone worried about the UK's stagnant "productivity" has somehow failed to read my historic takedown of the very idea
if working on rest days were mandatory they wouldn't be rest days, you feckless stooge
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UNOFFICIAL STRIKES: Passengers using Avanti West services should expect disruption today. Archaic rules from 1919 mean working on rest days is voluntary. Unions now stopping drivers volunteering - causing misery for public & staff who won't get paid. We MUST modernise rail.they literally had a Tory on the radio the other day saying that the water companies invested well in the 1950s-1960s but hadn't done so much in the last 30 years and I was screaming at the radio like "CAN YOU THINK OF ANYTHING THAT HAPPENED 30 YEARS AGO THAT MIGHT EXPLAIN THIS"
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1991: Let us privatise water, it'll cost every household in the country about £2000 more over 30 years, but we'll take that money and use it to upgrade infrastructure
2021: yeah, we didn't do that. We took the £60billion total and deposited it in our Cayman Islands bank accounts
seconded; but not only are they pretty, italics (along with title case and quote marks for poems and songs, etc) are all devices that help the reader make sense of what is going on in a sentence, and the modern media trend of eliminating some or all of them is incredibly stupid
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counterpoint: italics are pretty. twitter.com/kiracecilia_/s…
is it too obvious to say "the entire oeuvre of Malcolm Gladwell"
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what's your (non-right wing, too easy) book that you think would be better if it didn't exist? that book that induces so much false confidence in its readers that it feels like people who read it know less than they would have if they didn't (because now they 'know' bullshit)?
winners go to jail for human trafficking
losers have a great time in a comfortable chair
don't be a winner
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Reading books is for middle-brain losers.
It’s brain masturbation bullshit cowardice.
“I’m learning so much without risk!”
You’ve learned nothing.
Winners act.
Losers read.
hello i know absolutely nothing about France but here are my crashingly dumb takes on the news from France
people talk about bending your knees but you can't bend your knees; you bend your legs smh
type double spaces if you're being held hostage
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My Twitter account says I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t.
My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven’t.
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you almost don't need the qualifier "among young Americans" there
is it legal for a home secretary to ask parliament to pass a bill that she literally admits is illegal
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Look what is written by @SuellaBraverman on the face of the Illegal Migration bill - that this legislation may not be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights
this is incredible. Mr Astley is several orders of magnitude more rock than Royal Blood 🤘🏻 twitter.com/WUTangKids/sta
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i somehow feel like a celebrated left-wing publisher ought to recognize its workers' trade union
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For a full year, the Verso London union has been meeting with management about a recognition agreement, so that we can begin negotiations over our wages and working conditions."bring back law against sedition!" blubbers future lowest-IQ PM in history
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After her speech is interrupted by protestors, Liz Truss tells the audience she will bring in new legislation to stop "our democracy being disrupted by unfair protests."
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I'd be content with someone who promised that we might stumble blindly on as usual, only in a significantly less cruel, unjust, and corrupt way
twitter is a machine for laboriously discovering that people did not actually say what other people are saying they said
this clown is head of a conglomerate that owns at least one of my publishers (who can keep track), but by virtue of these comments should be legally prohibited from going anywhere near the book industry
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Here’s Thomas Rabe, head of Bertelsmann which owns Penguin, on the opportunities of generative AI.
Boy, I wish Salinger, Amis or Woolf had been able to do this. I love their content. Think how much more content they could have generated!
ft.com/content/1a02c9
it is indeed "regrettable" that, after six years of our screaming "Fuck you!" to the EU, they are not inclined to be nice to us
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NEW: #UK "urgently" considering next steps after no breakthrough in attempts to rejoin #EU's #Horizon scheme at a meeting of officials today
Britain asked the #EU to finalise UK access but, in a statement, said it was, "Regrettable that the EU continues to decline this request."
Tory government while money was cheap: we need to cut budgets everywhere to balance the books
Tory government when money is getting more expensive: lol we can finance tax cuts for the rich through borrowing
and even at the moment of his ignominious defeat he cannot help but attempt to degrade the public understanding of what "democratically" actually means
ffs have these clowns not read The Three-Body Problem
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Scientists have designed a new message to spark conversation with alien civilisations, and also suggest we challenge them to a game of chess to judge their logic and strategic skills. newscientist.com/article/231464
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what an amazing piece. reads like an interminable BTL comment by a drunk blowhard fantasist in his bedsit
i see Elon has been assiduously reading my quite interesting book reviews, into which i cram as much far-left propaganda as humanly possible
it's telling in retrospect how often Johnson was praised for his "optimism", ie his careless rhetorical insistence that everything would soon be jolly marvellous unallied to any inclination to work hard towards any particular goal bar the continuance of his own elevation
hi , will you be printing a correction admitting that the word "blacklist" in your headline is just a flat-out lie? Removing books from required-reading lists is not blacklisting them unless you have evidence that students will be punished if they mention them t.co/DYwhMN8DPK
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i don't want a political leader who has a "vision for the country", given that people who have visions for their country tend to be fascists and other species of authoritarian populist
this total fucking moron wrote in 2014 that Britain should be a leader in "science" and then two years later campaigned for Brexit, which is impoverishing and isolating British science 🤔
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I've said many times for many years, the political parties select for sexual deviants, incompetent narcissists, socioopaths. It's a feature not a bug. Problems in sw1 much worse even than they seem...
dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the
i am not ashamed to admit that until today i had thought that Andrea Leadsom and Liz Truss were the same person
it's interesting that the two highest-status genres of journalism are investigative reporting (the most difficult and important) and political commentary (the easiest and most useless)
me: *causes you problems*
you: "well look, now I have these problems"
me: "i can't fix all your problems, you idiot, you giant baby"
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THE TIMES: State can’t fix all your problems, says @RishiSunak #TomorrowsPapersToday
you can be absolutely certain he is lying when he childishly reverts to sub-Wodehousian vocabulary when denying something (cf "inverted pyramid of piffle")
how about we replace all the execs with ChatGPT and pay writers more
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