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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes

@tarquinhh.bsky.social
3.1K followers 6.4K following 4K posts

Oxford Law Research Admin, dabbler in history, philosophy & sociology of the life sciences & medicine.

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Reposted by Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes
Dolly Jørgensen @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social · 22h
Exciting job for #envhum postdocs! Project "Tolerating Urban Animals. Techno-moral perspectives on killing and caring for other species" (U Copenhagen) is looking for 2 postdocs to work on use of technologies for managing undomesticated/feral urban animals in 🇩🇰🇸🇪🇳🇴. employment.ku.dk/faculty/?sho...
employment.ku.dk
Two Postdoctoral positions in Ethnology at the Saxo Institute, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen
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Dan Neidle @danneidle.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Our full report, which goes into much more detail on the law and the facts: taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/10/01/m...
taxpolicy.org.uk
Did Manchester City cheat HMRC out of £12m?
Manchester City’s sham consultancy raises questions about £12m in unpaid UK tax. We examine the evidence - and the case for a criminal investigation.
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
or buy 400 copies of Imperial Island for less than £5k and then maybe you'd stop trying to deport everyone x
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
So, Everton were docked 6 points for a £20 million PSS breach, therefore, on the basis on 1 point deducted per 4.33 million in excess, for their *checks notes* £920 million breach Man City should be deducted 213 points.
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Beth Stratford @bethstratford.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I started looking seriously at rent controls when I realised that even a huge increase in house-building & housing benefit spend wouldn’t touch the sides of this crisis. (Bear in mind that renters in poorest quintile (5th) spend 63% of income on rent!) This👇 is p.7 of www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/pub...
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Spencer Sunshine @transform6789.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My “A Short History of Nazi-Satanism,” the first comprehensive overview of Nazi-Satanism, is finally out! Runs from the 1970s alliances b/t the Church of Satan & neo-Nazi groups thru today’s Order of Nine Angles and NVE. Link for PDF download. (captcha req) escholarship.org/uc/item/1f57...
image of 6 pentagrams around the text "A Short History of Nazi-Satanism - see link above"
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
*Keystone cops theme plays*
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
we are humanitarian and chivalrous, we are humanitarian and chivalrous, we insist, as we show no interest in other worlds except as mirrors
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 27/09/2026
Google finally updated some of its satellite images of Gaza and my god, it's horrific. The entirety of Rafah has been demolished. The majority of Khan Younis is in ruins. Entire towns completely leveled and erased of the map.
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Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Smotrich's plan is to push the entire West Bank population to the yellow areas, and annex the remaining 82%.
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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
ICE has abducted Senegalese WBB player Aminata Seck and won't release her. DHS 'policy' is to provide medical care to prisoners at intake, yet they admit to denying her care for an ACL injury for 1.5 months. The NCAA is letting it happen, despite its predatory recruitment of ICAs. We explain.
theguardian.com
ICE has abducted a college athlete. What are the NCAA and universities going to do about it?
Aminata Seck’s detention shows the bargain facing international college athletes: universities eagerly recruit them, but support can disappear when their immigration status becomes precarious.
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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
There’s nothing we can learn from the past that we can’t also learn from bold new disasters
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Lauren Dobson-Hughes @ldobsonhughes.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Canadian marriage licence: “There are no restrictions based on nationality, citizenship, gender or race. Bring 2 pieces of ID” UK marriage licence: “Apply for a marriage visa. Submit biometrics. Be resident in the UK for 9 days. Bring 75 documents. The Home Office may need to approve your marriage”
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M a r c u s 🏳️‍🌈🇧🇧 @marcusjdl.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Legacy of Slavery - My family and Bristol
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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published OTD in 1962. “[W]e have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” 🌱🐋 # HistSTM 🧪🌎 #philsci #philsky #WomeninSTEM
Caricature of Rachel Carson by David Levine for the New York Review of Books.
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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I’ve been writing and speaking on this topic for years, and I’m glad that news media are finally drawing attention to it. www.salon.com/2026/07/28/t...
It may be tempting to see value in projects such as the Schmidt Foundation — that’s Eric Schmidt of Google — funding a fellowship in AI at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Musk Foundation’s support of the Scroll Prize to use AI in reconstructing ancient texts in the burnt scrolls of Herculaneum. But these projects are simply two among countless others that have been seeding AI into museums and historical research for well over a decade. Even more egregious is the case of AI companies buying  and destroying rare books en masse in the process of scanning them for data. In the context of the dire austerity we are witnessing, the juggernaut of tech money seems impossible to resist.
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
My modest proposal for how to punish City for the 114 charges:
Lrrr from Futurama, with Ndnd in the background, stating "We will reduce Man City's points tally by 1 million points a day, for five days"
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Daniella M. @farsouthhistory.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Check out Kristin Brig-Ortiz's review of Christopher R. Conz's "Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho: The Poverty of Progress," published in 2024 by @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social; review now available @hnetreviews.bsky.social #envhist #envhum www.h-net.org/reviews/show...
h-net.org
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Vincent J Lynch 🐘🦣🦥 🦇🐋🐢🐍 @devoevomed.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
There are less than 192 mature individuals left in the world, when species go extinct, so do their unique cultures… #ExtinctionIsForEver 🦝 🧪 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozumel...
en.wikipedia.org
Cozumel raccoon - Wikipedia
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John Bull @garius.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
will say it again: the most effective way to curb far right agitators like Lowe, "Tommo" et. al. would be to stop their ability to earn money for it from social media or live streaming. So much of it is grifting for revenue, not attention.
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
He declined, though whether this was because he wanted more or fewer moths was unclear
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John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I will always remember fondly the student who finished an essay with the line "In conclusion, the early modern period marked a massive shit in European history."
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The Life of Sharks @thelifeofsharks.com · 24/09/2026
Swordfish Sometimes Intentionally Stab Sharks In The Head With Their Swords.
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Gabriel S. Pumpkins 🎃 @gsjphd.bsky.social · 30/08/2024
a close up of the face of an Allosaurus from Walking With Dinosaurs
subtitle: Allosaurus had never seen such bullshit before

