Paul Carroll
Paul Carroll
@supertrain.bsky.social
Deliberative and qualitative social researcher. Northerner in London. Gigs, Liverpool FC, Dulwich Hamlet, some other stuff
339 followers624 following687 posts
Paul Carroll reposted
Stop what you are doing and look at this lovely story. A photography student in the 80s took pictures of punks and mods on the street in Preston. He’s now tracked them down and photographed them again. The pictures and stories are really ❤️ www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Paul Carroll reposted
The Red Wall is a myth, a spook story that British politicians must worship at the altar of: do what I tell you or the Red Wall will get you. It is made up. It has long since lost contact with its original definition. It encourages people to confuse places and people. It is past its sell by date.
Love this
The Stone Roses showed me the power of being an introvert At boarding school in the early 90s, quietness was seen as weakness. But then I saw the band’s guitarist John Squire making a vast noise while hiding behind a fringe – and learned the strength of understatementIn September 1991, I had...
Watching these AI-first mistakes being walked back over the next several years will be really really funny
This line from the Telegraph’s CEO is particularly choice. It is an impossible to build a *premium* media brand that is also “AI-powered”. Doubly so if the raw material you’re starting with is… The Daily Telegraph.
Superman, Preston, 1978/79 (I think, I was very young)
First film you saw at the cinema. The real first one, not the pretend one you tell people! Mine: The Empire Strikes Back, 1980, Wigan. We were near the front and I can still remember how massive the AT-ATs looked, looming over us out of the snow :) Film, year, where, and whatever stuck with you.
Paul Carroll reposted
Despite all the disruption, the way television and movies and music worked before 2000 was absolutely fucking fine.
Personally, I'd rather one license fee to subscriptions to Amazon, Disney, Apple, Paramount, Discovery, Netflix, Sky, You Tube etc. It's actually very funny that in this climate of endless direct debits, no one has really been able to make a good case for the license fee
Paul Carroll reposted
Paul Carroll reposted
Can someone please do a graph showing the money paid out to every single person on PIP compared to the tax not taken from millionaires and billionaires? It will tell a story about modern Britain. I cannot tell you how fucking impossible they make it to claim PIP. Stop attacking disabled people.
Interviewing a govt minister Hazarika shows a graph comparing young people claiming PIP to the size of our armed forces & declares it "tells a story about modern Britain" I can't even make a sarcastic comment about our fearless fourth estate, because Hazarika is a Labour politician
Is right
I see we're having a debate about whether it's okay to go back to "X," the site owned by a trillionaire fascist who is currently bankrolling the GOP's midterm, throttled Ukraine's war effort, and still winkingly allows vast amounts of CSAM on his service Answer: No, what the fuck is wrong with you
Paul Carroll reposted
Paul Carroll reposted
Roman centurions of a cold evening at the Wall…
The Roman Army in Britain needed over a tonne of cheese to make it through the day. On the pod this week @deliciouslegacy.bsky.social and I look at how the Roman Army revolutionised cheese production and consumption in Britain. On Youtube and your pod app! open.spotify.com/episode/254E...
Paul Carroll reposted
Replying to @lottelydia.bsky.social
Even Dennis Skinner saying “I solemnly swear that I will bear true and faithful allegiance to the Queen when she pays her income tax” is part of the British political tradition. People haven’t had to make a Christian oath since the mid nineteenth entry. Get over it, Matthew.
Paul Carroll reposted
Paul Carroll reposted
Paul Carroll reposted
Paul Carroll reposted
This is bang on and once you see it you can’t unsee it
I think this is often driven by media class overcompensation for fear of metropolitan bias: a lack of proper engagement across geography, social class lines leads to a weird caricature of public opinion, as if the radicalised online group must be speaking up for authentic public opinion
Paul Carroll reposted
Paul Carroll reposted
Replying to @supertrain.bsky.social
You want to ask AI to tell you about something? Go right ahead. Be aware that it’s a probabilistic word prediction machine, but go ahead. Then dressing that up in the aesthetics of a fake focus group is a sort of new-clothes-ing that implies a breathtaking level of stupidity and gullibility
This is depressing as fuck. AI focus groups are absolute garbage. They are the opposite of generative. Every single real life focus group I’ve ever done - several hundreds by now - has given me something unique, something that reveals the actual lives and thinking behind people’s words
I hosted an in-conversation with AI minister Kanishka Narayan at Labour conference We covered a lot of ground... He said there was too much AI “doomerism” in Westminster And revealed he has used synthetic AI focus groups to gauge public opinion on a range of topics 1/9
Paul Carroll reposted
Cheats and, apparently, the temperament of a 5 year old. Get to fuck, you gold aeroplane pricks
UAE warns Andy Burnham it may pull billions in investment for the UK's proposed Oxford-Cambridge tech hub—dubbed the UK's Silicon Valley—in retaliation over Manchester City's guilty verdict, per The Telegraph.
Love this - not all business people are pricks, we just live in an era of knock-off Batman villains
Neiman Marcus closed its downtown Dallas flagship on Wednesday. The store played a notable role in the history of desegregation in Dallas. Previously, Black shoppers across the US could enter department stores, but they weren't allowed to try on clothes without adhering to certain conditions. 🧵
I’d love to be able to ask this racist dope if I, born in England to Scottish parents, am one of the English volk or Scottish volk she blithely and ignorantly imagines exist
Suella Braverman suggests on #BBCQT that you can't be English unless you are white, and have a lineage or heritage going back some generations