Archive: 2026-10
Week 302: End of an era
Sarah Helm, Palestine Action, and the Terrorism Act 2000
We’ve all seen the pictures of the thousands of arrests of peaceful protesters for supporting Palestine Action: an 83-year-old retired priest; a 94-year-old Jewish former human rights lawyer; a blind man who uses a wheelchair. As a result of this absurdity, terrorism arrests went up over 1500% in a year.
Why I’m no longer updating this repository
I’ve decided to archive the source code of my Ruby gems to make it clear that I’m no longer working on them; I’ve written this post to link from them in order to explain why.
Week 301: The barbarism will be televised
We arrived back from Brighton on Monday afternoon, and I proposed that we take the 381 bus that conveniently goes from London Bridge station to the end of our road. It’s a little slower than taking the Jubilee line and walking, but it’s cheaper and we had baggage.
Co-op Legal Services and the fully automated employee panopticon
An article in the Guardian describes how Co-op Legal Services are using a system produced by OpenAI to implement a quantified panopticon for their staff.
All our houses are built on sand now
And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
This was originally going to be called something like, “How slopcoded is your programming language?” But as I gathered the data, I found something else – something worse.
Week 300: A canal trip and a weekend at the seaside
We started the week with a train journey to Rugby, an hour’s travel for the improbably cheap price of £5.95 each. That was an advance ticket with a Two Together Railcard, which gives a ⅓ discount, but even accounting for that it was so cheap that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t made a mistake.
Motion E02
I was at the Green Party Conference this weekend, and in the room for the vote on Motion E02: Zionism is Racism. The debate was surprisingly calm and good-natured for such a contentious topic. A member who had survived the Holocaust as a child spoke passionately in favour of the motion.
I voted against it, and I wish it hadn’t passed.
The motion passed on a margin of only 209 votes (1,022 for, 813 against) out of a membership of over 200,000. A member-led democracy isn’t all it should be if under 1% of the membership take part in votes.