William Clare Roberts 🇵🇸

This has always been the TERF position, though they tried to be cagey about it at first.

I'll check this out, Eric. Wish I could be in Boston for your talk. If you have a text of the lecture you would be willing to share, I would be a very interested reader.

Windelband's nomothetic/ideographic distinction still holds. History seems odd because it really seems like it should be a nomothetic discipline but it has become overwhelmingly one of the ideographic humanities, where seeking the meaning of unique entities is the presumptive aim.

In 1854, after watching the federal government deploy 2000 federal troops and spend $40,000 sending Anthony Burns back into slavery, Boston's Amos Adams Lawrence said “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Columbia will never be free of this stain.

The Sino-Soviet Split

Lorenz Lüthi's book is probably the most extensively researched.

Home Office @ukhomeoffice Follow Illegal migrants living in hotels have been banned from using taxpayer-funded taxis for medical appointments. Under new rules, taxi use for medical journeys will be restricted to individuals with physical disabilities and serious or chronic illnesses. ... TP + ILLEGAL MIGRANTS BANNED FROM USING TAXIS FOR MEDICAL APPOINTMENTS

Home Offi... @ukhomeoffi... • Feb 6 The largest number of illegal migrants and foreign criminals have been removed or deported off British soil in a decade. - NEARLY - 60000 ILLEGAL MIGRANTS CRIMINALS REMOVED OR DEPORTED

Any time I look to see what the Labour government is up to in the UK it turns out to be things like making posters that Alfonso Cuarón put in the background of the long tracking shot that opens “Children of Men”.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance. But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain. He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend’s car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again. He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages.

ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.”

What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.

...but maybe I need to put together an epistolary treatise real quick.

Freedom book

I had a good writing day yesterday -- over 3000 words.

...but it was all on a letter to the advisory committee on the re-appointment of McGill's president, so it didn't really help me get closer to finishing this book!

I mean, all of these analyses present correlation as causation. The entire year of this has made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. Their response has been “ah you’re obsessed with complex academic minutiae like this ivory tower idea that ‘correlation is not causation’”

(More seriously, so many 20th century debates seem to just restage the various positions of the Young Hegelians in the 1830s and '40s. When I'm being cranky I say the whole European intellectual scene remains essentially pre-Marxian.)

Everyone should go read the list of members on Wikipedia.

Curtis LeMay and William Sessions were members: okay, that tracks.

But Cory Booker and Valerie Jarrett ought to crawl into a hole and never come out in public again. And Vernon Jordon, too, if he weren't already there.

This is an outstanding data post - a model of using data to answer a tricky and controversial question in a thoughtful and convincing way.

And joined trumps board of peace

ONE DAY LATER Larry Summers fleshed out his complaints in a Washington Post column

The emerging narrative from the people who worked for Biden seems to be "we debased ourselves repeatedly and violated our own laws for Israel and Israel won't even say thank you".

I'm glad to hear that you have better things on your horizon, Pavlos. I hope you will be able to keep writing and commenting.

8. Weiss's project is creating an Operation Paperclip for Epstein's cronies. Taking a group of discredited men and rehabilitating them as necessary pillars of system. Dershowitz and Peter Attia are the Wernher von Brauns of reactionary centrism.

I would say that is the most pathetic thing I have seen, but I am afraid that would be kink shaming

One refrain of mine going back years is that cops are very risk averse. Famous movie cops are adrenaline junkies, but real world cops are trained not to confront armed suspects unless they can establish absolute control of the situation. Hence:

jeffrey epstein is the kevin bacon of Horrible People Who Somehow Control The World

That which is for me through the medium of money - that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) - that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money's properties are my - the possessor's - properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness - its deterrent power - is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has [In the manuscript: is. - Ed.] power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

As a side note, it’s funny to see so many of these emails with thirsty academics repeatedly enact Marx’s bit in the 1844 Manuscripts about the power of money. “Oh Mr Epstein, your house in New York is enormous and, unrelatedly, your questions at dinner were so intelligent, so insightful, so deep.”

Israeli airstrikes on Gaza kill at least 30, with death toll expected to rise Attacks, which killed women and children, come day before border crossing is due to open in Gaza’s southern most city

Despite a nominal ceasefire, Israel has carried out some of its deadliest airstrikes on Gaza in months, killing at least 30 Palestinians, some of whom were sheltering in tent cities for displaced people www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Scandinavian transplant cultures FTW

...since lines up with the Ministry of Health numbers rather than the IDF.

In other words, taking the Israeli government version as the baseline of truth against which all other accounts are judged is incredibly widespread among people who really should know better by now.

I just reviewed an otherwise very good book by a respected academic that included a single sentence about there being good evidence that Hamas deliberately exaggerates the death toll from Israeli attacks, and then cited a Jerusalem Post story where the IDF was the only source and all evidence...