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Paul Evans

@pauliewaulie.bsky.social

790 followers 1.8K following 3.2K posts

Representative Democracy ultra. History, economics, film/TV policy, workplace & unions. Posts often conversational gambits. Views mine only. NFFC & Mayo GAA. https://paul-evans.org & https://pauliewaulie.substack.com Banner quote: NeinQuarterly.

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · Jan 1

Because we have stopped paying directly for news, we have made it possible for dark money to disenfranchise us.
substack.com/home/post/p-...

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 11h

Today’s PIN numbers are the home phone numbers of our girlfriends from the 1980s.

bleary @bleary.off-the-records.com · 13h

If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.

Did people really memorize phone numbers before cell phones, or is that just a movie thing?
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I was watching some old shows from the 90s and noticed people would just dial numbers from memory - like they'd call their friends or family without looking anything up.
Made me wonder if that was actually normal back then? Did people genuinely have all their important numbers memorized, or did most folks keep a little address book or written list nearby?

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Reposted by Paul Evans

Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 14d

Monopoly and totalitarianism go hand in hand.

The only way to stop the growing censorship of Trump's critics is to fight the consolidation of media outlets into the hands of a few families that do not care about the best interests of the country.

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Reposted by Paul Evans

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 15h

one thing that has been obvious for a while is this aspect of the authoritarian internationale: they recognize that their allies abroad are not *countries* but *political movements* within foreign countries.

time we liberals woke up and recognized this--because it's the truth.

Rigorous, Fred-based Reporting @thefred.bsky.social · 19h

Or maybe, just maybe, what was obvious in 2024 was correct: Netanyahu fully backed Trump and would not deal with Biden because Trump would give him a free hand to escalate the starvation, bombing, and do full ethnic cleansing. Which he then did, until Netanyahu embarrassed him by bombing Qatar.

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 15h

Yes. In one sentence, it's to recognise what previous governments usually knew - that governments must intervene to shape the information economy and not just be buffered by it. medium.com/@pauliewauli...

On government impotence.

Governments think there is no alternative. History tells us otherwise.

medium.com

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 15h

I hate to sound bleak and unforgiving here, but watching centre/left politics discussing this at the moment is like looking at a crowd of people who've turned up to a gun fight with a butter knife.

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 15h

We can't address you concerns unless we recognise that we’re not dealing with reality, but the medium=the message’s version of it.

The medium gutted journalism & drowned itself in opaquely funded disinfo. Its algorithms amplify division. It's either run by fascists or people who profit from chaos.

Reposted by Paul Evans

George Gantsoudes @pedsortho.bsky.social · 18h

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

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Reposted by Paul Evans

Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · 18h

“These findings follow previous research which concluded that the more people learn about how AI works, the less they trust it. The opposite was also true — AI’s biggest fanboys tended to be those who understood the least about the tech.”

The More Scientists Work With AI, the Less They Trust It

A preliminary report shows that researchers' confidence in AI software dropped off a cliff over the last year.

futurism.com

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 16h

The historical demographics for public service broadcasting factual TV were always instructive - shows like The South Bank Show always had a much more diverse viewership than anyone expected.

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 16h

John, I had read it before I commented and don't disagree substantially with you points. But I do have a problem with the way be keep chasing an argument that will always refuse (y)our answers while not doing anything about the fact that we're in a recursive bad-faith conversation to start with.

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 20h

@jydenham.bsky.social Why keep figuring out how to run with national populist narratives, when we could be fixing what makes us run with them at all?

There's no longer *anyone* labour-aligned who still thinks governments can make information economy less toxic, is there?

What happened to us?

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 20h

It'd also be helpful if we had a discussion on *why* we must have this conversation now, & why we didn't have to have it at other times.

Clue: The strongest correlation between 'immigration causing popular unrest' is 'media interests choosing to make it an issue' and not 'high levels of migration'.

John Denham @jydenham.bsky.social · 20h

Resisting National Populism will be even harder if much of mainstream and progressive politics won’t talk about the questions that migration and diversity raise about nationhood.

John Denham @jydenham.bsky.social · 22h

Migration and diversity trigger complex cultural, political, economic, democratic and legal questions about the nation. In the resulting politics the answers are often skewed. Some address those questions directly (and narrowly) while others avoid the nation question altogether.

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 21h

I don't know if you saw this from me a few weeks ago.... bsky.app/profile/paul...

