Steffan.J

hughsexey.com

If they're not banging it out on MySpace, I'm not interested.

Next stop, Jerusalem!

I'm hardly a Starmerite, but it's notable how few on the broad Left can take a win.
In fiscal terms, the last budget was probably the most left-wing in my lifetime.
This might also be the most left-wing foreign policy position, certainly with regards to war and US.
Yet they get no credit at all.

A big factor in the AI consciousness debate is that lots of atheists/agnostics believe in souls and don’t know it

Simon Jenkins wrote an article this week which approached being correct.

That made a huge dent in a normally useful and reliable heuristic.

Someone Googled 'Failed State' didn't they?

Which way, Western Man?

I'm beginning to wonder if relying on the conspiracy-embracing Right to secure the future of Israel might not be the most risk-free strategy.

He tried to get you back to Riyadh and you said "no, no, no"?

This deserves more likes.

Top tier poast.

"It hasn't failed! Real Blue Labour has never been tried!"

I think a big key to understanding at the moment is that "people who grew up in the political religion of Atlanticism are no better equipped to handle the current situation than Jeremy Corbyn was to handle the Salisbury attacks"

Famously, influencers never judge others on their choices, let alone suggest that they're superior to non-influencers.

For example, whether a historian advances a psychological explanation for (e.g.) WWII or a long-duree structural one probably has less to do with evidence and more to do with their own personality and background.

Thing is, I don't think you can reduce knowledge-production about history to *historians* alone, not least because historians don't, and can't, limit their knowledge-production only to the works of historians and primary sources.

Of all the religious festivals I'm aware of, Purim is definitely my favourite.

You might find that lack of definitive answer unsettling, but welcome to the Humanities!

In that sense, it's the network of historians, who judge each other on methodology, as well as other factors, that leads to the best, imperfect outcome, all with the expectation that other and future historians will arrive at different consensus of assessments.

Not really.
I think historians would basically concede that there will never be a single, definitive, 'objective' account of what caused WWII (for example).
Which is to say, there is no set of tools to definitively determine which casual narrative is true over all the other ones.

The thing is, for about two generations now, post-structuralists have been accused of *literally* claiming all truth claims are equal, usually by those who preen about how much they care about evidence.

Yet they never produce any actual direct evidence of that.

The hypocrisy is ludicrous.

All conservatives hate civil servants working from home.

For example, you could argue that socialism always leads to the gulag.
Even if we accepted that that's true, it still wouldn't be an accurate statement to assert that all socialists actively support introducing gulags.

I'm not saying there are no problems, or that you should agree with it.
My point is that nowhere does he assert that all truth claims are equally valid.
You may argue (maybe correctly!) that's the inevitable result of the position, but that's quite different from saying that's their position.

Nowhere does that say that all truth claims are equally valid.

There are multiple perspectives on the causes of WWII, and we are never going to get to a single definitive account.
That's standard History!
That doesn't mean you can just as easily blame it on Putin.

The ironic thing is that all the hard-core Realists find it basically impossible to cite any actual direct quotes from these pomos to actually prove their claim that they believe all empirical claims are equally valid.

Thing is, basically no postmodernist ever argued that all truth claims were/equally valid.
It was only a slightly stronger version of History that accepts there is never a fully definitive and objective version of events and their casuality.

Postmodernism seems to be a bit out of favour in modern academia, but if this isn’t a validation of Baudrillard I don’t know what is

Female officers condemn failures on police abuse as ‘insu... Women on the force find that, despite reforms, allegations of male colleagues’ sexual offences are still not being pursued

Five years ago this week, Sarah Everard was murdered by a serving police officer, sparking protests & promises of change

But now, woman officers abused by colleagues tell me reforms have victimised them more instead of protecting them

For @theobserveruk.bsky.social:

observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Nick Cohen:
'Polanski is a moral disgrace for going on a media outlet that platforms racist far-right figures.

'Read my latest piece in the Spectator. £££ paywall.'