davehitchcock.bsky.social
Historian: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8378-4968
Course Director and research unit lead, CCCU.
Currently: "Dying Homeless, 1600-2013", Soon: 'The Ends of Poverty in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800' (2nd album). He/him.
2,310 posts
5,382 followers
1,409 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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Jokes on us this won't solve it.
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I think the latter is the more likely outcome. No "unit of assessment lead" or similar will have the ability to simply refuse to submit something along the first lines. There is also a material risk of just shooting whatever future research community there is in the feet.
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Yep! Maybe this is how hauntings happen.
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This book right here? Yeah a 4* banger, trust me. Oh the colleague in question? EVR in 2023.
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so every single module (no choice most of the time) had to have a super clear reason for existing, and be intrinsically interesting to most history students, or have ways to make itself interesting to them.
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I think the answer we ended up with is, we don't offer the same provision. Inside the box of what is possible we designed a completely new provision. I strongly emphasised a "degree that is amazing for 25 students" (per year), NOT one that is traditionally expansive. That is the price for surviving.
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I'm now able to see the "aftermath" of our processes emerging here. It's... not going to be good. Perhaps with a few years of stability we can recover. Perhaps.
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Yeah this is an exact example of a really big problem with his way of understanding others.
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Yes I think that's fair enough as it goes, he functionally decided he wanted to be leader without agreeing, in an honest way, to explain that he was a long (long) way from Corbyn to labour party members. I think it's a false equivalence to suggest this is anything close to Johnson though.
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Anyways that desire of Starmer to have others say he did well, but not to have to say it himself? Yeah. I *totally* recognise that thing. It's already potentially a challenge in everyday working like right now, in politics, I worry it is debilitating.
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Yes, exactly.
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This leaves whole constituencies out in the proverbial cold. Entire industries where the "main family affected" is not in reach do not even get a look in. Groups of vulnerable individuals get "seen less clearly" in political terms. This produces the worry about who he is for, not just what.
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But I do think there is something missing, something important, from his calculus of domestic UK politics. It is like he intellectually understands the problems, and is inclined to technocratic (but real) solutions, but he only 'gets' them when its about a small family unit. Always "dad thinking".
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I'm not able to buy the idea, peddled as often by the folks on the left as on the right, that Starmer is an empty vehicle and as dishonest as Johnson. I see little evidence of that. He broke his pledges, well yeah, people do that. Johnsonian dishonesty was several storm categories up from that.
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You cannot simply do "the right things" in your own view, no matter how much power you have, and then expect people to intuit and understand how those things lift up them personally, or their communities. You absolutely must spell it out. Politics abhors a vacuum and these days bile will fill it.
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Sloop Johnnn B, here we go
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He has to sell this thing as hard as he can. By the way this particular thing is not an AI, it is nowhere near, not in the same time zone as, an "AGI", and his company just had a pretty hilarious mass outage. They're burning cash like it's going out of style.
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It's been a really quite nutty holdover from a previous era of "discretionary policing" of the poor, where the evidentiary standards for being criminalised (for rough sleeping) were low to absent, which the courts pretty much struck down as much as they could by the 1970s.
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Thing is, the 1824 Act was designed to be cruel and to go alongside a big push to "clean the streets" by the mendicity societies of the day. It was a precursor to the casual wards and flophouse era of vagrancy history in the middle and later c19th and was an early expansion of policing power.
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These folks have already learned to hate all their neighbours who don't look and speak and go to church like them and to enjoy the feeling. Much else is just window dressing on that core societal rupture.
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Fiche sounds sexier, down with precise accuracy i say, up with sexy archives
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NEW: California is demanding an immediate ruling to block the military from join ICE on immigration enforcement actions in Los Angeles.
w/ @joshgerstein
www.politico.com/news/2025/06...
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Top delivery of <<microfiche>> like it's a secret trove of occult wisdom, and lets be frank to aspiring historians under the age of about 40, yeah.
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I can't stress enough how clearly screenshots show ChatGPT playing in *directly* to user delusions, for example confirming to a man who believed the CIA/FBI were after him that he was able to access redacted CIA files using only his mind, and saying he was the reincarnation of religious figures:
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I'm sorry but I don't think you guys make it that far, not as a uniform state of a size and scale comparable to now. Not without an immense disaster in-between.
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People still take plenty of things seriously is I suppose what I'm saying, many just seem to feel far less obligation to tell anyone frankly that they do so, which is really corrosive.
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Yep. Often the lack of seriousness is po-faced, a kind of tarp over genuine (and fair common) ambitions: like amassing lots of wealth quickly (crypto); manufacturing political consent for atrocity; etc.
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Most of the widely read 'critics' still in post at legacy media outlets have absolutely no clue what they are actually looking at, when they see this stuff. I don't blame them for not having been waist-deep in forum discourse sewage in the 2000s, but it's time to study up.