Colin Warriner

@colinelmustard

The best thing about a new social network is writing a new profile bio | he/him | LGBTQ+ 🏳️‍🌈

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Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· 3d

I’ve paid so little attention to the ASOIAF series, so maybe this has already been widely commented on, but in A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin named three generations of the Tully family Grover, Elmo, Kermit and Oscar? 🤦🏻‍♂️

Four muppets: Grover, Elmo, Kermit and Oscar.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Jul 5

So, it turns out there’s been a system error, and that’s why America’s the way it is, but we can fix it if one of us volunteers to be sent to Hell…

Scene from The Good Place featuring an illuminated obelisk.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Jul 5

I think this might be one of the most incredible, unsettling and symbolic photos of today’s America I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop looking at it. From Reuters, published on the Guardian website.

Lightning strikes behind the illuminated Washington Monument, as people gather to watch 250th anniversary fireworks.
Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Jun 23

JD Vance awkwardly patting his wife’s knee.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Jun 11

Currently finding a small measure of joy in these photos of @mayor.nyc.gov and Peppermint at a Pride event 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Mayor Mamdani and Peppermint on stage at the MOLGBTQIA event.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Jun 3

The face being pulled behind him is definitely one that I would make if I saw someone trying to condescend that smugly to Senator Warren.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· May 27

Wish this could be my wfh inspiration today.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· May 25

I enjoy when cats are warm enough they drop all pretence at dignity

Our cat, asleep on her back in our slightly overgrown garden, in 33° heat.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· May 22

Met Police: We want to use Palantir. Mayor: No, you can’t. Palantir: Why isn’t the mayor doing more to protect people from being sexually assaulted by the Met Police? Met Police:...um, yeah. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

On Friday, Mosley told Times Radio: “What Londoners value is not being mugged, not being raped by a serving police officer and that’s really what the focus here should be … If we are going to politicise procurement in that way then we are going to compromise public safety”.

His response drew an angry response from the Labour MP Stella Creasy, who said Mosley “should be ashamed of himself”.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· May 15

Sir, you literally serve a God-Emperor.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· May 13

PSA: Apparently ‘Scavengers Reign’ is being taken off Netflix after 30 May. If you haven’t seen it yet, I strongly recommend taking the dwindling opportunity to watch a really intelligent, original, and occasionally heartbreaking animated series, which deserves so much love.

A still from Scavengers Reign, showing two characters (a human and a robot) next to a vehicle on an alien world.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· May 8

The BBC is really burying the lede here if they’ve determined evolution only began 27 years ago.

Excerpt from BBC article:

Greetings from Clydebank, where counting is under way for both Dumbarton and Clydebank and Milngavie constituencies.
Dumbarton has been held by Labour’s Jackie Baillie since 1999 - one of the "class of 1999", who were elected to the Scottish Parliament at the dawn of evolution.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· May 6

Get naked…but stay dry!

Bath taps with a ‘DO NOT USE’ sticker across them.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

And finally… “Because we get asked a lot” Oh, don’t make Palantir fash. Don’t make them fash. Well I suppose if they MUST fash, they must. But don’t make them fash. Oh but they can hardly REFUSE to fash NOW, since everyone is DEMANDING they fash.

Kristen Wiig in an SNL sketch about a 1920s party hostess who asks her guests not to make her sing, and then blithely proceeds to do so, badly, despite no one ever actually having demanded it.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

And then this, right at the end. Noxious, virulent and - for all their fetishising of ‘innovation’ - incredibly old and unoriginal. The Technological Republic has a theocratic, ethnonationalist tumour growing in its guts. And it’s one they *want* to metastasise.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

Another tiny violin for the billionaire ‘engineering elites’ that should be ruling us without having to submit to our petty scrutiny. They even name-check Musk. We don’t criticise them *because* they have ideas: we criticise them because their ideas are bad. Or are racist. Or are killing people.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

And not just more militarism directed towards crime, of course: a complete re-orientation of the state, commerce and society to serve military aims. (‘Everyone’ sharing the risk and cost always has a way of carving out the ‘right’ people.)

