The Proslogion of St Anselm – from the Office of Readings for Friday in the first week of Advent, quoted by Br John Mayhead in his Advent Bulletin for Turvey Abbey. "Come now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. Put aside now your weighty cares and leave your wearisome toils. Abandon yourself a little to God and rest for a little in Him."
Met by the Beloved – Meditation (in CAC’s Daily Meditations) by Mirabai Starr, from her Saint John of the Cross: Luminous Darkness. “It is time to enter the desert. You may not take anything with you: not your insulated bottle of cool water, not a knife, not a single raisin. You may not take a sleeping bag. No cell phone or map. Leave the sunscreen behind. Burn. It is time to enter into utter unknowing – and, by unknowing, come to know truly. The mind is an impediment on this journey. The senses are misleading. Leave them on the porch when you slip away in the middle of the night. Be very quiet as you close the door behind you. The members of your household will not understand your quest. They will try to keep you home. Leave. Go now. No one claims this will be an easy journey. Your senses will thirst for the familiar juices that remind them of a time when the Holy One fed them from her own breasts. The intellect will grope around in the dark, panicking. Pay no attention. Walk through the night. Sit very still in the daytime and watch the miracle of your breath as it quietly fills your lungs and empties them again. Spend forty days in the wilderness, and forty nights. Don’t give up. The worst that will happen is that you will die. Die to your fragmented self and be reborn into your divine self. Enter knowing through the needle of unknowing. In silence, finally hear the voice of the Holy One. In surrendering to sheer emptiness, be filled with the Beloved at last.”
‘A mini Battle of Cable Street’: the English neighbourhoods still grappling with the meaning of the flags – article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Stirchley is a modest kind of [south Birmingham suburb], sandwiched between better known (and better off) areas such as Bournville and Moseley, but there is plenty of evidence here of the lively community spirit that last year resulted in the area being named the best place to live in the Midlands.... Scratch just below the surface, however, and there are signs of something much less harmonious going on.... On at least four occasions since September, members of a Birmingham-based group called Raise The Colours (RTC), wearing branded hard hats and hi-vis vests and using a cherrypicker, have hung hundreds of Saint George and union flags from Stirchley’s lamp-posts, as part of a widespread campaign they say is intended to 'fill the skyline with unity and patriotism'. On each occasion a group of local residents, objecting to what they describe as territory-marking as part of an anti-immigrant movement, have taken the flags down, but say they have been subject to harassment and intimidation when they have tried to protest.... Flag-flying has faded from the political agenda in England since the febrile summer months, when tensions over migration and an emboldening of the far right were accompanied by a wave of flags being erected in streets across the country, with the vocal approval of some residents and despite the often silenced objections of others. But in many communities, including some where flags are no longer so visible, this has remained a fraught and highly divisive issue, even if strikingly few politicians are willing to speak about it. In the absence of political leadership, some neighbourhood groups say it has been left to them to push back against an organised and well funded movement that, while certainly galvanising support among many individuals, has been driven and encouraged by figures with links to the far right.... Anne, 66, from Walkley in Sheffield, said the disputes over flags near her home have felt like 'a mini Battle of Cable Street'” – referencing the 1936 clashes in London’s East End when neighbours united to resist a march by fascists. Walkley has been the scene of angry standoffs between a group identifying itself on Facebook as Reform Sheffield East, which erected many flags in the area, and a group of local residents who did not want them. 'We really do feel that it is designed to intimidate, and it is intimidating,' said Anne, who has lived in the neighbourhood for more than 20 years. 'A lot of us feel – and I think the evidence bears this out – that when these flags start going up, people then feel emboldened to say the sort of things that they haven’t felt able to say for 30 years.'... 'We know what these flags are[,' said Andrew Scarsdale, spokesperson for a group called Sheffield Communities against Racism and Fascism (Scarf). ']This is not like flags coming out for the football. This has been a deliberately toxified symbol. Everyone knows what it means, including the people who put the flags up.' A YouGov poll last month found the majority of ethnic minority adults now see the Saint George flag as a racist symbol."
