Anand

ok, looks like Wednesday afternoon is when I'm planning to be publicly furious on my own outside the BBC

what about you?

child grooming?

p-p-pick up a penguin

of course they do

only deep sea boats, or burrowing boats, gradually lost their eyes 🤓

In 2020 I sent a letter to Tim Davie, of which this is the gist. (I was proposing the creation of a trans-institutional framework for dealing with the issue.) Davie responded to say it was all fine and I shouldn't worry. (You remember Tim Davie, right?)

But truly, the “it could never happen here because our democracy is strong and we are above such barbarism,” even if it were true (it absolutely isn’t) is a despicable thing to even think in the face of what people are having to do to fight back against fascism in the US.

it's been known to happen 😅

so angry I nearly protested outside the wrong institution by mistake 😖

thank you

I guess this could be one of those 'Briton stood alone' moments people keep wanging on about, but that's ok, I'm that angry

unusually I'm in London next week

(city I grew up in, like a lot, but have rarely been to for many years, for difficult personal reasons)

I now feel like spending some of my incredibly precious hours protesting outside the Royal Academy and the BBC 😖

is anyone aware of any ongoing demonstrations?

a reminder that the USA is an active crime scene in far too many ways, across generations and communities

"Today
we remember
that freedom is not free."

There are no boring people in this world. Each fate is like the history of a planet. And no two planets are alike at all. Each is distinct - you simply can't compare it. If someone lived without attracting notice and made a friend of their obscurity - then their uniqueness was precisely this. Their very plainness made them interesting. Each person has a world that's all their own. Each of those worlds must have its finest moment and each must have its hour of bitter torment - and yet, to us, both hours remain unknown. When people die, they do not die alone. They die along with their first kiss, first combat. They take away their first day in the snow ... All gone, all gone - there's just no way to stop it.

Each fate is like the history of a planet.

——
When people die, they do not die alone.
They die along with their first kiss,
first combat
They take away their first day in the snow

-Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “People”
trans. Boris Dralyuk @bdralyuk.bsky.social

#everynightapoem

All of them. Please understand that before this moment we were already over the line, it has just expanded to include more communities

a man with a mustache is wearing a blue jacket and a leopard print scarf and is clapping his hands . ALT: a man with a mustache is wearing a blue jacket and a leopard print scarf and is clapping his hands .

I was actually arguing against baseline British culture, as I'm Kenyan Indian South African etc, but still... not everyone gets to be so special 😜

we will talk more, another time 🤞🏽

I don't know if you saw this on my initial thread

I'm familiar with the US, but politically it's an outlier, and I'm looking at these issues from a different viewpoint from you?

anyway, have a good night, I do need to try and sleep now I've checked Trump hasn't invaded anywhere new while I slept

no problem

insomniac in the UK here, not at my clearest and need to sleep again

I'm working on how we move around, but see that pattern the opposite way

not people moving to find their own cultural tribes, but about a scarcity of jobs and infrastructure

100% respectfully disagreeing with you 😅

'the strength of the tribalism feels right to me.'

I hear you, but I see that as people becoming increasingly brittle under stress, for decades, and unheard — across every part of the political spectrum

it's how I understand horseshoe theory: the far left+right merge into similar authoritarianism

The Two Americas of 2016 (Published 2016) A view of two imaginary nations created by slicing the country along the sharp divide between Republican and Democratic Americas.

this is the article

I can't find non-paywalled maps right now, but they are worth looking at

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

How to split the USA into two countries: Red and Blue Progressive America would be half as big, but twice as populated as its conservative twin.

that kind of cognitive/neurodiversity explanation isn't enough to explain gross (🥴) geographic patterns

(I was trying to find a classic two Americas map from 2016, which makes the rural/urban divide even starker, but is now more distorted by all the gerrymandering)

bigthink.com/strange-maps...

yes, thanks for sharing

I find Attemeyer's right-wing authoritarian personality idea useful — have seen it starkly in some individuals 😒

and we are all very rigid, tribal; including on the left, even in science (as Thomas Kuhn showed)

but that can only be a partial story, given voting patterns…

still on the fence about the World Cup?

NYT reports of the video confirm the sequence of events. Mr Pretti was shot - many times - while posing no threat.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

the actual analysis should begin with the clearly documented fact that the US federal government is executing peaceful citizens on the street, in plain view — and then blatantly lying to cover it up

anything less isn't journalism

curious if this BBC team would both-sides Trump invading Britain right now

if 'access' is all that matters…

The BBC coverage is absolutely terrible.

It leads on "sharply contested narratives"

It has a dramatic skew to the US government

It has posted the video but has failed to report on what it shows: it shows the US govt account is untrue

almost six years after the murder of George Floyd, the majority of Americans finally agree that all lives matter, in the most brutally paradoxical situation imaginable

“.. He cared about people deeply ..,” said Michael Pretti, Alex’s father. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street. He cared about those people, and he knew it was wrong ..”

@washingtonpost.com
www.washingtonpost.com/national/202...

the NPR (National Public Radio)
mobile app or the website linked below should work globally

high levels of development. They built the good institutions largely after, or at least in tandem with, their economic development. This shows that institutional quality is as much an outcome as the causal factor of economic development. Given this, bad institutions cannot be the explanation of growth failure in Africa. People talk about ‘bad’ cultures in Africa, but most of today’s rich countries had once been argued to have comparably bad cultures, as I documented in the chapter ‘Lazy Japanese and thieving Germans’ in my earlier book Bad Samaritans. Until the early twentieth century, Australians and Americans would go to Japan and say the Japanese were lazy. Until the mid nineteenth century, the British would go to Germany and say that the Germans were too stupid, too individualistic and too emotional to develop their economies (Germany was not unified then) – the exact opposite of the stereotypical image that they have of the Germans today and exactly the sort of things that people now say about Africans. The Japanese and German cultures were transformed with economic development, as the demands of a highly organized industrial society made people behave in more disciplined, calculating and cooperative ways. In that sense, culture is more of an outcome, rather than a cause, of economic development. It is wrong to blame Africa’s (or any region’s or any country’s) underdevelopment on its culture.

Thus seen, what appear to be unalterable structural impediments to economic development in Africa (and indeed elsewhere) are usually things that can be, and have been, overcome with better technologies, superior organizational skills and improved political institutions. The fact that most of today’s rich countries themselves used to suffer (and still suffer to an extent) from these conditions is an indirect proof of this point. Moreover, despite having these impediments (often in more severe forms), African countries themselves did not have a problem growing in the 1960s and 70s. The main reason for Africa’s recent growth failure lies in policy – namely, the free-trade, free-market policy that has been imposed on the continent through the SAP. Nature and history do not condemn a country to a particular future. If it is policy that is causing the problem, the future can be changed even more easily. The fact that we have failed to see this, and not its allegedly chronic growth failure, is the real tragedy of Africa.

I find this, by South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, helpful on the malleability of our values

(I guess partly as he sits outside the blinkered Western cultural understanding that culture is always key 🙃)

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism:
Can Africa change its geography and history?