I can’t work out if it’s just Essex?

Yep, mine too. And I can’t get it to work on Firefox at all anymore.

What milk?

Posted from my iPhone, natch

It makes the 2010s look like paradise

Did anyone think that making life unworkable without the use of a smartphone was perhaps a bad idea?

Screenshot of paper's title page. International law’s purgatory: Strategic uses of international law and the hollowing of the liberal international order Sophie Duroy, University of Essex Abstract This essay challenges accounts that locate the crisis of the liberal international order primarily in growing noncompliance or open defiance of international law. It argues instead that the present moment is the culmination of decades of strategic legal justification. In recent decades, states have increasingly engaged international law to reinterpret, proceduralise, and instrumentalise it in ways that expand the scope of permissible violence while preserving law’s authority as a legitimising discourse. Through practices ranging from expansive readings of self-defence and proportionality to the routinisation of targeted killing, mass surveillance, and selective third-party interventions before international courts, contested interpretations have gradually reshaped the content of legal norms without formal amendment. This process of informal legal change has hollowed out international law’s constraining function while entrenching its discursive centrality. Situating these dynamics within debates on double standards and transitional orders, the essay conceptualises international law as occupying a “purgatory”: normatively authoritative yet increasingly ineffective as a restraint on power.

New essay, forthcoming in the inaugural issue of the Armenian Journal of International Law and already available on SSRN: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Comments welcome!

One very helpful thing about working with @pollysmythe.bsky.social, an ex-industrial reporter who actually understands union politics and union rivalries, is you can get a clear-eyed understanding of what the tube strike is actually about. www.londoncentric.media/p/london-loc...

This happened with me and Monty Python, too

‘Surely if someone leaves they’re replaced?’ ‘Let me stop you right there.’

Never saw it as a kid, which is probably why.

I was trying to explain to a friend the current situation/dysfunction and think I just sounded insane?

My unpopular opinion is that I don’t like the Princess Bride.

And yet… the Strait won’t go away.

It has to be something like that: it’s a lot of semi-predatory open-access ones in my experience.

Wondering when this will be with our eldest (now 6)

I for one am looking forward to chaos with Ed Miliband

More on the state of British academia.

Such cruelty and brutalisation effected through these processes that are dismantling disciplines and universities in the face of governmental indifference

Somewhere Bismarck is looking down in confusion as Germany projects power by sending 4,000 pensioners, 12 buffet stations and a TUI loyalty program through the Strait of Hormuz

It’s possible—or they want to divert people off the Norwich train?

It always used to be that the 8 with change at Colchester was the cheapest

Yes

Why is it suddenly the 08:16?!

Students will be barely able to contain their anger and will gasp in disbelief as I shatter their preconceptions and expectations in the very first minutes of class by telling them that they do, in fact, have to do the reading.

Have we reached peak Bloomsbury yet? The cultural legacy of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and co. is undeniable, but with the design, fashion, art and literary worlds forever ‘rediscovering’ them, Matthew Sperling says it’s time to move on

Was Virginia Woolf imaginatively drawn to water? Did she spend time in the countryside? Did she live in a square? Did the Bloomsbury Group wear clothes? There are books answering all these questions and many more. But perhaps, suggests Matthew Sperling, it’s time to move on (at least for a while).

Going to be annoyed if any of these book club emails turn out actually not to be scams

‘Exam-obsessed’ schools leave pupils unready for work, Alan Milburn says Former minister leading review into young people and work cites survey showing most teachers decry lack of ‘soft skills’

'a YouGov survey of 1,004 primary and secondary school teachers in the UK found nearly three-quarters (74%) said there was too much emphasis on passing exams; while 73% said there was not enough focus on preparing pupils for employment or developing “soft skills”.' 1/2

The only way I can find to describe AI-writing is to imagine what all those auto-translated Google reviews you end up reading would be like in prose.

One of the worst parts of social media is serious people forgetting that legit. news organisations do, in fact, have to verify sources/‘the news’.

What keeps coming up again and again is the risk of AI is really the flattening and erasure of plural forms of knowledge and capability with one way of doing things. To appropriate the Zapatista slogan, we need a world where many worlds not only fit but thrive and flourish