This week I finally slayed the final boss off hand-knitting. This thing – which has 659,016 stitches (no mistakes) - has taken me three years to knit, through conferences, faculty and trade union meetings, and the rest. It has moved house with me five times, from Kansas City MO, to Roanoake Virginia, to London, then Edinburgh, and now Cellardyke. No wonder it took me so long. It’s in silk bought from a mill in China. The pattern is based on a ‘prize shawl’ knitted in Shetland about 115 years ago, using the proportions they used and their border design,

🧵For nearly 30 years successive UK governments have dedicated themselves to increasing house prices. This has been how politics worked: for the 50% of people who are home-owners, they get an annual pay-off/bribe from the government in the form of equity in their home to carry on voting for them. Not many other policies have mattered. And of course that additional equity has been effectively a tax free hand-out to the richest part of the population. It has been achieved through a variety of means: limits on home-building, sell-off of council housing that

THREAD: What is happening in UK universities is astonishing. Right now about quarter of universities are laying off staff. Almost all universities expect to make a loss this year. And the entire thing is happening in an effort to deceive the population about migration statistics. It's true that migration to the UK is high right now. We have a government with a headline policy of reducing immigration. But the only way they have found to do it is to try to discourage international students from taking up places in UK universities. Why this makes no sense:

Completely appalled by Jürgen Habermas’s statement on the war in Gaza (). The belief that supporting whatever the Israeli regime and army do will protect Germany from its past is itself antisemitic. Saying that the mass slaughter of Palestinians and the 1/normativeorders.net/2023/grundsatz… Destruction of Gaza is “justified in principle” is bad enough. But to claim to do so “in solidarity with … Jews” is horrific. It silences the voices of Jews who have dissented from this terrible violence. It attempts to make them morally culpable. Meanwhile, not a thought is 2/

We, the people of the world, stand accused of extremism, because we believe in the rights of Palestinians to determine their own lives, free from fear and violence, in a land they can call their own. Our leaders, who accuse us, believe in the bombing of a captive population. 1/5 A population where half of the people are children. It is difficult to imagine a situation more extreme, more dehumanising, more awful than what Israel, supported by the leaders of the world, are imposing on Gaza. Against this we are surely moderates, who struggle for peace, 2/5

It is such a shame that the deep public criticism of OFSTED is happening only after its terrible work is completed. Most of the British public do not understand what it was for and what it was doing. The timeline of Ofsted is that of the privatisation of most of Britain's schools under the academies programme. Schools used to be run and owned by the state, and with teachers all on a fixed national payscale. The role of Ofsted over the last 25 years has been, one by one, to accuse schools of failing in order to offer

THREAD: It is frankly astounding how much love this idiotic thread is. This "explainer" on antisemitism manages to suggest that Jews in the first half of the 20th century were wealthy and that "European Jews did benefit from whiteness, which is why they were given Palestine". Ok,

https://twitter.com/frazierapproves/status/1589249826763722753

let's talk about what's right and what's wrong here. Firstly there is no "one" antisemitism. The story that the author gives explains a particular strand of thought that is a mainstay of quite a lot of antisemitism, in which Jews are modelled as secret controllers of the world

A thread on this misconception. Let's start with two reasons this question comes up in the first place: firstly, there is a tendency in recent(ish) criticism to understand Adorno as a mere critic of ideology. This is particularly present in the American academy, where he is most

https://twitter.com/Sean_D_Kelly/status/1500613952677445632

often taught as a sort of grumbler who simply laments the excrescences of modernity, diagnosing cultural phenomena as deceptive in one way or another. Secondly, Adorno's own criticism of Heidegger is oddly pitched - especially in the late work (Jargon of Authenticity and the

THREAD: Wow the antisemitism in the Labour Party these days is wild. So a Jewish member of Haringey Labour Party, whose parents and grandparents fled Nazi Germany, and whose other relatives were murdered in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, was due to give a presentation about Jewish resistance in Poland for Holocaust Memorial Day. Before the meeting she gets phoned up by her non-Jewish MP @CatherineWest1 and asked not to speak. Then at the meeting she is attacked again and a third of the meeting walk out. The attempts to silence Jews talking about a genocide

THREAD: The Sue Gray Report gives a really good illustration of how the British State approaches issues of wrongdoing by powerful people:

1) Powerful people do not own up to what they have done. Instead they say "we'll have an inquiry".
2) Someone is appointed to lead the inquiry, who is invariably drawn from exactly the same class and social stratum (that is, posh) as the people who did something wrong in the first place.
3) The journalists play along. Instead of asking about the initial wrongdoing, they focus on the inquiry and its timeline.

