Michael Garnett

A red cross spray-painted onto a brick wall, with “I ❤️ refugees” added onto the middle of it

Leytonstone, London, 14th September 2025

Continued:

The cross cultural conversations happening on RedNote are something to see. For example:

So the Pettitian republican can maintain the view’s distinctness by insisting on (and trying to defend) these ‘implausible’ parts, which is generally what I think they do

I thought the remaining parts were more narrowly to do with the ‘mere capacity’ condition (i.e. non-interfering masters, rather than interfering non-masters). But the overall structure of C/K’s argument is definitely that RL collapses into NL *once stripped of the implausible(-to-them) bits*

That’s not my recollection: I thought they dismissed arbitrariness as implausible/moralised (for them, the justly imprisoned criminal is obviously unfree), then argued that any remaining seemingly-plausible parts of the republican account can be handled by probabilities of interference.

Pettit has an arbitrariness condition, which C/K reject; and he denies that probabilities matter, whereas C/K think they do. One might side with C/K on both issues, but the problem isn’t a lack of distinctness!

"I used GenAI to research this topic"

The research:

I can only conclude that this will wash an infinite amount of dishes

“We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer.” Adorno

“Women are educated—who knows how?—as it were by breathing in ideas.” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, s. 166)

The sheer scale of the self-own in that aside has killed me. I am dead.

“The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants.”
— Hegel, who for some reason I am still reading

Today I get to teach one of my favourite philosophical arguments: G.A. Cohen on ‘freedom tickets’

To be clear: this isn’t a side-effect of current government policy, but one of its central aims.

UK HE shrinking This is a live page of all the redundancies, restructures, reorganisations, and closures taking place across the sector at the moment. Solidarity to all. This sector is vital to the country’s…

Eighty-three universities are now making redundancies. That number will rise to 90 and then 100+ during 2025. qmucu.org/qmul-transfo...

Update: Moana 2 is a solid B- Disney movie, lots of thrills, spills, songs and a few decent visual gags. But it’s entirely lacking in the wit and emotional depth that made the first one so wonderful. Overall, disappointing.

Educators are rightly worried about AI threatening student writing. But there’s also dangers to reading with a new generation of AI summary tools, with students relying on abridgements rather than working through the details of difficult texts.

Gonna get just a medium popcorn and see how far it goes

(This dad joke is for my fellow Moana fans: you’re welcome)

Family ticket booked for Moana 2 tonight and I can report that the excitement levels here are extremely high. My kids also seem to be looking forward to it.

“I tweeted [x] on Bluesky”

This is important. It's no big deal to me that Bluesky totally ripped off everything Twitter is because that place now sucks so bad. But we don't need a new word for a micro-post of a nature we all understand to be a thing. Like podcast started from iPod, tweet is now just a generic. This is a tweet

Rousseau by a mile.

Rousseau 😡😡😡

Why Twitter is (Epistemically) Better Than Facebook Online Environments Social media has the potential to expand our epistemic horizons, connecting us with a wider range of people and more information and analysis than ever before. But it comes with…

my two cents on the echo chamber discourse (with a very outdated title)

1) echo chambers are only a risk for dominant groups, when they don't hear marginalised voices

2) most people instead need *epistemic respite*: space away from alternative viewpoints to build communities

For an intellectually serious analysis of what’s going on with the far-right, I’m not going to look to the far-right! I’m going to look for scholars I can trust.

Counterpoint: seeing fascist memes from people called things like @cuckfuhrer18 is, in fact, unlikely to deepen my understanding of politics and society

This was not informed consent

Every day I curse the series of life choices that led to my sometimes having to teach people about Hegel

Fb ad for Moana 2 with a thumbnail of Moana saying “that’s no island”

Every time I see this ad on fb my first thought is “omg they put a Death Star in Moana 2”

The unbreakable fall