Paul Harland
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pabloredux.bsky.social
Paul Harland
@pabloredux.bsky.social
1.2K followers 2.7K following 4.6K posts
Evolution: it's nothing personal. (Sorry if I ask too many questions... Share nicely!)

I'm here because you're here.

http://pabloredux.wordpress.com/

(Profile photo: a faint shadow of me cast across a weathered lichen-marked stone wall by the sea.)
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Paul Harland
briandavidearp.bsky.social
New 🚨 in Technology in Society: "Personalizing AI Art Boosts Credit, Not Beauty" - led by Maryam Khan www.researchgate.net/publication/...
January 5, 2026 at 5:11 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
mcopelov.bsky.social
👇🎯 Once again, I ask, in good faith & without trying to be overly alarmist, what anyone has seen in the last year to make them believe that the 2026/28 elections will be free, fair, & democratic by any traditional meaning of the words?

bsky.app/profile/mcop...
asharangappa.bsky.social Asha Rangappa @asharangappa.bsky.social · 19h
Trump sees dollar signs with Venezuelan oil, has designs on other countries, and clearly sees himself as some kind of emperor of the world. I don’t think he has plans to leave in 2028. And he’s showing he’ll use the military however he wants
January 5, 2026 at 4:34 AM
pabloredux.bsky.social
Interesting reporting from October.
January 5, 2026 at 10:16 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
snellarthur.bsky.social
🚨🚨EMERGENCY EPISODE🚨🚨
Very few people can claim to have met and known 🇻🇪's Maduro, Chavez & interim president Delcy Rodriguez. Well, my guest @catheriner.bsky.social, former 🇬🇧 ambassador in Caracas, is one of them and she spoke to me earlier today.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/b...
January 4, 2026 at 11:04 PM
pabloredux.bsky.social
Everybody has some double standards. But being able to operationalise it like this does allow swifter changes of direction than opponents with (slightly) more values. You need a very united opposition to the mass of bad moves to stop it - a difficult temporary coalition against a moving target.
dieworkwear.bsky.social derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 6h
amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders
Matt Walsh tweeted last year: "We've spent the last 25 years bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to countries around the globe while our own country has been systematically invaded and now our largest cities are run by foreigners and communists. If you want to know why I'm so avowedly non-interventionist, this is why." Then he tweeted today: ""This is a war for oil!!!!!" First of all, the "war" lasted like 90 minutes. Second, going to war to secure vital resources for your own people is totally legitimate. Why should we allow some third world communist shithole to control trillions of dollars worth of oil?" Laura Loomer tweeted last year: "I’m America First, I don’t support “Regime Change”. I went on @Bannons_WarRoom to talk about Chinese aggression in Venezuela and why we need to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign Islamic terrorist organization." Then she tweeted yesterday: "Maduro has arrived at the DEA office in Manhattan. He was transported in an armored motorcade after being transported in a blindfold via helicopter & then by plane to New York after his compound in Caracas was raided by US Special Forces. Proud to be an American today! USA 🇺🇸" Catturd tweeted last year: "Name one U.S. inspired regime change that hasn’t ended in absolute disaster." Then he tweeted yesterday: "Venezuela is now more free than New York City." Will Chamberlain tweeted last year: "The Republican Party is no longer the party of regime change and endless wars If you want to be its standard-bearer that is a non-negotiable position" Then he tweeted yesterday: "I can think of few better uses of my tax dollars than black-bagging the head of a foreign narco-trafficking organization that enriches itself by addicting and poisoning my fellow Americans"
January 5, 2026 at 9:48 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
timothysnyder.bsky.social
I'm trying to get a sense of how many (other) people were invited and then disinvited from US campuses last year. If you have a story to share, please dm. I will keep it confidential – just trying to figure out the scale of this.
January 2, 2026 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
emilylhauser.bsky.social
"The challenge is enormous & [moral]: to unite without vengeance, but w/o impunity.... Bc freedom doesn't come with a new president: it comes when the state ceases to be a threat."

