I think there's also a good argument to be made that there might be a concrete limit on how many people a single MP can meaningfully represent.

I got my permanent job at a university in 2008 (after 8 years hourly-paid) and now face redundancy. My salary has declined in real terms for my entire career.

The graph for senior management pay in a broken sector looks very, very different. This is not an accident.

This isn't redistribution, it should be noted. It is cost cutting austerity. Pay falling in public sector work should be seen alongside cuts to welfare benefits. Bad in itself but also takes the bottom out of private sector worker negotiations; undercuts the tax base; damages domestic demand.

I was heavily critical of the whole OfS/UKRI settlement when I wrote British Universities in the Brexit Moment.

Rob is spot on here - OfS always meant as a mechanism to ensure sector totally subordinated to government whims, the antithesis of the vision put forward in the Robbins Report in 1963 /1

The distinction that the conference organiser made between not kicking a trans person out and demanding that a trans flag be removed exists only in their head. Sends the message they accept trans people being present but only so long as we’re invisible. This is not allyship.

It is! A disrespect for everybody involved in the past and in the present and a disrespect for the actual dynamic process of understanding ourselves and our histories. Not a good look for a philosopher.

The real failure to look in the mirror is academics falling back on comfortable “we’re partly responsible because we enforced left wing orthodoxy“ thinking rather than the less comfortable truth that Trump/MAGA are bad faith actors who will only be satisfied with resegregated MAGA academies

Yes! Come out whenever one wants but one should really not insert oneself into very public conversations about shared history without significant periods of time spent discussing with and learning from a range of other, more experienced, LGBT people.

Klaus McForkface, a lifting robot developed by German manufacturer Linde AG, performed a stunning 1200-kilogram (2646 lb) overhead lift in Hamburg, beating the human world record by more than 300%

Handy Guide:

✅ Free Speech: When GCs who had no relation to my University complained to try and get me kicked off my course

❌ Not Free Speech: Exercising one's right to peaceful protest against those advocating your exclusion from society – on the campus you have to live and work in

Indeed. Because the issue was never reproducibility but poor theory that could not account for inevitable change in results over time as a result of change to society.

I still remember when queer feminist historian colleague blocked me on socials and proceeded to bad mouth me to other people because I told her in late 2023 that, while the accounts of Hamas sex violence were still unverified, there was ample research showing Israel deploys against Palestinians.

Don't make social housing income dependent, don't set it up as a multi-layered ownership system, don't make complex rules and definitely don't make the rent vary with income what the fuck are you talking about??

For sure. Never met a transphobic cis gay who didn't also find their own sexuality revolting.

New Labour loved doing this with minority groups. Appoint somebody to speak for them and then you can ignore the plurality of opinion in that group and just pick some easy wins.

It didn't really seem to me that there were sufficient crowds for crowd management to be necessary. It is a hallmark of the British state though that they just will not trust ordinary people. Everything has to have a sign and a rule.

It's supposed successes are all the product of prior work by others or not really success at all.

Stonewall was always pretty shit. It has always been far too close to the state. That was the point. Disarm any attempt at real change by having the state authorise a particularly unradical version of liberal sexual politics. Stonewall should have died with New Labour.

I see Mary-Ann Stephenson really is building a relationship with LGBT organisation, by having her Labour colleague* infiltrate Stonewall.

(* Stephenson is a party political appointee, contrary to Paris Principles.)

All I have to say on Dugdale’s appointment at Stonewall. The organization is in terminal decline. Which is what the whole bigoted movement wanted in the first place.

There was no replication crisis in the social sciences. It was a replication crisis in psychology and it was primarily the result of experimental work in mainstream psychology being extremely under-theorised.

it starts by embracing transphobia and ends by saying jews are the fault line in american politics

'Tis the season.

Exactly and quite so. At *best* Starmer did not "know" because there was an understanding he did not want to know, that there was a correct answer to be given to the PM and it was everyone's job to make sure reality was tortured into conformity with that. At *best*.

The UK has passed a bad, unworkable, lumbering, political law that failed because it didn't take into account the reality of the internet or technology.

They are flailing, and proposing even more draconian, privacy invasive, pro-censorship methods to save face.

Have you ever worried that young people have too much legal entitlement to education? Keir Starmer has. It keeps him up at night.

This is despicable. It's also documented that this is especially difficult for bisexual asylum seekers, who aren't only made to provide 'evidence' but are forced to explain and justify 'evidence' that they are 'actually' straight.

I'll be sure to pass this on at my next shift at the food bank

Lacanian: I...if you find Habermas, Arendt and de Beauvoir unintelligible, I don't know what to tell you but you're ngmi Bentham's Bulldog: The guy I was quoting is a Ph.D student at Princeton with a number of publications. I don't think he's just some illiterate rube.

I'm reminded of the Upton Sinclair line about not being able to get people to understand things when their paycheck depends on not understanding it. Claiming to not understand things is a status signal in analytic philosophy so of course it's common and easily explicable.

when a poor person gets social security, they spend it. that money goes to people who don't get social security.

You take the social security away and they don't spend it. That money stays in the rich's bank accounts as unclaimed potential tax.