Phil Swatton

Will check them out, thank you! Might be more manageable to get through!

At some point I really need to bite the bullet and read Statistical Rethinking.

Think my lastest stuff took the [No, Yes] route -- fun exercise

I was interested in the studying racists but not racism part moreso than the Goodwin part in any case, thank you!

Thanks for sharing, and I'll have to keep an eye out for the book!

Have you got a longer write-up on this critique of the field? I'd love to read it if so

🙋‍♂️

Racist blogging!

I'm so glad I don't have to live in a world where Matt Goodwin is an MP

When reading Suzanne Heywood's biography of her late husband Jeremy Heywood, two things struck me about Brown:

1) The world and not just Britain were v lucky he was PM during the crisis.
2) The humanity of his eulogy to Jeremy, directly addressed to Jeremy's family

I should probably write a new essay on something else sometime instead of re-upping this one, but I feel it remains relevant whenever something like the quoted post comes up: renewal.org.uk/blog/public-...

This thread is a very instructive of example of why the short form video is such a negative thing for our information environment, not least because many of those who see the video are unlikely to see it!

V worth reading

Congratulations!

Smiling because my book with @ghostofchristo1.bsky.social is out today!

In Beyond Woke and Anti-Woke (Bristol University Press), we examine the emergence of social justice ideology. Unlike polemical accounts, we use an analytic approach and academic theories and methods.

More 👇

A JFK campaign poster with a picture of a machine with a face and several arms. An alarmed worker looks on. The text reads "If Automation takes over your job... who will you want in the White House?"

Fear of the machine's impact on work dates at least to the Luddites, but nonetheless fascinating to come across something like this from JFK's 1960 presidential campaign:

Nick Vivyan, Chris Hanretty (@chanret.bsky.social) and I have a new book out: “Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice”. The core of the book is making the argument that citizens’ views about political issues neither reduce to an ideological orientation nor to a lack of substance. (1/10)

Think the difference possibly is that Johnson and Starmer were both weak by the time of these scandals -- Blair by contrast was not?

Fear and Freedom - Jan-Werner Müller, 2008 This article identifies a distinct strand of 20th-century liberal thought that was exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron and, to a lesser extent, Karl Popp...

I have in mind something like the below paper w/ this. The same paper notes as you do that he was all for technocratic social engineering by established civil servants. (2/2)

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Very fair note (dangers of tweeting based on very loose notes). By 'reacts against Red Vienna' I mean that he was anti-Marxist based on an epistemology of political knowledge which had overlaps w/ the Austrian economists. (1/2)

Fascinating thread on the enduring influence of Red Vienna’s scientific worldview.

Thank you!

I wish I'd known it when I visited Vienna! But yes, I think so, or at least that's the perspective of the book.

Of course: the decline of faith in planning happened for a reason. But I think @himself.bsky.social's musings in this post on Scott on how ML may be able to encode tacit knowledge (similar to points you made) are the beginnings of a response to that:

www.programmablemutter.com/p/high-moder...

Or see James C Scott, who was of the left but very sceptical of what he called 'high modernism' of the kind Red Vienna embodied, and also bucked the trend towards quantitative method:

dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

While I think of it, lots of examples of scepticism in planning being combined w/ scepticism in method. E.g. Isaiah Berlin was sceptical of scientific method in the humanities (some notes: philswatton.github.io/2025/06/18/i...), was also v. opposed to state planning.

Hope all of that makes sense! The book is not just about these things, but it covers them and is highly recommended

The Austrian school by contrast always rejected planning: their economic perspective is partly based in the rejection of scientific method in economics and in social planning. And I suppose you could say that disenchantment with the state in the post-68 left comes from disillusionment w/ planning

So to explain what I was trying to say: the Austromarxists/Red Vienna/Vienna school are a clear example of the pre-68 left you refer to in their faith in scientific planning and organisation.

According to Cockett, the post-68 New Left also adopts these critiques of scientism and planning, but eventually dovetails with rise of libertarianism.