meme originally by @antrodemus.bsky.social
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John Stott @jpsastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky
I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, your application was not successful.

Review process

As part of the initial triage of the 179 proposals submitted to this call, each was assessed using an AI-based review. Every proposal was read independently by several different AI models against the same seven criteria used to shape this call (including cyber security relevance, research quality and novelty, importance of the problem addressed, feasibility of the project plan, likely outputs and impact, value for money, and responsible research practice), with each model asked to give a score and a written justification with supporting quotations from the text. To guard against any one model's idiosyncrasies, we also ran a second, independent process in which different AI models debated the merits and weaknesses of each proposal before reaching a judgement, again against the same criteria. Scores from both processes were combined to produce an overall ranking. 

This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review.  Projects selected for funding were drawn from those that progressed to the full human review stage. We recognise that AI-assisted assessment is a new and evolving part of the review process, and we are continuing to evaluate how well it aligns with the judgements of human reviewers on this call. We will soon produce a document detailing our method, so that others can build upon it and improve it.

Feedback on your application

Your application was not selected to progress beyond the AI triage stage.  To provide transparency on the outcome of this assessment, we are sharing below the scores (out of 5) from each of the two AI review processes described above, together with the mean score across the two processes.
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Felix Organ: Hampshire cricketer or Roman fertility cult?
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Henry Snow @henrys.now · 24/09/2026
me in classroom: yes while I've been critical of the ideology behind mainstream econ thought most economists today are doing rich empirical work rather than fake and vile- some economists: so let's put a price on human life and then multiply it by a fake number so we can pretend the result is valid
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Sarah Elizabeth Cox @oispooky.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
2yrs after I finished my MA History at Goldsmiths, my research rights were bought and I was hired to work as historical consultant on this TV show. It's had BAFTA and International Emmy nominations. I got a book deal, too. Goldsmiths: "No point in MA History, let's fire everyone and delete it."
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Alona Ferber @aloner.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I wrote for the @lrb.co.uk blog (my debut) about the violent backlash to NAZA in Israel, denialism and how this sorry episode show Israel’s fundamentally undemocratic political culture www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
lrb.co.uk
Alona Ferber | Layers of Denial
The frenzy in Israel surrounding the documentary NAZA is fundamentally undemocratic. That is what happens after years of...
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
People really need to go back to the original Jurassic Park and look at the rather disturbing ways in which InGen's management of it now looks prescient
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Gregory Norminton @gregorynorminton.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Essential and enraging reading this morning, about the greed and corruption in our countryside and the strategic helplessness of government agencies. Ecocidal crimes going unchecked.
theguardian.com
‘The eels were climbing out of the water to die’: why did every fish in this idyllic lake perish overnight?
Furnace Brook in East Sussex was home to carp, tench, bream, roach and trout – and 15 trailer-loads had to be buried. The mystery led to a neighbouring farm, and a story of waste, pollution and dirty ...
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
What's behind this tidal wave of epidemics? In the largest study ever conducted on emerging infectious diseases, we show that the popular explanation - "our relationship with nature is out of balance" - doesn't hold up. Out now in Nature, after half a decade of work: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
The anthropogenic fingerprint on emerging infectious diseases - Nature
Emerging infectious disease outbreak risks are ubiquitous worldwide, and highest in landscapes where people, livestock and fragmented natural ecosystems coexist, but detection and data ...
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edeath @edithcharles.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Neil degrasse Tyson watching studio ghibli movies crying throwing up and then turning to the camera and calmly saying “castles typically don’t move unless bombed or due to a natural disaster”
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"The Raccoon City catastrophe is just a foretaste of the coming horrors that biotechnology corporations playing God will usher into the world without urgent international government intervention. Which is why I am calling on you, world leaders, and you, citizens of the world, to buy Umbrella stock"
Alfred Wesker, recurring villain from the Resident Evil video game series.
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Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The Knesset barred today the only two Palestinian led parties from running in the coming election. According to an overwhelming majority in the Knesset, the constitutional meaning of a Jewish State is a state where Palestinian citizens cannot run for parliament.
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Thomas I-G @thomasig.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Neglecting any mention of Thomas filming himself trying to sink the boat with RNLI rescuers aboard is bordering on disinformation, frankly.
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Dan Kaszeta FRHistS @dankaszeta.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The far right are now chasing RNLI at sea. This should be illegal
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Some Elements of a Xenosocioanthropology of Translation: Domestication of the Sarlacc and the Sand Peoples of Tatooine
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Sarah May @sarahmay1.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I think there is a bizarre perception that academics might be able to find other work more easily than oil workers, or that an oil platform is more of an anchor institution than a university. Just residual sense that academics are privileged.
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes @tarquinhh.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
George Henry Lewes: "Yes"
P. 250 of George Henry Lewes' Physiology of Common Life (1859): "destroyed; prick it, and this segment, incompetent to obey the will, obeys the laws of reflex-action, and moves. All sensibility, you perceive, has departed from segment B. In vain you prick or burn it; the animal feels nothing, as you assure yourself by noticing the complete stillness of the segment A."

