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Thomas Jones

@moonjets.bsky.social

590 followers 160 following 140 posts

I work @lrb.co.uk, most of my opinions are other people’s

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · Sep 1

By his own account Ferrari met Mussolini once, on 9 April 1924. He was asked to lead the motorcade escorting the prime minister from Modena to Sassuolo for lunch. Ferrari drove so fast that Mussolini couldn’t keep up and nearly skidded off the road. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Thomas Jones · Lunch with Mussolini: Ferrari Speeds Ahead

I’d been told in no uncertain terms at the ‘technical briefing’, even if you think you’re a good driver, even if...

www.lrb.co.uk

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Republicans Against Trumpism @rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social · 1d

Almost like someone had advance notice from inside Trump’s inner circle. Truly the golden age of corruption.

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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 1d

What an emblem of the billionaire class—descending on a peaceful city in a private jet on the horn to NYT asking for the place to be invaded by federal authorities because the rent-a-cops you employ for a week to harass a few junkies outside the convention center cost too much.

Mr. Benioff spoke as his annual Dreamforce conference is set to begin Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 visitors to the city. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address about the benefits of "agentic enterprise," a business model in which humans and artificial intelligence bots work together.
Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for nundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to "re-fund" the police.
The city never actually "defunded" its police force, and San Francisco's violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.
But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it ne → another thousand.

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 2d

Alchemy!

Justin Mikulka @justinmikulka.bsky.social · 2d

Does the public or media know the difference between methane and natural gas?

No.

This headline informs the public that in Iowa they are turning methane into natural gas.

Eastern Iowa landfill turning methane into natural gas - Radio Iowa

There’s a new facility at a landfill in Davenport that allows the methane gas from decomposing trash to be collected and used for power. Scott County Waste Commission spokesperson Rachel Evans explain...

www.radioiowa.com

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Will Davies @will-davies.bsky.social · 2d

I'm more sympathetic to the Haidt line than some but jesus H christ people with an *infinite flow of human labour* to support their families should not be lecturing people about this topic www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Kate warns too much screen time damages family life

The Princess of Wales says that smartphones and digital devices are causing an

www.bbc.co.uk

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 3d

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

violent alien @blipstress.bsky.social · 3d

An actual hot take: Too many authors are afraid of editors watering down their voice or whatever and not afraid enough of editors letting you put any old slop on the page.

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 3d

Not quite the same but David Bowie’s music took a nosedive after he divorced Angie and didn’t pick up again till he’d married Iman.

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 3d

This is one of the things I was trying to write about here www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

LL OF THIS was taking place under Fascism. Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king of Italy
on 30 October 1922. Ferrari, busy at the Alfa Romeo headquarters in Milan, wasn't paying attention. Italy's last multi-party elections before 1946 (though they were hardly free or fair) were held on 6 April 1924. A week later Nuvolari won the opening race of the Grand Prix season at Tigullio. The socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist death squad on 10 June 1924, nine days after Ferrari won the Circuito del Polesine in an Alfa Romeo RL SS. Antonio Gramsci was arrested on 9 November 1926.
'Enzo Ferrari spent 1926 in Modena,' Dal Monte writes. 'He was seen at football matches, cycling events and, in the winter months, even at ski events on the slopes of the Apennines.' What else was he supposed to do?

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Deborah Friedell @deborahfriedell.bsky.social · 4d

I love the @lrb.co.uk “Close Readings” podcast, so it was a total treat to do this episode with @moonjets.bsky.social & Colm Tóibín on Henry James -- even if Colm remains inexplicably blind to the charms of Lord Warburton & his moat. www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

Podcast: Colm Tóibín, Deborah Friedell and Thomas Jones · Novel Approaches: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James

www.lrb.co.uk

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Toby Earle 🇺🇦 @tobyontv.bsky.social · 4d

is this the Kemi Badenoch, wanting to cut English, whose slogan misspelled "Britain"

Ignoramus and philistine Kemi Badenouch saying students should not study Englush and "rip-off" degress, the Tories wanting to cut arts, sociology, and anthropology

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Patrick Dunleavy @patrickdunleavy.bsky.social · 5d

Privatising provision equals lousy service and huge company profits, wherever it is done.