This is re: Venezuela but also true for us & not just rn.

For how many of us is the state an active threat every day?
cristianfarias.com Cristian Farias @cristianfarias.com · 1d
Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.
Twitter thread in Spanish by José Mario de la Garza, a human rights lawyer in Mexico, translated using Google Translate: 1. Overthrowing a dictator sounds morally right. No one mourns a tyrant. But international law wasn't built to protect the good, but to restrain the powerful. That's why it prohibits force almost without exception: not because it ignores injustice, but because it knows that if each country decides whom to "liberate" by force, the world reverts to the law of the strongest. 2. The problem is not Maduro. The problem is the precedent. When military force is used to change governments without clear rules, sovereignty ceases to be a limit and becomes an obstacle. Today it is “overthrowing a dictator”; tomorrow it will be “correcting an election,” “protecting interests,” “restoring order.” The law does not absolve dictatorships, but neither does it legitimize unilateral crusades. Cont’d: 3. The uncomfortable question is not whether a tyrant deserves to fall, but who decides when and how. Because history teaches something brutal: removing a dictator is easy; building justice afterward is not. And when legality is broken in the name of good, what almost always follows is not freedom, but chaos, violence, and new victims. The law exists to remind us of this, even when it makes us uncomfortable. Maduro isn't the problem: he's the face of the problem. Removing him from power would be merely opening the door. Behind him is the machine: Rodríguez, Cabello, the military command, the operators of repression and plunder. If you only change the person at the top and leave the system intact, what follows isn't democracy: it's a reshuffling. And there's something even more difficult: Chavismo didn't just capture institutions, it captured daily life. Economy, media, bureaucracy, employment, fear, favors, blackmail. A country can't be "de-Chavistaized" by decree or by an electoral miracle. The real transition begins when that network is broken without setting the country ablaze. The challenge is enormous, and it's also a moral one: to unite without vengeance, but without impunity. Targeted justice for those most responsible, truth for the victims, guarantees that the rest will dismantle the system, and a plan for people to live again—not just survive. Because freedom doesn't come with a new president: it comes when the state ceases to be a threat.
January 4, 2026 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
natureportfolio.nature.com
Analysis of the confined crowds at the San Fermín festival in Spain shows that dense crowds can self-organize into macroscopic chiral oscillators, coordinating the orbital motion of hundreds of people without external guidance, according to a paper in Nature last February. go.nature.com/3WKkb8r 🧪
January 4, 2026 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
ancestralenq.bsky.social
Cheshire Archives staff cataloguing 40,000 glass negatives & 35mm slides which document all aspects of life in the county over the past century for 2 new purpose built archive centres in Crewe & Hoole to open next year. 👇
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Thousands of slides catalogued for Cheshire's new archive centres
Two new archive centres are set to open next year in Cheshire - one in Hoole and one in Crewe.
www.bbc.co.uk
January 3, 2026 at 7:44 AM
pabloredux.bsky.social
"Consider the Consequences! (published 1930) is a romantic novel in the form of an interactive novel or gamebook by the American writing partnership of Doris Webster (1885–1967) and Mary Alden Hopkins (1876–1960). It is the earliest known gamebook, and has 43 different endings." Now online!
January 4, 2026 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
johnthejack.bsky.social
Excellent report by @lindseyhilsum.bsky.social on Colombian border: Venezuelans wait with some trepidation, acting president without any real power, fears of factionalism and descent into (possibly bloody) chaos. Concern in much of region, particularly Cuba. Scepticism everywhere #c4news
January 4, 2026 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
johnthejack.bsky.social
Left-wing leaders across Latin America are feeling a bit like Mexico normally feels: 'So far from God and so near the United States.' @lindseyhilsum.bsky.social on #c4news
January 4, 2026 at 6:31 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
davidgunkel.bsky.social
--Think Différant--
Since mainstream analytic philosophy is clearly struggling to wrap its head around the writing of #LLM #AI, a better approach might be to consult the one philosopher who took WRITING seriously as a philosophical problem: Jacques Derrida. doi.org/10.1007/s001...
January 4, 2026 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
tobytram.bsky.social
Collecting a bundle of sunsets all at once, to bustle January out of the way all the sooner.
Sunset, as seen though a glass decanter top, so that it is fractured into 8 or so sunsets, all at acute angles.
January 4, 2026 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
p-hunermund.com
If you've missed this piece about the different modes of empiricism in computer science versus the social sciences, I can highly recommend it. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...
The Empiricism Gap in Computer Science
So far, I have argued that there is a dissonance between, on the one hand, CS’s founding myths, curricula, and self-image, and, on the other hand, the modern production of knowledge in computer scienc...
doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz
January 4, 2026 at 1:28 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
davidgerard.co.uk
there's a recent one from @eruditorumpress.com covering similar ground www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/on-inco...
On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI
An incidental consequence of having written a book on tech-fascism and the so-called rationalist movement is that I find myself periodically queried for my thoughts on artificial intelligence. On the ...
www.eruditorumpress.com
November 26, 2025 at 9:35 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
benjaminjriley.bsky.social
“The neuron teaches us something uncomfortable: computation isn't a lens revealing neural truth—it's a filter that shows us only the biology that looks like a computer. Everything else gets discarded before we even begin our analysis.”