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 25d

My multi-£bn-earning business idea (draft) is this: stews can be mass-produced for a pittance if pre-ordered & every place with a compliant kitchen (schools, canteens, cafes etc) could be selling them. A VC that earns £1 from the order/collection transaction transforms the food economy & gets rich.

Reposted by Paul Evans

Tom Freeman @tomfreeman.bsky.social · 23h

The role of ideas in this movement isn't as tools for understanding the world or devising ways to change it; the ideas are just mood music, vibes to make you feel edgy/radical/smart. In the phrase "intellectual energy" here, 99% of the importance comes from the "energy". www.ft.com/content/61d4...

"In the panic about young people flirting with fascism, this difference is important. Because one of the main reasons the young are drifting not just to the right, but to the radical or even far right, is its intellectual energy — a fresh fizz of ideas about the ways in which we organise society. That appeals to young people looking for something to get excited about, and something that feels like a departure from — a rebellion against — what their stodgy liberal parents believe.
And while there are plenty of prominent theorists on the right offering radical ideas — Yarvin himself argues that democracy should be replaced with monarchy — there is a distinct deficit of such thinkers, or even of new ideas, on the left. The young men who might once have been excited about Noam Chomsky’s arguments about the media manufacturing consent are now immersing themselves in the pseudonymous rightwing writer Bronze Age Pervert’s Nietzschean critiques of modernity, and his enthusiasm for pre-civilisational masculinity."

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 1d

It’s the combination of nihilism & disinformation that gives fascism in the edge, and it will take it.

Fascism is fundamentally criminality on a very grand scale. Everything follows from that surely (but this is all a debate about a fine distinction - if you’re right we still get totalitarianism).

Reposted by Paul Evans

Peter Geoghegan @petergeoghegan.bsky.social · 1d

This is exactly my analysis of the current situation. And currently don’t see the resilience in electoral politics to check what’s happening

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 1d

This is my top-line on addressing that resilience point: bsky.app/profile/paul...

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 2d

Pessimism incoming! 👇👇👇

The centre & left seem to have lost political ambition. It needs a wholesale shift in perspective to stop something that is beginning to look inevitable now. 🧵

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 1d

It’s a perfect storm;

1. Defunded journalism creating a vacuum that is cheaply filled by unchallenged bias.
2. Algorithms promoting anger
3. New undetectable ways of buying political control
4. Electoral politics having no resilience to cope with this.

Unchecked, it ends in fascism. Not if. When.

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 1d

We’re on the same page here Peter.

bsky.app/profile/paul...

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 9d

Living in the UK at the moment feels like being in a village directly in the path of a clearly visible avalanche, with everyone saying “Don’t worry, it’s all fine!”

Reposted by Paul Evans

James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 1d

It's almost exactly four years since Tim Shipman's notorious "Boris Johnson squats like a giant toad" tweet.

Seems like important context given how we often talk as though the next election – four years away – is a done deal.

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 2d

“Liberal democracy won’t continue to be able to coexist with electoral politics:” discuss.

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 2d

If we are to pursue this line of attack (we should) we also need a strong and rigorous position on what a good Representative Democracy is, as well as what it isn’t.

Central Bylines @centralbylines.co.uk · 2d

Exposing Reform’s Oil Ties Significantly Reduces Party Support, New Research Finds

Voters recoil at Farage’s fossil fuel funding.
Via @desmog.com @writesbright.bsky.social

Exposing Reform’s Oil Ties Significantly Reduces Party Support, New Research Finds

Reform UK’s oil industry interests are a major turn-off for voters, new research reveals. The think tank Persuasion UK tested five anti-Reform messages on 6,000 adults. According to the research, “by ...

www.desmog.com

Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 2d

For me, the big question is always “what are people likely to think about this movie in 20 years time.”

Reposted by Paul Evans

James Ball @jamesrball.com · 2d

Washington DC is, by several measures, America’s most liberal city. It no longer has a newspaper that’s even trying to represent that in its op-ed pages.

Philip Bump @pbump.com · 4d

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Paul Evans @pauliewaulie.bsky.social · 2d

He says “Why would a proud Irish person want me, or [DUP leader] Gavin Robinson, or Jim Allister [Traditional Unionist Voice leader] choosing their next taoiseach?””

Would unionism become a commitment to sinking a ship that northern protestants are sailing in?

The Irish Times @irishtimes.com · 2d

United Ireland could result in unionists holding Dáil’s balance of power, UUP leader says

Mike Nesbitt warns ‘biggest threat’ to NI remaining part of UK is English nationalism