Paul C(innamon) Kirby
International theory, feminist political thought, “Women, Peace and Security”, masculinities and the governing of them, critical war studies, statecraft, pop cultures, another university might still be possible. Gender detective.
- The Home (now Foreign) Secretary went on TV and told us Palestine Action were so intent on violence towards people they had to be proscribed tout suite. She couldn’t discuss details but they were akin to Nazi militias and jihadi beheaders, honest. No wonder the evidence has to be kept from juries.
- Since many Reform voters used to be Tories, they may not see politicians following their lead as a problem. Also underpriced that Nigel is a poundshop Trump, and some portion of his base will relish the debasement of defectors.
- Every official US government claim about its campaign of terror should be treated as a lie until proven otherwise.
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyColleagues were interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about @qmul.bsky.social's sudden escalation in taking down posters & threatening disciplinary action. It is a great explanation of what's happening & its dangers. Listen from 22min in: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... or clipped: youtu.be/SJGnCrDaCf0?...
- Let us bracket for a moment whether you or I would forget whether we had received £140,000 in today’s money from a rich pal who turned out to be a rampant paedophile. The confusion is surely enough to warrant a searching inquiry of who else may have paid him and for what. www.ft.com/content/1728...
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyThis ought to have been the main UK news story from the DoJ’s latest Jeffrey Epstein data dump. Peter Mandelson told Epstein he was “trying hard” to change government policy on bankers’ bonuses at his request, months after Epstein paid thousands of pounds to the then Business Secretary’s husband.
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyWe are Christopher Isherwood, watching neighbours inform on neighbours from our apartment above.
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyChris Rufo is so upset about the Minneapolis protests that he is resorting to anti-Nordic racism christopherrufo.com/p/the-curse-...
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyAnother banger from Jonathan Guyer, who's been on the USAID-Gaza beat for a few years. If anyone wonders why I really, really hate Joe Biden and his administration? It's because I had to work for them on Gaza. They're evil, evil people who deserve prison.
- The Women, Peace and Security UK Research Network is organising its first workshop. We invite submissions from researchers of all career stages and of any institutional affiliation (or none) based in the UK. Workshop: 19 May Deadline for abstracts: 2 March thedisorderofthings.com/2026/01/30/c...
- Symptomatic of a deathspiral comms strategy to put out a line so bad that it implies a Labour government in favour of the nightwatchman state: defence spending, transport infrastructure and the electrical grid, everything else is for you to figure out you parasite.
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyComplete insanity. And it's a political choice. There should be interest-free student loans for at least a share of the population. That's the rule not the exception if you look at other countries. Graduates are the most important electoral group for Labour. They can demand more from this government
- “I borrowed in total £55,000…” “How much do you owe now?" “£72,000” @vicderbyshire.bsky.social speaks to Dr Arthur Joustra, a trainee paediatrician, about how his student loan debt has risen since he graduated in 2022 - despite making payments. #Newsnight
- 60,000 US soldiers died in Vietnam over a decade, with huge political and cultural ramifications in a society of 216 million (1975). 325,000 Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine in under four years, drawn from a society of 144 million (2024). Really stress-testing authoritarian stability theory.
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyMatt Goodwin's lies about his background have hopelessly confused Google AI 😉
- Further notes on realism and rearmament.
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyEvery morning I wake up with a hollow anger that I have been enrolled, as a university worker, into a long-term objective of “enhancing” AI integration (“where appropriate”) into my undergraduate teaching
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyThis Wednesday!! Come along 😊
- I am so excited to be part of this event on the Global Politics of Abortion with the fabulous Dr Nayla Luz Vacarezza, Sarah of Ad’iyah Collective, Prof Sophie Harman & Dr Sydney Calkin 28th January. Be there! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/global-pol... @qmulsse.bsky.social @profsophieharman.bsky.social
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- The ostrich strategy. www.lbc.co.uk/article/uk-m...
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbySo we have figures now. Grok created and shared 1.8m sexualised images of women between December 31 and January 8, after Elon Musk promoted the feature on X. Overall, the Grok chatbot generated and posted 4.4m images — 41% were sexualised images of women www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...
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[Not loaded yet] - May have more to say later but just to trumpet that I’m in RENEWAL, and in the same double issue as the Labour Minister who resigned in part over the gendered impacts of the aid cuts and a Labour MP calling for an extra dose of feminism.
- What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags, like a heavy load. Or does it explode? www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
- 30,000 jobs gone in three years. Before the national insurance increase and the international student levy hits. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pay-spe...
- Honestly, encouraging. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/p...
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- What is the rearview of Iraq in the UK government? It should be that it was a ‘national interest’ disaster on multiple metrics, presumably all the more so given the time/cash lost in building the wrong kind of military. What will cabinet do the next time round? www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyHoly fuck they actually did it
- Affirming the western canon against woke cultural Marxism by banning Plato, no notes. dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...
- If undermining international law while claiming to champion it was a canny bit of realpolitik to prop up a Ukraine plan that will never be implemented, why didn’t the much stronger line on Venezuela from the French scupper it?
- Fourteen interventions on twenty-five years of Women, Peace and Security. Open access, free to read. “If an anniversary signals a return, a cycle of remembrance, then for WPS that ritual is in disarray… We may wonder: what sort of party does WPS deserve?” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyOne example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.
