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

One thing AI is actually amazing at is languages. I’ve been asking it to read out loud Arabic news as I’m trying to keep up my fus7a and it’s unlike any other language tool. And chatGPT can also speak and recognise and hold a conversation in pretty much all spoken Arabic dialects too

submitted 11 days ago • 3 comments

Trump is emboldened to announce he will commit war crime because the global north establishment — for 15-months — decided that Israel can act with total impunity. They destroyed the pretence of entire rules based order. And now they have the audacity to cry about consequences.

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Brilliant as ever is Alex de Waal in LRB on Famine Classification in Gaza www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

It’s a real struggle to not just collapse into a deep depression; always see myself as an optimist but everywhere is burning, the left is busy organising “networks” and “spaces” and a continued rightward slide feels inevitable. Feeling particularly doom-pilled today.

submitted 16 days ago • 5 comments

Google Earth / Maps is now updating its satellite imagery of Gaza. We now have a top-down view of some of the worst atrocities committed since the Second World War.

submitted 17 days ago • 4 comments

For Development Studies / Academic BlueSky (if it exists here) … our new paper on the politics of social assistance in Lebanon is out, with the BASIC programme @ids.ac.uk It explores how Lebanon’s fractured social contract remained in place during the fiscal crisis. www.ids.ac.uk/publications...

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Michael Burawoy was killed on Monday in a hit and run. Horrendous. Burawoy was one of the greatest sociologists of labour. www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/04/o...

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

The main takeaway from this is that it confirms proscription in Britain is a political tool not objective application of law: Countless journalists detained for writing about Palestine, but these two jokers can have a chat with the leader of a still proscribed organisation.

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

Aid — since it was formalised and linked to gov — has always served as a state arm. Trump merging USAID to the DoS is an acknowledgement of that fact. The same as DFID into FCDO. In some sense, this was inevitable, given the decline of activism and rise of donor-power. We need a new model.

submitted 20 days ago • 2 comments

Over at the other place, people seem to have not heard of a printer.

submitted 21 days ago • 4 comments

In-person course announcement! Develop your knowledge and skills to bring participatory action research into your social change work. Using Participatory Action Research to Improve Development Practice. 📅 May 12 to 16, 2025 📍 IDS, Brighton, UK Apply now👉 bit.ly/3B7s0gS

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

Free speech protects us from tyrants, gifts us an open society, free debate, and scientific progress. Pretty shit, then, that what its advocates actually mean is being racist online and bullying trans people.

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Maybe #Labour needs to focus on inequality & improve the lives of ordinary people instead of obssessing with runways, bats & top-down growth models. #UK www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

What will Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE possibly do without USAID!? ….. Trump should really fix the American education system. Oh well.

submitted 21 days ago • 2 comments

These people cannot conceptualise that if your democratic "choice" is between neoliberal A Team or neoliberal B team, with slightly different visions of how to tinker around the edges, then, perhaps, it doesn't feel like a choice. In this nightmare, an authoritarian who promises change is appealing.

submitted 21 days ago • 5 comments

Reform’s surge is easy to understand. It is the same as Brexit. People are fed up. The economic model Britain has pursued since the 1980s has failed. They want change — any change — and they don’t trust establishment parties to deliver it. Reform is an empty vessel, it just means “different”.

submitted 22 days ago • 4 comments

You don’t hear much from the Stameroids these days — I think some might finally accepted you can’t just wear a nice suit and tell the economy to grow. And others, who believed he secretly had a plan, have learned that isn’t the case. It’s a shame this folly will cost us fascism.

submitted 22 days ago • 4 comments

After 15 months of destroying Gaza, the UK reiterates that "Israel is an important regional partner for the UK" and that "the Ministry of Defence routinely conducts bilateral Defence engagement with the Israel Defense Forces". #DCUKparliament

submitted 25 days ago • 11 comments

The UK government defends Israeli abuses against Palestinians in a variety of ways. Here, foreign minister Hamish Falconer can only refer to "reports" of Israel's mistreatment of detainees. #DCUKparliament

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

Please, for the love of god, don’t vote for any political party in Britain that threatens to privatise the NHS.

submitted 22 days ago • 31 comments

For around five years (2015-2020), many countries in the global north had a choice between (democratic) socialism or barbarism. Welcome to barbarism.

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Unsure if this is a parody. “Let the adults handle politics now” gestures to the burning planet granted to us by these ‘adults’

submitted 22 days ago • 2 comments

The problem here is if you allow machines to learn then they will ... learn

submitted 23 days ago • 3 comments

Spot on Centrists have brought this all about by ignoring the needs of the majority of the population. . .who simply want fair pay, decent public services . . .etc

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

Liberal institutions—from centrist parties to multilateral orgs—are still fixated on ‘restoring order. But their ‘order’ birthed right-wing authoritarianism, enabled 15 months of genocide, eroded the power of labour, and rewarded capital. This isn’t a strategy. It’s a death cult

submitted 24 days ago • 30 comments

One of the things Britain is good at is universities. We punch above our weight and they’re key economic drivers across the country. So you’ll never guess which sector the government is going to allow to collapse next?

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

What liberal centrists get wrong is they believe right wing populists like Trump are trashing the international rules based order. No. It was trashed by liberal centrist global north governments who funded, armed, and ran political cover for a 15-month genocide.

submitted 27 days ago • 2 comments

My mum has a brief cameo on this report (pushing the trolly) This is the hospice where she works as a nurse. It has been absolutely devastated by the governments refusal to find end-of-life-care properly 👇 t.co/rFB1taMSpo

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

Establishment liberals are mindless zombies with no theory of capitalism’s collapse. The weirdo-right has a theory, but it’s something like ‘too many genders,’ ‘not enough neo-gothic buildings,’ and 'more crusades.’ We're stuck between zombies and wacky incels.

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

Women are often called "saviours" and "victims" in climate change debates. Read more about why this is a problem in this article co-authored by IDS fellow Deepta Chopra 👇 theconversation.com/women-are-se...

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

I suppose one hopeful outcome of the next few years is the rest of the world decides it’s had quite enough of the USA and instead builds a new alliance and institutions outside of an isolationist Trump administration.

submitted 33 days ago • 2 comments

Why was there an executive order from Trump to withdraw from WHO? well one can draw a direct line from the rapid circulation of conspiracy theory among his MAGA base on Twitter etc to that eventual decision, which will significantly harm public health. Ban Twitter.

submitted 33 days ago • 2 comments