June 2016

One thing the referendum campaign has cheered me up about, paradoxically, is the social acceptability of outright racism. One thing it’s profoundly depressed me about is the social acceptability of outright bullshit. Consider the Leavers’ arguments about immigration. If you’re not going to make some essentialist argument that foreigners are just bad – i.e. to…

Read More The public rejects racism, but sadly you can’t say the same for bullshit

Martin Kettle is all worked up to learn that Michael Gove is either a cynic or an extremist, now his extremism, or cynical pose of same, affects an issue he cares about. Where was Kettle when Gove wrote a whole book about the secret rulers of the world’s scheme to hand Europe over to the…

Read More Yes, Michael Gove is an extremist and has been for years

Here is a really superb paper on the 50 cent party, the Chinese Communist Party’s army of loyalist Internet trolls. The researchers scraped literally millions of below-the-line comments and Weibo posts, hired Chinese students to identify the 50-centers in random samples and classify the posts by subject, checked that the students, who worked independently, agreed…

Read More This is what the mandate of heaven looks like

It’s pretty depressing that British politicians are shallow enough all to glom onto the same risible fad at the same time: It’s a thing. It’s definitely a thing. Someone is telling them to stand like this. pic.twitter.com/RcvelFujVa — SimonNRicketts (@SimonNRicketts) June 2, 2016 It’s even more depressing that the risible fad in question is also…

Read More This one weird trick will completely fail to replicate the previous experimenter’s results