iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

My fave cold war joke is: “In case of nuclear war put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye…”

Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Someone must have calculated that some voters, perhaps even a majority, enjoy their leader threatening a nuclear first strike. Meanwhile my daughter found a cool beetle in the garden; a woman down the street fell in love for the first time at thirty. And a thousand other things…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

From the perspective of a parent: the “popular” kids at school aren’t necessarily smarter/funnier/prettier than everyone else… they just have a preternatural understanding of Machiavelli’s doctrines…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

“Shady Promo” is a great name for a band. It would allow you to boost the algorithm with a bunch of fake users, but ironically…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I really dislike “moral panic” where you might previously have said “mass hysteria”. Morality is the real version of ethics, as such a “moral panic” would be justified?

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

What’s the best antiwar artwork?

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I read Selfish Gene in school and was really into evolutionary psychology for a bit… Luckily I had an older psychologist friend who told me: “You share most of your genetic material with that cow over there, if you want to understand human behavior, better to look elsewhere…”

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I was once diagnosed with sluggish cognitive tempo and ADHD, which was a problem as i was trying to do a phd at the time. I just said “I have slugnative…” and trailed off. It’s an excuse for anything…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I just told my wife “together strong… apart weak…” Which is a line delivered by a monkey in a Planet of the Apes movie. I won the day though…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

*Cunk voice* “It’s no coincidence that dueling went out of fashion with the invention of the machine gun, allowing you to take out a host of love rivals at a stroke…”

The Duel After the Masquerade is a painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme 1857.

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I’ve been following a bunch of people back on Substack only to find their politics are completely bananas…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Ethiopians invented coffee and kept it to themselves for three hundred years..

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Embarrassing confession: Sometimes I don’t have anything to say but I post anyway…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

1. No, it’s the children who are wrong. 2. Supernintendo Chalmers 3. See my loafers former goafers 4. It’s German for “the Bart, the” 5. Stupid sexy Flanders

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Geese (the band) are great. Start with Au Pays de Cocaine.

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

University history departments would be much better if they had an “ops room” where global historical advances could be logged in real time…

Picture of a Battle of Britain ops room. Photo by Nick Catford.

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

As a kid, I went on holiday with a famous philosopher. He was infuriating to argue with. You’d offer a premise and he’d just say “no”. He was one of those Cambridge contextualist types. “Don’t you think the Beatles would have been successful in any era?” I asked. “No” came the answer…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

You can visit Sherlock Holmes’ house on Baker St. On every level there is a drama student in victorian garb. I managed to get Mrs Hudson to break character to talk about Sherlock’s opium addiction. Irene Adler on floor two was unbreakable though. True method actor. Five stars.

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

People are in the habit of telling me i’m being *too political* when i’m really just informing them of facts that make them feel uncomfortable… I maintain that childrens’ birthday parties are perfect venues for political discussion…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

The position previously was that we shouldn’t punish the collective for the sins of the individual… but increasingly the mantra is we shouldn’t punish the individual for the sins of the collective… I’m not sure what this means yet…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I’m surprised they haven’t remade the Blues Brothers, given the obsession with 80s IP.

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

How it feels to be reposted on Bluesky:

Photo shows kim jong il surrounded by sycophants writing down his every word…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

They should throw in a red herring one time…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

If people would still want to undertake the work off their own back if universities were defunded, it has value… Nietzsche, J A Hobson, Marx etc. wrote outside of universities… Careerism in humanities is regressive as it detracts from valuable work and dilutes the emancipatory potential of ideas…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I want historians of the future to consider that I exercised free will when I did something virtuous but was very much a product of my times when I acted like a dickhead…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I want historians of the future to consider that I exercised free will when I did something virtuous but was very much a product of my times when I acted like a dickhead…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I love beaches but they make me feel old. Everyone is young here. The waves crashing mark the passage of time…

Sign on the beach that reads “dangerous current”

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

As sea levels rise and the climate heats up we should embrace the Venusian lifestyle” “You mean Venetian? Like Venice?” “No dummy!, I mean Venusian, like Venus…”

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

My old supervisor told me once: “Liberals think more education is the answer to everything… “. Sure there’s a lot more to life than just education. I just think if you’re an educationalist you should believe in education…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Nick Hornsby’s High Fidelity had a great line about depression. When you are young it feels like an exquisite pain, a driver for creativity. When you are old it’s just another thing, like being sick or broke…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Hey everyone! Published my first article on substack. (It is free to read I think). I spent a lot of time on this one and it’s quite prescriptive/ambitious so i’d love to hear your thoughts?

substack.com

We Need Equal Speech

Traditionally, liberal democracy has required free speech but not equal speech.

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Reposted by Harry Sargent

Patrick Stokes @patrickstokes.com · 07/08/2026

I'd go further and say organised atheism (excluding the Humanists) was morally corrosive in its structure. It was never a free-standing answer to the problems of final justification religion aims to address; it was just 'those other people are wrong.' Goes double for Flying Spaghetti Monster shit.

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I just love you guys and i’m having a good time on here…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I have a friend (with religious upbringing) who reckons philosophy untethered from cosmology is just self-help. It’s hard to argue with this position. There must be a standard of justice outside ourselves through which we can say that others *should* act virtuously.

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I love my brother but every time I call him these day he acts like he’s in the middle of defusing a nuclear bomb…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I had a friend who would introduce constructivism to his first year students by jumping up and down on a table shouting: “You see this table, it isn’t here!!! Ha ha ha!!!”

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

What people say: “You should consider all the alternatives before concluding what is right…” What people mean: *Ha ha, i’ve already done this and decided you are wrong…*

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The trick to apologizing is to make it vague and general, like “i’m sorry for all the times I let you down as a husband”. Everyone gets bogged down the specifics otherwise, like who used whose toothbrush to clean the tumble dryer filter…

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Reposted by Harry Sargent

Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

When i feel like being a bit of a troll in the replies, i scroll down and watch the other trolls in action and the feeling passes…

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Reposted by Harry Sargent

Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

nothing makes you question your beliefs more than seeing those who share them

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

A lot of my mutuals whose posts I like don’t seem to come up on my feed at all. Anyone else have this problem? Is it because i follow too many people?

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

“I would sit and read my book if only i found the perfect place to sit” - who am I kidding? - i’m lazy and have the attention span of a gnat…

Epicurus book with scenic pretty backdrop, perfect place to sit and read…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

“Hey, can you watch my sandwich, i gotta take care of something…”

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

The bad sex in literature award about a decade ago had this great line about a bondage scene that was “excruciating, but not in a good way…”.

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Samuel Moyn’s idea that IL and the US constitution need an overhaul isn’t wrong… But, short of a divine revelation, the powers involved won’t agree on principles let alone the small print for such a change… WADR to Moyn, he doesn’t have the prophetical charisma of a Jesus or a Tolstoy…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I find sovereignty to be of ambiguous benefit: Crimes have been committed in violation of sovereignty for sure, but “sovereignty” has also been used to deflect international criticism of human rights abuses…

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Harry Sargent @harrysargent2.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Picture the scene: a desert island, survivors have turned to cannibalism, the sociologist picks the short straw: “But, but, you can’t, I collect data!…”

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