Enjoying the suggestion in this piece that Larry is now fulfilling the traditional function of the constitutional monarch www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

How universalist was Enlightenment thought? In our 2025 Besterman Lecture, Antoine Lilti (Collège de France) discusses 'The three languages of universalism: thinking globally in the Enlightenment’. Thursday 13 Nov, 5pm @magdalenoxford.bsky.social: voltaire.ox.ac.uk/event/bester...

Other news from this trip: I wore my Wedgwood Benn for Pope! t-shirt to the Vatican and a carabiniere stopped me and asked for my ID

There are adverts on the Rome metro to remind drivers that however much pedestrians might annoy them, it is always wrong to run them over

Il y a soixante-quatre ans, le 17 octobre 1961, la police française massacrait des Algérien·nes qui manifestaient pacifiquement pour leur dignité.

Honestly don't know how Starmer is so bad at this. The choice is between a few isolated criticisms now or a massive violent blow-up in two weeks' time that dominates the front pages and obviously benefits the far right. Completely incapable of thinking ahead

Al Jazeera is doing videos of the Palestinian releases and they're heart wrenching. One man was detained for over a year and was released to find out that Israel had killed his two kids. The youngest was three. Her birthday would've been on Saturday. He'd made a small bracelet for her in prison.

British politics: if we can just prove we're delivering on the economy and public services we might be able to inch our way back up towards 25% of the vote American politics: our record speaks for itself. beer no longer woke. Retired football player mostly standing

A labour government wants to make amendments to our laws to bring in conditions, and possible outright ban on protests in the UK because the Palestine movement got too big for them to continue to ignore. A Labour government. Not Tory, not reform, but Labour.

It's an unfortunate reality that it's-for-your-own-good authoritarianism is a component of Labour's political DNA, and when you put people like Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid, Jacqui Smith et al in the Home Office, you get plain old you-can't-do-that authoritarianism on top...

I'll say it again. Our horror at the Gaza genocide and at the atrocity in Manchester comes in both cases from the same, inherent part of our shared humanity. We need to assert that shared humanity in the face of both these evils as loudly as possible, and in as many practical ways as we can.

In fact, if this New Yorker story is anything to go by, the generals probably largely agreed with this section of Hegseth's speech. That's what happens when one chooses selective outrage over war crimes www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Yolande Knell reports that Israel bombed a school sheltering displaced people "& then when civil defence workers went to the scene there was another attack" 'double tap' strikes are designed to deliberately kill rescue workers & other civilians. This is what Israel does.

Trump controversially endorses traditional Marxist historiography on the Gracchi brothers

After more than a decade of war, Aleppo’s historic citadel has reopened its gates to visitors, symbolizing resilience and recovery for the war-torn city.

Call me a cynic but I just don't buy that this is Klein being too good-hearted to recognise a bad-faith actor. He portrays Kirk like this because his own liberal programme can only be sustained if one assumes there are good-faith actors on the other side; it's a psychological and political necessity

HUGE HUGE NEWS FROM EGYPT!! Egyptian President Sisi has issued a presidential pardon for activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah.

A last resister passes aged 99. Son of Italian refugees from fascism, "raised on red milk", only 14 at the Fall of France, his first resistance was pasting anti-Pétain messages on postboxes. By 16, he was in armed conflict. Captured in July 1944, tortured, escaping prison... Lifelong Communist.

Likewise, people are fond of saying Arafat rejected a Palestinian "state" at Camp David, when said state was under US proposals going to be demilitarised, territorially non-continguous, and deprived of control of its own foreign policy, airspace, and even water -- i.e. not a state

Despite endless scolding about the British left being too America-brained, it's the two parties of the right that believe they can essentially just do what the US did and get the same results in Britain, ignoring basic local economic, social, and indeed geological facts. See also: fracking

'Anti-Palestiniaism is so difficult to refute because the psychic economy of innumerable people needs it. I was told the story of a woman who, upset after seeing a dramatization of the "Voice of Hind Rajab," said: “Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.”'

