I expand on a rant about the unseriousness of serious politics backofmind.substack.com/p/the-genera...

Today's crazy world, data point #473: My mom helps out in a food pantry in rural Germany. And they now got contacted by American soldiers and civil servants from a nearby US-army base, because people have not received salaries for months because of the government shutdown...

Hard to think that anybody with experience of UK university senior managements would have confidence that, left to themselves, they'd back academic freedom over an income stream.

Imagine a country where hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents find stripped of their status and forced to reapply for their right to remain. Many no longer meet the criteria, plunged into illegality, subject to deportation. @emile-chabal.bsky.social foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/05/b...

Is it mandatory for the Guardian to give a 5* review to anything with Emma Thompson in it, because I'm struggling to find any better explanation?

Interesting piece from @felixbender.bsky.social. I don't agree though that the state's right to conscript is the same thing as the citizen's obligation to fight. The state could be justified in making me do things I don't have an obligation to do.

I've reposted this by Tobias Barrington Wolff a few times in the decade since it was published. Its arguments are all the more urgent for the UK where this path to the erasure of trans people from public space is being aggressively pursued by legal and political means and where Labour has caved

Fricker claims (Epistemic Injustice p.12) that if employers took no notice of grades a teacher's grading would have no effect on the behaviour of students. But surely for many students that's false since they (a) want to know how well they've done the work and (b) value the esteem of the teacher

Really important here from @sarahoconnorft.ft.com, especially in the context of nativist talking points about immigrant earnings/contribution. People need real opportunities to get and progress in the jobs they have the skills to do.

Sadly, for all his dubious classification of political movements here, Piketty himself is a "nationalist" (like the party he supports) because he cannot think beyond the framework of the nation-state.

The BBC headline with "migrants" is already terrible and plays into the far-right narrative. And the solution to asylum-seekers being exploited by criminals is to allow them to contribute by working legally rather than making them survive on a pittance.

There may be some substance to this

Thinking of all the ghouls on Facebook and X who speculated about the name and probable religion of the attacker

Indeed. Worth reading from @colinyeo.bsky.social

An amazing article in the Daily Telegraph where "Honest Bob" Jenrick commends the Polish government for its growth and deregulatory policies compared to stagnant Britain. Surprisingly, the fact that Poland is inside the EU and Britain Brexited is not part of the explanation ....

Adom Getachew, whom I know only as the author of the great Ways of Worldmaking, with insight into why some migrants vote the way they do (contra the naive assumptions that many of us make).

I do recommend the BBC World Service in the morning. You get to hear about things that are just absent from regular UK news coverage, such as the post-(fixed) elections in Tanzania and the serious violence there atm, with demonstrators shot in large numbers

Piece on how the British right has managed to convince a significant minority that it would be in their interests to get rid of the European Convention on Human Rights. My suggestion: rather than capitulate, make human rights part of a wider politics of equality. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Striking that there is no place for the left or the greens in @gideonrachman.bsky.social 's view of Europe's political future. Yet it isn't as if inequality, human rights and climate change are going away as urgent problems.

Hamburg crows

This section from Scott Soo's book on Spanish civil war refugees in France and the growing hostility towards them in the late 30s (even before the main retirada in 1939) from a centre-left government coming under pressure from the far right at home and abroad is, erm, really quite Labour-y.

It is very easy to claim that some event wouldn’t have happened but for immigration, since it is trivially true that no particular event now of any kind would have happened without immigration and no particular person would now exist but for it, including Matt Goodwin

There’s a quite famous passage in Mein Kampf where Hitler recounts how his young self looked at a Jew in the street and asked himself “is this a German?” Change a few words and locations and I bet you could get it in the Spectator now.

Apparently if P is believed by most *Americans* then P cannot be controversial. Top thinking from JK, as we’ve come to expect.

Works for AI too

Every time I eat a madeleine it reminds me of reading Proust. (I’m sorry if this joke is too recherché for some of you.)

I don’t do the philosophy of migration in a consequentialist register, but it maddens me when those who do bang on about the potential harms of “open borders” while seemingly oblivious to the harms of closing them: deaths, massive enforcement costs, intrusive surveillance, thwarted opportunities

We don’t need visas for highly skilled straw men, since the domestic market is already oversupplied with British ones

Is there a supermarket nearby? Is there a possible world nearby? One of these questions is not like the other.

Just seen a bottle of Danish-made “sparkling tea” (looking like champagne) in a Hamburg shop window. Assume that this is a thing.

Pretty annoying to get this ex cathedra lecture from Gillian Tett as if green activists haven’t been concerned about biodiversity. Just because she’s only just noticed.

I can see the point @jburnmurdoch.ft.com is trying to make, but frankly we discovered in lockdown that many of the workers we depend on aren’t “the brightest and best”, and it is immigrants who staff our care homes and pick our cabbages.

Magisterial

Further updates on the ignominious end to Lam's ignominious policy. Good to hear Badenoch say "But we have a principle. We don’t believe in making things retrospective." Let's hope all Britain's parties follow that principle. And for a less punitive & vindictive approach to immigration more broadly

Been waking up to the reports from Sudan on the World Service every morning. Heartbreaking

Cela pourrait constituer un argument valable pour la gauche française, dans le cadre du débat budgétaire.

Increasingly I think the point of a wealth tax is not to raise money but to create space for raising income tax. The lethal thing in politics is when the compliant middle class feels like they have been taken for mugs; if you want to get money out of them, someone else needs to pay more too.

Lady they’re just contacting you because they need a reviewer, any reviewer, someone, anyone, anyone willing to click accept and then deliver the review.

I'd be interested in a book on anti-tech ideas, but it doesn't sound as if this is it, since it seems to come from a securitization/IR perspective. Checking sample at Amazon, Charbonneau and William Morris not even in the index. But if anyone has read and can recommend, let me know.

I think we can be reasonably confident that things will carry on much as before and that people will have the ingenuity to get round the checks.

"The Home Office was so focused on “high-risk, poorly planned” wheezes such as sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, the committee found, that it lost control of the basics."

Adverts should be representative of traditional British families

One Battle After Another: very silly but great fun.

hello! I have a big profile of James Orr out now in the New World! it includes: a theory as to why he's been written about so incessantly over the past few months www.thenewworld.co.uk/marie-le-con...

What is civil society, and why should we care? Ernest Gellner on the conditions of liberty. www.programmablemutter.com/p/what-is-ci...

Well said!

It was always clear that the vociferous campaign for "free speech" was basically about giving people permission to engage in racist abuse (alongside the abuse of other minorities).

The current government is pretty bad, but most of this is down to deliberate neglect and refusal to assess under Patel and Braverman.

Fuelled by the likes of Jenrick and Lam and by people like that Reform MP and by the marching and flagging.

Glad to see that he's on the case. It would be good if our poltical journalists would use this to question politicians.