Some are very excited about “spinouts.”

I was in Budapest four years ago, on the day of the previous election. I saw Viktor Orbán leaving a fancy restaurant at lunchtime, looking very pleased with himself. It seemed unthinkable at that time that he could be out, but here we are. Congratulations Hungary.

Embrace tradition!

Thought of a funny bit. DuckDuckGoed it. Already exists:

em-dash-appreciation.org

It would be so easy to tell a university-based story that is both dramatically interesting and realistic:

Dishevelled twenty-something wakes up in stealthily parked car; gingerly exits. Sneaks in back door of public gym; showers and brushes teeth. Walks out onto campus. “Oh, hi Dr Smith!”

Etc.

Completely agree with your critique of the methodologisation/disciplinisation of conjunctural analysis. It’s a political technique, first and foremost.

Our podcast has landed!
Electric World Order: ep 1 - looks at the second wave of the energy transition, and why & how China is making it happen

Garfield looking at the picture of himself with a red “banned” sign over it, saying “huh, I wonder who that’s for.“

You would inevitably have a lot of references needing to be checked manually (e.g. in history journals where you have a lot of older sources and archives). But for fields that mostly reference recent journal articles (like anglophone philosophy) I think you could catch a significant percentage.

If references are correctly formatted then extracting the relevant information from each of them automatically should be trivial.

Given access to appropriate APIs on the metadata side, a half-decent programmer should be able to whip something up in a few hours.

The tricky part would be getting reliable metadata to check against. This is no problem with journal articles published by major publishers in the last 20 years or so. That should be extremely automatable, but other sources would be more problematic.

Abolition is the floor. The minimum. A reasonable compromise.

Letter to a friend (who definitely isn’t just me in a trench coat) On being unemployed and middle-aged, with aspirations of creativity

I wrote about being unemployed, middle-aged, and trying to find a creative voice in a world ever more dominated by self-satisfied mediocrity

polycritical.substack.com/p/letter-to-...

I just joined 👍

There is virtue in virtuosity.

I think that the entire ethos of Higher Education needs to be rebuilt upon this principle. But that’s just me.

This was my first reaction when ChatGPT came out: “Okay, so now everyone gets a C-.” Now it’s more like everyone gets an A-.

The absolute bare minimum has risen. But that doesn’t mean that the bare minimum is now good enough, any more than it was before.

This is the best I can say for it: AI raises the bar for what bad-to-mediocre work looks like.

If AI is able to tell me something that I don’t already know about my research area, this means that I need to do more research.

If my writing isn’t appreciably better than what an AI can generate, then I need to work on my writing skills.

The “good enough” attitude —valuing productivity for its own sake, pursuing quantity over quality, and generally having low intellectual standards — has long been a path to academic success. AI merely supercharges this. Amazing to see people so openly proud of their own mediocrity though.

Confidence and Conservatism: Integrating Affect and Ideology in the Critique of Reactionary Politics - Lawrence Wishart Affect and ideology are concepts easily associated but rarely thought through in their interrelation. Likewise, confidence and c

FWIW I wrote about needing to put ideology (à la Althusser) into dialogue with affect (à la Berlant) to deal with Trump-era political psychology. Though that was before Trump II. Not sure how I’d approach it now.

journals.lwbooks.co.uk/newformation...

(Paywall. Feel free to DM for PDF.)

It’s hard to discuss ideology theory in skeet form!

If “ISA” no longer works, this reflects a shift in the relationship of ideology to state rather than a diminution of ideology per se.

I think ideology is still central. Look at Polymarket, etc. Are the vast majority of users reaping material rewards from these markets? Not at all. They get the *promise* of rewards, but only a few insiders will ever gain them materially. Interpellation describes that relationship well, I think.

Trump wants critical minerals. So do Cornwall’s MPs. Global leaders are going head to head over critical minerals and national security. For some U.K. lawmakers, it is chance to grab both investment and votes.

World powers are deep in a fight over critical minerals.

But for a clutch of lawmakers in Britain's quiet Cornwall, they mean something else:

Votes.

New piece for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social, written with @jacktaggart.bsky.social and @tomchodor.bsky.social! It's an attempt at grasping the dismantling of multilateral global governance, in light of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, resurgent state capitalism, and hegemonic crisis. Link below:

There’s this big yellow thing in the sky that’s making everything hot. What the hell is it?

“Lynn, idea for Farage meeting. Jim Davidson hosts the 9 o’clock news. Stop migrants taking taxis.”

It’s difficult to express in words the contempt with which the McSweeney cabal deserve to be regarded, but Ian does a good job in approximating.

Why is every scandal existential for Starmer? Because he has actively worked to eradicate his own support base. And that, along with the Mandelson decision, can be laid at McSweeney's door iandunt.substack.com/p/starmers-m...

TL;DR: The left needs to read Machiavelli.