iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Pwnallthethings @pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 11h

If Democrats win, johnson will not be speaker at the point where they are swearing in the new Congress. They are sworn in by the speaker elect, who is chosen by the member elects

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Mic Wright @brokenbottleboy.bsky.social · 14h

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

JULIET SAMUEL
Kemi Badenoch invites excellence back to the party
• NEW
Unapologetic embrace of dynamism and distinction shows the Tory leader is serious about moving on from mediocrity
Juliet Samuel
Wednesday October 07 2026, 6.50pm, The Times

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 12h

Adam Shatz published this in November 2023. I agreed with it then, and I agree with it now.

A
SIMILAR moat is being dug in Gaza today. Determined to overcome its humiliation by Hamas, the IDF has been no different from - and no more intelligent than - the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, or the Americans
after g/i1. Israel's disregard for Palestinian life has never been more callous or more flagrant, and it's being fuelled by a discourse for which the adjective 'genocidal' no longer seems like hyperbole. In just the first six days of air strikes, Israel dropped more than six thousand bombs, and more than twice as many civilians have already died under bombardment as were killed on 7 October. These atrocities are not excesses or 'collateral damage': they occur by design. As Israel's defence minister, Yoav Gallant, puts it, 'we are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.' (Fanon: 'when the colonist speaks of the colonised he uses zoological terms' and 'refers constantly to the bestiary.) Since Hamas's attack, the exterminationist rhetoric of the Israeli far right has reached a fever pitch and spread to the mainstream. "Zero Gazans', runs one Israeli slogan. A member of Likud, Netanyahu's party, declared that Israel's goal should be 'a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948'. 'Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians?' the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said to a reporter on Sky News. 'What is wrong with you? We're fighting Nazis.'

'What fills me with dread, the Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh told me in an email,
is that we are at an inflection point in world history. Deep ongoing shifts over at least the past two decades that have been giving rise to right-wing and even fascist movements (and governments) were already building up, so I see Hamas's slaughter of civilians as roughly equivalent to Sarajevo 1914 or maybe Kristallnacht 1938 in accelerating or unleashing much broader trends. On a 'lesser scale', I'm furious at Hamas for basically erasing all we fought for over decades, and aghast at those who can't maintain the critical faculty to distinguish opposition to Israeli occupation and war crimes, and who turn a blind eye to what Hamas did in southern Israeli kibbutzim. Ethno-tribalism.
The ethno-tribalist fantasies of the decolonial left, with their Fanon recitations and posters of paragliders, are indeed perverse. As the Palestinian writer Karim Kattan wrote in a moving essay for Le Monde, it seems to have become impossible for some of Palestine's self-styled friends to 'say: massacres like those that took place at the Tribe of Nova festival are an outrageous horror, and Israel is a ferocious colonial power.' In an age of defeat and demobilisation, in which the most extreme voices have been amplified by social media, a cult of force appears to have overtaken parts of the left, and short-circuited any empathy for Israeli civilians.

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 13h

Went outside this afternoon and suddenly and quite uncompromisingly it’s Autumn.

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

There’s a very simple test for “is this person concerned about Palestinians or an anti-Semite using Palestine as an excuse” and it’s what they were posting on October 7-8.

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Pwnallthethings @pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

So a few folks asking why OAI is releasing this at all. And I think that's probably worth a thread in its own right

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The UAE-funded RSF, to give them their full name.

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

2 ,4 and 5 look particularly good

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James Ball @jamesrball.com · 04/10/2026

You can easily oppose the barbaric war crimes of the current Israeli government without backing this racist motion, which also takes away agency and the right of self-determination from everyone in the region, regardless of faith and background.

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James Butler @piercepenniless.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I had to read all of The Faerie Queene and Milton (PL/PR/Samson) over the long vacation before second year, which is a recipe for some pretty strange dreams. I've never been able to shake the sense of Spenser as shut up in a tower in Ireland, hallucinating wildly as atrocities pile up around him.

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Alice Goodman @revdalicegoodman.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Yes! (What Milton does with meter is always interesting).

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Chris Terry-Enescu @cjterry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

And what's the name of your act? Labour fiscal policy!

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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Former spokesperson for the state of Israel Eylon Levy. They have murdered so many journalists that this counts as humour

Eylon Levy: “I'm quite happy to let Piers in. Out is another question.”

Quote tweeting Piers Morgan: “Forgive me I don't trust you guys to be entirely truthtul given your ongoing ban on international journalists reporting freely in Gaza. Let them in, and then we can discover the real facts about what you have done there.”

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Richard Baker @rchrdbkr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This, from Pope Leo’s speech to artists yesterday, caught my eye:

"Art, when it is authentic, is animated by restlessness. Art is an essential place of listening, where we allow ourselves to learn about the aspirations and wounds of humanity, its thirst for beauty, for justice and peace, and its search for meaning."

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Hmmmmm. UK debt to GDP on the eve of WW2 was 140%. In a disaster scenario where all states face the same disaster I’m not sure headroom is a useful concept.

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That sense of relief when you scan the contents of the latest edition and realise there’s not a single story you need to read.

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

You can see why they pay this guy the big bucks.

In a note earlier this month, HSBC's European rates strategist Chris Attfield said France's debt was the cheapest it had been since at least 2008, whether judged against its Eurozone peers or on its debt-to-GDP metrics.
"A price will be found where the market clears, and it's more a question of where that settles," he added.

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Hujar right in both counts. Hujar is a great artist and Mapplethorpe’s work is forgettable kitsch. From Em Hogan’s review of The Wonderful World that Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek in @lrb.co.uk

(It's striking that, among the many names in Durbin's book, Robert Mapplethorpe is not mentioned, even though he and Hujar knew each other and disliked each other's work. Mapplethorpe said that Hujar's photographs made him 'cringe', while Hujar was scathing about Mapplethorpe's superficial 'art look' and the fact that he didn't make his own prints.)

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

What with this and funding a genocide in Sudan I’m beginning to think the UAE might be quite bad.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The sweetest moment in every capital markets banker's career is the moment he gets to explain to a stroppy investor thatn if they don't buy it somebody else will.

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

What with this and funding a genocide in Sudan I’m beginning to think the UAE might be quite bad.

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Jake (Real) @jakemhs.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1954)

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Henry Dyer @direthoughts.com · 02/10/2026

Intrigued to see the Conservative conference will feature a speech on "press freedom" next week while they ban lobby journalists such as @josiahmortimer.bsky.social from attending their conference.

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Mark Kersten @markkersten.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

“The ICC is being attacked because it is feared, because it tears away the veil of hypocrisy and propaganda, and because it forces those in power to account for their actions." EU Parliamentary Assembly denounces threats to the International Criminal Court www.coe.int/en/web/porta...

coe.int

Parliamentary Assembly denounces threats to the International Criminal Court - Portal - www.coe.int

<p>Resolution calls on member states and other countries to forbear from sanctioning judges for their work</p>

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo put her vision for the city like this: "A city where you can get let go of your child's hand"

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In that case I’m going to speculate it was intended as a gift for Hans, who loved change ringing.

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Oliver Rivers @maxrothbarth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That sweating man meme where the man is Labour and the choices are “a really stupid Higher Ed funding policy” and “another really stupid Higher Ed funding policy”.

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