Linden Wood

Miss Marple with a transmasc history. #IStandwithJews

[Linden Wood @LindenWould]

A painful truth

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

"A nation whose government cannot act in its own national interest because of who it depends on for votes is not a nation under complacent leadership. It is a nation under captured leadership. And that is a harder problem to solve than buying more missiles."

[Ellie Rofe @eliotranch]

I like Sarah, but this is the kind of myopia that's plagued the middle class since the 2000s.

I had family and friends in the trades when Blair chose to give the accession countries unlimited access to Britain in 2004.

Their livelihoods were rapidly impacted.

The middle classes - who had always hated the 'white van man' trades anyway - crowed and crowed about how shit you must be if someone could come from another country and beat you in the market.

But they refused to even begin to look at what was happening. Groups of men living in cramped housing for a year or two - so they could undercut Brits, because their goal was to rapidly save cash to go and create a life in their much cheaper homeland.

British men and women were not playing on the same field. And they were mocked as their businesses and futures were harmed.

This excellent Polish builder has stayed here and made a success of things. Lovely for him. Lovely for Sarah, who got a cheaper servant class. And it sounds like he's good for society in general.

But he was part of a wave of immigration that was really shit for lots of Brits - most of whom have since been called 'far right' for daring to notice the asymmetry of immigration impact.

More than 20 years on, and the wilfully blind dogma has only grown worse. Now this post ignores the very obvious social, economic and cultural impacts of even greater influxes of people from more alien and violent cultures.

I honestly don't know what we do when people refuse to see the picture in the round. Do we have to wait for a civil war before they'll acknowledge issues?

[Sarah Adams @sarahadams]

We have a candidate in Michigan talking about beheading a sitting Senator. Completely normal.

[Lee Kuan Yimby @LeeKuanYimby]

Imagine the freakout if Haley Stevens owned property in Israel and said it was rude to ask about that.

[Mahyar Tousi @MahyarTousi]

Complete silence today by the UN and western liberal governments.

[Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio @LeoKearse]

"Armed police to patrol Pride event because of undefined threat from no particular demographic whatsoever"

[Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley]

El-Sayed assured voters that he was really referring to the head of Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) in defending his remark. Somehow, alluding to the beheading of a staunch defender of Israel was presented as far more reasonable than mass beheading. That is what passes for a moderate in this age of rage. https://t.co/RVeDuqBj5u

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I don’t care about individuals. I do care that a former champion of human rights has become what it was created to fight. It no longer champions freedom of speech and belief. It has become the tyrant that persecutes those who don’t espouse what it decrees acceptable beliefs.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

In Europe, we’ve felt so safe and comfortable that we’ve been able to indulge in all sorts of loony ideas without consequences. Well, the consequences are here now.

[Jamesetta Williams 💕 @jamesetta_w]

The DSA has spent years yapping about the evil 1%, evil landlords and the evil corporatists who don’t support Medicare for All. And then nominated a guy in the 1% who is a landlord married to a woman whose business refuses Medicare.

This poor judgement is a pattern.

[Patrick🕸 @STILLTish]

I agree that diversity training can be good. An old friend who did the training and also looked after international students at the Uni I worked for, was really good at it and exercised common sense. Something went awry later. I remember asking in the training about one of our feeder colleges who had Muslim converts refusing to be taught by female engineers. They were told that if they refused to be taught by her they should select another module. So, how did the trainer answer my question? She explained that due to cultural sensitivities from a muslim recruitment agent (who we paid, btw) she sent a junior, amd male, employee to deal with him because he refused to deal with her as the female manager. Thats not diversity it is abject capitulation.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

This is very worth reading because it beautifully lays out the faulty thinking that has given us suicidal economic policy that has also made no impact on climate change whatsoever.

Characteristically, it pretends that those who oppose Net Zero do so because they deny that the climate is changing (no one sensible does), that outsourcing our emissions to poor countries, an accounting trick, is somehow green (it's not) and, most importantly, challenges the argument that the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions produced in the world today are emitted by countries that care about economic growth way more than they care about "saving the planet" (China, India etc) by citing Kenya whose entire annual emissions are roughly equivalent to what China emits in about 8 hours.

The hoax is not climate change. The hoax is that we can stop it by making ourselves poorer.

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[Chef Andrew Gruel @ChefGruel]

Here we go. One of the big grocery vendors will get this bid and will basically use government subsidies to sell the stuff they would otherwise throw away at their other stores.

[Sunday Sport @thesundaysport]

How about *nobody* calls for their political opponents to be killed? Not even as a 'poor taste joke'?
Maybe take that as a starting point and see if we can edge forward from there.

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

Who do the attendees need protecting from? GB News? Reform UK? Men with St George’s flags? Hmmm I wonder who it is?

[Ifan Morgan Jones @ifanmj]

Re: Jodrell Bank, what is this kind of architecture called anyway? It's dominated my life from school age. 'Something functional built in Britain post-war to last a short time but which never got replaced' is the closest I can get to a name.

[Billboard Chris 🌎 @BillboardChris]

I couldn’t go to the Temple Mount when I was in Jerusalem. The Muslims wouldn’t let me in.

Non-Muslims are only allowed at certain times, and they’re never allowed to pray there, or enter the Dome of the Rock.

It’s guarded by the Jordanian-administered Islamic Waqf.

This is the site where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac before God intervened. It is the site of the Holy of Holies in both the First and Second Temples.

This is where Jesus taught, and where He drove out the merchants who were selling animals for sacrifice and the money changers who exchanged currency for the Temple tax. Now, no Jews or Christians can go there.

Muslims have more freedom in the Old City of Jerusalem than Jews or Christians.

That’s not something you hear often from the propagandists on social media.

[Tom Tiffany @TomTiffanyWI]

Direct quote from @FrancescaHongWI’s campaign to Fox News: “Rep. Hong has never called for abolishing the U.S. Senate. Tiffany cannot produce a single statement where she did, because it doesn't exist.”

Apparently, they forgot about this post.

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

They hanged them in public

Allahu Akbar….That was the sound filling Isfahan's sky this morning when the Islamic Republic hanged three young protesters in public.

Abolfazl Sepahi. Amirhossein Safari.

Three of ours. Gone.💔

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Anthropic maintains that it is entitled to train for free on all the world’s output, even if the author objects. But if a competitor trains on Anthropic’s output after paying for it, that is IP theft. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.