garethwatkins.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Can somebody recommend a hopefully not Amazon Kindle e-reader? Something with... * A larger screen * The ability to upload a wide range of file types (so not locked to a specific marketplace) * Wi-fi (so not USB-only) * The ability to mark and annotate text * Good battery life

submitted 4 minutes ago • 1 comment

They learned lessons from Iraq. These lessons were: - Don’t seek public consent - Enforce your version of events - Enforce it via media panics and physically by police, if required - Never admit an error, let alone anything worse - Instantly forget what you did: if possible, never refer to it again

submitted 3 hours ago • 8 comments

Great investigation from Liberty and The i, who've uncovered what UK police forces have been doing with Palantir - buying AI software from them that uses data about an individual's race, sex life, health and political beliefs. inews.co.uk/news/police-...

submitted 3 hours ago • 4 comments

I liked this, but I disagree with the characterisation of their beliefs as 'nihilism'. Believing in nothing doesn't predispose a person towards ASMR videos of people in shackles etc. What we're talking about is sadism, enjoying inflicting pain in others. www.liberalcurrents.com/universalism...

submitted 4 hours ago • 1 comment

submitted 4 hours ago • 0 comments

Not just in content but form - massively-distributed mega-narratives are an attempt to mimic failing shared universes (Marvel, DC etc.) that end up doing everything they do better until they try to have internal consistency, 'events', central lore themes etc.

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

Nobody is talking about the Grooming Gangs(tm) thing in terms of its clear historical antecedents in Q-Anon, the Satanic Panic, witch hunts and antisemitism. It's 2025 and major political figures are trying to prove that there's a racialised other that somehow has a compulsion to molest children.

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

There are no large and well-funded trans activist groups, there was no major legislation passed - this is a phenomena that entirely exists on twitter, which has completely destroyed the minds of the political class.

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

Crazy how the entire political class being firmly behind Reform would produce this result.

submitted 6 hours ago • 0 comments

gm its Monday time to rise Nd grind let's get that bread

submitted 6 hours ago • 0 comments

Love is all too often the reason we give when we don’t act to stop bad things, big or small. Nonetheless the global precariat sometimes does take the risk of combating violence, without knowing what is on the other side. This, too, is theorized everywhere as love. lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-u...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

someone just got booted from a bunch of teen nazi group chats

submitted 19 hours ago • 27 comments

YES! Not to toot my own horn, but I wrote about this recently: buttondown.com/charliejane/...

submitted 20 hours ago • 5 comments

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? We actually found the 'let's Naruto-run onto the base and meet aliens' thing really funny! Don't get me wrong, we were going to shoot anyone who came within two clicks of the facility, but we would have felt bad about it.

submitted 23 hours ago • 0 comments

Fetterman has never been so activated.

submitted 23 hours ago • 0 comments

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

What's amazing is that there isn't anyone on the right who will stand up and say 'Yes, we hate the Democrats and they do awful things all the time, but in this one case the shooter believed what we believed, but was obviously mentally ill'. Like not even one.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

This is what happened with everyone in politics and media to the right of Ed Miliband since 2015: a massive shift to the right, so that the former centrists are openly reactionary as fuck driving gloves Tories, many Tories are openly fash and the choice is “Cameron 2015 or the posh National Front”

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

You should be able to take your dad to an autism assessment for Father’s Day. A bit like how you’d treat your mother to a full body massage, or an afternoon tea

submitted 1 day ago • 15 comments

Actually, if I just get more notebooks to write my ideas in I'll finally be able to write Vietnampire, a story of what would happen if Dracula was in the Vietnam war.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

The neo-Nazi crypto community has been torn apart by drama. At issue: an extremist who frequently hosted Kash Patel on his show, and now stands accused of ripping off his best Nazi buddy with a memecoin. My False Flag newsletter for @thebulwark.com is here: www.thebulwark.com/p/they-did-n...

submitted 1 day ago • 7 comments

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

🚨 NEW PUBLICATION! Who belongs to “the people” – and who does not? What a great way to start the week. I’m really happy that my article on populist in- and outgroup references is now out in @polstudies.bsky.social #openaccess 🔓 doi.org/10.1177/0032... 🧵 1/10

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

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submitted 1 day ago • 10 comments

Humanity will have lost a part of its soul if it loses the ability to think about PAWGs.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

The thing is that our students all KNOW this stuff is making them stupider—& many of them resent it. But every signal in their lives, including the entire media apparatus & their own university leadership, is telling them nothing matters, why not use it, if you don’t, you’re getting ‘left behind’

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Good news: I’m writing another book! Data centers have been a big part of the discourse over the past few years. I’ll be digging into why there are so many being built right now and the broader impacts they’re having. But also: do we really need this much compute?

submitted 2 days ago • 9 comments

Venn diagram of people with extremely boring, middle of the road politics and people who post like they've been released from an insane asylum on the fucking moon.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment