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🎥 Missed out on any of our events? Many are now available to view as recordings! Check out past talks on AI and gossiping, physical activity, the affective dynamics of violence, interdisciplinary conversations and many more 👇 medhumsplatform.org/archive/ #medicalhumanities #medhums

submitted 19 hours ago • 0 comments

omg wellard was in gladiator???

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

📢This is your emergency NLS Maps site downtime preparedness warning 🚨🔔😧

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

This idea that there is a god given right for fascists to always be allowed to run in elections because somehow democracy is threatened by not allowing fascists to run for office is profoundly stupid, dangerous and makes people sound patently insane. Fascists want to kill democracy. That is all.

submitted 3 days ago • 40 comments

There is something very deliberate about the way HIV programmes have been targeted by the Trump administration. It is the coalescence of HIV denialism, hatred of helping the poor or the foreign, eugenic and puritanical belief the victims deserve to die, and of course, more than anything, racism

submitted 3 days ago • 5 comments

Remember when academic publishers signed multi-million dollar AI training data deals with big tech and promised great AI-driven transformations to publishing services from looting academic work without notice or consent? Here's how that's going.

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

This is almost certainly true, but also given that we know people did things like put their cats down as family members in historical censuses, the idea that trans people are somehow wrecking a dataset that was otherwise perfect for two centuries is laughable.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

She is so transparently extremist. Trump is trying to wipe us out

submitted 5 days ago • 6 comments

The 'impartial' Alice Sullivan saying Trump is right about trans people

submitted 6 days ago • 75 comments

A lot of folk ask me about numbers and I’m not good at explaining them but this writer is. The economics of being a writer….including how best to support the writers you love aherm

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

“It appears thorough and convincing, right until the point that you read it” is a great line (about the way fines were made up, sorry, calculated.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Despite its falsity, RFK Jr's message resonates with many Americans. Because it gives them a sense of protection against the risks they face and a sense of permission to not feel bad for others who do experience harm.

submitted 7 days ago • 43 comments

🚨 Outrage as 20 police officers break into Westminster Quaker Meeting House and arrest six. 🚨 This shocking violation of a place of worship is a direct result of crackdowns on protest and dissent - freedom of speech, assembly and democracy are at risk.🕊️ 👉 www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

submitted 7 days ago • 138 comments

A reminder that "where there's muck there's brass" : Bradford, Yorkshire, one of the world's centre's of the woollen trade, recovered wool grease & lanolin from the city's sewage at their Esholt Works & made by-products for re-sale. @nkdgardener.bsky.social @ttshields.bsky.social flic.kr/p/2m5rEXZ

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

Confidential documents are meant to be leaked on the war thunder forum, the way God intended, not on signal group chat (It's the F-14 manual this time)

submitted 8 days ago • 20 comments

Pinned Post about my research. The Tyrant of the Bar: The 1902 Glasgow Licensing Courts and the Barmaid Question In 1902 Glasgow tried to prohibit barmaids. Read about the panic behind it, the legal realities and the working class women affected. oro.open.ac.uk/100192/

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

It’s patently false, but notice that “humans won’t be needed” to these people is identified as the desired future rather than the deeply dystopian vision that it actually is.

submitted 8 days ago • 218 comments

Brand new online release of over 60 articles from the Book of the Old Edinburgh Club (2010-2019). The 35 volumes in the Original Series (1908-1985) are now split into over 250 articles for reading and download. Enjoy over 400 Edinburgh history tales! oldedinburghclub.org.uk/improving-ac...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

I only learned about the Finnish Civil War recently, but death estimates are around 1% of the population killed in 3 months. For comparison it took 4 years of meat-grinder trench warfare to kill ~2% of the UK population in WW1.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

This BTW is my Exhibit A when I laugh at those who claim that Finland only managed to enact progressive policies because homogenous societies have higher trust, etc. That gets the causality very much backwards. Trust between mutually distrusting societal groups was built by progressive policies.

