It is very hard to see what the tories think they are trying to do. They face an opposition which, while not particularly progressive, is a lot more progressive than they are. This opposition is also much more popular than they are. So what are they doing? They’re proposing policies which are even more extreme than the ones they’ve already enacted. Why?

On the 19th April, 2024, Rishi Sunak gave a speech. For reasons which escape me, what he said might still matter.

I am unfortunate enough to have Mel Stride as my MP. On the 21st of March, 2024, he said some really unpleasant things about mental health. I was going to write to him, but there’s just no point: someone who can say what he said is not someone with whom it is useful to communicate. Below is the draft of what I wrote.

Here’s the deal: if I like the thing you make I will pay you for it, because people deserve to get paid for their work. If you then turn around and infest the thing I have paid you for with advertising which I cannot avoid, then fuck you.

Everyone wants to believe in conspiracies. Some people believe that the alarmingly far-right government of the UK is conspiring with shadowy plutocrats to enrich themselves. That government itself apparently believes in the ludicrous ‘15-minute city’ conspiracy theory, and that something variously known ‘the blob’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ is working furiously against them. Trump supporters in the US believe in more conspiracy theories than it’s easy to count. Their opponents believe that Trump is a sock puppet for Putin, or in various conspiracies called ‘disaster capitalism’. People on all sides think the Jews or, perhaps, the Muslims, are behind everything. Or is it the climate scientists?

Some time ago I wrote a post with empirical evidence for sexism in computer science. I’ve since realised that the data I used then is part of a much larger data set maintained by the US National Center for Education Statistics: here are some more pictures of their data.

Does the UK government’s incompetent response to COVID–19, as exposed by the enqury, offer any lessons for the future?

Symbol nicknames allows multiple names to refer to the same symbol in supported implementations of Common Lisp. That may or may not be useful.

Here is the British government’s new ‘plan for drivers’. And here is a quote from it:

We will explore options to stop local councils using so-called “15-minute cities”, such as in Oxford, to police people’s lives

We are now ruled by people pushing conspiracy theories: either knowingly because they think that provoking further divisions in society will keep them in power, or because they believe the conspiratorial nonsense they’re peddling to be true. I don’t know which is more terrifying, but in either case these people are grotesquely unfit to be in office.

Wayback machine link because rewriting history is pretty much certain here.

The government of Britain wishes to stop councils — councils elected by local people — implementing schemes where essential amenities are always within a 15-minute walk for their voters.