‘I don’t take no for an answer’: how a small group of women changed the law on deepfake porn – article by Anna Moore in The Guardian. "For Jodie [* not her real name], watching the conviction of her best friend, and knowing she helped secure it, felt at first like a kind of victory.... Her images and personal details had been posted online without her consent. Jodie’s pictures, along with her real name and correct bio, were used on many platforms for fake dating profiles, then adverts for sex work, then posted on to Reddit and other online forums with invitations to deepfake them into pornography. The results ended up on porn sites. All this continued for almost two years, until Jodie finally worked out who was doing it – her best friend [– and] identified more of his victims, compiled 60 pages of evidence, and presented it to police.... Ultimately he admitted to 15 charges of 'sending messages that were grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing nature' and received a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years. At that time, there were no laws against deepfake intimate image abuse, although experts had been raising the alarm since 2016.... More than two years passed before she felt ready to campaign for change, starting by telling her story on BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 in April 2024. ... Says Jodie, who works in financial services. 'I gradually realised the significance of there being no law which held him accountable for the deepfake abuse – and I wanted change.' Within little more than a year, she had it. The Data (Use and Access) Act, which received royal assent in June, has made the creation of a deepfake intimate image without consent a criminal offence and also criminalised requesting others to create the deepfake image – as her best friend had when he posted images of Jodie on forums. Both now carry a custodial sentence of up to six months, as well as an unlimited fine. It’s a huge victory won fast in a space where progress has been mind-bendingly slow. However, this isn’t the story of a new government determined to tackle an ever-evolving crime. It was fought for and pushed through by a small group of victims and experts who formed a WhatsApp group called Heroes...."
Young people have faced ‘violent indifference’ for decades, Lisa Nandy says – article by Pippa Crerar in The Guardian. "Young people have faced 'violent indifference' from the political establishment for decades, leaving them struggling to navigate a changing world, the culture secretary said as she announced the first national youth strategy in 15 years.... 'At the root of all of this is self-worth … They matter. They haven’t felt that they matter for a very long time, and that, in turn, makes them very vulnerable, whether it’s to gangs exploiting them to run drugs across county lines or it’s these online influencers who are preying on them.' Nandy said: 'There too many people in this country who feel that government is something that exists to stop them from living the lives they want to live, not enabling them to live the lives that they want to live. That’s very acute amongst young people.'”
I used to report from the West Bank. Twenty years after my last visit, I was shocked by how much worse it is today – article by Ewen MacAskill in The Guardian. "I had not planned to write anything about my trip to the West Bank last month. But I changed my mind when I witnessed how much daily life for Palestinians had deteriorated, how dispirited they have become and how much control Israel and its settlers now exercise over the Palestinian population. I had expected conditions for Palestinians would be worse, but not this much worse.... The most serious change since my last visit to the region is the expansion of Israeli settlements. There are 3.3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, including 435,000 in East Jerusalem. The number of Israeli settlers has jumped from 400,000 at the time of the second intifada to more than 700,000 now. But those figures do not convey the extent of the encroachment of the settlements, their suffocating impact, occupying more hilltops overlooking cities, towns and villages and even setting up in the middle of them, behind walls and barbed wire, often only yards from Palestinian homes, and protected by Israeli soldiers.... With a shortage of options from within, many Palestinians see the international community as their best hope, believing a turning point has been reached because of worldwide outrage over the destruction of Gaza. At the Birzeit conference, Saleh Hijazi, a policy coordinator for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, said more pressure had to be put on Israel by ending military ties, enforcing arrest warrants against Israelis accused of war crimes, divestment from complicit companies and expelling Israel from international bodies such as the UN, Fifa and the Olympics.... Such campaigns might work in the long run, as they did in South Africa. But in the short or medium term they will not change the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, caught between a Palestinian Authority that cannot protect them and Israel, with its military clampdown and its out-of-control settlers. While the body count in the West Bank was higher during the second intifada, life was absolutely worse now in every other way, said Budour Hassan, a legal researcher at Amnesty International. Hassan, who is from Nazareth, said: 'Even back then there was hope, maybe. Now the people seem completely desperate. They feel completely abandoned.'”