Fascinating read.
January 4, 2026 at 12:09 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
sundersays.bsky.social
It is underdiscussed how far Reform is an attempt to find a narrow governing coalition of a group of voters - a majority of whose views are the opposite of a public majority on many/most major public policy issues. Underestimated because of media ecosystem overestimating support for these positions
January 4, 2026 at 11:39 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
paulbernal.bsky.social
From the other bank…
January 4, 2026 at 9:39 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
casmilus.bsky.social
Death of the heart
discontinuednotes.com/2026/01/04/g...
Gertrude’s Time
I read As It Was In The Beginning by Gertrude Trevelyan. I saw a copy in the Bookseller Crow at some point in 2024 or 2025 and thought it looked interesting and so I bought it and it went on the pi…
discontinuednotes.com
January 4, 2026 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
casparhenderson.bsky.social
“Two questions leap out. The first is whether Trump’s appetite for military adventurism will continue to spread… The second question is how Trump plans to govern Venezuela… Even if Trump thinks he can run the place by remote control, reality will intervene” www.ft.com/content/4388...
Trump now owns Venezuela
The US president has a growing appetite for military adventure
www.ft.com
January 4, 2026 at 9:38 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
triphilosophy.bsky.social
✨ There's lots to look forward to in 2026. Why not come along to one of our #London #Lectures? 🏛️🎤

🎟️ Book tickets for these and other #philosophy events at buff.ly/8xNGjEm
January 4, 2026 at 9:45 AM
pabloredux.bsky.social
But markets are good?
monicamedhist.bsky.social Monica H Green @monicamedhist.bsky.social · 16d
This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪
Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding
With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.
www.nature.com
January 3, 2026 at 3:15 PM
pabloredux.bsky.social
After 15 years, am still sorting out my social media policy! How's yours looking?
j2bryson.bsky.social Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d
Not the biggest news, but I did my annual update of my social media policy joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2024/10/guid... Note in particular – @joinmastodon.org.web.brid.gy 's edit policy allows you to EDIT a toot if you learn something from its replies, & anyone who's interacted with it gets notified!
Guidance to my social media communications
artificial and natural intelligence, including politics, policy, ethics and security
joanna-bryson.blogspot.com
January 3, 2026 at 3:06 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
maxkennerly.bsky.social
Perhaps now people will stop wishcasting about the US military refusing illegal orders. That's not a thing that happens. The 100% compliance rate with using civilian boats for target practice was a bit of a tell.
January 3, 2026 at 1:39 PM