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The team gets physical with PragerU and discusses sex, dogma, and the obsession with wokeism.

I’m delighted to announce a series of new shows* coming in early 2024 – alongside the brilliant Henry Normal. We’re coming to Bath, Bexhill, Bury St Edmonds, Exeter, Ilkley, Leeds, London, Monmouth, Nottingham, Oxford, Salford, Stroud, Sunderland, Warwick and Wolverhampton. Tickets will go on general sale at 10am this Friday. I’ll send around links to…

Many academics in both Ukraine and the UK are horrified by the Putin-enabling posturing of far-left factions within the UCU

Open letter to the UK government from over 80 national and international civil society organisations, academics and cyberexperts raising concerns about the serious threat to the security of private and encrypted messaging posed by the Online Safety Bill. To: Chloe Smith, Secretary of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technologycc: Tom Tugendhat, Minister of State […]

Safeguard private communication Over 80 civil society organisations, academics and cyber experts from 23 countries have written to the UK government to raise the alarm about proposed powers in the Online Safety Bill. These powers would require the scanning of encrypted messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Signal, posing a threat to chat services which […]

The firehose of falsehood still spews Missed some things while on the road over the weekend. Something about an aborted revolt in Russia, was it? Jay Rosen’s comment on Anne Applebaum’s essay at The Atlantic made me look. Russian citizens along the Wagner Group parade route to Moscow came out to gawk, shake hands, and take selfies with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenaries. “Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime,” Applebaum writes: The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose.

Prigozhin's mercenary force is not a private military company but a sub-division of the Russian Ministry of Defence. So what is really going on with the short lived mutiny?

Friends, the days of mental illness being too taboo to discuss are over. The time when mental illness existed in the shadows, stigmatized or never acknowledged, is gone. We are finally talking openly about various psychological conditions, and I’m so glad that we are, because it’s made it a whole lot easier for me to blame every societal problem on people with mental illnesses.

It used to be that if you wanted to discover the causes of homelessness, you had to use complex statistical methods drawing on housing costs, employment, social ties, and migration to gain an understanding of what was happening. Now that we’re no longer living in the dark age of hiding mental illness away, all we need to do is see somebody who “looks weird” talking to themselves in front of a Jiffy Lube to know exactly what causes homelessness: people with mental illnesses.

The current Tánaiste (deputy prime minister), foreign minister and defence minister, Mícheál Martin, is using his last eighteen months in office to coordinate a shift in Ireland’s foreign policy away from an eroded notion of neutrality to align more closely with an increasingly interventionist EU and an expanded NATO. His alma mater, University College Cork, […]

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Rick and Morty, TWD: Dead City, AEW/NJPW, The Sandman, Frasier, Secret Invasion, SDCC 2023, and more!

In a bonus episode for supporting subscribers, an interview with a New York-based organizer about the four year campaign to pass the BPRA.

A new study shows how the effects of austerity on women and children are now being compounded by the cost of living crisis in Northern Ireland

Meet the forest that a community brought back to life on the slopes of a volcano in a hopeful story of ecological restoration

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

In the face of global challenges, Augustine offers a way between the despair of pessimism and the presumption of optimism

- by Michael Lamb

Read at Aeon

It’s true that self-confidence is beneficial, but the way in which it’s often taught is misguided and can be harmful

- by Eddie Brummelman & Kelly Ziemer

Read at Psyche

According to the research, ministers have pushed through changes to Britain’s political system that pose 'considerable risks' for the country's democratic future

Last week – RBA wants to destroy the livelihoods of 140,000 Australian workers – a shocking indictment of a failed state (June 22, 2023) – I wrote about the sense of being in a parallel universe when one reads official statements from the Bank of Japan and juxtaposes them against the stream of statements coming…

Bill Mitchell explains how MMT sees the effect of Interest Rate changes on the economy

There's been a complex crackdown in West Asia and North Africa on banning Queer iconography.

My grandma's fine set of plates is no match for my tupperwares.

Numerous serious casualties were incurred during Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s supposed “coup.” The Grayzone offers an in-depth look at the massacre carried out by some of America’s top Russia experts against their own credibility. When Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a supposed revolt against Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 23, sending his forces on a march toward Moscow following a series of tirades against the country’s defense establishment, Washington’s expert class overflowed with an orgy of regime change […]

The post The real casualties of Russia’s ‘civil war’: the Beltway expert class first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post The real casualties of Russia’s ‘civil war’: the Beltway expert class appeared first on The Grayzone.

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