The volunteers putting their bodies between Israel settlers and a Palestinian village – article by Julian Borger and Quique Kierszenbaum in The Guardian. "Every morning, teenage Israeli settlers drive a herd of goats from their outpost in the hills down into the valley towards the Palestinian village of Ras Ein al-Auja. The local men, women and children retreat inside their huts and tents. Any hint of resistance from a Palestinian is likely to bring in the Israeli army or the border police, confiscation of property and disappearance into the maw of 'administrative' detention without trial, for months or years. Instead, a small group of volunteers step forward each morning to face the descending settlers whose stated aim is to overrun and trample the village with their livestock, and drive Palestinians out. On this particular Saturday, the defenders of Ras Ein al-Auja are four Israeli Jews, a Hungarian and an American, who make a screen around Palestinian homes to shoo away the encroaching animals....It is a tense battle of wits. Chess, but played with goats. Just when the face-off is at its peak, the settlers in the outpost half a kilometre uphill unleash a surprise move – driving a herd of about 50 camels down towards the other end of the village, like a cavalry charge ordered by some unseen hilltop Napoleon, forcing the defenders to split up to confront the new threat.... On the day of the camel charge, a man with a light brown uniform and assault rifle slung around his shoulder arrived at the scene in a white pickup truck and walked alongside the goatherd boys in a show of support. Israeli activists identified the newcomer as Gabriel Kalish, the local security coordinator from Me’vo’ot Yericho, about 9km farther down the Jordan valley. Kalish refused to give an interview to the Guardian, suggesting that he happened to be passing by. However he added: 'This land belongs to the Jews.' Activists have photographed him many times, in a variety of different uniforms, at the site of settler incursions on Palestinian villages.... Since the beginning of the Gaza war, and the radical acceleration of an Israeli land grab across the West Bank, the 700 local people have largely been confined to the village, a string of huts, tents and animal shelters along a creek running east from a spring towards the River Jordan. They have cut down their flocks and bought feed for them, but refused so far to give up Ras Ein al-Auja altogether. 'It was very quiet here before. You could graze your flock east, west, north, south and there was no problem,' Naef Ja’alin, one of the villagers, said. 'The settlers started harassing us years ago, when we were grazing our flock, but that was some distance from the village. But since 7 October [2023], they have come closer and closer, to the point that today nobody takes their herd outside the village.' He said his son slept in his shoes so he is ready to run if the family is attacked at night."
