My column in today's paper: on banning the under-16s from social media, the trade-offs and assumptions that the ban makes:

So glad we have massively restructured transgender care on based on the works of someone who believes absolute nonsense.

They said "free speech" and "academic freedom" but never believed in either and now in texas you need a permission slip to mention race in class and they're fine with it. Might not have worked if people with large platforms weren't furious about marginal increases of black people in their offices

you are not going to somehow "free market of ideas" Elon Musk out of turning the X platform into a platform for demolishing liberal governance in Europe

With Plato in the Republic I think they're wrong about this; they're simply incorrect about their own self-interest. I didn't understand this until I saw in real life the exact kinda guys he was arguing with, and it's just utterly obvious from the outside that theirs is a pathetic and degraded life.

This is basically the view of the world that Plato sets out to refute in the Republic. One of the core questions asked therein is: why do powerful people think the mere fact of them exercising dominion makes it good for them to do so? Sure, you *can* get away with stuff if you're powerful - so what?

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

they're doing it for gender, imo

Since very few people are giving this absolutely GOATed JRPG any love: THEN: Golden Sun NOW: Golden Sun

look we're all making a big bet on AI! and if it pays off as big as we hope, well, it's going to make a handful of people super rich and you're going to lose your job but get to watch mickey mouse fuck geralt from the witcher. if it doesn't pay off well then you get to pay for the bailouts

Be clear, the American far right are coming for British democracy.

twitter being bought and turned into a propaganda machine for fascism, which is directly pumped into every journalist in the world's brain, is one of the worst things to happen in the last few years. we might not survive it.

This is also yet another case which even a few years ago would have been universally recognised as scandalously disqualifying even on the British right. Actual popular views haven’t shifted since then, but British elites have baked their brains on Twitter so they think this repulsive bile is normal

Today in absurd Oxfordshire planning disputes

Maybe - just a crazy idea, but bear with me for a moment! - the reason why the Lib Dems should not “get serious“ is that the UK’s most important media organisation covers politics in babytalk so much of the time?

(I think a lot of the BBC’s written output can likely be explained by them interpreting “need to write for a reading age of seven” as ”need to write for a moron with an adult reading age”.)

That is the point of a university you fucker.

Genuinely, how do I get the job as "guy who makes miniature displays for museums", because I think it would be great

All political tribes can be hypocritical but the right's current level of hypocrisy on free speech is deliberate. It's an assertion of power not a blindspot.

think if you're broadly a centrist and were suuuuuper concerned about attacks on free speech from the left and so you decided to give the right a hearing then you need to realise you were taken for QUITE the ride (and don't really have anyone to blame but yourself)

I have to wonder what the hardware store owner thought of me this morning when I, very obviously an English tourist in a resort town, arrived in his shop to buy a tape measure at 8:30 — can't happen very often, but we do need adequate tools for epigraphy

If I had a penny for every time a British politician had a 4-letter first name that begins with “Ke”, led one of the two largest parties in parliament, and was utterly unsuited to a moment of rising fascism, I’d have two pennies. Which isn’t much, but that I got them at the same time is distressing

This is a step in the right direction, but it isn't enough. The issue here isn't an isolated statement, but that Musk is waging a concerted campaign (in part through exploiting his control of X) to foment ethnic and political violence in the UK in the apparent hope of overthrowing the government.

Paid an impromptu visit to Airai yesterday to get the lay of the land and see if we couldn't find anything As it happens, we couldn't find anything, but interesting to see traces of old structures on the peninsula nonetheless

When Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell he was acting in the face of a majority in favour. Harold Wilson backed him up and called the speech “evil”. Long past time for Keir and Kemi to do the same.

Keep thinking of arguments for why it would be completely insane to dump a prime minister with a huge majority just 14 months in, and also about how if he's not going to say a single word in opposition to the kind of shit we saw today then I no longer feel convinced by any of those arguments.

As a colleague mentioned yesterday, Gamergate is one of the five most significant developments in US politics since the Cold War

[guy who's just successfully caught a dolmuş voice] You could say I'm actually pretty much a Çeşme local now, yeah

Laurie Magnus: Rayner acted "in good faith", had "the intention to pay all appropriate taxes", "was twice informed in writing" that the lower rate was due, "sought quickly to correct the mistake", "acted with integrity", but didn't seek expert advice. That was a mistake. But I find this much worse⬇️

get why she had to go but irksome she lost her job to something quite complex and, let's be honest, reasonably minor in the grand scheme of things, when shadow cabinet members get to merrily hang out with Eddie Swastika without any repercussions

Indeed. Sorry, the core people behind the last year are not liberals! They use the word as a pejorative! Need to accept that if you want social liberalism you are in the business of building coalitions with actual liberals, not wishcasting!

I think she probably did have to go, but I’m still gonna be fucking bitter about the right-wing press scoring a win

Cringed so hard while reading this terrific @jessicaelgot.bsky.social story I think I ruptured something. Who at GMG do I need to sue?

"Future historians will surely debate at great length whether it was economics or media culture or simple incompetence that led the Starmer government’s moral compass to break. But they surely won’t debate who, out of the Taliban or the people who fled from their regime, were actually the baddies."

This is just mad now - all beefed up by news execs and journos terrified of offending a so-called 'real' Britain that doesn't even exist.

Co-signed times a thousand. “Other people have no interiority” is, fundamentally, a deeply evil belief to hold which will lead you exclusively to terrible places

i think one thing that gets me about the conservative fetish about Great Books is that how do you read this and think "Donald Trump has these virtues" (you should read the Great Books regardless of what cons think; the examined life is worth living!)

Really need to train myself not to read the comments section on Facebook posts because it's just unremittingly depressing and frustrating every single time

god I hate this I hate this I hate it I hate it, I hate that the mainstream right has gone this mad and racist and radicalised, I hate that no one seems to know how to stop it from getting worse, it worries me so much and I hate it all

As the tweet says, this isn’t a cash strapped regional school that needs to focus on career oriented majors to attract dollars and students. It’s one of the premier universities in the country.

This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.

Someone asked me to take this out from behind the pay wall and I - unlike the British housing market - am nothing if not accommodating. So: no, empty homes won't solve the housing crisis

Bigotry erodes the critical faculties because it is a cognitive shortcut - but you'd think at the point that you were going 'the word UK starts to appear more in Hansard in the 90s because of IMMIGRANTS' you would have got to the point where you had eroded away your power of speech. But alas.

This is a word-perfect description of fascists. Hannah Arendt could have written it

The big political lesson here is: don’t do things there isn’t an intellectual defence for!

Someone needs to do a study on how traffic-based conspiracy theories have absolutely cooked the brains of every Facebook user in Oxfordshire

That an unelected advisor does not want to "appease" elected MPs speaks volumes for the way party strategists think about Parliament. MPs are there to represent the concerns of their constituents. Govts that stop listening to MPs - like Thatcher on the poll tax or Blair on Iraq - usually regret it

If you want to read about some of the work I've been doing for the CHANGE project, Ethan has summarised our latest (big!) steps in this blog post

*Such* an enjoyable weekend after so much preparation, hosting New Voices on the Polis here in Oxford So grateful to our excellent speakers, to the inimitable @nakhthor.bsky.social, and to my fellow organisers for making this all possible And now: an early night and a lie-in, I think