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Charles Martin-Shields

@charlesmartinshields.com
1.3K followers 2.8K following 620 posts

Senior researcher, German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). Working on forced displacement, digitalization, and conflict. Opinions here are my own. My book: bit.ly/4gjNQ09 Open access: bit.ly/3AXzbI2

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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 10h
If you wanted to destroy the capacity of a professional military to think, and turn it into some sort of simulacrum of the Russian military, this would be a great start.
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 17h
I see two things. The CDU has been carrying on about how people need to work more, retire later, etc etc. So a CDU politician adding this sort of frivolous ‘luxury’ to their tax payer funded office invites blowback. If your party’s strategy is “Be the Biggest Scold” this is what you sow.
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Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.eu · 28/09/2026
I worry that we are going absolutely crazy. A CDU politician (the eccentric type, often target of malice) has put a typical north/baltic sea beach chairs on his office balcony (he’s from the region). And somehow people lost it?? He had to send it back?? (He paid for it himself) What on earth?
tagesspiegel.de
Er wollte nur „ein Stück Heimat“ – und erntete Spott: Amthor will Strandkorb selbst bezahlt haben und schickt ihn zurück
Philipp Amthor hat sich einen Strandkorb auf den Balkon des Kanzleramts stellen lassen. Im Netz bekam er dafür viel Häme. Der Verkäufer des maritimen Möbelstücks nimmt den CDU-Politiker in Schutz.
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Reconstructionist @unavaleable.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Every French presidential poll LADY HITLER - 35% JEAN D'AUSTÉRITÉ - 18% CHUD COMMUNISTE - 17%
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 28/09/2026
There are a limited number of legitimate ways that LLMs and generative-AI can be used productively, it’s mostly a technology of social and cultural annihilation. It annoys the shit out of me that we’re using these slop machines in scientific research.
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Guido Kühn @guido-kuehn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Die Welt brennt. Die menschengemachte Klimakatastrophe verursacht immenses Leid, unbezahlbare Schäden, Wirtschaftseinbrüche, droht den Lebensraum Erde für viele dauerhaft unbewohnbar zu machen. Und wir fördern nun ausgerechnet jene Industrie, deren Geschäftsmodell es ist, unsere Welt anzuzünden?
Illustration eines brennenden Menschen, der an einer brennenden Tankstelle sein brennendes Auto betankt und dabei auf die Anzeige der Zapfsäule schaut. Textzeile: Tankrabatt ist der besorgte Blick auf den Spritpreis, nachdem man seinen Lebensraum angezündet hat.
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Manuel 'HonkHase' Atug @honkhase.de · 28/09/2026
Ab wann ist ein Innenminister ein Gefährder? "Dobrindt arbeitet mit den radikalislamistischen Taliban zusammen – und schiebt gleichzeitig nach Afghanistan ab. Viele sind keine Straftäter." Dobrindt lässt Afghanen abschieben – die meisten haben sich nichts zuschulden... www.fr.de/politik/afgh...
fr.de
„55 Prozent keine Straftäter“: Dobrindt lässt dennoch Afghanen abschieben – mithilfe der Taliban
Dobrindt arbeitet mit den Taliban zusammen – und schiebt gleichzeitig nach Afghanistan ab. Viele haben sich nichts zuschulden kommen lassen.
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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The GOP cut funding to the IRS because *audits work* and they fundamentally don't believe rich people should have to play by the rules.
Line chart titled "Revenue per audit," subtitled "In-person audits, 2010-2014." It plots average revenue and average cost per audit by taxpayer income percentile, poorer to richer, from the 0–5th percentile to the top 0.1%. Source: Boning et al. 2023, "A Welfare Analysis of Tax Audits Across the Income Distribution."

Across the bottom half of the income distribution, revenue and cost track closely, both around $3,000–$6,000 per audit. Above the median, revenue pulls ahead of cost: about $10,000 vs. $5,000 near the 90th percentile, and about $17,000 vs. $8,000 at the 95th–99th. At the top, revenue jumps to about $31,000 for the 99–99.9th percentile and about $90,000 for the top 0.1%.
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David Arditi @davidarditi.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
We need to have a conversation about peer review in academia across fields The problem: different people see their role differently as a reviewer Here are some of the issues and some of the solutions
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 27/09/2026
These fuckers are just out here looking for the most deranged ways to be despicable pieces of shit.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 27/09/2026
Right-wing billionaire decides to make a macarthur for race scientists and transphobes; initial recipients to be Nathan Cofnas and Kathleen Stock.