Infighting, broken promises and insisting on the national anthem: what seven months of Reform UK in charge actually looks like – article by Helen Pidd in The Guardian. "Reform won Lancashire on a remarkably flimsy policy platform. Though many candidates spent much of their time posting anti-immigration rhetoric on social media, they were vague about what they would actually change as councillors, perhaps because many of them didn’t understand what a county council can and can’t do. They promised to 'cut bloated salaries' – notably the £236,960 paid to the council’s chief executive – as well as 'woke spending'. They pledged to freeze council tax and fix 'all' potholes. They said no to four-day weeks ...and vowed to reintroduce weekly bin collections, something out of the council’s control. Some of the new councillors seem to have totally different priorities from the party’s leadership. I get chatting to Ellie Close, councillor for Leyland South. She says that more than anything else, she wants to speed up diagnoses for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send).... I say that’s interesting, given Farage’s views on the 'overdiagnoses' of Send which he said was 'creating a class of victims'. She looks shocked and asks me to repeat it. 'I’m not really sure what to say to that,' she says, 'because I’ve got personal experience with it. I think it’s something that we need to currently look at.' It’s clear that following Reform in Lancashire is going to be an interesting ride.... Things start to get crunchy for Reform in Lancashire when they launch a consultation on closing five local authority old people’s homes and day centres and moving residents into the private sector. The buildings are dilapidated, they’re not fit for purpose and they’ll cost millions to fix, is essentially the argument.... The idea immediately provokes controversy and a flurry of bad press, largely thanks to a 92-year-old resident of one of the homes earmarked for closure, who becomes the face and voice of the campaign to keep them open.... For all their talk about fighting the 'woke blob' and bringing common sense back to British politics, it is how Reform handle these human battles that will ultimately decide whether voters judge Farage fit to move into Downing Street. They can mess about with flags and play the national anthem and rail against DEI all they like. But if they shut down your mum’s nursing home, will you vote for them? Sitting at the back of the meeting with a big St George’s flag is Phil Price, whose 93-year-old mother lives in [one of the homes marked for closure].... He believes [the Reform cabinet member in charge of adult social care] does stand to benefit from the care home closures.... 'I’m a paid-up member of Reform and I’m disgusted with him... I wrote to Nigel Farage, because I thought they were going to come and change everything. And all they’re doing is coming in and tearing people’s lives apart.' I put it to him that Reform did make clear they were going to make cuts in Lancashire, to save money and eliminate 'waste': 'If there are parents who have paid into the system all their lives, worked hard for this country, if they’re waste, then we might as well just give up,' he says. I ask him why he voted Reform. 'I thought it was going to change Great Britain for the good. You know, to stop all the boats and everything coming in, and to be fair to the people who’ve paid into the system, who’ve lived here all their lives. All politicians, they’re all in it for themselves, I think. I was really excited about them and now I’m disillusioned.'”
‘Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act – article by Susanna Rustin in The Guardian. "[Celia Brayfield] started aged 19, as an assistant to Shirley Conran – then women’s editor of the Observer. When Conran moved to the Daily Mail, Brayfield went, too. 'The Daily Mail was a very sexist organisation,' she told me. 'I can’t tell you how awful women’s pages were, except for Mary Stott’s at the Guardian. All the news of the women’s movement in America was flooding across the Atlantic, but editors were profoundly uninterested. I always thought you couldn’t mention anything to do with equality before the fifth paragraph. You were radicalised by your workplace.' Brayfield found her own way of reporting on developments in the women’s liberation movement (WLM), as the resurgent feminism of those years was known. She would set up interviews with the movement’s big hitters and then, when editors rejected them, offer them to the underground press instead. A piece on the radical feminist author Kate Millett was published by Frendz magazine, which Rosie Boycott co-edited before launching the women’s movement journal Spare Rib. Along with Conran, Brayfield also joined Women in Media, a pressure group set up in 1970 to challenge sexism in the industry and beyond. Its activities have been largely forgotten, and many of those involved have died. But it played a key role in the campaign to outlaw sex discrimination and enforce equal pay – as well as lobbying bosses for equal opportunities at work. One policy that especially riled them, and became a focus, was the broadcasters’ refusal to let women read the news. The public would find this 'unnatural', the BBC executive Robin Scott told the Daily Mirror in 1972. 'There’s always bad news about and it’s much easier for a man to deal with that.' Fifty years on, such brazen sexism appears comically old-fashioned. But the women’s libbers who confronted it have also often been the butt of jokes. While achievements such as equal pay and the establishment of women’s refuges are recognised, the movement that fought for them has uncertain status. Second-wave feminists, as this generation is known, have been derided as man-hating harridans but also as entitled princesses – with their unrealistic demand for 24-hour nurseries and insufficiently intersectional politics. Their suffragette grandmothers, by contrast, are held up as courageous heroines."
