iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

What fleet? Belarus is landlocked.

Agree re social media platforms, but none of those are based in the UK so pro-russian propaganda on those isn't likely influenced by corruption of UK elites.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 5h

Why haven't the Trump administration said something like "we're bombing Iran to prevent them from building a nuclear weapon with which to destroy Israel"?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 5h

And which "Syria" exactly did Hamas envision opening a northern front against Israel? The Assad regime was still in power in Damascus in October 2023, but (at least in the early stages of the Syrian Civil War) Hamas's sympathies had been with the rebels.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 5h

Which UK news and media platforms are (in your opinion) pushing pro-russia propaganda?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 5h

Heat pumps are basically just two-way AC.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 7h

(David) Attenborough? Don't you mean Danny Kruger?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 10h

Surely what matters is that position of the mainstream anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was "one democratic state", but almost no-one in the southwest Levant wants that: almost all are Arab citizens of Israel, and it's a minority even of them.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 11h

Indeed -- shades of Ilsa Koch's lampshades!

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 11h

Surely that's just elite corruption though and wouldn't have much effect on _popular_ opinion of russia?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 11h

I'd be interested to know what my own County Durham looks like: I imagine it might be similar to WV (shared coal mining history) but unfortunately urbanstats.org doesn't seem to have any UK data.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 11h

How many such people _can't_ leave because they have family members in the area that need their help?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 11h

Interesting 🧵 from the point of view of someone living in another ex-mining region (County Durham, England) that almost certainly has very similar issues.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 22h

I'm surprised no Western country saw a single-issue "ban Chinese goods" party after 2000.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 22h

Might #MeToo have anything to do with it?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

What would you say to someone who says the lesson of the Holocaust is "we should have invaded Germany in 1933"?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If Chinese healthcare is that rudimentary, would it explain in part why they went for that draconian Zero Covid policy? (Along with of course their highly compartmentalized urban design that made it possible to _implement_ such a policy.)

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'm guessing we had better buses when the roads were less clogged with car traffic, and when the county's population was younger and thus less of a burden (through social care) on local government finances?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Creating "a dying country by and for geriatric racists" may be the (unintended) _result_ of their agenda, but surely it isn't that agenda's _goal_ ?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

What does he mean by "I would even extend it to them"? I suspect most American southern whites would be too racist to see white people as fair game for enslavement.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Most anti-car people believe they should move to cities for the good of the climate.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The problem with County Durham is that most of its population is scattered among villages that public transport couldn't serve adequately without huge subsidies, but which have no decent jobs themselves because they were built purely to support coal mining.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I think he's using "working class" to mean "people who actually work", assuming that buses are used mainly by retired people and non-working benefit claimants.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Incidentally, the New Brancepeth which you used as an example was one of 114 "Category D villages" which Durham County Council earmarked for destruction back in the 1950s, as they were seen as economically redundant.

bennettschool.cam.ac.uk

Durham’s ‘Category D’ villages - Bennett School of Public Policy

As government decides where to distribute the Shared Prosperity and Levelling Up funds, Owen Garling recommends places should be considered as more than just units of economic production.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

County Durham's real problem is that much of its population is scattered amongst a plethora of villages that were built purely to support coal mining, and thus now have virtually no economies of their own. Good public transport requires a population concentrated in cities.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

A euphemism for "white van man" tradesmen, often self-employed?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Nothing wrong with growth per se: in fact car-brain likely _hinders_ growth, because each additional car in an area worsens the quality of life for its residents.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The psychology community calls the mindset "Right Wing Authoritarianism" but in plain English we could more accurately call it "selfishness".

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

What's the evidence that they're pandering specifically to foreign oligarchs rather than to the petrolhead vote?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

By that do you mean that those other countries thought the Luftwaffe was for strategic bombing when in fact it was more a tactical air force to support the Heer?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Buses were a common target for Hamas suicide bombers: why not trains?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Maybe those folks on the left are the ones who aren't fortunate enough to have somewhere to live in a walkable city?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I thought the phrase "tech bros" referred to super-rich tech company _founders_, not to their employees!

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Aren't those people who switched to UKIP due to austerity people who had lost faith in the Tories, but who in an EU referendum were going to vote Leave (due to their Auth values) even without austerity?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'd like Sochi to be the 21st century's answer to Torgau: 🇺🇦🤝🇬🇪.

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Reposted by George Carty

Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

“Unlike you squishy libs, us principled leftists will never side with fascism” Let this be a lesson - everyone is susceptible to selling out to the fascists unless antifascism is their top principle

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Labour was never strong in "rural Britain" in the first place, except for coal mining areas that now lean Reform because their younger, better-educated and more liberal populations left in search of work since the pits closed, leaving old uneducated bigots behind.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Wasn't Thatcherism basically a southern revolt against an economic order designed more than anything else to keep obsolete northern industries on life support?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The railways were privatized under Major, not Thatcher.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

A consistent neoliberal would argue that Thatcher's real sin wasn't closing the pits, but failing to liberalize Britain's planning laws so that the residents of northern pit villages could migrate south: indeed, she made the planning laws even tighter!

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

That wasn't down to policy but rather to: i) Norway had an order of magnitude fewer people to spend the money on (this was a rationale for Scottish independence), and ii) Much UK North Sea gas was burned domestically (replacing coal) while abundant hydropower let Norway export more of theirs.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And those places still voted Leave in droves, mainly because that EU funding mostly went on consumer amenities, not replacements for the lost industries that would actually make those places pay on a sustainable basis.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I see a discrepancy here between "ragebait is very profitable" (a claim about an objective metric) vs "they think enraged users are engaged users" (a claim about what FB management believes).

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Does this not mean that socially-liberal politicians ought to use the first type of cueing in their political communications in the hope of attenuating the authoritarian impulses of voters?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

You can't have mass social media without some kind of curation algorithm (even if it's something trivial like "show posts by those I follow in reverse chronological order"). Perhaps the regulation should be that social media platforms must allow the use of third-party curation algorithms?

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

However, these plans were ruined by a combination of the Holocaust and a Palestinian Arab population explosion, which between them meant the Jews couldn't get a comfortable majority in even _part_ of the mandate without ethnic cleansing.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

My understanding is that the early Zionists assumed that Jews would overwhelmingly outnumber Arabs in the state they planned to create, because they observed at the time that European Jews massively outnumbered Palestinian Arabs.

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George Carty @gcarty80.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

We need the consensus to get the EU to play ball with us.

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