All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.

We are about to get a crash course in whether it’s really wanton household spending driving up inflation. Cause ya know unemployment is high, there’s barely any govt assistance to weather this storm and somehow… well somehow inflation will still be our fault.

Yes. The birds are the problem.

It's his birthday.

Top 25 finish at Southend Reserve #parkrun this morning.

What do you mean 21 of 22? shhhhhhhh. Still a perfect morning.

@parkrunnewzealand.bsky.social

The novel "Lolita" is a really valuable cultural artefact because within one sentence of anyone talking about it you can tell if their hard drive needs to be impounded

Just maybe Lolita is in fact a shit book and Nabokov was nothing special: just another perv.

Just one more sleep until #parkrun

Gotta keep hanging onto the good things.

Very timely piece by my colleague @nihilcurtis.bsky.social

A white van door in the foreground with parkrun flags in the background

Not a bad free camping spot for a #parkrun morning.

Loved Morrinsville Recreation Ground.

America’s Pro-Disease Movement How the Trump administration is worsening a public-health crisis

In this episode, Alan Bernstein, the director of global health at the University of Oxford, discusses with David Frum how misinformation, distrust in science, and extremist rhetoric are fueling a deadly resurgence of preventable diseases in the U.S.

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.

Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

it’s weird that we’re staring down the second unprecedented economic catastrophe in five years and instead of a novel coronavirus that will go on to kill millions of people this one is just “no one was willing to tell him no”

Free Speech Union plans hostile takeover of InternetNZ And it could just be one part of a wider strategy to shape the public conversation

Reminder you have until midnight tonight (Monday the 31st) to join Internet New Zealand to be able to vote at the AGM in July, and help stop the Free Speech Union and Hobson's Pledge taking over the organisation
www.feijoadispatch.nz/p/free-speec...

Being an academic as universities seem to be losing our social license is a weird place to be. Universities are absolutely integrated into power networks, but simultaneously those networks are terrified of the potential of critical scholarship and informed free thinkers.

Guardian headline reading "British Museum is right to keep Parthenon marbles says new trustee". Headline is superimposed on photo of tourists viewing Elgin marbles

You'd really think that if we have to keep having this conversation it could be more nuanced than "museums are important"

But here we are. In 2025.

Old and busted: sugar and spice and everything nice

New hotness: Salty, defiant, and extremely noncompliant

That does not look fantastic

Congressman Al Green on X: "Today, the House GOP censured me for speaking out for the American people against @POTUS’s plan to cut Medicaid. I accept the consequences of my actions, but I refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice. #WeShallOvercome https://t.co/sVklRmPCJl" / X Today, the House GOP censured me for speaking out for the American people against @POTUS’s plan to cut Medicaid. I accept the consequences of my actions, but I refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice. #WeShallOvercome https://t.co/sVklRmPCJl

Today, the House GOP censured me for speaking out for the American people against @POTUS’s plan to cut Medicaid. I accept the consequences of my actions, but I refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice. #WeShallOvercome x.com/repalgreen/s...

A white board with text and sticky notes

Fantastic first lecture in my Anth 377 class defining "democratic values" & discussing meaning making as a class. #anthro #socanth

Really looking forward to this semester after meeting these students.

‘Move fast and break things’ only works for people who have never had to clean up after themselves.

Giving people legal permission to attack other people in supermarkets is not a solution to anything.

i think "an effective altruist is personally denying twenty million people their HIV medications despite a court order telling him to send the money" is a pretty good summary of effective altruism as a real world philosophy

This morning at Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) HQ in DC as mandatory return to office began, this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source.

Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.

Rainbow community stands against Tamaki, Destiny Church at Auckland's Albert Park Members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community gathered in Auckland's Albert Park today to protest Brian Tamaki's demonstrations which targeted pride events last week.

Thank you @papa.org.nz for today's absolutely soul-filling gathering <3

www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

can we please retire the word "ex-pat" for white people? the word you're looking for is immigrant, you just don't think it applies to you

It is unclear to me how Lu*on thinks the economy works.

You can't get milk from a cow you're starving.

And if you starve it to death, there's not even a lot of meat for your vulture friends to "capitalize" on.

A parkrun token "113" in a person's hand

#parkrun makes Saturdays worthwhile. Loved visiting Southern Pathway and running into two parkrun friends from around the motu & pacific

So. The conclusion simply is this. On the basis of the documents provided the Minister didn't like humanities research, personally, and decided to defund it on that basis. That's it. Nothing in the record suggests any advice taken on impact or importance. Pure ideology with no evidential backing.

"He has 4 billion dollars, he's not going to steal your money" is an argument someone either makes in complete bad faith or in total ignorance of how the rich have conducted themselves throughout the entirety of modern civilization.