The Divided Mind by Edward Bullmore: do we finally know what causes schizophrenia? – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "Bullmore, a professor of psychiatry, [points to] a bogus divide between the body and the mind. He calls this the 'original schism', bequeathed to us by Descartes, and before him Saint Paul. It falsely suggests that our thoughts and any psychological distress we experience exist in a separate domain, detached from the flesh. Diseases are either 'organic' (like cholera or Alzheimer’s) or 'functional' (like depression or schizophrenia), emerging mysteriously from an entirely healthy body. Practically speaking, this schism cleaves psychiatry from the rest of medicine, meaning the physical health of patients with mental illness is often badly neglected. But it also sets up a division within psychiatry itself, between what has been referred to glibly as the 'mindless' tribe, which believes biology explains everything, and the 'brainless' one, which ignores neuroscience and looks for answers in a person’s upbringing and way of relating to the world.... But science does march on, and in the last four decades there has been loads of it, which Bullmore charts from his vantage point first at the Maudsley in London, where the tribes clustered in different parts of the canteen, and then at the University of Cambridge. One of his touchstones is Susan Sontag’s essay Illness As Metaphor, which showed how any 'intractable and capricious' disease becomes a container for morbid fantasies until such time as we have a better explanation. Now we know that TB is a bacterial infection of the lungs, we don’t tend to think that sensitive poets are naturally more prone to it, as we once did. Schizophrenia may finally be on the cusp of that transformation – something truly momentous, given the puzzle this strange and brutal disease has posed for so long. As Bullmore carefully explains, advances in scanning, maths, genomics and immunology have piled up to give us a clearer understanding of the illness. It is probably caused by the abnormal development of brain networks in childhood and adolescence; this, the evidence suggests, happens under the influence of immune dysfunction, and the cause of that is variation in a broad range of genes, interacting in particular ways with the environment. Triggers can include infections, abuse, social stress or drug use. The emerging picture marries biology and experience in a way that was always inevitable, since they are not really divided at all. The task for the next generation is to translate the science into better outcomes in the real world. Given what we now know, prevention, including better health and social services for mothers and young children, should play a major role."
Capitalism by Sven Beckert: an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "In the early 17th century, the Peruvian city of Potosí billed itself as the 'treasure of the world' and 'envy of kings'. Sprouting at the foot of the Cerro Rico, South America’s most populous settlement produced 60% of the world’s silver, which not only enabled Spain to wage its wars and service its debts, but also accelerated the economic development of India and China. The city’s wealthy elites could enjoy crystal from Venice and diamonds from Ceylon while one in four of its mostly indigenous miners perished. Cerro Rico became known as 'the mountain that eats men'. The story of Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, contains the core elements of Sven Beckert’s mammoth history of capitalism: extravagant wealth, immense suffering, complex international networks, a world transformed. The Eurocentric version of capitalism’s history holds that it grew out of democracy, free markets, Enlightenment values and the Protestant work ethic. Beckert, a Harvard history professor and author of 2015’s prize-winning Empire of Cotton, assembles a much more expansive narrative, spanning the entire globe and close to a millennium.... The word 'capitalism' originated in France in the 1840s, around the same time as its antagonists 'socialism', 'communism' and 'anarchism', but the system was much older. 'Capitalism is a process,' Beckert writes, 'not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end'. He begins tracking the process in the port of Aden in 1150. This vibrant trade hub between Asia and the Middle East, in what is now Yemen, was one of several 'islands of capital' which formed a 'capitalist archipelago'. Inventing new trades like accountancy and insurance, its 'strikingly modern' residents were in the vanguard of a global insurgency.... What they needed was the state’s collaboration. This developed during the 'Great Connecting' between 1450 and 1650, when the discovery of the Americas (named after a slave-owning merchant) finally enabled European traders to challenge Asia and the Middle East while making themselves indispensable. In the era of 'war capitalism', new trade routes and territorial seizures triggered conflict, which trade then financed. Colonialism established capitalism’s 'connected diversity'... If Adam Smith was wrong to see capitalism as human nature manifest, then Beckert overcorrects by presenting it as anti-human: a “rogue artificial intelligence”, an invasive species, an alien force, a supernatural hunger. It is insatiable and unkillable. Beckert calls his book an 'actor-centred history' about a phenomenon 'made by people', but it is ultimately a kind of horror story about a monster that eats men."