“Asylum hotel provider makes £180m profit despite claims of inedible food and rationed loo paper” - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Asylum hotel provider makes £180m profit despite claims of inedible food and rationed loo paper

Asylum seekers and charities tell BBC of

www.bbc.co.uk

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 4d

He also, as Thatcher’s defence secretary, threatened the Greenham Common protesters with being shot.

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 5d

What should happen: National revulsion, hounded out of public life

What will happen: New set design for Sky News as three very, very right wing parties fight out The Deportation Election

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 6d

From a review of Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021)

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

And then there's always a darker question lurking behind the one about whether or not robots can be people, and it isn't about robots but about people, and what it means when they - when we - treat others as if they weren't human. It is, or should be, troubling to realise that we have little difficulty not only in anthropomorphising computers, cars, toys or fictional characters, but also in dehumanising the people whose lives, sometimes but not always remote from our own, are instrumental to our happiness, or to our comfort.

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Ben Whitham @drbenwhitham.bsky.social · 7d

Men in balaclavas set fire to a mosque in East Sussex last night. It's only appearing on the BBC's local coverage, rather than its main national headlines, despite coming just a week after the (also under-reported) firebombing of an asylum hotel in London last week
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Peacehaven: Fire at East Sussex mosque probed as 'hate crime'

Video appears to show two people in balaclavas at the mosque before a large blaze spreads.

www.bbc.co.uk

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 7d

Ego homo vespertilionum sum

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 7d

Turns out Batman’s been around at least since Roman times

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 11d

you can't get just how lunatic and hateful UK media has been on this without knowing this. it is *astonishing* in both volume and spite.

ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 11d

"In 2012, 60 trans-related articles were published by Britain’s media. By 2022, it was more than 7,500, according to figures from Trans Media Watch. The media is not responding to public rage against vulnerable minorities; it is helping to create it." www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/709...

What is a reactionary centrist, and does the UK have them?

A term favoured by US progressives can help us understand Britain’s drift to the right

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk

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More Perfect Union @moreperfectunion.bsky.social · 11d

Electricity now costs up to 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers.

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring

Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.

www.bloomberg.com

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 14d

During the curtain call for Verdi’s 1847 Macbeth in Busseto last night, two of the dancers laid a Palestinian flag on the stage. Most of the audience kept applauding though there were a few boos. And you had to wonder which part of ‘gli oppressi corriamo a salvar’ the booers hadn’t heard.

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Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 14d

Even the Fratelli d’Italia, directly descended from the original Fascist Party, don’t make people do this.

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 14d

Something I wrote in 2018. The UK Labour Party could learn a lesson here but won’t.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/ma...

The PD, in government, cracked down on immigration. With EU backing, it last year negotiated a deal with Libyan forces, supplying them with funds and equipment to keep people from crossing the Mediterranean, knowing full well what detention in Libya would mean for them.
The number of people arriving from Africa on Italy's shores dropped dramatically, from more than 180,000 in 2016 to fewer than 120,000 in 2017, and under 6ooo so far this year. The PD's electoral dividend from this moral capitulation was nil (at best). People obsessed with immigration didn't vote for the PD; they voted for the Lega. Facts count for very little. Salvini insists on a connection between immigration and crime, even though statistics show that both overall crime, and crime committed by foreigners, have gone down over the last ten years, at the same time that the number of asylum permits issued has gone up.

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 16d

Although did I miss the bit of the speech when he was going to push back against rising racism, to help reinforce social norms in this area?

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Karl Jacoby @karl-jacoby.bsky.social · 16d

Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a "battle" rather than what it truly was: a massacre of over 250 Lakotas, mainly women, children, and the elderly. 1/

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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 17d

Elmore Leonard ‘did more with less than any crime writer I can think of,’ @jrobertlennon.com wrote in the latest issue. On the podcast, Lennon joins @moonjets.bsky.social to discuss the ways in which great crime writing will always defy the prescriptions of its genre:

www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

Podcast: J. Robert Lennon and Thomas Jones · How to Write Like Elmore Leonard

www.lrb.co.uk

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404 Media @404media.co · 18d

A new study, based on a survey of 1,150 workers suggests that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in a magic productivity boom and instead increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.”

🔗 www.404media.co/ai-workslop-...

AI ‘Workslop’ Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable

AI slop is taking over workplaces. Workers said that they thought of their colleagues who filed low-quality AI work as "less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output."

www.404media.co

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