A couple of teardowns of Russian Orlan-10 UAVs captured by Ukrainian forces have appeared on the Internet lately. This drone is a short-ish range platform for reconnaissance and artillery target acquisition that acquired a fearsome reputation after the 2014 battle of Zelenopillya in the Donbas, where a substantial Ukrainian force was destroyed by Russian artillery…
Read More Drone TeardownFollowing up on this post, there’s been a surprisingly good parliamentary debate on the practice of using bogus lawsuits to intimidate journalists and MPs, which touches more than I expected on the impact of kleptocracy in British politics. I have some objections to this – where was Liam Byrne on this when he was a…
Read More A little moreSo there’s a rolling crisis with Russia going on. A few weeks back I responded to this thread from the good doctor Leo Strauss with this tweet. What I think is necessary to understand here is the model of Putin-era Russia Tony Wood asserts in this podcast from 2018: Novara Media · #NovaraFM: Russia Without…
Read More Russia, Ukraine, and HighgateI promised to enlarge on this Twitter thread, so I will. Unfortunately the inciting incident has fallen prey to that terrible depressing habit of bulk-deleting one’s tweets on a schedule, but the point Michael Hobbes was making was about the way all kinds of tiny niche interests have developed a recognisable structure of celebrity-fan relationships,…
Read More a case study of troll-host symbiosisJon Lawrence set off with a cracking idea. One of the most important intellectual projects of the last decade has been the so-called replication crisis, the effort to find out if major psychology experiments’ results can be repeated. It turns out they can’t; a combination of stubborn prejudice, poor statistical methods, and academic career incentives…
Read More Me, Me, Me? In Search of CommunityHere’s a topic that’s bound to delight everyone. The best way I can think of to understand the social place of the British monarchy is as a very modern influencer content-marketing and celebrity management operation, the influencer house of Windsor. Starting in the late 1960s, there was a deliberate project to reinvent the institution in…
Read More The monarchy as a content-marketing operationWe live in a crisis of responsibility. Consider this twitter conversation with Lux Alptraum and myself. This was one of those good moments on Twitter; the very different networks in my feed crossed over, generating insight. I had just seen, via Simon Willison’s feed, this embarrassing story about that time futurvangelistic technogger Peter Diamandis presumably…
Read More Links on the crisis of responsibilityThis Time magazine report on the campaign by democratic America (in every sense) to force Trump to respect the election results is well worth your time. This slightly earlier NYT story can be read with it for more colour. The overwhelming, astonishing stand-out here is how close this was to the colour revolution blueprint of…
Read More All that was missing was the colourHancock does *not* rule out even tougher measures incl: curfewsclosing nurseriesending support bubblesmasks outsideone hour exercise "I don't want to speculate", he says, because most imp thing is not whether Govt strengthens rules but whether people follow them. — Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) January 10, 2021 How should we understand this? One theory would be that…
Read More Three Matt HancocksSo Matt Hancock is doing the rounds of the sundays, dropping hints that will be briefed out in more detail without attribution later. Perhaps this time’s the charm and the virus will be defeated by the sheer might of talking points distribution. Hell, it worked on us to the extent of getting this shower elected…
Read More A big conversation on seagulls, and after