Mike Page

Caswell?

Just caught up. A wonderful contribution. (And dead right, of course, about the yellow.)

This is mostly what Miller (1956) was saying, isn’t it?7+/-2 points on a scale will give you all the information you’re going to get. People often think that paper was about sequence span but, in as much as it was, it was wrong.

Great news. Long deserved.

A very pleasant surprise to hear you on my radio this morning, Kevin. A tremendous contribution, as always.

After your previous message, I was on tenterhooks waiting for this one.

Listening to it now. Excellent!

It’s not bad. It’s set (and was filmed) where B grew up, so has become a bit of a favourite. York, MacCorkindale, Agutter - what more could you want for a Sunday afternoon? The book is very good, if you like derring-do (and can ignore the anachronisms).

Michael York and Simon McCorkindale in fine Gansey sweaters, from the film of The Riddle of the Sands.

The Riddle of the Sands. Phwoar!

A quote from Charles Fourier: “Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all societies’ creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich. The newly freed slave takes fright at the need of providing for his own subsistence and hastens to sell himself back into slavery in order to escape this new anxiety that hangs over him like Damocles’ sword.”

@karlwiderquist.bsky.social I thought you’d like this quote from https://jacobin.com/2022/04/socialist-feminist-utopia-charles-fourier-philosophy-marx-engels?utm_source=bluesky I’m sure you’re already across it, but I saw it and thought of you.

Agree. And after that @dieworkwear, whom I think @deevybee.bsky.social follows…

Can very much recommend “Limitarianism” by Ingrid Robeyns, for a very thoroughly argued case along exactly these lines.

Grandad, grandad. Why didn't you do anything to stop it all? Yeah in hindsight we should have done more. Also in foresight. But I think we just hoped someone else would sort it out for us. Felt like they should. But they must have been waiting for us to do it. Sorry.

BILLY ELLIOT 2 (2028)

-Da, I wanna be an offshore welder

-No son o' mine is gonna weld! Look, lad, just study finite element modelling. It's not fancy, but it's an honest life

-It's over, da. Keir Thatcher's closin' all t'unis

-You'll feel different once your first grant--

-THERE ARE NO GRANTS!

Sorry to kibbitz, but maybe dried cranberries (esp. if it’s a FODMAP thing)

Thanks, Aidan. I think that’s right. As long as management behave like a “professional managerial class”, by appearing to defend government against staff rather than staff against government, our mutual interests are catastrophically deemphasised, with the consequences that we see.

I suppose we ought to consider, too, what alternative course of action, might extract the sector from the race-to-the-bottom implied by your three points (of which 3 is, of course, the most galling, as John notes), if strike action were definitively off the table. Ideas?

…refused to sign up to a collective, sector-wide campaign might actually focus all our minds on the underlying funding issue, common to all. The key problem, I think, is that VC’s are selected for a lack of solidarity with the staff body from which they sprang. Maybe not irredeemably so, though?

Pragmatically, I think you are right, of course. And yet such a management stance would lack any logic. VCs WANT higher unit funding (some have been v explicit in saying so); between them, they have a monopoly degree-awarding powers.  Selective strikes in institutions where the VC…1/2

But what if a strike were aimed at addressing 2 first, and thence 1? That is, a strike that tried to unite staff and management (yes, inc. VC’s; UUK, etc.) in pushing Gov to increase home-student funding. Along the lines of: No home degrees to be awarded until unit funding somewhat restored.

Have you listened to the Macrodose guest-hosted by Nick Bano? Gave me food for thought re. “supply and demand” (though admittedly haven’t read the book yet

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/against-landlords-w-nick-bano/id1646528688?i=1000643612673

U ok hun?

If this Lammy/Vance/celebrity/Cotswolds nexus isn’t an argument for sortition and deliberative democracy, then I’m not sure what is https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czr68vde7nvo

The business secretary Jonathan Reynolds says the racist protesters intimidating asylum seekers in Epping are "upset for legitimate reasons.”
I don't remember any Labour frontbencher saying the same about people protesting the genocide in Gaza. On the contrary, they've criminalised peaceful dissent.

I reluctantly admit you have a point, but I’m still quite chuffed with its renaissance. I had to get it on DVD because nobody streamed it, even when that had become the default. Come down to NW11 for a screening!

@mattpagefilm.bsky.social Finally this comes good, with Front Row heralding Absolute Beginners as an unacknowledged classic AND quoting Scorcese to the same effect! Where’s your Prince of Thieves now, eh!? https://x.com/mike_page/status/1272606900757172224?s=46&t=mHqDYMcMxepCmX_hjbyhkw

Heroes ✊👏

…and always print the name and affiliation on any badge, so that those of us who occasionally fail to retrieve the names of even people we know well, can craftily look at the name while sagely stating “ah, still at University of X, I see”

Have you worked out the gCO2/p.km? 😉

There's been a bigger scandal over a BBC documentary about the horrors inflicted by Israel against Palestinian children, over an irrelevant detail, than the horrors inflicted by Israel against Palestinian children.

The world turned on its head.

Depraved. Deranged.