Ben Rosamond

Another day, more Kemi-kaze haplessness.

Duverger's law on life support here.

That was Militant’s approach to rate- capping in Liverpool. The difference is that the party leader isn’t going to give a barnstorming speech at conference on the ‘grotesque spectacle of a Reform council … a REFORM council …’ etc.

She has a cross on conspicuous display. What she is saying stands in direct violation of the message of Luke 10:25–29 - the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Proper investigative journalism right here 👇. No court tittle-tattle or bigging up Reform. Just some cold facts that require attention and a response from the party leadership.

Those involuntary gestures - maniacal blinking in this case - can send such stark signals. Corbyn had an end-of-sentence contemptuous sniff that apparently couldn’t be coached out of him.

A huge formative influence. I met him once, in Sydney in 2002. We ended up in an Indian restaurant where the conversation was rather better than the food. A stellar scholar.

Outstanding thread and Substack post on the widespread, yet weirdly irrational, assumption that the voters who actually form the base of the Labour coalition aren't really authentic voters.

Kemi Badenoch vows to repeal Climate Change Act Tory leader says she would replace it with ‘cheap energy’ strategy, ending decades-long consensus on climate

This is unpopular with business, economically illiterate and contrary to the scientific consensus. But it apes Reform and that’s all that seems to matter. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Just to note that - by no measure - is the the median voter racist. The median X user might be these days, but they are different things.

This is very harsh … on 7th graders.

Visuals matter, often doing much more than mere words to frame stories. In this case, the image also builds on the persistently willful mis-presentation of racialised asylum seekers as ‘illegals’.

“Nothing to Do With Reform?” The Myth of Nathan Gill’s Bribery The bribery started the day he quit UKIP and continued under Farage’s leadership. The press have barely said a word

Excellent, forensic analysis: 'Farage wants to be Prime Minister. One of his decade-long allies has just admitted to taking Russian bribes while serving under him. And yet the press is barely covering this.'

There are also two rival (?) academic journals: the American Journal of Potato Research and Potato Research. Do consider submitting any spud-related work.

Great thread on a deeply misleading headline.

As the piece shows, the acquisition of anti-immigration votes has been achieved at the expense of the almost symmetrical departure of pro-immigration voters to other parties. SD are currently polling at 20-22% while two far right parties (incl. DPP) have about 16% between them. 3/

The Social Democrats' 'success' is often associated with the steep decline of the far-right Danish People's Party. In 2015 the DPP polled at 21% compared to the SD's 26.3. Under Mette Frederiksen's leadership, SD support rose to 27.5% at the 2022 election while the DPP had fallen to 2.6%. BUT... 2/

Excellent piece. Denmark 'serves as a warning that you cannot win over anti-immigration voters without simultaneously losing those who are pro-immigration. In a less flexible party system than the Danish one, this can be catastrophic'. 1/

Somebody should write a book about that!

'On humanities courses, *I’m told*, professors often assign shorter books or no books at all, preferring to work from videos or handouts' (emphasis added). There's so much wrong with this sentence that I don't even know where to start. The whole article is like this.

Quite. Amplifying a claim (however bogus & irresponsible) is to give credence to the claim, and - in this case - it's not even a claim that is being made beyond the US. The line should have been drawn under pseudo-scientific claims about autism when the GMC found against Andrew Wakefield in 2010.

What is the liberalizing potential of higher education? In this @bjsociology.bsky.social research, we show substantial variation in the association between field of study and anti-immigrant sentiment — a pattern most pronounced among those with tertiary degrees doi.org/10.1111/1468...

Nb

Farage pledges to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants Reform says mass deportation would save £234bn as it warns ‘Boriswave’ of migration will take critical toll on welfare system

Any journalist quoting this absurd, invented £234 billion number cited by Farage/Reform should make absolutely clear that it has been withdrawn by *its own authors* (the Centre for Policy Studies) after they admitted it contained several major errors (1/3)

🎯

And the article actually caveats its main message with two paragraphs saying just that.

There's an actual full-on authoritarian-far right assault on science going on right now. Is this book about this? It seems not. A terrific angry thread ...

👀. At what point will they suggest replacing the memorial in DC to that woke Lincoln guy with one to the real martyr?

Today in incredibly crap data-viz, itself highly dependent on dodgy manipulation of the *actual* data, but packaged for and lapped up by gullible billionaires ...

The legislative rationale seems to be the Malicious Communications Act (1988), which looks - on the face of it - to be a pretty flimsy basis upon which to build a prosecution in this case.