In essence, this really is just liberal campism

"Reorientating"? The US has never had a problem with autocracies that suppress access to information. Egypt, UAE, Saudi, and Israel constantly arrest, assault, or kill journalists. Applebaum just doesn't want this principle extended to the *anti-American* autocracies

Again, I don't think Klein and the other purveyors of this idea are ignorant of the below, they just think it furthers liberal aims to co-opt Kirk as an honourable political opponent. Unfortunately, this is stupid, insofar as it relies on the idea their own audiences are stupid

Getting at the basic contradiction in the "Kirk was doing politics" idea: we tend to think the opposite of politics is violence, but its more direct opposite is conspiracy. Telling people there's a left-wing plot to harm their families will in turn persuade them their only recourse is violence

Another compelling factor was Israeli troops’ “extensive and deliberate” targeting of Palestinian children, Mr. Sidoti said. Medical workers testified they had treated many children with direct gunshot wounds to the head and upper body.

BBC News - Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, UN commission of inquiry says www.bbc.com/news/article...

Every neighborhood in Gaza City is facing nonstop Israeli airstrikes, with civilians trapped in the devastation and thousands of families forced onto the streets, having nowhere safe to go.

A tiny martial autocracy, obsessed with its own mythologised past, exhausting all its resources by constantly bullying its neighbours and brutally suppressing rebellions amongst the Othered domestic population that it keeps in a state of perpetual servitude? This stuff writes itself

I'm genuinely grateful for the solidarity, irrespective of how rare this is from a politician. But fascism can't be reduced to displaced economic concerns. It doesn't stand up analytically, it won't help politically or strategically, and I really wish the left (of which I'm part) wouldn't do this.

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.

Today people went around my neighborhood in north east London spray painting St George’s crosses onto people’s homes. Many of these houses have non British people living in them. This is getting very dark, very quick.

Defenders of the Palestine Action proscription often cite the scrap in Bristol in which a cop was hit with a sledgehammer -- 26 cops injured yesterday, four of whom seriously, and as far as I can tell none of the usual suspects are clamouring for Tommy Robinson to be designated a terrorist

Alternatively, they're not ignorant of this at all, but they believe it more rewarding strategically and psychologically to buy into Kirk's own false self-presentation than to engage with material reality -- liberal simulacra to counter conservative simulacra

They're also revealing their ignorance of the online economy. Kirk was doing the opposite of persuasion; he was chopping up clips of ill-informed students designed to reassure his followers that their opponents were all morons and it wasn't worth inquiring into their ideas any further

"He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed. “It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?” "

“C’è la grandine, le frane, la siccità, la malaria, e c’è lo Stato. Sono dei mali inevitabili, ci sono sempre stati e ci saranno sempre.”

This gets progressively funnier with every use of the term "floppy".

Tony Blair appears to be deeply complicit in this monstrous plan of ethnic cleansing. That's the consequence of not holding him to account for his war cromes.

A very fundamental problem with Starmer as a politician is that he not only thinks voters are stupid and gullible, but consistently demonstrates that that is what he thinks

You mean to say San Marino's been sitting on this thing all this time and it's just never used it? What the fuck. How many lives could have been saved

In fairness it can be hard to keep up with sheer volume of awful things Israel are doing but just want to mention they're *still* invading and bombing Syria basically non-stop.

Good morning, everyone. After introducing my book about looted art yesterday, let me tell you more about what's in there. Today is about Napoleon. Napoleon stole a lot of shit, no really, it was insane. In fact, the era of systematic state-sponsored looting on mass scale began with Napoleon. thread👇

The Italians are still salty about this incidentally. I told my neighbour I study French revolutionary history and she launched into a disquisition on everything they stole from Turin, concluding with a shake of the head and "i francesi sono ladri"

Biden's WH aided and abetted Stage 1 of Gaza genocide: siege, displacement, killing of at least 50k people (over 80% of them civilians), and obliteration of infrastructure. The Trump WH has aided and abetted Stage 2: starvation, mass destruction of Palestinian cities, preparation for expulsion.

Ah what's wrong little buddy? Why the dirty delete? Big clever dark money think tank boy like you can almost certainly defend the position you came to based on ✨vibes✨ against a bunch of people who have actually read a book one time.

It also needs to be emphasised how far the modern state was constructed precisely *through* antisemitism, i.e. by identifying Jewish people as the heterogeneous element of the population that needed to be assimilated or expelled

This is especially depraved because Lew presumably knows that tonnes of these kids were murdered via the Where's Daddy? AI tool, which specifically hit the homes of suspected Hamas adherents while they were asleep, killing entire families at once