Converts by Melanie McDonagh: roads to Rome – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In the five decades between 1910 and 1960, more than half a million people in England and Wales became Catholics. Among them were a clutch of literary stars: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and Graham Greene. But there was a whole host of poets, artists and public intellectuals less known to us today, whose “going over to Rome” provoked envy and dismay. In this thoughtful though brisk book, Melanie McDonagh, a columnist for The Tablet, gives us 16 case histories of Britons who went 'Poping' during the scariest decades of the 20th century. At a time when reason and decency appeared to have been chased out by political extremism and global warfare, it was only natural to long for something solid.... Contrary to lurid Protestant fantasies, Catholic priests were not on the hunt for celebrity scalps to 'lure' into their incense-fugged, whiskey-sodden clutches. Again and again, McDonagh’s converts report being taken aback by the way in which their approaches to Brompton Oratory or Chelsea’s Farm Street Church were met with a cool equanimity and slightly humiliating lack of interest.... The aesthetic pleasures of Roman Catholicism also turned out to be largely illusory. Unless attending one of the smart London churches, converts had to get used to worshipping in ugly modern buildings alongside largely working-class congregations.... If you wanted magnificent buildings, glorious hymns, beautiful vernacular liturgy and the sort of clergyman whom you could invite to your club then you would be better off staying with the Established Church. Then there was the inevitable censure. When Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie tartly declared that 'only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics' she was voicing a general prejudice. Also commonplace were charges of moral turpitude (it didn’t help that Wilde, Bosie Douglas, Aubrey Beardsley and many other 1890s decadents had converted). To become a Catholic was to invite suspicion that you were mad, secretly gay or spying for a foreign power. Despite these penalties, few converts seem to have regretted their decision although, as McDonagh points out, it is hard to know for certain."
More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds – article by Aisha Down in The Guardian. "More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are 'AI slop' – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found. The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop. ... The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop.... Bandar Apna Dost, the most-viewed channel in the study, is based in India and now has 2.4bn views. It features the adventures of an anthropomorphic rhesus monkey and a muscular character modelled off the Incredible Hulk who fights demons and travels on a helicopter made of tomatoes. Kapwing estimated that the channel could make as much as $4.25m.... Pouty Frenchie, based in Singapore, has 2bn views and appears to target children. It chronicles the adventures of a French bulldog – driving to a candy forest, eating crystal sushi – many of them set to a soundtrack of children’s laughter. Kapwing estimates it makes nearly $4m a year.... Meanwhile, The AI World, based in Pakistan, contains AI-generated shorts of catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, with titles like Poor People, Poor Family, and Flood Kitchen. Many of these videos are set to a soundtrack called Relaxing Rain, Thunder & Lightning Ambience for Sleep. The channel itself has 1.3bn views.... For some, it’s a living. And while new, attention-grabbing ideas – such as exploding pressure cookers – constantly emerge, when it comes to AI slop, human creativity matters far less than the algorithms that distribute the content on Meta and YouTube. 'These websites are huge A/B testing machines just by their nature,' said [Max Read, a journalist who has written extensively on AI slop.] 'Almost anything that you can think of, you could already find on Facebook. So the question is, how do you find the things that are kind of doing well, and then how do you scale that? How do you make 10 of them?'”
