Simon Glendinning

I know the shit has hit the fan in a big way in the US - but Bluesky seems increasingly about nothing else. Even the bits that are not about the US are mostly about international responses to the US. I know, I know, it’s a massive world upheaval and really, really terrible, but…hey ho.

Imagine thinking Farage is the alternative to old party politics & will somehow make your life better, when you can’t state any of his policies, Brexit was a disaster that made everything dearer, he wants to defund the NHS, has stuffed his party full of tories & taken Russian money! FFS

The link seems only to get to the Abstract. What do I need to do to read the paper?

Varun Chakaravarthy is my current favourite cricketer. He is 34 but has had a short international career. That is because he was an architect until he was 25. Like all great spin bowlers he is has a very idiosyncratic action. His googly is utterly brilliant. He also looks like a stoner.

Excellent, incisive analysis

Draghi wants real decision-making power in Europe, not a federal Big Bang Competitiveness is not enough. The former president of the European Central Bank’s call for ‘pragmatic federalism’ would require Europe to strengthen its decision-making process if it wants to weigh i...

According to Italy's former prime minister, the power games at play in today’s world require Europe to make a qualitative leap in integration. A pragmatic leap. https://bit.ly/4a7jY4Q

Mary Creagh?

This is silly. A judgement “from the viewpoint of the planet” would seem to me way more likely to embrace wanting us (or most of us) gone as soon as possible - don’t unnecessarily extend the stay of current humanity on their account.

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This is amazing, a wonderful adventure. Good luck, Anand.

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Not sure - I think Lyotard in the 1970s saw this already, as (from the right?) did Heidegger in the 1950s -and both before “neoliberalism” came on the scene and appeared to play an explanatory role, a role it only seemed to have, I think, out of dubious nostalgia for a classic philosophy of history.

I’m puzzled by the fact that an art exhibition today is basically indistinguishable from works in a museum. Is it: works of the clearly past and works of the nearly past?

I’ve talked for decades of a need for a Confederation of States of Europe

That is a stronger political alliance but one that allows each state some self-determination and to protect its own culture, language and ways (whatever the latter means)

A Federal state will only strengthen some

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The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age The long read: Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve enter...

I really like thinking about Tooze’s demand that we acknowledge the historically unprecedented character of whatever is happening. I also like thinking about his idea that you don’t know what shit you’re in when you are in it. I don’t think I agree though. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

And the UK not at the table because of an act of collective insanity.

The US became a global power in a time when the economic-political space became planetary. However, a new global order could be constructed in that space by the global powers: one that re-configures each global power as a regional power - if they can mostly agree who gets what.

Thinking a bit more on this, there is a symbolism in the fact that this warning to the US is issued at the margins of a meeting of the 'coalition of the willing' to defend against Russia.

Europe in 2026, under siege from two sides.

This was the first of 26 consecutive tests for Tavaré, including tours of India, Sri Lanka and Australia, during which tests he made two test centuries and again achieved some notable feats of slow scoring. His 50 in five hours and fifty minutes, against Pakistan in 1982, was the second-slowest in the history of the English game."' Among his slowest innings was a score of 35 runs in six-and-a-half hours at Madras in the 1981/82 season. In 2012, Alex Massie wrote that, for Tavaré, scoring runs seemed "a disagreeable, even vulgar, distraction from the pure task of surviving".? At Perth in 1982 he made "an eight-hour 89, 60 minutes of which were entirely scoreless", although he

English cricket fans regretting the retirement of Chris Tavaré.

Thank you for this essay! Identifying Marxism as *the* inseparable adversary of Nazism is, I think, a pre-requisite of understanding Nazism. OTOH, there is a long tradition of non-Marxist socialism (“beyond all class distinctions”) which resists identifying socialism only with its left variations.

There is a passage on Europe in JS Mill’s On Liberty which could have set the tone for a distinctive and constructive British vision of Europe - but as far as I can see it was lost to the world until I attempted to resurrect it in 2021 …when it was already too late.

Not especially true - every MS has its Europe - but especially truly awful. :(

“Towards integration” or “towards closer union” is an undeniably teleological conception. And there is nothing wrong with that at all. The only question is about the ideal end (the telos). What is “complete” integration? You may say: a federal state. I say: something *essentially* short of that.

Yes! Hilarious.

Not sure about the law example here. I think it would take too long trying to refine it to fit. Nevertheless, on the face of it any piece of EU legislation that harmonises across MSs either does or does not conflict with the existing law in any given MS. The rest follows (I think).

No condescension intended. Teleological development does seem implied in your description of the emerging federal formation - and that would be a questionable way of looking at developments underway. But my central point is that *any* development would be constrained by the limits I identified.

Some national constitutional courts have challenged its absolute reach, asserting limits based on national constitutional identity or fundamental rights. But of course you are right about the steps in the process of law change. I’m not sure it makes a difference to the thought experiment though.

A thought experiment: suppose a law that is common to all MSs - no conflict - and the ECJ asserted a demand for a change in that law. That could be a moment of consensual legal progress in some domain. But what if the MSs all opposed the proposal? Would they all have to suck it up? Idk, I hope not.

Quite rightly the ECJ has primacy over conflicting national laws. But even there states reserve a right to oversight. And the idea that a federal state is “emerging” is far too simplistically teleological. I have mentioned structural limits to the development of that which that idea simply ignores.