Paul Dempsey

[Eoin O'Malley @AnMailleach]

When government (or anyone) says they want to tackle ‘misinformation’, it is always that they want to control what can and cannot be said. It is censorship, pure and simple.

[Sarah McLaughlin @sarahemclaugh]

I’ve been warning for a while that the UN’s Cybercrime treaty will bring trouble for free speech. Dozens of nations signed on last year.

And in just the first half of 2026, we’re already seeing troubling new cybercrime bills emerge globally. Read it here: https://t.co/prStEcLHdZ

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

In The Blank Slate, I suggested another cause: the denial of human nature, including appreciation of beauty. Elites assumed that human tastes are infinitely malleable and so the masses would learn to overcome their bourgeois prejudices and appreciate brutalism, authoritarian high modernism, & other flauntings of ugliness. The idea has recently been elaborated by the MIT linguist Samuel Jay Keyser in The Mental Life of Modernism. https://t.co/QE7y07Jd6Z

[Will Kinney @WKCosmo]

I'm going to say this again for those at the back: hundreds of thousands of TONS of books —some of them "rare" in the sense that obsolete books on Windows 95 programming or service manuals for Singer sewing machines from 1985 or books of racist jokes from 1958 are "rare"— are pulped or landfilled every year. It's illegal to digitally archive them because the PUBLISHERS won't allow it. If AI companies are diverting them to use for training on the way to being thrown out, that's GOOD, actually. The reporting on this is custom-crafted to be rage-bait for normie middle-class liberal book lovers, and you all are falling for it hook, line and sinker. Just complete suckers. Nobody is shredding Gutenberg bibles or the Codex Gigax here.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Scotland raised its top income tax rate to 48% to make the rich pay more.

New HMRC data suggests the result may have been the opposite: Scotland collected about £22m less.

We can't be sure, but Scotland may have fallen over the Laffer curve.

🧵:

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

Jerusalem 586bc.

Massive wooden beams, blackened and charred by the flames that consumed the city in 586 B.C., were unearthed at Jerusalem Walls National Park in the City of David, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Monday. They had lain in place since the day Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian armies destroyed Solomon’s Temple.

[Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair 🦥 @senatorshoshana]

In 2008 South Korea made it so you had to have your name attached to posts online.

Can you guess what happened next?

Half the country's people were hacked—and that was just ONE hack in a series of them.

And nothing improved online.

@TheFIREorg @sarahemclaugh told me about this and I could not believe it!!

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

One of my favorite Deng anecdotes.

[Tom Holland @holland_tom]

"Western countries need to consider that the survival of a vulnerable people with a unique religious and cultural tradition must take precedence over other strategic priorities."

Matthew Barber on the #Yazidis & the aftermath of genocide.

https://t.co/ShggMfDhnH

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

This is becoming an increasingly important story: "A Chinese thin tank estimates the number of people in flexible employment - without a permanent full-time contract - rising to 320 million this year from 280 million in 2025, about 44% of China's workforce. China's gig economy has become a crucial employment buffer as the property crisis wipes out construction jobs and manufacturers shed workers through automation and cost-cutting ​amid tariffs, overcapacity and price wars."
https://t.co/3y2EkzuB5Q

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Would you rather drink one beer every evening for a year, or drink 365 beers in one evening?

All of nuclear power 'safety' regulation is built on the idea that, when the same question comes to radiation, there's no difference. But the empirical evidence is overwhelming that the body repairs small amounts of damage caused by ionising radiation in the same way it repairs damage from other small harms.

If this is correct it would mean that the "unsafe at any dose" philosophy that has underpinned the regulation of nuclear energy since the 1970s is wrong. It is premature to conclude that yet: we need more evidence.

But if that further research does confirm what the existing evidence suggests, then nuclear power is much, much more expensive than it needs to be, even in places like South Korea that build cheaply, and nuclear power could be cheaper than any other form of electricity.

We could go much further than, say, the Fingleton Review or the mainstream proposals for reform that are on the table in the United States. We could have a new atomic age in which the "too cheap to meter" dream was realised.

[War Radar @War_Radar2]

JUST IN: 🇹🇼🇨🇳 Taiwan is preparing to flood the skies with more than 210,000 drones to make any Chinese invasion a nightmare.

Taiwan has unveiled a €5.6 billion autonomous defense plan to deploy over 210,000 unmanned systems, including kamikaze drones, reconnaissance drones, and uncrewed surface vessels.

Inspired by lessons from the war in Ukraine, the strategy aims to overwhelm any invading force and make an amphibious assault by China extraordinarily costly.

The future of warfare is being written in the Taiwan Strait.

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

Degrowthers are trying to force developed countries to choose the environment over the economy.

But in the last 20 years, we’ve had more growth and less environmental impact.

Taking care of the environment is a luxury good that countries buy more of as they get richer.

[Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu]

Reminder: Hinkley Point C (7% of Britain's electricity needs) is at risk of delay due to Natural England's view that the £700m on fish mitigations isn't enough.

https://t.co/xnH9jma4xV

[Nick Cohen @NickCohen4]

Russian intelligence pays you to firebomb the PM's home and you get 4 years? This is not a serious country

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

Except for the fact it was entirely predictable, it is indeed shocking. https://t.co/DlLDzdL3Gf

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

What does really seem just a little bit suspicious though is that there’s supposed to be a giant 2-km-wide river called the Dnipro and a forested island in the background behind the Lavra, instead of those massive residential high-rises in this piece of AI slop (to begin with).

Also, what’s crystal clear here is that @BowesChay is a fucking imbecile pushing brain-dead Russian war propaganda for peanuts.

[Ian O'Doherty @OdohertyI64991]

'Destroy anyone who professes support for Israel'
This little scrote is a guest in our country and he should have the manners to behave like one.
Instead, he wants to turn his new home - although not for much longer, one hopes - into the rancid, corrupt failure he ran from.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Keir Starmer and I disagree on many things, but good people across the political spectrum will welcome today’s verdicts, condemn these appalling attacks which seem to have been sponsored by Russia, and wish the PM and his family well.

Whatever our political differences, no one should face intimidation, threats or attacks because they hold public office.

Democracy is settled at the ballot box, not through fear or violence and definitely not through foreign interference from hostile countries.

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Public institutions are terrified of getting race wrong. So they outsource judgment to agenda-driven activists and “community leaders” who give advice that damages trust.
The answer is not to trash the police but to restore common sense.
My Oped in the Times below (no paywall!)👇