submitted 9 days ago • 4 comments

I hadn't thought of this, but yes. Finns trust in each other had to be laboriously built: it didn't come by itself. As recently as my parents' generation, some teachers would remember whose side pupils' families were on in the civil war, and adjust grades accordingly.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

Nonsensical response from PCSE about their removal of guidance for gender marker changes for trans people on their website. Apparently just removing guidance for EVERYONE reduces confusion about a potential policy change for U18s, as opposed to y’know confusing adults wishing to make the change. 🙄

submitted 9 days ago • 6 comments

16th May 1803, RCSEd minutes: "Mr Benjamin Bell then moved that as calling frequent meetings upon such trivial and ridiculous causes was attended with great inconvenience to most of the members a Committee should be appointed to review the Laws respecting special meetings"

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

"When using the word transphobia is treated as harassment, transphobia is not treated as harassment."

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

I wrote this yesterday before I heard the news about Sussex being fined £585,000 by the higher education regulator OfS led by Arif Ahmed (what a confirmation of bias!) and the repetition of that old cover story, 'Hounded.' Hope it helps. Killjoy solidarity! feministkilljoys.substack.com/p/hounded

submitted 10 days ago • 4 comments

Also yes this is the point. You actually can’t just say whatever you want without consequences, none of us can, especially if what you’re going to say is harmful to your students and creates an unsafe environment.

submitted 10 days ago • 7 comments

Important piece in the Lancet, summarised here:

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

“The OfS criticised the university's policy statement on Trans and Non-Binary equality, saying its requirement to "positively represent trans people" and an assertion that "transphobic propaganda [would] not be tolerated" could lead staff and students to "self-censor".” Uhhhhh

submitted 10 days ago • 15 comments

As someone who comments on book publishing, I think it would be extremely remiss of me not to comment on what has happened at Unbound. Full disclosure - I know John Mitchinson and previous owners well, (professional friends), a few years ago they paid me to support their authors with marketing ....

submitted 11 days ago • 4 comments

Cost of motoring in real terms is pretty much the same as in 2015... And that's according to the RAC www.racfoundation.org/data/cost-of... If we're really worried about transport costs - we should look at buses (the orange line) as the poorest in society have no cars and rely on them.

submitted 11 days ago • 5 comments

Social media bans won't prevent many people across our population from becoming steeped in dangerous transphobic bigotry. Not when that hate is printed in every paper, repeated by ministers and entire political parties. Instagram didn't cause this. www.theguardian.com/media/2025/m...

submitted 12 days ago • 18 comments

He’s literally travelling by Papal Fiat.

submitted 12 days ago • 48 comments

It strikes me that not everyone has read Quentin Crisp on the sex lives of American GIs stationed in London in the Second World War, and that's a shame.

submitted 12 days ago • 15 comments

These are fab!

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Intriguing blog. We look at medieval towns/villages at GCSE and it blows their minds how small everything was in terms to population. My students live in a mini new town of no importance. Yet it has a population of the biggest medieval city.

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

I'm convinced that at least some of the cultural resentment at academia is rooted on the completely mistaken belief that we all are have permanent job security, make six figure salaries to teach 4 hours a week with summers off, and get to spend all our time Thinking, capital-t.

submitted 13 days ago • 24 comments

ME: if we vote you in I want to see a left wing policy LABOUR: ok! 🌵 ME: that's a cactus. try again. left wing policy. LABOUR: here is a left wing policy🌵 ME: no that's still a cactus. listen closely. I need you to show me a left wing policy LABOUR: 🌵🌵🌵🌵 starve the disableds

submitted 13 days ago • 6 comments

I guess you just have to ask yourself whether, at any time in history, a government and its client media scapegoating a minority group for all of society's ills ever turned out to be right.

submitted 13 days ago • 4 comments

This made me cheer. It gets directly at a problem I’ve often noticed: people don’t fundamentally understand what a historian does.

submitted 13 days ago • 22 comments