- I’m inclined to this take on the seeping spread of ‘good enough’ short-cuts in scholarship, except that we can already see that one of the effects of responsibility discounting when using LLMs is that people are redefining what would have been clear misconduct *as* just unintentional carelessness.
- HMG has opted for the worst possible response to gangsterism. By refusing to defend ‘liberal’ order, they alienate natural allies. But by not pleading brute geopolitics they also sacrifice any claim to ‘realism’. While legalistic prevarication just reads as weak to Trump. www.ft.com/content/fed6...
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyDirector of the CIA is in the room but you have OSINTdefender's twitter page up on the screen
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyExpect to see a lot of this classic Onion headline, from 23 years ago, over the coming weeks.
- Hard to know whether a P-5 member of the Security Council should have a view on this sort of thing, or the stated end game of US oil companies profiting from regime change. Perhaps the FCDO can commission an expert study and report to No. 10 in a few months.
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- Mistakes were made, but not by me! www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
- IMHO what centrists miss is that Starmer’s “reasonable” persona adds to the loathing. It’s the opposite of the BoJo effect where the clown gets away with murder. There’s something extremely aggravating about someone lying to you through the tut-tutting face of an officious barrister.
- Would it not be easier, in that case, for the government to dissolve the people, and elect another?
- Adapt or die. www.ft.com/content/52e7...
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- The system works.
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- RFK Jr. is funding a $1.6 million study where placebos will be given to babies. But let’s all talk some more about that Malibu narcissist and her shittily-written book.
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- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbySo, El Fasher looks like one of the worst single event atrocities to happen this century so far, but the evidence has come in such a trickle it seems to only now be getting verified
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyTomorrow's front page 📰 'The UK is letting these people die'
- What a life. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/u...
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- Only 27% of union members voting for strike action, plus a turnout 10% below the required threshold. Zero sugar-coating. At no small cost to funds, branch morale, or negotiating heft. What counts now is the quality of the explanation, critically an ability to say what events could prove you wrong.
- Good stuff. renewal.org.uk/blog/corbyns...
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- A depiction of the ‘faculty lounge’ so alien to my experience that I guffawed and rewound twice.
- Complaints that Labour is doing Reform’s work for them often seem pitched at the level of electoral calculus, media discourse or the harms to non-citizens (increasingly the ‘wrong’ citizens). But anti-migrant triangulation will tank the economy as well as poison our culture!
- Every business with a toilet must navigate the distinction between “an individual's physique or physical appearance, [or] behaviour" (❌) and “clothes or other forms of presentation conventionally associated with one or other sex” (✅) without discriminating against transfolk. Dangerously absurd.
- This level of institutional commitment to reputational self-harm is intriguing, sociologically speaking. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...
- An intelligence great enough to have memory-holed Liz Truss.
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyElon Musk donated $277 million to Trump so he could steal the federal government’s data, dismantle the nation’s infrastructure, and stop foreign aid from going to nonwhite people. It’s a quid pro quo breathtaking in scope, corruption, and damage, & completely unprecedented in American history.
- Bye bye, “DOGE”. It no longer exists as a “centralized entity”, according to the Office of Personnel Management. @reuters.com www.reuters.com/world/us/dog...
- I for one welcome our new crybaby god emperor.
- Welcome to the machine slop arms race. How dare my lecturers use AI! Why shouldn't I use AI for lectures no one pays attention to? Why shouldn't I get help on my assignments? Why should I waste my time marking when 90% of students are using AI for essays? www.theguardian.com/education/20...
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- It’s obvious what Trump gains from further debasing the UN Security Council. Less obvious what champions of liberal multilateralism France and Britain think they’re up to in authorising use of force by an unknown military body in a fiefdom ruled by the President of the United States and Tony Blair.
- Is there even a mainstream political journalist who would think to ask? Or, while we’re at, to have prepared a follow-up on the relative prevalence of genocide and civil war in different periods to test the inevitable reply that such danger no longer exists?
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- “What some Democrats would prefer is a centrist manosphere of their own. (One imagines a podcast studio attached to a well-appointed gym where a bunch of white guys are discussing Abundance over beta-alanine smoothies and doing pistol squats to Pod Save America.)” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
- Cognitive offloading pass-the-parcel.
- Gender-affirming healthcare, but bad. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyAI could end scarcity, end humanity - or boost trend growth by 0.2 percentage points
- Easily missed: the decision not to fund a more expansive atrocity prevention effort was taken *before* the cuts to the aid budget. Sudan is on paper a remaining priority, but is nevertheless scheduled for an 18% cut in funding this year alone (with worse to come). www.bond.org.uk/news/2025/07...
- David Lammy, Aug 2025: “It grates that there isn’t more interest in the war in Sudan, which affects him personally. Privately, he’ll say it’s because those dying are African and black.” FCDO, Oct 2024: chooses least ambitious option for atrocity prevention. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
- David Lammy, Aug 2025: “It grates that there isn’t more interest in the war in Sudan, which affects him personally. Privately, he’ll say it’s because those dying are African and black.” FCDO, Oct 2024: chooses least ambitious option for atrocity prevention. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
- Reposted by Paul C(innamon) KirbyHoping this helps our colleagues across the industry
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- Unbearable. yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/10...