From shrimp Jesus to erotic tractors: how viral AI slop took over the internet – article by Aisha Down in The Guardian. "In 2024, [AI slop] began to achieve peak cultural moments. Notable among these was shrimp Jesus, a viral trend in which Facebook was briefly flooded with AI-generated images of the deity fused with crustaceans. Shrimp Jesus was quickly followed by hallmarks of the AI slop genre: videos of old women claiming to celebrate their 122nd birthday, and mini soap operas about the dramatic lives of cats. In 2025, the flood continued, growing more uncanny and more explicitly copyright-violating. This spring saw the advent of Ghiblification – that is, a trend in which users from Nayib Bukele to the White House rendered images, including of deportations, in the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.... Other AI slop moments followed: a spate of videos of AI-generated obese people participating in the Olympics, pressure cookers exploding, more cats. Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of the military junta in Burkina Faso, became the centrepiece of an AI slop cult featuring videos of Justin Bieber singing on the streets of Ouagadougou. In some ways, AI slop has improved. Gone – mostly – are the days of six-fingered hands and missing limbs that characterised the output of early image generators. In some ways, though, AI slop has hardly changed at all. It is still uncanny and contextless, still aimed directly at the amygdala, still chasing virality by virtue of having the lowest barriers to entry imaginable: no plot, no exposition, surreal imagery and cats, cats, cats."
Stop thinking – Substack post by Karl Schroeder, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Supernormal stimuli are exaggerated versions of natural stimuli that trigger stronger responses than the original stimuli they’re based on.... The classic example comes from Tinbergen’s experiments with birds. He found that birds would preferentially incubate artificially enlarged eggs or eggs with more vivid markings over their own natural eggs, even though the artificial ones were impractically large. Similarly, baby birds would beg more vigorously for food from fake parent beaks that were larger and more colorful than real ones.... We humans love supernormal stimuli. Think roller coasters. Spicy food. Tear-jerker movies. Public hangings. Pornography. Doomscrolling. – And, most impactful at this exact moment: LLM AIs.... What ChatGPT and the other AIs are doing is hijacking this instinct by performing as a conversational partner who has immediate availability, infinite patience, broad knowledge, whom we can access without the social cost of appearing ignorant, and whose responses are tailored to engage to our specific view of the world. Talking to an LLM entails no social risk, judgment, or interpersonal complexity, yet yields the pleasurable sensation of ideas 'clicking' without the friction of genuine disagreement. Every single one of these qualities is a pressure point vulnerable to supernormal stimulation.... I’m not here to throw LLMs under the bus. Remember, verstand [understanding] is incredibly useful and important. Hegel’s faculty of understanding is what gets us through 99% of our day. Having a tool that can help you do that is worth its weight in gold. It’s the other 1% that really matters, though. This where the Trolley Problems of your real life loom in a world of unexpected problems... That 1% is also where truly new ideas come from... an LLM is not going to help you recognize or generate a thought that is entirely new, since as I said, its ‘thinking’ process relies entirely on the existing connections between ideas. ... When you’re using an AI, picture yourself as a poor hapless bird sitting on a really big, super-speckled ball that you know in your heart of hearts isn’t a real egg. Your real eggs are there, scattered about you – unfinished ideas you can’t even name yet, much less ask some entity about; people who intrigue you but who you don’t know how to approach; movements and religious ideas that have struck a chord in you, but that you don’t know how to engage with. Raise your eyes, and you’ll apprehend a world of liminal things – undefined, unnamed, awaiting your particular mind and experience to render them real for others. Only you can name what’s really fresh in the world. Try moving to a different egg. It may not seem as rewarding at first. But unlike that big shiny one, it might one day hatch."