Does anyone have any work going that can be done remotely. I'm leaving my job at the end of the month so I can spend time with my partner, but need some income. Can do writing, copy editing, data entry and audit, university level marking, research, grant application writing, etc. Spent the last 5 years running an archive that focuses on social movements and radical culture 1960s-present. Also just submitted a PhD on german critical theory, metaphysics, aesthetics, literary theory, Marxism and psychoanalysis. Know my way around German classical philosophy.

THREAD: Genuinely find it astounding that there are people on the left who in one breath will say they are surprised by the rise of the internet far right, and then will spend time banging on about "culture wars", spend their energy bemoaning "wokeness", getting obsessed with "cancel culture". Certainly there are some problems of left authoritarianism around, which can be challenged. But if your way of challenging them is (a) borrowing a bunch of far right memes because you can't think of any better way to make your criticism, or (b) creating groups

THREAD: Let's talk about that Wes Streeting speech. I first met Wes in 2004, as my student union president. That year, Cambridge planned to shut down its architecture department. Radical students and the academics union mounted a campaign and kept it open. Once victory was... assured, the student union organised a rally outside the Senate House, where Wes claimed all the credit. It was also the first time I heard his speech about growing up poor, in a council house, and being essentially a working class boy made good. That might have been a fair...

THREAD: The policing system in Britain is predicated on arbitrary violence in general, and sexual violence in particular. The Wayne Couzens case is not the exception but the rule. He is exceptional only in that he carried out what each police officer threatens in every arrest. 1/ That threat is exacerbated where people resist arrest or refuse to follow police orders. Afterwards you’re much more likely to get roughed up, strip searched, and violated in custody. This is one of the main reasons people follow police orders. The police will try to say that 2/

Anatomy of the covid passports story: for a year every public health person explains why vaccine passports are a bad idea, because it will lead to exclusion and blame of minorities and those who won't or can't get vaccinated... Late last year Tony Blair backs covid passports through his 'Institute for Global Changs'. This isn't a surprise, since Blair works closely with Israeli government, who spend their time looking precisely for policies in which bio-security measures can be imposed precisely in

What we should be talking about is how massive cuts to funding and successive governments who do not take music seriously has led to most people not getting decent skills at school. Oxbridge music is packed out with toffs both because the depts want them to be, to keep chapels

https://twitter.com/katherineschof8/status/1376128966117879810

running, and because it's nearly impossible to get the sort of education you need for admission in comprehensive schools. Like to get in I had to do all sorts of crap in interview and testing I had never been taught by anyone. Widening curriculum would be a good thing - as would

This isn't a story about normal British incompetence. Boris Johnson isn't David Brent. It's a story about a government of opportunists and eugenicists that has hamstrung the health service, a government who decided old people and disabled people weren't worth saving (or who thought that there might even be benefits to killing them off.) It's a story about private contracts for the old boys club while public health and the NHS are frozen out. It's a story about banal and glib hatred of poor people. It is about a government who became convinced that

I’m feeling despairing and awful. ⁦@POTUS⁩ just renewed Trump’s travel ban. Anne and I have been separated by the closed borders since March - I was due to travel to Kansas City the day after the ban was put in. It’s so difficult not being able to see someone you love. We Have - like many unmarried couples in our position - tried to lobby the Us government for an exemption for long-term partners. Travel can be safe, if quarantines and testing are put in place. But the US has instead gone for absolute bans. Many other countries have invented .

An end of year COVID thread:

Sometimes a view of a complex world requires radical simplification. In the UK all public health measures have failed. This year we have seen as many deaths and as much sickness per head of population as states that did not intervene at all. While people put in effort to stay at home and to keep others safe, every attempt was undermined. 10 months into the pandemic there is COVID everywhere. In London up to 1 in 30 people have it right now. The hospitals have run out of ventilators and are triaging patients, so those with

With the suspensions of Moshe Machover and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi (following suspending at least one other Jewish member for questioning the IHRA definitions, and another being put under investigation), it’s clear @Keir_Starmer’s Labour are profiling and going after Jews. This is actually pretty terrifying. Jews who are speaking out are being persecuted, all under the kafkaesque idea that they shouldn’t be allowed to speak about the very antisemitism they face. People need to speak out against this.

THREAD: What evidence are the @EHRC hiding in their report about alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party? Or is the Equality and Human Rights Commission a kangaroo court?

Since August I have been trying to get the EHRC to disclose the evidence and information that it has received in its investigation into alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party. It is due to publish its report this week, but it still will not reveal the evidence that it is basing its report on. Back in August I sent them this request under the Freedom of Information Act.