This evening, a man who set up a task-force to look at injecting disinfectant as a cure for Covid was joined by one who pushed horse dewormer as a Covid cure. Based on nothing but vague feelings (probably wind), they insist that paracetamol causes autism 🤷‍♂️.

Trump is aggressively ignorant. He does not learn, actively resists it, and has surrounded himself with people who enable his stupidity.

Trump just announced that he always knew more about autism than the experts who‘ve studied it. Obviously, a very stupid, barely literate man with no expertise thinks he knows better than thousands of experts scientists. Not to worry, he has a man whose brain was partially eaten by worms to advise.

Politically, you’d think kicking Truss out would be a free hit for Badenoch: terrible reputation with the public, easy way of signalling you’ve learned lessons, she’s not going to be nice about the party anyway, Reform won’t take her (and even if they did you’d be delighted). And yet?

But jesus the way managers have put our futures in the hands of unscrupulous actors.... www.ft.com/content/3f49...

Humans: Ah, the human brain, a masterpiece of evolution, truly we are so creative and problemsolving and artistic and smart we are the BEST. Also humans: NOW, how do I make sure I literally never, ever have to think.

I have this lovely poem pinned to the noticeboard on the corridor outside my office.

Abolish the Home Office

Philosophers of mind! The University of Vienna is offering a professorship and has extended the deadline to 19 October. philjobs.org/job/show/29293

UK University leadership constantly strives to turn middle class left leaning liberals like me into full-blown revolutionary Marxists. I‘m starting to wonder if they‘re secretly Trotskyite accelerationists.

Are you a #researcher or work at a #university that is affected by the #H-1B visa fee hike? Please consider talking to me for a story in @nature.com. For secure comms I'm on Signal: @ngreports.30. Please repost for reach.

If you haven’t seen this (I hadn’t), you need to:

Polish Minister for Foreign Affairs speaking to Russia: “If another missile or aircraft enters our space without permission, deliberately or by mistake, & gets shot down, & the wreckage falls on NATO territory, please don‘t come here to whine about it. You have been warned.“ He‘s not messing about.

New Cocoon web address: philosopherscocoon.com

My university is working hard to improve its history of poisonous industrial relations by announcing that it‘s deducting 50% of pay from staff carrying out action short of a strike. Withholding pay for refusing to work beyond contractual obligations sounds unlawful to me, but what do I know?

“They studied 51 populist presidents and prime ministers who were in power between 1900 and 2020 and found that after 15 years, GDP per capita was 10% lower when compared with a plausible nonpopulist counterfactual.”

This mass deportation 'policy' is very like the flags being put up in our neighbourhoods: it's designed to mark the far right's territory, to make us feel that we are in their world already, living at best on borrowed time. The purpose is to intimidate. While our government is asleep at the wheel.

When I interviewed older South Asian British people about their retirement decisions over a decade ago, a large number said they had kept a passport and land in India and Pakistan 'just in case' When I asked 'in case what?' they responded 'in case we are told to leave Britain'

1/ So you’re thinking about applying for an academic job in the UK but don’t know how? This thread will walk you through the essentials.

I hope my friends love me enough to sell merch at my funeral

🌱 Fully funded PhD scholarship in Environmental Humanities at Ghent University! A unique opportunity to collaborate with Marco Caracciolo, Elly McCausland, and me on innovative research connecting literature, culture, and ecology.

Please please please can we make it a thing to have PDF versions of journal articles without header/footer information on every page - i.e., website URL, date downloaded, etc - because it is BEYOND ANNOYING when your screen reader reads all of that out. Completely takes you out of the argument flow.

This is why we’re doomed. Someone needs to grab Starmer by the shoulders and give him a huge shake.

Never, ever underestimate the short-term damage that fascists are capable of. When Idi Amin told thousands of Asians that they had just 90 days to leave Uganda, lots of people laughed. “He could never do that! That’s ridiculous.” But then the violence started. www.bbc.com/news/world-a...

I had to switch off Farage's press conference. Aside from the bigotry, the shameless hypocrisy of a man who has spent his entire adult life living off state payments & dark money, whist doing his utmost to avoid paying tax, complaining about welfare payments was too much. A sponger & a grifter.

America is most of the way to dictatorship & the only forms of resistance Schumer & Jeffries can think of are polite requests or thoughts & prayers. Hell, most of the time they can barely rouse themselves beyond complicity or acquiescence.