‘Of course he abused pupils’: ex-Dulwich teacher speaks out about Farage racism claims – article by Daniel Boffey in The Guardian. "It was 1981 and Nigel Farage was turning 17. He was already a figure of some controversy, as would become a lifelong habit, among the younger pupils and staff at Dulwich college in south-east London. 'I remember it was either in a particular English lesson or a particular form period that his name came up,' said Chloë Deakin, then a young English teacher, of a discussion with a class of 11- and 12-year-olds. 'There was something about bullying, and he was being referred to, quite specifically, as a bully. And I thought: "Who is this boy?"' Deakin conferred with colleagues in the staff room who corroborated accounts of harassment of fellow pupils and of Farage’s apparent fascination with the far right, including claims that he had been 'goose-stepping' on combined cadet force marches.... Despite the chatter in the playground and staffroom, Farage was put on a draft list of prefects by the headteacher... 'So when I heard that Farage’s name was on the finalised prefect list, I was appalled and that was why I wrote independently to [the headteacher], because I felt strongly about it – I still do,' Deakin recalled. Deakin’s letter of June 1981, first revealed by the Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick in a report in 2013, is uncompromising. She has never spoken before of this episode with the letter – written after Farage’s 17th birthday – emerging only as a result of her having given a copy of it to a senior teacher at the time, as was the practice at the school. She wrote: 'You will recall that at the recent and lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a "fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect" invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room...' The letter concluded: 'You will appreciate that I regard this as a very serious matter. I have often heard you tell our senior boys that they are the nation’s future leaders. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that these leaders are enlightened and compassionate.'... Deakin, now 74,... was not personally acquainted with Farage and did not see or hear his alleged racism and antisemitism, she said. But her memories of boys’ complaints of bullying, the subsequent testimony of the staff, the contemporaneous letter – written by her decades before Farage gained public prominence – and the sheer weight of credible allegations in recent weeks should leave no room for doubt for the public, she said. 'Of course Farage directly abused pupils,' Deakin said. 'His was the only name I recall boys mentioning to me.'”
I knew all about the NHS’s challenges and flaws. But then as a patient, I saw the love and the magic – article by Anne Perkins in The Guardian. "The NHS sits at the heart of politics and for most of my career in journalism, and charting the crises, the numbers, the arguments, the possibilities and the costs was a staple of my work. You can write all that, you can read about all that, but it can feel very different when events dictate that you cross the line from commentator to patient; when, like me, you pitch up as someone who arrives as an emergency, with a condition that might require major surgery and at least a week of post-operative hospital care – or might just go away of its own accord.... At its heart is the sense of a shared destination. It’s like getting on a bus, maybe not the sleekest model and definitely overloaded, but we’re all on the journey together. Everyone who’s seriously and unexpectedly ill comes here. Everyone. You don’t lie in your narrow hospital bed imagining the four-star facilities you might be enjoying if only you had more dosh, because it’s odds on that if it’s an emergency, that person too is just behind the curtain hanging limply to your right....If you haven’t experienced it, it is hard to explain the effect of witnessing this level not only of professionalism and patience, but of love. There are studies that show that for all the criticism and brickbats aimed at the NHS, those who use it most are the most positive about it. When you’re there and watch, you understand.... If we’re here, we’re in the same boat. We are in some way hurt, or we are supporting someone who is hurt, or maybe we’re making good on earlier kindness. It’s not magic. Everyone is still themselves, but softer. Warmer. Maybe even happier. Where else in our angry and atomised nation does this happen?"
Number of people who say Britons must be born in UK is rising, study shows – article by Eleni Courea in The Guardian. "Although a majority of the public still believe being British is rooted in shared values, a growing proportion see it as a product of ethnicity, birthplace and ancestry, according to analysis carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and shared with the Guardian. About one-third of people (36%) thought a person must be born in Britain to be truly British, up from one in five (19%) in 2023, a YouGov poll carried out this month for the thinktank found. Supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK held the most extreme views of any party backers, with 71% saying that having British ancestry was a prerequisite for someone to be truly British, and 59% saying they believed the nation was an ethnic, not a civic, community. Strikingly, the findings suggest a significant proportion of Farage’s supporters believe being white is an important national characteristic, and that Britain has become too ethnically diverse. More than a third (37%) of Reform UK voters said they would be prouder of Britain if there were fewer people from minority ethnic backgrounds in a decade’s time, and 10% said it was important to have white skin to be a good British citizen."
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