Not actually a Treponema
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generalparesis.bsky.social
Not actually a Treponema
@generalparesis.bsky.social
Mainly history, but a large dose of whatever takes my interest at that moment. She/her.
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
I came to this country as a child refugee. No English, no certainty, no idea what my life could become. Britain gave me refuge.

Not on a timer, not with conditions attached, but with a chance to grow roots.

A thread 🧵 1/8
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
UK set to limit refugees to temporary stays
Shabana Mahmood is expected to say the era of permanent protection for refugees is over, in major changes to the UK's asylum and immigration system.
www.bbc.co.uk
November 15, 2025 at 10:29 AM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
Get white men to understand they have an identity and have done nothing but talk to us about their identities and how to politically and culturally accommodate their identities for all of history challenge: impossible
This is a straightforward Republican attack line, what the fuck is he doing
November 15, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”
November 15, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
Predictable but still amazing to watch people who spent literally years accusing every librarian, teacher, and trans person they could find of sexually grooming children suddenly throw themselves in with "actually it's ephebophilia"
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
November 13, 2025 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
In other words, you need a large NECESSARY bureaucracy. Healthcare is big and weird and complicated to deliver and you need people to support the people delivering the care. And if you "cut bureaucracy" and reinvest that money in the frontline then the frontline are *less supported*.
November 12, 2025 at 10:54 PM
In the transphobic crowing about recording the biological sex of rapists, in Scotsman: "Since 2018 there have been 16,258 sexual offences recorded by Police Scotland, and the chief constable said “every one of those recorded accurately that it is a biological man who has committed that offence”." 1/
November 12, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
A brilliant example of what Lewis Goodall talks about when he argues why right-wing radicals keep winning. They don't play by the rules and simply don't care. Whereas the institutions they want to destroy do even when said rules are contorted to absurdity and are blatantly being used against them.
The founder of Newsmax was just on the Today programme pontificating about bias. Boy, the BBC loves to submit itself to flagellation.
November 11, 2025 at 8:45 AM
I thought that photo might be from the Glasgow Medical Officer for Health's annual report - it isn't, but this glorious photo of the temporary X-Ray centre in George Square is. The rest doesn't have such pretty pictures but some fascinating information (1/?)
November 10, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
The ability of the far right to insist that their views - trans people are lying perverts, climate change is a hoax, immigrants are all thieving, raping scum - are necessarily legitimate & must be given a hearing is already a vast victory for forms of extremism beyond the pale not long ago.
What bothers me is that impartiality and balance are two different and incompatible things. Impartiality means that you don't intervene to put your thumb on the scales. Balance necessarily requires that you intervene to artificially make every issue look like a 50/50.
November 10, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
Watson's racism & sexism were infamous. but this obituary sheds light onto something else: he was essentially an earlier rendition of what's happening now with tech CEOs & pundits who are convinced they're always the smartest person in the room & how this inevitably leads to anti-"PC/woke" brain rot
A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.
www.statnews.com
November 9, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
Interesting history deep dive on sex markers on UK passports.
Can anyone tell me when sex markers appeared on UK documents? Have they always been on UK birth certificates?
I am older than gender markers on passports! How do you regulate gender? By making it a form of government ID. It has nothing to do with state security, only regulation
November 9, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
Panera’s moderately caffeinated lemonade was loosely associated with 2 deaths before it was taken off market.

This article alone has 4 examples of ChatGPT encouraging young people to commit suicide, and OpenAI’s own public stats estimate over a million users discuss suicide with ChatGPT each week.
November 7, 2025 at 10:56 PM
I hadn't heard about this - the BBC is restricting access to its written archives. It feels like part of the bigger picture of shutting down anything that is a positive for producing and preserving knowledge in the UK.
November 7, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
WAC wrong-headedness
(that's the BBC Written Archives Centre)

I've brought together the key links for the campaign against the changes which now make independent and exploratory research at WAC impossible - and why this matters.

www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/wac-wrong-he...
WAC wrong-headedness - Illuminations
John Wyver writes: Some of you will know that I have been very involved over the past months with attempts to reverse the wrong-headed changes to access at the BBC Written Archives Centre (above, with...
www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk
November 7, 2025 at 4:36 PM
This default discriminates against Scottish people
www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0w4...
November 7, 2025 at 6:08 AM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
The long-running ideological war on libraries, education, and government workers is not separate from AI boosterism. It is the same ideological war on human knowledge and expertise. In some cases AI is being used to directly supercharge this effort:

www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."
www.404media.co
November 6, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
It is hard to function in a world where severe harms to children & adolescents are being caused by our state institutions, and almost everyone looks the other way, or cheers them along. Child safety doesn't mean a thing in this country if the child is trans.
November 6, 2025 at 10:37 AM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
To be really clear, Sussex ICB threatened, in writing, to close a Brighton GP practice serving 25,000 patients, purely to bully them into passing over child records. The GP did not want to pass on these records, because they understood the acute risk (& reality) of harm to trans adolescents.
Sophie's article is back up with a statement from the ICB. They are lying. They threatened Well BN with closure if they weren't given access to our childs records. Well BN held off for months, trying to stop them.
"Laura fears all will be lost if ICB Sussex forces her child off the medication.

If ICB Sussex get their own way in a matter of weeks and they force detransition, Olive may well take her life."

northwestbylines.co.uk/news/health/...
November 6, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
We have lots of student notebooks containing sketches on anatomy, diseases etc, however, this one is by far our favourite. It shows Joseph Lister, father of antiseptic surgery, disappearing through a trapdoor after his lecture in Glasgow in 1868. Now that's how to make an exit!
#Museum30 #Sketchbook
November 4, 2025 at 12:02 PM
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New awareness campaign
November 3, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
As @cathamclarke.bsky.social said to me the other week; it’s clear there’s a NEED for history - just look around you. But there’s a disconnect between that and the realisation that there’s a need to train historians.
I think it’s even worse: the lack of recognition that there even *is* such a thing as professional training in historical research!
November 1, 2025 at 9:52 AM
Good summary of the Historic Environment Scotland situation.
November 1, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
Reposted by Not actually a Treponema
Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term
www.gov.uk/government/p...
The value of public R&D
www.gov.uk
October 30, 2025 at 1:28 PM