David Rischel

Labour has squandered its first year in government Number 10 needs to remember that getting elected is a byproduct of doing a good job governing

“If you aim directly at election victory you will never get there”—@benansell.bsky.social on Labour’s lost first year in government.
www.prospectmagazine...

what's that, another unworkable internet censorship law with stupid unintended consequences? the mind struggles to comprehend it

Political Economy - Between a Rock and a Hard Place – Byline Times Digital / Print Edition It’s not a fashionable thing to say, but I have quite a lot of sympathy for Rachel Reeves. The Chancellor has endured a torrid first 11 months in office.

Flagging my most recent column for @bylinetimes.bsky.social in which I expressed unfashionable sympathy for Rachel Reeves, whose "misfortune is to be the teller of hard truths in a country only interested in easy answers." If only her party listened to what the markets are saying about Britain

The Politics of Apoliticism | Los Angeles Review of Books Kieran Setiya reviews Christoph Schuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy.”

I wrote about the social history of analytic philosophy @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social
lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

I genuinely think this particular aesthetic trend (Good Art Is Didactic And Also Assumes You Are Very Stupid) is a non-trivial source of anti-woke backlash, like unironically. It is really really annoying, and I think it has provided wedges by which anti-wokes can radicalise nerds.

Fair enough, apologies if I misunderstood!

Should say I'm not convinced it can reason, just not sure I got how we could conclude that from the fact that it couldn't perform the task you asked it to.

Not sure I see why that follows (that it can't reason)? I also can't do the things you asked it to do, but that doesn't mean I can't reason at all. Why couldn't it be the case that it's not a very good reasoner in some domains but quite a decent reasoner in other domains?

Jeg mente netop, at det fremmedgørende består i, at et spørgsmål de går meget op i ikke må diskuteres.

Sorry, jeg må have været utydelig - jeg er enig med dig!

Man kan også forestille sig, at det kan virke ret fremmedgørende for de skoleelever, som går meget op i Palæstina-spørgsmålet. Ikke den bedste første introduktion til demokratiet!

Here's a very clever trick that German Romanticism pulled off. At about the time a bunch of people decided they wanted to decolonise the humanities, a bunch of intellectual movements that were successors to German Romanticism had become the popular way of speaking/thinking among lefty humanists....

I disagree with most of this thread, and I see that one of the failures of the discipline is the one-sided reading of the evidence and overly confident policy recommendations to european politicians.

Addressing some points:

Yeah, that is probably my read of it too. They seem to be risk averse in the extreme. Irrationally so, as they fail to see the potential upside of 'risking' higher taxes now so that public services are better by the next GE. Also, there are risks no matter what you do. So I think they're mistaken.

What I still don't understand is *why* they are making this strategic error. I struggle believing that they are ideologically motivated to cut welfare spending rather than raise taxes, but maybe I'm being naive? Are they risk averse? If so, don't they see the risk of their current strategy

Y'days post: Labour’s strategic error on tax mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/03/labo...
The failure to raise taxes further reflects the absence of any serious analysis of what will be required to allow a noticeable (to voters) improvement in public services before the next election.

Inevitably, they're gonna go through parliament insisting they won't have to raise taxes, won't make anything better as a result, and then finally be forced to raise personal taxes late in the parliament dooming them for the next election.

That is absurd. What is going on? Why haven't they realised that they'll have to raise taxes?

*slaps roof of Downing Street* This bad boy can fit SO much magical thinking about how you can avoid broadbased tax rises.

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

It's also obvs morally bankrupt to take the money from the aid budget

Such a mystery to me why they won't just raise taxes. It's constraining everything they want to do, defence spending seems like the perfect excuse, and they can't possibly believe that they'll be able to win the next election hobbling along like this.

Motion to HEC: Focus on Defending Jobs and Reforming UK HE Two UCU Commons HEC members are bringing the following motion to the special HEC meeting on Wednesday 19th February. We are looking for UCU members in HE to add their names in support of the motion…

If, like me, you are a UCU member and agree the union should stop wasting time and effort on a fruitless round of pay strikes at a time when tens of thousands of academic jobs are at risk, then please consider signing this open letter (link early on the document): ucucommons.org/2025/02/13/m...

I think one bad-making feature of platforms like twitter and (to a lesser extent) bluesky is that they may widen the circle of people you end up disliking (because they're being nasty etc). That doesn't seem good for us, e.g. if it changes our overall view of how good people generally are.

The Impact of Media Framing in Complex Information Environments To what extent do news frames influence public opinion? While a large body of experimental research suggests sizable effects, it is unclear how these findings translate to authentically complex inf...

Now available Open Access:

📰 Does (immigration) framing influence public opinion?

🧵

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

If the UK was really, really smart, it would now plough tens of billions into research centres and take in all the American academics fleeing the US. Spoiler: the UK is not smart. 🇬🇧

It's perfectly legit for the Tories to oppose and attack the Chagos deal. Many will agree. But when a front-bencher
@robertjenrickmp.bsky.social
refers to Keir Starmer as a "quisling" (a traitor or collaborator) you have to wonder if the Tories are simply losing it in the face of Farage

e.g., "we're going to go along with the tory national insurance cuts to avoid reducing our chances of winning by 2 % even if it means we can't govern after the election" is just too sensitive to the immediate risk of losing the election without considering the potential upside of the gamble 2/2

This is good and I broadly agree that they're not failing because they're secretly or openly right-wing. But I wonder if there's a more general reason here, which is that a lot of centre-leftish politicians are overly risk-averse (more so than right-leaning ones) 1/