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

This is why they want to have a freer hand. So much deception and bad faith framing in this paragraph to imply that a ‘Technological Republic’ would do…what, to address crime? I strongly suspect suspend civil liberties, presumption of innocence, due process - the things enshrined to protect us all.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

They’re talking about *leaders* - not *workers*. Grace for cabinet members and presidential appointees. Freedom from things like investigative journalism or congressional oversight. They want us to stop examining leaders, and they’re laying the groundwork for more extreme ones to have freer hands.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

These are interesting because on their face they make reasonable points. Yes, let’s improve public sector pay and show more grace and forgiveness. Good things. But you start to realise they don’t mean public sector *workers* - this is them back on ‘elites’ again; the elites they like and are.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

Read in the context of the rest of this statement, I think it’s forgivable to conclude that the authors think the advancement of progressive values is the ‘imperfection’ they want to fix. And in that light, I wonder how much they actually value ‘peace’. Tweak the tone and these could be regretful.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

Paragraph 12 is getting a lot of attention for obvious reasons, but coming so soon after paragraph 4 calling out over-reliance on rhetorical flourish, it reads a bit Blair 1998 (‘A day like today is not a day for soundbites, but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder’)

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Apr 19

First sentence: totally fine; even commendable. Second sentence: hmm. There’s the casual importance given to the implicitly defined social stratum of ‘engineering elite’, but mostly my ears prick up at ‘defense of the nation’: an abstraction that here signals militaristic, not social improvement.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Mar 19

Ah yes, important counterbalances to the president’s petty vindictiveness: sweaty glee and po-faced Christofascism.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Hegseth suggested that Thursday would bring the biggest US onslaught so far. “To date, we’ve struck over 7,000 targets across Iran and its military infrastructure,” the defense secretary said. “Today will be the largest strike package yet … death and destruction from above.”

Hegseth, who has previously expressed sympathy for Christian nationalism, ended his remarks with an overtly religious plea for Americans to pray for US troops “on bended knee with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ”.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Mar 19

I’m sure he’ll offer a sober and thoughtful de-escalation.

“Hegseth to address media after Trump threatens to ‘blow up’ entire South Pars gasfield”

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Mar 4

Definitely not the main takeaway here and maybe this is me being a geriatric millennial but why is the Metro just quoting random commenters on social media by their first names only? Do we know Peter? Who is Aidan (other than a gobshite)?

Quote from the Metro article linked: “Reacting to the episode on X, Peter asked: ‘How can Benjamin say Hitler was good with children when he killed so many?’”

Quote from Metro article linked: “Aidan also wrote: ‘Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing is pure cinema. Sir Ben the absolute madlad rocking an original Hitler painting in his gaff.’”

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Mar 3

Everyone’s rightly talking about his daft rants about windmills and Sharia courts, but I also think it’s interesting that he seems to have forgotten where his father was born. Trump is gesturing to the German Chancellor, but while his father had German parents, he was actually born in New York.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Feb 24

Coming to this excellent post about three months late, but it’s a very good primer on why the drive to reduce jury trials seems misdirected (or even disingenuous). I particularly liked this evocative simile:

“The Leveson report is full of all sorts of modelling, estimating how much court time could be freed up by removing juries from swathes of cases, which is being paraded as the justification. That modelling has itself been questioned by the Criminal Bar Association as lacking a sound evidential basis, but even assuming it is accurate, it is against a baseline of our current, wildly inefficient system. We have no idea – because Sir Brian has not yet considered it – how much time could be saved by addressing the inefficiencies. We have no idea whether “radical structural reform” is even necessary. Because those questions have not been asked.

It is akin to having a freezing cold house, with the windows and doors wide open, the radiators leaking and the boiler on the brink. And your first port of call being to summon a bulldozer. And only then, standing amid the wreckage of your home, to ring for a plumber.”

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Feb 20

Love this ad appearing on the Guardian news feed about the tariffs decision.

Advert: ‘Immigrate to Canada’

Showing a smiling man holding a Canadian flag and giving a thumbs up.

Colin Warriner@colinelmustard· Feb 12