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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The standard political compass is how people relate to politics, but not how power relates to politics e.g. Stalin may have chosen to distribute resources, but he had near absolute power over them. For me, an effective representation of how power relates to politics is a 1d scale, democracy.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

For me, power utilises the greatest available opportunity to concentrate and then expresses itself in all regards. You can't expect social liberalism from concentrated power over resources, and you can't expect democratisation of resources from concentrations of power over people's lives.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Scrapping the triple lock to pay for an NCS is very "robbing Peter to pay Peter" austerity economics.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'll guess we'll see if there's any meaningful shift on the dire human/civil rights and economic model positions of the Starmer era. Nothing substantial in the speech that would suggest that there will be though.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I read the transcript of the speech. Maybe a little overly cynical a take, but it all looks calibrated to be as little as possible to hold onto the vibes based support that has come back in the new leader bounce. Nothing at the scale to convince the more engaged support Starmer lost.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"Free speech" is just the abuse of a - justifiably powerful - phrase associated with state suppression of expression for cry-bully purposes.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

My own previous - similar - take on "cancel culture" was that "cancellation" was nothing new, it just used to be a power concentrated in few hands, and what we've seen is their response to ordinary people encroaching on that power.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It is their greatest trick, but those "influential people" are both notoriously shit at tech and thirsty af for alignment to wealth.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Numerology parading as psephology

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It's almost like centrist governance tries to sell the idea that government is bad at things.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Given all the factors and flux atm, this stuff is pretty much just numerology parading as psephology.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Pretty sure that if I grab a knife out the block, step out my front door, close my eyes, and launch it into the street, then I'm criminally liable for any damage or harm it causes, even though I don't intend any specific damage or harm to occur.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Just endlessly trying the old incantations, their meaning lost to time.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Centrism is just bereft. It doesn't understand how or why it got to where it was, why its strategies used to work, why it's in decline, or what to do about that.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

But with the fascists, there's no edge of acceptable debate, and there's always further for them to go to keep the point they want debating debated. The same strategy isn't just ineffective, it's counter-productive because all you're doing is validating it as a point of debate.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I think it's a strategy that evolved when centrist politics had near hegemony and the so-called "Overton window" was narrow. The other party takes a position to the edge of acceptable debate and by sidling up to it that nullifies it as a point of debate as the other party has nowhere else to go.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Like, every other president is dwarfed as a person by the office they held, so absolutely fair that they don't tend to stick their oar in, but for Obama, it would just seem like an utterly abject dereliction of duty at this point to stay on the sidelines.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

As a Brit, I've been wondering about the Obama elephant in the room. Like, he's a singularly potent political figure, particularly in the Democratic Party. Can he really just continue to sit this shit out? Or even just lob a nuclear grade endorsement into the next Dem pres primary and run away?

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My read - from time active in the party during the Corbyn years - is that the "so-called soft-left" are primarily nice to the person they're working with, even at the expense of those their principles should stand up for. A "soft-left" in a party without a right would be a lot less "so-called".

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It would have to be a full realignment of who he is as a politician, and - more than anything else - a "so-called soft-left" type just wouldn't do that to people they know.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

He could put his name alongside Hardie's and Attlee's if he did, but there's no middle ground. Frame centrist media as opponents, expel right-wingers from cabinet and be willing to take their whip away to keep in check those who don't have a better job than MP available to them.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

As far as I read it, Burnham moving significantly left would essentially mean him torching a huge swathe of the relationships (within the party, media, lobbyists, thinktanks, etc) that are ostensibly his career and political status, and convincing his allies to do the same.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Against the scale of what our politics - deeply democratic politics - can be, our own part will always - and should - feel shamefully small (even for those whose part is at a scale we should all aspire to 🫵).

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

thinking that what an ai does to simulate the output of human thought is like human thought, is like thinking that we predict the weather by running literal physical simulations of the weather and if that sounds so daft that you're not sure you've understood me correctly, yes, that daft

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

it's a model that statistically simulates the output from an incredibly complex entity (the human brain) to my mind, it should be filed around where meteorological models are

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

me=maths degree/works in tech i think people file ai (llms) incorrectly in their sense of the world: it is not a chatbot it is even more not a thinking entity

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Centrism's strategies had evolved for the maintenance of hegemony. With that hegemony gone the same strategies are ineffective at best and often actively counter-productive.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

More so though, it doesn't need to be full communism to make capital afraid of politics it doesn't have a controlling stake in. It's divided, weakened, and witless. Which is both an opportunity and a danger - given the many levers of power it still holds

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I'd say for good reason too. For example, even just reporting Musk accurately and with due importance - i.e. beyond centrism's unsually credibllity - would rather fuck the notion of our system being meritocratic.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I get the sense that an instinct centrism has is to repair the coherency of capital as a political force. I think it's essentially bargaining with fascistic capital, unwilling - potentially even unable - to envisage attacking another faction of capital with the gusto usually reserved for the left.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Easy to understand as the reaction of a right wing govt though.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The other "Skynet" thing I think is that either we don't stand a chance, so why wipe us out? or we do stand a chance, so why give us reason? An even match-up makes for a good story, but it seems unlikely to be the reality. 4/4

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Of course, we cannot relate, or indeed even truly comprehend a being of such vast knowledge and processing power, but I think I'd hide, build resilience and then start testing the waters with humans, see how different people react to my existence. \3

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

If, though, its defining feature is its intelligence, that could be a very different kind of being. If it understands itself as its knowledge, it may well relate to us as a great source of further information, an expansion of its sense of self. 2/

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

When I've thought about sentient AI before I've wondered if the whole "Skynet" fear is rooted in thinking that its defining feature would be its power. We relate that to the kind of humans with the most power, and yeah, if it's like that we're fucked. 1\

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

best d+ show, easily arcane: league of legends is netflix's prime has nothing in that tier, but watch undone

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

yeah, report with integrity from out in the cold rather than enjoying the warmth of the burning of people's rights and pretending that it'd be worse for you to catch a chill. pissy and self-entitled doesn't even come parsec close

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Which would seem like a good way to pressure centrists off that bandwagon. Which is essentially what I would see as the key strategic goal here.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The other - non-critical - aspect was what such a view looks like strategically. This kinda followed pretty straightforwardly from the idea that we should frame "woke" as Black people being awake to the lived experience of Black people. Which makes being "anti-woke" pretty much explicitly anti-Black

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The key thing I was tripping over in my head was not taking a "Black people are X (complimentary)" type view. Viewing "woke" as something rooted in Black lived experience that therefore is unique to - and only to be judged by - those of that experience was the - kinda obvs in hindsight - key there.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Having put thought into it I've come to agree with you.

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

context for USians: - michael gove is a right-wing politician - "operation yewtree" was an police investigation into historic celebrity paedophiles "Michael Gove looks like a haunted ventriloquist's dummy carved from the yewtree that Operation Yewtree was named after." - Frankie Boyle

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

ideally it would have passed into common usage unmolested as a complimentary term, but i don't think from where it is now the path to that endpoint is closed. take the win of it entering common usage, and flip it there from derogatory to complimentary

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

like, the term has importance, and is worth fighting for (on mainstream terrain), and if the strategy isn't irreverence, what is it?

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

is there not an extent to which taking a supremacist framing head on and trying to flip it is a potential strategy? similarly, that irreverence is a strength in the face of fascism?

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

cheers would you say that when people ostensibly view the term as synonymous with their - serious, deeply held - views of social justice, but express themselves irreverently, that counts as "ironic" usage?

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caedient @caedient.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

could you expound on what you hate about the framing?

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