1/ I was asked yesterday by someone to give examples of men who represented healthy masculinity and I thought, "well, it's men who don't think that being a man ultimately involves dominance over everyone in your surroundings". 2/ A lot of the conversation around masculinity is "get your life together and eventually women are the reward" - that's dominant masculinity, not collaborative masculinity, which I have always found to be much healthier.

Germany's far-right AfD party wants to dissolve the EU, and want to call for a referendum to leave it: of course it does.

https://twitter.com/welt/status/1670703117640294403

An interesting thing about Germany is how little patience so many voters have had with anything remotely progressive, on either housing or climate. The far-right path isn't going to solve those problems, but it will provide lots of short-term catharsis at foreigners' expense.

🧵Today in Berlin. Was getting a cab to see the preview of a new TV series, on the evacuation of Jewish refugees from Marseille in WW2. Had a great chat with the cab driver about society. Just before he dropped me off, he stated the main problem for the world’s ills: the Jews. We had been chatting for a good fifteen minutes before that so I didn’t explode at him, I patiently explained why I thought he was wrong, in the same tone we’d been using before. Sometimes this stuff feels like defusing a bomb.

Watch how he brings extreme discourse into the mainstream by scoffing at its opponents. Elsewhere on here, actual historians and investigative journalists are warning of Meloni’s long embrace of fascism. But they don’t have his reach. The left - much to the surprise of a lot of people on here - isn't just sitting on Twitter, it is organising at the grassroots all over the world, and if it was really as useless as many of those people allege then people like Meloni would have succeeded much sooner.

Short thread.

One thing I have noticed so much recently (more than ever) is how in England we are so conditioned not to speak up even when we are angry about a social issue. It's a very hard thing to shake, this hardwired sense of deference. I was at a festival in England recently and the subject of the royal family came up. Someone in the crowd, who had worked for the Queen as some kind of advisor, was praising the monarchy's remarkable ability to renew itself. The moderator then asked if anyone had a view on that.

Bernardo Silva is the sous-chef of Manchester City’s midfield, rushing round and sorting out the logistics while Kevin de Bruyne prepares the recipe. Easy to forget just how important Kyle Walker is to the success of this Manchester City team - an example of so long being such an efficient part of the machine that, if not quite underrated, they get taken for granted.

(Random note:
Watching Avengers: Endgame (yet again) and for all the criticism the MCU gets, the opening hour perfectly captures the devastation of overwhelming loss. I am still surprised by how well and how long they drew that section out.) Wait, so Josh Brolin plays Gurney Halleck with the exact same energy that he plays Thanos.

It is the most grim thing when geopolitics decides that, for the sake of the greater good or to prevent wider conflict, you as a people are utterly expendable. My parents were here with Uganda, we were here with Syria and there was no line in the sand, and now we are here again. In short, I do not believe for one second that there would be no intervention if Putin started carpet-bombing Geneva. I think a key difference for Western Europe is that the people being carpet-bombed in Ukraine look "just like us", but obviously not "just like us" enough.

1/ Please RT:
I just got off the phone with a community organiser (africansleavingukraine.com) who is trying to help black and Asian students out of Ukraine and place them with academic institutions in the EU. If any academics can help with that, please email at the above link. 2/ They are looking specifically for academic institutions that will relax entry requirements (ie that will take non-EU students without too much extra bureaucracy). A couple of institutions have already stepped up, thank God. More please.

It's not helpful to keep ranting about this, but still: it was being reported fully 14 years ago that Putin had stolen enough money to make him the richest person in Europe, but too many people in London turned the other way because he was making them rich too, and here we are. Absolutely none of Putin's mass murder in Syria and Ukraine was inevitable, absolutely none of it, because if people in London had cracked down on his assets in 2007 (theguardian.com/world/2007/dec…) or long before that then none of this horror happens, none of it.

I feel like I need to write an essay about the dangers of laughing at killer clowns. 👇

https://twitter.com/okwonga/status/1491203362385465344

“My mother was a child in Nazi Germany…I remember her telling us how people initially thought Hitler’s language was exaggerated for dramatic effect…for a time he was a comic figure. As it carried on…fascism became…acceptable and eventually embraced.” google.de/amp/s/amp.theg…

I am sharing this again since I think it’s important and it’s being a little bit lost in this discussion.

https://twitter.com/okwonga/status/1479346336080273409

I find it very frustrating that Djokovic - please see above - is getting more scrutiny for his "water purifying" views than his nationalism, especially with the political situation in Bosnia as it is now. I get it, the outlandish stuff is funny, but we can't ignore the above.

Everything in this opinion piece is forensic, factually accurate and if anything it is understated.

https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1481223712250732546

Please read the above opinion piece for yourselves. It was surprisingly unsurprising. It is not alarmist, it is calmly factual, and it makes no comparison implicit or otherwise with Putin or Erdogan. It merely assesses Boris Johnson's behaviour against the rule of law.

You have people in Bosnia who need firm support from the UK as genocide deniers there grow in influence, and at precisely the same time you have a UK Prime Minister being smirking and evasive about a party he went to in lockdown. It's so grubby and degrading. We had people in Afghanistan desperate for help and at the very same time we had a Foreign Secretary playing truant from his day job. It is such a grim joke that the UK government call themselves Global Britain. They govern for no-one but the people in their own WhatsApp group.

1/ A key reason that my book doesn’t name names is that English political discourse is obsessed with gossip and sensationalism, with he-did-this and she-did-that, which deflects from the vital conversation about structures.

https://twitter.com/Okwonga/status/1460923738434805765

2/ Just look at the current political discourse. I’m not saying we shouldn’t name names, just that certain people who are used to being in the spotlight are experts at making the conversation all about them: instead of about the society that produces and enables them.

1/ This is so dangerous and I have been saying this for ages: many people do not realise what government they have elected.

New bill quietly gives powers to remove British citizenship without notice theguardian.com/politics/2021/… 2/ This proposed law isn't about Priti Patel or Boris Johnson, it goes beyond them. Just imagine this law in the hands of a yet more extreme government, doing its best to appease hard-right sections of the media and the electorate in a time of public unrest and climate collapse.

Manchester City are not possessing the ball, they are confiscating it. Certain pundits looking for anyone to criticise but the coach.

Remembering when many of us compared Boris Johnson’s contempt for democracy and the rule of law to that of Donald Trump, and several Very Serious People scoffed at the comparison. Still thinking about how Boris Johnson’s speech about climate change - in which he claimed the Roman Empire fell due to uncontrolled immigration - was a beat-for-beat remake of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech: “wars, terrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood.”

Barcelona are attacking Arsenal with advanced geometry! They are making the smallest gaps look huge. It’s wild when you think how open Chelsea were against this Barcelona team in the Women’s Champions League Final. That was like walking into a sandstorm.

Chelsea inviting so much pressure from Manchester City: it’s not so much Stamford Bridge as Helm’s Deep. It’s a sign of Tuchel’s success and the faith that he has rightly earned that he is getting away with an approach this defensive.

This story breaks my heart. Workers from Mozambique - “Madgermanes” - fled Germany in the 1990s due to horrifying levels of neo-Nazi violence. When they got home, they were denied years of back pay by their government. Many died in poverty. voland-quist.de/wppb_works/mad…

https://twitter.com/Heimatkunde_HBS/status/1438839488378281987

The story of the Madgermanes (above) is so grim since it gives the lie to the argument that, if you are a migrant who just works hard and keeps your head down, you can make a life for yourself. They were hounded from their homes. They were never forgiven for wanting quiet lives.