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David Timoney Profile picture
@fromarsetoelbow
Jun 27 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
This starts with the admission that there is no scientific basis for a social media ban for kids but ends with the conclusion that there is a consensus that something must be done so let's all ban social media for kids.
theguardian.com/news/ng-intera…
Not only is this a classic moral panic that uses children as the excuse to implement a regime of censorship, but it delicately steps around the question of what the harms are, beyond a gesture towards "addiction", because that would mean addressing the purpose of the algorithm.
This not only means ignoring the obvious measure of disabling the curated feed (i.e. "For you"), but also means that questions do not need to be asked about general media bias - e.g. that newspapers are purely curated feeds with little ability for the consumer to be selective.

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More from @fromarsetoelbow

David Timoney Profile picture
May 31
The Milburn report has to be seen in its historic context as the last stage of the central neoliberal project. The Thatcher economic revolution wasn't about deindustrialisation or the City Big Bang (epiphenomena) but about reducing the power of labour relative to capital.
This was a three-pronged strategy: weaken the unions through legislation & policing (the Miners' Strike, Wapping etc); make employment "flexible" and "marketised" (i.e. unprotected & employer-friendly); and reduce welfare to encourage people to accept lower wages & worse terms.
The first two of these were achieved, but progress has slowed since 2000 (part of the evangelism for AI among the political class is down to the belief it will allow a further cycle to commence). Since 2009, the purpose of austerity has been welfare cuts, not debt reduction.
Read 5 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
Apr 27, 2025
Rachel Sylvester's breathless style and tech illiteracy suggests that "Robots at number 10" isn't a crack at Starmer's lack of affect but a genuine paean to the transformative powers of AI fairy dust. This does not bode well for the new Observer.
observer.co.uk/news/politics/…
From Office365 to the singularity in one simple step. For the record, transcription software has been around for decades. It isn't AI. Image
At no point does Sylvester ask why the state has a long history of failure in IT projects. There are a number of factors, but the key one is outsourcing, specifically relying on consultancies for procurement. And no, being able to do stuff online is not "taking back control". Image
Read 4 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
May 31, 2023
New masterly inactivity just dropped ...
Obviously those imagining that Starmer will reverse course once he gets in ("The man is a consummate liar & that's why I'm voting for him") are going to be disappointed, but even those advocating the long game are sketchy on how the change in public opinion will come about.
The point to remember is that that the pro-EU establishment abjectly failed after 1992 to build a popular consensus in support of the project, partly because they wouldn't take on the europhobic press & partly because the EU was always a convenient excuse.
Read 4 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
May 31, 2023
Catherine McKinnon has, to use her own phrase, "winged to the Right" on topics such as porn & sex work, effectively providing feminist cover for reactionary politics, but this springs from a critique of liberation rather than a shared censoriousness.
That distinction is made clear in her take on trans rights. She has remained consistent in seeing "women" as a social construct rather than a biological essence, a point she makes well here. Image
And the inescapable logic of that is a critique of gender critical feminists as people who are insincere in their claim to be motivated by the excesses of male power. Image
Read 6 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
May 3, 2023
Lol. There are literally millions of people directly descended from William the Conqueror alone before you start getting down to the churls. Image
The problem with "ancestors" is that a lot of people imagine a pyramid with a couple at the top. But it's actually an inverted pyramid. Every generation going back doubles in number: you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents etc.
If you assume a generation of 30 years (i.e. birth to birth), 937 years back gets you 31 generations. 2^31 is 2.1 billion. Of course, there may have been a bit of in-breeding back then, particularly among the Southron folk, so the figure may be slightly lower.
Read 4 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
May 2, 2023
As usual, this fantasy is premised on the idea that there are lots of trained doctors & nurses available in the private sector. Leaving aside for the moment that many NHS medics moonlight (i.e. they're the same people), economics 101 tells us that this can't be true.
If it were, and at the scale necessary to make a dent in NHS backlogs, private healthcare would be carrying very large deadweight costs that would make it unprofitable. If those resources are fully utilised, this means the NHS will be in competition with private providers.
Those firms won't divert scarce resources to the NHS as that would be killing their primary business. More likely is that it will drive up the market rate (demand exceeding supply) allowing those private firms to import foreign medics at a premium to supply the NHS.
Read 4 tweets

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