These arguments, which may be found in numberless treatises, seem victoriously conclusive, till we discover the fallacy involved in them. The cerebro-spinal axis is a compound centre: it is one, only in the sense that a government or army is one: it is the union of several individual centres. When that axis is divided, the effective unity is destroyed: instead of one centre, two centres are established; and these two, being no longer united, cannot act in union, but must act separately. The limbs of A will obey the volition of A, but not the volition of B, with which they are no longer united. Nor will the limbs of B obey the volition of A. There is no longer one seat of government, but two seats. There has been a "repeal of the union." Parliament sits in Dublin, as well as in Westminster".
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Mediazona English @en.zona.media · 21/09/2026
For the 4th anniversary of army mobilisation, we added 10K+ names to our losses database in <2 weeks (double the usual rate) based on a leaked list of body exchanges. We only added the names of KIA whose identities we could confirm via state registries en.zona.media/article/2026...
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Patrick Ness @patricknessbooks.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
No system is perfect, yes some people might "cheat", but would you rather people who desperately need these things go on suffering so you can be SURE you're not being duped? Why is you not being duped so important that other people have to die for it?
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Dr Dion Georgiou 🇨🇾❤️🇬🇾 @drdiongeorgiou.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I don’t feel, as an ethnic minority Briton, there should be more obligation on us to embrace antiracist and pro-migration politics than anyone else. But I do also find myself wondering when I read stuff like this, “You do realise most people who believe this also consider you one too many as well?”
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Flint Dibble @flintdibble.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
They knew this 1,000-year-old archaeological site was here. It had been mapped, published, and reported to the agencies responsible for the land. Trump's border-wall contractors bulldozed right through it /1 Link: youtu.be/A4U6q76eqUM
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Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
In the last decade, the IDF prosecuted one (1) soldier for unlawfully killing a Palestinian in the occupied territories. Elor Azaria served 9 months in prison. Today Israel's president, Yitzhak Herzog, pardoned him and expunged his criminal record. A clear message of 100% impunity.
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Simon Wren-Lewis @sjwrenlewis.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This week's post: Racism and xenophobia are not 'legitimate concerns' mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/09/raci... The encouragement of violence against opponents by senior Reform politicians suggests they have the potential to become a fascist party. Perhaps we should call Reform proto-fascists.
mainlymacro.blogspot.com
Racism and xenophobia are not 'legitimate concerns'.
During the 2010 election campaign, Prime Minister Gordon Brown was questioned by a member of the public about immigration. Shortly afterwa...
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Treblig 🇺🇦 @camtreblig.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I like how this government has just leapfrogged over the earlier good parts of the New Labour period and have just gone straight for “Blair circa 2006 when his mental breakdown had become too obvious to ignore”
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becimay @becimay.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
My TLS piece on the Exeter cuts ✨
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Mags L Halliday @magslhalliday.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Every year on 19 December, the famous Christmas lights at Mousehole in Cornwall are dimmed between 8 and 9pm, leaving just the Cross and Angels shining down across the village and out to sea.
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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Last repost: I used to have family on Hoy. The story there was the Longhope disaster of 1969. Many coastal communities have stories like that, and every one deserves to be retold, and anyone who attacks the lifeboats has declared war on humanity. www.scottishmaritimemuseum.org/the-1969-lon...
scottishmaritimemuseum.org
The 1969 Longhope Lifeboat Disaster - Scottish Maritime Museum
By Amber-Louise Thornborrow Fifty-six years ago, on the evening of the 17th of March 1969, the volunteer crew of the TGB lifeboat assembled, venturing out into a south-easterly force…
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