Anyone who contributed to this event - the politicians and journalists who normalised him or submitted to his narratives, around the world - should hang their fucking heads in shame. They've put us in the most dangerous geopolitical situation for a generation and left a people at risk of genocide.
The first swallow arrived this afternoon to take up her/his summer residence chez moi. Earliest return date I have logged in my twenty years of being here. So Spring has officially arrived in my East Kent village! Pleasure in small things. Literally.
Daydreaming that Macron and Starmer cement the dawning of a new age of Entente Cordiale by issuing a joint communiqué telling Trump to just fuck off.
Er, out of interest, as a fellow Wolves fan, how exactly are you an "interested party". You can't possibly imagine Wolves can survive.
Thank you for alerting us to this really excellent intervention. I'm long retired, thank God, but my spies tell me the university that used to employ me is hellbent on encouraging the madness Emily Tucker diagnoses.
Essential listening, Tooze is as articulate as he is angry, which is to say VERY. Good on Habermas too.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/o...
My God, she is just SUCH a blithering idiot.
If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.
Dunno, but may I suggest you don’t wanna go there either.
Strikes me as a rhetorical exercise in Panglossian “willing the ends” of the sort to which Zac Polanski regularly resorts. The objection to this is as you observe, but as a tactic (or aspiration) it’s not without merit.
The reliably excellent Edward Luce being, y'know, reliably excellent in today's FT. www.ft.com/content/2f3e...
Look, this is all laudable stuff Peter, but, in practice, "jury trial" has never been a guarantee of justice, and, y'know, the system is facing crisis backlogs. Justice delayed is justice denied, so, in all seriousness, what is your alternative?
"Makes it worse that they built this up as an immigration enforcement measure, permanently tainting it."
Yup, as does Blair's enthusiasm for ID cards.
She's well on the way to Liz Truss status, without the 45-day inconvenience.
And crucially this needs to be married to a recognition that there is nothing intrinsically 'virtuous' about academic ability. It's just something that some people have and should be able properly to explore. Other forms of education and training are equally valid.
Accordingly, there needs to be a drastic reduction in the number of undergraduates so that universities can be what they always should have remained ... places of academic freedom and excellence for all those, but only those, with the ability to benefit from that education. 3
It was always madness to insist that 50% of the population go to university ... and that stupidity was then compounded by marketizing the whole bloated edifice. We need to return to competitive entry and grants freely available to all those capable of making the grades to obtain entry. 2
I sent my thoughts on this to friends yesterday, and they reckon I ought to broadcast them more widely.
My own view, having spent over 40 years watching the gradual destruction of the "student experience" I was privileged to receive, is that the UKHE model is irreparably broken. 1.
This stinks at every level. What refugees desperately need after their claims are accepted is the stability to rebuild their lives. This change will cause immeasurable stress and anxiety to some of the most vulnerable people in the country
Oooff.
This is essential (and vastly entertaining) stuff.
Nice to have a realistic goal, esp. one that dispenses with any need for the other sort.
The 'optimal outcome' for Burnham - assuming one accepts as genuine his desire to change the direction of the Labour government to something more closely resembling, er, a Labour government - would surely be to fight and win the by-election and the Labour leadership, and then make that change?
There's a point at which "impartiality" becomes gaslighting. The BBC has crossed this point.
Screenshot of an X.com post by Thomas Massie that begins, ‘Psst, Denmark…’ and jokes that telling the administration the Epstein files are in Greenland would make them lose interest and never find them.
Say what you want, but Massie has game.