MacOS Tahoe is annoying. It looks pretty enough, in a 'styled like it has been designed for mobile phones' kind of way, but removing Launchpad is just bad. Modern UX work seems to be entirely about smoothing the corners of icons a bit more whilst making all tasks slightly more difficult.

It’s astounding how we have normalised travelling on underground railways despite the fact that they sound like a chorus of the dead screaming in pain

Sunday morning has been spent being Reviewer 1, recommending a paper be accepted, which is a nice way to end the week.

I was so bound up in our local redundancy scenario that I missed this 👇 Kingston University has closed its Humanities Department? No English Literature? Creative Writing remains Our faculties | Kingston University London share.google/N9C39Dozxoc4...

For the too numerous academics for whom a career is a performative shell game in which science comes a long last, there is no breach of values.

this may be the last nail in the coffin for US academia. generations of scholars from around the world have strived to get jobs at US unis, which has been a boon for US research and for US students. those scholars will not stay here if they cannot travel home to see their families. why would they?

Today’s Right is dominated by people like Vought who are convinced there is nothing left to conserve – that our moment requires not “conservatism,” but a radical “counter-revolution.”   They have never been so powerful. And they are determined to abuse their power ruthlessly.

Anti-immigration demonstration in the Netherlands escalates. This is exactly what happens when far-right ideas are tolerated and normalised over an extended period of time. The far right gains confidence and grows, both at the ballot box and in the streets. nos.nl/artikel/2583...

"Our results stress the importance of developing sentientist economic frameworks for more informed & ethical policymaking." link.springer.com/article/10.1... By Romain Espinosa & Nicolas Treich (Sentientism 115 guest) #SentientistEconomics Merci @espinosaromain.bsky.social 🤩

I did the same yesterday, and the same applies (well, maybe not the friendly human part).

Just published at Society & Animals: my review of Doris Schneeberger‘s ‘Envisioning a Better Future for Nonhuman Animals: Towards Future Animal Rights Declarations‘ - brill.com/view/journal...

My little Plato: a civic life, as reviewed in the New York Sun earlier this year - paywall but you can read one article for free.

Right folks. I guess that’s it. We’re done. What’s everyone doing as their post-academic career? I’m thinking of going for grumpy-but-loveable owner of a bowling alley, who’s constantly working on a never-quite-finished novel.

A first-semester freshman at Auburn -- who has not even experienced one month as a student -- is demanding universities purge faculty members who dared to be critical of the man who created the Professor Watchlist. Calling college presidents & donors ... as one does their first month in college.

To follow up on this apparent virality, I think it's worth getting our head around the reality that Britain seems to be a country deeply angry about the sectors in which it has comparative advantage: universities, finance, creative industries. Aye, 'ampstead wasn't good enough for you?

People who know reptiles well say they don't only experience fleeting pains and pleasures, but also lasting emotional states: happiness & sadness, or at least good & bad moods. But how do you show this in a scientific way? My latest for @nytimes.com on a clever @coldbloodedcog.bsky.social study:

In less jest - yes, it's good if universities can help students develop skills for the labour market. However, the pointless venom of the current government about one of the few world class sectors in the British economy is tiring, enervating and just plain sad. Get a grip lads.

An actual quote from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’ Look forward to Wes S saying 'too often people go to hospital to have operations' or Heidi Alexander saying 'too often people go to the station to catch a train'

Having slept on this, and because I‘m feeling especially grumpy this morning, I’ve told the editor that if the author can‘t be bothered to respond to reviewers, or even highlight changes to their manuscript, then I‘m not going to review the revision.

Responses to the merger of Kent and Greenwich universities on LinkedIn are weird - it‘s full of gushing ‘bold move‘ ‘trailblazing‘ comments, talking about the opportunities & praising the management. Obviously, none of these people are academics or anyone with a meaningful university job.

Kyle is completely the wrong person for this job. He's choking down every oozing glob of US tech propaganda he can handle.

TEF changes could lead to ‘more university mergers or closures’ #highered #AcademicSky

Remember that this is the university where management encouraged students to snitch on striking staff. Also the university that installed surveillance cameras in the library, labs etc to monitor occupancy. This latest surveillance is cultural.

Martha Nussbaum once wrote a book called The Fragility of Goodness. That title seems apposite for these times. But we’re also see the fragility of bad people.