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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
So much of what we are confronting today is best understood by the actions undertaken by white communities in response to integration orders. White supremacy is a form of democratic nihilism. Every institution, norm, and value of democracy will be sacrificed for it. calendar.eji.org/racial-injus...
calendar.eji.org
Sep. 27, 1958 | White Little Rock Voters Choose to Close Public Schools Rather Than Integrate
Learn more about our history of racial injustice
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
to keep functioning, society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities
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András Forgács W @andraswf.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Nazis don't want you to remember their crimes
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 27/09/2026
Es ist das Chris Rufo Modell. Statt Migranten versucht er Universitäten zu zerstören. Er wäscht seine anti-intellektuelle Ideen in den Seiten der New York Times, the Atlantic, usw. und ist recht erfolgreich. Wir müssen diese “Institut” keine Legitimität bieten, sonnst aggressiv dagegen kämpfen.
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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
AI #slopaganda is not so much about fakes or disinformation. It's about aligning the world with your preformulated descriptions of it, making reality disappear behind its formulaic image, rendering visible all your fears at once in order to enjoy them more. It's a technology of fascist daydreaming
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This is like accusing someone of robbing a bank because they deposited money and never withdrew it
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
When I was told that our tech oligarchs took their morality from science fiction, I never quite expected it to be from Spaceballs: The Movie.
static.klipy.com
Space Evil Triumphs Over Good
Alt: Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 26/09/2026
Durchgebracht mit Stimmen von der CDU. Ich gehe davon aus, dass die CDU noch vor 2029 von dem AfD (zumindest im Osten) absorbiert wird. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
German town bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims
Germany's education minister has branded the ban on the small brass memorial plaques a "scandal".
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 26/09/2026
Based on how I read the U.S. laws on providing asylum and the unvarnished racism behind the Trump administration’s decision to grant white Afrikaners asylum, the next administration should revoke these asylum claims and deport the people who came in on this program. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
South African white genocide does not exist, new ambassador to US tells BBC
Roelf Meyer tells the BBC that being a white Afrikaner gives him legitimacy to challenge Trump's claim of a genocide.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 23/09/2026
was talking about this recently with an ex-congressman (an old timer from the 80s and 90s) and one of the remarkable things about this cycle is that trump has given his party absolutely nothing to run on. no bill to tout, no accomplishment to hype, no nothing.
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Amy Jo (AJ) Cousins @ajcousins.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
This is not deporting people. Literally. Legally. There is a deportation process and this isn't it. This is rendition. This is disappearing people.
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Senator Chris Van Hollen @vanhollen.senate.gov · 22/09/2026
Trump's ICE is disappearing thousands of people in their system, hiding their locations from loved ones & lawyers, & preventing them from exercising their constitutional rights.   This is the lawlessness Republicans keep writing blank checks for. Not another dime! apnews.com/article/ice-...
apnews.com
AP Exclusive: ICE hides locations of thousands of detainees with final removal orders
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding most detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, in a move that has made it harder for lawyers an...
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ex-Lethality Jane @lethalityjane.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
On my second Army deployment to Afghanistan I was stationed for a few months at a small base that did not have washing machines for clothes so we had to try and wash our uniforms, socks, and underwear by hand. If you've never tried it, give it a whirl, and then ask this question again.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Tell me again how good and important A.I. is for human flourishing? Between this and the killer drones, I’m struggling to find the pro-human balance. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/b...
nytimes.com
At DraftKings, AI Targets the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose (Gift Article)
Data science helps determine who receives betting incentives, but the company has resisted using similar technology to protect gamblers at risk of addiction.
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Jen Mercieca @jenmercieca.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
When authoritarian regimes collapse, their leaders experience symbolic deaths, largely through the destruction & removal of monuments that they've built to glorify themselves and affirm their power. Sometimes called "iconoclasm," who gets a statue or monument is always a symbolic struggle for power.
6th July 1945: A bust of Adolf Hitler lies amidst the ruins of the Chancellery, Berlin. Reg Speller/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesA picture taken on August 22, 1991 shows a crowd watching the statue of KGB founder Dzerzhinsky being toppled on Lubyanskaya square in Moscow. ANATOLY SAPRONENKOV/AFP/Getty ImagesIraqis, with the help of U.S. troops, topple a monument to Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad in 2003. One journalist described the toppling of Saddam as “the most staged photo opportunity since Iwo Jima.”Hungarians stand over the toppled statue of Joseph Stalin on Oct. 23, 1956.Credit...Andor D. Heller/Hungarian News Agency
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herman mark schwartz @thunen.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This is going to be a Harvard business school case study in how to alienate your core market. I grew up with converse all stars, so i’ve always had a soft spot. No longer.
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Instead of workslop, now we have warslop. Some dipshit analyst asked a chatbot "what's on this ship" and it said "nuclear materials" and then put that in a report that he also made with AI, and sent it off. Possibly the best example of how a "human in the loop" just human-washes the generated text
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 18/09/2026
This is the far more likely pathway for how AI will end us all, btw. Not via some superintelligent swarm of paperclip maximizers, but by a cascading sequence of dumb fuckups driven by human beings who have arranged things to be fast-moving and catastrophically fragile while also being really lazy.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 17/09/2026
Australia nicely demonstrates the way far-right parties end up pulling the strings on centrists goblins Centrists see surging support for drooling racists, and then try to mildly mimic their positions and policies. Centrists don't get a surge in poll support though; that all stays with the racists
abc.net.au
Family visas for foreign students targeted in migration crackdown
International students would effectively be banned from bringing family members to Australia under a long-awaited overhaul of the immigration system.
