The 1939 Mosley speech at Earls Court was an antisemitic, fascist, anti-parliament speech framed as a call for peace with Nazi Germany and for authoritarian national renewal. Karp quoting it in an interview isn’t evidence of sympathy; it fits his reputation for provocation rather than any shared ideology. The speech itself is a clear example of populist authoritarian rhetoric built on grievance, elite conspiracy, and rejection of liberal democracy.
Fascinating that Karp reportedly recited part of the speech to Mosley’s grandson, did some tai chi, left without a goodbye, and then hired him to run Palantir’s UK operation.
The speech text is online, but I’m hesitant to link it directly given sensitivities around perceived extremist material and online moderation in the UK.
. Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. Urban fantasy with a great audiobook narrator (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). Harry Potter meets Sherlock Holmes. Loved the computer history and London Library parts in False Value.
. Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones. Found the first book in a local phonebox library. Especially liked the probability computer in Conrad’s Fate.
. Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Recommended by a barber after I mentioned the cartoon "Scavengers Reign". Annihilation is well worth reading.
. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Novel about memory, forgetting.
. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Short novel imagining Einstein's dreams whilst he worked on his relativity theory.
This is fun. It's the sort of pet that has gone viral before.
One thing.. Calling any device "the first musical robot" ignores some interesting and important parts of well documented computational history that predate this product by hundreds of years:
Self playing organs(1800's), pianos(1800's), musical clocks(1500/1600's).. Things like this have existed for ages as fully automated and programmable musical "robots". They shaped 19th century ideas about computation. Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage explicitly referenced musical automata in their work.
The 1939 Mosley speech at Earls Court was an antisemitic, fascist, anti-parliament speech framed as a call for peace with Nazi Germany and for authoritarian national renewal. Karp quoting it in an interview isn’t evidence of sympathy; it fits his reputation for provocation rather than any shared ideology. The speech itself is a clear example of populist authoritarian rhetoric built on grievance, elite conspiracy, and rejection of liberal democracy.
Fascinating that Karp reportedly recited part of the speech to Mosley’s grandson, did some tai chi, left without a goodbye, and then hired him to run Palantir’s UK operation.
The speech text is online, but I’m hesitant to link it directly given sensitivities around perceived extremist material and online moderation in the UK.