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 17/09/2026
Credulous rubes signing deals with businesses built to stealing and annihilate knowledge: “Maybe THIS time Stealing and Annihilating Knowledge Inc. will deliver a fair exchange of value.”
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Micah @rincewind.run · 16/09/2026
"why does the left distrust AI" certainly has plenty to do with the technology itself but at its core I think it is about the fact that everyone building it is a wannabe fascist oligarch and nobody trusts them on a god damn thing
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
no, they're not. basically US civil society is a fire sale
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Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
ICYMI over the weekend: I wrote about the emerging far-right international, why the project it is pursuing is best described as a kind of aggrieved revanchism, and what an adequate democratic response might look like.
steady.page
A Far-Right International Is Assaulting Democracy
MAGA and the AfD are united in a struggle against democratic pluralism that transcends national borders. It is an alliance of extremists defined by aggrieved revanchism
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Jared Kushner is not "on the other side of the aisle." He's not an elected official. He's not an administration official. He's the president's son-in-law and a private citizen. You do not, in fact, have to take meetings with relatives of the president. Some might even say you should *not* do that
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Nome @nome.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Put ten million in a fund to live like a king off of the interest for the rest of your life, and try to spend the rest as fast as possible on things that would materially improve people's lives. Fund school lunches, buy and forgive debt, just give people houses, go fucking nuts. Right?
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Alan Jagolinzer @jagolinzer.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
“What we do know...is that crypto and meme assets have already become what I consider to be a financial cesspool that is leveraged by many of the darkest actors on the planet.” My 2025 testimony in Democracy Shield hearings at European Parliament. youtu.be/xJaJfROLs6Y?...
youtu.be
Prof Jagolinzer testifies to EU Parliament about the dark uses of cryptocurrency
YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit
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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I find it infuriating and unnerving how liberals are unable to recognize brownshirts when they see them, or understand that brownshirts exist along a separate axis of public mobilization than “protesters,” which is how they’re always described. These aren’t protesters, they’re paramilitaries!
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Butt Praxis @buttpraxis.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Yeah the endgame here is very obviously the destruction of girls’ sports by making them sites of mandatory sexual abuse and it is really blackpilling how many people are going along with it out of fear of trans people or their hope for little Christleigh getting a track scholarship to Azusa state
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Joshua Foust 🪖🎮 @joshuafoust.com · 11/09/2026
The “illegal for liberals but legal for conservatives” principle is already leading to very dark places in general, but as a subversive force eroding the few virtues of military service left it will impose incredible long term damage to our society. We will NOT like a formally politicized military.
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The conflation of AI-critical with technophobic is tactical & infuriating. While accusing us of just knee-jerk hating tech, they’re enshittifying search engines, degrading digital archives, sundowning or enclosing popular tools, etc. We were all happily using that tech!
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 11/09/2026
The EU member states worked so hard to create an imaginary that the EU isn’t a state that they can’t reasonably turn around and have the EU do things that states do, even when it’s critically necessary. Then there’s the deep un-seriousness among EU politicians about how much things really cost…
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Kevin Gannon (now a Moo Deng fan account) @thetattooedprof.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Watching the morning baseball recap show and just saw a commercial for a chain of plasma donation centers, urging viewers to consider the benefits of donating plasma--especially receiving "up to $800 a month"--and that's surely a sign our economy is doing great
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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Since becoming president again, Trump has promised: -$5000 stimulus checks via "DOGE dividend" -$2000 stimulus checks via "tariff dividend" -$1000+ checks via "savings" from expiring ACA subsidies -$5000 "dividend" if Rs win midterms No checks have been issued www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-magi...
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
lol I just realized Trump is treating the voters like his construction crews on a building project. Tell them to do a job and then stiff them on the promised compensation.
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Devin Burghart @dburghart.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Today, the Heritage Foundation, the org behind Project2025, took credit for driving Lonnie Bunch out the Smithsonian Institution. Bunch was the first African American and first historian to serve as head of the Smithsonian. But sure, tell me again how it’s not about racism.
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Charles Martin-Shields @charlesmartinshields.com · 09/09/2026
I would posit that part of this is because in places with few/no foreign nationals, AfD can make ‘migrants’ into any straw- or boogieman they want. People have no frame of reference and passively accept it. (Of course there are also plenty of racists in these places who simply lap it up)
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Thomas I-G @thomasig.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
My legitimate concern is that this world leading success story of multicultural integration is being usurped by racist hoodlums and thugs who want to tear it all down, and many in power think that's just dandy.
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The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Have seen this Nature piece about the effects of X's algorithm mentioned again and it bears repeating; exposure to a right wing algorithm makes you - measurably and predictably - more right wing, even after you stop using it. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature
Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...
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